The Magic Circle by Katherine Neville (top 10 books of all time txt) 📕

feel safe to change them at the last moment, if necessary, to redirect my path.

I felt highly proud of myself, deciphering all this from a 26-by-26 matrix—though I knew it was Sam who was brilliant, putting it into geographical context only to be read by someone who knew the lay of the land as well as he himself did.

Just as I was about to erase the matrix still looming on the screen, I remembered to hunt for another, deeper layer. I double-clicked my mouse on the asterisk, to no avail. Then I tried the first letter of Sun Valley, and finally I clicked on the exit letter s in woods. The screen vanished at once and a message popped up:

Keen gnosis of gnosis. Signed: Reg du Coly.

Reg du Coly was an anagram of Grey Cloud, Sam’s sacred spirit name known only to me—just as were C. G. Loudyer and Lou D. Grecy and all the other rearrangements of letters of our names that we used to make up to dazzle each other when we were kids. So this meant that the other half was an anagram too, and contained the other half of the message from Sam to me.

It was going to be a long night.

Not all that long, actually. I was very good at cryptic anagrams—something Sam had counted on.

The first word of his anagram was keen, which the dictionary at my fingertips told me was a mourning cry or lament for the dead. Highly appropriate, considering that Sam was technically dead and that’s what I felt like doing right now, keening, even if I knew he was actually alive.

The other word, gnosis, I knew meant knowledge—especially the secret, hidden, esoteric kind one needed in transformations. Once again contextually appropriate to my genealogical bent, my career, and the situation in which I seemed to have found myself while sitting in front of my computer just at this moment.

The easiest and quickest way to decipher an anagram is to take all common letters and sort them into clumps, then see what words they produce in common. For instance, in Sam’s eighteen-letter message Keen gnosis of gnosis, there were the following numbers of vowels and consonants: e=2, i=2, o=3, f=1, g=2, k=1, n=3, s=4. There weren’t that many meaningful sentences you could construct from so limited a set. To simplify even those options, he’d provided two clues in the words keen and gnosis.

If a keen was a lament or moan, then it was a sound, a cry, maybe even music. And given that my mother and grandmother had each been among the top singers of her day, it was a good bet that by keen Sam meant a song.

With the letter set Sam had given me there were enough letters to spell song not once but twice—which was all it took. Of the letters left over, after borrowing from my crop to create two songs, I quickly spelled the words seek and in. Ergo: I Seek in Song of Songs was my message.

So that’s what I would do.

Olivier had the Book of Mormon in his top desk drawer, though there was no Bible. But good lord, there were so many religious fanatics here at the site that they even had brown-bag scripture readings at lunchtime. There must be a copy of the Bible somewhere. I dashed around a few offices until I found one. Then I flipped through and located the book.

And I read: “The Song of Songs, which is Solomon’s …”

It didn’t escape me that this wasn’t the only reference Sam had made to Solomon. The first was the Solomon’s knot he’d hung from my rearview mirror: his first contact with me since being born again. Not feeling I really had time, tonight, to decipher the hidden meaning in a seven-page poem that had inspired zeal on the part of so many over the millennia, I slaked my immediate interest just by flipping to the last stanza:

“Make haste, my beloved, and be thou like to a roe or to a young hart upon the mountains of spices …”

And I knew I must make all due haste, to the mountain.

THE MERRY-GO-ROUND

Woe to Ariel, to Ariel … yet I will distress Ariel, and there shall be heaviness and sorrow …

For the indignation of the Lord is upon all nations and his fury upon their armies: he hath utterly destroyed them, he hath delivered them to the slaughter.

—Isaiah 29, 34

One cannot say it is pleasanter to look at a battle than at a merry-go-round, but there can be no question which draws the larger crowd.

—George Bernard Shaw

Sunlight glittered like black diamonds off the volcanic cones of the Craters of the Moon National Monument. Wild, twisted lava beds sprawled across the valley floor as the car shot down the deserted road heading toward Sun Valley.

We’d taken my car because Olivier’s was still on the fritz, but he did the driving. Jason sat, or stood with front paws on the dashboard, checking out the panoramic view and keeping close tabs on the navigation. My arm had recovered enough to drive, so Olivier was surprised when I asked him to drive the whole 150-mile trek so I could sit in the backseat and read the Bible. Maybe he thought my recent troubles had driven me to find solace in the Good Book, but that’s not what I was seeking in the Song of Songs, now lying open on my lap—nor did it seem a likely tale to provide much solace.

I found it odd that Sam would pick the Bible to hide his message in. Neither of us had much expertise in the religion department, and this particular chapter, which I’d never actually read, was about as steamy as you could get in a book with no brown paper wrapper. The torrid, heavy-breathing account of a romance between King Solomon and the Shulamite, a young woman who works down in the vineyards—it’s more or less in the