by Layton Green
She took a deep breath and finally looked up. Again the guilty eyes.
She approached and cupped my face in her hands. “Thank you for saying that. Oh, Aidan—do we have to do this right now, with all that’s happened? I thought we were going to take it as it comes.”
“If it was just a matter of mood . . . I can take it as it comes as long as we’re on the same page, or somewhere in the same chapter. I don’t think you’re even reading the same book.”
A tear dropped like mercury from her eye. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought I was getting better. Does it have to be all or nothing? Why can’t we give it more time?”
“Because the wait is destroying me.” She moved to touch my face again, and I gently caught her wrists. “And because love is all or nothing, Asha. This isn’t our first date. It’s either there or it’s not by now, and you know that.”
“I want so much to make this work,” she said, a trembling hand shadowing her eyes. “More than anything I’ve ever wanted.”
“I believe you,” I whispered. “But it’s not good enough. I wish it was.”
Huge brown eyes peered up at me, long lashes glistening with moisture. As I looked in those eyes, reflective of a soul I felt I knew better than any in this world, I couldn’t believe what I was going to lose.
I gave her one last chance to capitulate. Those three words came easy the second time, a broken dam that could never be repaired.
She remained silent. No little white lies for her. She stepped closer, and I pressed my lips against the top of her forehead. She lifted her face to me. I walked away and didn’t look back.
-58-
Our split happened so fast it felt like a rip in the fabric of reality.
Heedless of danger, I walked to the edge of town and gazed on the moors, shaking as if I had drunk a gallon of coffee.
Meaning? I had found it, all right. It was in a beautiful world on the other side of the mirror, a world I could see but not step into.
I found a pub and warmed myself by the fire. After a few too many pints and progressively darker thoughts, I grew restless and walked to the edge of town. Night had settled, and I stared at the cold and lonely moors. Never had I been in a place where civilization ended so abruptly, swallowed by the vastness of nature. I shivered despite my warm coat.
I was not quite desperate enough to walk alone on the moors at night, but neither was I able to bear the thought of running into the others. I decided to return to the inn and sleep in the common room, then leave in the morning for home.
As I turned to leave, I heard a noise behind me, on the moor. I whipped around. A tall man in a dark overcoat was striding towards me out of the gloom, his collar upturned.
I chose to stand and face him. Despair is a wonderful creator of courage.
He had a hawkish nose, a dark brow, and thin lips fixed with a somber expression. “Aidan,” he said. “We need to talk.”
I took a step back. “How do you know my name?”
His eyes flicked to the side, into the moor. “I’m a Druid.”
My mouth opened but I couldn’t find my voice. I stared at him with a mixture of shock, fear, and rage.
“Wrong answer,” said a different voice, and Jake materialized out of the darkness behind the man, holding a knife sideways across his throat.
The Druid put his hands out, palms up. “I only wish to talk.”
“Any of your friends around?” Jake said. “Because if they are, and this is a setup, then you get cut first.”
“There is only me, and I came only to talk.”
I gave the man this: his voice never wavered.
Which made me nervous.
Jake stepped in front of him, keeping the knife in place. “In the middle of the night on the moor? Interestin’ place for a conversation.”
“Due to our past . . . interactions . . . certain precautions had to be taken. Judging by the knife against my neck, I’m sure you understand my desire for discretion.”
“How’d you know I was out here?” I asked Jake.
“Everyone’s lookin’ for you. We thought one of our friends here,” he inclined his head towards the Druid, “might have snatched you.”
“I needed some fresh air,” I mumbled.
Jake looked at me oddly. “Some bartender said you were talking nonsense about walking around the moors all night. I started circling the edge of town, and saw you with Tall and Black here. You all right?”
“Sure.”
Jake turned back to the Druid. “So? What do you want? It better be good, or I might start remembering a number of incidents that reflect very poorly on you and your friends.”
The man finally swallowed. “First of all, I never approved of the measures taken by my Order. Most of us didn’t.”
“You damn well better not have,” Jake said.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“You know who we are.”
“We know you’re Druids. But are you the descendants of the high priests or did you just go out and buy some white robes?”
“Suffice to say we are followers of our Order.”
“You’re fruitcakes, is what you are,” Jake said. “And I’ll decide what’s important. What’re you looking for? Where does the map lead?”
The man spoke slowly, as if deciding what to reveal. “We have reason to believe that when the Elders were persecuted, they hid a trove of forbidden knowledge, despite the prohibition.”
Jake and I exchanged a glance at the acknowledgment of Mr. Sofistere’s hypothesis.
“The legend of the Vessel has been passed down orally for generations. When it was uncovered, and found empty, we were sure the map would lead to our forgotten legacy.”
“And it didn’t,” I said, my voice flat.
“We’ve reached a dead end. If the last location on the map was once known, or if the Vessel contained something of importance, the knowledge has been lost.”
“You came out here just to tell us that?” I said, incredulous.
The Druid glanced uneasily into the moors. “I wanted to apologize. Our intention was never to harm you. We’re not a malevolent Order.” His eyes moved downward. “At least, not most of us.”
