Curse of the Druids (4 page)

Chapter Six

The next morning brought sunshine and warmer temperatures. By twenty degrees would be my guess, and actually eighteen degrees according to the lovely Brit gal on the ‘tele’. Amazing how a change in the weather can also bring a change in perspective. And Marie looked amazing—not just slightly dolled up in her sweatshirt and jeans. It was the glow to her countenance, almost as radiant as it had been after a night of cavorting between the sheets with me. Of course, none of that was possible last night, with the invisible detente line and Ishi resting less than ten feet away. Maybe she came to terms with her personal demons. Hopefully she did. Time would tell.

“So, you’re not angry at me anymore?” I asked, discreetly, as we made our way to the inn’s small restaurant. Ishi was far ahead of us, his raging hunger spurring him toward the scent of sausage and biscuits.

“I haven’t been angry since you shut the hell up last night.”

She smiled impishly.

“Oh really?” I returned her smile with a sly grin, and slipped in a quick kiss. “We’ll see who wins next time.”

She almost took the bait, but as I hoped, she didn’t. Anyone watching us walk hand in hand up to the table Ishi secured for us would’ve never guessed how tenuous our bliss was that morning.

“We’re going to have a good day today, no?” Ishi wasn’t fooled, and he offered us both a pained grin.

“It depends on Nick,” said Marie. Her curved luscious lips were held firm, almost as a thin-lined grimace.

“I’ll behave,” I said, demurely.

It’s as close as she’d get to a white flag without lowering her sword first. But it ensured a pleasant meal and the promise of an enjoyable morning. All of us brought ravenous appetites, which surprised me until I remembered yesterday’s unexpected encounter. We had merely picked at our dinner.

After breakfast, we set out in earnest to make the most of December’s shrinking daylight hours, checking the van for obvious explosives and climbing in quickly once it appeared we wouldn’t be blown to smithereens. Still, a tense moment awaited Marie starting the engine. Yeah, she got to drive again, but it seemed wiser to wait for a better battle to wage. My gut told me that our decision to stick around another day rummaging on the banks of the River Avon might prove regrettable.

None of us detected anything or anyone suspicious on the highway, and in fact, no one had looked anything like our friends from yesterday—other than a cook at the B&B. That guy could’ve passed as a close buddy of the Audi’s occupants. It took me a moment to realize the dirty looks he gave us were instead a reaction to the buffet line nearby needing constant replenishments.

The highway was more crowded than yesterday, with most of the traffic headed for Stonehenge. It could’ve been disheartening had it been our first trip to the area. The guys in the Audi changed that perspective. A crowd was a good thing… or so I figured.

“I hope the tourists are heading to the main attraction.” Marie veered onto the frontage road that would take us to our destination along the River Avon. “If not….”

“If not, what?” I asked, knowing the answer, but wanting to hear it pass through her lips. “I thought you didn’t want to consider aborting our exploration plans?”

“Smartass.” She snickered and cut me a slightly perturbed look. “We won’t be aborting anything. Remember? But having to camouflage the dig while keeping an eye out for wayward tourists who decide to go on a bigger tour of the place would be bad.”

No, it would be frigging disastrous!

“What?”

Of course, she responded to my smirk.

“Nothing,” I said, and released a low sigh as the asphalt gave way to the uneven dirt road from yesterday. “Just hoping we don’t have
any
visitors interrupting us today.”

And, at first, it didn’t seem like we would…. Until Marie parked the Viano behind the dirt pile again.

“Shit!” she hissed, once she stepped out of the van. She shook her head wearily while looking at the tire tracks and boot heel marks that intersected our tire tracks from the previous afternoon. “Do you think this was from the first car that came out here yesterday? Maybe they came back.”

“Or it’s the Audi, perhaps?” said Ishi, grabbing his gear from the rear of the van.

“Well… considering the make of the first vehicle was more jeep-like than anything else, I’d say…. No, it wasn’t the park employees. Not the ones we saw, anyway.”

Upon closer inspection, while muddying my knees as I kneeled down to study the tire width and tread, it looked similar to the tire tread of the BMW I left behind in Honduras. I admit to some surprise that a luxury sport model of any make would risk damage from a rutted road like this one. Nothing scientific about my analysis, and my assumptions based on limited experience have often come back to bite me in the ass. But, my gut told me it was either an idiot tourist—like us—who might’ve been intrigued to find out where we had been as we left the area yesterday, or it was our guys.

Either answer worrisome, it increased the likelihood of another discussion about leaving this shit behind to come back at a future date. Meanwhile, the appropriate questions of “What do we do now?” or the more precise “Should we forget about the damned amulet and get the hell out of here?” were plainly evident in Marie’s expression. But does anyone seriously believe our little debutante would voice them?

Good. So we can move on to what she did say.

“Well, we’ll just have to work faster and make sure we are out of here today—preferably by lunchtime.”

