Lydia Gregory-Crowe didn’t see them coming.
One minute she had been sipping her cup of steaming Armenian coffee, the next, two armed men in black ski masks had guns to her head. She tried to call out to warn Alexander, but remembered he was back at the lighthouse, most likely prowling in its basement, playing make-believe or whatever he did down there.
Seconds later, she was led out onto the front lawn to meet the last two people coming out of a black jeep. A red-haired man with brilliant blue eyes stood first, glanced at her, smiled, then looked down to the lighthouse. Lydia started to pull herself free, struggling until she saw the next person emerge from the passenger side of the jeep, a cigarette dangling from his lips.
“Hello, Lydia. Sorry to drop in like this.”
Her expression went from anger and fright to outright shock.
“Robert!”
“Can we not point guns at her?”
The man beside him sighed. “In a minute. Lydia, where’s Alexander? Where’s your son?”
“I’m not telling you-you, who the hell are you? What do you people want? Robert, did they abduct you?”
“Settle down, Lydia. I know this might look a bit like overkill, but Xavier didn’t want to take any chances. Not with something of this magnitude.” He sighed. “We’ve come for the tablet.”
Lydia’s bright green eyes sparkled. “The Emerald Tablet? What-? Wait, you think it’s here?”
Xavier Montross brushed past her, heading to the lighthouse entrance as the rising sun glinted off the mist-shrouded bay. He turned his attention to the tower. “Oh, it’s definitely here. Your husband, it appears, never quite trusted you.” He gave her a sympathetic look. “Maybe it had something to do with your not being entirely honest with him from the beginning about who you were.”
“The fact that I was a Keeper had nothing to do with my feelings for Caleb.” She held up fists, wrists still cuffed. “And you. I remember you. Skipped out on the team in Alexandria.”
“Saved myself, more like it, from their stupidity. Saved myself for more important things.”
Lydia released a long breath. “Well, I don’t believe you. Caleb didn’t take the Emerald Tablet. He couldn’t.”
“He could,” Montross said, heading to the entrance, “and he did. It’s been right under your nose, all these years.”
Robert followed, helping Lydia along after dropping his cigarette in the snow. “Your son knows too.”
“Impossible. I would know if Alex were keeping such a secret.”
Robert smiled. “A mother doesn’t know everything, not in this case, Lydia. He’s more his father’s son.”
“How can you be sure?”
Robert pointed. “Ask him. He drew it.”
Montross grinned, moving quickly now to the steel door, blazing in the rising sun. “I’ll show you my sketches later. Over a hundred of them, some drawn during the past decade, but most over twenty years ago, when I was a boy.” He blinked at her, then reached for the door. “Even then, my destiny was clear. Even then, this day was in my sights.”
Lydia shot out her bound hands, caught her brother’s collar with both hands. “Robert, you can’t allow this! If the tablet is down there, you can’t let this man-anyone other than a Keeper-get his hands on something so powerful!”
Robert held his sister’s cuffed wrists, and looked into her eyes. “Don’t worry, he’s going to give it to us. And then it will finally be where it belongs. He only needs to read a portion of it, something his visions have shown him. Don’t ask me to explain it all.”
“If you don’t know his true motivations, why would you take this risk? Our father taught us better than that.”
“Don’t bring him into this. The Emerald Tablet, and all its ancient knowledge, is our birthright. Bad enough our ancestors had to wait over two thousand years for its release, keeping the damn secret, but then to have an outsider steal it away?”
“Caleb’s not an outsider.”
“Not anymore, true, but-”
“He was a Keeper, truer to the cause than we ever were.”
“You’re softening, Lydia. Too much in his shadow, I think.”
Lydia glared at him. “You should have just come to me, I would have talked to Caleb.” She pounded his chest.
“Enough,” Montross said, then turned to his men. “You two stay up here. Keep an eye on them.”
Robert’s head snapped around. “‘Them?’ But-”
“Don’t worry, Robert. I will still give you what you want, but first, I must do this alone.” He reached into his suit coat pocket and pulled out a sheaf of pages. Unfolding them, he looked at the first page of a schematic-type drawing of the steps below the ground floor of the lighthouse, to the basement sub-cellar and storage area that decades ago had been used to store fuel for the lighthouse.
