The Paradise Prophecy (29 page)

Read The Paradise Prophecy Online

Authors: Robert Browne

BOOK: The Paradise Prophecy
4.83Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
He stopped in his tracks, taken aback by what he saw. “This sure as hell isn’t Narnia.”
“Another book lover,” Callahan murmured, but her words were inadequate, giving short shrift to what lay before them.
It was a small library, with ten or more rows of bookshelves, each filled with exquisitely bound books. And if Batty was correct, not one of them was less than two hundred years old.
Ozan was not merely a book lover, but a bibliophile—in the grandest, most traditional sense of the word.
Batty stepped forward cautiously, as if his mere presence here might do damage to these treasures. The sight of this room electrified him, and he was suddenly alive, the most alive he’d felt since he’d lost Rebecca. More alive than that night with the mysterious redhead.
And that was saying something.
Crossing to the nearest shelf, he moved down the first row of books, gently running his fingers along the spines, feeling their age, their gravity. He began removing and examining them, one after another.
Demonomanie des Sorciers
by Jean Bodin.
A Compleat History of Magick, Sorcery and Witchcraft
by Richard Boulton.
Basilica Chymica
by Oswald Croll.
Disquisitionum magicarum
by Martino Del Rio.
Manuale Exorcismorum
by Maximiliani ab Eynatten.
First editions all. Each one pristine. Priceless.
And this was only a small sampling of Ozan’s collection. Batty had never seen so many volumes on the paranormal and the occult gathered in one place.
“Check this out,” Callahan said.
He turned and found her standing next to a cluttered worktable at the center of the room. On one corner of the table sat a small stone figurine of a winged Saint Michael, his sword held high.
“I’m sensing a shared obsession,” she said, then gestured to the mess on the table. “Looks like he was trying to decipher code. Just like Gabriela.”
Batty joined her there and she pointed to a spiral notebook with several lines of verse written on it in English, some of the words and letters crossed out, others circled—
—all of them from the eleventh chapter of
Paradise Lost
.
Sitting open next to the notebook was another pristine first edition, nearly five centuries old.
Batty picked it up. “
Steganographia
,” he said, carefully leafing through it. Its pages held lists of spirit names, tables full of numbers, zodiac signs, planetary symbols. “He must have been using this as his guide.”
“What is it?”
“A three-volume treatise on conjuring up spirits to send secret messages.”
“Come again?”
“It was written by a fifteenth-century abbot named Johannes Trithemius. Kind of a how-to book on communicating with your colleagues through the use of angelic messengers. But when his friends found out what he was working on, it caused such a commotion he decided not to publish it. He even destroyed the parts he thought were particularly incendiary.”
“What kind of commotion?”
“He was accused of dealing in the black arts and consorting with demons.”
“There seems to be a lot of that going around.”
“But here’s the thing,” Batty told her. “It’s not really a book of magic at all. The stuff about spirits is all coded writing, and Trithemius clearly says in the preface that it’s just an exercise in cryptology and steganography. But nobody believed him, and his reputation as an occultist was sealed.”
“And it looks like someone published it anyway.”
“Nearly a hundred years after he died,” Batty said. He closed the book and returned it to the table. “The first two volumes were deciphered almost immediately, pretty much proving that the incantations were exactly what Trithemius had said they were—harmless encryption exercises. But the key for the third volume wasn’t cracked until the seventeenth century by a guy named Heidel, and he hid his solution in his own coded message. So it effectively wasn’t deciphered until about a decade ago.”
Callahan gestured to the notepad. “And you think Ozan was using the same encryption keys to hunt for secret messages in these verses?”
“That’s the way it looks.”
“But why? What does he know that you don’t?”
Batty shrugged. “Milton was a controversial figure in his day, who got into a lot of trouble for speaking his mind. Maybe Ozan was working on the assumption that he used Trithemius’s encryption methods to conceal his later work—although you’d think, if anything, the material in
Polygraphiae
is a better choice.”
“Polygraphiae?”
“Another one of Trithemius’s books. His true masterpiece on cryptology.”
Callahan sighed. “My head’s starting to hurt.”
“Welcome to my world. Whatever the case, Ozan or Gabriela strike me as naive amateurs more than anything else, yet they both seemed convinced that there’s something in Milton’s poetry that the rest of us haven’t . . .”
Batty paused, his gaze now drawn to the stone figurine of Saint Michael at the corner of the table. He studied it a moment, suddenly aware that there was something off about it.
It was a familiar-looking piece, one he recognized from the Garanti catalogue, but the depth and pattern of the chisel marks didn’t look right, and he’d bet his last dollar that it wasn’t an original. In fact, it wasn’t even that great of a reproduction.
“What’s wrong?” Callahan asked.
“Probably nothing. It just seems odd to me that someone with Ozan’s taste would have such an obvious fake on his worktable. Especially in a room like this. And especially of Saint Michael.”
Callahan shrugged. “Maybe he liked it.”
Batty reached over, picked it up. “That’s like finding a jazz purist who likes Kenny G. Besides, there’s something about this thing . . .”
“Let me guess. You feel an energy.”
Batty looked at her. “Mock me all you want, Mrs. Broussard, but unless I’m mistaken, you were feeling it pretty strong back in that archive room.”
But she was wrong—this was more instinct than energy. Flipping the figurine over, he examined the base, which was rounded and about the same circumference as a soda can. Grabbing hold of it, he pressed and twisted until he felt it give, then the lower half of the base swung to one side, revealing a narrow, hidden compartment.
There was a key inside. Hollow shank. Antique.
He looked at Callahan. “You were saying?”
“Luck. Nothing more.”
There was some truth to that, but Batty would never admit it. He removed the key, set the figurine back onto the tabletop and scanned the room, staring at the bookshelves. “It’s obvious Ozan was hiding something. What do you bet some of these books aren’t real?”
“I think that’s a pretty safe assumption.”
Batty moved into the first row again and began running his hands along the books, this time looking for a faux book panel. Following his lead, Callahan went to another row, the two moving from shelf to shelf until, a few minutes later, Callahan called out to him.
“Professor, over here.”
He found her at a bookshelf against the far wall. She had already put the faux book panel aside—a phony fourteen volume collection on neopaganism and witchcraft—to reveal a locked wooden compartment.
Batty tried the key in the lock—a perfect fit.
He turned it, felt the mechanism give, then pulled the compartment door open to reveal a large rectangular wall safe, complete with LED readout and electronic keypad.
“Shit,” he muttered.
“Relax,” Callahan said. “Despite appearances, these things are cake to get into.”
Pulling her purse from her arm, she rooted around inside until she found a small nylon tool case, then unzipped it and removed a miniature screwdriver. Moving up to the safe, she unscrewed a rectangular nameplate just below the keypad and set it aside.
Behind it was a lock cylinder. “This is the bypass lock,” she said. “In case you forget your key code.”
Returning the screwdriver to its case, she reached into her purse again and brought out a ring of what looked like keys, but were less defined.
She held one up. “Jigger key,” she told him. “They’re old school, but they work.”
“You’re like a Boy Scout,” he said. “Only a lot better looking.”
She arched a brow at him. “Careful, Professor. I wasn’t kidding about killing a man with one hand.”
“I’ve already come to the conclusion you’re
never
kidding.”
“Glad we have an understanding.”
She inserted the key into the lock and jiggled it, but nothing happened. Choosing another key, she tried again—and again got nothing. The third and fourth keys wouldn’t fit and the fifth one was a bust as well.
One last key.
She slipped it into the lock, gave it a jiggle, and Batty could tell by the look on her face that she’d done it. Not quite a smile, but a very faint smirk. As she turned the key, the electronic mechanism
thunked
and the LED readout flashed O-P-E-N
.
“Impressive,” he said.
“Not really,” she told him, pulling the safe door open. “But let’s hope it was worth it.”
There was only one item inside: a moldering old leather-bound manuscript.
Batty gingerly removed it, staring in surprise at the thin leather strap wrapped around it, a familiar-looking Saint Christopher medallion glinting in the light.
Callahan was staring at it, too.
“Custodes Sacri.
I guess there’s no question now.”
Batty said nothing, his attention drawn to the manuscript itself and the initials J. M. discreetly etched into the bottom right corner of the cover. Feeling his heart kick up, he quickly removed the strap and flipped the manuscript open to reveal gray, aging pages
—handwritten
pages, in a faded violet scrawl.
“Holy Christ,” he muttered. “This can’t be right. The only known copy is a transcription. A printer’s draft. And only thirty-three pages survived.”
“Thirty-three pages of what?”
Her question was just a buzz in Batty’s head. “This looks like the entire manuscript, for God’s sakes, just as he dictated it. Where the hell did Ozan find this? It has to be another fake.”
“
What
does?” Callahan asked. “What is it?”
Batty’s eyes were transfixed on its carefully bound pages. If it
was
a fake, it was exquisitely rendered.
His hands trembled as he turned back to the first page and stared at its title. Then he looked up at Callahan, feeling an unbridled giddiness overtake him, as if he were an archaeologist who had just stumbled upon the lost city of the Incas.
“For the last time, Professor, what the hell
is
that?”
Batty tried to control the tremor in his voice. “It’s John Milton’s original draft of
Paradise Lost
.”
27
 
