Direct From The Source

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“So, how can I help you today,” smiled Dr Wayfit breezily but briefly, “Mr., uh, Smedley?”

“I’ve been struggling in lockdown”, the man replied, looking evasively through the third floor window of the medical centre. “My mental health is suffering. I’m feeling very anxious about… the vaccines. You know.”

“For something that does so much good, there are far too many conflicting messages out there”, the doctor said. “Do you… ” – she paused, looking him squarely in the eyes – “…rely on social media for information?”

“Oh no”, the man said, his face suddenly brightening, “I get my information direct. From the source.”

The doctor’s eyes narrowed quizzically. “You mean, from epidemiologists?”

“No!” Smedley laughed raucously, his head tipping backwards. “From the Voynich Manuscript. Everything about the coronavirus is in there, everything. Look at this.” He pulled out a crumpled piece of paper from an inside pocket and held it up for the doctor to see. “f69v. Proof. 100%. You can’t deny it. Even back in the 15th century, they knew. They Knew!“

Dr Wayfit shook her head. “I’m sorry to have to tell you, but it’s actually a well-known fact that Wilfrid Voynich hoaxed the manuscript himself. You don’t have to look far to find well-illustrated websites arguing this point in a highly persuasive way.”

Shocked, Smedley leapt backwards towards the door, his picture of f69v clutched to his face in horror. “But… that makes no sense at all? What kind of crazy drugs are you self-administering?”

“No, it’s all just common sense”, she cooed reassuringly. “Take your f69v, for example – it’s nothing more complex than a series of brightly-coloured pipes arranged around a starfish, the same as literally millions of medieval diagrams.”

“Really? Is there even one medieval diagram remotely like it?”

She rolled her eyes extravagantly. “To be precise, it’s the same as literally millions of medieval diagrams could have been, had the person drawing it chosen to draw it that way. And so what Wilfrid Voynich was hoaxing was how any one of those million medieval diagrams could have looked, had the person drawing it chosen to draw it as a set of brightly-coloured pipes around a starfish.”

“An eight-armed starfish?”

“It’s a work of imagination, obviously.”

“But… it’s so obviously coronavirus”, Smedley spluttered, now purple in the face. “And even though I’ll happily admit that my conclusion can be difficult for some to accept, your explanation is ten times crazier. Maybe even a hundred times.”

“Look, there’s really no reason for you to feel so upset by the Voynich Manuscript. You’ve been in ‘qokdown’ for far too long, and we in VAnon are desperately keen for people to understand that…”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

“So, Dr Wayfit”, the police detective asked, looking at the body crumpled on the pavement far below the medical centre’s smashed window, the picture of f69v grasped firmly in the dead man’s hands, “you must admit this is a bit of a strange tableau, right?”

“Not really”, she replied, her eyes darting around distractedly. “The moment poor Mr Smedley told me that he thought the Voynich Manuscript had meaningful content, I knew instantly he was quite deranged. Honestly, he was a clear danger to himself, and I don’t think there’s anything I could have done to prevent this awful tragedy.”

The Winter Ballroom

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The Brazilian nurse adjusted the Great Poet’s line and pillows with genuine tenderness but little effect.

“Titanic deckchairs?” he mused. “Infinitesimal parameters?” Words, old friends, pain relief, they all failed him now: like the snow falling softly outside, the only way was down.

Since arriving, he had only written occasional haikus on a Post-It Note pad: but day by day even that had become impossibly long-form. His writing fingers drummed arthritically on the coverlet, empty-tanked sports cars ever impatient for races they would never finish.

On a whim, he stared past her out of the window at the snowman standing in the tiny courtyard. It lacked yesterday’s newly-made sharp definition, true, but a pinprick of its shaped vitality was still discernible, if you knew where to look. “You and me both, pal”, he wheezed ineffectively.

“Are you alright, Meester Alston?”

“Never better”, he tried to lie: but as with his pen, the words seemed too wide, the channel too narrow.

She paused, watching his struggle for breath. “I will leave the light on”, she said as she left. “You seem to have a lot on your mind tonight.”

As the ground-floor’s other temporary residents turned in and switched off, the snowman gradually found itself illuminated just by the poet’s room light, leaving it a white lighthouse in a wine-dark sea of night. And far off in the hospice, a muffled radio played the organ intro to Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale.”

And he was back in the ballroom, Bayswater, 1967, winter solstice. Dress code was pagan, Bohemian black for everyone except his bride, white-faced, ivory-clad Lindsay, his Mama Cass, his muse, with her sane reasoning and insane appetites.

Oddly, his resentful, drug-abusing sons were there too, their burning arrows of creativity forever condemned to sail listlessly beneath his own Laureate arc: and his daughter Caterina as well, beautiful before she was born and serene after she died.

