The Ghost Manuscript

by Kris Frieswick

  She used her phone to do a quick search on the tree that the man had told her about. It was actually called the mother tree, and it grew on the west side of Bardsey Island. In the picture of it online, it looked like a gnarled old woman crawling up the side of a whitewashed farmhouse. She pulled the translation from her bag and looked at the words of the poem again. The field of flowers. Died as he past. His watery nest. The Afon Gamlan led to Barmouth. The spotted rock rose’s natural habitat. The tides could have driven the King’s funeral barge up the coast straight to Bardsey. And the tree. The oldest apple tree in the country. Tree Zero.

  Was it the mother tree in the poem? Was it Bardsey? Or was there another old tree on Holy Island that also had orchards dating to the same time period?

  Carys closed her eyes. What would Lestinus and his fellow warriors have done? She inhaled and exhaled. She let her mind drift.

  Slowly, the playground faded away. The world became quiet. Her mind’s eye filled with the view along a broad, flat, sandy beach, the sky gray with low clouds. She could barely tell where the sea ended and the sky began. The land was utterly barren. Nearby, a smattering of maybe ten to fifteen dirty, bloodied men were pushing a small boat. She moved closer, her vision gliding along the muddy flats until she was next to them.

  She looked inside the wooden boat. A body—that of the man in the white, blood-covered tunic with the ancient cross on its front—lay in the bottom.

  She turned and examined the warriors, their faces tight with fear and confusion. They yelled at each other, gesturing and pointing. Tears streamed down the dirty face of one man, creating narrow strips of clean skin from his eyes down to his matted brown beard. They were leaderless. Mourning. The deepest mourning any of them had maybe ever experienced. They were fleeing something. Panic coursed through them.

  “We outran them,” Lestinus’s voice intoned in her head. “We sent the rest of the army back home. The Usurper’s troops were on their way south to slaughter our people, who were unprotected. We needed to put the King somewhere where the hordes—and the Usurper’s men—would never find him. Where there were monks sworn to protect the tombs. A place where his grave would be just one more of thousands and thousands of other tombs. And then we needed to get home.”

  Holy Island would have just been too far.

  She opened her eyes, and Lestinus was next to her on the bench.

  “We buried him on Bardsey,” said Lestinus.

  She stared at him.

  “He’s there,” said Lestinus. “You must listen. Listen to me. Listen to yourself. You know it’s true.”

  He was right. He stared back silently, his form never wavering. His eyes as clear and crisp as the light sparkling off the bay. Arthur was on Bardsey Island.

  Then it dawned on her—Harper was so sick. He was hallucinating, too. It had to be from the manuscript. Even if he hadn’t been inhaling the smell of it, like Carys did, he’d been around the mold for far longer than she had, years and years. She had to tell him. He probably didn’t know that this was what was causing his illness. She had to warn him. She had to tell him so many things.

  Carys searched and found the number for Waggoner Hospital and dialed. It was before dawn back in Boston, but she didn’t care. She sweet-talked the receptionist into putting the call through to “James Weldon’s” room.

  “John Harper,” he said. He didn’t sound like he’d been sleeping.

  “It’s Carys,” she said.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m in Wales. I think I know where he is.”

  “My god,” he whispered.

  “Bardsey Island.”

  There was complete silence on the other end of the phone. She couldn’t even hear him breathe.

  “Oh, Carys. No,” Harper finally said, his voice dripping with disappointment. “That can’t be. That’s the most obvious place in the world. That island’s been picked over more than any other location on earth except for Holy Island. He can’t be there.”

  “The flowers in the poem are spotted rock roses. The river that carried them—it was Afon Gamlan. Camlann wasn’t a place, it was a river. It’s high up in Snowdonia. And it has four waterfalls, and it flows right through one of two places in Britain where those spotted rock roses grow. The waters of the Afon Gamlan eventually flow out to the sea just south of Bardsey. The mother tree in the poem…it’s the ancient apple tree on Bardsey. The ebullient seas. It’s the rip currents around Bardsey. And Bardsey is riddled with caves. He’s in a cave on Bardsey.”

  “It can’t be…”

  “There’s something else. The hallucinations you’re having—”

  “They’re almost gone. I’m doing much better. There’s talk that they may be able to release me sometime soon,” Harper said.

  “You need to get a full medical checkup. Have them check your lungs and kidney function. The hallucinations are caused by a mold spore that was hiding in the manuscript. My friend at Harvard tried to warn me about it when he analyzed the dirt from the journal, but I didn’t follow up with him. The mold gives you an infection in your lungs, and then it travels to the kidneys and causes hallucinations. If it’s not treated, it can kill you.”

  There was a long silence on the end of the phone. Then Harper spoke very softly.

  “Carys, have you been—”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Who was it for you?”

  “Lestinus,” she said. A great burden lifted.

  “But how could that be? How could the same hallucination appear to both of us?” Harper asked. “How is that possible? It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “It makes perfect sense,” she said, surprised at her own logic in the face of something so insane. “The manuscript was written by him. We both immersed ourselves in that book. His voice was already rattling around in my head before he ever appeared to me. If we were going to hallucinate anything, it would be the thing we were most obsessed with, wouldn’t we? And we are both obsessed with Lestinus.”

