The Babylon Thing

by Peter Ackers

26

  Oak Island

  7:31a.m

  Barely awake, the workmen working at Oak island are preparing for another day’s drilling. Lucy is penetrated. The camera, safely inside the jaws for the drilling part, shows the progress of the cold, unmoving auger as it is lowered quickly down the shaft. Becker watches the monitor. Each time he watches the smooth walls of the shaft for things he missed the time before. Each time, nothing.

  7:34a.m. and the auger touches the bottom. But Becker does not issue the order to begin drilling. Instead, he moves closer to the monitor, studying the grainy black-and-white picture, trying to work out what he is looking at, for it certainly isn’t soil.

  A lump of some kind, roughly oblong-shaped, covered in mud. He grabs up the remote control, twisting the focus dial, trying to see better. Paper. Yes, now he can see. Bits of paper littered around the floor of the shaft and around the auger dug into the soil. Focus, you sod!

  Workmen come to see also, alerted by the apprehension smeared all over their boss’s face. They too see paper. They too try to read what are now obviously words printed on it. A couple of words are made out.

  The.

  Art.

  Is.

  The breath catches in Becker’s throat as he makes out part of a dirt-covered fourth word:

  Capu. As in Capulet. As in Romeo Capulet.

  The remote slips from his grasp, dropping as fast as his jaw. The workmen are still trying to read the words, but Becker is staggering back, shocked, unable to breath. A vision of fame, of people saying God He Was Right All Along, flashes through his mind, and then suddenly he is pushing at his workmen, screaming at them to get the auger out, to grab that muddy lump in the drill’s jaws and bring it up, NOW!

  7:38a.m. and the auger finally pops free, dripping wet mud. A workman is shoved aside as Becker moves quickly forward, dipping his hands into the mud, trying to force open drill's the jaws, shouting for someone to open them even though they are opening. He snatches the muddy lump out, cutting his hand on the jaws as he does so , but he barely notices. People gather round. Becker shakes and wipes off the mud, and now they can all see he holds pages of a book, pages and pages, and they realise that their boss was right all along about what was buried here, because as he cleans it, he reads from it, his voice shaky, and even those who don’t know the story have heard of Romeo and Juliet, perhaps Shakespeare’s most famous work. Or, as Becker always claimed, Francis Bacon’s most famous work.

  And now, as they begin cheering, Becker included, he is wiping the manuscript all over his shirt to clean it, and at about the same time that he recognises that the manuscript is actually a professionally printed and bound book, he sees the front cover, sees how modern it looks, sees the Penguin symbol on the spine, sees the title: Penguin Classics Series: Romeo & Juliet, and then sees red.

  Rage consumes him in a flash and his fists fly, knocking down the nearest man, who considers jacking in his job and returning blows before quickly letting this feeling subside, and then Becker is cursing and storming away, promising that the culprit of this joke will be fired.

  8:41a.m. and Becker’s undiminished wrath is taken out first on two workmen, whom he fires for no obvious reason other than that they were on a tea break, then a little later his anger unloads on the group of people that Jacky last night heard partying on their boat. Deciding to check out this Oak Island treasure lark, they land at Smuggler’s Cove, but barely get to the end of the beach before Becker has all nine of the teenaged American boys and girls thrown into the sea, and their yacht stoned until it is out of range.

  11:22a.m. and Becker’s ears prick up at the sound of an engine echoing across the island. Climbing on top of a hut, he watches a convoy of vehicles coming across the causeway that connects the island to the mainland. These rough-terrain vehicles come towards his site. Two trucks, eight cars. Dumbfounded, he watches as the vehicles grind to a halt on the edge of the site and at least thirty people climb out.

  Out of the lead car steps Jacky Jackson. Becker's rage intensifies at the realisation that everything bad currently happening is Jacky’s fault. He does not see the scientists who flock into his huts to take over, the workmen who cast aside all his tools to make space for their own, the engineers who begin to dismantle his drill like army ants round a dead mouse, devouring it.

  Jacky Jackson, dressed for this sunny morning in long khaki shorts and a green T-shirt top, comes towards him, staring up at him, waving a sheet of paper. Now Becker notices that sod Leo and his own man, Bates, beside him.

