I saw it, the image always amazed me—and not just because the personifications of sulfur and quicksilver looked like Matthew and me. So much detail surrounded the chemical couple: the rocky landscape, the wedding guests, the mythical and symbolic beasts who witnessed the ceremony, the phoenix who encompassed the scene within flaming wings. Next to the page was something that looked like a flat metal postal scale with a blank sheet of parchment in the tray.
“Scully will tell us what she discovered.” Matthew gave the student the floor. “This illuminated page is too heavy,” Scully said, blinking her eyes behind a pair of thick lenses.
“Heavier than a single page should be, I mean.”
“Sarah and I both thought it felt heavy.” I looked at Matthew. “Remember when the house first gave us the page in Madison?” I reminded him in a whisper.
He nodded. “Perhaps it’s something a vampire can’t perceive. Even now that I’ve seen Scully’s evidence, the page feels entirely normal to me.”
“I ordered some vellum online from a traditional parchment maker,” Scully said. “It arrived this morning. I cut the sheet to the same size—nine inches by eleven and a half inches—and weighed it. You can have the leftovers, Professor Clairmont. We can all use some practice with that probe you’ve developed.”
“Thank you, Scully. Good idea. And we’ll run some core samples of the modern vellum for comparison’s sake,” Matthew said with a smile.
“As you can see,” Scully resumed, “the new vellum weighed a little over an ounce and a half.
When I weighed Professor Bishop’s page the first time, it weighed thirteen ounces—as much as approximately nine sheets of ordinary vellum.” Scully removed the fresh sheet of calfskin and put the page from Ashmole 782 in its place.
“The weight of the ink can’t account for that discrepancy.” Lucy put on her own glasses to take a closer look at the digital readout. “And the parchment used in Ashmole 782 looks like it’s thinner, too.”
“It’s about half the thickness of the vellum. I measured it.” Scully pushed her glasses back into place.
“But the Book of Life had more than a hundred pages—probably close to two hundred.” I did some rapid calculations. “If a single page weighs thirteen ounces, the whole book would weigh close to a hundred and fifty pounds.”
“That’s not all. The page isn’t always the same weight,” Mulder said. He pointed to the scale’s digital readout. “Look, Professor Clairmont. The weight’s dropped again. Now it’s down to seven ounces.” He took up a clipboard and noted the time and weight on it.
“It’s been fluctuating randomly all morning,” Matthew said. “Thankfully, Scully had the good sense to leave the page on the scale. If she’d removed it immediately, we would have missed it.”
“That wasn’t deliberate.” Scully flushed and lowered her voice. “I had to use the restroom. When I came back, the weight had risen to a full pound.”
“What’s your conclusion, Scully?” Chris asked in his teacher voice.
“I don’t have one,” she said, clearly frustrated. “Vellum can’t lose weight and gain it again. It’s dead. Nothing I’m observing is possible!”
“Welcome to the world of science, my friend,” Chris said with a laugh. He turned to Scully’s companion. “How about you, Mulder?”
“The page is clearly some sort of magical container. There are other pages inside it. Its weight changes because it’s still somehow connected to the rest of the manuscript.” Mulder slid a glance in my direction.
“I think you’re right, Mulder,” I said, smiling.
“We should leave it where it is and record its weight every fifteen minutes. Maybe there will be a pattern,” Mulder suggested.
“Sounds like a plan.” Chris looked at Mulder approvingly.
“So, Professor Bishop,” Mulder said cautiously, “do you think there really are other pages inside this one?”
“If so, that would make Ashmole 782 a palimpsest,” Lucy said, her imagination sparking. “A magical palimpsest.”
My conclusion from today’s events in the lab was that humans are much cleverer than we creatures give them credit for.
“It is a palimpsest,” I confirmed. “But I never thought of Ashmole 782 as—what did you call it, Mulder?”
“A magical container,” he repeated, looking pleased.
We already knew that Ashmole 782 was valuable because of its text and its genetic information. If Mulder was correct, there was no telling what else might be in it.
“Have the DNA results come back from the sample you took a few weeks ago, Matthew?” Maybe if we knew what creature the vellum came from, it would shed some light on the situation.
“Wait. You removed a piece of this manuscript and ran