  “But he knew things,” said Harper. “He knew things we couldn’t have known ourselves. Hallucinations don’t know things.”

  “I know. It’s impossible. But Lestinus insists that they buried him on Bardsey. How could I know that?”

  “If he’s just a hallucination, then he’d say what you wanted him to say, wouldn’t he?”

  “Maybe, but he’s told me other things, too,” said Carys. “Like the poem.”

  “What about it?” asked Harper.

  “He said it was written by Taliesin,” she said. “How would I know that?”

  “I have no idea,” said Harper. “And we have no way to know that that’s even right unless we analyze it. But that’s the least of our worries right now. Have you told anyone about the manuscript?”

  “No,” she lied. Annie didn’t count—she was essentially an extension of herself. “But I’ve been researching the area at the local library. I’ve told the librarian nothing. Dafydd recognized the Gamlan as the river with the four waterfalls. He kayaks it.”

  “Who’s Dafydd?”

  “He’s a local guy,” she said. “He’s been extremely helpful.”

  “You’ve brought too many people into this.”

  She snapped.

  “What the hell did you expect me to do? I needed to find this tomb, and I needed to do it as quickly as possible. No one here knows me. We have to hope that no one knows where I am—but we don’t know for sure that I haven’t been followed. I’m here all alone and I’m scared. Nicola was nearly murdered, and I don’t want you or me to be next. I needed help.”

  There was a long silence on the other end of the phone.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I haven’t even talked to you since she was shot. John, how is she?”

  “It doesn’t look good,” he said. “JJ has been keeping me posted on he
r condition. He’s been to the hospital every day. He’s very fond of her. They grew close after my wife died. He’s taking this hard.”

  “I’m so sad for both of you, but she’s strong,” she said. “I just know she’ll pull through. But I have to ask. Why didn’t Nicola get the hallucinations? She’s been working with this book as long as you have.”

  “She had very little exposure to the original manuscript,” he said. “She worked almost entirely off the x-rays of the writing behind the main text. I was the only one who really spent time with the manuscript.” There was a pause. “I love the way it smells.”

  She smiled.

  “Carys,” he said, “if you’re convinced the tomb is on Bardsey, then you need to go to Bardsey. Leave right away.”

  She looked over at Lestinus, still silently watching her.

  “How do I figure out which cave it is?” she asked Lestinus.

  “I have no idea,” said Harper. “I mean the poem says—”

  “I’m talking to Lestinus,” she said. “I mean, my, uh, hallucination. Hang on a minute.”

  Lestinus looked up at her. “It is on a line between the last light of the fat sun and the mother tree,” he intoned. “It points right to the mouth of the cave.”

  Carys stared out over the water and briefly mulled his words—the poem’s words. She let them float around her head, and soon an interpretation began to take a vague shape deep in her mind.

  “Are we sure the translation of the words in the poem ‘fat sun’ is accurate?” she asked.

  “The original words were the earliest forms of the modern rhef and houl,” he said. “Rhef meant large, fat, grand in ancient Welsh. Houl, sun, was pretty straightforward.”

  “Fat, grand, big sun,” she said, thinking out loud. “The biggest sun. Could it maybe have been an eclipse? The sun looks larger during an eclipse.”

  “We could find out when there were solar eclipses in Wales,” he said. “That would narrow it down.”

  “But what would it mean to be between the eclipse and the mother tree?”

  “Maybe if you draw a line from the tree, aiming right at the sun during the fullest point of the eclipse when the sun is its fattest, along that line is where the cave is? I could do some research on my end. JJ brought me my laptop the other day when he came to visit. Meanwhile, get up to Bardsey as fast as you can. Call me in a few hours, and I’ll tell you what I found out.”

  “I’ll leave right away,” she said. Then something occurred to her. She’d calmed down enough that it seemed obvious. “John, is it possible that we do know all of the things he tells us, somewhere deep in our minds?”

  There was a long pause on the other end of the phone.

  “Like in a fever dream?” asked Harper. “Or that moment right before you fall asleep when you can remember things you’ve struggled to remember all day long?”

  “Exactly,” she said.

  Harper was quiet again. Then he exhaled.

  “It’s the only explanation,” said Harper. “You and I know the Dark Ages better than almost anyone ever has. You say you read the books you found for me over the years, right?”

  “Many of them,” she said.

  “Your brain never forgets anything,” he said. “It just stores it somewhere that most people can’t access. Maybe the hallucinations are letting us access it.”

  “But you know what I know,” she said. “Why didn’t he tell you all the things he’s telling me?”

  “I don’t know, Carys,” Harper said. “By the time Nicola was done with the full translation of the poem, my condition was already so bad that I couldn’t think straight for more than a minute at a time. You’ve only been exposed to this mold, or whatever it is, for a couple of weeks. I’ve been inhaling it for years. Maybe there’s an optimum amount of impairment that unleashes your knowledge, but past that point you go mad. It was like my brain wasn’t my own anymore.”

