[This chapter, originally the first chapter of the book, has been placed at the end for the purpose of informing others of the origins of this terrible manuscript. It has little value beyond that. Many have chosen to scan it or skip it entirely. I will leave that up to you.]
Anthony Begels was a celebrated anthropologist. She wore her long brown hair in a ponytail and always sported safari clothing ordered from catalogs. She now sat stiffly in a chair, staring across the publisher’s polished mahogany desk. It would have been impossible for her to ignore a giant reproduction of a woodcut that stretched the entire length of the wall behind him — “Moebius Strip II.” Much red, black, and gray-green. Red ants crawling over a grid twisted into a figure eight, a google, or sign of infinity. Its inside and outside were equally twisting in and out of itself. Yet the ants seemed to be unaware of this; pacing, pacing, always tracking onward towards infinity… towards nothing. To her, it looked stereoscopic.
He caught her stare. “Gorgeous, isn’t it? Cost me a pretty penny, I’ll tell you. About a million and a half.”
“Dollars? I think you got ripped off,” she said, frowning, and thought, A million and a half for a print?
He snickered. “Watch this,” he added, sounding pleased with himself.
His hands hovered over the desk for a moment, and then lightly placed an index finger on a specific spot in the middle of the desktop. He then steepled his fingers and stared into her face for a reaction. She tried to look over the surface of the desk, but she could not figure out what he was doing. Then something happened that made the whole room shift slightly. She felt her equilibrium momentarily shudder.
The grid on which the ants walked began slowly turning, in high definition, and the ants crept over it, inside and out, tirelessly. When it turned a certain way, a tiny spark of artificial sun beamed off an edge, giving it a definite metallic look, gleaming gray-green. The entire wall was a projected image, although no one ever guessed that at first glance. All were fooled, equally. And, she silently observed, it was not her imagination that it appeared stereoscopic; there was great depth in the graphic. She gasped and thought Escher would have been pleased with the wonders of modern technology as his print had, quite literally, sprang to life.
“Love Escher,” was her simple reply.
“I stare at it all the time. The entire wall is covered with a very expensive lenticular lens, so no 3-D glasses are needed. It couldn’t really exist, of course, because one of these realities simply isn’t there. Not real. Not ‘true’, is a better way of saying it. Maybe none of them are real.” He recollected the remarks he was going to make the moment she entered his office, and decided to start there. “Your appearance here, Dr. Begels, is surprising.” He laughed nervously. “I’m sure you’ve heard that a thousand times.” When he saw that she was not looking at him, but had continued to stare at the Escher display, he touched the surface of the desk again, and the walking ants and the revolving grid stopped, but did not seem flat like ordinary paintings. “Too distracting, you see.” And tittered, proud of this modern marvel.
She smiled/winced. “And the other one.”
“The ‘other one?’”
“’Your father must have wanted a boy.’ And before you ask, yes, it is my real name.” She brushed a long strand of hair back that had escaped her ponytail. And sighed.
“Ah,” he said, sizing her up. He tapped his fingers on the boxed manuscript that was positioned neatly on the right corner of his desk. Leaning forward, he asked suddenly, “Dr. Begels, do you understand the importance of this find, this manuscript? I really don’t know what to make of it, actually. Of course, it’s too controversial not to publish. You say you have submitted it to no one else?”
“That’s right,” she said, with a sly grin. “We agreed on a set price — rather steep — and that is all I ask. Well, actually, I shall expect my share of the royalties, should this hideous little tome become popular. I have my doubts, though. I have lived with this hellish book for more years than I care to think. I have fulfilled my part of the bargain. The rest is up to you.”
“What do you mean?”
“I have promised a certain group — who I will tell you more about later — to do my best to get it published. I have done my part. They believe that it is not important that the book becomes popular, but that it does exist as a serious reference for posterity, or something like that. They said something about the manuscript being an important key of some sort. I do not understand that — the thing about a ‘key’ — even though I translated the book. And I promise you, I won’t pursue trying to understand it either.” She brushed a trembling hand beneath an eye, and then put it stiffly in her lap with the other one.
