The Demons of King Solomon

by Aaron J. French

  “I tell you, Docteur Corbett, that is merely another brick. The builders marked many of them to indicate who had worked on a given part of the tunnels. That is someone’s name. Or—” and here she tried a laugh “—it is the name of an ex-lover with whom the bricklayer had an unhappy love affair. Consigning her name to an eternity of merde et pisse.”

  Lizzie shook her head and removed a magnifying glass from her tool belt, switched on the tiny LED light set in a ring around the lens, and leaned closer. Her heart jumped in her chest. It had been a long path from her tiny, cramped office in the back corner of the cellar of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale. Her search had begun with a reference in one of the old books sent to her by the cartload for reevaluation and scanning. The library had hundreds of thousands of volumes, many crumbling with age. Her two-person department—Lizzie and a little mole of a man named Hans—had the grandiose title of ‘Restoration and Preservation of Religious Works,’ but were expected to do complete computer optical scans of books previously available only on microfiche, oversee the transfer of those scans through various software programs, index the contents, and do keyword searches for the university’s searchable database. Occasionally something important was uncovered by the process, but typically by some graduate student doing deep research for his or her thesis.

  In rarer cases Lizzie or Hans found something themselves. Sadly, ninety-nine percent of those discoveries led to a series of frustrating dead ends. Lack of supporting materials was the most common closed door, though there were also conflicts with ongoing research by other groups or, worse, Lizzie’s research colliding with something being undertaken by one of the scholars who was deemed far more important than she.

  Not this time.

  A few months ago, Hans had come upon a notebook that had been improperly indexed and was mentioned nowhere else in the library’s vast records. He thought it was interesting, but decided it would be something more appealing to Lizzie than himself. Hans was in that department because he lacked all ambition. If something looked like it would require extra effort, particularly extracurricular work, he usually passed it to her.

  Lizzie was happy with that arrangement, and rewarded Hans by cooking extra food at home and bringing him some a couple times a week. He got fatter and she got tidbits to nibble on, like that book.

  The notebook was unique—untouched, unread, and unrecorded. It had been written by a man who only used the initial E, and who wrote French with a distinctly non-French hand. After comparing the handwriting to others in a pattern-recognition database, she became convinced that the author was Johann Augustus Eberhard, a German theologian who died in 1809. The paper and binding were consistent with journals of the same era manufactured and sold in Halberstadt, a town in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt, the capital of Harz district.

  Why it had been written in an obscure French dialect was a puzzle. Lizzie privately thought that it was intended to hide its contents from Eberhard’s colleagues and rivals, most of whom were German but would likely only be familiar with modern French.

  The contents of the notebook was mostly dry stuff with little to interest anyone except someone with a fascination for nineteenth-century Parisian tourism. And there were long sections of theological speculation with a bias toward the philosophy of phenomenalism. But while Lizzie was carefully scanning the pages she found some incomplete sentences here and there. Fragments that could easily have been dismissed as offhand notations or half-formed thoughts that were abandoned for one reason or another. That they were written in an older dialect of French was curious, but not earthshaking. Eberhard was, after all, a scholar and theologian, and French was the language of science, politics and art. There were many old writings in various dialects. By themselves, the notations might have been nothing more than bits copied by Eberhard from things he read or saw.

  Except that they weren’t.

  Lizzie had a lot of personal quirks and tics, not the least of which was some runaway OCD that she tried to rein in as best she could. The fragments bothered her because Eberhard was an orderly man and an orderly thinker. So, she went back through the notes, typed them into a Word document, then messed with them, moving them around like puzzle pieces. It was a project she came back to often over a period of weeks. She even read up on word puzzles and word-based codes.

  And then she had it.

  The sentence fragments were part of a code, but the page numbering factored in as well. There was a math problem there because the pages were hand-numbered and inconsistent. Some numbers were on the upper right corners, some on the lower right, others on the upper and lower left, and some centered top or bottom.

  That was the key, though it took several sleepless nights to suss out what the number pattern was. Nothing with Eberhard’s notebook could be taken at face value. That he went to such pains to encode those notes suggested he had something worth hiding. When Lizzie finally assembled the lines per the numbering patterns, what she discovered took her breath away. Something potentially huge. It could change her entire life. Not merely her professional life, but everything about who she was.

  She told absolutely no one about it, though. Not the molelike Hans, her partner in their little department. Not her on-again-off-again boyfriend, or her on-again-off-again girlfriend. Not even her mother, and she usually told Mom everything. Instead she told the department head that she was finally, after too many years, going to take some of the vacation time that had been stacking up. She bought a coach ticket to Germany and spent a week going through more of Eberhard’s papers to satisfy herself that she was correct. Then she took a train to Paris and spent three weeks telling half-truths and outright lies to arrange this two-person expedition down into the sewers.

  Every step of the way the coded words left by Eberhard haunted her. He had been a good man, a kind and decent man, a man for whom compassion and—perhaps—a forward-thinking understanding of implications were more important than personal gain. And he’d been old, near the end of his life and dealing with health problems. He knew that he would likely die within a few years. As, in fact, he did.

