31

Cipher

 

Again, I would be the victim of enigma. A postal deliverer came to my door and had me sign for a package. When I opened the manila envelope, and the bubble wrap, there was a smaller entirely black envelope inside with chalk-white letters that read: “To: Gimaldi. From: Mr. Clysm.” No return address either on the black or outer envelope. By the heft and size of it, I could tell the contents contained a book. What I didn't know was the entry of this book would soon consume roughly 20 straight hours of wakefulness.

It was irregular but not unheard of for some prospective sellers who trusted my name to send me a sample of their wares, but these were usually sent to me with far more protective packaging.

Written in an elegant cursive script was a note to me:

 

Dear Mr. Gimaldi -

 

A dear colleague and friend of mine has recently been the victim of treachery resulting in his untimely death. I am rather certain who was responsible, and I also have knowledge that you have been the victim of a rather unpleasant set of mysterious circumstances. I am entrusting this manuscript to your care much in the way Marci gifted unto Athanasius Kircher the mysterious Voynich manuscript in 1666. I do know it holds the key to what you are looking for; namely, the name of the book that records the outcome of the nefarious synthesis. It is beyond my abilities to crack the code, but I was told that you are a bit of an enthusiast in this regard. Please accept this gift along with my luck. The cost of this book is immaterial to me, so do not feel in any way obliged to offer any remuneration. In closing, please, find out the name of this book, locate it, stop this synthesis from taking place, and maybe there will be some justice for my dear friend A. Setzer.

 

-Clysm.

 

Another book, and another mystery. The envelope contained a quarto manuscript in parchment, measuring 5” by 9”. I set to work discovering all I could about the manuscript before concerning myself with the wending mystery of the contents. I took out my notebook and recorded the size, and other details. There was no author and no date. There would be no clue as to who financed it since there was no colophon, and parchment does not have watermarks. Dating the manuscript proved difficult, but not impossible. Texts written on parchment existed up until the invention of the printing press when rag-linen paper replaced production, even for the most sumptuous editions. So, this meant the text was presumably incunabula: written, by hand, before the printing press. There were only sixteen pages in the manuscript. Without any further clues, I examined the paleography, looking for stylistic script and common abbreviations that may have narrowed when it was written. Despite what “Clysm” wrote, the text was not, upon deeper inspection, written in code, but rather cipher, as was common for the period (which I narrowed to 1350-1450). Only one word was intelligible on the first page: “Pergamena”, which only means “made in Pergamum”, a stylized way of saying the text was written on parchment. On the second page was a Latin inscription that stated that there were two keys to this text. The first key was to be “lowered in its tree by one,” which I knew to be to take the letter and go down one step in a cipher column. Those medievals occasionally used silly methods for concealing their words and meaning (which wasn't always too necessary given the fashion of the times for being abstruse)

The text itself came with this cipher:

 

.O H..W.E.H.. U..W K.D.K.J.K.O, U.R.R.O

WC.J.D H.. .G.K.K, .O E.D. WC..S.O;

.O H..D WC..M.K.O, E.D. .G.K.K

 

Otherwise, cipher or pure gibberish. Due to some of the conspicuous repetitions, I reasoned that it was unlikely there would be a grille involved. Grilles being, of course, only useful if both parties had the same card with the right chits punched out to be overlayed upon the text. From what I knew about ciphers, I applied the most common:

 

1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9
A	B	C	D	E	F	G	H	I
(J)	K	L	M	N	O	P	Q
	R		S		T		(U)
V		W		X		Y		Z

 

 

 

The result, by lowering each ciphertext by one letter in the column was this:

 

.T Q..C.N.Q.. H..C R.S.R.V.R.T, H.B.B.T

CL.V.M Q.. .P.R.R, .T N.M. CL..D.T;

.T Q..M CL..S.R.T, N.M. .P.R.R

 

Although this seemed to read to be as gibberish as the first ciphertext, after staring at it confusedly for half an hour I suddenly suspected that the periods were actually standing in for vowels. Given my understanding of Latin, the most reasonable vowel that would appear in the formulation “.T” would be an “E” to spell “Et” (most often represented as “&” in medieval texts). It took another few hours of trial and error to come up with the right vowel substitutions. As if the word “key” was the key, I located the Latin word for it (”clavem”). After much frustration, I finally came to a rational phrase, one that seemed very familiar:

