“Tigall, tigall, efram shine.
Divine long neetings have Y mine,
Vora endess sky and Ys,
Endess, endess, whiten tis,
Tigall, tigall, efram shine,
Y divine long neetings mine.”
Michael shook his head. “It’s beyond me. Do you recognize the meter, Galen?”
He did—in the adjacent chair, the musician had turned white. “My God,” he said slowly. “My God—it is a nursery rhyme.”
“Which one?” Michael asked. “I’m afraid I’m not up to date on my nursery rhymes.”
Galen looked out the window into the darkness of the night and, voice shaking, began to recite:
“Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are,
Up above the world so high,
Like a diamond in the sky,
Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
Now I know just what you are.
“That’s the one,” said Jude.
“Oh, dear,” said Michael.
* * *
Michael set his glass of absinthe on the low table and slid off of his chair onto the floor, where he lay arms akimbo. “Frankly, I don’t know what to think,” he said helplessly. “I thought I was prepared for just about anything, but I’ve never heard a story like you’ve just foisted on us told with a straight face.”
“I concur,” said Galen, rubbing wearily at his temples, “and I don’t think the mere effort of listening to a story has ever drained me so completely.”
“I understand,” said Jude, “although I’d like to think the lateness of the hour and the quantities of alcohol consumed have something to do with your state of being.”
“Blast,” Michael exclaimed, looking upside down at a mantel clock. “It’s after three in the morning—and we haven’t even taken a thorough look at the manuscript.”
Galen responded with an equally aggravated epithet. “I have two meetings before noon, neither of which I am prepared for, but I am loathe to leave this … Book, without a solid declaration of intentions. What do you propose?” he asked, turning away from the pages and towards Jude, who seemed neither fatigued nor distressed by the lateness of the hour.
“Gentlemen,” he said, rising from the couch for the first time since they had entered the apartment, “I was fully aware that the processes of verification and translation were not going to be instantaneous. When I invited you to my show, my intention was to prepare you for the story I had to tell, and perhaps for events to come …” What those events might be, Michael thought, would be a good question for a day when his eyeballs were not preparing to fall from his head.
“… And I am quite prepared to leave the Prime Edda with whichever one of you would be the most appropriate to have deal with it. After all, we are colleagues, are we not?”
Jude could see Galen trembling—he wanted to take hold of the document and infuse it into his bones, and his desire for it was barely controlled and more visible then he would have guessed. Galen was struggling between his need to possess, and his academic and logical understanding that overall, Professor Langbein was the better qualified. He was on the verge of speaking, his choice still unmade, when Michael ended Galen’s inner stalemate.
“Why don’t we just keep it in the secured section of the main Library?” he suggested. “That way, we would all have access to it whenever we can find the time.”
“Mmm,” said Galen, “I like the idea of mutually equitable access, but I must ask—haven’t there been security concerns with that very section recently?”
“That wasn’t my fault,” Michael insisted groggily. “I don’t even know what happened to the key, much less the strongbox, and no one is willing to let an untenured professor look at the security reports. You’re Administration,” he said, nodding to Galen, “can’t you look into it?”
“Of course,” Galen answered. “I had to ask. I’ll look into it tomorrow.”
“Excellent,” said Jude. “Shall we wrap up the pages again, then? I’m sure we’ll be meeting to examine it again soon, and we all have an early morning approaching.”
“Yeah,” said Michael, sitting up and reaching across the table. “I’ll just put the top sheet back on, and …”
Time stopped.
The next seconds stretched into infinity, as Jude, Galen, and Michael all witnessed events occurring over which they had no control, beginning with the infinitesimal brushing of Michael’s rolled-up sleeve against the half-filled glass of absinthe, which progressed to the tipping of said glass, followed by the green liquid’s newly airborne state, and ending with the ultimate conjoining of the alcohol with the single sheet of the manuscript which lay to the left of the stack.
With a shriek, Galen returned time to its normal flow. “Curse you, Langbein! What have you done? What have you done?”
“Oh, God, oh my God,” said Michael, his face ashen, “quick, Jude—pull the sheet away, we must …”
Jude stopped them, hand upraised. He was peering at the absinthe-stained portion of the document with an odd expression.
Michael sprang to the kitchen, then bounded back into the room bearing several dishcloths, which he proceeded to use to sop up the spilled drink. Jude, in the meantime, had taken the sheet—half of it covered in absinthe—and was holding it up to the lamp near the window, while Galen rewrapped and secured the rest of the manuscript on the writing desk near the door.
Michael was muttering to himself as he mopped the tabletop, a combination of self-directed fury and sleeplessness. “Prime Edda … Oldest Edda document ever found … I soak it in alcohol…. Idiot, idiot, idiot …”
Galen moved to Jude’s side and looked at him queerly—the mathematician was not attempting to dry off the parchment, but was instead holding it near the broad lampshade and was examining it closely.
“What is it, Jude? What are you looking at?”
Jude motioned him closer. “Tell me, musician—what do you see? Is it a new reality, or just the ghost of an illusion?”
