Darkness Rising (The East Salem Trilogy) (32 page)

“The real Druids,” Villanegre said, smiling politely to Cassandra, “boarded two ships and sailed from the English shore.”

“I didn’t know the Druids were seafarers,” Quinn said.

“They weren’t. But they’d formed an alliance with some people who were very capable seafarers.”

“Vikings,” Ruth said. “Who else could it be?”

“Our people,” Tommy said. “Sorry about that, guys.”

“The same,” Villanegre said. “The remaining Druids divided into two groups to better their chances of surviving. One ship sailed to the south and turned east at the Strait of Gibraltar to circle back through the Mediterranean and land in southern France. I should add that by this time—”

“When was this?”

“End of the eighth century,” Villanegre said. “By this time the Druids who’d survived had learned their lesson. They’d learned that you can’t hope to lie low and be undiscovered if you build massive stone monuments that are visible for miles.”

“Stonehenge,” Quinn said.

Villanegre nodded. “So they went underground. Literally. They worshipped only in caves. And they blended in with society and lived rather normal lives, except when they’d congregate to practice their black magic. But we tracked them down, eventually, after one poor fellow ended up on a rack and had the truth stretched out of him. We killed as many of them as we could find in what history has recorded as witch hunts. You may recall.”

“There were a lot more than 104 people killed as witches,” Dani said,
recalling a figure from a women’s studies class that said as many as six million women in Europe may have been executed for practicing witchcraft.

“Yes,” Villanegre said. His tone became somber. “Much of that was Satan’s doing, but some of it was ours, I’m afraid. We started a terrible mania that we hadn’t anticipated. And we learned, from a very hard lesson, to play our cards much closer to the vest.”

“You’ve been saying
we
,” Carl said. “Who is this we?”

Villanegre studied him for a moment.

“People like you, Carl. People who’ve given their lives to God and pledged to renounce Satan and to defeat him. Originally we were the descendants of the soldiers who fought with Charles the Black. Some of us chose to wear the vestments and serve God in a public capacity. Others saw a greater wisdom in staying hidden and operating surreptitiously. It was a game of cat and mouse. We knew we hadn’t found them all. We only rooted the last of them out of Europe after we saw that painting.”

“
The Garden of Earthly Delights
?” Dani said. “The Duke of Ghent?”

Villanegre nodded. “He was merely a pawn. His oldest—and I dare say rottenest—son was a Druid high priest. They claimed they were an Adamite cult, trying to use sexuality to return to the state of grace man had originally known in the Garden of Eden. But they were just another hedonistic cult of charisma, of the sort we’ve seen many times over the millennia. The two figures emerging from the cave—”

“In the lower right-hand corner of the center panel of the painting,” Tommy said.

“One is the Prince of Ghent, and the one whispering in his ear is a demon.”

“What happened to the second ship?” Tommy said. “You said there were two.”

“We never found out. But we received a prophecy. An angel told us that someday they would send for their painting, and when they were reunited with it, their powers would multiply.”

“I know where the second ship went,” Ben Whitehorse said. “Tommy, do you remember when I told you that Leif Ericson sailed for America with thirty-five men but returned with only thirty-four?”

“The Man of the North,” Tommy said.

“Leif Ericson wasn’t the first Viking to sail to America,” Ben said. “When Ericson sailed, he was using a map that another man had drawn. That other man was the one the Druids hired to bring them to America. We don’t know his name, but in Indian lore he’s just called The Sailor.”

“Does Indian lore say where he landed?”

“He is said to have sailed up the Hudson River as far as he could go and dropped them off,” Ben said. “That would have been around Albany. Not so far from here. The Iroquois called it Muhheakantuck, which meant ‘the river that flows two ways.’”

“Where’d they go from there?” Dani said.

“They went to the region of New York you call the Finger Lakes,” Whitehorse said. “It was there that the Druids corrupted the people and taught them to be cannibals who practiced human sacrifice. They brought Thadodaho and the Wendigo to America.”