 

ET QUICUNQUE HAEC RESERAVERIT HABEBIT

CLAVEM QUI APERIR, ET NEMO CLAUDIT;

ET QUUM CLAUSERIT, NEMO APERIR

 

From here, it was an easy matter to translate, and a trip to the search engine revealed these to be the last lines of Roger Bacon's Epistola fratris Rogerii Baconis de secretis operibus artis et naturae et de nullitate magicae (1252). The letter was written by Roger Bacon to a colleague in enigma since it contained his recipe for making black powder. The letter begins with a long exposition on art and nature, and is filled with Bacon's predictions for horseless carriages, flying machines, the telescope, underwater equipment, suspension bridges, and elevators. However, the last line of the epistle was inserted with a highly significant purpose, and this was where the second key would prove important. The Bacon line itself can be translated as his rather dramatic finale to what black powder presents humanity; namely, that it is like a door that, when opened, no man can shut; and if shut, no man can open.

Exhausting a few other possibilities, I decided to follow the numerological line, thus rendering the now deciphered text thus:

 

56 889385 8153 25452115296, 8125296 331154 889 175292, 56 5546 3318496; 56 8884 331845296, 5546 175292

 

A hopeless kludge of numbers. On instinct, I reduced the numbers further so that “56” would be 5+6 = 11, and 1+1=2. The result was a more manageable, but possibly erroneous 2586687822721528. But this would prove the right way of going about it since, on the following page was a devotional text of four lines copied from some passage in the Bible. This was prefaced by a text written backward that the key was “in four fours”. I counted off the sixteen numbers I had in my collection and applied the numbers to pick out the letters so that the first letter was two letters in, the next five letters after that, and so on, so it would look like this:

 

x2xxxx5xxxxxxx8xxxxx6

xxxxx6xxxxxxx8xxxxxx7xxxxxxx8... &c.

 

The letters I was able to fish out were these:

 

DEAR

SATR

OCIT

ATIS

 

For a moment, I was frustrated, since it looked to me like another round of cipher, but when I put them all together in a string, DEARSATROCITATIS, it was just a matter of inserting two spaces to separate the words so that it spelled (de) Ars atrocitatis. The art of atrocity. The prefatory “de” was not correct Latin, but there was probably no way that the cipher-maker could have made the Bacon quote work out perfectly. From there, it was just a matter of trying to locate the book. Lo and behold, the Internet killed the mystery immediately, preventing too much undue sleuthing. There was a book listing on an academic site.

 

Title: Secret Atrocity: Prophecies of Anonymous Medieval Authors Attributed with the Composition of the Ars atrocitatis.

Author: William R. A. Warburg, The University of Chicago.

Publisher: Lexburg Institute for Medieval Studies, 1977.

Synopsis: The Ars atrocitatis antedates Codex Infinitum (author unknown) by thirty-three years, although the reported events are chronologically reversed. Ars atrocitatis was originally written in 1315, corresponding with the death of Raymund Lull. The sensational text speaks of a mysterious synthesis of typological elements that have occurred, written in the past tense as if to lend the writer a prophetic affectation in having witnessed or experienced the events themselves. This study follows the many texts that reference or falsely attribute the Ars atrocitatis to a wide variety of credible names in the medieval period.

 

The book was, unsurprisingly, out of print, and there were no used copies in the offing. I decided to locate the author himself, but there was no listing for a Dr. William R. A. Warburg at the University of Chicago. I sent an email for some assistance and it was a solid two days until I received a reply that stated Dr. Warburg had left the Philosophy Department a decade ago and was now teaching as professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. Rather than just show up unannounced and be risked being perceived as a lunatic, I found his email and contacted him. His reply was disappointing:

 

 

 

To say that I was peeved would be an understatement; here was a stranger showing interest in a work on such a highly marginal topic, and he couldn't be of any further assistance beyond telling me that I could track it down myself. In my pique and insomnia, I decided to contact him directly in person. I found out when and where he was teaching and waited for him after class. I was determined to satisfy my curiousity about this text, and to discover where I could get a hold of this Ars atrocitatis since it was reported as “missing”, and had never been reproduced for archive and research purposes. I was certain that the book Castellemare referred to me only by call number was this text, and the Yale Beinecke Rare Book Library reported not having it in its holdings.

