Comedy Was the Dangerous One
Filed under: Books — The Workshop
Dr. M came into the Shadow Hearth with her usual smile — the smile of someone who enjoys her work. She was humming a very old, rowdy sailor’s song, which I suspect she doesn’t know the lyrics to. Master S does, though, and he smiled. She was carrying a pile of books in both hands when she suddenly stopped. From the corner of her eye, she could see the hat rack. The bowler hat and the swan-handled cane were unmistakable. Mister Alex DeLarge was in the Vault.
As if sensing something was wrong, Master S appeared in front of her.
This has happened before. The presence of Alex brings a strange atmosphere to the Vault — to the whole castle, in fact. And Dr. M seems the most affected by it, for reasons she has never fully explained.
Master S saw the look on her face, and his voice softened in the way it only ever does for her.
“Has he broken any rules?” she asked.
“Not yet. No.”
“What is he doing?”
“Talking to Maestro Beethoven on the Celestial floor. Or trying to. I don’t think old Ludwig can hear him.”
That brought the smile back to Dr. M, and she patted Master S on the forearm.
“Don’t worry. I have Nevermore and the Cheshire Cat keeping an eye on him. And Beethoven too. He tends to wander where he is not allowed.”
“Come. I have something to show you.” And he led her upstairs to the Workshop.
The painting on the first landing made her stop. It always did. The attic, the sombre light, the Gothic-Victorian furniture, the Creole figure in a nightgown. Bertha. Poor Bertha. She continued up the stairs, but a little sadder than before.
Now, Readers — there is an arrangement at the Vault that the Doctor can only enter the Workshop if Master S is present and allows it. It does happen, particularly when a new object or discovery arrives or is archived. From the trembling in Master S’s chevron mustache, you could tell something big was brewing.
The Workshop is not your usual workshop. It is Master S’s thinking made physical — every object in its exact position, every lamp at its precise angle, every open journal marking exactly the page he left it on. The working tables run all around the balcony, each one dedicated to a specific item currently under examination. The walls are lined with cabinets, Wunderkammern, fishbowls small and large — very large, but that is for another day. This is his domain entirely, and it feels like it.
“As Felicette has been telling you,” Master S continued, looking sideways at her to see her reaction, “I have been inquiring again about Tome II.”
And react she did. First she turned red as a beet, then she started getting agitated, and finally she blurted — “We have not been —”
“It’s all right,” said Master S. “I don’t mind the little cat reading over my shoulder. She is quite remarkable, I must say.”
Of course, they are talking about Felicette — the first cat to be sent into space and return alive, by the French. She went up in 1963 and came back safely, and history promptly forgot her. Everyone thinks Laika was the only one but they are wrong.
“So what’s the news? I thought you were at a dead end.”
“I was. But I recently received news from the Herculaneum updates through back channels, and there may be a new avenue of research. Let me tell you the story first, as this object has not been archived yet.
“When Aristotle wrote the Poetics, it was divided into two books. Book I was on tragedy — which we know even today as the foundation document of literary theory in the Western tradition. The vocabulary it gave us for discussing drama has lasted two thousand four hundred years. Without it, there is no Shakespeare, no Racine, no modern dramaturgy as we understand it.
“Are you following me so far?”
“Yes, Master S. I think I’m following you through the explanation of one of the most famous books in history. But thank you for checking in on me.”
“Ahem. Well, then. What you may not know is that there was supposed to be a Book II, called Comedy.”
“Yes, I know that too. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco was about that — but everyone knows that’s storytelling.”
“Aha. But that is where everyone is mistaken!” Master S exclaimed. “The novel is fiction. The premise — that someone, somewhere, deliberately suppressed the text rather than letting it survive, whether for religious reasons or another — is a theory that genuinely circulates among classicists, even if most of them will not admit it at dinner parties. The book existed. And furthermore — I believe it still does.”
“Well, Master S, I haven’t seen you this excited about a project since researching and finding Moby Dick’s bones!”
“Ahh yes. She was an elusive one. But nothing like this one, Doctor. Nothing like this one.
“See — even Aristotle refers to it himself. Cross-references in later Greek and Roman commentary confirm it was a real text, read and discussed. And then, at some point between late antiquity and the medieval period, it disappeared.
