The Voynich Cypher

by Russell Blake

  Her cell warbled. She listened for a moment, then hung up.

  “All’s well. Let’s go inside. Are you hungry? The place is loaded with every kind of delicacy you can imagine,” Natalie offered.

  “No, I’m good. Maybe in a few hours.” He hesitated. “Why don’t you tell me a little more about this threat while I look over the Scroll? I’m still fuzzy on parts of it…”

  “Come on in and I’ll break it down for you,” she responded over her shoulder as she made her way to the front door.

  Steven followed dutifully after her, admiring the view.

  The interior of the villa was the usual rustic Tuscan finish so popular in the area, all terracotta flooring and exposed wooden beams on the ceiling. Natalie moved into the dining area and opened the satchel, extracting the cylinder and carefully removing the Scroll before spreading the pages on the dining table.

  “Do you have a magnifying glass?” he asked. “And can we get some more light in here? Maybe a desktop lamp, or worst case, a flashlight?” He looked around the room. “Oh, and do you have a computer with internet access? I’ll need it for research.”

  Natalie nodded and pointed at a laptop that was on the kitchen bar counter. Steven walked over and was soon online, typing rapidly. He pulled up a site and was reading intently when Natalie returned after a few minutes with a hinged desk lamp and a rectangular magnifying glass. She plugged in the lamp, watched it flicker to life, and turned on the overhead lights for good measure. Steven noticed she didn’t open the curtains on the dining room window. She apparently valued her privacy, especially while sorting through stolen parchments. Which reminded him.

  “So, who exactly stole these for your father? Maybe that’s a good place to pick up the story…” he started, as he closed the web browser and moved to the dining table and the quire.

  “Liberate. My father had someone liberate the Scroll from where it was being kept by those to which it no more belonged than to me. Let me just start at the beginning and you’ll realize why I’m so cautious about everything,” Natalie protested.

  “Why don’t you? I hope you don’t mind if I interrupt you occasionally with a question or three,” Steven countered.

  “No problem. All right. First, you have to understand that my father would have never, ever engaged in the theft of anything. Liberating an article of historical significance from a group which had itself liberated the item in order to come into possession of it is a different matter. The lost quire was removed from the Voynich centuries ago, only a few years after the document was created. It was stolen and locked away from prying eyes by a faction of the Catholic Church,” Natalie explained.

  “Ah, yes, the mystery sect. You know, it’s strange, because I’ve never heard of this ‘Order of the Holy Relic’ even though I’m more than passingly familiar with every medieval secret society that ever existed,” Steven protested.

  “Nobody has heard of it. That’s its whole objective. It’s a top secret splinter faction with tremendous resources, supported at the highest level of the Church – the first director of the group, who is always known as the ‘Sentinel’, was handpicked by Pope Nicholas V after he’d crushed a plot to displace him from the Papacy. After Constantinople fell to the Turks, he created the Order and dedicated a stipend to its ongoing operations,” Natalie continued.

  “That would be around 1453 or 54. Fair enough. Although how do you know this?” Steven probed.

  She looked at him with thinly-veiled annoyance. “As I already explained, Morbius Frank co-opted a member of the Order and put him in touch with my father. He filled in the group’s history, or as much as he knew of it. Almost everything about the Order is shrouded in mystery, even to members. Besides its origins, my father discovered that its charter was to keep the Scroll in its possession, hidden forever.”

  “Now out of its possession, technically speaking,” Steven observed. Natalie glared at him. He ignored it and continued. “You’re telling me that this parchment will not only drive Morbius Frank’s minions to hunt us down, but will also bring the full weight of the wealthiest organization in the world to bear in order to recover it?”

  “Exactly.”

  “If you’re right about even half of this, you’ll never be safe as long as you have the Scroll. Am I missing anything?” Steven asked.

  Natalie walked around the table and stood next to Steven, studying the pages intently.

  “Where are you going to start?” she asked.

  He considered the question.

