Gods of Aberdeen

by Micah Nathan

  Albo shook his head and stroked one of the books closest to him, as a father would his child. “We are still unpacking. Mr. Corso’s catalogue was among my belongings that were lost in the fire. It may take us years to once again document what we have. We do not even know what we lost.”

  “So where would I find the Malezel book?”

  Albo shrugged and smiled gently. “Pray God will lead you to it,” he said.

  Art turned and surveyed the room. He put his hands on his hips and sighed.

  “Is this stuff all yours?” I said. I spotted a dusty jukebox with cracked glass, an electric guitar lying across what looked like the top part of a piano.

  Albo laughed softly. “No. Nikolai Donegar was a collector, as you can see. This was all here when we arrived…”

  He looked out over the room, lips pursed, a hint of a disapproving frown sneaking its way onto his face.

  “I will have Brother Falldin bring tea, if you’d like,” Albo said, his smile returning. “I would help you but the damp chills my old bones…”

  “We’ll be fine,” Art said. He was already searching the piles, picking his way delicately among the stacks and towers.

  I helped Art for a while but eventually made my way into the junk, imagining I’d find some lost cache of gold coins. Instead I found a box of pornographic pens, the kind where the women’s clothes come off when you tip the pen upside-down, and I also found hundreds of envelopes stuffed with flyers advertising a Czech rock group. Another box held official-looking forms—taxes or something like that—and the box near it had a bunch of moldy albums I’d never heard of. There was a door on the far wall but it was locked.

  Art was sitting on the floor, sifting through a bunch of papers. He looked tired—shoulders slumped, eyes heavy.

  I tried the door again. I thought for a moment, and decided that since the door probably hadn’t been opened in years (a trickle of rust sifted down from the knob when I’d first turned it) I wasn’t entering someplace I shouldn’t. At least, I figured, nothing the monks owned would be in there.

  “Can you pick locks?” I asked Art.

  With anyone else it would have been a crazy question, but Art had all sorts of quirky, random skills, like card tricks and origami (I once saw him make a woman with a parasol, out of a restaurant receipt), and he could do complicated math problems in his head, square roots and cube roots and long division, and he could even fix his car—over the course of the semester I’d watched him replace the brakes, perform a tune-up, and give the engine a partial overhaul.

  “The door might be locked for a reason,” Art said.

  “It hasn’t been opened in years,” I said.

  Art dropped the papers and looked at me, wearily, and then he stood and made his way across the room. He stopped, looked around the floor, and picked up a bicycle wheel. He began to work on one of the spokes.

  “There’s a chance the Malezel book was lost in the fire,” he said.

  I didn’t say anything. What was there to say?

  “If that’s the case,” Art grunted and ripped a spoke free from the wheel, “we might have to go to Sofia.” He started bending the spoke. “I’ll pay for your ticket, don’t worry about that. But I haven’t even started the next section for Dr. Cade, and I’d planned on getting back in time to at least finish the first third of the Crusades, and if we have to travel to Sofia I don’t see how I’ll be able to translate Malezel before the semester starts.”

  I wasn’t sure I’d heard him correctly. “Sofia?” I said. “In Bulgaria?”

  Art nodded. “The Petrusal Library has a decent selection of hand-copied works, courtesy of all those poor monks who destroyed their eyes sitting in the scriptoria. I don’t like to use copied works, but we may not have much of a choice. Of course, that’s assuming there’d even be a copy of Malezel, given its heretical status, but I figure anything with Dei may have been preserved on principle alone…”

  Art was right to be wary. The scriptoria were dreadful places, consisting of a senior monk sitting in the front of a dimly lit room, reading from a text for hours on end, while his fellow monks (especially those who had to perform penance, for scriptorium duty was often given as punishment) remained hunched over at their cramped desks, transcribing his words. Monks would often nod off, waking up and continuing their transcription as if they hadn’t missed a beat, and sometimes, when the tedium became unbearable, monks would doodle nasty little notes in the margins: A curse upon the author of this wretched text. My back is broken, my neck is stiff, my eyes dim and still there are six months before the end. As a result, many transcribed manuscripts (including, as many Christians are loathe to admit, the Bible) are filled with gross errors in continuity and syntax.

