The Haunts & Horrors Megapack: 31 Modern & Classic Stories

by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

  Galt’s dream scream rang through my memory.

  I told Prescott my suspicions regarding the third degree tracing board, and my hopes of finding a patterm15 in his journals which might explain the unusual focus of Galt’s attention.

  Prescott was unmoved.

  “I can save you the trouble of searching my journals.” He removed his glasses and rubbed his temples. The glasses returned. He continued slowly, thoughtfully, “I have to concur with your theory. There are several instances where my collected anecdotes would seem to indicate Galt is either gesturing—”

  (or screaming)

  “—or apparently screaming at the tracing board.”

  It was clear from Prescott’s body language he was uncomfortable with the idea. I could see it in the way he looked passed me while he clarified his findings, and in the subtle undertones of his halting speech.

  “Why didn’t you tell me this?”

  “I wasn’t sure what it meant,” he cleared his throat and met my gaze, “and I’m still not sure what it means.”

  “Don’t you understand? We came to the same conclusion years apart. There has to be something to this. We need to look at the tracing board.”

  “I have. There’s nothing hiding in the symbols. I’ve examined and re-examined them. I’ve researched their meanings, and their potential meanings, from over a hundred Masonic sources.”

  “But what about the actual physical object? Have you examined the tracing board itself?”

  “Of course,” he patronized me with raised eyebrows, “I’m the chairman of the Maintenance Committee. I’ve dusted it once a month for the past twelve years. I’m telling you, there’s nothing there.”

  And given that, I knew I had my answer for this, “Sure…but have you ever taken it off the wall?”

  Prescott’s eyes widened.

  “You’re aware the third tracing board was purchased by the lodge in 1908, right? It’s over a century old.”

  I grinned at the predictability of the old Doctor.

  “You’ve never taken it off the wall.”

  “I can’t risk damaging it. The piece was moved into lodge alongside our oldest artifacts. The tracing board existed before the building itself.”

  “My point exactly. If Galt was Initiated in 1880, and the lodge was constructed in 1924, there’s a very good chance Galt was involved in the building or engineering—”

  Prescott cut me off, “There’s an awful lot of supposition there.”

  “Maybe. But where there’s smoke, you’ll often find fire.” I fought the exasperation tugging at my voice, “Look, we owe it to ourselves to at least check it out.”

  He glanced at a tattered page of yellowed newsprint in a high-end frame over a peripheral bookshelf, “I guess just taking it off the wall can’t really hurt…”

  It sounded like he was trying to convince himself.

  “I don’t see how.”

  I held my breath.

  He dropped into thought.

  The moment hung, suspended on Prescott’s impending decision.

  Finally he said, “Let’s call it an acceptable risk.”

  I gave him a mute nod.

  “I suppose we ought to bring the Master in on this.”

  I agreed, and found myself staring at the yellowed page which had caught his eye.

  It was the Friday, December 9th, 1927 edition of the North Bay Nugget…the issue highlighting disappearance of Charles Galt.

  * * * *

  Worshipful Brother Daniel J. Wilson had unlocked Doric Lodge, and was comfortably reading a book in his cushioned chair when Dr. Prescott and I arrived. And though the light was still pallid, I noticed he’d set the dimmer as bright as it had ever been, a clear sign of the approach he intended take in this matter. He nodded at us from his elevated position in the east, “Gentlemen.”

  I was a bit older than Wilson, whose meteoric rise through the chairs of Blue Lodge16 had been marked by a no nonsense attitude and a strict adherence to the ancient charges.17 In addition to a plethora of minor accomplishments, several candidates had been Initiated during his year, and in the ebbs and flows of Masonic time, his reign had been golden. He was a good master and a born leader. It was obvious he was at home in this role, and in return Wilson was widely respected by those in lodge.

  Putting his book aside he said, “I understand the two of you have been quite busy with ghost stories.”

  I glanced at Prescott. He regarded Wilson with composure. No doubt he’d become accustomed to skepticism. But Wilson wasn’t finished, “Over the course of the past twenty-four hours I’ve received two rather disturbing phone calls.”

