The Ghost Manuscript

by Kris Frieswick

  An instant later, a mouthpiece was being guided into her mouth, the air flowing strongly through it. She clamped down and inhaled the fresh, beautiful oxygen. There were hands on her shoulders, human hands this time, pulling her horizontally along the tops of the rocks, and then she felt the pressure ease on her body and she began to float again. Her mask was adjusted against her face. She let herself go limp for a moment and tried to get her breathing under control. The hands on her shoulders helped.

  She held the top rim of her mask with her hand and began to blow water out of her nose. As the water drained away, she opened her eyes. Through the window of the mask was Dafydd’s face. His eyes were wide but not panicked. He had his regulator in his mouth, and she had his secondary in hers. He had her primary in his hand and was pushing her regulator’s purge button. Air bubbled out in spurts. It was working fine. It was dangling off her tank right near her right shoulder, exactly where it was supposed to be. How had she missed it?

  She took a few more breaths until she felt her heart slow down. She removed his secondary regulator and put hers into her mouth. He waited, breathing in the air slowly and calmly, as if nothing out of the ordinary had just happened. They sat there on the bottom of the ocean together for a few moments, lit by the flashlights, looking at each other. She was alive. She was not going to die. Not at the moment anyway.

  Dafydd reached over and touched her shoulder. With his other hand, he made the A-okay sign. She flashed it back to him, then again, so he knew she meant it. He swung around and pointed the flashlight above them at something on the cliff wall.

  There was an opening in the cliff, about four feet wide, ten feet above the ocean floor. In front of the opening was an enormous flat boulder that ran like a second wall parallel to the cliff about four feet away from it. There was just enough room for a person to get between the boulder and the cliff. It was just like the bookshelf that obscured the opening to the vault at Adeona. If they hadn’t been exactly where they were, looking over at the wall from this precise angle, they would not have been able to see the cave.

  They kicked gently over to the tall, flat boulder and pointed their flashlights around its base. It was smoother than anything surrounding it, almost as if it had been hand-hewn. It was about seven feet wide, and the sides were almost completely vertical. It had an unusually uniform thickness, about two feet for its entire height, which she estimated to be about fifteen feet. Its top was slightly rounded. It reminded her of something.

  The longer she moved the flashlight across it, the more convinced she was that it was man-made. Dafydd swam at its base, examining something there. He wiggled his flashlight at her to get her attention and then laid his flashlight on the ground, pointed right at the base where the rock met the sand. The light hit a deep, straight vertical scratch in the rock. With both hands, he very gently and slowly began to brush the soil away from the base where the scratch dropped down below the dirt.

  As Dafydd moved the dirt and rocks aside, the water filled with silt, and before long they were surrounded and temporarily blinded by the reflected light. When he finished digging, he swam backward with the flashlight and waited for the silt to dissipate. As it did, on the side of the rock, there emerged a carving, about eight inches in diameter.

  It was a circle quartered by a cross—an ancient Christian cross.

  Dafydd looked up at her. She looked at him. Then he raised two fists high above his head in a victory stance. She couldn’t help but laugh through her regulator.

  Now for the hard part.

  Dafydd swam slowly around the boulder and into the small space between it and the cliff wall. She came in from the other side. He motioned for her to go into the cave. Protocol was for the less experienced person to go first. That way, if she got stuck, he could still get out. Go for help. Only one person had to die. If this was the cave they were seeking, it had to be big enough for a group of men to be able to bring a makeshift casket through it—or whatever they had used to carry the King. If it got too narrow, they would know it wasn’t the right one and they’d back out. Unless it had collapsed in the fifteen hundred years since.

  All that was left to do, finally, was to go in and see.

  Carys pointed her flashlight farther into the opening. The cave became wider once they entered its mouth. She swam in, focusing all her mental energy on keeping her breathing steady. Silvery fish flashed like shots of light past them.

