The Stone of Madness

by Nick Baker

  Lex flicked indiscriminately through the book, and to his uneducated eye, he wondered what all the fuss was about. With its archaic language and bizarre symbols, the book had been written in double Dutch for all he knew, and after a few minutes’ perusal, he quickly lost interest and returned it to his coat.

  Lex spent the remainder of the journey cooped up in the claustrophobic berth trying to suppress the seasickness that continually threatened to engulf him, and after a crossing that was marginally less disconcerting than the outward trip, the boat struck land in a brackish backwater a few miles along the coast from Harwich. After boarding a freight wagon laden with cargo destined for the city, Lex returned to the bedsit he rented in a run-down area of the East End just shy of two weeks after his departure.

  When he finally crawled up to his room in the early hours, he was reassured to espy the delicate piece of tape he had left hidden between the door and the jamb still safely secured in place. He unlocked the door and trod on a note lying on the doormat hastily written in Abel’s spidery scrawl requesting the delivery of the book the moment he returned. He smiled at the thought of turning up on Abel’s doorstep at four in the morning, and without a second thought, he went straight to bed and slept until lunchtime. After a leisurely bath, he caught a bus to the Academy and dropped the book off with Abel after a curt exchange of words. It was time to celebrate, and after a quick scout of the neighbourhood, he found the nearest hostelry, the rather inappropriately named Scales of Justice.

  The weeks that followed went from one mind-bending hangover to the next, and while Lex heard nothing from Frankl, he was happy to combine days spent gambling with evenings of unbridled alcoholic excess. Despite an encyclopaedic knowledge of the horses and a never-ending supply of inside information gleaned from stable hands, jockeys, trainers, tipsters and owners, Lex’s long-running and extremely unlucky losing streak continued as if he had never been away.

  Barely a month after his return, he reluctantly opened his eyes and snapped them shut again. He pulled up the bedclothes to shield his eyes from the late morning sunshine streaming in through the half-drawn Venetian blind. He ruefully recalled the moment the blind had frozen after the cord had jammed, leaving the material sadly dangling halfway across its frame. The blind was swaying in a gale passing between the sash and its warped wooden frame, and as he ventured from beneath the sheets, his head spun with the kaleidoscope of light that accompanied the oscillating blind. His mouth felt as a dry as the Sahara, and as he peeled his tongue from the roof of his mouth, he recognised the familiar manifestation of alcohol-induced dehydration. He had drunk at least a pint of Scotch judging by how he felt, but as to where and with whom, he could not recall. He groped in vain for the bedside table and the packet of cigarettes he hoped, rather than expected, to find there, only to dislodge an empty liquor bottle onto the floor. He watched in dismay as the bottle rolled across the floorboards gathering speed as it went before colliding with the skirting board to shatter into myriad pieces.

  After washing and dressing in a vain attempt to dispel the perennial headache that had dogged his return, he thought about where to go for a late breakfast followed by that elusive winner and a gentle slip back into oblivion. After all, he had fulfilled his side of the bargain, and now it was someone else’s turn. In the meantime, well, there was always one more drink to be had.

  *

  Abel Strange’s glasses slipped unceremoniously towards the bulbous tip of his nose, teetering on the brink of an inglorious fall onto the faded pages of the manuscript that lay open on the desk in front of him. He pushed absent-mindedly on the glasses so that they came to sit more comfortably on the bridge of his nose, an innocuous gesture habitually performed due to the weight of the thick optical prisms his short-sighted vision depended on.

  He looked up from the manuscript with eyes that were strained and weary after an unbroken spell studying the hand-written words. He sighed and looked aimlessly through the window, only to be startled by a hideously deformed, demonic silhouette of a gargoyle leaping out from the shadows of the crenellated stonework. Strange’s pulse slackened once the penny dropped that the waning sunlight was playing a trick on his eyes, seemingly bringing the gargoyle to life. As he stared through the window, he looked back on his progress, or more accurately, the lack of it, over the past few weeks.