Upon further research, I would discover that there were not just one Ars atrocitatis, but several variants. One of them had been in the possession of history's most adept and unscrupulous master forgers of ancient texts, Constantine Simonides (I would later learn something a bit unsettling about this link). Another had been stolen from the Library of Paris by the most highly reputed book thief, Libri. Another had been reputed to have been in the holdings of the Cottonian Library, but succumbed to the great fire of 1731. I had no choice but to pay a surprise visit to Dr Warburg.

He was giving a class that I decided to sit in on, at the back of a lecture theatre with the slight smell of naphthalene. He was a portly, sagging hulk of an old man in a rumpled suit that was presumably purchased an era ago.

“So, we come now to the pernicious issue of attributions and the tangled web of genealogical errors in the history of codexes. This grail of truth and authenticity in regards the text, especially ones that are faithfully and unfaithfully reproduced, is at times pure folly. For the sake of argument, let us assume that there is some archetype text, a root book from which is copied several others. Can anyone here tell me what can go wrong in the transit from the root text to the copies?”

An awkward silence before a student raised his hand and said, “Well, the copyist could make an omission.”

“Yes, but there is more than one type of omission. One can be by mistake, such as in copying a line that begins with the same word, but having accidentally skipped the first one. For example.”

He wrote on the board two lines:

The man was at the gates.

The man was a Moor.

“Note,” he continued, “that the lines would be longer, but a copyist in haste might accidentally skip the second line, thinking to proceed to the next without redundancy.

“The other change would be more intentional, but not bad-natured, such as in not being able to decipher a word or letter due to bad calligraphy, damage, an ink blot, and so on. Any other possible errors? Yes, you.”

Another student: “I suppose they could just make a misprint, like mixing up two letters in a word, like a spelling mistake.”

“Yes, and that happened on occasion despite due diligence. Another error can result of substituting or inserting a word by assumption, especially in badly damaged or hard to read texts. Another error which deserves some attention is the tendency for the copyist to act as an editor... By this, I mean those of good intention who wish to simplify an awkward passage for clarification purposes, which may also involve modernizing archaic or abstruse language or obscure references. In such cases, the preservation of the authentic text is secondary to the preservation of its message so that present and future readers may better benefit from it. Any other errors?”

“Translation error?” a student ventured.

“Yes, certainly that was a common problem, especially if the book was not being merely copied, but translated from Greek or an Arabic language. Errors in translation are quite common, and especially more so among those not so skilled in the root language. Let me add another error of a more psychological variety: the error that occurs in the interval between seeing the original text and actually copying it. So much can occur... An interruption or an assumption or a lapse of memory. Any other possible errors?”

I put up my hand, and he pointed a chubby, mechanical finger at me as if I were just another of his students.

“The picture can become more complicated if we braid the genealogical succession of the text,” I said. I could see that he was intrigued and implored me with a gaze and nod to continue. “Say, for example, we have an archetype book written in one hand and continued in another by a different author. Or, perhaps, if the original is lost, and two or three other copies had been made and are mistaken as the archetype, placed in different monasteries. Of course, these monasteries would each claim their copy as the original. Or, again, if the transcription incorporated the marginalia and glosses into the main text.”

“Yes, yes, this would make the matter more complicated,” he said with a meaningful and serious acknowledgement before turning back to the rest of the student body. “And so I don't want any of us to think that the matter is merely a succession of errors emerging from one original since there may not be just one original. It isn't always so linear, leading from from one sacred original to multiple copy errors. All right, then, I believe our time is up for this week,” he said, now raising his voice to the automatic reflex of students gathering up their items and ready to take flight. “Remember, for next class, to read chapter six on bibliothecarial considerations, and we will take up the curious and unfortunate story of Thomas Chatterton.”

A few students tarried on, asking mundane questions about their assignments. I remained as well, just in the aisle as if I were some looming interceptor. The students that had posed their questions dribbled away, and Dr. Warburg was collecting his notes and books into his cracked leather shoulder bag.

“Yes?” he asked me since I was rooted in his path.