“I see. In your” (slight, painful grimace, she noticed), “quite lengthy cover letter, Dr. Begels, you say that you personally unearthed seventeen bound leather volumes in, um, let me check some notes I made… in 1989. Is that right?”
“That’s right. Before we are permitted to dig in an area, we must show just cause. I went before my team and conducted a few preliminary digs.” She blinked several times. He nodded, believing it was a nervous twitch, or better yet, a mild form of Tourettes syndrome.
“Is that, uh, legal?”
“No, not at all, but I did it anyway. I had a funny feeling about this one. Anyway, when I found a few volumes, I begged my father to purchase the land so that the find could be mine alone.”
“Clever,” the publisher said. “I have a question about the person who received this uh, unedited manuscript in the form of, uh, apparently automatic writing, isn’t that right?”
“Unfortunately, I cannot tell you what would amount to concrete evidence. Everything I’m about to share with you, in one degree or another, is educated conjecture. Reliable guess-timates, you see? Whether it was male or female, there was simply no historical record. There was none with any of the bound manuscripts. I can only surmise — without data — that the person was driven quite insane. To have this hideous stuff just appear in your head… horrible! The compulsion to write it all down would have been maddening, I’m sure. The reason I think it was written in pretty much an automatic style, as do the others in the group, is because much of it is written in a rushed hand. The same rushed hand, the words jammed together — unbroken. It gave me the impression that great parts of it were written at once. Not thought over, not plotted, like a novel, but rushed. We thought it might hint at the fact that it was written as if dictated.
“And let me assure you, sir,” she said grinning wryly, “there are no more volumes, so please don’t think that if the book becomes popular, that a few million dollars might make me mysteriously ‘find’ some more that, whoops! we just overlooked the first time, thus creating sequels. The royalty checks, if there are any, can be sent to my attorney, who will forward them to me.
“But I will tell you what I think happened, if you like.” Her face lost its disinterested stare, he noted. This was obviously born of conviction.
“Uh, yes, I wish you would.”
“I think it was forced upon some young girl just blossoming into womanhood, or -”
“Or,” he interjected, “someone of a strict religious order.”
“You’ve thought of that one, too,” she said, smiling, then hurriedly chewed on a bit of fingernail.
“How cruel that — I’m just guessing on the method of transcribing, mind you — every time you sat down to write your lessons or perhaps to painstakingly write out a page of illuminated manuscript… and this came out!”
“But, in the unedited manuscript, which is impossible to imagine in print,” she added, “if this were the case, she either buried the manuscript herself, or kept it hidden from everyone. A woman writing this kind of literature up until modern times was considered unstable, at best, if they wrote this kind of thing. Worst-case scenario, she could have been burned at the stake or tortured, depending on what era she actually lived. If it were kept by a dark order, her identity could possibly have been kept secret.”
“You keep saying ‘she.’ Is that intentional?”
“I’ll get to that in a minute. Now, all of this is pure conjecture. It’s frustrating, because the mind naturally plows this ground, seeking answers. The person who received all of this, who was mentioned in the manuscript only briefly, is never referred to by name or sex.”
“In fact,” he said, excited, “the narrator seems genuinely surprised that there is a connection between himself and a stenographer at all. Isn’t that the impression you get?”
“Most definitely. To think that someone had to live with this for weeks… months. What if it came sporadically over the course of ten or twenty years?” She looked out the window to sigh and collect her thoughts for the next onslaught. “Imagine, if you will, but I suppose we will never possess what any of us could consider hard evidence. In fact, since the timeframe in which the manuscripts were carbon-dated; when they might have been written, and which years they speak of, which was all ‘future’ to the poor wretch — since all of that is impossible anyway, it’s unknowable with any degree of certainty, when it was written.
“The last hope I had, was to take the most innocent sample I could find from the first page to a handwriting analyst. All of the Koine-like Greek was printed, unfortunately for us, so I could not say clearly whether it was masculine or feminine.
