Every House Is Haunted (14 page)

Wendy nodded absently, looking around at the few inhabited cubicles. Each one was decorated with family photographs,
Far Side
calendars, plush toys, and anti-work slogans like
I’D RATHER BE DRINKING
and
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY
.

In one cubicle, a large model of Godzilla stood atop a computer monitor. Wendy stopped to admire it, and noticed a sticker on the wall that said
TOO MANY IDIOTS, TOO FEW SERIAL KILLERS
.

“Thumper,” Vanners said by way of explanation.

“What?”

“Never mind. You’ll meet him later.”

They continued across the room to another glass door that led down another long corridor. They passed other parts of the facility: the supply closet, the copier room, the cafeteria. There was even a modest-sized gymnasium.

“It doesn’t have all the comforts of home,” Vanners said, “but what we lack here we more than make up for in Coyote Hills.”

They came to the final stop on the tour—a door in a corridor that ended at another elevator.

“Where does that one go?” Wendy asked.

Vanners shook his head, and motioned to the door before them. Wendy gave it her full attention. She saw it was the only room on the floor that didn’t have windows looking in on it.

It was also the only room with an electronic card-reader next to the door.

“This is the library,” Vanners said. He slipped the lanyard over his head and slid the card into the scanner. A green light came on, and the lock disengaged with a sharp snapping sound.

“Go on in,” Vanners said.

Wendy looked at him questionably, then stepped inside.

The room was dimly lit, almost cozy, like the libraries she had known as a kid. But to call this place a library was, in Wendy’s opinion, a huge overstatement.

There was only one book in the entire room.

It lay closed atop a wooden pedestal, looking very important within a glass case not unlike the kind used in restaurants to preserve cakes and pies. A single overhead pot-light cast a soft, orange glow on the book, emphasizing the deep furrows in its dark cover.

“You can take it out of the cradle,” Vanners said from the doorway.

Wendy carefully removed the glass lid and picked up the book.

It was extremely old, that much was apparent. She half expected it to moulder and crumble in her hands, as some Egyptian mummies were said to have done after their crypts were opened and exposed to fresh air. And it was heavy, too, for something the size of a hardcover novel but as thin as a newspaper. The book was bound in a way she had never seen before, and though the edges of the binding were frayed, it was still in unbelievably good condition.

The spine crackled as she carefully opened the book. She was startled to see that each parchment page had retained its velvety-smooth texture, and had none of the stiffness or warping that was the eventual fate of most writings this old.

Wendy felt such awe at the remarkably preserved condition of the book that she scarcely paid any attention to the contents. Crude pictograms and symbols, it seemed. Like nothing she had ever seen. Some of the text ran horizontally, but some also ran vertically and even diagonally. Some text was wound into drunken spirals, and some started on the left side of the page and then jumped across to the right.

Her overall impression of the artefact was of a shoddily constructed scrapbook. Something a disturbed kindergarten student might have made.

And there was something else. An indefinable sensation she got just by holding the book in her hands. A dark feeling she didn’t much care for.

Wendy returned it to the cradle, replaced the glass lid, and rejoined Vanners in the hallway.

“What is it?” she asked in a voice that trembled slightly.

“We call it Black Book,” Vanners replied. His voice had also lost some of its
joie de vivre
.

“Yes, but what
is
it?”

Vanners grinned, but there was no warmth in it. “Think of it as the other book that’s going to change your life.”

“Did you feel it?” Vanners asked as they walked back to the elevator.

“I felt . . . something,” Wendy said in a low voice.

“We’ve pointed every damn instrument we have at the thing and all we know is that it was written in ink made from some kind of charcoal and vegetable gum, and it’s in incredibly good shape for a book that’s over six thousand years old.”

“Six thou . . .”

“We’ve carbon-dated the pages and binding and it checks out.”

“That would make it early Sumerian.”

Vanners nodded. “That’s what we think.”

“It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. I don’t know how something like this could have existed, let alone survived in that condition. . . . You don’t have any idea what the symbols mean?”

Vanners gave her a look as if the answer was obvious.

