The Daykeeper's Grimoire

by Christy Raedeke

  Justinem: like Nostradamus?

  Caitym: kinda—but not really. Different kind of prophecy

  Justinem: about what?

  Caitym: about me

  Justinem: u?

  Caitym: Yep. And yes, I know I sound crazy. anyway, this has to do with that mayan calendar I sent u. I guess my part in this thing is to get kids to use it

  Justinem: that shouldn’t really be a problem—after u sent it to me I got the email that u sent to the whole school and I immediately got a bunch of emails from people who want to get together to talk it over.

  Caitym: really? all since I sent that a couple of hours ago?

  Justinem: Yep. so if u r supposed to get people interested in it, it looks like u succeeded.

  Caitym: now I have to get it out worldwide. I have to have some sort of, like, gathering to kickoff using the calendar.

  Justinem: from Scotland?

  Caitym: No, here’s the tricky part. i have to go to Easter Island

  Justinem: those big heads?????????????????

  Caitym: xactly

  Justinem: and parents are ok w/ this?

  Caitym: No, they don’t know a thing.

  Justinem: how?

  Caitym: This is where u come in …

  Justinem: ?

  Caitym: can I say that I’m @ your house?

  Justinem: of course! U don’t think they’d find out?

  Caitym: I think I have it covered, I just may need some help from u.

  Justinem: No prob.

  Caitym: & one other thing …

  Justinem: ?

  Caitym: Do u feel like going to Machu Picchu?

  Caitym: u still there?

  Justinem: wait, u r joking, right?

  Caitym: uh, no … but from your answer I get the picture. it’s too crazy

  Justinem: wait wait. where is that, anyway? Mexico?

  Caitym: Peru … south america

  Justinem: Hmmmmmm

  Caitym: honestly, I know how insane this sounds and I would not even blame u if u sent the psych ward 2 come get me, but u KNOW me. I’m totally serious about this and would not ask if it were not so totally important.

  Justinem: what do I tell my parents?

  Caitym: I’ll set it up so they will think u r here.

  Justinem: if u can get them to believe it, then I’ll go to Machu Picchu. I can’t believe I just typed that sentence.

  Caitym: u have no idea how much I love u for this …

  Justinem: when?

  Caitym: need to be there june 21, so fly in2 peru on the 20th

  Justinem: AS IN 3 DAYS FROM NOW????????????

  Caitym: Yep

  Justinem: u ARE crazy

  Caitym: certifiable. but hey, I’m not making the deadlines here, I’m just following orders. I’ll plan a layover in SF so we can hang & I’ll fill you in on everything

  Justinem: alright, sister, it’s a go. bsides what else have I got going on?

  Caitym: God, this has been too e z …

  Justinem: r u calling me e z?

  Caitym: ha ha. Okay, so I’ll be @ the freaky heads, u will be @ Machu Picchu I’ll try to get Amisi Mhotep to organize the pyramid one. u know anyone from Cambodia?

  Justinem: Duh. The whole Huy family from your favorite vietnamese Pho soup shop!

  Caitym: Oh my God, u r a genius. Is Chantrea still in Cambodia visiting her grandparents?

  Justinem: Yep. I was just @ the restaurant 2 days ago. They asked about u, btw.

  Caitym: Oh, I’d pay a million $$ for a bowl of Pho right now. Can u do me a huge favor and ask for Chantrea’s email address?

  Justinem: Si senorita

  Caitym: Practicing for Peru?

  Justinem: Si senorita

  Caitym: u r the best.

  Justinem: no, u r

  Caitym: no, u r. hey, guess what? I’m going to ask J Crew to come with me.

  Justinem: If u can pull that off u really r the best …

  Caitym: doing it tonight, will let u know how it goes.

  Justinem: I can’t believe how weird your life got since u left.

  Caitym: u and me both. Thanks for trusting me.

  Justinem: anytime …

  Caitym: ok, I’ll be in touch

  Justinem: ciao baby.

  Now that Justine has agreed to go, I email her mom with my mom’s fake email address and ask if Justine can come for a visit. This is going to be a harder sell with summer school and all. But Justine is acing chemistry and with her extra tutoring I’m sure she’s scoring huge points.

  There’s one more thing I have to do before I go down to dinner, and it’s the hardest of all.

  I sit at my desk and force myself to do it. I write on a small piece of paper, “Alex—Can you meet me at the tower by the hidden names as soon as dinner is over? Very important. Very secret.” As I slip it in my pocket my nerves start; it feels like caterpillars are crawling around inside my stomach.

  As I’m putting on my shoes, Mom pops her head in the door. “Come on in,” I say, glancing over at my computer to make sure my screen saver is on.

  “I have a big surprise for you …” she sings.

  I try to fake excitement. “What is it?”

  She takes my hands, “Justine’s mom, Erin, has offered to fly you to San Francisco for a few days to surprise Justine as an early birthday gift!”

  “And you said yes?” I say, jumping up and down. “Please please please?”

  I may be overdoing it.

  “Of course we said yes! Dad and I will take you to the Edinburgh airport and then you’ll be on a direct flight to San Francisco.”