  Art held up the bicycle spoke, its end bent at ninety degrees.

  “Now, help me find a paper clip,” he said. “Anything thin and strong will do.”

  I searched around for a bit, then had a minor revelation and pulled a metal clip off one of the porno pens’ caps. Art was already at the door when I gave it to him.

  He inspected the clip for a moment and slipped it into the lock, along with the bent end of the bicycle spoke. After a few tense minutes Art’s face relaxed and he turned the bicycle spoke. I heard a distinct click.

  “Incredible,” I said.

  Art dropped the tools on the floor and wiped his palms on his pants. “Repetition,” he said plainly, and he walked back to his books.

  I entered a small room, dark outlines in front of me lit dimly by the single bulb in the basement, and once my eyes adjusted I saw the far corner of the room was littered with jars and glass boxes, and the walls were covered in posters, old posters from the turn of the century, advertising magicians (The Wondrous Bandini! The Mysterious Necromancy of Corvinus the Hungarian!) and elixirs that claimed to cure everything from dropsy to consumption. One such poster showed a muscle-bound man with a mustache and iron wristbands, swigging a bottle of “McGillicuty’s Samson Oil.” In the next panel, with feet firmly planted and arms extended, the newly empowered muscleman resists the pull of three horses, gripping their thick reins in his hands, while people in the audience stand and cheer.

  I walked past a desk, a large day calendar centered on top. Notes were scribbled on a few of the days. Someone had sketched a naked lady, and written a phone number beneath. A deck of cards lay near the calendar, and a stiff rubber clown nose that cracked in half when I squeezed it. One of the drawers held an open jar of wax or Vaseline or something like it, with the ancient corpse of a fly on its back, stuck in the goo. Another drawer had silk handkerchiefs tied in various knots. Another had a baggie filled with an ominous white powder, twist-tied shut, lying next to some plastic spoons and a packet of sugar and a jumble of coffee stirrers. There was a familiar smell in the room, vinegary and sweet under the must and damp, and I soon realized what it was: formaldehyde. It reminded me of high school bio lab.

  The jars and glass boxes were covered in a thick coat of dust, and when I wiped off the front of one of the larger jars, I discovered where the smell was coming from. Floating, motionless inside the jar, was a hand. It was swollen and its peeling skin looked like beeswax.

  I turned the jar and looked at the hand from all sides. Whose hand? I thought. Nikolai Donegar? Nikola Donegar? A thief cut from the gallows? I knew about the Hand of Glory: the hand of a gibbeted criminal, lopped off and used as protection against burglary. Lot of good it did you, I thought, and I wiped clean another jar.

  Inside was a foot with two missing toes. I cleaned off the glass boxes. Various organs, all labelled in English. A spleen, a gall bladder, a liver. The biggest box contained a large grayish lump with the label The Heart of Nicephorus, the Adriatic Giant glued to the outside of the glass.

  A black towel had been draped over the largest jar. I took a deep breath, and pulled the towel off.

  There was a head in a glass globe, a monstrous staring thing with swirling black hair and puffy, misshapen lips, bared teeth the
color of skim milk, sunken eyes that still bulged and looked as though they might blink at any moment. Below it, engraved in English on the globe’s wooden base:

  DR. HORATIO J. GRIMEK

  CLAIRVOYANT, SPIRITUALIST, TRUTH SEER

  ASK, AND YE SHALL RECEIVE

  I stared, both fascinated and repulsed. I knocked on the globe with my knuckle. Horatio stared back. His hair hung in mid-swirl, black lines crisscrossing his forehead.

  “Does the Philosopher’s Stone exist?” I said.

  One of his ears looked like it was falling off.

  “Will Art find his book?”

  “How old is Cornelius?”

  I leaned in and whispered:

  Does Ellen love me?

  Horatio J. Grimek continued his thousand-mile stare. A poster of Carmine the Magnificent loomed above, Carmine holding a black wand in one hand and a ball of fire in the other, his eyes colored bright blue like the summer sky.

