The friar paced around the work table in his dungeon room. Torchlight threw his hunched shadow on the walls in frantic rotation. The torches did nothing to raise the temperature; he could almost see his breath before him.
The brothers had locked him in with orders to decipher the strange manuscript that awaited him on the oak plank that served as his table top. It made sense that the task had befallen him, as he was the only one of the order who could read English. The reason he needed to be locked inside his room to do it eluded him; it was a decision as mysterious – as aggravating – as the text he had just finished reading.
At first the form of the manuscript had irked him. Rather than a scroll, which could be rolled out and laid flat, as he was accustomed to doing, the manuscript was a sheaf of parchment sheets bound together on one side, which had to be held open. The sheets had been scribed, in a remarkably precise hand, on both sides. At first he had thought that each sheet was its own document, but as he read he realized that the sheaf formed a single text; at the bottom of each sheet, one simply moved to the top of the next one, or – how strange it was – flipped the sheet over and started on the back.
The text described the adventures of a man – and friends of the man – named Alabama Zack. As the friar understood it – the text, though in English, was in a style he had never encountered before, so what he had gleaned accurately from the text was in question – Zack was a war hero who had been possessed by a spirit that robbed him of his memory. The text described how Zack had come to recover his memory, a feat the friar doubted the reality of, since it had apparently happened without an exorcism.
The friar doubted the truthfulness of the text altogether, because it claimed that along with Zack’s recovered memory came the realization that Zack could perform something called ‘dimension jumping,’ which seemed to be the ability to travel between locations in the blink of an eye, rather than by walking or any other realistic means.
The friar paused in his pacing to face the desk and look at the strange manuscript. The first sheet, which was thicker than the rest and, along with the final sheet, served to bind the rest together, was engraved with an image of a man with yellow hair and mustaches, wearing a large hat and a long grey cloak. Out of the cloak, as though appearing from morning mist over a pond, stood the words “Alabama Zack: A Historian’s Take by Charles Renault.”
Renault. A Frenchman, like his brothers. But writing in English. Yet another mystery, the friar thought. The questions around the text only seemed to multiply. Why had the brothers locked him in his room to study this text? How could such a fantastical tale be deemed ‘history’? Who was Charles Renault? And Alabama Zack? Could he have been in any way a real person?
The friar gripped his opposing forearms inside his cloak and shrugged his shoulders for warmth, and as he did, a final question loomed in his mind: How in Creation had the brothers obtained such a strange text?
Image from Pixabay, by geralt: https://pixabay.com/users/geralt-9301/