“We skipped the light fandango…” Indeed: so what shall we dance this time, my dear? His mistresses, Tarni and Ute and Iris, eased gently out of the shadows as bridesmaids – though hardly vestal virgins – lifting him to the stage, to Lindsay, to a reconciliation they had both wanted but had never quite reached.

And everywhere he looked in the darkness around her, he saw more eyes, more faces, more everything, and with a vivid clarity that had long eluded him. And he was writing, writing now, writing his life and his love and his pain and his death, trapped and freed within a seventeen syllable prison cell of heaven and hell…

It was Nurse Celestina who found the body beside the snowman: how the Great Poet got there was a mystery. The Post-It Note in his hand was blank, though: there never was enough time to write that final haiku.

Our winter ballroom
Fills with friends anew.
My first and last dance, with you.

“The Devil in the Details” Voynich short story…

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Here’s a nice departure from normal: a ‘Peter Crossman’ short story that just appeared on tor.com called The Devil in the Details, by Debra Doyle and James D. McDonald.

It’s a kind of high-octane (parody of / homage to) the modern-day Knights-Templar-as-God’s-Special-Ops novel genre, based around missing pages from the Voynich Manuscript being offered at a dangerously high-powered auction, at an arcane and mysterious venue with the Vatican and (possibly) Google Research also trying to bid, if they can stay alive long enough… you get the idea.

The writing sustains a quirky balance between rigid Latin medievalism and modern weapon fetishism, with tongue firmly in cheek. I hope you like it! 🙂

Encyclopedia Girl. (Chapter 2)

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( Chapter 1 )

Chapter 2.

— Day Two, 9am —

“Hold the door, Max!”, Joey calls good-naturedly from just behind me, and heavily jogs up the steps into the tiny ante-room we amuse ourselves by calling a ‘foyer’. “Was that…?”

“Yes, it was indeed our purple-haired encyclopedia girl Germaine.” I reply, putting the office kettle on and corralling four coffee mugs onto a small tray. “Though she says we should call her ‘Mayne’.”

“Ah, as in The Spanish”, Joey nods conspiratorially, slowly backing his ample frame onto the less-than-entirely-new office sofa. “So… how do you think this is going to play out, young Mr Harmer?” He’s called me ‘young’ ever since college, when he was in the year above: it’s sometimes hard to believe that was fifteen years ago.

“Well…”, I muse, reaching for the coffee jar, “half of me thinks we’re completely doomed: but the other half is looking at the money our man Charlie has already wired through, and liking it a lot.”

Light taps at the door herald Mayne’s return, along with two sizeable crates of Voynich-related books she’s wheeled along on a kind of powered carrying gadget. “Charlie said that you’ll be wanting these.”

Fortuitously, this is when Parker – the third (and fittest) member of our troika – skateboards in: and so the kettle is left to boil while he and I ferry the books up the steps and onto our war table.

By the time everything’s in its proper place, Joey has – slightly unusually, it has to be said – finished making coffee and has moved on to thumb through Mary D’Imperio’s “An Elegant Enigma”, though with what looks like a slightly sour look on his face.

I catch his eye. “Not quite to your legalistic taste, J-Man?”

He winces. “If this is as good as it gets, what we’re dealing with with this Voynich Manuscript thing isn’t ‘evidence‘ but ‘stuff that people think might one day become evidence‘. Really, it’s all a bit virtual for me – and you know how much I hate that word.”

“Along with every other word coined after Shakespeare”, chimes in Parker. He’s not wrong there.

I turn to Mayne, who by now is happily sniffing the coffee fumes from her mug. “What’s the low hanging fruit?” I ask her.

“Yes. Ah.”, she stutters. “That would be ‘The most easily achieved of a set of tasks, measures, goals, etc.‘”

A silence falls on the room. Mayne looks around slightly puzzled.

“Oh, and a 2012 track by Tenacious D. ‘She wears the beekeeper suit‘. Is that the answer you wanted?”

I perhaps should have instead started the day by telling Joey and Parker about Mayne’s tendency towards extreme literalism.

“Ohhhh kayyyy…”, I interject, “let’s try asking you about the low hanging fruit of the set of Voynich theories we might reasonably consider disproving.”

“That’s also a good question”, she frowns. “Perhaps Gordon Rugg’s grille-text?”

“Hey – isn’t that the one from Scientific American way back when?” puzzled Parker.

“June 21st 2004, yes. Rugg famously claimed that, by using Cardan grilles randomly moving over a set of tables, a 16th century hoaxer could have produced a manuscript indistinguishable from the Voynich Manuscript.”

This has me puzzled. “But the Voynich’s radiocarbon dating was 15th century, right?”

“Yes, the same dating that a whole bunch of other internal evidence has.” She slurps her coffee unself-consciously. “Rugg therefore concludes that it must have been written on century-old vellum, while all those other features must similarly have been contrived by a sophisticated hoaxer to look as if they had been added in the 15th century.”

“But given that there are no 15th century books that look like it, Rugg has to be claiming that it’s a hoaxed copy of a book that never itself existed?”