“Given what we do know of handwriting is based on relatively modern samples. We can’t be sure they apply to someone living, say, a few thousand years ago.”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Given it’s a safe bet to assume someone living a thousand years ago would be exposed to none of the modern conveniences we take for granted, male or female, their thought processes would be nothing like ours. They would be, for all intents and purposes, remarkably alien to us.” With some satisfaction she folded her hands in her lap, and smiled. Then brushed her pant leg. Again. For that invisible something she seemed to never locate.
“And?” he asked, suspecting this was only the beginning.
“Having said all that,” she said triumphantly, “I’ll still give you the impression we have. I consulted with three handwriting experts, two women and one man. Cities apart, and across a few months. Given all I’ve told you, they all three were positive that the handwriting, such as it was — and they knew nothing of the timeframes that I have discussed — was done by a woman. I only felt, having lived inside the manuscript for a few years, translating it, that it had a woman’s touch.
“One of the women and the man expressly said they felt sure ‘her’ life had been subjected to strict inner and outer discipline, possibly by a religious order.”
“Interesting,” he said. “The story is like a virus. And like the story, the sickness always spreads to the most negative possible outbreak. Think of a poor young nun, in another century, and every time she sits down, she envisions this.”
“Maybe it is interesting,” she said. Now that he knew a great deal about the book, she felt she could convey to him the most open, and weariest of looks, without being misunderstood. She reached into a pocket and pulled out a small bottle that rattled when she opened the cap, and dropped a pill into her palm. She swallowed it without asking for water. “This ‘book’ has made me so vulnerable, that I’m sure if we wouldn’t just do better without it ever having been found in the first place.”
“If,” he emphasized meaningfully, “you did discover it, and it wasn’t the other way around, I mean, think about it; haven’t you been more instrumental than all the others. Well, except for the person who wrote it in the first place, I mean. You and I are part of the final stage. We are seemingly working very hard to get it published. How do you know that we are not as much a part of this integral puzzle as all the rest?” He stopped, realizing how far he’d gone. “I’m sorry. I know how this probably sounds.”
“Well, I doubt it, but I know what you mean. The dark brotherhood disagrees with me. They feel that it was destiny, as you say. They have made sure that I cannot lose. If no publisher releases it, they say they would make me filthy rich forever — out of gratitude, you understand.”
“Hunh?”
“In their minds it was meant for me to find it, to translate it, to be contacted by them, to want to give them the book. You see, to them, this filth is their first truly holy book. I was told that my name will go down in their history books forever. Anyone harming me will feel the full intercontinental wrath of their assassins. Funny, isn’t it?”
“Fascinating!” he said, his eyes aglow.
“But what can protect me against my destiny? I’ve found myself in the book, you know. Don’t ask, I won’t tell you where. I pray you do not find yourself inside the book. Do yourself a favor, and don’t read it any more than you have. It’s a grave responsibility. That part is my private part of Hell. I told the dark brotherhood about my dreams.” She laughed a little kind of insane laugh. “They rejoiced. They said it guarantees my place in eternity. I actually hate them for saying that.”
There was silence between them for a minute, while demons walked over their graves.
“And you say, in your cover letter, that it took how long?”
A brief ache passed through her blond brow. “I’ve spent the last five years carefully, painfully translating the copious text.”
“But you said the text was Koine Greek. The ease of this -”
“It was very like Greek. I found that the Greek was almost like an evolved language that would have been used hundreds of years from now, maybe. Yet, still Koine, or common Greek.”
“Is there any proof of the existence of the two physicians mentioned in the manuscript?”
“I have discovered,” she began saying, as she looked through his tall windows, “much about them. They both attended the same medical schools. The short dark one did seem, according to those who went to school with him, to have an unreasonable sense of competition with the other. And, according to those who knew one or the other, or both, the tall muscular man was completely unaware of the other’s jealousy. That may have been part of the problem, as you have read. I tracked their last known location to the same hospital in Brussels.”
“And?”
“Their history ends there. We know that the short dark one followed the other one there for professional reasons, but neither one was ever heard from again.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely! The entire hospital caved in on itself; it crumpled into a great cavern that either opened up beneath it or was always there, waiting to consume whatever was built above it.”
