I’ve always liked the word “eldritch.” Since I’m not writing fantasy stories including elves and ancient, magical, “eldritch” powers, I’ve never had an opportunity to use it. But I looked it up, and counter to what I expected, it doesn’t necessarily imply anything ancient or magical. You can just use it as a synonym for “weird.” That’s exactly what I need to describe the kind of things that have happened on February 13. Keep in mind, of course, that in some years this is Friday the thirteenth. Not this year, obviously, but make of that what you will. Regardless, I’m just going to come out and say it: some of the stuff that’s happened on February 13 is downright eldritch. Although now that I see that on the page, I don’t like it. “Downright” hardly goes with “eldritch,” if you know what I mean. So let me just begin again. Please unread the previous paragraph.
Welcome, gentle readers, to the eldritch enigmas of February 13! On this day in 1322, a bit more than 700 years ago, the sun set somehow uneasily, freeing a portentous darkness to spread in rabid fits and starts across the ancient landscape of Ely, in Cambridgeshire, England.
(Note the cheap writing tricks employed just there. A bit of alliteration with “eldritch enigmas” that tries to suggest the whole thing is going to be beyond human imagination, partly because I used needlessly complicated words where I didn’t have to. Then I made the night seem like some sort of entity that could be “freed,” and because I used the word “rabid,” that entity seems like it could be dangerous. So you’re getting the idea that bad events might be in the offing here. Come on, admit it, just by choosing the right words I gave you something like that feeling, didn’t I? Now, what have I been saying about rhetoric? But never mind, this is about February 13.)
The darkness gathered its blackest gloom to wrap around the Ely Cathedral, which was already, in 1322, ancient. Its first stones had been laid over six centuries before by the Anglo-Saxons let by King Anna of East Anglia. His daughter Æthelthryth became the first abbess. Later the Normans added to the cathedral. Their labors continued for a century at least, and no one now remembers the lives spent in toil over it. They erected a mighty central tower, another to the west. On the dark night of February 13, 1322, though, no one remarked or recorded the event, which must thus have remained invisible; a vast scream of collapse in the unlit darkness. Because for reasons never fathomed, the great central tower of the Normans fell that night. It simply collapsed, and when morning again dawned, there was nothing but rubble where it had stood, seemingly for the ages. Was it simply a flaw in the design? A mistake by the builders? A mighty timber, overstressed, that finally gave way? We cannot know. The tower collapsed, and perhaps because so much was unknown, it was never rebuilt. Why take the chance of once again angering what might have been a vast eldritch power mysteriously and incomprehensibly displeased by some aspect of the tower?
(A few more cheap writing tricks in that part. You can get a lot of mileage out of throwing the word “vast” around for no particular reason, and you can count how many ways I basically shrugged in that paragraph and said “huh, dunno what that was.” It’s all in how you say it, of course. Also, I was please to work in “eldritch” again. It’s probably never going to happen again, since I don’t often read fantasy stories, let alone write them. I hope you’ll humor me. )
The mysteries of February 13 were just getting started in 1322. About a century and a half later, probably in Florence or Milan, Italy, Leonardo da Vinci finished some of his notebooks. What he did with them, nobody knows, but a sculptor named Pompeo Leoni eventually brought them to Spain. He evidently fumbled around with them, because they passed through any number of owners. Genuine notebooks from Leonardo da Vinci have been valuable probably since the days when he was still writing them, so these were pretty significant documents. They were finally cataloged in the Biblioteca Real, one of the leading libraries in Europe. It’s still a leading library to this day, and not at all associated with terms like “butterfingers,” “oops,” or “where did I leave my keys.” But after the da Vinci notebooks were added to the Bibioteca Real collection, they vanished. Now, it’s one of the main jobs of a library to keep a list of what they have. And if the librarian on that particular day could be forgiven one little mistake, it’s hard to explain why a succession of librarians in a well known, important library would keep misplacing notebooks by Leonardo da Vinci — which people knew had been acquired by the library; it wasn’t a secret. But the documents stayed misplaced. For 252 years. A professor of language from the University of Massachusetts found them, quite by accident. Maybe only the last in a long, long series of accidents.
(Switched things up here; instead of subtle suggestions about supernatural forces, this weird little episode is presented as very, very extended human error. It’s exactly as inexplicable as the collapse of the Norman tower, but here I’m presenting a very similar thing as just a mistake. Human mistakes can be exploited to great advantage when your writing. Er, I mean when you’re writing, of course. Just a mistake. Nothing to see hereOH MY GOD WHAT IS THAT OUTSIDE THE WINDOW?!?)
It was 1961. Definitely 1961; I checked and double-checked. Not 1921, and not 2021, and not a hundred thousand years earlier either. Instruments can be off by a bit, like if your speedometer says you’re driving at 65 MPH and you’re clocked by radar at 66. But duplicate instruments can’t all be off by that much all at once. Anyway, it would be February 13, of course; seems like it always is for some confabulated reason. Three people were looking for geodes around Olancha, California, and they found some. Geodes are cool; they’re little round rocks almost always small enough to pick up in one hand, and they just look like normal rocks. But then you cut or break them open and inside you sometimes find some spectacular crystal formations. Anyway, one of the finders, Mike Mikesell, sliced open one of the geodes with his diamond-edged saw, just to see what was inside. It wasn’t crystals. It made no sense at all at the time, but eventually they figured out what it was. An automobile spark plug from about the 1920s. Now, there are only a couple of ways a spark plug from the 1920s could end up inside a geode, which is usually formed about a half-million years before its found. It could be that spark plugs, and maybe the cars that use them, are just our recent versions of inventions that some incredibly ancient civilization — think Atlantis or something like that —thought of first. Or it could be that somebody was zipping around in time, probably double- and triple-checking their instruments, as you do, and by mistake they dropped a spark plug way back in the geode-formation epoch. Why take a spark plug with you? Darned if I know. Some kind of lucky piece, maybe. Another possibility, I suppose, even though this one doesn’t seem very reasonable, is something to do with ancient astronauts visiting Earth. With spark plugs. See what I mean? As for me, I just put it down to another one of those things that always seems to be happening on February 13.
(Please note that I didn’t say one thing about anybody really traveling in time here. The spark plug in question, when it was scientifically analyzed, really was a Champion Spark Plug from the 1920s. But that geode…that might just have been a mass of iron oxide formed around the spark plug when it was sitting in the ground rusting. But where’s the fun in that?)
There are a few other February 13 oddities, like the a 1979 windstorm that sank a bridge (really), the city of Brussels sinking a river in 1867 (really), or the 2004 discovery of a diamond the size of a planet (again, really). But whatever agencies may produce them, whether supernatural, superscientific, superfluous, or just goofs, you can get completely different effects by just writing about them in different ways.
