by Greg Cox
“It’s working!’” she said as her end of the seesaw hit the floor of the walkway with a thump. “I wouldn’t have thought that I was heavy enough to lift you.”
“Leverage,” Stone said. “You just need to provide … leverage.”
Face-to-face with the mosaic at last, he examined it by the light of his headlamp. “Okay,” he called down to Gillian. “As I suspected this segment of the mosaic is an emblema, a prefabricated panel assembled elsewhere before being inserted into the larger mosaic at this location.” He took a closer look at the panel containing the leering lunar countenance. “And this particular emblema … it’s a forgery, or at least it’s not original to the site and, by all indications, was added to the design centuries later.”
Gillian gaped in surprise. “How can you tell?”
“Little things,” he explained. “For one thing, traditional Roman mosaics always featured a thin white outline around the figures.” He turned the beam of the lamp onto a barely intact portrait of Cassiopeia a few feet to the right. Much of the mosaic had fallen away, exposing bare concrete and patches of dried mortar, but you could still make out the narrow white outline around a surviving arm and foot. “But there’s no outline around the Man in the Moon.”
“Maybe because he’s already made up of white tiles?” she suggested. “Just to play devil’s advocate.”
“Nope. The Romans were sticklers when it came to form. They would have used two different shades of white to create the mandated outline.” He turned the beam back on the moon, which gleamed in places just like the real thing. “And there’s another thing. Some of these tesserae are tilted slightly, the better to catch the eye by reflecting any available light. That’s a Byzantine technique, developed long after the Roman legions departed from Britain. No way was this panel placed here back when this fort was a going concern. It’s a fake, meant to blend in with the actual Roman mosaics—to a degree.”
“But what does that mean?”
“That’s what I want to find out.” He ran his hand gently over the emblema; even though it was not entirely authentic, he didn’t want to damage the artwork if he could help it. And was it just his imagination or was this particular panel placed just a hair lower than the adjacent portions of the border? “I wonder…”
He wasn’t the master thief Ezekiel was, but Stone had picked up a few things after a couple of years poking around for hidden manuscripts and secret compartments. Placing his palms against the recessed panel and cautiously exerting a bit of pressure, he tried sliding it left, then right, then …
“Eureka.”
The entire emblema slid beneath the rest of the mosaic, revealing a concealed niche holding a latched cedar box that looked to Stone to be just the right size to hold, say, one-third of a certain ghost volume. Reaching in, he drew the box from its cubbyhole.
“I’ve got something!” he said. “Let me down … slowly.”
“Roger that.”
She slid gradually off her end of the seesaw, but not quite gracefully enough. Stone’s end dropped abruptly, slamming into the floor with a jolt. The beam bounced against the stone walkway.
“Hey!” he protested, along with his indignant tailbone. “I said slowly!”
“Sorry!” she said. “That was trickier than I expected.”
“Tell that to my bruised behind!”
She craned her head. “I don’t know,” she said with a smirk. “Looks fine from where I’m standing.”
Her flirty tone took a lot of the sting out of his bumpy landing. He would’ve responded in kind, except that he was more anxious to find out what was in the box. Undoing a latch, he lifted the lid to find a slender, leather-bound book inside. An embossed title leaped out at him:
Mother Goose’s Melodies. Volume Two of Three.
“Bloody hell, it’s real,” Gillian whispered in awe. “We found it.” She looked up at Stone. “Upon consideration, I may have to rethink my views on Atlantis.…” A note of suspicion entered her voice. “Unless this is all some sort of scam and you placed the book here for us to find.”
He couldn’t blame her for considering that possibility, especially after he’d questioned her motives not too long ago. “You’re the one who figured out the seesaw thing,” he pointed out, “and brought up the Norse connection.”
“Well, that theory’s been around since the nineteenth century at least, and I am a folklorist, so it might be reasonable to expect that—”
“Look,” Stone interrupted. “Trust your gut. Do you really think I’m scamming you?”