“That’s correct.”

“How marvellously 1980s”, shrills Joey, “a Baudrillardian simulacrum!”

There’s an awkward, tumbleweedy silence as Parker and I stare at him blankly.

Germaine coughs politely. “Jean Baudrillard used the word ‘simulacrum’ to denote a thing which bears no relation to any reality whatsoever. Its earlier meaning was ‘an image without the substance or qualities of the original’.”

Parker, ever the mathematical logician, is shaking his head. “That’s all very well, but… come on – was Rugg actually able to prove any of this?”

We all look at Germaine. “In fact, no. Skeptical physicist Mark Perakh demonstrated that the Voynich-like text Rugg reconstructed had statistical properties much more like those of gibberish than those of the actual Voynich text.”

Parker shakes his head: “So all Rugg really proved was that a 16th century hoaxer could have produced something that superficially resembled the Voynich Manuscript, as opposed to something that actually had the same statistical properties as the Voynich Manuscript.”

“That is correct,” Germaine nods.

“As a piece of computer science, it’s probably quite interesting”, Parker muses, “but as historical research, it seems worthless. Who really cares if a 16th century hoaxer could possibly have made something that only superficially resembled the Voynich Manuscript?”

“So have I got this right?”, I ask. “Rugg has no actual evidence, an hypothesis that doesn’t do what he says it does, and has spent the last decade dining out on the headline rather than fixing the problem. Meanwhile, all the actual Voynich evidence out there he dismisses, saying that reproducing anything that trivial should be well within the range of a sophisticated 16th century forger.”

Joey dejectedly sinks back into the far end of the sofa. “If anyone’s a hoaxer in that whole sorry saga, I’d have thought it was him.”

“But guys, guys”, I say, “- and Mayne, please consider yourself an honorary guy – whatever our opinion, how do we go about trying to disprove Rugg’s theory? You know, like we’ve been paid to?”

“Do we need to?” Parker asks. “That Mark Perakh guy has already cut it down to almost nothing. And if Rugg, with all the modern computing power at his disposal, hasn’t in a decade been able to use his grilles and tables to construct a replica of his supposed simulacrum with the same statistical properties, the chances of a supposed 16th century hoaxer doing the same must surely be basically zero.”

“Yeah”, says Joey, “if Rugg thinks it’s a fake replica but can’t replicate it using the approach that he claims was originally used to make it, why should anyone else think the same? Case closed, in my opinion.”

“Great work, guys”, I concur, “I’ll email this through to boss-man Charlie straightaway. Then shall we break for an early lunch?” I look out at a roomful of eagerly nodding heads. Proof is good, but lunch is better.

Encyclopedia Girl. (Chapter 1)

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Chapter 1.

— Day One —

Today, like every day, the phone rings: I answer it, but for once I’m genuinely surprised by what I hear.

What usually happens here at the Epistemological Detective Agency is that a client calls: he or she has ended up in some kind of nebulous everyone-loses train wreck scenario, surrounded by people spinning ridiculous stories to save their sorry skins. But if that’s you and you’re rich and really want to get to the truth (or, at least, to disprove the manifestly false)… well, you call us. In a world of wonky knowledge pipes, we’re the 24-hour emergency plumbers. Not so much lawyers, but rather something closer to ‘industrial logicians’.

But this afternoon’s call is playing out to quite a different script. On the other end of the line is a well-known billionaire Yale benefactor – let’s call him “Charlie” – who wants to hire our specialist services, but not necessarily in a way we’re going to be comfortable with.

“So…”, I say, trying to recap where we’ve got to, “do I take it that you want us to prove what kind of thing this manuscript actually is?”

“No, that’s not it at all.” He pauses: but even over the phone, I can hear him still trembling with anger and annoyance. “I want to hire you Epistemological detective people for some proper Popperian disproof. These crazy-ass Voynich theories are making my alma mater a laughing stock, and I want you to stop them in their ridiculous tracks.”

He’s definitely got a point: for months now the Voynich Manuscript has been all over the media and Internet, with one broken theory after another loudly trumpeting itself as supposedly irrefutable fact. They can’t all be right at the same time: but they definitely might all be wrong.

“I can see what you’re trying to do”, I muse, “but history is something of a… high-risk area for us.” And the less said about that whole sorry Vinland Map episode the better, we both think to ourselves.

“Look, sixteen thousand bucks a week says your agency will take it on. My PA says that’s double your normal rate, but I don’t care, I know you can do this thing and I want you guys on board ASAP, even if History does make your toes curl.”

After a lifetime as a captain of industry, Charlie is plainly used to getting what he wants. Right now, I haven’t really got any objections that $16K a week can’t comfortably fix. And he knows it.

“I’ll take it from your silence that you’re on board”, he beams, yet another deal won by sheer force.

