The Ben Hope Collection: 6 BOOK SET

by Scott Mariani

  He picked a leafy path between the tightly clustered conifers, oaks and beeches. The birds were singing in the trees above him and the milky rays of the autumn sun flickered through the green and gold foliage. For the first time in days he was almost able to clear his mind of troubled thoughts. Though he missed her badly, it was a relief to know that Roberta was safely out of the way. Whatever happened, she’d be all right.

  Beyond the wooded valley the ground began to rise again. A kilometre away across a rocky plateau, an escarpment sloped dramatically upwards to a high ridge. He saw that his route was going to take him straight over the top of it. He walked on steadily through the rocks, ignoring the thorny shrubs that caught at his ankles. The jagged ridge loomed closer.

  Far away, Franco Bozza was watching the tiny figure of his quarry through powerful binoculars. He’d followed Ben Hope all the way from Palavas, staying carefully out of sight. He’d watched him scramble down the hillside away from Rennes-le-Château and cut a straight path across country. He obviously knew where he was heading. Whatever the Englishman was looking for, he would find it too. This time, he wasn’t going to let him get away.

  Bozza had stalked in a semicircle around Ben’s flank. A goat path through a copse of trees shielded him from sight. Keeping low through the increasingly rocky terrain, stopping from time to time to check the progress of the small faraway figure, he’d worked his way right round and now he was high above Ben, near the escarpment’s summit. Behind him, where the ground sloped away far below into a green valley, was a house in the distance.

  The rock face soared up to a flat ledge, like a shallow plateau, and then rose up again to the summit. To the right, the hillside plunged dramatically away down some 300 metres into a deep valley thick with trees. Ben began the long climb. After half an hour or so he reached the first level, some ten metres across. A jutting shelf of grey rock overhung the cliff face to create a shallow cave. He stopped and rested for a few minutes, squinting up at the slope that he still had to climb.

  Above him, Bozza crawled out a little further across the big rock. From this vantage point he had a good view of the Englishman through his binoculars. The wide, flat rock hung out over the edge of a steep slope. It felt stable enough under his weight, and it was secure enough to have stayed where it was for a thousand years. But Bozza was a heavy man and the further he moved towards the edge, the more strain he was putting on the rock’s balance.

  By the time he knew it was beginning to slide, it was already too late to do anything about it.

  Bozza rode the falling rock flat on his belly for the first few metres of the drop. It plunged over the edge and smashed into a cluster of smaller boulders and sent them spinning down with it. Bozza was thrown clear and went rolling and tumbling down thirty metres. He clawed frantically for a handhold but everything was sliding with him. The landslide gathered momentum, carrying away a slice of the hillside.

  Ben could see the dust from a hundred tumbling rocks from where he was standing looking up at the rest of his climb. His blood froze. It was coming straight towards him. He dived under the shelf just as the spinning rocks reached the ledge. They hammered down all around and tore most of the ground away. He shielded his face from the loose earth and dust that poured down in a choking curtain. Suddenly the ground was giving way under his feet. He reached out in desperation and grasped the edge of the shelf above him. He hung there, praying it wouldn’t break away and crush him. A large jagged stone bounced off the cliff face and struck him on the shoulder, tearing his grasp away from the hanging rock. He slid and rolled a long way down the slope, boulders and dirt crashing all around him. A white flash of pain jolted through him as his body hit a protruding tree root. Somehow he managed to get a hold on it as the landslide battered him on its way past. The root held. The violence of the slide diminished, and then it was over.

  The air was thick with dust. He spluttered and coughed, his mouth and throat full of it. He managed to find a secure footing, and slowly he let his weight onto his feet, testing the fragile slope. He gave the tree root a grateful pat and made his way cautiously back up the escarpment, heading for solid ground.

  Bozza had come to a stunned, bloody stop among the rocks. His fingertips were raw from where he’d been scrabbling for a hold. He picked himself shakily up off the ground and looked around him at the debris from the landslide. He’d slid and tumbled a long way. Another couple of metres and he would have plunged straight over the edge of a sheer drop down the face of the escarpment and into the steeply sloping wooded valley below.

