The Lost Island

19

Respondeo ad quaestionem, ipsa pergamenta.

In his aerie high above the Meatpacking District of Manhattan, Glinn gazed from a plate-glass window that looked westward over the High Line park to the dark back of the Hudson River, reflecting the lights of Jersey City. It was just after three o’clock in the morning.

“I respond to the question, the page itself.” Ipsa pergamenta, the page itself…

Glinn had not studied Latin, but Brock had spent hours with him going over every possible meaning, submeaning, double meaning, and alliteration in each word of that sentence, parsing it with Talmudic intensity. To no avail. Now Glinn’s mind felt congested. He’d been chewing this over too long.

The page itself…

To clear his head, he took out another book of poetry: Wallace Stevens. He opened the book at random. The poem his eye settled on was titled “Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself.” The page itself, the thing itself. A nice coincidence.

He read through the poem once, twice, then laid the book aside.

Not ideas about the thing, but the thing itself. I respond to the question, the page itself.

And that was when he had the revelation. It wasn’t a riddle at all. It was a literal statement of fact. Ipsa pergamenta. The page itself or — quite literally — the vellum or parchment itself, the physical parchment, would answer the question.

Could it really be that simple?

It made perfect sense. The vellum of the Chi Rho page was different: thicker, finer, whiter, cleaner than the rest of the Book of Kells. The secret lay in the vellum itself.

There, in the dark, he blushed with chagrin. The answer was so obvious he had missed it completely.

He directed his wheelchair to the elevator and descended to the main floor. The back laboratory for Project Phorkys was empty. Glinn motored to the safe that held the Chi Rho page, punched in the code, and removed it. Laying it on a clean glass stage, he selected a sterilized surgical knife from a set of tools resting in an autoclave and, working with great care, cut a millimeter-square piece from a blank corner of the page. Using tweezers, he placed the square into a test tube and sealed it, labeled and racked it.

For a long time he stared at the square piece of skin. Then he muttered, under his breath: “I wonder…I wonder…just what kind of animal you came from.”