by Spencer Baum
“The second condition is that you must take this safe. It was made specifically to hold this book. It is the most secure safe in the world. It was made by a locksmith in the mountains of Switzerland and it cannot be cracked. If you forget the combination, neither you nor anyone else will open the safe ever again.”
“It’s an amazing book,” Courtney said. A decorative crystal was sewn into the front cover. “Why is it here, and not in--”
“A museum?” Nelson laughed. “Tonight I’m going to leave you here, so you may have your first reading of the manuscript in a secure place. If you are indeed meant to have it, as I believe you are, you will understand everything when you read it.”
Chapter 10
Kevin retrieved the brown leather book from the safe. He knew right away that he was holding a book that was decades, maybe centuries, old. The leather was worn to the point of being soft. The pages were flakey and delicate. Kevin had seen this notebook only once before. On the day he found his mom splayed on the floor, her coffee mug shattered and her face confused, this notebook lay face down in the corner. On that day, he had only seen the back cover.
He would have remembered the front. Attached to the front cover, sewn into its lining with criss-crossing leather straps, was a small, round crystal.
Kevin reached into his pocket, retrieved the crystal he had found on the side of Turquoise Mountain, and held it up next to the notebook.
“What is this?” Jackie said.
Kevin shook his head. With the care of someone handling a precious painting, or a child, Kevin walked the book out of the closet and gently placed it on his mother’s workbench. He lifted the brown leather cover, cradling the attached crystal with his hand as he opened the notebook.
The American Desert: A Chronicle of Observation.
By Peter Gerrard.
“Kevin, this is an original Peter Gerrard manuscript,” said Jackie.
“It’s probably worth a fortune,” said Joseph.
The words on the title page were handwritten in the tidy script of a different age. The pages were old, worn, and thin. Joseph was right. This book probably belonged in a glass case in a prestigious museum.
Kevin turned the page and read the first sentence.
There is a treasure inside Turquoise Mountain, worth more than all the money in the world.
The page clung to Kevin’s fingertips. He continued reading.
There is a higher place of awareness. Most are oblivious to it. In Turquoise, the treasure dominates this place. It calls out to those who can hear it. I can feel it tingling through my fingers and toes; I can sense it all around me; but most of all, I can hear it. The strongest human connection to this higher place is through sound. The connection is so strong in Turquoise that townsfolk hear it, and have no idea what they’re hearing.
The power of the words made Kevin feel confined and uncomfortable. All this time, in the same house where he and his dad slept every night, tremendous secrets, locked away in the safe. Peter Gerrard was a Hearer.
I came to Turquoise while following the Monarch Butterfly. The amazing butterfly’s annual migration will divert itself thousands of miles if necessary to ensure there is always a stop at Turquoise Mountain. I can’t help but think that they are called by it too. The pull of the mountain is mysterious and strong.
Kevin turned the page and found a hand-drawn sketch of Turquoise Mountain. The hum rose in volume and Kevin looked up from the manuscript to see what was happening.
But as soon as his eyes left the page the hum went quiet again.
“This is weird,” he whispered.
“Tell me about it,” said Joseph. “This is the same picture that’s hanging on the wall above Cassandra’s bed.”
“Is it?” said Kevin. He looked back to the book. The hum grew loud again. He kept his eyes on the page, allowed the hum to swell in his ears.
Jackie turned the page.
The hum roared, like someone grabbed the volume knob and cranked it up. The change surprised Kevin, and out of instinct, he closed his eyes and covered his ears with both hands.
The hum was quiet again.
“What’s wrong?” said Jackie.
He opened his eyes. For some reason, he expected the room to be different, to be bigger, more open, and was surprised to find it unchanged.
He looked back at Gerrard’s manuscript. On the left page was a diagram of a termite, all its body parts labeled. On the right was a mess of spiral doodles, as if Gerrard was trying to get the ink flowing in a ballpoint pen.
The volume returned. It was like the normal hum was trapped inside a tin can, and the spiral designs on these pages ripped the lid open so he could hear it in its un-muted glory.
“It’s that book,” he said. “It does something to me.”
Jackie looked at Gerrard’s manuscript, apparently unaffected by it. She lifted it from the table, just slightly, and Kevin caught a glancing view of a spiral shape on the open page. The hum resonated in proportion with the amount of page he could see. This time he wasn’t taken by surprise, and found it to be tolerable, if unsettling. He held his gaze on the book.
“It’s like a choir is singing inside my brain,” he said, and listened to his own words get churned and enveloped inside the sound.
Kevin closed his eyes, stood still and listened. The hum was present, as it always was now, but nothing like what he heard when he looked at the book. The drawings on the page, the spiral doodles especially -- they connected with his brain. They were like words, or symbols, meant to bring forth a specific association in the mind, and with these doodles, the association was a sound.
He heard Joseph and Jackie breathing, his own heartbeat, the movement of the breeze outside, something scuttling across the floor. He opened his eyes and turned his head to the scuttling sound. It was an ant. He reached with his foot and squashed it.
He looked back at the manuscript. After the shock of the volume had passed, he focused more intently on the sketch. He sensed patterns inside it.
