The depth of the excavation should easily have reached through sufficient millennia to have exposed whatever it was down there that marked the spot. The alluvial layers were plain to see and Otto was in no doubt that he should have found something significant by now. There was, however, nothing at the bottom but a reddish mud. There was no way of knowing precisely what he was going to find, but he was certain that the stelae did not exist simply to point the way to damp soil. A subterranean cavity must be down there somewhere, possibly capped with stone for security and durability – that was the most likely scenario.
With the evening sun starting to dissolve into the rainforest that capped the hills behind him, the Patient’s silhouette was starkly outlined to Otto. He had never viewed the Patient from such a perspective before, and was struck by the pure humanity of the shape. To control the entire existence and health of so excellent a creature made him proud of both his own work and that of the man from whom he had inherited it.
Otto handed the Patient the shovel and instructed him to jump down and push it deep into the mud to see if it met with any resistance in the next few inches. But the Patient did not move.
‘He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need of it because he is complete in himself, must be either a beast or a god.’ It was only a whisper, but Otto recoiled as if he had been shouted at.
‘I know that,’ Otto replied, ‘but how did you know that?’
‘Which am I?’ asked the Patient. ‘The beast or the god?’
‘It is not that simple. I ask again: how did you know those words?’
‘All men by nature desire knowledge,’ whispered the Patient, quoting from the same source.
‘You desire it, but where did you find it? I did not teach you this philosophy.’
‘You gave me fish. I taught myself to make a rod. Then I caught my own fish.’
The sun must have emboldened him, thought Otto. Back in the underground laboratory he had never dared to speak without permission. Where was his sense of respect? What had happened to his meek manner, his pet-like, unquestioning deference? This was not the creature on whom Otto, for so many years, had freely experimented; this was something more. The Patient had grown in spirit. He was no longer the passive half of a single soul dwelling in two bodies. It was as if he were greater than the sum of his component parts, more than just a living set of legs, arms, head, body and organs. It was as if he were a man.
At some deep level, Otto knew this was a man – fully functioning, emotional, abused and deprived. He knew it in the same way that a diner tucking into a juicy steak knows – but tries to forget – that the meat was once part of a conscious animal that could experience pleasure and pain.
Otto returned to the truck. From his black leather bag, he pulled out Bilbo’s notebook and his own notes. Had he missed something? He started from scratch, re-checking the photographs of the stelae, the interpretation of their inscriptions, and the legends and records of the local Mayans in antiquity. The price of failure was high, and with every passing hour he feared his rival, Lord Ballashiels, might use the knowledge that he surely possessed to attempt to be the first to locate the prize.
* * *
The last of the tutors departed, post-dated cheque in hand. Ratty had completed all of his intensive tuition courses. He felt fitter, stronger, wiser and, most peculiarly, sexier. His student date with Ruby at Chichester Cathedral, he now knew from his flirtation studies, would have developed into something interesting if he had grunted disdainfully rather than enthusiastically reading a poem and attempting spooning techniques that had gone out of fashion with togas. More importantly, he was nearly ready to return to Guatemala, where he would solve the mystery of the stelae and claim the treasure that awaited him.
He waved the tutor off and walked back inside, ignoring the mound of unopened and unfriendly-looking mail that was becoming something of a feature within his portico. The remainder of this afternoon, he decided, would be allocated to the enigmatic poetry that had been bouncing around his head for so long. He made straight for his library and had just reached the top of the mahogany ladder when he heard the doorbell ring. He cursed under his breath in classical Greek. He was a long way from the unforgiving parquet floor, high amid the dusty upper shelves. He gripped the rungs and waited for the uninvited visitor to leave, but the bell rang repeatedly – and it literally was a bell, worthy of any parish church – suggesting that whoever was pulling the rope wished to see him on a matter of some urgency.
