Tales from the Vatican Vaults: 28 extraordinary stories by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Garry Kilworth, Mary Gentle, KJ Parker, Storm Constantine and many more

by David V. Barrett

  Saunière also told me that other evidence he had acquired made it clear that the mysterious Priory of Sion had taken possession of Urim and Thummim some years after the Hebrew high priests had lost them.

  Whatever the Priory were and whoever they were . . . whatever their real aims and objectives might have been . . . I was convinced by Saunière’s evidence that the Priory of Sion had played a vital role in the mystery of Rennes-le-Château . . . and that they were still very much involved with it when I met him. One clear element about them that emerged from our traumatic conversations was that during the turbulent thirteenth century in the Languedoc they communicated with both the Cathars and the Knights Templar in the vicinity of Rennes-le-Château. It was at their instigation that the four fearless Cathar mountaineers had escaped from Montségur with the priceless artefacts referred to as ‘the treasures of their faith’. Saunière actually told me what he believed some of those objects were – and why they were so uniquely important. I still find his revelation almost impossible to believe . . .

  He said that when the Cathars seemed on the verge of extinction in 1244, they passed their incredible treasures into the safekeeping of the Templars. Saunière also told me how the Templars themselves were almost destroyed on Friday, 13 October 1307, on the ruthless orders of Philip IV: almost – but not quite. Warned and protected by the Priory of Sion, the Templar fleet sailed safely from La Rochelle carrying masses of treasure and the awesome objects entrusted to them by the Cathars of Montségur.

  According to Saunière, the wise and benign Templar leaders knew something of the amazing power which those artefacts contained. They knew that if such power fell into the ruthlessly evil hands of Philip IV, he could control the known world. It had to be kept from him, and as far away from him as possible. Saunière gave me the details of where the staunchest of the Templar sailors had taken those astonishing artefacts, and where they had hidden them. This was where the enigmatic Pythagorean dice triangle from Station Ten provided me with a crucial clue to the labyrinth below the island so far away from Rennes.

  Saunière said that the Templar fleet had followed the ancient Viking sea-routes, passing south of Iceland and Greenland before steering south-west along the Atlantic coast of Canada into Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia.

  He reminded me that the Templars were great architects, planners and designers as well as great warriors. There on an island in Mahone Bay, off the coast of what is now Nova Scotia, according to the secret Saunière shared with me, the Templars had constructed an amazing booby-trapped shaft. It led down more than 100 feet to a labyrinth hewn from the solid limestone below the soil and glacial deposits. It was in this Templar labyrinth that the sacred artefacts were concealed, and it was here that the dice clue was essential. Its location at Station Ten in the Church of St Mary Magdalene was another vital clue that had to be read in conjunction with the numbers on the dice. Saunière told me repeatedly that the mysterious sacred artefacts must never fall into the wrong hands. He said that because some of the first Oak Island researchers had believed the shaft to conceal a vast fortune in pirate treasure, it was called the Money Pit.

  Saunière also said that there were curious, inconsistent references to something else that the Templars were believed to have hidden down there seven centuries ago. He told me that a number of the ancient records that he had accessed were strangely contradictory. Some of them suggested that the Oak Island Money Pit was built to guard the unique sacred treasure and keep intruders out. Others wondered whether it had been built to keep something – or someone – in.

  Saunière went on to explain to me that the dice numbers, and the fact that they were at Station Ten, provided clues to the extent of the labyrinth and to the importance of Frog Island, close to Oak Island. Frog Island, he said, was the site of another shaft – similar to the Money Pit. It apparently led down to another section of that strange old labyrinth that the Templars had built. It was then that I began to understand what might really be concealed down in that amazing labyrinth. Once Saunière realised what I was making of what he was telling me, he felt able to reveal the rest of what he knew – or thought he knew – and it was a very strange tale indeed.

  He told me that the Cathars had guarded some amazing artefacts: including two of the Emerald Tablets of Hermes Trismegistus, things of astounding power that had once served as the mysterious Urim and Thummim, the high priest’s tablets in ancient Israel. But there was more . . . far more. According to Saunière’s account, there were ancient magical artefacts down there that had also been guarded by the Cathars, and then passed to the Templars when Montségur fell. I wondered, as he described them, if they were really incredibly advanced technological artefacts that only seemed magical to those who could not understand how they did what they did.

  But those brave religious warriors had guarded more than artefacts – they had guarded a being.

  According to Saunière, one of the four fearless mountaineers who had climbed down the precipitous rock below the doomed fortress of Montségur was not human. In due time, this strange entity had sailed with the Templars from La Rochelle, guiding them and guarding them all the way to Oak Island in Mahone Bay – and there he had instructed them how to dig the secret labyrinth that was to become his new home. The real treasure at the bottom of the Money Pit was an extra-terrestrial amphibian entity with a mind so brilliant that he could have conquered the world and ruled it for millennia.

