Chapter 33
The Complete Map
The next morning Eisenberg studied the new paranormal researcher as he walked into the library and wondered who he was, as none of the others had heard of him, but he knew he was good and knew far more than the others, and he trusted Kurt, and was sure he had put him there for a reason.
He watched him search through the books, with amazement at the speed and amount of books he had searched.
“What do think?” Kurt asked. “Tell him what you’ve found!”
“This place is hideous …” the paranormal researcher replied, gasping at the things he had read. “They must have killed thousands … What I don’t get is their true identity … I’ve not been able to trace them to anything really … Other than some wars they fought … And even they did not know who was fighting them, and there were accounts of them massacring massive armies and there being no survivors …”
“Is there anything else on the wars in the books?”
“There’s little on and there seems to be some sort of cannibalism they carried out … They mention them feasting on the bodies of the soldiers …”
The paranormal investigator looked energetic, as though he wished to do something, and he had noticed some of the others were losing hope of finding anything new, and he watched him place a book he had down on the table.
“It would be a shame to ruin this place!” he silently moaned, and Eisenberg recalled his reply and wondered what the hell he was talking about.
“It’s incredible that this stuff is full of supernatural stuff?” he moaned, wondering what else was there.
For moment Eisenberg wondered if he was trying to get valuable books, but he doubted it, and he wanted to thank him for spending so many hours trying to solve and uncover what was buried away there.
“There is a lot of supernatural stuff … The rest is stuff by other people about other things ...”
“Stuff like witchcraft …”
“Ancient stuff from Transylvanian …”
Eisenberg removed the map he had found in the library and spread it out on the table and used a magnifying glass to study it, and realized it looked different with the extra lighting now in the library, and he managed to recognize things on it with fascination, and sat wondering what it had been used for, and he knew the book it was in had nothing, as the paranormal investigator had studied it scrupulously and had found nothing.
The fact that the original map was relatively similar drew his attention to it.
“It’d also probably destroy what’s there if you used explosives to blow it …” the paranormal investigator continued, and Kurt nodded back, and Eisenberg realized that they had been talking about something, which he could not grasp.
Eisenberg sat confused and suddenly recalled where he had put the original map and got it out the bottom of his inside jacket pocket and placed it over the table.
He sat surprised, as both of the treasure maps were so similar and he could not grasp why, and he flattened them both out and was surprised that their sizes were identical, and he had thought the new one was far larger, perhaps as it had been squashed and crumpled more.
The amazing thing was they actually fitted together, and the more he flattened them and fitted them together the more he was positive they were once joined together, and he started to study them and realized they were a complete map of the original top floor of the castle, even though both looked about the same.
Yet what he could not grasp was why they were there, and why one half was hidden in a book and why the lawyer gave him the other one, and he wondered why it was not a better drawing, and he wondered if Howard Eisenberg had been more confused than he had been, as there was no suggestion of there being anything on it and he had checked the original map scrupulously with everything he could think of and it surely never held much.
Eventually Eisenberg got the plan of the top floor and compared it to the map version and tried to spot any differences, and scrupulously studied it centimeter by centimeter.
In the end, at a distance, going over it again, all he could see was what looked like an the ink mark at the center of both of them, which was on both maps, which was on the original map beside the cross mark, at where the hauntings and library were, and he studied it with a more powerful magnifying glass and was amazed that it actually had a shape, which had been smudged and altered when both parts had been separated, and he realized it might just be the library, and drawn wrongly.
It was located at the exact center of the original castle, and he eventually pushed it away from him and realized it had to be in the library after all, and he wondered where the hell someone of ancient times would hide something in the library, and he decided to search everywhere in the library they had not searched.
Chapter 34
The Real Center
“What the hell is this place?” Kurt moaned out loud, playing with the map, with both maps stuck together, and Eisenberg wondered why he reacted strangely.
“It’s great during the day,” he uttered back, and thought of trying to explain something, and he stopped, as though he wanted to avoid saying something, and he kept wondering if Kurt knew something about the place he never.
While they approached the center of the building, where the large cavity now was, where the deformed ghost figures still emerged at night, floating in midair, as though the floor was beneath them, they wondered what they were missing.
Eisenberg watched Kurt approach the place and wondered what the hell he was hiding away now, and if it was the same thing as before, even though he had found many things he had already been keeping to himself.
“What is it you’re looking for?” Kurt moaned, looking at the place, now with some depression, and shrugged.
“This is not the center of the building!” Eisenberg announced, and pointed at the map. “The exact center is over there!”
