The Tavernier Stones (43 page)

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Authors: Stephen Parrish

BOOK: The Tavernier Stones
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“We need to conduct a systematic search of the three chambers,” John insisted. He was sure the woman wouldn’t shoot them. They needed to stall long enough to create an opportunity to disarm her.
“We don’t have time for that,” the woman said.
“We have all night.”
“Do you want to get shot, young man?”
“If you shoot us, you won’t recover the stones. Ever. You want to stand around and wait? We can wait too; we have no place else to go. Think we’ll get hungry? So will you. Think we’ll get tired? How long can you keep that gun raised to our heads? There’s nothing you can do.
Nothing
.”
The woman bit her lip. She looked around the room as though searching for an idea. Finally she noticed the spool on the wall and the rope that threaded up and around to the bell. She grabbed the spool’s handle with her free hand and wound it down a few turns. The bell lowered to within arm’s reach. Turning back to the altar, she picked up the ball-peen hammer.
John watched the bell sway under the threads still holding it up. He glanced at Sarah; her eyes were shut, and she appeared to be gritting her teeth.
“There
is
something I can do,” the woman said. “I can let everyone know you’re here. Imagine what the residents of this town will do to you when they catch you in this chamber, in the middle of the deep, dark night. So, for the last time, where are the lost Tavernier stones?”
The three were silent.
The woman lifted the ball-peen hammer above her head and struck the bell.
John covered his ears. The metallic
clang
resounded through the chamber. Its throaty echoes pounded on the tiled surfaces and beat mercilessly on his eardrums.
“Now all you have is a few minutes,” the woman hollered above the din, “if you want to tell your grandchildren you found the greatest treasure in history. Minutes, that’s all. Solve the puzzle—before townspeople flood this room.”
She struck the bell again. And again.
 
Gerd Pfeffer, who was already making his way through the darkness to the church with an empty satchel slung over his shoulder, stopped and listened for a few seconds. The ringing sounded distant and muffled, as though it came from deep inside the earth.
“
Verdammt!
”
 
Barclay Zimmerman ran out of his hotel room and into the Marktplatz. Throughout the town of Oberstein, lights were coming on as people woke to the sound of the ringing bell. It was past midnight, and some of the people spilled onto their front porches and balconies, rubbing their eyes in confusion. Then it seemed to dawn on them, and Zimmerman heard voices carrying anxiously from house to house, penetrating the calm night air: “
Jemand läutet eine Glocke!
”
Somebody’s ringing a bell!
Men trotted across lawns, buttoning their shirts as they ran, as though they comprised a minuteman unit that had been ready for such an event for the past three centuries. A mother appeared on an upstairs balcony, snatching her curious children into her arms. “
Oh, mein Gott, nein,
” she said. “
Nicht so etwas
.”
 
John thought his eardrums would burst. The old woman continued hammering the bell in a tantrum. Her eyes darted from David to John, John to Sarah, skeleton to bell, all the while gleaming like headlights at the front of a driverless vehicle.
It’s time to put a stop to this, John decided. He removed the sheet of cardboard from under his shirt and unfolded it, then went around to the other side of the altar and stood next to the skeleton. When the woman saw what John had in his hands, she stopped hammering.
The bell continued to vibrate with a low hum. When it finally became still, the sudden contrasting quiet made the atmosphere in the chamber tense.
John held the cardboard up to the candlelight. It was perforated with holes that channeled square and rectangular patches of yellow glow onto his face and chest. He unceremoniously kicked the skeleton out of the way. Loose bones scattered across the floor, making hollow clicking noises as they rolled and tumbled. The dagger fell out of the skeleton’s ribcage and came to rest at Sarah’s feet. Sarah looked down at it, then up at the woman. But the woman was watching, shaking her head.
Positioning himself where the skeleton’s ribcage had been, John held the cardboard grille at arm’s length and aimed it at the wall toward which the skeleton had pointed, the same wall that was decorated with the large drawing of a Baphomet.
He hesitated.
Everyone stood motionless, waiting to see what would happen next. What happened next was John lowering the cardboard and calmly tearing it into pieces.
“No!” The woman stuck her pistol into John’s face. “Stop doing that—stop doing it …
now
!”
John scattered the shredded pieces of cardboard on the floor. “I won’t participate,” he said. “I won’t be the instrument of this sacrilegious act.”
“You just ordered an execution,” the woman told him. “Your own.”
 
Outside the tunnel gate, Pfeffer was first to arrive on the platform. He tried the gate and found it locked. Below, in the town, rivulets of people joined to make currents as the town’s residents, armed with all the weapons they could expediently grab, converged on the Felsenkirche.
He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and rubbed his face vigorously to remove any remaining camouflage makeup. Surveying his all-black clothing, he decided it was better to arrive with the rest of the townspeople than to be found by them lingering at the gate. He ran back down the steps.
 
At the foot of the steps, the townspeople, Zimmerman among them, were on their way up. Zimmerman felt himself transported back three hundred years. The clothing was more modern, the weapons were more effective—but not much more. The people around him were frightened, and it was a suspicious fear, a foreboding over the invisible, the indecipherable, the uninvited.
This, he thought, is what a lynching looks like. Somebody’s not coming back down these steps alive.
 
John closed his eyes and waited for the bullet to sear through his brain.
“Wait!”
It was David’s voice. John opened his eyes. He watched as David reached inside his pants and removed a piece of cardboard that was identical to the one John had just torn up. He held it up for the old woman to see.
She lowered her gun.
John looked at the cardboard. “Where the hell did you get that?”
“I told you you’d need me.”
Sarah said, “John, if you tear that one up too, we’re all dead.”
“Listen to your friends,” the woman advised John. “Or you’ll watch them die first.”
“
Please
,” Sarah implored him.
John accepted the piece of cardboard from David and took a deep breath. He aimed the cardboard once again at the Baphomet. Each of the grille’s fifty-four open squares lined up with its respective tile on the wall. But something funny happened when the grille was lined up just right: the Baphomet disappeared.
There was, John knew, no predictable pattern to the prime numbers between 1006 and 1406. Twin primes—primes like 1019 and 1021, separated by only two digits—occurred eleven times, accounting for nearly half the total number of holes. And vertical pairs—primes like 1013 and 1033 that, when cut out of the grille, made two adjacent holes, one above the other—accounted for eighteen rectangular windows in the grille, or thirty-six holes all together.
There was no predictable pattern, but a pattern of sorts nevertheless emerged from the two phenomena. The cutouts formed a pair of irregular curves, one snaking its way down the left side of the 400-square array, the other down the right side. Together they
avoided
the outline of the Baphomet; the artist had arranged his strokes to fit between the spaces of the locator grille, so that no line work would show through any of the open windows.

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