WOMAN: Are you from nearby?
YOUNG MAN: Yes, we just moved to … [He stops, reads the kid’s lips. Then to the clerk.] We live in Axton House.
WOMAN: Axton House.
YOUNG MAN: Yes.
WOMAN: Oh. Well, uh … Maybe Sam can drop by sometime this week. Actually, I’ll kick his ass off the couch if I have to.
YOUNG MAN: Oh, great. Thanks.
WOMAN: [To the kid.] Can I help you, dear?
[The kid replaces the device in the box and leaves it on the counter.]
WOMAN: Are you buying this?
KID: [Nods.]
WOMAN: [Checks the price tag.] Okay, that’s … eighty-five ninety-nine.
KID: [Whistles and snaps her fingers to the man.]
YOUNG MAN: [Pulling his wallet out.] Do you take Visa?
WOMAN: Sure.
YOUNG MAN: [Producing his credit card, to the kid.] Aunt Liza warned me you’d do this.
[She grins. The woman runs the credit card, hands out the ticket, he signs.]
WOMAN: Thank you. And welcome to Point Bless.
YOUNG MAN: Thank you. [To kid.] Let’s go.
[Woman leaves through the back; they start for the door, kid carrying the box.]
YOUNG MAN: So what did I buy that for?
[She pulls up the string around her neck, retrieving a small notepad from inside her shirt, tied to a ring together with the stub of a pencil. She scribbles a message and shows it to him.]
YOUNG MAN: Either I’m dense or you abbreviate too much. What does “e vee pee” mean?
LETTER
* * *
Axton House
Axton Rd.
Point Bless, VA 26969
Dear Aunt Liza,
It’s half past six in the evening and I’m lying on the sofa in the music room (first door on the left from entrance). The yellow paper light from the side lamp fights the remains of dusk outside. At the other end of the room, about half a mile away, I hear Niamh on the piano. Where did a brat raised in the streets of Ireland learn to play the piano?
Nuns taught me!3
Anyway. The day’s been gloomy and memorably sad, so we spent most of it indoors. We plan to start lighting up some of the hearths; otherwise, as winter besieges these long, windy halls, the whole house will become unlivable except for the inside of the quilt in which Niamh wraps herself at night like a Chinese spring roll.
We explored the maze today. It’s beautiful, as Niamh’s pictures show. Perhaps even more so with the box hedge overgrown and the floor so dirty with cracking leaves and twigs. I think decadence becomes a labyrinth. Same goes for the house: downfall and smut romanticize it.
The maze isn’t all that challenging, though. Niamh told me about the tip you gave her once, “Always turn in the same direction, and turn around only if in a loop.” We reached the center pretty soon. The intricate path makes the finding of four stone benches and a statue of Ariadne winding a ball of thread a little treasure. We sat down, despite the drizzle and the fear that the creeping fingers of ivy under the seats would clutch our feet and drag us into the hedge, and we stayed there, breathing that cold little square, realizing that a maze is one of the craziest, coolest real things one can aspire to own.
There’s not much else new. I went through Ambrose’s office here on the first floor and found nothing but the reassurance that this was the workplace he meant for people to see, the one dedicated to his futile public business. The rest of the paper-towered desks about the house surely hide worthier prizes.
Meanwhile, Niamh explored Strückner’s room and the servants’ quarters. They fit under the main stairs, and except for a useful little bathroom have long been deserted. According to Glew, Strückner was invited to occupy one of the nicer guest rooms in the refurbished second-floor south wing. Though he accepted, I think he took the smallest one out of modesty. I wonder if he ever dared to untidy it.
By the way, we drove to town this morning and Niamh bought a voice recorder. She plans to leave it on in the bathroom through the night and capture “electronic voice phenomena.” I’m concerned that I’ll have to flush the toilet at launching time to cover up the splash. And talking about splashes, she also picked up a brochure from a swimming pool installer. I’ll try to keep her from turning this place into a holiday resort before you see it, but you’ll have to hurry up. I don’t know how long I can hold her.
Yeah, that might be my way to say I’m beginning to miss you a little. So does Niamh, I’m sure. I don’t let her read these letters anymore; she keeps laughing at my prose and pointing out how pompous I sound. She says I read too much Lovecraft.
Well, at least it taught me some form of English. And we live in a haunted house now, so that background might come in useful.
Oh, and Niamh really wants a dog.
Kisses,
A.
P.S.: I considered this was worth a new page. While looking for an envelope for this letter, Niamh stumbled across the one found in Ambrose’s office, the empty one with “Aeschylus” written on it, and she noticed this:
A E S C H Y L U S
S T R Ü C K N E R
EXCERPT FROM SAMUEL MANDALAY’S ARS CRYPTOGRAPHICA. LONDON, 1977
* * *
Among substitution ciphers, the simplest form (and therefore the most transparent) is monoalphabetical substitution, which consists of individually replacing each letter for another symbol. A memorable instance of this cipher is found in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold-Bug.” Sherlock Holmes cracks a similar code in “The Adventure of the Dancing Men,” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The high incidence of this kind of cipher in crime fiction actually denotes its inefficiency to safely conceal information in real life.