  He heard a noise and spun around to see Ben Hope standing ten metres away.

  Bozza didn’t have time to reach for his gun. Ben’s sights descended squarely, deliberately on the man’s chest and the Browning barked twice in rapid succession.

  The flat reports hammered through the silence of the mountain air. Bozza’s body jerked back like a shaken doll. For a moment he teetered on the edge of the precipice, his arms outflung as he struggled to keep his balance. Ben watched him coldly and then fired again. Bozza clutched at his chest, and with a last wild look of hatred he disappeared over the edge and was gone.

  It was another hour before Ben found his way down to the tree-dotted valley beyond the hill. He sat down on a mossy fallen trunk and caught his breath. He could have done with a pair of decent army boots. His lightweight shoes were just about wrecked. His feet were painfully raw inside.

  This can’t be the place, he thought to himself, looking across the valley. And yet, according to the map and the compass, it had to be. There was nothing else anywhere, just more of the same wild landscape.

  What he was looking at was a white house that nestled in the trees a few hundred metres away on the other side of the valley. It was tucked in close to the foot of a high, looming mountain. He sighed. He hadn’t known what he was going to find–maybe a ruin, even a stone circle or something. But this trim, white modern villa was the last thing he’d been expecting to come across at the site of the ‘House of the Raven’.

  It was a radical design, boxy, flat-roofed and very unlike the usual stone houses of rural Languedoc. It looked as though it had been built sometime in the last few years. Yet it seemed to blend into its wild natural surroundings with almost magical ease, as though it had been there for centuries.

  He approached the walled gateway and was gazing up at the house when a voice called out, ‘Hello? Is there anyone there?’ A woman was walking towards him across a pretty, well-kept garden. She was tall, thin, upright, maybe in her mid-to-late fifties. But the main things Ben noticed about her were the dark glasses and the white stick she used to probe the way ahead. She stepped carefully down the path to the gate. She smiled, looking somewhere over Ben’s shoulder.

  ‘I was just admiring your beautiful house,’ Ben said to the blind woman.

  Her smile broadened. ‘Ah, so you’re interested in architecture?’

  ‘Yes, I am,’ Ben replied. ‘But I also wondered if I could trouble you for a glass of water? I’ve just come over the mountain and I’m pretty thirsty…would you mind?’

  ‘Of course not. You must come inside,’ the woman said, and turned towards the house. ‘Follow me-watch the latch on the gate, it’s stiff.’

  He followed the blind woman up the flagstone path to the villa. She led him through a large hallway into a modern kitchen, and tapped her way to the fridge. She took out a bottle of mineral water. ‘There are glasses in the cupboard. Please, help yourself.’ She sat with him at the table, a benign expression on her face as she listened to him drink two tall glasses of water.

  ‘You’re very kind,’ he said. ‘I’ve walked all the way from Rennes-le-Château. I was looking for the House of the Raven.’

  ‘You’ve found it,’ she said simply, shrugging. ‘This is the House of the Raven.’

  ‘This?’ But it couldn’t be. This place was modern. How could it crop up on an eighty-year-old alchemical manuscript? ‘Perhaps I’m in the wrong place,’ he sa
id. ‘The house I was looking for is old.’ A thought occurred to him. ‘Was this house built on the site of an earlier building?’

  She laughed. ‘No, this is the original house. It’s much older than it looks. It was built in 1925. It gets its name from its architect.’

  ‘Who was the architect?’

  ‘His real name was Charles Jeanneret, but he was better known as Le Corbusier. His nickname was Corbu.’

  ‘House of the Raven,’ Ben repeated, nodding. Corbu–the French corbeau meaning a raven. So despite its ultramodern, almost futuristic appearance, the place dated from more or less the period of Fulcanelli’s manuscript.

  ‘Why were you looking for the house?’ she asked curiously.

