by Layton Green
After Dr. Clifton left, Jake paced back and forth with an intense scowl. Lou drummed his fingers on the table as he stared at the letterbox. I was deep in thought, absorbing everything that had happened.
Lou stopped his finger movement. “We need a new strategy,” he said.
Jake waved a hand. “Tell us something we don’t know.”
“If the nexus was really that important, there had to have been ancient search parties out looking for it. Scouring the globe. And if anyone found it, I’m guessing there was some kind of temple or monument built at the site.”
“I like where you’re going with this,” Jake said. “You’re thinking this theoretical place of worship might have been marked with the letterbox symbol.”
Lou gave a slow nod. “It’s a long shot. But it’s the only shot I can think of.”
We took Lou’s idea and ran with it, scouring the museum’s archives for books on ancient ziggurats, cathedrals, shrines, temples—anything that might fit the bill. We grabbed sandwiches from the cafeteria for dinner and settled in for the long haul. Midnight came and went, and when I finally looked up, it was three a.m.
I rubbed my eyes; they were starting to blur. “I’m getting diminishing returns.”
Lou yawned and agreed. Jake didn’t respond for a moment, then snarled and slammed shut the book he was reading.
Jake agreed to leave the museum, mainly because he didn’t want us walking to the hotel by ourselves. Vowing to return at first light, we slipped out the side entrance and hurried down the street.
Lou and Jake lit up as we walked, then started comparing research notes. Halfway to the hotel, Jake said out of the side of his mouth, so low I could barely hear him, “We’ve got company. Keep walking and act normal.”
Every muscle in my body tensed. I canvassed the street in front of us, seeing nothing but empty pavement and a corridor of ash-colored buildings. Heeding Jake’s advice, I resisted the urge to look over my shoulder.
Lou and Jake kept discussing the search. I heard a flutter in the back of Lou’s voice, but Jake’s was clear and firm.
I braced for the worst, though I could detect no sign of pursuit. What had Jake heard? Why hadn’t they ambushed us already? The streets were deserted.
The hotel was three blocks away. It was the longest ten minutes of my life, but we reached it without incident. I let out a huge breath, shivery with adrenaline. I started to speak but Jake cut me off with a glance.
We climbed the stairs to our hallway. Halfway to our room, Jake put a hand out, stopping us. He gathered us close and spoke in a whisper. “We had eyes on us. Two pairs.”
“White robes?” I asked.
“Jackets with hoods.”
“Maybe they were just thugs,” Lou said weakly, and Jake withered him with a glance.
“Why didn’t they go for us?” I asked.
Jake shrugged off his backpack, which contained the letterbox. “My guess? They want us to do their work for them. They’ll see what we find and then move in.”
Lou peered nervously down the hallway. “So what do we do?”
“Get some sleep. Act normal. Don’t discuss anything in the room. When we go to the museum in the morning, put anything you can’t leave behind in my backpack.”
After a few hours of restless sleep, we stuffed our toiletries and a change of clothes into Jake’s backpack, along with the letterbox. It was a smart move; we could leave at a moment’s notice if we found anything.
We researched all day, guzzling coffee and eating cold sandwiches from the café in the atrium. Besides the cleaning lady, no one bothered us.
Late that night, craving a bit of fresh air, I followed Jake outside during one of his smoke breaks. We had our backs against the wall, watching the street. Right after Jake flicked away his butt, Lou burst out of the door, his eyes wide.
“Guys,” he said, “I found something.”
We rushed back inside, crowding around another impossibly old book. The title was in Latin.
Lou waved his hands as he spoke. “This is a Roman history book, circa 1100 A.D. Basically it’s an accounting of the fringes of the Roman Empire at the time. The passage of interest concerns a forested area just south of Russia and controlled by barbaric tribes. A Roman explorer documented his journey to the region.”
“Surely you weren’t just reading ancient history books in Latin,” I said. “What drew you to the passage?”
“I was flipping through books with references to ancient temples,” Lou said, grinning like a kid who had just discovered a cabinet full of chocolate bars. He opened the tome to a bookmarked page. On the right half was a page of unbroken Latin script, and on the left was a single drawing that took up most of the page.
The symbol on the letterbox.
A shiver of excitement coursed through me. After taking a long look at the drawing, Jake sank into one of the chairs. “What’s it say?” he croaked. “I’ll read it for myself later, but give me the gist.”
“The Roman explorer stumbled upon the ruins of an ancient temple complex. The ruins were deep inside the forest—a collection of megaliths, altars, and pagan symbols. And get this—the central structure was a ziggurat built around a hill, surrounded by hundreds of spears planted upright into the ground.”
Jake flew out of his seat, his long hair flying. “A temple with spears—the pointed symbols on the map. That’s got to be it!”
“No one from the local tribes knew who had made the ruins. They used the forest for worship, but were afraid of the temple and refused to go inside. The Roman speculated they had planted the spears themselves—probably as a superstitious method of protection from whatever the temple contained or represented.”
“Not too unusual,” Jake said. “Numerous civilizations left only their architecture as a legacy.”
