The Ancient Nine

by Ian K. Smith, M. D.

  When I finally reached the tree, I began circling it, and then I saw it. The branch was as wide as the trunks of some of the other trees, curved down in a U with a considerable portion that was flat enough to sit on. It was the strangest-looking tree I had ever seen.

  “Holy shit!” Dalton said, sticking his shovel in the ground as he stood next to me. “This is the craziest-looking tree I’ve ever seen. How in the hell does something grow like this?”

  We both walked over to the branch and stood there in amazement. It looked like a human arm stretching out.

  “So now we have to find the graves,” Dalton said. “Aunt Contessa said Mrs. Abbott had been buried underneath the tree on the right side of Mr. Abbott. The order had something to do with Scripture. Erasmus had been buried on his father’s left.”

  “Let’s do this in circles,” I said. “We’ll start tight against the trunk and walk around it until we meet. If we don’t find any gravestones, then we’ll step farther out and circle it again.”

  Starting up against the tree we walked the first circle but didn’t find anything. We did this ten times, but there was no sign of a gravestone. When we were twenty feet away from the tree, Dalton stopped and said, “They’re here, but we’re doing something wrong.”

  “Maybe they’re flat markers instead of vertical tombstones,” I said.

  “Possible,” Dalton said. “Just seems strange a man as rich as Abbott would be buried without a tombstone.

  “Maybe not,” I said. “They knew that one day this property might be owned by someone not in the family. If they built a big monument to themselves, whoever bought the place might grow uncomfortable with a reminder of death so visible. So instead, the Abbotts decided to do it quietly with small, discreet plates. No one would really know, and they could remain here forever.”

  We walked back to the tree and started our circles again. This time, however, we used our shovels and feet to clear away the leaves and brush. It was going painstakingly slow until Dalton hit something.

  “Jackpot!” he yelled.

  I ran to the other side of the tree. He was on his hands and knees about ten feet away from the trunk, pulling and yanking at the weeds and gnarled shrubbery. I got down beside him and started doing the same until we had a clear look at the flat metal marker belonging to Elizabeth Abbott. It was remarkably simple.

  ELIZABETH CHARLESWORTH ABBOTT

  WIFE OF COLLANDER WENDELL ABBOTT

  WOMAN OF THE WORLD

  1888–1978

  Dalton kept looking at the grave marker, then said, “Life is funny. Who would imagine that a woman with a life of such privilege and influence would be remembered by a small piece of bronze and twelve simple words?”

  “Collander must be to her left,” I said.

  We moved over a foot, and after clearing away leaves and pulling at more weeds and overgrowth, we found the second plate.

  COLLANDER WENDELL ABBOTT

  PIOUS SERVANT OF GOD

  1887–1977

  Dalton and I didn’t say anything, sensing how close we were to our answer. Another foot over and we began clearing away the brush. We scraped and pulled until we found it. It was smaller than the other two and carved in black marble.

  ERASMUS DANFORTH ABBOTT

  BELOVED LOST SON

  1908–1927

  “His plate is here, but it doesn’t mean he was actually buried here,” Dalton said. “This could just be a memorial to him.”

  “What if he really is down there?” I said. “Doesn’t prove much.”

  “It means that Collander Abbott knew a helluva lot more about his son’s disappearance than he was letting on.”

  “But it still doesn’t prove that Erasmus was killed trying to break into the Delphic that night. He could’ve been kidnapped and killed at some other time, and the Abbotts just never made it public.”

  “Possible,” Dalton said. “Or they knew who killed him and why and decided to keep their mouths shut about the whole thing.”

  “Or he’s not even down there,” I said. “Maybe it’s just an empty grave.”

  “It’s very possible they could’ve just put a plate here to honor him,” Dalton said.

  “First things first,” I said, planting my shovel in the ground.

