At one point, in 1880, to which nobody knows why, its existence had become entirely dormant and a wealthy businessman had found the castle by accident while visiting the region and had bought it from the owners of the land.
He had recognized its value, historical importance, colossal architecture and dimensions, and had seen that it was worthless in the desolate wood, in the middle of nowhere, and had it removed in large sections and shipped across the Atlantic, where he had intended to reconstruct it near New York.
What occurred next was never revealed, and there occurred an extensive amount of lost information, and all that was known was that the owner had died in mysterious circumstances and that the castle had ended up at a different and secret location in the depths of an immense desolate wood, hidden away from anyone locating it, with what was there activated again.
I
The Lost Treasure
Chapter 1
The Deadliest Treasure
The sounds had initially been astonishing! Now they had gone beyond, and were mind-bending! They came screaming up through the shaft with a dangerous fury that stunned Pendleton, and no matter how he tried to shake it off and contemplate identities his thoughts never altered or formed stable recognitions.
Clouds of powdered dirt and stone swirled about through beams of lights from the above lights as he released some more rope, edging him downwards, seeking to get hold of the treasure.
The Second World War was still going, but just about over, and Pendleton realized that he had avoided being killed after all, and wondered if he was going to be killed here instead, and was unsure what was worse.
He groaned and dangled about on his rope, and grabbed hold of part of a castle boulder, while glimpsing parts of the shaft above, wondering if he could have wangled his way out of it. But it was not really them and he really wanted to do it, and he wanted to explore the castle shaft. He had always wanted to explore and discover something new of value and greatness, and perhaps even be remembered in history.
What interested and terrified them was why the treasure was hidden in such a place with such occurrences!
What was it they were dealing with anyway? Why was it there in such a far out place? Was the stuff protected by something?
Something of unfathomable unidentifiable supernatural nature sounded as though it were under the castle, in some form of magnetic field or energy field, trapped or trying to free itself from something, ultimately escaping to another location of liberty, and he tried imagining some form of spirit trapped there every night for hundreds of years, perhaps in an ancient dungeon. Yet again even that could not explain it, or anything!
“Have you found if it’s down there?” Henrik shouted down, in a combination of extreme annoyance and confusion, with a way that gave Pendleton the impression that the two archaeologists up above might be on the edge of considering doing something extreme, and beyond their normal. Though Norgrove, the other archaeologist, gave him the impression that he had waited all his life to be here!
He again started to realize the implications of the find and that they would have to check what was there, no matter what.
He quickly shouted up: “You investigated all these walls?”
“Yes!” Norgrove replied. “We used all the best equipment.”
“We’re the only ones here and that know about it?” he replied, still trying to find out more about what was happening, and they were allowing him to know. Basically it was just them three there at the great old immense haunted castle, buried away in the wood, at the location that they had traced the treasure to.
Yet they could have left the task until the morning but they could not wait. They had waited too long and had gone too far to get their hands on it, and he just wanted to get it.
What the hell difference did it make if it was morning or night? It was dark there in the tunnel at both times!
He wondered why the lights were above, and why he never had one, and shouted up, “Are you two coming down here or what?”
The two archeologists shifted into the shaft and made their way down, with the lights, and he observed them, and realized why they had not given him a light, and that he was like a worm on a fishing line, and there to check what the score was. The two also had trouble climbing in and down, and were overweight and bulky, and he was better at climbing than they were. They would have a hard time getting back up again! And he even wondered if they would camp the night at the bottom or something, if they were too tired and sleepy, which made him gasp again when he thought about it, and he lodged his boot into a gap between two of the boulders, to rest his tired body.
“What did they find out?” he muttered, mainly to himself, and wondered what he was missing again.
“There are other small shafts running through here ...” Henrik called down, dangling overhead, who had stopped to examine a small hole in the shaft, he had missed in the darkness there.
“Ventilation shafts that connect together,” Norgrove continued. “They must run through most of the building.”
“I agree! I’m sure they are for an ancient ventilation ...” Henrik continued, sticking his head up close, and shining his light in the hole and looking along it.
“What else could it be?” Pendleton asked.
“They could have been used to build it ...” Henrik replied, moving away, looking for something else.
Pendleton wondered how high up they were, as the height of the castle was immense, and they had been on the top floor, and they never knew how far underground it went, and the blackness there looked like an abyss.
The height of the castle was incredible, as well as the length being massive with rooms and corridors going out everywhere, especially with there being no proper lighting, and he had not thought such a construction was possible at the date that they had given. It was also unbelievable that somebody had managed to ship the thing over to America, and when it must have happened, in such large sections and fit them together.
