Oracles of Delphi Keep (34 page)

Finally, the old man set the magnifying glass down and removed his spectacles. Rubbing his eyes tiredly, he let out a long sigh. “Well?” asked Thatcher, and Ian noticed he seemed quite anxious about something.

“It is as I suspected, Master Goodwyn,” said the professor. “The handwriting is unmistakable. It is Laodamia’s.”

Ian looked back to Thatcher, who appeared dumbstruck. “But … but …,” he said.
“How
, Professor?”

The professor shook his head slowly. “I haven’t any idea, my good man.” Then he turned his attention to Ian and regarded him for long seconds before speaking again. “Ian Wigby,” he said softly.

Ian gulped and pulled at his collar, certain that he was in terrible trouble. “Y-y-yes, sir?” he stuttered.

“I cannot imagine how a woman who lived nearly three thousand four hundred years ago could have such a strong connection to a boy and a girl living today, but somehow, the powers of the greatest Oracle of Delphi far exceeded my initial observations.”

Out the corner of his eye, Ian caught Carl turning and staring at him with a confused look.

“I’m sorry, sir,” Ian said slowly, “but I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

The professor stood up and pushed his chair away from his desk, which allowed him the smallest space to pace back and forth. “Of course you don’t understand, lad!” he said. “How
could
you possibly understand these things? And yet, here you sit at the center of the most remarkable archaeological discovery the world has ever seen!”

Carl began to giggle and soon he was laughing and rocking back and forth, pointing first at the professor, then at Ian, who couldn’t help laughing too, and it all seemed very funny until the professor cleared his throat gruffly and snapped, “What is so amusing, young men?”

Ian stopped laughing immediately but Carl snickered some more and wiped his eyes. “Well, it’s all a prank, isn’t it?” he said.

The professor scratched his head and smoldered with irritation. “A prank?” he sniffed. “You’re playing a prank with me here?”

Carl’s smile faltered. “Er … no, sir,” he said.
“You’re
playing a prank on
us
, aren’t you?”

The professor looked at Thatcher. “What is this confusing young man going on about?”

Thatcher pushed away from the wall he’d been leaning against. “I’m afraid he believes you were attempting a bit of humor, Professor.”

The professor’s eyes narrowed as he looked at Carl. “I assure you, young man, this is no prank!”

Carl’s smile disappeared completely and he dropped his
eyes to the floor. “Oh,” he said meekly. “I’m terribly sorry, sir. Please continue with your great discovery, then.”

The professor snorted and turned back to Ian, who resisted the urge to flinch under that reproachful glare. “As I was saying, Master Wigby, before I was so
rudely
interrupted, I believe this scroll to be authentic and I believe the message inscribed in it to be as extraordinary a discovery as the Rosetta stone!”

Ian tugged again at his collar. He had no idea what the professor was talking about and felt conflicted about saying so after the crisp rebuff Carl had just received, so he simply nodded.

Fortunately, Thatcher stepped in to clarify things. “Professor,” he said gently, “perhaps the lads could benefit from a bit of history here to help them understand the importance of what you’ve discovered.”

The professor went back to his pacing and nodded. “Yes, yes,” he said. “History is a good place to start.” The old man then stopped pacing and looked at Ian and Carl thoughtfully before he began. “As I’m sure your schoolmaster has told you, I am a noted archaeologist and I’ve excavated many lost ruins throughout the world. One of the very first excavations I worked on was when I was about Master Goodwyn’s age, and it was in my very own backyard, right here in merry old England. For my college thesis I chose to look at our Druids—an ancient and sophisticated civilization embroiled in myth and magic.

“Very little is known about the Druids, you see. We are witness to evidence of them all over the countryside in the form of some crumbling ruin or other, but these were not
people who wrote anything down other than a few mysterious runes on a rock or two around the landscape. And yet we do know that these people had an incredibly advanced knowledge of astronomy and astrology, and they were quite proficient at making tools and weaponry from bronze. But there is something else that is truly extraordinary about the Druids: we still don’t know how these relatively primitive peoples were able to accomplish such incredible feats of physics.”