  We went about our grim task, saying very little to each other, the screeching sounds of bats and birds and night crawlers echoing in the darkness. It took the better part of an hour, but I was the first one to hit something. I thought it was another rock, but when I tried digging around it, I only hit more of the hard surface. I got on my knees and cleared the dirt with my hands, and that’s when I first saw the dull metal.

  “You got it!” Dalton said, flashing the light over the dirt.

  It was well past midnight when we had the entire casket unearthed.

  “You want the honors?” Dalton said, planting his shovel into the mound of dirt.

  “Let’s do it together,” I said.

  We made signs of the cross, then reached down and pulled at the lid. It didn’t open with the first tug, so we regripped and tried again. Still no give. Finally, we both stuck our shovels inside the seam and pried it open.

  I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I figured Abbott’s skeleton would be a pile of dust after all these years. Then I had visions of a decaying body with maggots and other insects and a foul odor. But neither was the case. Instead, we found a small silver urn with bowed handles that looked like a golfing trophy.

  Dalton reached down and lifted the urn.

  Abbott’s name, date of birth, and death had been inscribed.

  He handed the urn to me, and I was surprised at how heavy it was, considering it was so small.

  “Let’s look inside,” Dalton said.

  As I turned the urn to remove the lid, something caught my eye. I took the bottom of my shirt and rubbed it across the face of the urn in hard, slow circles, then held it back up to the light.

  “What does it say?” Dalton asked.

  I immediately recognized the grammatical style and strange spelling. “You’re not gonna believe it,” I said. “I think this is part of the Ancient Nine’s creed in the succession book.”

  “Are you kidding?” Dalton said, taking the urn back. He turned and read the words, then lifted the top and pulled out a small, tarnished silver box. Erasmus’s initials were engraved in the top.

  I slowly pulled back the lid and looked at a teaspoon of ash dust. “Something’s not right,” I said. “We didn’t find any published reports about his body being found nor a burial. The Abbotts were hiding something.”

  “Or protecting a deadly secret,” Dalton said.

  * * *

  WE HAD ALMOST finished covering up Abbott’s casket when sounds trickled in from the other side of the woods. These weren’t sounds coming from animals. The voices were heavy. There were several of them. One of the men was shouting out directions. I could see flashlights crisscrossing in the distance.

  “Let’s go!” I said to Dalton. “They know we’re back here.”

  I grabbed my shovel and was about to make a run for it when Dalton grabbed me by the arm.

  “We can’t go back the way we came,” he said. “We have a much better chance of making it onto the adjacent property.”

  He stuffed the urn in his backpack, grabbed his shovel, and pointed in the opposite direction.

  “But how are we gonna climb the fence?”

  “It must end somewhere.”

  The voices were closer now. The sounds of twigs snapped under heavy feet. Flashlight beams crisscrossed through the thick woods.

  We ran hard and fast, their voices falling at our backs. Stray branches ripped at our clothes, and partially buried rocks twisted our ankles as we navigated the uneven ground. I almost fell a couple of times, but grabbed nearby trees to keep me upright.

  Then Dalton suddenly stopped.

  “What’s up?” I said, out of breath, the taste of acid filling my mouth.

  “Foll
ow me,” Dalton said.

  We were about seventy-five yards away from the burial site. I could no longer make out the tree, but I could see the cluster of light beams in the area we had just left. Dalton squatted behind a large oak, then opened his backpack and lifted a pair of binoculars.

  “Night vision,” he said. “Forgot I had them. Five times magnification with a built-in infrared illuminator.”

  He made a couple of adjustments on the lenses and brought them to his face. We sat there for a couple of minutes, him looking back at the burial site, me looking at him wondering what he was seeing.

  “I have to give it to him,” Dalton said. “That sonuvabitch is relentless.” He handed me the binoculars.

  I adjusted them to fit my face. Brathwaite stood there in that same ski jacket and baseball cap. He was looking down at the graves and saying something to the other men. One man was short, heavy around the midsection, and wide in the shoulders. He carried himself like someone accustomed to manual labor. He had a flat nose and disheveled black hair. Unlike the other two men, he didn’t wear a hat or gloves. I saw a gun in his hand. My body instantly tensed.

