Ugly Duckling, In the early nineteen-thirties, a celebrated dealer in rare manuscripts died in New York. Among his papers, locked in a cabinet, was a series of plain notebooks written in a small and precise hand.
They have not been published before.
The notebooks claim to be his account of a document that has resisted sustained scholarly examination for over a century — a manuscript of unknown origin, written in an unidentified script, illustrated with drawings no one has been able to explain.
His claim is simple. He made it.
The editors of this volume cannot verify that claim. They have published the notebooks anyway, because the alternative — suppression of a document on the grounds that its claims are uncomfortable — seemed worse.
The reader will form their own judgement.
Ugly Duckling is a memoir. It may also be a forgery. The reader will have to decide which — and whether, in the end, the difference matters.
I have been many things to many people.
A soldier. A linguist. A ghost.
Born in Puerto Toro, at the edge of the Amazon,
where the river decides whether you live or disappear.
Raised in Königsberg, where the cold teaches you
that history is not the past — it is the ground beneath your feet.
I served with the French Foreign Legion.
I worked in signals intelligence.
I learned that every transmission contains two messages —
the one that is sent, and the one that is hidden.
I speak what the dead spoke.
Medieval Latin. Aramaic. Sumerian. Caló.View all by Ivory F Wild
