Disciples of the Serpent: A Novel of the O.C.L.T.

by Williams, Sidney

  More slashes and angles.

  “Professor?” O’Donnell asked.

  Bullfinch’s brow had wrinkled as he stared down at the photo.

  “I’d concur with that.”

  He extended a hand and introduced himself to McKenzie. McKenzie smiled politely. He held O’Donnell’s hand a little longer and smiled. She forced a smile back and disentangled her hand. No time for that. Should’ve worn the baseball cap over the hair.

  “Is this an isolated piece or do you have others?”

  “It’s an odd find from what I understand. A farmer’s field in the early aughts. Supposedly there are a few others with similar markings and there’s been some effort to study and correlate, but they offer only what you might call snippets.”

  “Has anyone tried to put them all together?” O’Donnell asked.

  “Possibly, but I don’t know where anyone is with it. We haven’t had any requests for a look at this piece in a while. Scholars often keep things close to their chests. Ever hear of the Facsimile Edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls?”

  O’Donnell shook her head. Bullfinch nodded.

  “Fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls were controlled by a group of scholars who held back their publication from the Fifties until the Nineties,” Bullfinch explained. “It was only when The Huntington Library in California decided to make embargoed copies available via microfilm that the blockade was broken.”

  “This could be even closer to the chest. There are rumors of more examples of this secret alphabet held by a secretive group of scholars,” McKenzie said. “As you know, Officer O’Donnell, in Ireland you can plow a field and find a Viking ship from twenty-five hundred B.C. Sometimes things get found and sometimes the wrong people get there first.”

  “What are we talking about here? Private collectors?”

  “Or some band of scholars who want to hold onto the knowledge until they’ve amassed what they want to publish,” Bullfinch said. “Or something more insidious.”

  “Why was this thing in plain view if it was so rare and important?” O’Donnell asked.

  “They won a bit of a battle here to keep it local vs. shipping it off to Trinity or somewhere. If we hid it away, we’d be as bad as the scholars with their finds under wraps wouldn’t we?” McKenzie said.

  “Can I talk to the professor alone just a second?” O’Donnell asked, taking Bullfinch’s arm.

  She tugged him several paces away from the curator and ducked her head slightly.

  “These in the photo look what you found in the park, right? And the marks on Professor Burke’s desk.”

  “These markings seem to be some kind of alphabet.” He tapped markings in straight lines on the photo. Then he traced another set of additional marks. “These others are unclear. Might have been brought out with a little more washing and care. We’ll run the photo through O.C.L.T. databases and see if we get a match, but speaking of things that get locked away, we may be in undiscovered country here.”

  “How come you’ve never heard of this rock?” O’Donnell asked.

  “It’s an artifact, dear lady, of an obscure or even obfuscated story. I’m not an expert on every rock in every corner of the globe. I’m a student of mythology. Ask me what Quetzalcoatl or Jörmungandr can do, I can fill you in…”

  “Wait, who?”

  “Show me a few examples of a potentially lost alphabet; I’m scratching my head like you are.”

  “What does it mean that these symbols aren’t familiar to you? If they represent a myth?”

  “Probably that it’s an odd and isolated myth tied to whatever Professor Burke was upset about.”

  “One group of Celts around a campfire?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Whatever the story, maybe we need to figure out the locations of similar artifacts, right? Or I suspect more lives are going to be lost.”

  “No argument there,” Bullfinch said. “And if these people collect what they want, there’s no telling what awaits us.”

  O’Donnell’s brow wrinkled into a frown. “What are you suggesting here, Professor? I’m talking about killers with a twisted delusion. Are you saying there’s something they might do with a bunch of ancient rocks or marks?”

  “I’m afraid I am. I’ve seen a lot of strange things. If these people are willing to kill, they believe there’s a prophecy that can be fulfilled. I’ve seen enough to know we can’t rule out the possibility that they’re right.”

