The Fountain of Youth (Order of the Black Sun Book 15)

by P. W. Child

  “Clear,” Heri said.

  “As if anybody could come for a walk on a hilltop in this bloody cold!” Sam shivered.

  “Scotland is colder, isn’t it?” Johild asked mockingly.

  Sam leered at her over the collar he’d pulled up to cover his mouth and nose. “Usually, but with the wind chill of your heart, Jo, these islands can grow colder than the Arctic.”

  “Oh darling, I only make it cold to give you an excuse for the obvious lack of endowment you no doubt sport under those layers of clothing,” she hit back.

  “Whoa!” Sam gasped, stunned. “That was a really good one!”

  Heri followed his uncle, who had started toward the higher slope of the mountainside. In passing he sighed at Sam and Johild. “Get a room already, you two. I can smell the sex from a mile away.”

  Chapt er 21

  “Where is it?” Johild asked when she and the other two had caught up with Gunnar. “I saw it a few moments ago. Papa, it looks like the Aurora Borealis, but very small, right?”

  He nodded. “That’s actually the best way to describe it.”

  Heri scrutinized the area his cousin had pointed out, but saw nothing. “Are you sure, Jo? I see nothing but flattened stones and long grass.”

  Sam stood with him, also trying to find what Johild had claimed to observe. Baffled, the four of them stood staring at the site, moving their eyes to widen their peripheral vision, but saw nothing.

  “Gunnar, I’m freezing my fucking ass off,” Sam said. “Can’t we leave a camera here to capture the lights and just stream it to my laptop while we wait in the car?”

  “Pussy,” Johild mocked, sending her cousin into a fit of laughter. “Just stick it out, Sam. If it’s what I thought I saw, it’ll be worth the suffering.”

  “I’ll tell you what. I’ll stretch out in the car and you and your toughness can come and summon me when the lights appear, okay?” Sam teased. Heri tapped him on the shoulder and pointed out into the dusky gray of the night, his eyes fixed on something. “What?” Sam asked, but he soon knew what his friend was staring at.

  Above the area where the two virtually invisible circles of stone met, a faint play of light shimmered no more than a meter above the grass and weeds that curled under the cold wind.

  “Holy shit,” Sam gasped softly with widened eyes that were tearing up in the chill of the early night.

  Gunnar turned to smile at Sam and Heri, beaming proudly that his word was confirmed. He crossed his arms over his chest and winked. “I told you so.”

  “Wow,” Johild uttered in awe, heading straight for the strange pink, green, and blue haze moving lazily within the confines of some invisible field. “The wind is strong up here. Auroras usually appear stronger with less atmospheric movement, don’t they?”

  “I suppose,” Sam replied. “But I’m no expert on the Northern Lights.”

  “This can’t be the Aurora phenomenon, people,” Heri said impatiently, frustrated with their ineptitude at telling basic scientific principles apart. “Those colors in the sky are caused by solar wind in the magnetosphere,” he started to explain, sounding a bit patronizing. Gunnar’s eyes were stuck on the beauty of the anomaly, while Sam and Jo seemed indifferent to the origin of the phenomenon. It drove him crazy that they weren’t concerned with the reason for the appearance of the lights, merely that it was awesome.

  “There’s no way this occurrence is caused by the same properties of the Aurora Borealis,” he said again as they gathered around the floating colors that appeared to intertwine at various points.

  “It looks like a paint spill in a glass of water!” Johild observed. The lights illuminated her beauty even more. “Only, there’s no ether in which it can blend. Heri, it has to have some sort of magnetic properties,” she proposed.

  “Jo, the Northern Lights happen at very high altitudes, for one. They don’t bob around just off of the ground. And even if they could, they wouldn’t just occur within a small area. The atmosphere is consistent throughout the local region on the mound of Grímsfjall,” Heri answered.

  “Sam?” Gunnar asked. “Why are you so quiet?”

  “I’m trying to assimilate both Heri and Johild’s theories into my layman’s logic to figure out how this is formed, but my conclusions come to nothing,” Sam admitted. “You guys will have to let me send this to my friend David Purdue in Edinburgh. He’s a genius scientist and I’m sure he’d be able to tell us how it is formed, at least.”

