Entry #2: The Words of St. Jerome (1864)

St. Jerome of Stridonium

Born Eusebios Sophronios Ieronymos, St. Jerome was a Catholic priest from Illyria, now known as Albania. He is recognized as a Doctor of the Catholic Church for his work translating the Bible into Latin from the original Hebrew and Greek. The product of his labors, the Vulgate, is the official Latin translation used by the Catholic Church to this day.

As a Catholic saint, he serves as the patron saint of archaeologists, librarians, and translators.

*          *          *

After half a lifetime of studying, I had finally done it. I had an office of my own in one of the most prestigious universities in the world. Granted, it was a dusty storage room in one of Cambridge’s many old basements, but it had a desk, and it had my name on the door: Israel St. James, M.A. My master’s degree diploma occupied a prominent place on the wall behind my desk, in a surprisingly decent frame considering my meager salary as an assistant curator.

Occupying an equally prominent place on my desk in front of me was a piece of paper of which I was much less proud: the latest rejection letter from the college council regarding my request for a research grant. Without research, I could not produce any productive work within the college, which meant no doctoral thesis and no Ph.D. I didn’t know what I would do at Cambridge without a doctorate. No historian or archaeologist ever got anywhere without a doctorate, and after what I had seen, I certainly wasn’t about to go into teaching.

Of course, the council’s attitude toward my field was perfectly understandable. I had no chance of convincing them that ancient relics in general held any weight as a topic of study without telling them of my real interest. To test the waters, I had approached several senior members of the faculty, men who held considerable influence with the council, and hinted to them about the true nature of my interests. I wasn’t about to tell them that I was hunting historical relics with unusual, even supernatural powers, but I attempted to draw a rough picture in the hope that at least one of them would be interested enough to appeal to the council on my behalf.

To say that they were unimpressed would be putting it politely. Most of them simply dismissed my claims as silly rumors, the sort of thing an undergraduate would fantasize about. A few of them actually laughed me out of their offices. The nicest one actually showed me a bit of sympathy, stopping short of outright rejection but encouraging me to put aside these fancies lest I forfeit my place in the college entirely. It was fortunate that I hadn’t been given any classroom responsibilities, he said, or else knowledge of my behavior might spread among the students. The implication was that I would do less damage to Cambridge’s sterling reputation as long as I stayed squirreled away in the basement among the stockrooms and archives.

Well, if I was going to be stuck in a basement, I might as well get settled in. A large wooden crate had arrived at the office only that morning, labeled only as my personal possessions and research materials to allay suspicion. I pried off the side and pulled away the packing straw to reveal the polished brass casing of Archimedes’ Apothecary, the relic to beat all relics. I positioned the large vault against one wall of the office, with a heavy cloth nearby in case I ever had a visitor whom I didn’t want to frighten off, and I twisted the dials on the side to zero. When I released the catch, the door swung open, and I withdrew the catalog that listed every relic contained in the Apothecary and the equations for locating them within it. There were thousands of years of history in that box, and it would all have to be catalogued and transcribed, but for now, I turned to a page with a picture of a bronze pot, the Novoscope.

The Novoscope had been built by Zhang Heng, one of the great scientific geniuses of China’s Han Dynasty. In AD 132, Zhang Heng had built a similar device with a pendulum linked to a ring of eight dragon heads, each holding a small bronze ball that would drop if the pendulum moved. The device was sensitive enough to detect the slightest tremor in the earth, and was in effect the world’s first seismometer, able to determine the direction of an earthquake by observing which dragon dropped its ball. Near the end of his life, he built the Novoscope to detect similar tremors in reality, supposedly similar to those created by the manifestations of a relic as it generated its supernatural effects.