  He centered his attention on me.

  “Perhaps you can explain why Brother McCann’s mom was on the line yesterday; complaining a man from our lodge had come by to pester her with questions about her mentally ill son.”

  I opened my mouth in an attempt to defend myself. Wilson held up a hand. He turned to Prescott, “After that, perhaps the good Doctor can explain why he’s phoning me at eight o’clock on a Sunday morning, demanding my presence in lodge with a bizarre request to examine the third degree tracing board.”

  Jesus…it was Sunday? I’d had no idea. And from the way Prescott suddenly wavered, I was guessing he didn’t either.

  To the Doctor’s credit, he stepped forward, “Danny,” his voice was quiet, respectful, the use of ‘Danny’ instead of ‘Dan’ or ‘Worshipful Brother Wilson’ intended to convey a sense of the generational gap between them; it was transparent ploy, but effective. Prescott continued, “I’ll be happy to clear all this up for you. But before we do anything, it’s imperative we have a quick look at that tracing board—”

  I broke in, “If what we’re thinking is wrong, there’ll be no harm done. I’ll apologize to Mrs. McCann, and I’m sure Dr. Prescott finds himself as embarrassed as I do at the hour.”

  Prescott bobbed his head in agreement.

  “But, if our thinking is accurate, we may be one step closer to untangling a mystery—and in the process ending the rumours—which have plagued this lodge for years.”

  Wilson gave us a sarcastic chuckle, “No harm done…yeah. As long as you don’t count my sleep. Well, far be it for me to stand in the way of anybody solving the Mystery of Old Charlie Galt,” he rose, “so, if you Hardy Boys are ready, let’s take this damned thing off the wall and be done with it.”

  He fixed Prescott with a hard stare, “And, depending on the results of this so-called examination, I’ll be looking forward to hearing your explanations, Doctor.”

  Prescott and I exchanged a nervous moment.

  Wilson headed for the tracing board, leaving the east on a diagonal, crossing to the Chaplain’s Chair in the north. We followed in a straight line from the center.18

  With Wilson and I on either side, we removed the antique from the wall; an extremely agitated Dr. Prescott oversaw the event. It was long and thin, about five feet by three feet, the fragile, time-scarred frame flimsy in our hands. The wood was remarkably light…I suppose I expected a piece of such preserved history to command a more substantial weight. Prescott bent for a closer look, circling while Wilson and I placed the base on the floor and held the piece upright.

  The Doctor straightened, “Oh.”

  I tried peering around, but the height of the piece frustrated me, “What ‘oh’? What do you see?”

  We leaned the tracing board face down against the Chaplain’s Chair. The back was covered, sealed with a thick, brown paper. Prescott tapped the lower left corner, “Here…what do you make of this?”

  At first I thought he’d discovered a manufacturer’s stamp, but under scrutiny I realized I was looking at three small lines of calligraphy:

  Edgar Wallace Framing & Photography

  110 Main St. North Bay, Ontario

  1925

  We stared at the fine script. Prescott was rattled.

  “They must’ve had it re-framed.”

  “In 1925.”

&n
bsp; Wilson added, “I know the shop is long gone. There’s a parking garage there now. But the name…I recognize that name…Edgar Wallace…”

  I came to an obvious but no doubt unwelcome conclusion, “We have to remove the back. We have to get rid of this paper.”

  Prescott’s head snapped toward me. At the same time Wilson walked away, toward the anteroom in the west. He tossed a distracted, “I’ll just be a second,” over his shoulder.

  “The paper has to stay. We can’t do that.”

  I turned to Prescott, “Why not? The back is easy enough to replace. I’ll tell you what,” I found my Swiss Army knife in a front pocket, “leave it to me to cover the repair cost.”

  And before Prescott could say another word I opened my sharpest blade and slid it into the paper alongside the frame with no small amount of precision.

  Prescott bordered on apoplectic, but what could he say? Besides, I knew he wanted the answers as much as I did.

