The Scrolls of Velia

by John McWilliams

  “Bedford Regional,” Mary interjected. “That’s where they’re taking him.”

  “Who’s taking him?” Sue asked.

  “Some guy Mary knows,” I said.

  “Jake Saunders. He works for my uncle,” Mary shouted at Sue—in my ear.

  “Here, you want to talk to her?” I handed Mary the phone.

  Mary paced, talking nonstop for at least a minute before coming to a halt. Then she looked at the phone. “It’s dead. She said they’re sending someone to pick us up.”

  We gathered our gear and started walking again.

  “So, what exactly are we picking up in Watertown?” I asked.

  “A suitcase.”

  I looked at her. “Is it full of rocks?”

  “I don’t think so. Actually, I don’t know what’s in it. But there’s going to be some digging involved.”

  “Digging? As in digging in the ground?”

  “Where else would you dig? But don’t worry, the suitcase should be fine. It’s inside a coffin.”

  “I wasn’t worried—wait, inside a coffin?”

  “Just a small one—not one of those huge things.”

  “You mean a child’s coffin?”

  “Yeah, but no one’s in it. Just a—”

  “A suitcase.” I stared at her as we walked a few more steps. “You sure there isn’t a kid in it?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Henry. Probably not.”

  • • •

  Back at the airport, Mary and I were greeted like heroes of a foreign war. That novelty lasted about ten minutes. Because the moment I suggested that Big Mike be banned from the Tarrant County jump—if not from skydiving all together—the praise came to a resounding end, and I was summarily invited to join the owner of my school and the owner of Skywalker Skydive in the front office.

  They didn’t quite say it like this, but they argued that if they were to ban Big Mike, both schools would lose at least a handful of good-paying customers. I argued that they were being foolish and that someone was going to end up dead. But my words fell on deaf ears. (And, no, I didn’t quite say it like that either.)

  “Good luck with your upcoming disaster.” I slammed the door so hard, the frame cracked, and the door swung back into the office pitifully. “What a piece of crap.” I looked at the two owners, waiting for one of them to say something. Neither did.

  Out in the parking lot, I opened the passenger door of my Dodge pickup, exchanged my sneakers for boots, and put on my Stetson hat. Seeing Mary leaning against her blue Ford Mustang, I tipped my hat at her. She smiled. I took the backpack from my back seat and headed over to her car.

  After several stops to pick up a shovel, a flashlight, and a GPS, we drove two hours north to Watertown. Mary parked in the dirt driveway of an old, Gothic style house, then used her GPS to lead us to the exact spot where we needed to dig.

  “Are you sure about this?” I looked around the iron-gated section of woods. The density of trees and overgrowth made it seem like dusk.

  “1818 to 1853,” Mary said, brushing the dirt off a fallen tombstone. “Cool.”

  “We’re digging up a child’s coffin in a graveyard. I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure that’s illegal.”

  “We’re just digging up a… container,” Mary said. “That’s all.”

  “In a graveyard.” I looked at her. “This friend of yours—”

  “Dr. Adella Fortier.”

  “Did Dr. Fortier happen to mention why she’s storing a suitcase in a child’s coffin?”

  “I assume they’re cheaper.” Mary shrugged.

  I shook my head, then picked up the shovel and handed her my hat. “Don’t get that dirty,” I warned.

  She put the hat on. “How do I look?”

  “Ridiculous,” I said.

  She stuck her tongue out at me.

  On the way here, Mary told me about the deal she had made with this Dr. Adella Fortier. Mary was supposed to bring her this suitcase, and in exchange, the doctor would provide Mary with information about her long-lost astronaut. Somehow, apparently, Dr. Fortier had knowledge of his whereabouts.

  The way I figured it, the sooner Mary caught up with this guy, the better. He was certainly way too old for her, and for some reason he was on the lam. For Mary, I was certain, the whole thing was a fantasy, and a good part of the appeal of that fantasy was the challenge of finding the guy. Once he was found, the fantasy would become reality, and this man’s allure would dissipate.