How could people spend so much on such things and leave them derelict, out in such desolate woods? Why had it not even been put out in the open for everyone to see?
Pendleton gasped as he recalled the legends and what had already happened, and wondered if this would be his death, in a death or glory situation.
For a moment he wondered if it had actually come from Transylvania and had vampires, and realized that if it were at least he would be still around as a vampire. At times he had thought it had similarities to castles over there.
“So are we going down ...?” Henrik asked firmly, watching Pendleton’s peculiar expressions in his light, from overhead.
“You could send down a camera with a light attached?” Norgrove moaned sarcastically, and Pendleton started to move off from the wall where he was resting against, and prepared himself, and took glances at what was below as he started going down, but even with the lights being closer it never revealed anything new.
The rope suddenly started swaying and vibrating furiously, giving the impression that Henrik was frantically doing something against Pendleton’s rope, and he glanced up and realized Henrik was climbing up for some reason, and he gasped when he realized Norgrove’s face was frantic and that the two were actually desperately trying to escape from there, almost slipping trying to climb up, which amused him for a moment, bewildered at their sudden change of attitude.
As he tried to see what was going on he noticed that light across his front was not coming downwards from them but shining upwards from something below, and his eyes fixed onto a strange orb of light floating upwards.
“Get me out of here!” Henrik hollered, making Pendleton shudder and try to escape for his life.
Pendleton even thought of removing his harness and plunging down, and perhaps allowing him to have the fate of dying on the ground below, and having a normal human death.
With a loud thud Norgrove came crashing down to his original position after slipping, and clouds of gray dust flew up and blinded Pendl
eton as it went into his face and lungs, and he went crashing into the wall.
He groaned and dangled about on the rope, glimpsing parts of the shaft around him, mentally exhausted, needing sleep, allowing himself just to go into sleep state, wondering if he could somehow wangle his way out of it. But it was not a matter of persuading himself of anything, it was really happening, and he wished what was going to happen would just happen.
If he had only known all those years ago what would end up happing, he would have forced himself to forget about such ventures.
Sounds were now screaming out at him and he realized how loud they had become, from the abyss below, as if a gateway into hell were there, with him suspended over it on a thin rope, spinning endlessly, waiting to descend into its hideous reaches.
How had they managed to talk him into this? One minute they had been chasing treasure and the next a castle mysteriously appears into it, and he had been dumped with their theories, and then with the shaft.
He jerked, startled, hearing a sort of scream, almost human but somehow different, as though out of a distant strange place, and he visualized it out in space, in blackness.
There were traces of rotted vegetation floating in the light coming down from overhead, as they still continued to climb out.
Some of the blocks of stone about him resembled the stones in Egyptian pyramids. They were strange things to use to build, but they were hard to penetrate, and needed in a good castle.
He realized sounds were now not emerging from under him but coming were from somewhere above, and then they started emerging about him and he listened intensely with confusion.
Sounds manifested everywhere as though invisible creatures were surrounding them, and strange glowing and swirling forces formed and went about them and telepathic figures like spirits with shrouds swirled about it, wailing and screaming, and he partially entered a dream state, and as it increased he believed he was holding onto reality.
A bright explosion of colors exploded out making him come to, and realized the thing below him had reached him and he opened his eyes wide and examined his surroundings and saw that he was no longer in the shaft, and dazed and confusedly he examined his surroundings and an immense whirlpool of shifting outlines magically shifted by, and he studied everything and realized that he had no body or proper presence and was some form of energy formation shifting around with other similar formations, and that he was swirling out into a vortex of reshaping energy patterns that replaced reality, with transforming elements altering to something that he could not recognize.
If he had died and gone into the afterlife why was it so strange? Why it was there mesmerized him! Was he classified as being anything? Where was it? Reality was no more than magically spinning patterns and he wondered how worse the situation could get, realizing that he could be trapped there for all eternity!
Chapter 2
The Lost Castle
The whole story was incredible now and Bryson could hardly believe anything, and what had occurred. The events of the past weeks were astounding and he could hardly believe that they were on the trail of another treasure quest.
The last shreds of sunlight had vanished beneath the wood behind them, and well below the horizon, with the deep black winter night there engulfing them, and Bryson studied his surroundings over and over trying to explain why the wood so closely resembled the wood surrounding Grovnor Castle.
The wood looked almost the same in places, and he considered their search for the castle in what must be one of the most desolate regions of the US. They had not seen anyone for many miles, and planes even seemed to avoid flying there.
