“Take a break, men. Get some fresh air. I’ll fool around down here. You take lunch early and cool off. You’re earning your money, that’s for sure.”
The men were more than happy to be allowed to climb the ladder and lay out on the grass. One by one, the three members of Candenborn’s crew climbed out of the hole while the millionaire made small talk with the remaining men. They kept expecting Candenborn to begin looking at the wood planks, but instead he acted as though he were happy just to get to know the other people under the earth with him. After the third and final man was halfway up the ladder, he finally bent down with one of the lanterns and inspected the spot where the shovel had hit something other than dirt.
“What do we have here?” he said, hunched over, his hand running across the surface.
A thin layer of dirt was still covering the wood planks, but not enough to completely block Candenborn’s view of the wood. It was smooth and light, just like the other planks the men had removed. But as he brushed the dirt away, he noticed that the wood the men had uncovered wasn’t a series of long planks at all, but a rectangle, roughly two feet long and one foot wide.
“What do we have here?” he said again, but this time, if he could have heard himself, he would have frowned at how much he sounded like a little boy being allowed to shoot his father’s rifle for the first time.
He stood up and assessed the area. Partly, he did this to make sure he wasn’t missing anything else—a message written on the wall, a note left next to the box. His heart was racing. He was talking to himself.
“This can’t be it,” he said, looking at the fairly small box. “You can’t fit a treasure in there.”
But as he held the lantern out in front of him, the little wood box really was the only thing out of the ordinary. And as much as he wanted the moment to linger, to appreciate the exhilaration of finding something buried a hundred feet underground, he couldn’t wait any longer and he dropped to his knees and picked up the box.
It was surrounded on all sides by dried leaves, he guessed, to keep the box preserved. And they had done the trick. The box looked like it could have been put in the hole just yesterday.
His heart froze. Were his men playing a trick on him? If they were, if they were above ground, laughing hysterically at the prank they were pulling on him, none of them would ever find a job again. He would go to the edges of the earth to make sure every farmer, craftsman, and foreman knew these men were to receive no form of employment unless whoever hired them wanted Julius Candenborn’s full wrath.
But no, he had personally inspected each man before they were allowed to go down the hole. This wasn’t the first treasure hunt he had heard of. He knew what happened. One of the men was careless and left behind a piece of clothing he didn’t remember having on him. Someone else found it later on and a story spread like wildfire that the treasure seekers must be close because they had found a segment of the pirate’s clothing! The same thing happened with tools and personal effects. Part of Candenborn’s attention to detail meant that wouldn’t happen at Oak Island. And because he had done it, he knew the men hadn’t been able to sneak a wooden box down the hole even if they had wanted to.
Whatever he was holding was it. The thing. The treasure that someone had taken the trouble of burying a hundred feet underground.
“But—”
He looked around him. How much gold could such a small box contain? Not even the poorest man, whose entire fortune could fit in such a small cube, would be crazy enough to think it was worth burying so far underground.
His fingers found the wood’s edge, where the lid rested, and pried it away from the rest of the box.
“What in the lord,” Candenborn said.
Someone had to be playing a trick on him. There was no gold at all. No emeralds or rubies. Not even any sapphires!
There were only pieces of paper bound together by string to form a primitive book. A measly book? That was what someone had taken the trouble to bury?
A wave of anger washed over him then. The men who had been digging were lucky they were gone. If they were still in the hole with him, he would bash their heads in right there. He didn’t even consider himself to be a violent man, but if they were in the hole with him and gave even the smallest snicker at finding a book instead of riches, he would not only kill them, he would bury them in the godforsaken hole and then tell their families that the men had skipped town with prostitutes just so their legacy was tarnished. He was supposed to be Julius Candenborn, the millionaire who found the buried Oak Island treasure, not Julius Candenborn, the millionaire who found a damned book!
But then the logical part of his brain kicked in. It must not be an ordinary book if it’s down here, he thought. And anyway, no matter what he ended up finding, he would still be famous for being the one to find it. Maybe it has a map to the real treasure!
He flipped the cover open as delicately as he could, his thumb and index finger barely touching the first page, then began reading. His brows furrowed. Without realizing it, he had started holding his breath. The veins in his neck bulged.
“My god,” he said. And then, as he flipped each page, “My god… My god…”
11 – The Big Dig
Year: Unknown
It wasn’t as easy as simply digging a hole in the ground. The Mi’kmaq needed all of their canoes for fishing, and any island Anderson would select would be too far away to consider swimming, especially with all of the tools and supplies he would need to take with him. Not to mention that after being dropped in the cold water upon his arrival, he never wanted to shiver that badly again. That was the least of his concerns, though.
Most of his energy went into thinking of ways to create a hole as deep as the one he envisioned. He wanted to create a pit, with the primitive tools he had available, that wouldn’t be able to be excavated until at least the nineteenth century. To do so, he would need all of his ability as a trained engineer.
