by Glenn Cooper
They returned to their camp and Reggie took a couple of the lads to find a generator somewhere on the island. Atwood holed up in his caravan to furiously make an entry into his notebook, and the rest of them talked among themselves in hushed tones over a simmering lamb stew.
After sundown, the van returned. They had found a builder in Newport who hired them a portable generator. They also procured several hundred feet of electrical line and a crate of lightbulbs.
Reggie opened up the back of the van for the professor's inspection. "Reginald delivereth," he declared proudly.
"He always seems to," Atwood said, patting the big man on the back.
"This is big, isn't it, boss?"
Atwood was subdued; the experience of writing his diary left him nervously deflated. "You always dream of finding something very important. Something that changes the landscape, as it were. Well, old man, I fear this might be too big."
"How d'ya mean?"
"I don't know, Reg. I must tell you, I have a bad feeling."
They spent the entire next morning firing up the generator and stringing the underground structures with incandescent lights. Atwood decided that photography was the first order of business, so he deployed Timothy and Martin to shoot the scriptorium chamber, Ernest and Dennis to shoot the catacombs, and he and Beatrice photographed the library. Flashbulbs popped incessantly, and their ozone smell permeated the musty air. Reggie acted as roving electrician, laying wire, tinkering with misbehaving bulbs, and tending the generator, which chugged away aboveground.
By mid-afternoon they had discovered that the vast library was only the first of two. At the rear of the first chamber was a second one, presumably built, they reckoned, at a later date when space was exhausted. The second vault was as enormous as the first, 150 feet square, at least thirty feet in height. There were sixty pairs of long, tall bookcases in each chamber, each pair separated by a narrow central passage. Most of the stacks were crammed with thick tomes, except for a few cases at the back of the second room, which were empty.
After they had done a cursory exploration of the boundaries of the vaults, Atwood did a rough calculation in his notebook and showed the numbers to Beatrice. "Bloody hell!" she said. "Are these right?"
"I'm not a mathematician, but I believe they are."
The library contained nearly 700,000 volumes.
"That would make this one of the ten largest libraries in Britain," Beatrice said.
"And I daresay, the most interesting. So, shall we make a stab at why medieval monks-if that's who they were-were rather compulsively writing down names and dates from the future?" He clapped his notebook shut and the sound of it echoed for a couple of beats.
"I didn't get much sleep thinking about that," Beatrice admitted.
"Nor I. Follow me."
He led her into the second room. They hadn't strung wire very far into this chamber, and Beatrice stayed close to him, both of them following the sickly yellow light cast from his flashlight. They plunged deeply into the dark stacks, where he stopped and tapped on a spine: 1806.
He moved to another row. "Ah, getting closer, 1870." He kept going, glancing at the dates on the spines until finally, "Here we go, 1895, a very good year."
"Why?" she asked.
"Year I was born. Let's see. Move that light closer, would you? No, need to go a bit earlier, this one starts in September."
He put the book back and tried a few adjacent ones till he exclaimed, "Aha! January, 1895. It was my birthday a fortnight ago, you know. Here we go, January fourteenth, lots of names. Gosh! This thing has every language under the sun! There's Chinese, Arabic, English, of course, Spanish…Is that Finnish?-I believe that's Swahili, if I'm not mistaken." His finger moved an inch over the columns until it stopped. "By God, Beatrice! Look here! 'Geoffrey Phillip Atwood 14 1 1895 Natus.' There I am! There I bloody am! How in Hades did they know that Geoffrey Phillip Atwood was going to be born on January 14, 1895?"
Her voice was frigid. "There is no rational explanation for this, Geoffrey."
"Other than they were awfully clever buggers, wouldn't you say? I'll venture they're the ones in the catacombs. Special treatment for clever buggers. Not going to bury their special lads up in the regular cemetery. Come on, let's find something more recent, shall we?"
They hunted for a while in the second chamber. Suddenly, Atwood stopped so abruptly that Beatrice bumped him from behind. He let out a low whistle. "Look at this, Beatrice!"
