The Supernatural Enhancements

by Edgar Cantero

  ID: Undoubtedly, yes. However, the human brain is a flexible container, to some extent. It does not require new brain cells to store new ideas thrown at you. It associates old ideas to new ones. But the ball can’t do that; it can’t organize information or browse through it, so it stays with the last thing it’s fed. About ten seconds.

  NW: Nevertheless, you are able to record a man’s thoughts in a ball.

  ID: Yes.

  NW: And transmit the thoughts from a ball to another man?

  ID: Yes.

  NW: Can you copy one ball into another?

  ID: Yes.

  NW: This is amazing.

  ID: Thank you.

  AUDIO RECORDING

  * * *

  [DR. BELKNAP and A. arguing, voices overlapping.]

  DR. BELKNAP: When I say “elephant,” you picture an elephant in your mind; your brain makes the elephant, triggered by just three syllables.

  A.: No, you should see the elephant I’m seeing, okay? If I tell you, “They plucked my eye out,” and you picture it, and try to feel the pain, and concentrate on that hot spot you feel behind your eyeball, you won’t feel even half of what that crystal ball makes you feel. These conductive telepathists or whatever explicitly rejected words. They said they’re just a suggestion. The ball has everything in it. The stab of your optic nerve snapping, like a hair pulled out. The speed of a body dropping to Earth from the stratosphere. The temperature inside a girl’s bed.

  DR. BELKNAP: You sleep in a girl’s bed!

  A.: Another girl’s bed!

  [Postclimax silence. Pencil scribbling. An empty second.]

  Yeah, sure. Waiter? Can we have another slice of raspberry pie here? Thanks. [Shift; now quieter.] This is real; it’s not confusing like dreams. You know, like in dreams, when you’re talking to your grandmother and suddenly she becomes the mailman? Or how you try to read but letters just get scrambled? Well, it doesn’t happen here. The edges are not blurry; everything is perfectly defined.

  [A dish arrives. It slides on the table toward the microphone.]

  DR. BELKNAP: I’d still like to see that ball. But … for the time being, I believe you.

  A.: [At his quietest.] Really? Then you’re less of a skeptic than I am.

  DR. BELKNAP: Well, I did my own research on this Dänemarr. [Foraging inside a handbag.] I thought you’d like to see this. Do you have access to the Internet?

  A.: We’re working on it.

  DR. BELKNAP: This address links to an interview with Dänemarr from a German magazine. It was part of a series on science exchanges between the two Germanies in the eighties. The West seemed impressed enough.

  A.: Cool. Thank you very much.

  DR. BELKNAP: How is everything else?

  A.: Fine. Fine, I told you on the phone. No fever, no rough nights …

  DR. BELKNAP: The ghost?

  A.: No news. Although the ghost was a whole different matter, I think. It’s unrelated to all this.

  DR. BELKNAP: I revised your cousin’s file too. Since … I am no longer your therapist, I think you should know that in April he claimed to have seen a ghost. In the bathtub.

  A.: Oh.

  DR. BELKNAP: A strong coincidence.

  A.: Not really. People who are about to die often see them.

  * * *

  8 This video is date-stamped November 28.

  December 6

  VIDEO RECORDING

  * * *

  BEDROOM WED DEC-6-1995 11:37:21

  The view of the bed is blocked by boxes and waves of bubble wrap. In the foreground, NIAMH is plugging in the computer.

  GALLERY WED DEC-6-1995 11:37:26

  The south windows on the right multiply themselves toward the far end of the room. The camera lies low. An undergrowth of scribbled paper sheets, many of them showing five-by-five alignments of letters, pervades the checkered floor. In a very narrow clearing sit a notebook, Mandalay’s Ars Cryptographica, half a bottle of Yoo-hoo, and A. in lotus, holding a baseball bat behind his neck.

  [HELP barks somewhere. A. unfolds his legs, comes to the window, and looks out.]

  A.: [Mildly concerned.] Ooh, fuck.