At first, he had thought about creating a primitive drill that could lift loose dirt toward the surface as it continued digging a hole deeper and deeper into the ground. There was no way, however, to make a drill large enough for the job he planned to undertake. Not with the resources he had.
He also thought about trying to make a primitive version of dynamite and creating huge craters, one on top of the other, until he was working his way down into a makeshift tunnel. No idea was too foolish to automatically discount, not even trying to harness the power of the ocean’s waves or even solar power. But in the end, he knew none of it would work.
For moving up and down the hole as it got further and into the earth, he settled on a simple method of using moving floors that would be controlled with ropes and pulleys and allow him to move up and down a certain amount of distance, to the next level. Panels of each floor could be removed to allow him to dig further down or to climb up to a previous level. Every ten feet, he would step onto a new wooden floor, like a prehistoric elevator, and descend another ten feet. He would still have to do years worth of digging by hand, but at least it gave him a way to get deep below ground level. For the massive amount of dirt he would be moving, he would use a second series of pulleys for raising and lowering the buckets he was alternately filling and then emptying. With this system and a complete set of tools, shovels, and buckets, he would be able to dig into the earth as far as time allowed. And the one thing he had too much of was time—the entire rest of his life—so he could easily dig as far as four tree lengths, assuming his patience lasted that long.
But even once he settled on an approach, it wouldn’t be as easy as digging the hole. He would be all by himself, on a remote island, for long stretches of time; he needed to have all the resources for survival so he could live on his own. In addition to having to make all of his own tools, he would need a way to have a steady supply of drinking water and food as well as a sturdy shelter for when the winds and rain came. All of it would take time.
Before he started, he spent an ent
ire day sitting around the village and thinking about his family and the rest of the country and even the rest of the world, and how everyone was a victim of the Tyranny in one way or another. If he was going to go through with this, if he was going to devote the rest of his life, or at least the next few years, to digging a massive hole in the ground in hopes that the box at the bottom might one day be used to prevent the Tyranny, he needed to know he was thinking clearly.
Without anyone he could talk to about his idea, all he could do was try to think what the other time travelers would do in his position. Each man had wanted nothing more than to prevent over a billion deaths around the world, stop millions of innocent people from being sent to prisons, keep everyone from living under the weight of thousands of laws meant to control every aspect of their lives.
Every Thinker knew there were a few key ways they could prevent the Tyranny—stop the gathering at Jekyll Island, foil JFK’s assassination—and that outside of these primary objectives and a batch of secondary objectives, no time traveler should interfere with the course of history. He knew that. But here, amongst the Mi’kmaq, hundreds of years before the Tyranny, it wasn’t so easy to give up the mission he had been sent back in time for. He had left his wife and son, he had survived his reappearance, and for what? Just to live as a member of a tribe?
At the end of his time reflecting on what he should do, he knew that simply living out his remaining years wasn’t enough. He couldn’t spend the rest of his life doing nothing. When it came time to eat that night’s supper with the rest of the tribe, he knew in his heart that he was doing the right thing, that the possible rewards outweighed the possible risks, that no matter what it took he would prevent Debbie and Carter and everyone else from being told where they could go and where they couldn’t, what they could say and what they couldn’t. He would keep the world from ever having to look up at the sky and see little cameras flying everywhere… or bombs dropping on their homes.
“Big day tomorrow,” he said to Benio as they ate a bowl of soup in front of a fire.
The elder did not say anything, only nodded and offered a faint smile.
“I start my big project tomorrow,” Anderson tried again.
The sides of Benio’s mouth curled upward and his eyebrows dropped into a frown. “Do what you feel you have to do. That’s all any of us can do.” Then the elder got up and walked away to chat with someone else.
“Whatever,” Anderson mumbled and ate the rest of the soup by himself.
The next morning, as the very first step in his project, he asked one of the men in the village to show him how to build a canoe. The native walked with Anderson to the forest so he could show him which trees made for good sailing, then walked with him to the existing canoes to point out how they were constructed. When the man did not know the English word for what he wanted to say and Anderson did not know the Mi’kmaq word, the native would use a combination of hand gestures and sound effects to demonstrate various things such as angled chopping and how to make an oar.
Even with the tools the Mi’kmaq let him borrow, it took Anderson two days just to chop down one tree. Each time he wound back with the axe and swung with all of his might, the blade barely left a mark on the giant hemlock.
He was sure the tribe would let him borrow one of their canoes if he asked, but he didn’t want to put them in that situation. He would need it for long stretches of time, and it wasn’t fair to use the tribe’s limited resources for a venture that went against their sacred beliefs regarding the land.
Once the tree was down, he had to give in and ask for help for the first time. It took a group of eight of the older boys to help him drag the tree trunk closer to the shore, where he would chop away the branches and start to form the actual vessel.
Every step of the process took longer and was more difficult than he thought it would be. It took two months to make a good canoe. It took a week just to make a good oar.
It took another year to make the levers and pulleys he would need. He asked one of the men in the village, a man who specialized in making jewelry, if he could forge something out of metal from one of Anderson’s designs.