  “I knew your sworn to silence promise was bullshit,” Jo grunted.

  “It is not. Look, I have no cameras here. What I’m suggesting is getting him over here to see for himself. That way the secret is safe. What do you say?” Sam suggested.

  They did not look happy with his offer. “Don’t you want to know once and for all what is happening here?” Sam persisted.

  “I don’t want to know,” Gunnar mumbled from the other side of the rainbow shred. “I want this to remain a mystery.”

  But he was the only one who felt this way. Both the cousins would appreciate some sort of explanation to soothe their curiosity. Sam could see that Gunnar was feeling emotional about having shared his find, so he changed the subject somewhat to draw the old man’s attention toward the interesting side of the investigation instead.

  “Can we maybe move those rocks away, then?” Sam asked. “Maybe I can just take a water sample if the shaft is still filled with mountain water. That should explain why people who drink it or bathe in it find that their bodies do not age as they should.”

  Gunnar lifted his chin, looking decidedly more positive about Sam’s latest proposition.

  “That sounds like a plan, yes,” he agreed, and Heri also nodded.

  “I have a water bottle in the car,” Jo said, and she turned with a skip to make her way down the slope to retrieve a container for their examination. Her long, fair hair looked like a ghostly apparition as Sam watched her disappear into the night.

  “Want me to come with you?” Heri called.

  They heard her faint voice answer, telling them to get the rocks moved so that they could save some time. They obliged right away under the anxious and excited eye of the old man who had not dipped in the pool since he was a much younger man.

  “Watch your feet, Gunnar,” Sam said as he and Heri pushed the flat rock aside.

  “Geez, are we moving Stonehenge here?” Heri growled as the two of them pushed with all their might, barely inching the stone at all. “This isn’t a boulder by any reach. Why the hell is it so heavy? Christ! My rectum is about to prolapse.”

  Sam burst out laughing and ceased his efforts for a second. “Wait, wait,” he chuckled, trying to catch his breath before trying again.

  “Uncle Gunnar, how did you and Uncle Jon move this goddamned rock?” Heri moaned as he pushed. His uncle looked a bit confused, having forgotten such small details since that night, but he soon remembered more and more.

  “We had our fishing tackle with us, because we were on our way to Hvalba when we ran into the Nazis. That was all we had then that you two don’t have now. We also struggled with the stones over that small area, but when I put my pack down on it, Jon could shift it easily,” he recounted. With a shrug he gestured that there was no special way he knew of to move the rock. “Maybe you boys just don’t have enough marrow in your bones,” Gunnar chuckled.

  “What was in your fishing bag?” Sam asked him.

  “Uh, line, bait, and some iron hooks in my old trunk. We were going to get new nets and rods for different catches once we’d managed to get a trawler at the bay from Ragnar. Other than that, there was nothing worth mentioning.”

  Sam looked at Heri. “I don’t know about you, but it feels like this stone is held by a force other than gravity holding it down. Can you feel that too?”

  Heri nodded his head. “What was the trunk made of, Uncle?”

  “Copper and tin, mostly. Welded it together ourselves,” Gunnar answered.

  Sam continued while catchi
ng his breath. “As mentioned before, I’m not big on science, but could the copper and the iron in your bag maybe have disrupted an energy field here?”

  “Ah! Long shot, but it’s the only substantiating explanation,” Heri reluctantly agreed. “So there is only one way to find out if it’s a possibility. What copper or tin do we have with us?”

  Sam shrugged. “None.”

  Gunnar said nothing. He simply walked over to another, smaller rock and picked it up with a hefty groan. Struggling to get a good grip, he finally lifted the rock high enough to make a good impact before hurling it onto the larger slab of stone. With a crack and a spark, the two ancient stones met, their meeting clap echoing through the vast flatness of the region.

  “Fucking hell!” Sam marveled as the large stone shattered from the impact and a faint glow of green light permeated through the crevices of its destruction. Heri stared wide-eyed at his uncle, amazed by the simple solution he hadn’t thought of. Gunnar grinned at his nephew, his barrel chest heaving from the exertion. Mockingly he wheezed, “Physics.”