  Wilson returned flipping through a slim, hard-covered volume around the same time I was preparing to cut into the paper along the top of the frame.

  “I knew I recognized that name. Check it out.”

  It was a history of the lodge, opened to a complete list of Doric Lodge’s Past Masters, replete with photographs and short biographies. Wilson pointed out a sepia-toned headshot of the Past Master in 1927, one Worshipful Brother Edgar Wallace, who’d been “a local businessman and a municipal councilor”.

  The significance of the date wasn’t lost on us.

  Prescott said, “When I was in the army we had a saying, ‘Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.’”

  I gave him a grim smile, hurrying to slice away the back of the tracing board, more sure than ever we were on the right track. Meanwhile, Prescott explained our fascination with the year 1927 to a confused and skeptical Wilson.

  Then the brown paper fell away from the frame, revealing a protective layer of eighty-odd-year-old cardboard. We moved it with extreme care, and even then portions crumbled in our hands. Eventually the back of the tracing board began to show itself. Prescott guessed it was constructed from some sort of pre-twentieth century cloth. The corners, normally hidden by the frame, were tattered and slowly succumbing to inevitable decay.

  Dr. Prescott used the opportunity to take a tiny sample.19 Wilson, frowning and obviously annoyed nothing of any real importance had been discovered, leaned in to assist Prescott. It was in this moment he suddenly stopped with a puzzled expression, crouching, tugging at an obscured something held by the frame.

  A thin page slid into existence from behind what little of the cardboard remained. With some caution given its age, Wilson placed it on the carpet amid the scattered refuse.

  The paper was in remarkably good shape…a by-product of having been safely encased between the cardboard and the tracing board for the past eighty-six years. It looked as though it had been torn from a book.20 At the bottom of the page was the Roman numeral ‘II’ in an antique typeface. And the size of the page was right; maybe five inches wide by eight inches long, the ragged edges seeming to agree with me, as did Dr. Prescott. The page consisted of ten handwritten statements21 centered beneath the title,

  We, The Roundhouse Lodge, Believe:

  As Above So Below

  Reason and Tolerance are the Highest Virtues

  Love Thy Neighbour As Thy Self

  Look beyond the Narrow Limits of particular

  Institutions, whether Civil or Religious

  Prize Truth, Beauty and Love while

  seeking symmetry with the Infinite

  Government and Religion

  must be kept Separate

  Humanity did not invent Geometry,

  Humanity merely discovered Geometry

  —Geometry is the face of the Absolute

  A Balance will always be found—

  Nothing can exist in the Light

  without casting a Shadow

  Contemplate Death—Know Thy Self

  Be not a cancer on the Earth—

  Live always in Harmony with Nature

  Prescott’s eyes blazed with excitement. He breathed, “Fascinating.”

  I studied the handwriting, which differed from the meticulous script on the tracing board.

  “What the hell is the Roundhouse Lodge?”

  Wilson asked the question as if we had an answer.

  Without taking his eyes off the document, Prescott said, “I’m not entirely certain, but ‘roundhouse’ is a term for a locomotive repair shed on a spinning platform. I think the ONR22 still uses one in Kapuskasing, but they’re rare these days. The reference here suggests a group of railway men from Doric Lodge may’ve established an informal lodge or perhaps even a clandestine lodge.23 Clearly the word ‘roundhouse’ harkens back to another time, raising several questions: when was this Roundhouse Lodge formed? North Bay is a train town—”

  I added, “And Galt worked with the railways.”

  “—personally, I think the real question is who brought Freemasonry to North Bay? Was it here before the railway? Or did this so-called Roundhouse Lodge play a larger role?”

  I said, “So it’s like the chicken and the egg. Which came first, the Roundhouse Lodge or the Doric Lodge?”

  “Exactly,” Prescott grinned.

  “That’s nothing. Take a peek at this.”

  Both of us looked at Wilson, who’d flipped the old paper, revealing three well-known symbols of Masonry—a sun, a moon and a key—each numbered and connected by arrows. Below this bit of strangeness a line of familiar glyphs, reproduced here from Dr. Prescott’s notebook:

  “Jesus! Now this is interesting!”

