The History Mystery

by Ana Maria Machado

  Sonia and Pedro exchanged glances.

  ‘Sorry,’ Sonia said, ‘what was that you were saying, Andrea? Could you say it again?’ She wanted to make sure they’d got the story right.

  ‘You don’t listen when people talk and then you want them to repeat what they’ve said. I haven’t got a replay button, you know,’ said Andrea, looking a bit annoyed.

  Pedro came to Sonia’s defence. ‘No, it was my fault. I came barging in, not realising you were in the middle of a conversation, and I started talking to her. I’m sorry.’

  ‘All right, then,’ said Andrea with a sigh. ‘What I was saying was that you really need to fix that computer fast, before this virus spreads out all over the place. I think I’ve already contaminated Colin and he has spread it to the office. It seems to be very contagious. We could have an epidemic on our hands.’

  She made it sound as if it was actually a virus or disease, spreading from one person to another.

  But Pedro was interested and he had lots of questions. Andrea told them that Colin and a client had gone to sign a deed at a public notary’s office, and in the middle of the document a strange sheet of paper had appeared. It seemed to be a letter, probably some sort of prank. The clerk had got all nervous, arguing with the people around him, thinking someone was trying to set him up.

  ‘And did you keep that piece of paper?’ Pedro asked. ‘Or did you throw it away?’

  ‘Which paper? The deed? It’s been kept, obviously. The client took it all with him. Colin worked it out somehow and it was all fine. He’s great, you know? Competent, observant –’

  ‘No, not the deed. I mean the page of writing that seemed to be part of a prank.’

  ‘Oh. I think Colin did keep it. I remember he said it might be useful.’

  ‘And do you think he would show it to me if I asked to see it?’

  Andrea was serious now. ‘Of course not! Don’t be silly! Professional secrecy. It’s a very important rule. It’s fundamental for any lawyer. This is the client’s business and no one else’s – it’s private. Nobody can be allowed to go looking through other people’s documents.’ Sonia knew how distracted her sister could get. It was clear she was already thinking of something else, talking and reading the magazine at the same time. She’d better make it very clear.

  ‘No, Andrea, nobody wants to look at any client’s documents. Pedro just wants to see the prank letter to study the virus. It’s just a technical curiosity. Maybe it will help him to fix my computer. Perhaps you could give him Colin’s number? Then they can talk directly.’

  Andrea agreed and gave Pedro Colin’s number.

  Sonia grabbed her backpack and, within moments, Andrea was back reading her magazine as Sonia and Pedro left the room.

  Pedro was very excited by what he had just heard.

  ‘The Brainy Hacker strikes again,’ he said. ‘It’s all becoming clearer. As soon as I heard, I came over to tell you.’

  ‘As soon as you heard? But Andrea only just told us the story, so how could you have known it already?’

  ‘I didn’t know that part, of course. No, I mean, there’s been a new attack. What I came to tell you was about what happened on Will’s computer. Apparently it was a double attack this time.’

  Though, actually, it was a triple attack, but at this stage they had no idea that Faye was having similar experiences.

  Perhaps even quadruple. But they had even less of an inkling about Robbie’s misfortunes. It would be weeks before they would hear about that.

  6 – A Matter of Strategy

  Will was crazy about games – any games. He’d even play cards or do jigsaw puzzles, whatever was to hand. But, no question about it, his favourite kind were electronic games. If he could, he would spend twenty-four hours a day gaming – chasing, escaping, scoring, levelling up, planning gameplays, beating records. To him, a TV set or a computer were just peripherals to a gaming console.

  Will didn’t watch sitcoms, he didn’t watch the news, he didn’t care about the music videos everyone liked to keep up with, except for the occasional heavy metal band. He turned on the TV only to watch sport – any kind of sport. Football, basketball, volleyball, even chess, snooker and golf, when they got this stuff on cable. Matt swore that one day he actually caught Will watching a domino championship, though Will insisted that was just a joke.

