by Greg Cox
He checked his own phone. “Same here.”
“So now what?” she asked.
He glanced around the ruins. No trace of a doorway remained, so there was nothing for the Annex’s Magic Door to latch on to. They were cut off from the Library for the time being.
“We do this the old-fashioned way … sort of.” He recorded a brief message into his own voice mail and stuffed his phone into a chink in the ancient masonry, marking the location with Gillian’s bright red scarf. “I left a message with my colleagues letting them know where we’re going. They’ll be able to track us this far if they have to. If we get trapped, we’ll just have to wait for them to come get us.”
“But we’re not likely to get trapped, correct?” Gillian asked. “You know what you’re doing?”
He tried to strike the right balance between confidence and caution. “There is an element of risk. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather keep watch over things up here instead of poking around down below?”
“And if that ‘competition’ you mentioned earlier comes calling, like maybe whoever snuck that threatening pumpkin onto our table in the dark … what then?” She glanced back over her shoulder at the way they’d come. “Under no circumstances are you leaving me alone and exposed on top of this hill. Safety in numbers, I say.”
Stone figured they could keep debating this until they were both as old as the ruins or he could just give in and get on with the expedition.
“Fine,” he agreed. “But I’m going first. No argument.”
She peered down into the forbidding depths of the old well. She dropped a loose stone down the shaft. A faint splash came from the darkness far below.
“Suit yourself,” she said.
He rappelled cautiously down the side of the well. It was a tighter squeeze than he would have liked and the neglected timber supports did not exactly fill him with confidence. His descent shook loose bits and pieces of the wall, which raced him to the bottom. Despite his expertise and experience, he held his breath until he touched down in what seemed to be a shallow pool of water, about knee-deep. He mentally kicked himself for not procuring rubber waders as well, although he would have had to lug the heavy boots all the way up the hill. He was going to need some dry socks later.
“Jake?” Gillian called down from above, an edge of concern in her voice. Peering upward, he saw her head and shoulders silhouetted against the moonlit sky. “Are you all right? Is it safe?”
“Give me a minute,” he hollered back to her. “Just to look around.”
The beam of his headlamp exposed what appeared to be a largish underground cistern designed to capture and hold rainwater that could be hauled up via the well shaft, perhaps to replace or supplement a spring that had gone dry at some point during the fort’s existence. Scum-coated water filled a half-empty reservoir the size of a private swimming pool. Ceramic tiles and mortar sealed in everything around him, preventing the collected rain from seeping into the earth. Thick wooden beams supported the vaulted ceiling of the cistern, which looked to have been carved out of a preexisting cavern pressed into service by some enterprising Roman engineers. Mold and algae coated the walls and a few fallen timbers. Stale air reeked of mildew, while cobwebs hung like tattered curtains all around the chamber. A narrow paved walkway ran along the edges of the reservoir; Stone clambered up onto it, out of the cold, mucky water. Spiders and bugs scurried away at his approach; Stone counted himself lucky that he hadn’t spied any rats yet.
Unlike that one time in Sumatra.…
Lifting his gaze, he spotted the cracked and crumbling remains of a decorative mosaic border running just below the edge of the ceiling, partially veiled by gray webbing and green slime. Water sloshing in his boots, he stepped forward to get a better look, only to hear something splash down behind him.
“What is it?” Gillian asked eagerly, having rappelled down on her own. “Have you found another clue?”
He turned toward her, annoyed. “I told you to give me a few moments to check things out first.”
“I got impatient,” she said, not at all repentant. “You didn’t think I was going to wait up there forever?”
“It was only a couple of minutes!”
“Be that as it may, it’s water under the bridge … or fort.” She waded through the stagnant water toward the walkway where Stone was standing. She extended her arm toward him. “Do be a gentleman and lend a lady a hand.”
He helped her up onto the raised walkway, but her foot slipped on the slimy tiles and she started to tumble back into the reservoir. He tugged hard on her arm and pulled her toward him, so that she fell against him as opposed to into the drink. He wrapped an arm around her waist, gripping her tightly … just to help her maintain her balance, of course.
