Angel Dust-Part II
by John Wolf
Sleep was uneasy. Different plans of action raced through my dreams. Later that day, when I couldn’t sleep any more and with a sense of urgency, I made a call to a man I thought might makes sense of the writing placed in my hands by the angel.
The halls of the university echoed with my steps when I arrive the next morning. I stopped in front of a door with a frosted glass insert that read, School of Paleontology. Gathering a few thoughts before I turned the faded brass doorknob, I couldn’t help but accept any belly laughs and guffaws after showing anyone this cryptic parchment and telling them where I got it.
To my surprise, Professor Winsor was sitting at his desk that faced the door, tapping rhythmically on the top of a small animal skull in anticipation. A huge window to his right bathed him in a white light. The place smelled of chalk dust and old bones.
“Welcome, Billy,” he said, while rising with an extended hand. “Where is this document you told me about on the phone?”
I extended my arm with the page rolled up and gave it to him. He immediately flattened it out and caressed the paper with a light touch as he scanned the words. He gave me a quick glance and continued, mumbling something under his breath. He stopped and placed a couple of glass paper weights on the page and look up at me.
“And where did you say you got this?”
I looked around the room embarrassed to say an angel gave it to me. “Ah, I got it at a garage sale, but someone watching said that it was a real antique, something that I should have evaluated.” I waved a couple of fingers his way like I thought he’d be the guy.
Something caught his eye out the window and he looked. A look of surprise came over his face. “I think I know what this is.”
I looked out the window to see a large group of crows had landed on the only grassy patch surrounded by snow.
“They’re watching.”
“Who?”
“Never mind. Billy, it might take a day or two to run out these ciphers. Can you leave this with me?”
“Sure. As a matter of fact, why don’t you just keep it? If it’s an artifact of some sort, it should be placed here at the university anyway.”
“Right. If this is what I think it is, you are the messenger and it will have to stay with you. I meant, could you stay here at the university a day or until we can unravel what this says?” He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at the page.
This whole thing was creeping me out. I backed away and said with an arm in the air, “No, it’s yours. I’ll see you later and we’ll talk.” I left, banging the door a little hard. I paused in the hall waiting for the glass to fall out behind me and go down my neck.
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I opened the outside door into a black cloud of crows, squawking and pecking. “Damn!” That seemed to make them more furious. I backed into the hall and closed the door. Professor Winsor was standing behind me.
“I think you better stay. Let’s get started. The reference library is next to my office.”
I looked over my shoulder to see a tilted head, a wide expression, and a thumb pointing down the hall.
The library was a private one tucked into the corner of a bone lab behind a door Professor Winsor unlocked with an old skeleton key. He pulled a chain hanging from a light bulb at the end of a wire in the middle of the room. It cast the room in yellow light. He disappeared in between a couple of racks of books. Why does everything in the paleontology school look like it came from the Jurassic Period?
I looked around, found a broad table, and dusted off a corner. I pulled up a chair and waited for the professor to reappear from the shadows.
He returned with a huge old bible, carefully opened it with gloved hands, and unrolled the page, placing his paper weights on it exactly as before. He grabbed a pad of paper, sat, and pulled a pen from his jacket pocket. He looked at me and said, “Write this down.” He handed me the pad and pen, and then began to run a finger down a page to the first cipher, consulting various pages in the old book, he barked out words.
I had him spell them out, since I’d never heard of them before. I tried to read the message, but the words didn’t seem to be related. They were all Greek words or at least they looked like it.
He looked over my shoulder. “Good, now place a dot under each word, starting from the right going to the left as I read you a number.” He consulted the page again and the numbers that were in the message. This took about a half hour, because there were a lot of words, and I had to start the count at the beginning of the list of words each time. I placed the last dot, and he grabbed the pad and started walking out the door. “Pull the light won’t you?”
Back at his desk, he relisted the words with dots on a new page. He read the page and sat back in his chair with finger tips pushed together, looking off into space mumbling Greek. Then he said, "I believe it is the Deus Doxology."
(to be continued...)
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John is a writer in progress. Word by word the trail of communications gets clearer. Maybe someday the message will be picked up by a distant ear and the effort to be heard will have been reached. Until that day, the keyboard clatters endlessly into the night. |
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