Where dust goes to die

 I am neither a brave man nor a particularly well-traveled or adventured one.  I fear to argue with the butcher when I ask for lamb and he picks up beef.  I once took the wrong medicine for two months because my doctor handed me a prescription written for someone else and I could not bring myself to challenge his authority and ask for the right one.  So, finding myself on an overgrown Lancashire moor as the sun set, with only a flashlight, some spare batteries, a backup flashlight and a large kitchen knife sheathed in a teatowel lest I accidentally cut myself, a sense of intense dread came over me as slowly and inexorably as the setting of the sun.  The light seeped away and slowly the landscape became a silhouette of itself and the noises of nocturnal animals waking in their abodes made me shiver and quail.  I turned the flashlight on, and quickly turned it off again; reassured that it was working and terrified that the batteries might die before I found my way back to civilisation if I used it unnecessarily.  I clutched the tea-towelled knife tightly in my other hand and stared up at the sky which, despite darkening, seemed not to want to let the stars out.

Vermistaad calls the constellation that I was looking for Vulgaris but it has a better-known name today and I had looked it up, first in a star catalogue and then in a more useful almanac.  I knew to look for it in the east, and as the sun had set I had carefully set my back in that direction so that I was facing the right way, but now I feared to move in case I disoriented myself and could not find the constellation again.  My feet ached and my legs tingled with the onset of pins and needles and my hand ached from gripping the knife that I hoped I would not need to use and I wished that this was already all over and done with so that I could retire to my bed and shelter under the covers from the terrors of night.

Finally the stars winked into existence as though they’d always been there and I looked among them eagerly.  Standing alone and still for so long had chased my fear back and left my desire to do something — anything! — foremost.  I had a moment of cold panic when it seemed like Vulgaris was missing, but then I found a star in the right place and traced another one to its left, and slowly, with growing confidence, I identified it.  I felt a momentary sense of pride, swept away by the pain of the chill in my toes as I started to move.

Keeping Vulgaris over my left shoulder I looked about for the path that Vermistaad had written about and, as I expected, saw nothing at first.  Then it seemed as though there was a faint flicker of light, as though a firefly had signalled, and then another, and when I concentrated on them there was the dim shape of what might be a path across the moor.  When I started walking along it my doubts dissipated; a faint silvery glow seemed to emanate from it — surely the effect of moonlight on dew settling out of the cooling night-air onto a manmade declivity in the ground.  That there was no moon that night didn’t occur to me until much later, but I am sure that starlight would be an adequate substitute.

The path was narrow and twisty and at times I stopped and cast about me for where it had gone for it seemed to disappear and reappear according to whim rather than geography or geometry.  At one point it vanished altogether and I crouched down on the ground, frantically feeling around for anything to guide me, my breath rasping in my throat and my heart pounding in my chest.  I was certain I was about to be set upon and eaten; that Vermistaad’s cryptic words were guarded by more than ciphers and that I had unwittingly fallen into his subtle trap.  Then the path glimmered back into view and my relief was so severe that I think I would have fallen over had I not been already crouched down so low to the ground.  It seemed, momentarily, as though it was going back on itself, but that thought rapidly dispersed as the landscape around me seemed no more familiar than before.

The path led me thus, hither and thither, for a good twenty minutes before a large, dark object loomed ahead of me.  Seeing that path was leading now directly towards it I turned on the flashlight, holding my breath with anxiety, and cast the pale, whitish-yellow circle of light over the thing ahead.  Brick walls revealed themselves, and then a dark, mullioned window.  I had encountered a house of some measure, and I turned the flashlight off and pressed onwards, sure that this must be where Vermistaad had hidden the Testament.

The path led around the house to the right and ended at a small wooden gate constructed from several palings and held together by crosswise-nailed planks.  The gate was latched but not locked and swung open easily onto a short paved path with a garden on one side and a lawn on the other.  The far side of the lawn — scarcely three metres away, was bordered by a high hedge that I could not see over, and the garden was scraggly at best.  A gardener might have commented more favourably on it, but to me it looked if not dead then trying to die quietly and with dignity.  I hesitated at the door — should I knock?  There was a large iron knocker set in the middle of the door; a simple wrought-iron ring that struck a narrow plate beneath it.  When I picked the ring up though the door moved slightly and, leaning on it, it opened fully into darkness.

I turned the flashlight on and looked for a light-switch beyond the door, reasoning that if anyone lived here they would surely notice my intrusion and make themselves known.  Then all I needed from them was the Testament, whose value they undoubtedly did not know, and I would be gone.  I was trying so hard to convince myself of this that it took me a couple of minutes to realise that there was no light-switch anywhere on the wall by the door.

I stepped into what was a narrow hallway with a door to my left and a door at the end and a cloud of dust swirled up.  I leapt back, sure that this was a diabolic conjuring, a demon spirit set to guard the Testament from would-be thieves and inhaled sharply.  Acrid grey dust was sucked into my lungs and my coughing fit was so loud and long that the tubercular inhabitants of Thomas Mann’s sanatorium would have applauded me.  Every time I coughed myself to asphyxia I wheezingly sucked in a desperate breath that dragged more dust from the air into my lungs.  Only by staggering backwards into the night air until I reached the gate did I finally get free from the dust-cloud and was able to choke off my coughing and recover, leaning on the gate like a geriatric and clutching my aching chest with the hand holding the flashlight.  Though I never noticed myself letting go of it, I am sure that that is where I lost the knife.

