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.)