  “I think the first thing we need to do after I have a chance to examine it thoroughly is to make copies and store the original someplace safe. It’s not a good idea to be handling vellum that’s almost six hundred years old. It will degrade in no time – the chemicals from our skin and the atmosphere will start eating away at it. We shouldn’t really be handling it at all, and ideally it should be stored in a humidity and temperature-controlled unit,” Steven explained.

  “I know all that. I already made copies of the Scroll – super high-resolution color copies, which I printed out and also have on disk. But I wanted you to see the actual pages, in case there’s something the copies didn’t pick up, or there’s some telltale only the originals show.”

  Natalie’s father had probably given her all the same admonishments about handling the originals, so he let that one lie.

  “Good. Then I’ll just need some time to look these over. There’s something about the grouping and illustrations that I find strange, but I can’t put my finger on it. Give me some time and maybe it’ll come to me,” he said.

  “You’re here for the duration, so take as long as you like, Dr. Cross.”

  “Steven. Please, Natalie, call me Steven. But I’m not sure what you mean by the duration…”

  She stared at him like he was an idiot. “Steven, I thought this was clear. You’re not safe. Frank’s people, the Order, and anyone helping them will be looking not only for me, but also for you. The visit to your office was just the start. Whether it’s fair or not, or even makes sense or not, you’re in danger because your name was on that letter, and there’s nothing you can say or do that will change that. I’m sorry, but the way I see it is we’re going to be spending a lot of time with each other, for the duration, until we either solve the puzzle and can figure a way out of this mess, or they find us and put an end to it all.” Natalie didn’t need to expound on what she meant by putting an end to it all. Her implication was clear.

  Steven hadn’t fully considered the ramifications of their predicament, but he did so now. If, and that was a big if, she was correct about a shadowy sect hunting for them both, not to mention a billionaire’s murderous henchmen, they were in an impossible situation.

  He rubbed his chin. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but aside from your say-so, do you have any proof that what you’ve said is true? I’m not questioning your veracity, so don’t take it the wrong way, but is there anything else you haven’t told me that might be more solid than rumors of a secret group and speculation about your father’s death?”

  Natalie sighed, clearly exasperated. “You’re looking at a section of the Voynich that’s been hidden for hundreds of years. My father was dead seventy-two hours after taking possession of it, and his partner’s enforcement thugs have been overturning every rock they can find to locate me – I’ve gotten multiple warnings on that front from my contact network. You’ve just been visited by two gentlemen who were extremely interested in your whereabouts. Precisely what more do you need to know?” she asked.

  “We don’t know for sure what that was about…” Steven protested, but she grabbed his arm to quiet him.

  “There are two possible explanations. First is that I’m crazy, and this is all an elaborate hallucination of mine, and we’re in no danger of anything worse than dying of boredom while you study the rarest document in the world. The alternative is that I’m telling the truth, and it’s as bad as or worse than I’m saying, in which case it’s going to
require every bit of luck and skill we can muster to be alive tomorrow. I think you need to decide which it is, because right now you’re wasting time on an issue I thought was decided,” Natalie fumed.

  She was right. It was A or B. Either way, it would do no harm to examine the Scroll thoroughly – at worst, he was trapped in a Tuscan villa with a stunning femme fatale who favored Catwoman suits and had the most amazing eyes he’d ever seen…who might also be kind of crazy. Actually, that wasn’t the worst case scenario, but he didn’t want to think about the second possibility just yet.

  “I’ll admit you’re persuasive, Natalie. Let me get to work on these and see if I can spot anything that would be a giveaway or a clue. But as you know, the Voynich’s kept its secrets for a long time. I’m not sure how much I can do in a day,” Steven parried.

  “Better get busy, then. This is our only shot, on the off-chance that I’m not as nutty as a Christmas fruitcake,” she said, and then beamed a thousand kilowatt smile at him before turning and leaving him to his work.

  As the day wore on, Steven took Natalie up on her offer of lunch and was pleasantly surprised at the spread she set out. Organic green salad, gnocchi pesto, dry salami, rigatoni in a four cheese sauce, all accompanied by a passable bottle of chianti.