She looked him in the eyes. “No, I can’t say that I do.”
“Then let’s get out of this hole.” He closed the lid on the box for safekeeping. “We can inspect the goods someplace drier and more hospitable.”
He was dying to examine the book, but he didn’t want to linger too long at the bottom of the well, especially with Mother Goose still in the wind. Granted, Baird had run into her in New Jersey, thousands of miles away, but magic had a way of making time and space somewhat rubbery, as the Magic Door at the Annex proved every time he stepped through it. If he could make it from the USA to the UK in no time at all, maybe Mother Goose could as well?
Let’s clear out of here before company shows up.
Getting back to the well shaft meant hopping back into the reservoir and wading again through the filthy water. Stone kept a tight grip on the box as they approached the exit. He figured he’d let Gillian climb up and out of the well first before following right behind her. The sooner they got back to somewhere he could contact the Library, the better.
This is one volume Mother Goose is not getting her hands on.
“After you,” he began. “Ladies fir—”
To his alarm, the climbing rope, which had been waiting for them, was abruptly yanked upward, disappearing from sight. He grabbed for it, almost dropping the box into the water, but he was too late. Their way out of the well vanished before his eyes.
“What the—?”
A mischievous cackle came from high above. Peering upward, Stone saw Mother Goose looking down at him, just like Gillian had earlier.
“Going somewhere, children?” the crone taunted them.
Startled, Gillian looked from the stranger to Stone. “Let me guess,” she said with admirable coolness. “The competition?”
“Right on the money,” he said. “Meet Mother Goose.”
Her jaw dropped. “The Mother Goose?”
“More like a Mother Goose … we think.” He shrugged. “It’s a mystery.”
“Enough chatter!” Mother Goose demanded. “Give me that book. It belongs to me.”
“Not according to the Treaty of 1918,” Stone said, “or so I’ve been told.”
“To perdition with that treaty! It’s null and void!” She lowered a pail on a rope. “And I’ve already claimed the first volume from your friend the thief, so you might as well play nicely, too.”
“You mean Jones?” Stone wanted to believe that the crone was lying, that she hadn’t managed to wrest another set of missing pages from Ezekiel, but he feared that was wishful thinking. He’d been a Librarian long enough to know that the bad guys had an irritating tendency to get their hands on what they were after. “What happened to Jones? Is he all right?”
“The thief is hale and hearty, not that it matters,” Mother Goose said. “Now be a good Jack and put the book in the bucket.”
“Or what, we get the hose?” He was tempted to grab on to the crone’s rope instead, but he doubted that she could support his weight—or wouldn’t let go if he tried. “Worst reboot of The Silence of the Lambs ever,” he muttered under his breath.
“Or you stay where you are,” Mother Goose said. “Turn over the book and maybe I’ll lower your own rope back down to you.”
“Sorry. Not happening.”
If Jenkins was to be believed, and Stone had no reason to doubt him, letting Mother Goose get another piece of her book could have seriously apocalyptic consequenc
es. And Stone cared too much about history to want to see it end before its time.
“We’ll stay put if you don’t mind. We’re in no hurry.”
Gillian gave him a look. “We’re not?”
“Trust me,” he said.
Stone had faith in Baird and his fellow Librarians. Given time, they’d surely track him down and maybe even find a way to open up the Magic Door to come get him. Plus, there was always that drainage tunnel.…
“Perhaps a little company will change your minds,” Mother Goose said. “You know what they say, three’s a crowd.…”
“Company?” Gillian asked, looking around. “What does she mean by that?”
Stone wished he knew. “Stay sharp,” he warned her. “Be ready for anything … and I do mean anything.”
Up above them, the crone began to recite an incantation in a singsong voice:
The itsy-bitsy spider climbed up the water spout,
Down came the rain and washed the spider out,
Out came the sun and dried up all the rain,
And the itsy-bitsy spider came up the spout again!