“Dr. Warburg, I was hoping that this would be a good time to discuss an important matter about a manuscript you are fairly knowledgeable about.”

“Hoo, I may not be able to oblige... I have a few administrative matters to attend to and some work to do. Perhaps you could arrange to meet me during my office hours.”

“It concerns the Ars atrocitatis, and I do not think that I can be so easily put off given that I may have some new information on the text to share.”

“Oh, you must be the gentleman who contacted me on email about the monograph I wrote on the subject. I am very sorry that I couldn't be of any more assistance, but academic interests are fickle, and eventually we wander off to other things.”

“Recently, someone gave me a text in cipher that, when deciphered through a double-series of keys, supplied the title of Ars atrocitatis. Here,” I said, proffering the text.

He took it and did not conceal his puzzlement.

“I do not wish to question your deciphering abilities, so I will take what you say as true. Have you any idea why the atrocitatis is mentioned specifically? This is a rather ancient text you have, and you say it came into your possession recently? Hmm... Have you any idea which library it was once housed in?”

“Not a clue.”

“Ah, well, you see, that is truly unfortunate. The information as to where the book has been is sometimes more invaluable than having the book itself, just as archaeologists value the strata of where a piece of pottery is found more than the object itself.”

“Dr. Warburg, I am not ignorant of such things. I am a scholar in this field.”

“Oh? I didn't mean to sound patronizing, I am sorry. Your name again... Garibaldi?”

“Gimaldi,” I corrected.

“The name is familiar. What have you published recently?”

“Admittedly, not much. I tried my hand at cracking the Codex Seraphinianus.”

“Ah, yes. That. No offense intended, but that book is not one I consider very seriously since it was made in the 1970s... I believe the author is still alive, no? A graphic designer or some such thing. I do recall that someone took issue with your decipherment.”

“Newbold syndrome,” I said. “He was right.”

William Newbold was a very brilliant and distinguished scholar who had prematurely declared cracking the cipher of the Voynich Manuscript in the 1920s, only for subsequent scholars to demonstrate that he took too many liberties with his assumptions and imposed what he wanted to see in the text. It is something most of us who deal in code and cipher try to guard against, though the temptation when frustration runs high or coincidences abound is seductive. And, in some cases, it is the pressure to publish.

“I'm sorry to hear that. Perhaps your decipherment, even if it was more fanciful wish than truth, will be validated when the thing gets deciphered.”

“Dr. Warburg, I know you are busy, and I do not want to spend our brief time here talking about my failures. I have a very focused concern at hand concerning this book you wrote about. Have you ever come into contact with it, or did you focus solely on referential attributions to it?”

“We all have our failures, Gimaldi, and this one can be considered mine. So you may find me as lacking in eagerness as you to revisit failures. Yes, the monograph deals solely with attributions. Between you and me, and not caught in the black and white prison of published text, yes, I have had the occasion to be in the presence of the Ars atroctitatis. It nearly drove me out of my mind.”

“Could you tell me more?”

“Let's go to my office,” he said quietly, obviously disturbed as if I had disinterred something Warburg would have rather left buried.

 

“There are a few associated books,” Dr. Warburg began.

We were sitting like old conspirators around his clogged desk, piles of papers and books like hopelessly disheveled towers of Babel after the obliteration.

“These form a nucleus of writings,” he continued. “Instead of that nucleus of writings that emerge from a single work, these work in tandem. There are several misleading and impossible references in the glosses of the book... I have composed a glossary in the short time that I had with it.”

He fished through his desk and produced a manila envelope that had been pressed flat and unopened for decades under the papery archaeology of his career.

“This,” he said, pushing it toward me, “Has never been published, and neither do I ever want to see it published.”

“Where does the story begin? There must be a story attached to this, how you came to research this subject.”

“It begins with an unholy librarian, or should we say a custodian of sorts... But a custodian of horrors is what he wants to see brought into this world. His name is unimporta -”

“Castellemare?” I leapt in. It was as sudden as a surprise slap in the face.

“Y-yes. It was through him that I discovered the Ars atrocitatis.”

“How long ago was that?”

“It must have been... 1975. I became obsessed. Fortunately, now, I am too old and the many ghosts are much swifter than I am to catch them... more so than even back then when I was perhaps the age you are now. Mysteries are the sport of much younger men. You know this Castellemare? He must be quite aged by now.”