“But we don’t even know where to dig yet,” said Ishi, pausing to survey the length of the ridge we still collectively assumed was an ancient mound. “It will take time to find the weakest point to get the best access to what’s inside, and then we will have to sift through whatever’s in there. Right, Boss?”

Yeah, oh joy. It likely meant big time happiness trying to recover what might as well be a mud and rust incrusted needle in a slimy goo haystack.

“We’ll start in the middle, Ishi—just like we talked about last night,” I said, motioning for him and Marie to follow me to the side of the mound facing the water. “We can work our way toward either end, and hopefully a suitable breach will present itself.”

“It had better,” he muttered, moving silently to catch up to us as we hurried to the riverside and made our way to the middle of the mound. “And, what happens when someone finds our van?”

“You mean ‘if’?” retorted Marie. “If someone finds us, then it would mean we took too damned long to get inside the mound, find the amulet, and head back to Cricket Field while no one around here was the wiser. But the
if
becoming a
when
is entirely up to us.”

“You mean Ishi,” I said, motioning for him to get started, while I took out a pair of binoculars to keep an eye on the distant highway.

“No, I mean him
and
you!” she said, snatching the binoculars from me and thrusting the other shovel into my gut for me to take.

If only she hadn’t looked so damned perturbed it might not have stung as bad. But rather than give her any more shit, I began testing the ground for the breach we sought, while Marie scanned the countryside like General Rommel looking for the first sign of an allied attack.

To be honest, I thought we’d find the breach quickly, but didn’t. In fact, we didn’t find a suitable spot to focus our efforts on during the first pass along the mound’s entire length. But before we took our chances on the other side, Ishi wanted to give the middle of the ridge one last shot.

“T
hank God!”
Marie whispered, reverently, as the earthen wall near the base of the structure gave way. “Let me see!”

Ishi stepped aside to allow her enough room to peer inside the two-foot hole. A musty, earthen smell carrying the rank stench of old fungi drifted up through the gap, and I noticed crumbling brick fragments along the hole’s rim. So far, this was anything but a typical burial mound. Hard not to feel a mixture of dread and excitement.

“It looks really dark in there,” she said, suddenly less enthusiastic to explore the most likely home for her coveted relic.

“Yep. What did you expect? A tour guide with a lamp coming out to greet us?”

“God, Nick, you don’t need to be such a jerk!”

Apparently I do need to be one, darlin’. If you don’t want to get down and dirty, then my previous suggestion to wait and come back ain’t such a bad idea.
Hell, we can come back next spring or summer, when it’s warmer and the daisies and thistles are in full bloom. Whaddya say?

“We can come back, you know,” I told her, bending down and adding my penlight to Ishi’s flashlight. “We can secure it and maybe purchase some better lights from the camera shop in downtown Salisbury.”

I couldn’t get a clear view, but it looked a little like the catacombs we visited in Rome the past summer. Albeit, the bones there were not sitting on shelves caked with debris from centuries of lying in darkness—darkness fed by the mixture of earth, roots, and moisture from the adjacent river. Having better lighting could certainly come in handy.

“No… I’ll go in there,” she said, summoning her courage with a deep breath.

“No, I’ll go in there,” said Ishi, before I could offer doing the same. He deftly slipped into the hole, his feet landing with a thud upon the mound’s muddy floor. “Holy shit, Boss—you won’t believe what’s down here!”

“Dead people?”

“No… I mean yes. But dead people who must’ve all been rich. I see lots of jewels shining with the skeletons…. Looks like what Marie said would be here: a catacomb from Roman times.”

Ishi’s flashlight beam flickered past the hole, confirming his excitement as he alternated his view of each side. No doubt, he already began referencing what he saw within the mound against the results of the many hours of online research he had devoted himself to, when Marie announced our destination the morning we fled from Paris.

“We’re coming, Ishi.”

I helped Marie step into the hole and followed behind her. I soon had a better view of what was there. A
much
better view.

“Holy shit!”

Chapter Seven
 

To say what we found inside the cramped confines of the mound was completely unexpected would be untrue. However, what had been lying largely undisturbed for centuries, including human remains entombed since the time of Christ, seemed surreal under the glow from our flashlights. Marie’s earlier mention of her father’s tales about local royalty, along with Roman officials and officers, being buried here had sounded fanciful. Those stories were now confirmed by actual bones and artifacts laid out on stone shelves. The shelves were three bodies deep and lined both sides of the crypt, separated by a narrow brick aisle.

The aisle was in terrible shape, and many of the bricks had long since deteriorated from moisture forming a thin layer of sludge that covered much of the floor. The corpses stored on the lower shelves appeared to be similarly affected, and the stench made it damned near impossible to view anything below the top shelves. God only knows what jeweled weaponry, helmets, and crowns existed beyond our reach. Our safe reach, that is.

