“You have The Book of Sula…” he whispered in disbelief to himself. “Blair. She has The Book of Sula. It is the Cloccan book of restorative powers. It has not been seen for over an age. But how? THAT is what you pulled from the manuscripts?” Reid stammered in disbelief.
Blair walked over to us and looked Reid in the eye. “I know. I would have tried something—anything—but my assistance and our first aid kit pales in comparison to this kind of Cloccan medicine. There is no better antidote for death than the book of life. I knew it had to be The Book of Sula.”
Reid blinked hard. “Thank God. The legend said the shrine of the white elephant had to be illuminated with the light of a human torch, and a life given its rightful end. I hate to admit it, but I thought you were dying, Whit. If there needs to be an altar sacrifice at the shrine of the white elephant let it be me instead.”
We were standing in front of the magnificent white elephant kneeling on a polished black marble platform. A small dagger rested in the curl of her trunk, its black hilt decorated with cairngorm stones. The stones reminded me of the color of Reid’s eyes, a smoky-brown quartz color. I noticed one of her tusks was missing.
“Put me down Reid,” I commanded. My voice was strong and my body was renewed. I had to get moving. “It’s an order.” I was prepared to fight my way down if he did not comply and he could tell. He set me down and I took the dagger before Reid’s crane instincts could jeopardize his own life. On the ground was its leather sheath. Picking it up, I placed the dagger back inside it and tucked it into the wool sock of my hiking boot. Reid shook his head. “It’s pointless, Whit. We cannot get out of here until a life is given a rightful end.”
I looked at the beautiful Lucie statue and knew this was the mistake of man. Death was always senseless. She was there to help us find a hidden path and it was her life that needed to be given a rightful end. She needed her dignity restored. I removed the tusk that formed the spine of The Book of Sula and inserted it into the empty space where it should have been on the statue.
A golden rope ladder dropped from Lucie’s jade back to our feet. “Patrick is the human torch. A rightful end of life is not death. It is dignity. Death is not the end,” I said as I grabbed the rope. Lucie was about to show us the way out of the cavern and I could finally feel the spear. It was close.
Blair grinned and slapped me a high five. “Good to have you back. That move was totally awesome. Mr. Parks is going to love it. He always said you use tools like no one he has ever trained.”
“I have to hand it to you. I thought it would be hard for you to impress me more than finding The Book of Sula. But saving my life and getting us out of here…that pretty much qualifies,” Reid said with a sly grin, and his eyes shone. I nodded and accepted his heartfelt compliment.
“Let’s say we are even. If it weren’t for quite a bit of help, I would not have gotten out of the first chamber. We all have strengths and weaknesses and that’s why a team can accomplish so much more than an individual. Together we are better.” I winked at Reid, reminding him of what Mr. Parks told us not to forget.
I took the backpack from Patrick and placed the cover and loose pages of The Book of Sula inside, grabbed the rope, and started up Lucie’s smooth, hard back.
Chapter Sixteen: Impetus
Standing upon the statue of Lucie, the way out was clear. There was a platform that led out of the cave but it was too far to jump across and, if we missed, we would land in a river of liquid mercury. Blair, Patrick, and Reid climbed up onto the flat wide back of the Lucie statue. Patrick reproduced the flame of light and said, “I thought you said the white elephant was the remover of obstacles, Reid. It’s nice she is giving us a boost but there is no way we are going to make it across that river unless Lucie starts walking. Who knows? Maybe she will. This morning has been totally crazy so I guess I am up for a completely insane afternoon.”
Reid looked at his watch. It was thirty minutes until noon and I was positive that was the time of day the spear could be released. Our first goal was to get out of the cave and if we got the spear in the bargain that would be a bonus.
Blair was trying to calculate the distance across the river. “Let me see what I have, Whit.” I took the pack off and Blair pulled out some bungee cords and her duct tape. “Lucie is said to help those who tried to help themselves, but we don’t have many supplies. We left my long rope at the entrance of the cave.”
