Mike Jones: Infernus

“Ah,” he said, sizing her up. He tapped his fingers on the boxed manuscript that was positioned neatly on the right corner of his desk. Leaning forward, he asked suddenly, “Dr. Begels, do you understand the importance of this find, this manuscript? I really don’t know what to make of it, actually. Of course, it’s too controversial not to publish. You say you have submitted it to no one else?”

“That’s right,” she said, with a sly grin. “We agreed on a set price — rather steep — and that is all I ask. Well, actually, I shall expect my share of the royalties, should this hideous little tome become popular. I have my doubts, though. I have lived with this hellish book for more years than I care to think. I have fulfilled my part of the bargain. The rest is up to you.”

“What do you mean?”

“I have promised a certain group — who I will tell you more about later — to do my best to get it published. I have done my part. They believe that it is not important that the book becomes popular, but that it does exist as a serious reference for posterity, or something like that. They said something about the manuscript being an important key of some sort. I do not understand that — the thing about a ‘key’ — even though I translated the book. And I promise you, I won’t pursue trying to understand it either.” She brushed a trembling hand beneath an eye, and then put it stiffly in her lap with the other one.

“I see. In your” (slight, painful grimace, she noticed), “quite lengthy cover letter, Dr. Begels, you say that you personally unearthed seventeen bound leather volumes in, um, let me check some notes I made… in 1989. Is that right?”

“That’s right. Before we are permitted to dig in an area, we must show just cause. I went before my team and conducted a few preliminary digs.” She blinked several times. He nodded, believing it was a nervous twitch, or better yet, a mild form of Tourettes syndrome.

“Is that, uh, legal?”

“No, not at all, but I did it anyway. I had a funny feeling about this one. Anyway, when I found a few volumes, I begged my father to purchase the land so that the find could be mine alone.”

“Clever,” the publisher said. “I have a question about the person who received this uh, unedited manuscript in the form of, uh, apparently automatic writing, isn’t that right?”

“Unfortunately, I cannot tell you what would amount to concrete evidence. Everything I’m about to share with you, in one degree or another, is educated conjecture. Reliable guess-timates, you see? Whether it was male or female, there was simply no historical record. There was none with any of the bound manuscripts. I can only surmise — without data — that the person was driven quite insane. To have this hideous stuff just appear in your head… horrible! The compulsion to write it all down would have been maddening, I’m sure. The reason I think it was written in pretty much an automatic style, as do the others in the group, is because much of it is written in a rushed hand. The same rushed hand, the words jammed together — unbroken. It gave me the impression that great parts of it were written at once. Not thought over, not plotted, like a novel, but rushed. We thought it might hint at the fact that it was written as if dictated .

“And let me assure you, sir,” she said grinning wryly, “there are no more volumes, so please don’t think that if the book becomes popular, that a few million dollars might make me mysteriously ‘find’ some more that, whoops! we just overlooked the first time, thus creating sequels. The royalty checks, if there are any, can be sent to my attorney, who will forward them to me.

“But I will tell you what I think happened, if you like.” Her face lost its disinterested stare, he noted. This was obviously born of conviction.

“Uh, yes, I wish you would.”

“I think it was forced upon some young girl just blossoming into womanhood, or -”

“Or,” he interjected, “someone of a strict religious order.”

“You’ve thought of that one, too,” she said, smiling, then hurriedly chewed on a bit of fingernail.

“How cruel that — I’m just guessing on the method of transcribing, mind you — every time you sat down to write your lessons or perhaps to painstakingly write out a page of illuminated manuscript… and this came out!”

“But, in the unedited manuscript, which is impossible to imagine in print,” she added, “if this were the case, she either buried the manuscript herself, or kept it hidden from everyone. A woman writing this kind of literature up until modern times was considered unstable, at best, if they wrote this kind of thing. Worst-case scenario, she could have been burned at the stake or tortured, depending on what era she actually lived. If it were kept by a dark order, her identity could possibly have been kept secret.”

“You keep saying ‘she.’ Is that intentional?”

“I’ll get to that in a minute. Now, all of this is pure conjecture. It’s frustrating, because the mind naturally plows this ground, seeking answers. The person who received all of this, who was mentioned in the manuscript only briefly, is never referred to by name or sex.”

“In fact,” he said, excited, “the narrator seems genuinely surprised that there is a connection between himself and a stenographer at all. Isn’t that the impression you get?”

“Most definitely. To think that someone had to live with this for weeks… months. What if it came sporadically over the course of ten or twenty years?” She looked out the window to sigh and collect her thoughts for the next onslaught. “Imagine, if you will, but I suppose we will never possess what any of us could consider hard evidence. In fact, since the timeframe in which the manuscripts were carbon-dated; when they might have been written, and which years they speak of, which was all ‘future’ to the poor wretch — since all of that is impossible anyway, it’s unknowable with any degree of certainty, when it was written.

“The last hope I had, was to take the most innocent sample I could find from the first page to a handwriting analyst. All of the Koine-like Greek was printed, unfortunately for us, so I could not say clearly whether it was masculine or feminine.

“Given what we do know of handwriting is based on relatively modern samples. We can’t be sure they apply to someone living, say, a few thousand years ago.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Given it’s a safe bet to assume someone living a thousand years ago would be exposed to none of the modern conveniences we take for granted, male or female, their thought processes would be nothing like ours. They would be, for all intents and purposes, remarkably alien to us.” With some satisfaction she folded her hands in her lap, and smiled. Then brushed her pant leg. Again. For that invisible something she seemed to never locate.

“And?” he asked, suspecting this was only the beginning.

“Having said all that,” she said triumphantly, “I’ll still give you the impression we have. I consulted with three handwriting experts, two women and one man. Cities apart, and across a few months. Given all I’ve told you, they all three were positive that the handwriting, such as it was — and they knew nothing of the timeframes that I have discussed — was done by a woman. I only felt, having lived inside the manuscript for a few years, translating it, that it had a woman’s touch.

“One of the women and the man expressly said they felt sure ‘her’ life had been subjected to strict inner and outer discipline, possibly by a religious order.”

“Interesting,” he said. “The story is like a virus. And like the story, the sickness always spreads to the most negative possible outbreak. Think of a poor young nun, in another century, and every time she sits down, she envisions this .”