  Just as Philip IV was the personification of human greed and cruelty, this wise and benign amphibian being was the personification of generosity, kindness, independence and freedom. How different might our world have been today if he had not chosen to conceal himself under Oak Island? But how would the knowledge of such a being impact on our religion? Was this not a secret that must be concealed at all costs?

  *

  Although I now understood what Saunière believed was in the labyrinth below Oak Island and Frog Island, I still had no clue as to the source of his enormous wealth.

  There was no question that a significant source of wealth really existed. He had spent vast sums on restoring, redecorating and refurbishing the Church of St Mary Magdalene in Rennes, filling it with pictures and statues. He had built an orangery, and a beautiful mansion, the luxurious Villa Bethania. He had also built a very curious watch tower which gave him a clear view of Couiza Montazels, and the house where he had been born. His watch tower had a steel door at the top of the stairs leading to the roof. If an attack came from above, the door could be closed while escape was made at ground level. If the attack came from ground level, an escape could be effected over the roof. In either case that steel door would have blocked the pursuers for vital seconds while a successful escape was made.

  Of whom was Saunière so afraid? He had already told me so much that I hesitated to press him further, yet such was my curiosity that I felt compelled to pursue the question. I shall never forget sitting with him in his strange watch tower, where we had opened a bottle of the vintage wine that he loved so much.

  I gestured around to the estate that he had created and asked him bluntly and boldly where the money had come from. He sipped his wine thoughtfully and appreciatively for a few minutes, then smiled enigmatically. Finally, he explained. ‘The Holy Grail,’ he said, ‘is far older than our Christian legends about it. There may well have been a sacred cup that our Lord used at the Last Supper, a cup that went with the Templars to Oak Island, but stories of a very different grail go back millennia before our Christian Age. This one was a magical device, a source of wealth beyond our imaginings. By some ancient writers it was called the Cornucopia. I had it in my hand for a brief time. It had been hidden here in a secret cave below the Church of St Mary Magdalene, and I unearthed it. Somehow, it reproduced anything that was placed in it. That’s where the wealth came from. It reproduced gold, coins, jewels . . . anything of value that I put inside.

  ‘Like a fool, I spent so much that questions were asked in the highest places of the Churc
h; dangerously powerful men in the Vatican began to ask things I could not, dare not answer. So great was my fear that I gave the Cornucopia to the Commander of the Priory of Sion. He alone knows where it is hidden now.’

  Ω

  With those intriguing words by Saunière, the Saint-Sulpice scholar’s account comes to an abrupt end. Whether it had originally continued further, and those pages were lost or destroyed, we cannot know.

  Whatever we might make of the strange revelations towards the end of this document, one fact is of immense historical significance. Much has been written over the last few decades about Fr Bérenger Saunière and Rennes-le-Château, some of it just as bizarre as the account we have here. But all of those writings, whether by Gérard de Sède, or Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln, or even the various popular but unhistori-cal fictional treatments, come from the 1960s and 1970s or later. This document dates from the 1920s, mere years after Saunière’s death, and appears to be based on detailed conversations between Saunière and the writer.

  This is by far the earliest known source we have on the mystery of Bérenger Saunière, and we can see that it was an incredible tale from the beginning.

  It must also be significant that someone high up in the Church – perhaps the writer himself – believed that the contents of this document were important enough to be suppressed.

  1918–1960s

  We have seen several accounts already where God, or at least the spiritual or supernatural realm, is reported to intervene in one way or another in the human realm.

  This account of a man’s experiences with an enigmatic book he was given when he was young, and which he guarded throughout his life, necessarily involves the real intervention of the spiritual into our mundane world.

  As historians we cannot comment on spiritual truth, but merely record and report the documentary evidence we find, and leave readers to draw their own conclusions.

  The Will

  KristaLyn Amber

  God has a plan for all of us. Is that not what they say?

  I was certainly not of that opinion when the book found its way to me.

  I was young. Too young to understand much of the world, but old enough to know that there was no God in the Great War, at least none that I could see.

  Between the years of 1914 and 1918, war had come to Hooge too many times for me to believe that it would ever leave us, and now it had come again.

  It was November in Belgium, I was thirteen, and our home had already become a memorial to what we all had thought would be the War to End All Wars.

  If only, yes?

  The battles had taken much from my family, because they had taken much of my family – cousins, grandparents and my father earlier that same year. Having lost my mother years before to an illness, I had resigned myself when I heard the thunder return that, this time, I would follow them. Not by choice, but by inevitability.

  To be fair, this mentality did help to numb the fear. I was completely indifferent as I watched from the window of the church that we always took shelter in. Bullets flew, soldiers cried out to a maker whom I had not witnessed the mercy of in years, and I watched, feeling only just enough interest to continue taking in the absurdity of it all.

  What was the point, these men from so many nations shooting and shouting? Half of them could not hope to know what the others were saying, though I imagine the words were not so different in meaning. And all this simply because no one would be the first to say, ‘No more’. It was the mindless plight of fools, in my opinion, and I had no respect for it.

