First look at Leaf 005

I fear the piecing together of such knowledge may drive you into a new dark age my friend. Steady on, and have another cup of coffee to steel your nerves.

Christian Matzke

You are going to receive two envelopes from me and I apologize for the mixup. I sent 1,2,3 and 5 out Yesterday, but forgot to include Leaf 4! Please let me know if you need help sorting them once they arrive! Dighton, Mass. Mr. Matzke, I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since I can read no more. I was quite taken aback when I received the curious twin parcels you had promised, for they were hastily pushed into my hands by a stranger, rather than by the garrulous gentleman who traditionally delivers my post, and has for some years. The odd, mis-shapen fellow who had so abruptly accosted me shambled quickly away, tossing furtive glances from side to side and several pointed, if nervous, glares back over his shoulder at me. He was strangely attired, swallowed up as he was in a dark, heavy, woolen coat, of the type favored by sea-men. I ajudged him to be quite a bit older than myself, and his swarthily complexed, wind-worn appearance supported my theory that he was a sailor of some experience, and I thought it odd that this visitor from foreign shores, for his obviously Asiatic features and tantalizingly familiar yet ultimately indecipherable mutterings marked his origin as somewhere far off in the deep Pacific, should be acting as someone's errand-boy. I thought it doubly-odd given the particularly temperate weather the recent storms had left in their wake, relieving us somewhat of the oppressive heat of an atypically long New-England summer but being still warm for the season, and stranger still when I observed his labored gait, due no doubt to the need to balance his formidable hump, a burden that seemed almost to move beneath the folds of his voluminous coat as the poor wretch hurriedly attempted to navigate the still-sodden turf with the additional detriment of his infirmity as he rounded the far edge of the property and disappeared from my view. I fell to examining that which the stranger had so abruptly pressed upon me and soon put the bizarre circumstance of my parcels' arrival out of mind. Cutting apart the travel-worn packets and wondering somewhat apprehensively at the curious cryptic marks incised almost reverently onto those scuffed wrappings, I set about arranging the contents on my desk-top. They were, as I had expected from our correspondence, the stained and time-worn pages of a particularly old book, but in judgement of their size - likely an unusually large specimen of Imperial Octavo I should think - they must, when intact, comprise a prodigious volume indeed. I shouldered on in my initial, cursory perusal, attempting to set the leaves in ordinal sequence, recto and verso being apparent from the orientation of the sheets' deep folds. I presently deciphered the clues the enigmatic though enterprising printer "R.C." had positioned beneath the text proper, no doubt to guide his apprentices in the work's assembly, and congratulated myself on my cleverness as I made short work of the remaining leaves and settled in to give the venerable pages a deservedly more thorough examination. Buoyed by my self-satisfaction and a steaming cup of strong coffee, which I must confess to liking exceedingly, I delved contentedly and with great interest into Dee's work, poring over the outré woodcuts and dense text-blocks of hoary Elizabethan prose. My preoccupation had proceeded apace until I quite unexpectedly faltered over an eldritch term - a name, in fact, ancient and terrible - that was nevertheless all too well known to me and my family. I felt a wave of dread familiarity slowly creep up and then finally break over me - that singular feeling which the French call déjà vu - and I shuddered, disoriented, suddenly chilled despite the warm atmosphere of late summer which had languidly clung on now well into September, and just as quickly proceeded, paradoxically, to perspire as the thick, humid air which lingered behind the previous night's storm closed in upon me, almost cloying, as I found myself transported, awash in vivid childhood recollection of my maternal grandfather's steady mental decline and of his furtive whispers and cryptic warnings of the German's dread Experiment 17, which had so haunted and tormented him since his days in the O.S.S. My thoughts then, understandably, but with no little trepidation, were dragged inexorably towards that which had finally broken the once proud, old soldier, something he had never spoken above a whisper, a shadowy episode from the war-years that had simply been one step too far for the man, something he referred to only as Das Hexenhammer Projekt. Somewhere in his later years a change came upon him, something that transformed his hushed, awe-struck shock into a gnawing, obsessive fear, a horror that consumed him, until, at last, he became a danger to himself if indeed not others, leading to his eventual internment, and ultimately his demise, in the squalid confines of the Danvers Lunatic Asylum, a bleak and hopeless prison in the wilds of Essex County euphemistically re-dedicated as the less disheartening Danvers State Hospital during the final months of his sad tenure. Mr. Matzke, similar to my ill-fated forebear, though I am locked in fear's iron grasp my will can forestall the torture of curiosity no longer. When you have read this hastily scrawled missive you may guess, though never fully realize, why it is that I must have forgetfulness or a supply of these pages which alone make life endurable. In Patronage Yr. obedt. svt., - M