Phil waved the flashlight around the small, cramped room. A large furnace dominated the left side. Thick insulated pipes and electrical conduits ran along the ceiling. To the right of the door a fuse box and a row of switches hung on the wall.
Phil shook his head. “The boiler room. I guess I got worked up over nothing. You were right. I must’ve been hallucinating.”
“It’s easy to do that in the dark,” Caitlin said. “Maybe this will help.” She flipped on several of the switches by the door. A bare bulb hanging from a cord filled the cinderblock cubicle with harsh light. Out in the hall, a row of fluorescent lamps stuttered to life. Caitlin and Phil turned and saw the spectral props and flats that had seemed so evocative and forbidding in the semidarkness dissolve into the mundane and literal objects that they were.
Phil turned off the flashlight and put it in the inside pocket of his varsity jacket. Caitlin, wasting no time, began checking the doors on the left side of the hall.
Phil followed her lead and began checking the ones on the right. He peeked into a small rehearsal space, a storage room, and a janitor’s closet with a sink.
“Hey, Phil. Over here.” Caitlin’s voice was muffled and distant.
Phil looked down the hall. At the far end a door was ajar. He could see that inside the room was lit.
He walked to the doorway. The commodious room was a wonderland of costumes and accessories. Along the right wall were two working tables, a sewing machine, three chairs, a mannequin, an ironing board, and a small curtained area for dressing. Racks and racks of outfits, separated by narrow aisles, ran across the room. More garments were heaped on shelves along the walls. Here and there boxes, bags, or piles of clothing for which no better place could be found had been deposited. The room was packed to the brim, surfeited with a smorgasbord of garb.
“Caitlin, where are you?”
Above the sea of shirts and coats and dresses, a hand waved to him. “Over here.”
Phil charted a course down the left side of the room and found Caitlin standing behind a mound of petticoats. She was engaged in a methodical search—removing articles of clothing from their hangers, carefully examining them, then hanging them back up. Phil looked at the long aisle and multiplied that by the number of rows he guessed the room contained.
“We’re never going to find it,” he mumbled.
“We’re certainly not going to find it if you keep thinking like that,” Caitlin replied. “Let’s just work together on one aisle at a time. Why don’t you start on the other side of this one and work toward the front. I’ll work toward the back.”
“It’s a plan,” Phil said without enthusiasm.
“And remember,” Caitlin added, “if you come across any Shakespearean costumes—especially ones for men—let me know.”
“How will I know it’s a Shakespearean costume?”
“Oh, come on. That’s simple. Doublets, long gowns with trains, regal robes—that kind of archaic stuff.”
Phil felt she was belittling his intelligence. “What do you think I am, a philistine?” he asked in a sarcastic tone. “I hate to remind you, but that’s not the kind of stuff they were wearing in Romeo and Juliet the other night. They were wearing contemporary clothing.”
“All right, fine,” Caitlin said, throwing up her hands with impatience. “We’ll check the modern clothing too. Why differentiate? We’ll check everything, if you want. Just pay close attention to anything that looks Elizabethan, okay?” She turned her back to him and continued to scrutinize the items on the rack.
Phil shrugged and walked around to the other side of the aisle. “So what exactly are we looking for in these costumes?”
“Something written, probably. Maybe a symbol. Maybe a book. I don’t know.”
“How can you find something if you don’t know what you’re looking for?” he protested.
“We’ll know it when we find it,” was her enigmatic reply.
“That makes no sense at all,” he insisted.
“Yes, it does. If you knew what you were looking for, you wouldn’t have to look for it.”
“Isn’t it possible that if you don’t know what it is, you won’t know it when you find it?”
“Yes, I guess so. We may not find it. But if we look, at least we’ll have a chance of finding it. If we don’t, we won’t.”
Phil couldn’t refute this last argument, so he laid aside his doubts and joined the search.
