Final Translations

Adrian’s car was parked but his hands were still on the steering wheel. He looked over at the lumpy sack in his passenger seat. At what was inside it. The book.

It was always easy to dismiss the idea of an ancient magical tome when it wasn't nearby. It seemed laughable. However, when it was nearby, it was difficult not to take it seriously. The book had a palpable presence; the air around it felt thick, and it left a taste of dread on the tongue. Deep within him, a bone-deep instinct, hard-earned no doubt by the mistakes of his ancestors, recognized the book as a threat.

He’d found it lying on the ground in the alley behind his apartment building. It had probably been tossed out a window. He couldn’t be sure which one, but if he were a betting man he’d have put his money on the one strung up with crime scene tape and crawling with cops. Later he’d played the concerned neighbor and asked one of the uniforms what had happened in there. The cop wouldn’t let anything go, but Adrian got the impression that whatever had gone down was grim.

Adrian was usually the type to mind his own business. He wouldn’t have poked his nose into it if it weren’t for what had happened the first time he’d touched the book picking it up off the ground. It was difficult to remember exactly what that sensation had felt like, sort of like trying to recall how much an injury had hurt once the pain had faded away. The brain likes to forget things like that. However, he knew that when his fingers had brushed against the book’s cover he had felt something stir. Something deep, ancient, dark. Sometimes he let himself believe that it had all been in his head, but that wasn’t rationality talking - it was fear. It was easier to believe he’d imagined it all than to grapple with the reality that was currently resting in the passenger seat of his twenty-year-old sedan.

The right thing to do would have been to turn the book over to the police. Then there was the smart thing to do, which probably would have been to sell the damn thing and make it someone else’s problem, pocketing a decent chunk of change in the process. Adrian hadn’t decided to do the right thing or the smart thing. He’d decided to hold onto it. There was power in the book, even if it was dangerous, and playing it safe was a luxury reserved for the healthy.

It had been an unusual stroke of fortune for Adrian to find someone so close by who could help him decipher the book’s contents. He’d shopped it around, doing his best to keep a low profile, until, eventually, he’d stumbled across Christine Sharpe, a PhD student at Marlinth University specializing in ancient cultures of the Middle East. She had immediately been interested. Too interested in fact. It had taken a lot of convincing on his part to keep her from telling the whole world about his secret. Only the threat of pulling the book away from her entirely had gotten through to her. If she had been more astute she might have noticed that it wasn’t a threat Adrian was necessarily ready to follow through on.

Adrian took a deep breath and removed his keys from the ignition. He’d had a dozen meetings with Christine already, but those had just been research. Today marked the first official steps towards trying to pull his insane stunt off. He couldn’t lie to himself anymore by pretending that he was just entertaining a silly fantasy. He was going for it. And why not? If he was wrong all it would cost him was some pride. But if it worked…

One step at a time, he told himself. Grabbing the sack - he never touched the book directly - Adrian got out of his car and walked inside the imposing stone brick building where the university housed their anthropology department. A few twists and turns through the poorly lit interior saw Adrian to the barely-not-a-closet Christine used as her office.

The door was open as Adrian walked up but Christine didn’t notice him. She typed away in a cheap office chair, hunched over her knee with her face pushed in front of her monitor. One loose strand of her cherry red hair was tucked between her lips. She worried at it, lost in concentration.

Adrian knocked gently on the door and Christine looked up at him startled.

“Oh, Adrian. Sorry. Is it ten already?” she asked.

It was ten-fifteen actually - he had been running late - but there was no reason to point that out. Instead, Adrian entered and sat in the rickety old chair opposite Christine. Her desk was covered with loose papers and what may have been the remnants of yesterday’s lunch.

“Good to see you,” Adrian said.

“You have the book?” she asked. Adrian had gotten to know Christine decently well. Most of their previous meetings had lasted an entire day, going late into the night as Christine plugged away. It had taken him some time to get used to her demeanor, but he knew now that she hadn’t meant to brush off his greeting. She was just focused. Christine cared about the book, not the person who had brought it to her. Funnily enough, that was something he found he could respect.

Adrian carefully slid the tome out from his bag as Christine snapped on a pair of tight-fitting archivist’s gloves. She wore them to protect the book’s integrity, but Adrian would have insisted she use them even if it had been printed yesterday. He didn’t need her having any insight into its true nature.

Christine folded open the book’s strange, leathery cover with gentle reverence. She fanned through its pages. They were yellow and frayed with age, but Christine insisted that they were in almost impossibly good condition for how old the book was. She’d thought it was a hoax at first. Only when her test results came back conclusive did she really believe.

“I don’t have much time today,” he told her. “I’ve prepared a series of bullet points I need you to check. I want to be absolutely certain that we’ve got this stuff right.”

That caught her attention, and she dragged her eyes away from the text to look up at him. “Only an hour?” she frowned. “That’s not very much time to work with.”

“Can’t be helped,” he responded. “I have to be at work.”

“You could leave it here with me,” she offered hopefully.

Adrian shook his head. He trusted her, and had in fact left the book with her before so that she could work on more extended translations, but today was too important. He wasn’t willing to let it out of his sight. “Sorry, maybe next time.”

Christine didn’t press the issue. She’d learned that Adrian wasn’t likely to give any ground. Instead, she reached over and accepted the notes that Adrian offered, setting them beside the book. “I’ll do my best I guess,” she told him, clearly disappointed. Almost immediately she was lost in the work, and Adrian was forgotten.

