“Christ, Gunnar! I’m so sorry,” Sam said softly.
“I’m glad that I told you all the truth after all these years.” Gunnar sniffed and wiped his face with his beanie. Johild gave him a few tissues from her bag.
“Now I know why you hate journalists more than I do,” she concluded, just as Heri’s car slowed down, approaching the last few hundred meters to the rising crest of the very site where Gunnar’s tale was set.
18
Nina was a little concerned about who may be listening, as the small room was missing its door. The narrow stairs ran down from the ground floor and landed right inside the small archive room, leaving no room for a door anyway. She placed her laptop, leather sling bag, and pile of papers on the desk and chair.
Upon her desk the small cooler box stood, stocked with bottled water as she’d requested be delivered every morning. But she had no time for drinks or food, because the incomparable Dr. Gould possessed an innate curiosity that would not be denied. A delicious plethora of information was stacked about her, wall-to-wall records and files others had become too lazy to study. On the other hand, perhaps they put things down here they were afraid might be discovered.
Nina’s hunch was riper than she realized.
She vigorously started going through the masses of documents and old files shoved into the cabinet Gertrud suggested might have what she was looking for. Applications, statements of bursaries, and trivial memos about new price hikes and rules of conduct – that was all Nina could find at first. But eventually the large drawers yielded more interesting files, such a lawsuits pending, transfers of property, and letters addressed to prospective benefactors.
“Ewww, if my lungs weren’t already full of shit they certainly would be by now. Geez, don’t they ever dust down here?” Nina mumbled as her dirty fingertips paged. By now she’d learned not to lick her finger to separate the papers better. The drawers hadn’t been touched for what seemed to be decades. Spots and spills on rusted manuscripts tainted the words upon them, but she could discern some of the dates.
“Whoa,” Nina whispered to herself, ignoring the steady nausea that came with her slowly creeping chest pain. Her lips moved rapidly as she quickly read short excerpts here and there, but her voice was very subdued and her dusty hands were shaking between the excitement of what she might find and the tremors of her condition. “We herewith wish to welcome you…” she breathed as she took the next document up between her two hands, “…and on retainer, but due to unforeseen circumstances…” She tossed it aside for the next sheet of yellowed parchment, typed out by a typewriter, “…please. Professor Gregor Ebner, Honorary 3rd Level Member and owner of the Norman Fortress now known as St. Vincent’s, will be interred this Sunday, 19th of July 1992.”
Nina’s blood ran cold. Some of the words in this particular newspaper obituary hit home in a very bad way for her. The mention of the term, ‘3rd Level Member’, suggested that Ebner, Mrs. Patterson’s adoptive father, was a member of the Order of the Black Sun. There was no report on how he’d died, however, but it disturbed the pained historian that her good, elderly friend and the Dean’s mother, was raised by a member of that sinister organization.
“Oh my God, Mrs. Patterson,” Nina moaned as her dark eyes stared up at the ceiling. She had to take a moment to take it all in. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, Nina set that particular snippet aside on the seat of her chair next to her. With the concerning news fresh in her mind she kept on digging into the last drawer right at the bottom of the old locker cabinet.
“More accounts,” she sighed, “more kissing ass for money, invitations to awards that don’t mean squat, more…” Nina stopped. The next document was far too much of a coincidence for her to dismiss. Her heart went wild as she read it, but to her surprise, her feelings veered towards sadness instead of anger.
“Purdue?” she frowned, keeping the page under direct light from the bulb above her just to make sure she was not reading it wrongly, what with her dwindling eye sight and all. But she would’ve given anything to rather have had a bout of blindness and been mistaken. Unfortunately for her, she’d read correctly. “Purdue was a benefactor of this college right after the death of Ebner, right as Dean Patterson took over from his grandfather? Holy shit, Dean Patterson is part of the Black Sun! And Purdue is funding him!”
“Dr. Gould?” a voice jolted Nina into a near-heart attack.
