Phoebe Harkness Omnibus

by James Fahy

  “This way,” she said chirpily, leading us onward beneath the arches. “These arcade arches you see around you were once fitted with iron grilles. Only three of which were gates.” She told us conversationally. “They were closed at night, of course. Rather a bastion down here. Some of these works were, and still are, extremely valuable you understand.”

  We nodded appreciatively.

  “Of course, it’s a lot less like a dungeon down here now,” she smiled. “This whole lower floor was opened up as a reading room back in 1863. The metal grilles were removed and the arches, as you can see, have largely been glazed. Rather brilliant, the new glass against the ancient stone, don’t you agree? I find it very striking. Far more hospitable. It’s not easily broken either, acts as a restrictor of unwanted airflow, keeps the books from being exposed to too much.”

  “I’ve certainly seen grimmer dungeons,” Allesandro agreed. I wondered where.

  “Here we are.” Deep in the archives, she sat us at a reading table, flicking a lamp which cast an island of warm gold on the dark oak surface, and without further ado, disappeared into a nearby stack. All other lights in the basement had flickered off around us. They must be on an energy-saving timer, I supposed. We were left adrift at our softly-lit table, in a sea of underground darkness.

  The librarian returned shortly carrying, rather reverently, a large and very old-looking book, its covers were plain brown leather, so soft and wrinkled it looked to me alarmingly like human skin.

  “The Voynich manuscript,” she said with hushed, almost superstitious tones, setting it down as gently as a new born baby before us. “You are very lucky it is here you know. Before the Pale Wars it was in Yale University, in what used to be the United States. Thank goodness for Bonewalkers, that’s all I can say. When Yale burned down and we lost the East Coast to the Pale, so much could have been lost forever.” She shook her head. “We recovered so many valuable texts from their Beinecke Library. I know not everyone agrees with the GOs, but I say we have an awful lot to thank them for, don’t you?”

  “Oh absolutely,” I said. “Bonewalkers, don’t you agree, Mr Harkness?” I gave him my tightest smile.

  “Absolute saints,” Allesandro said absently. He stroked the cover of the book lightly with his pale hand, caressing the ancient leather. I almost expected it to shiver under his fingertips. “Hope, I wonder, in all your expertise as head of studies here, what can you tell us about this most solitary, peerless, work?”

  The librarian looked delighted to be asked, although her eyes were still moving softly in and out of focus.

  “Oh certainly,” she said. “Well, it’s roughly two hundred and forty pages of written and illustrated vellum. Absolutely filled with indecipherable writing, and some extremely odd illustrations. It’s been estimated it dates to sometime during the Renaissance.”

  “All the best things do,” the vampire murmured.

  She gently opened the book for us, revealing yellowing pages filled with dense script.

  “Every page contains text, mostly in an unknown script, although some also contain small examples of Latin.” She showed us. “Most pages contain substantial drawings or charts, coloured with paint. It’s mainly quill pen and iron gall ink, but most people think the coloured paint was added to the illustrations at a much later date.”

  My eyes scanned the dense, spiky lettering which greedily filled the inner pages.

  “What do you mean by indecipherable?” I asked with interest.

  “Well, you can see. They’re not words, or at least not words we understand.” She pointed out. “Most of the characters are just one or two simple pen strokes. A script of maybe twenty to twenty-five characters would account for pretty much all of the text. There’s no obvious punctuation, nowhere in the whole two hundred plus pages.”

  “So it’s gibberish?” I raised my eyebrows as Allesandro gingerly lifted the page and flipped through with a look of concentration furrowing his brow. The next few pages were equally crammed with tight, small lettering, and here and there, a mediaeval, brightly-coloured painting of some unknown plant, flower or leaf, wound and curling around the energetic writing.