“That’s why you’re here, kid.”

After they returned topside, Vanners took Wendy out to Coyote Hills, a housing development for employees of Project Wellspring.

She followed Vanners’ silver pickup along another nameless desert trail that suddenly and inexplicably turned into flawless, black asphalt.

She was so absorbed by this unexpected change that it took her a moment to notice the houses passing by on either side of the road. Large, picturesque bungalows and quaint little cottages, each with its own luxurious green lawn, and on each lawn a sprinkler system spraying out twirling fans of water.

Vanners turned into the driveway of a quaint little Cape Cod with lots of gingerbread trim, and a flower garden that seemed to be thriving in spite of the harsh desert conditions.

Wendy parked behind him and got out of her car.

“Welcome to Coyote Hills,” Vanners said proudly. “Population: 16. But we’re a town on the grow!” He sounded absurdly official, as if he were the mayor of this tiny town. “If you decide to stick around, you’ll be number seventeen.”

“This is your place?” Wendy asked.

“Nope, this one’s yours. I live over on Maple Lane.” He pointed further down the street.

“I get to live here?” she asked skeptically. “This is my house?”

“One of the perks of the job. If you choose to take it.”

The chance to study the oldest book in the world
and
a considerable trade-up from the one-bedroom dormitory she’d expected? Suffice it to say she took the job.

On Tuesday, Wendy was introduced to her supervisor, Professor Horowitz. A tall, skinny man in his early sixties with pale skin and a prominent bone structure that gave him the appearance of a skeleton in a lab coat.

He didn’t seem to like Wendy very much, and he didn’t seem overly concerned about hiding the fact, either. Vanners told her it was because Horowitz saw her as an affront to the quality of his research to date on Project Wellspring.

“What exactly is the purpose of the project?” Wendy asked as they entered the office area.

“For now it’s a straight decipherment deal,” Vanners explained. “Put another way, in R&D we’re currently doing a lot more R than D. We’ve got plenty of ideas for application, but we can’t work on implementing any of them until we unlock the damn book.”

“Unlock the book?”

“There’s a general feeling among the experts who have had a chance to examine Black Book that it’s not only written in a language we don’t understand, but also some form of code. What kind of code, we don’t know exactly. The thing doesn’t match up with any comparable linguistic data we’ve managed to get our hands on. Horowitz doesn’t know what it means, and neither did the three guys who worked here before him.”

A metallic thumping sound caused Wendy to jump. She looked over at a young man with shaggy red hair bending down to get a can of Sprite from one of the vending machines.

“Sorry about that,” he said, smiling sheepishly. “Sounds like someone racking a shotgun, doesn’t it?”

Wendy smiled politely.

“Thumper, this is Wendy Harris. Wendy, Thumper.”

“Charmed,” he said, tipping her a little salute with his can of soda. “Welcome to the cave. Your eyesight will adjust in a few weeks. ’Course by then you won’t be able to go back out into the sunlight.”

“It might be for the best in your case, huh, Thumper?”

“Touché,” Thumper said. “If my mother could only see me now. A lab technician who spends his days feeding hundred-year-old manuscripts into a computer that is, alas, my only friend.”

“What about Tara?” Vanners asked, nodding at a narrow-faced woman sitting in a cubicle on the far side of the room.

“Tara doesn’t talk. I might as well have a conversation with Godzilla.”

Wendy recalled the model she had seen perched on the computer monitor the other day.

Vanners clapped his hands together like a teacher calling his class to attention. “I’ll let the two of you get acquainted. If you need me, I’ll be in the cafeteria with Horowitz.”

Thumper’s situation turned out to be almost identical to Wendy’s. After graduating from UCLA with an advanced degree in computer science, he had come here after hearing about the job from one of his professors. He had been on Project Wellspring for eight months and still didn’t have any clear idea as to the nature of the work he was doing.

“It’s research,” he said, offering the same reply (and the same shrug) that Vanners had given her. “I run ancient texts through an optical scanner. But it’s a living.”

