The rain began to slacken as I stood in the small graveyard beside St. Leonard's Cathedral in the grey-streaked morning light. Enclosed by a waist-high, wrought-iron fence, there were about twenty marked graves there beneath the moss-hung branches of two ancient live oaks. There among those gloomy graves was the lichen-tinted headstone of my fifth-great grandfather, Elias McMorn.
I squatted and shined my pocket flashlight on his grave marker. I could just make out the words, "Taken by yellow fever, October 1822." As I traced a finger over the chiseled letters, I couldn't help but grin. Yellow fever was the official verdict of the coroner's jury, but every McMorn born since knew that Elias had been killed by a vampire.
Elias had fought beside LaFayette in the colonial war years before moving his family to Claiborne. Elias and LaFayette were among the four hundred patriots who tried to stop Tarleton at what would later be called the Battle at McMorn's Bridge. LaFayette escaped that day unscathed, but it cost Elias his right eye.
When Elias arrived in Claiborne, wearing a tricorn hat as black as a dragon's lung, the town was a fear-gripped frontier village centered around a stockade high above the Stygian banks of the Alabama River. By this time, Elias had been a Methodist minister for years, and his reputation as a scholar of the extraordinary proceeded him wherever he went. When he stepped off the steamer at Claiborne, he was armed with nothing more than his battered Bible and his wits.
Being one of the few tutored men in Claiborne who could read and write the King's English, Elias quickly found employment at one of the town's newspapers, The Alabama Courier. Elias would become close friends with the newspaper's owners, William Tucker and William Turner. They had all seen service in the war and were bound by Masonic obligations.
In the years following the death of Elias, St. Leonard's Cathedral was constructed beside the small cemetery that contained his grave, on the site of a much smaller church that had been made of hewn logs. Today, the cathedral's three gilded spires reached toward heaven, and the church's entrance faced west across LaFayette Square and the river. Bringing me out of my revery, the bell in the cathedral's central tower began to ring, tolling eight times to mark the morning hour.
A moment later, across Finger Alley, the bell over the door at Grimlan's Books tinkled as the owner entered to begin the business day. I turned and watched as the store's lights tinkled on, illuminating the disordered stacks of books inside. I could just make out the silhouette of Flynn Ewell's niece as she flipped over the "Open" sign hanging on the door.
I hopped over the cemetery's damp, wrought-iron fence and landed firmly on the wet sidewalk across the street from Grimlan's Books. From my vantage point, I watched the well-shaped proprietor as she wistfully stepped behind the counter and began to prepare for a day of welcoming customers to her shop. I pulled the mysterious yellow envelope from my shirt pocket as I stepped off the curb in her direction, careful to hide the Beretta M9 on my belt in the folds of my Gortex jacket.
I strode quickly across the cobblestone street and stepped up onto the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street. The edge of the sidewalk there was about three feet off the street-top, harkening back to the days when passengers would alight from their wagons and buggies onto the sidewalk. Those days were long gone, but the sidewalks remained the same.
As I reached a hand towards the door of the store, the smell of fresh bread wafted down the street from Morstan's Bakery. My mouth watered and my stomach grumbled, and I was suddenly wanted a moon pie. I couldn't remember the last time I'd had anything to eat.
In that same moment, one prolonged blast from a steamboat horn reached my ears, and I knew without looking that it was The Demeter pulling away from its dock Under the Bluff. The dark history of that cursed vessel was long lost on even the most knowledgeable of local history students. Now the boat makes short trips up and down the river, loaded with tourists who are oblivious to the dark deeds once done beneath the planks of its mystery-shrouded decks.
I placed a hand on the damp, wooden face of the door and gave it a push. Instead of swinging open easily, it wouldn't budge. I tapped on the door's plate glass window to get the young woman's attention.
She moved from behind the counter and made her way lightly towards the door. I watched around a flyer for an upcoming meeting of the Claiborne Vintage Book Club as she grabbed the inside handle and gave it a solid tug. The bell jingled overhead. "The door sticks in the rain," she said, smiling.
I stepped inside and looked around. Stacks on stacks of dusty books filled the store's main room, no doubt the biggest fire hazard and safety code violation this side of the Shamrock Grill. I turned back to the girl and noted the single word on her plastic nametag: Claire.
Minutes later, I watched in silence as Claire Grimlan maneuvered a large magnifying glass over the single page that the envelope contained. She wore white cotton gloves, and the page was illuminated from beneath by the cool glow of a florescent light table. "It's interesting in an odd way," she said.
I leaned in for a closer look. "Why do you say that?"
Without looking up, she moved the magnifier in closer. "The paper's old, more than a century for sure, and it was carefully torn out of the back pages of a book," she said. "One side of the paper is jagged, but still clean for a ripped-out flyleaf."
Two lines of script were written across the center of the page, and consisted of symbols that I had never seen before. "What about the script?" I asked, looking over her shoulder and through the magnifier at the blurry, squiggly lines. "Is it some type of code?"
"It's Theban," she said. "Definitely don't see that every day." Grimlan straightened and said "Stand fast" as she walked into the stacks of the store.
When I lost sight of her, I leaned in for a closer look at the handwritten script. I was sure that I'd never seen anything like these symbols before. A few seconds later, Grimlan returned with a dusty volume that she'd pulled off a high back shelf.
She set the heavy book down on the counter and dust billowed from its dusty pages. "Trithemius's Polygraphia" was written in dim letters on the book's spine. "The Theban alphabet is known as withes' alphabet," Grimlan said. "And lucky for you it's a cipher."
Grimlan took the single page off the light table and opened the dusty tome. "Give me a minute," she said as she began to compare the symbols on the page against a table in the book. As she worked out the translation, she took notes on a yellow post-it note.
"Here you go," she said, passing me the yellow square of paper. Written in her neat handwriting were the words "The Claiborne Herald, June 5, 1863."
(All rights reserved. This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.)
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