  Nine

  When McKenzie was asked if he had any reference of the farmer who’d found the artifact, he not only confirmed that the man was still alive but produced an address. While O’Donnell had wondered if talking to him was worthwhile, Bullfinch had accepted McKenzie’s offer to drive them to the location. He warned it would be hard to find, so they piled into his little red Renault hatchback and cruised along a highway past neat single-family dwellings, then past rolling green fields occasionally dappled by crumbling gray stone walls and remnants of ancient structures.

  “When I come back to the isles, the sense of awe returns to me. You can drive past things that are a thousand years old,” Bullfinch said. “They don’t have quite so much of that on view in America. Everything’s new.”

  After a bit of a drive they moved through forestland where nearby, McKenzie informed them, scenes for the BBC-TV series Ballykissangel had been filmed. Not long after that, they passed a field where a huge gray speckled draught horse grazed.

  Then they turned onto a winding road that stretched through more verdant territory, and after a few turns and a spin through a tunnel of arching tree branches, they came to a small farm house. It felt like the absolute middle of nowhere to O’Donnell.

  In the middle of nowhere chasing spooks. What a difference a day makes.

  Alfie Morten was in his late fifties, and as the Monty Python troop might have put it, not dead yet. He looked rather vibrant, in fact, with wind-tossed hair still dark atop his head, though it had grayed at the temples. He wore a heavy blue fleece vest over a couple of layers that didn’t include a wool sweater. He did have a black-and-white sheep dog following him around the barn beside his house as well, making him almost right for a postcard pose.

  “We have one little field we still plough the old way,” he said after introductions, hand shaking and expressions of remorse over the theft. “That’s where we turned up the stone. Thought it might be meaningful, so we called Mr. McKenzie’s office and the local paper came out.”

  He rubbed a hand across his chin. “Didn’t think it was something to kill for.”

  “We’d love to see the field where it was planted,” Bullfinch said. “How’d you come to turn it over to the castle museum?”

  “Right thing to do. Same county where it was found, though the museum of natural history in Dublin would have loved to have it, they said.”

  He opened a gate and let the dog lead the way, and they strolled through grass still damp with dew toward a distant, fenced portion of land.

  “Other Garda authorities will be coming eventually,” O’Donnell said. “You’ll probably be makin’ this trip again.”

  “If it’ll help get the stone back, so be it. If you folks are ahead of the game, glad to show you.”

  “I’m wondering who might have contacted you besides museums, once the story was in the paper.”

  “Mostly folks like Mr. McKenzie’s predecessor and the people from Dublin. I think it was a while later a few other calls came.”

  “Later?”

  “Couple of years really. A man called wondering what we might have done with the stone. Said a few quid might change hands. Said I could always use some airgead síos but the stone was already where it needed to be.”

  They reached a small gate, and he unlatched a chain and pushed it open, allowing O’Donnell to follow the dog through to the edge of settled rows. The harvest of the field had been complete a while for the year, and the land rested at the moment.

  “I guess you’ve turned
the dirt here enough to know there’s not more where the first stone came from.”

  “I’d say that was safe, though it had been turned a few times before the rock turned up. Was a bit of a surprise, but they said it’d probably been here quite a few years, people who came and poked a bit, that is. Couldn’t figure out how it came to be here.”

  “Given the oddness of the markings, from what I’ve read in the files, they thought it must date to before the Norman invasion, probably before Christianization or concurrent with,” McKenzie said.

  “If you had to guess?” Bullfinch asked.

  “A broad guess, fourth- to seventh-century range.”

  “Can we get GPS coordinates on this patch?” Bullfinch asked.

  O’Donnell gave a slight laugh. “If there’s coverage. I don’t see that many cell towers nearby.”

  “We’ve got it on record,” McKenzie said. “We can almost give you the precise point.”

  “I’m getting a little juice. What are you thinking?” O’Donnell asked.