After I deciphered the equations in the catalog, I dialed in the combination on the Apothecary’s dials and released the catch. I opened the door and gently lifted the Novoscope onto the floor near the far wall, where I could clearly see it from my desk in case anything happened. Like its more mundane predecessor, it looked like an ordinary bronze pot, except that it had a figure of a dragon on its lid, gesturing with one claw like an ancient Chinese weathercock. Around the outside of the jar were a series of rings inscribed with Chinese rod numerals, similar to tick marks in the West with a line drawn across a group of four to represent five, and so forth. If the Novoscope detected a relic, the dragon would rotate to indicate the bearing to the event, and the numeral rings would align beneath the dragon’s head to indicate the distance to the event in li, the basic unit of distance in the Han Dynasty, with 1 li equal to about 416 meters.

With the essential tasks of office decoration done, I set to my work with the rest of the relics and documents in the Apothecary, listing their names and properties and transcribing the various books that had been kept inside by the House of Wisdom. I also had plenty of ordinary work to do from the college archivist, but I needed to be careful to keep my work with the Apothecary private. I couldn’t allow any of the relics in my care to be mixed in with the pieces on display behind glass upstairs, lest unpleasantries occur among the public.

Not three days later, I heard a gonging noise from the Novoscope. The dragon began to rotate, and the numeral rings spun around beneath it. I immediately set down my fountain pen and scrambled to find my world map, protractor, and ruler to lay down a range and bearing to the event. When the Novoscope settled, though, I had to put away my map, because it wouldn’t be of use for this occasion. The distance to the event, according to the Novoscope, was only about one li. Whatever this relic was, it was somewhere inside Cambridge, in the Theology department if my mental map of the university was accurate.

When I reached the theology department, the first thing I saw was a horde of concerned students in the hallway. I had seen students like that before when a scheduled lecture was delayed, but this crowd had an additional undercurrent of rumor running through it. I couldn’t quite hear what the scuttlebutt was, but these students were definitely worried about something other than a missed class.

Eventually, I found an office belonging to a professor in the theology department and worked my way through to it. I found the professor sitting at his desk, with a postgraduate assistant at a smaller desk near the door. “Excuse me, but I heard about the trouble you’ve been having. Is there anything I can do?”

“I rather doubt it, I’m afraid,” said the professor. “Are you a doctor?”

“No, I’m an assistant curator in the history department.”

“And what exactly makes you think that an assistant curator has any expertise to offer regarding Dr. Pidgeon’s condition?” I was already tired of the theology department.

“It depends. Has Dr. Pidgeon received any unusual shipments lately?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. He received a package this morning from the Vatican Archives.”

“Is that unusual? Was he expecting a package?”

“He was not, but such an arrival is hardly unusual. You see, Dr. Pidgeon is also Reverend Pidgeon. He is on good terms with the Catholic Church. We assumed that he received the package as an academic behest from Rome.”

“That must have been quite an honor, for your department to receive a gift like that,” I said, trying to appeal to his pride. I felt that I had some bridges to mend. “Now, what exactly can you tell me about what’s happened to Dr. Pidgeon?”

“Not sure. I went in to speak with him this morning to see what he’d received from the Vatican, and he spoke to me in gibberish.”

“What? Do you mean that he was just babbling nonsense?”

“Not precisely nonsense. He was speaking a mixture of languages. He’s fluent in several languages, but some of the words he said to me . . . I could swear that he didn’t speak those languages, but he was speaking them nonetheless.”

I was only a novice at hunting for occult relics, but that sounded like a tallyho if ever I heard one. “Professor, exactly what did Dr. Pidgeon receive from the Vatican?”

“Excuse me, sir,” said the graduate student at the other desk, “but I’m afraid I didn’t catch your name.”

“Israel St. James, from the history department.”

“I thought so,” he said. “Professor, you remember what I told you the other day about Mr. St. James, don’t you?”

“Ah, yes,” said the professor, “now I recognize you. The only survivor of the ill-fated expedition to the Baghdad House of Wisdom, who drove off a crew of pirates with a magic box.”

