“Here,” said Nasser, waving the others toward a spot by the base of the pillar. “Shine your lights there. No, there. Good. Do you see that writing?”
“Writing?” said the geologist. “It’s nothing. Tool marks, maybe.”
“No, no, no,” insisted Nasser, his voice and face flushed with excitement, “it’s been scuffed, but it is certainly writing.”
Ghul placed a heavy hand on Nasser’s shoulder. “Mr. Oruraka and Mr. Kostas said you could read it. Prove them right.” The threat was unspoken, but eloquent.
Nasser unslung his pack and removed a few small vials and a sponge. As the others watched, he poured a little liquid from two of the vials into a plastic cup, used a coffee stirrer to blend them, and dabbed the corner of the sponge into the mixture. The geologist watched him do it and began to nod; however, Nasser explained his process to the others.
“Everything ages,” he said, “even rock. And, as forensic science tells us, all contact leaves a trace. This solution will react only to microscopic trace elements of iron, and the older and more oxidized the iron, the more it will react to the solution.”
“Brilliant,” murmured the geologist.
Nasser used the sponge to dab the solution onto the marks in the rock. High above, Violin tapped the controls of the goggles she wore and the zoom function brought what the professor was doing into sharp focus. Beside her, Harry watched and repeated the action. On the pillar the rough scratches changed as the oxidized flecks of ancient iron turned to the color of blood, revealing the original markings made by some unknown hand many centuries ago. Violin felt her heart begin to hammer as she recognized the marks.
“What does it say?” asked Ghul, and the excitement was evident in his gruff voice. “That’s not Arabic.”
“No,” said the professor, “nor is it the language of the Europeans who possessed this castle.”
The Irishman grunted. “I saw something like this when I was doing a mining assessment in Greece near an old Minoan ruin. Is it Linear A?”
“Not exactly,” said Nasser. “This is a very rare protolanguage used by a group within the Minoan culture. Linear A was their main language, and it has never been deciphered. This is older. Incredibly ancient, actually. It was only used by a secret sect of Minoan priests.”
“Then how can you translate it?” demanded the Irishman.
Nasser smiled and did not explain.
Ghul growled in irritation. “What the hell does it say?”
“It is both a warning and a set of instructions,” said the professor. “Something I’ve seen before in a translation in Von Unaussprechlichen Kulten… a very rare book, gentlemen. Yes, very rare. One passage spoke of the writing in the oldest of languages on a stone believed to be a lintel from a forgotten temple excavated from off the shores of Santorini. The passage was a warning not to touch that which is untouchable, or attempt to learn what is unlearnable.”
“Well, that’s a bunch of shite,” complained the Irishman.
Nasser ignored him. “The same warning is here, and it is meant for anyone except the priests whose job it is to protect what is hidden. Below the warning are instructions for those priests.”
“Read them, damn you,” snarled Ghul.
The professor nodded and bent close. “It says, ‘Push high with four hands, push low with six, and four to bow before wisdom and pull. Left and right and back. ’”
There was a beat.
“What the sodding hell does that mean?” demanded the Irishman.
Ghul chuckled. “It means the professor is about to earn his bonus.”
Nasser straightened and ordered his colleagues back as he walked around the pillar, dabbing now and again with the mixture. A few more symbols appeared. Nasser instructed some of the guards to place their hands in very specific places. Two big men were positioned with hands on the central stone in the pillar, at about chest height. Three others were made to squat with their palms on the lowest stone. And then two more had to kneel and dig their fingers into the narrow crack between the base of the pillar and a rectangular flagstone.
“Put your backs into it,” said the professor. “Ready? Go!”
The men pushing on the middle ring of the pillar pushed to the left, the lower three to the right, and the kneeling men pulled. They were big men, picked for this task. The pillar was heavy and ancient and held part of the ceiling. The other guards and scientists stood watching, their faces filled with equal parts confusion and skepticism.
There was a sudden harsh, deep, dusty, grating sound. Then the three pieces of ancient stone moved. The central stone rotated one way, the stone below it turned the other, and the flagstone slid away from the base. The men strained until some of them screamed with the effort.
“Stop,” gasped Nasser, and the men staggered back, sweating, gasping, cursing, exhausted by their efforts. Then they all fell into a shocked silence. Violin felt her heart turn to ice and she heard a small, strangled sound from Harry.
A section of the floor began to move, folding downward with a grating rumble, revealing by slow degrees a set of stairs hidden for hundreds of years. And from below, from where those stairs vanished into swirling dust, there was a sudden ghostly green glow.
The men staggered back as gas and dust billowed up from below. Even from her lofty perch Violin caught a whiff that smelled like old, rotting fish.
“Perfect,” breathed Nasser.
Violin turned, hooked a hand out, caught Harry by the sleeve, and pulled him close so she could whisper in his ear.
“It’s time,” she said.
Harry looked at her. “Wh-what?”
She did not answer. Instead she hit the release button on her tether and dropped down, drawing her knives as she fell.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I played follow the leader with the Secret Service agents as I worked my way over to the battlefield that is West Lafayette. Something like 16 percent of Baltimore buildings — homes and commercial properties — are abandoned. That makes for a large, spread-out, and very spooky ghost town within the thriving city. Lots and lots of ghosts there. Lots of bad things happening there. Crack houses, murder scenes, quiet places for all manner of horrific sexual abuse. Lonely places to hide, or be abandoned to die — or to be alive and hurt but left wondering if death was a useful doorway out.
Driving along West Lafayette is like driving into an Edgar Allan Poe opium dream, especially as you turn onto North Arlington and see the big, old, and sadly forgotten hulk of Sellers Mansion. It’s a sprawling pile built in 1868 for Matthew Bacon Sellers, president of the Northern Central Railway. Once upon a time it was a showpiece, but those times are long gone. Three stories tall, sturdily built, and although long empty it never felt to me like it was actually dead.
Not saying it’s a haunted house, but there is some kind of residual energy there, and we’re not talking Casper the Friendly Ghost. More like something from a James Wan horror flick. The kind of place where if some weird haunted doll suddenly stepped out through the bare laths you’d be like — yeah, that fits.