  [Turns around, only to be confronted with his maelstromic workspace.]

  LETTER

  * * *

  Axton House

  1 Axton Rd.

  Point Bless, VA 26969

  Dear Aunt Liza,

  […] It was Curtis Knox.

  We served tea in the dining room—the music room wasn’t clean enough. It was awkward in the beginning. He probably didn’t want to talk to us, and Niamh didn’t want to talk to him: She’s convinced he was behind that break-in we had in early November. I had almost forgotten about that—it happened four weeks and a window jump ago—but to Niamh, he still was the intruder she saw running away into the night. She was tense.

  I dismissed her ten minutes into the conversation. See, I still refuse to believe him capable of entering a house through a window. I can imagine him taking off his waistcoat and rolling his sleeves up if the situation requires it (by the way, he sported an unseasonal tan), but not in order to commit a crime. And even if he’d been behind the burglary in some way, he was now willing to give diplomacy another chance. He would surely not pull out a gun and demand anything. He’d pay somebody else to do that.

  So Niamh left us to resume setting up the computer upstairs while we discussed the tea set, the weather, and how the Internet was bound to change our lives, among other frivolities. I expected Knox to be a sort of computer skeptic; he isn’t. I commented then that I was surprised that Ambrose never adopted this technology.

  “Ambrose?” he said. “Why would he of all people be interested in the Internet?”

  “Well, for a start, he’d save a lot in long-distance calls,” I said.

  That was the “frivolities over” signal. Knox leaned forward, left the cup and the saucer on the table, and his voice went three degrees Britisher.

  “As a matter of fact,” he began, “that is somehow related to the motive of my visit.”

  About two minutes of zigzagging preamble followed, which I failed to memorize.

  “The thing is that for some time I’ve been waiting for some … let’s say message from Ambrose Wells in the event of his death.”

  I feigned shock and leaned forward to show how Japanesemonsterly interested I was. “Please continue.”

  “I mean, of course, as a result of a disposition in his will, a commission, a covenant, if you wish.”

  “I see,” I said, while mentally tracing back the string of mutual lies that had brought us here. “Of course,” I lied forward, “Ambrose’s death came as a shock to us all.”

  “You didn’t even know he existed.”

  “And so I was beshocked the most. I mean, maybe he hadn’t enough time to arrange everything.”

  “I am pretty confident this was taken care of.”

  “Really? When was the last time you guys met?” I asked, for lack of a better question.

  “June the twentieth,” he answered. “Still, this was a long-running business.”

  “Business,” I repeated. “What kind of business?”

  “Well, uh … studies he left unfinished and that he surely arranged for someone to continue.”

  “Just to make sure—are we talking Mason stuff?”

  I really loved this reaction shot. He would have needed to pull a very big gun at me now to take him seriously.

  “Mason or whatever,” I clarified. “I understand Ambrose was part of a circle of scholars who did some kind of research.”

  “Indeed, he was, yes,” he cut to the chase. “The research is the least of my concerns, of course; given the nature of his demise, I cannot pretend his mind wasn’t troubled by far more serious matters than our silly work,” he said, and he almost chuckled before realizing how inappropriate that would be.

  “Oh, so you’re in the group too.”

  “Well, yes, but unlike me—and this is the point that
was worrying me—Ambrose’s position in the group entitled him to certain …” The following word took him time to get out. “… privileges … that he was bound to pass on to somebody else.”

  “What kind of privileges?”

  “Well, a special set of responsibilities, together with the possession of … certain tokens.”

  “Like a crystal ball?”

  (Yeah, well, I had to say it. We couldn’t be sitting there all day.)

  A minute or so flew by, Knox staring at me all the while as he reformulated his strategy. Finally he said, “You found it.”

  “Yes.” I improvised a lie based on truth. “We found a message from Ambrose regarding this … ‘Society.’ I guess you guys were still part of his concerns after all. I guessed, too, that this Society was the reason for your last visit.”

  “You never told me.”