  But it was no joke that Will hardly ever spent any time on the internet or chatting with friends online. Most of the time, he was disconnected from the world, playing for hours on end. His favourite games were the ones you could play online with friends and that go on for ever, throwing little dice, playing the role of heroes or villains, alternating between tense silences and loud yells.

  The others always thought it would be hard to beat Will, with all that practice he had. He had fast reflexes. That’s why his friends didn’t like playing action games against him. It was no fun any more, because he always won. It didn’t matter whether they were using a controller, a mouse or a keyboard. Will was just a winner.

  The one exception was strategy games. Will was not all that good at games like that, especially at the more advanced stages. He didn’t have a lot of patience. So he’d often get a friend to come over to his place to help him out with the planning, so that he could learn and improve his skills. Someone like Pedro, for instance, who was the kind of person that could stay silent for a long time, analysing the alternatives for a game he was imagining, a game he hadn’t even started to play yet, that only existed in his head.

  Pedro would sometimes interrupt the game, leave the room, make a sandwich, come back eating it, and all the time he would be thinking about his next move. And, in the end, it usually worked.

  It was exciting to have a strong opponent every once in a while. So Will sometimes liked to play against Pedro, each in his own house, on different computers. At other times, though, they would just sit down side by side, playing together against the computer. At times like that, Pedro was invaluable. He really improved the chances of winning. And it was at one of these times that the Brainy Hacker decided to strike again.

  The two friends were playing a new game, full of different obstacles. It was on a CD that Will’s godfather had brought back to him from a trip to London. It was set in the Middle Ages, Will’s favourite era, and was full of knights, armour, castles, sieges, jousting, tournaments with flags that waved in the wind, damsels locked in towers, magic potions, dragons, Crusades, illuminated parchments, wizards, spells, dungeons. Loads of stuff. You could play for hours, always with new elements, without it ever becoming repetitive.

  That’s why Pedro went on playing for a while, then a little while longer, and ended up spending the whole of Friday afternoon and evening at Will’s place. And that’s how he happened to see a message that appeared all of a sudden on the screen, totally out of the blue.

  Will was just about to delete it, but Pedro intervened to keep the message on the screen for a few minutes – long enough to read it a couple of times before it all disappeared, when the impatient Will made a quick and unstoppable movement that brought the game back to the main screen.

  ‘I can’t say I memorised it, but I did pay close attention and I think I can roughly repeat it,’ Pedro was saying to Sonia now, as they walked to Will’s house that Saturday morning.

  Well, Sonia thought, he hadn’t exactly called her up for a Saturday date with a movie and a bite to eat, as she had dared to imagine, full of hope. Still, it was clear that he wanted her company and valued her help in this challenge of trying to track down the hacker.

  ‘Do you really think it was a new attack from the virus? Or by the Brainy Hacker?’

  ‘Yes, I do. But Will is sure that it couldn’t be, because the game was on a commercial CD and it’s a closed system. You can’t add stuff into it. The game doesn’t have an online mode and it can’t receive messages via the web.’

  He paused and then said, ‘Only, when we played it, it did look as if it was able to pick up stuff fr
om somewhere else. I’m sure the Brainy Hacker did use the monitor, but this time the message couldn’t have come over the internet. It came through the game itself. It’s much the same as what happened the other times, except that this time the hacker used a character.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Sonia curiously. They had almost arrived at Will’s gate by this time, and they had decided to try and repeat the experience. At least, that was the idea.

  As they walked, Pedro had been explaining that there were loads of characters in this game. Depending on the situation, a player could be harmed by one of the characters, and that meant he or she would forfeit some items, for instance. But a player could also win points, of course, or get help from allies to face a challenge. These allies could be warriors, or a knight maybe, or a wizard. And the place where the mysterious message had appeared, that time when Will and Pedro were playing, was in a tower belonging to one of these wizard characters.

  ‘A wizard! Like, with a boiling cauldron, a pointy hat, a starry cape?’ asked Sonia, surprised. ‘Will likes playing with stuff like that?’