  While Lex was in Amsterdam, Strange had not been idle, diligently scrutinising the cipher to look for the keyword even before the second book arrived. Just before his death, Styx had explained that by undertaking a frequency analysis of the encrypted passage, the keyword could be determined. Nevertheless, despite looking for patterns of repetition using a complex mathematical formula, Strange soon realised that the technique was flawed, because, quite simply, the number of encoded letters was too small to allow such a sophisticated analysis.

  Once the manuscript arrived, Strange set to work amidst a frenzy of expectation, locking himself away in a dormitory high up in one of the countless towers that dominated the Academy’s skyline. The Academy had once been overwhelmed with students, but in recent years, numbers had dwindled to little more than a handful of classes, leaving students in the unenviable position of being outnumbered by the teachers who had made the decaying edifice their home. The countless vacant rooms of the once-thriving institution were ideal for Strange to pursue his meticulous evaluation of the near-identical copies of the book, and as Chief Mentor, it was his privilege to have unhindered access to abandoned areas of the building free from interruption and away from prying eyes.

  Initial progress was both rapid and fruitful, but eventually and to considerable frustration, his work soon came to a grinding halt. As luck would have it, it was not a difficult task to determine the keyword through a painstaking comparison of the books. During his evaluation, he noticed that, at various intervals, a word was repeatedly omitted from the text. In one copy, Piotrowski continually made reference to ‘the Esoteric Brotherhood’, whereas in the other, on five occasions, it was ‘the Brotherhood’, leading Strange to suspect that ‘Esoteric’ must be the keyword. With a creeping sense of anticipation, he paired the keyword with the cipher and input the pairs of letters into a Vigenère table constructed in the way that Styx had described. He felt a thrill in the pit of his stomach as the plaintext took shape, but elation soon gave way to disappointment as the letters coalesced into the same gobbledegook he had begun with.

  After a moments’ dismay, he recalled Styx’s description of the Caesar shift and how the table could be constructed with twenty-six possible permutations depending on the position of the alphabet within the table’s axes. He knew it would take time, but on a whim, he began with a Caesar shift of five, based on the number of times the presumptive keyword had been dropped from the manuscript. This time, as he wrote out the letters, he stared in amazement as the deciphered letters merged into a recognisable sentence.

  ‘The secret is deeply buried within the covers of the book,’ he read out over and over again, each time with an increasing sense of dissatisfaction and disappointment. Yes, he was relieved at finally breaking the cipher, but all he had achieved was to confirm what Pearly and Frankl had suspected all along.

  Following the false hope of a breakthrough, Strange went back to the manuscript time and again, searching in ever more ingenious ways to uncover the secret the message alluded to, but all to no avail. He tried to convince himself that there was further code enmeshed within the text, but no matter how hard he looked, he could not find it. It was like searching for a grain of sand on a beach, continually re-examining the book looking for patterns in the words and in the construction of the sentences in the vain hope of uncovering something he must have missed, but the more desperately he searched, the more impotent he felt. The prospect of failure hung over him like a black cloud, and in frustration, he even questioned Frankl’s overzealousness at disposing of Styx.

  Strange realised he had been daydreaming and shook himself free of his musing. He looked away from
the gargoyle and returned his attention to the book, accompanying it with a sigh at having reached such a frustrating impasse. He switched on a reading lamp, illuminating the desk he had been slumped over for as many hours as he cared to remember. He returned his attention to the manuscript and regarded it with a combination of exasperation and despair. In a sudden act of defiance, he slammed the pages shut, scattering sheaves of notes across the room. He leapt up from the chair, desperately needing to escape from a room that had become a prison cell. He knew he could ill-afford it, but perhaps a break would allow him to return refreshed, ready to face the many hours that unquestionably lay ahead. It was only a matter of time before Frankl turned up to assess his progress, and after the repulsive man’s increasingly frequent phone calls, Strange had struggled to reassure him that everything was proceeding as planned. He dared not imagine the ignominy that Frankl would heap on him should he fail, and he was determined not to let that happen.

