by Brett King
L
E
E
W
R
A
E
“Could be someone’s name,” he suggested. “Lee Wrae-something?”
She rotated the scytale, holding the top and bottom. “Check out the words on this side.”
F
E
E
D
B
R
A
“Feedbra?” he asked. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Be patient. We haven’t finished.” She wrapped the last strip of scytale around the branch. She stood back and studied it. “Wish I knew what the message means.”
Wurm ran his fingers down the characters.
F
E
E
D
B
R
A
N
C
H
2
E
S
U
S
“Jung missed a letter,” he said, pointing below the number two. “See? He missed a J.”
“Think it should read ‘Jesus’? ‘Feed branch to Jesus.’ What’s that supposed to mean?”
“How should I know?” he asked. “Let me rewrap it.”
“No need,” she said, rotating the scytale. “There’s not a J anywhere on the sash.”
“You’re right,” he fumed. “We’re left feeding a branch to Esus. One problem, though. Who the hell is Esus?”
“Maybe John knows.”
“Brynstone?” he snapped. “If he gave a damn, he’d be here.”
“He’s trying to rescue his wife and child,” Cori said with ice coating her voice. “Someone wants to kill Kaylyn Brynstone and her daughter.”
He waved his hand. “Fine. Let them do it fast, so Brynstone can get here to help us.”
She reached up and slapped his face.
He grabbed her wrist, glaring with that dangerous look again. “Give it to me,” he growled. “Give me the Radix.”
“Or you’ll do what?” she asked. “You don’t trust me with it?”
“It’s better in my hands.”
“John gave it to me.”
“Bad call on his part. You haven’t earned the right. You don’t deserve the Radix.”
“Tough. I’m keeping it, Edgar. Now let go of my wrist.”
They locked their gaze, neither ready to yield. Wurm was big and powerful, but she couldn’t lose her nerve. He snorted, then released her arm. He turned for the door. “I need air.”
“Good idea,” she answered. “But while you’re outside, keep thinking about ‘Feed branch to Esus.’ Help me figure out what it means.”
Wurm looked back. His right eye made a slight twitch.
She understood why he was acting like this. The Radix could seduce even the strongest of wills. Her voice softened. “Keep your head together, Edgar. I need you.”
He headed out the door.
Wurm breathed cool Swiss air. His mouth was growing dry. He’d kicked a two-pack-a-day habit, but the nicotine craving found him at the worst times. He stared at his hand, sensing a smoldering cigarette between his fingers. He drew in another cleansing breath. Playing to his addiction, he dropped the phantom cigarette and stamped it beneath his shoe.
He walked down to the snowy shore outside the Bollingen courtyard.
He respected Cori. That didn’t mean Brynstone was right to entrust the Radix to her. She wasn’t fit to serve as Keeper of the Radix. He had dedicated his life’s work to the holy root. He knew more about it than anyone. It was his destiny. The Radix was in his blood. It was a part of him. He had refused it because he thought he wasn’t ready. But now? He hungered to be the Keeper. He glanced back at the tower.
For the moment, she was the Keeper. It was a mistake in need of correction.
Sooner or later, Wurm knew, he would need to take the root from Cori.
Even if it meant killing her.
Cori paced inside Jung’s tower, waiting for Brynstone to answer his cell. When he picked up, she felt a giddy thrill hearing his rich voice. “John, where are you?”
“Headed to LAX. Stuck in traffic.”
“Have you found Kaylyn and your daughter?”
“We’re on a wild-goose chase,” he grunted. “The man who kidnapped my family wants to meet in Vegas. He likes to play mind games. Hopefully, we play better than he does.”
“Good luck, John,” she said. “Real quick question. Esus. Mean anything to you?”
“Druid god to the Gauls,” he answered. “Esus was a woodsman god, often portrayed with a hammer. A Celtic version of Hercules. His followers made human sacrifices, sometimes nailing criminals to oak trees in his honor. He’s associated with the Green Man. Wurm should know about it. Call back if he doesn’t.”
