by Lis Wiehl
He leaned forward and gently brushed a fleck of dust from the box Abbie had left behind, examining it for a moment.
“What I am about to tell you is going to sound rather fantastic,” he said. “They say those who fail to understand history are condemned to repeat it. Understanding pre-history is even trickier, since it is by definition unrecorded. We can get only glimpses, intimations from various sources—cave paintings, stone monoliths, occasionally archaeological artifacts.
“When God sent his only Son, Jesus Christ, to die for us on the cross two thousand years ago, the world was a desperate place. As Dani’s research demonstrates, there is evil in the world. It is here now, and it was walking the earth two thousand years ago. As you all understand, Lucifer was cast out of heaven, but he was not destroyed. He survived to influence men and to send his representatives to torment us and lead us astray. There is an unseen war raging between good and evil. I would not say mortal men are the pawns or foot soldiers in this war, because there are many on the side of evil who are very much willing volunteers, just as there are those on this side, on my side—on our side—who believe in God Almighty and who have trusted in Jesus Christ as Savior. Men and women who will take up arms and lay down their lives, as I would—as you would—for the cause of righteousness. We are not pawns. We participate. We must participate.
“But I’m a historian, not a theologian,” he said.
A log in the fireplace popped loudly, causing Arlo the cat to jump up from the sofa where he’d been lying. Otto, dozing before the fire, wuffled in his sleep and his paws twitched, while Villanegre continued. He spoke of a time when the world had been ready for change, when the pagan Egyptian and Greek and Roman and Aztec and Incan civilizations had all failed, but had prepared mankind for the coming of a brand-new idea, the message Christ brought in a narrative that began in a manger in Bethlehem and ended on a cross at Golgotha. But that was a false ending—the true ending to the narrative came when the stone was rolled away and it was learned that Christ had defeated death, and that he’d shown us all the way that we too could find everlasting life.
“But as Christ’s message began to spread, Satan and his forces redoubled their efforts. He sent his demons out to attack mankind and to teach them the ways of black magic and sorcery. In the ancient world one of these heathen pagan groups was called the Oak-Worshippers, or People of the Oak. The proto-Indo-European word for them was deru-weid, which Latinized as druides. The Welsh root dryw means ‘seer,’ but the meaning is more that of sorcerer or fortune-teller than visionary.”
“Druids?” Dani said. “Are you saying East Salem has a Druid problem?”
“There go the real estate values,” Tommy said.
“I warned you it was going to sound fantastical,” Villanegre said. He explained that the Druids, who worshipped Satan and practiced his dark arts and engaged in cannibalism and human sacrifice, established themselves in Gaul, which at the time spread across most of modern-day France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and parts of Holland and Germany. They were driven out by the Romans, as one pagan civilization replaced another, but they always knew that Christianity was the true threat.
“As of about the second century AD, the Druids were pushed from the continent and had relocated mainly in England and Ireland, where they managed to hang on by keeping a lower profile. As Christianity gradually transformed the Roman Empire—”
“Into the Holy Roman Empire?” Tommy guessed.
“Not quite,” Villanegre said. “The HRE was a German affiliation of royal houses. But the word of Christ could not be stopped by artificial boundaries drawn on a map by man. By the end of the first millennium, the pagans had been essentially crushed in England and Ireland too.”
“St. Adrian,” Carl said. “The man who drove the last Druids from Great Britain.”
“With the help of Charles the Black,” Villanegre said. “Very effectively, it seemed. The name makes him sound a bit evil, but it refers to the color of the armor he chose, matte black, which allowed him to make stealthy attacks at night. His war horses were black as well. Charles was as ruthless as any warrior who’d ever drawn a broadsword, but he also fancied himself a rather clever chap and thought of a way to slip a spy behind enemy lines. He sent a fellow named Tibald into the Druid camp, where he pretended to worship with them. Tibald convinced the Druids he was one of them. Funny thing, though—”
“They turned him into a double agent,” Quinn said. “Just a guess.”