“I don’t think an apology’s quite gonna do it,” Jake said.
I felt a coldness settling in as I remembered the deception played on Asha, the events at Kutna Hora, Lou almost drowning in the peat bog, and everything else that had happened. “You caused some of us terrible pain,” I said. “You put our lives in danger.”
“We were only trying to frighten you. Asha’s injury was an unfortunate accident.”
“Unfortunate?” I said, my voice tight. “And Lou? He almost died in that peat bog.”
The man looked shocked. “I was assured by . . . I was told there weren’t any bogs that deep near the woods.”
“Well, there were,” Jake said, pressing the knife tighter.
“I’m truly sorry.”
It wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough. All the rage and frustration I felt from the quest came bubbling to the surface, stoked by the breakup with Asha. I shoved Jake aside and grabbed the man by the collar, yanking him towards me.
“Have you no soul? Causing me to think I killed someone? Causing Asha to think her dead brother is haunting her, causing her to live with this day after day? How could that possibly have helped your damnable cause?”
I was shaking him. He didn’t resist and I backhanded him across the face. I stopped my second blow because I saw him cringe, and because he was looking at me with a strange expression.
“What’re you talking about?” he said. “Killed someone? Haunting?”
I shoved him away in disgust.
“Lose it, brother,” Jake said. “You hired some local boy in Naples to pretend to be Asha’s dead brother.”
“I admit that was the plan,” he said slowly. “And I agree, a particularly heartless trick. For the record, I voted against it.”
Jake snorted, and it
took all of my willpower to refrain from striking him again.
“But it never happened,” he said.
This time Jake grabbed him by the collar.
He spoke quickly and put his palms up. “We hired a street child in Naples, a boy who looked like the one in the picture we took from Asha’s apartment. To be honest, there wasn’t a remarkable resemblance. We were counting on the effects of shock and darkness and planned to distort his voice through a speaker, telling her to return the letterbox. We paid half the money beforehand, which was a mistake. The boy never showed and we had to abandon the plan. We never sent anyone to the castle.”
-59-
I looked at Jake, who appeared just as confused.
“Then who was the boy?” I asked the Druid. “We all saw him. He led us to the tower.”
“The first and only time we approached the castle was the day before you arrived. We explored the ruins and blackened our symbol into the courtyard.”
“Why in the world should we believe you?”
He spread his hands. “Why would we point out the next location to you?”
It was a good point, one I had wondered about before.
Jake pressed the knife across his throat again. The Druid seemed shaken for the first time. “I swear I’m telling you the truth. There was no boy.”
Jake slowly let his hand drop.
“Why don’t you tell us what measures you took to retrieve the box,” I said, not sure what to think. “After Naples.”
He took a deep breath and nodded. “We thought Pompeii would have a more pronounced effect. When you continued to Paris, we followed, planning to trap you in the cemetery. As you know, we were already using Kardec’s tomb as a meeting place. Very clever, by the way, figuring out the dolmens. We were impressed.”
“How’d you get inside the cemetery with the dogs?” Jake asked.
“Paris has catacombs crisscrossing the city. Many years ago, we built an entrance from the catacombs right into Kardec’s tomb.”
“Go on.”
“Our goal that night was to frighten you into leaving the Vessel. We planned to corner you and demand its return, and I suspect we would have been successful.”
Neither Jake nor I contradicted him.
“But you barricaded yourself in that tomb, and we were forced to leave before the cemetery opened.”
Jake and I again exchanged a glance. “What about the man in the black shroud?” I asked.
He frowned. “We were outside the tomb the entire time. No one entered that tomb unless he was in there to begin with.”
Jake raised the knife again. “I told you what I’d do if you’re lying—”
“I assure you again I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said hurriedly, eying the knife.
“Did you send a young woman to Notre Dame in Paris?” I asked. “Blond and very pretty?”
“Absolutely not.”
I crossed my arms. I had no reason to trust him, but what could he gain by lying? Was this some ploy to retrieve the letterbox? “The scene outside the bus?” I asked.
“We set a dead pig and the wicker cage on fire. The man was wearing flame-retardant material and we took him down as soon as you were out of sight.”
“Breaking onto the bus?”
He raised his palms. “Again, we were trying to frighten you into leaving the Vessel. We didn’t expect you to resist as you did. You gave a few of our people quite a scare.”
“They’re lucky I didn’t kill them,” Jake muttered.
“After that, we decided the situation was escalating to a point to which we were not prepared to go. So we devised the plan at Kutna Hora.”
“You drugged us,” I said.
“I apologize if you had a headache afterwards, but the drug was harmless. A general anesthetic.”
“I figured as much,” Jake said. “I also figure you’re goin’ to tell us you had nothing to do with what happened inside the ossuary.”
“We pumped the drug into the chapel and waited for the fumes to dissipate, walked in when you were fast asleep, retrieved the Vessel, and left.”
Jake gave a short, hysterical laugh. “Right.”
“I guess we can never prove if you’re lying,” I said.