  In a sudden fit of pique, he picked up a candle and a box of matches and turned his back on the desk while silently cursing the Academy’s ancient electrical wiring system. He strode from the room and set off down a spiral staircase that led towards numerous vacant dormitories. He passed through long-forgotten halls exuding desolation and neglect, chilling him to the core, and along indistinguishable corridors bound by cool walls as smooth as marble, damp with the ever-present trickle of decay.

  At last, Strange saw a distant glow of light ahead and slowed his pace. He halted, turning his head towards the sound of carefree voices drifting back towards him along the corridor. In his black mood, Strange had unknowingly found his way through a maze of passageways to the students’ common room. The sound of idle chatter took him back to a forgotten time when he had also been a student at the Academy, doting over his friends like a faithful dog. He pictured Pearly and Henry sitting together as he looked on, silently torn between his loyalty to each man, observing their discussion gradually evolving from friendly banter into something far more menacing. Henry had been, ostensibly, such a dark and brooding young man, yet undeniably also capable of kindness that often went unnoticed by others. Pearly had been intelligent, articulate and captivating, and admired by one and all. These two men had been the closest of friends and the most profound of enemies from the moment they met, and despite this baffling dichotomy, it was no surprise that, finally, it had ended with him, Abel Strange, caught in the middle.

  He laughed, cold and hollow, still unsure even now of where his true allegiance lay. To Pearly, a man who had been dead for ten years? Or to Henry, who had done so much for him in recent years? The debate had been raging inside his head for as long as he cared to remember, yet no matter what, it all seemed in vain. And now he was embroiled with Frankl, a man he detested, but what choice was left to him if he was to unravel a secret that had accompanied Pearly to the grave?

  Sitting on the cool stone floor, Strange recalled the anger and despair that had threatened to overwhelm him following Pearly’s demise; resentment at being left alone and sorrow for the loss of a man he had loved. While these feelings had dwindled with the passage of time, he had never come to terms with them. He supposed it was inevitable that Henry had been linked with Pearly’s death, but as to who was culpable, he had never dared to speculate. It was also hard to believe that Pearly had, in some way, been responsible for Saskia’s death.

  He shook his head. He had never been privy to Pearly’s darkest secrets, and even now, he suspected that Frankl was holding something back, but whatever it was, he was determined to find out. He closed his eyes and let his recent struggles wash over him. He licked his fingers and doused the candle, pitching the corridor into darkness. The babble of voices gradually dipped as the pupils headed for their dormitories, and as the sound of footsteps on the stone flags dwindled into an eerie silence, he was left feeling utterly alone and forlorn.

  He rested in the corridor until he lost all track of time, focusing on the solitude as he sought to purge the thoughts that threatened to engulf him. Whether he slept or rested, he did not know, but in the darkness and isolation, he finally found some harmony as all thoughts were vanquished, leaving his mind an empty canvas.

  Strange suddenly sat bolt upright. At first, it began as nothing more than a distant notion, but gradually, his thoughts coalesced into something more tangible, a bright and all-defining light, a revelation of infinitesimal dimensions. That was it. He had it. He had solved the riddle of the manuscript!

  ‘The secret is deeply buried within the covers of the book,’ he cried out, only to hear his words reverberate around him, exacerbating his excitement even further.

  He laughed. How could he have missed it? It was all so glaringly obvious!

  He picked himself up in a sudden frenzy, desperate to return to the tower. He knew he was right; he was sure of it. He fumbled in his pocket for the box of matches, and after rekindling the candle, he set off, rushing headfirst to his apartment to collect the implements he was sure to need.

