The Alchemist's Secret (38 page)

He sat amongst the trees overlooking the valley with the Le Corbusier house below him, and tried to get his thoughts in order. Evening was falling fast, and the wind was picking up. It was close and sticky. He could see black clouds scudding beyond the treetops. A storm was coming.

Antonia’s last comment struck him as a little odd, a little out of place.
I hope you find what you are seeking.
He’d told her he was looking for the house, that was all. As far as she was concerned, he’d already
found
what he was seeking. And
seeking
seemed too strong, too evocative a word for someone who was just checking out an old house they found on a map.

Maybe he was reading too much into it. Or did the blind woman know something she wasn’t letting on? Did the house have something to yield up to him? If it didn’t, that was it. There was nowhere to go from here.

There was a rumble of distant thunder. He put his hand out and felt a large, heavy raindrop splatter against his palm. It was soon joined by another, then another. The rain was lashing down by the time car headlights appeared, winding slowly up the private road to the house. Lights went off in the windows. Antonia came out, and the driver helped her to the taxi under an umbrella. Ben watched from under the dripping canopy of an old oak tree as the car drove off.

When the taillights had vanished to red pinpricks in the falling darkness, he turned up his collar and headed across the valley.

He moved quietly and cautiously around the outside of the house. Rain was cascading from the guttering, churning neat flowerbeds into mud. There was a sharp flash of lightning, and thunder rumbled angrily overhead a second later. He brushed the water out of his eyes.

Darkness had fallen fast as the black thunderclouds rolled in. He used the
LED
pistol torch to find his way around the side wall until he came to a back door. The lock was flimsy and easy to pick, and in less than a minute he was in the house. The thin white beam of the torch led him from room to room, throwing long shadows. The storm was right overhead now and building in intensity. There was another flash, two seconds of flickering strobe lightning, and the crash of thunder that followed instantly afterwards rocked the house.

Remembering his way around, he quickly found the room with the ornate fireplace. He shone his light on the carved raven, which looked even more alive in the shadows than it had in daylight. Its beady red eye glinted in the light beam.

He stood back, thinking. What was he looking for? He didn’t really know. The raven symbol had led him this far, and his instinct told him he should keep following it. He stared at the fireplace, his mind working furiously as rain beat against the windows. Something occurred to him. He went back outside into the downpour and saw he was right.

From inside the house, the fireplace seemed to be set into the outer wall-yet as he stood in the garden, wiping the rain out of his eyes and sweeping the torch beam along the line of the roof, he saw that the squat chimney stack protruded from the roof inboard of the gable end by about three metres. He’d noticed that the window in the wall adjacent to the fireplace was about a metre from the corner, but looking from the outside it was about four metres from the end of the house.

As he hurried back inside, dripping and shivering, he realized that unless it was some quirk of the ultramodern design, it meant there was a hidden cavity behind the fireplace. An insulation space? Too big, surely. It had to be about three metres deep. Maybe it was a corridor, or even a cupboard, that could be accessed from some other room.

But where was the way in? He tried all the doors, but nothing led in the right direction. The room above was a bedroom with solid floorboards and no way down. There was no cellar beneath the house, from where the hidden room might have been accessible through a stairway or trapdoor. He returned to the living-room and scrutinized the fireplace again. If there was a way through, it must be here.

He turned on the lights and tapped around the wall, listening to the sound. All around the fireplace, the wall was solid. Moving to the left of the fireplace, his tapping made a different note. Another metre to the left and the wall sounded quite hollow. There were no cracks or joins anywhere, nothing that could have been a hidden doorway. He tried levering away the wooden panels on the walls, in the hope that one of them might reveal something. Nothing.

He reached his arm up behind the fireplace surround, groping up into the sooty chimney. Maybe there was a lever or some mechanism to open a way through. There wasn’t. He wiped the black dusty soot off his hands. ‘Must be something,’ he muttered. He ran his hands all over the fireplace, down the sides, his fingertips running over the intricate carvings, feeling for something that would press in, or give or turn. It seemed hopeless. The rain hit the windows with a crackling like flames.

