“The short story is I fainted and hit my head on the sink. Then, when the paramedics got here, they took my pulse.”
Naomi looked meaningfully at Caitlyn.
“Yeah. They did not like what they found. The doctors eventually shrugged it off, though, since I’m fine.”
“Very Gallic of them. ‘Eh, so zhe seemed dead, vhat of it?’ ” Naomi said in a mock French accent. “So what’s the long story?
Did
you faint?”
Caitlyn chewed her lower lip. She’d decided in the hospital that she wanted to tell Naomi
everything
that was going on. Naomi was the only girl she could trust not to gossip, as well as being the only girl she thought might understand.
“Will you close the door?” Caitlyn asked. “I have something I want to tell you.”
Naomi closed the door and came back to the bed, sitting on the end. Her face was concerned. “What is it?”
Caitlyn took a deep breath. “I hope you don’t think I’m crazy after you hear this.” And then she told her everything, from Raphael to the Woman in Black to Bianca to the Templar treasure.
“
Mon Dieu
,” Naomi said when Caitlyn finally finished. Her eyes were wide. “That is one heck of a story.”
“Do you think I’m crazy?”
“Crazy? No!”
Caitlyn slumped in relief. “Good.”
“You’re not crazy; you’re a witch!”
Caitlyn sat back up. “What!”
“I don’t mean it as an insult,” Naomi assured her. “I think you have some sort of special power. Don’t you see?”
“See what?”
“You’re a magnet for ghosts. You’re like a medium; you talk to spirits. Only in your case, you don’t do it during a séance; you do it while you dream.”
Caitlyn had never looked at it like that before, and she wasn’t sure how she felt about the possibility of being a medium. “It’s the one consistent element, isn’t it?” she asked. “The Screechers, the Woman in Black, Bianca, maybe even Raphael: they could all be ghosts.”
“What else could they be?”
“Beats me.”
“If they are all ghosts,” Naomi went on eagerly, “it seems clear that some of them—or at least one of them—has a purpose for visiting you.”
“Which is?” Caitlyn asked, faintly bewildered. She almost couldn’t believe Naomi was taking her theory and running with it. She wasn’t even questioning that Caitlyn was telling the truth!
“They obviously want you to find the Templar treasure.”
“But I doubt it’s still here. The castle has been renovated from roof to cellars; they would have found it.”
“But why else would you be going on this treasure hunt with Raphael, in your dreams? It must still be here.” Naomi hopped off the bed. “Are you allowed to walk around?”
“Yeah.”
“Then let’s go see her!”
“Who?”
“Mary, of course!”
Caitlyn laughed and reached for her shoes, careful not to bend over too quickly. “I’ve never seen you so excited.”
“Caitlyn, until you came along, there was nothing at this school that was worth my excitement.”
They went together to the chapel, a small, airy structure slightly apart from the château proper, rooted on its own outcropping of rock. It was used only for the a cappella choir’s practice and the occasional lecture by a visiting expert. A van shuttle provided transportation to the village of Cazenac for any girls who wanted to attend religious services, or who wanted a change of scenery.
On this March day, the sky was bright blue, the sun’s rays giving cold illumination to the late-winter landscape of grays, browns, and muted greens. A blustery wind stole the heat from their bodies as they crossed the short distance from château to chapel.
Once inside, the light took on a different quality. It was softened by the colored glass of the windows, as if tamed to serenity. Caitlyn stood for a moment soaking it in, enjoying the old-church smell that she thought must, like “mother” and “God,” be an archetype of human existence.
“Here she is,” Naomi said.
Caitlyn joined her in an alcove. Carved of white marble, the life-size Mary stood with her hands pressed together in prayer, her eyes cast heavenward. She wore a long robe and a crown with twelve stars upon a head of long wavy hair. The statue was set in an arched niche in a marble wall carved with myriad designs, the complexity of which rivaled the sundial ceiling.
“Now what?” Naomi asked.
“Start looking for anything that might be a symbol of the Knights Templar. Anything with a cross in it.”
Naomi gave her a look. “Caitlyn. This is a church. There are going to be crosses.”
“Unusual crosses, then.”
Naomi muttered but went to work searching the details of the statue and its surroundings. Caitlyn started to do the same but then remembered the sundial, and stood back, looking at Mary and trying to think.
The sundial had told them where to look for the clue. There was no writing on the statue, though.
Caitlyn’s gaze roamed over Mary, then settled on her hands, pointing upward. Her eyes, as well, were cast up. Caitlyn followed to where they pointed.
A scallop shell was carved into the peak of the arch above Mary.
Caitlyn took a chair off the end of a row and started to carry it over to the statue.
“Caitlyn, let me do that,” Naomi said, taking it from her. “Did you forget you had your head split open?”
“Put it by the statue.”
Naomi did, then put a steadying hand on Caitlyn’s hip as she climbed onto the chair to look at the shell.
It was the size of Caitlyn’s hand and for all the world looked like the symbol on a Shell gasoline sign.
Except for one detail.
At the base of the shell, where all the radiating lines met at the hinge, was a smooth spot on which was carved a cross with arms of equal lengths. Inside each quadrant formed by the cross, another small identical cross was carved.
Caitlyn had seen the symbol before, on a Web site about the Templars. It had been one of their seals.
“What do you see?” Naomi asked. “Is it the next clue?”
Caitlyn smiled down at her, elation bubbling in her chest. “What can you tell me about the symbolism of a scallop shell?”
“Either we’re taking a trip to the beach, or we’re having
coquilles Saint Jacques
for dinner.” At Caitlyn’s look of puzzlement she said, “Scallops with mushrooms, cream, and parmesan.”
Caitlyn laughed and climbed down from the chair so that Naomi could take her place and look at the carving. “I don’t think either of those hold the answer.”