  “Long shot,” Bullfinch said. “Just considering the possibility ley lines. We’re still in a realm of inquiry where anything could be relevant.”

  “I’m new to this realm of inquiry. You’re going to have to fill me in on ley lines.”

  “Lines of energy. Often sacred sites, especially in the British Isles, seem to be arranged along those lines. Bear in mind there’s some skepticism about that.”

  “You can count me in those ranks ’til I know more,” O’Donnell said. “But you’re thinking this stone found here might be lined up with something else?”

  “Speculation, but as I said, at this stage anything’s possible, or it could matter to our killers, and that’s what’s really important.” He mulled something over for a moment. “Could explain why an errant piece of rock with a strange marking turned up so far off the beaten path.”

  “Off the beaten path but along a magical energy highway stretches credulity,” McKenzie said. Sounded like he was among the skeptics as well.

  “In my circles the unlikely commonly surprises,” Bullfinch said. “Fringe is relative. Besides if it matters to…”

  “I’ve got coordinates,” O’Donnell said. She’d been pacing with her phone in her palm and now stood several paces from the men.

  “Well, one form of magical energy worked,” McKenzie said.

  “It would seem that way to a sixth-century resident anyway,” Bullfinch said. “Your suggestion proves one point, my boy.”

  Bullfinch keyed in coordinates to his tablet from O’Donnell’s screen. “Some things scientific can appear magical. Our phones alone might have gotten us all hanged or burned in some cultures.”

  A map of the British Isles appeared on his screen after a bit of a wait, and a moment later networks of amber lines zigzagged through the mapped territory. Then a little blue dot began to pulse.

  “Ah, the app my friend Mack created appears to work offline with your data,” Bullfinch said.

  “Is that where we are?” O’Donnell asked.

  “The blue dot’s where we are.”

  That dot sat right on one of the large amber lines. Others stretched off in multiple directions.

  “We follow those, we gonna find another rock with funny markings?” O’Donnell asked.

  “Not necessarily, but if we can figure out anything about our killers’ desires, we can see where their work lines up and where it might lead. There are probably sacred sites all along these lines.”

  “Looks like you’ve got a lot of choices,” McKenzie said. “It’s really an antique land here. Deserted medieval villages, churches, standing stones, just what you might expect.”

  “Yes,” Bullfinch said. “Just what we might have expected.”

  “You want to tell me what you might suspect yet?” O’Donnell asked, once she and Bullfinch were alone, back in the Garda vehicle on the return trip to Dublin. She’d stopped trying to hide frustration.

  “I’m not sure what I expect or what I’m seeing,” Bullfinch said. “Let’s try to get our data aligned and then we can develop an informed hypothesis.”

  The road didn’t offer much shoulder, but she tapped the brakes hard, jolting both of them as she edged the vehicle to the roadside and shoved it into park.

  “Look, I’m a copper. We’ve been thrown into working as partners here. Whatever they told ya, I’m not just a gunslinger riding shotgun, Professor. I’m an investigator and I’m trained in intelligence and counterterrorism. You’re acting like these folks are building to something. If it looks like we’ve got what leans toward terrorist activity, I can’t work in the dark.”

  “In the sense that they’re possibly perpetrating something worse than Islamic fundamentalists or the IRA, I’d agree on the terrorism front,” Bullfinch said.

  “Mass poisoning with this venom?”

  “That might be a best-case scenario. That could be contained.”

  O’Donnell draped a wrist over the top of the steering wheel, keeping the car steady while allowing herself a glance at the passenger seat.

  “What might be the worst?”

  “I’ve been studying and doing this for a long time,” Bullfinch said. “The world is full of secrets. We don’t know the worst until we gather more information so I’m hesitant to trigger a panic that could complicate matters. If they merely think something is possible, we’re dealing with human behavior we can contain. If that stone they’ve taken is part of a bigger puzzle that they can unlock and there’s something slumbering they can awaken, we’ve got real trouble.”

