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Authors: Robert Browne

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BOOK: The Paradise Prophecy
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Her words surprised the poet. He had heard that, despite his age, the astronomer was still in complete control of his faculties. But perhaps the
good days
this young woman spoke of were filled with enough brilliance to outweigh the bad. The old man’s writings certainly reflected this.
They came to a stop at the end of the hallway and she opened a door, gesturing him into the room beyond. The shades were drawn to block out the afternoon sun, because no sun was needed.
The old man was blind. An affliction, the poet knew, he had suffered only recently.
But his hearing was good, and the moment the door swung open, he turned in their direction and said, “I cannot teach you anything. I can only put you on a course to self-discovery. What you find, and what you do with it, is up to you.”
He sat in a chair by a blazing fireplace, his blank eyes staring out at nothing. The poet stood there in the doorway, a bit confounded, feeling as if he’d walked into the middle of a conversation and not quite knowing how to respond.
Was the old man even speaking to him?
He decided his best course of action was simply to introduce himself, but as he began forming the words, the astronomer cut him off.
“I know who you are. I invited you here, remember?”
“Yes. Yes, of course,” the poet stuttered, feeling as if he’d just been chastised by his own father. “But to be quite frank, I’m not absolutely certain why.”
The old man softened then, waving a hand at him. “Come in, come in. Have a seat. You must be weary after such a long journey.”
This was certainly true. Traveling by horseback was never easy. The poet closed the door behind him, and with the aid of the light from the fire, he found a chair and pulled it close to the old man.
It was at that very moment that the regret began to overcome him. As he sat down, an inexplicable sense of darkness descended upon him, as if the Devil himself were hovering nearby, watching and waiting with great anticipation.
“I’ve read your work,” the astronomer said. “You strike me as a man of sound intellect, with a strong belief in God.”
“I could say the same of you.”
The old man shrugged. “There are those who claim I’ve rejected scripture in favor of science, but even after my arrest and the death of my daughter, my faith in God and nature has remained firm. Whatever the course of our lives, we should receive them as the highest gift from His hand. Don’t you agree?”
The poet nodded. “Of course. But I also believe the greatest liberty God has given us is the freedom to think and speak in whatever manner our conscience may guide us.”
“As do I, my son.”
“Which is why I find your confinement here nothing short of reprehensible.”
The old man waved a hand dismissively. “Those who keep me prisoner in this cage have small, fearful minds.”
“It would appear so, yes.”
“They huddle together protectively and use their faith as a shield, rejecting anyone who questions the sanctity of their petty narrow-mindedness.” He heaved a sigh. “But enough of such talk. I didn’t ask you here to discuss politics.”
The poet hesitated. “Then why, exactly, am I here?”
“We’ll get to that. But first, let me share with you the story of my most recent discovery. As a man of letters, I think you of all people will appreciate it.”
The poet raised his eyebrows, thinking of night skies and star clusters and wondering how someone who no longer had eyes could find much of anything out there. “What sort of discovery?”
The astronomer smiled, but it seemed forced, as if he were trying to hide some private fear that lay just beneath its surface. That sense of darkness grew deeper, and for a moment the poet wondered if he should flee this place and never return.
“I’ve found the pages,” the old man said, offering no further explanation.
The poet was confused, once again feeling as if he’d stepped into a conversation he hadn’t previously been part of. “Pages?”
Despite his blindness, something flickered in the astronomer’s eyes and they seemed to come alive. “The seven missing pages from the Devil’s Bible,” he said. “The seven missing pages that, if placed into the right hands, will change the universe forever.”
 