A loud, scuttling sound came from the drainage tunnel behind them. Stone contemplated all the cobwebs draping the ancient cistern. Glancing up he saw that the night sky was already beginning to lighten high above the well. Dawn was approaching here in the UK.
Out came the sun …
“Oh, crap,” Stone said.
Gillian clutched his arm, scooting closer to him. “That doesn’t sound very itsy-bitsy.”
“Poetic license,” Mother Goose said with a shrug. “I’m afraid our eight-legged friend has grown somewhat larger … and hungrier.” She cackled merrily. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like your climbing rope back?”
Stone was torn. Suddenly, waiting it out underground wasn’t looking like such a viable option anymore. The scuttling sounded louder and closer as something climbed up the old drainage tunnel toward them. Turning his light on the entrance, Stone glimpsed a large brown shape through the hanging cobwebs. Some forgotten guardian of the treasure, he wondered, or something conjured up by Mother Goose? Probably the latter, he guessed.
“The torch!” he said. “Get the torch from my pack!”
Gillian nodded, getting it. “You don’t have to ask me twice!” Hurrying behind him, she extracted the acetylene torch and, showing impressive presence of mind under the circumstances, the safety glasses as well. “Now what?”
Before he could answer, the not-so-itsy-bitsy spider burst through the webbing into the underground chamber. Conditioned by old drive-in movies, Stone had expected some kind of giant tarantula, but then he remembered that those were hardly native to Great Britain. Instead he saw an immense brown house spider roughly the size of a German shepherd. Eight long hairy legs supported its bristling brown thorax and abdomen. Four pairs of eyes fixed on Stone and Gillian. Furry palps twitched ominously. Venom dripped from its oversized fangs as it scurried across the surface of the reservoir toward them.
“Light it up!” he shouted, averting his eyes.
Gillian ignited the torch. A brilliant blue flame lit up the cistern, deterring the spider, who retreated up a rear wall and onto the ceiling, where it scuttled back toward them with alarming speed.
“Watch out!” Stone shouted. “It’s almost on top of us!”
“I see it!”
She swung the torch upward just in time to keep the spider from dropping down on them. Alas, the cutting torch was not a flamethrower, so it was only good for short-range defense. The spider darted away from the six-inch flame into a shadowy corner of the ceiling before taking another run at them from a different direction. Again Gillian barely managed to ward it off with the torch in time. The spider sprung backward without getting singed.
“I’m not certain how long I can keep this up,” she confessed, with a slight quaver in her voice. “This wretched beast is bloody fast!”
Stone could see that. He also had his doubts about how long the torch would hold out; he had used up much of its fuel cutting through those steel bolts earlier. The torch was by no means a long-term solution, as Mother Goose surely knew as well.
“Well?” she asked from atop the well. “Is my little book worth your life, Librarian? Or your Jill’s?”
Flame or no flame, the hungry spider showed no sign of abandoning its hunt. Spiders were carnivores, and this particular specimen seemed to have its cold, arthropod heart set on gobbling up him and Gillian. Little Miss Muffet, he recalled, simply ran away from her spider, but he guessed that hers hadn’t been quite so aggressive. This spider was playing for keeps.
“Bugger!” Gillian swore as the monster tried to bypass her to get to Stone instead, forcing her to shift position to defend him. The slippery floor of the reservoir threatened to undo her, dooming them both. “It gets past me just once and someday they’ll be digging up our bones here!”
“Damn it,” Stone swore. His own life was one thing—Librarians weren’t known for their long life expectancies—but he wasn’t about to let Gillian get turned into spider chow. Scowling, he placed the box in the pail. “Fine. Have your freaking book!”
“There’s a good boy!” Mother Goose tugged the rope up, cackling all the while. “I knew you’d make the right choice!”
Stone watched, fuming, as the pail ascended, taking the precious volume out of his reach. By now, Gillian’s back was pressed against his as she waved the torch back and forth in front of her to buy them more time. The spider’s ghastly shadow capered across the walls in accompaniment to its ceaseless attempts to get past their defenses. The determined predator was not letting up, and the torch was going to give up the ghost anytime now.
