On the way I called Bug, who was East Coast time and was already up and at the Hangar.
“You have anything for me?” I asked.
“Yeah-h-h-h-h,” he said, but he stretched the word out so long that it sounded like he wasn’t sure what it was he had. “You won’t believe how much stuff we got. We’re talking seventy-one file boxes, each one crammed with stuff. That’s something like three hundred thousand pieces of paper. Auntie had them bring it all back here and we’re using the high-speed bulk scanners. But that’s just scanning. Then everything has to be processed through MindReader and—”
“Bug,” I said, cutting him off, “I don’t care. Tell me if you actually got something.”
“Yes,” he said. “Maybe.”
“Try harder than that.”
“Well, first, we got a slight hit on one of the Gateway projects. Freefall. It’s vague and it seems to be tied into the Kill Switch thing. Our best guess so far is that it’s some experimental way of knocking down drones, but really, that’s all we have on it so far. The good news is that we have a line on four previous addresses for Oscar Bell.”
“That’s something. I’ll send someone to run that down. What else?”
“Okay, first, Oscar Bell is dead. Murder-suicide. After the DoD sued him he went totally bankrupt and broke. The IRS froze every penny of his assets and he lost his house and everything else he owned. And he drank, too. He apparently went crazy and killed three people at a diner in some Podunk town in Washington state, then turned the gun on himself.”
“Why didn’t MindReader pick that up?” I asked.
“Not sure. We have a copy of what looks like the original handwritten police report and another that looks like it was printed out, probably at the police station where it was filed. But when I checked with the local police department they have nothing at all in their computers. Nothing in hardcopy, either. I’ll send you what I have.”
“Okay. What else?”
“Some of this is freaking me out because one of the other file boxes contained an inventory list of restricted documents. But get this, Joe, I’m not talking like military top-secret stuff. I’m talking Catholic church sort of restricted.”
“Not following you. What kind of stuff are we talking about? Holy Grail? Ark of the Covenant? Jesus’ birth certificate?”
“It was in Latin,” said Bug. “Index Librorum Prohibitorum. I had to look it up. It means ‘List of Prohibited Books.’”
“Okay. So…?”
“So, I called Circe because this is her sort of thing, and she said there were two of these lists. One was stuff that was against church policy or critical or like that. Pascal by Voltaire, Monarchia by Dante Alighieri, Casanova’s memoirs. Like that. Naughty stuff. But when I read some of the titles on the inventory sheet she said that none of them were on that list. She thinks that list is one that was supposed to be a big church secret. Circe knows about it because… well, she’s Circe. She knows that kind of stuff. She told me that there was a group of these psycho monks who used to go around taking these books away from people and sometimes killing them. Like if the Inquisition and the library police had a cranky kid. She called it the Ordo Fratrum Claustrorum. Anyway, here’s the really freaky stuff. Half the books on the list are ancient books of magic and alchemy. The Greek Magical Papyri, Arbatel de Magia Veterum, the Pseudomonarchia Daedonum, The Black Pullet, Ars Almade, which is book four of the Lesser Keys of Solomon, The Ripley Scroll, The Book of Soyga, an Icelandic book called the Galdabok, and — here’s one you’ll recognize — the Voynich manuscript.”
Yeah, I recognized that one, all right. It’s a weird fifteenth-century text written in an unknown language and kept at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. Experts had tried for centuries to decode it, and even doubted that the language was real. Circe cracked the code, though, with the help of some additional pages we found. As it turned out, the language was that of the Upierczi, a race of very bad people living in caves beneath the Arabian sands. The Upierczi are genetic offshoots, a splinter line of evolution that showed how perverse science can be. They are the reason we have legends about vampires.
“There’s more,” said Bug. “Those books were only half the list. There was a separate part of the list preceded by a long list of warnings and prayers about how the world will end if these books are ever read or even opened. Really wild stuff.”
“I’ve found extreme religious orders, as a rule, are prone toward general nuttiness,” I said.
“No, this is worse than that,” said Bug, “and this is where we run right into the whole Mountains of Madness—Elder Gods stuff.”
I nearly sideswiped a kid on a bike. “Shit,” I said. “Tell me.”
“In those books by H. P. Lovecraft and some of the other writers — August Derleth, Robert E. Howard, Henry Kuttner, and like that — there’s a bunch of books of ancient dark magic. You heard of the Necronomicon?”
“In movies, sure.”
“Right, those were movies based on, or inspired by, Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos.”
“What about it?”
“The Necronomicon is on this list,” said Bug. “Actually… almost all of those books are. Joe… I don’t think they’re fake. I think all of this is real.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
The things Bug told me about those creepy old books gnawed at my nerves all the way into work. How could they not? But I tried to put them into perspective with what Bolton and Bug had both said yesterday. Maybe it really was a matter of many of the things we believed to be supernatural were actually unclassified aspects of very real science. After all, in my years with the DMS I’d encountered the Upierczi, who were the flesh-and-bone basis for vampire beliefs. And I’d been on a case in the small town of Pine Deep in Pennsylvania where I’d taken down a genetics lab that was trying to create a kind of supersoldier based on another genetic anomaly — lycanthropy. Did this explain all of the stories of werewolves and vampires around the world? Maybe not, but it made the darkness at the edge of town less of a place of magic and more of an area of mystery. The Cop part of me wanted rational answers, and to achieve that I needed a lot more information than I had.
I got to the Pier as fast as I could.
A sleepy Junie called me at ten and I asked her if she could come in, explaining that Church and I wanted to ask her some questions. She said to give her an hour. When Junie arrived she looked apprehensive.
“You’re being very mysterious,” she said.
“It’s been that kind of week.”
“You’ve only been back to work less than two days.”
“Tell me about it,” I said as I opened the door to the conference room. Church was in the same chair but in a different suit, looking fresh and rested. He stood up and gestured to a chair.
“Ms. Flynn,” he said, “thank you for coming in. Please sit. I apologize for the inconvenience but I believe that when you hear what we have to say, you’ll understand.”
As she sat she glanced from Church to me and back again. “Is this about ISIL?”
“Why do you ask?”
“It’s all over the news. That’s all anyone’s talking about. The power outages. Everyone thinks Houston was because of them.”