He stood back from the fireplace, thinking desperately. There was nothing for it. He
was
going through that wall, and if there wasn’t a ready-made doorway he’d make one himself.
Fuck it.

He found a wood-axe in a tool-shed outside, buried in a chopping block surrounded by a pile of split logs. He grasped the long axe-handle and wrenched it out of the block. Back in the house, he swung the axe up over his shoulder and aimed it at the hollow part of the wall. If his guess was right, he could smash a hole through to the other side.

What if I’m wrong, though?
He lowered the axe, suddenly filled with doubt. He shot a guilty glance at the raven, and its glittery red eye seemed to meet his knowingly.

He looked thoughtfully into its impassive face. The bird was so lifelike that he almost expected it to fly at him. He put down the axe and ran his hand along the smooth lines of its wing and neck, up to the glassy red eye. Suddenly seized by a crazy idea, he pressed the eye, hard.

Nothing happened. He supposed that would have been too obvious. He took out the
LED
pistol-torch again and shone it all around the contours of the carving, carefully examining it. He passed the beam over the raven’s eye and a sudden glare of powerful reflected light dazzled him. There seemed to be a complex system of tiny internal mirrors in the eye that were concentrating his torch-beam and firing it back at him.

Another idea came to him. He walked to the light-switch on the wall and turned it off, plunging the room back into darkness. He shone the
LED
into the raven’s eye again, standing a little to one side to avoid being dazzled.

The reflected light from the raven’s eye hit the wall across the room and cast a circular red spot, about three inches wide, on the painting he’d noticed earlier. It landed exactly on the oddly blank round shield that the old man in the painting was holding up.

Ben kept the light on the eye. He moved a little closer to the painting and saw with astonishment that the red dot contained the twin-star-circle motif from the dagger blade and the notebook.

He remembered that Antonia had said the architect had been a jewellery maker in his time.
You clever bastard.
It was a work of almost unbelievable intricacy to have engraved the reflecting mirror with a minute yet perfect replica of the geometric design. But what did it mean?

He pulled the picture away from the wall and his heart leapt. There was a concealed safe behind it. He switched the lights back on and hurried back to examine it more closely. What might be inside?

The safe was from the same period as the house, its steel door adorned with enamelled designs in art nouveau style. In the middle of the door was a knurled rotary combination lock with two unusual concentric dials, one with numbers and the other with letters of the alphabet.

‘Oh, Christ, please-not more
codes
!’ he groaned. He pulled the notebook out of his bag. Folded between its pages was the sheet on which he’d written out the keys to crack the code. The combination to open the safe might be something from the notebook. But what? He flipped through the book. It could be anything.

He sat down with the notebook on his knee, guessing wildly at a few possibilities and quickly working out the coded versions in combined letters and numbers. First he tried the French for ‘House of the Raven’. It was a long shot, but he was desperate.

LA
MAISON
DU
CORBEAU

He twisted the dials this way and that, entering the complex sequence. E/4, I/26; R/2, I/26…It took him a minute or two to dial up the entire phrase. He sat back and waited for something to happen. Nothing did. He sighed impatiently and tried another combination.
The Cathar treasure.

LE
TRESOR
DES
CATHARES

No good either. This could take for ever. He glanced at the axe lying on the floor and wondered fleetingly whether he should just hack the damn thing out of the wall and try to shoot his way into it from behind. He smiled to himself as he recalled what a grizzled Glaswegian sergeant-major had once said to him:
‘If in doubt, lad-resort tae violence’.
Maybe it wasn’t a bad maxim, in the right circumstances.

Then his eye fell on the painting that he’d taken down from the wall, and he stooped to look at it more closely.

What an idiot I am. The key!

The large silvery key that the old man was clutching had something written in tiny letters up its shaft. He dropped down on his knees to read it.

LE
CHERCHEUR
TROUVERA

The seeker shall find.
Ben grabbed his pen and feverishly scribbled the phrase out in code.

