The Atlantis Keystone (3 page)

Erik thought about the castle, its cold and empty rooms where it would be very difficult to conceal anything and the several acres of grounds surrounding it. He could not see how it could have remained so well hidden for several hundred years, unless it was buried in a hole in the ground or in vegetation in the woods. By now it would either be impossible to find or ruined by the elements. “Hm… I hate to sound negative but it might be something of a needle in a haystack search,” he said. “I understand why Torpa is the obvious place to start but I still think that if it was there and possible to find, someone should have found it by now.”

The professor stood up and started to pace back and forth between the table and the shelves for a minute as if he was pondering a particularly tricky issue before he turned to Erik who was still sitting by the table. “Stranger things have happened,” he said optimistically and smiled mysteriously. “And we should probably also explain why we think it’s likely to be at Torpa.” The professor fell silent and waited for the student to give details. With surprise Erik noted that the professor looked at his student affectionately, a look that seemed to convey more than simple admiration. He couldn’t help wondering if they were in a relationship and what the rules were on teacher-student affiliations.

The student cleared her throat. “I discovered a note in one of the Torpa journals. It was in the earliest journal from the middle ages. It was a simple drawing trying to imitate the cartouche of the pharaoh Ahmose. We know for sure that the tablet was crafted around 1550 BC, in Ahmose’s reign but his name is not mentioned on the half tablet. So the imitation of the cartouche of Ahmose must have been taken from the lost half. This means that the other half must have been at Torpa at some stage.”

“We also know that using Linear B values, the sound Ahs appears on the Linear A side,” the professor added. He had moved away from them towards the bookshelf and was not looking at them as he spoke. “The cartouche of Ahmose in Egyptian hieroglyphs reads ‘Ahms’, which is similar.” Erik didn’t bother to ask what he meant by Linear B values. Instead he looked at his wristwatch and planned his escape.

“Oh my god, is that the time!” he said with make-believe alarm in his voice. In fact, his flight was not for another four hours so there was no real urgency but he was tired, hungry and wanted to be alone with his thoughts. “I really need to rush off to the airport.” He stood up and walked over to the professor. He seemed disappointed, as if he had another hour long lecture about the ancient civilisation of the Minoans planned for him.

“I hope that we have managed to convince you that it is of utmost importance that we find the other half of the tablet. The discoveries that could be made if we did manage to decipher Linear A… Who knows what we may find?” He flapped his arms as if to illustrate just how exciting it would be. Erik nodded slowly in response, not sure what else to do. The student stood up and walked over to them. Professor Simmons continued: “We would like to ask you if we could please get access to Torpa to pre-empt the possibility that the tablet is hidden there. I understand that no proper investigation on this has taken place before.”

“As far as I’m aware, no,” Erik said. He had never heard of the Torpa tablet before and he could not imagine that anyone else at Torpa had either, not even his grandmother, so it was unlikely that there had been an investigation previously, at least not in the last century. “I will speak to my mother about giving you access. I’m sure there’ll be no problem.”

“We would also very much appreciate if you could have a think.” The student looked sheepish and even took Erik’s hand to emphasise her words. Erik was glad that she didn’t quiet manage to look straight at him as he was sure even a glance at her eyes would put him off balance. She continued, speaking quickly: “You might have an idea of where it could be. It’d be so good if you or someone else Swedish could also check the journals; I’d recommend the fifteenth century one and the one from the nineteenth century which mentions the donation.”

Erik promised to do so. They said goodbye and Erik was off. He could not stand the thought of getting on another tube, so he took a taxi to the airport. Feeling the breeze from an open window, Erik could finally relax and gather his thoughts. He was surprised that such an old important object had been found at Torpa and had got its name from the castle; but that his family had forgotten all about it only a few generations after its discovery. It was strange. He wondered how it had got to Torpa in the first place. Probably with the Vikings, he speculated. Although he was glad that his mother would get her share of excitement, he had no intention of getting heavily involved. He didn’t have the time or the desire to spend hours searching for an ancient stone tablet.

T
he sledge hammer was heavier than he had expected. Although every step felt like pulling a tonne of bricks with each foot, he progressed at a reasonable pace towards the medieval building in front of him. Wearing his blue and white striped pyjamas and sheepskin slippers, he crossed the draw-bridge over the dried up moat. The white render of the old stone house had an almost purple tinge in the midnight sun. There was no wind and the lake in front of it was tranquil. From a distance he could hear a woman’s muffled scream but he was not able to make out the words. As he reached the black metal door he put down the sledge hammer for a moment. His hands were shaking as he fumbled with the keys. The familiar squeak from the door opening was almost submerged by another chilling scream. It came from upstairs, just as he knew it would. He went into the dark, cold entrance hall. There was a smell of mould mixed with wet clay. He had not brought a torch so he felt his way with his hand on the wall towards the stairs. The surface was uneven like rough sandpaper. Up until that moment he had been glad to be tall and broad shouldered but his size proved to be a major obstacle as he struggled to move in the constricted space. His large slippers didn’t fit on the steps. The weight of the sledge hammer slowed him down. For a moment he thought he was going to get stuck in the bend of the stairs but he managed to break loose. There was another cry, this time much closer. He knew she had been imprisoned inside a wall at the top of the stairs. Now he could hear what she was saying, voice weak and quivering but yet loud:

“Let me out!”