Christine was in her late twenties, a few years older than Adrian’s own twenty-five, with just the barest hint of crow's feet. She had a round face with pale skin and a small smattering of freckles that complemented her striking green eyes. She'd be cute if her eyes didn't skip past you when she scanned a room. As it was, her aloofness kept her from being an object of affection. She certainly didn’t seem to dress for attention, preferring the plain blouses and loose slacks of a working professional. They did a good job of hiding what was probably an impressive set of cleavage. Adrian guessed that probably wasn't on accident.

“This part here,” Christine said, tapping on the notes without looking up. “I’m not so sure anymore that it’s ‘the last person to do you a favor’. I think it might be more specific. Maybe, ‘the last person to give you a gift’?”

“Good to know,” Adrian said, nodding as Christine put the correction down on his notes.

“Give me just a second to cross-reference something,” she said as she rifled through the bookshelf at the back of her office. She hadn’t looked at him once even while they’d exchanged words, but that was ok. Adrian didn’t need a friend, he needed an expert.

The section he had her working on described a ritual used to contact…something. An entity. Christine said the word was too bound up in the cultures of the time to translate literally. Whatever it was, it was supposed to give the one who summoned it a boon. An early version of the ‘demonic pact’ myth, Christine had speculated. Adrian was hoping it was more than just a myth. If it worked it could save him from the miserable fate he’d been consigned to.

The ritual required, among a rather arcane setup - candles, chalked out geometries, the usual such fare - six offerings: a lock of hair from the last person to tell you a secret, an article of clothing from the last person to give you a gift, the spit of the last person who you had spoken to, the image of the last person you had seen, the blood of the last person you had lain with, and the name of the last person to make you a promise written by their own hand. Some of those were going to be harder to get than others, but Adrian had a plan for each of them. One of them he’d already gotten his hands on: Doctor Merrill’s signature was on the prescription he had written earlier that day, and Adrian figured the doctor’s milquetoast commitment to “keep trying” was good enough to count as a promise.

Importantly, the ritual had to be completed at midnight under a full moon. That was tonight, which meant that Adrian would have to move fast to secure his offerings or else wait another month. That wouldn’t have been the end of the world necessarily, but anticipation sat heavy in Adrian’s gut. He didn’t want to wait. He wanted to know, as soon as possible, whether he would be cured or proven a fool.

The time ticked by slowly for Adrian as Christine did the final proofreading of his notes. It was only as the hour drew near to a close that she spoke up again. “Well, I don’t see any other mistakes…”

“But?”

“But there’s still a lot I can’t be certain of. Like this word here,” she said as she indicated a point on the open page. “I don’t recognize it. I think it might be a name, but not one I’ve ever come across before. And a lot of the details are still vague. It isn’t clear what…”

“The instructions are clear though, right?”

“Yeah, sure. But the important question is why they thought any of this was worth doing in the first place. Where did these practices develop? And why? You know, if I was allowed to consult with some of my colleagues, they might be able to offer some insight.” Christine looked up at him with a dim fire behind her eyes. “When exactly were you planning on letting me publish my findings again?”

Adrian drummed his fingers on her desk. “Actually, I’ve been giving that some thought and I think I’m ready to let you off your leash. Next time we meet you can go ahead and do whatever you want.” Of course, he didn’t plan on seeing her again after this.

Not knowing that, a smile broke out across Christine’s face. “Really?” she asked, hungry. “You mean it?”

“Sure,” he said with a shrug.

Christine practically squealed as she spun around in her chair. “Alright, well then there’s a lot I’ll need to get ready. When did you want to meet again?”

“My schedule's a little up in the air. I’ll let you know in the next day or two after my manager gets back to me with my hours.”

“Right, right. Makes sense.” Christine was already busy rifling through her papers.

Alright, Adrian told himself. It was time to get what he needed. He smoothed down his shirt and put on a slightly concerned expression. “Christine…” he began gently. “You are the right person for the job, right?”

She looked up and blinked. “What? Yes.” Then more firmly, “Of course. I’m an expert on Assyrian culture and history. Trust me. Why? Did Roger say something to you?”

“I have no idea who that is. It’s just, I know that sometimes people can get to where they are by maybe cutting some corners here and there.” He was fishing here, but time was short. Best to go for it.

“What?” Christine asked, clearly insulted. “I’ve shown you how good I am already. I’d like to see someone else make as much progress as I have, and under such limiting conditions.” She said that last part with a glare.

“I know, you’re right,” he placated. He didn’t need her angry with him. “I don’t know what I was thinking, sorry. You’re serious though? You’ve never copied someone’s answers or grabbed an essay from online somewhere? Everyone’s done it at least once.”

“Never,” she said, aghast. Then a brief pause. “Well, never on anything that mattered anyway.”

There it was. Adrian seized on the opportunity immediately. “What does that mean?”

She waved him off. “Like I said, it doesn’t matter.”

“Oh come on,” he laughed. “You can’t leave me hanging. It’d be nice to know that the great, soon-to-be-Dr. Sharpe is as human as the rest of us.”

Christine fidgeted uncomfortably. “It’s just…freshman year in undergrad I may have…used some answers I got from a friend for a psychology test.” Her blush showed furiously against her light skin. “But it was just a gen ed class. It didn’t matter. And like I told you, I’m an expert.” She said that last part tapping the book with her gloved fingers. “Let me publish and I’ll show you.”

Adrian nodded. “I took it to you for a reason,” he told her. “It was stupid of me to doubt you.”

Adrian extended his hand out and, after a beat, Christine shook it. “Next time?” she asked.

“Next time,” he confirmed.

A confession of cheating on some nothing test almost a decade ago wasn’t the deepest, darkest secret he could have imagined…but it was a secret. Benign as it was, it should work. It was almost too easy to grab the hairbrush from the corner of Christine’s desk as he packed up.