  “Oh no, no, certainly not,” she said, scandalised. “Any lexicographer would tell you. They are most certainly words. They follow phonological laws you see, quite clearly, just not ones we’re familiar with. For example, certain characters must appear in each word, much as we use vowels in English. Some characters never follow others. Some are doubled or tripled whereas others never are. Many researchers through time have commented that there is a highly regular structure of the words. See here…” She pointed to a label beside a curling leaf. “There’s almost no repetition among the thousands of labels on the illustrations throughout the manuscript. Almost no words have fewer than two letters, or more than ten. It’s encoded, certainly.”

  Hope Nelson clearly believed that the book was a language, not the scribblings of a madman. “The trouble is,” she said. “Words that differ by only one letter repeat throughout the work with a high level of frequency. This is most unusual. It causes every single-word-substitution alphabet deciphering ever attempted on it to yield nothing but nonsense.”

  The vampire flicked onward a few pages, more tiny writing, more obscure plant drawings, I could identify none of them. The plants and flowers looked fantastical.

  “There is no consensus then,” he murmured, “on what this actually is?”

  Miss Nelson shook her head. “Some experts thought it a very thorough book simply on herbs, a pharmacopoeia if you will, to deal with mediaeval medicine, but there is much more to it than that. As we cannot decipher the writing, the illustrations give us our best definition of different sections of the manuscript.”

  She gently turned a few more pages, which crackled stiffly with age, each time revealing more minute writing and more outlandish plants.

  “As you can see,” she told us eagerly, her glasses flashing with reflections off the table lamp. “This first section here is clearly herbal in nature. The enigma is that no one can actually identify the plants. Many of the drawings have rather fantastical appendages or additions. Indeed a large number of them, as you see, appear to be composites of more than one plant. The roots of one species, the leaves of another, and flowers which don’t relate to either.”

  “Early biological splicing?” I joked. “That’s rather advanced for its time, wouldn’t you say? What about the other sections?”

  “Astronomical in nature is next,” she said, skipping many pages and showing us complex diagrams of celestial arrangements, densely labelled. Several of the pages contained fold outs, which she unravelled on the table top to reveal what looked like maps of the heavens.

  “Circular diagrams, you see?” she said. “Suns, moons, stars. Either astronomy or astrology, no one knows, although the zodiac signs are almost all present. Each of them ringed by a circle of female figures, always thirty of them, usually naked, and rather crudely rendered.”

  We stared at the figures, tiny female forms cropping up on every page. They were indeed very basically drawn, and some with almost no features at all, just a bare and basic representation of femininity. The women stared blankly up from the page at us. Silent and ancient here in the hushed subterranean reading room beneath the Camera.

  It made me think of our faceless corpse, which sent shivers down my spine.

  “They’re all holding stars,” Allesandro pointed out. The librarian nodded.

  “Mostly,” she agreed. “Although these women, the empty-handed ones, seem to be tethered by the arm to one at least, like tourniquets.”

  “Or IV drips,” I noted. There seemed something medical about the pictures to me, although perhaps I was just projecting my own scientific mind onto what was clearly a vague symbolic image to begin with.

  “The next section,” Nelson told us. “After the herbal and astrological, is absolutely filled with women like this. It’s generally referred to as the biological section.” Sh
e rustled the pages and showed us further into the work. The text and illustrations seeming to glow faintly in the hushed basements dim lights. “Again, it’s a continuous script, the entire section, many small naked women, some of them are wearing crowns, you see? Usually they are immersed in tubs, alone or in groups. Here, and here also…perhaps bathing.”

  These illustrations twined around the text on each page in a way that reminded me of old bibles and their elaborate illustrated letters. The many illustrated pools and figures, repeated in the section on page after page, in one form or another, seemed to be depicted connected to one another by an elaborate network of pipes.

  “These basins and tubes…” Nelson traced the linked drawings gently with a fingertip, “…are sometimes interpreted as implying a connection to alchemy.”

  “Bacon was certainly an alchemist,” the vampire said to me. “That much we know.”

