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The Book, even as a mere black and white facsimile of its original self, was suffused with living vibrancy. Its Sphinxian pages, covered in their nearly impenetrable riddles of elegantly illuminated ancient characters, seemed to stare back with an inner life as Professor Merriman scrutinized them relentlessly.

Merriman’s relationship to the Book had evolved, beginning with stubborn, pointed disinterest, moving almost immediately to rapt intrigue, and eventually, after a few weeks, settling into an almost combatative posture, such that the man and the Book appeared engaged in an unrelenting battle of wills – the former determined to crack the latter’s defenses, the latter relentlessly adding new road blocks to understanding.

Commander Pell had returned in only a matter of hours after locking Merriman in the white room, but by then Merriman’s attentions were devoted entirely to the Book, such was its strange power. Merriman found himself turning its pages with an undeserved reverance for a photo copy, the artistry of the original document so overwhelmed his sense of reason. The elegant curves and swirls of the script were at first almost entirely lost on him, and yet still Merriman passed his eye over each line, as though he were re-reading the well worn and personally prized manuscript of a childhood favorite.

Commander Pell had hoped the Professor would relent, but anticipated a fight, especially given Merriman’s inelegant ‘recruitment’ into the scheme. But Pell was pleasantly surprised when he returned to the ersatz prison cell and could hardly draw Merriman’s attention away from the tome.

“You really can’t bring in anyone else?” Merriman asked after a long silence, speaking to Pell without even looking up from the page.

Commander Pell’s brow scrunched in consternation. “No.” He replied, with finality.

Merriman’s eyes never stopped their methodical left right scanning. In a distracted tone, almost as if he were speaking from inside a dream, he just said. “Then I’m going to need some very specific books.”

A procurement list was drawn up by the Professor and given to the two guards, Pell’s co-conspirators, who first escorted Merriman from his home. It contained a dozen obscure linguistic texts on some of the oldest languages on Earth, with a specific focus on Coptic and Ancient Demotic.

“Even if you find all the others,” Merriman drew one of the guard’s attention to a heavily underlined and starred entry on the hand scrawled list – Khaled Mahman’s opus ‘The Evolution Of Language In The Nile Valley’ – “don’t come back without this one.”

The guards did not disappoint, and within a week they’d returned with every book on the list, notwithstanding that several were long out of print and never very popular to begin with, even among other linguists. Merriman wondered how they’d been procured so quickly, but the guards refused to comment.

That was five weeks prior. Merriman still worked in the white room, now filled with tables littered with notes and a constantly changing character chart written in chalk on three rolling chalkboards. He was given a modest bunk elsewhere in the facility, but spent almost no time there, apart from the meager sleep he took every day or so.

Every waking moment was spent in the white room, where Merryman worked with the ferocious intent of a man on fire. Always he was reading, analyzing and comparing characters – his tired eyes ceaselessly flitting between an academic text – usually Mahman’s printed or handwritten work – and back to the Book, slowly building the puzzle pieces of the arcane and obscure printed language.

It was, as predicted by Professor Mahman about the original Signal, a hybridized version of Demotic Egyptian, Coptic and something else entirely. The characters fluctuated unexpectedly all the time. The Book was filled with symbols which appeared only once or twice and looked like nothing else, almost pictographs, except without any obvious physical corollary to the outside world.

Still, within the cluttered melange of gorgeous, jumbled confusion, certain patterns did appear. 23 characters, most with obvious visual lineages to known characters in written Demotic – a few being identical – recurred several hundred times each. This wealth of similarities provided an infinitely more robust framework than Professor Merriman had ever anticipated.

Once a whole chalkboard was filled with the pieces of the puzzle Merriman was fairly certain he understood, the Professor set about translating a first draft – creating a working linguistic hypothesis.

With the basic cipher, Merryman was able to translate perhaps 60%, poorly by estimation, with context clues then allowing for loosely educated guesses regarding the meaning of some of the myriad remaining indecipherable symbols, which were systematically added to the chalkboards.

Under normal working conditions, back in the linguistics department on campus, a first attempt such as the one Merriman pieced together of The Book would never see the light of day. Such efforts were intended only as an extremely rough starting point for the linguist – or, for a project of this difficulty, a team of linguists – to jump off from and return to, and compare with the two dozen future drafts, until, after a decade or longer, one final, synthesized, vetted document would be released for peer review – and perhaps still be rejected for publication as “too speculative.”

In this case, five weeks after first setting eyes on The Book, Professor Merriman set down his pencil beside the “finished” first translation, his fingers shaking gently, sweat beading on his forehead as his heart raced in his chest like the hooves of dozen lusty thoroughbreds, neck and neck in the race of their lives.

Merriman looked absolutely exhausted, his sleep deprived features magnifying the appearance of age dramatically, as if ten years had been sapped from him in five weeks, as though the Book had exacted a blood price for its secrets.

“Call Pell.” Merriman sat with his head heavy in his hands, spurred elbows resting on the table like dilapidated struts, the translation neatly shut in front of him, its plain blue cover a final, flimsy barrier between the secrets of The Book and the outside world.

“He needs to see this. Now.”

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READ MORE FLASH FICTION

ACTION	APOCALYPTIC	DARK	ESTABLISHED UNIVERSE	FANTASY
FUNNY MAYBE	HORROR	MISC	PULLIN’ THE HEARTSTRINGS	SAD MAYBE
SCIENCE FICTION	SCIENCE FANTASY	TWIST ENDING	WTF IS THIS?

READ LONGER STORIES

THE DEMON’S CANTOS	INCIDENTAL SUPERHERO
BENEATH	THE HUMANITY SAGA
THE TRAVELER	I, LYCANTHROPE

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