Voynich Shift - Season One (COMPLETED)

Grandfather's Notebook

The young man sat back from his desk mulling over the items written on the surface of the note pad. He frowned as he glanced over at the dog-eared leather notebook that lay next to it. The worn object was barely held together by a simple blue rubber band and nearly fell apart each time it was opened. Parker cursed himself under his breath for wasting this much time on nothing.

After his layoff from National Cellular in New York, Parker found himself adrift. Without his job, he no longer had any sort of direction, or money for that matter, and his future was looking more and more bleak. Then, everything changed. His mother's estranged father abruptly passed away and the old man left everything to his one and only heir...Parker Raymond, unemployed technician extraordinaire.

After moving into the creepy old plantation home and lounging about for nearly two days straight, Parker's boredom began to get the best of him. He decided to explore. At first, it was just odd markings on the walls of the home scratched in various locations. On day three, he located a dusty chalkboard in the basement marked by several circles surrounded by unintelligible symbols and crude renderings of naked women.

Parker knew his grandfather was crazy, so none of what he had uncovered to this point piqued any of his interest meters. He grew up listening to the tales his mother told of the man's bouts with insanity. Maniacal ravings and other traumatic terrible events marred the woman's childhood and it was what Parker always assumed drove the woman to drink herself to death. At any rate, these recent discoveries only added more reinforcement to Parker's preconceived notions of the psychotic old man. That was until the oddly serendipitous discovery of his grandfather's stupid book. He couldn't explain it, but something about the thing and the writings contained in it drew him in like a moth to a Savannah streetlight.

This little book gave Parker something to do...a relatively pointless something, but something nonetheless. It, along with the large inheritance left to him by the strange old man, now allowed him to do what he wanted, when he wanted. And right now, what he wanted was to figure out what in the hell his mother's father was up to and why.

In the book, Parker noted the old man rarely wrote anything too in-depth or insightful. In fact, it oftentimes  appeared to be nothing more than more incoherent babbling. But in several instances, the old man made references to something called a 'Voynich Shift' and let his fingers fly. Those were the moments Parker found the little journal to be the most fascinating.

That's when Parker decided to look online and discovered the internet was filled with articles detailing at least a handful of the entries his grandfather scribbled in the book. He found the only real differences between the two sources of information was when they were created. The old man's notes were written decades before the advent of the world wide web. And one stood out more than the others, the entry followed by the date, "July, 1954". A reference to the infamous Taured Man, the number '72' on the right edge of the page, and  written below the word 'leonis' followed by two references to time...well, time was Parker's initial assessment, he still was not sure if that was what the old man referred to. Nevertheless, until he had something better...times were what he called the numbers '01:07' and '02:04'.

Parker typed in 'leonis, a quick search revealed the word was Latin for lion and clarified nothing. Parker was just as confused as when he first started. The young man yawned and rubbed his eyes. It was two o'clock in the morning and he had been at it for hours with no satisfactory results. The same as the previous two weeks. Parker shook his head and stood, throwing his arms skyward to stretch.

He noted the moon beginning to shine in through the bedroom window. The large round satellite slowly revealed itself from behind the clouds and its light flickered in through the branches of the ancient oaks lining the plantation. "Seriously Parker, you idiot, what the hell are you doin'? This is so stupid..."

The sound of something buzzing interrupted Parker's self-deprecating thoughts. "What in the world is that?" he exclaimed, turning to locate the strange sound.

Silence filled the room as the buzzing ceased, only to return moments later, this time with more intensity.

"Did grandpa really have a stupid pager?" the young man asked aloud and frantically began searching the room before the device stopped working again. "What in the hell would he need one of those for?"

Parker lay prostrate on the wood floor and thrust his hand beneath his grandfather's old bed, patting it blindly around in the dark. "Found it!....What the fu..."

It was suddenly daylight and Parker found himself in the middle of a muddy, rutted road surrounded by dirty men carrying pickaxes and shovels. "Horses?" It smelled like a zoo. Horses were everywhere. Horses pulling wagons, chickens squawking beneath the hooves and wagon wheels. Horses led by filthy gawking men; the animals trotting by with burlap sacks, saddles, and repeating rifles strapped to them. Parker slowly sat up. His world was now filled with snow-capped mountains and trees that surrounded him on all sides.

"You there! Yeah you! What in tarnation are you doin' down there on your hands and knees in the horse shit, fella? You tryin' to get yourself killed!?!!" yelled a scruffy looking man in overalls, his floppy tan hat long past its prime. He stood in front of a general store and began frantically stabbing at the air. "Move! Get out of the way, fool!"

Parker turned to find a horse-drawn carriage looming over him. He raised his hands in the air as the large black beast continued to charge forward, threatening to trample him to death.