I let this drop. There was no sense in me telling this venerable scholar that Castellemare most likely didn't age a day since he encountered him over thirty years ago. Instead, I took a different tack.

“Would you happen to know of an Anton Setzer?”

“Not particularly, but I did once encounter a bastardization of the name of Ptolemy Soter written as Setzer.”

“The founder of the Alexandria Library?”

“Yes, very good. And Zenodotus of Ephesus was their first librarian, 280 years before Christ.”

“In what manner did Castellemare introduce you to the book?”

“He approached me, in my office. I was teaching at the University of Chicago at the time, dangerously close to my tenure review, and needed to publish something. I was simply out of ideas, and this librarian appeared as if from nowhere and inspired my research direction.”

“You mentioned associate texts... “

“Yes, such as Codex Infinitum and Codex Machina. There was another one, I believe, called Spiritus Designata, but I cannot be sure. I found mention once, if memory serves, in a book entitled Codex Obscura, based on the real life of a one Jonkil Calembour, but when this came to light, I had long since abandoned my interest in the Ars atroctitatis. The version Castellemare had sported a metal plate, suggesting that it had once been chained to the shelf of a library.”

“You mentioned Thomas Chatterton, a forger,” I pressed, ignoring mention of Calembour for now – but this flagged item for further questions would be forgotten.

“Ah, yes, poor Thomas. Good mind, young and taken with his exposure to what he had found in St. Mary's... Took his own life at the age of eighteen. Quite a precocious boy, studied and emulated the style of old English texts and wrote under the name of Rowley. Received indignant reaction from Horace Walpole. He produced his first rather convincing forgery or fabulation at the age of twelve, and took his life in 1770. The world lost a good mind that had just run astray because of how enamoured he was with the old style.”

“The reason why I bring this up because I did locate mention that another forger, of highest renown by the name of Constantine Simonides had his own copy of the atrocitatis.”

“He did, but the thing about Simonides is that he wasn't actually a forger,” he said, and seemingly quickly regretted saying it. I knew why.

“Dr. Warburg, I am familiar with Castellemare and the Library.”

“Then I suppose it would not be such a stretch – between us – to make the claim that Simonides, despite his skills, did not forge all the manuscripts he was purported to. Yes, he faked a bundle of them, but not all of them. However, regular scholarship would not be convinced by this claim unless they could also be convinced of the Library.”

“So it is your assertion that some of Simonides' allegedly forged texts were actually originals from the Library.”

“Yes, and those he did forge were inspired by the books he saw there. There is a letter between Simonides and someone with a name very close to Castellemare's where the latter heatedly demands of the former to return a few books.”

I couldn't help but to input the respective roles of Castellemare and Setzer, where Setzer as the artificer would most obviously be the representative stand-in for Simonides, a repeating drama between those who would preserve authenticity and those who would seek to multiply texts as sabotage. I could also picture, with some amused satisfaction, Castellemare throwing his trademark fits over people who refused to give back books.

“Simonides trafficked in icons and impostures, but he was masterful at it. From Odessa to Athos, St Petersburg to London, he duped even the shrewdest minds with his clever forgeries. But it was not just his skill that helped him along, but the books he stole from the Library. Half of what is attributed – falsely – as forgery are actually books that emerged from the Library.”

“One wonders why they have not been recollected back into the Library,” I said carelessly.

“It was too late – they became part of public record, the damage was done, may as well leave them be. They became part of this world's history, and so to pluck them would be superfluous. Besides, Simonides took a risk in what he did and he lost: he was denounced as a forger so the books remain safe.”

“Have you encountered anyone beside Castellemare who may have had contact with the Ars text?”

“Indeed I have, but their credibility is a matter of dispute... We are speaking mostly of those melodramatic medievalists, or hobby medievalists with a good chunk of money and no scholastic merit, who torture the air with their talk of conspiracies and mysteries. But one such gentleman, while I was researching in Prague, had told me that Raymond Lull himself had referenced the book twice in his works.”

“Was this corroborated?”

“Not at all!” Dr Warburg sniffed. “The first reference was to a manuscript written by Pseudo-Lull, a reference to be found on page 216. There was no page 216 since the manuscript only had 215 pages.”