“Yes, we will take it on”, I reply, “though I’m sure you already know it normally takes us about a fortnight to assemble a dossier of rock-solid premises to build out from.”

“In this instance, I have a short cut for you”, he smirks. “I’ve taken the liberty of putting Encyclopedia Girl on a plane, she’ll be at your door first thing tomorrow morning.”

“Encyclo-who?”, I hear my voice say, though a touch more incredulously than I actually intended.

“Her name’s Germaine Zayfert; she’s from Long Island, and has spent the last two months filling her capacious photographic memory with everything to do with the Voynich Manuscript. She’s on my payroll until the summer, as a kind of intern: just keep feeding her bagels and coffee and she’ll tell you everything you want to know. I’ll wire a fortnight’s money in a minute. Goodbye!”

And with that the line goes dead. Whatever made Charlie his billions, I think to myself, it certainly wasn’t his phone manner. I call Parker and Joey to let them know to clear their diaries and to be in at 9am: we’re going to be busy for a good while.

— Day Two —

When I arrive to open up our Little Italy office at 8.30am, there’s a purple-haired girl already sat on the stone steps outside. Her eyes seem distant, yet raster back and forth as if she’s counting far-off cars only she can see: she looks about fifteen, but I know she’s older.

She springs to her feet and juts out a small white hand for me to shake. “You must be Maxten Harmer?” she asks with that superfluously upwardly-inflected final syllable that everyone under twenty-five seems to, like, like so much?

“Yes, I must”, I reply, shaking her hand lightly. “But call me Max. How should I introduce you to the others?”

At that, she recoils backwards, physically withdrawing into her coat. “I… don’t see anybody else here,” she mumbles into the fabric. “Who the heck are you talking about?”

“Joseph Serrani and Parker Hitt II, the Epistemological Detective Agency’s other two principals: they’ll be here in half an hour. I expect Charlie already told you about them.”

“Oh. Yes. That’s right.” I watch in curious fascination as her body language slowly winds from scared witless back down to merely tense as hell. “Sorry about that. I have a tendency to be quite… literal, sometimes. Call me ‘Mayne’. Can’t stand that whole ‘Encyclopedia Girl’ thing.”

“Yeah, that would bug me too,” I commiserate, opening the door and disabling the alarm. “‘Mayne’ is good. Coffee?”

“Perfecto”, she answers with what can only reasonably be described a homeopathic flicker of a half-smile. “I’ll fetch my bags.” And she turns, marches down the steps and then away down the street, without once looking back.

I can’t honestly see how this is going to work.

Snoopy’s Ultimate Voynich Novel…

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Part I
It was a dark and stormy night. The world-famous WW2 codebreaker furiously twiddled his moustache. Suddenly, a shout – “I’ve solved the Voynich!” It was the television! A small boy and his beagle were smiling at the camera, holding a book up. They had “proved it was a hoax”. This meant one thing: war! The codebreaker slammed the door and drove to the library.

Part II
Seven hundred years earlier, Knights Templar pounded the monastery door. Roger Bacon answered. “We’ll taketh that”, said the knights, grabbing the mysterious book from his hands. “My secrets are safe with you idiots”, sneered the codemaker monk.

Part III
The security guard approached. The codebreaker was in his pyjamas, waiting at the library’s front gate. “You’ll have to wait till morning, sir”, said the guard. A shot rang out. The guard slumped. The codebreaker hid the body in a snowdrift. The history graduate walked warily past the man in bloodstained pyjamas on her way home. The boy on TV carried on smiling.

Part IV
The Knights Templar couldn’t decipher the book. “Torture him!”, the Grand Master screamed. They tried, but Bacon had a heart attack and died. Nobody would ever know. Or would they? And then the whole Templar Order was suppressed. Or was it?

Part V
The gate opened, and the codebreaker ran in past the history graduate, again. The librarian shrugged. But where was the security guard? The codebreaker sped through all the pages one last time, until – yes, there it was! A bloody fingerprint, overlooked by everyone. It wasn’t a hoax! Outside, the librarian noticed the trail of blood and called the police. The dog smiled even harder.

Part VI
Leon Battista Alberti borrowed the book from the Vatican, his oily fingerprints messing up the radiocarbon dating. Suddenly, a thud! Alberti lay unconscious in the street, mugged: the thief ran away with his prize, for his great-grandchildren to sell to the Holy Roman Emperor, and from there to Athanasius Kircher in 1665, the Jesuit archives, and then Wilfrid Voynich in 1912.

Part VII
Bang! The codebreaker lay shot, slumped by the book, his vividly red blood mingling with the ink, the paint and the blood spatter from Alberti’s head. His life ebbing away, he suddenly realized: nobody would ever know. They’d all think it simply a hoax, forever. He lifted his hands to the sky and shouted “Noooooooo!” The boy and the dog danced on top of the kennel, one last time.

THE END

The Voynich Manuscript, the ultimate Nigerian scam?