“Lying? About what?”
“Things happened inside Kostnice,” I said. “Involving one of your people in the tunnels beneath the ossuary.”
“I assure you that’s quite impossible. You were unconscious before and after any of us encountered you. And I don’t know of any tunnels underneath Kostnice.”
“Neither do we.”
We stood in the darkness, facing each other with uneasy stares. The man looked as if he were about to say something else, then gave the moors another nervous glance.
“What?” Jake asked. “If you’re holding something back . . . .”
“There’s another reason I came tonight,” the man said. “I wasn’t sure how to tell you, because I don’t know if I believe it myself.” His voice dropped and he looked shaken. “But after what you’ve told me . . . .”
“Spit it out,” Jake said.
He expelled a breath. “I’m the most knowledgeable historian of our Order. After we recovered the Vessel, I was chosen to carry it to Avon Tor to decipher the last site on the map.”
“And you went.”
“Yes. But something happened at Avon Tor, similar to the things you’re telling me.”
He paused, and Jake ran his thumb along the flat of his blade.
The Druid pressed his lips together. “It was dusk, and I was alone on the moor. It was all rather dreamlike, but I saw some things . . . people from my life . . . who couldn’t have been there.”
“Why not?” I said.
“Because they were already dead.”
My skin started to prickle.
“I ran away and looked back only once, but it’s the one thing in my life I would take back if I could. I saw . . . a thing. A walking shadow. I don’t know how else to describe it. It was dark, and I was scared and confused. Perhaps it wasn’t really there. Perhaps they weren’t really there. I got to my car and left as fast as I could.”
He stopped, visibly upset. All of my experience as an attorney screamed that this man was telling the truth.
I saw Jake looking at him with narrowed eyes and a tight mouth. I wondered what Jake had seen at Avon Tor.
“Why don’t you tell us what you know about this ‘Vessel,’” Jake said.
“Our oral tradition speaks of a wooden container buried on the moor that houses something important. Powerful. The legend is vague and, as you can imagine, distorted through centuries of oral transference. Some believe the Vessel is connected to the spirit world and possesses occult secrets. Most of us simply believe it will lead to historical insights or lost knowledge. Yet we’ve exhausted all avenues and found neither a hidden repository nor the last site on the map.”
“That’s all you know about the box?” Jake said. “That the Druid high priests made it? Isn’t there some sort of record?”
He gave us a sideways glance. “Druids didn’t make the box.”
“Huh?” Jake said. “But the dates, the Ogham—”
“Let me clarify. Druids constructed the sides and the map on the bottom. But the oral traditions reveal that the Elders constructed the Vessel and the Pathway around a Sacred Tablet.”
“The lid,” Jake murmured.
“Nothing about the design on the lid comports with what we know of the Elders. We don’t know why this particular piece of wood was chosen, and the histories don’t say. Those of us who believe in the more . . . spiritual . . . nature of the Vessel believe the lid to be a relic from a forgotten age, a relic which the Elders knew possessed special significance. To be honest, I never subscribed to any of that.” His lips compressed, and his eyes slid to the moors once again.
“So who made the Sacred Tablet?” I asked, following his gaze into the gloom.
“No one knows.”
/> -60-
“There’s a final thing you should be aware of,” the Druid said. “There’s a difference of opinion among our Order concerning the Vessel. Or shall I say a schism.”
“Let me guess,” Jake said. “The rogue faction is the one who told you those bogs were two feet deep.”
He didn’t deny it. “A few of us believe more strongly in the . . . mystical . . . abilities of the Vessel. And I fear these members are prepared to go to great lengths to see it returned.”
“My turn to take a guess,” I said grimly. “Their leader has a burn scar on the back of his left hand.”
He gave a curt nod.
“What do you mean, a few of us believe?” Jake asked. “Spell it out.”
“The man you’ve described was given an ultimatum to suspend the search. In response, he fled the Order, vowing to recover the Vessel at any cost. We have no idea where he’s gone. But we felt it right you should know.”
Jake snarled and raised the knife again. “His name? And don’t even try to wiggle out of telling me.”
“Nyles. Nyles Kempthorne. But the name means nothing. We all join the Order under assumed identities.”
A line of white-robed Druids emerged from the darkness behind him. They didn’t advance, but the message was clear, and Jake and I were forced to back away and let the man slip into the night.
We returned to Belstone, wary of the threat that still existed, chewing on the answers we had received. Answers that had, yet again, only raised more questions.
The others were waiting for us in the common room. Lou looked as relieved as I had ever seen him, and Asha’s eyes were red. I let her hug me, though I felt drained of emotion.
As the fire popped and crackled, Jake and I told the others what had happened. I was reluctant to bring Asha’s emotions for her brother back into the fold, but her eyes looked dull when we finished, as if our story had only deepened her mistrust.
She put her fingers to her temples and shut her eyes. “More lies,” she said bitterly. “It’s just more lies.”
He looked pretty damn serious to me, I thought, but said nothing. It was better if she didn’t have her hopes raised. Not by someone we had no reason to trust.