Author's note: Just a shorty for the Halloween contest. I've had this idea in my head for a while but didn't know what to do with it. Then the contest came around and it seemed like a good fit. Enjoy!
On the day I located the subject of my three years of searching, I was sitting in the temperature and humidity-controlled library of Sir Jonathon Bisby. He was one of the richest men in the world and had the most extensive collection of ancient books anyone in the public had ever seen. Some say the only larger collection was in the Vatican.
To call the warehouse where I was working a library would be a stretch of the definition. It was quite literally a warehouse which was built out to house thousands of the oldest books in existence. Row after row of cases and shelves littered the room in organized chaos.
The security presence was borderline ridiculous. There were a dozen armed guards covering both the front and back exits and entrance gate. Inside, there were half a dozen more that roamed the room, traversing between and around the rows of books.
Surprisingly, we were left alone to complete our work. We weren't under constant guard nor under lock and key, but there were also cameras everywhere.
The book for which I searched was an ancient tome with no known title and no known author. You can imagine how hard that made finding the son a bitch. The description of the book for seekers like me was "The Book of Gabriel." No one knew why it was called as such, however, it was assumed to be because of the legend of a depiction of an angel on one of the pages. There were rumored to be no other drawings in the book.
It was supposedly a book of spells, and I was interested in only one spell.
There was no description of what the book looked like, no one knew how many pages it contained, and no one knew who how many copies existed.
Bisby had acquired an entire library of books from a private collector who had recently died, and I was called in as an expert to help catalog and organize the collection. He didn't care about the value of what he bought. He wanted to know what was in there.
I was on my third week of translating, sorting, cataloging, and being awestruck, when I found a faded brown leather-covered book that was in excellent condition. There were no identifying features, no title, date, author, or anything else to help me identify the curious old book. It appeared to be written in Latin, but the words made no sense. They were jumbles of Latin letters; it was as if it were in code.
I hadn't considered it could be the book of Gabriel because it didn't appear old enough. The book I sought should have been over a thousand years old. Bisby's newly acquired book was barely a couple of hundred years old.
Yet I flipped through the pages and was shocked to find a small drawing of an angel in the middle of one of the pages. I was so shocked, I dropped the book onto the table, causing my assistant Tanzy to look up.
"Everything okay, Dr. Graystone?" she asked, looking over the top of her glasses.
"Yes, Tanzy. I lost my grip as I was examining the condition of this one."
She smiled and went back to her work. I sighed at the sight of her, as I often did. I was in love with her, and she didn't know.
Her honey-blonde hair and blue eyes tantalized my soul. When she wore her red-framed glasses, she gave off the dirtiest of dirty librarian vibes. Her long legs were often encased in sexy stockings, leading up to a tight rear end that made me drool at the sight of it.
Tanzy was a graduate student from Sydney when I met her. She became one of my aides and a valued research assistant. She had a passion for ancient books and languages that mirrored my own, and she was stunning. When I left the University to go out on my own, she came along as my assistant.
Tanzy didn't know I left the University and went into the private sector solely to find the book of Gabriel. I knew I'd never find it unless I was out in the world of private collectors, valuing and evaluating their collections. I had to be out in the dirty hidden world of private collections and not in the libraries of academia. I knew that book would never be found in public.
I picked up the book and looked at it. It was thinner than I expected, being only about fifty pages, and I was glad. Translating it would be enough of a pain, but the fact that it was in some sort of code drove me mad with frustration.
I turned each page and as I got towards the end, a handwritten note fell from the back of the book. It read:
"Graystone at UIC."
I was surprised that my name was on the note, but I hadn't been at the University for two years. It was either not put there recently or was never acted upon in the last years I worked there.
Then I was shaken by the thought of whoever wrote that note knowing I was looking for the book. I never told anyone I was looking for the thing. Any inquiries I made about it were anonymous, which was common in the seedier side of underground book sales.
I took a picture of the first page so I could break the code after hours. I had no idea where to begin, so I knew it would take a while and there was no way to sneak the book out of the library.
"Whatcha doin', Doc?" Tanzy questioned as I slid the phone into my pocket.
"Nothing" I stuttered. "Just saw something interesting is all."
She walked over and I inwardly groaned as I saw her nylon-clad shoeless feet.
"What was so interesting?"
"Oh...uh...I think this one is in a cypher," I stumbled, smelling her perfume.
"Latin, obviously," she said as she carefully turned the pages. "Yes, I agree. Do you think it's a substitution cypher?"
"I think that was probably the most prevalent in the era it was created," I said.
"Let's work on it," she chirped. "We're about done for the day. It'll give us something to do tonight."
I smiled. "Okay. Take a picture of a page and work on it while I work on mine."
She frowned. "I think it would be better to work on it together, Doc. I mean, it will be faster, surely?"
"Okay, Tanzy. We'll work on it together."
She smiled and bounced away.
*****
I swallowed my last forkful of pasta as I crossed off the next on my list of cyphers. "Well, we're up to ROT10."
That simply meant that we were working from rotating the letters one up, such as A becomes B, to ten up, where A becomes K. That would be in a normal modern alphabet, of course.
"It's 13," she said, jumping off the couch.
I decoded the first sentence out and it worked.
"Great job, Tanzy."
She grabbed me in a hug and felt amazing in my arms. Suddenly, she let go, embarrassed.
"Sorry, Doc. I was excited."
I laughed, "Me too, Tanzy. Let's get to breaking the code and then we can work on a translation. It's killing me not knowing what we're dealing with."
"I wonder why they used such a simple cypher, Dr. Graystone. I mean, it's never been a hard one to break."
"Tanzy, I don't mind you calling me Doc as a nickname but calling me Dr. Graystone just makes me feel old."
"Sorry, Doc," she frowned, then smiled. "But you're not old. You're only thirty-six."
"Yes, but you're twenty-seven. I'm ancient compared to you. Anyway. I can't explain why the code wasn't more difficult, but I'm sure the book is a copy, not the original. They may have been hiding that they made a copy of this particular book, not that it was meant for someone else to decode."
"Interesting theory, Doc," she smiled. "I'll start deciphering, you start translating."
I agreed and we went back to work.
*****
Hours later, Tazny got confused.
"Doc, the cypher doesn't work on this word. It does work on the rest of the sentence though."
"Let me take a look," I said.
She came over to my bed and sat cross legged next to me, giving me an amazing view of her legs.
"Using the cypher, it becomes, ZARIZINOT."
"Holy shit," I whispered to myself.
"What is it, Doc?"
"Oh...nothing. I was just surprised."
She grabbed her phone and searched the word on the internet.