  The priest of the church tugged on my shoulder, telling me it was urgent that I keep away from the windows, but I did not agree. He left me to fate when my younger sister began crying.

  Save the ones you still can, Father, I had thought to myself. Take care of her. This world is done with me, and I am certainly done with it.

  A particularly loud shot brought me to attention, and I settled my eyes to the street where I saw a man stumbling away from the fighting. Normally, I would not have blamed the man for choosing to desert the fight, but he displayed no signs of running from anything, rather he seemed to be seeking something out.

  And then his eyes settled upon me. I nearly ducked away but I remembered that I did not care if he took my life, so I remained.

  The man squinted at me and then looked down to consult the pages of a thin book in the palm of his hand. Then he looked at me in an entirely new way.

  It seemed he had found what he was looking for, and I wondered if God was real and was personally attending to my decision to forgo life.

  Suddenly I was nervous.

  I remembered what I had told my sister only weeks before: if you begin something, finish it, and do it as soon as possible. I had filled my father’s shoes quickly and with little patience, so in my young mind dragging things out only led to meaningless disaster, as I had seen for most of my life.

  In my final moments, I decided I would show my sister that I was no hypocrite. I climbed through the broken glass, which had once been a lovely stained glass window, and walked towards the soldier, because it was better that my death not endanger anyone else.

  The man seemed impressed as he slowed his pace to stop in front of me. I only looked at him as he bent one knee to meet my height. He said things that I could not comprehend. He spoke French.

  He tried to speak to me several times, but it did not take long for him to realise that I did not understand. His brows drew together as he decided on a new tactic. He moved the old book from under his arm and held it out to me.

  He spoke again and pointed at it repeatedly. Now I knew that it must be important.

  I looked down at the book and back to him before cautiously placing a hand on the cover.

  He nodded vigorously, his eyes glinting. I recognised what I saw in them. Hope. It had been a long time since I had seen it reflected in someone’s eyes. It made this book all the more intriguing.

  Not yet willing to commit, I simply brushed my fingers across the cover. It was very old and rough. Something about it reminded me of my grandfather, to be honest, and the warmth of the memories made me even more willing to accept the Frenchman’s gift, though I was sure I would not be able to read this book. I could not even discern the title back then. La Volonté. The whole book would be in French. What use was that to me?

  The man saw the doubt in my eyes and continued to push the book towards me until finally I was startled into taking it without thinking. I was so intent on shoving it back at him that I nearly missed it.

  Once the book was secure in my hands, I swear to you, the title changed. Now it read De Wil. The Will.

  Frightened by whatever witchcraft this was, I threw the book back at the Frenchman. It hit him but fell to the ground, and he laughed. He picked it up and held it out to me. The title remained in Dutch.

  He said something in a gentle tone, his eyes gleaming with kindness, though his smile was so sad.

  I accepted the book this time, purely out of shock and respect for the tears collecting in the Frenchman’s eyes. He reached forward, placing a hand on the book as if it were an old friend. He lifted the cover just enough to see the words inside, which must have remained in French, unless he could also read Dutch. His breath caught in his throat, but he smiled anyway. The tears began to fall and he looked at me, still smiling but breathing too quickly.

  ‘Merci,’ he whispered, and his next words I will never forget. ‘Dieu vous bénisse.’ He took in a very deep, shuttering breath and closed his eyes, placing a steadying hand on my shoulder. ‘Dieu vous bénisse . . .’

  Suddenly, I remembered the war. The gunshot reminded me, but not quickly enough to save him. It pierced him, I never did know exactly where, but he fell onto me and was gone before he met my shoulder.

  I fell backwards, scrambling away from him and throwing the book in the process. He was dead. He had just died in front of me.

  Not this again.

  It was too much for me. My vision
blurred and I barely remembered to grab the book before I ran back to the shelter of the church. The fear of battle had returned accompanied by a curiosity that would not let me leave this world until I knew why that man had sought me out.

  So I lived, as you can plainly see, and it was not long before the sun finally began to rise on the world again. The war came to an end and I could breathe deeply.

  My sister and I were left with few options, but the priest took us into his care. It was months before I discovered why. He would not allow us to be taken or separated, and I knew that it had something to do with the look he had given me when I had returned with De Wil. There had been shock on his face, of course, but also recognition. I did not know how he could have heard about the book, but his eyes lingered on it with a sense of reverence. It was familiar to him.

  So I was suspicious of him, and he sensed it.

  My sister and I worked for our keep, and I became acquainted with the church and its workings, even participating in Sunday services as necessary, but never happily.

  I lived for the darkness. When I was allowed to return to my room at the end of the day, I would read the book by candlelight, and I saw things: names of people I would never meet and things that they needed to know or do, even how to help them. Every night the story would change. Upon opening the cover, the words would be different, telling of new persons and circumstances that required attention.

  I could not decide what it meant, or why it was mine to hold. It was not long before the priest confronted me about it.