by Graham, Jo
LOST THINGS
By Melissa Scott & Jo Graham
Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press
© 2012 / Author
Copy-edited by: Darren Pulsford
Cover Design By: David Lawson
Background Image provided by: Bob Eggleton
LICENSE NOTES
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OTHER NOOK BOOKS BY MELISSA SCOTT & JO GRAHAM
& Crossroad Press
Melissa Scott Novels:
SGA-16 Homecoming - Book I of the Legacy Series
SGA-18 Allegiance – Book III of the Legacy Series
Jo Graham Novels:
SGA-14 Death Game
SGA-16 Homecoming - Book I of the Legacy Series
SGA-17 The Lost - Book II of the Legacy Series
Jo Graham Collections
The Ravens of Falkenau
Unabridged Audiobooks – Jo Graham
The Ravens of Falkenau
This novel ties in with the Crossroad Press original series O.C.L.T. – featuring the novels The Parting by David Niall Wilson & Incursion by Aaron Rosenberg, as well as the novellas Brought to Light & The Temple of Camazotz. Lost Things occurs in the past, but O.C.L.T. members were there…
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LOST THINGS
The world is full of lost treasures. Some of them are better off not found.
In 1929 archaeologists began draining Lake Nemi looking for a fabulous treasure. What they awakened had been buried for two thousand years. For a very good reason.
DEDICATIONS
For my grandparents
Elma Shoffner Wyrick Edwards (1900-1988)
Lt. Granville Glenn Wyrick Sr. (1895-1940)
Col. Raymond F. Edwards (1890-1982)
with love from Jo, your "angel"
For Great-great-aunt Marion (Lt. Marion L. MacNab)
&
Great-great-uncle Alex (Col. Alexander J. MacNab)
Veterans of both World Wars
With thanks for the books, the sword, and the inspiration
Melissa
Prologue – May, 1929
The bowl of the lake reflected nothing. On bright nights the full moon seemed magnified by the water, as though it had come to rest in the dark pool. That was why the Romans had called Lake Nemi Diana's Mirror.
The sounds of the massive pumps covered any noise it might make, working night and day to drain the lake. It was the most significant archaeological site in a generation – two Roman ships from the reign of Caligula, resting beneath the waters of Lake Nemi in almost pristine condition. But then It knew all about the ships. It had known them for a very long time.
They were ruins in the mud, a few beams exposed as the lake drained. They were gone like the Sanctuary of Diana that had once graced the shore. But She was still here. Far away in the woods the man heard it and stiffened – the faint baying of hounds.
It inhabited this man. It wore him, frail thing though he was, already weakening in Its grasp. They were running, he and the man, his sedentary feet made fleet by fear. They were running through the woods while briars grabbed at them, while moonlight mistook their path before them. The hounds were louder. They were coming. The hunters were behind. They could see the flashes of their strange torches, incandescent in the darkness, silver against the trees. A white hound led the pack, sharp nosed and keen, the others following her. It was She who led.
The man's breathing was harsh. They were being driven. Out of the trees, out of the wild wood. Now there were shouts behind, calls from one hunter to another in strange, bastard Latin. The hunters had seen them. The ground was muddy and they slipped. This man was no hunter, no soldier, and he had been run hard. He slipped and slid down the bank, one leg catching beneath him, knee twisting. He was down. The white hound crested the bank, beautiful and implacable.
And then She was not there. It was two brown ones, bloodhounds, the man thought, and they stopped and set up a cry. It was only a moment before the hunters came up. Silver lights played over their face, and they cringed, It and this man, hiding from the brightness.
"Poor soul," one of the hunters said, sliding down the bank. "It's Signore Gadda all right."
They wore blue uniforms, all the hunters. A second one climbed down, lifted this man's hands from his face. "Signore Gadda? Can you understand me, sir? Do you know what has happened?"
This man would reply, but It would not let him. It could see the white hound behind the hunter, and It screamed.
The first hunter spoke again. "I thought we'd never find him. His wife is frantic. God help him." He moved his hand across his chest, as though making some sign of warding.
Another man climbed down, a tall man in middle age, wearing black rather than the blue uniforms, and the second hunter spoke to him. "Signore Davenport, it is definitely your man. But I do not think he understands a word."
"It is a terrible tragedy," Davenport said, and he leaned over them. This man knew him. This was his leader, his patron. He was afraid he would lose his job. But he could not speak. "Vittorio? Can you hear me?"
It screamed. There was the smell of incense on this one. He reeked of Her.
"We should take him to the hospital in Rome," one of the hunters said. "I will send a man to tell his wife that we have found him but that he is very ill."
"Yes, definitely the hospital," Davenport said. "Vittorio…."
The hunters hauled them to their feet, dragging them from the wood, from the ships, from the wild, but It did not resist. To Rome. That had potential.
One of the hunters shook his head to the other. "What makes a man do this? Suddenly go mad and dash into the woods to live like an animal?"
"Perhaps they can help him at the hospital," Davenport said. "Some kind of seizure or stroke, I do not know." He looked at this man again, his face a study in concern. "Perhaps he will know his wife when she comes."