“You never speak their names, do you? I noticed in your cover letter that you didn’t use both of their names in the book. Only one man’s name is used in the book. You -”
She looked through him. “That’s my business. When you’ve lived with this as long as I have, you may not be as eager to say either of their names.” She pointed at the box. “Maybe no one’s name ever again. A personal friend — a therapist — says I have become ‘acutely vulnerable’ to certain sounds, feelings, things; certainly cruel movies and the like, in her words. I agree with her.”
“You’re also sure about the dates recorded here?” he asked, again tapping the top of the manuscript box.
“Yes, the collapse of the hospital is a well-documented event — 1987.”
“Doctor Begels, it is impossible that ancient volumes could witness… ” he stopped suddenly, light dawning on his long, unhandsome face. “Did you say you had the manuscript carbon-dated?”
“Yes. I’ve had them inspected also, very trustworthy people in England, who have looked at the paper, the ink, everything. They believe them to be authentic. I reacted like you, at first. I was so disgustingly intrigued with the contents that I hadn’t thought to have them dated. As a last resort, at my father’s prompting, I took them to the experts in England. Nothing can prove them to be anything but three-thousand-year-old volumes. Which is why I have suggested the whole affair be published as fiction. You will agree that even as fiction, it is a little on the unusual side.”
“Yes, a little.”
“The original leather-bound volumes I have permanently entrusted to the group I have mentioned, the dark brotherhood. They are eternally safe. I did this for several reasons. In their original state they are unedited, and for that reason they must never see the dark of day, or be published. They are also extremely ancient, which, as you stated, is impossible.”
“To say the least!” he fumbled. “We will definitely hawk them off as fiction, to avoid any awkward misunderstandings.”
“All the work was done on my laptop. I’m hinting, that once I did all the editing (with many suggestions by the dark brotherhood), I threw the edited stuff into the electronic trash bin and scattered it into cyberspace. Never to be recovered. Yes, later I erased and reformatted my hard drive. In a way, I wish it hadn’t been I who found them. Thankfully, you will never know the effect of poring over documents such as these. For example, I had to decode most sections (that I have been promised will never be published) that use the most unrestrained, hideous names for all races of people. Not words you might hear anywhere, my friend — the vilest names. By a process of elimination, I was able to tell which phrases belonged to which race, or group.” She paused, and caught her breath. “Five years, exposed to that.” She pointed to the box.
Early morning sunlight glittered through the dewy window and danced lightly across the forest green blotter on the desk. No light can touch that book, she thought, and then her mind laughed. And maybe laughed again, but she stopped it.
“Yes,” he said, “you have excluded much text here.”
She laughed aloud. “It is best.” She smiled wearily. “Are you familiar with what is known as The Apocalypse According to John?”
“Of course,” he replied.
“In the Apocalypse According to John, also known as The Book of Revelation, there is mentioned in the first verse of the thirteenth chapter that there is a beast coming out of the sea, having ten horns and seven heads.”
“Alright, I’ll take your word for it, having never read it,” he said as he unconsciously steepled his index fingers again, safe in the protective church of his mind.
“It also states that on each of the Beast’s heads there is a blasphemous name.”
“And,” he smiled like the Cheshire cat, “your point being?”
“In the unedited version of the book I translated thirteen essays that graphically describe what was written on each head and what it meant. It also described how believers in the Messiah would be impaled on the horns, after the Beast had defeated Him and His angels in the last great battle, the battle in Megiddo, or Armageddon. I thought it wise to purge those kinds of things from the finished product. The Beast was apparently seen, at great length, by the book’s author.”
He couldn’t help but smirk. “Interesting! You’re quite sure the original is safe, Doctor?”
Her laugh was a challenge. “There is a brotherhood that no one knows, my friend, whose existence is so deep and dark that only a few of their own brothers on earth know who all the members are. One of them joked that they made the Masons look like the New York Times. I do not know this. They have promised me that no billions of dollars could ever make the real book surface again, even if I wanted it, or begged them. I wouldn’t, of course. They wanted all of it. They adore the complete text; and I even imagine they will worship it, as damnable as that may sound. Because they contacted me during the translation process, I could not, under torture, tell you their location or even who I gave it to. All the details of my handing it over to them were quite clever and I shall never reveal them. So, yes, believe me, the original is quite safe. Not one word of this present manuscript had better be deleted or added, or the deal is off. There’s a symmetrical reason for this, as you may notice, if you have read it often enough, as I have. It must remain as it is — just as we agreed — or I’ll walk to another publisher. Or, better yet, never seek to publish it at all.”