There are several common ways to assign new values to each letter. The simplest of these involve transposition of the alphabet. For example, shift the alphabet one letter forward, thus replacing each letter by the next: a = b, b = c, c = d. We call this a Caesar cipher. An even more puerile method: Write out the twenty-six letters of the English alphabet in two rows of thirteen; then replace each letter by the one below or above. So: a = n, b = o, c = p.
The following method allows one to encode and decode a message quickly by knowing a single key word: Write out the alphabet in one row; then below write one key word, the longer the better, omitting repeated letters, and fill the rest of the row with the remains of the alphabet. In the following example, we used the word Mozambique.
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
MOZABIQUECDFGHJKLNPRSTVWXY
And again we replace the letters in the upper row with the ones in the lower: a = m, b = o, c = z. […]
If the language of the message is known, breaking a monoalphabetic substitution code is extremely easy. This is due to the recurrent character sequences discussed in §Appendix II. An example: By far the most frequent word in the English language is the. If a ciphered message contains several occurrences of a word such as 123, it is not unwise to start by verifying whether 1 = t, 2 = h, 3 = e.
In order to counteract the breaker’s efforts, the messenger may wish to reduce these sequences to a minimum by a) omitting or cutting down on common words such as articles, demonstratives, and personal pronouns; and b) omitting spaces and punctuation marks. Still, some recurrent character sequences will remain detectable (as exposed in §Appendix II.3). For instance, if 4 is always followed by 5, but 5 can be preceded by other symbols, then most likely 4 = q and 5 = u. This applies to all languages in Western Europe.
Furthermore, the message will still be susceptible to a frequency analysis as detailed in §Appendix II—as Legrand does in Poe’s tale: Take all the symbols in the coded message and sort them by number of incidences. If the message is in English, the symbol on top of the list is most likely the letter e.
The definitive way to strengthen your substitution cipher is brevity. It is estimated (see Zangler, 1949) that any message longer than eighty characters falls within the reach of a more or less laborious aficionado. On th
e other hand, a message written in a single row, without spaces or punctuation, even using a childish Caesar cipher, may very well be indecipherable.
But, of course, an indecipherable message is not a message.
(Bedroom.)
—What does this mean?
—That Ambrose DID leave a message for Strückner.
—How was Strückner supposed to know he was Aeschylus?
—They’d used the code before? Wells Sr. a cryptographer.
—Of course. And he had a Strückner serving him too. It isn’t much of a code, though. I guess it had to be within Strückner’s skills.
—Not as easy if the message inside short. Like “CALLCALEB.”
—That’s going to the other extreme: from pastime to indecipherable.
—But the key is the envelope. Strückner knows 8 letters already:
A = S
E = T
S = R
C = U
H = C
Y = K
L = N
U = E
—And from here he can work out the rest. Whereas someone who came across the envelope by accident, not knowing whom it was for, would need to start from zero. Ingenious.
—Pity we only got the envelope.
—What might he have done with the message?
—Destroyed.
—I guess so.
A.’S DIARY
* * *
Just a while ago I was standing in a dazzling white desert. The heat was intolerable, but the sun was not to blame. A fire was burning behind me. I heard distant screams. Light engulfed me. I was carrying a gun.
I blinked into blackness. I thought I’d carried along a gasp from the dream; I heard it dissolving into silence. I waited for Niamh to move, but she didn’t.
I stayed in bed for a while until I felt clearheaded, and then I got up and felt my way along the edge of the bed and around the canopy to the bathroom. If something out of the normal was going to happen, I wanted to be awake enough to record it properly.
I closed my eyes at the bathroom lights. The new bulbs worked fine, but my eyes had grown sensitive. Squinting, I washed my face, trying not to sprinkle water on Niamh’s voice recorder lying on the sink. I looked in the mirror, and my reflection stepped back. My sclerae seemed cleaner, but the contour of my eyes was scarlet, like I’d been crying for weeks.
I must have heard something. I can’t remember what. I know I instinctively turned to the bathtub. I didn’t see a shadow.
As I stepped closer, I imagined the sound track to this scene. Either two single piano notes in rapid succession, or a tremolo of violins growing as my imprudent hand rose to the curtain.
I pulled the curtain, and a guitar blast shook the foundations of Axton House.
It actually came from the music room, right through two floors and strong enough to blow the ceiling away. It was the same Dead Kennedys album that Niamh had been listening to earlier in the afternoon, but I didn’t recognize it at first. What I did recognize was a whistle from Niamh on top of Jello Biafra’s voice that almost cracked the mirror from side to side.
I ran—no, I flew downstairs, regretting the whole way that our house is too big: a long corridor, the third-floor landing, a long flight of stairs, second-floor landing, two flights of stairs, another corridor lit by the music room from where the punk music blasted, and the anteroom across, which I stomped into just in time to see Niamh bursting open the double doors to Ambrose’s office.
She ran to the window and scanned the garden. Later she claimed to have seen somebody; I saw no one.