  So, he left behind his coded notes but did not try to ensure that they would eventually be found. He left no specific instructions except the last few lines of the message.

  It is all washed in blood.

  Perhaps some future, better society will find a way

  to wash it clean.

  I do not see such generosity of spirit in the world today.

  And so I pray that whosoever finds what was hidden

  will use it for better purposes than any for which it was

  given, taken, used, coveted, and hidden.

  May God share His Mercy and Provide His guidance.

  Peace to you.

  Now she was poised to either add a new chapter to history or make a fool of herself.

  “Please,” insisted Ami impatiently, “it’s only an unremarkable brick. At most it’s scratched, probably by rats.”

  “Nope,” she said, more to herself than to Ami, “it is definitely not that.” She wiped away some of the grime and it was clear that there were words cut into the brick. “See there?”

  Ami cleared her throat. “Very well, there are words. But as I said, the laborers working down here—”

  “—would have written in modern French,” she cut in. “This isn’t that.” Lizzie took a small squirt bottle of clean water and spritzed the writing, then sponged it clean with a piece of cloth. The letters stood out very clear in the light of her magnifying glass. There were three words, carved with great precision. “The oxidation is considerable, though. It’s old.”

  “These sewers were built centuries ago. In the mid-nineteenth century.”

  Lizzie was getting annoyed with her ‘assistant.’ For someone who was supposed to be gearing up to defend her dissertation, Ami seemed remarkably ignorant. Granted, this was outside her field of philology, the study of ancient languages, but not that far. It was reasonable,
even practical to know quite a lot about more recent language variations. That she was a French language scholar perturbed Lizzie even more. She tapped the writing.

  “You see this? This isn’t the language a nineteenth-century laborer would use. Or even the architect. This is a variation of ancient Français, particularly the dialect from the outermost towns of the old Angevin Empire.”

  Ami stiffened and bent closer. “What? Why would city builders use that?”

  “Because,” she said, “whoever laid the bricks in this part of the sewers was not working for the city. See what it says?” She read the inscription:

  “With generosity or not at all.”

  “That makes no sense,” said Ami.

  “It will.”

  Lizzie placed her fingers on the writing on the left-hand side of the brick, held her breath, and pushed.

  Absolutely nothing happened. Lizzie felt panic leap up in her chest, bringing with it a flash of anticipated shame as she thought about the weight of humiliation that would crash down on her if this proved to be a big fat nothing. Word of it would get out, and it would get back to Yale. Her job was by no means secure, even though she was good at what they let her do. Lizzie had no political pull within the university, and the natural cattiness of the academics at the library would turn against her in an instant. A lifetime’s worth of self-doubt, self-recrimination, self-loathing, and general feelings of inadequacy according to her own unbending standards crowded into her chest and left no room for her heart to beat.

  She pushed the brick again and it stubbornly refused. It sat there, being a brick, being part of an immoveable wall. Well… what did she expect? Magic? A gift from the Fates? She didn’t believe in either.

  No. This was going to end right here and now and so would her career. She’d have to go crawling back to Yale and hope they did not fire her on general principles. Even though she was not here as any kind of official representative of the university, that’s how it would be viewed. She would make the whole library look stupid.

  Because I’m stupid, she thought bitterly. She glared at the brick. Begging it silently to move. Hating it for not moving. Hating herself and everything.

  “You see,” said Ami, and even with her—someone so much farther down on the professional totem pole—there was mockery and condescension in her voice. “I told you—”

  Then something did happen.

  With her continued pressure the brick moved. It slid inward. Not far. Maybe half an inch.

  Lizzie said, “God!”

  Ami said, “What…?”

  For a moment nothing else happened and everything was deathly still.

  Ami snorted. “A loose brick.”

  There was a grating sound deep inside the wall. A heavy sound, as if something ponderous moved with slow reluctance. Ami yelped like a kicked poodle and backpedaled as a section of the wall moved outward. Dust and gas belched from within, and Lizzie turned away, holding a hand up to protect her eyes, but squinting through it all so she didn’t miss a thing.

  “Mother of…” began Ami, but words failed her. She sat down hard and the foul water splashed up around her, splattering her with excrement. Rats screamed in the dark and scurried away, their little nails scraping on the slick stones.

  Lizzie stood as the dust thinned and swirled away.

  The hidden door had moved inward about twenty inches and then stopped, caught on something. It was enough, though. She turned off her magnifying light and removed the more powerful Mag-Lite from her belt. Her hands shook so much that it took her four tries to turn it on, but then a bright blue-white light spilled into the doorway.

  She cut a look at Ami, who still sat waist deep in the water, eyes wide, mouth open in a silent “Oh” of fear and surprise. Lizzie rose and flashed her a smile brighter than any light down there, and then went in through the doorway.