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Greetings, most dearly beloved [insert-name-here],

I bring you a message of great urgency and yet colossal financial benefit. My name is Seko Mugu Alberti, and thanks to ancestry.com I have discovered that I am the sole descendant of Renaissance polymath genius Leon Battista Alberti. This means I am in line to inherit the architectural and consulting fortune he deposited at the Medici Bank long ago. Yes, I do believe I was indeed just as surprised to find this out as you are now.

Through close reading of my ancestor’s published works, I have discovered that he kept a copy of his bank account details hidden in plain sight. All I now need to do is present the proper authentication to the modern successors of the Medici Bank (the Rothschilds, of course) and they will be compelled to give me my rightful inheritance of (with compound interest) 48.9 billion US dollars.

As a result I have been looking for an exceptional historian and code-breaker to assist me – for a modest 15% finder’s fee – in deciphering Alberti’s greatest work, the Voynich Manuscript. (I wasted a lot of time on the disgusting and perverted Hypnerotomachia Poliphilii, and the less said about that monstrosity the better). The nice gentleman at Cipher Mysteries sold me a list of mugus cipher researchers for a thousand US dollars “to put behind the bar in Frascati” (whatever that means), which is how I now find myself with your most excellent contact details.

The ridiculous Voynich Manuscript is, as I am sure you have already worked out, 240 pages of nonsense constructed with the sole purpose of concealing and disguising Alberti’s bank account details. Sadly, when I contacted Rothschilds with the important passphrase “qokedy qokedy dal qokedy qokedy” to identify myself, the teller refused to hand over even 100 dollars of my staggeringly large inheritance. I tell you, it is a shameful and degrading thing to be escorted from a bank building at gunpoint when you have committed no crime, no crime at all.

So you see, the fate of my inheritance is now in your hands. Research, research, research it! Find my ancestor’s hidden number or identification phrase, and you and I will be rich beyond all Renaissance dreams!

I remain your excellent friend and accomplice in research,
— Seko Mugu Alberti

The Voynich Translation, Chapter 5…

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[Here are links to chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Enjoy!]

* * * * * * *

The crew were spending the rest of the day on those interminable fly-past shots of the Voynich Manuscript all modern documentary editors demand, their rostrum camera a microlight buzzing across a lightly-inked vellum landscape. But Marina Lyonne would be interviewing Mrs Kurtz tomorrow morning, which was when the real fun would begin.

Graydon shifted uncomfortably in his chair, looking sideways at Emm. “So… dare I ask why Mrs Kurtz is so bothered?”, he asked.

“It’s more than just her”, Emm explained, “it’s all the curators. On the one hand, they completely grasp that while the Voynich is ‘Beinecke MS 408’, they’ll never truly be free of the alien artefact, Knights Templar & Rennes-le-Chateau nutjobs.”

“Yeah”, he said, “they do go with the territory, I guess.”

“OK: but on the other hand it’s the hoax theorist academics who annoy them much more. To the curators, whatever the Voynich turns out to be, it’s still a genuinely old historical object: so those hoaxologists ought to know better than to treat it as some kind of postmodernist joke. Which is why the Beinecke tried hard to shut its metal and glass front doors to the French film makers.”

“So, they then – let me guess – brought on board the impeccably-connected Marina…”

“…who managed to pull some stratospherically high-up strings within Yale, right. Et puis“, Emm continued, gesturing expansively in the general direction of the film crew downstairs, “voici tout le monde. Still, none of that means the curators appreciate being powerplayed by her… or, indeed, that they will necessarily play boules.”

“So”, mused Graydon scratching his head, “my job now is to give Mrs Kurtz plenty of powerful petards to place under the whole hoax argument. I’m happy to do my best: I just wish I knew what would give the biggest bang.”

He stood up slowly, pausing as the scale of the challenge hove slowly into view. How on earth could he prove that it wasn’t a hoax? Given the pervasive fog of uncertainty that surrounds nearly aspect of the Voynich, how can anyone prove anything about it at all?

“Perhaps we should start with the dating evidence?”, suggested Emm: she took notes as Graydon patiently went through the early 15th century radiocarbon dating, the mid-15th century parallel hatching, the late-15th century quire numbers, the 14th century hunting crossbow, and the mid 14th to early 15th century Savoy-like marginalia handwriting. They all told much the same story: the Voynich was an object rooted in 14th and 15th century ideas, but written on early 15th century vellum.

Emm shook her head. “Marina’s bound to point to the disparities between the dates. Surely a 16th century hoaxer making something mysteriously old-looking would just copy lots of plausible bits onto old vellum?”

“It’s not really like that”, said Graydon. “None of these dates are exact, not even the radiocarbon dating. Yet they come from such different directions – radiocarbon, Art History, palaeography, history of science. A hoaxer would need a very much more multimedia notion of what it means to be old than was in play during the 16th century. Piece all those fragments together, and an overall story does emerge: it’s just that it’s not a 16th century story. Hence we can basically rule out John Dee and Edward Kelly as authors.”