  “Well, I’m telling you now. This message was addressed to the person he had designated to resume his functions.”

  “Do you still have it?”

  “No, the person to whom it was addressed has it. Caleb Ford.”

  If that came as a harsh surprise, his flinching wasn’t that obvious.

  “Ambrose had an address for him in Kigali,” I resumed.

  “In Africa?” he asked. He said it in the exact pitch of Michael Palin in The Meaning of Life: “ ‘A tiger, in Africa?’ ”

  “We’re still waiting for an answer.”

  “But Kigali is just an anchor point. He could be anywhere in the Great Lakes area.”

  “I understand, but what am I supposed to do?”

  “Are you aware of what’s happening in that region?”

  “Uh … Well, we don’t watch CNN, but—”

  “There is a civil war going on! There are genocidal raids!”

  “What is your point, Mr. Knox?”

  He made sure to breathe before this one.

  “I’m saying, and I am deeply sorry to do so, that Ford is probably dead.”

  He didn’t seem much sorry. Barely concerned, at most.

  And yet, once I brushed aside his body language and actually listened to his theory, I was the one affected. It had never come to my mind, but the scenario was not implausible. Ford hadn’t contacted anyone since April. There were some calls to Rwanda in the phone bills I examined weeks ago, but most of them were brief—probably a message left at a hotel, and nothing else. And then there was this notion of what a hotel in present-day Rwanda must look like. Is there a reception counter and a bell? Is the paint on the walls coming off? Is there a man in a suit behind the counter, or a child on drugs wielding an AK-47?

  “You see,” Knox interrupted, “it’s been eight months without news from Caleb Ford. I’m afraid we must assume the worst.” He looked down for a second, succeeding to at least appear honest. “In all modesty I think I knew Ambrose Wells enough to know that he would have thought of me as the second in line.”

  “He never considered that eventuality.”

  “Still, if you consider it yourself, I think you will agree that the most sensible thing to do is to give me what Ambrose meant to give Caleb.”

  “We don’t know if Caleb is dead. If he were, we would have been told. Until we find out what happened to him, as long as he’s not declared dead, I’m abiding by Wells’ instructions.”

  “It’s Africa. There will not be a death certificate.”

  “As far as I know, there is a stable Rwandan government right now. There are authorities; they can identify a body.”

  “There must be a million bodies lying between Kigali and Zaire!”

  “Is Caleb Ford white?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then his body will stand out.”

  He rose from his chair. “Oh, this is outrageous!”

  “Careful. You’re talking about Uncle Ambrose’s will.”

  “Oh, now he’s ‘Uncle Ambrose’? What happened to ‘second cousin twice removed’?”

  “He gave me this house! I’d call him ‘Daddy Cool’ if he wanted me to!”

  We exchanged a couple more lines, but none as good as that one, so I’ll cut it short. Knox left promising he would get in touch with Glew, the lawyer, to make me see reason. I can imagine what Glew will tell him, though. Provided that the message to Caleb was signed without witnesses, and thus not legally binding, Ambrose’s will prevails, and it says I inherit Axton House and all of its contents. And the crystal ball was found inside Axton House.

  The question is, why does he want that crystal ball? As far as we know, it’s nothing but a recording device; there are many more in the basement. What makes this one special?

  Or even better: Which ball was he talking about?

  On the other hand, if Caleb is dead, this puzzle we are trying to solve might turn unsolvable. Ambrose surely never counted on this eventuality. Maybe he suspected that Caleb was in trouble by September, but not when he wrote the letters in February, including the ciphered one to Caleb. The chain might be completely broken.

  Our only hope then is to break the code once and for all, and hope that the ciphered letter will give us some real clues. Like what does that large hex key we found open, what do the crystal balls really contain, and what happens in this house on the winter solstice? Otherwise, we are stuck.

  But let’s not despair. We still have puzzles to think through.

  VIDEO RECORDING

  * * *

  BEDROOM WED DEC-6-1995 23:01:15

  NIAMH and A. sitting at the computer, thinking.

