As she turned the vellum page, with more firmness than was perhaps necessary considering the age of the manuscript, a liberal blanket of dust shifted in protest. In the flickering of the electric lamp the air shimmered as the particles were gently dispersed into an allergy infested web across her face. She wrinkled her nose at the musty smell before sneezing three times in quick succession, finishing with a curse for amateur collectors and a final scowl of annoyance for the Professor.
Yanking her glasses off her head she massaged the pink indentations they had left on her skin, before fishing up her sleeve for a crumpled tissue and blowing her nose rather vigorously. Sighing she stretched back on her chair in an attempt to wake her stiff muscles. She rubbed half-heartedly at the tiredness pricking at her eyes, which only succeeded in causing the remnants of the mascara applied early that morning to crumble in unattractive black clumps around her eyes.
Unnoticing she tilted her wrist towards the light, peering at the small face of her watch, before realising she had taken her glasses off. Reaching for the familiar wire frames she crammed them back on, blinking furiously as her eyes adjusted, and finally groaning at the hour.
The room was a dark windowless box so she had been unable to gage the passage of time. Her stomach rumbled in furious objection to the many frustrating hours she must have spent pouring over the manuscript. At least the owner was not so amateurish as to allow food and drink in his archive. Though at this moment she would have gladly sold her own grandmother if it meant she could have a slice of cake or even a soggy pre-packaged sandwich.
Palaeography, she bemoaned to herself, was quite simply evil. It made her eyes hurt, her head spin, and always made her unaccountably hungry. The Professor, who was supervising her doctorate, had commanded her to visit this small archive in the private residence of some titled and undoubtedly bearded gent. She had been packed off on an early morning train with only a post-it-note with the manuscript number scribbled across it and the mysterious words “it’s said to hide a marvellous treasure.”
As she looked down at the supposed treasure, she decided that the Professor was clearly seeking vengeance for her late and less than adequate submission the week before. The manuscript was in bad shape due to years of mistreatment and visually it was far from impressive. The writing of the scribe hurried across the page in a cramped hand, making her laborious Latin translations even more protracted. The only thing luxurious about it was the paper itself, which did not correspond with the dry, boring and rather unimportant information scrawled upon it.
The stern tirade that was sure to greet her if she returned to the Professor empty handed prompted her to have another cursory thumb through the wretched document. As she turned the page, careful of a second potential dust cloud, she paused to admire the quality and lack of imperfections in the vellum. It was then with the light shining behind the skin that she saw the minute scratches. Something had been written on the vellum, scratched off, and then deliberately and carefully written over as if to disguise the original text.
Hurriedly she grabbed her pencil and notepad and began a hasty transcription. She could not complete all the words and some of the Latin nouns were a nuisance but finally she was able to drop the page and re-read her own writing. Her heat began beating faster as she realised what lay before her and the secrets it exposed.
Grabbing her bag from under the table she stuffed her notebook inside and folding her glasses up tucked them into her cardigan pocket. She needed to get outside and use her mobile. She didn’t need to look to know that there would be no available service in the windowless box. As she stood her chair screeched across the floor, the sound echoing in the silence.
It was only then that she registered the depth of the silence. Where was the archivist? Rationally she realised that he too had probably felt the need for sustenance, but her heart hitched nonetheless as she glanced around her into the dark corners of the room. She had always been afraid of the dark.
Had she imagined that or was that a noise?
“Hello?” She called out shakily as her hand scrabbled in her bag for something heavy. She alighted on her hairbrush. The ridiculousness of the situation made her want to laugh. If there was somebody hidden in the dark, wielding an old brush, with half the bristles fallen off, was hardly going to stop them. “I was just leaving.” She backed slowly towards the door as she continued nervously, “Thank you for the trouble of opening the archive and everything. I hope your employer is not too severe on you.”
She tripped before she managed to reach the door, dropping her phone as she flapped furiously in an attempt to regain her balance. She knelt, blindly searching the floor in the darkness. Her hands came across something sticky and she retracted them swiftly in repulsion. As she stood up she looked at her hands. It was dark and she didn’t have her glasses on but she hoped very much that it was melted chocolate from a contraband snack of a previous academic that darkened her fingertips, and not what she feared it was.
The phone forgotten in her panic she leapt with surprising agility over the object that had caused her to trip and barrelled through the door. Heart pounding painfully in her chest she dashed up the wooden staircase, her heels making a resounding crack with every step she took. When she had said to her friends that palaeography would be the end of her, she had imagined herself slumped cross-eyed with boredom over some antediluvian tome, not fleeing with a bloody secret squashed between her dog-eared Mills & Boon novel and spare socks.
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