Dominik returns home, his movements very quick and rushed.  He’s cold and realizes he needs a real winter coat, four layers aren’t going to do it this year.  His apartment is a loft, a very large loft in an old warehouse on North Avenue just west of downtown.  It’s not a great neighborhood but he likes living there.  It’s just close enough to everything fun that he can walk or take a bus but far enough from the action that he doesn’t have to listen to yuppie douche bags outside his window at three in the morning.

As soon as he enters he runs to the dining table in the center of the loft, pulls the box out from under his coat and sets in on the table.  It’s been bitter cold all day but on the way home it became overcast and started to rain.  Freezing rain.  Dominik can hear it hit the glass ceiling of the loft.  It’s hypnotic and very pleasant.  Now that the box is home safe Dominik removes his coat and shoes, turns up the heat and begins to relax.  He’s away from Jack, he has what he wanted and he’s home safe.  It’s still early, only 6:30pm but it looks like midnight.  The smell of cold coffee from this morning makes Dominik crave more.  He decides to make espresso.  It’s a long process and Dominik loves the process.  This will give him time to think about what to do next with the book.  He starts to prime the machine, an authentic Astoria espresso machine from Italy.  He grinds the beans.  As he listens to the sound of the rain and the grinder together he begins to think about his parents.  They died in a plane crash two years earlier and he misses them.  They were good parents and he had a good childhood.  They weren’t rich but professionals and upper middle class.  He was an only child and inherited everything after their death.  He has been able to live off the inheritance for the last two years and figures he can continue in this manner for another four to six years if he’s careful.  Then he’ll need to earn a living like everyone else.  This cushion has been a godsend since the knee injury and gives Dominik the freedom to take his time healing.

Now that the machine is primed and the beans ground he makes a perfect double shot of expresso.  Pitch black with that caramel colored foam on top.  He smells it, inhaling as deeply as he can, then walks over and sits at the table sipping espresso as he looks at the box.  After a couple sips he sets the espresso down on the far end of the table, opens the box, and carefully removes the cotton stuffing.  He sits quietly and looks at the book sitting in the box on the table before him.  He leans over close to it and sniffs it.  He can smell the leather, the paper, the musty smell of an old book.  All the scents are stimulating his mind, his imagination runs wild thinking about who could have owned this book, who has touched it and who has tried to use it.

Dominik has a massive library with books of every kind in his collection.  Most are not antiques but no subject is off limits, he reads everything.  As a student of archeology books are a type of archeological dig for him.  A way to peer into history, to see the ideas of others, to witness arguments and debates and history in action.  When he reads Marx for example he is not thinking about communist philosophy but rather what Marx was doing as he wrote it, his demeanor and frame of mind.  Dominik is very scientific, very left brain, when it comes to archeology.  He is as enamored with Indiana Jones as the next person but is really only interested in what scientific analysis can prove true about an artifact.  For him that’s where archeology ends.  The story telling and speculation doesn’t interest him, in fact it annoys him.

One of the largest parts of his collection is the section of Occultism, Mysticism and Magick.  Dominik is fascinated with people’s fascination with the Occult.  He doesn’t believe in any of this himself.  He’s an atheist and doesn’t have a superstitious bone in his body.  Never the less he is an expert on all things Occult.  He’s familiar with everything from the Key of Solomon to the most recent new age books on candles and crystals and all that bullshit.  What interests him is the history and evolution of Occult sciences and when and how these ideas intersected with the physical sciences.  When Alchemy became Chemistry, etc.  He is also fascinated with the modern trend to inject “science” into modern Occultism, Like Aleister Crowley’s Magick in Theory and Practice, where the author attempts to espouse a set of hard scientific principles equivalent to Newton’s Laws of motion in physics.

But now he has in his possession one of the actual manuscripts he’s only heard talked about in theory.  At least one of the original copies.  The book itself was believed by those who made it to have magical powers, to be a talisman or vehicle for the transmission of divine forces.  It’s not written in any language humans can read or speak.  It’s entirely symbols, hieroglyphs in a sense but not any that are translatable into modern spoken language.  This makes it particularly interesting to Dominik as his other area of expertise is linguistics.  He was never very good a math, at calculating the volume of a solid or anything practical but discovered early in Freshman year that he had a penchant for symbolic logic, for meta mathematics and eventually for linguistics.  He’s been fantasizing about translating this text for years, ever since he read about it in a textbook on medieval history.  For centuries scholars have speculated about what it said based on the mysteries surrounding its owners and their actions, but no one actually knows what it says.  Dominik wants to put an end to the mystery and get to the facts.  He was hoping this would be his thesis at Harvard but he isn’t waiting for permission or approval to work on it.  He has the resources and time so he’s working.

Not sure what to do next Dominik gets up, picks up his espresso and begins to pace in front of the book while he drinks.  He thinks about Necronomicon, that bullshit fiction novel turned into a fake history.  The key of Solomon and Sepher Raziel.  Sepher Raziel is an amazing piece of work but calling it a manual of science doesn’t make it scientific.  He thinks about the Grimorium Verum and the numerous case studies of teenagers decapitating corpses in the hopes that they may grow magic invisibility beans.  As he runs through this history in his head he feels both excitement and anger.  How could people be so fucking stupid?  He stops cold in his tracks, drinks the last sip of espresso and decides that the next step should be to copy the first symbol and cross reference it to the rest of his library.