“Oooh, your ex-wife definitely won’t like that“, smiled Emm. “But I don’t think it’s going to be enough to sink her ship. What about the cryptography – can you prove it’s a cipher?”

Graydon’s face dropped. “Really, that’s what’s been bothering me for the last couple of years or so – it’s why my PhD has taken so long. Pass those new scans, let’s see what Mrs Kurtz has got for me…”

The first one was something he’d asked for five years ago: multispectral scans of the “michiton oladabas” marginalia, highlighting the different inks used. Mapping iron, carbon and phosphorus to red, green and blue, the page came alive with layered detail, laying out what was clearly… a tangled, gritty mess.

“Oh no“, he groaned, “we don’t have anything like the weeks it would take to sort this out. But at least the ‘nichil obstat‘ part is reasonably clear now.”

Emm shrugged blankly. “Which means…?”

“…’that it contains nothing contrary to faith or morals’. Essentially, it would seem that a 15th century church censor – possibly a bishop – has examined the manuscript and decided that its contents weren’t anti the Church. Nice to know, but not hugely informative.”

On they went to the next scan, and to the next, and the next, only to find that they all told the same tangled ur-story. Though there were plenty of subtly-sedimented ink layers in all the trickiest sections, there was nothing to be found that could obviously be used to disprove hoax theories… really, nothing at all. It was evening now, almost time for the Beinecke to shut for the day: Emm idly looked across to Mrs Kurtz’s cameo-lapelled grey coat hung up in the corner, and wondered where she was.

“Let’s try that first scan again”, Graydon sighed wearily. The pair of them looked again at the back page’s spectrally-enhanced marginalia, their faces pressed close to each other, both now squinting at the mysterious top line, tracing out the ductus, weft and weave of the letters with their fingers.

Graydon could feel the skin on Emm’s cheek buzzing hot with their intensely shared concentration: he was sharply reminded of the intensity of his marriage to Marina. For all the sexual bravado and defensive sparkiness of Emm’s verbal fencing, working with her in this way was provoking feelings in Graydon that nobody since Marina had managed. The timing was just plain wrong, and he hated to admit it, but right now his mind was turned on.

“It all makes sense apart from that last word”, Emm was saying, several thousand miles away from his runaway train of thought. “Por le bon Simon Sint… what?” She grabbed his hand and started carefully tracing out the super-enlarged letters with his index finger, as if he was the quill, her quill. However, her attempt at reconstructive history was having a dramatically different effect on Graydon from the one intended. It now wasn’t just his mind that was turned on.

For a minute that seemed to stretch out into an hour or a day, his gaze tennis-matched back and forth between the word she was tracing out imperfectly with his finger and her implausibly attractive face. Even though time was rapidly running out, he felt there was something he really had to tell her. “Emm”, he began, dredging the words out, “I really think we should…”

And then the door burst open: it was the security guard Davis, with a wrecked, slapped look to his face. “You better come quick. Mrs Kurtz is in trouble. Miss Lyonne gave her the kiss of life: an ambulance is on its way.”

They ran, taking ten steps at a time down the stairs to the reading room area. And there she was, lying on the floor by the desk, glasses askew but still on the chain round her neck, her skin white-grey as high winter cloud. Marina, sitting on the floor next to the librarian and holding her limp hand, looked wearily up at Emm and Graydon. “Heart attack”, she mouthed at them.

For a few moments, they all stuck in position in an awkward tableau, unsure what to say or do: then Davis reappeared with the paramedics in tow, and the whole resuscitatory logic took over.

Before long, Gray, Emm, and Marina found themselves outside the Beinecke in the cool evening air, an odd silence having fallen over them all. The Voynich didn’t seem important any more.

“So, this your new girlfriend?”, Marina sniped artlessly at Graydon.

“Why, yes she is”, interjected Emm, and before Gray could say a word had dragged him into an intensely full-on kiss. “Still, no time to rake over old ground, lots of new furrows to plough, we’ll see you in the morning, Miss Lyonne.” She swiftly yanked Graydon away from Marina’s burning red gape and off into the night.

As they marched away from the library, Graydon whispered to her “Err… am I going to regret asking you what that was all about?”

Emm paused: “It originally was a spur of the moment thing, but the more I think about it, the more support you’re going to need. After all, tomorrow will probably be the hardest day of your life.”

“Errr… sorry?” Graydon stammered.

Emm sighed. “For a bright bloke, you’re not very fast, are you? With poor Mrs Kurtz in hospital…”

But their conversation was interrupted in stereo by the same text message arriving at both their mobile phones:

Dear lovebirds (smile, you’re on CCTV), the Provost needs to see you ASAP. Perhaps you’ll join him for dinner at the Skull & Bones club at 8pm? A.Friend.

The Voynich Translation, Chapter 4…

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[Here are links to chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Enjoy!]

