It’s both fun and terrifying to be taken so seriously.
TWENTY-FOUR
We settle in for the drive to Long Melford; Justine and I sit quietly thinking in the back while Mr. Papers rides shotgun with Clath, surveying the scene.
The countryside and the towns are absolutely beautiful. It’s hard to understand why there aren’t any trashy homes or trailer parks here like all over the United States. Everything has been built sturdily and all the buildings, while all slightly different, work perfectly together.
I poke Justine as we see the sign for Long Melford. I’m tingling all over, like when a local anesthetic wears off and you can feel your nerves firing. We pass the inn where I booked a room for Alex on the way to ours, which is just a few blocks away.
“It’s probably too late to see the church this afternoon,” Clath says, making a seventeen-point turn in order to parallel park the car in a miniature space. “Let’s check in and call it a night. We’ll reconvene in the a.m.”
The inn where we’re staying is more than two hundred years old and although it’s very charming, it’s doll-sized. I almost have to duck to go through doorways and my feet hang over the sides of the bed. People back then must have been more like elves than humans; it’s amazing to think of the physical differences that can occur in just a few hundred years, when you add refrigeration and medicine to the mix.
Clath walks us to our room and says goodbye. I don’t even unpack before I grab the hotel stationary and write:
Holy Trinity Church / 8 P.M. Tonight
“I’ll be right back,” I tell Justine as I write Alex’s name on the envelope. “If Clath comes by, tell her I went out to get some Tylenol.”
I take the back staircase down and leave from the side door in case Clath went down to the lobby. Then I run at full speed to Alex’s inn. Completely out of breath, I try to hand the envelope to the knobby guy at the reception desk and tell him this is an urgent delivery for a guest. He takes out a small silver tray and holds it out it for me, as if he could not possibly touch the envelope with his hands.
Before I run back, I look in the window to make sure knobby guy is really taking the envelope to Alex. When I see him get up and walk with the tray, I sprint back.
Justine and I have a snack in the hotel and wait out the early evening. We get outside just as the last rays of the sun are setting. I start to shiver, both from the cold and the excitement of seeing Alex soon.
The church sits on a hill up from the town, past where the city lights end. Once it’s completely dark, we have to rely on the rising half-moon to light our way.
“Are you excited to see Alex?” Justine whispers.
“Nervous is more like it,” I whisper back. “It seems like every time we’re apart, I have to start at zero again.”
“How do you know that he’s not just as excited and nervous to see you?” she asks.
“I don’t know—he never seems nervous. He’s just so … so … .”
“So dreeeeeeeeeeamy?” Justine says, punching me softly on the shoulder.
“Just wait,” I reply. “Seriously.”
As we get closer to the church, we start to see stones at weird angles poking from the ground. I think at first it might be some formation like Stonehenge, but once we get closer we realize they’re tombstones, all askew from the ground moving over time.
“Ew,” Justine says, grabbing my arm. “If this place is eight hundred years old, there are some seriously ancient bodies here!”
“Let’s run,” I yell, grabbing her hand and flying up the hill.
Once past the church graveyard, we slow down to assess the situation. There are no cars outside and only a very dim light burns from inside the gigantic stone cathedral.
“Do churches get locked at night?” Justine asks.
“I don’t know,” I reply, leading us to a small arched side door. I put my hand gently on the iron knob and turn. Nothing. We walk around back to another door. Locked.
“I guess we’ll have to try the front door and take our chances,” I say. The two large double doors to the church are closed, but when I try the handle, it moves. Slowly opening the door just a crack, we both poke our heads in. Papers squeezes his whole body through and runs in. I don’t want to yell for him, but I also don’t want to lose him in this enormous church, so Justine and I follow.
It seems to be empty. It’s dark, except for the glow of offertory candles, every statue and pillar making a sinister shadow. As we walk to the front of the church to be sure no one is there, we hear, “Pssst!” from a dark corner.
“Alex?” I whisper, following the sound.
“Here,” he says, emerging from a tiny side room devoted to a statue of some dark figure.
Just the sight of him—his messy hair and his wide shoulders under a Navy pea coat—makes me happy to the core. I cannot see him without also feeling that kiss, his faint stubble, his pine scent. As soon as I reach him, he gives me a huge hug. My nervousness melts. His hug feels like getting into a warm bath after skiing.
Papers breaks our hug by jumping up on Alex’s shoulder and wedging himself between us so he can fully squeeze his neck.
Justine puts out her hand and offers it to Alex.
“Alex, this is Justine, my best friend in the whole world.”
“’Tis a pleasure to finally meet you!” he says, taking her hand and then bowing deeply.
“Likewise,” she says, blushing at his bowing. Her eyes dart over to mine and I give her the look that says, I know! Can you believe he’s for real?
“So you made it,” I say, starting the obvious.
“Well, when a bloke receives a mysterious plane ticket and hotel reservation in his email, he’s bound to show up.”
“Did you have to explain where you were going?” I ask. “I mean, was there anything anyone would be suspicious of?”
“Nae, Thomas helped me cook up a story about going fishing with one of his old seafaring mates. As long as I show up with a few cod from the market, I should be fine.”