 
T
he poet couldn’t leave the villa fast enough.
What he had hoped would be the highlight of his travels—an afternoon of fine wine and poetry and conversation with one of the great men of his time—had turned out to be anything but.
Instead he had witnessed what he believed to be one of the astronomer’s
bad days
and found himself listening to the tale of a thirteenth-century Benedictine monk who had broken his monastic vows and was sentenced to be walled up alive—an image that gave the poet considerable pause.
Hoping for mercy, the monk begged his brethren to allow him to create a formidable tome, one that would contain all human knowledge and bring glory to their monastery. But the monk was given only a single night to complete this task, and when he realized that such a feat was impossible, he made a pact with the Devil, who offered to help him in exchange for his soul.
The astronomer told this story with quiet rapture in his voice and seemed to take great delight in describing the fruits of the monk’s labor, assuming that because the poet was a student of literature, he would somehow share in that delight.
Written in Latin and roughly the size of a small storage trunk, the book, the Codex Gigas—or Devil’s Bible as it came to be known—contained painstakingly rendered transcriptions of both the Old and New Testaments; the
Chronicle of Bohemia
; a necrology of the time; various historical treatises; holy incantations and conjurings; and a number of starkly wrought illustrations, including a multicolored drawing of the rebel angel Satan that brought involuntary shivers to anyone who gazed upon it.
The astronomer claimed to have seen this book long before his arrest and trial and confinement to the villa. But it wasn’t the book itself—as magnificent and perplexing as it might be—that had excited him.
It was those missing pages. Pages that had disappeared without explanation, removed from the middle of the Codex Gigas by unknown hands and rumored to contain the secret to one of God’s greatest creations.
“Seven simple pages,” the old man said. “And finding them was an obsession I carried with me for much of my life.”
As the poet listened, he realized with great sadness that the astronomer’s mind had been twisted by age and he had created this absurd fiction out of whole cloth. It surprised him that a man of science, a man who had dedicated his life to supporting his beliefs with concrete evidence, would allow himself to be consumed by such a dark and rather fanciful tale.
Surely no such secret existed. And the story of the monk and his pact with the Devil was nothing more than superstitious drivel.
But even more absurd was the astronomer’s claim that he had recently found these missing pages. After spending the last two decades pouring over monastery records, monks’ diaries, private correspondences and sending out inquiries from Prague to Jerusalem, he traced all seven of them to an antiquities dealer in Rome, stored in a sealed portfolio in one of the dealer’s many archive rooms.
“So I bribed my captors,” he told the poet, “and slipped away in the dark of night, taken by carriage to the capital city. Then I locked myself in that archive room and swallowed the contents of those pages like a drunken old fool.”
Fool, indeed, the poet thought. But he humored his host. “And did you find everything you had hoped to?”
“Oh, yes. And so much more. The promise of a greater source of power than any one man should hold.”
Enough of this nonsense. Time to call his bluff. “I’d love to see these pages, then.”
“I thought you would. That’s why I’ve invited you here.”
“I assume you brought them back with you?”
Now the astronomer lowered his head, struggling for an answer, and the poet almost felt guilty for asking. “Sadly, no. But I’m hoping you’ll help me retrieve them.”
The poet was surprised. “You just said yourself you had them in your hands.”
“Yes,” the old man murmured. “But I nearly collapsed, right there in the room. Had to be carried away before I could arrange to take possession of them—before I could even finish
viewing
them, as glorious as they were.”
“But why?” the poet asked.
The astronomer lifted his head again, staring directly at him, the brown of his irises barely visible behind milky white membranes. The look was so unsettling it sent a chill straight through the poet’s body.
“You see these eyes? They’d grown dim and tired, no question about it, but they could still see when I walked into that archive room.”
The poet frowned. “I don’t understand.”
The old man swallowed, as if what he was about to say might choke him, his unseeing gaze burrowing into the poet’s very soul.
“It’s quite simple, my son. The curse upon those pages drove me blind.”
ISTANBUL, TURKEY PRESENT DAY
 
T
here were four of them, huddled in a corner of the café, half hidden by shadow.
Three men and a woman.
Ajda hadn’t heard them enter. The bell above the door had somehow failed her. But the moment she emerged from the kitchen and saw them sitting there, she knew that they were strangers to the city.
Tourists.
Not that this was anything unusual. The streets of Istanbul were always filled with such people. They flew in from all over the world, marching like lemmings into foul-smelling buses that carted them around to all the usual landmarks, the museums, the wonders of a strange land.
But there were no tour buses this late at night, and Ajda was surprised to see these four.
One of them called to her in Turkish, ordering black tea, but his facility with her native tongue did nothing to endear them to her.
Even from a distance, they made her feel ill at ease.
As she carried the tray to their table, setting a cup in front of each of them, she avoided looking directly into their eyes for fear their gazes would somehow burn straight through her.
It was an irrational fear, she knew, but the hour was late; the café otherwise deserted, and her gut told her that there was something very wrong here.
She hoped they would quickly drink up and leave.
They spoke Russian then, although none of them looked to be natives of the country. It was a language Ajda knew fairly well, after summer studies in Saint Petersburg and two years rooming with a family near Brighton Beach in America before returning here to the city. But the strangers couldn’t know this, and they spoke freely in front of her.
Or perhaps they simply didn’t care.
“All right, my dear,” one of the men said, turning his gaze to the woman. “The floor is yours. What’s so important you had to drag us here at this hour?”
He was statuesque, dressed in impeccably tailored clothes. He reminded Ajda of the many American businessmen she’d seen on television.
“I’ve just returned from Manasseh,” the woman told him. “I have some disturbing news.”
Ajda tried not to listen. Their business was not hers. And as she tucked the tray under her arm and turned away from the table, she attempted to distract herself from their conversation with thoughts of Ferid and his promise to marry her.
But it didn’t work. The strangers, like most tourists, were speaking much louder than good manners dictated, and Ajda’s curiosity had been piqued. The place the woman had spoken of—Manasseh—was not familiar to her, although she had long been a student of geography.
Was it a city? A country?
Ajda had a vague memory of hearing the name before, but associated it with a king of some kind. Something she had learned in school, no doubt.
“Don’t keep us in suspense,” another of the men said. “What is this news?”
He was the oldest of the group, but he dressed like a much younger man, in a leather jacket and jeans—an aging rock star, wearing sunglasses at night. He was sitting next to the woman, and he casually reached over, running a hand along the small of her back. An intimate gesture that made Ajda shiver with revulsion. The thought of being alone with this man repulsed her.
The woman, however, didn’t seem to mind. Far from it.
“
Custodes Sacri
is alive and well,” she said.
A long silence followed, and Ajda made herself busy wiping a nearby table, chancing another glance in their direction.
All eyes were on the woman.
And who could blame them? She was beautiful. Exotic. Ethereal. Not that Ajda made a habit of admiring other women. But there was something about this one that compelled it.
At the moment, however, these men weren’t interested in her beauty. Only in the words she had spoken.
BOOK: The Paradise Prophecy
6.48Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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