Ice Claw dz-2

by David Gilman

  Countless waves around the world waited for him and his board, and there were high valleys choked with snow just begging for him to slice them open with a sweeping curve.

  Life should be that simple. Bobby was part of the great outdoors. Connected was how he felt. Integral. Symbiosis. Mountains and sea needed him and he needed them.

  That was why he liked Max Gordon. That kid was “connected” as well. Max was cool. He’d take on a challenge. He’d give it a go, as the Brits say. Yeah. He’d take Max to Hawaii one day and let him see real waves on Oahu. That’d chill his blood. Winter storms in Alaska created huge rollers that traveled thousands of miles until they hit Oahu’s north shore. Monsters. Wow. Those waves came at you like an express train, twenty yards high. Higher.

  Max’d like that.

  He looked out across the bay. Peaches must have caught a wave farther down and decided to call it a night. She was probably trudging through the sand right now. He’d keep the fire going. She’d be cold.

  As the moonlight shimmered across the flat-water bay, he heard distant growls-off-roaders. Three or four of them were scratching around the night. He checked his cell phone, nervous he’d missed Max’s call. Nothing. Then something pushed through the bushes.

  Bobby got to his feet, grabbed a piece of driftwood to protect himself and faced the figure who’d stepped into the firelight. The malformed head raised its face to the moonlight, as if sniffing the wind. The gashed mouth revealed pointed teeth. Its tongue licked saliva before it dribbled down its almost nonexistent chin.

  “You must be Bobby,” Sharkface said.

  Max pulled books and files from the library shelves, searching for any clues. Sayid did the same. But all they found for their efforts were a few charts, a plan of the chateau and what amounted to a series of yearbooks of scientists. Max was on the upper level, moving along the gantry below the emblazoned Basque letters on the roof beams. He looked at them and dismissed them. The words were a legacy of the generous spirit of Antoine d’Abbadie, encouraging the readers in his library to work and seek wisdom. It didn’t matter. Max didn’t understand a word.

  His eyes were glazing over. He’d been in the half-light too long, and trying to read the foreign words on the spines of the folders and books was giving him a crick in his neck. He was looking without seeing, concentration flagging.

  And then something caught his eye. He took two steps back. Words had been scratched along the edge of a shelf. Faint, barely visible, and they were small. It was doubtful if anyone would notice them unless by chance. Or unless they were looking.

  What he needed was a piece of chalk to highlight the letters. But there was no chalk. What else? Max looked down to where Sayid sat at the trestle table, poring over a volume. He saw what he needed. He ran to the end of the gantry and down to Sayid, praying what he wanted would still be in place.

  The old typewriter.

  “What? You’ve found something?” Sayid said as Max stuck his nose close to the old metal keys.

  “Something,” he said, his fingers already lifting the faded ribbon from the machine. Within seconds he was back at the bookshelf. He rubbed what little pigmentation there was with spit on his finger, then ran the ribbon across the bookshelf’s edge. It worked. The faded scratches lifted slightly, but he could see only a few of the words. Luciferi primo cum sidere frigida rurar carpamus … There were more words too worn to be seen. Max muttered the inscription to himself. Lucifer! There it was.

  If only Mr. Chaplin were at his shoulder. The soft-spoken teacher at Dartmoor High had found the route to Max’s fleeting attention span in class by teaching them ancient Greek and Roman history. And Dartmoor High was built on a onetime outpost of Rome’s XX Legion; that meant soldiers and battles-and Latin.

  “What is it?” Sayid said quietly, looking up to the gallery.

  Max studied the words again. “More Latin. I dunno. Something to do with … er … to do with hastening … the first morning light.” He shook his head and shrugged apologetically at Sayid.

  “Thicko,” Sayid said.

  “I can tell you all the battles the Twentieth Legion fought. I can’t help it if they spoke in ancient Italian.”

  “Lucifer, though, eh?” Sayid said.

  “Luciferi. Yeah.”