  That’s what I figured, anyway.

  And, no, I wasn’t being disingenuous by offering Mary my help. She understood my intentions.

  Mary looked at my shovel barely an inch into the dirt. “That hole isn’t going to dig itself.”

  “What if these coordinates aren’t right? I’d sure hate to dig up someone’s bones.”

  “Adella—Dr. Fortier—said it isn’t that deep, so we’ll know way before we hit anyone’s bones.”

  A cloud must have passed in front of the sun, because just then our cavernous section of woods became even gloomier. Mary took a flashlight out of her pocket, and when it refused to work, she rapped it on a headstone.

  “Mary. What are you doing?”

  “Oops. Sorry.” She patted the hunk of granite.

  I pressed the shovel into the dirt. And I’m officially digging up a grave.

  “I bet it’s money,” I said. “Why else would someone go to all this trouble?”

  “Could be. But don’t get any ideas. We need to bring it to her as is—”

  “I know, so you can get your astronaut back. Don’t worry, I’m not exactly hard up for money.”

  “Oh, don’t be such a showoff.”

  “I’m not showing off. I just didn’t want you worried.” I began digging in earnest.

  Mary wheeled the flashlight around, illuminating the leafy canopy above. The light went dim, then died. “This thing sucks.” She slapped it against her palm.

  “So, what’s this woman like?” I asked, emptying a shovel load of dirt onto the growing pile.

  “Like super, super smart. She’s a mathematician.” Mary strolled through the vine-entangled tombstones—browsing.

  “Huh. For some reason I thought she was a medical doctor.”

  “Well, she is in a hospital—but she’s a patient.”

  I tapped something hard with the tip of the shovel. “Talk about a shallow grave. I think we’re there.”

  Ten minutes later, I had a four-foot mahogany coffin uncovered. Using a crank key someone had duct-taped to its lid, I unlocked it and peeked inside.

  “Oh my God!” I slammed the lid shut.

  “Holy crap, what is it?” Mary scrambled around to my side of the coffin.

  “Wow, you really are ghoulish,” I said as she waited for me to reopen it. “I was just kidding.” I lifted the lid, revealing an old leather suitcase.

  “And you’re a jerk.” She hit me with the flashlight.

  I withdrew the suitcase—which was really more of a carry-on bag—and handed it to her.

  “Not too heavy.” Mary shook it.

  Getting to my feet, I dusted my hands on my jeans. “Well, we’d better open it.”

  Mary looked hesitant. “I don’t think Adella would like that.”

  “Mary, we have to. You said she was in the hospital, right? Is she seriously ill?”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “What if there’s a gun in there? Do you really want to deliver a gun to a seriously ill person in a hospital?”

  “Oh, right… Good point.”

  Mary set the bag down, opened it, and pulled out six rubber-band-bound stacks of twenties and fifties, along with three sets of IDs, all for the same woman.

  “Is that her?” I asked, pointing at the picture on one of the passports.

  “That’s definitely her.” Mary dug back into the leather bag, removing two spiral-bound notebooks, four DVDs, a handful of flash drives, a change of clothes, and a toothbrush. “That’s
all of it,” she said.

  “Any idea what your Dr. Fortier might be running from?” I asked. “This is a go-bag.”

  “I have no idea.” Mary studied the bag’s contents. “At least there’s no gun.”

  “Well, that’s something.” I leafed through the notebooks. Both were filled with mathematical formulations and annotations. “You said she was sick. Is she too sick to travel?”

  “Well, she’s not exactly sick sick.”

  “Not exactly sick sick?”

  “She’s at Ellington State Psychiatric Hospital.” Still wearing my hat, she lowered its brim.

  I lifted the brim until I could see her eyes. “You’re telling me we just dug up a grave on behalf of a mental patient?”

  “It wasn’t a grave.”

  “It could have been.”

  “But she’s really, really smart.”

  “Which really, really isn’t a plus when you’re talking about someone with mental problems.”