“Nobody knows when or how. There is no record of its destruction, no surviving copy, no fragment longer than a few lines of disputed paraphrase. It simply stopped being copied — and in a manuscript culture, a text that stops being copied for two or three generations effectively ceases to exist. And here is the shame of it. Because of multiple factors — including a certain Roman emperor — roughly two-thirds of Aristotle’s work has disappeared. Comedy may simply be one more casualty among many.
“Or that is the official story.” A small spark appeared in his eyes. “I told you nobody knows when or how. But there are some of us who can speculate why.”
From somewhere far above, faint and half-heard, the opening notes of Beethoven’s Ninth drifted down through the floors of the Vault. Neither of them mentioned it.
“Let us recap what we have found so far. First, the Tractatus Coislinianus. A Greek manuscript from the tenth century, catalogued as Coislin 120. Buried inside it is a short, anonymous Byzantine text — located at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris — a summary of a theory of comedy that maps almost perfectly onto the structure of Poetics Book I, but for comedy instead of tragedy. Many scholars believe this text could be the lecture notes of one of Aristotle’s students about the lost Book II. It is only five pages long, more an outline than a full text.
“Secondly, Eco himself. He was not a novelist. He was a scholar and one of the most respected medievalists of the twentieth century. His novel is itself partly responsible for the modern resurgence of interest in finding Book II. Eco effectively created a generation of scholars hunting for the very text his fictional villain destroyed. Whether this was done on purpose I will not speculate. But it has certainly helped the search.
“And finally, the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum. This is where we are now. In 1750, workmen digging a well outside Naples broke into a buried Roman villa. It was eventually identified as the country house of Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, father-in-law of Julius Caesar. The villa had been buried under twenty metres of volcanic mud when Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE. Inside, archaeologists found a private library — eighteen hundred carbonised papyrus scrolls, blackened and brittle, but preserved by the very disaster that destroyed them.
“Most of the scrolls are unreadable. The ones that have been deciphered so far have turned out to be largely the work of a single Epicurean philosopher named Philodemus. And here is the best part.” The sparks in Master S’s eyes grew brighter. “The library is now believed to be only one of several in the villa. A second, larger library may still be buried in the unexcavated levels below.
“Using artificial intelligence and X-ray tomography, work has begun to read scrolls that have never been physically opened. Some classicists genuinely believe — and some quietly hope — that one of the unopened scrolls, in one of the unexcavated chambers, may contain Aristotle’s lost Book II. The villa was built by educated, wealthy Romans in the first century BCE. They would have owned the major Greek philosophical works of the previous three centuries. There is no evidence the book was there. But there is also no evidence it was not.
“The letter I received from the Herculaneum updates mentioned that they have isolated a scroll that corresponds to the time Aristotle was alive and teaching. It could well be the lost Tome.”
“Oh, Master S! That is fantastic news. That could be one of the biggest finds in history, and of course we shall be involved. When are they going to know more? Is there anything we can do?”
At that, the last notes of Beethoven’s piano came to an end. Silence came down from the third floor.
“We shall continue this conversation later, my dear Doctor. I believe I am going to make sure Maestro Beethoven and our other guest are accompanied to the door. You may stay here—” and at that you could see the Doctor’s smile grow larger than the Cheshire Cat’s — “but you cannot touch anything!” Master S said, dead serious.
“Of course, of course,” the Doctor said, with a small, sad smile. Everyone knew she was going to disobey. Not out of malice, mind you, but out of curiosity. As always.
Walking down the hall, they heard him mumble: “Comedy. How can they find comedy dangerous?” And he disappeared out the door, sighing.
The Doctor took a seat. Felicette came and sat on her lap.
Well, my dear, Dr. M said softly. If that isn’t something, I don’t know what it is.
Item VII-10: Aristotle’s Poetics, Book II remains Object Sought, Provenance Unconfirmed, under active investigation by the Workshop. One carbonised scroll, of the correct period, has been isolated at Herculaneum. Master S has noted his objection to unsupervised access to the Workshop in the official record. Felicette was already on the Doctor’s lap before the door closed.
— Dr. M, writing from the Workshop, 105 Palimpsest Road
Item VC-003: The Grim (Chacha)
Filed under: Familiars — The Shadow Hearth
The door of the Shadow Hearth opened and Dr. M came inside, lost in thought, as usual — trying to read the book in her hands without actually being able to, because she had lost her bifocals. Again.
She bumped into the leather couch, prompting Chacha to look up from her usual slumber.