Galen stepped forward and leaned in closely. Gently gripping the fragile sheet, he looked towards the space where Jude indicated … Something. “Mmm,” he said with his favorite ruminating rumble, “I see what you’re seeing, but I can’t quite make it out. Michael?”
“What? Is it going to be all right? We really ought to get it into a cleaning bath right away …”
“Never mind that. Come have a look at this.”
Dropping the rags to the table, Michael hurried over to where the two men stood, an odd look on both their faces. As one, Galen and Jude pointed to where the liquid had stained the parchment, then stepped back. Michael looked at it, then drew a deep breath, furrowed his brow, and looked closer.
Taking the sheet from their hands, the historian strode from the room, then returned with a jewelers’ loupe fixed to his right eye. Turning on several more lamps, he laid the sheet down on the table and proceeded to scan the entire page an inch at a time.
After five minutes, Galen made as if to speak, but Jude’s light hand on his shoulder and a subtle shaking of the head indicated that they should let Langbein do his work—whatever they had seen, it had instantly and completely sobered the professor, and drawn from him an attention as fine as a laser.
Ten minutes passed, then fifteen. Jude and Galen both sat on the couch, not willing to leave, and equally unwilling to disturb Michael’s examination. At twenty minutes, Galen was again starting to say something when Michael sat up, muttering, looked around, found the bottle of absinthe, and poured the remainder of its contents on the parchment.
Galen’s fingers clenched, and he looked at Jude in shock. “Tell me I didn’t just see that. Tell me he didn’t just destroy an irreplaceable document.”
“He didn’t just destroy an irreplaceable document.”
“How do you know?”
Jude shrugged. “I don’t. You just asked me to tell you that.”
“I didn’t just destroy an irrepl
aceable document,” said Michael. “We’ve discovered something extraordinary. Absolutely extraordinary.”
“Look here,” Michael said excitedly as the others crowded alongside him, kneeling. “The absinthe acted as a washing agent itself—it didn’t destroy the block-printing, or damage the annotations, but it did render the sheet semitransparent.”
“So what is this we saw?” asked Galen. “The faint hatching across the sheets?”
“It’s a Palimpsest—which means that other texts have been written on the surface, then erased. Usually, we use a special solution to bring them up without damaging the paper, but in this case, the toxicity of the absinthe did the trick just fine.”
“Well, it’s lucky you aren’t a scotch man,” said Jude.
“But the writing,” Galen pressed. “What is it?”
“Runes—ancient runes; offhand, I’d guess probably several hundred years older than the Icelandic writing of the Eddaic runes which were printed on top. But that’s not the amazing part.”
He paused, perhaps more out of his own disbelief than for dramatic purposes.
“I’ll have to verify this at the University,” he said, his voice cracking. “But the first lines refer to its being something called the Book of Alberich. Do you understand what this could be? Not a poetic cycle, or a mythologized history. This could be an accounting, perhaps only once or twice removed, of the actual father of Hagen—the very instigator of everything in the Prose Edda, the Nibelunglied, and … Wagner’s Ring.”
He took a breath to continue, then stopped and stood, looking out the window.
“Michael?” said Jude, “what is it?”
Wordless, Michael carefully set the still dripping sheet of parchment between the leaves of a spare Pennyroyal Caxton Bible, then placed the huge book on the crowded shelves to the right of the couch. He then moved slowly around the couch where he snapped off the switch on the tall lamp and waved them both to the open windows, before nodding down at the street. “We have company.”
Filling the sidewalks in front of the building and spilling over into the street, several hundred men and women of all shape and size stood motionless; every few seconds, another joined their number at the edge of the throng. Most of the silent figures wore bandages of some sort across their foreheads, and even in the faint illumination of the street lamps, Michael could see on many of them the dark stains of blood which had seeped into the fabric. Standing there, the motion of breathing causing a gentle swaying in the crowd, they seemed spectral, as if a bloodied platoon of Yankee soldiers had been straggling for home and overshot by several thousand miles.
They were all, to the last man, staring at Michael’s windows.
“Do you suppose they’re fans of yours?” Michael asked wryly, looking at Jude.
“What makes you ask that?”
Michael dipped his head at the front of the group below. “Because the last time I saw that fellow, he had eighteen inches of iron sticking out of his forehead, and you were the one who had just put it there.”
It was the stout heckler from the nightclub, his head now bandaged in a fashion similar to the others. His expression was stony, and gave no indication that he recognized any of them from earlier in the evening.
Galen’s eyes narrowed. “Trepanning. Trepanning. That’s what you did to him in the club,” he said grasping Jude by the shoulder, an accusing note in his voice. “I recognize some of them—they’re students at the University. Were you responsible for the incidents earlier in the week? Was that your doing, Jude?”
Before he could answer, the midnight calm was split by a piercing howl. One of the ghostly throng had tipped back his head and had erupted in a sound which shook the windows of Michael’s apartment. Then, one by one, the others in the street added their voices to the primal outpouring, until it seemed as if the building itself was going to come down around the academics watching from the windows above.
An instant later, they realized that the building would not, in fact, come down.
Instead, the howling students with the holes in their heads were scaling the walls.