“Quite a good one,” Villanegre said. “The Druids managed to flip poor Tibald. Some think Satan tempted him with a female demon. A succubus. Tibald, under the control of Satan, told Charles the Black precisely where the Druids were, and Charles and his men rode in on their mighty war horses and slayed them all. Two hundred and eight men and women. Brought their heads back to Adrian on pikes. The skulls are still at the abbey, buried in a sealed vault in the basement. And that, they thought, was that.”
“Except?” Dani said.
“Except the 208 souls Charles slaughtered were not the last of the Druids. They weren’t even Druids. They were Picts dressed as Druids. He’d been duped. I don’t know what manner of sorcery got them to carry out that fatal masquerade, but it isn’t hard to imagine.”
“What happened to the real Druids?” Ruth asked. “They obviously wanted Charles to think he’d killed them all.”
“And by the way, has anybody bought the film rights to this story?” Cassandra said.
“The real Druids,” Villanegre said, smiling politely to Cassandra, “boarded two ships and sailed from the English shore.”
“I didn’t know the Druids were seafarers,” Quinn said.
“They weren’t. But they’d formed an alliance with some people who were very capable seafarers.”
“Vikings,” Ruth said. “Who else could it be?”
“Our people,” Tommy said. “Sorry about that, guys.”
“The same,” Villanegre said. “The remaining Druids divided into two groups to better their chances of surviving. One ship sailed to the south and turned east at the Strait of Gibraltar to circle back through the Mediterranean and land in southern France. I should add that by this time—”
“When was this?”
“End of the eighth century,” Villanegre said. “By this time the Druids who’d survived had learned their lesson. They’d learned that you can’t hope to lie low and be undiscovered if you build massive stone monuments that are visible for miles.”
“Stonehenge,” Quinn said.
Villanegre nodded. “So they went underground. Literally. They worshipped only in caves. And they blended in with society and lived rather normal lives, except when they’d congregate to practice their black magic. But we tracked them down, eventually, after one poor fellow ended up on a rack and had the truth stretched out of him. We killed as many of them as we could find in what history has recorded as witch hunts. You may recall.”
“There were a lot more than 104 people killed as witches,” Dani said, recalling a figure from a women’s studies class that said as many as six million women in Europe may have been executed for practicing witchcraft.
“Yes,” Villanegre said. His tone became somber. “Much of that was Satan’s doing, but some of it was ours, I’m afraid. We started a terrible mania that we hadn’t anticipated. And we learned, from a very hard lesson, to play our cards much closer to the vest.”
“You’ve been saying we,” Carl said. “Who is this we?”
Villanegre studied him for a moment.
“People like you, Carl. People who’ve given their lives to God and pledged to renounce Satan and to defeat him. Originally we were the descendants of the soldiers who fought with Charles the Black. Some of us chose to wear the vestments and serve God in a public capacity. Others saw a greater wisdom in staying hidden and operating surreptitiously. It was a game of cat and mouse. We knew we hadn’t found them all. We only rooted the last of them out of Europe after we saw that painting.
”
“The Garden of Earthly Delights?” Dani said. “The Duke of Ghent?”
Villanegre nodded. “He was merely a pawn. His oldest—and I dare say rottenest—son was a Druid high priest. They claimed they were an Adamite cult, trying to use sexuality to return to the state of grace man had originally known in the Garden of Eden. But they were just another hedonistic cult of charisma, of the sort we’ve seen many times over the millennia. The two figures emerging from the cave—”
“In the lower right-hand corner of the center panel of the painting,” Tommy said.
“One is the Prince of Ghent, and the one whispering in his ear is a demon.”
“What happened to the second ship?” Tommy said. “You said there were two.”
“We never found out. But we received a prophecy. An angel told us that someday they would send for their painting, and when they were reunited with it, their powers would multiply.”