He flipped through the pages, nodded, opened the door, then closed it behind him.
At the top of the stairs, Xavier cocked his head. He glanced through his drawings again. Nothing on the pictures, except the last one-one showing his own face looking through a glass-like porthole-and what looked like the reflection of a boy’s face in the glass. He held the pages and looked down the granite staircase, the steeply withering descent, thirty-six stairs to the first bend, then around another thirty-six to the sub-cellar itself. Two lamps burning dimly, set on the walls.
He walked calmly, descending with his eyes closed as if he’d walked these stairs a thousand times before, if only in his mind. To the bend, and then around and down. On the second stairwell he stopped and flipped through the pages again, twenty of them now, and he paused at each page. He stopped at one showing a room with a door and three ledge-like shelves on either wall. Above the door were three large, emboldened Greek letters, and on the six shelves were round peg-like objects. On the shining metal door itself was a single porthole-like window.
Montross continued. At the bottom, the air was dank, musty, the floor cobbled and uneven. Reaching out along the wall, he found the light switch he knew to be there. Flicked it and said, “Hello, Alexander.”
In the light that blasted through the darkness like a sunburst, the small boy with curly dark hair kneeling before the door shielded his eyes, and then stood up.
In a cracking voice, he said, “You’re not getting inside.”
Eight thousand miles away, Caleb was being airlifted to the Fort Erickson research station to a waiting team of medics. In the helicopter, Phoebe and Orlando were by his side, Phoebe holding his weak hand while Caleb muttered about the visions still roiling in his head.
“Montross is in the vault, our vault… with Alexander.”
Alexander balled his fists, squinting, getting used to the light again after running below and then shutting off the lights, hoping to hide. Bad idea, he thought. Obviously a group of armed men showing up could only be after one thing-the artifact in the vault behind him.
Trying to sound as brave and confident as his favorite hero Dash, the boy with super speed from his favorite movie The Incredibles, he said again, “You’re not getting inside.”
Alexander’s focus cleared as the well-dressed red-haired man stepped into the light. The man had dazzling blue eyes, shamefully blue-so much that they seemed the color of a newborn’s eyes, brilliant and desperately hungry. Alexander saw something of himself reflected in them.
“Hello, Alexander. My name is Xavier Montross. I was a friend of your father’s years ago. I’ve seen this vault chamber”-he raised a sketchpad and waved it around the room-“saw it and saw you long before you were even born.”
Alexander swallowed and stepped away, his back now against the wall. Uh oh. “Great, so you’re psychic too.”
“One of the founding members of the Morpheus Initiative.”
Alexander shrugged. “Everyone else is dead. Being psychic makes people act stupid.”
Montross stifled a laugh. “But not you, right? You’re too humble.”
“I’m only nine.”
“Well, anyway, my very astute youngster, you’re definitely your father’s son. Probably reading at college levels already, right?”
He thought of his books, all those precious books lining the shelves in his room, and all those he could reach in his father’s study.
“Of course you do. Well, you should know this: I was the only one with enough sense not to go under the Pharos on that fateful trip. Because I knew.” Again he raised the sketchpad. “I saw what was going to happen.”
“Why didn’t you tell anybody?”
“I warned your dad. Might just have saved his ass so he could live long enough to father a son. Ask him about that, if he comes back.”
Alexander shivered, his eyes closed and suddenly, just for a moment, he had a jolting vision of crushing ice, of an enormous head with sad, regal eyes looking on protectively. He heard helicopter blades, and what sounded like his Aunt Phoebe’s voice.
“I saw this too.” Montross gazed at the walls to his left and right, nodding to himself as if in vindication of his drawings. Then he looked above Alexander’s head, over the door.
Blinking away the vision, and the certainty that his father and the others were in big trouble, Alexander stood up straight, spreading his feet to cover something on the ground, hoping “Don’t bother,” Montross said. “I know what’s there. Oh, your dad’s a clever guy, I give him that. Taking elements of the Pharos’s vault design and incorporating them here. Thinking he’s following in Sostratus’s footsteps, right? But I wonder, Alexander, have you figured it out yet?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Sure you do, kid. You’re the sole child, the son of two Keepers. No choice really, you’re their chosen replacement. You’re being groomed, just as Keepers have done for over two thousand years. But your dad, being such an admirer of Sostratus and a stickler for the Egyptian mystery school’s technique of learning by experience, he would have you discover the truth first-hand. To prove yourself worthy and to fully understand the concepts, you must solve the puzzle and find the treasure on your own.” Montross stepped closer, carefully. “So, have you done it?”