  Pedro pretended to be concentrating on opening the gate, but really he was hesitating, wondering how to answer. He wanted Sonia to take the game seriously, to see it as a grown-up thing, not some silly kids’ stuff. He certainly didn’t want her asking Will questions like that.

  After a few seconds’ thought, he answered: ‘You don’t want to take much notice of those things, Sonia. These games are all like that, with wizards and magic and stuff, but it’s just a set. They’re actually very sophisticated and difficult. Complex as chess, for example. They require intelligence, highly developed logical thinking –’

  ‘And a blue cape covered in little stars?’ Sonia chipped in with a smile.

  ‘No, I can’t say I saw a cape,’ said Pedro seriously. ‘In the game, we were inside a castle. The wizard wasn’t about to go outside – he was in the tower. Maybe he just wears a cape in bad weather, who knows? But yes, there was a cauldron. And a pointy hat. And a lot of glass bottles with colourful liquids bubbling in them. There was an owl perched in a corner. And a big book.’

  ‘Full of recipes for spells?’ she went on, teasing him. ‘And was there a magic wand?’

  She was really quite surprised at all this childish stuff in Will’s game. He had always seemed such a dark kind of guy. He wore black and listened to punk and heavy metal bands. He always put on such grown-up airs – and now suddenly she finds out he’s into fairy tales, the kind of thing that she and her girlfriends had left behind ages ago.

  Pedro replied, slightly impatiently, ‘How am I supposed to know? I didn’t go flicking through the book. It was on a screen, remember? But listen, suddenly the book spun around, changed position and faced us, wide open and showing the pages – and there was this message written on it. So, tell me, are you still very interested in the details of the costumes and décor, or can I tell you what we read on that screen, on those pages?’

  He sounded annoyed.

  ‘No, I’m sorry, go ahead. What was written on the book? Tell me!’

  But just at that moment, Will’s mother opened the door and invited them in, all smiles. A few minutes of polite small talk followed, so it was some time before the three friends were together at the computer, and Sonia asked again, ‘So, go on, tell me, what was this mysterious message you got?’

  ‘Well,’ said Pedro, ‘it was in those weird fancy letters, with the first letter on the page written very big and surrounded by all these detailed illustrations in gold and red and blue.’

  ‘Gothic,’ said Will, the medieval expert. ‘That kind of writing is called gothic script. And the way the first letter on a page is all coloured and illustrated – that’s called an illuminated initial.’

  ‘But what did it say?’ Sonia asked.

  ‘It started with two sentences that I remember exactly,’ said Pedro. ‘“To you I will tell it. I am not who everyone thinks I am.”’

  ‘Cool!’ said Sonia. ‘A mysterious character. But it could easily be part of the game. If nobody can hack into a CD, then the message must already have been part of it, no?’

  Will spoke then. ‘I thought the same, at first, but we soon saw that it couldn’t be.’

  ‘That was what I thought too,’ Pedro went on. ‘But the very next thing in the message was an apology for butting into our game and interrupting what we were doing. The message explained that there was no other way, because they needed to communicate with us and simply using the internet wasn’t working.’

  ‘That made us realise it couldn’t be part of the game,’ Will interrupted. ‘I mean, come on, like anyone would talk about the internet in a medieval game? So I wanted to close it down and get on with the game, but Pedro wouldn’t let me. And then this whole stream of other letters started appearing like mad, page after page. The guy was telling this big long story, and he wouldn’t let us play on.’

  The boys told Sonia that the message’s mysterious author introduced himself, saying that he wasn’t actually the wizard they had seen in the game moments before. He was just an assistant who was still learning the secrets of alchemy. But he studied a lot, and he could read and write and knew Latin.

  ‘He was explaining the whole time that he could read well and quickly,’ said Will. ‘He said that he was used to reading, that he had studied in some monastery, but that at that time almost everyone was illiterate.’

  ‘The Brainy Hacker always says stuff like that,’ said Sonia, as if she were talking about an old friend. ‘And then?’