The doors had been blocked from the inside. The carpet was littered with papers. On the center panel behind the desk, where a painting of black plantation workers praying had hung, an open safe yawned.
Niamh had not been asleep when it happened. I guess her mutism has somehow sharpened her hearing; otherwise I can’t explain how she could pick up the breaking of a glass two floors and several closed doors away. She heard nothing else, but it was enough to set her in motion. She walked downstairs, barefooted, and began checking all of the rooms in the dark. Once she located where the intruder was, and judging it too dangerous to face him, she opted for scaring him away. So she went to the music room, where she’d been playing the piano first and her CDs later, turned up the volume to the max, and pressed play to scare the intruder; then she whistled to call me over; and finally, she charged at the office doors without opening them to force him out—she only pushed strongly enough when I got there. Of course, the burglar had left by then.
(Living room, later.)
—I think it was Knox.
—You think or you saw?
—Think.
—Not good enough. I doubt it was Knox. If I were him and wanted something from that safe, I wouldn’t come in person.
(Meditating.)
—Anyway, forget about the who. Think about what. Knox expected Ambrose to leave him something; we know that. But what Ambrose left was a coded message for Strückner.
—& Knox very interested in Strückner.
—True. We know it was a brief message; it was bound to be. Most likely, it was meant to lead Strückner to a longer message kept somewhere else. So it probably said …
—“Check the safe.”
—Exactly. We’re assuming Strückner knew where the safe was. Maybe he didn’t. But let’s assume he did.
—So he opened it, took what he looked for & left. & when Knox came after him, found nothing.
—If it was Knox. Are you sure he left empty-handed?
—90% sure.
—But it doesn’t make sense. If the safe contained Ambrose’s final dispositions, and if they concerned Knox, as Knox believed, if all that were true, Strückner would have transmitted them to Knox, period.
—What if Str. DIDN’T open the safe?
—Why shouldn’t he?
—Maybe he wouldn’t follow the instructions?
—Why wouldn’t he?
—Maybe he didn’t decipher them?
—And yet he destroyed them?
—Maybe he didn’t?
—No, if he hadn’t understood them, or hadn’t understood they were for him to read, he would have put them back in the envelope. Anybody would do that.
(Meditating again.)
Okay, let’s say he did read it, but chose not to follow it. It’s strange, but … let’s go from here. He says the hell with it, he leaves, deeply affected … Then we come along … Then Knox comes along …
—Knox does what Strückner wouldn’t do?
—Very risky. Plus, here’s something puzzling—how long was it between you hearing the window breaking and giving the alarm?
—5–10 minutes.
—So he knew in which room to look, knew where the safe was, and spent ten minutes searching it?
—OPENING it.
—See? There’s our hypothesis castle tumbling down. He doesn’t even search the house; he goes straight for the safe; he even breaks in by the nearest window. Why is he so confident about the safe? Why is he so sure it’s worth the trouble?
—Strückner told him!
—And didn’t give him the combination?
—Good point.
(Depression.)
—Why didn’t you come upstairs when you realized someone had broken in? He could’ve been a professional! He could’ve killed you!
—I’m here to protect you.
(Meditating …)
—Oh, okay, get yourself a dog!
I guess we felt profaned enough for one night, so we refused to go back to bed. After coffee and chocolate milk, we began to inventory the contents of the safe (mainly a coin collection, a jewel case, and a folder of title deeds whose original order I failed to reproduce), and return them to their nominal place.
The revelation came at dawn.
The safe had been opened, not forced. Once all its contents were returned to it, I realized that if we closed it we wouldn’t be able to open it again. I decided
that a thief wouldn’t come back for what he didn’t take the first time, and left the safe ajar; then I started to look for another place to hang the painting. As I carried it around, I noticed in the back of the canvas the same blue-headed thumbtacks I had seen among Ambrose’s desk supplies.
I stood there holding the painting for about two minutes before I figured it out.
The instructions left for Aeschylus were not “Check the safe.” They were “Look behind the painting.”
Both Strückner and Knox thought it meant to look in the safe, but neither had the combination; that was why one failed to follow the instructions and the other sent someone to open it.
Actually, it was as simple as removing the cork sheet behind the canvas. Morning was breaking when we found Ambrose Wells’ letter taped to the back of the painting.
* * *
3 This appears written by Niamh herself on the margin.
NOVEMBER 7
LETTER
* * *
2/14/1995
Dear Strückner,
This will be the twenty-first letter I hide behind the old Van Krugge. Yet I have the dark presentment that this one will be read. Surely you understand why.
I have adhered to this yearly ritual since my twenty-ninth birthday, after returning from India, when I first noticed I was too closely following my father’s steps. I will ask you about him often this year. I will be eager to hear what your father used to say about mine. It is indeed remarkable: No physical threat looms ahead; no clock is ticking my time away. And yet I feel that if I live to replace this letter in a year’s time, I will be reborn.
You understand now why I chose to be childless. I cannot permit this fate to continue devouring souls of Wells. Nor can I tolerate any more Strückners wasting their lives serving honey tea to eccentric occultists. Both our families deserve a rest.
The Supernatural Enhancements Page 3