The word rope stuck in my mind. “Reid, hold up your hand and see if your magnetism can help us find something.” We were faced with the same predicament here—we could see the clue but could not reach it. Dr. Cohen’s words about the scavenger hunt echoed through my mind when he said Dr. West had to “make it a growth experience.” Clearly, Dr. West had wanted us to learn from the hunt so we could use the knowledge later.
Reid held his hand up and this time I felt a vibration. Blair was looking at him intensely and Reid put a finger to his lips. Once again, I felt like I was on the outside of a conversation. Had he done a Cloccan call he had mentioned? There was no time to find out because a swing with a stone seat was coming toward us.
“The seat is made of loadstone. It is magnetite that has the power to attract as well as be attracted. Did you know that was there? I mean, with your intuition?” Reid asked me. He held the swing steady and looked over the thick braided vines.
“Lucky guess. It was something I remembered from our team experience at the Lincoln Memorial. Patrick, you go first. Use the light from your hand to help time your jump and then you can help us all see the landing,” I said. “Blair will go next.”
Reid pushed him but Patrick made it only halfway across. For the next attempt, Reid directed, “Patrick, pump with your legs and use your weight to create momentum. Once you pick up enough speed to get to the landing—drop. I will be able to bring the swing back.” He pushed Patrick as hard as he could and Patrick leaned back to maximize the propulsion of his weight through the air. This time, he glided across the distance and dropped to the platform. A small fire lit the platform as he waited for the rest of us.
Reid brought the rope swing back to Lucie’s jade back. He held it steady and said, “Whitney and Blair, you two go together. You will need the weight of both of you to carry the push across. I can bring the rope back with my hand. I will try to run off Lucie’s back and use my weight to create enough motion to swing across.”
Reid pulled the swing as far back as he could and gave us a hard push. We were flying over the river when I heard one of the vines fray and Blair curse. There was too much weight for the swing. Without hesitation I dropped the backpack.
“The Book of Sula!” Blair gasped as she watched the backpack fall into the silver river of liquid mercury beneath us. I understood that a Cloccan would never have been able to drop the book, but HER story, like a true story of life, did not belong to any of us. Blair did not know that I had seen the pages inside the book and they were blank. HER story was unwritten; The Book of Sula’s purpose was to restore life and helped us find the hidden path. It had served its purpose.
My eyes were on Patrick and the platform. I grabbed Blair with my free hand to focus her on the jump and we crashed into Patrick. I could see the river of liquid mercury slinking like a silver snake below us. It was a long way down. We were safe but I had the bad feeling Reid was not. I stayed frozen in place as I tried to figure out why.
“Did I miss something?” Patrick asked Blair as he pointed me. I was as still as a statue as I tried to glean information of the immediate future from the air.
“Not yet. A precognitive can sense danger before it happens, and something is wrong,” Blair explained. I took a deep breath and nodded.
In Reid’s mind, I could see him hoist himself into the swing after he ran as hard as he could off Lucie’s stone back. He was about halfway across when I realized our oversight: the loadstone that helped Reid retrieve the swing would prevent him from making an accurate jump to the ledge. The rock’s magnetic force would impact his ti
ming if he didn’t get rid of the swing’s seat before he jumped.
I pulled the sheathed dagger from inside my sock and handed it to Patrick. “Patrick, please use your best football pass and get this to Reid. There is not a second to lose,” I said urgently.
Patrick extended his hand and held the dagger in his palm to judge its weight. He yelled to Reid to get his attention and pumped his arm to show him he was about to throw something his way. In the blink of an eye, it sailed across the cavern and landed safely in Reid’s hands.
Reid had the tool he needed but he did not know what I wanted him to do with it. Thankfully, he crossed into my mind and I showed him my concern. I saw his brow wrinkle in deliberation as he wondered if the magnetic pull would significantly impact his jump trajectory. Impatiently, I stamped my foot in response.
An instant later, one of the swing’s vines started to unravel. Dry dust clouded the air as the vine frayed and I could only hope Reid used his few remaining seconds to cut the seat free. Finally, I watched the loadstone seat fall silently into the abyss. Reid emerged holding fast to the remaining woven lifeline. His eyes were focused on the ledge as he calculated his jump and then, unexpectedly, the rope dropped a few inches.