  “Wait, what? What do you think might be sleeping?”

  “Based on this venom, Irish legends like Crom Cruach, some of Professor Burke’s verbiage at the conference and my personal experience the last few years, coupled with my luck, I’d say a giant serpent’s not out of the question.”

  19 Years Ago

  Matt Snyder felt his brows converge as oiled cloth folded back from the broken stone. He had to study it only seconds to see that it was probably heavy and its shape and markings suggested the tapering near the upper portion of a menhir, a single standing stone with lines etched into its edges.

  “A fine piece, wouldn’t ya say?”

  The man grinned, parting lips over yellowed teeth.

  “It’s interesting,” Snyder agreed.

  He studied the markings along the stone’s corner with more focus. They were lined with grit and white dust that made them stand out. The angles of slashes that stretched down to the jagged edge of the break were familiar in style, but he thought some looked different. He couldn’t deny he’d like an opportunity to clean the stone and do some careful study to try and interpret them and see if they complemented what he’d assembled so far.

  He’d like the chance to do that somewhere quiet under a magnifying lamp, making precise measurements. Not in this man’s dusty and dimly lit shed. If a secret alphabet had developed then been scattered, he wanted to understand it and be one of the first to reveal it.

  “Where’d you find this?”

  “That information would be part of the askin’ price,” the man said, tilting back his tweed cap with a tweak of the brim. He winked a lid closed over one pale gray eye.

  He was in his late twenties, sporting as much of a beard as he’d ever grow, which amounted to stubble. He didn’t look like a farmer, but Snyder couldn’t detect any clues in his neutral street clothes that suggested useful background detail.

  He’d asked Snyder by phone to come to this residence at the edge of Drimnagh, a suburb, for something interesting related to his studies. Accepting had seemed odd and dingy at once, but promises of a major discovery lured.

  “I was told this was your area of interest. You know I can go somewhere else. Maybe not to as serious an independent scholar as yourself, but to some rich American who’d like nothin’ better than to have this in a case in his den fer his drinkin’ buddies to admire.”

  Snyder wasn’t sure that was exactly the kind of A
merican who’d want to pick up an artifact, but this definitely belonged in the hands of someone like himself, amateur or not, someone who understood its importance. Not in a showcase overseas.

  “Offer’s good fer now. Goes up later. Leaves the table in three days,” the man said.

  Hard-bargain time.

  Snyder could try to memorize the markings, but he’d never be certain he had them right, and the error of an angle could make all the difference in a new discovery.

  “The price includes the stone and the details of its original location?”

  “Sure. You can go poke around there all you like after we’ve had our handshake. You won’t find no more of it that’s what you’re thinkin’ though. I looked everywhere. Didn’t find the rest of it.”

  At least after this, the area could be looked over by serious searchers and not whatever this man was. Snyder reached into his breast pocket. He’d brought an envelope with cash as the man had asked.

  Sometimes scholarship, even his brand, meant dingy deals.

  “OK, for this, the stone and a map to where you found it. The location matters.”

  “Certainly, sir. I’ll draw it on the back of your hand if ya like.”

  “A paper will do if you don’t have any better coordinates.”

  “As you said on the phone, I’m not a serious researcher like you, but you should be able to find the spot for what I can give you.”

  He found a pad of old, brown paper and began to scribble.

  A few minutes after the stone had been lugged out to Snyder’s trunk, the man in the tweed cap leaned against the window, looking both ways through the glass to make sure the vehicle had departed.

  When he felt comfortable that was the case, he pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and began to wipe the gel from his teeth. He’d been assured at the theatrical supply store that it would not damage enamel, but he didn’t want it staying on any longer than he needed it. Likewise, he didn’t want to swallow much of it.

  Once he’d cleared most of the makeup, he strolled into the kitchen and picked up the telephone to dial a number from a piece of paper in his pocket.