“My hero,” she said, catching her breath. She grabbed hold of him to steady herself. “How very gallant of you.”
“Shucks, ma’am,” he said, playing up his Americanness. “T’weren’t nothin’.”
Time slowed for a moment as they clung to each other deep beneath the earth. Rippling water cast shifting shadows onto the dismal stone walls surrounding them. The subterranean cistern was hardly the most romantic of settings, but Stone wasn’t complaining. Gillian fit very nicely against him.
I do like thee, Doctor Fell.…
After a moment that felt both too long and too short, she glanced down at his hand which had somehow migrated to the curve of her hip. “You can probably let go of me now,” she said, with what he wanted to think was a trace of reluctance.
“You sure?” he asked, in no hurry to release her.
“We are on a treasure hunt, aren’t we?”
Right, he thought. Mother Goose, Jack and Jill, Humpty Dumpty, saving the world.…
“Yeah, we are,” he grumbled. “Just my luck.”
“Luck can be fickle,” she said teasingly. “Every folklorist knows that.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?”
She smiled cryptically. “I thought you were supposed to be good at figuring out clues?” She glanced again at his hand on her hip, which had yet to budge. “In the meantime.…”
“You first,” he said.
“If you insist.”
Letting go, she pulled away from him and swept her gaze (and headlamp beam) over their unusual surroundings. “Oh my, I can’t believe I’ve never been down here before. Mind you, I’m no archaeologist, but to think that all this history has just been waiting here, albeit a bit moldy and worse for wear.”
Her beam fell on a round opening at the far end of the cavern, just above the lip of the reservoir. Thick white cobwebs all but obscured the open gap, which looked to be about fifty inches in diameter. A rusty metal grate, which had probably once guarded the opening, was half-sunken in the reservoir a few feet away.
She pointed at the opening. “What’s that?”
“Probably a storm drain,” Stone guessed, pulling his head back into the game. “To keep the chamber from flooding.”
Gillian regarded the drain a tad apprehensively. “We’re not going to have to go crawling around in there, are we?”
“I doubt it,” he said. “You wouldn’t want to hide anything valuable where it might be washed away.” He turned his attention instead to the fragmented mosaics running along the top of the walls, searching for some sort of clue or hidden message. The mosaics, made up of countless minute shards of stone and glass called tesserae, were in sorry shape, which possibly explained why they had been largely neglected in the modern era. Entire sections of the mosaic were missing more tiles than remained, so that they resembled jigsaw puzzles with most of the pieces gone astray, and what was left of the surviving mosaic was obscured by grime and mold and cobwebs. The art historian in Stone winced at the woeful condition of the mosaic, while the Librarian examined it for clues to the hiding place of the lost spells.
“Find anything?” Gillian joined the light of her own lamp to his.
“Still looking,” he confessed.
Despite the damage done by time, Stone observed that the mosaic seemed to have a celestial theme, featuring constellations and figures from Greco-Roman mythology: Orion the Hunter, Castor and Pollux, the moon gazing down from the sky with a broad smile on his face.…
His face?
“Hang on,” he said excitedly. “Romans of the imperial era saw the moon as Luna, a goddess, so why does that moon up there look distinctly masculine?” He turned toward Gillian. “Didn’t you say something earlier about the Man in the Moon?”
“That’s right,” she said. “In the original Norse myth, Hjuki and Bil—aka Jack and Jill—are captured by the Man in the Moon and carried off into the heavens instead of falling down the hill.” She stared up at the grinning, white moon. “You think that means something?”
He nodded. “Sometimes it’s the piece of the puzzle that doesn’t fit that you need to look at the most closely.” It struck him that the moon mosaic appeared to be in slightly better condition than some of the fragments around; unfortunately, it was also at least ten feet above their heads and out of reach. “The question is, how do we get up there to take that closer look?”
“Don’t think you’re climbing up on my shoulders,” she said. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m hale but not husky.”