“The explorer found the letterbox symbol engraved all over the ruins. It was so strange he copied it down and reported his find to Rome. Luckily for us, an enterprising scholar included a drawing in this book.”
“So correct me if I’m wrong,” I said, “but don’t we still have to find this place? Or is there more?”
“I don’t know exactly what region it’s in,” Lou said, “but I’ve got a very good guess, as should you by now. A land of vast primeval forests south of Russia, with a rich pagan history that continues to this day. A land known for harvesting crystals especially conducive to illumination. A land with a history of woodworking, including a style distinctive to wood carvers in the Baltic area up until the end of the first millennium.”
Jake was grinning with knowledge.
“Lithuania,” I murmured.
Yet even if a Babylonian search party had found its way to the Baltic forests, I wondered, and built the temple depicted in Lou’s book, why had the site been abandoned?
“Lithuania’s a big country,” I said. “Do we have a map of this temple’s location to start with?”
“No,” Lou said, “but I think we have a good chance of finding it. What do you think, Jake?”
“Oh yeah,” he said, exchanging a knowing look with Lou.
“Am I missing something?” I asked.
“Just one of the rules of thumb of historical research,” Lou said. “As we’ve seen, it can be incredibly hard to find something buried in the past. But what, our fearless leader, isn’t nearly as difficult?”
Jake gave a grim smile and started unwrapping a pack of cigarettes. “Tracing it forward.”
-69-
We returned to our hotel for another few hours of sleep, leaving the museum as if nothing unusual had happened. No one accosted us, but I wondered how much rope our enemies would give us before deciding to make a play for the letterbox. We badly needed the location of the nexus.
The next morning, after we set up camp in our reading room, I went to the main atrium to grab breakfast sandwiches for the group. As I entered the huge room, I locked eyes with a pair of people in wool overcoats. They looked away as soon as I saw them, and
the dark-haired man, who was in the process of pulling off a pair of gloves, stopped what he was doing.
My heart skipped a beat. I entered the cafeteria line as nonchalantly as I could. I couldn’t be certain, because I had never seen his face, but I felt sure it was the Druid with the burned hand. Why else would he look at me and then away, and more importantly, pull his gloves back on inside the building?
Yet it was more than that: it was something about his face, his predatory eyes and the arrogant set to his mouth, as if he possessed knowledge that others did not. Secret knowledge.
I made sure to imprint their appearances in my mind. The woman seemed vaguely familiar, a thin older lady with long gray hair and close-set eyes. I couldn’t remember where, but I thought I might have seen her before. The man was tall and narrow-shouldered, roughly fifty years old, and his pale, craggy face looked as if it had once been handsome.
Safely ensconced in a line of people, I risked a glance over my shoulder, and then took a longer look around the atrium.
There was no sign of them.
I took a circuitous route back to our reading room and told Jake and Lou about the encounter.
“You think they realized you made them?” Jake asked, unwrapping his egg and bacon sandwich.
“I’m not sure. Probably.”
He grunted. “They won’t like being ID’d, and who knows how many more there are. We need to find what we’re after and get the hell out of Dodge.”
I couldn’t have been more in agreement. As the morning wore on, I kept telling myself that things were getting too dicey, that I should get on a plane back to the States.
And then I made a discovery.
“Look at this,” I said, pointing out a drawing in yet another history book about the Baltic region, this one from the early sixteenth century. It was an undeniable representation of a ruined ziggurat surrounded by spears, though there was no sign of the letterbox symbol.
Lou broke into a wide grin as he picked up the book. “How many of these do you think there were in the Baltics?”
Jake slapped me on the back and then cracked his knuckles, his mouth tight. “We’re on the map.”
It took the rest of the day and most of the night, but now that we had a more recent reference point, we were able to trace the history of the ziggurat site through settlement, wars, pestilence, the onset of Christianity, and the anti-religious travails of Communist rule. We learned that the people of the region had destroyed and rebuilt the ruins many times over, and in many different guises, eventually erasing all evidence of the Akkadian symbol. Though the site had gone by many different names, it remained a mysterious and feared place of worship, buried deep within the forest.
At six a.m., blurry-eyed after an entire night of research, Lou was flipping through a history of modern Lithuania. I poured my umpteenth cup of coffee as Lou looked up, an incredulous look on his face. “I can’t believe it. It’s right there, and it’s not even a secret. The Lithuanians call it the Hill of Crosses, and it’s a pilgrimage site near the town of Šiauliai.”
“The Hill of Crosses,” Jake repeated. He rose slowly to his feet, as if in a dream. “Commie, are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
“Nexus or not, this is the location we’ve been researching. I’m sure of it.”
The three of us could have been the subjects of a still-life painting. Then the adrenaline hit, and we whooped and danced around the room.
When the initial excitement wore off, Jake looked ready to bolt out the door. He started giving rapid-fire orders. “Commie, make sure you know exactly where we’re going. Counselor, get us some grub for the road and look natural doing it. They’ll think we’re holed up for the day. I’ll pack up and we’ll hit the road in thirty minutes.”
“Won’t they just follow us?” I asked.
Jake winked at me. “Not from the exit we’re gonna use.”