  Heri had to concede that his uncle had won that bout fair and square. Sam and Gunnar made quick work of clearing the majority of the stone fragments away to better investigate what was beneath.

  “Um, a little help here?” Sam groaned to Heri, who stood sentinel next to him, looking around from side to side.

  “Where is Jo?” he asked.

  The question sent chills through Gunnar and he jumped up to see if she was nearby, but it had become so dark that the vehicle was obscured by darkness. Sam felt his stomach knot up.

  “Johild!” he shouted. “Jo! Where are you?”

  “Hey, what are you shouting for?” she said as she came walking from the blackness outside the reach of their flashlights. Relieved, the three men enveloped her to see what container she had brought.

  “It’s not much,” she sighed. “Just 250 ml, but it should be sufficient, right?”

  “Aye, that will do,” Sam replied, smiling. “Thank you.”

  Johild was positively spellbound by the beautiful colors floating from the exposed hole. “How did you get the rock away?” she asked, but Heri just cleared his throat. Then she noticed the broken stones surrounding the hole. “It’s hard to see if there’s water in there behind all this blinding light, but I’ll admit, I’m too scared to stick my hand into it.”

  “We’re pretty sure it is made by magnetic particles, Jo,” Heri said, setting her at ease. “I’m sure you can touch it.” He looked up at Gunnar for support and his uncle reluctantly pretended to be sure.

  Johild leaned forward, her hand outstretched towards the ethereal pastels dancing in mid-air. Holding their breath, they waited for a reaction from the anomaly. Looking back at the men, Jo continued on, dipping her fingertips into the colors. The gentle particles merely morphed and mixed until they settled again in a new arrangement. Johild giggled and exclaimed, “It doesn’t hurt, but it…it…”

  “Tingles,” her father said at the same time she did. “Yes, I remember it vividly. The tingling, like when you’re walking down a dark corridor and your skin tightens with a thousand little painless needles.”

  “Adrenaline?” Sam asked.

  “Kind of, but there’s…more,” Gunnar affirmed. “Go on, touch it.”

  “Will just my hand stay young then?” asked Sam, smiling at the others as he stuck his hand through the dancing haze of green and pink. It was peculiar for sure. He had to lie on his stomach on the edge to get his arm far enough down to reach the water.

  “Looks like the water level has sunk a bit,” Sam reported, using Jo’s bottle to scoop up some water. “I can’t wait to hear what Purdue makes of this.”

  Cha pter 22

  “Mr. Purdue was furious, Charles. He spent how many days in his lab, talking to his science mates on the underground screens and I swear I could hear him crying at some point,” Lily whispered to the butler a few doors away from Purdue’s bedroom. “It’s the first time in over a day that he took to his bed, as you know. So I was wondering if I should even bother with lunch today. Do you think, maybe, what those bad people did to his brain is not gone for good? I mean, his own therapist tried to kill him. I’d be a bit batty if all that had happened to me, you know?”

  “Lillian, I told you that Mr. Purdue can get eccentric at times, but he is hardly the type who allows his temper, if he had such a thing, to rule him. The man is also well-known as an insomniac, so please stop meddling,” the butler advised her.

  No sooner did his words sound, than Purdue opened his bedroom door, looking flustered. “Why didn’t you wake me at the usual time, Charles?” he snapped as he passed the butler. Before Charles could explain, Purdue slammed the bathroom door and a loud click of the lock confirmed that he wanted to be left alone.

  Lily scoffed, looking Charles straight in the eye. “If he had such a thing, hey?”

  Gloating at her well-founded concern, she walked down the hallway of the mansion’s second story, heading for the kitchen. “I’ll slap a nice lunch together then.”

  “How wonderful for you,” Charles sneered to himself. “You guessed right, once.”

  Charles was immensely concerned for his master. He’d never seen Purdue like this before. The jovial billionaire had always seemed to have everything under control. A man who was impossible to offend or intimidate, there had to have been some immeasurable blow to his personal life for his emotions to lurch past cheer, charm, and aptitude. The butler gave it some thought, but he dared not snoop and he would never imagine asking what was wrong. It was simply not his place to do so.