  “Oh my God, I’m so excited! Thank you, Mom!” I say as I hug her.

  “You should thank Erin; she’s the one who arranged all this.”

  “So when do I leave?” I ask.

  “We’ll get on the overnight train late tomorrow night and be in Edinburgh in the morning. I’m glad it’s only a few days,” she says as she gently pulls on one of my curls and lets it spring back up again. “I miss you already.”

  “Me too.” For some reason my eyes well up. I walk away mumbling something about leaving my sweater in the bathroom and dab my eyes.

  ————

  During cocktail hour I corner Uncle Li and Tenzo and tell them my plan. They have all sorts of reasons I shouldn’t do this, of course. But what can they do? Neither of their names or birthdates is carved in the wall upstairs.

  “So will you cover for me?” I ask Uncle Li. “You have to distract my parents with some big feng shui project they have to do or something.”

  “Certainly,” he replies coolly. “I’ll do what I can.”

  “And Tenzo, Bolon said to ask you about PEAR.”

  “The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research lab?” he asks.

  “I don’t know, he said you would know somebody at something called ‘PEAR’ that could measure whether or not this worked. But to be honest, I’m not really sure what you would measure. Do you even remotely know what I’m talking about?” I ask.

  “Of course. The PEAR lab runs the Global Consciousness Project that gathers information about whether there is this sort of ‘collective mind’ that all people are plugged into. Bolon told you about that?”

  “Yep.”

  “I’ll send an email to my friend at PEAR tonight. You said summer solstice, right?”

  “Just like that you can get someone to use a big lab at Princeton?” I ask.

  He nods. “If it’s too short notice for a formal experiment, he’ll do it off the record for me.”

  “Must be a good friend,” I say. It’s hard to imagine that Tenzo has many pals.

  “Actually, he is the only person at the University I could call a real friend,” he replies. “We grew up on the same block. Happy coincidence that PEAR is where you need the favor!”

  “Coincidence is just a fleeting glimpse at wholeness,” I reply. They both look at me like flames are shooting out of my nose. “That’s just Bolon talking
.”

  The three of us sit together at dinner, and while all the guests re-live their super exciting “stranded for a night in Single Malt Scotchland” experience, I explain quietly to Uncle Li and Tenzo about the emails and the plane reservations and all that I’ve done so far to make this trip happen. At one point, surprised at how well I am deceiving the authority figures in my life, Tenzo asks if I think all of this is ethical. I don’t really know what to say, but Uncle Li immediately defends me by saying, “If ever there were a case of the ends justify the means, this is it!”

  Then, as if my trip to Easter Island isn’t shocking enough, I tell them about what Mrs. Findlay had told me about Thomas and his brother Donald. Their mouths hang.

  “So do you think it’s Donald who locked us in?” whispers Uncle Li.

  “Has to be. It can’t just be a coincidence that Donald stole two ancient Sanskrit books—”

  “We should talk to Thomas tomorrow to see what he says about all this,” I say.

  When Alex reaches for my plate after dinner, I slip my note into his hand. He walks to the kitchen, comes back a few seconds later to clear my glasses, and then nods his head discretely. My stomach does roller-coaster flips and I stop breathing for a moment at the thought of being alone in the moonlight with this beautiful creature.

  And then the nervousness sets in. How can I ask a guy I’ve only known for a couple of weeks to run across the world with me?

  When my parents rise from their chairs and the guests get up and mingle, I slip out the side door into the kitchen. Mrs. Findlay is making a racket washing an enormous pot so I am able to pick up Mr. Papers and creep out the back door without even being noticed.

  In Scotland, the midsummer sun never goes far enough below the horizon to get really dark, so even at ten o’clock it’s still twilight—dark enough for stars, but light enough to see your way. When I arrive, I see Alex is already there, leaning against the tower.

  I take a deep breath to keep my cool.

  “What’s this all about then, Superspy?” he asks with a grin. His teeth shine in the moonlight like glowing Chiclets. “It’s all very ‘cloak and dagger’ now, isn’t it?”

  I’m glad to see he’s amused and not annoyed.

  “Hey, about the other day, I’m just so sorry, I really—”

  “Stop,” he says, holding up one hand. “I’m the one who needs to apologize, mate. I had no right to say those things.”

  “You didn’t say anything that wasn’t true,” I reply.

  “Let’s just forget about it, shall we?”

  “Great, I’d love to. Because there’s something I have to ask you, and I’m not sure …” My voice trails off. “God, where do I start?” I say under my breath.

  “The beginning?” he says.

  “Okay. Right. The beginning.” I exhale. “When I first got here I discovered this hidden room off of me bedroom. And in that hidden room is a passageway into the tower.”

  Alex points to the small door on the outside of the tower. “There’s one right here, too …”

  Does he think I’m an idiot? I shake my head. “The one upstairs goes to a different place. You know how this door leads to stairs that go up around the outside of the tower? Well, they’re twisting around a hidden inner core, and in this core is a huge room with all this crazy stuff in it.”

  “What kind of crazy stuff?” From the look on his face I assume he is picturing medieval torture devices.