Shaking his head in frustration, he climbed down and went to the window. The view afforded him a peek at the entrance portico, where stood a man in a grey suit. Definitely not a welcome sight. Ratty had encountered the type before, and they invariably wanted to extract money from him towards outstanding loans, interest and collection fees. If these people needed their money back so desperately, why did the fools lend it to him in the first place? He closed all of the shutters, lit the chandelier and climbed back up the ladder.
His head almost brushing against the flaking paint of the ceiling, he browsed past a collection of bound student theses from Cambridge, Harvard and one or two lesser universities, feeling a shimmer of contentment that he had read all of them, and continued on to the poetry section. Finally, he found it. A 1964 edition of The Whitsun Weddings, containing thirty-two of Philip Larkin’s finest poems including An Arundel Tomb, from which Ruby had quoted.
It would have been so much easier for Ruby to have explained what she meant, he told himself as he climbed down, but she had refused to discuss the matter when they had met at the President’s palace in Guatemala City. It could be weeks before he heard from her again, and as the commotion at his door confirmed, he simply didn’t have that much time to complete his quest.
He sat at his leather-topped bureau à gradin and opened the book. ‘Time has transfigured them into Untruth. The stone fidelity They hardly meant,’ he recited without looking at the pages. Then he re-read the entire poem, noting that the line referring to ‘little dogs under their feet’ was factually incorrect. Larkin implied in his poem that both effigies on the tomb displayed stone dogs beneath their feet, whereas only the woman had a dog in that position. The knight’s feet rested on a small lion, lying in a sphinx-like position. Was Ruby referring to this poetic inaccuracy? If so, why? It didn’t make sense to him.
‘Lord Ballashiels!’
The voice sounded close. Ratty got up and crept towards a tight gap in the shutters. The man was pacing impatiently outside his window.
‘I know you’re in there, Lord Ballashiels. I’ve come to collect outstanding monies you owe. This is your last warning. I have a warrant to enter the property by force and seize your possessions if you don’t open the door.’
Phew, thought Ratty. That was a relief. For a moment he’d thought the man had come about one of the mortgages secured against his house. This was just one of the smaller unsecured loans.
Returning to the poem, he considered the theme of the passing of time distorting the original intention of the sculptor of the effigies. If the maker of that tomb in Chichester did not intend to display the sentimentality that it now showed, perhaps the glyphs on the Mayan stelae could no longer be interpreted as they were intended by their creators. The passage of time hadn’t changed the glyphs, but it had changed thought processes. So the way those glyphs were understood could be fundamentally wrong.
That was all very well, decided Ratty, but it didn’t explain why Ruby’s words had affected him at such a deep subconscious level. He had risked his neck to get away from Otto without losing the stelae, and a comment about the detail of the connotation of the carvings wouldn’t have meant enough to him to warrant such action.
A sharp rapping noise came from the window. Ratty jumped. He could see an ugly nose pressing against the glass through the slit between the shutters.
‘I can see you in there, Lord Ballashiels.’
There was no avoiding him now. Ratty opened the shutter and li
fted the stiff sash window a couple of inches, revealing a bulbous, stubbly face with small eyes and cauliflower ears.
‘How much do I owe you?’ Ratty asked, determined to get straight to the point. He had better things to be doing than dealing with the vulgarities of usury.
‘Just under twenty-five grand,’ replied the man with a solemn tone that suggested such a sum was a great deal of money to him. In the context of Ratty’s overall negative wealth, this was a paltry amount. Small change. He would settle this with just a few nuggets of gold from the treasure he was confident of finding as soon as he returned to Guatemala. The problem lay in convincing these finance-obsessed people that such a plan would work. So far all of his attempts to persuade the lenders to wait for his Mayan hoard had been met with derision.
He slid the window shut and trudged to the front door.
‘Do come in, old fruit. Follow me.’ Ratty led the meaty debt collector along the impressive hallways and staircases up to the turret room. ‘Make yourself comfortable in there while I look for my cheque book.’ Ratty ushered him inside and waited while the man tried to sit on a rickety Hepplewhite chair. Then he left and silently locked the door.