“Oh,” she said, as if she hadn’t noticed where she was. After a second she looked up and said, “Greetings, Readers! Welcome to the Vault! We are so happy to have you visiting us, isn’t that right, Master S?”
From the second floor came a grunt. That sound was common at the Vault, as it was one of the main answers Master S, curator of the Vault, had to offer.
Dr. M was a young woman dressed in a pale blush blouse with a high collar and fitted sleeves, tucked into a dove-grey skirt that reached the floor — the sort of outfit that had started the morning looking perfectly presentable. Her curly hazel hair was tied up at the nape of her neck, not very carefully.
“I’m Dr. M and I am delighted to have you here. Don’t pay attention to Master S — he is usually grumpy.” Another grunt came from the same place as before.
“And how is this silly, silly dog doing today? Moved much?” she asked, knowing full well that Chacha doesn’t move at all.
“By the way, readers — this is Chacha, or as some of you may know her: THE OMEN OF DEATH… ”ooooh” Honestly, I have never seen her omen anything, but that’s what the tag said when she got here.
Her official status in the Vault is Active Stasis in Harmonic Hearth — a classification that Master S arrived at after three weeks of attempting to determine the precise subspecies of folkloric manifestation.
She arrived without a retrieval file and without any prior correspondence with the Communications Bureau. This is not entirely unusual — the Vault receives a number of its best items this way — but it does mean that her provenance remains, technically, unresolved. Master S finds this professionally irritating. I find it amusing, precisely because of that.
She does occasionally raise her head when someone enters. But mostly, she sleeps.
We did our due diligence, and what we found is this: The Grim — the enormous black dog of British and Northern European folklore, glowing-eyed, silent, appearing at roadsides, churchyards, and crossroads without invitation — is one of the oldest death omens in the historical record. Old enough, and present in enough regional variations, to suggest that whatever gave rise to it arose independently in too many places to trace back to a single source.
The name itself is instructive. Grim comes from the Old Norse Grimr — one of the many names of Odin, the Norse god whose portfolio included death, wisdom, wandering, and a fondness for sending large black dogs ahead of him as scouts. These were creatures sent to mark those whose time had come, arriving before the god himself as a kind of advance notice. When Viking settlement brought Norse tradition into sustained contact with British folklore over several centuries, the two lineages merged into the figure that would haunt English rural legend for the next thousand years: a spectral black dog, enormous, silent, and understood — when seen — as a sign that something was already in motion that you would not be stopping.
On the other hand, historical records and folklore songs tell a rather different story. In Scandinavian and Northern English tradition, when a new churchyard was consecrated, the first creature buried in it was believed to become its eternal guardian — bound to protect the graves from robbers, witches, and whatever else might come in darkness to disturb the dead. To avoid requiring a human for this purpose, a black dog was often buried alive at the north entrance of new churchyards. This creature became the Church Grim: a large, black, spectral dog, seen near the church at night not as an omen of death at all, but as evidence that the guardian was on duty.
The same creature with two completely opposite meanings. Which one applied depended entirely on which village you grew up in, and nobody involved thought this was a contradiction. I, for one, find it fascinating. When I told both stories to Chacha, she didn’t seem very interested, to be honest.
Master S says we should probably return her, and who knows what havoc she might cause one day when no one is watching. But come closer, because I can’t say this very loud — I know that when Master S leaves late at night after working long hours and walks to the exit, he stops and scratches Chacha behind the ears. If you ever say I told you this, I will deny it until I turn purple.
Right then.
In any case, she is one of our many residents here at the Vault, and she has her special place on the rug by the fireplace. Feel free to say hello if you ever meet her… or perhaps run the other way. Either seems reasonable.
“Before we go — is there anything you’d like to say to our readers, Master S?”
Another grunt. Dr. M rolled her eyes.
“Ah — there are my bifocals. On the fireplace mantle.” She picked them up, squinting at them with mild suspicion. From somewhere in the upper levels came the low, rolling croak of a raven. Dr. M said nothing, but she did look up.
It was a pleasure meeting you, dear Reader. Until next time — and don’t forget: what is hidden is not invisible.
Item VC-003 remains in Active Stasis in Harmonic Hearth, Level I. The food bowl is to the left of the rug. Master S has noted his objection in the official record. The bowl is always full.
— Dr. M, writing from the Shadow Hearth, 105 Palimpsest Road