The fifteen members of the team (including him, and Merton and Mortimer), had been put together by him and Mortimer, and were mainly made up of archaeologists, scientists, ex-military, and explorers, who had experience in searching, examining, documenting, and detecting what they might miss, or there to help or defend them.
The adventure brought him back to life after a long length of inactivity and lack of anything of interest. At times he still could not believe that there was another castle, and that anything existed there! And that there had actually been a similar castle near Grovnor Castle at one time!
The last castle exploration, after all the findings and evidence they had collected, in the end seemed to add up to little, and he still now occasionally thought they had found something else.
It was winter and deep snow shrouded the jungle of vegetation around them, and he realized again that they would have to camp there. And having not slept outdoors in winter he gasped at sleeping in such thick cold snow, and considered if they would find his remains there one day, and wonder why they had done it.
The snow landscape was untouched by human hands, and at times empty of sound, and had a deep silence that he had only heard in thick winter snow landscapes. It reminded him of another world! An empty wood absence of life with faint mist surrounding regions around them.
What was shocking was how easily they could get lost, and he was unsure if they even knew accurately where they were. They knew where they had come from and what they would eventually arrive at after days of falling a compass, but not what was there about them. They had been unable to get a helicopter to search, but if they had waited and went far enough he was sure they could.
There was nothing to recognize anywhere, and he watched some of the men attempt to use communications devices to give updates on what was happening without picking up anything.
They were all getting too exhausted wading through the deep snow areas to do and recognize anything significant, and the first peculiarity he noticed was a distant hum, similar to a distant engine whirling, out at an unknown place, which shadowed them, and drove him insane trying to identify it.
Their legs almost became stuck in deep bogs of stinking vegetation buried below the snow, which resembled quicksand as it grew in depth, and they were hidden, even under intense lights, and Bryson started to wonder if they could even find somewhere that they could actually camp over. There was a definite look of a swamp emerging around them!
A cold haze edged its way over the trees and undergrowth and they started slowing, and allowing themselves to rest. It was nothing like anything that he had seen elsewhere.
He could not get if it was a strange environment about him, something strange existing there, or a combination of things that created different reactions.
Strange vapor clouds shifted about their sides, always shadowing them, at about the distance – as if they were probing them, and analyzing them for some purpose.
Nobody said anything about it but most looked like they were wondering if any of it had intelligence, and sometimes pondered vaguely watching it linger over deep pools of slime in the mind-bending landscape.
When more confident it existed Bryson watched it to find out what form of life it could be. What did it use to exist? What was it doing?
He wished he could get some samples from it, but decided to wait or leave it, and they would check if it was dangerous.
Gusts of freezing wind blew and withdrew simultaneously in opposite directions, blowing and sucking, giving him the feeling that something invisible nearby was breathing over them, something of supernatural or alien nature, like a hungry beast breathing over its prey, perhaps with saliva dripping from its mouth, or something was there and the environment was reacting to its presence and its paranormal powers.
Though the tiredness and lengthy day were affecting him and most of the others, Merton and Mortimer, the two paranormal scientists loved it, he was sure, and seemed to come to life more, as they always did in such situations, and at night.
They had become famous celebrities and the media had given them coverage for weeks at one point, and their technology had vastly improved, and if they found anything they would bring in all their new equipment to investigate everything that they could.
Since their investigations of Grovnor Castle and all the proven details had been released,
what everyone had experienced there, people’s thoughts on it had seemed to alter more and more in the direction of there not being anything there, and there being no evidence of anything, and he had seen the problem again and again that people were not going to believe anything unless they were confronted with it, and that the two scientists had work to do.
He never got why they had not become conventional scientists like him! Surely they were good enough to become immensely wealthy and could lead the way in some other field?
Many of scientists were working on what it had been at one point, and again they all returned to their original thoughts.
Even though he also wished to investigate everything there, as they were sure to experience something, going by all the facts given. Yet he was starting to remember all the dangers and last encounters that had occurred.
The two paranormal scientists had tried informing others, not with them now, of their investigations of paranormal disturbances that could be there, and had soon withheld their research from them when they had found out that they did not accept anything of that nature, without total positive proof, and they avoided giving any details of anything of that nature, especially to the people there that had been in the military, including Mitchell, the head of them, who were there to help them and with any dangers and to investigate further.
They had given Mitchell some of their findings and thoughts of paranormal activity and strange occurrences occurring there, and he had given them his thoughts about it and that he was not fully sure what to make of it as they had not proven anything.
On the day before they had arrived there Mitchell had been amazed at the findings of the scientists when they had given him more, as they had believed that they should, as that they believed they would encounter more.
The Lost Treasure Map Deluxe Book Collection (2017 Edition) Page 83