I look at Justine, and she’s as mesmerized as I am by the accent. What is it about a Scottish accent that turns plain English into something entirely delicious?
I nudge her to break her stare.
“How are my parents?” I ask. “Do they seem okay?”
“Aye, they seem fine. Gran says a new group just booked a trip so they have some business to take their minds off their loss—of the house and of you.”
“And Thomas? Everything good with him?”
“Thomas is still on high alert. Not leaving the castle for a moment and keeping a close eye on who comes and goes from the island. He still fears retaliation from the Fraternitas.”
“Well, I hope you know I haven’t been ignoring you—they said it was super critical that we no longer communicate by cell or Skype or even email. That’s why I had to see you in person. I just don’t know how we’ll exchange information with no phone or computer.”
“I wondered why you went dark!” he says.
Justine immediately imitates his rolled Rs on “dark.” We both look at her and she puts a hand to her mouth. “Did I say that out loud?” she asks. Alex just laughs.
“Yeah, we can’t use any digital communication. So we have to figure out some other way to plan stuff.”
“Oh, there are ways around that!” he says, shrugging like it’s no big deal.
“What do you mean?” I ask at the same time that Justine says, “How?”
“My mates and I have a system with the Breidablik School email. See, very few of us have computers at home so we have to use school computers. But ‘sent’ email is checked, and outside email is not allowed. So to get ’round it, we all memorize each other’s passwords and check each other’s drafts folders. If you see a draft email with your name as the subject, you know it’s yours.”
“That’s brilliant!” I say, so loudly that my voice echoes through the church.
“Aye. Since it’s not sent over the ser
ver, the school never sees it. The same system would work perfectly for what we need.”
“So we just open a new Gmail account that we all have access to and only write email as drafts?” Justine asks.
“Aye,” Alex says. “If it never leaves your inbox it can never be traced.”
“It’s genius. Somehow I’ll get the username and password to Uncle Li and Tenzo, and you can get it to Thomas, then we’ll all check it every day in case we need to communicate. The Fraternitas will never see it.”
“So now that email is settled, want to tell me why I am here?” Alex asks. “I suspect it has something to do with the Three Hares?”
Justine looks at him like he’s psychic.
“He saw the hares on the false wall in my room,” I explain to her. “And on my key.”
“Before I left, I read up about the town I was being mysteriously sent to. Turns out Long Melford is famous for this church, and this church is famous for its stained glass—including one window that features the Three Hares,” Alex says. “Wasn’t a stretch to put it together.”
“Write-ups of this church always talk about the Three Hares, but it’s weird that there is no mention of it being a symbol that started in China.”
“Aye, all mentions I saw relate it to the Holy Trinity,” he says.
“So where is it?” asks Justine. “Let’s find those hares.”
“The site I read said it’s above that door, under the stained glass of Our Lady of Pity,” Alex says, pointing across the church.
We each grab a candle and head in that direction. Because it’s pitch black outside, we can’t see much of anything until we get right under the window.
Then we see it.
“Look! It’s tiny!” I say, pointing to the small circle under a series of three really big stained glass windows.
We move a chair over to the window so Alex can hold a candle up and illuminate it, but even he’s not tall enough. Papers jumps from the chair to Alex’s shoulder, grabs the candle, and then hops up to a ledge, shining the light on the stained glass.
Finally we see it clearly.
TWENTY-FIVE
Justine’s eyes light up. “Oh, wow—that’s so weird. It’s not just the Three Hares in the window. Look what’s rising up over the right side of them.”
“Is that the sun?” I ask. “Unbelievable!”
I quickly pull out my sketchbook so I can get every detail down.
“Look, the hares are going counterclockwise, the yin direction, because the other half of the window, the sun, is yang. This is what Uncle Li would call a complete Tai Chi—a perfect balance or whole.”
“A whole what?” Alex asks. “I think you two have made a leap I don’t know about. What’s the sun got to do with the Three Hares?”
“This window symbolizes everything we’ve just discovered. This leap in human evolution has to do with two things: what goes on in the sky, and this spin—this torus energy that unites everything. This one window combines both concepts!”
“Torus energy?” Alex asks. “As in torsion?”
“Exactly!”
“In Dunhuang, when we looked at the Three Hares really closely,” Justine explains, “it became clear that it was a symbol about spinning the Flower of Life in three dimensions.”
“You’re saying if you spin a 3D version of the Flower of Life you get a torus?”
“You actually know what a torus is?” I ask.
“Of course; it’s like a donut.”
“Right! Neither of us knew that. Crappy American education.”
“And what does torsion have to do with anything?”
“It has to do with everything! From a teeny proton up to a black hole, everything spins and creates torsion energy. And that includes DNA and—most incredibly—the heart.”
“The heart?”
“Yeah,” Justine says, “the seven muscles of the heart are situated perfectly so that when they squeeze blood through your body it creates this vortex of magnetic energy in a torus shape.”
“And can you guess what that vortex creates?” I ask.
“Rainbows? Unicorns?” Alex says. “Look, you’re beyond me now.”
“No, just stay with us for a moment. This spin creates gravity.”