  “Well, we already dug it up. We might as well bring it to her.” Mary sat on the fallen tombstone.

  “A go-bag to a person in a mental institution? And, do you mind?” I pointed at where she was sitting.

  Mary looked at the granite slab under her rear end. “Sorry.” She got up and knelt next to the go-bag. “Look, there’s an inside pocket.” She unzipped it, removed a manila envelope, and emptied its contents onto the spiral notebooks.

  The first item was a burnt orange business card with two menacing-looking ravens on it. They stared in opposite directions, one white, the other black. I turned the card over and read the only two words printed on it: “Raven Entelechy.”

  “What’s a Raven Entelechy?” Mary asked.

  “Probably a company, I guess.”

  “Do you even know what ‘entelechy’ means?”

  “No—hang on.” I looked it up on my phone. “‘Actuality as opposed to potentiality. A vital agent or force directing the growth of life.’”

  “Great.” Mary dropped the card back into the manila envelope.

  The next item was a photograph of twenty or so men and women at a conference table. Based on their attire, I guessed it had been taken within the last ten to twenty years. On the back was written, “The first annual meeting of the New Eureka Group – Zurich.”

  Mary studied it, shrugged.

  The last item was a notebook. Unlike the spiral-bound notebooks we found in the main section of the bag, this notebook was quite thick, and had yellowed pages and a worn leather cover. The writing was small and precise. I opened it to the first page.

  The Eureka Group – 16 November, 1942, Berlin

  To whom it may concern:

  Contained within these pages are the mathematical principles and detailed physical explanations of a mechanistic approach to the unification of all known physical forces. The key mathematical formula, what we have dubbed the “Eureka Symmetry Formula,” however, has been purposely omitted. Due to our current political situation, we cannot risk having it fall into the wrong hands. Yet, unwilling to risk having our hard work, and that of those who came before us, lost to posterity, we have included a cipher for acquiring the Eureka Symmetry Formula. It is included in the back pages of this notebook. We only pray that you, the reader, use this information strictly for peaceful purposes…

  “Anything interesting?” Mary looked over my shoulder.

  “It seems to be the notebook of a German scientist—or group of German scientists—from around World War Two, who claim to have come up with a Theory of Everything.”

  “Written in English?”

  “Yeah—well, it doesn’t sound as if they wrote this for the Germans.”

  “Because of Hitler?”

  “That’d be my guess.”

  “What’s a Theory of Everything?”

  “It’s a theory that explains all the forces in the universe with just one fundamental concept. Like if you could demonstrate that gravity, electromagnetic waves, and the stuff that holds all the subatomic particles together was something called pixie dust. That would be a Theory of Everything.”

  Mary stared at me.

  “Of course, then you’d have to explain what pixie dust is.”

  “Well,” Mary took the notebook and flipped through its pages, “whatever their theory is, it’s got to be pretty outdated by now.”

  “Not really. I mean, we still use physical and mathematical concepts that are thousands of years old. Can I see that again?”

  She handed it back to me.

  The math, or at least the symbols used, looked like some of the stuff I had seen in the spiral notebooks. I paused on a page with the heading “Space-Time Transformation Modules.” If this isn’t nonsense, I thought, it’s way over my head.

  “What does it say?” Mary asked.

  “Oh—this is some crazy stuff. It’s like relativistic field equations mixed with these weird transform functions. Listen to this.” Mary aimed her flashlight at the page, although it wasn’t really needed. “‘The symmetry of time and energy, as demonstrated, could therefore provide the basis for one hundred percent matter to electromagnetic energy conversion.’”

  “Meaning?”

  “I think it means some kind of perfect energy source. But how this guy gets there, I have no idea.” I flipped through the pages. “And there’s no name. I have no idea whose notebook this is.”

  “It’s the Eureka Group,” Mary said. “That’s what it said on the first page. Which is interesting, because…” She held up the conference table photo. “This, according to what’s written on the back, is the New Eureka Group.”