  His contract terminated? He hears this from Jacky’s lips. And more. Leave? What is all this? his confused mind asks. He is being kicked off the island? Him? Mike Becker, project director? Balled up, the sheet is thrown to him. Standing atop the hut, he catches it, opens, reads. Or rather, just looks. At the signature at the bottom, Charles Diaz’s signature on a letter. Now reads. Cancelled funds; mission over. He needs to read no further. Once more a ball, the letter misses Jacky’s face by inches. Jacky doesn’t flinch.

  Down he comes, planning to smack that unflinching face. Now it moves, lightning quick. At first he thinks it is the momentum of his heavy fist, having missed its target, that drags him forward, toppling onto his face in the dirt. Then the growing pain in the back of his head says otherwise; as does the sight of that Bastard Jackson rubbing his palm, having caught it funny on Becker’s skull.

  And what is this now, his own security guards helping him up, now escorting him away? Traitors! One more thing, Jacky calls to him. Becker looks round, while still being dragged away. A small one-armed Argentinean man at the Nova Hotel is owed $6.95 by Becker? What on earth can this man Jackson be talking about?

  “For the gap I had to make in his book collection,” Jacky says, and Becker, now realising, roars like a wounded tyrannosaur.

  27

  Leo and Bates followed Jacky into the same hut they’d used for Bates’ report yesterday. Jacky crossed to the flip-chart and turned to a new leaf. He began to draw on it in black marker; Bates watched with glee and anxiety, unsure still of what to think of what Jacky had told him over the phone an hour ago - that he had solved the riddle of the Money Pit. Leo, however, had already had it explained to her, so she could inform Marcellus, and now sat picking dirt from under her nails.

  Jacky drew a version of the illustration from the torn page of Lawrence Marcellus’ diary, including the letter L in the top left corner.

  “The Pit? Bates said.

  “A cee-gar for that chap,” Leo remarked.

  Jacky ripped the page from the chart and held it before him. Bates just looked at it, not sure if he was supposed to speak. Jacky just stared at him.

  Finally he shrugged. “I give up. What am I looking at?”

  Jacky tiled the large sheet of paper clockwise as Bates looked at it, until the L that was in the left top corner was directly over the sketch of the Pit. Now the L looked like a chevron and the Pit was tilted at 45 degrees.

  “There’s your Money Pit,” he said.

  28

  By darkfall, they were ready. Jacky and Bates had spent most of the afternoon going over photocopies of reports and graphs from the Golder Association’s 1971 survey, cross-referencing that information with everything else they had.

  Jacky had outlined his findings, although he refused to disclose his source as being a diary written by the supposed architect of the Pit. Whatever treasure was buried here, it was indeed deep underground somewhere around the area where Danny McGinnis discovered a depression in 1795. The original shaft dug did not go straight down, though; it ran diagonally at 45 degrees then turned back on itself, again at 45 degrees, until it was directly beneath the starting point, effectively creating the shape of a V on its side, a chevron.

  “That makes sense,” Bates had said. “Anhydrite and limestone make up the underground of this place. There’s going to be a hell of a lot of whopping water-filled holes down there. It seems the designers knew this and tunnelled around them.
But could the Pit really be a pair of perfect straight lines? It would be like trying to get through a minefield. You’d have to zig-zag all over the place.”

  “Possibly,” Jacky said. He liked this guy and really did want to share what he knew with him. However, he couldn’t give up his source.

  With this new idea about diagonal shafts, Jacky had gone back to the diary, hoping to read things differently. And it had worked. Words and terms that had meant nothing the first time now had more important meanings. Lawrence Marcellus had referred to “stairs” and to “digging bases” without actually mentioning the Money Pit. Carefully filtering out what was relevant, Jacky had quickly painted a picture of the grand plan hatched in Lawrence Marcellus’ mind.

  He had determined that not only was a diagonal, zig-zagging pit the only way to run deep enough without hitting one of the many water-filled pockets that would flood the tunnel, it also made for a more secure treasure vault. If anyone did happen to decide there was something buried, they would invariably choose to tunnel vertically. And even if they chose the correct location, there would inevitably be solution caverns in the way to foil any chance of excavation success. The plan was ingenious, really.