Both Michael and Galen turned to Jude for an explanation, only to find him already at the door, the Palimpsest firmly tucked under one arm. “Well?” he said with finality, “I think we’d best repair elsewhere, don’t you?”
Jude was at the end of the hall when Galen hit the door, just as the first of the still-howling students breached the windows. Michael was last out. He didn’t lock the door.
***
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Church of Phineas Gage
If any religion can be said to be integral to the day-to-day workings of Vienna, it would be a religion based on the consumption of coffee, and its temples, the coffeehouses. Granted, there are coffee-consuming cultures all over the world, and places where it is done in greater quantity—perhaps even places where it is more integral to the general harmony, like Seattle, or research stations in Antarctica—but the one thing Vienna held as its catechism was that if you’re going to drink coffee, you must do it in style.
The first aspect considered when opening a Vienna coffeehouse is atmosphere; it must look as if the facility has been in continuous operation since Napoleon’s occupation at the latest, and once the doors were opened, the owners would never admit to the contrary. The preferred decor is Comfortable Decrepitude; the preferred clientele, literate. In the Viennese coffeehouse culture of the 19th-century, the writers, artists, and poets of Vienna, and sometimes of Europe, hung out in coffee shops when they got tired of the poorly-heated apartments—which was probably the same reason Kafka came to the city from Prague—and wrote, painted, and poeticized themselves into the wee hours of the night. Trotsky and Lenin played chess in coffeehouses, and Freud—well, he was playing a different game altogether.
On Tuesday morning, sitting at the Cafe Central, Michael and Galen were not writing, drawing, composing poetry, lamenting failed revolutions, or looking lewdly at other peoples’ cigars, but were instead spotting one another in a marathon to consume as much caffeine as was humanly possible before their heads exploded.
Galen sat slumped in his seat, occasionally glowering at Michael, who was making every effort to maintain a cheerful facade, even though his face felt like it was carved from granite. They had been sitting at the cafe for almost an hour and were beginning their fifth pot of coffee before one of them spoke.
“What was that … poison, you served us last night, Langbein?” Galen rasped. “I feel like I was hit by a train.”
“Absinthe,” said Michael wearily. “It’s a very intellectual drink.”
Galen responded with a venomous look which suggested to Michael that cheerful would not be the currency of the day. Michael had hoped for a better beginning to the morning—after the events of the evening before, and the John Woo movie they endured for the rest of the night, which for them had only ended a few hours earlier, a nice breakfast would’ve been a good sign that God did not indeed hate him. As it was, he couldn’t be certain just exactly how God felt about him, as opposed to Galen, whom Michael was sure was now ranking him somewhere between tax attorneys and child molesters.
As if to echo Michel’s thoughts, Galen cleared his throat. “What time is it, Langbein? You didn’t lose your watch, too, did you?”
“Ah, no,” said Michael placidly, pulling his watch from his pocket. “It’s ten-thirty two.”
“Holy Hades,” said Galen. “Where the devil is Jude?”
“Hey,” said Michael as he replaced the watch. “I’ve still got the toothpaste in my pocket. At least the night wasn’t a total waste.”
“Oh, shut up,” said Galen.
* * *
Getting out of the building Michael’s apartment was in was not a problem. Getting to a street where they would not be hemmed in by their pursuers was.
Slipping out the back entrance, Jude hit the ground first, followed closely by Galen, and then Michael, who quickly outstripped the others. His long l
egs taking huge strides, he pointed them to Grillparzerstrasse, which ran just south of the University and towards the Rathauspark.
Jude, breathing heavily but running with a smooth, effortless gait, drew alongside Michael. “What are you thinking?”
“The park,” Michael puffed back. “There are a lot of trees and shrubs scattered throughout the lawns. We might be able to hide there.”
The sky was black—no moon, and an overcast sky offered a degree of additional cover. Not pausing, Jude nodded and waved to Galen, several paces behind.
The park was divided by a wide square, making the sections fairly symmetrical. “Which section?” Jude asked, “Parliament, or University?”
“Parliament.”
Moving swiftly, the three fugitive scholars ran down the avenue and into the park, where they paused momentarily to reassess their situation. In the darkness behind them, they could hear the sounds of their pursuers: two hundred students with holes in their heads and a sudden penchant for howling and climbing buildings. Around them was the early Viennese morning, which was oddly subdued and quiet, even for four o’clock in the morning. And ahead of them they hoped to find some sort of refuge—though none of them was certain where their flight was ultimately leading.
Michael looked around at the shrubbery, and his heart sank. The lighting within the park was substantial enough that it would be unlikely they could avoid detection for any period of time—especially given the numbers of their pursuers.
In the near distance, they could see the howling group split, many of them heading towards the Ringstrasse—which meant that they were not in imminent peril, but were also cut off from any possible refuge or aid they might have found at the University.
“Michael?” Jude whispered questioningly.
“This way,” he said, breaking into a run.
“God in Heaven,” Galen puffed, having only just caught up.
Michael headed east, past the Burgtheater and into the burgeoning rose gardens of the Volkesgarten. Behind them, they could hear the sound of howling as the throng tracking them entered the Rathauspark.
The Festival of Bones: Mythworld Book One Page 12