  Max scanned the books wedged immediately above the scratched words. A folder was hidden behind them, its corner alerting an inquiring eye to find it. Max reached in and pulled it free.

  The worn brown paper had sloughed, like dead skin. He opened it and a few pages fell out. The first sheet was a hand-drawn circle with symbols and numbers around the edge, and inside the circle what looked to be three or four triangles of different sizes.

  Scrawled across the top of the page, in a barely legible script, were three more Latin words: Lux et veritas.

  “There’s more!” Max blurted out as he made his way down to Sayid. “Lux et veritas. That means ‘Light and truth,’ I know that much.”

  He laid the sheets of paper on the table, but Sayid’s attention was elsewhere. He had found a volume of documents.

  “Blimey,” Sayid said. “Look at this.”

  Sayid placed the big book next to Max’s folder on the table. A diagram filled the page. It was an intricate symbol, a zigzag pattern, all angles and lines. Where the lines did not touch, the spaces formed shapes that made the pattern look like a field of diamonds, while the spaces between the lines made star patterns. This was something.

  “You know what this is?”

  “Yeah,” Sayid said, still gazing at the drawing.

  “It’s all right, Sayid. No hurry. Take your time. You don’t have to share the secret if you don’t want to.”

  “Well, it’s just a bit of a surprise, that’s all. My family had books on Islamic art and I’ve seen this before. Wow. Amazing.”

  Max stared at Sayid, who was transfixed by the drawing. He turned it this way and that, and no matter which way up it was held the pattern stayed the same.

  “I’ll tell you what this is …,” Sayid said, the intricate drawing still holding his attention.

  Max sighed, and waited.

  “This is the Divine Order,” Sayid told him.

  “The what?”

  “It’s pure geometry. I think the Arabs got it from the Greeks, but they perfected it. Anyway, that’s what it represents-that the chaos of the universe is part of a plan. At least, I think that’s what it means. And this shape, this diagram, shows the chaos of the universe in a defined order. All very precise.”

  “You’ve lost me, Sayid.”

  Max’s mind raced. His dad had taught him so many things when they traveled together, but this didn’t trigger any memories. He knew the ancient Greeks had learned from Egypt and Babylonia, and that the Indians and Arabs had mastered astronomy and mathematics, but where did this fit in? Was there anything his dad had told him that would help solve this puzzle?

  The thought of his father, alone and struggling with his own illness, stabbed at him. His dad was bigger than life. His strong, adventurous, clever dad. Max let the feeling slip away. No good dwelling on it. But he remembered his dad telling him about the Greek masters. The bloody conflicts of ancient times fascinated Max, and he’d visited battlefields with his father. It was about the time he just couldn’t settle down at Dartmoor High. So his dad told him stories. They walked in the heat of Greece, where warriors had fallen in great battles, his father explaining how the use of geometry had enabled men to build siege machines for thousands of years. It was his father’s way of helping him concentrate in class, giving him something vibrant to grasp when the subject demanded concentration rather than imagination.

  Max had struggled at school. When his mum died, the shock and grief resonated through him, a silent weeping he could barely hold in. And to try and understand even the most basic elements of geometry would make his brain seize up at times. So his dad told him about Pythagoras. A Greek master mathematician, a vegetarian mystic who believed he could prove the
secrets of the universe through geometry. Secrets of the universe. Now Sayid had told him that the drawing meant exactly that.

  “If it’s in this book, then I reckon it’s not part of any clue,” Max said. “But maybe it tells us that Zabala was searching for something to do with astrology or astronomy and was using geometry to help him solve the puzzle.”

  Max took the second piece of paper from the folder. It had a row of five numbers across and five down. And only one word, a symbol and a number were written across the top: Mars = 65.

  “Mars equals sixty-five,” Max said. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Mars is the god of war.”

  “I know that, Sayid. But he’s not sixty-five years old, is he? And he doesn’t live at number sixty-five Acacia Avenue.”

  “I’m only trying to help. Keep your shirt on. I’m the bloke who helped you get through your maths exam last year, remember? Your mad monk must have put it here for a reason.”

