Two months later the move to Portugal was ten days away. But by now Thomas and Belinda were not well at all. They could hardly walk and both had spent the last week in bed.
“I don’t think it’s wise for you to go,” Edward said gently one evening as he helped his grandmother drink her tea. Most days her hands shook uncontrollably, and right now it was worse than usual. “The facility in Portugal isn’t set up for assisted living and you’re better off here with me.”
“You’re a wonderful grandson,” Thomas responded, tears flowing down his face. “I don’t understand what’s happening to us, but we’re blessed to have you in our lives. This is a hell of a way to live, but I agree with you. I don’t think I’m up to going, Belinda. I think we’d better stay put.”
The thing that kept the old couple’s spirits high was talking about the crypt each evening. Thomas and Belinda loved to hear Edward spin tales of Arthur, Guinevere and the Knights of the Round Table. He enthralled them with vivid theories of what they might find behind the ancient wooden door and just who might lie in the sarcophagus. This time the three of them spent together kept the old couple going. But the day came when that wasn’t enough.
Edward was at the store one afternoon when he got a call from a sobbing Belinda. “He’s gone, Edward. Please come. Now.”
Thomas had died peacefully. Edward had left them both in bed after serving them breakfast. They’d been watching the news, she told him, when she noticed Thomas’s head was lolling forward. She’d tried to fluff his pillow, but when she touched his clammy skin, she knew it was over. This man she’d known and loved for decades was gone.
Just two weeks later Belinda died. With Thomas gone, her health, will to live and strength just faded away.
They were buried together without fanfare. There was no autopsy, no eulogy, no funeral, no weeping. Two elderly people succumbed to old age. It happened every day.
That was fun.
Stop saying that.
Edward became the sole heir and executor of the estates of both his grandparents. There was no need now for a buy-sell agreement on the bookshop. It belonged to him lock, stock and barrel – the building, the assortment of bizarre books, magician’s supplies, chants for raising the dead, potions, and a thousand other mysterious things stuck on one shelf or another, in this drawer or that. And, of course, those things down below were now his too.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Twelve months after the deaths of his grandparents, things were much different in the life of Edward Russell. Everything was going very, very well.
First, there was the incredible spike in sales at The Necromancer’s Bookshop. Although there were more walk-in customers than before, that wasn’t where the real activity was. Today thousands dealt with the occult bookstore via the Internet or by mail. Early on, Edward and his assistant Alexander Whitwell had created a website and begun advertising; the immediate surge in sales was surprising. Obviously a lot of people around the world had a burning interest in the dark arts, and there weren’t many stores online that catered to their bizarre needs. But The Necromancer’s Bookshop did. Within months there were three employees. His assistant Alex, the friend from university who was also a computer whiz, was handling a million dollars a month in Internet sales. A young man spent the day packing and shipping orders. Edward and a female college student who worked part time handled over-the-counter sales with help from the others when things got busy.
He’d learned a great deal from the books they’d found in the chamber. The eccentric bookseller’s nonexistent social life meant plenty of extra time to work on the ancient volumes. Most appeared to have been written between the fourth and sixth centuries AD. So far he didn’t know who wrote them, but the books could be extremely rare examples of writings from Roman Britain.
Edward turned some of the Welsh volumes over to his university professors for examination. He told them he’d bought a collection and these were part of it. The books were a hodgepodge of poetry, novellas, plays – the kind of thing Elizabethan Britons had turned out in droves, only these were written a thousand years earlier. They were valuable not for content but because of their age, the educators said. They estimated each book would sell for several thousand dollars.
All that was interesting, but he didn’t have the answers he really wanted. He still had no idea how or why the books had ended up in the crypt of St. Mary Axe.
The sarcophagus and the massive wooden door remained the enigmas they’d been for two years. Edward couldn’t risk the public finding out the secret of the subterranean room. He kept the basement door locked; he alone went downstairs, where the ladder was still stuck through the hole in the floor. He frequently spent hours in the crypt, going over every surface to see if there was anything else to be discovered. So far he’d come up empty-handed.
Edward decided to tackle one puzzle at a time. The heavy wooden door would have to wait – he didn’t have a plan to open it. The sarcophagus would be first. Online he learned how to construct a system strong enough to raise an automobile engine. He hoped it would lift the lid. One Saturday morning he went to a do-it-yourself hardware store and bought all the parts he’d need – lumber, pulleys, a winch, nylon rope and chain. After the shop closed at noon and everyone went home, he dragged his purchases into the crypt. There everything sat for months until he found someone to help him.
At last he couldn’t wait any longer to find out what was inside the coffin. He began to develop a plan involving neither publicity nor the authorities. This wouldn’t be easy to figure out, but he had to do it.
Fortified by a couple pints of ale one Saturday afternoon, he sat alone as usual at his pub and finalized his plan. He needed one more person. The most trustworthy, logical choice was Alex – his friend from university who’d become his first employee. But Edward relied on Alex for so much at the shop – the computer guru was virtually indispensable – that he couldn’t be the one to help find out what was in the chamber. Edward couldn’t do without him. Whoever helped Edward would have to be dispensable. That was the simple fact and that was part of the plan.
