[Original Novel] The Eternal Mysteries of Vril, Part 3
Big deal. So he must know somebody responsible for developing it, and they smuggled him a sample. “There’s no indication of how it was made. It’s formed perfectly down to the atomic level. It only doesn’t cut you when you touch it because the edges were deliberately beveled.”
I asked her what all of that’s supposed to mean about the pin’s origin. “I don’t know yet. But to be honest I wonder if he’d go to all the trouble of getting ahold of this alloy illegally, then risking prison time by having it machined in one of the vanishingly few facilities capable of this level of precision...just to get laid.”
I objected that he does in fact have a Y chromosome, so yes he would. She did smile at that one. “Okay, okay. Granted. But that is an awful lot of trouble to go through. My mother’s a psychologist and was never as tight lipped about her patients as she was supposed to be. So I’ve heard loads about wackadoos.
Many of them retreated into fantasy as a coping mechanism because of traumatic loss. They crave external validation, wanting more than anything else to be surrounded by other people who believe as they do. Leon Festinger wrote a fascinating case study about this effect. That’s the sort of thing I got for my bedtime stories.”
It made me think about Neil differently. Perhaps one of his parents died violently? Or someone he was in love with. This elaborate delusion was then simply his way of papering over that hole in his heart, just enough that he could keep getting out of bed each morning.
When I tried to take the pin from Melanie, she didn’t let go right away. I stared at her. “Well, it’s just. I could still take it back to the lab for more tests, maybe there’s more about it…” I put my hands on my hips. “...Alright” she confessed. “It probably is worth a lot of money. Potentially.”
I pried it out of her fingers, newly protective of it. “The thing is” she stipulated, “it’s made of a one of a kind alloy. Eventually somebody will take a closer look at it, realize that, and it will quickly be traced back to the lab it must’ve come from. Depending on how many times it’s changed hands since then, it’s not unlikely that the cops could come around, wanting to question you about it.”
That took the wind out of my sails. One moment, excited that I could pay my tuition in whole or in large part with a trinket I’d been given for free. But she was right. I would at least have to wait until the alloy entered common use, so it wouldn’t be so obvious where the pin came from.
I mulled over my options the next day. We weren’t into the material proper yet, the professor had us doing some ridiculous team building exercises like trust falling which made me second guess how wisely I’d chosen to spend the money left to me for college.
It gave me time to think, though. While falling blindfolded into sweaty nervous hands which nearly dropped me twice. That experience had quite the opposite of the intended effect, all told. I only came away from it more embroiled than ever in tangled thoughts of subterranean civilizations and fantastical energy sources.
He must’ve done this so I’d have to return the pin. But then, does that mean it’s made of something new every time? I could hardly believe he had such discreet, guaranteed access to bleeding edge materials research facilities that he could reliably get ahold of samples without management eventually getting wise to it.
Regardless, I had to return it. I wanted to be done with the matter, not to keep this niggling little reminder of a first year fling hanging around to torment me with thoughts of what might’ve been. The more I dwelled on it, the more I worried that I really had misjudged Neil too.
He’d been chatting up that girl the other day. But then, that’s his job. I didn’t hear him saying anything affectionate, come to think of it. It’s no great crime to be eccentric either, especially if it’s how you’ve chosen to overcome a painful past.
As a result, even while feelings of embarrassment conspired to prevent it, I sought out Neil in order to return the pin. It was as easy as ever, I simply went through the tour a second time and waited until it was over. This time he greeted me with the same warm, gentle smile, as if nothing ever happened between us.
I held out the pin. He met my gaze. “Did you have it looked at?” I warily nodded. “What did your jeweler say?” I insisted Neil take the pin so I could leave. That faint, irritating smirk again! “I see. It’s for the best this way. It never would’ve worked out between us for very long, anyhow.” He took the pin and refastened it to his smooth black shirt.
I wondered for a moment whether to take that as a slight. Just another attempt to draw me back into a quagmire I was determined to escape from, I concluded. Not today. I turned tail and left him standing there, a puzzle I would never solve but that I didn’t care to.
That’s what I thought at the time, anyway. I didn’t yet feel it, but there was a splinter in my mind. A nagging curiosity which grew louder and more difficult to ignore as one week rolled into the next. That nagging possibility, one in a trillion, that there might’ve been something to it all.
Not necessarily the X-Files type stuff about underground supermen with limitless energy, but the thing with the pin…I couldn’t account for it, so I couldn’t leave it alone. All of the mundane explanations I could come up with had glaring flaws which made them unsatisfying.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle once wrote that after you’ve eliminated all other possibilities, whatever remains must be true, no matter how improbable. That ignores the undoubtedly countless possibilities which just haven’t occurred to me...but try as I might, I couldn’t get anything to stick. To smack of reality, to make all of the pieces come together just right.
