The Spiritualist's Dilemma

Breakthrough

The chiming of the large clock atop St. Sebastian Cathedral snapped Maya awake from her reverie. It was 12 in the noon and she was in the office of Messrs. Grington and Basse, an accounting firm where she worked as a Junior clerk for 5 days a week. Her job was to pore through the account books of clients – shops and offices and find out irregularities and errors. She hated the work but it paid her enough to make ends meet while giving her reasonable time to pursue other interests. Two dozen people sat across a long table in the hall, bent over files, pen in hand, or chatting idly with their neighbors. Lethargy had begun to spread its claws over the office and soon yawns would be widespread. Her gaze shifted to the account book open in front of her and she could not help a shriek of horror. Between the rows of numbers – expenses and payments for the Kirorimal Spice Traders, she had absently scribbled the symbols upon the window of Prof. Mortemius Chinew's room. They loomed large amid the tiny ant-like numbers crammed upon the page. Since yesterday evening when she had first examined the room and found the symbols, she had been unable to take her mind of the mystery. The disheveled room, the fine red mud of the footsteps, and the strange symbols upon the window floated all over her head blocking other thoughts. The symptoms were not new, Maya was used to them now. If she hung onto an unresolved puzzle for too long, her mind began to itch. Painfully. And the only way to get rid of the itch was to locate the answer to the problem, the solution to the mystery. She had not slept the whole night, twisting and turning in her bed, thinking about the case. It was more complex than it had appeared at first glance. The mystery was certainly worth more than a 50 Cowrie bet. Someone had broken into the professor's house in the dead of the night, in a room locked from outside, drawn strange symbols upon the window and then disappeared all of a sudden. There was no explanation of how he had entered or indeed gotten out of the closed room and why he had drawn the symbols. The symbols themselves were the strangest part of the mystery, they made no sense whatsoever. Maya had ventured to the Emilia Public library in the morning and borrowed dictionaries of Armenian as well as half a dozen other languages prevalent in Cardim. Hindi, which she already knew to a large degree, Kannada, Mandarin, Tamil, Arabic, Portuguese and French. She had then tried to locate the symbols in the dictionaries but to no avail. The efforts were futile, the symbols were present in none of the books. The texts now lay upon her table in a tall tower of failure. If Mr. Grington, the chairman of the firm, saw her solving word puzzles while in office he would have surely chucked her out of the building along with the dictionaries. But fortunately for Maya, he was sick today and not in the office.

Maya crossed the symbols that she had drawn on the account book and set the work amidst the pile of other unfinished files kept upon her table. There was no way that she would be able to focus on work today, it was not worth even trying. She decided to concentrate on the mystery instead.

She took up a blank piece of paper to study the symbols once more, they had to mean something. She was of the opinion that it wasn't all too complicated, that she was missing something simpler, the symbols were not in some exotic language, there must be some other explanation for it. She had drawn the symbols so many times since yesterday evening that she no longer needed the help of her notes to reproduce them. There were eight characters. Each was different from the other but they made no sense whatsoever. She tried to join two together to form something coherent, then did away with a few strokes in a means to simplify the characters but still came up short. At the end of a grueling half an hour she had made no progress and her failure had left her frustrated and restless. As if she had an itch but someone was holding her hand, not allowing her to scratch herself. No! She had to keep calm and composed. Patience and perseverance are paramount to success, she remembered the text from Henry Camleman's book.

"Patience, perseverance," she muttered under her breath, "Patience. Perseverance. Patience. Perseverance..."

But these symbols are bound to mean something! She suddenly brought her pen down violently upon the paper that she was working on so that the nib of the fountain pen broke, splattering ink on the sheet as well as the table. People working on the long bench around her looked up to see the sudden outburst. They grinned at each other nodding.