by Jess Lourey
Salem’s brow furrowed. “You said when you ran over here, each wheel was set to the letter A?”
“Yeah.”
She yanked her phone out of her pocket, opened up the photo stream, and scrolled to her clearest photo of the puzzle lock. She tapped the screen with her pointer finger to enlarge it. Ten As, all in a row. Salem’s cheeks burned. She shouldn’t have accused him of lying, even in her brain. Yet, something about him troubled her. Of course, most people troubled her. The squeal of approaching sirens pierced the air, commanding her attention.
Bel stopped her stream of soothing words, head whipping toward the cemetery’s entrance. “I’m going to make sure they take the shortest route here.” She took off down the walkway, her sneakers pounding.
When Salem faced the lock, all the letters had returned to As. She gasped. They were programmed to reset. What had triggered them? Were they on a time sensor?
That seemed unlikely considering Medary had been interred nearly 150 years earlier.
Timed technology had been uncommon then. It was more probable that the reset had been triggered by some movement, either hers out here or Jinny’s on the inside.
He tapped her shoulder. “Here they come.”
She turned her attention toward the cemetery’s entrance. White, red, and blue lights flashed off the ceiling of the sky, maybe a half a mile away. They would arrive in less than a minute, and then what?
Her eyes scraped the mausoleum’s door. Its surface was flat except for a smooth knob perched above the puzzle lock, protruding like the emergency handle inside an industrial freezer.
On impulse, she pushed on it.
The heavy marble of the door creaked. A wash of rotten air kissed Salem’s face.
“Holy shit!” The man jumped. “You opened it?”
She didn’t think she had, but the stink of decay was followed by the tiniest of sobs. She dragged the door the rest of the way open, stepping into the ethereal dark.
“Jinny?”
Salem reached into her pocket for her phone’s flashlight. Distracted, she tripped over a soft bag on the crypt floor. Her cell flew from her hands and skittered into the absolute black at the rear of the tomb.
The door closed behind her with an unearthly howl.
Panic swamped her.
She was trapped in a darkness so complete that her eyes tried to make shapes against the black. She was drowning, dying, being buried alive. She couldn’t breathe.
She dropped to her knees and grabbed at the nearest object: the soft bag.
But it wasn’t a bag at all.
Salem understood this the moment she touched it, the second she felt the unyielding, cold stone of death under the soft cloth.
She’d tripped over a dead body.
She scrambled away from the corpse, her back slamming into the door. “Jinny?” The word came out as a sob.
A whimper from the farthest of the chamber answered her.
Salem’s breath caught. Of course the dead body wasn’t the child. She wouldn’t be cold already. A hot burst of relief pierced her panic. “Jinny? Is that you? My name is Salem.”
“There’s a dead lady in here.” Every tiny word came out in a hitch, followed by a wheeze. “I saw her when he closed the door on me.”
Salem’s gut clenched. “I think I tripped over her.”
“I have asthma. I can’t breathe.”
Salem began moving toward the child’s voice, even though it meant climbing over the corpse. “Do you have medicine?”
“Not in here.”
And the question she didn’t want to ask. “Who closed the door on you?”
“Crow. My mom’s friend. At least I think maybe he did, but I don’t really like him. We were playing hide and go seek. He brought me over here and said it would be a good place to hide.”
“Did he open the door?”
“I didn’t see. He didn’t even let Teddy come in.” The girl’s words were farther apart, the effort to produce them painful to hear.
Salem kept moving toward the child, hands searching every inch of the floor as she crawled. The mausoleum was 12’ x 10’. Medary was the only person buried in here.
Well, the only official burial. She’d covered five feet already. And this little girl thought Crow had trapped her in here on purpose. Something he’d said when she and Bel had first come upon him was nagging at her, but she couldn’t grab a hold of it. “OK, honey. I need to find my phone. Can you help me?”
“Phones don’t work in the cemetery. That’s what my mom said.”
Salem continued to feel along the cold stone floor, trying not to think of the odor, sweet and rotten joined together like a trick. The smell reminded her of the reek of a dead squirrel that had been trapped in her garden shed. She continued feeling the ground in a grid pattern. “I need the light.”