The sound brought forth vivid images in his mind: his dreams from the night before. A basketball game, a memory of his mom in Johnny’s barber shop, the crystal sinking into a flowing mass of termites.
Kevin’s cell phone rang, startling him from his trance.
“Unknown number,” Kevin said, looking at the display. He answered it.
“Hello, is this Kevin Browne?” It was a man’s voice, deep and resonant, familiar.
“Yes?”
“Do you know that right now your name is being mentioned on closed circuit radio channels operated by the federal government?”
“Kevin it’s him!” Joseph hissed. Kevin waived Joseph away with his arm.
“Who is this?” Kevin asked.
“Someone who would hate to see an innocent kid take the fall for something he didn’t do.”
“Give me the phone,” Joseph said.
“I’d like to help you, Kevin, but first I need to get you someplace safe,” said the voice at the other end of the phone. “A warrant has just been issued for your arrest. Your arrest will be carried out by a secret agency who has the power to wipe your name out of existence if they deem it necessary.”
“Arrest? Who is this?”
“They’re going to take you out of school citing truancy – it’s still illegal to ditch school in Turquoise, you know. That’s what the officials will tell your teachers. But they really want to take you in for questioning about the explosion at Turquoise Mountain.”
“Give me the phone, Kevin!” Joseph shouted. “That’s Lou Sweeney!”
Feeling befuddled, Kevin handed his cell phone to Joseph.
“Mr. Sweeney, my name is Joseph Silver. Kevin, my sister and I were at Turquoise Mountain yesterday when the explosion happened. We know who did it.”
“Lou Sweeney?” Jackie said.
“Well, now, this is interesting,” said the voice on the other end of the phone. Even the muted sound of a voice coming through a cell pho
ne pressed to someone else’s head was audible to Kevin’s ears, and now, with a name to attach to the voice, Kevin recognized why it was familiar. It matched the voice that once bellowed from the radio in Johnny’s Barber Shop.
“Yes, Mr. Sweeney, it’s a long story. The woman who blew up the mountain, we broke into her house – I found a copy of The Shuberville Tribune.”
There were several seconds of silence on the other end of the phone.
“So, there were three of you at the mountain yesterday?”
“Yes,” said Joseph.
“Are all three of you together now?”
“Yes.”
“Listen, carefully young man. The three of you are in terrible danger, more than you can possibly imagine. It is imperative that you come to The Global Mug coffee shop as fast as you can. Do you know how to get here?”
Joseph looked to Jackie. “It’s downtown,” she said.
“Yes, we know where it is,” said Joseph.
“You recognized my voice – I assume you know the password.”
“Yes, Mr. Sweeney, I’ve read all your books,” said Joseph.
“Say the password to the server at The Global Mug. She will take you to me. Now hang up this phone and run, Boy. Don’t finish what you’re doing, don’t explain to your parents, don’t even stop for the bathroom. Get out your front door and start running. Goodbye.”
Kevin heard the click ending the phone call. Joseph closed the phone and handed it to Kevin.
“What was that all about?” asked Jackie.
“You heard the man,” said Joseph. “We’ve got to go.”
“We can’t just go meet a strange old man sight unseen,” said Jackie. “Stranger Danger you goofball!”
“Oh get off it,” said Joseph. “Even if this were a loony old man with bad intentions, what can he do to us? Can he run as fast as a car? Can he jump over ten-foot fences? Can he fly?”
“Point taken,” said Jackie, “but Kevin and I are in the middle of something.”
“Didn’t you hear him?” said Joseph. “We’re in danger!”
Jackie sighed.
“Will it be alright if we take a break to humor my crazy brother?” she asked Kevin.
Kevin glanced back at the book on his mom’s desk.
“This comes with us,” he said. “We’ll take my backpack.”
“This newspaper too,” Joseph said, “and the crystal, we should take the crystal.”
“Why?” Jackie said.
“This is Lou Sweeney,” Joseph said. “We need to tell him everything. If anyone will know what’s going on, he will. I want to show him everything.”
“How is he going to know anything?” Jackie asked.
“When we get there we’ll find out, I’m sure,” said Joseph. “We’ve got to go now!”
“We’re not showing him this book,” Kevin said. “My mom didn’t want to show it to anyone.”
“Maybe we should leave it here,” Jackie said.
“No!” shouted Joseph. “Lou knows what he’s talking about! If he says you’re in trouble over Turquoise Mountain, then it’s true, Kevin! For all we know, your house might be raided by federal agents while we’re gone. Don’t leave anything here you wouldn’t want them to see.”
Kevin sighed. He wished he had a few seconds to think. Apparently, he didn’t. He stuffed the book and crystal in his backpack, and they went out the front door.
“Alright Jackie,” said Joseph, bouncing on the balls of his feet, “lead the way downtown.”
Chapter 11
A cowbell clanged as Jackie pulled open the front door of The Global Mug. The inside was a cramped space, cut in half by a large serving counter. A wallpaper of local bulletins and political paraphernalia was interrupted only by a blackboard menu that hung on the center of the back wall. They were the only customers inside.
