Ghost of a Chance

18 The Rune Book

Alex opened his battered pocketwatch and the runes inside flared to life. He couldn’t see the magic, of course, but he felt the faint tingling sensation of their power as they activated. It was comforting. He’d spent most of the week wondering if his magic was waning, if the sacrifice he’d made to save the city was stealing his very identity.

He knew what Iggy would say, what he had said, that magic was a part of him, that it didn’t fade with age. Still, people went deaf and blind with age, wasn’t magic just another sense?

He was a good detective, of course, but the world already had good detectives. It was his magic, the things he could do and see that others couldn’t, that set him apart. He’d never have found Danny’s missing trucks without it. Would anyone need another detective if he lost what made him unique?

The feel of the runes in his watch was like a musical chord, ringing in his mind. He smiled as he detected a slight sourness to the sound, as if one of the notes was not quite on pitch. Experience told him that one of the runes etched into the watch’s back cover was beginning to fade. He’d have to redo it soon if he wanted to continue being able to open his front door.

Taking hold of the handle, he turned it, smiling at the memory of Jessica’s poison-snared door handle. Iggy’s runes on the front door and entryway were a far better and less deadly deterrent. No one without the proper rune combination could enter, and only a runewright could activate the runes in Alex’s watch. Only once the runes were active would the constructs on the brownstone release the door.

Alex turned the handle and pushed. Then the smile ran away from his face.

The door didn’t move.

He checked the runes, certain that they were working, and tried again with the same result.

He felt his heartbeat spike. Normally he’d have been sure that the slight sour note of the weakening rune wouldn’t affect the properties of the pocketwatch, but what if he was fooling himself?

What if he’d already lost enough of his ability that he missed the difference between a weakening rune and a defective one?

He closed his eyes and willed his heartbeat back down. One thing he knew from being a detective was not to let a first impression dictate the direction of a case.

Sufficiently calm, he reached up and pulled the chain that rang the door bell. He noticed that his hands were trembling and quickly took a shot from the flask, hoping that was the reason.

A long minute passed and he was about to ring again, when he heard the inner door to the vestibule open. Iggy’s silhouette, dressed in his red smoking jacket, appeared blurry through the frosted surface of the door’s stained glass window. A moment later, Alex heard the thunk of the door bolt being drawn back and the door opened.

“What’s the matter?” Iggy said, taking in Alex’s appearance with a single glance. Before Alex could answer, his concerned look turned to one of embarrassment.

“I’m sorry, lad,” he said, reaching out to take Alex by the arm and pull him inside. “I was looking through the… the Textbook, so I set the deadbolt.”

Alex had to hold his hands together to keep them from shaking in pure relief. The deadbolt was an extra security measure that they only used when Iggy took the Archimedean Monograph down from its place on the bookshelf. When it was locked, an extra construct of powerful protection runes activated. To hear Iggy describe it, with these runes in place, the brownstone could survive a bomb.

As Alex stepped inside, Iggy closed the door and reset the deadbolt. From this side, Alex felt the protection construct activate. If the construct in his watch had been a chord, this sound washed over him like the crescendo of something written by John Phillip Sousa. It wasn’t a physical sound, of course, but that didn’t stop the hair on his arm from rising nonetheless.

“You had me worried there,” Alex said, finally having the presence of mind to close his pocketwatch and return it to his waistcoat.

Iggy cast him an appraising look.

“Still on with that nonsense about losing your magic,” he said. It was not a question; the old man knew Alex well enough to make that deduction. “I told you it doesn’t work that way.”

Alex wanted to believe him, more than he was willing to admit, but Iggy had trained him as a detective. He knew that all the doctor had to go on was his own intuition. He’d never actually met someone who’d traded the majority of his life energy for power. Not until Alex did it, anyway. There was no way the old man could really be sure.

Still, Alex reminded himself, he could sense the runes activating in the door and in his pocketwatch, and he wouldn’t be able to do that if he’d lost his magic.

It wasn’t an airtight theory, but Alex decided not to poke any holes in it.

“I suppose you’re right,” he said to Iggy. “So,” he went on, changing the subject, “why are you reading the Monograph?”