Frustratingly, the bell rang again. He made the long journey back to the entrance, smoothed back his dyed hair and pulled the heavy iron handle. A woman was standing there.
‘Is Lord Ballashiels at home?’
Ratty looked at the young woman. She had cropped auburn hair, freshly tanned skin and wore a repulsively unfeminine grey suit with flat black shoes. In her right hand was a plastic leather-effect briefcase and in her left hand she proffered a business card.
‘And you might be?’ grunted Ratty, using the casual, disinterested tone he had not quite perfected.
‘Cindy Evans,’ she replied. She pushed the business card into his palm. Ratty studied her curves – despite her grim clothing, he was not displeased by her appearance. ‘Is your master at home?’
He looked at the card. She was a banker. A ‘personal relationship manager’ from the unfortunate institution to which he owed the bulk of his debts. This was the big one. He had been expecting this.
‘My master?’ he enquired, leaning moodily against the door frame. ‘I have no master. There is no one to whom I am answerable. I am Lord Ballashiels, but you can call me Justin.’ He enjoyed the startled look which this revelation triggered.
‘Lord Ballashiels, the bank has written to you many times demanding a meeting to discuss your situation and you’ve ignored every request. Not only have you missed a number of payments with us, you also appear to have taken out a substantial mortgage with another company, which you somehow managed to get secured against this property even though the deeds are held as security by my bank. What you have done has crossed the line into fraud.’
‘Ah, yes, those loans. Glad you mentioned them, actually. Hoping to pay them off soon, as it happens. Got a little project in the pipeline. Bit of archaeology. Guatemala. Kind of a treasure hunt, in fact. Should be enough to –’
‘As you have ignored all communications,’ Cindy interrupted, ‘my bank has already applied to the County Court to repossess. The order has been granted. Bailiffs and the police are on their way. I’m sorry, Lord Ballashiels, but you could also be looking at a custodial sentence for obtaining money by deception.’
Ratty sighed. All this interfering from financial institutions was a most unwelcome intrusion in his life. New Ratty would shortly become Homeless Ratty and possibly Jailbird Ratty.
A black car drew up behind Cindy and another unsympathetic-looking bank manager type stepped out.
‘Lord Ballashiels?’ called the man. Another grey suit, thought Ratty, wondering if his profligate expenditure of these bankers’ money had rendered them unable to afford any colour in their lives.
‘Yes, yes, you’ve come about the money,’ replied Ratty, without even bothering to ask the man’s name.
‘I have to warn you, Lord Ballashiels,’ said the man, ‘that my bank has supplied the Crown Prosecution Service with the evidence they need to issue a warrant for your arrest on suspicion of fraud. Unless you can repay all outstanding sums immediately then you will shortly be taken away for questioning.’
‘Do come in, both of you. I’m sure we can discuss this over a cup of tea.’
Cindy and the banker followed him into the hallway, marvelling at the faded and broken grandeur of the manor.
‘Walk this way,’ Ratty said. ‘Not far now. Just up these stairs.’ He led them up the stone steps to the turret room and unlocked the door. The first debt collector had not found any item of furniture that could take his weight safely and was leaning patiently against a wall. ‘Do go on in.’
Cindy and the other banker stepped inside the cluttered and musty turret room, their eyes too busy scanning the jumbled array of antiques to notice immediately that Ratty had closed the door and was locking it from without.
‘Wait there, old bean counters!’ shouted Ratty from the staircase. ‘I’ll just bash off and find some pennies for you!’
Now he had truly crossed the line. He shivered with excitement. It felt great. He was high on the thrill of criminality. The house was already lost. His liberty was already threatened. There was nothing left to lose.
