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FILE 017 · VOL II · Something Answered
Close This Book Before It Writes Your Name
Close it before it writes your name.
Based on: Grimoires and Living Spellbooks
Intake record
| Recovered from | Used bookstore, back room, estate box marked MISC. OCCULT |
|---|---|
| Contents | One hand-bound book, untitled; the store owner's inventory notebook |
| Finder | Q. Harlan, bookseller |
| Status | The book's page count changes each time it is inventoried. |
Recovered file
There is a manuscript in the Beinecke Library at Yale that nobody can read. It is called the Voynich manuscript. It is about six hundred years old, written in an alphabet that matches no known language, illustrated with plants that do not exist and pools of water full of small naked women connected by tubes. Cryptographers have attacked it for a century. Codebreakers who cracked military ciphers in two world wars failed on it. Nobody knows who wrote it, or for whom. [1]
In 2009, scientists at the University of Arizona carbon-dated its vellum to the early 1400s. It is real. It is old. And it is not the only book like it. In Stockholm there is a thirteenth-century manuscript called the Codex Gigas, so large it takes two people to lift. Legend says a monk wrote the entire thing in a single night after making a bargain with the devil. Its most famous page is a full-length portrait of him. [2]
Quinn Harlan had always assumed it was a hoax. Then a book like it came into her store in a box of paperbacks, and she understood that it might simply have been written for someone else.
The rest of this file is sealed. The ending, the sources and the archivist's note unseal with the file.
Unseal File 017 ($2.99) · its volume · everything ($49.99)
Built on real, cited records. The stories are dramatized. Disclaimer · If you are in crisis in the U.S., call or text 988.