"The Cipher of the Celestial Clock"

As recorded by Dr. Everett Thorne

It was on the twelfth of November, a particularly crisp morning that saw frost clinging to the wrought-iron fence outside our rooms on Pembrick Street, that Mr. Aldous Finch once again astonished me with his peculiar talents.

“I am expecting a client this morning,” he said, folding his newspaper with the solemnity of a priest concluding a sermon.

“How can you be certain?” I asked, not having heard any knock.

“Because the gas lamp at the corner was dimmed an hour early. Someone wished to examine our building in shadow.”

He barely had time to finish the sentence when the bell rang.

Our visitor was a woman of about thirty, tall and angular, with flame-red hair coiled in a strict chignon. She wore no jewellery save for a curious brooch in the shape of a sunburst.

“Miss Portia Greaves,” she introduced herself. “I am assistant curator at the Ludgate Astronomical Society. I’ve come to you, Mr. Finch, regarding a matter most bizarre. We’ve received a coded message—anonymous and uncannily accurate—predicting the precise moment a meteorite would strike near Marlow. Which it did.”

“Go on,” said Finch, his interest clearly piqued.

“We thought it a prank. But now we’ve received a second cipher, suggesting a celestial event of even greater magnitude—an eclipse that would be...impossible.”

She placed the message on our table. It was scrawled in Latin, with references to star positions, lunar alignments, and the phrase: Sol verberabit falsitatem—"The sun shall strike down falsehood."

We visited the Ludgate observatory that afternoon. The place had the musty, reverent air of an old chapel, save the walls were lined with ledgers and astrolabes instead of hymnals.

Finch examined the telescope dome, the records, and the coded message again. He was silent for nearly twenty minutes before uttering: “There is no eclipse.”

Miss Greaves paled. “But the coordinates—”

“False,” said Finch. “Fabricated to imply an event. But look closely at the cipher. It isn’t astronomy—it’s theatre.”

He turned to one of the astronomers, a pale man named Silas Broom.

“You, sir, once worked at the Museum of Horology, did you not?”

“How did you—?”

“The smell of bronze polish on your sleeves. And only a man who’s handled celestial clocks would know how to forge a star map with such subtlety.”

Broom wilted.

Finch pressed on. “You devised the code, using astronomical markers to cloak your scheme. This ‘impossible eclipse’ was a distraction—meant to draw eyes upward while a theft was to occur below. Most likely, during the upcoming viewing gala at the observatory.”

Indeed, when questioned, Broom admitted the plan. He intended to use the event as cover to steal a rare 16th-century astrolabe being transported for the gala—an artefact he believed rightfully belonged to his family, who had donated it generations prior.

As we returned home, I remarked on the strangeness of using the heavens to disguise theft.

“Not so strange,” Finch mused. “History is full of charlatans who claimed the stars whispered to them. Some wore robes, others lab coats. A cipher dressed as science is still deception.”

Source: Some or all of the content was generated using an AI language model