The Book of Common Dread

by Brent Monahan

  Simon turned away. He did not want to seem rude to the stranger. Nor did he want Frederika to see him standing there; she had caught him staring too often already. Simon turned to the right and walked briskly toward the Rare Manuscripts Preparation section.

  A moment later, the pale-skinned man unfroze and crossed with purpose to the guard who oversaw the main turnstile.

  "Excuse me," the man said, in an upper-class British accent, "Is access to the library free?"

  "No, sir. There's a charge," said the guard. He waved a lethargic hand. "Ask at the desk."

  The man pivoted around. His hand went up to his sunglasses. He looked at the winter light filtering in through the front doors and the reference room. He left the glasses in place. He approached the front desk and asked again about access.

  "Twelve-fifty for a one-week pass," the librarian told him. "Twenty-five for a month. Access only; no checkout privileges."

  "For a week, please," the man said, opening his purse.

  "I'll need some kind of identification," the librarian said.

  "Certainly," the man responded, through a dazzling white smile. "Will my international driver's license do?"

  "Yes." The librarian accepted the license and studied it. "This will only take a minute, Mr. DeVilbiss," she said.

  ***

  Because he was late, Simon took a shortcut through the Exhibitions Hall's showcases. He carried a standard Swiss army knife as a key ring. He dug it out of his pocket and blindly fingered through the half dozen keys until he had the one he wanted. Unlocking the nondescript wooden doors that concealed the entrance to the Rare Manuscripts Preparation section, he was confronted by a forbidding gate of woven steel wire. He hurried through the gate's unlocking procedure and entered his domain, the cluttered and musty-smelling warren where things rare were codified, analyzed, and preserved. The caged-in bookshelves on both sides of the passageway were crowded for the first time in Simon's recollection. The bequest of Abraham Schickner was huge-more than six hundred books, the majority either hand-scribed or printed before A.D. 1500. Simon could not help shortening his stride; his eyes insisted on sweeping along the cracked and wizened spines of the special books. Most were written in Latin or Greek. From the titles it was obvious that Schickner's preferences ran to religious books and their antitheses-volumes on magic, the occult, superstition, and the supernatural. Histories, philosophies, and eloquently phrased yet benighted scientific tomes peppered the collection. But the greatest prizes were stored in a pair of special, airtight cases. Made of stainless steel brushed to a satin sheen, the cases were roughly the size and shape of coffins, their lids incised with curving windows of tempered, shatterproof glass. Inside, under pressurized inert gas, rested thirty papyrus and vellum scrolls, some dating from hundreds of years before Christ walked the earth. The security lights of the case nearer the wall winked on and off, because its contents had been removed. One of the two persons who had taken them out had to be Dr. Gould, Simon's boss. By default the other keyholder was the Reverend Wilton Edward Spencer, Willy to his friends.

  Reverend Spencer had grown up as the only son of a well-to-do Virginia landowner, had served for decades as the pastor of an equally well-to-do Presbyterian church, and had picked up the unusual study of Akkadian and Ugaritic grammar. Upon retirement, he spent several years in Syria and Iraq, becoming a world authority on the two dead languages. Now almost seventy, he taught at the venerable Princeton Theological Seminary, passing on his rare knowledge to other religious scholars.

  Willy Spencer's residency at the seminary had had a great deal to do with the Schickner Collection being bequeathed to nearby Princeton University, because the crown jewels among Abraham Schickner's treasures were a unique pair of Akkadian scrolls with a mysterious history. The scrolls had been discovered in a cave near the Caspian Sea and had been carbon dated back to about 600 B.C. The country they had been smuggled out of was never specified, for fear that its government would some day learn of the discovery and sue for their return. The loss would have been painful even for the multimillionaire, since he had won the treasures in 1957 by bidding $600,000 in an ultrasecret, ultraexclusive auction. His prizes were made of calfskin, both wrapped around cedar rollers. The author's real name was unknown, but the Greek who had translated the work into his own language in the early fourth century B.C. dubbed him Ahriman. In the Zoroastrian faith, Ahriman was the Devil. Tucked among both prescient and fantastic statements was a pointed denunciation of the beliefs and practices of many religious groups of that time, particularly the Zoroastrians who dominated the southland around the Caspian Sea.

