The heat from the helicopter wings melted away another layer of wax off the Masonic pyramid, revealing yet another code.
Yet another crazy message, symboligan Robert Langdon cursed. And this one looked like somebody'd whipped it up in Adobe Illustrator using Birbiglia font in 24 point type:
The message made no sense at all to his Harvard-educated mind. Could it be the ancient Masons were crazy? No, like I said four thousand times, they were fine, honest men who worked in stone with tools. Robert stared at the message and suddenly it hit him. The words were homonyms! Homonyms, Robert knew, were words that were pronounced like other words but spelled differently.
The colonel of fowl secrets. Suddenly the allegorical thin, gauze-like fabric that had been obscuring Robert's vision for so many hours seemed yanked quickly away from his face.
"Back in 1926," Robert said to baffled but beautiful Noëtic Science expert Katherine Solomon, "Colonel Harland Sanders invented a method of cooking chicken with eleven herbs and spices. Eleven! The number has long been thought to hold mystical properties, though if you just stand there and chant Eleven! nothing whatsoever will happen. Many distinguished men with degrees say that the placement of the two uprights a small distance apart -- one stroke, then a space, then another stroke -- by early Piltdown man has predicted everything from highway design to football."
Katherine reeled, trying to take it all in.
"It's no coincidence, then," Robert continued, "that with eleven herbs and spices, the Colonel changed the world in a most profound way, as our eighty-seventh clue hinted, because before this point most people ate hamburgers."
Hamburgers, Robert knew, were disk-shaped pieces of meat encased between two puffy buns.
"Wait," Katherine said. "So those bizarre scratchings on the bottom of the pyramid: it's not a map -- it's a -- ?"
"It's a recipe!" Robert declared.
Robert and Katherine had to agree the chicken was an exact duplicate of the secret KFC recipe, and was absolutely delicious. "I'd never have guessed it had that much salt," Katherine declared, staring out at the sparkling dome of the Capitol building from the balcony of Robert's apartment and forgetting all about the night's events, especially the snaggle-toothed midget. "Now if we can only find the Boston Market recipe for mashed potatoes."
Just then the phone rang. Robert spoke in hushed tones before returning to Katherine. "Be careful what you wish for," he said. "This next adventure could take us all the way from Boise to Pocatello while revealing the hidden secrets of Idaho farmers."
"Wow," Katherine said. "That would be rad."
She licked Robert's fingers, and he licked hers, and looking at the Washington Monument they once again stopped to think about how cool Masons are.
3 comments:
If you can just crank out the first 761 chapters, you'll have Dan Brown on the run!
totally agree! Roman...love your writing, keeps me in stiches. And its National Novel writing month. we want your novel! we want your novel! we want your novel!
You really do have a knack for this.
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