The Book of 21 (5 page)

“Nothing that I can discern, right now.”

John lifted the paper carefully by the corners and unfolded it. He read the first line on the top sheet, which said, “If you are reading this, it is because I am dead.”

John looked up at Brinker and found her peering at the papers.

“That looks like the Dr. Dunglison’s handwriting,” she said as she craned her neck for a better look.

John folded the stack and said, “I’m sorry, I’ll need to ask you to step outside for a few minutes.”

Chapter 4:
A Letter from Beyond

After Brinker had left the office, John sat in Dunglison’s desk chair and eyed each of the pages. Despite the fact that the author used unruled office printer paper, the handwriting filled the pages in remarkably straight lines.

He pondered the overall appearance of the packet and tried to put his finger on what bothered him about it. He finally identified two things that did not seem right. First, despite Brinker’s claim that the handwriting was Dunglison’s, it seemed abnormally neat, especially for someone anticipating his own death in the next few hours. Second, Dunglison’s declaration of death seemed very assertive for an academic. Most professors, or at least the ones John knew, seemed to hedge statements with words like maybe and probably. He wondered whether Dunglison left the papers, or someone else forged and planted them to send John on some wild goose chase.

The rest of the note read:

I hope that this will eventually pass under the eyes of Detective Erving Fullman, if he is still alive. At least he will know I was not imagining what I had told him.

Over the past two years, I have been doing research into witchcraft folklore in the Philadelphia area. Philadelphia was one of the few places in the colonies lacking extensive witchcraft trials. I found only one witch trial on record in Pennsylvania. I have uncovered, however, some very interesting folklore and a lot of information on odd religious sects that were tied to witchcraft in some way. To get a feeling for the stories, I would often visit local sites where the sects purportedly met. I saw no harm in exploring, as the tales were two to three hundred years old.

In the past few months, I started to feel that I was being watched. I often noticed people on campus that seemed out of place, and I noticed them repeatedly. I seemed to see these people all over campus, wherever I happened to be. On several occasions, I have seen them on the weekends when I was out to dinner. At first, I thought the university might be observing me. I am a homosexual male, and I am becoming increasingly visible in my field. I have never seen any behavior from the university, however, that might be homophobic. Therefore, as the sightings increased, I felt less sure that it was the university. I began to believe that either some unknown group of people was following me, or I was going insane.

Frustrated, I approached one of the people I had repeatedly noticed following me. I was sure that this could not be a coincidence; our lives could not be so closely intertwined that I would see him at so many different places. He looked at me as if he had never seen me before and scurried away as if I were a madman, with fear in his eyes. That man disappeared, but I kept seeing the others from time to time.

I started to worry that I suffered from some kind of paranoid delusion. As the human body ages, unfortunate things sometimes happen, and perhaps they were happening to me. A trip to my physician’s office told me that no biological infirmity was to blame. All that came of my trip was a prescription for Valium, which I have yet to take.

I began to sit up every night with the lights on, and I often imagined there were people outside my lace curtains watching me. When I turned to look, however, I saw no one there. I dreaded entering my dark house, and I imagined someone waiting for me every time I entered a room and turned on the light. I finally went to the expense of having an electrician connect most of the lights in the house to a panel inside the front door.

I started to worry that I might have warped my mind by reading one twisted tale too many. Ted Hallman mentioned, however, that he noticed people lurking about who seemed similar to those that I had described. Thankfully, young Ted was kind enough to meet Detective Fullman with me. With two of us seeing the same thing, Detective Fullman listened intently and seemed to take us seriously, although I am sure the detective did not dismiss the theory of group hallucination.

Last weekend, against Detective Fullman’s advice that I “stop frequenting creepy places,” I went to three sites of local stories. The first was the Jonas farm, which is now nothing more than rubble along the Schuylkill River. The second was the haunt of the Brethren of Roxborough. They were said to meet in a cave below a waterfall in the Wissahickon area. While the cave itself is gone, I visited the waterfall area and took a few photos of the site. The third place I visited was the Krumpmeyer woods outside of Zieglerville. This was also known as something of a haunt for witches, where covens were said to gather.

At each of these three sites, the same car passed us when we stopped to get out. This was noticeable at the first and third site because of their remoteness. At the second, I noticed it because I was looking for it in my paranoid state. There was a single driver, a dark-haired young man in a blue polo shirt, who did not turn to look at us when he passed, though I felt he knew I was looking at him. At Krumpmeyer woods, we were chased away by the landowner, who had received an anonymous call that someone was on his property.

Since that weekend, it seems we have been under constant watch. I have taken to sleeping even less than before.

Two days ago, I was standing close to the tracks at University City Station. As the train was coming into the station, I was sure I saw the man from the car that had passed us. He was walking up the platform toward me. I became nervous with the train arriving and backed away from my position so close to the tracks. With that, the man stopped, turned around, and left the platform. He never looked at me. Yesterday, three homeless people seemed to be converging on me while I was walking to 30th Street Station. Luckily, Dr. Smolniczek was coming to campus from the station that day, and I turned and walked back with her. Campus security escorted me to the station later, without event.

My manuscript has over thirty sites and stories in it. I have visited each of the sites numerous times. Unfortunately, I do not know which site brought on this response. Still, I feel that the events of the past few days point to the three sites I mentioned above being more suspect than the others are. Since we saw the highest amount of interaction at the Krumpmeyer woods, I have the feeling that a coven of witches still exists and meets there. They may be malicious, but they may just be frightened that we will expose them. Witches exposed to the public have often met with persecution, and they may be acting in their own defense.

