The Book of 21 (27 page)

Chapter 35:
Grave Digging

After a few minutes of silence, the graveyard rolled into view. The wrought-iron fence held a myriad of marble tombstones and a large white mausoleum. The towering grave markers seemed to form the skyline of a miniature necropolis. Based on the amount of weathering he saw on the markers, John was guessing that there had been no burials in the yard for quite some time. He parked the truck next to the open gate, killed the ignition, and hopped out of the still-sputtering Chevy.

A few seconds later, the engine of the old yellow truck stopped gasping for life, and the two of them had reached the iron gates of the large cemetery. Though a chain supposedly secured the gates, it had enough slack to allow them to squeeze through and move into the graveyard beyond. John pulled Hallman’s exhumation request out of his pocket, but found that it held no location for the grave.

“Looks like we’ll have to go from tombstone to tombstone to find the thing,” John sighed.

“Great way to spend the morning,” Amy replied with a flash of sarcasm.

“Let’s find it before we get the tools out. Carrying a shovel around a grave yard tends to make people nervous.”

“I don’t think we’ll need the shovel.”

Following her gaze into the cemetery, John realized she was looking at the mausoleum. John focused on the crypt, and at the crown of the building saw two lines of text. The first read, “EVAN FIELDS.” The second read, “FATHER – BROTHER – FRIEND.”

Dumbfounded, John uttered, “It can’t be that easy.”

While John limped toward the mausoleum, Amy raced back to the truck. Within a few seconds, she appeared next to him with the crowbar. He realized she was one step ahead of him.

“I thought you were going back for your eyeliner,” he chuckled.

“Don’t be an ass.”

“Let’s see if we can get in without breaking the place apart.”

John inspected the door. Underneath the white paint, he could tell the sturdy door was made of hard wood, probably oak. The knob wiggled, but the door remained locked. Beneath the knob was an old-fashioned keyhole, through which he could peer into the darkness of the crypt.

“Damn,” he sighed.

“What?”

“I don’t see many of those old locks, this may take some time. Hopefully, it’s not rusted shut.”

“What if it is?”

“Then, we move on to plan B.”

“What’s that?”

“You’re holding it.”

John inserted the lock picks and probed. When he withdrew them, he saw little flakes of brown metal fall from the keyhole. He frowned, and said, “Not good. It looks like it’s rusted over.”

“Time for plan B?” Amy thrust the crowbar at him.

“Stay calm; let’s see if I can get it free. Here, let’s make sure that knob isn’t rusted up too.” John took the crowbar and hammered on the doorknob a few times to make sure it could turn.

He then tried again to pick the lock. At first, the lock refused to move, but he maintained a steadily increasing pressure on the tiny bars. Just as he wondered whether the rust would yield before the tiny tools would break, the lock finally gave way.

The door swung open with a slow eerie creak. Inside, the darkness and dust seemed to create an opaque onyx soup. Once the dust had settled a bit, they could see the white stone sarcophagus of Evan Fields in the center of the room.

Amy covered her mouth to guard against the dust and warned, “It would be good to let it air out a few minutes. I would guess there are all sorts of bacteria swirling around in there; just like when they opened Tut’s tomb.”

“Well, this one hasn’t been closed for thousands of years, and we might not have more than a few minutes before someone sees us in the graveyard and calls the cops.”

John stepped inside slowly. After his eyes adjusted to the light, he noticed that the narrow end of the sarcophagus was bordered by a notched rectangle. Outside that border, there were several small bas-relief images. Among those symbols, John saw a crucifix, a pentagram, and a little devil locked behind bars. The symbol that stood out was at the top-center—a Keystone that cast carved rays of light on the other relief symbols around the border of the rectangle. He pulled out the Key of David and held it so Amy could see it, while he pointed at the notched rectangle on the side of the sarcophagus.

“Coincidence?” he asked.

“La Clef… the Key of David! This is what all the fuss is about? This little piece of paper was important enough to kill for?”

“I think it’s really about what the paper will lead us to.”

“Do you think that it should be used on these symbols, or should we open the sarcophagus?”