Damn. And everything had been going so well. I glared at the professor’s assistant, who had a smug, self-satisfied look on his face at having exposed the loony historian. I supposed it was acceptable for them that one of their faculty was losing his reason, as long as they could keep the American crackpot away from him.

“Tell me, Mr. St. James,” said the professor, “how have you found your illustrious career at the history department, riding as it did on the coattails of your late mentor?”

“My career is entirely the result of my own labors and merits, sir,” I said, trying to keep the rage out of my voice. The ridicule I already received in my own department was bad enough. I didn’t need to hear it from the rest of the university as well. “I am confident that I would be in a much better position if he were still alive to provide counsel.”

“Well, I won’t have you polluting these halls with any talk of mystical curses and such. Bad enough that the students all whisper and spread rumor, but I won’t have it made worse by an irresponsible and importunate member of the postgraduate staff. Good day, Mr. St. James.”

I left his office hat in hand with a death grip on the brim. The professor was sure to alert the other faculty to my presence, perhaps even summoning the university constabulary to guard Dr. Pidgeon’s office. If I didn’t act fast, I would never gain access to Dr. Pidgeon, and whatever relic he’d been sent might fall into someone else’s hands. Others might fall victim to the same condition as he. I couldn’t let that happen.

I quickly worked my way through the crowd and reached Dr. Pidgeon’s office door. Doing my best imitation of a renowned expert in babbling professors, I knocked on the door. I was greeted by a young put-upon assistant.

“I’m sorry, but the professor’s not seeing anyone today.”

“I’m aware of that, young man,” I said in my most posh Harley Street accent. I was banking pretty heavily on the bowler hat and Van Dyke to sell a certain level of expertise. “I’m here to evaluate Dr. Pidgeon’s condition.”

“Oh, are you the man they sent for? Well, come on in, then.” He opened the door and let me into the office.

The entire office was covered with strewn papers and documents, in languages from all over the world and throughout history. The professor was hard at work at his desk, with a small shipping crate lying open next to it spilling straw onto the carpet.

“Excuse me,” I asked the assistant, “but did that package arrive just today?”

“Yes, it was a special delivery from the Vatican,” said the assistant. “Why? Is it important?”

“Possibly,” I said as I approached the professor and took out my notebook for the look of the thing. “This may be the result of a fungus-borne toxin of some kind, perhaps a sort of mold in the packaging. I’ve seen this sort of thing before among archaeologists, curators, that sort of thing.” I was particularly proud of that piece of flummery. I would have to remember it for later.

While the assistant digested my false medical knowledge, I moved in on the crate, looking for any shipping information that might tell me what this relic was. I found what I was looking for in an envelope, and a fine one at that. It was a card with a message written in Latin in a delicate copperplate script, naming the gift from the Vatican as a reliquary containing a finger bone from St. Jerome. I looked up at Dr. Pidgeon, and I saw the reliquary hanging on a chain around his neck.

This was the part that I had not been eagerly anticipating. Since my encounter with the pirates, when they killed my old boss and nearly killed me, I had developed a sort of sixth sense regarding the relics in my charge. When the pirate captain had pried open the back of Archimedes’ Lost Apothecary, he had revealed the multi-dimensional mechanisms within. Oddly enough, it is not exactly beneficial to the human mind to look upon something with the phrase “multi-dimensional” in the name. All the pirates who had seen it were instantly driven insane and either dashed their own brains out on the ship’s railings or threw themselves into the ocean. Apparently, the event drove me insane in a more useful way, or else I just took it better than the others.

“I beg your pardon, Dr. Pidgeon?”

“Hai.”

“I need to examine your pendant. May I?”

He lifted it away from his chest and presented it to me for inspection, although he didn’t take the chain off of his neck. I took the pendant in my hand and leaned in close to view it up close.