  It must have been excruciating to bring Arthur down through here. One of the men must have scouted it beforehand. Where the tunnel walls pushed inward, the rock walls sported long scratches. They looked like the doorjamb at her apartment after she’d tried to push a too-wide table through it. She and Dafydd swam on, and the tunnel leveled out flat and opened up wider, then began to climb upward again.

  In about twenty yards, the tunnel split into two distinct paths. They both knew better than to split up. Dafydd motioned to the one on the right. Carys glanced at the walls inside both tunnels, and only one—the one on the left—had scratch marks.

  She pointed at the scratches and motioned for them to go left. They swam on, the bubbles clinging like liquid mercury to the cave’s ceiling before dancing off farther into the cave. Her heart began to pound a little faster, but from anticipation this time, not fear.

  After about seventy-five feet, the tunnel narrowed and stopped—a dead end.

  She stopped swimming. This was the right way, she knew it, but a rockfall blocked their way. She swam up to it and shined her flashlight along the walls on either side of the blockage. The white scratches dug into the wall right up to the fallen rocks and disappeared into them. She spun around slowly, wiggled her light at Dafydd, and pointed straight ahead. He shook his head no. She knew she was asking for something that was not only dangerous but violated one of the basic principles of diving—disturb nothing. But this was different.

  She nodded her head emphatically yes and stabbed her finger toward the rocks and the scratch marks on the wall. She swam back away from the wall, and Dafydd swam toward it and reached for the rock at the top of the stack. He gave it a push. It didn’t move. He pushed again. Again nothing.

  She swiped her flashlight beam back and forth along every inch of the rockfall. On the third pass, she saw something she’d missed before: a rock, almost perfectly spherical, of pure white marble—it matched no other rocks she’d seen on the dive. It was at the very bottom of the rockfall, nearly obscured beneath a larger rock. She swam in closer to it, got right down at the level of the floor, and shined her light on it, brushing away the sand that had accumulated around its base.

  As the full stone was revealed, Carys noticed a series of indentations on it. She leaned in closer. There, in tiny Latin script, were etched the letters “SUSCITATEVIVEQUE.”

  Wake and live.

  She turned to Dafydd, her heart pounding. She pointed at the rock. He swam in close and looked at it. He turned back to her, his eyes wide underneath his mask. She pointed at the rock again and made a rolling motion with her hands. He motioned for her to get back. She obeyed.

  When she turned back around, she saw Dafydd reach down and shove the white stone to the left, then swim toward her as fast as he could in an explosion of effort. There was a thud, then a crack that pierced the silence of the tunnel, like wooden twigs snapping. The lowest row of stones seem to drop down, underneath the rockfall. Then the wall of stones collapsed methodically downward into itself—not backward or forward but inward, the way a building implodes, as if the whole thing were dropping into a chamber below the tunnel.

  Dafydd, who had pressed himself against the side of the tunnel, turned in shock to look at Carys. She flashed him an A-okay. When the silt cleared, they could see open water on the other side.

  They swam on and the tunnel veered sharply upward again. She led the way. They were so close. She could feel it. For one short moment, she let herself hope that maybe this w
as really going to happen.

  Then the pain hit her. It started in her center and radiated like a shockwave through the rest of her body and her limbs, convulsing her completely.

  She doubled into a fetal position. She could not breathe or think or process what was happening—her mind was filled only with the pain. She felt Dafydd grab her shoulders and turn her toward him. He motioned with his thumb. Up.

  She could not let that happen. She pulled away and kicked her legs hard, every stroke torture, sending herself deeper into the cave as it climbed upward. It had to be here. Somewhere. She had to know, even if it was the last thing she ever knew.

  The narrow cave widened before her into an enormous black void. With knife strikes of pain in her midsection, she kicked up, up.

  And then her head popped out of the water. She instinctively ripped out her mouthpiece and inhaled what she prayed would be air.

  It was.