E/4, R/18; N/22, V/12, R/18, A/17, N/22, V/12,

R/18, A/11, A/17;

O/13, A/17, E/23, A/11, U/9, R/18, A/17, I/26

His heart was thumping as he dialled in the last number. From deep within the safe’s mechanism he heard a metallic clunk. Then there was silence. He grasped the handle of the safe door and yanked it. It held firm. He swore. The combination must have been the wrong one, or else something had gone wrong with the safe’s mechanism after all these years. The door was stuck fast.

A sound from behind startled him, and he twisted around as his hand went for the Browning.

The fireplace was opening. A gentle shower of dirt fell from the chimney as soot-encrusted panels swung slowly open to reveal a space just large enough for him to walk through.

Ben took a deep breath and stepped through the fireplace into the darkness. He flashed his torch around him and blinked at what he saw.

He was in a narrow room, some six metres long and three deep. At one end sat a large old oak table, covered in a thin layer of dust. On it rested a heavy metal chalice, like a huge wine goblet studded around the edge with iron rivets. Lying in the goblet, staring up with empty eyes, was a human skull. On either side of this grim ornament sat two iron candlesticks, two feet high with broad round bases and each holding a thick church candle.

His torch was dimming; he reached into his pocket for his lighter and lit the candles. He picked up one of the heavy candlesticks, and the flickering light threw shadow around the room. The toothless skull leered at him. Around the walls were dusty shelves lined with books. He picked one up and blew the dust and cobwebs off it. Holding the candle close he read the old gilt script on the leather cover-
Necronomicon.
The Book of the Dead. He replaced it and picked up another leather-clad book.
De Occulta Philosophia.
Secrets of Occult Philosophy.

It looked as though he was in someone’s private study, long since abandoned. He put the books back carefully on the dusty shelf and swept the heavy candlestick around him. The walls of the room were painted with murals depicting alchemical processes. He walked up close and studied one that showed a hand emerging from a cloud. The Hand of God? From the hand, water was dripping into a strange vessel that was being held up by little winged nymphs. From an opening at the bottom of the vessel there flowed an ethereal, misty substance scattered with alchemical symbols and the label
Elixir Vitae.

He turned away and raised the candle to illuminate other corners of the room. Above the entrance he’d come through, a face looked down on him. It was an oil portrait in a broad gilt frame. The face belonged to a heavily built man with a grizzled beard and a thick mane of silvery hair. Looking out from under the bushy grey eyebrows, his eyes seemed to twinkle with a sense of humour that belied his stern expression. A gold plaque below the portrait read in stark gothic letters:

‘So we meet at last,’ Ben murmured. He moved away from the portrait and walked around the edges of the room, looking down at the floor. The stone tiles were partly covered by a dusty old rug. Beyond the edges of the rug he could see the outer parts of a mosaic pattern on the floor. He knelt and set the candlestick down with a metallic clunk. Clouds of dust floated up in the wavering light. He lifted the edge of the rug, and a large spider scuttled out and disappeared into the shadows. He rolled the rug up into a long tube and pushed it against the wall. He blew the dust away, revealing the coloured stone mosaic set into the flagstones. After a minute or two of brushing and blowing he stepped back to look at it.

The pattern was about fifteen feet long and took up the whole width of the study. Here they were again, the twin star-circles. At the exact centre of the design was a circular flagstone with an iron ring inset flush with the floor. He grasped the ring with both hands and pulled hard. There was a rush of escaping cold air from below.

He shone his torch down into the hole. The fading beam lit up a spiral stairway carved into solid rock, descending into blackness.

The long descending stone spiral carried him down into solid rock. As he corkscrewed deeper and deeper into the vertical tunnel, the sound of the storm outside faded away to nothing.

After a while, the staircase ended and met a level passageway that snaked off into the dark. There was only one way to go, and the only sound was his echoing footsteps and the drip of water. The smooth rounded walls of the tunnel were high enough for him to walk upright. It must have taken centuries to dig this out of the mountain terrain. A rough tunnel would have done just as well, yet whoever had created this had been interested in far more than utility. They were chasing perfection. But why? Where was the tunnel leading? He walked on.