  He instinctively fell back on his well-tested ploy. ‘I was doing some historical research. It’s mentioned in some old documents, and as I was in the area I thought I’d come and visit.’

  ‘Would you like to see round the place?’ she asked. ‘My eyes failed me some years ago, but in my mind I can see it as clearly as ever.’

  She showed him around from room to room, tapping her stick and pointing out this feature and that. In the main sitting-room was a tall and elaborately carved oak fireplace. Its ornate style was completely at odds with the sparse, straight-lined, almost ascetic design of the rest of the house. Ben stared at it. It wasn’t its craftsmanship and beauty that drew his eye, impressive as they were. He was staring at the carving above the mantelpiece, which dominated the whole fireplace.

  It was a raven carved on a circular emblem, just like the one in Fulcanelli’s manuscript and Notre Dame cathedral. He ran his eye along the carving, its bladelike feathers, curved talons and cruel beak. Its eye was a glittering ruby-red glass inset that seemed to stare back at him.

  ‘Is this an original feature?’ he asked. ‘The fireplace, I mean,’ he added, remembering she was blind.

  ‘Oh yes. It was carved by Corbu personally. In fact he began his career studying carving and jewellery-making before he became an architect.’

  Below the raven, the Latin words HIC DOMUS were carved in gold-lettered gothic script. ‘Hic… here,’ Ben translated under his breath. ‘Here the house…this is the house…This is the House of the Raven…’

  But where was this leading? Why had Fulcanelli put the house on the map? There had to be a reason. There must be something here. What?

  As he searched his mind for some kind of connection, he gazed around the room. His eye lit on a painting hanging on the opposite wall. It showed an old man dressed in what looked like medieval garb. In one hand the man clutched a large key. In the other he held up a circular shield, or perhaps a plate, that was oddly blank as though the artist had never completed the painting. The old man was smiling mysteriously.

  ‘You never told me your name, monsieur,’ said the blind woman.

  He told her.

  ‘You are English? It was nice to meet you, Ben. My name is Antonia.’ She paused. ‘I’m afraid I will have to ask you to leave now. I am going to visit my son in Nice for a couple of days. The taxi will be arriving soon.’

  ‘Thanks for the tour.’ He bit his lip, trying to hide the frustration in his voice.

  Antonia smiled up at him. ‘I’m glad you found the place. And I hope you will find what you are seeking, Ben.’

  60

  He sat amongst the trees overlooking the valley with the Le Corbusier house below him, and tried to get his thoughts in order. Evening was falling fast, and the wind was picking up. It was close and sticky. He could see black clouds scudding beyond the treetops. A storm was coming.

  Antonia’s last comment struck him as a little odd, a little out of place. I hope you find what you are seeking. He’d told her he was looking for the house, that was all. As far as she was concerned, he’d already found what he was seeking. And seeking seemed too strong, too evocative a word for someone who was just checking out an old house they found on a map.

  Maybe he was reading too much into it. Or did the blind woman know something she wasn’t letting on? Did the house have something to yield up to him? If it didn’t, that was it. There was nowhere to go from here.

  There was a rumble of distant thunder. He put his hand out and felt a large, heavy raindrop splatter against his palm. It was soon joined by another, then another. The rain was lashing down by the time car headlights appeared, winding slowly up the private road to the house. Lights went off in the windows. Antonia came out, and the driver helped her to the taxi under an umbrella. Ben watched from under the dripping canopy of an old oak tree as the car drove off.

  When the taillights had vanished to red pinpricks in the falling darkness, he turned up his collar and headed across the valley.

  He moved quietly and cautiously around the outside of the house. Rain was cascading from the guttering, churning neat flowerbeds into mud. There was a sharp flash of lightning, and thunder rumbled angrily overhead a second later. He brushed the water out of his eyes.

  Darkness had fallen fast as the black thunderclouds rolled in. He used the LED pistol torch to find his way around the side wall until he came to a back door. The lock was flimsy and easy to pick, and in less than a minute he was in the house. The thin white beam of the torch led him from room to room, throwing long shadows. The storm was right overhead now and building in intensity. There was another flash, two seconds of flickering strobe lightning, and the crash of thunder that followed instantly afterwards rocked the house.