Alexander slowly shook his head.
“Not lying to me, are you, boy? Worried that I’d threaten you, or your mom, to force you to let me in?”
“Not lying. I don’t know the way in, not yet.”
“I believe you.” Montross closed the sketchpad, tossed it aside casually, then pointed to the door. “Move aside, please.”
“No.”
“Just a step to your left, that’s all. I’m not stupid enough to try to open the door yet, but I need to confirm what letters lie under your feet.”
Alexander glared at him for another long moment, then shuffled sideways to let Montross lean in and look.
“Ah, as I thought.”
He studied the letters on the floor, and then again over the door. “So, in the Above we have the Greek letters: Theta, Omega, and Delta. And Below by your feet, reading again left to right, we have Omega, Delta, Theta.”
“You won’t figure it out,” Alexander said.
Montross only smiled, then walked to the shelves running the whole twenty-foot length of the left side of the room. He glanced over his shoulder at the opposite wall, and the three identical shelves. “I’ve already figured it out, kid.”
He touched the mahogany tracks, more like frames around a series of peg holes bored into the wall. “Three to a side. Each one with eleven peg holes. And there’s a rounded wooden pin inserted, randomly it appears, in one of the holes on each shelf.”
Alexander made a sound like a laugh.
“What?” Montross glared at him.
“Get it wrong and there are no second chances.”
“Really? Your dad would be that ruthless? Kill his own son if he made the wrong choice?”
Alexander shivered again. “He said I would know when I figured it out. And if I didn’t know for sure, I should never try it. No hunches or guesses.”
“I see. Well, then,”-Montross smiled-“I’d better get this right, for both our sakes.” He touched the peg on the top row, grasped it, and pulled it out sharply. Alexander winced, then they both looked at each other and smiled.
“Nothing’s going to happen yet, right?” Montross asked. “Not until I set everything in position. Put all the pegs where I want them, and then try the door. At that point, either it opens…”
“Or,” said Alexander, “we both get squished.”
“Squished?” He looked up at the ceiling, then the cracks along the walls. He cocked his head. “What’s he got up there? A trap ceiling? Something to crush the hapless intruders? Or do the walls close in like that garbage compactor in the first Star Wars?”
“It was actually Episode Four,” Alexander corrected.
“First for me,” Xavier said. “So, how do you know there aren’t hidden blades that might come out and slice us to pieces?”
“I don’t know.”
“How about fire? A release of natural gas and a spark? And after the inferno your mom can come down here and sweep up our ashes?”
Alexander grimaced. “I don’t know, but I’ve dreamed of stuff like that.”
“Have you now?”
“Traps just like that taking care of people like you.”
“And what kind of person am I, Alexander?”
Without pause he said, “A thief.”
Montross smiled. “You know, your Uncle Robert came here with me. Is he a thief, too?”
“I don’t believe he’s really with you, but I guess he is if he came to take something that doesn’t belong to him.”
“He did, and let this be an early life lesson for you, kid. Some people will do anything for power. Anything. And the kind of power promised by that artifact in there, it can make friends turn against friends, family against family. You just can’t trust anyone. Can’t trust your mom and dad, can’t trust them even to come home and see you again after a night out. Can’t trust the world, can’t trust God or Fate or anything. The only thing you can trust are your visions, and sometimes not even those, not until you’re really sure your head’s not fu-” He smiled, catching himself. “Your head’s not playing games with you.”
“What are you talking about?” He looked to the stairs at the other end of the room, and thought he might be able to make it if he burst into a run, sprinting with Dash-like speed, but then he was struck with the thought that if he left, the treasure would be defenseless.
