Stories That Crawled From My Brain

Codex Macto

"Is here OK?" I asked my girlfriend, Sarah, as I struggled with one of the many disintegrating cardboard boxes stuffed with dusty crap.

"Yeah, that's fine. What's even in there?" She asked.

"Just more notepads and sheets of paper," I said, placing the box down on top of an array of yellowing papers that were scattered across the crammed breakfast bar.

I picked a notebook out, blew away the dust, and then flicked through. On every page were random unintelligible scribblings with the occasional English word or letter, all in pencil. Despite their impenetrability, I found them fascinating.

"Notepads filled with nonsense," I said.

"Something to do with Dad's work," Sarah said.

"How so?" I asked.

"Dad was a philologist," she said. She removed a box from a chair and sat down on it, unsure of how to proceed - near enough the entire flat was covered in boxes of papers.

"A what?" I asked.

"A philologist. He studied the evolution of languages. He also translated ancient texts, a bit, before…" She stopped suddenly, reflecting on a time long past. Indeed, ever since I had known Sarah, her father had been absent from her life. The only times she had ever mentioned him was when I had specifically asked, and even then she had been loath to share. Only when we'd had a few drinks would the vice begin to loosen and she'd reveal a bit more of the story.

When one day I received a text inviting me to the house she shared with her mother, I knew something was up. Her mother was not keen on me, and hence Sarah and I usually spent nights at my flat in the city, rather than hers in the leafy suburbs of south west London. I had initially assumed I was in for the chop, but realised it was something else entirely when I knocked at the door of the quiet Victorian terrace and it drifted open with no resistance. I walked into the hall, closing the door silently behind me, and heard no sound greet me.
"Hello?" I asked, walking sheepishly along the hall. I poked my head into the lounge, and saw Sarah quietly sitting on the sofa, staring into space.

"What's up, honey?" I asked.

The last thing I expected her to say was that her father had died. Professor Jones's extremely outdated Last Will and Testament had still listed his ex-wife as the beneficiary and executor of his estate. It appeared that despite his long absence, he had never changed it. His ex-wife, Sarah's mother, had begrudgingly accepted the assets under his name, which amounted to the contents of the small, cheap flat for which he was in rental arrears. Disappointingly for Sarah and her mother, there appeared to be nothing of any value in the place. In fact, the inheritance cost them money: Sarah's mother had to pay for professionals to come in and clean up the place - it had been littered with black bin bags full of empty bean cans and stale bread, which appeared to have been the Professor's only source of sustenance for a long time. The cleaners had finished with the food waste, and had left Sarah and her mother to sift through the papers and boxes to see if there was anything of sentimental or monetary value. After a long day so far, there had been nothing.

"His job sounds as if it would have been interesting," I suggested, but Sarah seemed very disinterested. I studied the dusty notepad in my hand intently, fascinated by the swirling script. It drew me in, as if trying to communicate its strange language to me. My vision blurred and the effect was as if the pencil scribbles were forming something, as if they were alive.

"He must have found something interesting. But he certainly wasn't interested in me," Sarah said. Her words shook me out of my trance, and I put the book back down on the messy countertop. Sarah leant forward on her chair, putting her elbows on her knees and hands on her face.