  ‘Then he said that a long, long time before, on a day on which the wizard was performing one of his experiments looking for the Elixir of Youth, there was a little accident.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Sonia. ‘This elixir – what’s that? I thought alchemy was about the Philosopher’s Stone?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Will. ‘The Philosopher’s Stone was a mysterious substance that could turn everything it touched into gold, and it was a stone, of course.’

  ‘Hence the name,’ Sonia added with a grin.

  ‘Yes,’ Will went on, ‘and the alchemists were always experimenting to see if they could find the powerful substance of which this stone was made. They hoped that one day someone might find the stone among some treasures in the East or something. But the other thing they were interested in finding was the Elixir of Youth, which was a liquid. The Stone and the Elixir were different things, but some scholars believed that the discovery of the Stone would be a first step towards finding the Elixir. Among the aims of alchemy were the discovery of the Stone and the Elixir, and also other things, such as the Machine of Perpetual Motion.’

  Sonia was beginning to be sorry she’d asked. She hadn’t really wanted a lecture on alchemy.

  Alchemy was not very highly thought of any more, Will said, but in fact the alchemists of old had done a lot of important research. The search for perpetual motion had ended up helping to develop physics. The search for the Elixir of Youth and the Philosopher’s Stone had contributed to findings in chemistry. So it wasn’t just silly magic, like a lot of people think. Deep down, the paths of humanity …

  That’s enough! thought Pedro. He really felt like screaming at Will to stop. But he didn’t want to be mean to his friend. So he just said, ‘I’m sorry, but aren’t we straying a bit from the subject here, Will?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Will. ‘I didn’t realise. I was just explaining how this alchemy thing worked in the Middle Ages, so Sonia could understand the message from the wizard’s assistant.’

  ‘Yeah, OK, but now you’ve explained it, everybody gets it. Can we move on?’

  Will nodded, slightly offended, and let Pedro carry on. So Pedro explained what the wizard’s assistant had told them.

  One time, while the wizard was doing some experiment, a few drops of liquid had splashed over the assistant. It was just a little accident, but those few drops had consequences, and the effects endured over time.

  ‘T
hat Elixir of Youth thing?’ Sonia asked. ‘So he got baby skin in a few parts of his body, where the liquid touched him, maybe?’ She was trying to imagine what that would look like.

  ‘No,’ Will said. ‘This liquid was probably not the Elixir of Youth, or of Eternal Life, as it was sometimes called. In fact, it couldn’t have been, because the elixir was never found. With the passing years, even the alchemists started believing that it couldn’t ever be developed. They gave up looking for it. Later, only the explorers kept looking for the Fountain of Youth in distant lands.’

  ‘But anyway,’ Pedro picked up the story, ‘what our guy said, the wizard’s assistant, was that what splashed on him was this liquid that was being experimented with. It wasn’t the Elixir of Youth itself, but it was maybe going to be an ingredient in the elixir.

  ‘And it didn’t affect his skin, as you imagined it might, Sonia, but it had consequences in his spirit. Something deeper than an effect on the surface of the body.’

  ‘What on earth do you mean?’ asked Sonia.

  ‘Well, from what this person told us, something in him never died. He may not have gained eternal youth, but he did gain a kind of eternal life, a sort of immortality, I don’t exactly know, but something like that.’

  ‘So the guy’s a zombie?’ squawked Sonia. ‘Like, the living dead?’

  ‘No,’ said Pedro. ‘As Will explained, it’s not his body that lives for ever, it’s not physical eternity. It’s his spirit that goes on living for ever.’

  Sonia came up in goosebumps at that thought.

  Pedro continued: ‘Something mental, it appears to be. But he wasn’t able to explain this thing properly, whatever it was. So that’s what we want to find out.’

  ‘Exactly!’ Will was getting excited. ‘So the plan is, we’ll play the game again until we get to the same point, in the same room, and then we can see if the big alchemy book turns towards us again with another message.’