“One more thing,” she said. “How’s Banshee?”
“Dropped her off with the Friedmans next door. She’s not making the trip to Vegas.”
“Aww. You should have let her come to Europe with us.”
“Yeah. Wurm would have loved that.”
After Cori ended the phone call, she found herself worrying about him.
“Talking to Brynstone?” Wurm asked, stepping inside Jung’s spiritual tower.
“Mm-hmm,” she said, whirling around. “He said you’d know about the Green Man.”
“He was right.” Wurm stretched. “The Green Man legend goes back to Egyptian mythology. Osiris was their god of nature and vegetation. In Egyptian paintings, he’s often shown with green skin. Later Celtic legends described a god of tree worship based on Jack-in-the-Green, a creature who roamed the woodlands. Despite the Green Man’s pagan background, he’s immortalized in medieval churches all across Europe.”
“Immortalized how?”
He led her to a relief on Jung’s wall. Flowing leaves surrounded a carved face. The eyebrows, hair, cheeks, and beard created a mask of foliage. Curled horns jutted from the creature’s forehead.
“John said the Green Man is associated with Esus. Like the scytale says, we need to ‘feed branch to Esus.’” She tried to insert the branch in the Green Man’s mouth. Didn’t work. She flipped the branch, trying the other end. It slid inside the mouth like a key inside a lock. A rumbling sound echoed below. A rectangular hatch opened at the base of the wall.
“You found a passage,” Wurm marveled.
They knelt and examined the opening with their flashlights. Six red letters painted inside the passageway jumped into view. “We’re on the right track,” she said. “See?”
Wurm smiled, reading the word. “Nekyia.”
Nekyia was a central theme in Jungian psychology. To achieve psychological wholeness, a person must take a night-sea journey into the unconscious mind. Ancient mythology had inspired Jung’s notion. The Egyptians believed that upon death, the soul traveled on a boat through the world of night. During the journey, the soul had to face a series of challenges before reaching the promise of rebirth at dawn. Jung found examples of Nekyia in the legend of Jonah inside the great fish and the story of Odysseus descending into Hades. A person undergoing Jungian analysis must make a similar journey toward “individuation,” emerging as a more complete person. The idea fit his notion that therapy—like alchemy—could transform people.
“Think we can squeeze into that hatch?” Wurm asked, scratching his head.
She handed her coat to him. “Jung was a big guy like you. If he did it, you can do it.”
He winked. “Ladies first.”
A mildew odor tickled Cori’s nose as she squeezed headfirst into the Nekyia opening. Without warning, she slid down a metal chute into blackness. She splashed into frigid water. Completely submerged. Desperate for air, she flailed about underwater. She couldn’t tell if her body was up or down until her elbow scraped bottom. She panicked, realizing she had nearly hit her head on the watery floor of Jung’s subterranean chamber. She rolled, then planted her feet. She l
unged upward, bursting above the water. Disoriented and choking, she rubbed her eyes and glanced up at the hatch opening, seeing Wurm’s silhouette in the rectangle of light.
“You all right?” he called.
“Flooded down here,” she sputtered between coughs.
“No surprise, given the proximity to the lake.”
“Can’t see a thing. Lost my flashlight.” Water swirled around her chest. “Inside the opening, a slide drops down about twelve feet. Find a rope.”
“I brought a climber’s rig from the jet. Used to be a mountain climber, you know. Years ago, I climbed the Eiger in the Bernese Oberland here in Switzerland.”
“Edgar,” she shouted, “just get a rope. Tie it to the Tree of the Philosophers.”
Cori splashed through the dark water. Fumbling, she found the wall. It was too slick to climb. After wiping bangs off her wet forehead, she plunged her hand back into the water, then patted her jeans. She felt the Radix tucked inside her pocket. Hopefully, the vial was watertight.
It was dark down here, but she explored the submerged cavern. She drifted to a different wall, trying to make sense of this place. Then something cold slithered past her shoulder.
Chapter Forty-one
Bollingen
1:17 A.M.
