Dozens of questions ran through my mind as I examined the old flyleaf inscribed with the coded message. Why would someone slide it under my office door in the dead of night? Why would someone write the message in a cipher composed of letters in an almost-forgotten occult language?
Claire ran a white-gloved index finger over a line of the ghostly text, and I observed that none of the ink came off the page. "Are you familiar with runes?" she asked as she brought the tip of her finger to her nose and sniffed. "In addition to being a means of communication, the Norse thought they were imbued with magic."
Claire passed the magnifying glass to me, and I bent over the light table for a closer look. "The ink looks unusual," I said. The hellbent letters were written in an almost blackish green of backwards horseshoes and loops.
"It's what the Piachi called bee's blood," Claire said. "Some of the almost incomprehensible works of Saint John, Karl Ruprecht Kroenen and John Keel were written in the same thing. Exact recipe unknown. I've read about it, but never seen it in person. Careful not to touch it without gloves.
"No matter how complex or obscure the message, I think your next step is clear," she said. "I'm sure the June 5, 1863 edition of The Herald can be found at the Claiborne State University library."
I'd visited the CSU library hundreds of times, and I'd had many misadventures there that I would prefer to forget. While not widely known, the library's Archive of Special Literature contains Alabama's finest collection of ancient parchments, old palimpsests, clay tablets and Pnakotic manuscripts. Those works attract scholars from around the world and not always for harmless, academic reasons.
Claire pulled off her gloves and tossed them onto the light table. "To keep questions down, go now." From her breast pocket, she produced an old iron key topped with a stylized skeleton with crossed arms.
I parked in a vacant lot a hundred yards from the library and kept to the shadows as much as possible on my approach. The campus is riddled with surveillance cameras, and I was sure that the fact that I was entering the building was being caught on camera. I skirted the wide stone steps leading up to the main entrance and made my way to a lesser-known side door that served as an entrance for the building's custodial staff.
This was the only entrance that didn't require an electronic key card. I pulled Claire's skeleton key from my hip pocket and slid it into the old door's keyhole. I turned the key and tried the knob, but nothing happened.
Suddenly and without warning, the door opened inward with such speed that I was left holding the key in my shaking right hand. A man's face, unshaven and perfumed with cheap whiskey, appeared a few inches from my nose. I instinctively reached for my Beretta.
"What the hell took you so long?" the man said. The stitched patch over his breast pocket said "Patrick." "Claire said you were on your way, but I didn't sign up to wait on you all night." In response to my stunned, puzzled look, he said, "She's my niece," ushering me in roughly without another word.
I followed close behind as Patrick led me deeper into the dark building. I followed him around a corner and down a flight of stairs that ended in a padlocked iron door. He produced a large ring of keys and began to search for the one that fit the lock. Over his stooped shoulders, I saw that the placard on the door: Hard Copy Newspaper Morgue.
Patrick eventually found the correct key and inserted it in the rusty lock. It opened with a loud "snick," and he pushed the door open, groping around in the darkness until he found a long, thin string of butcher's twine overhead. He pulled it and a single, naked bulb flickered on with a click.
My eyes fell upon shelf after shelf of dusty bound volumes that extended into the darkness beyond the reach of the dim bulb overhead. "She's all yours," Patrick said. Without another word, he about-faced and departed, hanging the open padlock in its hasp on his way out the door.
I grabbed one of the large bound volumes from the nearest shelf and propped it against the door to make sure it didn't accidentally close behind me. The book's spine said it contained newspapers from 1935. I then lifted the open padlock from its hasp and dropped it in my hip pocket. I had no plans to get locked inside.
From my other hip pocket I produced a small flashlight and shined its narrow beam along the shelves as I searched for the volume containing papers from 1863. It was a small miracle that these papers even existed. Printed during the War Between the States on sub-quality paper, they should have been transferred to microfilm years ago. Question was, why hadn't they been put into a form where they would have been more accessible to the public?
I searched the dusty shelves for the better part of half an hour before my eye fell on the 1863 volume. It had been pushed behind another stack of bound volumes and was shrouded in ancient cobwebs. The covers of the large book were also secured together with an old brass lock that I was able to knock off with several well-placed strokes from the butt of my flashlight.
I set the large volume on the floor and began carefully turning the yellowed pages until I reached the papers published in June of that year. Front page news the first week of that month included stories on a rampaging yellow-fever epidemic. Unexpectedly, my eyes also fell on more than a few notes scribbled in the ciphered runes that had covered the old flyleaf I'd shown Claire.
These cryptic notes centered around a story regarding a pair of unusual twins. The story said that they'd been smuggled up river in a locked chest to avoid the yellow fever quarantine. When the parents opened the rune-inscribed chest they found one gangrenous twin dead, while his sister was perfectly healthy, despite the five-day trip without food or water from Mobile to Claiborne.
The story noted that the black-haired girl was named Lilith. When the authorities opened the chest, she was found sucking her thumb. Her unfortunate brother's body was inexplicably bloodless as if his lifeblood had been drained from his body.
Suddenly and without warning, the sound of a closing door caused me to jump to my feet. A second later, the weak overhead bulb went out and my handheld flashlight flickered off. In the next moment, my ears were met by the sound of ponderous steps in the darkness.
(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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