  I replaced the black towel. Silly, I thought, and I turned and walked away and that’s when I heard a hollow thump, the kind of noise something sloshing against the inside of a bucket of water would make. Since then I’ve convinced myself that hollow thump was a mouse, roused from its hiding place, scurrying among the jars and glass boxes, but at the time, when I still believed anything was possible, when I’d already found myself in the basement of a strip-club-turned-Benedictine-monastery searching for an ancient manuscript that held the secret of immortality between its alum-tawed pigskin covers, I believed that maybe, maybe the head of Dr. Horatio J. Grimek still had some leftover mojo from his days as soothsayer, and I bolted, banging my hip against the desk, kicking over a box of plastic magic wands, careening out of the room and slamming the door behind me.

  Art looked up from the stacks, slowly, with a sort of detached interest.

  “Anything good?” he said.

  I was breathing heavily, my heart a trip-hammer.

  “A human head in a jar,” I said, and to my amazement, Art simply nodded and went back to work.

  Albo was kind enough to put me up in one of the spare rooms, with a cot and a thin wool blanket and one of those old space heaters with exposed, red-hot coils. Art told Albo that, with his permission of course, he’d continue his search through the night, and if he did find the manuscript, he’d present his offer to Albo in the morning.

  “Offer?” Albo said.

  “To purchase the book,” Art said. “I have some idea of its worth, but you can certainly name your—”

  “Our books are not for sale,” Albo said, with a kind smile. “Certainly we could use the money, but I could not bear to part with my books. They have become our only link to the past.”

  Art was going to say something, I think, but Albo smiled reassuringly. “You may, of course, copy whatever it is you need. If you’d like, I could ask Brother Luschausen to assist you.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Art said. “My assistant here will take care of it.”

  Art looked at me and raised his eyebrows.

  “Hoc opus, hic labor est,” I said. This is the hard work, this is the toil.

  Albo laughed, wrinkles spreading from the corners of his eyes like the branches of a dried-up riverbed.

  I was awakened sometime in the night. Art was standing over me, gently shaking my shoulder. For a second I thought I was back home, in Dr. Cade’s house.

  “Eric,” Art whispered.

  The space heater glowed red. The wool blanket was down near my waist and I was shivering. Art’s face was a half-moon, one side lit orange from the heater, the other cloaked in darkness.

  He has cancer this time, I thought. Or maybe some rare blood disease. Or maybe Art just wants to talk about the usual; the Byzantine literary salons of Thessalonica; the astronomy laboratories in Trebizond; the rise and fall of the Saxon empire.

  I pulled up the blanket.

  “I found it,” Art said, excitedly. “I found the book.”

  I wanted to be thrilled but jet lag had taken its toll, and I couldn’t imagine getting out of my bed and walking across the frigid stone floor.

  “I’m exhausted,” I said.

  “Keep your voice down,” Art hissed. “I need you to look at something.”

  “What time is it?” I said.

  “Three, maybe four,” he said. He ran his hands through his hair and looked around the small room. “Get your stuff together and follow me,” he said. “And for Christ’s sake, keep quiet.”

  We sat on the stage in the main room, near the pole, letting the white Christmas lights illuminate the book. The rest of the room was dark; small round tables, the Christmas lights reflecting like distant stars in the smoked mirror behind the bar. Art was wearing a pair of latex gloves, and he had a jeweler’s loupe in his hand.

  A row of acorns filled the center of the book’s cover, just like the Gilbert book had described, and in the four corners, in Cyrillic script, were the words Fides, Lux Lucis, Caritas, and Aequitas. Faith, Hope, Charity, Justice.

  Lux lucis, I thought. What an odd choice of words.

  The hope of lux lucis is entirely different from spes, the theological virtue of Hope. Spes is the desire for a future good, which the medieval Church believed was only possible to attain with the help of God. (However, I now know that spes also implies the hope for an eternal life, which glorifies God because, according to the Church, only through God is eternal life possible. Knowing that, Johann Malezel’s decision to replace spes with lux lucis made even more sense.)