Wurm was sliding on a spelunker’s headlamp when he heard Cori’s scream, harsh and piercing, from down in the watery chamber. He fed the rope’s free end into the Nekyia opening. Wiggling to squeeze inside, he followed the rope, easing in feetfirst. He crammed his large frame through the rectangular hole, scraping skin on his back.
Cori wouldn’t stop screaming.
“What’s wrong?” he yelled. He moved down the slide, clinging to the taut rope. Stopping at the slide’s level bottom, he held out his hand in the blackness and pulled her onto the landing. Dripping wet, she scrambled into his arms. Keeping his balance, he hugged her shivering body. He slid spelunker headgear on Cori, positioning the LED lamp on her forehead.
“There’s a snake down here,” she gasped. “I hate snakes.”
“So did Jung.” He scanned the black water, then looked over at the wall. Paintings and symbols covered its surface. He squinted at the water. Something broke the surface. He touched the nape of her neck, wet hair clinging to his fingers as he turned her head.
“That’s no snake. Take a look.”
A white arm floated on the water with fingers pointing upward.
She shuddered, curling into his chest. He released her, then climbed off the slide’s bottom. He eased into the water, lowering himself to the submerged floor.
“Be careful,” she warned.
Icy water splashed around his stomach. He couldn’t resist the thought of Gilgamesh, the ancient Mesopotamian hero, plunging to the bottom of the sea to find a plant that offered the elixir of life. As he moved to the wall, something grazed his waist. He fished around, then caught it. A leg. He followed it to the hip, then ran his fingers across the corpse’s stomach. Finding the shoulders, he raised it above water. A woman. With wet clothes clinging to her body, her flesh was blue and swollen. Wurm cringed. He recognized her.
“Her name is Lucrezia Borgia,” he called. “Named after Cesare Borgia’s sister.”
He stared into the woman’s blank eyes. Distended lips had curled open as if about to speak. Her hair covered a wide gash.
“What happened to her?”
“Struck her head, I think, then drowned.”
“Not surprised,” Cori called. “I almost did the same thing.”
“I’m sorry,” he whispered to the woman in his arms. “Poor Lucrezia.”
After crawling up to the hatch, Wurm dug in the backpack. He removed a climbing harness, then lowered it down to Cori. She strapped Lucrezia Borgia in the harness. He hauled her dripping corpse from the Nekyia chamber. After unfastening the harness, he carried Lucrezia to Jung’s bedroom in the maternal tower.
He hurried back to the spiritual tower, where Cori waited down in the chamber.
Before joining her, he stuck his head inside the chamber. His caving lamp brightened the area above the hatch door. He saw where Jung had constructed a primitive network of weights, pulleys, and siphons that opened the hatch when the branch was inserted into the mouth of Esus. Once opened, a person’s weight on the slide would activate a primitive timer. After clicking off the minutes, the timer would trigger a force pump to close the hatch. Wurm smiled. Jung’s design brought to mind the ancient scientist Hero and his studies on hydromechanics.
“Let’s not waste time,” he advised, making his way down the slide. “This hatch will close again, sealing us in here like it did for Lucrezia.”
“How much time do we have?”
“Maybe a half hour.” He checked his water-resistant watch. “I’m guessing we opened the hatch around one seventeen, Central European Time.”
Standing with him on the slide, she pointed. “Edgar, look over there.”
Three papers floated on the surface where he had fished out Lucrezia’s body.
He crawled into the water, then drifted over to collect them. Cori coaxed herself into the pool, then joined him. Wurm shone the light on a dripping paper.
“It’s a faxed page from my mother’s notebook,” she told him. “The final words spell out ‘Feed branch 2 Esus.’”
“Your mom made it that far. Her notes would have saved us time.”
“The Borgias broke into my house to steal this.” She looked up. “They assaulted my roommate, Tessa. Then they faxed the pages to Switzerland.”
“For Lucrezia. They’ve tracked you since the publication of your mother’s book. If you’d been home, they would have killed you.”