So Edward called his young shipping boy. He was strong and smart – Edward would need that – and they agreed to meet at the shop Sunday morning for a special project.
“Don’t say anything to anyone about where you’re going or what you’re doing,” he admonished his young employee. “You’ll find out why this needs to be secret when we meet. Trust me – you’re not going to believe what you see!”
At ten a.m. they sat at the table in the back room of the bookstore, the locked basement door five feet across the room. Edward explained that he must swear his employee to secrecy.
“Did you tell anyone you were coming here this morning?”
The young man answered excitedly, “No! I did exactly as you asked! What are we going to do?”
There could never be a disclosure to anyone about the things he would see or hear today, Edward explained. The man eagerly agreed, his mind racing in anticipation. Edward revealed that there were some very unusual things he’d discovered in a crypt downstairs. They descended the ladder and ended up in the ancient room.
Edward’s employee was fascinated with the sarcophagus. “My God, this is absolutely incredible! What do you think this is? Norman? Saxon? And how old can it be? This is crazy!”
“It is incredible, the coffin of a Briton, I think. It probably dates from the Middle Ages. But as I said, this is a secret. Do you understand?”
“Oh yeah, I understand!” Positively exuberant, the young man turned to look at the old wooden door. “This looks like the entrance of an old castle! What’s behind it?”
“I have no idea. That’s not what we’re working on today.” Edward’s voice was quiet and calm. He was strangely saddened at how excited the boy was. Mystery, intrigue, the thrill of the unknown – all those things worked against this man whose help Edward needed. There was no way he could keep this information quiet. All along Edward planned to
deal with the young man once he no longer needed his help. But part of him hoped it might be avoided. The boy was a great clerk in the store and he’d be missed. But it couldn’t be helped, especially now.
Using the extensive collection of tools that Edward’s grandfather, Thomas, had kept in the basement, the men built the winch system within two hours. The boy crawled up on top of the sarcophagus and found only an inch of clearance at the back of the stone lid. It might be enough to insert a hook. If they could, the lid could be slowly winched up and slid away from the back wall. Then it could be hoisted up and off.
Around one Edward asked the boy if he wanted to stop for lunch.
“No way! Let’s get this lid off!”
That was the enthusiastic answer Edward had expected. Within thirty minutes everything was ready. Edward stood next to the sarcophagus to keep an eye on the back side where the hook was affixed to a chain running to the pulley overhead. As the young man turned a wheel, the chain became taut, then groaned against the weight of the lid.
“Is it moving?” he asked Edward.
“Not yet. Be very careful but give it a little more pressure.”
An additional half-turn was enough to raise a few puffs of dust from the coffin. Now the back side of the lid was slightly elevated so that the entire slab was tilted up in the back and downward on the front side where Edward stood.
“It moved a little!” Edward cried.
The eager boy mistook Edward’s excited comment as tacit approval for another turn of the winch. A second later Edward yelled as the raised lid slid off the coffin toward him. He jumped back just in time to avoid being crushed as it hit the floor.
“What the hell!” Edward tripped and fell sideways as the heavy lid broke into a dozen pieces six inches from his legs.
The boy rushed over to where Edward lay. “Oh God, Mr. Russell! I’m sorry! Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. What in hell caused you to keep moving the lid?”
“I thought you wanted it raised. I thought you were telling me to winch it up. I’m so sorry! My God, I’ve broken it. Look what I’ve done!”
Thick clouds of dust from the shattered stone lid filled the room. It was getting difficult to see or breathe.
“Let’s get out of here until things settle down!” Edward groped his way to the ladder and the boy followed. Reaching the basement, he pulled the rug over the hole so dust wouldn’t permeate the room above. They went upstairs and sat at the same table in the back of his bookshop.
The boy was equally apologetic and exuberant. “This is so exciting! I’m so sorry I broke the lid, but now I can’t wait to see what we find inside that coffin!”
Edward brewed tea at the counter. He brought it to the table and said, “It is amazing, isn’t it? I couldn’t have done it without you and breaking the lid was most likely the only way we could have accomplished it. Don’t give it a thought. It won’t be long before I … before we … see what’s there.”
“Shall we run out and grab a bite of lunch while we wait for the dust to settle?” the boy suggested.
“Let’s have our tea and calm down,” Edward replied quietly. “First things first.”
That was fun!
Thirty minutes later Edward again went to the basement, pulled back the rug and saw that the dust had settled. Tugging and shoving, he maneuvered the young clerk’s body to the crypt and into another of the construction bags he’d bought. Soon the bag rested under the floor stones next to Curtis Pemberly.
That task complete, Edward stepped over and around the broken lid littering the floor and looked into the ancient coffin. Although he didn’t know it then, his were the first eyes to see its contents in a thousand years.