Thumper also told her about Tara, the narrow-faced girl who didn’t talk.

“Well, she talks, but not very often. I say ‘good morning’ to her every day, and I get a response maybe ten percent of the time. It could be worse. My father’s typical attitude in the morning was to whip bottles of Jack Daniels at my head.”

Wendy stared at him.

“It wasn’t so bad,” he said, giving her hand a reassuring pat. “It was only the full bottles that really hurt.”

Over the next two weeks, Wendy fell into that depthless chasm of the working class—the daily routine.

Monday to Friday she woke up at six, showered, dressed, and stuffed a piece of toast or an apple in her mouth before driving the twenty-five miles to the glove factory. She spent the morning struggling with the perplexing symbols of Black Book, jotting notes on possible leads, then hashing them out with Thumper and Tara in the afternoon. By the time four o’clock rolled around, the three of them were wandering the halls like undead ghouls in a George Romero movie.

A month went by, and Wendy was still no closer to understanding the book’s strange language. The work was going very slowly—something Horowitz pointed out every chance he got. He likened Wendy’s progress to the speed at which the polar icecaps were melting.
For your sake, Ms. Harris, and for the sake of all humanity, I sure hope the solution to global warming isn’t in that damnable book, because we’ll all be living on rafts and backstroking to work by the time you find it
.

“You should feel sorry for him,” Thumper told her one day.

“Feel sorry for him? The guy’s a total jerk.”

“He’s a Skeletor,” Thumper said, as if this explained everything. “His skin’s two sizes too small for him. He walks around like he’s wearing jeans that just came out of the wash. Rides up in the crotch. Bound to make anyone miserable.”

“Thanks, Thumper.”

It would have been easier to take Horowitz’s comments in stride if they were only off-the-cuff jabs made by an angry, old man. But the truth was, she was no closer to figuring out Black Book, and however mean and pejorative Horowitz’s criticisms might be, inaccurate they were not.

The only thing she had come up with, the only theory that Thumper and Tara had yet to shoot down, was that Black Book might be a primitive arithmetic primer. Some of the symbols bore at least a passing resemblance to basic syntactical structures she had seen in other ancient texts of the same period, but it always felt as if there were something missing, some basic layer of information she hadn’t figured out how to interpret.

There was something else, too. It was a minor thing, but she couldn’t help feeling it might be significant.

The first time she had handled Black Book, she had done so with her bare hands, and the book had left charcoal stains on her hands. Every time after, she had been wearing latex gloves, and it had left no marks.

Maybe it was because the gloves just didn’t pick up the charcoal, but she wondered. She wondered a lot.

She was still wondering about it as she was getting into her car at the end of another fruitless day. Thumper and Tara had taken the afternoon off to go to the movies in Bartonville. Wendy had been invited, but she didn’t feel right about leaving early on yet another day when she had failed to produce any results.

She rummaged in her purse for her car keys and felt something wet and sticky touch the back of her hand. She pulled it out and saw the old napkin she had used to write down the directions to the job interview. The eyeliner she used had caused the napkin stick to her hand.

She recalled how angry she had been that day when she saw the directions had been smudged. The writing was totally illegible now. She could no more understand the words on the napkin than she could the symbols in Black Book.

She stared at the eyeliner stain on the back of her hand for a long time. Then a smile slowly spread across her face.

She hopped out of the car and ran back to the glove factory. She took the elevator down and searched all of the rooms on Sub-Level One. Horowitz wasn’t in any of them, which meant he was probably in the lab on Sub-Level Two. Wendy’s key-card didn’t give her access to that floor, and Horowitz never answered his phone.

She went to her desk, booted up her computer, and fired off an e-mail to the good professor, telling him of her discovery.

His laconic reply came a moment later:
I’ll check your notes in the morning.

Wendy stuck her tongue out at the screen and dropped her finger ceremoniously on the delete key. “Take that, Skeletor.”

What she proposed was impossible, of course. Completely impossible. But the Black Book itself was impossible on so many levels she had given up trying to document them. When you bent the rules of physics once, why couldn’t you do it again?