  For nearly a full minute, Lizzie inched her way along a hidden corridor empty of everything except spider webs and rat droppings. Then she reached a turning in the wall and when she rounded it, her light seemed to change from blue-white to yellow.

  No.

  To gold.

  She stood in the mouth of a great chamber and stared. Her mouth fell open but she was absolutely incapable of speech. The icy fingers that had been clamped around her heart disintegrated and she could feel it beating. Stronger. Like fists. Sweat broke from her pores and ran down the sides of her face and inside her clothes, despite the cold dampness of the chamber.

  There were hundreds of them.

  Made from iron or wood or bronze. Some bound with heavy bands of metal and clamped shut with huge old locks. Others stood open, their chains and locks abandoned, the lids thrown back. On the wall directly across from where she stood were the same words she had decoded, painted in a clear hand. The same hand. Eberhard’s own.

  I pray that whosoever finds what was hidden

  will use it for better purposes than any for which it was

  given, taken, used, coveted, and hidden.

  May God share His Mercy and Provide His guidance.

  Peace to you.

  And above those words a cross had been painted. Not the French style. No, this was closer to the German version. Four arms of equal length and thickness, widening at the flat ends so that the terminus of each arm looked like the base of a candle holder. A cross pattée. Not painted black, as a German might have done, but painted red.

  Painted by Eberhard in red above a sea of chests of gold and diamonds and rubies and…

  Lizzie’s mind faltered as she realized the true importance of what she had found. The thing thousands upon thousands of priests, treasure-hunters, scholars, and historians had looked for since Friday, 13 October 1307, when Pope Clement V issued the Pastoralis Praeeminentiae, a papal bull ordering the arrest of an order of knights whose members had been the bankers of the Crusades and whose power had risen to rival that of the Holy Church.

  She had found the treasure of the Knights Templar.

  4

  Égouts de Paris

  One Year Ago

  Lizzie Corbett was in the hidden room for a long time.

  Ami stood in the shadows of the corridor.

  “Do you know what you’ve found?” asked the assistant.

  “Yes,” gasped Lizzie.

  “Do you understand what it means?”

  Without turning, Lizzie asked, “What…?”

  There was no answer. Lizzie turned but Ami was not in the corridor. When Lizzie emerged, dazed and trembling, from the hidden treasure house, the younger woman was not there. Nor was Ami Filou at the Sorbonne. Ami had simply vanished.

  That terrified Lizzie at first because she feared that the assistant had gone off to betray her, or maybe to phone for some thuggish friends to come and steal the treasure.

  Nothing of the sort happened.

  Lizzie went to the street level where she could get a cell phone signal and placed a series of calls that wrote her into every headline in the world, and into the pages of history.

  Within ten days she was on the cover of Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, and a hundred other weeklies and ten thousand newspapers. The following month she saw herself—startled blue eyes, wild hair, perpetually smiling mouth and look of pure astonishment—on the covers of weighty periodicals from National Geographic to Scientific American. The Lady of the Templars, they called her. Fortune’s Lady, they called her. Indiana Jones’ Sister, they called her.

  The name Ami Filou faded from her thoughts completely.

  5

  The Library of the Ten Gurus

  Toronto, Canada

  Nine Months Ago

  Mahip Singh leaned back in his chair, crossed his legs, and turned the page of the thick report he had received that morning. It was the fifth such report passed along to him by operatives working for his department of the Library. Like the others, it included biographies of more than two dozen candidates.

  And like the others, one name kept rising to the
surface with the highest recommendations. He spoke the name aloud in the quiet of his office.

  “Dr. Elizabeth Corbett.”

  Mahip smiled.

  6

  University of Glasgow

  Scotland

  Eight Months Ago

  Lizzie Corbett waited through another standing ovation.

  She hated them.

  She hated being in front of so many people.

  She hated giving speeches.

  She hated being a celebrity.

  She hated a lot of what had happened to her since she’d found the treasure of the Templars.

  The money was okay, though. Not that she got to keep the actual heaps of gold and jewels. The French government confiscated that in a heartbeat, and she very nearly got arrested for vandalism. No, her bank account had swollen to impossible limits through book deals and movie deals and appearance fees and speaking fees. Four months ago she’d had eight hundred and six dollars in her checking account and three thousand in savings. She’d also had one hundred and seven thousand dollars’ worth of student loans.

  Now she had no debt at all. Yale had been quite happy to cancel out her loans in exchange for a guarantee that she would give quarterly talks, mentioning that the research that led to the discovery had begun in their library. They’d also upped her to full professor, jumping over the heads of more qualified and deeply disgruntled seniors. She had nearly four million dollars in the bank. An insane fortune for a bookworm nerd girl from Philadelphia. Less than half a percent of the fortune she’d found, and that was just calculating the weight of gold at the current market price. The gemologists had not yet put a tally on the value of the seven hundred and eleven pounds of diamonds, rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and topazes. Or the ninety-two pounds of pearls. The best guess was that it would take five years to assess their value because a third of the gems were set into jewelry from thirty ancient nations. The Templars had a long and greedy reach.