  “The short one is carrying a gun,” I said, still looking through the binoculars. “Brathwaite is saying something to him.”

  I couldn’t see the face of the third man, whose back was facing me. He wasn’t as tall as Brathwaite, but he stood several inches above the man with the gun. He had a cane in his right hand and a flashlight in his left. He was wearing a long heavy coat. Brathwaite pointed to something in the ground, when the third man moved enough for me to catch a quick glimpse of his face. I recognized him right away. His movements were slow and his expression somber. Stanford Jacobs was standing over the grave of Erasmus Abbott.

  28

  IT WAS ALMOST three o’clock in the morning by the time we pulled into Cambridge with the remains of Erasmus Abbott resting comfortably in the backseat. We decided it would be important to do a careful word-by-word comparison of the passage engraved on the urn to the Ancient Nine creed. It looked the same, but neither of us had memorized the text, and the arcane English spellings were so strange that it was difficult to tell if any of the words had been altered.

  While the trip had at least answered one important question—whether Erasmus Abbott’s body had ever been discovered—it still left a lot of others unanswered. Was he killed that night in the Delphic? Why hadn’t his family been more open about what happened? Why hadn’t the media covered the discovery of his body?

  “We can forget about all the theories that Abbott was kidnapped or secretly sent away to live out the rest of his life in anonymity,” I said. “The dates on the marker say he lived to be nineteen, the same age he’d been the night he broke into the Delphic.”

  “He was killed that night,” Dalton said. “But how many people knew, and when did they tell his father?”

  “They probably told him right away,” I said. I bet Abbott knew Erasmus’s death could expose the club’s secrets, so he agreed to keep it all quiet and let the commotion slowly fade away. With his son already dead, what good would it do to also expose the Ancient Nine?”

  “I’d buy that,” Dalton said. “But why would he put that same inscription from the book on the urn? If these guys were so secretive about their brotherhood, then why take the risk of basically publishing the passage?”

  “That’s assuming the Ancient Nine creed and the urn inscription are the same,” I said.

  “Jacobs was a little bit of a surprise, but it all makes sense,” Dalton said. “He’s probably the Delphic’s wealthiest member. He’s old enough to know about these events, and an ideal member for the Ancient Nine, a man who some respect and others fear.”

  “Just makes me wonder about the conversation I had with him at the cocktail party,” I said. “Showing me his art collection was a ruse to get me alone. Then he hit me with all those questions about my family, especially my father. What was it about my dad and his family that was so fascinating to him?”

  “I wasn’t convinced before, but now I am,” Dalton said. “He was definitely digging for something.”

  “And he’s obviously tight with Brathwaite.”

  “Tight enough to get up and drive an hour in the middle of the night to an old burial ground in the middle of the woods.”

  “Do you really think they would’ve shot us?”

  “I hope not,” Dalton said. “Maybe they want to scare us. Brathwaite thinks we have Uncle Randolph’s book. Now he knows we have Abbott’s urn.”

  “And both lead us back to the Ancient Nine.”

  “And them to us,” he said. “We have to expand our thinking beyond the Ancient Nine. There’s some kind of pattern with these religious passages. I keep feeling like all roads lead to that damn book in Houghton. I think we’re closer than ever.”

  “And Brathwaite knows it,” I said. “I can check HOLLIS tomorrow and see if there’s anything on microfilm. I’ve found other old books that have been copied. If we’re lucky, maybe The Christian Warfare was copied too.”

  “Maybe. But we’ll probably still need to see the original book.”

  We reached Dalton’s room, hiding the urn in his backpack. He went into the closet and stood up on a chair to reach the back of the top shelf, where he pulled out the little succession book. The urn had tarnished so badly, it was black, but the engraved words were still legible under the light. We placed the book and urn next to each other and read them both. I grabbed a sheet of paper and together we transcribed the wording on the urn.