“Perhaps it was on the flyleaf or the colophon?”

“I checked, even with UV light – nothing.”

“And the second book?”

“Either it was never catalogued, lost, or simply never existed at all. I did, however, have some luck from an unexpected place. I was studying a work reputed to be in the hand of John Dee, circa 1586, and followed a ciphertext section that, with some rearrangement, could have led to another key.”

“Oh?”

“Dee was an admirer of Trithemius' cryptography, and would on occasion try his hand at double enciphering – that is, to conceal a text in cipher, and conceal a deeper meaning beyond the surface cipher.”

“Were you able to crack it?”

“With ease; Dee's ciphering abilities may have been superior for his time, but history and patient scholarship eventually reveals all the magician's tricks. He does, in fact, reference an Edw. - i.e., 'Edward' in relation to the Ars atrocitatis.”

“Edward Kelley, Dee's assistant?”

“That was what I assumed, as a reflex, but it didn't seem to accord with what Dee was trying to achieve with this particular double-cipher. There would have been no reason to bury Kelley's name, stitched to the Ars, since Kelley had no connection to the purported contents.”

“Which are?” I asked, not concealing my own mounting excitement.

“This is where the matter gets muddy, I'm afraid. I've heard some go as ridiculously far as to say it is the end of days. Such religious zeal among millenarians is tiresome, and each of their predictions has turned out wrong and is once again deferred to some future date. Another report says it is the result of some variety of synthesis between seven magi, and another stating it is the synthesis of the most representative of the seven lands. The synthesis connection is by far the most prevalent, but as to what or who enters into synthesis, and what the outcome of it is remains shrouded between the covers of a book we have no access to.”

“But Castellemare presented you with a copy.”

“On loan, and not for very long. The copy I was lent was quite battered and missing several leaves, some of them seemingly torn out in haste. I was lucky to squeeze out two intelligible lines at a time, the rest of it quite faded, or soiled, missing, or blacked out. It also didn't help that the printers used a very thin ink.”

“Do you have a copy of what you saw? A transcription?”

“I used to, but as soon as I gave back the copy to Castellemare, my transcription went missing. I assume given Castellemare's secrecy that he had plucked them, leaving me only with the notes which I used to write my study and signal attention to this peculiar manuscript.”

“Would you happen to have a few of your notes that I could glance at?” I asked hopefully.

“Somewhere, but I'll need some time to retrieve them,” he said, waving his hand over the hopeless avalanche of notes and papers. “You have to understand that it has been a very long time since I reopened that case after it went so tragically cold.”

“I understand. Could you give me any physical details of the edition Castellemare leant you? It might be of some service to me if I can, upon a wing and a prayer, locate a copy of my own.”

“You would be in luck. I just happen to have a card file – I know, anachronistic of me, but old library-style habits die hard. Let me check.”

Dr Warburg shifted his bulk to a the old file card catalogue, flipped the yellowed cards until he found what he was looking for, and then he closed the drawer.

“Found it,” he said, handing it to me for inspection.

 

Ars Atrocitatis – Anonymous

In English, on paper; publication date: 1315; 6 1/4' x 4 ½', vi+ 185 leaves, no illuminations or capitals. Severely damaged, obv. attempt at rebinding. See notes.

 

“So if the edition is not from 1315, although it might have some of the original leaves rebound into it, what year do you place it?” I asked.

“That's a mighty difficulty, I'm afraid. Upon examination of the typography, I could date it to around the late 1500s, although the method of printing was archaic. The colophon boasts that it was done by chalcography – brass punches. Such a Venetian method was mildly popular in the late 1400s but long since discontinued. As well, even if there are original 1315 leaves in the book, they are written in English. All texts of that time were written in Latin. If that were not enough to drive a researcher mad, the title page was also written in English, but not according to older spelling. Look at the back of the card.”

 

Curious title page: Ars atrocitatis, This being the 7^th and Final Volume of the Dies Irae Cycle, Full and Unexpurgated From Its Original Printing. Including a Preface by Fr. Ioannes Obercit. Published in London. Anno MCCCXV.

 

“The 'Dies Irae Cycle'?”