The words were not wholly unexpected coming from someone essentially buried alive. Now that he had reached his destination he felt calmer but he couldn’t bring himself to answer. He took a deep breath and used all his strength to swing the sledge hammer on the wall. It remained intact. He hit it again. Not a scratch. By the third strike he was getting tired. It was as if his slippers were nailed to the ground and as if the floor had turned into a gigantic magnet pulling the hammer down. Frustration and tiredness started to take its toll…

Erik woke up from a stifled thud followed by pain in his left foot. He looked around, drowsy from deep sleep. He found himself in the downstairs library. It was quiet and the room was dark but moonlight from the window illuminated the room to some extent. Three large books had landed on his naked foot. He had been sleepwalking. It had happened many times before. He would sometimes wake up trying to eat soap in his on-suite bathroom or peeing in the walk-in wardrobe but it was the first time he had ventured this far. In front of him was one of the bookshelves. He was alarmed when he noted that he had managed to pull out some of the oldest books there. He stretched down and picked one up. It was one of the valuable Torpa journals; oddly enough the older one that the student, Emma Johnson, had suggested he had a look at a month earlier. He had meant to deal with the student’s request by delegating the whole thing to his mother but after London it had slipped his mind. He hadn’t been back to Torpa since then. His mother had given permission for Professor Simmons to get access to Torpa to search for the tablet and a visit had been planned for August but Erik had forgotten to ask her to arrange for someone to study the journals further in advance of their visit. It was weird but perhaps his subconscious mind had remembered it and brought him there to remind him. As he was sliding the books back onto the shelf he was relieved to see that they were intact despite the fall. Only one page from the oldest one had come loose but he could easily slip it back in.

Trying to gather his thoughts he went over to the window to look at the moon which appeared unusually bright. It was full moon. He glanced down at the old castle further down the garden and thought about his strange terrifying dream. He almost expected to find the front door open but it wasn’t. Anna had been trapped inside the space in the wall where the medieval girl had died. He wasn’t sure what the significance of this dream was but he thought it was strange that he had ended up in the library in front of the journals when dreaming of Anna and the space in the wall. Was there a connection which he had missed? It occurred to him that a potential hiding place in which no one had looked in the last few hundred years was the gap between the inner and outer wall of the legend. Could the other half of the Torpa tablet somehow have ended up there? It was certainly a long shot but Erik decided to have a look in the journals.

He quickly picked out the oldest book from the fifteenth century, sat down behind the antique desk and turned the table lamp on. He opened the desk drawer and found a pair of white gloves placed there for the purpose of handling old books. With great care he turned the fragile pages. He could almost feel Anna’s presence as he started to look through the old scribbles. She had spent a lot of time going through the journals. Erik found it all very uninteresting; rows and rows of purchases, sales, expenses, revenues. The Swedish was almost incomprehensible, clearly old-style. It also included some notes about particular assets, such as new horses and cattle, as well as comments about staff, meetings with some named people and tax collections. He noticed a morbid headcount – appearing to be naming people in the district who had died from the plague, old age or been executed for one reason or another. There were also some haphazard comments about church visits and godly punishment displaying a mixture of guilt and deep faith. After an hour he had managed to skim through about hundred and fifty pages of unexciting scribbles. Though he had to admit that this record of daily events from a time long gone was a fairly unique collection of notes, he simply could not understand Anna’s fascination, bordering on obsession, with these useless doodles. Just as he was about to give up he came to the page which had come loose when he dropped it on his foot. It was the page with the drawing showing the cartouche of the Egyptian Pharaoh. It was very small and shakily illustrated and he was impressed that the student had spotted it. Next to the miniscule drawing was a comment stating
“Fräls oss ifrån ondo”,
appearing to be an extract from the Lord’s Prayer:
“Deliver us from evil”.
He asked himself whether this could give a clue as to where the tablet may have been hidden away – maybe it had been disposed of to ‘deliver them from evil’. The reason why the tablet had been cut in half and why one half had been retained in the house was still a mystery but he suspected that it had been accidentally damaged, judging by the uneven cut which he had seen in the photo. He glanced at his watch and saw that it was nearly morning. The house was still quiet. He continued his deliberations. The tablet was certainly impressive enough, with beautiful writing on both sides. It could perhaps have been sufficiently exotic to the Torpa occupants of that time to create a possible assumption of magical powers. It was generally known that people in the area around the lake had been particularly superstitious, living by an enormous amount of unwritten rules created solely by reason of strange old traditions. This tablet would certainly have been a mystery to them. It could have been put down to ancient spells. Something could have happened to the family at the same time as the tablet had been broken which had made the author of the journals think that the tablet may have had supernatural influence on their lives; inflicting war or ill health or perhaps even protecting them from evil. He immediately thought of the plague and the girl.

Erik started to browse the following pages. The plague had killed thousands of Swedes in the fifteenth century and the journal illustrated this with chilling clarity. The death count showed that the region had lost many lives to the plague. It must have been a terrible time in history, Erik thought. Only a few pages on from the Egyptian Hieroglyph passage there was a reference to a key which belonged to a door which had been removed. There was even a drawing of the key but no further explanation. Erik guessed from the illustration which key this note in the journals referred to – it was still in the family’s possession. It was rusty and had been on a shelf in the grand hall ever since Erik could remember. It occurred to him that the gap where this door had once stood could be what had been blocked up to house the dying girl all those hundreds of years ago. That would in effect tie the space in the wall to the Torpa tablet, given the proximity in the journal of the drawing of the cartouche and the key. They were only five pages apart. The link was not wholly unfounded and the memory of his dream convinced him that Anna would now finally get her last wish fulfilled; perhaps they would now be forced to open the wall. What Anna had known or guessed would then be revealed. Erik doubted that Anna had had the bilingual tablet in mind when she pleaded with him to ask his mother about opening the wall but he hoped that he was right about the link. He decided to call the professor in the morning to mention his theory. Erik almost laughed at the thought that it seemed that Anna had now inhabited the bodies of an Oxford professor and a student to get the wall opened.