  The scrolls were titled Physics and Metaphysics, the latter for things that Ahriman claimed to exist beyond the physical world. Scholars had only had the Greek translation to work with, as published in 1503 by the great Venetian printer Aldus Manutius. All earlier, hand-scribed copies seemed to vanish around the beginning of the sixteenth century. While some were of the opinion that Aristotle had read the work and patterned his own encyclopedic Physics and Metaphysics after it, most dismissed the Ahriman texts as the ravings of a brilliant but insane mystic. Those few scholars who had read the book had little time to form their opinions: less than a month after Aldus had printed the book, legates of the pope descended on Venice, confiscated all unsold copies, and ordered under threat of excommunication that Aldus never reproduce the work again. Pope Alexander VI had apparently found Ahriman's lack of faith as disturbing and threatening as the Zoroastrians had. Forty-eight copies had been sold. The Church's agents tracked down thirty-five and burned them. The rest went as safely underground as the Christians in the catacombs. Through the centuries single copies emerged in public; they promptly disappeared. On separate occasions, a library and a museum and all their holdings had been totally destroyed by fire within days after receiving a copy of the book. Each had had, for its time, a redoubtable security system. The museum, in Leipzig, had been consumed in 1823. Since that time, no other copies had publicly surfaced.

  This, as Willy Spencer had related it to Simon, was the bizarre background of the two scrolls and their translations over the last twenty-five hundred years. Now Willy had been given access to what were possibly the originals of those scrolls. In 1958, soon after secretly purchasing the treasures, Abraham Schickner had brought in the great German scholar of Akkadian, Professor von Soden. Von Soden had taken only three days to declare that even though the calfskins were ancient, the purchase was nevertheless a clever forgery. He gave three reasons for his opinion: All other Akkadian texts of that period were written on baked clay tablets; the Akkadian grammar was imperfect; and the science on the scrolls was far too advanced for six hundred years before the birth of Christ.

  There was no greater authority for Schickner to turn to for dispute. In disappointment, he stored away what he assumed was a very expensive mistake, and the world remained ignorant of the scrolls' existence. Then, six months ago, Willy Spencer had published a scholarly monograph that showed the limits of von Soden's understanding of certain Akkadian local dialects. In excitement, Schickner had written to Reverend Spencer and included transcriptions of portions of his Ahriman scrolls. Spencer had written back from a summer dig in Turkey that he would be honored to examine the scrolls when he returned. Then Schickner learned that he had cancer of the brain and only weeks to live. He had willed his entire book collection to Princeton Library, with the stipulation that Wilton Spencer do a complete translation of Ahriman's Physics and Metaphysics.

  Word of such a spectacular bequest was not long in leaking out. The Journal of Written Antiquities was first to announce it, followed swiftly by The Chronicle of Higher Education and the New York Times. Even before the books arrived, scholars and journalists were besieging Spencer for information on the mysterious Ahriman scrolls. So far, he had refused to release a single word of his work.

  Simon approached the reverend with a purposely heavy tread. He knew how adept the old man was at masking out the rest of the world while wor
king and how angry Willy became when jolted from his concentration.

  Spencer looked up and smiled. "Morning, Simon!"

  "Good morning, sir," Simon returned. The old pastor bore a vague resemblance to Albert Einstein, a former Princeton U. professor who still commanded godlike reverence on campus. Willy was bald on top but sported a wild victor's wreath of white hair above his ears. He wore wire-rimmed glasses which perched perpetually on the tip of his nose, and when he smiled he displayed a slight gap between his two front teeth. The weight of years had pressed his frame down a couple inches, to five foot seven. His trousers and shirt changed from day to day, but he always wore the same paisley tie, the pattern of which varied slightly, depending on the viscosity of Willy's recent lunches.

  "I'm not seeing any more visitors," Willy announced, suddenly removing his smile. "I've given enough interviews and gawks," he muttered, swinging his hawklike gaze back at the scroll rolled out before him under protective glass. "I'll never get this translated otherwise."