The pressure of Reid’s weight was causing too much strain on the withered vines and some were starting to snap from high over his head. He had missed his jump opportunity and we had nothing we could use to catch him. Panic blitzed my mind as I helplessly watched Reid disappear from view.
I looked up and saw the vine breaking free as it writhed through the air. “The rope!” I yelled with enough warning for Patrick to reach out and grab it. Then I heard Reid slam into the cliff beneath us. It couldn’t have felt good, but at least I knew he was alive if he was holding the rope.
The braided rope squeaked under the pressure of Reid’s weight. He had to get to the ledge before this portion of vine also disintegrated. “Reid! Get up here!” I yelled. “The rope is not going to hold!”
“I’m moving as fast as I can, Florence Nightingale! No time to shake off the massive body check I took into a wall of solid rock, I guess. Can’t you help a guy out?”
I grabbed onto the rope to help Patrick pull him up. To my surprise, it was as light as air. What had he done? I thought frantically. Had he let go? I dropped to the ground to look over the platform.
“It’s nice to know you DO care. At least a little,” he said with a grin from under the platform. I felt relieved and angry at the same time and I hated when he did that to me. “Before you get too huffy, I found a golden rope ladder that drops from the platform to this entrance. Look on the bright side, I just saved us some time and aggravation. You all were standing on a dead end.”
Patrick and Blair were lying on either side of me and heard what Reid said. Patrick moved toward the ladder and lit it with his hand. “Cool. Talk about a hidden path. This is an almost impossible to find path!” Patrick said as Blair held onto the rope of gold threads and climbed down. I thought about what Patrick said and as I went down the ladder I realized it WAS probably impossible for someone who was not Cloccan to find. Was there some kind of infrasound coming from under the platform?
Patrick joined the three of us and rubbed his hands together. In front of us was a large tunnel and its ceiling was lined with several bronze bells in a variety of gigantic sizes. I was wary this was another Cloccan test. “Before we go in, do either of you have any insights about the bells?” I asked Blair and Reid at the entrance. “Cloccans use bells to communicate, right? This must have something to do with that.”
“I think these bells have a legitimate purpose. When Blair and I stepped on the stones in the first chamber with the manuscripts, it set off a Cloccan call for aid deep within the cave. These bells may be housed here for signaling purposes connected to other areas of the cave or region. There doesn’t seem to be anything malicious about them.” Reid started down the path under the bells.
“Yeah, why would I ever think that?” I muttered sarcastically as I looked at the first bell’s green patina under a coating of grime. Going under it, I saw the bell’s inner depth of darkness and its heavy clapper. The bell’s sheer size must be how it achieved such low tones. At the end of the path, Reid turned the handle of a plain wooden door and found it was locked.
“Knock-knock. Can I get a who’s there?” Patrick said into the wood door. “Oh, I get it, the joke’s on us.” He banged the door in frustration. We were all feeling tired and irritated.
“Maybe you are onto something, Patrick,” I said, remembering the castle murder hole from the first chamber. “A sanctuary knocker was used outside of cathedrals to provide asylum to anyone who needed protection during the Middle Ages. These doorknockers sometimes used a series of bells to signal arrivals over a great distance. They were the original doorbells. No one gives much thought to doorbells today but what if the door is locked because we need to find a door knocker or a doorbell to enter?”
Blair had found an ornamental ring on either side of the door. Patrick brought the light over and we could see a rope was attached to each end of the knocker. The knocker, when used, would ring one of the bells. Patrick held up his hand to allow us to follow the rope to see which bell it went to and that was not all he spotlighted. Blair saw the skeletons first and gasped. On either side of the path were piles of bones of bodies that had decayed long ago.
“Don’t move in case this door threshold is spring-loaded. We need to keep our weight on the platform. If it shifts, I have a feeling we will topple into that ditch full of bones,” I said. My heart was racing. “Reid, see if you can feel anything from the rings. Maybe there is a clue for empaths.”