Iggy’s face grew troubled.

“Follow me,” he said, turning and heading for the kitchen.

Alex hung up his hat on the row of pegs along the foyer wall, then headed after his mentor. In the kitchen, Iggy had a half-dozen books laid open on the massive oak table. Each book seemed to have several pieces of torn paper sticking out of it, marking various pages. A notepad filled with Iggy’s spidery script lay on the table, held open by an ashtray. In the center of this storm of reference material, lay two books; one squarish, thickish, and bound in black cloth… and the other tall, thin, and covered in red leather.

Alex could feel the presence of the Archimedean Monograph the moment he entered the room. It was a collection of the most powerful runes known to man, handed down from the most famous and clever runewrights in history. Iggy had found it around the turn of the century and had kept it carefully hidden ever since. Even that precaution wasn’t enough though; he’d been forced to leave his home and his family, fake his own death, change his name, and flee to America because of it. Alex knew first-hand that the legend of the Monograph drove many dangerous, desperate, and unscrupulous people to seek it. People willing to do anything to obtain it.

Alex had learned of its existence a year ago when he managed to unravel the secret of its deadly finding rune. He’d been stunned that the book had been hiding on Iggy’s bookshelf the whole time. Iggy had been prodigiously proud of Alex for finding it, promising to reveal the book’s secrets to Alex in time. Then he had promptly forbidden him from opening it without his permission.

So far, Alex had kept that promise.

The smaller black book was the one Alex had taken off the dead-and-burned kidnapper. Several of the pages had been torn out and laid around the open books, their face-like symbols staring out from the papers.

“I take it you didn’t have any luck at the museum,” Alex said, picking up a rune that looked like a man with an enormous nose looking to the left.

“Not entirely,” Iggy said, picking up the rune book and turning to the last page. “No one knew what these were at first, but then I showed their senior Egyptologist this drawing.”

Iggy turned the book so Alex could see. On the last page, a runic construct had been carefully drawn. Or, at least Alex assumed it was a construct; the form seemed familiar at least. It was round and made up of concentric rings. Each ring had symbols like the strange runes on it. In the center was a large circle with a grotesque caricature of a man’s face, with his tongue sticking out. Almost all the runes in the rings looked like they were depicting creatures of some kind. Alex recognized birds, animals, and a few men, along with others that he assumed were mythological.

“So what is it?” Alex asked, not able to make heads or tails of the construct.

Iggy grinned at that, causing his mustache to rise up.

“The Egyptologist sent me to a Dr. Hargrave, he’s an expert on ancient languages,” Iggy said. “As it turns out, this is a calendar used by the ancient Mayans.”

Alex knew the Mayans used to live in South America and they made pyramids like the Egyptians, but that was the extent of his information.

“So the runes are Mayan?”

“The linguist couldn’t be sure,” Iggy said. “He’d never seen symbols like the ones in this book, but the calendar is exactly like one at the museum.”

“So what does all this mean?” Alex asked, tracing the rings of the calendar with his finger.

“Dr. Hargrave wasn’t sure,” Iggy said with a sigh. “Mayan is a dead language.”

“Then how do they know this is a calendar?”

Iggy laid the book back on the table and pointed to the innermost ring.

“These are months,” he said. “Days, then years.” He moved his finger out to each of the other rings.

“But the linguist has no idea what these say,” Alex said, picking up one of the symbols Iggy had torn out of the rune book. It looked the head of snake with a string of pearls around its neck and too many teeth.

“Even if he could read Mayan, I doubt he’d understand these,” Iggy said. “It’s clear that these are runes, and from a school I’ve never heard of. That concerns me.”

“So you’re going through the Monograph to see if there’s any mention of other schools?”

Iggy nodded.

“All the known schools are mentioned,” he said. “All the writers seem to believe that Archimedes was the first runewright, and that the Kanji and Arabic schools are offshoots of that. But I’m starting to doubt it.”

“How could ancient Mayans have copied from Archimedes work?”

Iggy shrugged.

“It’s technically possible,” he admitted. “Archimedes died around two hundred B.C. and the Mayans existed until about the seventeen-hundreds.”

