Read No Evil, Part 1 of 2

By Daniel Lev Shkolnik

Professor Jubilee was dead. As she lay in her office, investigators circled her body, pausing to take photos. Their white gloves crawled among her belongings like cave creatures blindly searching for food.

“Professor Rhine, help me understand,” said the detective, “why would your wife write her final words in a language no one could read?”

“I’ve told you already, I don’t know.”

“We were told the letters come from a certain book she was translating, the—”

“The Lockhart Codex,” said Professor Rhine.

“We were told you are the foremost expert on this language—second only to the victim.”

“No one is an expert in this language. People have been trying to translate it since it was first discovered a century ago. Linguists, anthropologists, cryptographers. It’s like no language we know of. No one can decipher it.”

“Maybe you’ll be the second person in the world to crack it.” The detective turned to look at the body of Rachel Jubilee.

“It looks like she was the first.”

On the floor beside her was a single sentence written in the same language as the codex. The letters were traced in her own blood.

“We’d appreciate your cooperation, Professor.”

That night, Professor Lucas Rhine shot up in bed. His eyes darted back and forth as if seeking a black predator in the shadows of his room. Leaving the sheets like a troubled sea behind him, he made his way to his desk. He spilled out the contents of his briefcase and pushed everything aside except the photo the detective had given him. On the edge of the photograph, he could see her bloody fingers, curled up like a crab—in the center was her final sentence.

Lucas Rhine pulled a robe over his shoulders and descended into his basement. He moved aside the dusty exercise bike and made his way to the very back of the cellar where he kept his old notes on the codex. Water had browned the corners of some of the cardboard boxes. They were numbered up through 32.

As he looked at the archive, he felt something brush against his ankle. He screamed and shot his flashlight left and right. Nothing moved. All he saw was a lumpy underworld of his own forgotten things. “I need to call an exterminator,” he said.

Professor Rhine carried box 32 up the stairs and let it thunk atop his desk. These were the final pages he’d written on the subject before he abandoned hope of ever translating the book. He looked through the old notes until he was sure that the words Rachel had written were not a quotation from the codex. They formed an original sentence.

“How did she do it?” he said.

The Lockhart Codex, named after the collector who discovered it, appeared in the late 1800s, but was written several centuries earlier. Mr. Lockhart became obsessed with the manuscript, convinced its pages contained a great secret. No one took him seriously. He spent years attempting to translate it on his own and over time became increasingly paranoid, believing someone else was after the secret. He entrusted the book to a university librarian and promised to return in three days but was never heard from again.

Professor Rhine remembered how he and Rachel first learned about the strange book. They were grad students at the time. Many people had already tried and failed to translate the manuscript. Their professors warned them that if they hoped to build respectable careers for themselves, they should leave the book alone. Neither of them listened. They studied the Lockhart Codex together, published in academic journals together, and eventually became the foremost scholars on the ob-

scure book. While they could never translate a single sentence, their dogged attempts resulted in unexpected contributions to cryptography, linguistic analysis, and medieval symbology. After the heart attack, everything changed.

Lucas awoke in the hospital with a haunting sense that he had wasted his life. “Rachel,” he said, “the book—maybe it doesn’t mean anything?”

She looked at him as if he were a stranger. “It means everything.”

Try as he did, Lucas couldn’t bring himself to continue working on the codex. Rachel on the other hand spent more and more of her life in its pages. He would go to sleep alone while she labored under a green library lamp. In the end, a series of massive arguments tore through their marriage, each worse than the last.

“If you’re not here to help,” she said, “then leave.”

He moved out. And although they did not divorce, she began to teach and publish papers about the Lockhart Codex under her maiden name, Jubilee. At the time of her death, they hadn’t spoken in two years.

As the sun rose in Professor Rhine’s window, it found him writing furiously. Two empty pen cartridges rolled at his elbow. The whites of Professor Rhine’s eyes were cracked with veins. His shirt was yellow under the pits. It was in this state that Lucas Rhine tore through the department of cryptology and barged into the office of Steven Baxter.

“Baxter!” The professor waved the Lockhart Codex in front of his nose and slammed it atop the cryptographer’s paperwork. “I was wrong. There is a translation. I’m certain of it.”

“Lucas, you look terrible.”

Professor Rhine snatched up a piece of chalk and began wildly scratching symbols into the nearest blackboard. “I need you to run a statistical analysis on the distribution of letters in the book. I know we’ve tried that before, but this time I want to—”

“Lucas, are you working on this to help the investigation?”

“The investigation?” Professor Rhine stopped his assault on the chalkboard.

“The detectives came by my office last night.”

“What for?”

“They came to ask about you. About you and Rachel.” “Baxter, we don’t have time for this. This could be the biggest discovery of our careers. You were working with her up until the end. You must know something. What was the last conversation you had with her? What were her final ideas before the breakthrough? We can re-create it. We can publish together!”

“Stop it, Lucas.”

Professor Rhine’s smile disappeared. He wiped his face with his hands and leaned against a bookshelf.

In silence, Dr. Baxter stared at the old codex that now sat on his table. Its dark leather cover curled at the edges. He thought of all the years of work that had disappeared between its pages—all the minds it had lured with mystery and promise. One by one, it consumed them all. A chill ran through him.

“Baxter, please, I beg you. What was the last thing she did before she translated the codex?”

“She went to visit someone she believed had already done it.”

“Someone already cracked it? Who? Has it been published already? Baxter! How haven’t I heard about this? Where are they? What institute are they a part of?”

“He’s at Beacon Heights.”

“The psychiatric hospital?” Lucas looked at him without understanding. “He’s a psychiatrist?”

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