“Day of Wrath, judgement. None of it adds up.”

“What is this about a preface?”

“There was a preface, but it was not in the hand of this Fr. Ioannes Obercit. Obercit was a 17^th century friar obsessed with clocks, and no previous reference is extant. The preface in the copy I had was written by that same agonizing 'Edw.'”

“But we know it was published in London.”

“Actually, the colophon states that it was printed in Ambianis – i.e., Amiens.”

“Given all these inconsistencies, it seems to me that the book that was leant you was a very sloppy forgery.”

“You perhaps know as well as I do that in his Library, there are no forgeries. And it is proper parlance in our trade, when the authenticity of a book cannot be confirmed, to give it the probationary description of being a copy. In addition, I do recall the final page of the text, a rather ominous finale. Not much of the actual book was readable given its poor condition, but these phrases were: 'cave ab homine unius libri' and 'cetera desunt'.”

“Beware those with only one book.”

“And 'the rest is missing'. Perhaps this was meant to deepen and broaden the mystery, or perhaps to throw non-initiates off the scent of the secret.”

“Do you suspect that it was written by and for some kind of secret order?”

“There were not enough references to any collective in what I was able to read, no mystic symbols, or any of the other glyphs so cherished by a secret society. I do think it was meant to be consumed by the few, but not necessarily those who were part of the same fraternal order. The title page is written as if the book were meant for public sale, and makes no mention of whom the book is meant for. There were no astrological diagrams, no recognizable enigmatic phrases in currency among alchemists, and certainly no discussion of the ways to conduct sacred rites. I would like to think this book was for some order, and that it was some devotional arcana of secrets, but the evidence did not bear that out. Of course, much of it was in such poor condition that I could not read it, and so I cannot say any of this with any certainty.”

“The title page mentions that it is the seventh and final in the series. Have you any idea what the other six are?”

“I mentioned already, and this is a dim guess, Codex Infinitum, Codex Machina, and Spiritus Designata, but I would hazard to guess that there were several associate texts that acted as apocryphal spinoffs. I would postulate the existence of nine or more other books that make up the cycle, but it would be hard to determine without the original which were genuinely part of it.”

“I have encountered mention of this Codex Infinitum,” I ventured.

“As have I. At last tally, there were fourteen variations.”

“Fourteen? Have you encountered one of them?”

“No, this is by mention in other manuscripts dating between 1355 and 1662. Most of them reference it with a helpful annotation, but all of them are widely different in what this book contains. Sadly, the references are scant, even in their synopsis, so I could not tell you what the book – or books – is about. It may have turned out that the title, Codex Infinitum, was a popular one used to name many different books.”

“I would like to obtain a copy of your study on the Ars. I know you directed me to the library holdings, but I was hoping to obtain a copy direct from you.”

At this, Dr Warburg seemed to go grey. It was a perturbing request.

“I like to think of myself as very accommodating to the needs of research, but generally only where the research will result in a fruitful end. If there is any caution I can give, and one that enthusiasm has a tendency to deafen, it is this: you ought to concentrate your efforts elsewhere. If I learned anything in my feverish obsession with that book, it was that it is akin to struggling in quicksand.”

“Let me assume the burden of responsibility for what I choose to research. I have a personal investment in this project, and I am asking you for assistance.”

“Really, it is a work of juvenilia, filled with hasty speculations and roughshod analysis. You really shouldn't trouble yourself with it.”

“Dr Warburg, I am not interested in your intellectual modesty. I am asking you, as one touched by the mystery of Castellemare's Library to another, to lend me a copy of your study on the Ars atrocitatis. It would be of immense help in my own work as I have a few other pieces of the puzzle that were perhaps not in your possession when you committed your study.”

“All right, then. Come back in two days and I will have found my copy of it, a copy you need not return. But, if I may ask, I cannot suffer to allow myself in being dragged into that awful pit. So, to that end, whatever you uncover, I do not wish to be a party to it. As far as I am concerned, the matter is at an end.”

I was more than satisfied with that arrangement. I was certain that I had tapped all that was valuable in his memory in dealing with the text, and although I wanted to discover more about his dealings with Castellemare, it would only serve as distracting anecdotal information. I thanked him warmly for his time and arranged to meet him again to retrieve his book.