“Well,” he said, “I’ve read it. It’s concise and brief. There’s no grand need to edit any of it.”
“Naturally, I made a few changes — only a few. As I said before, the language of the completed text is unnerving, unhinged. Every last thing was described in the coarsest language imaginable. I exchanged a few words to give the text a more clinical, less hideous effect.”
“This book will make you a very rich young woman, if not for the royalties, then for the set contract.”
“That’s all, then,” she said, nearly rising. He was not finished, she could tell. She politely sat back down, smiling slightly.
“Oh, one last thing, Doctor. The little matter of the title. Did you think over my suggestion of a title change? You’ve stated that the title literally translates as, ‘The Book That Unwound You.’”
“That’s right, I have thought it over. I think I’d like it to be called simply, ‘Infernus.’”
“His name,” the publisher paused for effect, “for Hell.”
She turned her head to stare out the window, and began reciting what he considered must be a well-practiced poem. “’Gold is for strength, Green is for pus; White is their neutral, but Red is mine leader.’”
He leaned over the desk and cocked his head to hear her mere whisper. “What did you say? What was that?”
“A poem I translated, but never included in the text.”
He almost believed he saw a thin tear run down her sallow cheek and disappear into her clothes. “And why is that?”
“I thought the colors would be obvious.”
“The colors of the demons? And are they? Obvious, that is?”
She turned and looked at him, which she seldom did. Her right eye blinked seven times. “Oh, yes.” She paused, and then winced as if someone had spit in her eye. “Oh, yes they are obvious.”
“Well, maybe the people would want an annotated version -”
“I don’t care what the people want!” The only time she ever raised her voice during the interview. She was breathing heavily, ending it with a sigh.
He realized she was pressing her hands over her pants often, although they seemed immaculate, creaseless. Her fingers were pencils. Short, chipped, unkempt nails. Brittle, like the rest of her. What was she like before? he asked himself, not sure if he hadn’t said that last part aloud.
“You may wonder,” she said quietly, “if I am a mere shell of my former self. Simply put, yes, I am.”
“Then why not just give the book to this, uh, so-called ‘Dark Brotherhood’? Why publish it at all? The money?”
“The money?” She laughed, perhaps too much, nearly mocking him. “No, I told you. They will make me rich beyond my wildest dreams should the book fail to sell.”
“Yes?”
She stared up at him from beneath her brows, just this side of madness. “No, you see, they want this book shoved rather rudely into the public eye. They want others to read it. To infect them.”
“But… but,” he stammered. “That’s damnable!”
“Interesting choice of words. Yes, that’s exactly what it is. Damning them all.” He rose and extended his hand. She stood, glad that this part was over, shook his hand, and asked him, “Do you know what the preface was in the beginning of the book?”
He flipped through a few pages in his in box, and frowned. “I wasn’t aware there was a preface.”
“No, don’t look for it. I didn’t include one. What the poor soul was forced to write, apparently, was this: ‘As in Hell, so there are tears continually in Heaven. Both weep evermore. One feels only horror and an unspeakable pain; the other sees nothing but beauty, and can only be grateful.’”
As she was leaving, she thrust a small piece of paper into his hand. “You can choose to include this as part of the book, if you choose. I don’t know what to do with it. It was an explanation I wasn’t sure belonged in the book.”
He looked at it. It was seven short numbered notes. He read it as he stood there, and she waited, glaring at him the whole time.
“A few things to remember about ‘life’ in Infernus (I must tell you a few things so that we can communicate in a common language).
1) You (whoever is receiving this as an exercise in automatic writing) are writing what happens to me in the present. Everything you write will come to you in the present tense; it’s up to you to change that, if you feel it is necessary.