“So DNA creates gravity? The pumping of the heart creates gravity?” he asks.
“Every tiny thing, every speck of dust, every planet in orbit, every galaxy—they all spin. Which means gravity is a byproduct—energy is the expansion, gravity is the contraction. Constantly, over and over and over again. Nothing is ever lost or gained, only transformed.”
“So we humans are affecting the gravitational field?”
“Yup,” confirms Justine.
“Now think about that line in the poem in the hidden room that says, ‘Like gravity, love is a force of great might, true power comes when we connect and unite,’” I say. “Something happens when we’re all on the same wavelength, connected by thought or intention or place—or all of those things.”
“So all of this is connected? The Mayan calendar, the precession, the Three Hares, this new theory about torsion energy?” he asks.
“Totally,” I answer. “These are all pieces of the same puzzle. All things that lead to this supposed transformation.”
“And all part of what the Fraternitas is bent on stopping?” he asks.
Justine and I both nod.
“And have you seen or heard from them lately?” he asks.
“We’ve been totally under the radar. No email, no phone calls, no texting,” I say. “And there’s not one single sign of the Fraternitas knowing where we are.”
Justine knocks on a wood pew for luck and I follow her lead.
Alex looks back up at the small circle of stained glass that says so much in such a little space. “Do you reckon they knew what they were drawing here, the original artist?”
“Probably a code that only those in the know could understand,” I answer. “When it’s here with the sun, the artist just had to know what it meant. Plus, the Three Hares are going counterclockwise, which is super rare. Only a small handful of hares in these symbols go counterclockwise.”
“All that ying-yang stuff is lost on me, but I’ll take your word for it.”
“Yin, Alex,” I say with a soft push to his shoulder.
A whoosh of air blows through the building, making the fire of the candles wave and dance. Instinctively, we all hit the ground and army-crawl to the door. Alex pops his head up to see if it’s clear and then opens the door for us. I didn’t think I could run any faster than I did running up through the graveyard, but I do. My feet barely touch the ground as we run through the dark night to the warm glow of town. Mr. Papers keeps up with us, which is pretty amazing considering his age.
Once in town, we ditch into an alley and wait to make sure we weren’t followed. We’re all doubled over, gasping for breath.
After a few minutes, we realize no one followed us and Alex walks us to our place. I’m not at all hungry but I can’t bear to say goodbye to Alex, so I suggest we have dinner in the little restaurant of our hotel. I figure if Clath comes down it will be easy enough to explain Alex away as a guy we just met.
Justine, being the best friend in the whole world, eats her soup in record time and then yawns and says she’s going to hit the hay. I eat as slowly as humanly possible to let these last moments linger. Over tea and dessert, I fill Alex in on what we learned on our trip to Atala, careful to never mention the place itself.
Just as I’m trying to figure out in my head what saying goodbye will look like, Clath comes in to the restaurant with a tray of dishes. She looks at us with a furrowed brow and comes straight over.
“Feeling better, Caity?” she asks suspiciously.
“Yes, finally better enough to eat. Dr. Clath, this is … I’m sorry, was it Roger?”
“Robert,” Alex answers.
“Nice to meet you,” Clath says. “You from here?”
Alex shakes his hea
d. “On holiday with my family.”
“We were both eating alone so we started chatting,” I say.
“Well, I see you’re all finished now, so I’ll walk you up. I was just bringing my room service tray down. The shepherd’s pie was unbelievable.”
I reluctantly get up. This was not the goodbye I wanted.
“Thanks for the chat, Robert,” I say, offering my hand. He shakes it and gives it a secret squeeze.
“Pleasure was all mine,” he says.
Then there’s nothing I can do but turn and walk away with my prison warden.
Just as we’re about to reach the stairs I feel a hand on my shoulder. “Miss, you forgot your receipt,” Alex says, handing me a piece of folded paper.
When I get to the room I immediately unfold the paper to see what it says. It’s an email address. We’d forgotten to decide on a name and password so he’d jotted one down:
Username: Creid.Rù[email protected]
Password: FuaighCruitheachd
Justine looks over my shoulder. “Random,” she says. “Like we’ll ever remember that.”
“I will,” I say clutching the paper to my chest. “It’s Gaelic for Believe love connects universe.”
“That is the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard!”
“It’s carved into the tower at the castle, in twelve-foot-high letters made of cups and rings.”
“Was Professor Davis just talking about cups and rings?”
“Yep. They’re symbols found all over Scotland that no one has been able to explain. But I think, like Professor Davis, that they’re pictures of toruses.”
“Tori,” Justine says with a smile. “Like cacti.”
I burn the piece of paper in the bathroom sink so it never falls into the wrong hands.
Then, falling back on my bed with a sigh, I close my eyes and recreate our goodbye—with much less Clath and her drugstore shoes and much more kissing.
TWENTY-SIX
I wake up in a sweat, panicked about something I can’t put my finger on. My heart beating too fast to get back to sleep, I roll over and look at the clock. It’s five in the morning and still pitch black out. Could I sneak out and try to find Alex’s hotel? No, after the lava caves under Easter Island, the thought of being alone in the dark without anyone knowing where I am freaks me out too much.
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