  “So how does any of this fit in with your mental patient friend?”

  Mary studied the picture. “She’s not in the photo. Maybe she’s related to one of these people.”

  “Or maybe she’s just crazy, and we’re even crazier for digging up her coffin.”

  “She’s not crazy,” Mary said. “You want to talk to her? You could come with me to the hospital. Although I doubt she’ll be too thrilled if we don’t bring her her bag.”

  Going to the hospital would extend my time with Mary, and I was curious about this stuff. I looked at the contents of the bag. There really wasn’t anything dangerous here. “I suppose she could use the money to pay someone to help her escape the hospital,” I said.

  “But that wouldn’t be our fault.” Mary repacked the bag.

  I thought about that for a moment. “All right.”

  “All right, what?”

  “Let’s go see her,” I said.

  “Okay, but please don’t mention that we rummaged through her stuff. At least not until I get my answer.” Mary zipped the bag shut and stood. “If we hurry, we should be able to make it to Ellington before the end of visiting hours. But first…”

  She handed me the shovel and tilted her head toward the hole.

  I get that pretty women have a certain power over men, but Mary… Mary seemed to have something more.

  What was I going to say? Something about me doing all the work?

  I got busy reburying the coffin.

  • • •

  We made it to Ellington State Psychiatric Hospital at seven forty-five, the sun slipping below the horizon as we ran up the front steps. At the reception desk, we were greeted by a nurse who happened to remember Mary from a previous visit. She offered to escort us to Dr. Fortier.

  “You’re really cutting it close,” the nurse said. “Visiting hours end at eight. I hope you didn’t travel far.”

  “It was kind of far,” Mary replied, “but we only need to talk to her for a few minutes.”

  “That’s good.” The nurse stole a glance at Mary as we marched down two flights of steps. “You’re very naturally beautiful, you know that?” She smiled at Mary and blushed.

  “Thank you,” Mary said. “It’s probably just from being out in the sun all day.”

  Behind them, clip-clopping along in my grave-digging leather boots, I felt like an old plow horse.
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  At the bottom of the stairs, the nurse led us down a long hall, our footsteps echoing off the walls. “She lives in the basement?” I asked.

  “Dr. Fortier spends a great deal of time down here,” the nurse said. “There’s room for her to do her math. She enjoys it so.”

  Someone called out from one of the rooms.

  “Would you excuse me?” the nurse said. “This’ll only take a second.” She went to respond to the call, leaving us to wait in the hallway.

  “How’d you hook up with Dr. Fortier in the first place?” I asked Mary.

  “Someone I know, who works here in the administration office, saw my astronaut friend visiting Dr. Fortier. She even sent me a picture to prove it.”

  “And why was he visiting her?”

  “Adella said she wouldn’t tell me until I brought her her suitcase. It is weird though, him visiting her. I mean, given her notoriety and all.”

  “Notoriety?”

  “You know, all that Skull Lady stuff.”

  “Hang on, hang on.” I walked a few steps away and returned. “Are you telling me Dr. Adella Fortier is the Skull Lady?”

  “I’m sorry, you didn’t know that?” She looked at me innocently.

  “Why would I have known that? I don’t keep track of who’s who in the world of psychopaths.”

  The Skull Lady, from what I could recall from a couple of years back, had dug up and removed the heads of seven corpses before chemically stripping their flesh and storing their skulls in her closet.

  “So,” I said, “we not only robbed a grave, we did it at the behest of the queen of all grave robbers?”

  “I thought you liked adventures.”

  “Not as much as I like staying out of jail.”

  “It wasn’t even a real grave,” Mary muttered.

  “It could have been! Mary, this woman stored people’s skulls in her closet. In hatboxes!”

  “Oh, that’s just a myth created by the media. The boxes just happened to be the size of hatboxes.”

  “How does that—” I stared at her. “Did I mention my father’s a U.S. senator?”

  “I don’t know what you’re so freaked out about. You’re the one who actually killed someone.”