  * * *

  I will breake of my ſinnes by vntained repentance and turne vnto the Lord whom I haue offended, aſſuring my ſelfe that his mercies are infinite, and therefore he is redie to forgiue, and the merites of Chriſt a full ſatisfaction for all my ſinnes though many and hainous, and therefore in him I may bouldly challenge forgiueneſſe as a thing of right appertayning to me.

  * * *

  I wrote down the transcription:

  I will break of my sins unfeigned repentance and turn unto the Lord whom I have offended, assuring myself that his mercies are infinite, and therefore he is ready to forgive and the merits of Christ a full satisfaction for all my sins though many and heinous, and therefore in him I may boldly challenge forgiveness as a thing of right pertaining to me.

  Then we opened the succession book and looked at the Ancient Nine’s creed on the back page:

  * * *

  heretofore I haue diſhonoured God by my ſins, but now I will giue him glorie in beleeuing and acknowledging his infinite mercie, goodneſſe, iuſtice, and truth in his promiſes; and ſecing by my ſinnes I haue crucified the Lorde of life, I will not ad hereunto this outrageious wickedneſſe, to tráple his pretious bloud vnder my filthie feete as a thing vnholy and of no worth, neither will I through my vnbeleefe make it to be ſpilt in vaine; but now with all care and conſience I will gather it vp as a moſt precious balme, and with the hand of faith apply it to thoſe greiſly gaſhes, and deepe woundes which ſinne hath made in my ſoule and conſience, and with this ſpirituall lauer I will waſhe my polluted ſoule till it bee thoroughly purged from all vncleaneſſe. And ſeeing I haue depriued my ſoule of that in herent rightcouſneſſe wherewith it was indued by creation, now I will apply thereunto a farre more excellent rightcouſneſſe by the hand of faith, euen the righteouſneſſe of Ieſus Chriſt God and man, wherewith being adorned I may boldy offer my ſelfe into the preſence of my heauēly father & receiue the bleſſing of euerlaſting happines.

  * * *

  “So much for that,” Dalton said. “Two completely different passages, saying totally different things.”

  “True, but that doesn’t mean they’re not related,” I said. “Look at the way the words are spelled and the sentence structure. They’re both heavy on religious themes—sins, repentance, and spiritual obedience. They could be from the same source. This is why we need to look at that book.”

  * * *

  WHEN I GOT home that nigh
t, I was surprised to find Percy sitting on the steps outside our entryway, smoking a cigarette. He was wearing a shrunken ratty blue Andover T-shirt, his silk pajama bottoms, and monogrammed slippers. His hair was a complete mess.

  “What the hell are you doing out here so late in your pajamas?” I asked. “You’re gonna freeze to death.”

  “Give me a break,” he said, looking up at me momentarily, then resting his head on the railing. His eyes were red and swollen. I could smell the alcohol on his breath from several feet away. He was more than a little drunk. He was bombed.

  “You’re wasted,” I said. “C’mon, let’s go into the room.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “And I don’t want any of your fake sympathy. I had a lot to drink, and I deserved every damned inebriating ounce of it.”

  I was cold and tired and in no mood for playing psychiatrist, but he looked so pathetic that I couldn’t ignore him and go in. “What happened?” I said, sitting down next to him.

  He took another pull on the cigarette, choked a little, and blew out a burst of smoke. “You don’t care. No one cares. My life is gone to shit, and no one gives a shit.” He let out a pitiful little laugh.

  The poor guy was in the worst shape I’d ever seen him. He wasn’t even wearing that damn pinky ring. “What the hell happened?” I asked.

  “They’re all a bunch of phony bastards,” he stammered. “Every single rotten one of them is a no-good, sniveling bastard.”

  “You mind telling me who you’re talking about?”

  “The Spee,” he mumbled. “Bunch of lying assholes. If I owned a gun, I’d go over there and shoot every last one of ’em, then find their mothers and shoot ’em too.”