He shined the flashlight beam on a heap of cloth on the ground near the end of a row, a mass of brown and black material, like a load of laundry. They cautiously drew closer until they were looking down on it, shocked by the sight of a fully clothed skeleton lying on its back.
The large straw-colored skull had traces of leathery flesh and some strands of dark hair where the scalp had been. A flat black cap lay next to it. The occipital bone was caved in with a deeply depressed skull fracture, and the stones underneath were rust-stained with ancient blood. The clothing was male: a black, padded, high-collared doublet; brown knee breeches; black hose loose on long bones; leather boots. The body lay on top of a long black cloak, trimmed at the collar with ratty fur.
"This fellow is clearly not medieval," Atwood mumbled.
Beatrice was already kneeling, taking a closer look. "Elizabethan, I'd say."
"Are you sure?"
There was a purple silk pouch hanging from the skeleton's belt, embroidered with the letters J.C. She poked at it with her index finger then gently forced the dry purse strings open, tipping silver coins onto her palm. They were shillings and threepence. Atwood moved his beam closer. The rather masculine profile of Elizabeth I was on the obverse. Beatrice flipped the coin over, and above the coat of arms was crisply stamped: 1581.
"Yeah, I'm sure," she whispered. "What do you suppose he's doing here, Geoffrey?"
"I rather think that today's going to produce more questions than answers," he responded pensively. His eyes wandered to the stacks above the body. "Look! The nearest books are dated 1581! Surely, no coincidence. We'll come back to our friend later with the camera gear but let's finish our quest first."
They carefully skirted the skeleton and carried on through the stacks until Atwood found what he was looking for.
Fortunately, the 1947 volumes were within arm's reach, since they had no ladder.
He swept the cases with his beam and exclaimed, "I've found it! Here's where 1947 starts." He excitedly pulled down volumes until he triumphantly declared, "Today! January thirty-first!"
They sat together on the cold floor, squeezed between the racks, and let the heavy book straddle their laps so that one-half was resting on one of her thighs and one half on his. They scanned page after page of densely-packed names. Natus, Mors, Mors, Natus.
Atwood lost count of the number of pages turned, fifty, sixty, seventy.
Then he saw it, moments before she did: Reginald William Saunders Mors.
The diggers had made the Cunning Man in Fishbourne their local. They could walk to the inn from the excavation site, the beer cheap, and the landlord let them pay a penny per head to use the bathtub in the guest wing. The pub sign, a leering man crouching over a stream catching a trout with his bare hands, never failed to elicit a smile, but not this evening. The diggers sat alone at a long table in the smoky public bar, moodily avoiding the locals.
Reggie checked his timepiece and tried to make light of the matter. "This round's on me if I can borrow a couple of quid. Pay you back tomorrow, Beatrice."
She reached into her purse and tossed him a few bills. "Here you go, you big gorilla. You'll be here to pay me back."
He snatched the bank notes. "What do you think, Prof? Is it curtains for old Reg?"
"I'll be the first to admit it, I'm foxed by all of this," Atwood said, rapidly downing the remaining quarter pint of his beer. He was on his third, which was more than his usual, and his head was swimming. All of them were drinking at a clip and their words were getting s
lushy.
"Well, if this is my last night on earth, I'm going out with a gut full of best bitter," Reggie said. "Same again for everyone?"
He gathered the empty pint mugs by their handles and carried them to the bar. When he was out of earshot Dennis leaned in and whispered to the group, "No one actually believes this rubbish, do they?"
Martin shook his head. "If it's rubbish, how come the prof's birth date was in one of the books?"
"Yeah, how come?" Timothy chimed in.
"There has to be a scientific explanation," Beatrice said.
"Does there?" Atwood asked. "Why does everything have to fit into a neat scientific package?"
"Geoffrey!" she exclaimed. "Coming from you? Dr. Empiricism? When was the last time you went to church?"
"Can't remember. Excavated quite a few old ones." He had the dazed look of a newly minted drunk. "Where's my beer gone?" He looked up and saw Reggie at the bar. "Oh, there he is. Good man. Survived Rommel. Hope he survives Vectis."
