The Arlington Grimoire

Arlingtons of Chelsea, an auction house with an international reputation, is struggling to catalogue a medieval book, which is written in an impenetrable script. In order to catalogue it accurately, the chairman wants a) to be sure that it isn’t a fake, and b) to know where it’s come from. He orders his in-house experts to explore the book’s history. He asks one to research previous owners, another to investigate what those owners might have made of it, a third to seek out possible buyers and a fourth to analyse the book’s ink and parchment. The results are surprising, if not alarming. The owners have included a quartermaster in Napoleon’s army, Faust, the emperor Rudolf II, Heinrich Himmler and US army Intelligence officer. Among those who, over the ages, have tried to interpret it are Champollion, the French scholar who first deciphered hieroglyphics, James Joyce and a polytechnic lecturer from Hertfordshire. Potential buyers include an AI expert, an American biblical scholar who believes that the Arlington grimoire is a history of the race of giants which inhabited the world before the Flood, the proprietor of a firm which supplies tombs to super-rich transhumanists in order to ease the transition to their cryonic afterlives and, finally, a physicist who thinks he is about to make a breakthrough in the search for dark matter and thus be able to formulate a new TOE (or Theory of Everything.) Perhaps the most shocking discovery of all comes from the expert who was asked to research the book’s ink and parchment. The parchment is made out of animal skins, which comes as no surprise. What does surprise – spoiler alert! –  is that the animals in question are human.