“When you are told to!” was the only response.
The conservator had ended up calling the Périgueux police prefect’s office. He was worried and asked the prefect’s chief of staff what he thought. They’d known each other for years.
He got a quick answer. “My dear friend, remember that we are simply government officials. That’s all.”
At nine precisely, the conservator handed the visitors their sterile gear and opened the security entrance to the cave.
70
Sol and Marcas were following the conservator.
“The main cave is nearly seventy feet wide and sixteen feet high. There are several smaller galleries. We’re now in the Hall of the Bulls. To the right is the passageway that leads to the nave and the apse and then to the Chamber of the Felines.”
Marcas saw Sol tighten his grip on the pouch. Then he looked around, his eye catching a long line of aurochs and horses. There was a frieze of bulls and what looked like a bear. A whole bestiary in bright colors that looked like it had been painted the day before.
“Magnificent!” Sol said.
The conservator seemed to relax a little. “Lascaux is unique, a masterpiece of the Magdalenian period some eleven thousand to seventeen thousand years ago.”
“How can you be so precise?” Marcas asked.
“Researchers collected more than four hundred tools and bone fragments in the cave and carbon dated them.”
“Incredible. Are there only animal representations?”
“No. That’s what makes Lascaux so mysterious. Look, there’s a unicorn near the entrance.”
“A mythical animal?”
“Yes, the Magdalenians dreamed, just as we do.”
Marcas recalled the tapestry La Dame à la licorne at the Cluny Museum in Paris. Biologists specializing in plants of the Middle Ages had suggested that some of those depicted in the tapestry might have had hallucinogenic properties.
“What’s most intriguing are the geometric symbols. There are several hundred of them, like checkerboards or grids. We don’t know what they represent.”
“Could they have some spiritual significance?”
“Perhaps. They don’t appear to correspond with anything tangible, like animals. Not all scholars agree, but they could well relate to ritual ceremonies held here.”
“Do you think that Lascaux was some kind of sanctuary?”
“I personally think it was a temple, yes. I’ll show you why.”
The conservator guided his visitors down a gallery to a semicircular area and then through a narrow passage that led to a deeper area.
“This is the Shaft of the Dead Man. Look at the scene.”
On the wall, a man with what looked like an erection was sprawled out in front of a bison.
“He has the head of a bird. It’s quite possible that this was a shaman,” the conservator said.
“A shaman?” Marcas asked.
“Yes. Prehistoric humans most likely came here to commune with the spirit world. The shaman was their intermediary.”
Sol was examining the man with the bird head. “But he looks dead.”
“A death preceding a spiritual rebirth. That’s what the bird symbolizes. The shaman’s life force has been freed to journey into the beyond.”
Sol looked totally absorbed.
“We have come a long way since theorizing that Lascaux was simply a place where men came to make art,” the conservator said. “I, as well as many others, believe that the humans who did these paintings were infused with a sense of the sacred.”
“What do the animal representations mean?”
“Some researchers hold that these creatures were visions or hallucinations seen during ritual ceremonies.”
They headed back toward the Hall of the Bulls.
“What’s over there?” Sol asked, pointing down a dark tunnel.
“The Painted Gallery. It has the great black bull, bison, ibexes, and a—” The conservator looked at his watch. “Listen, it’s getting late.”
“And a what?” Sol asked.
“Excuse me?”
“You said ‘ibexes and a—.’”
The conservator was close to the exit. “And a horse,” he said. “An upside-down horse. It’s coming out of a crack, as if it has crossed through a wall. Perhaps another vision.”
“Leave us now,” Sol said.
The conservator hesitated.
“Now,” Sol growled, and the man left.
Marcas heard the door close with a click. He turned around. The paintings shone brilliantly against the pale limestone walls. Sol was pointing a gun at him.
71
“So here we are, Inspector. A perfect place for the shadow ritual. Remember, no funny business. You know how Joana feels about your woman. They should be here soon. If you want to see Ms. Zewinski alive again, you’ll do what I say.”
Marcas felt entirely cut off from the world and about as insignificant as a dust mote in this cave haunted by the ghosts of humans who had lived some fifteen thousand years earlier. Even during his Freemason initiation, when he was by himself with the ritual skull, he hadn’t felt so alone. The bulls and bison on the walls would survive long after his own bones were gone. And that could happen sooner rather than later if he didn’t find a way to control this madman and his sidekick Joana.
Sol was waving the gun at him. “Go on. Prepare the ritual.”
Marcas set out to recall the details in the Breuil Manuscript. The basics were like any other Freemason ritual. Then the image of Sophie Dawes’s body flashed in his mind, followed by the list in his notebook of the ritual slayings of his fellow Freemasons. Anger was boiling up inside.
“No dawdling, Inspector.”
Marcas unfolded the map of the cave the conservator had given them and found the east, which he marked with a stone. Opposite it, he placed two other stones symbolizing the pillars Jakin and Boaz, marking the entrance to the temple. Using another stone, he drew a rectangle in the middle, as indicated by the Breuil Manuscript. He used the same stone to scrape out a small pit.
“In theory, you need to leave behind any metal before entering the temple,” Marcas said, looking at the gun.
“Nice try,” Sol said, still pointing the weapon at him. “Over there.”
Marcas stepped aside as the old man walked toward the pit, opened the pouch, and pulled out the old vials they had found, along with two matching new ones.
72
The on-call tech flushed the toilet and pulled up his zipper. His shift would last another hour. He was tempted to leave now, as the probability of an incident in the Lascaux cave was as close to absolute zero as you could get. In the eleven years he had been monitoring the sensors and maintaining the instruments, he had never once experienced an alert. Well, there was that time in the Hall of Bulls. A government minister and his mistress, on a tour with other dignitaries, had ducked into the hall for a quickie. The sensors had immediately picked up the rise in their body temperatures and the cave’s carbon monoxide level, but because the tryst was over as soon as it started, the heavy breathing hadn’t harmed the bulls.
The technician went back to his office and continued to take apart one of the sensors he had been working on. With a little luck, he’d be able to change the diode and test it before his shift was up. He was opening the instrument with a Philip’s screwdriver when an alarm rang out in the control room. He set down his tools and opened the sliding door. He walked over to the control panel, cut the alarm, and checked the parameters. The carbon dioxide measurements indicated that several people were in the cave. A VIP tour. He had been notified. But he had been told that only two guests and the conservator would be in the cave. He clicked on the application to convert the carbon dioxide units into the number of visitors.