Hurrah!
Omphaloskeptic has triumphed for the forces of good!
Now, after all this time, maybe You can prevent a terrible werwolf apocalypse! Maybe there won’t be such a big demand this winter for “Deep Woods OFF” and citronella candles! Maybe You can save the world! Maybe Agent Brown will be proud of You again!
And just maybe You will not have to fear the full moon.
You call Jones, and tell him where to find Barlow.
Where?
Jones answers. Before he can even finish saying “Hello?” You blurt out your discovery in a rush:
“Jones, it’s me, and I’ve got good news and very, very bad news. The good news is, I think I know where Barlow’s hiding: the wax museum in Pigeon Forge. The bad news is, it looks like we’re going to need that OFF after all. There are thousands of mosquitoes carrying the werewolf virus all over the southeastern states. You should get yourselves some beekeeping suits, just to be safe. I’ll work on decoding the rest of the messages, and let you know if I find out anything else about the whereabouts of Barlow or his gang, and maybe, just maybe, a cure to this awful virus.”
After decoding all the messages, you breathe a small sigh of relief, although you’ll still be nervous until Barlow is captured and everyone who was infected with the virus has been cured.
Thankfully, you’ve found the antidote: colloidal silver destroys the virus internally. Naturally, Barlow designed his virus so that it took a “silver bullet” to kill the werewolf. You could almost laugh… if it weren’t for all those who suffered or died because You couldn’t figure out the code in time.
You shake your head in sadness. You almost had it.
You saw the two paragraphs, and considered that there might be two “halves”, but then dismissed it when the paragraphs were not the same length. Separately, it had also occurred to You that the paragraph breaks might be false. But You never put the two ideas together. You even counted the number of letters in each word, but You didn’t see the repeating patterns of numbers. At very least, You should have noticed that there was an even number of each length of word in each message: 16 two-letter words, 12 three-letter words, and so on. It took the eyes of a navel-gazing “neophyte” to make You see what had been right in front of You. Ah, well. There’s nothing for it now, but to try to do better next time. Although you hope there won’t be a next time, you fear these spies will be back in action eventually. You hope Jones will call soon with good news. You begin warming some spiced cider - you’ve had enough coffee for a while - and sit down to wait for his call.
Jones, Brown, and several other agents of the CIA surround the boarded-up wax museum in Pigeon Forge. When Jones called, You invited yourself along for the finale. After all, if someone turns You into a werewolf, it’s only fitting that You get to be there when Justice is served.
At the signal everyone moves in. Through the door our raiding party finds itself in a hall of monsters, all made of wax. It seems every old movie creature is here, each reaching out in a frozen attack. After one final turn the hall ends and there stands the Devil, wearing an evil sneer. Satan glows in an eerie light… but he is just a wax dummy. A quick search leads to only more rooms and wax monstrosities.
“There must be a secret passage somewhere,” You say. “We all know there is a laboratory in this building…and a dungeon too.”
Brown is over examining the wax Satan. “I think I see something,” says the young agent. Brown pulls on the trident in the wax devil’s hand, and a hidden door opens. Stairs lead downwards. In the far distance below You hear noises. Somewhere down there, people are screaming for help.
Into the underground our heroes proceed. After what seems a mile of steps the torch-lit path straightens. Then ahead is a frightening sight: the dungeon. At least a dozen people are chained to the wall. This foul-smelling room is littered with bones and filth.
“Help us,” one man cries. “Most of us are spies who were working for Barlow. Wednesday he told us to come here for our big reward. Then he gassed us all and we woke up as prisoners. He’s going to perform unspeakable experiments on us. Please help us and we’ll confess to everything!”
The CIA agents begin working to free the former spies, as well as the hitchhikers who have been prisoners for nearly a month. The men are so thankful. It seems obvious that they now are all more than willing to help the government’s cause.
“Where is Barlow?” Jones demands.
“He’s in the lab. The lab is over there, behind that oak door. But be careful. He’s crazy!”
Now the group heads for the final confrontation. The heavy door is wrenched open and a fantastic scene meets your eyes. Inside is a mad scientist lab, seemingly out of some 1950’s Hammer House horror movie. Lights indeed do blink. Beakers bubble. And in the corner stands the crazed scientist Barlow.
“Keep back!” Boris Barlow cries wildly. “It’s too late to stop the werewolf apocalypse. Even as we speak, Quentin Stokes is driving a van loaded with thousands of jars of werewolf mosquitoes. He’ll be opening them all over the Southeast United States. My wishes should have been granted. Now everyone will pay!”
Jones and Brown step forward, guns drawn.
“Don’t move, Barlow! You are surrounded. The game is up. You supposedly hate Tennessee, but you were hiding here in Tennessee all the time.”
The man’s eyes turn even wilder. “Pigeon Forge is in North Carolina! Pigeon Forge is not in stinkin’ Tennessee!” Barlow lunges forward and pulls a lever. The room is now bathed in a new stranger yellow light. And then around you suddenly all those freed spies begin transforming into werewolves!
