I should know. I am the author of the Scroll. I know of my own recollection and experience that there is no truth in it, however occult or oblique. It is a fiction plucked from the air while I was drunk and angry, realised over a fortnight of half-hearted fakery and laid out as a prank. There are half a dozen ways in which its mendacity should have been uncovered long ago. The gold leaf is not gold; the ink is the wrong colour, and not faded enough. The vellum comes from the wrong animal. The script is filled with errors, because I was only somewhat familiar with the Hebrew alphabet and language. The dyes and pigments are inappropriate. There is one glaring anachronism. There is no other work detailing the life of the Egyptian wife, and no supporting record of the Chamber—though one or two scrolls and codices, once you’ve been told it exists, seem to make reference to it in passing. That seeming is an illusion, a false pattern emerging from the spinning of a wheel. The Scroll is a ghost book, a summoner of phantasms and dreams. It is a dream itself, that I should never have written down.