9. An excerpt from the diary of Julian Triton
This day and age represents so many unique opportunities to create! In my time there was music (if you were a member of the church), theatre (if you did passion or mystery plays), writing (if you were a priest), and art (if you wished to illuminate religious texts). No wonder they called it the dark ages!
Now the whole world is made of light and not the kind of light one in my condition must shun. The process of sitting in a darkened movie house for the first time was, to say the least, an immensely emotional experience – and I hate showing emotion; emotion makes one soft and the soft are subjugated. So imagine my pleasure at seeing a sunrise for the first time in – I don’t even know how long. How great is Mr. Edison and his machine for broadcasting light even as I sit her in darkness.
This book, this pen and this ink, ill gotten as I can make them, will be my confessional. I will trust my agent to deposit it in the safest bank in the New World. Trust! Well, I trust as I will. Do I not also have a key?
The confessional! As in all literature, the antagonist seeks out his own demise, and what am I if not antagonistic? He stupidly leaves clues for the powers of good. The better the villain, the more worthy the hero must be. Well. I state here now – for whoever is able to find the source, defeat the security and crack the code – thank you for being a worthy adversary. Now, please do your best to protect yourself because my secret cannot be told unless one of us is destroyed.
The last time I tried this everyone but me was destroyed. That and a scriptorium and the town in which it was built. Oh, the intricacies of building a library for the greater good!
But enough of this babble! I ask you; do you have the courage? Or will you become one of thousands and thousands of victims I’ve left in my wake throughout the centuries?
The coding was not a problem, really. What kind of a linguist would I be if I hadn’t lived all these years? Language is what defines all civilization and the language of any land is the language of the victors. I speak dozens of languages and am partial to Greek, as you must know. I can hardly remember my native tongue. Only certain words float back to me – usually in nightmares. Mine was a tough upbringing and the language was as tough as the land and the people who boasted that they’d never been conquered. So the language was as rudimentary and crude as the landscape and its people.
Much later in my education was I to realize that in order to truly conquer you must not only impose your will on people – you must also have a culture to impose upon them. So I studied the great civilizations of the great conquerors; the art, culture and language of war. But that was to come later.
“And now do you understand the key to this code?”
And with a rush of air, that Leticia realized was her own breath, she was awake and panting as the library, the sun, the books and the dangerous, beautiful man faded into the distance. All that was left was the smell of the book. That smell and that diary she still couldn’t read, even though she was on page four.
“Wait. How did I get on page four?”
“Are you all right Miss Reed?
And for the second time in as many minutes, Leticia Walker Reed started. It was the librarian who’d shown her the books on Spanish and Caltilian dictionaries.
“I’m terribly sorry. I must have dozed off.”
“I thought so too but you were turning pages…”
“While asleep?”
“I assumed you were squinting. It happens a lot here.”
“I.. ah… thank you.”
Leticia was feeling so many emotions that she couldn’t get them straight and she knew only one person to talk to. In a manner of speaking. She exited the San Francisco Public library and crossed the street to her hotel.
She rushed past a display in the library’s atrium celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Pony Express. Had the mail service been in existence that day, Leticia Walker Reed would own a per centage of its debt.