Access card in hand, we entered a portion of the basement I’d never seen before, a warren of narrow corridors and rooms piled high with crates. As we wolfed down breakfast sandwiches, Jake led us through the maze as if he had mapped it, stopping only to retrieve a crowbar he had planted in a box in one of the rooms.
One of the hallways dead-ended at an old metal door secured with a rusty padlock. It looked like no one had been around for years. Jake took out his lock-pick set and, after much pulling and grunting, removed the padlock.
The door opened to reveal a round, brick-walled vestibule as cold and musty as a tomb. A dusty staircase descended into darkness.
“What is this place?” Lou said, peering nervously down.
“The old employee entrance to the British Museum tube station.”
“The what?” I said. “There is no such thing.”
Jake grinned. “There used to be. I figured we might need an escape route, and took a look at the building schematics. When I saw this old addition, the light bulb went on.”
I ran a hand through my hair, not relishing the thought of trekking through an abandoned tube station with the Druids so near. As usual, Jake didn’t give us time to debate. We replaced the padlock as best we could, used our cellphones to light the way, and then started down the staircase, our footsteps echoing in the stillness.
To keep my mind off the vulnerability of our position, I asked a question that had been bothering me. “How did the letterbox,” I said, “if it truly is a Babylonian artifact, end up buried in the moors?”
“The Romans scattered the Druids across Europe,” Jake said. “They must have found the ziggurat site and the Akkadian-inscribed tablet when they pushed into the Baltic forests.”
“But why break with tradition and add the Ogham inscription?” Lou asked.
“Seems obvious, doesn’t it? Something happened to them at the nexus. Something powerful enough to convince them to record it, and turn the tablet into a religious object of their own.”
“And the map?” I said. “What do you think about Sofistere’s guess, that it indicates sites throughout Europe where the Druids met under persecution, or leads to a treasure buried at the ziggurat site?”
“You want to know what I think, Counselor? I think the Druids saw the same things we did, and they made the map as a sort of spiritual testing ground. A way to prepare the traveler, at intersections of the ley lines, for the journey to the nexus.”
The silence of the passage punctuated Jake’s words, until Lou snorted. “You should have been born in the Middle Ages.”
“That still doesn’t explain the monotheism,” I said to Jake. “Why name God in the singular on the letterbox?”
“Polytheism doesn’t preclude belief in a supreme being,” Jake said. “Most pagan cultures believed in a being or force similar to our concept of an omnipotent God, and the various spirits and deities they worshipped were viewed as lesser gods, or different facets of the same gem. This applies to Hindus, Buddhists, Native Americans, and indigenous African religions, to name a few. The Druids didn’t keep records, but maybe they referred to their concept of God in the singular, despite the fact that they worshipped various aspects of the spiritual and natural world. Maybe they thought God was the spiritual energy that ran along the ley lines. Or maybe,” his voice turned grim, “they had a change of heart in Lithuania.”
The bottom of the staircase materialized, ending at another door. I looked over my shoulder for the hundredth time, but there was no sign of pursuit.
“What we do know is this,” Jake continued. “The Druids took the letterbox back to their homeland, all the way on the other side of the world, and they buried it as deep as they could.”
Jake picked the lock again. The door squeaked open to reveal a cavernous room with tiled walls and a rounded ceiling. A rush of stale and even cooler air greeted us.
Detritus littered the floor. As I skirted a pile of bricks, I felt as if we were explorers in some dystopian future, poking through the ruins of a lost civilization.
Four hallways with arched entrances branched int
o darkness. The room wasn’t big enough to be the main entrance to a station, and I guessed it was a connector hall.
“Where does this come out?” I said. “Won’t the exits be locked from the other side?”
“Probably.” He raised the crowbar. “That’s what this is for.”
“That’s your plan?” Lou said, incredulous. “Find a random door and smash through?”
“Have some faith, Commie. I know it’s hard for you.”
He led us down the second corridor to our left. We walked as fast as we could, just short of a run. I kept expecting to hear rats, the plop of water, or worse—the sound of booted footsteps. But there was only deafening silence.
A hundred feet down the corridor, Jake stopped in front of a door with its seams set flush into the wall. I would have walked right by it.
Jake attacked the locking mechanism with his crowbar. It took a while, but it was old and he was able to rip through it. We opened the door and stepped into a smaller tunnel with a sleeker ceiling and walls.
“Engineering tunnel,” Jake said. “It should lead straight to the surface.”
The tunnel sloped gradually upward, eventually merging with a sewer tunnel, and we climbed out of the first grate we saw. Thankfully it exited on a side street with little traffic. A few pedestrians gawked at us as we climbed out, and we hurried around the corner.
I clapped Jake on the back, relieved beyond words to be above ground. Yet it somehow seemed too easy. I had almost begun to attribute the Druids’ abilities to follow us to supernatural powers, and even after their deceptions were revealed, it was hard to shake the notion. Not to mention the creeping suspicion that someone was helping us from the shadows, herding us to our doom.
What machinations had been put in place when the letterbox was unearthed from its watery grave?
Lou stopped someone to ask directions to the nearest tube stop, and they pointed us towards Holborn.