  They ate on the small, brick-built outdoor breakfast patio off of the kitchen, which had a sturdy rustic pine picnic table and two benches. Natalie and Frederick sat across from him, making strained small talk about where they could go from Italy to ensure her continued survival. Steven had probed for some more information on her background, but the attempt had been met with a polite but firm rebuff.

  Steven wondered what the exact nature of Natalie and Frederick’s relationship was – she seemed far more relaxed with him than Steven would have expected her to be with a driver, and he seemed to know everything she did about their current adventure, even though he limited his commentary to a few terse words. As with much that had occurred over the last half a day, Steven figured he’d discover more in time and contented himself with savoring the gourmet meal while thinking through his examination of the Scroll.

  “Are you making any progress?” Natalie asked after he thanked her for lunch, clearly having resisted the urge to raise the subject throughout the meal.

  “Perhaps. The glyphs look the same as the rest of the Voynich, but they’re arranged in a different format, almost like short descriptive paragraphs. That would be consistent with several other quires, but there’s just something that strikes me as unusual about this set. I haven’t yet been able to put my finger on it, but I’m working on it,” Steven summarized.

  “If you have a breakthrough, I’m all ears, Steven. I’m thinking I’ll take a nap while you’re working – Frederick can get you anything you need,” she said, yawning ever so slightly into her cupped hand.

  “I’ll try to have the whole thing wrapped up by the time you wake up,” Steven said easily as he reentered the dining room.

  After spending several hours poring over every nuance of the parchment pages, the truth was that Steven was no closer to deciphering the Scroll than when he’d first laid eyes on it. That wasn’t unexpected, although a part of him felt disappointed. It would have been wonderful if it had inspired a Eureka moment. But in his experience, that wasn’t how things worked. He was very good and had honed his skills over the years, but there were no secrets to decryption only he knew – much of the time it was simple trial and error. One painstakingly looked for patterns and tried known examples of encryption techniques that dated from the same period, hoping that it would yield a solution, or at least a direction to follow. But the Voynich had always been inscrutable, impervious to all efforts to decode it. Even after the best in the field had done their best, there had been no breakthrough. Plenty of theories, but no solutions.

  He wearily rubbed his hands over his face and stood back from the dining room table as he stared at the collected pages. There was so much data to incorporate, and no obvious place to start. This was an almost impossible task, and he wondered absently why the Order had spent so much energy guarding what on the surface appeared to be just more Voynich cypher. It made no sense. He began pacing in frustration, his gaze wandering absently over the Scroll as his mind raced. There was something there, but so elusive…

  Wait a second. The crest on the final page of the Scroll, under the elaborately drawn roots of a mythical plant. That looked vaguely familiar.

  Steven racked his brain to recall why he’d felt a stirring, or where he’d seen the crest before. It was a tiny depiction of a labyrinth, which seemed out of place in this seemingly medicinal chapter. He concentrated on it, searching his memory banks for the recollection, but couldn’t place it. He continued pacing. That crest. What was the significance? For that matter, what was the significance of any of the illustrations, depicting everything from elaborate, nonsensical plumbing diagrams replete with bathing nude women, to cosmological diagrams of unfamiliar or fantastical galaxies or constellations, to plants that appeared to be hybrids of the real and the invented?

  Whenever he spent long hours studying the Voynich, he always felt like he was being sucked down a dark rabbit hole into an upside-down world where nothing made sense. Today’s efforts were no different.

  And yet that symbol. He’d seen it before.

  Steven moved to the computer and, from online scans of the complete document, spent an hour looking at every illustration in the Voynich. The labyrinth didn’t appear anywhere, so he hadn’t seen it before in the Voynich. Frustrated, he switched strategies and loaded a search engine, then proceeded to pore through countless results for medieval astrological and astronomical symbols. There were tens of thousands, and he quickly acknowledged the futility of trying to find the needle in the haystack. But he knew he’d seen it elsewhere during his travels. Could those have been coded clues that would decode the Voynich? Anything was possible, and Steven realized he wouldn’t have thought twice about the symbol if he hadn’t seen it in quire 18.