  Prescott’s knees creaked as he moved for a closer perusal.

  Wilson asked before I could, “Do you know what this means?”

  Prescott tsk-tsk’d us, “I don’t have a clue about the numbers…or why they’re reversed. The sun, the moon and the key I know you know, although their context here is a mystery. But these marks below that…well, frankly I’m a little disappointed in the both of you. It’s clear neither of you have read Beyond the Pillars,”24 he puffed, pushing himself to his feet, “it’s the Harris Code.”25

  Without notice, Dr. Prescott ambled off to the anteroom. He returned almost immediately with a copy of Beyond the Pillars I’d often noticed but never picked up.

  He quickly found the appropriate section.

  “It’s a simple enough code. The alphabet is broken into a series of four grids, two in a tic-tac-toe pattern, and two in the form of an X. The first eighteen letters of the alphabet fit into the tic-tac-toe grids, the remaining eight into the X’s. On one of the X grids the letters have dots, as on one of the tic-tac-toe patterns. Here,” he turned the book toward us, “see for yourselves.”

  Wilson said, “Intriguing. So the letter ‘E’ would become a simple square.”

  “Precisely.”

  Prescott began working the code in his notebook. We watched him put it together in less than a minute.

  “Ex Libris.”

  He stared at us triumphantly.

  I looked at Wilson. He shrugged.

  Prescott rolled his eyes.

  “It’s Latin. And obviously they should never have stopped teaching it in schools. Ex Libris…it means ‘Library Of’.”

  After a moment of confused silence I said, “Okay, but library of what?”

  Prescott gave us a sly, knowing smile, “I have an idea about that.”

  There were two doors in the east, one on either side of a crimson curtain behind the Master’s chair. Prescott headed for the one on the right. He led us through it, and into the Secretary’s office. Of course ‘Secretary’s office’ was only vaguely accurate. In reality it was more of a catch-all storage space where the lodge’s forgotten odds and ends eventually came to rest.

  Prescott began moving planks of wood left from a failed renovation project some ten years ago. He leaned them against a set of pre-World War
II filing cabinets. Not entirely sure what we were doing, Wilson and I hurried to help. Prescott talked while we worked, “In 1958 my sponsor, Soupy Bolger, gave me a tour of this building. Soupy said the Secretary’s office had once been used as a library, and back then there were still one or two boxes of books kicking around.”

  And sure enough, as we moved the planks we slowly uncovered a series of beautiful, dark-oak shelves extending floor to ceiling. They were built into the wall, very likely during the construction of the lodge itself. Prescott ran an admiring hand over the rich grain, “I’ve frequently wondered what became of the original volumes housed here. No doubt some were priceless.”

  “I think you’ve answered your own question, Doctor.” Wilson seemed entranced by the shelves’ intricate wood-work, staring intently at an exquisitely crafted key intertwined with vine, “And say, isn’t this one of the symbols on the page we discovered?”

  In fact there were nine Masonic signs decorating the shelves. Three vertical supports crisscrossed the horizontal ledges, and at nine of the intersecting points the wood had been painstakingly hand-carved into a moon, a beehive, a sun, a geometric compass, a key, a builder’s square, a broken column, the letter ‘G’ and the 47th Proposition of Euclid (also known as the Pythagorean Theorem).26

  “It would appear all of our characters are assembled,” Prescott’s hands played over the figures, “and I think I understand—”

  He ran his finger along the wood on the underside of the key, suddenly smiling at us, “Sure…”

  He asked for my Swiss Army knife.

  I quickly passed it to him.

  Amazed, I watched as this man who’d nearly had a stroke while I was cutting the paper on the tracing board, jammed my blade under the key, into the almost ninety-year-old oak.

  “As I suspected,” Prescott moved to the next closest figure, the builder’s square. After a cursory examination he beamed, “I know what the page is trying to tell us.”

  He turned, his face flushed, his eyes bright, “All of these symbols are carved into the wood, they’re actually part of the structure…all except three, which appear to have been added after the fact.”