  Ironically, the naivety of a child had foiled Lawrence Marcellus’ great plan. Most geological experts were now agreed that the original depression discovered by Danny McGinnis had been nothing more than a sinkhole. Oak Island had many, the Golder reports said. The famous Cave-In Pit was one, created in a rumbling moment in 1878. When it was discovered to be above the flood channel from the sea, treasure hunters believed it to be man-made. The sinkhole discovered by Danny McGinnis had long caved in by 1795; a tree that had fallen into the hole when it was created accounted for the so-called “oak platforms” he and two friends discovered; the depth variations of 10ft were imaginary, for the wood was littered at all kinds of intervals, 3ft, 21ft. Completely random.

  The charcoal and putty discovered at 40 and 50ft respectively were naturally deposited; the coconut fibre at 60ft was coincidence, nothing more than submerged trash from a long ago visit to the island - for coconut fibre was, back then, common as a wrapping for boxed items - that had been claimed by the sinkhole.

  However, the iron and wood discovered at roughly 125ft were deposited by man, Jacky believed. There was a clue in the diary. Its discovery was pure fluke based on digging begun by a boy who’d found a filled-in sinkhole. His curiosity had set in motion a chain of events that would eventually unearth a secret buried in 1754, many years before McGinnis came with a shovel.

  “I believe the Money Pit is not a straight shaft but a series of steps,” Jacky said. “Each step is a hollowed chamber of specific size, joined to create a diagonal of boxes. Either they descend from a place that allows them to avoid all the caverns underground or they go around one when it appears. In effect, this is the most secure way. Any chamber beneath a natural flooded cavity will be safe, because any tunnel dug down from above it will of course tap into the cavity first, and flood it. This is what has happened with every single one of the hundred or so shafts dug into this island.”

  Bates was flicking through documents, comparing graphs and statements with the facts in his mind.

  “I don’t know. It’s a nice idea. Just a bit far-fetched for two hundred years ago. Who had the technical capability?”

  “I don’t think I want to start discussing the technology of Egyptian pyramids and Mayan observatories at this point. Let’s just assume two hundred years isn’t that long ago in the great scheme of things, okay?”

  “Even if this is right, where would we start digging? And then there’s the fact that any number of these ‘steps’ could have collapsed by now, especially with all the digging that’s gone on in this area. I mean, remember the causeway? Well that was built by a guy so he could bring in a big crane, and with that he dug a pit 100 feet wide and 140 deep. That would have destroyed many of your ‘steps’.”

  Jacky shook his head. He crossed to the dartboard and plucked out a dart. “Look at the map, look at my calculations. Do the maths. Each chamber, or step, needs to be big enough to allow men to work, right?” Jacky had already done the maths himself, based on something from the diary. In describing a bathroom he was having built, right at the start of the journal, months earlier, nothing to do with the Money Pit, Lawrence Marcellus had stated that for comfort a man had to have room twice his height and three times his length; anything less and fear of enclosure would set in. “We’ll say a man stands six feet high. Let’s add another man to his shoulders to give room for swinging a pickaxe or some other tool. And let’s say as a rule of thumb we add yet another man for the length. That gives us a chamber 18 feet long by 12 feet high. Now, let’s say that we take the spot where the iron and wood were haphazardly found in the Money Pit. That was 125ft, roughly. So we’ll say it was chamber number 10. Now, let’s count outwards, 10 chambers. 10 times 18 equals 180.”

  Jacky approached a detailed map of Oak island on the wall. He measured off roughly 180 feet from the Money Pit with a compass and drew a circle. The line passed over -

  “- Borehole 10-X!” Bates exclaimed. “Are you saying Triton discovered it?”

  “By accident perhaps.”

  “But it could be anywhere else along that circle line.”

  “Let’s pretend that the iron found in the Money Pit at 125-odd feet was part of the outermost chamber, the one located at the sharp point of the chevron. If the chambers return the same way for the same distance, how deep is the final one, the one right beneath Borehole 10-X?”