“We had our theories, but until recently we had no proof,” Villanegre said.

“How many ‘we’s’ are there?” Tommy said.

“It’s a very small and very secret group. There are twelve of us—like the twelve disciples. We call ourselves the Curatoriat. None of us knows who the others are, but we have ways of staying in contact with each other.”

“If you don’t know who the others are, you can’t reveal the names if you’re questioned,” Dani said.

“Precisely,” the Englishman said. “We are, in a fashion, the curators of that painting. Our task, since wiping out the last of the fiends in Europe, has been to find out what happened to the second ship. The painting currently hanging in the gallery at St. Adrian’s originally hung in a cave in northern France, where it was used in what one might laughingly call worship. We’re the ones who moved it to the chapel in the Duke of Ghent’s
palace. We had to get it into the public view, despite its atrocious message, because we needed to use it as bait. We’ve been waiting over five hundred years. And now it’s here.”

“How are the members of the Curatoriat chosen?” Carl said.

“We are each responsible for selecting and training a successor,” Villanegre said. “That is also a secret we keep. But we are ever vigilant, because we know that when the painting is reunited with Satan’s vulgar acolytes, it will be a sign that time is short.”

“Time is short?” Quinn said. “Short for what?”

Villanegre looked at him somberly but didn’t answer.

“I’m still not clear what this has to do with Abbie Gardener,” Dani said, resting her hand on the box. “Or with this.”

“Ah, yes,” Villanegre said. “As I said, there are twelve of us. Once there were thirteen. For a while, when we were unable to establish contact with the thirteenth, we assumed Satan had somehow found him and destroyed him. Then we heard from him. He was a wise man who had received a vision from God that to keep us all safe, only one should know who the other twelve were. The Guardian would be protected. God had blessed him and his successors. Or her—the Guardian is not necessarily male. We learned where the second ship had landed, and that the Guardian was there, fighting them alone but protected. Abbie Gardener was the Guardian, the last in a long line.”

“She couldn’t have been too protected,” Tommy said. “They killed her.”

“I don’t know how they managed that,” Villanegre said. “It worries me greatly. We think the forces of darkness are gaining strength. We don’t know how or why.”

“How do you know Abbie was the last?” Dani said. “I mean, how do you know she didn’t pass the torch on to someone else?”

“I dearly hope she did,” Villanegre said. “The Guardian was the coordinator. I and my fellow curators passed our messages through her, and we received our instructions from her. But the line went dead, so to speak. Mind you, we did not know her identity. We don’t know each other’s
identities either. She knew ours, but neither man nor demon could put us into enough pain to get us to reveal her name because we didn’t know it. I came here following the painting. And hoping.”

“Is it George?”

“There’s no right of primogeniture. That would be too easily defeated,” he said. “By the way, those paintings in the house weren’t fakes. I had no choice but to lie about them, or there’d be headlines from here to Singapore about the astonishing hidden art collection with a value well into the billions of dollars. The Curatoriat put it together over the centuries, piece by piece, and shipped it to the Guardian by various methods to keep the destination secret. We are to sell them when the time comes to raise funds.”

“Funds for what?” Cassandra asked.

“It’s a defense fund,” Villanegre said. “The money raised can be spent only after a vote by the Curatoriat. We have the power of Jesus behind us, but to get things done here on earth, it helps to have financial resources.”

“The question remains, what’s in this, and how do we get it open?” Tommy said. He put his finger on the box and traced the inlays. “There might be a key we need. Though there’s no hole to put a key into.”

Dani pressed the central inlay in various places, then pressed the four smaller Celtic crosses.

“I already tried that,” Tommy said.

“Maybe it takes a special kind of touch,” Dani said. “Or combination. Like the keypad that opens the gate at the end of your driveway.”

“It wouldn’t take much pressure,” Villanegre said. “The masters of marquetry during the Renaissance could work in incredibly small tolerances.”