For a solid hour they worked their way through the racks in silence. The sheer abundance of outfits was overwhelming. In addition, there seemed to be no discernible scheme according to which the items had been stored. The aisles did not progress according to historical and geographical origins, moving from one era and country to the next, nor was the collection arranged by function. The whole thing seemed haphazard and arbitrary.
Caitlin sighed. She looked at the plethora of costumes running down the aisle and shook her head. Maybe Phil was right, she thought. This is futile, like looking for a needle in a haystack. She removed a pair of commedia dell’arte pantaloons from the rack, gave them a perfunctory search, then hung them back up in disgust.
She yawned. “Phil?”
“Yeah?” came his lethargic response from the next aisle.
“How’s it going over there?”
“All right, but I’m a little beat.”
“Me too,” she conceded. She felt too enervated and listless to continue the search, so she slumped down on the floor and leaned against a box of shoes. “Well, what are we going to do?” she asked.
There was no response. She noticed the room had grown silent. “Phil? Are you there?”
Phil popped out of a thicket of costumes a few feet from where Caitlin reclined. He was wearing a flowing purple robe embellished with gold crescent moons and brandishing a black staff with a small star affixed to its end.
“Cute!” she said sarcastically.
“Thanks,” he said. “I thought you needed a little cheering up. You sounded so discouraged.”
“Where did you find that wild costume?”
“Over in the corner. The tag says ‘TPST.’”
“TPST?” Caitlin jumped to her feet.
Before he knew what was happening, she was all over him, delving into pockets and running her hands up and down his sides.
“Hey, that tickles! Stop it!”
“Hold still,” she commanded, dispensing with decorum in the heat of excitement. “Don’t you see, Phil? ‘TPST’ stands for The Tempest—by Shakespeare! The protagonist is an old magician named Prospero.”
“Prospero?”
“Yeah, as in Edward Anthony. I think you’re wearing the very thing we’ve been looking for!”
“I am?”
“Yes. Turn around,” she ordered.
Bewildered, Phil did as he was told.
He could feel her fingers checking the hood and slipping inside the collar. Then she started down the back seam. Her fingers paused about halfway.
“There’s something in the lining. Bend over.”
Phil obeyed and Caitlin flipped back the tail of the robe. He felt a tug and then heard a rip.
“Eureka!” Caitlin shouted. “Look at this!”
Phil stood and turned. In her thumb and forefinger Caitlin held a yellowed piece of parchment.
Phil tossed the robe on a nearby mound of clothing. “What is it? Let me see.”
Caitlin gently unfolded the brittle paper. There were several incomplete lines of writing in florid penmanship, much of it smudged and illegible. Two edges of the parchment were clean and two were ragged. It seemed to be a fragment tom from a larger document.
“You’re brilliant!” Phil cried. He threw his arms around Caitlin and hugged her.
“You’re the one who found the robe,” she told him. “If I ever go looking for gold, remind me to bring you—”
Suddenly a door banged shut.
“What’s that?” Caitlin whispered, grabbing Phil’s arm.
“I don’t know,” he whispered back as all the lights in the room went out.
Through the darkness they could hear slow, heavy, inexorable footsteps approaching.
Caitlin quickly slipped the parchment into her shirt pocket. Phil removed the flashlight from his jacket, switched it on, and aimed it at the sound.
Out of the shadows, an obscure, towering figure lumbered toward them. It was a man, dressed in black, his face covered by a hideous Harlequin half-mask.
A blade glinted in his hand.
“Caitlin, quick. Take the flashlight and stand back,” Phil whispered. “This guy’s got a knife. When he goes for me, run for the door, okay?”
Caitlin took the flashlight, but before she could do much else the menacing assailant was upon them.
Phil assumed a martial arts posture.
The huge man crouched, then lunged at Phil’s chest with the knife.
Phil stepped back adroitly and the thrust fell short. He feinted with his left hand, throwing his antagonist off guard, then slammed his right fist in the man’s belly. As his opponent bent forward in pain, Phil spun around and delivered a roundhouse kick to the side of his head.