* * * * * * *

Absent-mindedly dusting breadcrumbs off a beard no longer there, Graydon Harvitz paused in thought at the glass doors of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Was the building a sublime symphony in concrete for keeping old books alive, or a big ugly mausoleum for entombing struggling grads?

More immediately, was his ex-wife Marina there to bury the hatchet or to twist the knife?

He tried – not entirely successfully, it has to be said – to console himself that she was almost certainly far too busy servicing her own self-gratificatory academic career to try to destroy his rapidly withering vineage. Taking a deep breath and holding grimly on to that reassuring feeling of irrelevance, he launched himself inside: but, as had always been the case, Marina caught sight of him within microseconds and marched over, her red hair and sharp eyes a visual siren, ringing alarm bells deep in his soul.

“Graydon, you useless ass,” she spat, missing neither a semiquaver nor a beat, “if you’ve checked into Planet Yale to rain on my freakin’ parade…”

“Nice to see you too, Marina”, he soothed, “glad those anger management classes are finally paying off.”

They stood there in the lobby, gladiatorially nose to nose. The time that they’d loved each other so intensely, feasting on each other’s rich minds and young bodies in an intellectual and physical fugue, was so long ago now – it may as well have been another life entirely. Everyone had said they’d been mad to get married while still at college: and yes, everyone had indeed been proved right. Guess that’s what happens when you surround yourself with clever bastards, he mused.

“So”, she glared, “still using blank maps to hunt for a snark?”

“I prefer to think of it”, Graydon murmured, “as trying to pick the right snark. A lot of fish in that sea.”

It was, of course, the Voynich Manuscript that had ripped them apart. Right at the height of their mutual obsession, Marina had seen a lecture on the tables and grilles Gordon Rugg asserted had been used to construct its “Voynichese” text, and had been simply electrified. In a moment, the polarities of all the mysterious deep magnetisms holding the couple together – the passion, the logic, the sheer quest-iness – had been dramatically reversed. Everything that had joined them so tightly suddenly divided them with equal force.

And now it was the Voynich Manuscript that had brought them back together, if only for a day. Or rather, for however long during that day Graydon could manage to avoid being killed by her.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw one of the film crew surreptitiously filming their spat. “You’d better get back to your Quattrocento Candid Camera”, he said to her, methodically rotating a middle finger to the vertical in the direction of the cameraman. “The French love their romans historiques, don’t they?”

“Actually, it’s part of a series on the science of meaninglessness and hoaxes”, she sniffed, “not that a mid-ranking historian such as you would recognise capital-S ‘Science’ if it stamped on your damn foot.”

Oh yes: hadn’t she just loved leaping on C. P. Snow’s “Two Cultures” Arts vs Science bandwagon, as yet another way of post-rationalizing and institutionalizing their separation. Really, Marina was not unlike the “little girl who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead”: when she was good, she was very very good – but when she was bad, she was utterly horrid. In that way, her logic was resolutely Aristotelian: unable to even exist in the excluded middle between the two extrema of true and false.

Yet since their divorce, Graydon had found himself becoming ever greyer: though not in the sense of being dull, but rather that he found his belief in the black and white certainties that Marina worked with gradually fading. Working so long with the Voynich Manuscript’s overlapping uncertainties had stripped him of his ability to see things in absolute terms.

And then – suddenly jolting them both out of bullet-time back to the present – Mrs Kurtz came over and gently took Marina’s arm, leading her off towards the stairs, to the room downstairs that had inevitably been prepped up for the filming. And as they turned to move away, Graydon could swear – for one curious moment – that he saw the formidable Mrs Kurtz wink at him. What? Mrs Kurtz, winking at him? What was that all about?

As the building quickly swallowed up the two women and the crew, the elderly security guard came over from the front desk and silently handed him a note. Graydon opened it out:

“Davis will let you through to the staff room. Lots to do! Emm x”

The guard wordlessly guided him round to the door and keyed in the access code. As he went through, Graydon was amazed to see the staff room table filled with dossiers, scans, diagrams, graphs, and even pictures of him. Behind them sat Emm deep in beautiful thought, running her fingers over ultra-high-resolution micro-photographs of the Voynich Manuscript he didn’t know existed. The unexpected notion that the Beinecke curators had some Voynich secrets they didn’t want let out began to form in his mind… but all the same, it did have the air of a somewhat creepy job interview.

“Do you expect me to talk, Miss Goldfinger?”, he said.

“No, Mr Harvitz, I expect you to die!”, Emm replied, “particularly if you keep butting up against your ex-wife like that.”

“OK… but would it be rude of me to ask, ummm… what the heck’s going on here?”

“It’s very simple”, Emm plonked. “Marina’s here to prove that the Beinecke’s star exhibit is garbage. But Mrs Kurtz has other ideas. And, much as we all hate the concept, right now you’re probably the library’s only hope.”