He ran to his bedroom and threw some clothes into a battered leather portmanteau. Through the uneven panes of a leaded window he spied Constable Stuart, the village police officer, cycling along the driveway towards the manor. He sprinted down to the library and picked up his passport. The bell tolled, echoing along the gloomy corridors. He grabbed the cases of archaeological scanning equipment and flew out of the back door to the disused stable block where his elderly Land Rover sat waiting, untaxed and un-roadworthy, but – crucially – out of sight of Constable Stuart at the front door, who had yet to get over the novel delights of campanology.
The engine started, reliable as always. Nothing else on the vehicle functioned, but that was of no concern as Ratty bumped across the fields to the rear of the manor. As the constable vainly applied brute force to a mediaeval door that had proven strong enough to foil Cromwell’s cronies, Ratty tossed the turret key out of the window, joined a remote country lane and headed for Heathrow Airport.
Saturday 1st December 2012
The mound of earth outside was damp with morning dew, which gave it the appearance of freshly-dug soil, as if someone had continued burrowing all through the night. But the hole had not been touched since the previous day.
The Patient yawned and rubbed skin that was sore from the cold steel of Otto’s needles.
‘I feel,’ said the Patient, ‘that you perform these tests on my person out of nature, compulsion and habit. I sense that reason, passion and desire no longer play a part.’
Once again, Otto recognised more than a hint of Aristotle in the Patient’s comments. Yesterday the Patient had refused to elaborate on the remarks he’d made regarding his self-teaching of philosophy. There had been no books available to him in the underground laboratory; decades ago, Otto’s father had taught the Patient the basics of reading, but had given him nothing to read. He intended to maintain in the Patient a mind that was a blank canvas, a raw material. Otto had no cause to change this. For the Patient suddenly to have acquired sufficient knowledge to quote from philosophical works was astonishing.
‘The type and state of my motivation are not your business,’ Otto said. ‘And I ask again, by what means have you acquired knowledge that did not come from me?’
‘All my knowledge came from you. I learned that you placed a small piece of metal in the door and twisted it to enter my home. I saw that object many times. Its contours remain in my memory. I reasoned that a similar object would gain me entry to your home. It was my first project. I built a key. I released myself.’
‘When did you do this?’
‘It serves me no purpose to measure time. One night I climbed some steps and then retreated. Another night I climbed to a new level, and then retreated aga
in. You displayed no sign that you knew of this, so I climbed more levels. After many nights I found your library. It became my nocturnal domain. I learned to read the books. It was hard at first, but it became magical. The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet. The books told me of a world I had not seen. They told me stories, they taught me languages and medicine and history. I learned of war, love, hatred, prejudice.’
‘And philosophy?’
‘I have read every book in your collection. Several times.’
‘Why did you not leave?’ asked Otto.
‘You told me I was special, that I needed to be protected from a cruel and dangerous world. I simply wanted to learn about this world. I knew you would take me to see it, some day. And you did.’
The colour slowly drained from Otto’s face. He was deflating. He felt foolish, outwitted by a creature he had assumed to be a meek ignoramus. A desire to apologise for the years of abuse began to swell within him, occupying the space left behind by his retreating self-confidence. He fought the feeling. The Patient owed him everything, he told himself. He had taken good care of The Patient; he had been responsible for his food, his health, even his life.
A strained silence ensued until the Patient said, ‘You will not find what you are looking for here.’
This was taking things too far. Otto regained some redness in his cheeks as he angrily retorted, ‘You will speak when spoken to. I have heard enough from you.’
‘No, you have not,’ replied the Patient in a calm monotone. ‘I say again: you will not find that which you seek under this soil.’
‘How can you know what I seek? And how can you know that it’s not here?’
‘You seek the truth demanded by your destiny. And it is not to be found in the hole that I have dug for you.’
‘You do not know what you’re talking about.’
The Patient coolly breathed in and waited a few seconds before replying, ‘I know more than you can possibly comprehend. And I will lead you to the site that you seek.’
The Sphinx Scrolls Page 21