He sits at the table with a sketch pad and pencils.  He touches the soft cover and rubs his finger back and forth on the leather.  He feels an electric buzzing sensation that he writes off as a haptic hallucination or neuropathy.  He carefully opens the cover to expose the first page and begins to draw a replica of the first symbol.  He’s excited but all business, carefully replicating every detail and taking notes on the appearance of the paper, stains and all.  The picture is drawn to scale with every dimension painstakingly measured out.  The final sketch looks like a blue print, very technical.  Confident in the product of his labor Dominik carefully repacks the book and closes up the box.

It’s now 9:30pm and the freezing rain storm has subsided but there’s still a drizzle.   Dominik puts on some mood music for a dark stormy night of studying, Anthrax’s Persistence of Time, and walks across the loft to his library.  The library is the entire North wall of the loft, 50 feet long and two stories high.  In rhythm with the ticking clocks on the first track of the album Dominik begins pulling down volumes of text from his Occult collection placing them on the rug just in front of the bookcase.  One after another;

• Key of Solomon
• Lesser Key of Solomon
• Sepher Raziel
• Grimoreum Verum
• Grimorie of Armadel
• Enochian Magick
• Book of Black Magic and Demonic Pacts
• Occult System of Natural Philosophy

Dominik sits on the rug in front of the stack of books with his detailed sketch and a large note pad.  He feels happy and calm.  This feels like studying for finals and he desperately misses school right now.  He takes a few minutes to analyze his sketch, to memorize every detail.  Dominik has a photographic memory and this has been both a help and a hindrance in his life.  Obviously a big help in school but he can’t un-remember things he’d rather forget.  Before looking through the books he makes a few notes based on first impressions.

• Glyph 1, Page 1
• This is a very intricate symbol.  Doubt it will translate into a single word or idea.  Most likely a collection of interconnected ideas all in one symbol.  Maybe a whole paragraph or chapter worth of information.  Ideas based on looking at the symbol…
• Linear
• Radiative
• Sun
• Zodiac
• Penetrating
• Web
• Tentacles

With these ideas in mind Dominik begins to look through the stack of books for similar symbols and ideas.  Since the symbol reminds him of the sun he begins there, sun gods and occult symbols for the sun.  After several hours nothing seems to fit.  Anthrax finished long ago and Dominik is completely unaware.  He gets up to stretch his legs, the clock reads 1:24 am.  He’s undeterred by the failure to get anywhere and completely awake.  In the mood for more music he puts on Slayer’s Reign in Blood and stairs out the windows on the East side of his loft at the city as Angel of Death begins to play.  He thinks about the symbol and what images it invokes.  He’s tempted to open the box again but doesn’t want to over expose the book to the elements.  His plan is to tackle one page at a time but now wonders if that was a poor plan, too simplistic.  Perhaps several symbols are interrelated.  His plan is partly motivated by the stories, the myth, surrounding the book’s previous owners.  If true, they suggest that each page stands alone.  That each page and its symbol are a complete piece of Magick, a spell or evocation, a mechanism for causing a particular change.  But now Dominik realizes that he contradicted himself in some sense by relying on rumors, other people’s superstition, and folk tales to motivate a scientific process.  Despite those considerations the approach still makes sense to Dominik.

With Slayer playing in the background he walks back to the pile of books, sits on the carpet and continues his research.  He knows that regardless of whether or not he finds and answer tonight that his subconscious will correlate all this data while he sleeps so he just keeps paging through the texts, slow and methodically.  Several things do pop out and leave an impression.  He keeps fixating on the Theurgia Goetia and the seal of the 31 princes.  This has a similar structure as the symbol on the first page but it’s not a great match.  Also, based on what he’s seen and read about the book he doesn’t think it’s Jewish, he doesn’t really think it is part of or derived from the Key of Solomon.  It’s clearly Medieval European and a Kabbalistic influence would not be a surprise but this doesn’t really feel like a fit.  Dominik suspects that it’s based on European pagan magic rather than Kabbalah or ceremonial magic.  He has many books on Norse magic and some other European pagan traditions but this part of his collection is not as complete as others.  He really thinks it’s a merging of several smaller symbols and is starting to think a trip to the university library is good move.  The time is 4:18 am and Dominik is not interested in sleeping.  He is too obsessed with figuring out this symbol and almost feels imprisoned by time, like he’s waiting for the sun to rise and places to open just so can get started.  As he sits on his rug, back against the book cases, staring at the other side of his loft, he feels like he’s waiting in line to check out at the DMV, like his time is being wasted.  Why can’t everyone be up all the time like him, he wonders to himself.  Maybe NYC would be a better place for him to live.

He sits quietly waiting for morning.

• Applied Science
• archeology
• crime thriller
• horror
• Occult
• supernatural