  Dafydd surfaced behind her. The light from their flashlights shined on their faces, and his was filled with the beginnings of panic. Seeing this made her more scared.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “I’m okay,” she said. “I’ll be okay.” She was sure of it. Oh hell, she wasn’t sure. That was another of her lies. But they were almost there. That was something that she did know, as certainly as she knew her own name.

  “We have to get you back out,” he said. “What’s happening?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Whatever it was, it’s done.”

  Dafydd’s face turned resigned as he realized he was going to lose the fight. He shined his flashlight past Carys’s head, upward, to illuminate the space they were in. It seemed, for a moment, to have no limits. But as their eyes adjusted, they could see that they were in an enormous underwater cavern, a huge natural cathedral filled with stalactites, like statues of the twenty thousand saints, dangling from the ceiling. Some nearly touched the water.

  And there, in front of them, was a flat platform carved like a stage into the wall of the cavern. Upon it rested a rectangular object, huge, of dirty white stone. On the side facing them, etched into the side, was the same symbol that had adorned the enormous rock slab that marked the entrance to the cave: an ancient Christian cross.

  Tears sprang from Carys’s eyes, from pain or joy, she couldn’t tell.

  “Oh my god,” said Dafydd softly. “It’s here.”

  Dafydd’s light illuminated a series of stone steps that extended from the stage down into the water and continued down far beneath where they were swimming. He grabbed her vest and swam her up to the stairs, and they rested there, half in and half out of the water. Dafydd sat staring at the sarcophagus. Then he turned to her.

  “What’s going on? Tell me what you’re feeling,” he said.

  “It’s just an abdominal thing,” she said. “It happened a few days ago, but I thought it was nothing.”

  “It’s obviously not nothing,” he said. “We’ve got to get you back out of here.” He grabbed her air gauge. “We’re low.”

  She smiled wanly. The pain was beginning to abate.

  “We have to look inside it,” she said. “We have to see if he’s there.”

  “No,” said Dafydd. “We have to get you out of here. We can come back now that we know where it is.”

  “No. We may not get another shot at this,” she said. “I am going nowhere until we open that tomb.”

  She knew he wanted to look, too. If she could stand, he’d see she was alright. She hoisted herself with her arms up another stair so she was completely out of the water. She unclipped her tank vest.

  “Help me with this,” she said.

  Dafydd looked at her for a moment, unmoving, then reached over and held up the tank and she pulled her arms out of the vest. She pulled off her fins and stood up. The pain in her stomach was still there but not as knife-like.

  The stage was in a large alcove with a rounded back wall. The floor was about ten feet deep and twelve or fifteen feet wide. The alcove extended up about ten feet before merging again with the cave’s natural contours. It looked like an enormous version of the tiny nooks carved in church walls that hold statues of the Virgin and saints. There was nothing else on the floor of the alcove but the sarcophagus. It had been carved directly out of the cave’s stone. It could never be moved. It was enormous—about four feet high, eight feet long and four feet wide. Dafydd stripped off his gear and came to stand beside her.

  It was a remarkable work of art. A treasure unto itself. As permanent a thing as the people of that time could create. One of the last human beings to stand in this spot was likely Lestinus, offering his benediction over his master’s casket. She wished he was with her so he could see the tomb again—and then wondered briefly why he wasn’t. Perhaps her mind was so focused on the task at hand that there was no bandwidth for hallucinations.

  “Where do we start?” asked Dafydd.

  She bent over to examine the stone more closely. The lid, about three inches thick, fit cleanly with no gaps between it and the sides of the sarcophagus. She marveled at the workmanship. There was no way Arthur’s men could have built this, and certainly not the alcove. It must have already been built, reserved for the burial of someone very important.

  She put her hands on the edge, Dafydd joined her, and slowly they pushed. The lid slid away a few inches without much resistance. They looked at each other. It shouldn’t have been that easy.

  “Let’s keep going. Very gently. Twist it away to the side so we don’t have to lift it off.”