But there were plenty of relics to sort through among the dozens of corpses lining the upper shelves. Although untouched by the putrid mixture affecting the lower portion of the crypt, these former privileged folk were not unaffected by the elements. Dust and brick fragments had fallen from the ceiling of the tunnel-like tomb, where the ravages of time and nature’s determination to reclaim the mound’s contents had escalated in recent years.

Did I mention the gold? Much of it was encrusted with jewels. After donning protective masks, Ishi and I gently sifted through decayed clothing and bones to lift the more intriguing artifacts.

“We didn’t come here for this shit,” Marie advised, tugging on my sleeve. “Focus on finding the Ambrosius Amulet.”

“The hell you say!” said Ishi, holding a jeweled dagger up to his flashlight’s beam. “This makes up for all the bullshit and ‘no hunts’ since Egypt!”

“Okay,” she replied, motioning for him to carry on undeterred. “But I guess Nick and I will have to get used to life without you, huh?”

“What?!”

Ishi turned his beam to her face, forcing Marie to shield her eyes. I pointed my penlight’s limited beam toward his face, revealing squinty eyes that made him look almost child-like.

“The place is cursed,” she said, turning away from the light until Ishi lowered it. “According to Papa, anyone who has taken from the dead in this tomb has met a violent end soon after. The list of victims includes a handful of earls, dukes, and princes, along with several locally famous highwayman from the 1600s.”

“I don’t believe you,” said Ishi, quietly. Nonetheless, he lowered the dagger and dropped it near the skeleton’s left finger bones.

“So, if there have been multiple thefts, how did they get in here?” I asked, not immediately considering the breach we discovered likely came from an invasion by grave robbers in centuries past. The hidden crevice that Ishi pushed through was completely camouflaged to where I wouldn’t have considered it ever being anything else but a fissure created by time. Normally, such thieves are not concerned about leaving a mess revealing their nocturnal deeds, since by the time anyone else found out about a break-in the thieves were long gone. Unless…. “Are you implying there was a commonly known way into this place? Like someone, or a group of permitted trespassers, came here on a regular basis to either claim or return the amulet?”

Ishi looked at me as if I had lost my frigging mind. And, the thought didn’t exactly make sense to me either…. Except, a logical reason for the amulet disappearing and ending up back here was for people—such as the druids of ancient lore—to bring it back to the mound and rebury it, rather than the amulet magically ending up here without the aid of human beings. That made sense.

“Don’t think that just because visitations by royalty and crooks to this place have been documented it’s the only explanation,” cautioned Marie. “Papa showed me plenty of accounts that spoke of the amulet’s magical properties. And, sometimes it
did
end up here on its own.”

“All right… but what if it’s not here right now?” I said, uttering the first thing that came to mind, without considering it could further ignite my gal’s temper. “You’re not expecting us to hang around here all day waiting for it to show up… or are you?”

“Of course not!” she snapped.

Even in the dimness, I could almost see a cloud settling upon her—despite the fire in her response. It appeared she hadn’t considered the possibility that the amulet might not be present.

“But you said it would be here,” said Ishi, pointing his flashlight beam in her direction again. “That’s what you told us in France, and again in London.”

“Hey, take it easy with the light, man,” I said, protectively.

“Sorry Boss.” He lowered it to her feet.

“Yes, that’s what I said,” Marie admitted, her tone sounding forlorn, which pulled on my heart to where I felt like a callous asshole… at least for a moment.

“Then what gives?” I asked, finding it damned near impossible to remain compassionate. “You said your father told you it had been returned here in 1735 by Lord Carleton, who laid it on top of the mound at dawn on the winter solstice that year, and watched the amulet disappear. You said Carleton claimed it was apparently pulled into the crypt through the frost-covered grass by an unseen hand, and that’s the last time anyone visited the mound in search of it. Especially after he later claimed to be haunted by ‘something from the banks of the River Avon’. The very same thing he spoke about on his deathbed.”

“If the amulet’s not here, I’m going to be seriously pissed!” added Ishi.

“It should be here,” Marie insisted, but with meager enthusiasm. She shook her head worriedly, and began sifting through the remains closest to where she stood. “But, we are wasting time debating instead of looking. I would appreciate your cooperation for the time being, and we can fight about it later.”

“How big is this thing supposed to be, again?”

Marie didn’t answer my question for nearly a minute, while she and Ishi worked feverishly to sift through the skeletal remains closest to them. Many still contained tattered garments that crumbled as they pushed them out of the way. Surely Marie was thankful for the gloves she wore, protecting her from the grime and occasional worms and dormant insects. Maybe it was the same for Ishi, since he moved quickly, sifting through two corpses and then prepared to explore the more noxious, and possibly poisonous, remains lying upon the lower shelves.

“Be careful, little buddy,” I cautioned.