“Now we will all die!” shrieks Barlow. “The world belongs to the wolves!”
The hideous mutations are occurring all around You. It seems in moments that all the freed spy- werewolves will be completely turned. Thinking quickly, you pick up a stone from the floor and hurl it at the strange glowing bulb high above. Fortunately, your aim is true, and the light shatters into a million pieces. The wolf mutations stop and the afflicted men return to normal.
I think we’ll find a nice prison for you, probably somewhere in Tennessee,” says Jones with a smirk.
The thrashing crazed scientist is captured and led away.
Now one of the former spies speaks up. “It may not be too late to stop Stokes. He left this morning, and I heard him say he was travelling in a U-Haul. He might not have had time to get to the warm climate needed for those mosquitoes to survive.”
Jones barks orders into his phone.
“And tell them to be careful when they find the truck. Make sure everyone approaching the vehicle is doused in OFF!”
Handshakes and congratulations abound. It appears You may have solved the code just in time. Disaster may yet be averted. You and Brown did not start to turn, so this morning’s dose of colloidal silver must have already worked. Hooray!
So, for those of us who aren’t professional codesters, but still think this whole thing was interesting, could you spell out the solution in English?
Jones, Brown, and You share a cup of hot cider. With just two days until Thanksgiving, there is much for which to be grateful. Stokes was captured prior to releasing the werewolf-virus mosquitoes. Everyone known to have been bitten by werewolves has been treated and cured. The few mosquitoes released on the University of Tennessee campus could not have survived this fall weather— but just in case all students and faculty will receive doses of colloidal silver. Even the scar on your arm has nearly vanished.
It was a difficult case.
“So tell us,” Brown asks. “How did You solve the code?”
“After much work, I came to the conclusion that there was no consistent pattern to the coding. After all, if there was a pattern, we had enough information to look for words and phrases such as ‘werewolf’, ‘Tennessee’, ‘Insect repellent’ and ‘virus’ that were almost certain to appear in the coded text. However, there were no patterns that matched those words. This was puzzling."
You settle back in your new easy chair and continue.
“So how might words be coded without a consistent pattern? There had to be something else, a key for decoding the words. But where was this key?”
“I felt I must be missing something. Something was hidden by all these red herrings. But what? Then a small intelligent Ompaloskeptic-like voice whispered in my head. Each coded message repeats the word pattern exactly. Sure there is false punctuation in the second half of the code. And yes, the paragraph breakage is false. But these changes are merely made to hide the fact that each puzzle is a ‘mirror’. The coded message is followed by its key. Even the silly devil signature is part of it. Once I took that thought and added my impressive Heart of Dorkness-like notes, I was able to discover the truth.”
“Can You give us an example of the solution?” Jones inquires.
“No problem.”
You set up a chalkboard and write the first sentence of the first code:
BATS R CRA PFRF QOE MOX TO NEXHTOI.
“And at the exact middle of the code, our key begins:"
DHTK I TIX SHBI CSZ POE OY MONSTER
“As you now know, each code is a repeat of the same word lengths. Both sections are needed to decode the one sentence. I played around with several methods before hitting on the proper decoding. Think of the letters as numbers. A=1, B=2, C=3…etc. If we add “B” the first letter in the first sentence to “D” the first letter in the matching sequence, we get 2+4=6. What letter is sixth? “F” is sixth. Continue on in this pattern and A+H=I. Now comes ‘T’+’T’. No problem. 20+20=40. If you wrap the alphabet again, with A=27, B=28, C=29… we can handle numbers over 26. T+T=N(40).
“Using this method, the entire first message is revealed:”
FIND A WAY INTO THE CDC IN ATLANTA. YOU ARE LOOKING FOR MY EXPERIMENTAL WEREWOLF VIRUS. IT SHOULD BE LOCATED ON THE THIRD FLOOR. BRING THIS VIRUS TO OUR SECRET HIDEOUT INSIDE THE WAX MUSEUM IN PIGEON FORGE, NORTH CAROLINA. WE WILL THREATEN TO TURN EVERYONE INTO RAGING SNARLING BEASTS UNLESS THEY MEET OUR DEMANDS.
“Interesting,” Jones notes, taking a sip of delicious hot cider. “In such a code any word can be encoded into another word as long as there is a matching key. Barlow could use Halloween words, nonsense words, or any others he wanted throughout his message. The words just had to be of the right length to match the text that was being encoded. That’s why there was TWILIGHT ZONES instead of TWILIGHT ZONE. And those Halloween words would be as much a part of the code as the random mix of letters in the key. He could put the Halloween words in the first half, or in the second half of the code. It didn’t matter.”
“Right. And the Halloween words would just distract out attention. Without all the red herrings, it becomes more obvious that the code is a ‘mirror’. There are so many distractions in this code. And the beauty of the code is that these distractions are easily incorporated into the code without disrupting the mirror in any way.”
Jones invites You and Brown to Thanksgiving dinner. “Bring family and friends. If it is warm enough, we will dine on the patio. There shouldn’t be any mosquitoes this late in the year!”
You all share a hearty laugh.