  Duty, however, did not deter sensitivity to his master’s demeanor. It bothered him that Purdue was behaving completely in opposition to who he really was. When Charles descended the stairs to the laboratories, he once again found the other labs vacant and locked. Purdue had dismissed all the staff members he did not need at the moment and had told them to take a week’s paid vacation. Charles knew that this meant that Purdue wanted to be alone.

  His laboratory was a mess. Charles was reluctant to clean up, lest he disarrange something he did not recognize as important and that could cost him his appointment as head butler.

  “Charles!” Purdue roared from the steamy frame of the bathroom he’d just emerged from.

  “Yes, sir?” Charles jogged to get up the stairs to the ground floor lobby.

  “Are you in my lab?” Purdue asked, his face contorted in irate seriousness.

  “I was just checking if there was any tidying to do, sir,” Charles reported, but he could feel his adrenaline warn him that that was the wrong answer.

  “Stay out of my laboratory,” Purdue barked. “Please! Everyone just stay out of my way. All of you. I’m pressed for time and everything I attempt in my quest to fix this…this…fuck-up…” he shouted, using a phrase that almost never escaped him, “has been a monumental failure. Now, if anyone is looking for me, tell them to sod off. I’m pressed for time.” Barely clothed properly, Purdue hastened back down to his lab to continue his relentless search to stop time. Walking briskly as he wiped his face and threw his towel over his shoulders, he mumbled, “No time. Time is running out. Have to stop time, for Nina. Nina, hold on, my dear.”

  Charles joined Lily at the base of the second staircase from where she’d watched Purdue disappear under the floor. He looked at the cook and admitted, “You’re right. The master has gone batty indeed.”

  The intercom sounded and Charles excused himself to attend to it. In his mind he was already practicing saying ‘sod off’ in the most respectful way a butler could. “Yes?” he said into the speaker, with his finger on the talk button. Security reported that a police homicide investigator named Campbell was there to see Purdue.

  “Oh drat,” Charles mumbled.

  “Excuse me, sir?” the man asked.

  “Um, nothing, nothing. Let him come in,” he ordered. “Thank you.”

  “Right away, sir.”

  “Oh, you are ju
st ticking off the boss all over the place today, aren’t you?” Lily remarked before she disappeared around the corner to hide in the kitchen.

  At first Charles reckoned he could explain the circumstance to the investigator and give his boss what he wished. He opened the front door and changed his mind. The large, rugged man in the typical trench coat worn by noir detectives in old Hollywood flicks did not look like a reasonable man to be told off by a simple butler, that was for certain.

  “Good morning. Afternoon. My name is Lieutenant Campbell. I’m from the Dundee office of Police, Scotland,” he said in a robust voice.

  “Please come in, sir. Mr. Purdue is currently…” he glanced at the direction of the laboratory door, “indisposed for company.”

  “That’s alright, my good man,” Lieutenant Campbell consoled strongly. “I’m not here for his company. Where is he?”

  “Sir,” Charles tried to impede the police officer’s way to make him understand reason, but Campbell was not thus inclined. Impatiently, he kept advancing towards Charles as he set out the rules of the way it was going to be.

  “Listen, Jeeves. I respectfully urge you to comply with my request or else I will have to arrest you for obstruction and throw you into a cell full of gentlemen you could not groom with a Hazmat suit and a horse brush, savvy?” Campbell hammered his words.

  “Very well, sir,” Charles replied with a stone face, but inside he wished he had the will and the ability to deck the obnoxious intruder. He kept an eye on the untidy officer as his soles tapped along the descending stairs to Purdue’s lab. Taking a deep breath, Charles knocked three times. It wasn’t every day he was being shouted at from two sides by two authority figures. Now he just wanted to do his job and go home at 7 p.m. for a hefty brandy and a solid heed to forget the day’s bullying.

  “What is it?” Purdue’s growl emanated through the shield of the door.

  “Sir, Lieutenant Campbell is here from the Dundee police offices. He insists on speaking with you, sir,” Charles announced as the cop’s shadow fell upon him. Alarmed at the prohibited protocol, he was going to ask Campbell to wait upstairs, but Purdue had already opened the door. Charles was caught standing there between the two, awkwardly mute.