“Assuming someone knew how to get from Ancient Greece to South America,” Alex felt compelled to add.

Iggy didn’t respond, just shrugged and stared at the strange runes scattered around the table.

“That’s not what’s worrying you, though,” Alex guessed. “Is it?”

“No,” Iggy said, picking up the Monograph. “This book has been legendary for the better part of a century,” he said. “I always believed it was the pinnacle of runic lore. A collection of the most powerful and dangerous runes ever created.”

Alex nodded, seeing where Iggy was going, and he picked up the black book.

“But now there’s a new game in town,” he said. “And we have no idea what they can do.”

The thought was sobering. Alex realized that if he thought enough about it, it would probably be terrifying.

He resolved not to think about it.

“So far,” Iggy said, beginning to stack up the reference books, “the runes we’ve seen have been fairly straightforward. Tracking, force, fire, that sort of thing.”

“But how did they activate that rune that burned the dead man?” Alex asked.

“And burn that rune into Mrs. Cunningham,” Iggy agreed. “They’ve definitely got a few tricks over on us.” He indicated the black book. “I’d feel better if I knew what any of these glyphs did.”

“Glyphs?”

“That’s what Mayan writing is called.”

Alex set down the glyph book and picked up the Monograph. Just holding it in his hand, he could feel its power. Normally, the book was shielded by powerful obscurement runes, but they didn’t work when it was open.

“I take it there’s no rune in here for translating languages,” he said.

Iggy took the book and closed it, setting it back on the table.

“Actually there is,” he said, “but I wouldn’t try to use that on an unknown magic. What if it activated the rune? That’d be fine if it was a light rune, but what if it was something more deadly?”

“Point taken,” Alex said.

Magic was a great tool until it wasn’t. Iggy was always telling him that there weren’t any shortcuts when it came to being a detective. Still, Alex seemed to always be doing things the hard way. It would be nice if something came easy, every once in a while.

Alex helped Iggy clean up, putting the Archimedean Monograph back on the bookshelf in the front room. The shelf and even the space where the book sat were covered in invisible runes that drove the viewer’s eye to look anywhere but at the book. Alex knew it was there and still had problems looking right at it once it was back in its place.

“I’m hungry,” Iggy said once Alex was done.

“Don’t look at me,” Alex said. “Dinner is your department.” He hadn’t been paying attention, but now that Iggy brought it up, his stomach rumbled.

“I was busy learning about glyphs so we can hopefully find your missing draftsman,” Iggy said. “What did you do to help?”

A slow smile spread across Alex’s face but he didn’t answer.

“You figured it out?” Iggy guessed, sounding impressed. “You know why these glyph runewrights took Cunningham.”

“Not yet,” Alex said. “But I’ve got an idea. That reminds me, did Danny call for me?”

Iggy shook his head.

“It’s too late to cook,” he said, heading for the stairs. “I’ll get my coat and we’ll walk down to the diner for a bite. While we eat, you can tell me all about your solution to the kidnapping.”

Alex’s stomach grumbled again but he shook his head.

“I can’t,” he said. “I need to be here in case Danny calls.”

Iggy looked at the big grandfather clock standing in the corner of the front room. It was already pushing eight o’clock.

“By the time we get back, Danny is sure to be home,” he said. “You can call him then. Now let me get my coat and we’ll go.”

Iggy went up the stairs and down the hall to his bedroom to remove his smoking jacket and put on his suit coat. Alex waited impatiently. That feeling that he should be doing something more to find Leroy kept coming back.

If he was right about why the glyph runewright and his friends had taken Leroy, Alex would need the help of the police to find him. Right now Alex was not their favorite person. If he wanted to have a chance of getting Leroy back to his wife alive, he would have to play a very careful game. He needed proof, or at least seriously compelling conjecture, in order to get the cops on board.

Of course, standing in the foyer waiting for Iggy, there wasn’t a single thing he could do about it.

It was frustrating, but Alex took a breath and resolved to wait for the evidence he needed. If he moved too soon, if he couldn’t convince the police that he was right, it would cost Leroy his life.