His response was a mere grunt. But unlike me, it seemed he had a clear idea of what to be on the lookout for.

“The sapphire should be three inches tall and two and a half inches wide, and about an inch thick,” Marie advised, when she finally addressed my question. “The dragon holding it is solid gold, giving significant weight to the amulet. Also, the gold chain is large enough for a grown man from two thousand years ago to drape across their collarbone.”

“So, about twenty to thirty inches in length for the chain?”

“Yep. Now… how about helping us find the damned thing, Nick?”

“I’m on it, sweetheart!”

Her latest zinger was delivered like a spitball from a southpaw pitcher. I didn’t hang around for a second admonishment, and went to work on the smaller remains of a female of significant social importance. At least the jewels near the skeleton’s sternum indicated as much.

“Don’t even think about it,” warned Marie, as I picked up a ruby and diamond necklace and prepared to slip it into my pocket.

“Even though this baby might pay for our expeditions for, I don’t know… the next ten to fifteen years?”

“Did you not hear what I said a few minutes ago? You must be thinking with your other head!”

I whirled to face her, and her flashlight was pointed at my crotch.

“Very funny, darlin’.”

“It’s not intended to be funny. This shit’s very serious, Nick. The same goes for you, too, Ishi.”

I swear, Marie has eyes in the back of her head. Ishi dropped what looked like a gold brooch encrusted with emeralds and rubies onto the shelf he presently stood next to. The item came from somewhere hidden, below the shelf, likely from the putrefied contents of the very bottom, based on the nasty gunk still clinging to it.

“That royally sucks!” he lamented. “Do you know how hard this is for a pair of looters to
not
loot?”

“Apparently harder than I previously thought,” she replied. “If you two can behave while we’re down here, in the coming weeks I’ll take you to a place that will put the riches stored here to shame. But
only
if you don’t piss away the opportunity we have here. Comprende?”

I especially hated her using one of my pet words. Even so, my gut told me Marie was right. We were indeed wasting time picking through this shit.

“Well, I hope you’re right about it being here,” I said. “If it isn’t, please spare us the mumbo-jumbo bullshit about it magically hiding someplace, or that the damned thing is presently in use somewhere else. Otherwise, you’ll have two very unhappy ‘compadres’ on your hands. Comprende?”

I couldn’t resist the return barb, and there wasn’t any sugar to sweeten that sucker. It was increasingly feeling like a very bad idea, and I had become too pissed off to care. Focused only on finding anything resembling the amulet Marie had described, Ishi matched my fervent efforts to get through this exercise as quickly as possible. Regrettably, priceless relics can be destroyed by such recklessness. However, since we weren’t taking them with us anyway, the rarities that could’ve gone for untold thousands were simply in the way of what we sought.

I expected Marie to squawk about our careless bulldozing, but like us, she hurriedly sifted through corpses and filth as if looking for the iPhone she frequently misplaces. Within two hours, we had finished our initial investigation.

No sign of the Ambrosius Amulet.

“Maybe it’s hidden in the walls, between the bricks, no?” said Ishi, wiping the sweat from his brow with his cleanest forearm.

The tomb was nowhere near as cold as the outside temperature had been upon our arrival. All of us were sweating from the exertion and high humidity inside. Exerting and breathing the air’s foulness, too. We were idiots for leaving our better surgical masks in the Viano, and being too damned lazy to go get them once we picked up the pace of our sifting work.

““We just haven’t looked hard enough in this place… or the amulet’s not here,” I said, snickering. “Maybe the map is a fraud.”

“It’s
not
a fraud, you dumbass!” Marie reached in her coat and yanked the map out. “How can you not believe in alternative explanations that deal with the supernatural, Nick? Especially after everything we’ve dealt with? Did you not watch a pyramid lift off from an Egyptian desert and soar into the sky? And did you not see a living deity that was half human and half lioness? Or, do you suppose this is one long opiate-fed dream state you’ve been stuck in for the past six months? Hell, maybe I’m not
real
either!”

Yeah, you’re real all right—a real peach when you don’t get your way, which makes you a royal b—

“Don’t say it, Nick! Don’t say it, or I swear to Christ I’ll….”

“Maybe it’s just a treasure map, Boss—”

“Shhhh!”

“What in the hell was that?” whispered Marie, after I motioned for her and Ishi to remain quiet.

She pointed nervously to the hole leading out of the mound. The sunlight from earlier barely reached inside the opening, as the winter sun continued it’s westward journey across the sky. But I seriously doubted it would aid us in any way from the men owning the voices we heard. Voices speaking in the Masri dialect of Egypt.

Shit!

“That? Oh that, my dear, is the sound of underestimating our Egyptian buddies’ determination to find us!” I hissed, motioning for her and Ishi to join me in quietly moving out of reach of a potential flashlight’s beam. “Looks like we’ve got company.”