“Jake?” Gillian asked. “Between you and me, I think we’ve outstayed our welcome.”
“Working on it.” He shouted up at the crone. “Hurry it up! You’ve got your damn book, now throw us that rope!”
“Oh, you don’t want that boring old rope,” Mother Goose replied. “I’ve got something even better for you!”
Claiming the book, she placed something else in the pail and lowered it back down to them. Stone grabbed it as soon as it came within reach and hastily inspected its contents. Hoping for something—anything—they could use to escape the spider’s lair, he found instead … a bottle of malt vinegar and a roll of brown construction paper?
“Hey!” he yelled at Mother Goose. “What gives?”
The crone vanished from sight, but Stone could still hear her chanting up among the ruins:
Up Jack got and home did trot,
As fast as he could caper,
And went to bed and bound his head
With vinegar and brown paper!
Her voice trailed away, leaving Stone stuck at the bottom of the well with nothing but some useless props from the nursery rhyme. He raised the glass bottle, tempted to hurl it at the spider in frustration, then reconsidered. Perhaps there had been a method to Mother Goose’s maddening gift?
“Vinegar,” he murmured. “Of course!”
“What did you say?” Gillian asked as the blue flame from the torch started to sputter. “Jake?”
“Vinegar! It’s a natural spider repellent.” He uncapped the bottle and, without asking, dumped half its contents over her head. Growing up back in Oklahoma, he’d learned a thing or two about warding off brown recluse spiders while enjoying the great outdoors. He splashed the rest of the vinegar over himself. “Trust me!”
Gillian shook her head, spraying vinegar in his face. She spit the spilled brown liquid from her lips. “You could’ve warned me.”
“No time!” He shoved her toward the entrance to the drain tunnel, several feet away. “Make for the drain … quickly!”
With any luck, the reeking vinegar fumes would dampen the spider’s appetite for them while they dived down the waterspout. He had no idea what was waiting for them at the end of the tunnel, but it had to beat sticking around to be devoured. He wasn’t sure what exactly the brown paper was for,
probably just to be true to the rhyme, but he jammed it into his pocket anyway.
“Move!” he shouted. “We’re getting out of here!”
They clambered out of the water and dashed toward the gaping entrance. Tattered webbing shrouded the opening, making it impossible to see what lay beyond. The spider, seeing its prey on the verge of escaping, shot a thick strand of fresh webbing from its rear, snaring Stone’s leg just as he and Gillian reached the top of the drain. He tried to tug his leg free but found it rooted to the spot.
“Son of a—!” he exclaimed.
Gillian glanced back to see what the problem was. “Jake?”
“Don’t wait for me!” he said. “Go!”
“Rubbish.” Coaxing one last spurt of flame from the torch, she sliced through the thick white strand holding Stone in place, then hurled the still-hot torch at the spider. Her wild throw missed, but it struck a hanging sheet of cobwebs instead, setting it ablaze. The fire leaped from web to web, spreading quickly through the underground chamber. Chittering in panic, the spider retreated from the flames, even as they began to eat away at the wooden timbers supporting the ceiling. Smoke filled the ancient cistern, hiding the spider from sight. Acrid fumes stung Stone’s eyes and throat.
“Oh my,” Gillian said. “I didn’t mean to do that.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Stone said. “We’re leaving anyway.”
Between the fire and the frantic spider, there was no time to dawdle. He shoved Gillian headfirst through the drain opening, then dived in after her.
Geronimo, he thought.
The tunnel was steeper than he expected, and slimier, too. Muck and algae greased the curved walls of the chute so that he and Gillian shot down the drain as though riding the world’s least sanitary waterslide. Their screams echoed in their ears as they hurled faster and faster down the tunnel, tearing through random webs and roots and weeds. The beams from their headlamps danced wildly, doing little to combat the utter blackness of the tunnel, as Stone squeezed his eyes shut and waited tensely for the heart-stopping ride to end.