“I’m in no rush to see a three-hundred-year-old corpse,” he replied with a wince, “but I don’t want to miss anything, either. Let’s look around first, then pop it open, just to be sure.”

The walls of the crypt bore the notched rectangle John knew from the Key of David, and nothing more. The floors and ceilings were barren. Each side of the sarcophagus, however, bore not only the notched rectangle but also symbols around its perimeter.

John checked the left side more closely and realized that each side held
different
symbols around its edges. Moreover, each side highlighted the symbol at its top-center, or twelve-o’-clock position, with carved rays of radiating light. A keystone, the symbol of Pennsylvania, capped the side at the foot of the stone casket, but here, he found something different.

“This side has a key with a skeleton’s head at the top—a skeleton key.”

“To unlock any door.”

“A possibility. The Key of David was supposed to unlock the door that no man could unlock.”

“Maybe they just needed a woman,” she jibed with a smile.

“You are
so
funny.”

Amy moved to the other side of the sarcophagus, and returned, “This side has an old padlock, the kind with the big keyhole in the middle.”

They continued walking and met at the top of the sarcophagus. There, they found the notched rectangle topped with a shield that held a large cross. Had the cross been painted, John would have guessed it would be red, just like the ones on the Templar uniforms, or on the priest who painted Amy last night.

Amy turned to him and sighed, “Well, the cross brings back memories, but the sides all have different symbols around their borders. We have no clue as to which side we should use, or whether they all might help.” She shook her head. “This is useless; let’s get out of here and get some help.”

“No, not yet. We’re in too deep now. I don’t want to have some shrink tell me I’m crazy and that I killed Shalby due to some hallucinatory fit. Hell, at this point, any sane person would lock me away as a nut; the shrink would not even need to be paid off.” He thought for a second. “We need to open this up and just make sure there is nothing in there before we start trying to figure out which of these we should use. There may be something inside that will tell us which one is the real key.”

John pushed on the stone lid. Even with his slight effort, the lid moved a little. He looked at her in shock.

“It’s moving really easily,” he murmured.

“So?”

“I expected that it would have a lip to keep it from sliding.”

Her eyelids sprang open.

She moved alongside him, and the two of them pushed the lid. As the lid skated across the top of the sarcophagus, it filled the chamber with the sound of stone grating on stone, and eventually revealed the dried corpse of Evan Fields. After three hundred years, only tattered shreds of cloth were left to cover the small gray body.

John took out a lock pick and began to poke through the remains. After a few seconds, he muttered, “I don’t see a place to hide anything.”

“It has to be one of the rectangles on the side,” Amy urged, stepping back to inspect the symbols before her.

“I’m not so sure.”

John thought for a moment about one phrase from Trumbull’s letter;
take it to the grave
. There could be a false bottom in the sarcophagus. If that were the case, Fields would be guarding the lock with his dead body. It was a poetic idea, but as John perused the bottom of the stone casket, he felt it seemed to be solid. In fact, it seemed that someone carved the whole sarcophagus out of a single piece of thick, heavy, marble.

The lid, however, moved easily and seemed to be lighter than John had expected. He grabbed onto it and wrapped his fingers around the bottom. There, he not only felt the absence of a lip that would hold the lid in place, but an absence of stone; the lid’s bottom surface was concave. He moved his hands along the bottom of the lid, toward the center of the stone slab, and felt bumps—there were more bas-relief carvings on the underside of the lid.

“I found it,” he said calmly, with a smile spreading across his lips. “Let’s flip it over. Help me push until we get the center just on the edge.”

They applied gentle pressure to the side of the lid. After it moved a few inches, John felt the lid begin to tilt off the sarcophagus and knew that they had the lid’s center of gravity right on the edge.

“OK, hold it,” he said.

“What?”

“Get on the end. We need to flip this as it falls, so it lands face-up.”

The two of them moved to opposing ends of the sarcophagus and pushed down on the hanging side of the marble slab, while lifting up on the side still over the sarcophagus. The slab fell onto its edge with a resounding boom, and the impact sent small chips of stone spraying through the chamber. After it teetered on its edge for a second, John pushed the slab so that it landed flat against the floor of the tomb with a thunderous crack.