They both went around the hole in the floor, and Eisenberg recalled all the scientists that had been at work there and realized that they had been searching the wrong place and the place behind a wall further along at the side of the corridor was, and they came to the place where there was a large region between two rooms, and they entered one room, where they saw a small hole drilled into the wall, and they examined it.
“You’ll not be able to enter there!” Kurt moaned, shrugging.
“Why not?”
“We drilled there to send in a camera. But couldn’t get through! It’s solid! We think it’s some form of metal … That’s what we found up in the attic …”
Eisenberg recalled it and realized with surprise that they had been searching there, and probably had worked out it was the center point.
“What now?” Kurt asked, curiously.
“We can have the inside checked with something …”
“We tried everything! But for some reason nothing shows up at that zone.”
“What about sonar or something?”
“Nothing works! But we got the depth of the wall and inner solid chamber, and found it was its thinnest at the top in the attic, and about only a tenth of the thickness, and they’ve been working on getting through it ...”
Chapter 35
The Chamber Shell
Eisenberg crouched down under the attic roof and watched the workmen drill furiously into the shell of the room below them.
Again he wondered how the hell the occupants of the castle had managed to build the chamber shell, and realized they should have removed the outer wall surrounding it and examined what it was, and he wondered how the hell they were going to enter the thing and get safely out, and if there was anything inside they would have a hard job getting out the blasted thing.
Suddenly he saw more workmen appear from the roof overhead, bringing in ropes and the way for them to descend into its confines, and he was sure they had something to lower them down and hoist them up, and he gasped and wondered what they thought existed there.
As the cloud of dust about
them started to disperse he heard them trying to decide who should go down and realized none them wanted to do it, and he realized how much the place had affected them, and he for some reason wanted to do it, and he made his way over to them, crouching below the ancient roof, and he was amazed that he never even needed to say anything, and as though they were waiting for him to do it, and they immediately started attaching a harness to him and he moved into the hole going into the blackness below, and he gasped at the size of it and that he might not be able to get out of it, or get trapped going through.
It was what he had been waiting for though, and it was the climax to all their investigations, and he fitted everything he needed about him, and loosened himself up and started squeezing his legs and body through the hole, and as he went done he examined the thickness of the shell that they had drilled through with some astonishment, and wondered how the hell they had manufactured such a thing, and accepted that it might not be what it seemed, and made differently, and he shifted into the blackness below, and it engulfed him, and they started lowering him faster, and he looked down into the sheer blackness as though he was hanging over an abyss, and it went out into infinity.
Above he felt dust falling and spotted the workmen sitting around the hole on the attic floor, and he tried to work out what the hell the building had been used for and why it was so different, and wondered if it just belonged to some wealthy eccentric person.
While his speed slowed he watched the hole decrease in size and he heard and felt shudders from the rope from the drill being used on something else and he tried to work what they were doing, and he smelt the surrounding stale air, and heard surrounding shudders about him from the drill vibrations, and he felt dust and small stones come down over his head.
Chapter 36
The Hideous Chamber
Eisenberg stood confounded, like he had died and was standing somewhere in hell, surrounded by impenetrable blackness, waiting to be given his punishment for entering the chamber.
When he grabbed his light from his jacket and put it on its dimmest setting, and waited, and turned it on, and saw nothing at first, and barely able to see, and examined all the chunks of material and pieces of wood scattered across the ground, from the hole overhead, and he wondered who the hell had put the place there, and how the hell he had ended up doing what he was doing, and he could not fully grasp what dangers there were, and even if any really existed, and he still had not been able to prove the ghost figurations could physically affect them, and he wondered if they were actually the real thing and that the media and the era had altered them beyond recognition.
A deep thud echoed down and he looked up startled in time to see something flying through the air and land next to him, and realized one the workmen had dropped a ruler into the chamber, and he watched one gaze down at him through the hole, and he shifted position, and away from the debris, and he vaguely saw shapes about his side and stood transfixed trying to identify them.
The ebbing radiance of his light surprised him and he could not grasp why he had one with the batteries going dud and he quickly turned the brightness up to see what was there but the power of the batteries was too low, and he played about with it until he had it at its brightest, and he walked over to the objects he saw, scarcely grasping the concept of why such a place existed.
The solid walls echoed sounds of his movements that took strange tones, and he strained his eyes increasingly to see further, but there were no real features to anything.
One of the workmen suddenly shouted and a beam of light shot about the walls and down over him, and the light directly in his eyes, and he threw the light straight down to him to get, and he rushed straight over to it, and he played around with it and slowly turned around, with the light blasting straight out, and saw what he thought were giant coffins, going around in a circle, with an even larger central one, and he slowly marched over to them.