  Dafydd walked to the far end, and pushing the lid clockwise, they angled the lid so it was resting across the top of the sarcophagus.

  She stepped back. So did Dafydd. They looked at each other, and the same fire burned for a moment in their eyes. Moving slowly, her awareness of the pain in her gut all but gone, she stepped to the side of the sarcophagus and pointed her flashlight inside.

  There was nothing in it.

  The pain rushed back, but this time it was from the clench of her heart. Her face must have fallen, because Dafydd moved next to her and looked in.

  “Empty,” he said. “It’s bloody empty.”

  “It can’t be empty,” she said. “It’s not possible. No one has been here.”

  She bent her body over the top of the tomb and stuck her head as far inside as it would go, to the point where it looked like she might climb in. She swept her flashlight back and forth deep inside.

  There, in the very end of the tomb underneath where the lid obscured their view from above, were three lumpen objects.

  She grabbed Dafydd’s dry bag off his vest and took out a package of sterile gloves. With a grunt, she reached as far back as she could into the tomb and grabbed the objects. They were two leather sacks and a manuscript, bound in red leather and grander than the Lestinus manuscript. She placed the two sacks on the floor of the alcove. Dafydd reached down for them.

  “Don’t touch,” she said. “Please.”

  He backed away, a frown on his face. He had expected treasure—books were not treasure to him.

  Carys carefully peeled back the cover to reveal the first page of the manuscript. It was handwritten, the penmanship good, the ink still surprisingly strong given its obvious age. The first page opened with the words “Peregrinatio mea—Madoc Morfran.” My journey—Madoc Morfran. She turned the page and translated it out loud for Dafydd. “I am Madoc Morfran, the son of Riothamus Arcturus, and herein I tell of my voyage to the place across the sea. It is there that Arcturus lies with the gentle people of the sand.”

  “Arthur,” said Dafydd. “You were right. That manuscript was…”

  Her mind was spinning, and she placed the manuscript on the top of the tomb.

  Arthur’s son had taken him away and buried him somewhere else.

  She dropped to the floor. When was this going to e
nd? She sat there and let it sink in, trying not to cry.

  How would she ever tell Lestinus? He would be devastated. Then she remembered and felt like a fool.

  She reached over and picked up the first sack, and pulled open the top. It, too, was in remarkably good condition. The air temperature, unchangeable humidity, and lack of sunlight inside the tomb must have conspired to create perfect preservation conditions. She reached into the sack and drew out a small object—a gold brooch, about two inches across, with a small red stone at its center. The design was clearly mid-sixth-century Romano-British. Dafydd stepped forward to look more closely.

  “Bloody hell,” he whispered.

  She slowly pulled out seven more golden objects—combs, pins, belt hardware—each adorned with rough-cut, colored precious gems. She lined them up on the floor.

  “These belonged to the people Arthur defended from the Anglo-Saxon hordes,” she said. “They left their wealth with Arcturus and his men with the hopes of retrieving it when the hordes were defeated.”

  “That didn’t work out quite as planned, did it?” he asked, leaning over to examine the objects closely with his flashlight.

  “Nope,” she said, and slowly returned each item to the sack, which she then placed in the dry bag. She grabbed the second sack. It was much lighter. She slid open the pouch and reached in. She couldn’t quite get her cold fingers around the tiny objects in this sack, so she gently dumped them out into her hand.

  It took her a minute to realize what she was looking at. There was a seashell. A carved, flattened stone—like an arrowhead—made of some sort of white rock. And seeds. A few that were very tiny, and several larger, almost like kernels of corn.

  “What on earth…?” she asked.

  “Is that what I think it is?” asked Dafydd, pointing at a shell. “Why would someone put this stuff in a coffin?”

  She shook her head. Dafydd placed his hand on her shoulder.

  “We need to go,” he said. “And we’ll need to surface as soon as we get out of the cave. We’re too low on air to swim underwater all the way back to the boat.”