“I know where the second ship went,” Ben Whitehorse said. “Tommy, do you remember when I told you that Leif Ericson sailed for America with thirty-five men but returned with only thirty-four?”
“The Man of the North,” Tommy said.
“Leif Ericson wasn’t the first Viking to sail to America,” Ben said. “When Ericson sailed, he was using a map that another man had drawn. That other man was the one the Druids hired to bring them to America. We don’t know his name, but in Indian lore he’s just called The Sailor.”
“Does Indian lore say where he landed?”
“He is said to have sailed up the Hudson River as far as he could go and dropped them off,” Ben said. “That would have been around Albany. Not so far from here. The Iroquois called it Muhheakantuck, which meant ‘the river that flows two ways.’”
“Where’d they go from there?” Dani said.
“They went to the region of New York you call the Finger Lakes,” Whitehorse said. “It was there that the Druids corrupted the people and taught them to be cannibals who practiced human sacrifice. They brought Thadodaho and the Wendigo to America.”
“We had our theories, but until recently we had no proof,” Villanegre said.
“How many ‘we’s’ are there?” Tommy said.
“It’s a very small and very secret group. There are twelve of us—like the twelve disciples. We call ourselves the Curatoriat. None of us knows who the others are, but we have ways of staying in contact with each other.”
“If you don’t know who the others are, you can’t reveal the names if you’re questioned,” Dani said.
“Precisely,” the Englishman said. “We are, in a fashion, the curators of that painting. Our task, since wiping out the last of the fiends in Europe, has been to find out what happened to the second ship. The painting currently hanging in the gallery at St. Adrian’s originally hung in a cave in northern France, where it was used in what one might laughingly call worship. We’re the ones who moved it to the chapel in the Duke of Ghent’s palace. We had to get it into the public view, despite its atrocious message, because we needed to use it as bait. We’ve been waiting over five hundred years. And now it’s here.”
“How are the members of the Curatoriat chosen?” Carl said.
“We are each responsible for selecting and training a successor,” Villanegre said. “That is also a secret we keep. But we are ever vigilant, because we know that when the painting is reunited with Satan’s vulgar acolytes, it will be a sign that time is short.”
“Time is short?” Quinn said. “Short for what?”
Villanegre looked at him somberly but didn’t answer.
“I’m still not clear what this has to do with Abbie Gardener,” Dani said, resting her hand on the box. “Or with this.”
“Ah, yes,” Villanegre said. “As I said, there are twelve of us. Once there were thirteen. For a while, when we were unable to establish contact with the thirteenth, we assumed Satan had somehow found him and destroyed him. Then we heard from him. He was a wise man who had received a vision from God that to keep us all safe, only one should know who the other twelve were. The Guardian would be protected. God had blessed him and his successors. Or her—the Guardian is not necessarily male. We learned where the second ship had landed, and that the Guardian was there, fighting them alone but protected. Abbie Gardener was the Guardian, the last in a long line.”
“She couldn’t have been too protected,” Tommy said. “They killed her.”
“I don’t know how they managed that,” Villanegre said. “It worries me greatly. We think the forces of darkness are gaining strength. We don’t know how or why.”
“How do you know Abbie was the last?” Dani said. “I mean, how do you know she didn’t pass the torch on to someone else?”
“I dearly hope she did,” Villanegre said. “The Guardian was the coordinator. I and my fellow curators passed our messages through her, and we received our instructions from her. But the line went dead, so to speak. Mind you, we did not know her identity. We don’t know each other’s identities either. She knew ours, but neither man nor demon could put us into enough pain to get us to reveal her name because we didn’t know it. I came here following the painting. And hoping.”
“Is it George?”