“You mean, Mrs Kurtz wants li’l ol’ me to find a way to rescue the Voynich Manuscript’s reputation while simultaneously destroying my bitter ex-wife’s international TV career and getting my PhD?”

“Yup, that’s basically it. So, behind your back over the last few weeks, Mrs Kurtz has been secretly getting you all the ammunition you’ll need. As long as you load the gun, she’s more than happy to fire it. Sorry, I thought you’d worked all that out already.”

Graydon paused, perplexed, the politics and permutations pirouetting precipitously in his washing-machine mind.

“I… guess I only really have one question. Where do I sign?”

FS: cursed cipher manuscript, slightly singed…

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Fate dealt Stanley Picker a strange card that day: he just happened to be ambling past the burning library on his way home from work as the rampaging mob surged out into the street pushing trolleys of rare books and manuscripts.

Amidst all this mayhem, Stanley only had eyes for the odd little cipher manuscript balanced precariously on top of one of the piles of books being noisily wheeled past him. He could not possibly have known that it was better known as “MS 666”, nor that the library had marked it down as a “shorthand diary” (nor how strangely correct this was); nor indeed could he have known that its provenance led back through Aleister Crowley (yes, the Great Beast himself) and onwards to dark places heaven (or perhaps hell) only knows.

Though at that precise moment Stanley believed he was picking up the book, who can say for certain that in some hard-to-fathom fashion it was not in fact picking him up? In the way that Marxist historians insist that factory machinery consumes the workers that operate it, do not cipher mysteries similarly consume the historians, researchers and other passing fools who apply themselves to their unfathomable challenges? It could be said that poor Mr Picker was not really the picker: rather, the small book was pursuing its own dangerous agenda, one to which he was quite oblivious.

And so it was that, with the swiftest of surreptitious shuffles, the tiny volume silently disappeared under Stanley’s work coat. Now it would be free, far from the tyranny of the library’s dull lighting and (surely its #1 pet hate) that bow-tied moron Edward Jackinder with his narrow eyes and scratchy facial hair who kept trying to decipher it.

Back at his house, Stanley opened out his new-found meta-linguistic trophy on the kitchen table and started to examine it. School had left him not only with a profound distrust of gym teachers but also with reasonably functional Maths and language skills: so it didn’t take him long to realize that his prize appeared to be written in an unknown European language (though admittedly one all of its own).

But the strangest thing about it was that every time he returned to its final page, there appeared to be slightly more text. At first, he of course thought he might have been mistaken, but as the days crawled by, the writing gradually reached the bottom and started at the top of the next one. He found himself talking to the diary, trying to verbalize both his curiosity and his growing unease with its ongoing metamorphosis: his mornings now brought crippling headaches, stopping him from going into work.

At the same time, Jackinder was grimly pursuing the book’s smokey trail: though he could make out the thief’s jacket on the CCTV footage, and had worked out where the man must work, nobody at that supermarket seemed able to identify him from the images. It was almost, he mused, as if the man was being silently erased, painted out of the picture one obscuring daub at a time.

But a few weeks later, Jackinder caught sight of him buying milk in a corner shop not far from the library. In a strange way his face had become thinner, much greyer since the theft – but the resemblance was unmistakeable, beyond any shadow of a doubt. Deliberately putting down his basket, Jackinder narrowed his eyes even more than usual and resolved to follow and confront this wretched criminal.

Yet the two didn’t have far to go to reach the flat marked “S. Picker”: and as the man stumbled up his steps, almost fell over the threshold to the house, and left the front door wide open behind him, Jackinder knew something was badly wrong. Hesitantly, he followed him inside the open plan apartment, finding Stanley laying on the sofa near-dead and – mirabile dictu, his heart wanted to shout – MS 666 open on the kitchen table, its pages turning lightly in a late Summer breeze. Yet… what was this madness? The ill-looking thief had apparently vandalized the manuscript, even adding his own fake cipher text to the final page. That was wrong on so many levels, he mused: really, what kind of an idiot would do such a thing?

This wasn’t really going to plan, Jackinder thought to himself as he slowly straightened up. In his mind’s eye, he had simply intended to wield the mighty sword of academic righteousness, by finding this stolen book and returning it triumphantly to the library. As he stood there holding MS 666 in his very own hands, the problem was that he now realized that he had quite another option – to take it for himself. Picker was lying there in pain, utterly unaware that Jackinder had even entered the flat behind him: Jackinder could do precisely what he liked, and nobody need ever know.

Slowly, almost unwillingly, Jackinder felt his hands sliding the book inside his jacket, and his feet walking slowly out through the door and down the street. He didn’t know where he was going or even why, but a strange new sense of purpose – an almost deadly elation, in fact – was consuming him, driving him ever forward.

He could not possibly have known, but the further Jackinder walked, the more writing was now appearing inside MS 666: but this time it was not just a single page, but a whole new chapter.