  Lux lucis is an elucidation, a seeing eye, the light of day that shines upon something unknown. Such double entendres aren’t rare in heretical works; the very nature of heretical works implies hidden meanings clear only to the initiated. But it seemed as if Brother Malezel hadn’t been as clever as he’d believed, or maybe he just didn’t care if the Church took notice.

  Art, however, wasn’t interested in any of this. When I asked him what he thought of Malezel’s lux lucis, he merely shushed me and read aloud, in a harsh whisper, from the top of the first page:

  “‘I emit the hypothesis that arsenic acts as a catalyzer and the sulphur as a ferment in this transmutation.’”

  Art turned to page 38. As the Gilbert book had noted, a small hole had been burned in the page, passing through to the next. Art put the jeweler’s loupe in his eye and delicately brushed the hole with a gloved finger.

  “You can still see traces of the wax, I think.” He popped out the loupe and handed it to me. “Tell me what you see.”

  I didn’t need the loupe. “It looks like a hole,” I said.

  “Yeah, but what kind of hole.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “A small hole.”

  “I wish I knew the number and location of wormholes in the spine,” Art said. “A wax burn you can fake, but bookworm trails are trickier. If the holes have smooth curves it can indicate a punch or drill of some kind. Of course, if you burr the edges it could pass off as legit but that takes some talent…”

  At this point he was talking to himself. He wasn’t even looking at me, just staring at the page, rambling on about forgeries and fakes and the Church planting false information in copies of heretical texts.

  Art gently turned the page, then another, then he closed the book and patted the cover. He wrapped the book in long strips of white cloth, and when he finished he slipped it into his bag and pulled off his latex gloves.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “Borrowing what I need,” he said.

  “You mean stealing what you need.”

  Art shook his head emphatically. “I intend to return it when I’m done.”

  “Then why don’t you just ask Brother Albo?”

  Art buckled his bag shut. “They don’t even read their books. They just store them away. This book isn’t meant to be forgotten on some shelf in the dark corner of a monastery basement.”

  He quietly slipped off the stage and slung the bag over his shoulder. “You ready?”

&
nbsp; I looked around the room. Albo wouldn’t know his book had been taken. He wouldn’t ever know—even years later, when their inventory is done, he would just assume it was lost in the fire. I recalled Albo’s kind smile, and the bad wine he’d given me, and his delight at my lame little attempt at a Latin joke (hoc opus, hic labor est). I don’t believe in a god—at least not a moral one who’s concerned with our affairs—but I’m sure that stealing from monks is marked down somewhere in the cosmic registry.

  Art, however, didn’t look concerned at all. In fact, he looked the happiest I’d seen him since he’d walked into my basement apartment at the Paradise Motel. I looked at his bag, made a silent apology to whatever god may be listening, and followed him across the room, buttoning my coat and trying to push the image of Dr. Horatio J. Grimek’s head out of my mind. I know what you’ve done, Horatio was saying. Ask, and ye shall receive.

  We wandered back to the hotel, treading heavily through the rising stratum of snow, our path lit by streetlamps and the moon floating behind a scrim of clouds.

  “We shouldn’t have taken the book,” I said.

  Art adjusted the bag at his side. “I’ll send an anonymous check,” he said, irritated. “Stop worrying about it.”

  I kicked at a soot-blackened icy chunk that looked like it had fallen off the underside of a car. Art took out his pipe and began to pack the bowl.

  “Don’t you feel any remorse?” I said.

  I thought maybe Art was going to start yelling at me, and I didn’t care, but instead he stopped and struck a match, pulling on his pipe in long, soft drags. He exhaled, head back, gazing at the night sky. “I believe in necessity,” he said. “If anything, I pity Albo Luschini. He had the key to unlocking the mysteries of the universe, and he never even knew it.”

  Aeneas, I thought. Pitying Dido.

  The wind had returned and it whipped around us, shrieking across snow-covered cobblestones and careening off brick buildings, echoing over the valley and fading away into the mountains, breaking atop craggy peaks and icy pine, scattering about like dust.