While he approached the first he realized it was a solid stone tomb, and he counted twelve of them going in a circle around a thirtieth central one, and was amazed at their perfect symmetrical positioning, and he even wondered where he was in the building, and why it was like he was somewhere else, and he tried to grasp if there was anything else, and wondered why the hell it was only tombs, and why they were so hidden away.
He examined the strange stone and it’s perfectly cut edges and wondered why it was so immaculately cut and could not accept it was cut by hand, and he felt its smoothness with his fingertips, and tried to find anything on it that gave the identity of the person, and he searched increasingly trying to grasp why they had been put there and why.
His close examinations gave little and he started going around the circle of tombs, occasionally glancing at the central one, and its immense size, wondering if it belonged to a king, and he started searching them for their names and dates.
With a piece of paper and pen he drew a vague plan of them and walked around them looking for any entrance points to them that he might have missed, positive that there had to be something, and he found nothing and they looked perfectly sealed and he wondered what the hell the structure was for, and climbed over one and into a gap between the outer tombs and the large central one, and shifted around the gap examining the other side of the tombs, and found them the same.
He suddenly spotted writing carved into the large central tomb near its base and he knelt down and examined the small writing with his torch and saw he never knew the language and carefully wrote it down on a piece of paper, and started examining the writing on the piece of paper for anything, and spotted a crack near the top of the large tomb when the torchlight went there, and hidden in dirt over it, and saw there was a stone lid over the tomb.
He placed the torch on the floor facing up at the lid and started pushing the lid up, and shoved at it until went up, and he could get his hand inside, and he pulled it sideways, and pulled it sideways until he had successfully pulled it over to the side, and away from covering the contents of the tomb, and rested on the floor with the torch, ready to reveal the contents of the tomb, and recalled the ghost figurations, and stood and shone the torch inside the tomb.
Chapter 37
The Supernatural Being
Scientists shifted all about the chamber adjusting and setting up equipment all over the area of the tombs, and by their descriptions Eisenberg knew their technology had gone far beyond anything that they previously had, and most of the scientists had been changed for far more advanced ones, and most were thunderstruck by the giant supernatural being resting in the central tomb.
They used new drilling equipment to tunnel through the thick metal shell behind the wall in the corridor, and created a doorway into the chamber from the corridor.
Nobody had given him any explanation of what was in the central tomb! Nobody had even touched it! The only thing that had been touched had been the treasure chest he had found buried in it, and he kept realizing repeatedly that Howard Eisenberg had been right all along, and there was treasure buried away there.
The jewels themselves were staggering as most belonged to rich kings and powerful people who had been killed in wars and by other methods, and the contents were worth incalculable millions.
He had also taken a diary he found with it, which was in a strange language, which he never grasped, but the paranormal investigator, who translated the books in the mansion library, was able to translate a few lines of, and claimed the supernatural being was Dracula.
The other tombs were full of the remains of strange women that had wooden stakes embedded in their chests, which they were sure were vampires, but the scientists and others had not bothered with them and left them for the archaeologists to investigate.
Kurt and others were astounded there was a treasure after all, and wondered what the lawyer would do, as they were all getting a share, and Eisenberg realized he never really wanted to spend his life running the companies for Howard Eisenberg.
The disturbances clearly escala
ted and the paranormal scientists that investigated the ghost formations appearances claimed they were two of the women vampires in two of the tombs, which had abnormal skeleton formations, and they believed that they were something else, and not human, and believed they were trapped in a form of limbo state between life and death.
Eisenberg watched scientists set up equipment at the haunted zone, where the ghost figurations emerged, over the library, as well as at the real central zone at the tombs, and he sensed an upcoming catastrophe.
Eisenberg went over what they told him of what they were doing and what all the equipment was for, and he accepted it if it solved the haunting problem and explained what was occurring, but not if it made things turn into a new state, and a highly deadly state, and he gasped at the amount of problems they had and wondered if things were going in the wrong direction from what they wanted.
The paranormal scientists and technicians rushed about setting up equipment all around the corridor and tombs, while testing and checking everything.
He realized paranormal existed and realized that they had not entirely believed it until then, and had vague fantasies of things, and no real definite thoughts it was a real problem.
He kept examining the equipment, and places they had hidden away to monitor everything, and he watched all the scientists and technicians and became positive that they had found far more than they indicated, and were keeping secrets.
When it grew late, at the time the haunting occurred, there was something strange about the occurrences and tombs that he could not quite grasp, and he sensed something was going to occur, but he could not grasp it, and he was sure that they might not do it if they avoided doing certain things.
The Lost Treasure Map Deluxe Book Collection (2017 Edition) Page 9