The impact had broken the slab into three pieces, which they pushed back together as best they could. Inside the lid was another notched rectangle, proportioned exactly like the one on Hallman’s paper. Atop the rectangle, a small symbol radiated light; that symbol made Amy’s brow furrow, and John’s jaw drop.

“What is it?” she asked, while bending down to touch it.

“Vau; it’s also called the Key of David.”

“This is it!” Amy looked up at him with a wide smile.

“I’d like to think so, but I’m not so sure.”

“This has to be it. There are so many symbols around the sides, though. I wonder if they should be read like hieroglyphics.” She pointed to a carving of the Greek letter Sigma. “This is the symbol for summation.”

John pulled out the paper with the key, and followed the lines across the rectangle with his finger. “Let’s see what symbols are on the perimeter where these lines intersect the border.”

John started at the top-left of the diagram, as if writing the letter Vau. He found the glyph that was, approximately, where the diagonal line on the sheet of paper met with the notched border, just below the top-left corner.

That tiny bas-relief was a carving of a church. In front of the church, a man stood with tiny woodland animals at his feet. A small bunny, fox, squirrel, and beaver stared up at him. One small songbird hovered above his head, and another perched on his shoulder. John took in the intricacy of this particular symbol. There was a great deal of effort put forth for this one glyph.

“Francis—St. Francis,” he sighed. He knew the man shown in the relief from his days in Sunday school.

“The patron saint of animals?”

“You know, if you think about it, men are animals.”

“Almost all of them,” Amy said with a smile.

“No.” John shook his head. “Literally, all of them;
humans
are animals.”

Amy looked at him as if he had a screw loose. “Yeah, I guess so,” she returned.

“I wonder if they were telling us something—that this man was watching over us dumb animals, or maybe keeping us from harm.”

“I think it’s just a symbol, John.”

“You are probably right.” He shrugged. “I’m tired.”

After he ruminated a second more, John lifted the Key of David up and traced an imaginary line across the stone with his forefinger, matching the angle of the line on the paper as best he could. At its end, he found a picture of a woman pointing along the next imaginary line—toward the bottom-left corner.

“We must be on the right path, she’s pointing along the next line.” John stared at the glyph, wondering if it could be that easy. “She’s right there pointing at it, in plain sight, and I never would have known.”

“It’s the Virgin Mary. What’s next?” Amy prodded.

The outstretched finger of Mary pointed at an angle that coincided perfectly with the angle of the next line drawn on the Key of David. John followed that angle to the last symbol. That final symbol was just as intricate as the other two; a cross reclined as if drawn in a three-dimensional perspective, and some distance beneath the cross, a tiny devil-like figure with a goat-head, beard, breasts, and cloven hooves sat on top of a book.

“Baphomet,” John sighed. He squinted, then stretched out a finger and rubbed the stone between the cross and Baphomet.

Amy’s face crinkled. “What is it?”

“There are three very fine lines there; they are very straight, and razor thin. I never would have noticed them if it wasn’t for the weird angle of the light in here.”

“So what does that mean?”

John shrugged. “I don’t really know. With the amount of time spent to create this stone, I would assume they are not defects.” After staring at the slab for a few seconds, John pointed to the picture of Mary. “Given that she seems to be pointing to third carving in the series, I’m guessing we are reading this in the right order.”

“If you’re sure about that, this is where we should start,” Amy offered, pointing at the picture that they were assuming to be St. Francis.

“I’m not sure what the carving of St. Francis means, either.”

“Well, he’s in front of a church,” Amy snapped.

“Yes, he is, but which church?”

“Maybe it’s his church.”

“I don’t even know where or when the guy was alive, so I don’t know where to start looking for the Church of St. Fran…” John furrowed his brow, and whispered, “The Church of St. Francis.” He recalled the last line of Trumbull’s letter. “When Trumbull said it rests at the feet of Francis, he meant in the foundation.”