“You never know.”
“Anything?” Naomi asked a week and a half later, as they hiked down a trail through the woods with their ten other geology classmates. They were on an afternoon field trip to study the local karst landscape, karst being the formations formed by eroded limestone, Caitlyn learned. Their first stop was to be the
gouffre
into which Brigitte’s brother Thierry had tried to commit suicide.
“Nothing!”
Naomi cursed under her breath.
“Tell me about it,” Caitlyn agreed.
It was a sunny, chilly late March day, but blessedly free of wind. Caitlyn’s ears ached from the cold, but it felt good to be outdoors, tramping through a forest of pine, evergreen oak, and bare deciduous trees. The rough path was a mix of dirt and pale limestone, its edges softened by a lining of moss, ferns, and shrubs, many of which could have been found in the woods near her house back in Oregon.
“I haven’t remembered a single dream since the night I hit my head,” Caitlyn said. They were at the back of the group, a half dozen feet behind Amalia. “Even my attempts at lucid dreaming don’t help. I’m starting to get scared that my dreams are gone for good.”
“Scared” didn’t begin to describe the increasing panic she felt at not being able to return to Raphael. Every free moment she had, she closed her eyes and tried for a lucid dream. Brain static was all she got. Nights were no better.
Her written dream journals sent to Madame Snowe were bare, and she feared the headmistress thought she was hiding something. She’d considered making up dreams, only rejecting the idea in the end for fear that Madame Snowe, with her PhD in psychology, might read unintended meanings into the fake dreams, and think Caitlyn more nutty than she already was.
Naomi was shaking her head. “There’s a purpose to your dreams. They can’t stop yet: they’re not finished. We haven’t found the treasure!”
Ahead of them, Amalia glanced back over her shoulder, a question in her eyes. Caitlyn nudged Naomi’s arm in warning. “Shh!”
“Sorry,” she whispered. “It’s frustrating, is all.”
“I know. Believe me, I know.”
Caitlyn had thought the answer to the puzzle was only steps away once they found the scallop shell. It had taken only half a minute on the Internet to discover that it had three main symbolic meanings.
The first was fertility and love; it was the symbol of Venus. Botticelli had put Venus on a scallop shell in his famous painting of her birth.
The second meaning was the Celtic death journey. The lines on the scallop shell converging to one point looked like the rays of the sun, setting to the west at the end of the world. More specifically, setting at Finisterre, literally “the end of the earth,” on the Atlantic coast of Galicia, in Spain. Coincidentally, the Latin name for the Atlantic had been
Mare Tenebrosum
, which translated to either “Sea of Darkness” or “Abyss of Death.”
Caitlyn couldn’t help noticing how often “darkness” and “abyss” had come up in her dreams. There was something there.
The third symbolic meaning of the scallop shell could also have a connection to a treasure map: the shell was the symbol of Saint James, who was one of Christ’s apostles.
King Herod Agrippa beheaded James in 44 A.D., in Jerusalem, and legend had it that his body was sent on an unmanned ship to Spain for burial. The ship was wrecked on the coast, however, and the body lost. It washed ashore some time later, undamaged, and covered with scallops.
It seemed an odd sort of miracle to Caitlyn. The scallops were native to Galicia, however, and had long been a symbol of the region.
James’s final resting place became Santiago de Compostela, one of the most popular pilgrimage destinations in the Middle Ages. A scallop shell from the shores of Galicia became a souvenir of the pilgrimage, and proof of completion of the arduous journey. Eventually, the scallop shell became a universal symbol of pilgrimage.
Caitlyn was surprised to find that one of the pilgrimage routes to Santiago de Compostela had passed right through the Perigord Noir region. The map she’d seen online had had too large a scale to tell how close the route had come to Château de la Fortune, though.
Assuming the scallop shell above the statue of Mary to be a reference to Saint James, Caitlyn had made a list of identifying traits for the saint, including a floppy hat and mantle as well as the Cross of the Knights of Santiago. Armed with this list, Caitlyn and Naomi had roamed the castle looking for Saint James.
He was nowhere to be found.
Caitlyn feared that, like the sundial, his image had been destroyed by time. If that were so, she would never find the next clue unless she got back to Raphael’s world. Even if she was wrong and the shell did not represent St. James, she doubted she’d figure out what it
did
mean without Raphael. She needed him.
And not just for the treasure.
The group came to a stop, halted by Madame Brouwer, their tall Dutch geology teacher who looked like she should be playing professional beach volleyball, not teaching girls about rocks. “If you are ever lost in the woods, look for these markings on trees or stones,” Madame Brouwer said in her hearty voice, pointing her walking stick to a painted short white horizontal line above a red one, on the trunk of a tree. “They are markings of the Grande Randonnée trail system that covers France and extends throughout Europe, and the markings will eventually lead you to a village. This portion of the Grande Randonnée we are on now has been trodden by pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela for over a thousand years.”
Caitlyn caught her breath and looked at Naomi, who appeared just as surprised. The very trail they stood upon was the pilgrimage route!
As Madame Brouwer continued to talk, Caitlyn’s mind wandered down the path to a new idea. Maybe she was wrong to look for an image of Saint James. Maybe it was the pilgrimage route itself that mattered. The path was part of the pilgrimage route, and the pilgrimage route led past the
gouffre
. The abyss. Maybe the treasure was in the
gouffre
!
Her heart thumped in excitement. Could it be that simple?
The trail came out of the woods to a clearing, in the center of which was the
gouffre
, an enormous hole in the pale rocky ground, at least thirty feet across. Scrubby-looking bushes and tufts of grass surrounded its rim. The girls at the front of the group inched toward a clear spot at the rocky edge, one by one leaning cautiously over to peer into its depths. Caitlyn waited impatiently for her turn.