On Monday morning the members of his team at The Necromancer’s Bookshop would ask what happened to their young shipping clerk. He didn’t seem like the flighty type, but he hadn’t called and hadn’t shown up for work. None of them knew much about his personal life, so they wrote his abrupt departure off as the stupid actions of a kid who must not have cared much about his job.
Edward’s employees worked every day in the bookshop totally unaware that the boy was nearby – just below them, in fact.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Edward stood speechless in the crypt, transfixed at what lay in the sarcophagus. He had been half expecting a body covered with a funeral shroud, perhaps holding a cross or other memento from his past. But this took his breath away.
Lying in the coffin was the body of a man maybe six feet tall, dressed head to toe in battle gear. Not an inch of skin was visible. His face was shielded by what looked like a bronze helmet and faceplate. One of his arms was tucked underneath a heavy shield that reached from his neck to his knees; the other, sheathed in a thick glove, grasped a massive sword with a golden handle. It was two feet long, its inscribed blade slightly rusted but not as much as Edward would have expected after all these years. The tightly fitting stone lid had done a good job keeping out the elements.
The figure had impressive, well-preserved leather boots that reached halfway up his calves. Extending from underneath the shield down to his knees was a garment made of interlocking metal rings. It was a coat of mail, used defensively to protect a soldier in battle. He would wear it like an overcoat. Edward had seen some displayed at the British Museum. In fact, there had been a life-sized, fully battle-ready medieval knight. The body before him could have been its twin.
This all was amazing, unbelievable, and of such significance it would make news worldwide. Part of his brain told him to report it to the authorities. That part wanted the fame and publicity that would inevitably accompany the things in the crypt. But the realistic, pragmatic part of his psyche said no. Anyone examining things in detail would scour the entire room to see what else might turn up. An examination of the floor might reveal the other bodies.
Someday he’d contact the archaeologists. There would have to be some housecleaning before that would happen.
So for now the entire thing – the chamber, the knight, the books, the still-locked door – everything would remain a secret.
Edward went out and bought a large sheet of Visqueen. He stretched it tightly over the sarcophagus as best he could. Hopefully it’d keep the body from further decay in the damp air of the basement. He needed time to figure out what he’d do next with this amazing find. Just before sealing up the warrior with the plastic sheet, he’d done one thing to satisfy his immediate curiosity. He reached inside the coffin and used a cloth to wipe down the blade of the man’s sword. He wanted to see if he could make out the inscription. It was faint and the puny string of lights hardly helped. He snapped several pictures so he could examine the writing later. All done, he turned away, then jerked his head back again. There was something else – something etched into the handle he’d almost missed. One discernible word.
Lamorak.
Is that a name?
Is that your name, Sir Knight? Lamorak? It would be incredible to have a medieval knight in the basement, holding a sword that bears his name.
Will your sword tell me who you are?
Edward had spent years preparing for degrees in medieval history and literature. Somewhere in the past he’d come across that odd word, but he couldn’t recall where. One web search later, it all came back to him. According to Arthurian legend, Lamorak was a Knight of the Round Table. A lesser-known one, his name was among twenty-five that appear on a huge round table that today hangs in Winchester Castle. Those who believed Arthur lived said the table dated to the legendary king’s reign in the fifth century. Most modern scholars disagreed – they thought it was made in the 1300s. Medieval festivities called Round Tables were frequently held to imitate the feasts and jousts of the famous knights of yore. Many historians thought this table was created for one of those.
Lamorak was a prince, the son of a medieval king named Pellinore and brother of Sir Percival, both of whom also were Knights of the Round Table. According to legend, Lamorak was one of
the bravest and strongest of Arthur’s band and the best at jousting. He had a notable weakness – he enjoyed beautiful women who were married to someone else.
That evening Edward stood in front of the sarcophagus. The yellow lights overhead cast an eerie shadow across the body. For over an hour he neither spoke nor moved. He contemplated what had happened. This discovery was one of the most historically significant events in Britain in two thousand years. If it were truly Lamorak. And if he chose to ever reveal it to the public.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Edward glanced up as a smartly dressed man in his thirties snaked through a throng of customers, walked to the counter and said, “Good morning. May I speak with Edward Russell, please?” The man spoke excellent English with a hint of an accent.
“That would be me. How may I help you?” This wasn’t his typical customer. With his three-piece suit and fancy silk tie, this man looked more like a businessman than a magician. What was he doing here?
He offered a business card. “My name is Philippe Lepescu. My firm represents a client who is interested in the possible purchase of your building.”
Edward looked at the business card and saw the name Ciprian Investments with an address in Lucerne, Switzerland. Philippe Lepescu was the company’s president. Recalling Gordon Foxworth’s futile attempt to scam his grandparents by offering to purchase the place, he wondered if this visit was connected. He smiled.
“Did I say something amusing?”
“Sorry. Yours isn’t the first offer I’ve had and I was just recalling the last one. The building isn’t for sale.” Even if he were interested, Edward couldn’t sell. He’d be asking for a prison cell since he knew where the bodies were buried, literally.
The Crypt Trilogy Bundle Page 10