“Like what feats, Professor?” asked Carl, clearly confused.

“Have you boys ever heard of the Druid standing stones?” the professor asked.

Ian pumped his head up and down. “Yes, of course,” he said. “Stonehenge has a whole circle of them, doesn’t it?”

The professor winked at Ian. “Very good, lad,” he said. “Yes, Stonehenge is perhaps the best-known example, but there are others that are even more impressive. You see, what makes these standing stones so extraordinary is their sheer size, weight, and often where they were quarried from. I know of one stone in a small village in Germany that is estimated to be at least sixty meters tall and weigh over twenty thousand kilos! And to give you an idea of how heavy that is, gentlemen, not even our most sophisticated cranes would be able to erect it. Yet, these rather primitive people carved it out of a distant quarry, got it across several kilometers of rough and hilly terrain, and then managed to set it upright, where it withstood the elements for centuries before cracking in half and falling to the ground.”

Ian’s eyes widened and his memory flashed back to the stones that covered the stairway to the hidden tunnel. He
wondered suddenly where they had come from and who had placed them there. “What was it about these big rocks that made them so important to these people?” he asked.

“No one knows,” said the professor. “But when I was a much younger man, I desperately wanted to find out. So I set about to excavate the ruins of Grimspound, in what is now Dartmoor in the southwest of England. And the discovery I made was extraordinary, but it has taken me these past fifty years to conclude that.”

Ian and Carl exchanged another look and Carl shrugged. So both boys waited patiently for the professor to continue, and after taking a sip of water from a glass on his desk, he did. “You see, early in my excavations I discovered a very well-preserved hut, which contained three perfectly intact clay pots.

“The pottery depicted a fascinating story. The artisan was the daughter of a village elder, who, as a child, had been orphaned and was found wandering about near the village, clearly having suffered a terrible ordeal. The artisan said that her mother had remained mute afterward until her dying day, when she told her daughter the story of the four off-spring of Gorgon and how they had destroyed her village and killed her entire family.”

“Who’s Gorgon?” Carl asked.

“I’m getting to that,” said the professor with an impatient wave. “The Druids believed, much as the ancient Greeks, in a series of gods who wielded their power both above and below the earth. Gorgon was the god of the under world, and coincidentally, Demogorgon was the name of the same god in ancient Greece.”

“I thought it was Hades,” said Ian, remembering a book on mythology he’d read from the earl’s library.

“Hades was the later version,” said the professor. “The first was Demogorgon and he was a much nastier character indeed.”

Ian shivered. For some reason he didn’t like hearing the name out loud.

“Now, on these clay pots,” the professor continued, “I discovered, the artisan said that before her mother had been found wandering in the fields near their home, she had belonged to a distant village and had a large family. On her maternal side, she had four beautiful aunts who were the prize of the village. Everyone knew they would marry well, and often suitors came to court them. But one sunny day, the four aunts wandered off and were lost for many moons. Searches were conducted far and wide, but no sign of them could be found, and the villagers decided the aunts had been kidnapped by raiders. But just as a war party was being formed to attack the raiders’ camps, the four maidens appeared in the village again, each in terrible condition, with burns and cut marks and dirt covering their faces, and something else: all four women were now heavy with child.

“The aunts each told a similar tale of how they had been lured mysteriously into a cave by a voice which called them each by name. They had followed the voice and found themselves deep within the cave, lost and frightened. The farther they went, the hotter it became, but a light ahead pulled them forward.

“Finally, these sisters came to a beautiful chamber filled with pools of warm soothing water, and gold and diamonds
sparkling from the walls. Being exhausted after their long journey, the maidens soon fell fast asleep. When next they woke, the four of them were with child and quite alarmed by that fact. Not knowing what terrible trick had been played on them, they hurried out of the chamber. For days they walked through the maze of caves and tunnels, and finally reappeared out of the rock and made their way back to their village. The very night the sisters returned, all four went into labor and each one died in childbirth.”