“I think if there are buttons that can be pushed, it would be those smaller crosses,” Ben suggested. “Remember that demons can’t overcome their physical aversion to sacred icons. They wouldn’t be able to touch the crosses.”

Tommy took up the box and pressed his fingers against the Celtic inlays.

“There are eight inlays,” he said. “Four on the front and four on the
back. But because of . . . this . . .” He stretched his hand as wide as he could. “Because of the distance between them, one person can only push four at a time, in corresponding pairs, one on the front and one on the back. So how many possible combinations are there?”

“For one person?” Quinn asked. “You need a factorial equation. Pascal’s triangle. If AB and BA are the same, there are 120 combinations. If the order you press them in matters and AB is not the same as BA, then there are 392 ways to do it.”

“What if it requires three sets of combinations?” Ruth asked. “Or four?”

“Then it’s exponential,” Quinn said. “Pascal’s triangle becomes Pascal’s pyramid. One hundred twenty cubed is 1,728,000. Three hundred ninetytwo cubed is 60,236,228. To the fourth power—”

“In other words, a lot,” Tommy said.

“Maybe it takes two to open it,” Dani said. The others looked at her. “Simultaneously. If this is something one Guardian passes on to another, that would make sense.”

“That would require harmony and cooperation,” Villanegre added.

“Consistent with the Christian message,” Dani said. “I think I’m starting to get the hang of this faith thing. Just hear me out—God wants us to love one another, right? He doesn’t want us fighting amongst ourselves.”

She looked Tommy in the eye long enough for him to get the message meant just for him.

“I think the box can only be opened by two people,” she said. “Like the launch boxes on nuclear submarines where two people have to put their keys in the locks in order to fire the missiles. It’s a fail-safe, in case one person goes crazy and tries to fire them on his own.”

“That sounds reasonable,” Ruth said.

“But what’s the pattern?” Dani said. “The combination? Quinn, how many possibilities with two people at the same time? Never mind. Too many.”

“Or not,” Tommy said. Now all eyes were on him.

“What do you mean?” Dani asked.

“Whoever made this box wanted the good guys to open it and the bad guys to keep out,” Tommy explained. “Maybe the combination is something else a demon can’t do—like make the sign of the cross. Top, bottom, left, right. Head, navel, left shoulder, right shoulder. The buttons are already arranged in a cross-like pattern.”

“
In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti
. Amen,” Villanegre said. “It’s certainly worth a try.”

“Tommy,” Dani said, “hold the end of the box just the way you were, with your thumbs on the top and your fingers on the bottom. Okay— bring it this way.”

Tommy extended the box, and Dani held the opposite end in both hands, pressing the top inlays with her thumbs and the bottom ones with her fingers.

“Now press the pair at the top,” she said. Tommy did as she instructed. “Hold them in, and I’ll press the pair at the bottom. Okay, so now, Tommy, press the inlays on the left side . . .”

“Got it,” he said.

“And I’ll press here . . .”

Dani and Tommy pressed, then pulled. The box slid open.

29.

Nested inside the box was a book, about twelve inches by eight, and three inches thick. On the cover were the words
Vademecum Absconditus
embossed in gold leaf.

“A
Vademecum
is a reference,” Villanegre said. “The Oxford Vademecum lists phone numbers of the colleges and local restaurants and such.
Absconditus
. . .”

“Means secret,” Ruth said. “Or concealed.”

“Yes,” Villanegre said. “I’d suppose it means it’s a reference of secret things.”

“That’s so weird,” Cassandra said to Tommy. “I had a dream in which you were looking at a book.”

Tommy was startled and tried hard not to show it as he looked at Dani. He could see by her reaction that she too had immediately grasped the implications of what Cassandra had said. If Cassandra had had a prophetic dream about Tommy, with such specific imagery, it signified more than just a random reconfiguration of preexisting memes. It meant the mosaic of God’s design included her.