Ernest was thoughtful. He wasn't as tipsy as the rest. "We need to do some tests," he said. "We need to look up more people we know or perhaps historical figures to verify their dates."
"Just the approach," Atwood said, hammering a beer mat with his hand. "Using the scientific method to prove that science is rubbish."
"And if all the dates are right?" Dennis asked. "Then what?"
"Then we turn this over to scary little blokes who do scary little things in scary little offices in Whitehall," Atwood replied.
"Ministry of Defense," Ernest said quietly.
"Why them?" Beatrice asked.
"Who else?" Atwood asked. "The press? The Pope?" Reggie was waiting for the publican to pull the last of the pints. "We're dying of thirst here!" Atwood called to him.
"Just coming, boss," Reggie said.
Julian Barnes came through the door, his great coat open and flapping. No one was more surprised than the local men, who knew who he was but had never seen him in a pub, let alone this one. He had an unpleasant kind of bearing, a snotty blend of entitlement and pomposity. His hair was slicked back, his moustache perfectly carved. He was small and ferretlike.
One of the locals, a union man who despised his lot, said sarcastically, "The wing commander's got us confused with the Conservative party offices. Down the road on the left, Squire!"
Barnes ignored him. "Tell me where I can find Reginald Saunders!" he boomed out in a round oratorical tone.
The archaeologists snapped their heads in attention.
Reggie was still at the bar, about to deliver the poured pints. He was a dart's toss from the pompous little man. "Who wants to know?" he asked, straightening himself to his full, intimidating height.
"Are you Reginald Saunders?" Barnes demanded officiously.
"Who the hell are you, mate?"
"I repeat my question, are you Saunders?"
"Yeah, I'm Saunders. Have you got business with me?"
The small man swallowed hard. "I believe you know my wife."
"I also know your motor, guv. Toss-up which I prefer."
With that, the wing commander pulled a silver pistol from his pocket and shot Reggie through his forehead before anyone could say or do anything.
Following his audience with Winston Churchill, Geoffrey Atwood was driven back to Hampshire in a covered army transit lorry. Beside him on the wooden bench was an impassive young captain, who only spoke when spoken to. The destination was a wartime base where the army still maintained a large barracks and training ground, and where Atwood and his group had been detained.
At the onset of the journey Atwood had asked him, "Why can't I be released here in London?"
"My instructions are to return you to Aldershot."
"Why is that, if I may ask?"
"Those are my instructions."
Atwood had been in the army long enough to know an immovable object when he saw one, so he saved his breath. He supposed solicitors were drawing up secrecy agreements and that all would be well.
As the van squeaked and bucked on its worn suspension, he tried to think pleasant thoughts about his wife and his children, who would be overjoyed at his return. He thought about a good meal, a hot bath, and resuming his reassuringly pedestrian academic duties. Vectis would by necessity disappear down a deep well, his notes and photographs confiscated, his memories expunged, practically speaking. He imagined he might have furtive chats with Beatrice over a glass of sherry in his rooms at the museum, but their heavy-handed confinement had achieved its desired effect: he was scared. Far more scared than ever during the war.
When he returned to the locked barracks, it was nighttime and his comrades surrounded him like photographers swarming a film star. A pale, dispirited lot, they had lost weight and were irritable, fed up, and ill with worry. Beatrice was housed separately from the men but was allowed to stay with them during the day in a common room where their minders brought them colorless army grub. Martin, Timothy, and Dennis played hand after dreary hand of gin rummy, Beatrice fumed and swore at the guards, and Ernest sat in the corner stroking his hands in an agitated, depressive state.
They had all pinned their hopes on Atwood's foray to London, and now that he was back, demanded to know every detail. They listened, rapt, as he recounted his conversation with Major General Stuart and applauded and wept when he told them their release was imminent. It was only a matter of working through government secrecy agreements for signature. Even Ernest perked up and pulled his chair closer, the tension in his jaw slackening.
"You know what I'm going to do when I get back to Cambridge?" Dennis asked.