“Not my plan.” He looked around speculatively. “Maybe if we can pile up enough rubble and debris…”
Gillian’s gaze fell on a fallen wooden beam lying nearby.
“You know,” she said, “there’s another verse of ‘Jack and Jill’ that’s often forgotten or omitted. It comes after Jack gets patched up and Jill gets a whipping from their irate mother:
Now Jack did laugh and Jill did cry,
But her tears did soon abate,
Then Jill did say that they should play
At seesaw across the gate.
Stone didn’t get it. “So?”
She indicated one of the fallen timbers. “Care for a game of seesaw?”
13
Florida:
The Wilshire Puzzle House was a sprawling Victorian mansion crouching at the end of a long private drive lined by a half dozen palm trees. High hedges and shrubberies kept the outside world at bay, but the mansion’s various spires and turrets climbed even higher. “No Trespassing” signs, faded and weather-beaten, discouraged visitors, but Cassandra and Cole snuck onto the grounds anyway, having parked the soiled convertible a few blocks away. Peering upward, Cassandra noted the clock tower rising above the upper gables. It was past one, but the clock in the tower seemed stuck at midnight. She assumed that wasn’t a coincidence.
“So the house is empty now?” she asked.
Cole nodded. “Old Man Wilshire died without a will, and his heirs have been squabbling about what to do with the place for generations now. From what I hear, they do just enough maintenance to keep the house from falling down, in order to preserve its value, but otherwise it hasn’t changed since the Devil finally caught up with Wilshire back around the Crash of ’29.”
“I see,” Cassandra said. “Not unlike the Goose family feuding over that spell book way back when.”
“Word.” He made a gesture she was unfamiliar with. “Family fights are the worst fights.”
Cassandra made a mental note to make sure her own will was up to date and in order. “So how exactly did the late Mr. Wilshire die?” she worked up the nerve to ask.
“Spontaneous combustion,” Cole said, “or so they say.”
Cassandra gulped. That certainly sounded like the Devil’s MO, at least in her experience. Memories of a scorched ceiling and an occult sigil charred into the woodwork elicited a shudder. “I can believe it.”
Using their phones as flashlights, they made their way around to the rear of the mansion, which was shielded from view by dense, overgrown shrubbery. Cassandra almost tripped over a loose paving stone, but she managed to keep her balance. A cool autumn wind gave her goose bumps. She hoped that was a good sign.
“Are you sure you know the way in?” she asked.
“Trust me,” he replied confidently. “You came to the right Brother Goose. After my dad showed me how, I used to explore this place all the time as a kid, mostly to prove to my friends that I wasn’t afraid of no devils or curses.”
“And you never ran into anything particularly … demonic, did you?”
“Nope,” he assured her. “But I did get lost inside a few times, for reasons you’ll understand when you see the place.”
Cassandra didn’t find that particularly encouraging.
A flight of rickety wooden stairs led up to an elevated back porch. Following closely behind Cole, she climbed the steps to reach the back door, which was a sturdy oak barrier boasting a brass door knocker that bore the face of a leering demon. She wondered if any entity in particular had posed for the ornament; the face didn’t resemble any particular devil she had run into lately, but you never knew.…
“Try the door,” Cole said with a smirk. “Ladies first.”
Cassandra didn’t understand. “It’s not locked?”
“See for yourself.”
Puzzled, she took hold of the doorknob and tugged. To her surprise, the door swung open easily to reveal a solid red-brick wall identical to the rest of the house’s exterior.
“There … there shouldn’t be a wall there,” she protested.
He chuckled at her confusion. “You can’t trust the doors in this place. Some of them aren’t even doors.”
“Then how do we get in?”
He pointed down. “This door’s just a decoy. The real entrance is hidden under the porch.”
He guided her back down the stairs and into a shadowy space under the porch, where their flashlight beams exposed a large stained-glass window angled like basement doors beneath the stairs.
“But this doesn’t make any sense,” she said. “Why put stained glass where the sun can’t get to it? That’s just crazy.”