She drifted to a wall where Jung had painted a red and white rose. After studying the alchemical symbol, Cori ran her hand along a seam. “I found a hidden room,” she announced. “Jung built a maze down here. Follow me.” She moved through the water, taking the glare of her headlamp around the bend.
Wurm trailed along the coarse wall, turning the corner. He didn’t see her.
“Cori,” he said in a halting shiver. “Where are you?”
“Over here,” she called in the distance. “Go to the end of the wall. Take a left.”
Wurm moved through water and turned the corner. And another and another. He felt lost and confused, foreign feelings to him. Cold water stiffened his weary body. He turned another corner. No sign of Cori. Wurm muttered, “Blast her.”
“C’mon.” Her voice sounded more remote. “I’m near the center.”
“I’m turning back,” he called, embracing himself to stay warm. “If someone’s not in the tower, the timer will click off, then the hatch will close. We’ll be trapped down here.”
He turned, confident he could get out, thinking it wouldn’t be more difficult than his book maze. As for Cori, she had found her way in. She could bloody well find her way out.
Cori waded to the center of the labyrinth beneath Jung’s tower. The water seemed cold at first, but now adrenaline blocked the chill. She moved around a corner and found herself facing a symbol known as the eye of god. Painted in black on the wall, a brow arched over the eye. Two lines, one straight, one curled, emerged beneath the bottom eyelid.
She remembered the first time she’d seen the ancient Egyptian symbol. She’d been eight, visiting her mother’s class at Princeton. During the lecture, she’d sat in the front row beside two sorority girls, who smiled and waved at her. While she worked magic with a crayon in her Hello Kitty coloring book, her mother had shown the class a transparency of the Eye of Horus. She had looked up, mesmerized.
Her mother had explained that Horus was the falconheaded son of the Egyptian gods Osiris and Isis. Osiris’s brother, Set, who became king of Egypt, murdered Osiris. Horus avenged his father’s death by facing his uncle in an epic battle. Set was captured but escaped. Horus defeated him a second time, but not before Set plucked out Horus’s left eye. Horus offered the eye to his father. As Osiris and Isis ascend
ed into heaven, Horus became the king of Egypt. The entire line of Egyptian pharaohs had descended from him.
Known as the udjat eye, the symbol became popular on amulets used to grant health and ward off illness. In her lecture, Ariel Cassidy had shown variations on the Eye of Horus—stripped of falconlike markings beneath it—in the Masonic symbol of an eye nestled inside a pyramid. A similar eye also appeared in the Great Seal on the U.S. dollar bill.
What her mother didn’t tell the class was that the Eye of Horus served as a symbol for the Radix. Studying the udjat eye, Cori could see how the iris and the lines beneath it mimicked the basic shape of the letter R. Over the centuries, the eye inspired use of the Rx symbol as shorthand for the Radix.
She remembered something else about Horus; it meant “above” in the ancient Egyptian language. She aimed her headlamp above the eye symbol. Near the ceiling, one stone jutted an inch from the wall, forming a ledge. Was something up there?
She clutched the rough-hewn wall, then raised herself out of the water. She ran her fingers along the surface. Nothing on the outer edge. Pushing her hand higher, moving her palm over the stone, she found she couldn’t touch the wall behind the ledge. Reaching inside the small alcove was impossible from down here. Cori embraced the wall, climbing until she could peer over the stone. A black metal box waited inside the alcove. She smiled, coaxing the box from its hiding place. Heart pounding, she became lost in the dizzy thrill of discovery. Was the Scintilla inside? Hugging the box, she eased back into the murky water.
A short time later, Cori found Wurm in the maternal tower. He was basking in the glow of a fire in Jung’s small kitchen. She caught his gaze as he noticed the box in her hands.
“Good lord, child. What did you find in Jung’s labyrinth?”
“I hope it’s the Scintilla.” She glanced around. “Where’s Lucrezia?”
“Vanished.” He shrugged, warming his hands. “I laid her on Jung’s bed. Someone claimed her body while we were in the maze. Probably the person we saw outside the tower. Probably the Borgias.”