Caitlin saw the man drop the knife and fall headlong toward her. He hit the floor with a thud and groaned.
“Come on, Phil! Let’s get out of here!”
They jumped over the body and fled from the room, knocking over clothes and boxes.
Chapter 22
XXI XII MDXCIX
From the shallow drawer on top of his new two-volume boxed set of The Oxford English Dictionary, affectionately known as the OED, Leo removed a heavy, black-handled magnifying glass. He turned to Phil and Caitlin, who were sitting on the couch. “I didn’t know we had a karate expert on our floor,” he said.
“Tae kwon do, actually,” Phil corrected him. “And I’m no expert. My dad was in special forces in Vietnam. He taught me a few moves, just in case.”
“Good thing he did,” Leo said, slapping the weighty lens against his palm. “That guy in the costume room meant business.”
“No question about that,” Caitlin muttered, the image of the grotesque mask and lethal knife still fresh in her memory.
“I wonder if he was acting independently or working for someone else,” Leo mused. “Or maybe there are several people out there trying to follow us to the treasure.”
“Are you implying there’s a conspiracy?” Caitlin asked.
“I have no idea. All I’m suggesting is that when a guy pulls a knife on you, it’s prudent to consider every possible motive for his behavior.”
Phil leaned forward and looked at his freshman counselor. “Do you think we should go to the police?”
Leo pondered the proposal for a moment. “Normally I wouldn’t hesitate to report something this serious, but this is an exceptional situation.”
He sat down in an armchair opposite the two freshmen. “In the first place, you guys weren’t supposed to be inside the theater any more than the guy who attacked you was. So you’d have to prevaricate about what you were doing down there. Also, if the police got involved, The Plains would report the incident. That would put Bill in an awkward position because then he’d have to run something in the Herald, and publicity just isn’t something we want right now.”
Leo paused and gently probed the slim bandage on his head. “Going to the police and the newspapers might help bring the culprit to justice. But submitting to grueling interrogations and having our names splashed all over the front page clearly would impede our search for the treasure. It might also make whoever’s on our trail even more desperate and ruthless. So for now I think we need to be circumspect and guard our secret diligently, even if it means taking some unusual risks.” He released a deep sigh. “I feel bad about what happened to you guys. I shouldn’t have let you go alone.”
“Don’t worry about it, chief,” Phil said. “It turned out okay. We didn’t get hurt and, miraculously enough, we found what we were looking for.”
“We’ll see.” Leo picked up the piece of parchment from the coffee table and held it up to the light. The script was inscrutable. He set the fragment back down and examined it with the magnifying glass. Caitlin and Phil watched the expression on his face oscillate between curiosity and perplexity. Then suddenly he looked uneasy, as if he were in the grip of some quandary.
“What does it say?” Caitlin asked.
Leo stood up. “I’m not sure, but I have an idea.”
As Leo crossed the room to his bookcase, Phil picked up the magnifying glass and he and Caitlin leaned forward to have a closer look at the paltry scrap of paper. Through the lens the enlarged handwriting appeared more consistent and neat, but still alien and incomprehensible.
“I can’t make out a word of this,” Phil said.
Caitlin nodded. “It’s as if someone’s trying to tease us. Do you think this is another one of Prospero’s practical jokes?”
“I bet it is,” Phil surmised. “I bet it’s another one of his codes, where every letter in our alphabet correlates with a letter in some other alphabet.”
Leo pulled a thick tome from one of his shelves. “It’s not a code and there’s no other alphabet. This is in our alphabet, only a much earlier version.” He set the ponderous book on the coffee table next to the piece of parchment.
“What’s that?” Caitlin asked him.
“A history of typography. I’m hoping we’ll find a typeface or script that roughly corresponds to the handwriting in the fragment. That will help us transcribe the message into something we can read. If we’re lucky, that something will turn out to be in English.”