  Bates calculated. Then he rose and approached a wall, the one covered with photographs. He stared at one. It was a still taken from the footage of a camera that the Canadian Broadcasting Commission lowered down Borehole 10-X in 1971. The grim, grainy picture was of poor quality, the light on the camera barely able to penetrate the thick watery gloom. Shapes were visible: what might have been a wooden pillar, some chests, and what was famously thought to be a severed human hand, just floating there.

  “No offence, Jacky, but you’ve been here two days and you claim to have cracked it. Are you seriously saying that this water-filled cavern is actually the elusive Money Pit? This gloomy cave?”

  The truth came out of him before he could stop it. “We were never supposed to find treasure, Alan. Whatever is in those chests is a reward for anyone lucky enough to find it, but it isn’t what this is all about. The people who designed this thing were too professional to be off by such a distance. That cavern is at roughly 235ft, and we’re looking for 250.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m The Money Pit, which I doubt contains anything like money or treasure, is underneath that chamber.”

  29

  Borehole 10-X was not perfectly vertical. While its lowest point reached the gloomy water-filled cavern over the real Money Pit, its surface entrance was 13ft removed from the point where the workmen sent by Marcellus started digging.

  They hit iron in just five minutes. By darkfall, just forty minutes after they’d begun, they had unearthed what looked like an iron coffin for a giant, 3 feet wide, 12 deep, and 20 in length. The extra two feet were so that the iron vaults could overlap, allowing passage from one to the next through a trapdoor that swung downwards, while still extending 18 feet outwards each time. Jacky and Bates had missed this point: that if the vaults were stepped, bottom corner of one connected to the top corner of the one below, how on earth would a man pass from one to the other?

  A workman yanked on the handle and then kicked at the trapdoor. The door dropped open and foul, stale air escaped, making the workman who stamped the door open retch. His partner, stepping forward, shone his torch into the hole, revealing emptiness, four grimy grey walls. A rope ladder extended down from a point of the ceiling just inside the trap. He descended into the vault.

  Above him, fifty faces crowded round the 6ft deep hole, blocking out the moonlight. When he reappeared through the trap, emerging from the blacknes
s within like a ghoul rising from the grave, he was met with a dozen questions. When he remarked that there was a similar trapdoor in the floor at the far end of the vault, he was asked a dozen more.

  That was when the men in black moved in.

  A team of nine wearing black suits and thick padded coats, they were highly trained men sent by Marcellus to control what Jacky had known would be a tense situation should the Money Pit ever be found. Jacky stood back and watched as these men systematically moved everyone away. They were led away from the site as one of the men hauled open the rear door of a four-wheel-drive Land Rover and started pulling out equipment. Leo appeared, smoking a cigarette. Lately, she seemed to be taking everything in her stride, as if having already read this script a dozen times and knew every detail, everything that was happening or was going to happen.

  “What’s going on?” Jacky asked, but he already had an idea.

  “Everyone’s going to a restaurant to celebrate, courtesy of Marcellus. A privately hired one, where they won’t be able to tell their stories. They’ll be watched there and at the hotel we’ve arranged for them and even all day tomorrow if it takes that long.”

  “If what takes that long?”

  “Getting whatever’s down there, covering this whole thing up and getting the hell out of here.”

  Some of the men were changing out of their suits. He saw tools and helmets with flashlights attached. The work here was supposed to be over for the night, to resume tomorrow morning. Jacky now knew that was not the case. Marcellus had brought in a bunch of tough-looking professionals and they were going to work in secret right through the night. He suddenly feared he would be next to be escorted off the island.

  30

  Of course, that didn’t happen. Why Marcellus should feel he was the best person for the job just because he had stolen a bone necklace, Jacky didn’t know. But it seemed he was Marcellus’ favourite player in this game. Leo spoke with Marcellus on the phone, then returned to report that Jacky was in charge. He accepted, then immediately afterwards handed the operation over to Bates, who was delighted that his views would now finally be heard, his instructions adhered to.

  Jacky sat in one of the huts that was set aside for leisure, listening to the radio and studying Polaroids taken of the interiors of C-1, C-2 and C-3. These were the names given to the iron vaults, the C standing for “coffin,” which came from a joking remark from one of Marcellus’ men. They hadn’t yet discovered any bodies so that title was as-yet unjustified, but C-3 had contained a broken hammer that was even now flying towards a laboratory in Halifax for dating.