He was its protector. While it was true he hadn’t quite figured it all out, he had spent more time down here in his short life than anyone else had. He was closest to it, and sometimes he felt that just by being outside of the entrance, in this testing room, he could feel its power. Feel it calling to him, feel it changing him. Making him stronger. And he could be more patient, since he knew it was there, his birthright.
“Never mind, kid. We’re going in. Sorry to cut short your lesson and interfere with your dad’s teaching plan, but I’m going to cheat and give you the answer.” He started pulling out pegs and resetting them. Alexander tried to look around his broad shoulders to see where he was inserting the pegs, to see if it made any sense.
“What have you figured out so far, my boy?” Montross said after placing the third peg in a new position on the lower shelf.
“I learned that I’m not to share what I’ve learned with thieves.”
“Very good,” Montross said, shaking his head. “But I’m guessing you at least understand the basic concepts of alchemy, one of the key tenets which is ‘As Above-’”
“‘-so Below,” Alexander whispered, completing the mantra he had learned years ago.
“Correct. All that mumbo-jumbo about recreating the heavenly aspects down on earth, in architecture as well as literature, reflecting the orientation and movements of the heavens onto the earth, but also doing the same thing spiritually. Becoming more than mortal, achieving the immortality promised by heaven.”
Alexander swallowed. “So is that what you’re here to steal? Immortality?”
Montross began work on the middle shelf. “You wouldn’t understand my motives, Alexander. Not until you’re a little-no, a lot older.” He took one peg from the middle and moved it two holes to the right, then he stood back, nodding.
“My dad,” Alexander whispered, “did you hurt him?”
Montross turned, regarding the boy quietly. “Did you see something?”
His eyes filling with emotion, Alexander nodded. “Under the ice.”
Montross turned away, lowering his head. “I think he’ll be okay. Sorry, but I needed the Morpheus Initiative out of the way, preoccupied. Needed their focus elsewhere, so they wouldn’t be tipped off about this.”
“There was a woman,” Alexander said. “She’s scary.”
“God, kid, you’re good. Maybe you’re more like me than I thought.”
Alexander withered under the man’s gaze. He felt like he was being analyzed by a crocodile looking for a hint of fear, or just the juiciest area to bite first.
Montross said, “I saw my parents killed before it even happened. It did wonders for me, let me tell you. That kind of freedom, at such a young age. I spent so many years believing that what I saw, what I drew, could have the power to kill. That it was my fault.”
“But that’s not what it does. You’re just seeing the future.”
“I know. But when I was your age, I saw the world a little differently. Thought I was so much more.” Montross looked down at his empty hands, and Alexander wondered if the thief imagined himself holding some scepter of kingship or a torch of knowledge. Whatever it was, Alexander didn’t care.
“Are you going to kill me and Mom?”
Montross turned to him and sighed. “Listen, I’m not a killer, not normally. That’s why for those times where it’s necessary, I use someone like that woman you saw, like Nina. But no, you can help me. You and your mom will be having pie and ice cream in no time, waiting for your daddy to come home. Just a nice happy family again”-he bent to the lowest shelf, took out a peg and moved it all the way to the left-“minus one Emerald Tablet, of course.”
Up at the farmhouse, Lydia sat at the kitchen table, the two mercenary types standing at the door, hands on their guns, while Robert made another pot of coffee.
“Robert,” she whispered. “It’s not too late. Call this off. Send these men out of here before someone gets hurt.”
“I’ve searched too long for that tablet, given up so much. We both have.”
“I know, but if Caleb does have it, he only has our best interests at heart. And, knowing him, he’s probably rigged the lighthouse basement with some god-awful traps, and heaven help you if Alexander is down there when they go off.”
“Montross has it figured out. Don’t worry, I trust him.”
“Like I trusted my husband?” Lydia shook her head. “Robert, this artifact is too powerful. It makes liars out of everyone. How do you know he won’t just turn around and kill us all once he’s found it?”
“He won’t.”
“He could be just like Waxman. Have you thought of that?”
“I have, and he won’t. Besides,” Robert patted his side where Lydia could see the outline a gun strapped under his heavy sweater in a shoulder harness. His face darkened and his eyes tinted with a heady sense of power she had never seen in him before. “We Keepers have our defenses.”
Lydia shook her head, eyeing the two guards. “This is insane. And my son-your nephew-might be down there.”