“Motherfucker!” she exclaimed, her hand on her chest. With an extremely apologetic open hand gesture she panted, “I’m so sorry, Clara. Good God, you’re worse than Gertrud!”
“What?” Clara frowned, but she smiled at the startled historian who looked so childlike where she sat on the floor. She hadn’t make out a word after ‘Motherfucker’, though, since it was the most colorful cry of surprise she’d heard in a long time.
“Nothing,” Nina said.
“What are you doing?” Clara asked, amused by the Scottish academic’s eccentricity. “Finally somebody decided to clean up down here,” she mused as she looked the place over from side to side. “Honestly, Dr. Gould, I don’t know how you can work down here. The place used to be a medieval dungeon, for God’s sake. Who knows what kind of energy is still down here and you sit here all alone? You have more guts than me.
That’s no secret, fruit fly, Nina thought with a mean streak. “Um, can I help you with something down here? I’ll be sure to call you if I find a treasure chest of doubloons, okay?” Nina winked.
“Oh! Yes, um, I was just wondering if you will be coming in tomorrow. Dr. Smith just wants to know which faculty members will be using the office building, because they’re fixing the air-conditioner or something,” she informed the visiting fellow with the high tolerance for creepy atmospheres. Clara shivered visibly, folding her arms tightly across her chest.
“What’s the matter?” Nina asked deliberately. It was her own juvenile way of bullying lesser females of the species, especially snobs with no backbone, like Clara Rutherford.
“I don’t rightly know, Dr. Gould. But if I can share a secret for a second,” she whispered to Nina, “this place has always given me the creeps.”
“Aw, this little tomb, uh, room?” Nina played.
“The whole college grounds and the main building and even the cottages. You certainly have stones, Nina. But this archive room is far worse than any of the other storage rooms in the rest of this place,” she admitted, revealing a side of her Nina hadn’t seen before.
She didn’t want to admit it to herself, but it appeared that Clara Rutherford was actually just short of pleasant to converse with when she was not around Christa Smith’s asshole radar. Nina got to her feet and dusted off her pants. It dawned on her that this was actually the opportune moment to get some information she couldn’t get anywhere else.
“Listen, Clara, I’ve been meaning to ask you,” she addressed the obviously uncomfortable woman. “Do you know anyone by the name of Cotswald?”
“Oh, that’s the woman that’s made an offer to purchase St. Vincent’s,” Clara revealed, without realizing that she was discussing something Nina was not even supposed to know about. “Why do you ask?”
Nina used a childlike innocence to reel in Clara’s knowledge. As long as Nina seemed dumb and harmless, most psychologies dictated that Clara would divulge all kinds of information to her. She shrugged, “Just heard that I was not as special as I thought I was.”
“Why?” Clara asked sympathetically.
Nina laughed and waved it off. “No, I just mean that I thought I was the only freelance historian ever invited to lecture here, instead of the usual formal teaching graduates or professors of great universities. I read that a Cotswald person was lecturing here long before me and I got jealous of the tenure he got.”
Clara frowned, perplexedly pulling back her head. “No, Dr. Gould. You must be mistaken. He never got tenure.”
That’s it. Hook, line, and sinker. Keep it coming, fruit fly, keep it coming, Nina coaxed in the shelte
r of her mind. “Funny. That isn’t what I heard.”
“No, he was dismissed. Christa and Daniel cut short his contract. They would never nominate him f-f…,” Clara suddenly noticed what she was giving away. “Who told you about Cotswald?”
“Mrs. Patterson just mentioned that there was a historian much like me teaching here before. That’s all. No big deal. I was just curious,” Nina said in the most naïve tone she could manage.
“Mrs. Patterson,” Clara sighed. “Of course. Anyway, will you be coming in tomorrow?”
“No,” Nina pulled up her nose. “I have a Skype date with a boyfriend and a lot of wine and nicotine on my menu for tomorrow.”
“Ah! I see.” Clara smiled. “Alright then. I’ll let the Dean know.”