“There’s no right of primogeniture. That would be too easily defeated,” he said. “By the way, those paintings in the house weren’t fakes. I had no choice but to lie about them, or there’d be headlines from here to Singapore about the astonishing hidden art collection with a value well into the billions of dollars. The Curatoriat put it together over the centuries, piece by piece, and shipped it to the Guardian by various methods to keep the destination secret. We are to sell them when the time comes to raise funds.”
“Funds for what?” Cassandra asked.
“It’s a defense fund,” Villanegre said. “The money raised can be spent only after a vote by the Curatoriat. We have the power of Jesus behind us, but to get things done here on earth, it helps to have financial resources.”
“The question remains, what’s in this, and how do we get it open?” Tommy said. He put his finger on the box and traced the inlays. “There might be a key we need. Though there’s no hole to put a key into.”
Dani pressed the central inlay in various places, then pressed the four smaller Celtic crosses.
“I already tried that,” Tommy said.
“Maybe it takes a special kind of touch,” Dani said. “Or combination. Like the keypad that opens the gate at the end of your driveway.”
“It wouldn’t take much pressure,” Villanegre said. “The masters of marquetry during the Renaissance could work in incredibly small tolerances.”
“I think if there are buttons that can be pushed, it would be those smaller crosses,” Ben suggested. “Remember that demons can’t overcome their physical aversion to sacred icons. They wouldn’t be able to touch the crosses.”
Tommy took up the box and pressed his fingers against the Celtic inlays.
“There are eight inlays,” he said. “Four on the front and four on the back. But because of . . . this . . .” He stretched his hand as wide as he could. “Because of the distance between them, one person can only push four at a time, in corresponding pairs, one on the front and one on the back. So how many possible combinations are there?”
“For one person?” Quinn asked. “You need a factorial equation. Pascal’s triangle. If AB and BA are the same, there are 120 combinations. If the order you press them in matters and AB is not the same as BA, then there are 392 ways to do it.”
“What if it requires three sets of combinations?” Ruth asked. “Or four?”
“Then it’s exponential,” Quinn said. “Pascal’s triangle becomes Pascal’s pyramid. One hundred twenty cubed is 1,728,000. Three hundred ninetytwo cubed is 60,236,228. To the fourth power—”
“In other words, a lot,” Tommy said.
“Maybe it takes two to open it,” Dani said. The others looked at her. “Simultaneously. If this is something one Guardian passes o
n to another, that would make sense.”
“That would require harmony and cooperation,” Villanegre added.
“Consistent with the Christian message,” Dani said. “I think I’m starting to get the hang of this faith thing. Just hear me out—God wants us to love one another, right? He doesn’t want us fighting amongst ourselves.”
She looked Tommy in the eye long enough for him to get the message meant just for him.
“I think the box can only be opened by two people,” she said. “Like the launch boxes on nuclear submarines where two people have to put their keys in the locks in order to fire the missiles. It’s a fail-safe, in case one person goes crazy and tries to fire them on his own.”
“That sounds reasonable,” Ruth said.
“But what’s the pattern?” Dani said. “The combination? Quinn, how many possibilities with two people at the same time? Never mind. Too many.”
“Or not,” Tommy said. Now all eyes were on him.
“What do you mean?” Dani asked.
“Whoever made this box wanted the good guys to open it and the bad guys to keep out,” Tommy explained. “Maybe the combination is something else a demon can’t do—like make the sign of the cross. Top, bottom, left, right. Head, navel, left shoulder, right shoulder. The buttons are already arranged in a cross-like pattern.”
“In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen,” Villanegre said. “It’s certainly worth a try.”
“Tommy,” Dani said, “hold the end of the box just the way you were, with your thumbs on the top and your fingers on the bottom. Okay— bring it this way.”
Tommy extended the box, and Dani held the opposite end in both hands, pressing the top inlays with her thumbs and the bottom ones with her fingers.
“Now press the pair at the top,” she said. Tommy did as she instructed. “Hold them in, and I’ll press the pair at the bottom. Okay, so now, Tommy, press the inlays on the left side . . .”