  “The next section is not so clear,” our guide told us with a small frown. “Cosmological in nature, lots more foldouts, the most interesting one, in my opinion, is this.” She flicked to the relevant page, and carefully unfolded the vellum, several times. The foldout was large and very busy. “It spans six pages, as you can see, a huge and densely detailed diagram, and seems to contain a map of sorts. There are nine little islands, and it contains castles, and what some say seems to be a volcano.”

  “A map of where?” the vampire asked.

  She shrugged. “Maybe nowhere, it could be figurative. Representing something else, a diagram, an alchemical recipe of some kind.”

  There was a noise, somewhere in the dark of the basement behind us, a soft clank, as though a cupboard door had been stumbled against.

  I peered back into the silent gloom. “Is there anybody else down here with us?” I asked.

  The librarian shook her head. “There’s no one left in the building,” she assured me. “I was the last, I was locking up. It’s not usual to allow access to the reading rooms after hours…” She looked a little dreamily confused. “In fact…I’m not sure why I’m down here at all. It’s… it’s most irregular.”

  Allesandro reached out and gently placed his hand on hers. She looked down at him, mildly panicked.

  “Nonsense,” he assured her in a soft voice, smiling his angelic smile. “It’s perfectly fine. This is all perfectly fine, isn’t it, Hope?”

  I watched her eyes glaze a little, and her brow un-furrowed as the vampire’s will sloshed over her mind like waves on a beach, eradicating any flimsy sand defences.

  “Yes,” she sounded relieved. “Yes, of course it is. Perfectly fine.”

  He patted and released her hand.

  “It’s all very interesting,” he said. “And I’m aware that there’s a lot of different theories as to what the document means, and who actually wrote it and why. What we’re interested in, Hope, is a certain associate, who may have been spending time here, looking into this recently.”

  “An older gent, from the museum,” I prompted.

  She nodded happily. “Oh yes of course, dear Mr Knight. He’s been practically living here for weeks. Barely left the basement. Always scribbling down in his little notebook. He was like a man possessed. Charming though.”

  “Did he say anything to you, about his findings?” I asked. “Or why he was working on it at all?”

  Hope looked thoughtful for a moment. “He was rather cagey about whatever his theory was.” She shrugged. “These academics always are though, awfully tight-lipped until they’re published. He did consult me a little in the early stages of his research, before he got rather, well, rather intense to be honest.”

  “And?” I prompted.

  She shook her head. “He was certain it was Bacon’s work, I know that much. And from what we discussed, I got the impression he was leaning heavily towards the book being alchemical in nature, but with an almost…supernatural tilt.”

  “A supernatural tilt?” the vampire asked.

  “Well, you have to remember,” the librarian said. “This document was written a long time ago. Long before we knew that we were not alone in the world. We may have engineered the Pale, but the Genetic Others, vampires, Tribals, they’ve always been around. It’s only due to the war that the truth came out, otherwise we’d be none the wiser and still consider these people as myths and legends.”

  “She called me legendary,” Allesandro smiled at me playfully.

  “Now there’s some make-believe,” I said, rolling my eyes and trying not to smile. “So, he thought the alchemy in the manuscript was somehow related to what at the time were considered mythical creatures? We’re talking about GO genetics?”

  She shrugged, it was hard getting her to focus while she rolled under the vampire’s will. “Alchemy searches for many things, traditionally. The transmutation, one thing becoming another.”

  “Lead into gold,” Allesandro said. “Humans can be so silly.”

  “And the philosopher’s stone,” Hope said. “The endless search for immortality.”

  The vampire snorted, unimpressed. Maybe immortality wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

  “Knight believed this text was somehow tied to the immortality of the GOs’? And all this biology? What did he think it conveyed?” I wanted to know.

  There was a rank smell somewhere in the dark cool basement. “And what…is…that?” I asked, wrinkling my nose. “Are there rats down here? Smells like wet fur.”

  “There are no animals in the Radcliffe Camera,” our guide said stuffily. “Some of the books are carefully preserved, but the smell people usually comment on is medical.”