"To Rome," they whispered. "To Rome."
Chapter One
Five thousand miles away, Lewis Segura jerked awake. Not a dream of barbed wire and trenches this time, or even the sickening lurch a plane makes when it stalls, the nose beginning to dip down. It had been worse than that, weirder than that. There had been a lake, and things like snakes, like giant eels, moving through the depths, screams underwater that wakened echoes where there couldn’t be any; a dark wood, and shapes within it, and at the last a white hound appeared between trees, waiting for him, her head raised, her eyes as blue as the summer sky. His heart rang with familiar certainty: this was coming, this was true.
He sat up, craning his neck to see the clock on the table. Not even midnight. Alma slept next to him, burrowed into her nest of blankets, the pale sheen of her blond hair against the darkness. Her breathing was even and steady. Whatever had wakened him hadn’t bothered her, and heaven knew Alma had her own ghosts.
He hugged his knees to his chest, hoping Alma would wake. He’d always dreamed like this, even before the war, but since then — since then there had been more nightmares, tinged with smoke and the sound of guns, but the true dreams had remained, clear and distinct. If this was one of them — well,
it was a warning, surely?
He closed his eyes, trying to make sense of the sequence of images, of the struggle under the water, the serpent twining around a drowning man, rings of flesh and scale like a hundred clutching hands. And then there had been the screams, silent and mindless and horrible, bubbling with icy water. He’d run toward the woods like a man pursued until he’d checked, seeing the white dog. And behind her…. Behind her stood three women, caught in moonlight, one with a bow strung and ready in her hand, another with a poppy as scarlet as fresh blood, the thin petals resting gently against her white-robed shoulder. Between them stood a third woman, hands upturned, a veil covering her hair. They were all the same, he realized, the same fine-boned face, serene and stern at the same time; their eyes were blue, implacable. In the water behind him something roiled beneath the surface, and the dog bared teeth in a silent snarl.
He crossed himself like a child, but the images were still vivid, the silent women, the snarling dog, the thing beneath the water and the thrashing terror.
Lewis took a deep breath, trying to put the emotion behind him. If it was a true dream, a warning, what did it actually mean? Stay away from water? The closest lake was a good five miles away, and he didn’t swim anyway. Beware a white dog? No, the dog had been hunting the thing in the water, the same as the women. They hadn’t been interested in him, just the lake and its secret. Bow and poppy and veil, three identical women, or one woman seen three times…. He couldn’t make sense of it, and the fear was still heavy in his gut.
Alma was still asleep, her back to him, curled around her pillow. He thought for a second about nudging her awake and pretending he’d done it by mistake, but she’d had a busy day, taking a charter to Grand Junction and back. It wasn’t a long flight, but it meant threading the passes, and for a guy who didn’t like letting a woman fly him even when she did own the company. Lewis didn't want to wake her.
Instead he turned over carefully, listening to the faint strains of the radio coming up from downstairs. Jerry was awake, or maybe it was Mitch. Jerry had lived there for years, maybe since the operation that had taken part of his right leg after the war, and Mitch lived over the garage until he could get a place of his own, which Lewis figured would happen about the same time that Jerry went back to teaching, which was to say never. But his bosses' living arrangements were none of his business, especially since Mitch was part owner in Gilchrist Aviation and he was just a hired pilot. Even if he shared Alma's bed.
Lewis turned over. Alma's soft breathing was slow and soothing. Sometimes the dreams were all right, like the one that had led him to Alma. It had been a good dream, too: a plane that he’d never flown, shaped like one of the Stahltaubes he’d seen before the War, but every bit as maneuverable as the bird it mimicked, so that he had swirled and spun, not in defense but in sheer joy of flight. Below him stretched Long Beach, the airfield and its lines of planes, the crowd with their heads tipped back to see him dance.
The flare had gone up to call him in, and he’d taken the plane up toward the cloud deck, which made no sense in retrospect, but at the time had seemed the most reasonable thing in the world. He’d risen through the clouds into sunlight and blue sky and a sweet green runway stretching straight and clear before him, the windsock barely twitching on its stake beside a hanger like a young cathedral. He’d brought the bird-plane down, felt wheels kiss the sod, brought it gently to a stop beside the hanger, and a fair woman in a blue dress turned away from a scarlet biplane. It was for him, he thought, his plane, his freedom, and the woman smiled. Our Lady, the Queen of Heaven, and he’d awakened with the joy still sounding in his bones.
At the time he'd been out of work three weeks and was starting to think he knew how a dope fiend felt when he couldn’t get his fix. He still might not have gone to the airshow except that at the Legion meeting Frankie Onslow had said that he’d heard that a guy named Peters, who belonged to a Post up-state, had a crop-dusting service and might be looking for a pilot. The combination of the news and the dream seemed to be telling him something, so he’d taken a couple of dollars from his last pay packet and ridden the trolley out to the show.
Of course, Peters hadn’t been hiring, but he’d mentioned a man named Stalkey who’d taken Lewis’s name and the phone number of the boarding house, and mentioned another guy named Wiggins. Wiggins was equally non-committal, but said he’d heard that Jeff Forrest had a new mail contract, and wrote the name and hanger number on a scrap of paper.
