Chapter 1
The Library
July 1992
Hugh wanted to apologise. For what, exactly, he wasn’t sure; he hadn’t actually done anything yet. Maybe he should be apologising for that?
He tried to swallow, but his mouth had gone dry and his throat clicked every time he swallowed. That would be on the recording—the microphone in here was very sensitive—and one of the other assistants would have to clean up the audio, which took hours as it was.
He swallowed again: click.
Somewhere in the ceiling the PA snorted into life, so he was not totally surprised when a fussy baritone voice said, “Sometime this century perhaps, Mr. Franklin?”
“Sorry. Sorry. Just . . . is it already recording?”
“Yes.”
Hugh rasped his tongue over his teeth. He would have traded his soul for a cup of tea, but directly in front of him was the only extraneous object in the otherwise featureless room: an enormous sign on a sheet of foam-board reading NO FOOD OR DRINK PERMITTED.
Of course not. The books were delicate and valuable and irreplaceable; some of them could not even be handled anymore, lest they crumble apart. And this one wasn’t even technically a book.
The scroll he had been tasked with translating was still mostly rolled up, with the top part of the manuscript gently clamped under a sheet of Plexiglas. The remainder was nestled into a new acid-free cardboard box that now perched on the ledge of the draughtsman’s desk. The PA was silent, but he still seemed to hear his employer’s impatient breath over it, feel the piercing blue gaze through the camera perched over the desk.
Before anything else, though, there was the little ceremony—the necessary precursor, like making sure you had the marriage license before the wedding. Hugh opened the envelope leaning against the cardboard box and extracted the slip of paper within, then used the tiny brush-tipped squeeze bottle of acid-free glue to adhere it to the scroll. There:
FROM THE LIBRARY OF JURGEN LEITNER
And now the rest could begin, whatever the rest turned out to be.
At least this one was in standard Latin, thank God. “No date listed in this section,” Hugh said, and cleared his throat. It was always a push, forcing himself to go on past this point. Every single time.
They were waiting. Why was he so nervous? It was just translation, and that was one of the few things no one could deny he was good at. And despite everything he had seen here—and his employer’s warnings about worse—he hadn’t experienced anything yet. Still, it gave him pause; the warnings wouldn’t be necessary if there wasn’t some kind of backstory, like the DO NOT USE IN BATH labels they put on hair-dryers now.
He’s waiting, Hugh reminded himself. Go on, do your damn job. What did you think you were hired for, your sparkling personality?
He began to read, translating as he went. “May the good Lord keep me,” he said, his voice trembling, “and preserve me from harm as I bring forth this work from the darkness to the light.”
He paused, hunting for the minute but detectable spaces between the words. He could not fault the monks for trying to use their paper efficiently—the stuff wasn’t cheap, after all—but he resented them very slightly for not giving at least a tiny bit more consideration towards the comfort of future translators. A faint breeze sprang up inside the room, not blowing on his face but around the desk, like a small animal pacing in measured steps. There was a new smell, too, cool and flinty, erasing the usual odour of ancient paper. Was that something? Did it count as something? Or was it—
Hugh paused, but the smell and the breeze were gone, if they were ever truly there. He waited for something else to happen, and when it didn’t, resumed, moving his finger along the sharp black text, his nose hovering an inch above the plastic. “Through the method of—Or, foreswearing? No, sorry. Through the mortification of my wretched body I—”
“Less of the editorialising, if you don’t mind,” the voice snapped. “We are attempting to be objective about this, Mr. Franklin. Precision is key.”
Hugh jerked upright. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. Um . . . through the method of fasting and abjuration, for many days, I have heard clearly the voice of an angel. This angel did not give me his name, and I did not request it, being a lowly creature before him. And he did . . . he did instruct me . . . to write down all that he said . . . without changes.”
He reached the end of the section, lifted the Plexiglas and extruded more of the scroll from the box, then replaced the plastic to flatten it again. And then he blinked, reflexively, as if something had unexpectedly photographed him with flash. “I can keep reading the text,” he said uncertainly, “but there’s something missing here.”
“Missing?” the voice said.
“An illumination. It might be an initial. Or a full illustration . . .”
Hugh lowered his face again over the scroll, his fingertips absently worrying at its free edges, where the linen paper had softened with age into something that felt like skin. The missing piece was roughly rectangular, about the size of a matchbox, and its edges were sharp and crisp.
At a glance Hugh could not pinpoint who might have done it, or during which time period of the scroll’s long and checkered lifetime—medieval documents tended to change owners more than people thought—but the person had been extremely careful, removing the entire image. Perhaps it had been grangerised? It’d be curious for such an old text to fall victim to an eighteenth-century practice, which had usually involved relatively recent and therefore better-engraved art, but not unheard of. Nothing was unheard of when it came to old books. But it was very annoying to not know whether the missing illustration had been repurposed into another book, or if it’d merely been cut and saved in an archive of stolen illustrations. He wondered whether Leitner would ask him to try to track it down—an impossible task.
“There really doesn’t seem to be any indication of what might have been there.”
“Keep reading,” the voice said.
Hugh went on for a few minutes (discussion of ink, dyes, the deceptive lures of maps, the revelation of a new sacred geometry) and when he arrived at the next missing piece, the voice said, “That’s enough for now.”
For a moment the breeze seemed to return, with the smell of a distant heath, but it barely tussled Hugh’s already-disarrayed hair. Then it vanished and he could not have sworn it wasn’t a simple trick of the mind. Still, wasn’t that virtually the precise wording of the warnings—psychological tricks, tricks of the mind?
He packed the scroll back into its box and went to the door, waiting till the buzzer sounded and the lock disengaged.
Hugh stood for a moment in the corridor, cradling the box in one arm and dusting himself absently with the other, as if he had been outside in London’s smog instead of in a sealed room with its own air supply.
“Mr. Franklin.”
Hugh started and turned, dropping the box and recovering it at once with a wince; hopefully nothing had crumpled or torn inside it. “Oh, er, Mr. Leitner! I didn’t expect—I thought you’d be—”
His employer pressed his lips together and waited till Hugh stumbled to a stop. Leitner was a little taller than Hugh, but not by much. He was prim and slightly old-maidish in his mannerisms, with his entire appearance possessing an edge of Scandinavian fastidiousness. His suit was expensive, the tailoring subtle; it visibly did not come from a fashion magazine but from some Bond Street tailor who disregarded current trends.
Hugh inevitably felt rumpled and tongue-tied in the man’s presence, as if he were a street urchin plucked out of the gutter and inexplicably brought to live in this house rather than an ordinary thirty-four-year-old hired as a research assistant. He frequently had to remind himself that Leitner did not do things arbitrarily—would be offended by the very notion—and so even though Hugh never felt that he belonged, he had as much right to be here as anyone else.
Leitner could activate the testing room’s door-release mechanism from his office, and he usually did; there was a tasteful brass button set into a vaguely Art Deco plate outside the door as well as on his desk. All the readouts led to his office as well, along with the audio and video feeds. Hugh had been expecting, even anticipating, a few minutes alone in the hallway before he walked over to Leitner’s office for the usual debrief. For all the house’s oddities there was something soothing to being surrounded by such evident money and gravitas, as if the walls were cushioned rather than Morris-papered. This was a place of safety, the hallway murmured. A stronghold built to protect its small, fragile inhabitants, so easily crushed compared to the thick walls that surrounded them.
“I must confess I am a little disappointed,” Leitner finally said.