“What is it?” the man said, looking at the sketch.
Anderson looked at the drawing and said, “People where I come from call it a block and tackle.”
Once the canoe was done, he dragged it into the bay’s cold water just to make sure it wouldn’t sink.
“What am I doing?” he said when he started shivering in the frigid water. No one was around to provide an answer. Benio hadn’t visited the entire time he had worked at constructing the canoe.
But somewhere out there, his wife and son were going on with their lives. They were eating their first and last meal of each day together. They were watching television together. At least he liked to think they were. Maybe the Tyranny’s men had shown up and dragged them away as a message to everyone else. And even if they were alive, would they know that none of the things that were said about him on television were true, that he wasn’t a radical or a traitor? When the people on television were nothing but a sounding block for the Tyranny, paid to praise everything the Tyranny did and ostracize everyone who would question them, it was easy to forget who the real traitors were.
Each time the people on the news said Anderson and the others like him had all betrayed their country, it would be up to his wife to whisper to their boy, “Standing up to injustice is never wrong, no matter how many people try to tell you it is, no matter what reason they give.”
But even if the Tyranny hadn’t dragged her away to one of its prisons, maybe she still wouldn’t defend him to their son when these things were said about him on the news. After all, if she did, the Tyranny would be listening and would hear that she was dissenting, and that would be all the reason it would need to ensure their son grew up without either parent.
“Daddy is a radical!” Carter would say after seeing the men in fancy suits say the same thing on television and all Debbie would be able to do would be to groan and keep silent or else never turn on the television in the first place.
Whenever he was cold or tired, whenever a new blister ripped open on his hands, he thought about these things—his wife and son and everyone he knew still under the reign of the Tyranny—and he got back to working again.
Satisfied that the canoe would get him where he wanted to go, he rowed out into the bay and began looking for a suitable island. Two miles out, he found one he thought might work. It was still within sight of the Mi’kmaq village in case something happened and he needed help, but was far enough away that they wouldn’t hear him working or notice anything he did.
But even once he was there with all of his equipment, the work was still excruciatingly slow. He had to build a shelter before he got started digging his hole because he didn’t want to be out in the open when it rained or snowed. By himself, with ineffective tools, the shelter took a month to build. It didn’t help that he went back to the mainland every three or four days to ask advice on how to address all the issues he was having building a home, asking which plants were safe to eat, and so on.
On one trip back to the mainland, he even asked the woman who had given him that first bowl of soup how she made it. A funny thing had happened during his time with the Mi’kmaq: the soup that he had once thought of as dirty water had become his favorite meal. Either his taste buds had changed or he had learned to focus on what food tasted like and not its appearance. Now, whenever someone made it, he asked for seconds and treasured each sip.
After the shelter was complete, he walked the perimeter of the island a couple times to find the best place to begin his task. When he found the spot he liked, the giant hole began as nothing more than a single shovel’s worth of dirt dug and thrown over his shoulder. Compared to making a canoe and building a shelter, digging the hole was easy because it was something he knew how to do. It would take time, much more than building the boat or a cabin, but it was not above his level of expertise.
After an hour, he had the beginnings of a circular hole that was eight feet wide. Granted, it was only two inches deep, but it was the start of what would become a pit a hundred feet into the ground.
The work was slow but steady. By the end of the next day, the hole was three feet deep and he started thinking about constructing the removable wood planks that would become the first “floor” of the hole, which could be lowered down to ten feet.
By the end of the second week, the hole was five feet deep and he was in the middle of tying ropes around each set of conjoined wood planks so they could be raised and lowered with a block and tackle.
Large chunks of time went by without him realizing it. He lost track of how long it took to finish the first set of wood planks, get them joined together, and run them with rope so he could start using it as he intended. Each day, he worked in a haze of memories of AeroCams and wars and checkpoints and surveillance, all of which kept him moving along. After a month, he wouldn’t be sure if a week had passed or a year.
Six months of every year was devoted just to threading lengths of fiber strands together with the women from the village. Between the ropes used to raise and lower each floor—forty feet of rope for the first level, eighty feet for the second, and eventually, a very long time later, four hundred feet of rope for the final level—he needed an inordinate amount of rope.
Usually, he did this when it was raining because the hole would fill up with water and it would take days or weeks for the water to empty and for the hole to be suitable to dig again. The makeshift cover he built to keep water away from the hole only showed marginal results. After a tropical storm passed through, the hole was filled with water for five months. By the time it was dry again, he had made a coil of rope that was two hundred feet long.
Year after year went by. The progress was slower the further he made his way underground, but he was always making some sort of headway. The rope and pulley system, along with the partial floors to lower himself to the depth he was digging and then raise himself back to the surface, worked perfectly. He shoveled so much that his first shovel broke and he had to go back to the mainland to have a second one made. When that one also ended up breaking a year later, he had to have a third shovel constructed.
The Theta Prophecy Page 8