  Fifteen minutes later, breathless and in a whirl of anticipation, Strange crossed the threshold to the dormitory and made for the small desk. He stooped to inspect the manuscript still lying where he had slammed it shut, regarding it now with excitement rather than the despondency of earlier. He sat down with a magnifying glass and scrutinised the cover, immediately finding what he was looking for.

  Piotrowski’s manuscript was typical for its era, comprising of groups of eight pages of vellum, bound together and hand-stitched into the bindings. The book’s front and rear covers were constructed of thin, rectangular pieces of wood protected by leather jackets. Strange felt his pulse quicken as he focused the lens on the bullet hole. At last, he knew he was right! Rather than a single sheet of wood making up the front cover, there were two, but even now with the aid of a powerful lens, he could barely make it out.

  ‘The secret is deeply buried within the covers of the book,’ he repeated inanely, this time with a wry shake of his head. He finally realised that the sentence he had puzzled over for so long was merely a statement of fact; a piece of paper was hidden inside the book’s front cover!

  He picked up a stiletto and worked it assiduously around the margins of the cover to peel back the leather that had encased the wood for almost five centuries. He placed the sharp point of the blade between the two pieces of wood, and with a quick twist, the conjoined twins parted to reveal a single sheet of vellum. He removed the paper and held it up to his eyes, smiling with relief as he stared at the reams of letters, small and neat, and quite obviously and incoherently written in code.

  18

  THE STONE OF MADNESS

  Wren’s Cache

  JOSEF FRANKL PULLED UP the collar of his ankle-length overcoat and huddled back in the doorway to shelter from the incessant rain. He shook his head disconsolately, struggling to accept that even now, in the early hours of the morning, the storm had not abated. He looked up to espy water spilling out of a blocked gutter and collecting in a seething puddle at his feet. He followed the water’s progress as it flowed in great rivulets across the pavement before gushing into the road. Here, the water was building into a swirling vortex above a storm drain clogged with debris. He shivered involuntarily and, for the first time, questioned the prudence of going ahead with the meeting he had convened for the remainder of what had once been the Order of Eternal Enlightenment.

  It was a week since he had received the news that Strange had finally cracked the secret of Piotrowski’s manuscript. After visiting the Academy to see the astounding revelation for himself, he had spent the next few days absorbing the implications of Strange’s discovery before dispatching the black pearls that would convey the instructions of where and when they were to meet.

  He had followed Pearly’s age-old tradition and chosen a typically dangerous venue for the meeting after receiving the dubious assurance from the meteorological office that the current downpour he was witnessing from the confines of the shelter would miss the capital, but onc
e again, they had got it wrong. He briefly wondered whether to postpone the meeting, but after straining his eyes to examine his wristwatch, he realised it was already too late; he could not back down now.

  He slipped from the doorway and looked up to leaden skies. The oppressive atmosphere endured, and although the rain was slackening, it continued to fall in a steady drizzle. He shook his head like a dog, expelling raindrops from the few remaining strands of his hair. He pulled up the hood of his coat before heading eastwards along The Strand towards a deserted Fleet Street. It was several years since he had last visited this area, but his destination was one of Pearly’s favourite haunts, and on this day of days, he was well aware of how fitting that would be.

  He checked he was alone before turning off Farringdon Road into a neighbourhood of narrow alleys and passageways, and after losing himself in a maze of frighteningly similar streets, he came to a halt. He craned his neck to examine a street sign on the adjacent wall, dimly lit in the neon light. Old Seacoal Lane, it read; a throwback to the distant past when coal barges from the north had sailed up the Fleet River. It was hard to comprehend that the river had once flourished here, passing beneath the gates of the notorious prison that had shared its name. In days gone by, the river had been a dumping ground for the murdered and slain, yet even now, the tightly-knit tenements still retained a dubious reputation as a haven for gangsters and thieves. Although the river had long since disappeared, Pearly had always loved this part of the city from the day he had been born into it.