  Deeply.

  For very long.

  A.: [Suddenly, his chin dispensing with the support of his right hand, he snaps his fingers.] Use the rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle.

  [Niamh does some clicking. They stare at the screen, expectant.]

  [Ecstasy ensues.]

  Yaaay! I’m a mighty pirate!

  DECEMBER 7

  A.’S DIARY

  * * *

  Honestly, I think I tried every conceivable key word.

  The first and most obvious option was Caleb Ford (or Caleb or Ford), in the same fashion as the Aeschylus message, which used the recipient’s name as the key. But after trying and failing I realized what a foolish choice it would have been, since anyone intercepting the letter (like ourselves) would know Caleb’s name from the envelope.

  Still, we tried other easy solutions, just to put them out of the way: Ambrose, Wells, and Axton House.

  Of course, just as Strückner’s code name was Aeschylus, Caleb must have a code name too. We learned all the code names in the Society from that ledger page; we just don’t know which one is Caleb. So I tried them all: Leonidas, Hector, Archimedes, Sophocles, Zosimos, Socrates, Cybele, Dioskuri, Anchises, Elpenor, Coroebus, Phoenix, Amphiaraus, Tyche, Alexandros, Asterion, Chronos, Prometheus, Heracles, and Zeus. All failed.

  I also tried society, twenty, crystal sphere, crystal ball, dream, nightmare, ghost, and Ngara. Oh, and Belknap. Hey, who knows.

  And I even tried redhead, pitchfork, eyeball, grenade, surf, Rubik’s cube, and Puma shoes. To no avail.

  So, enough with the niceties: It has to be cracked.

  —How?

  —Well, according to the manual, all we need to attack the cipher is a breach. A string of clear text.

  —Which you don’t have.

  —No, but we know what to expect. Sort of. There was another letter, the one for Knox, written probably on the same day, to be read on the same occasion, not ciphered. That should give us some ideas.

  (Meditating.)

  —Letters begin with the date. First word = February?

  I spent most of Monday putting that theory to the test. It failed. By midnight I’d hit several dead ends. I entertained the possibility that February had been abbreviated to Feb., but this line of attack seemed flawed anyway. The fact is that Playfair does not offer a standard way to encrypt numbers, so if the date is there, it must have been spelled out. And the message is only 256 characters long; if you begin with �
��February the fifteenth, nineteen ninety-five,” you’ve almost run out of space before even getting to the subject.

  Of course, Ambrose might have skipped the date. In that case, the letter would be headed by the sender’s address: “Axton House.” That path took me half of Tuesday before I stalled.

  And I also tried assuming the first words were “Dear Caleb.” There went the other half of Tuesday.

  —I don’t think it begins like a conventional letter: He’s bound to keep it brief.

  —It still could end like one. He must have signed it.

  —So the last word is Wells?

  —Or Ambrose? A.G.W.?

  I actually tried all three. Plus Leonidas, Ambrose’s code name.

  And thus I wasted Wednesday.

  VIDEO RECORDING

  * * *

  GALLERY THU DEC-7-1995 11:04:25

  An autumn carpet of white and sepia paper sheets lies over the gallery like war propaganda from an enemy fighter.

  Defeated A. sits under the dreary windows, bouncing a baseball against the opposite wall while studying the cipher in his free hand.

  Five-by-five grids multiply across the papers strewn around the room.

  HELP watches the baseball in its endless cycle out of A.’s hand, off the wall, onto the floor, back into his hand.

  NIAMH is playing “Cockles and Mussels” on a harmonica.

  [Niamh pockets her instrument, fishes for her notepad and pencil.]

  A.: Don’t bother suggesting anything; I’m not listening to you. [Throws the ball.] Face it: This is not your field. Just stand there and be cute.

  NIAMH: [Voiceless snigger.]

  [A. loses the ball. Help immediately catches it and offers it to his master, tail wagging. A. ignores the dog and stands up.]