“But he’s got a couple of planes in the stunt show,” Wiggins said. “I wouldn’t go over there till after.”
That made good sense, and anyway Lewis was hungry by then, and his feet were getting sore, so he found himself a spot in the grandstand to unwrap his sandwiches. Bologna wasn’t his favorite, but it was cheap and ok with a lot of mustard. He ate both of them and folded the waxed paper into a triangle, watching the stunt plane swirl and dive. With the right plane he could do pretty much everything he was seeing. He could do better than most of the pilots — if it were a combat situation, he could take them all.
That way lay danger. He fished in his pocket for a nickel instead, bought a Coke, and climbed out of the stands to watch the rest of the show. The white Jenny just finishing its loop was Forrest’s, and if that was his best pilot, Lewis figured he stood a chance at any jobs that were going.
He wouldn’t go over there yet, though, would wait until the crowds cleared out a little. He shaded his eyes, squinting, found the next plane as it dropped down out of the high blue, lining up on the runway. The loudspeaker crackled, the whine of the plane’s engine already swallowing the words.
“— Al Gilchrist — Cherry —”
Weird name for a plane, Lewis thought. A girlfriend, maybe? It dropped lower, another Jenny, coming in low and tight. It was cherry red, red as lipstick, red as the plane in his dream — it was the plane in his dream, every detail just as he’d seen it, down to the blue and white roundel on its tail. As it passed the first pylon, it rolled, wings tipping up and over, kept rolling, maintaining height, maintaining a perfect line as it rotated around its own center, around the pilot himself in his cockpit. Lewis’s muscles tensed, feeling in imagination the aileron hard over, the world spinning around him: not the hardest maneuver in the world, but hard to do well. And this was done well. Gilchrist finished the last roll just before the end of the course, snapped level to flash upright past the pylon. The crowd cheered — at least some of them knew what they were seeing — and a stranger in a shabby jacket leaned close to shout something.
“Nice,” Lewis shouted back. “Real nice.”
The red Jenny was circling back to land, coming in almost sedately. She bounced once, twice, then settled and slowed, trundling toward the hangers. He should follow, he knew. That was what the dream had meant, he was sure of it — maybe Gilchrist needed another pilot, maybe he was hiring — but that was too good to be true. He couldn’t rely on dreams when he had real leads to follow up. He pulled the slip of paper out of his pocket instead, checked Forrest’s hanger number.
He should have known when he got there that it was a bad idea. Forrest’s planes were all white, decked with red and blue stripes like bunting, and the Legion flag hung from the rafters, limp in the heat. A couple of boys in what looked like old uniforms were sitting just inside the door; they pointed him to Forrest, a big man who’d put on his khakis for the occasion.
“Mr. Forrest?” Lewis put on his best smile. “Ham Wiggins said you might be looking for a pilot with military experience.”
The big man turned, pushing his doughboy’s hat onto the back of his head. “I might be,” he said.
“I put in four years regular Army, three of that with the Air Service,” Lewis said. “And I’ve been flying as a civilian ever since I got out.”
“Barnstorming,” Forrest said.
“Some. I worked a couple of years for a guy who had a mail contract. Then I did some charter work. I’ve dusted crops, and I’ve given lessons.”
Forrest was starting to look interested in spite of himself. “Huh. What’s your name, son?”
“Lewis Segura. Lieutenant —”
But the interest had died. Forrest shook his head. “Sorry. I only hire American.”
I am American, damn it. Lewis had been down this road often enough to know there was no point in arguing. “Suit yourself,” he said, and turned away. He could feel the boys smirking as he left the hanger, wished he’d kept the Coke bottle so that he could smash it. It wouldn’t take much, they’d been too young to have served, despite the cocky uniform — wouldn’t even take a gun to kill them – even a broken bottle would do, the jagged edge sharp as any blade. There was no good thinking like that. Lewis kept walking, dust in his mouth and the odor of gasoline and oil filling his lungs. It smelled like France, or like the France he’d known best, the hangers and the rickety houses where the squadrons lived. Where he’d learned to fly, where a dozen friends had died —
He shoved that thought back into the box where it belonged, jammed his hands into his pockets. There would be work, somewhere, even if the barnstorming tours seemed to be dying away. A flash of red caught his eye — Gilchrist’s red Jenny, half out of its hanger, the paint seeming even brighter in the sunset light. It was unmistakably the plane he’d dreamed about, and in spite of himself he drew a little closer. It was just to check the design on the tail, he told himself, but the dream-memory had him in its clutches: this plane was for him, was going to take him back to the skies.
The design was exactly what it had been in the dream, too, a circle and cross that looked military, but when you got up close was probably meant to be a stylized compass. There was writing underneath it, too, Ps. 22:16-17, and as he frowned, trying to remember, a woman stepped out of the hanger. She had been in the dream, too, tall, tanned, with bobbed blonde hair held back in a blue kerchief that matched her eyes, and the joy he had felt then crashed over him like a wave. He controlled it sharply, knowing she’d only find it unnerving, blurted out the first thing that came to his lips.