Caitlin began flipping through the thick, creamy pages. “Where do we start?”
“Let’s try the late Middle Ages,” Leo said. “I once saw a facsimile of the Kelmscott Chaucer that looked similar to the writing on this parchment—and that was equally arcane.” He reached under the coffee table and retrieved a notepad and pen. “Phil, want to play scribe?”
“Sure, chief.”
“P-l-a-y-e-r,” Leo spelled, studying the document with the magnifying glass and comparing what he saw to the sample on the page. “Did you get that?”
“Sure did.” Phil laid the transcription on the table and they scrutinized their hour’s worth of work.
xxi xii mdxcix
lind,
y at playing with one
I am no clownish custard,
tion. When I say ‘Not one
ivocate. Again, know well
hat authority rules longest
elf manifest. The player
Caitlin pointed to the left and bottom edges of the parchment. “Too bad it’s torn. As it stands, it’s gibberish.”
“Not entirely,” Leo said. “The content may be opaque but the form is lucid. Look at the upper right-hand corner.”
Caitlin looked at the amalgam of x’s and i’s and drew a blank. “Another code?”
“I don’t think so.”
“How about an algebra problem? Or a diagram for a football play?” Phil joked.
“They’re Roman numerals, like the ones on the cornerstones of buildings,” Leo said. “It’s a date.”
Phil leaned over the piece of parchment and studied the Roman numerals. “Let’s see. Twenty-one, twelve, fifteen hundred and ninety-nine.” He looked up, a puzzled expression on his face. “How can this be a date? There’s no twenty-first month.”
“Maybe the writer was British,” Caitlin said. “Don’t the British put the day first, then the month, then the year?”
Leo smiled. “Very astute, Caitlin.”
“Which would make it the twenty-first of December, 1599,” Phil said. “Wow, this thing’s almost four hundred years old!”
Caitlin looked at Leo. “Do you think this is a fragment of a letter?”
“Probably,” Leo replied, rubbing his chin. “But we won’t know for sure until we solve Prospero’s other clues, which I suspect will lead us to the rest of the document.”
> Phil let out a loud, protracted yawn. “I don’t know about you guys, but I’m definitely not looking forward to waking up tomorrow morning.”
“What do you mean ‘tomorrow’?” Caitlin said. “It’s already today.” She pointed to the digital clock on the table beside the telephone. “It’s practically four in the morning.”
“No wonder I feel so listless and apathetic,” Phil said as he snuggled into a corner of the couch.
Caitlin yawned. “Me too. My brain’s getting sluggish.”
“To tell the truth,’ Leo said, “I’m feeling pretty phlegmatic and incoherent myself. Why don’t we get together again after we get some rest—”
“Amen,” Caitlin murmured.
“—and then go see Carmen Torres.”
At the mention of his English professor’s name, Phil opened his drooping eyelids. “Why do we need to see her, Leo?”
“She’s a good friend and mentor who also happens to know a lot about the Renaissance. I think she could help us place the writing on this piece of parchment you found tonight. Besides, I was planning to ask her if she’d keep Prospero’s letter for us. Now I’m hoping she’ll keep both documents.”
“Why do you want her to have them?” Caitlin asked.
“She once told me she has a safe in her house. Phil’s room and my room have already been ransacked. Yours could be next. Carmen has office hours from one to three tomorrow—I mean today. I think we should all go see her then. Any objections?”
Caitlin shook her head.
“It’s okay by me,” Phil said, “as long as nobody mentions the paper I’m supposed to write for her by Friday. I haven’t the slightest idea yet what I’m going to say.”
“I hear you,” Leo said, giving Phil a knowing wink. “I’ll help you with it Thursday if you want, and you can type it up on my computer when you’re done.”
Phil smiled. “Thanks, chief. I owe you one.”
Tooth and Nail: A Novel Approach to the SAT (A Harvest Test Preparation Book) Page 19