Reid ran his forefinger over each of the tarnished bronze circles. He shook his head that there was no clue. Patrick threw up his hands and I could see sweat on his brow as the light flashed by his face. He sputtered, “Oh great. So we are standing on a ticking time bomb! How are we going to pick the right knocker? Eeny, meeny, miny, moe?”
“Patrick, we must stay calm and think. We need to figure out what bell communicates the right message,” Reid said as he tried to follow the line of the other ring with his eyes. It was useless. The bell at the end of that rope could not be seen through the darkness.
I looked at the knocker whose rope disappeared into darkness. It connected to me. Reid gave me a quizzical look to explain why that would be my choice. “Queen Juliana said in her dedication of the Netherlands Carillon that to achieve real harmony, justice should be done also to the tiny voices, which are not supported by the might of their weight. She said MANkind could learn from this. Reid, I think it is part of HER story that bigger is not always better. It is the quality, not the quantity. Blair, use this knocker. It is a leap of faith that it must go to the small one.”
I stepped aside. Blair took a deep breath as she picked up the ring.
Chapter Seventeen: Faith
Blair forcefully swung the ring down onto the dark metal knock plate and a dull clang hung in the air. I stared at the stone door, willing it to open. There was no keyhole, visible hinge, or space at the threshold. It was completely blank and devoid of clues or weakness, and there was little to distract us from the mounting anxiety and trepidation. We all presumed the severity of a wrong decision would be a fatal error and we waited, barely breathing, for our knock of faith to ring true or bring a bitter end.
Each second seemed to be marked by more sweat beading up on Patrick’s brow and Blair kept her eyes fixed upward, her lips moving as she mouthed a prayer. Reid rested his hand on my shoulder, and the seconds dragged as the air around us grew heavy with unknowing. Patrick glanced at me, the flame in his hand flickering with nervousness, and I held up my hand as a signal to bide. We would endure it. Patrick was cracking under the pressure of the smothering silence and I watched him carefully in my peripheral vision, ready to block an impulsive move.
Finally, there was a faint jingle above us in the darkness, and I exhaled. My shoulders relaxed while bits of e
arth and dust sprinkled onto our heads. The bell had not moved in a long time, if ever, I thought to myself.
“And, the bell had a strike note of C major,” Reid whispered in agreement from behind me. He gave my shoulder a slight squeeze. We were all relieved by the Cloccan message. I managed a nod but couldn’t help wondering why hadn’t the door unlocked?
“It’s also a good sign that we haven’t been dumped into the pit full of bones,” Patrick added to Reid’s whispered comment. Patrick wiped the sheen of sweat off his forehead and his eyes focused on the skeletal remains. “Anyone else wondering how they ended up like that? Wait. Don’t tell me if you know, Whitney. I was just thinking out loud. Better not to know. Try the other knocker, Blair. Maybe that one is broken.”
Patrick was cracking under the pressure of limbo. I reminded myself that he did not have martial arts training and it showed in a test of mental discipline. Blair gave me an uneasy glance at Patrick’s suggestion that we backtrack on the knocker decision, and I signaled her to wait. Blair took a deep breath and smoothly gave Patrick a task to settle his nerves. “Patrick, my boot is untied. Can you move the light? I want to be ready when the door opens.”
Bosco had taught me that a person could survive only three seconds without spirit and hope, and despair was the fastest path to death. Blair had wisely refocused Patrick off the skeletons and created an opportunity for him to do something that would not get us all killed. I gave her a smile. The expectation of success was a crucial survival skill in all levels of adversity.
Our face-off with the door was interrupted by the crackle of gravel. The sound of small rocks being crushed by a tremendous weight was coming from the start of the bell passage and I was regretting my prior resentment of the silence. I tried to turn around to get a better view of the avalanche but Reid’s hand on my shoulder pulled me against him. The noise stopped with a crashing boom of heavy permanence. A large boulder had closed the passage opening and we could no longer leave the way we came.
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