“Hi! Welcome to The Global Mug! I’m Amy!” chirped the girl from behind the counter. The girl, eighteen or nineteen years old, smacked her chewing gum between sentences. The smell of fruity lip gloss and perfume emanated from her person and mixed pungently with the shop’s aromas of coffee, tea, and espresso.
Jackie shot Joseph a look of skepticism.
“Would you like to try a Half Caff Triple Shot Vanilla Latte With Soy today?” asked the girl. Her voice swung from high to low in a sing-song way that announced in no uncertain terms that this girl, Amy, was a ditz.
“No thank you,” said Joseph.
“Okay.” Two smacks on her gum. “How about a Double Mocha Macchiato?”
They said nothing.
“Alrighty!” said Amy. “I can take a hint. One shot of The Global Mug’s world famous espresso for each of you!”
Joseph took a deep breath.
“The password is mustard,” he said.
Amy’s eyes darkened. “Follow me,” she said. Her voice was the same, but it was as if she had turned into a different person. She looked older, smarter, even intimidating. She swung the countertop open, revealing a downward stairwell behind her. She pulled a remote control from her pocket and began pressing buttons. Automatic steel shades appeared from inside the ceiling, covering the windows and doors of the coffee shop.
“Come on!” Amy commanded, waving her arm to summon them to the stairwell.
They followed her down the stairs, Joseph going first, Kevin going last. A door at the bottom led to a storage cage, where cans of coffee beans, jars of tea leaves, and assorted dishes lined the walls, surrounding an automatic stair-climbing exercise machine that begged someone to ask what it was doing there. Amy led them around the stair-climber and to a steel door at the back of the cage, held closed with a sizable padlock. She opened the padlock with a key from her belt and pulled back the door, revealing another stairwell. This one was narrow, and as they followed her to the bottom, Kevin’s backpack scraped against the walls. They landed in a round room with concrete walls and a high concrete ceiling. Metal ladders stretched across the ceiling from one end to the other, like monkey bars on a playground. For no discernable reason, a single rope hung from the ceiling to the floor. Hanging between two of the metal ladders was a lone light bulb, filling the room with a pale yellow glow. A popsicle stick of a man sat in a small wooden chair against the back wall. He wore a dirty blue uniform with a white oval patch over the breast pocket. On the patch were the words “Liberty Pest Control.”
“Tom?” said Jackie.
“Hello Ms. Silver,” said Tom in the same slow, Southern accent Kevin had heard the day before when he met this man at Joseph and Jackie’s house.
“You do their pest control?” Amy asked Tom.
Tom nodded.
“Good,” said Amy. “So they check out.”
“They check out,” said Tom. “If they were in league with her, we’d know by now.”
“In league with whom?” asked Jackie. “What’s going on?”
“We’ll let Lou answer that for you,” said Amy. “We bring him out.”
“We bring him out,” Tom repeated.
Amy and Tom turned to face a steel door under the stairwell. They approached it together, slowly, as if performing some sort of ritual. Amy banged her fist on the door three times. Locks unfastened on the other side, each with a loud clang that echoed around the concrete room. The door opened to reveal a stubby man with a long nose and bursts of tangled white hair.
“It’s him,” whispered Joseph.
“In the flesh,” said the old man, his deep voice taking Kevin back to the memory of Johnny’s Barber Shop. “Tom, can you introduce me?”
“Ms. Silver, Mr. Silver, Mr. Browne,” said Tom. “This is Lou Sweeney.”
Chapter 12
Lou Sweeney wore a faded purple shirt and loose-fitting blue jeans. His skin was beyond pale, having settled somewhere between white and translucent, but his eyes were pure black, the pupils grown so large as to fill all the visible space, looking to Kevin like two raisins in a bowl of skim milk.
“You’ve met my business p
artners, and you knew the password,” Lou said, the echo of his familiar voice in the concrete room creating the unusual sensation that they were inside one of his radio broadcasts.
“Here’s the proof, Mr. Sweeney,” said Joseph.
Joseph unzipped Kevin’s backpack and retrieved the newspaper. He handed it to Lou, who unfolded and began reading. The room froze. Kevin thought of all the unusual things that happened in the past two days, and wondered if this was the strangest moment of all. Five people standing in a concrete room deep underground, watching an old man read a newspaper.
Lou handed the paper to Tom, who gave it only a passing glance and handed it back to Lou.
“It’s the real thing,” Tom said.
“Tell me how you came to possess this,” Lou said to Joseph.
“Be careful what you tell him,” Jackie said.
“It’s okay, Jackie. If you can’t trust Lou Sweeney, who can you trust?” said Joseph. “Mr. Sweeney, my friends and I broke into a woman’s house this morning. We did it because we have reason to believe this woman blew up Turquoise Mountain. I stole this paper from her house.”
Lou put his hand on his chin and stood in silence for a time. “Tom, show our friends your picture,” he said.
Tom reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a black and white photograph. He handed it to Joseph, who gasped, and thrust the picture at Kevin.
The picture was worn at the edges. The upper right corner was torn. It was old, and had been handled too much.
The picture showed a young girl, twelve or thirteen years old. The girl stood in front of a bookcase, holding a framed document for the camera to see.