The rule in the reading room was simple.
No flash. No pens. No counting the women.
Elias Ward thought the last one was a joke the librarian in New Haven had written to amuse herself. The Voynich manuscript had been a joke for five hundred years: a book no one could read, plants no one could name, baths of pale figures in green water. Scholars counted quires and folios and recipes. They did not, as far as he knew, need a rule about the figures.
He had two weeks with a high-resolution facsimile and three days with the thing itself, under glass, by appointment. He was there for the botanical quires. He told the desk that. He did not tell them he had already, in the facsimile, started to number the bodies in the pools.
There were, on his first pass through the balneological foldouts, one hundred and forty-two.
He wrote the number down. He felt foolish and precise, which is how he preferred to feel.
On the second pass there were one hundred and forty-nine.
He assumed he had missed a cluster in the crowded tub on the left of folio 78r. He went back. The cluster was there. So was a new figure at the rim, smaller, facing out of the page as if the water had a shore on his side of the glass.
He did not count a third time that afternoon.
At night in the rented room he dreamed in the manuscript’s green. Not a narrative. A temperature. In the morning his notes had a line he did not remember writing.
Do not count the women.
He counted.
One hundred and sixty-one.
The new ones were not well drawn. The old figures had a cramped medieval grace. The new ones looked hurried, as if a hand that was not the original scribe’s had added them while he was not looking, or while he was. Their faces were turned more fully toward the viewer. Their mouths were open.
Elias asked the librarian if the facsimile plates were a known variant.
She looked at him for a long time and asked if he had numbered anything.
He said no.
She said good.
The appointment with the real manuscript was on a Thursday. The vellum was dirtier than the photographs. The plants still resembled no garden. He was not allowed to turn the leaves himself. The staff member turned them with two hands and did not comment when Elias leaned too close to the pools.
He did not need to count. He could see the extra bodies without numbering. They were denser than in any published plate. One figure on the far right of the largest bath had its hand lifted, not in the manuscript’s usual stiff gesture, but in the small wave a person uses when they have recognized someone across a room.
The staff member turned the leaf.
On the next verso, in the margin where scholars argue about cipher keys, there was a column of tallies. Hash marks in groups of five. The last group was unfinished. The ink was darker than the fifteenth century.
Elias’s own pencil, which he was not supposed to have uncapped over the cradle, rolled off the table and hit the floor.
He did not pick it up.
He left twenty minutes early and sent the library a note that his work on the botanicals was sufficient. He did not mention the baths. He did not request another day.
In the facsimile on his laptop that night the number had risen again. He stopped opening the file. The file opened once without him, at 3:11, on the foldout, zoomed to a face that had not been in the image when he imported it.
The Voynich manuscript remains unread. That is the public fact. The private fact, among a small number of people who have sat too long with the green pages, is that the text may be the least of what it is doing.
The plants do not have to be real.
The script does not have to resolve.
The women in the water only have to be counted.
Each count is an invitation. Each invitation is answered by another body in the pool. If you keep going, the page fills. If the page fills, there is no reason to believe the water stays on the vellum.
Elias does not work on unreadable books anymore.
He still sometimes wakes certain he has missed one in the corner of a tub.
That is how it starts.
Do not count the women.
The ones who already did are in the margin, in the unfinished tally, waiting for you to finish the group of five.
