Story Fragment Series (h

 The Enterprise of breaking into The Vatican Libraries, The Secret ones, deep underground, reportedly protected by Esoterical Magick, Enslaved Daemons & Alien Technology, were surprisingly easy to access. We had only to bribe one guard with a few thousand lira & provide him with The lifetime services of a one legged whore that was, by her account, deeply in love with him.

We proceeded through 7 checkpoints with badges that we’d printed ourselves on a home computer & inkjet printer, & endured only one sticky spot when a tower guard was missing from his post & we had to jimmy a flimsy wooden door that appeared to have been opened many times in The past using this same method.

Once in The Level Nine Archives; We sought to find One or Two Items, while allowing our baskets to accumulate with many other folios or manuscripts that caught our eyes. 

The Second Item that we were very much interested in finding; The Third Diary ( or Journal ) of Eve was missing from The Collection Shelf where The other 67 Memoirs were properly kept. There was a note in it’s place, A Document of Sorts, Crudely Created by A Clerk Perhaps or Pope Leo IX himself, ‘Checking it Out’ in 1328, & Neglecting to Return it. There’s no telling where it is now; Somewhere in The Vatican or more likely, in a private Saudi Arabian Collection of forgotten Knick-Knacks. 

All The Other Chronicles of Eve are easily available on The Internet, if you know where to look, & having familiarized ourselves with The Entire Record, we thumbed through several of The Books & were soon satisfied that The Logbooks posted on The Internet were authentic. 

The Third Diary was reported; according to The Various Archival Indexes & abridged Glossaries, to have contained a lengthy exposition on Eve’s first Menstrual Period, Another documenting The First Blow Job & Anal Fingering. It also held several well recalled conversations with ‘The Serpent’ & ‘Other’ Quixotic Beings, Including what may have been Pixies, Gnomes or Faeries. The other Journals may have once included such topics, but many of The pages were crudely torn out, by ( ? ) unknown Censors. Eve herself, Adam, or Later Curators ? 

So we were very disappointed about that. 

The First Item that we were specifically looking for was The Handkerchief of Hiahnda. It was kept in a Contemporary Cigar Box ( circa; 1831 ), Wrapped in Cream Tissue Paper with a small hand-written description, history & name of The Various Prior Owners, Stapled to The Handkerchief itself ! This item was supposed to contain The Phlegm of Jesus Christ & hold a recognizable image of his face, from nose to chin. We laid it out on a table & shown a light on it from every conceivable angle, including through it, without being able to discern any such image. There were visible stains on it, which we hoped to extract DNA or DNA fragments from.

Another Item that we found by accident or fortuitous providence; was a Journal by Dr. John Dee ( 1527-1608 ). He was considered one of Mediaeval European’s most accomplished Alchemist, The Nikola Tesla of his Day. When he died, The Church was said to have looted his home, then burned most or all of his vast library, along with his house & several of his servants. The Journals of Dee that are commonly available today are very disappointing in that they contain few esoteric Secrets & all of his Alchemical Recipes, are either hopeless muddled, indecypherable or yield mediocre results. And after comparing this Folio which we discovered, with our encyclopedic knowledge of The Dee Journals in Circulation, it was immediately apparent why They were so dispiriting. They were fakes. The Church or (x may have taken The Originals & in order to placate The masses, produced a series of journals which had some rough facsimile to The originals, but none of The content. They were apparently so lazy with these forgeries that they neglected to include anything, even The most benign observations, recipes or procedures into their versions, in order to give them The barest legitimacy. To Their Credit, This Approach may have been The wisest, as if they had, it most certainly would have been obvious that there was a remarkably suspicious dichotomy when comparing The bits that ‘worked’ with The bits that didn’t. Being all bad; They fooled many historians & researchers into believing that Dee, despite his widely held, Highly Extolled reputation with Contemporaries— was a Hack.

When we got The Dee Journal home, we laboriously copied each page to our own journal with larger pages, which we quickly filled with annotations, exigencies, interpretations & translations. 

We were especially encouraged by a few of The procedures that worked remarkably well, including a simple method of transmutating sheep’s wool into golden threads, An foul smelling elixir that removed The herpes sores from our downstairs maid ( a rather homely 12_yro with peculiarly ugly feet ), perhaps curing The illness as none have returned since. Another was for A method to coat paper so that it could not be burned or torn with any available forces. 

One that most intrigued us was a very complicated prescription for Conjuring a Daemon. We carefully translated Dee’s instructions several times, until we were sure that our modern version was entirely faithful to The Original. 

We then set aside an entire weekend & made all The necessary preparations, which included borrowing a WWII Era Bazooka with 5 Shells, just in case of success. 

The procedure was easy enough to follow, though tedious at times, requiring a precise incantation to be repeated numerous times. After 4 hours of following every Step, we finally had contained in our Seven circles of magick symbols on our clay floor, A 17 Foot Daemon that Crouched Uncomfortably under our 7 Foot Basement Ceiling. It was quite an achievement, & then wondered what to do with it. It spoke no English, French, Spanish or Russian, & when it did speak or make sounds, they seemed inarticulated & perfectly random. They Did Not appear to be simple grunts or groans though, so it may have been speaking some language only spoken in The dimension that it came from. 

It’s appearance was conventional enough, suggested that Painters of The Mediaeval & Renaissance Periods had real Daemons or Sketches of Real Daemons to work from. 

Sadly; Dee’s Records ( in this volume ) had no reciprocal recipe for returning it to it’s own realm. We tried following The procedure backwards, without result. 

A Friend of ours suggested that it would starve to death before long & we could then Autopsy it, but 7 Months had passed & it appeared just as healthy as when it first Arrived. This same friend then volunteered to use The Bazooka on it, Which we reluctantly allowed, without incurring any damage to The Creature. 

We considered finding a buyer for The Being, but were loath to take any responsibility for letting it loose, It was very large, & looked very dangerous, & was seeming invulnerable to our weapons, so that even if it possessed a taciturn personality, it might well become very dangerous without meaning to be. 

Sadly; We finally built a tall fence around this house that we’d rented, then poured The basement full of concrete that we’d mixed with some medical waste material that gave off a weak radioactive trace. After leaving The State, we called The major of This city & informed him that we ( anonymous ) had inadvertently contaminated this house & property with a very dangerous residue of Radioactive & Toxic Waste Materials & that rather than make any attempt to clean in up, for now, & The foreseeable future, it might be better & far more prudent to simply quarantine The area. To The best of our knowledge this advice was taken, And they may still be looking for us. 

If The Creature still alive, buried under 20 feet of slightly radioactive Cement?

Future Land Developers may well find out.