  "I understand. How's it coming?" Simon asked, stealing a glance at the ancient treasure. For their age, the mottled buff and tan surfaces had retained a remarkable resiliency, cracked in places and corroded at the edges, but still largely intact. The ink had not survived as well, and Simon wondered how Willy's old eyes distinguished many marks, despite his magnifying instrument and ample light.

  "It's coming fine, fine. Just beginning, of course. But I don't believe it's a fake."

  "No, huh?"

  "In spite of being on vellum rather than clay. Don't know what to make of that, but then again, the materials aren't my concern; only the words." Spencer pushed the spectacles up to the bridge of his nose, for yet another slow run down the slope.

  "And the words are convincing you?" Simon prompted, fascinated by the man's mind almost as much as the magnificent scrolls.

  "They are. I can understand why von Soden rejected it. Great as he was, he didn't have the knowledge we've gained since his time. Semiotics has taken a quantum leap in the past two decades. It's not only the peculiar blending of ideogrammatic and phonetic usage but also a unique form of unpronounced determinatives." Spencer babbled on in his jargon, assuming that Simon understood every word. Simon wasn't even trying. He had no interest in Akkadian and would be happy when he could read Spencer's translation along with everyone else. His attention was instead focused on the shape of the characters. To him, cuneiform writing looked like a pick-up-sticks game played with large-headed concrete nails. How the detective-scholars had deciphered this lost language in the first place astonished him.

  Simon waited until Spencer lost some steam and was catching his breath before he said, "I don't want to be as annoying as the visitors, sir. I'll let you get back to work."

  "You can interrupt me any time, Simon," Willy offered, winking. "Any time."

  Simon thanked Willy, took a printout from his desk and left the room by the main exit. With his nose buried in the report, he was unaware of the sounds of the self-locking gate and doors as he walked out to the main catalog section. His objective was to see if any of the items in the Schickner Collection were already owned by the library. He seated himself at one of the catalog desks and became so engrossed in his task that he was completely unaware of the person who had come up on the opposite side.

  "Excuse me," Frederika said.

  Simon lifted his eyes from his work. The voice was not immediately familiar to him, but he placed the dress and the figure instantly, so that his head snapped back and his eyes rolled wide, like a doll suddenly uprighted.

  "Oh! I'm sorry," Frederika apologized, now equally startled.

  "That's all right," Simon assured, rising from the chair with instinctive civility.

  "I'm Frederika Vanderveen."

  "Yes, I know. Reference. We've talked… on the elevator. And you were on the gurney next to me during the last blood drive."

  "Oh. Right." Her voice sounded huskier than he remembered, although he had not had an opportunity to hear it for several months.

  "I'm Simon Penn."

  "I know. I'd like to ask you a favor," Frederika said, in a timid tone.

  "I hope you don't want to see the Ahriman scrolls," Simon replied, honestly.

  Frederika shook her head. "But it is about another of the Schickner books. I understand the Memphis Grimoire is part of the collection."

  "Is it?" Simon asked. "I don't know, offhand."

  "Yes." Frederika leaned forward and set her delicate hand on the exposed page. "I've seen a copy of this printout." As her finger traced slowly down the list, her fine, golden hair gradually cascaded around her face. Simon inhaled the delicate fragrance of her.

  "I don't even know what a grimoire is," Simon admitted.

  Frederika's forefinger moved on. "A book of rites and incantations. Magic."

  "Oh."

  "Here it is."

  Simon moved his eyes unwillingly from Frederika and looked at the information below her finger. "Yes. What about it?"

  "I'd like to see it."

  Simon offered her an apologetic mien. "Sorry. Dr. Gould doesn't like unauthorized people in our section under ordinary circumstances. With those scrolls in there, everyone with pull has been finding an excuse, so an edict was made."

  "I see. Well, could you bring this one book out for me?"

  Simon shook his head. "Nobody outside the section can handle it until it's deacidified and theft-proofed."

  "That's a shame." Frederika winced and glanced forlornly in the direction of the Rare Manuscripts section's closed doors.