2) The reason this is so is because there is no time here. A fitting phrase that is as follows: To live in a nanosecond that never ends. It is a definition that can be understood by you. Everything that will ever happen to you in Infernus happens during the same nanosecond. Imagine every paper cut, every severed finger, every toothache, every disembowelment, every cold, all happening to everyone at once.
3) How you are able to hear me at all from my eternal exile is unknown to me. I just sense that it is so.
4) In Infernus, no one ever tells the truth. There is no longer any need for truth or maintaining the truth — for there is no hope here. Everything in Infernus is in an absolute state.
5) Since all the pain of all mankind is shared by all, no real conversations take place. Consequently, no permission is ever asked for anything, and none is ever given by anyone. The strong take what does not belong to them — the souls of others.
6) All of the mouths of all mankind are opened as far as “inhumanly” possible in a permanent Scream Eternal. All happens here through a veritable sea, a tumultuous wall of sound. Ten billion souls screaming and screaming and screaming.
7) Either you are made to do things by those who outrank you in authority (the only thing that determines strength here) or the words scrape through your brain like a migraine. No, a migraine is bearable compared to this. This is like a bag of broken glass that sits in your head that someone can shake when they wish to. No actual conversations take place ever — all is done in the brain as bursts of hideous migraines. The smallest words sound like hammers. However, in order to convey everything I am compelled to share with you, you must write down everything that I dictate to you, so it will flow, as a narrative.”
“See what I mean,” she spoke in a tired voice. “I’m not even sure where I’d put it. Maybe just throw it away, right?”
Then she left his office, and closed his door with a smart, metallic click. She barely stifled a laugh, but thought instead: He bought that, hook, line, and sinker. She walked to the elevator, and pushed the down button. Dark Brotherhood, indeed. “More like Dark Motherhood,” she said aloud, but hadn’t meant to.
“I thought so,” he spoke softly behind. He pulled the lit cigar out of his mouth and blew smoke between them, obscuring them.
She turned, smiled, and entered the quickly closing elevator. They never saw each other again.
She went home and had a dream that night that she was floating beneath 17,000 layers of flame. The same dream she had had ever since she was a little girl.
A brief silence followed his last words. Then a male voice in the back of the room said, “What the hell was that?”
Another voice said, “Hey!”
The teacher stood. She sighed, and the class could hear her breathing. “Do you plan to come back and finish this story?”
“Yes, I -”
“That story was boring!” an anonymous male voice shouted at the back of the class.
“Boring? What? Why?”
The young man stood up at the back of the class. “It’s just a conversation between two talking heads.”
The old man was clearly surprised. “But, I thought it was exciting because it is so necessary to what follows.”
“No,” he repeated. “I would suggest that you put this chapter at the end of the book, as an appendix, so anyone could read it, if they wished, when the whole thing was over. Just go right to chapter two, where I assume the meat of the book begins.”
“Hmmm,” ruminated the nude man. “That might not be such a bad idea after all. I’ll think about it, how about that?”
The young man sat back down without speaking again. The nude man smiled, and began deliberately, slowly putting back on his clothes. “You will ask me to stop reciting my book somewhere during the next few chapters. Nearly everyone does.” Bright sunshine was glaring through the windows in amber streams and bathing his naked, hairy body.
A woman in the room asked, “Why?”
“Because people tell me it is hideous, unrelenting and it gives them nightmares.”
Another voice: “Isn’t it just a story?”
“Yes,” he said, pulling his pants to his waist. “I made it up. Completely! We cannot proceed unless that is established first. It is complete and utter fiction.”
A large, beefy young man stood up. “Then why? Why would someone tell you to stop reading it?”
He calmly looked at the young man, sunlight glittering in his green eyes. “Because,” he began, then laughed, “maybe it is a novel in Hell.”
The young man smiled and shot back, “You mean a novel about Hell?”
“You tell me next week what you think,” the old man said, wearing his pants now.
“I don’t believe a word of it,” said another.
“I hope not.” He began pulling his T-shirt over his short-cropped, gray hair. “It is merely a novel and a short one at that. But, what if I could get inside your head? What then?”
“I hope you do,” said a young woman named Josie.
“With a blender?” he asked, then left.