If I didn’t break the phone when I dropped it. Dumb.
Her hand brushed against something hard. She’d been moving too fast. She lost the spot. Where was it? Had it been her phone? It took her five forever seconds to find where she’d felt it. Her hands gripped the cool plastic. She moaned in relief.
My phone.
She swiped the screen, bathing the mausoleum in a sanitized white. She drew her first full breath since she’d been locked in here. A tiny girl cowered in the far corner, almost within touching distance, all hair and eyes and tears. The child rushed toward Salem the moment the light appeared, grabbing her hard enough to draw blood. She shivered in Salem’s arms, fragile as a bird and breathing like Darth Vader.
The panic rose again in Salem’s throat. She swallowed it. She had to keep her head on or this girl wasn’t going to make it out of here. Hell, she might not make it out of here. She pointed the phone’s flashlight around the space. It was the size of a low-ceilinged dorm room. Samuel Medary was entombed in the east wall, and he’d been there since November 7, 1864, so he did not account for the smell of rotting flesh. An altar balanced next to his crypt displayed a vase that had one time held flowers. They were now dust sprinkled over a white stub of candle and what looked like flint.
The space was surprisingly clean, but of course it would be, sealed tight as a tomb for 150 years.
Almost.
Hands shaking, Salem trained her light to the only spot in the crypt she had yet to survey: the corpse just inside the door. She covered Jinny’s eyes with her free hand.
She could already see by the outer ring of light that the body was lying face up.
She aimed her cell at the feet. Women’s tennis shoes, size 8.
She moved the light up the jeans, to the fall coat, hands splayed out at the side.
They were purply-black and broken looking.
As if she’d been desperately beating at a door with her hands, terrified to the point that she’d used them like clubs long after they were broken. The pain must have been excruciating.
Salem felt lightheaded. She forced herself to keep the flashlight moving to the face.
She couldn’t stifle the shock.
Mackenzie Swenson, goth girl, liked to be called Mack, missing since October 1.
Even with her face frozen in a rictus of fear, Salem was sure it was her.
A memory of Mackenzie’s mom, crying, terrified for her daughter, flashed across the movie screen of Salem’s brain. Salem bit her tongue to keep from weeping. She didn’t want to scare Jinny any more than she already was. If such a thing was even possible. Salem tumbled down the rabbit hole. Could fear be measured? Had science produced a terror scale? Was there an absolute zero? Was Jinny at it? Was she?
Jinny’s breath stopped, yanking Salem back to the surface.
“Jinny!” She squeezed the child in her arms.
The pause lasted a lifetime.
Finally, a ragged, wheezy breath answered Salem. It was quiet, but it was something, a reminder that Salem did not have the luxury of panic. She needed to commandeer her own resources and set her mind to the task rather than letting it escape lik
e it always did.
“We will figure this out,” she said, more to herself than Jinny.
In the puzzle lay the solution.
Somehow, Mackenzie Swenson had been locked in here to die.
Not somehow. Crow. That’s what Jinny had called him, and it fit. He was sleek and beady-eyed. The memory that had been nagging at her came into full view. He’d told Bel it was no use to yell for Jinny, that he’d been hollering her name since she’d disappeared into the crypt.
But he hadn’t been yelling. Salem and Bel would have heard it in the cemetery if he had.
He’d lied.
With absolute clarity, Salem knew Crow had locked Mackenzie Swenson in here to die.
Then he’d locked Jinny in.
And now he’d trapped Salem.
An angry fire began to crackle through her, burning up the fear.
If he’d trapped them all in here, that meant that goddamn code was breakable.
She swallowed hard. She would have to move Mackenzie’s body to reach the lock. There wasn’t time to hesitate.
“Jinny, I need you to sit over here, a couple feet away from me. I need to move this lady so I can open the door. Can you do that? Jinny?’
The little girl was limp in her arms. Salem flashed the light on the child’s face.
Jinny’s cheeks and lips were blue.