  The vampire stood up slowly, looking back the way we had come, through the dark arches. His eyes were narrowed. “No, you’re right. Animal smell,” he said, his voice quiet.

  The basement library stretched around us, silent and still and shrouded in darkness.

  “Hope, did Mr Knight happen to tell you who commissioned him to study this text? Or did he leave notes here? You mentioned a notebook,” I pressed, trying to keep her lucid.

  “I’m afraid he didn’t leave anything here. You could contact him at the museum, I’m sure?”

  No, we could scoop him up with a spatula, I thought. What’s left of him. I kept having to remind myself these deaths were not common knowledge, so I smiled and nodded. She might have an idea. Perhaps the notebook would be in his office.

  “As for whom he was working, he didn’t exactly say,” she said. “But I know he was working with some scientists from the Jenner Institute. Some kind of a special project he said. He was quite honoured to be involved. Bless the fellow, you know I think he’d gotten bored since he retired and was glad to be of use again. Academics are never really happy unless they’ve got their teeth into something, are they? He did mention that he got quite a boost to the museum funding for his help. He told me that much.”

  “Jenner scientists?” I glanced at Allesandro. “The missing students, Amanda Bishop’s class.”

  “My little Helsing regular was working at the Jenner,” the vampire agreed. “And it is her students who are missing. But what was the project, and who’s behind it?” the vampire asked. “And why did it seemingly get them both killed?”

  “Project…Crescentmoon?” I suggested, dangling the word in front of my companion like a carrot. He gave me a curious look. I had wanted to mention it, just to see if it got a reaction, but he didn’t seem familiar with it.

  Another noise from further behind us made us all turn. A soft thump.

  “Is someone there?” the librarian said, sounding very put out. “This library is closed. Hello?”

  She looked anxiously at us, her mind trying to reconcile her words with the fact that she was happily giving us a guided tour.

  “The manuscript,” she said. “Please can you…look after it a moment? It’s very precious. I’ll only be a minute.” She turned and walked back the way we had come. I heard her heels clopping away from us, the automatic lights flaring briefly, marking her passage un
til she disappeared behind the stacks. The lights clicked off one by one with an air of finality, leaving us marooned in darkness. I stood up, slowly and carefully, and Allesandro grasped me by the wrist. His fingers were cold against my skin. I looked at him. He was staring into the darkness. I had a terrible sense of foreboding.

  “Something is wrong, Doctor,” he whispered.

  The smell was stronger than ever. Bestial. Wet rank fur. And something else. Overlaying it all, the smell of…sickness.

  I scooped the book off the table. It was surprisingly heavy. A tiny part of me gave a small internal ‘eep’ at the fact I was clumsily manhandling an ancient and fragile work.

  “We should…” I began, but got no further. A short series of bangs cut me off, making me jump, and making the vampire close his fingers possessively tighter around my wrist. A soft wet thud followed, and something rolled out of the shadows, bouncing like a beach-ball as it tumbled across the floor toward us.

  It came to a halt a few paces before it reached my feet. We stared down silently into the blank-eyed and surprised stare of Hope Nelson’s severed head. Spatters of blood flecked her face, spattered across her glasses, somehow still attached to her face. The head was messy. It had not been severed from her body with a blade of any kind. It had been torn off. Ripped.

  My hand flew to my mouth as I stared at the remains. I didn’t scream. I’ve never been a screamer, but horror churned in my throat.

  A long low growl rolled out of the gloom, deep and threatening. It was such a deep noise I felt it vibrating in my chest like a motorbike idling.

  “Tribal,” the vampire at my side said, eyes narrowed. His lips had peeled back in a snarl, revealing his fangs.

  He hadn’t looked down at the severed head thrown playfully at our feet. A mocking gift. I forced myself to tear my eyes away from it, from Hope Nelson’s shocked, wide-eyed stare, her lolling mouth.