  Jacky didn't want more than one guy in any of the coffins at one time, fearing extra weight could cause collapse, so he had delegated a guy as Photo Collector. This guy had to make his way down and back up each time the guy far below, Joe Carter, said he'd taken his photo.

  C-4 had been breached just a few moments ago, and the photograph was yet to be delivered to him. However, the coffin must have been empty because otherwise his radio would have crackled into life. Normally he would have wanted to be right at the action so he could see any discoveries first-hand, but he wanted to spend the time reading over Lawrence Marcellus’ diary and making further notes.

  Remembering the radio, Jacky turned it on so that he could keep a constant ear on the proceedings. The voice of the man systematically making his way deeper and deeper underground was three parts static to one part vocal chords; he sounded like a robot whose voice box was malfunctioning. Still, Jacky could make out his words okay. He was giving a running commentary of his every action, his every sight, but there was nothing of worth happening. That deep, the light coming through the traps would be extremely faint indeed, the subterranean gloom barely shifted aside by the ray from his helmet torch. There wouldn’t be much to see. He almost pitied the man, even though he had volunteered for the assignment.

  Four vaults down. Sixteen to go. Deeper and deeper. Six more before the halfway mark, which the Oak island Treasure Company had unknowingly reached in 1897, and which the Oak Island Association had unwittingly destroyed thirty-six years earlier when they accidentally collapsed the Money Pit and flooded it.

  Somehow, the hiss of static was soothing, like a lullaby. And like a lullaby, it put him asleep.

  When he woke later, there were extra photos in his lap. Someone hadn’t wanted to wake him. He rifled through them. C-8 was the last. On one of the walls of C-7 someone had scribbled something, some kind of sum. It was probably just someone working something out, it wasn’t meant as a clue or a puzzle. Still, the man down there had considered it important enough to photograph.

  He checked his watch. Carter had been down there almost three hours. It seemed like quite a long time, considering that all he had to do was open a few trapdoors. Still, three hours to get a hundred feet underground really wasn’t that bad.

  His voice was still coming through on the radio, now quite hard to understand because the hissing and static had intensified with the increased depth.

  “- okay, done here, opening trapdoor to C-9 -“

  Jacky heard a creak as the trapdoor was hauled open. Heard heavy breathing as the man descended the ladder. His microphone was attached to his helmet, meaning he didn’t have to operate a button to speak; his transmission was constant.

  “- walls. This coffin sways with my footsteps, sways slightly. Loose soil, perhaps? Walls are colder to the touch than the others. Perhaps due to seawater, perhaps seawater is outside -“

  Jacky tried to picture a ship, Lawrence Marcellus’ ship. It would have to be big, very big. Each of those vaults was solid iron, many tonnes in weight each. And he had buried twenty-four of them. How big a ship would that take? How many men would be required to carry them? How long would it take to bring twenty-four of them 500ft inland? How long would the whole process, from landing to leaving, take?

  “- this trapdoor stuck. The seal seems slightly damp. I’m going to use the crowbar. Going to try -“

  Something fell into place in Jacky’s mind. Like anything that falls, one moment it is at one place, the next it is elsewhere. That was how it happened. One moment the realisation was not there, and the next it was at the forefront of his mind, and he was snatching up the radio.

  “Stop!” Jacky shouted into the radio. “Don’t open that door, don’t open it.” He let go of the TALK button, hoping to hear the man in the vault respond. Instead, Bates’ crackly voice was asking him what was wrong.

  “Stop him, Alan! Don’t let him open that trapdoor! Christ, can’t he hear me?”

  “He’s got his radio secured open on talk. No, he can’t. In case something happens and he can’t activate the talk button. That how we -“

  Just then Bates’ voice was drowned by a strange sound. It was like a thud, but not a solid one. There was a half-scream, half-grunt by the man whose name was Carter, then nothing but hissing as his radio died, the transmission gone. Jacky dropped his own radio. He was out the door before it stopped bouncing on the wooden floor.