  Think, dammit. It’s an emblem – almost like a coat of arms with the circular labyrinth depicted as the central element.

  It was right on the periphery of Steven’s awareness. But the harder he focused, the more fleeting it became.

  This isn’t working.

  Steven knew he’d need to stop trying to force it and wait until the gears meshed and the answer came to him. But knowing and doing were two distinctly different things. Increasingly frustrated, he decided to go for a short walk to clear his head. After alerting Frederick, he made his way down the long drive, taking in the vineyards and olive trees surrounding the property.

  The summer sun felt good on his face; by its angle, he realized that it was going to be evening in just a few hours. That raised the question of what he was going to do. If Natalie was right, his best option was to stay at the villa until further notice, but there was a part of Steven that wasn’t comfortable allowing an ephemeral threat drive him underground. His life for years had been spent in a sort of hiding, always looking over his shoulder, and he’d only recently become comfortable that he had nothing more to worry about. Then this slammed into him. It wasn’t fair.

  Steven was jolted out of his daydream by the deep boom of a nearby gunshot. He swung around and found himself facing an old man, seventy yards off, holding a turn-of-the-century shotgun. He was shooting at the crows, trying to drive them off his property. Steven waved at him. He waved back. There were few things like the Italian countryside, where just a few minutes outside of a major town you could find farmers discharging guns with nobody batting an eyelid.

  What a weird country. He continued strolling, amid a reverie of his old place in Greve, haunted by Antonia’s restive ghost and his own disturbed dreams, and realized there was a part of him that still missed living in rural tranquility. Just as quickly as that image flitted through his consciousness, the familiar sequence of recollections began their bittersweet parade – those last moments, kissing and holding Anton
ia, watching her race off in the Audi, thinking it was just another routine day when, in reality, the final minutes of her life were ticking away. If it hadn’t been for the ancient book peddler, he would have also been crushed by the huge–

  The book collector. His box.

  Steven stumbled, then turned and ran like a madman back to the villa. He burst through the front door to find Natalie standing in the kitchen, her nap over, making herself a cup of tea.

  “I know where I’ve seen the Voynich crest before,” he announced, only mildly winded from the sprint back.

  “That’s amazing!” She peered at him. “What Voynich crest?”

  Steven realized that he hadn’t shared with her any of his postprandial speculations. He beckoned to her, and she joined him at the table where the Scroll was laid out.

  “You see this small drawing on the last page? The one that looks like a highly-stylized circular labyrinth in a shield-shaped exterior?” he asked excitedly, tapping the parchment delicately with his index finger.

  “Yes. I see it, although to me it looks a lot like the rest of the drawings. What’s the big deal about it?” Natalie asked.

  “I’ve seen it before.”

  “You already said that. But why is that such exciting news?”

  “Because of where I’ve seen it,” he responded.

  “Where have you seen it?”

  “On another parchment, also written in a cypher, but one that’s been decrypted,” he announced.

  “And…” Natalie gestured with her hand: like, whenever you’re ready to tell me the meat of it, proceed.

  “Decrypted by me.” Steven could see she still didn’t get it. “I have the parchment.”

  CHAPTER 12

  “You’re saying that this little emblem, or whatever it is, is similar to some parchment you worked on?” Natalie summarized, surprised at the direction events had suddenly moved in.

  “No, I’m saying that it is the exact same crest as on a medieval parchment that I own – I bought it along with four others from an antique book dealer several years ago. One of the oldest families in the business in Italy, and perhaps all of Europe. They’ve been at it for hundreds of years, and many of the older pieces in circulation have moved through their hands at one time or another if a sale was involved. This parchment was part of the family’s private collection, which comprised mainly obscure and historically insignificant documents. The only reason it’s now noteworthy is because of the drawing. Otherwise it would just be a run-of-the-mill fifteenth century coded letter that was drafted using a fairly complex substitution cypher. The pisser is that I actually consigned it to a rare book company six months ago, with some of my others,” Steven explained, then shifted his attention to the Scroll. “If you look at the crest, you’ll see that it’s an eleven-circuit labyrinth. Not sure if that has any significance…”