  “You need to tell your doctor. There could be kidney failure. I heard about a man who—”

  “I promise. I’ll do it today. Leave for Bardsey immediately. I don’t think I need to tell you to be careful.”

  “Tell Nicola I miss her and I’ll see her soon,” she said. “And please give my best to JJ.”

  “I will. I will.”

  Carys hung up and contemplated the bay for a few moments. She closed her eyes and let her mind drift back to the poem. The tomb was in a cave, a castle of defense under the ocean waves, a watery nest. It was a cave under or at the water. If she was going to get into the burial cave, she needed to be prepared to dive into it.

  She opened her eyes and gazed out over the sea. Dafydd was out there, and she was sure, for the right price, he’d take her diving on Bardsey. Or at least he could hook her up with a dive kit. There was no reason to let Harper in on this portion of the plan. He’d have a fit and get stuck in that hospital for another six months.

  When she stepped into the warmth of the Farmer’s Arms, Pete, as ever, was manning the bar.

  “I’m afraid I need to check out earlier than I’d planned,” she said.

  Peter raised his eyebrows. “Sorry you can’t stay longer.”

  “Me too.”

  She sat at her usual spot next to the window and dialed Dafydd’s number. It went to voice mail.

  “Dafydd, this is Jane,” she said, trying to sound light. “I have a business proposition for you. I’d like to hire you for a dive trip, up north, but we need to leave right away. Please call me back as soon as you get this number.” She left the number to her prepaid and hung up.

  ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆

  Two hours later, Carys drove north through the Welsh countryside heading for Aberdaron, a tiny seaside town where she could get a hotel and catch the ferry to Bardsey Island. She wanted to get the lay of the land. The sky had turned stormy, with great dark gray clouds looming low. They matched her mood.

  Lestinus appeared next to her. She turned to speak to him, then remembered she was just speaking to herself.

  “You need me,” he said.

  “You’re a figment of my imagination,” she said.

  “Do not abandon me. You will die.”

  “Shut up,” she said. The phone next to her rang. Dafydd’s cell number appeared on the screen.

  “Hello, Dafydd,” she said, more cheerily than she’d intended.

  “Hi,” he said. “I got your voicemail.”

  The cry of seagulls and the clank of sailboat rigging sang merrily in the background.

  “I want to go diving up on Bardsey,” she said. “I need a guide and some gear, so of course I thought of you.”

  “Well, I’m glad you did. When are you thinking?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow? You realize it’s quite a drive to get up there.”

  “Yes. I’m actually on my way up there right now. I’m heading to Aberdaron for the night. Can you meet me there? Also, is there somewhere up there we can rent a boat?”

  “Hang on, hang on. I haven’t even told you how much I charge.”

  “How much do you charge?”

  “I hate talking about money on the phone.”

  “As I said, I need to dive tomorrow. Maybe the next day as well. Are there places to stay on Bardsey?”

  “There are more things involved here, Jane. The tides. If the tides aren’t right, we’re not diving. Did you have somewhere specific in mind?”

  “I’m not sure yet.”

  “I have some suggestions if you’d like to hear them. I know the island pretty well.”

  “Can we talk about it tonight? When can you leave?” she asked.

  “What’s your certification?”

  Carys paused a little longer than she intended while she racked her brain for the name of her certification. It had been a long time since she’d been diving. She
wasn’t even sure her certification was still valid. She knew she knew it and she needed to remember fast. She glanced over at Lestinus.

  “PADI,” Lestinus said.

  “PADI,” she said to Dafydd.

  “Do you have your card with you?” Dafydd asked.

  “No, I don’t. That’s why I need you to bring some gear. I won’t be able to rent up there without my card.”

  “You realize I could lose my dive master certification if we get caught, right?”

  “We won’t get caught,” she said.

  “It can be treacherous up there,” he said.

  “Dafydd, can you help me out or not?”

  “How many days do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll pay cash.”

  “Get me a room. I’ve got some arrangements to make. I figure you for about a medium suit. Thick one. It’s bloody cold in that water,” he said.

  “Thanks very much. I’ll call you later to check in,” she said.

  Carys drove on for a few more minutes, then dialed Annie’s number.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Annie said.

  The urgency in Annie’s voice drained the blood from Carys’s face, and she knew before Annie even said the words what had happened.

  “What are you doing right now?” asked Annie.

  “Driving.”

  “Pull over,” said Annie.

  Carys obeyed.

  “I’m stopped,” she said.

  “Nicola died late last night,” said Annie.

  Her body went completely numb.

  “I’m so sorry, Carys,” said Annie.

  “I just spoke to Harper. He didn’t know.”

  Then, a sob exploded out of her, and she began to cry harder than she had in years—maybe decades. She pressed the phone against her thigh so Annie wouldn’t have to listen.

  Nicola did not deserve this ending. No one did, but especially not Nicola.

  After a minute, she sharply inhaled so she could speak, and moved the phone to her ear.

  “She and Harper were together,” she said between jagged breaths. “He’ll be heartbroken.”

  “Right now, I’m more concerned about you,” said Annie.