The rush of information and knowledge I experienced from the pendant, like the one that I got from the Apothecary that day on the ship, is not something that can be easily expressed in words. It’s rather like describing an unfamiliar scent. I suddenly saw a series of images, depicting St. Jerome surrounded with pages and pages of text in every language. Latin and Greek mixed with old Teutonic texts, Chinese pictographs, Sumerian cuneiform, and Olmec hieroglyphics. Every text was being recited aloud by a different voice.

The sensation of suddenly understanding something, without the benefit of first having studied or deciphered anything, is one of the most jarring and disorienting experiences a man can undergo. Again, it’s not a simple sensation to convey. All I can say is that I suddenly understood the nature of the reliquary of St. Jerome.

The relic conveyed on its wearer the ability to understand any spoken or written language in existence, a distillation of St. Jerome’s talents and experience as a translator. The danger of the relic, and the fate that had befallen Dr. Pidgeon, was that anyone who wore it for too long would lose the ability to distinguish between languages. Anything they wrote or said would appear as a jumble, incomprehensible to anyone who didn’t comprehend language to the extent bestowed by the relic. The good news was that there seemed to be a way to cure Dr. Pidgeon of his condition, but the bad news was that given my reputation, I would be unlikely to convince anyone that my knowledge was valid. Dr. Pidgeon was likely to spend the rest of his life in Bethlem unless I could convince someone that I knew that of which I spoke.

When I came out of my knowledge-dumping trance, the professor’s assistant had gone. I don’t know exactly what I was doing while I was learning about the relic, but it could certainly have spooked him. Possibly he thought that I was succumbing to the same affliction that had struck Dr. Pidgeon, and he had fled in case it was contagious. I gently removed the relic from Dr. Pidgeon’s neck, took Dr. Pidgeon’s arm, and gently led him out of his office with the idea of getting him to the university sanatorium, but we were stopped in the hall by a pair of constables.

“Mr. St. James, the proctors would like a word. If you’d like to come with us, sir.”

I went along with them. It seemed that someone had filed a formal complaint about me this time. It suddenly became clearer where Dr. Pidgeon’s assistant had gone while I was out.

The constables hauled me back to the history department to stand before a hastily assembled panel of the college proctors. My guts tightened up when I spotted a familiar face among them: one of the members of the college council that had been the most vocal about preventing me from pursuing a doctorate. Any chance I had of objective, impartial treatment in this impromptu hearing had just evaporated.

“Well, well, Mr. St. James,” said the council member. “You have been stirring up trouble at the theology department, haven’t you?”

“Not at all, sir,” I said.

“Dr. Bradford, to whom you spoke, is a close personal friend of mine, Mr. St. James. He told me that he expressly forbade you from involving yourself in this . . . situation with Dr. Pidgeon. What’s more, Dr. Pidgeon’s assistant has accused you of impersonating a medical doctor. That is a serious accusation, Mr. St. James.”

“And it is absolutely untrue, sir,” I said. “At no time did I claim to be a doctor. I told Dr. Pidgeon’s assistant that I was there to evaluate his condition, which was exactly the case. He may have erroneously concluded that I was a doctor after I told him a small fib about a fungal infection, but that was only because he would not have understood the real cause of Dr. Pidgeon’s condition.”

“Ah, I was hoping we would come to that,” said the council representative. “Can you kindly state to this panel your explanation for Dr. Pidgeon’s condition?”

He had a smirk on his face. He had already decided not to believe whatever I told him. Well, to hell with him, then. I valued my career, but I valued my integrity far more.

“Dr. Pidgeon’s condition is a result of this relic, which he received in the post this morning.” I took the St. Jerome reliquary from my pocket. “It grants the wearer the ability to comprehend and translate any written or spoken language. Prolonged exposure, however, renders the wearer unable to distinguish between languages. The victim will speak and write in a random jumble of languages that is incomprehensible to anyone other than himself.”

The panel were snorting in derision. Of course. Things like this didn’t happen, after all.

“Of course, Mr. St. James. He was driven mad by a magic pendant. Next, you’ll be telling us how to treat Dr. Pidgeon, I imagine.”