Finally, wiping tears from my eyes and sniffing mucus back into my raw throat, I recovered enough to try again.  Now pointing the flashlight at the floor I saw that the house was covered in dust: where I had stepped were two scuffed footprints in dust so thick and ancient that it had felted down into a kind of carpet.  I knelt and carefully poked a finger down into it; I got as far as the knuckle and still did not feel the floor beneath it.  The door however, glided over the surface barely touching it, and by dint of more poking around I discovered that there were steps inside, hidden beneath the dust, and that the floor of the house was lower than the surrounding ground.

I almost gave up at that point, wondering if the Testrament could really have been left in a place this decrepit and filthy.  What sane mind could conceive of this as a safe place for something as valuable as the Testament of Carnamagos?  And then a wheedling little internal voice asked me how sane I thought Vermistaad was when he was writing in multiple languages and ciphers in order to hide something he thought important enough to write a book on.

I placed my feet as delicately and carefully in the dust as possible, picking them up high and setting them down again gently and slowly so as to disturb the dust as little as possible and took the five steps needed to get to the first door.  I pushed on it harder than I probably should have done, because I was certain that more thick dust would lie behind it and probably stop it from opening.  So when the door moved easily and silently, I fell through it and landed on my face.

Vermistaad's book

 As dust falls

It was a Tuesday in June when I cracked the third of Vermistaad’s ciphers and could, after months of struggling, read the second chapter of his magnum opus: Diaries of Carnamagos.  

The first chapter was written in a mixture of Latin and Greek, and though scholars disagreed on the intent behind it, all agreed that it was disturbing material and that Vermistaad must have written it shortly before, or perhaps even slightly after, he was committed to the New Bethlehem Asylum.  All subsequent chapters were seemingly gibberish but many had postulated that they might be written in code.  Several scholars, including deGriff, had investigated the possibility and had discovered the first cipher — an achievement in itself as it turned out that Vermistaad, confusingly, had switched to writing in French.  Sadly the cipher appeared to apply to random sentences throughout the chapter and did not appear to work for any later chapters; the inability to make progress was why many scholars had given up at this point.  It further didn’t help that the deciphered and translated lines were, if anything, more disturbing than the previous chapter.

The second cipher was uncovered by me last year.  I considered letting the scholarly community know about this breakthrough but the additional lines, bringing the total decipherment to a little over half the text of the chapter, was both chilling and thrilling at the same time.  It seemed that Vermistaad had, as the book alluded to, owned a copy of the Testament of Carnamagos and had read it.  That strange tome, of which all copies and editions are considered lost, would be worth a fortune to the occultists and collectors and, as venal as it may be, I did not want to risk letting someone else beat me to such a prize.  Being a scholar does not bring wealth and fortune in general and I relished the idea that I might be able to afford to spend my days in study in a warmer climate with other people looking after the mundane drudgery of life for me.  It seemed a just reward for my efforts to decipher Vermistaad’s text.

The third cipher fell to my efforts (and my computers) only when I considered that Vermistaad might have chosen yet another language to have written in.  Neither Dutch nor German yielded any results, but curiously Portuguese turned out to be the missing link.  When I woke that Tuesday morning and found my computer placidly sitting there with the full, undeciphered text on the screen and an initial translation — poor, as is to be expected when using online translation tools — waiting to be read I nearly fainted.  I forced myself to make a cup of tea and then sat down to drink it and read what Vermistaad had to say.

Even knowing that Vermistaad was quite likely mad when he wrote this the chapter was barely coherent and hints and allusions were so thick that it was hard to locate a single sentence that concretely described anything.  My tea grew cold as I sat there, sifting through his words, trying to make sense of something it was quite clear he had failed to make sense of.  I was certain after a couple of hours that his experience with the Testament had affected him quite severely, and for the substantially worse, but beyond that there was little to go on.  I reached the final page, sat back and stretched, and then was astonished to find that the text was practically lucid!  For four paragraphs Vermistaad explained where he’d found the Testament and that he’d decided, after studying it, that it was not safe to leave it lying around where anyone might claim it.

And then the inchoate mixing of thoughts returned and the last few paragraphs, those that should tell me where he hid the Testament, were as opaque and illucid as all the rest of the chapter.

I poured the tea away, made another cup, and sat down again.  The promise of having the Testament in my hands — or rather, a secure bank vault guarded night and day — was too much to pass up.  I had broken two of the ciphers that Vermistaad had used to hide things; I could find a way to pierce the veil of his confusion and locate the Testament itself.

It took a full week of dead-ends, blind alleys and stumbling around as though in a darkened room full of sharp and mobile objects.  Every time I thought I was making progress with one allusion another one would bring me up sharply and force me to admit that I was wrong.  The hints seemed to link to each other but when I tried following a path through them I invariably found myself turned around and going backwards.  Even when I assumed, improbable though it was, that each hint was intended to be used more than once I made no progress.  But slowly I found small things that were invariable and as I pieced them together the text started to show a greater cohesion than I believed possible.  When I set my pen down Tuesday evening, one week after deciphering the text, I had the strangest set of instructions I have ever been given: under the light of the full moon, when a certain constellation was high enough in the sky, there was a path to be found that would lead to the place where Vermistaad had placed the Testament.

It sounds magical, and it may have been intended that way, but written out coldly and devoid of Vermistaad’s mazing words, I understood it to mean that it was like Stonehenge.  Vermistaad’s path was visible always if you knew what you were looking for, but until then you had to be there at the right time when the light was right and then you could see the way to go.  I did not believe for a moment that strange gods would open diabolical ways for me to tread, or that Vermistaad had (as he appeared to claim at one point) hidden the book outside of time and space; only that I would be pushing through trees and bushes that overgrew a forgotten path in the Lancashire countryside.

I shuddered.  I do not like hiking.