  Simon eased back onto the stool. It occurred to him that this was now the longest conversation he had ever held with the woman, and that his refusal threatened to bring it to an abrupt end. "Is this for you?" he asked, to keep it alive.

  Frederika laughed. "For me? No. It's for an old college roommate. She's doing graduate work on medieval history, and her thesis is on witchcraft. This grimoire's very rare, so she can't have it sent through interlibrary loan. When I told her we were getting a copy she freaked out. It would really complete her research. There's one at the Library of Congress, but she can't get down there for several weeks. By then her advisor's on sabbatical. It'll delay her graduation half a year." Her words tumbled out with remarkable fluidity, as if she were reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

  Simon missed the rote sound of Frederika's reply; his thoughts focused on the many negative things he had heard about her, trying to reconcile them with the image of innocence she projected. "I assume she reads Latin."

  "No," Frederika answered.

  "Rather shortsighted for a medievalist." Simon scanned the basic information on the book and whistled softly. "Two hundred and five pages!"

  "She doesn't need the whole thing," Frederika said quickly. "There's supposed to be one chapter on necromancy."

  Simon's eyebrows lifted. "Raising the dead?"

  "Exactly. That's all she wants out of it."

  Simon registered the intensity of Frederika's expression. Her former roommate had to be some fast friend to have commanded this kind of concern on Frederika's part. Seated behind the large desk, with Frederika standing on the other side, he felt like a high school principal. Her Alice in Wonderland look, in a blue dress with white pinafore, only made him more uncomfortable. "Maybe I can help."

  Frederika brightened. "Really?"

  "But I also need help," Simon ventured. He hoped to God he could keep his face from turning crimson. Rather than dangle a silence that invited limitless assumptions, he plunged on. "You rent a room in your home. I suddenly need a place. It would only be for two weeks."

  "I don't understand," Frederika said. "What happened to the place you've been living in?"

  "It's my girlfriend's. My ex-girlfriend's." His face begged her not to push for further explanation.

  "How did you know I had a room?"

  "How?" She was sizing him up as he spoke. Thanks to his friend, Neil, he knew the room was empty. It was a struggle to keep
an ingenuous look on his face. He felt the dreaded blush rising. "I overheard a girl student mention it last year. Is she still renting from you?

  "No. The room's vacant," Frederika said, still thinking. She lifted her hand to her mouth, to cover the gentle clearing of her throat. The reason for the rougher quality in her voice registered on him.

  "Sounds like a cold coming on," he said.

  "You don't intend to share my toothbrush, do you?" she asked, sounding only slightly sarcastic.

  The pent-up blush suffused Simon's face. "I didn't mean…" He became aware that Frederika's helpless little-girl look had gradually transformed into that of an assured woman.

  "I'm sure you didn't,"

  "I'll pay you whatever's fair," Simon pushed. "Say three hundred for the rest of the month?" Her sudden shift in attitude unnerved him, compelling him to increase his intended offer: "I could have the passages translated by tomorrow night."

  Frederika glanced again at the Rare Manuscripts section doors. "She'll need the ritual part-you know, the words the magician speaks to raise the dead-translated and in Latin," she told Simon.

  Simon's elation lifted him from the stool. He extended his hand. "Deal. Just as long as I don't have to work with hieroglyphics."

  Confusion pinched Frederika's face. "Excuse me?"

  Simon's arm hung in midair like a railroad crossing gate. He had gotten what he wanted, and yet he found himself pointlessly prattling on. "Memphis Grimoire," he said, sheepishly. "I assume it… originally came from ancient Egypt."

  "Ah. Yes." She sniffed once and squeezed her eyes shut. "I think you're right about that cold."

  "I have a surefire remedy," Simon offered.

  "That's okay," Frederika answered. "The translation and the rent will be enough." She put her hand gently in Simon's. Neither of them made an effort to shake. "I live on Hodge Road."

  "I'll find it," he said, although he knew where she lived.

  Frederika's warm smile brought dimples to her cheeks. "Till tomorrow night, then." She swung around abruptly and walked toward the Reference section.