She started up the stairs again, straining under the mild physical exertion with her plump body before she stopped and bent down to regard Nina through the bars. “Dr. Gould, I know it’s none of my business, but I’d just like to implore you to stop smoking. You know, for your health.”
“Oh my darling Clara,” Nina replied coldly. “That ship has sailed long ago. Let’s just say stopping now would be too little, too late.”
Clara did not know how to respond to a statement with such hopelessness from an individual who’d already made up her mind about her fate. “I’m sorry you feel that way, but I guess to each his own, huh?” she replied with a twinge of disappointment. “Those things will be the death of you. I was just trying to help.”
“Noted,” Nina said, smiling kindly.
She watched the frumpy administration manager’s feet slowly take on each step and heard Clara mumbling disgruntledly about Nina’s non-compliance and such.
“Looks like you’re the one who direly needs a bloody Stair Master,” Nina muttered, giving her an eyeful of hate until her feet disappeared from view. “My health?” Vexed, she scoffed at the idiot’s audacity to chide her on her smoking before sitting down again to find out how Dave Purdue was fitting into a Black Sun member’s college funding.
However much she wanted to uncover more on Purdue’s involvement, Nina could find nothing more on him in the drawer she was rummaging through. Already annoyed by the nosy administration wench and the growing agony in her chest, Nina felt her anger mounting. One by one she perused the documents she’d found, but the only thing she gained from searching for some proof of Purdue’s involvement was a bunch of painful paper cuts and useless letters and staff folders from the eighties, nineties, and early 2001.
“Look at this,” she whispered when she discovered the contract of the previous historian, Dittmar Cotswald. “The Dean never invited him here. My God, he was invited to lecture here by Dr. Christa Smith?” Nina looked up. “The same person who invited me here, but why not the Dean himself?”
She nicked her finger again, shortly after sustaining another paper cut mere moments before.
“Shit! Fuck!” she growled. Nina had noticed before that her nose bled a lot more since she’d taken ill, but with her rage and frustration she quickly realized that coughing fits held the same baleful courtesy.
As if Clara’s statement had kindled a curse, Nina started coughing profusely. She grabbed a woolen item of clothing she had packed in case of the cold front the weather stations had been predicting and held it in front of her mouth. Nina spewed out globs of blood onto the knitted cardigan as her chest caught fire inside. Her eyes teared up with water as she coughed, her emaciated body convulsing on the floor of the little archive room. On the stairs she swore she could have seen Gertrud watching her, but she did nothing to help. It took little over a minute for Nina to lose consciousness.
19
In the ruckus of the clapping thunder nobody could hear Nina’s attack. She was all alone with no way of reaching her cell phone to call for emergency services. The latter did not seem an extreme choice to her by any reach – she thought she was dying. Furious with herself and the world alike, she crawled towards the emergency button in the corner, wired to what she had hoped would be the internal security alarm.
The security panic button, red in color, stood out against the greyish antiquity of the walls that it was mounted on. Nina’s weak eyesight could easily identify it, even in the pale light. While clutching her chest and spitting blood into the cardigan, Nina moved gradually over the piles of files and papers she’d been stacking since she’d started her snooping.
Her ears began to hiss and she lost her equilibrium under the force of her body’s convulsions just as she reached over the cabinet for the button. On her tiptoes Nina leaned forward to hit the button, but her balance abandoned control and she fell against the cabinet, capsizing the large cabinet with unnatural ease.
In her daze Nina saw the damage her collapse was causing to the wall-lined bookcases and file cabinets, but she was on the verge of oblivion. In her ears the sound of thunder rumbled, but she soon noticed that it was not the voice of the cloudy heavens outside. Toppling the cabinet had caused the wall behind it to collapse just about when she did. By the time Nina hit the ground she knew that the cacophony she heard was her doing.
Knocked out momentarily, Dr. Nina Gould stopped coughing and the cardigan she’d used to shield the bloody mess of her malady fell from her grasp. The rumbling of the crumbling wall eventually ceased, as if it were waiting patiently for Nina to wake up. For a moment she lay motionless on the floor, never having reached the panic button for help, but her pain revived her. Nina groaned weakly as she tried to prop herself back up to a seated position.