"We're not interested, Dennis," Martin said, shutting him up.
"I'm going to take a bath, put on clean clothes, go to the jazz club and introduce myself to loose women."
"He said we're not interested," Timothy said.
They spent the next morning waiting impatiently for news of their release. At lunchtime an army private entered with a tray and laid it on a communal table. He was a dull humorless lad whom Beatrice loved to torture. "Here, you dimwitted wanker," she said. "Get us a couple of bottles of wine. We're going home today."
"I'll have to check, miss."
"You do that, sonny. And check to see if your brains have spilled out your ears."
Major General Stuart picked up his ringing phone at his office in Aldershot. It was a call from London. The muscles of his hard face, fixed with disdain, didn't move. The exchange was short, to the point. There was no need for exposition or clarification. He signed off with a "Yes, sir," and pushed his chair away from his desk to carry out his orders.
The lunch was unappetizing but they were hungry and eager. Over stale rolls and glutinous spaghetti, Atwood, a man of great descriptive powers, told them everything he could recall about Churchill's famed underground bunker. Midway through their meal the private returned with two uncorked bottles of wine.
"As I live and breathe!" Beatrice exclaimed. "Private Wanker came through for us!" The lad put the bottles down and left without a word.
Atwood did the honors, pouring the wine into tumblers. "I would like to propose a toast," he said, turning serious. "Alas, we will never be able to speak again of what we found at Vectis, but our experience has forged among us an eternal bond that cannot be torn asunder. To our dear friend, Reggie Saunders, and to our bloody freedom!"
They clinked glasses and gulped the wine.
Beatrice made a face. "Not from the officers' mess, I shouldn't think."
Dennis started seizing first, perhaps because he was the smallest and lightest. Then Beatrice and Atwood. In seconds all of them had slumped off their chairs and were convulsing and gurgling on the floor, bloody tongues clamped between teeth, eyes rolling, fists clenched.
Major General Stuart came in when it was over and wearily surveyed the sorry landscape. He was bone-tired of death but there was no more obedient soldier in His Majesty's Army.
He sighed. There was heavy lifting to do and it would be a
long day.
The general led a small contingent of trusted men back to the Isle of Wight. Atwood's excavation site had been cordoned off and the cutting covered by a large field headquarters tent, shielding it from view.
Abbot Lawlor had been told by a military man that Atwood's party had discovered some unexploded ordnance in their trench and were evacuated to the mainland for safety. In the intervening twelve days, a steady flow of army transit lorries were ferried to the island by Royal Navy barges, and one by one the heavy vehicles rumbled up to the tent. Squaddies who had no idea of the significance of what they were handling did the backbreaking work around the clock of hauling wooden crates out of the ground.
The general entered the library vaults, the clop of his boots reverberating sharply. The rooms were stripped bare, row after row of towering empty bookcases. He stepped over the Elizabethan skeleton with complete disinterest. Another man might have tried to imagine what transpired there, tried to understand how it was possible, tried to wrestle with the philosophical vastness of it all. Stuart was not that man, which perhaps made him ideal for the job. He only wanted to return to London in time to get to his club for a scotch whiskey and a rare beefsteak.
When his walk-through was done, he would pay a visit to the abbot and commiserate about the terrible mistake the army had made: that they'd believed they had cleared all the ordnance before allowing Atwood's group to return. Unfortunately, it seems they missed a German five-hundred-pounder.
Perhaps a mass in their honor would be appropriate, they would somberly agree.
Stuart had the area cleared and let his demo man finish the wiring. When the percussion bombs went off, the ground shook seismically and tons of medieval stones collapsed in on their own weight.
Deep within the pancaked catacombs, the remains of Geoffrey Atwood, Beatrice Slade, Ernest Murray, Dennis Spencer, Martin Bancroft, and Timothy Brown would lie for eternity beside the bones of generations of ginger-haired scribes whose ancient books were packed into a convoy of olive-green lorries streaming toward a U.S. Air Force base in Lakenheath, Suffolk, for immediate transport to Washington.