  “It’s not dungeon crazy. It’s more, I don’t know, new-age crazy? I’ll take you there sometime when this is all over. But let me get to the important part …” I pause for a moment while I try to figure out how to put this without sounding totally insane. I decide to bring some adults into the picture first so he doesn’t think I’ve made this all up in my head.

  “Tenzo and Uncle Li have been helping me figure all this out. It’s very complicated and involves this weird code and stuff. But the bottom line is that this whole castle was built to protect a prophecy.” I look in his eyes to make sure he’s following me, and then I say, “A prophecy that I’m supposed to carry out.”

  Alex looks totally confused. “What kind of prophecy? And how do you know you are involved?” He asks this in just the right way, not with a tone of disbelief, but in a way that tells me he is genuinely curious.

  “Seriously, I know how crazy this seems. But we found this book, this poem that Fergus Mac Fireland wrote way back in the 1700s, and it mentions my name and my birth date. And the year 2012. Remember the heavy conversation at dinner about the Mayan calendar and stuff? Well, it all has to do with that, too.”

  Alex crosses his arms and rubs his biceps with his hands like he’s warming himself. “You’re giving me goose bumps, Caity.”

  “Believe me; no one is more freaked out by this than me. But here’s the deal, and I know this is way too much to ask, but I have to give it a shot.” I look him in the eyes again, trying to get a read on how receptive he’ll be.

  “Go on …” he says, “I’ll help in any way I can.”

  “Would you ever consider going away for a few days? We’d have to fib about some things, but in the end everyone would understand why we did it. It’s for the good of the world, although I know that sounds like something a schizophrenic would say.”

  “Where exactly?”

  “Have you heard of Easter Island?”

  “Are you mad?” he says, looking at me like I just told him I eat live babies for breakfast.

  I’m crushed. I don’t know what to say. “I’ve wondered that myself,” I mumble.

  We stand there silently for so long that it becomes uncomfortable. He is just staring at me, examining me like I’m some prehistoric creature that’s just been unearthed.

  “I reckon we need to back up even further,” he says. “Let’s start at the very beginning; tell me how you even came to the Isle of Huracan in the first place.”

  I’m not sure how this is going to help him, but I start at the beginning, in the spring, when my dad first got the news. “It really came out of the blue,” I tell him. “Mom and Dad came into my room while I was studying one night, and I remember thinking something was up because Dad sat in my desk chair, which he only does when he needs to ‘come down to my level.’ I don’t know about here, but that’s classic behavior that adults use on kids and dogs in the states.”

  Alex nods like he knows exactly what I mean.

  “So anyway, Dad sits down and tells me that his Uncle Hamish had just passed away and had left us some property in Scotland. Then he said they were planning on selling it, but then that very day they got a sign.”

  “A sign?”

  I nod. “This is so embarrassing to admit. The ‘sign’ thing should have been my first clue that it was all going to get weird, because my parents are not the kind of people who talk about getting signs. They’re the kind of people who make fun of people who talk about getting signs.”

  “So what was the sign?” Alex asks.

  “Oh, God, it was this obscure thing about some guys at UCLA discovering a double helix nebula near the center of the Milky Way.”

  “You mean a double helix like in DNA?” he asks.

  I nod. “Yep. Seriously, my parents are the only people in the world who would see a DNA-shaped cloud of gas and dust as a sign to keep property.”

  Alex looks confused. “What was the connection? How did this become a sign?” he asks.

  “They thought that the universe was telling them to keep the property—Hamish’s fascination with the Milky Way and then the big DNA cloud next to it told them to keep Breidablik in the bloodline.” When I say this all out loud, it sounds as crazy as finding an image of the baby Jesus on a grilled cheese sandwich.

  But Alex looks like he gets it. “Aye, when you put it that way I can see their point.”

  “Hard to believe this all came down to space dust,” I say, wondering what would have happened had Mom not read that very article on that very day.

  “
And what’s the Mayan connection? It’s odd enough that there’s a Chinese element.”

  “Back in the 1500s before the Maya were invaded by the Spanish, they took their secret knowledge of space and calendars and cycles of time and hid it all over the world. Some went to China, some came right here. They built something on this island that Fergus and Xu Bao Cheng concealed with the tower.”

  “So why is this all coming out now? And why you?”

  How did I think he was just going to say, Yeah! Right on! Get me a plane ticket and let’s roll! I give him an out. “Look, I get that you don’t want to go. Let’s just forget it.”

  He looks pissed. “Have I said no?” he asks. “Can you blame a bloke for wanting some background before hopping a plane to Chile?”

  I am so in love with him for knowing that Easter Island is part of Chile.

  “Sorry,” I say as I cross my arms across my chest. “You have no idea how weird this all is for me.”

  “Then imagine how weird it is for me, hearing it all in a five-minute conversation.”

  “I know. Sorry. So anyway, I’m supposed to unite kids by getting them to use this Tzolk’in calendar and having this worldwide kickoff of it. That’s where Easter Island comes in.”

  “It sounds bloody interesting and I’d love to help, but I couldn’t possibly get that kind of cash anytime soon,” he says, looking down and rolling a rock around with his foot.