Noticing that nobody has come running to the archive room, Nina was surprised. To her it had sounded like an explosion or an earth-shattering quake.
“How could they not have heard that?” she asked herself as her eyes found the debris of hundreds of years of masonry at the foot of a black chasm in the wall. Blurry sight impaired her scrutiny of what she saw in the large hollowed-out wall, but there was no mistaking what it looked like. Even the blind could see that whatever was in the wall was supposed to remain hidden. What slept inside had been carefully concealed by double walling, as the exterior of the two walls was clearly built decades, even centuries, later than the first. Nina squinted her eyes to better discern the details, but soon wished she hadn’t.
“Jesus!” she shouted in shock, slapping her hand over her mouth two syllables too late. Her big brown eyes stared, wide, for a moment before she stumbled to her feet and wiped the blood from her nose. It left an ugly smudge of scarlet across her cheek, but she had no time for grooming now. Slowly Nina approached the gaping hole that had split the wall about seven feet from the floor, trying to dismiss the thing she saw inside.
“Oh God, please don’t be a corpse. Please don’t be a fucking dead body,” she murmured as she came closer through the floating curtain of dust. Suddenly she saw it. Gasping, she pinched her eyes shut. “I saw it. I saw it. I saw it and it is a fucking dead body…” she whispered in terror, freaked out by her discovery. In her life Nina had seen her fair share of creepy things and even saw people getting killed a few unfortunate times, but to know that she was alone with this corpse in an ancient chamber just exacerbated her repulsion. But much as she felt repulsed, Nina felt a natural compulsion urging her to get closer and investigate her find.
Above her the wild weather exhibited its fury, lending an air of macabre apprehension to the whole affair. “Like being in a goddamned horror flick,” Nina muttered, praying that the storm over this part of Hampshire would not knock out the power and leave her in the company of the dead thing under the floor of the main building in the pitch darkness.
Upon reaching the foot of the tear in the masonry the small historian held her breath. In the stuffy ark, reeking of old mud and decay, the figure sat. It had been a full-grown man, from what she could tell by the moldy clothing it was wearing, and it was sitting with its face buried between its knees. Its arms, however, were tied behind its back. The most horrific part of it was that a plate of food had been placed next to a bottle of wa
ter – out of reach.
“Christ! How cruel!” Nina exclaimed. Upon closer investigation she noticed that the back of his skull was crushed inside of the skin. It denoted suicide, from the evidence of bone fragments embedded in the wall behind him where his head would have rested. Nina could take no more. Violently she vomited from the grisly and malevolent way in which the man had met his end. “This is sick!” she moaned in between spewing fits. “So fucking sick!”
“You have no idea how sick we can get, Dr. Gould,” Dr. Christa Smith said from the staircase. Nina started so that she lost her footing and fell against the ghastly paper-skinned skeleton. She let out a gritty scream, but her true worry was coming down the steps to corral her in. Behind Christa, Clara followed, saying, “I told you she would be snooping, didn’t I?”
“Yes, you did, love. Now shut up and let me think,” Christa said.
As Clara descended the stairs she pulled down a leather strap, which covered the entrance by trap door.
“And I thought the place had no door,” Nina muttered to herself as Christa approached her from the bottom landing. “You could have just denied this, you know,” Nina told her, staying in the tight tomb of the ill-fated man to keep distance between her and Christa. Nina saw the gun in Christa’s hand and knew that she couldn’t escape a bullet with so little space to move in. She knew she was cornered.
“Why would we bother to deny it? They could identify him by dental records and by the timeline of when his wife reported him missing,” Christa replied.
“As if she doesn’t still hound us to this day,” Clara rolled her eyes, getting a deadly look from her friend for it.
“Why don’t you shut your mouth and close the trap door, Clara? Make yourself useful!”
Order of the Black Sun Box Set 5 Page 52