S
potting a leather book bag amidst the clutter on the worktable, Batty quickly moved to it and snatched it up. He dumped its contents onto the table—sunglasses, car keys and an iPad—then slid the Milton manuscript inside.
“What are you doing?” Callahan asked.
“Not leaving this here, that’s for sure.”
Ozan had apparently been planning to work from the original, and Batty wanted to examine it more closely. If it was genuine, maybe he’d find something that hadn’t made it to the printing press. A line of verse or a stanza that might help him figure out what Ozan and Gabriela had been looking for.
He gathered up the notepad and the copy of
Steganographia
and shoved them into the bag, then reconsidered the iPad and added it to the mix. There might be something useful on it.
“We need to get back to the hotel so I can sit down with this stuff.”
“I don’t know if you noticed, Professor, but there are a few people out there looking for us right now. How do you propose we do that?”
“This is a smugglers’ tunnel, remember? What do you bet there’s another way out?”
Callahan seemed to like that idea. “Not bad, Mr. Broussard. You just earned yourself some brownie points.”
“Why, thank you, dear. Does that mean I’ll be sleeping in a nice warm bed tonight instead of the sofa?”
She smiled. “You pick the hospital, I’ll be happy to put you there.”
 
 
A
s they geared up to go, Callahan was thinking
she
was the one who needed a hospital bed.
Putting aside LaLaurie’s mind meld—the effects of which were still lingering—she was completely, utterly and irrevocably exhausted. She’d managed a few hours’ sleep on the plane. Enough to recharge the batteries a bit. But the day’s events were weighing on her now and her body kept screaming for her to just lie down already. And the thought of getting out of this place, back to the comfort of their hotel room, was uppermost in her mind.

Other books

Birds of a Feather by Don Easton
Beautiful Maria of My Soul by Oscar Hijuelos
The Wedding Gift by Marlen Suyapa Bodden
The Long Valley by John Steinbeck
Clouded Innocence by Gambel, D.
Kiss of Death by Lauren Henderson
H. A. Carter by Kimberly Fuller
Why She Buys by Bridget Brennan
God Don't Play by Mary Monroe