Robert smiled. “Something tells me Alexander can take care of himself just fine.”
#
“I don’t understand,” said Alexander, a little braver now that he didn’t feel like his life was in immediate danger. “I felt like I was close, but couldn’t figure it out. How do the shelves relate to the ‘As Above, So Below’ thing?”
“You’ll see.”
“I could get it if there were just two shelves-a top and bottom, above and below, but the middle one messes everything up.”
“Because you’re not seeing the full picture.”
“But the above and below puzzle at the door, it doesn’t make sense. The letters don’t match. They’re not mirror images, and it’s not even like the lower one is the reverse of the top. The letters don’t move, they’re not on blocks, you can’t-”
“Just settle down, kid.” Montross worked faster now, rearranging pegs, moving from top to bottom, then to the middle, setting them into different holes. Occasionally glancing back to the other side.
“Why are you-Oh! Wait.” Alexander looked at the left wall, then back to the right. Then back to the door, pointing to the letters. He blinked, the room’s colors shifted, and for a moment, he saw it. In his mind he saw lines of light stretching from the letters to the shelves: the above left letter, Theta, with a line angled down, concurrently with the bottom shelf on the right wall; the above right letter, Delta, highlighting a trail to the bottom shelf on the left wall. Then the lower letters doing the reverse.
“But what about the ones in the center?”
Montross turned to him, smiling. “Ah, welcome aboard. You’re close now. So close. See, isn’t it great figuring things out intuitively?” He set the last peg in place. “Course, it helps if you can cheat. Although, eight years of trying to remote view this thing I’d hardly call an easy cheat.”
“But the middle ones!” Forgetting all about the danger, Alexander ran to Montross. “I get it. Above and Below are maintained, but in the whole system, the whole room, not just the letters at the door. The Delta letter, top right, lines up with the bottom left shelf, so that’s why you put the peg in the… Hold on! The seventh hole?”
“Egyptian, boy. Think like an Egyptian. They wrote-”
“Right to left!” Alexander smacked his own head. “I would’ve gotten myself killed.”
“You can thank me later.”
“It’s the fourth letter in the Greek alphabet, so the peg goes in the fourth hole from the right.” Alexander moved closer, looking in the dim light. “And the top shelf on the left, matches up with the letter Theta on the right-most letter on the floor. The eighth letter in the alphabet, so you’ve got it.” He counted off the peg holes. “Eight holes from the right.”
“Yeah, okay, you’ve got it, kid. And I did the same on the right wall. Omega for the first hole and Theta again for the eighth.” Montross approached the door, smoothing his sweaty hands on his pants as he reached for the great bronze handle.
“But the center ones, I don’t understand those. Omega on the top.. Why’d you match that up to the right wall, and Delta went to the left? I don’t see any signs, anything that could Montross stopped, hand inches from the door.
“Oh no,” Alexander said, looking at the back of Montross’s head. “You don’t know, do you?”
“You should go back up the stairs, Alexander. In case I’m wrong.”
“You guessed?”
Montross gave him a steady look. “I guessed.” He turned his head slightly just as his hand settled on the handle. “I spent months trying to view which way was correct, but I never saw it, never asked the right questions, maybe. But what I do know is that I saw myself-visions of myself-after this moment. So I know, I just know whatever I choose, it won’t get me killed.”
Alexander frowned, taking a step back. “That’s a little sketchy. Thought you said not to trust Fate, or your visions.”
“Touche. Call it a hunch, then. I trust those. But as I said, get on upstairs if you don’t believe me and don’t want to risk being squished flat or sliced into cubes. But I’m going in or dying a horrible death, with or without you.”
Alexander frowned, looking again at the letters above the door, then at the position of the pegs. He sighed, then stepped closer, right behind Montross.
“So you believe me?”
“It was a good hunch,” Alexander said, pointing. “The only one where you wind up with both Deltas on one side and both Omegas on the other. So if you orient the room on its side instead, you’d have the same arrangement. One Theta on top and bottom, and then two like symbols. It’s the only way that works.”
Montross smiled and rubbed his hands together. “See, you figured it out after all. Now, let’s go. Do you want to do the honors, or shall I?”