“Now you’re getting the picture.”
Undoing a small, inconspicuous latch, he swung the window inward, exposing another set of steps leading down below ground level into a basement. He scooted aside to let Cassandra pass.
“Watch your head,” he advised. “And don’t take anything for granted.”
Ducking low, Cassandra descended the steps into a murky vestibule facing a third set of stairs leading back up to the first floor. A skylight was improbably installed in the ceiling, some stories beneath where it might let in any sun.
“See what I mean?” Cole joined her in the vestibule, sweeping his flashlight beam around. “The whole place is like this. Wait and see.”
“You’re the tour guide,” she said. “Lead the way.”
She followed him upstairs, where she rapidly discovered just how “crooked” a house Ezra Wilshire had built. Outdoor windows were installed in indoor walls, making it feel as though the house had been turned inside out. A Persian carpet was nailed to the ceiling. The skylight occupied the center of the floor like a rug. Cassandra detoured around it to avoid crashing through the glass. Zigzagging corridors led off in various directions. Stairways went straight up to the ceiling. Hallways tapered and widened randomly. A trapdoor hung open in front of a fireplace, offering a view of the cellar below. An oil portrait mounted above the fireplace showed a shifty-looking old man with a distinctly haunted expression. Wary eyes seemed to peer anxiously from the painting, watching out for the doom that awaited him. Dark pouches under those eyes hinted at sleepless nights.
Ezra Wilshire, Cassandra presumed. Precombustion.
And sixes … everywhere, sixes. Wilshire seemed to have been obsessed with the number six and its multiples. Once Cassandra saw it, she couldn’t stop seeing it: six panels in each window, six-sided floor titles, six arms per chandelier, six corners to a room, six steps to a stairs or twelve or eighteen or twenty-four. Thinking back, she realized that there had been six palm trees lining the front drive, six gables on the house’s facade, six stories, counting the
towers.…
“Six, six, six,” she murmured, her head swimming. Mathematical progressions shimmered before her eyes. Geometry rang in her ears. “Six squared, six cubed, sing a song of sixpence…”
She tottered unsteadily on her feet. The crooked house was disorienting enough without glow-in-the-dark multiplication tables whirling around her head like satellites. Reaching out, she placed a palm against the wallpaper to steady herself.
“You okay, little lamb?” Cole asked.
“I’m fine,” she lied. “Just let me get my bearings.”
She closed her eyes to block out the house’s myriad eccentricities and proliferating sixes. Breathing exercises, taught to her by Baird, gradually brought her cascading synapses and scrambled senses back in line. There had been a time when something like the Puzzle House would have caused her brain to go into full meltdown mode, incapacitating her, but she’d learned to harness her unique gifts rather than fear them. She was a Librarian now and it would take more than a glorified carnival funhouse to throw her off her game.
You can do this, she thought. You’re stronger than this.
The intrusive equations calmed down. The six-string chorus in her ears faded to background noise. She opened her eyes and let go of the wall.
“Sorry about that,” she said. “Felt a little dizzy for a moment.”
“You and everybody else who sets foot in these screwy digs,” Cole said. “Don’t beat yourself up about it.”
They found themselves at a juncture splitting off in six directions. A six-armed chandelier hung unlit above their heads. A dusty parquet floor offered no obvious hints on how to proceed. Cassandra glanced about in bewilderment, at a loss as to where to even begin looking for the missing pages in the rambling old mansion.
“Just how many weird nooks and crannies are there in this house?”
“No way to say, due to the cray-cray.” Cole shrugged and threw up in his hands. “Back in the day, Old Man Wilshire had crews working 24/7, 365 days a year. Carpenters, painters, glaziers, decorators … you name it.” He wandered over to inspect some ornate mahogany wainscoting. “Good work if you could get it. Our crooked man paid twice the going rate, so people put up with his nuttiness in exchange for a steady paycheck. By the time you add up all the additions and expansions and remodels … the Devil only knows how many rooms and closets and secret compartments there are.”