Biting back tears, Salem tugged off her coat and rested the child in it before turning to the corpse. She slid her hands underneath and lifted, whispering apologies to Mackenzie’s ghost. The body was clumsy and dense, as unwieldy as a bag of soup, the festering-sweet smell of decay penetrating Salem’s flesh. Her stomach lurched, but she kept the bile down, even through the slide and lurch of loose flesh as Mackenzie’s corpse shifted in her hands like an enormous rotting peach. She set the body gently down, just to the side of the door, her breath escaping in small green gasps.
She knelt in front of the lock.
It’s setting was identical on this side of the door, except for the tiny hourglass embedded in the stone above the row of letters. The lock was programmed to reset on a timer—the hourglass explained how—but that didn’t help Salem to crack the code.
Whereas the outer lock had displayed all As, in here it was a row of Ms, the opposite letter on the wheel. What possible sequence could Samuel Medary have chosen out of the trillions of possibilities?
Or maybe it wasn’t locked at all.
She tried the knob, a twin to the one she’d pushed on outside.
She may as well have tried to move a Buick. The door was locked solid.
Next she tried variations of the word “Minnesota,” cutting and adding letters, rearranging, spinning the letter disks like tiny roulette wheels.
The door stayed sealed.
Even worse, grains of sand were now sliding through the hourglass. Watching it, she calculated that it was programmed to reset the lock every 10 seconds. That was hardly enough time to input the code if you knew it, let alone guess at it.
But she didn’t have time for that kind of thinking.
She tried scrambling the letters of Medary’s name.
Still nothing.
Jinny wheezed, then stopped.
Three seconds later, she breathed again, like a balloon losing air.
Salem wiped the tears from her eyes. Crack this code, dummy!
She was spinning the wheels so fast that they grew warm.
Variations on James Buchanan, the president who had appointed Medary to Minnesota.
L’Étoile du Nord, Minnesota’s motto.
St. Paul. Mississippi. Minneapolis. Fort Snelling.
Nothing.
She slammed her fist into the tomb’s door. It only reminded her of Mackenzie’s final hours. The code’s key must be right in front of her face. She looked at the phone she held. She would go online to pull up Medary’s family member names. She’d minimized the photo she’d taken of the lock’s exterior before she remembered that there was no Internet service.
She recalled something else, too.
The inscription.
Of course.
It was a motherloving chronogram!
Salem had first read about chronograms in a tiny Jewish codebook her mother had picked up for her at a garage sale. A chronogram, or “time writing,” was the use of letters to represent numbers, which, when rearranged, revealed a date. Gravestone chronograms were popular in the mid-500s, fell out of a favor, reappeared during the Renaissance, and hadn’t been heard of much since. In fact, Salem wouldn’t have heard of them if not for that slim yard sale book.
“Jinny, I think I figured out how to open the door!”
The child didn’t respond. Not a sound. Not even a breath.
Salem bit down on a sob. She was sweating despite the crypt’s chill. She had to move faster. She enlarged the photo she’d taken of the chronogram, mentally recording which letters were also Roman numerals:
I
CHRISTI OSTENDERE VIAM: CVLTVS PAX, VERITAS, LVX, ET VITA.
FINIS
All laid out, that gave her: I, C, I, I, D, V, I, M, C, V, L, V, X, V, I, L, V, X, V, I, I, I.
Her gut plummeted. That was 21 letters! The puzzle lock had only 10 spaces.
Jinny wouldn’t survive, and Salem was going to suffocate. Every time she blinked, all she could see against her eyelids was Mackenzie’s swollen purple-black fists, the terror of dying alone in a tomb forever frozen on her face.
Salem whimpered.
And then she remembered.
In a true chronogram, the letters alone meant nothing. They had to be added to reveal the date they represented. Salem pushed aside Mackenzie’s gruesome image to make room for a long mental equation:
100 + 1 + 1 + 500 + 5 + 1 + 1000 + 100 + 5 + 50 + 5 + 10 + 5 +1 + 50 + 5 +10 + 5 + 1 +
1 + 1 = 1858
1858!
The year Minnesota became a state, with Governor Samuel Medary at the helm.
Salem would have cursed her stupidity if there’d been time. She translated the number back into Roman numerals.
MDCCCLVIII
Ten letters.