That’s when I knew I was going to meet with Neil again. Damn it all, I didn’t want to. I just couldn’t stop thinking about the whole baffling mess. The book. The pin. Melanie’s psychoanalytic speculation. I resolved, at the very least, to return armed with more than just questions.
The first thing I did was to plug his name into Google. Nothing much turned up outside of his involvement with the university. No forgotten forum posts, no abandoned social media accounts on obsolete platforms, no paper trail of any kind.
Must’ve paid some sort of service to delist everything before he started attending Stonehouse U. Anticipating somebody he talked up would try this, wanting to preserve his oddball mystique. Next I tried searching the university staff list. Surprisingly there was an entry for him...but not related to the campus tours.
Under a grainy, smiling photo of Neil, he was identified as a research assistant to one “Hieronymus P. Travigan”. I really had to dig to find anything on the official page about that guy, it was tucked away in a section you could only get to from that profile link, as it wasn’t listed in the main site directory.
Just a brief blurb acknowledging that he’s still alive and on the payroll, then a small map of the campus with a green outline around the building where I could expect to find him. That, too, turned out to be an unforeseen oddity.
I’ve walked through that part of campus a few times now and never seen the building indicated. When I specifically went in search of it though, there it was all of a sudden. The fact that it was surrounded on all sides by maple trees made sense of why I never noticed it before.
I was still marveling at how close to invisible this place was from the street when I rang the doorbell. The charming little building concealed amidst the trees resembled an old Victorian house, never painted that I could tell. All of it just ornate designs carved from dark, polished wood.
“Yes, what is it about?” I could see only a dimly illuminated sliver of the man speaking to me through the crack in the door. Elderly, by the sound of it. “I saw on the website that Neil Schreiber works with you.” He went silent for a moment, then asked how I knew Neil.
I told him about the tour. About the Feuerbach monument, the dates, and the pin. He chuckled a little bit at the end, but then unfastened the security chain on the door and opened it fully. “You’re one of Neil’s recruits, then. You should’ve said so straight away. Come in, come in!”
Recruits? I didn’t quite know what to make of that. Briefly, I remembered the other girl Neil was talking to at the monument. But I’d apparently said the right things to gain an audience with this hobbling little grey haired hunchback, I didn’t feel it necessary to endanger that by picking at nits.
As he led me down the poorly lit corridor, I first took notice that the interior was even more lavishly decorated than the exterior. Every available space was embellished with finely carved flourishes. Not just the ceilings but the wall panels, wainscots and support pillars as well. I crossed my arms, paranoid I might accidentally damage some of it.
The next thing I noticed were all manner of bizarre antique machines on display at every turn. I couldn’t guess at their purpose. One looked to be a welded metal chair encircled by a pair of toroidal glass vacuum tubes, held at an angle relative to one another by a set of primitive looking robot arms.
Taking up the most space by far was what could only be the remains of a Soyuz capsule, but with some spherical device the likes of which I’ve never seen before integrated into the cockpit where another cosmonaut would normally sit.
“Sssoooo….you keep this stuff….for a museum?” He guffawed. “No my dear girl, it’s a private collection I’m afraid. Not for just anybody’s eyes, though if you know Neil, that’s good enough for me. Lovely earrings by the by, they really bring out the orgone in your eyes.”
Odd way to say it. I don’t know what color orgone is supposed to be, but I appreciated the kind words. I wear these over the top earrings mostly because they often elicit revealing reactions from people. If they’re a closeted shitheel for example, this way I have a chance at an early warning.
We arrived in a lavishly appointed sitting room that seemed a suspiciously long ways from the entrance, given how small this house looked from the outside. The doddering old professor returned a few minutes later with freshly brewed tea.
“Now tell me” he urged while pouring some into my cup. “What’s all of this about?” I didn’t yet know enough about him to gauge how much or little I should reveal. But given clear signs that I was dealing with another eccentric, I doubted if I needed to self-censor.
After unloading it all on him, he blinked a few times, then exhaled. “My goodness. I see why you sought me out. I didn’t realize you broke it off. I assumed you’d at least been initiated already.” Initiated? Could this be related to the frats and sororities somehow?
An alternate meaning then occurred to me, and I started to worry it could all be some Heaven’s Gate kind of thing. I set the tea down and scooched it towards the center of the tray to signal that I didn’t intend to finish it. He looked concerned, but didn’t mention it.
Stay Tuned for Part 4!
I think things are getting deeper and deeper here. Why digging deep this far. All for a pin?.