Before their souls were fused, both had learned a thing or two about the calligraphy of alphabetic languages, whether out of personal interest or under threat from their grandfather. Years of practicing, whether by choice or not, had made this new soul increasingly sensitive to the differences between various styles of handwriting.
Kraft gathered his awareness and slipped into a state of meticulous observation and perfect recall. He forced himself to ignore the faint, strange feeling stirring in his intuition and focused on analyzing the papers scattered across the floor.
The pressure of the pen and the steadiness of each stroke greatly affected the variation in line thickness, reflecting the writer's state of mind. The connections between letters indicated how fluidly someone wrote, how familiar they were with the words, and how well they understood the whole. Though connections could be added afterward, the unnatural spots at the transitions between strokes were still distinguishable.
And when someone wrote under similar conditions, their handwriting tended to look similar. The notes scattered across the floor could be roughly grouped into three categories.
The first category was exemplified by the letter the professor had left for him. These pages displayed the professor's considerable skill, with a style that was "impractically ornate."
The flowing lines and elegant connections between letters hadn't come from writing quickly. Instead, the writer eased off the pressure at the end of each stroke, then lightly pulled the pen toward the next letter to join them. In practice, this style was not only inefficient but also prone to mistakes caused by a trembling hand.
But the sweeping lines gave the writing a strong sense of unity and beauty. Combined with the professor's excellent control over spacing and letter size, they made the writing machine-like in its neatness and precision, even on unlined paper.
The professor must have been in good spirits when writing these pages, with enough energy to pursue an almost extreme level of delicacy and beauty in his handwriting.
The second style had probably been used when the professor needed to write faster.
The strokes were generally a little thinner. When Kraft picked up the pages to look closely, he saw very few rough edges where the ink had bled, suggesting that the professor had written quickly, with little time spent on each stroke.
These notes were frequently interrupted. The letters abruptly broke off where they should have connected, leaving a blunt end or a lingering dot of ink. It looked as though the professor had paused to consider his wording, breaking his train of thought before picking it up again. There was a sense of his rhythm being thrown off.
When the professor continued writing, he'd casually added a stroke to reconnect the broken letters. Since those sections had been added afterward, they were less natural than the uninterrupted writing, giving Kraft a chance to spot them.
The third style was the easiest to pick out. It was obvious that the writer's mind had been elsewhere. The strokes varied in thickness, and the writing lacked both continuity and unity. Often, even the letters on a single page slanted at different angles—a rare occurrence for someone with an established writing habit.
These notes contained at least half again as many unfamiliar words as the other pages—words unfamiliar to both Kraft and Lucius. Some even had half a page of information that was completely unreadable.
Uppercase and lowercase letters were mixed together, and violations of writing conventions were everywhere. The words were separated by indecipherable punctuation marks, resembling typos that offered no clues to the intended meaning.
On the worst pages, the spaces between letters had vanished. The letters crowded and piled on top of each other, crammed into a mass rather than spreading into the blank space beside them. The handwriting was no better than Kraft's before he'd learned to write, and almost impossible to decipher.
A handful of awkward characters left Kraft completely stumped. They followed no known writing style. Some had been drawn against the usual direction, then retraced several times in the same place when the ink ran out, until the strokes damaged the paper fibers and carved grooves into the page.
"Are you really sure this is the professor's handwriting?" Kraft pulled out a page from the third category and pointed to a stroke that had pierced right through it.
This style was not only ugly, it would badly damage the pen nib and make an earsplitting scraping noise. Imagine a needle being dragged across sandpaper covered in tiny bumps. The unpleasant sound scraped at the eardrums, while its irregular vibrations traveled through the pen to the writer's fingertips.
Just imagining that feeling at the pen tip made Kraft wince. The sight alone could cure low blood pressure. Putting himself in someone else's shoes, he couldn't imagine any normal person enjoying this. It was like the unbearable noise of a spatula scraping the bottom of an iron pan, something people instinctively loathed.
Lucius leaned in for a look, then confirmed it. "I remember this one. The professor definitely wrote it. It was one of the last notes he made before leaving, and it was unusual enough that I can be sure."
Kraft frowned, placed the page on top of the pile, and carried it to the window, trying once more to understand what the professor meant.
Many people had their own quirks when writing. If they wrote quickly without paying attention, their handwriting could turn into a mess. But this was different. Kraft was certain this wasn't some unusual uppercase version of a letter.
The strokes had been drawn backward, and the pen had cut through the paper fibers. It had taken several strokes to "carve" the symbol into the page. The ink had been uneven, spreading through the damaged fibers and turning a single line into a string of irregular dots and clumps, like a necklace of beads.
Kraft's mind absorbed its shape and matched it to the lesions caused by Tuberculosis as it spread through narrow passages: a string of tumors and cysts, their sickening outlines the result of something orderly becoming distorted.
Fine, angular strokes looped around it and converged on another symbol, like the bony, long-nailed hand of a corpse plunging into diseased tissue. Long, narrow letters, tangled like swarming flies, encircled them. Their arrangement seemed both round and square, and the longer he stared, the more they seemed to move and warp.
He had never seen writing like this. No—he shouldn't call something so unnatural a character. No one with their reason intact could or would scribble something like this.
If these were notes left by Professor Calman, Kraft would sooner believe that an evil spirit had stolen the professor's body and, after deceiving everyone, sat down to write the most malicious joke it could imagine.
"No, something's definitely wrong." Kraft gave his conclusion and looked away from the page. Once his thoughts had started to wander, they were difficult to rein in. Unavoidable associations filled his mind, dragging up the most nauseating or vivid things in his memories and blending them with what he saw into a revolting mess.
His disgust forced him to get away from the papers as quickly as possible and put them back into a sealed container where he couldn't see them.
"I think I've got some clues. Let's sort them out first."
"Sure. The professor isn't here, so you're in charge." Lucius readily agreed and pulled out a few wooden slips he used as bookmarks.
Kraft spent some more time sorting the notes into three categories, then put them back in the box, separating them with the wooden slips so they'd be easier to sort through in more detail next time.
With two final thumps, the lid closed again. The room returned to its tidy, comfortable state, and Kraft felt inexplicably relieved. But the matter was far from over. That mysterious laboratory—whatever was going on in there—was waiting for them to deal with it inside the Medical School.
Making a gas mask wasn't an option, and just covering their faces with wet cloth wouldn't be reliable either. They'd have to think of something else.
As for what they could do, there was one option that was no option at all. Kraft thought of the gear often paired with medieval plague doctors' black robes: the Bird-Beak Mask. It existed in this world, too.
He really didn't know anything specific about how it worked. All he knew came from some general-interest articles of uncertain origin, which said the beak was stuffed with a cloth bag filled with spices and herbs.
That sounded a little reasonable, didn't it? And yet it also sounded completely unreasonable.
"Lucius, I wanted to ask: do we have the kind of mask people wear when visiting plague victims? The kind with a long, pointy beak." Kraft brought his hands together in front of his mouth to make a beak shape.
"Is that really necessary?" Lucius couldn't understand. Kraft had worn him out, body and soul, and even his enthusiasm for the experiment had faded. "Even if there really was poison, we only lost consciousness after drinking a diluted sample."
For a moment, the thought that maybe he really was being too cautious took hold. Kraft quickly pushed it away. The professor and Lucius had often gone in to do experiments, so at least the door had been opened every day to air the place out. But the laboratory had been sealed for a week now. Who knew what might happen if there was something volatile in there?
Making extra preparations would cost them a little time at most. Failing to prepare might cost him every remaining year of his life. That was a calculation he could handle.
The author has run out of stockpiled chapters ∑(дlll)
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