  Remembering his way around, he quickly found the room with the ornate fireplace. He shone his light on the carved raven, which looked even more alive in the shadows than it had in daylight. Its beady red eye glinted in the light beam.

  He stood back, thinking. What was he looking for? He didn’t really know. The raven symbol had led him this far, and his instinct told him he should keep following it. He stared at the fireplace, his mind working furiously as rain beat against the windows. Something occurred to him. He went back outside into the downpour and saw he was right.

  From inside the house, the fireplace seemed to be set into the outer wall–yet as he stood in the garden, wiping the rain out of his eyes and sweeping the torch beam along the line of the roof, he saw that the squat chimney stack protruded from the roof inboard of the gable end by about three metres. He’d noticed that the window in the wall adjacent to the fireplace was about a metre from the corner, but looking from the outside it was about four metres from the end of the house.

  As he hurried back inside, dripping and shivering, he realized that unless it was some quirk of the ultramodern design, it meant there was a hidden cavity behind the fireplace. An insulation space? Too big, surely. It had to be about three metres deep. Maybe it was a corridor, or even a cupboard, that could be accessed from some other room.

  But where was the way in? He tried all the doors, but nothing led in the right direction. The room above was a bedroom with solid floorboards and no way down. There was no cellar beneath the house, from where the hidden room might have been accessible through a stairway or trapdoor. He returned to the living-room and scrutinized the fireplace again. If there was a way through, it must be here.

  He turned on the lights and tapped around the wall, listening to the sound. All around the fireplace, the wall was solid. Moving to the left of the fireplace, his tapping made a different note. Another metre to the left and the wall sounded quite hollow. There were no cracks or joins anywhere, nothing that could have been a hidden doorway. He tried levering away the wooden panels on the walls, in the hope that one of them might reveal something. Nothing.

  He reached his arm up behind the fireplace surround, groping up into the sooty chimney. Maybe there was a lever or some mechanism to open a way through. There wasn’t. He wiped the black dusty soot off his hands. ‘Must be something,’ he muttered. He ran his hands all over the fireplace, down the sides, his fingertips running over the intricate carvings, feeling for something that would press in, or give or turn. It seemed hopeless. The rain hit the window
s with a crackling like flames.

  He stood back from the fireplace, thinking desperately. There was nothing for it. He was going through that wall, and if there wasn’t a ready-made doorway he’d make one himself. Fuck it.

  He found a wood-axe in a tool-shed outside, buried in a chopping block surrounded by a pile of split logs. He grasped the long axe-handle and wrenched it out of the block. Back in the house, he swung the axe up over his shoulder and aimed it at the hollow part of the wall. If his guess was right, he could smash a hole through to the other side.

  What if I’m wrong, though? He lowered the axe, suddenly filled with doubt. He shot a guilty glance at the raven, and its glittery red eye seemed to meet his knowingly.

  He looked thoughtfully into its impassive face. The bird was so lifelike that he almost expected it to fly at him. He put down the axe and ran his hand along the smooth lines of its wing and neck, up to the glassy red eye. Suddenly seized by a crazy idea, he pressed the eye, hard.

  Nothing happened. He supposed that would have been too obvious. He took out the LED pistol-torch again and shone it all around the contours of the carving, carefully examining it. He passed the beam over the raven’s eye and a sudden glare of powerful reflected light dazzled him. There seemed to be a complex system of tiny internal mirrors in the eye that were concentrating his torch-beam and firing it back at him.

  Another idea came to him. He walked to the light-switch on the wall and turned it off, plunging the room back into darkness. He shone the LED into the raven’s eye again, standing a little to one side to avoid being dazzled.

  The reflected light from the raven’s eye hit the wall across the room and cast a circular red spot, about three inches wide, on the painting he’d noticed earlier. It landed exactly on the oddly blank round shield that the old man in the painting was holding up.