A copy of my manuscript has been hidden on my office and home computers, in the /system directory, with the file name of ibid_etal.txt. It has everything I have uncovered on these topics. The original file, named witchcraft_folklore.rtf, was in my document directory, and I suspect that this file is probably gone now. In the event that both of these files, or the computers themselves, are taken, I have placed a diskette containing another copy of the files inside Pelcham’s book. You will find it on my bookshelf.

My research assistant, Ted Hallman, also has notes and feels his evidence points to the Brethren of Roxborough. He thinks they may guard
The Book of 21
, also known as
Le Coeur Codex
. I fear his perspective may be tainted by prior prejudice, since one must overlook more than the oddly structured French name of that book to believe his theory. He seems to simply be seeing what he wants to see.

Ted concealed his notes separately from mine. We decided that neither of us should know where all the pieces were in case something happened. I am not sure I agree with his assessment of the situation, but I am sure his notes will tell you his views.

--

Richard Dunglison, PhD

One thing in the signature line caught John’s eye—PhD. It, along with the ponderous nature of the letter, spoke to John about the life perspective of the victim. Even when Dunglison understood he was in trouble—and was scared for his safety—he wanted to make sure anyone reading the note knew he was a levelheaded PhD.

Fullman was a new name to John. In a large police department, like Philadelphia’s, it was quite possible that he would not know a detective on staff. It was unlikely, but possible. Either John would find the detective in the global directory, or if the name were missing for some reason, the call log would point him to the right person.

He leaned back in the chair and realized that he now had something to look for when he went over to Hallman’s place. Without knowing the information in the letter, he could have easily overlooked something important and not realized it. Of course, given his earlier concerns about the authenticity of the letter, he would need to take it with a grain of salt.

John was jarred from his thought by a young woman’s voice.

“Hi Doctor Dungli—” she said, cutting off her words when her eyes met John’s face.

A blonde in her mid-twenties stood before John. Her spiral locks were flowing over her shoulders. A striped sweater and khakis hugged her perfect hourglass of human form.

As he stood to meet her, he folded the letter and slipped it in his hip pocket. “Sorry, Dr. Dunglison is not here.”

“Oh, I’m, uh…” She took a deep breath, extended her right hand, and walked in. “I’m Amy Ritter, a grad student in one of his classes, and I had a paper to give to him. Is it OK if I leave it on his desk?”

“No, I’m sorry, but you’ll have to hold onto it. Dr. Dunglison has been delayed.”

Her left eyebrow lifted, and her head tilted. “What’s that mean?”

With all his being, John hated breaking the news to the workmates of the victim. He understood the emotional reaction of family members, but never grasped why people would get so demonstrative over the death of someone they only associated with at work or school. Dunglison was probably someone she knew only superficially, but now the spoiled brat would probably demand counseling for years because of her abnormally harsh
trauma
of knowing a
human
that
actually died
. John wondered when counseling became a necessary service for students who had somehow encountered death. Realizing that he was taking too long to respond, he shook off his cynicism and avoided the situation.

“Dr. Dunglison won’t be in today. Please hold your paper for now.”

“OK,” she said with a smile. “Thanks, anyway.”

She turned and walked out the door. She then took a right, and with a flash of blond locks, she was gone.

Returning to the bookshelf, John found the book by Pelcham, and inside, he found the diskette. After carefully removing the disk from the tome with a pair of tweezers, he dropped it in another one of the plastic evidence bags that he carried with him. He then tucked the bag into his shirt pocket. The computer would be password protected, so there was no point in turning it on to check for the file; Harry’s team would need to contact campus IT for access.

He scrutinized the office for anything else that might be out of place, but eventually found himself staring at the beautiful view of the campus offered by the window. It made John wonder why someone with this job, and this kind of office, would choose to go around to morbid places chasing tales of goblins and witches.

It was then, that a glint of sunlight on brass caught his eye.

The window lock was open, and the slight scratches on the lock told him that someone had slid something into the window to force the lock from the outside. Outside the window, the building did not seem to sport a ledge or fire escape. John wondered how they even reached the window to force the lock, and why Dunglison would even bother locking it when he was on a floor up this high.

Regardless of how someone reached the window, the scratches on the lock pointed to the idea that someone had been in here. If that was the case, the scene was tainted, and he knew he should not touch anything else until Harry’s team could go over the whole place.

John decided he might as well examine the exterior of the window while he waited for Harry and the CSA team to arrive. He locked the door behind him and stopped by Anita Brinker’s office to let he know she was about to have a lot of company. He found her at her desk, just as he first saw her; she was eyeing paperwork through her spectacles.

“Ms. Brinker, is there a security system here?”

“There are motion detectors in the halls. Campus security locks this wing at ten every night, and they open it up again at about six.”

“I’ll need you to keep Dr. Dunglison’s door locked. I think someone was in there last night. I’m going to get a forensics team to go over the whole place.”

“You have to be kidding me. His murderer was here?”

“I don’t know that. I think
someone
was in there. The forensics guys are likely to find some of our hair in there. That girl Amy…”

“Yes, I saw you met Amy Ritter.” There was a strange coldness in Brinker’s voice.

John nodded. “Yes, Amy, she’s got quite a mane on her. The forensics guys will need her contact information for comparisons if they find some long blond hair.”

“Sure,” Brinker uttered with a frown.

“Ms. Brinker, may I ask why you seem somehow displeased when discussing Ms. Ritter?”

Brinker looked him in the eye, leaned back in the chair, and asked, “It shows?” She stared at her desk for a few seconds, as if she was trying to figure out how to gently reveal something unpleasant, then said, “Amy started here in the fall, as a teaching assistant. She was
very
fond of Richard. He made it a point to keep his door open whenever he met with her, even though I heard her ask him if she could close it more than once. You have to watch yourself if you are a professor these days. A sexual harassment suit is a good way to get a free education and a bankroll. She was in there two or three times a week for her first few months.”