The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [47]
“Yes.”
He turned to Tosh. “Sorry, boy.”
He opened the door and flipped a switch to his right. In a circle all around the room, the spotlights were joined by small lamps that were connected to the upright beams of bookshelves. There were no windows in the entire room.
“I think of this as my city,” Mr. Forrest said to me. “I shut the door, and the world falls away. I can be in here for hours, come out, and have no idea what time it is.”
He brought me over to a long table. I couldn’t resist running my hand along its shiny surface.
“It’s from New Zealand,” he said. “Made from an old railroad bridge. Heavy as hell and it cost me a fortune, but I love it.”
He stooped over to the center of the table and drew toward him a large, flat box made of cardboard.
“These are archival boxes,” he said. “I keep color plates in here and some letter prints, which arrived yesterday. They were horribly packaged in recycled freezer bags. The horror!”
He opened the box. The first letter I saw was an H under a cloudy sheet of what I took to be tracing paper.
“See, it’s perfect that you came today. Though I admit I’m partial to the S in most medieval alphabets.”
He picked up the H by swiftly lifting it in what he explained was its protective vellum, then opened it in front of me.
“See their faces?” he said. “Usually they are so stoic. But this artist challenged convention by making the characters within the letters have expressions. I didn’t know it until I saw them in person, but I won’t be able to sell these. At least not yet.”
Mr. Forrest reminded me of a geeky kid I knew at school. He spent most of his time in the audiovisual room, tinkering with sound equipment. In the cafeteria, he had once spoken so excitedly about the qualities of static that everyone grew silent until David Cafferty, a jock who was missing his two front teeth from being kicked in the mouth during football practice, began the avalanche of laughter that buried him.
“How old are these?” I asked.
“Sixteenth century, but besides the faces, what makes them special is that they were drawn by a monk who’d taken a vow of silence. I like to think this was the only way he could communicate. Wait, you’ll see.”
Mr. Forrest quickly took each letter out of the box and arranged them down the length of the table in their folded vellum.
“It’s a story,” he said. “I haven’t figured it all out yet, but from the lance one of the figures carries and the frequency of certain colors, I believe the monk was telling his own story.”
I looked at the H in front of me. Two figures comprised the verticals. Across the horizontal, one figure was passing something to the other.
“Is this food?” I asked. I thought of my mother’s ruined casserole.
“Good, Helen,” Mr. Forrest said. “That would be grain. The plates tell the story of the harvest, which was very common, but they also tell this other story. There, now, we have them in order. Come follow the plates with me.”
Mr. Forrest circled around the other side of the table and joined me at A.
“This is the figure to watch,” he said, pointing at a male figure who had what looked like a bowl cut. “See how he’s dressed in blue and gold?”
“Yes.”
“He will be in almost all the letters. This was very unusual. These alphabets are largely decorative, and to draw too much attention to any repeating figure was not done.”
“Here he is again,” I said, pointing to the C.
We walked slowly down the length of the table together. I studied each letter and followed the blue-and-gold figure.
“I take it your father isn’t home?”
“He’s supposed to be in Erie.”
“How is he these days?”
“If I could get my driver’s license, I could at least do the grocery shopping.”
I reached the X and leaned in close. On the slant that began on the left, there was a figure who could have been sleeping. On the slant that began farther right and crossed over the body of the sleeping figure was the blue-and-gold figure. He held only the handle of the lance. The rest was buried in the sleeping figure.
“He murdered someone!” I said.
“Bravo, Helen! Very good! It