Fingers trembling, she input the letters into the puzzle lock’s dials.
Each one created a whisking sound that vibrated in her bones.
Grains of sand fell like bombs in the hourglass, erasing her life in seconds.
At the final letter, I, the lock’s tumblers fell into place.
Click.
The door opened with the quietest of sighs.
Salem yanked on the handle and was bathed in red and blue lights and a cacophony of voices, the squawk of radios, the smell of coffee and worry.
Bel pushed through and crushed Salem in a hug, her eyes red from crying.
Salem broke free to grab Jinny. EMTs rushed in, oxygen mask at the ready, and wrenched the child from her hands. Once Jinny was safely outside of the tomb, Salem pointed at the corpse. The law enforcement lights flashed over it like macabre Christmas lights.
“I think that’s Mackenzie Swenson,” Salem said weakly.
Bel steered Salem to the side, out of the way. “What the hell happened?” she asked. “How’d you end up inside that godforsaken crypt?”
Salem searched the crowd that had gathered, mostly emergency personnel plus some hangers on. Crow and Katrina were rushing toward the ambulance that Jinny had been taken to. Katrina stepped inside to be with her daughter, but there wasn’t room for Crow. He stood worriedly at the rear of the vehicle. His concern appeared genuine.
Until he flashed Salem a look.
Followed by a smile that landed like a stomach punch.
Salem’s heartbeat stopped for a moment, and then came thudding back with a Vengeance.
“Ma’am? Can we check you out?”
Salem recoiled. An EMT was speaking to her. “What?”
He indicated the back of a second ambulance. “Just a quick check-up.”
“How’s Jinny?”
“The child? She’ll be fine.” He led S
alem toward a folding chair and took out a blood pressure cuff. “They’ll take her to the hospital and run a full panel. Probably keep her overnight, but she’s breathing normally. A minute longer in there, I don’t know that she’d be so lucky.”
Bel squeezed Salem. “You cracked the code, didn’t you?”
Salem nodded, numb. “It was a chronogram.” She listened to the beeps of the blood pressure cuff, terrified to look at Crow again. “How’d Mackenzie die?”
The EMT grimaced. “We haven’t identified the body yet, but whoever that was, she died of thirst. It’s a tough way to go.” He removed the cuff. “Blood pressure is a little high, which is to be expected. Any cuts or scrapes I should know about?”
Salem shook her head. A police officer stepped into her line of sight.
“Ma’am, I’m officer Webster. Can I ask how it is that you came to be trapped inside a tomb?”
Salem squeezed her eyes shut. The truth was that no one had pushed her. She’d stepped inside willingly. She also hadn’t observed Crow close the door behind her.
Even Jinny had said she wasn’t sure if she’d been pushed, or how the door had shut. “I don’t know.”
The officer nodded. “For now, we’re treating this as an accident. We might have to seal the door on this tomb, unless we find evidence of malicious intent.”
Salem was sure they wouldn’t discover anything, not a lick of evidence linking Crow to this, no fingerprints on Mackenzie, no witnesses to him luring her here. The best she could do was tell Katrina her fears and make sure Jinny was never alone with Crow again.
When she opened her eyes, she had a clear sightline to him. He stood alone in the wake of the ambulance driving away with Jinny and Katrina. Creepy handsome. His shoulders were slumped, the perfect posture of a worried boyfriend. But then he turned and locked eyes with Salem. The sly smile was back, for her only.
See you around, he mouthed.
He winked at her before disappearing into the crowd.
*Thanks to Austin Freeman’s short story “The Puzzle Lock” for this story’s cipher inspiration and to Arthur Conan Doyle for the title’s. The short story above is a prequel to Salem’s Cipher, occurring six years earlier in Salem’s life. Appointed by President James Buchanan, Samuel Medary was in fact the governor of Minnesota when it became a state. He died in November 7, 1864, as represented in the story, but he is actually buried in Ohio in a standard tomb without a puzzle lock. Minneapolis’ Lakewood Cemetery exists and is gorgeous, but with the exception of its Memorial Chapel and Mausoleum, all other details have been made up, as have all the characters and incidents in this story.