The Lost Treasure Map Series

by V Bertolaccini

  All about him, the others went into dream states.

  James fell on the floor, as though taking a fit.

  Bryson lunged at Mortimer’s shoulders, pulled him to the door, and he forced him to rush away with him, until they were away from it.

  Mortimer glared at his watch. “We must help them!”

  “It’s too powerful!”

  “We’ll have to find a way.”

  “You must tell me all you know about that thing.”

  “I don’t believe that it is her. She brought something here that I believe that she had used to travel here. However, William Randall could not break its curse. He tried to use her spell book and spells to do it. But nobody could read it properly, or they believed that they were in riddles to stop anyone else using it.

  Mortimer glared, and he read parts of the book fast, in more detail.

  “A crystal created the magic! And William Randall intended to find the spell to neutralize it.”

  “That’s the spell there!” Mortimer stated, holding out the book, showing it to him.

  “Can you decipher it?”

  “I don’t know! But where’s the crystal?”

  “It has to be with the being.”

  Bryson realized where it was! He had seen it on the drawing of the creature in the book. It was in a pendant.

  They rushed straight to the dining room, and to it.

  He ripped the last of the material off the skeleton, plunged his hand in its chest, and onto the pendant.

  “This is it!” Bryson screamed, holding out the pendant, watching strange energy surges make his arm muscles wildly shudder and vibrate.

  The green crystal embedded in the pendant was pulsating, beaming out blinding beams of green light.

  Mortimer grabbed the pendant, and held it out.

  “I know why the spell never worked!” he shouted. “It was not a spell! It was an order to destroy it, if she had to. If she was captured by humans! It was a riddle, to hide it from anything that was not an alien transcendent!”

  Mortimer smashed the pendant hard against the table, shattering the crystal into millions of particles, instantly making the disturbances vanish forever.

  Epilogue

  The Transcendents

  Once transcendent entities had existed throughout the universe and beyond, with magical forces.

  Their wars and elaborate usages of their powers had in the end caused it to be annihilated, and the last had possessed so little that they could barely dwell in the universe, from beyond.

  Objects, with accumulations of it, had allowed the last to dwell in desolate regions of the universe.

  The powers of the last one had been told of in legends!

  Fishermen had stumbled upon the magical being, floating in the sea, washed ashore, on the shore of a Scottish island.

  It had been about to expire, but had somehow survived.

  It had stayed, its last days, in the desolate Grovnor wood, as a witch, in a cottage, hiding to conceal itself, and magical crystal.

  It had foreseen the future, and had found how to accumulate its powers from anything that had had it. And, when it had expired, it had left the most powerful magical object left – with powers going beyond anything else – with power surge sequences that opened gateways, going beyond the universe.

  Part II

  Novel 2

  The Lost Treasure Map 2

  Victor Bertolaccini

  Prologue

  The Lost Treasure and Voyager

  For centuries legends of lost treasure had been passed on through generations of people, though few details existed, and the occurrences behind them had been too confused and vague. Fundamental facts had been clearly missing that would have allowed people to locate anything thought by them to exist, and nothing had clearly been known to answer the queries of the treasure hunters, who had risked their lives in deadly attempts to explore the castle.

  The origins of the castle’s hauntings, from the majority of accumulated sources, had been proven to have occurred around 1620 when fishermen had witnessed the materialization of something of unknown origins, with a bright light of magnitude that had exploded out of the morning mist.

  Accounts of it reshaping and continually altering proved that it had altered from something else to something.

  According to legends all the people at the castle had been found dead after it had been brought there – with its deadly powers going beyond this universe, opening gateways going beyond space and time – and that valuable treasure had been left near where it had been concealed.

  For centuries the lost treasure had been thought to exist there by the few explorers, who had carried out investigations and searches for it, of which many had paid by losing their lives by being in the confines of the castle at the wrong time or place.

  The place must have been one of the most dangerous places in the world! People could not survive permanently living in its confines! Even though at times its powers dwindled and some people had managed to survive and escape after living for months there, and had given horrific accounts of the mind-bending wonders and deadliest menaces that they had been subjected to.

  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.

  II

  The Lost Voyager

  For billions of years the transcendent voyager had existed never wholly knowing what had created it or where it had originated, carrying out its mission of searching through time and space in its universe for abnormalities, unknown civilizations and species, and transcendent entities with colossal powers and capabilities and to destroy them if they were dangerous to reality and what its programming considered dangerous.

  It had been designed and given technology beyond anything else that it had encountered and had the abilities to search its universe in a degree and with abilities that would not have been believed to exist by the most advanced transcendences and civilizations, and would have been thought of as magical powers, and it had the ability to search its universe throughout time.

  Its form had been an invisible complex mass of energy, stored in many dimensions, that had been built to last forever, and it directly entered stars to energize itself and store its vast powers for extensive amounts of time.

  Its stores of information had been vast and it had the ability to collect as much information on what it had been programmed for eternally and improve its defenses and other abilities, and it had become the ultimate weapon of destruction against the destruction of its universe.

  It had stored the technology and abilities of zillions of species and had the ability to recognize and handle what it had been searching for within a range of its universe.

  At one point it had unintentionally left the universe and had entered an outer universe that it had not known the existence of, where colossal amounts of universes had existed, and on its entrance there its programming had accepted it as the real universe and that it had to accept it as the universe that it had to carry out its mission in.

  At first it had been unable to enter the universes and properly detect anything in them and it used all its information and studied how it had entered the outer universe and found a way to enter them and locate particular things in them, but
infinite amounts of things of unknown origins existed in them.

  In supernatural universes it had learned to open and use gateways that shifted it accurately to destinations. It discovered far more than it had ever realized could exist and it gave itself colossal magical abilities and energies and it had analyzed everything in a greater degree.

  On its first entrances to this universe and world it had been left staggered when it had encountered something of unknown origins that had drained its energy from it!

  Even though it had not done much in its damaged condition, with most of its vast abilities virtually unusable and it being trapped and buried away in the castle, it had been able to explore things through supernatural gateways into universes, going out into the strangest places, and it had even considered if there had been others such as it in the endless universes and if they had created it, and if it could get them to help it, and it had gained abilities to explore inconceivable dimensions and powers in the universes, far beyond its original knowledge and powers.

  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 gr
ound 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 Pendleton 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.