  “He wasn’t mad, I’m sure of it. He was a scientist, and he’s giving us another clue along with everything else.”

  Max studied the piece of paper a moment longer, gazing at the numbers, willing his mind to make some sense of them.

  “I read a book once about spies in the Second World War and they used a code system like this, but that was something to do with letters in a box, not numbers,” Max said.

  “I remember that, you were going on about it for ages. And?”

  “And … I dunno. I can’t remember how the system works.”

  Sayid looked dismayed.

  “No good pulling a face, Sayid. I told you about it as well. How come you don’t remember?”

  “Because I was probably doing your maths homework at the time.”

  Max touched his finger onto each square.

  “There’s always a pattern with numbers. They always mean something,” Sayid said.

  “Obviously,” said Max, “Otherwise they wouldn’t be here, would they? Anyway, I can tell you one thing-all these numbers, up, down, across, and diagonally add up to sixty-five. They have to be these particular numbers in this particular order to do that.”

  Sayid checked. Max was right. Each column and row totaled sixty-five.

  “There’s hope for you yet.”

  “Well, I’m not thick, y’know. I just struggle with maths a bit,” Max huffed.

  Sayid fingered the scrap of paper. “I’ve seen something like this before. It’s called a magic square,” he said.

  “Magic like in abracadabra?”

  “Nah, the Arabs got it from the Indians when they invaded. Seventh century or something. Then a mathematician …” Sayid lifted his head for a moment, scratching around in his memory. “Al-Buni. That was him. He got into astrological stuff in about twelve hundred and used it for-”

  Max interrupted him. “Sayid, we don’t have time for a history lesson. Just tell me what a magic square is, will you? Or at least this one. ‘Mars equals sixty-five’ means something. Zabala wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble to hide something if it weren’t vital.”

  “I don’t know what these numbers mean. But the sixty-five bit, at least that’s a start,” Sayid said, frowning with uncertainty.

  “I suppose so,” Max said, “but a start in what direction we don’t know. Not yet, anyway. I reckon we’d better get back and study this at the comtesse’s.”

  Sayid nodded, his mind also trying to make sense of the jumbled ideas entangled in his head. “Let me think about it some more,” he said, folding the paper neatly.

  “OK. Numbers are what you’re good at. But we’ve got to check the observatory before we go. We won’t have another chance to come back,” Max said, tucking the drawing of the circle into his pocket and pushing the worn folder back into the shelves.

  Sayid tidied the trestle table as Max carefully rethreaded the typewriter ribbon.

  The observatory was on the same floor, and by the time they reached it, there was no sign of any disturbance in the library, nothing to draw suspicion of a search.

  The observatory was an uncomplicated room. There was no decoration. Dark wooden floors gleamed with reflected light from two mullioned windows, one left, one right, which allowed an almost perfect rectangle of moonlight to stream in. The room was mostly bare, clearly used as a place for work, research and compilation of any findings done in the library. A Gothic arch was set in the middle of the room, flanked by old wooden bookcases displaying research-drab folders. In the arch’s alcove an old-fashioned telescope about two meters long was cantilevered on what looked like spoke wheels. It sat solidly, its barrel pointing up at about forty-five degrees. A small wooden seat on a slider was fixed to the floor beneath the whole apparatus.

  “Stay away from the windows, Sayid. Just in case anyone is out there.”

  Max stroked the telescope’s barrel. In the archway’s ceiling, louvered windows could be opened to access the sky.

  “You lie down there,” Sayid said, pointing to the wooden seat, “then you slide under the telescope and watch the stars cross the meridian line.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Sayid smiled and pointed to a sign barely visible in the archway. “It says so. I’m going to have a go.” Sayid was already maneuvering himself onto the floor.

  “Sayid, we don’t have time.”

  “Course we do. C’mon, Max, you know all about the stars. Let’s have a look. It’s a clear night. Open those shutters up there.”

