I got a call this morning from the Huntington Library in San Marino. Apparently they've obtained several old books which might be Los Susurros de la Musa Perdida, and they want me to come in and help authenticate them. I may or may not have squealed and run around my home for several minutes after finishing the call. I mean, Los Susurros is kind of a legend. Or at least it is among the supernatural community and that portion of academia that specializes in folklore. Plenty of scholars tracing the history of fables, children's stories, and tall tales have been frustrated by references to this wealth of lost stories, and they have made much of the few stories that are supposed to have been given out from that trove. Not to mention that the few specific individuals mentioned as having at some point possessed and contributed to Los Susurros each had all kinds of rumors floating around them in their day.
The collection supposedly began with an explorer named Gabriel Esteban Salazar. He was there in the early days of colonization, and he was endlessly curious. He was basically a personification of all the whitewashed fancies of exploration and adventure that have been used to paint Christopher Columbus as a hero. Salazar arrived in the Americas eager to discover new lands, record strange customs, and sketch exotic flora and fauna, but somehow he was turned away from that vision. At first he stumbled onto stories as a way to relate to the Natives, but soon he became focused almost entirely on the fairy tales, ghost stories, and fables they had to tell. He recorded them with just as much thoroughness and care as other explorers put into maps and accounts of wildlife. He eventually became an advocate for the tribes, and some accounts indicate he was a close friend of Bartolome de las Casas. Of course, we all know how that battle went.
After a while the powers that be (or rather, the powers that were) found him more annoying than useful and arranged to have him sent back to Spain. Having come from a family of merchants, Salazar was not exactly impoverished on his return home, however the business was struggling and he spent nearly every spare coin he had expanding his collection. There was one man in particular whom he trusted to seek out stories from the New World and even some from the Old World as well on his behalf, though accounts of the man's identity tend to disagree. What is agreed on is that he inherited the collection upon Salazar's death. From there the trail of Los Susurros rambles through history, many of its owners and contributors completely unknown.
The next time the story really gets exciting is when the collection falls into the hands of a pirate. Supposedly, he was the first one to record the stories of African slaves. He was also the first Englishman to keep it, though that point could be debated. After something like twenty years of piracy he had amassed a small fortune, and he made a deal with the English crown for a new home in exchange for certain military secrets he had acquired over the years. He took the name of Jonas Goodspeed, and the crown quickly created an unofficial position for him. He rooted out spies, enforced a certain level of civility within the criminal underworld, and did any other dirty business that was handed off to him. And all the time he continued to collect stories. He collected children's rhymes, tales told only in certain remote towns and by certain people, urban legends, and any new lore he found coming from the colonies.
After Goodspeed passed away there's a handful of individuals known or suspected to have possessed Los Susurros, none of them quite as impressive as either he or Salazar. They each had at least one rumor attached to them, but most didn't have that same kind prolific life story. The first two were scholars, and after that there were three who regularly dealt with the Natives in some official capacity. The last person known to have kept the collection was a missionary who spent nearly half his life among the tribes. After that, the trail runs cold.
Until now, that is. I'm already checked in to my hotel room and I've been spending most of this afternoon looking through stories of various kinds from the same stretch of time in which Los Susurros was supposedly assembled, and from the same cultures. They've already got people sniffing the ink, sending samples to labs, and studying the linguistic fingerprints. My job is to look at the stories themselves, see if their styles fit with the alleged sources. And I intend to do my job right.
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