“Indeed. Dr. Pidgeon must be prevented from contact with any and all written language for several weeks, and he must be spoken to in English frequently. With persistent immersion in his own spoken tongue, his normal linguistic faculties should return in no more than a month’s time.”

“Is that so? How do you come by this knowledge?”

“Well, suffice it to say that I just do.”

They stopped smiling. Apparently, whatever joke they had been sharing among themselves was now over, once it became clear that I would not debase myself for their amusement. “It does not suffice. An inability to explain these phenomena reflects a lack of comprehension on your part.”

“I am perfectly capable of explaining, if you are capable of believing.”

They didn’t like that one bit. “Mr. St. James, we grow weary of your prattling. Your lunatic hypotheses have no place in these halls.”

“Well, if you still do not believe me, then I propose a wager.”

“Oh, really, Mr. St. James…”

It was time to take my future in hand and leap off the precipice. “Follow my instructions regarding his care to the letter. If he regains his senses within the month, then you will cease obstructing my progress toward a Doctor of Philosophy degree.  If he does not, then I will vacate the university immediately, and you never have to hear my prattling again.”

That got their attention. I could see the wheels turning behind the council member’s eyes. I was giving him an easy way to get rid of me for good, and all he had to do was lend credence to my ideas for a month. He and the proctors deliberated among themselves for at least three minutes.

“Very well,” he finally said. “We will grant you a chance to put your unorthodox hypothesis to the test. If Dr. Pidgeon has not improved after one month of your specified treatment, you are to vacate the university and cease all studies here.”

“Agreed.”

For the next month, I checked in on Dr. Pidgeon to make sure that he was being kept away from all forms of the written word, and I had several conversations with him that mostly consisted of listening while he rambled on in foreign languages. I chimed in whenever he stuck to languages that I knew.

As the month passed, he began to use English more and more in his speech, only briefly lapsing into Russian or Greek or Cherokee. By the end of the month, he was completely cured, and I was once again summoned before a panel of proctors.

“Mr. St. James,” said the chairman of the panel, “it has been one month since Dr. Pidgeon was subjected to care as per your instructions. He has been examined by a professional psychiatrist and found to be cured of his affliction. Therefore, pursuant to the agreement between yourself and this panel, you will be permitted to remain with the university. I must confess, however, that although we are satisfied with your results, we remain dubious of your initial claims regarding this reliquary.”

I was relieved to be able to keep my position with the history department, but I had had just about enough of their blind cynicism. Wasn’t it enough that I was able to cure Dr. Pidgeon? “If you are still in doubt, I have some other relics in my office. Anyone who would like a demonstration can drop by, and I will do what I can to assuage your curiosity. In the meantime, if there is no more official business to discuss, I do have some work waiting for me on my desk.”

Not even the member of the council who stood in my way before could come up with a sound reason to detain me further, so I was released to my office.

Over the next week, I got more visitors to my gloomy little office than I had seen in my entire residence there to that point. I demonstrated the St. Jerome reliquary to most of them, being careful not to let anyone wear it for more than five minutes at a time lest they succumb to the same affliction that had befallen Dr. Pidgeon. I also showed several of them the Apothecary itself, and while most of them dismissed it as a conjuring trick at first, expecting me to produce a flock of doves or something similar, their misgivings were laid to rest when I showed them some of the documents that we had found inside it. Dismissing a mechanical contrivance was one thing, but it was quite another to dismiss a legitimate treasure trove of historical evidence to support it all.

When the whole ordeal was over, I was summoned to the office of one of the other members of the college council. He informed me that due to my stellar work and indubitable expertise with these anomalous relics, as he called them, I was to be promoted to a full curator of the history department’s collection. Of course, such a position within the college was normally only held by a full faculty member with a Ph. D. in history, so he encouraged me to proceed with my thesis with all haste. This post could not be held dormant for long.

I couldn’t ask for more than that.