  Sayid was already settling himself beneath the telescope’s eyepiece. Max jiggled with the rods that opened the arched ceiling. “The moon’s too bright, Sayid. You won’t see much.”

  “Stop moaning, Max. Just do it.”

  Max finally got the old louvers opened. He was afraid the whole system might collapse on them, but he stopped when he felt the opening rods getting stiff.

  “That’s fine,” Sayid said, grinning. But then he grimaced as he struggled to focus the eyepiece.

  Max gazed around the room. The folded paper was burning a hole in his pocket. He just wanted to get to a safe place and pore over it.

  Irritation began to bite. “Sayid, give it up. C’mon, we’ve got to get out of here.”

  Sayid’s eye was glued to the telescope; he shuffled himself a little forward, a little back, until he was as comfortable as he could be, waving an arm for Max to be quiet. A tinge of light moved to one side of the room. Max’s heart jumped. Something dark had shimmered. Imaginary monsters lived in these old walls. Gargoyles climbed down from their lofty perches, their claws scratching walls, their hunter’s eyes seeking prey. But it was a trick of the light, aided by Max’s imagination. Or was it? The wind, turning from the sea, snared itself across the battlements. The gargoyles’ open jaws cried out, desperate for life.

  Sayid looked up.

  “It’s just the wind,” Max said.

  Sayid smiled halfheartedly and put his eye back to the telescope. Max decided to let him stay where he was for a few moments. The light that had shimmered came from the far side of the room.

  An old burnished mirror, its copper surround a patina of dull green, barely reflected any light at all. It must have been one of the original mirrors in the house, and the glass was now a murky brown color. Max looked at his reflection. The boy who stared back at him had no eyes; the light from above cast deep shadow across his face, obliterating any reflection from his pupils, blackening the sockets. The thin red line of a scar still puckered the skin across his eyebrow, and his bunched jacket gave him the appearance of a hunched creature. He smiled, half expecting to see fangs instead of teeth. But then he gazed beyond his own image. Pulling down his cuff, he wiped away the dust on the mirror’s surface. It was clearer now.

  Something in its reflection caught his eye.

  Max turned and moved towards the opposite wall where an old wooden panel hung, its dingy paint seeming testimony of its age. It was about fifty centimeters long and half as wide. Small, tarnished brass eyelets, hooked on bar
ely visible nails, held it to the wall. The painted image, faded and dull, hung in the darkest corner of the room and was out of place; the only picture in the whole room.

  It had that kind of medieval look about it, where the figures didn’t seem quite real-flat and two-dimensional. There was a mountain range in the back of the picture; dirty, dust-covered peaks, any resemblance to snow long gone. But the image was easy to understand. A faded star, the yellow and white paint still recognizable, hovered above the peak. To the right of that another star, equidistant. And to the front of the mountains, lying in the foreground, was a monk. His head rested on a log or a boulder-Max couldn’t decide which-one hand held a telescope, crude, like the first ever made. The monk looked old, almost biblical; his ragged beard covered his chest, but his free hand’s index finger pointed towards himself.

  Max scanned the tiny writing on the engraved metal square screwed to the frame’s base. It was in French and said that the chateau was dedicated to St. Anthony the Hermit. Max concentrated, looking at every brushstroke on the wooden panel. There was a scratch in the bottom left-hand corner. He tilted the panel and let the light pick up the picture’s texture. The mark was barely visible unless you were looking for it. It was a Z.

  This was no medieval painting, it wasn’t even done at the turn of the last century. Max lifted the panel down onto the floor, surprised at its weight. Why the hermit was looking through a telescope made no sense, but the two words in old-fashioned letters did. One lay to the left and below the old man, and the other was opposite: Lux Ferre. Max jerked his head up, almost fearful that anyone else might have seen the clue. Max was on his hands and knees, staring down at the picture on the floor, gazing at the eyes of the old man. The way the figure was painted allowed the viewer to look directly into his eyes-even with the telescope balanced in front of the man’s face. It was as if he were looking directly at Max. Appealing.