“That’s very sad,” said Carl, and Ian knew that his friend was thinking about his own mother.

“Yes,” said the professor, “but for the time, not that unusual. Now, many years later and while on her deathbed, the elder told her daughter that the children born to these maidens were the most hideous of creatures, barely passable as humans, in fact. But the village felt obligated to raise them, and so they did, but soon each child began to show signs of black magic. One child could start fires with the snap of his fingers, while another could turn a bucket of water into solid ice just by looking at it. Still another could tear up the crops by creating small wind-filled cyclones, and the fourth could open up the earth and make a grown man fall into the crevice just by thinking it.”

Ian looked skeptically at the professor. This sounded like some sort of fairy tale. Still, he waited for the professor to continue.

“The village put up with these little devil children,” the professor said, “until their antics became too much to bear, and the elders gathered and decided to banish them before they brought the village to ruin. The artisan’s mother, it
seems, was the only one who showed the departing four any bit of kindness, because as they were being tossed out, she gave each of them a bucket of milk and some cheese for their journey And this, according to her, was why she was later spared their vengeful wrath.

“Within a season the children of the maidens were back and they reigned down the full power of their horrible abilities on the village. Huts were burned to the ground; whole families were swallowed up by the earth; other villagers were turned to solid ice; and anyone who remained was engulfed in a powerful cyclone and carried away, never to be seen again—except of course the artisan’s mother, who was carried on a more gentle wind to a land far, far away, where she was laid down as if she’d been a leaf on a breeze. And this was where she was found wandering the fields, lost and afraid, and soon adopted by the new village.”

“All that was on these pots?” asked Thatcher.

“Yes,” said the professor with a chuckle. “I tell you, it was quite a story. And it was so rich with detail that I never forgot it. But, years later when I was on that expedition in Greece and excavating Adria’s scrolls, a colleague of mine, Sir Donovan Barnaby, happened upon another bounty. He found a similar villa to excavate not far from where I was digging and he too discovered some scrolls. These appeared to be written by the Oracle Laodamia herself.

“Donovan was a right old chap, but a bit daft if I might say so, and he often put an importance on things that, quite frankly, weren’t of great value, which is why his discovery of Laodamia’s scrolls was largely ignored.”

“If I might ask,” said Ian, intensely curious, “what did the Oracle’s scrolls say exactly?”

The professor took his seat, wiping his spectacles with his sweater sleeve as he answered. “They told of a great and impending danger,” he said ominously “Donovan and I used to share a bit of whiskey every night around dusk and discuss our separate excavations and I do remember at the time being startled to learn that Laodamia had such impressive examples of forecasting events far out into the future. According to Donovan, she had predicted the burning of the library at Alexandria in the third century BC, the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC, the birth of Christ, the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, and … well, many other events. And the astounding thing, again per my colleague, was that according to his translations, these events actually happened
exactly
as Laodamia predicted they would in her scrolls.”

“Extraordinary!” said Thatcher. “Professor, did you have a look at Sir Barnaby’s translations?”

“No,” said the professor. “That is, not until this last week. Donovan and I got into an argument over whose discovery held more importance, and of course I believed at the time that much of his translations must have held errors, because I couldn’t fathom a person able to foretell such events so accurately.”

“So you rang him up to ask him?” Ian said.

The professor shook his head sadly. “No, my boy, I’m afraid Sir Barnaby was killed on a later expedition back to Phoenicia when the tent he was in caught fire. It was a tragic death, and later, when I learned he’d willed me all of the papers and notes he’d taken, plus a few of the scrolls, I was in a
state of deep regret over our argument, as you can imagine, so I shipped them all off to Blythe House, where they’ve been collecting dust all these years.”

“But now you’ve had a chance to review the papers?” asked Ian, hoping the professor would get to his point before sundown.

The professor chuckled. “Yes, yes, my dear boy. I have. And I’ve had a chance to go over Barnaby’s translations and Laodamia’s scrolls and found them to be accurate word for word. And now I have two bits of fact that through my own experience I can link together in a truly incredible way.”