The Daykeeper's Grimoire (9 page)

I run my fingers over the carved name of my super-great grandfather and feel some kind of shock, a zing. I jump back.

“You okay?” Alex asks.

“Weird, I just got some kind of … shock,” I say.

Alex points to my feet. “Those flip-flops can generate a lot of static.”

“That was probably it,” I say, though I know it wasn’t.

“Well, I best head back to the farm,” he says as he jumps on his bike. “Bye, then.”

As soon as I see that he left through the gate, I go back to the names and write them down in my sketchbook. Then I pull at the ivy to hide the carving again; I don’t know what Dr. Tenzo is looking for, but I’m certainly not going to make it easy for him to find
anything
.

After changing to pick up Uncle Li, I run into Thomas at the front door.

“I’ll go get Uncle Li with you, Thomas,” I say. “Dad’s staying here.”

“Your father not well?” he asks with a smile.

“You people are evil,” I say. Thomas gives me a wicked smile.

“So what did you think about that inspector?” I ask on the way to the ferry.

“He’s a wee sour man, isn’t he?” he replies. “I didn’t like him a’tall. Was happy to send him off.”

“Me too,” I say as I gaze out the window wondering what on earth would make me interesting to a Bavarian man and the secret society he might work for.

We arrive at the dock as the ferry is pulling in. I see Uncle Li waving his hand and yelling, “Caity! Caity!” like a kid who hasn’t seen his mom in a long time. He’s dressed in his usual uniform, a dark blue silk shirt—the Chinese kind that buttons up to the neck—black pants, and soft loafers. He’s the only person I know who’s old enough to have a lot of wrinkles but no gray hair; his hair is still a glistening blue-black. Seeing him puts me so at ease that I feel it all though my body, like a long soak in a hot tub.

The ferry docks and he hops off. I run over and give him a big hug. I can feel it already; he will make everything better. “I have so much to tell you, Uncle Li,” I whisper.

As soon as we drive through the castle gates, Uncle Li has his hand on the door handle like he can’t wait to get out. Thomas parks and takes his luggage, but I keep him for the tour.

We start in the formal garden. Not wanting to influence what he thinks, I don’t give anything away before he checks out the property. As we walk around he says things like mmm hmmm, and uh huh, and at one point he puts out his hands in front of him, palms down, and starts walking like a sleepwalker in the movies as he checks for underground water currents.

Uncle Li stops at the tower and silently looks it up and down. He walks around to the back where the waterspout is, takes a sip, and nods his head. Then he looks at me for a few seconds. I look right back at him, still not giving him any information, even in my gaze. He walks around to the front of the tower, and then goes in the little door; he’s so short he doesn’t even have to duck. As we walk up the stairs he keeps one palm on the wall, dragging it along the whole way up. I scan each rock, hoping to find something with the Flower of Life symbol on it. When we get to the top, we stand and look at the loch and the forest and all the huge boulders. Finally he says, “This castle is not what it seems.”

Staring straight ahead, I ask, “In what way?”

“You must be honest with me and I will be honest with you.”

I turn to look at him. “But what’s your first impression?”

“This castle is hiding something. Very unusual energy field here, along with odd subterranean water patterns. Also a sense of ancestry. A very strange combination of forces.”

“You can just sense that?”

“You could too, it’s not that hard. Become a receptor; information is available to all.”

“What do you think it’s hiding, Uncle Li?”

He shakes his head and says, “Something very powerful. Can’t put my finger on it yet.”

“I hope you can help me figure it out. This is getting …” I want to say dangerous but then I think it may freak him out so I say, “complicated.”

“Most the time
complicated
can mean interesting. Let’s go sit down and you can tell me all about it.”

Uncle Li looks tired when we get back to the castle. I ask if he’d like to rest. “I’m not as young as I once was,” he says forcing a smile. “Travel exhausts me.”

“Let’s just talk later then. I’ll walk you to your room.” For the first time I notice that Uncle Li is getting older. When you see someone almost every day the little changes become incremental, but since I hadn’t seen him for awhile, I notice that he is aging. Could I really burden him with what’s going on?

Once Uncle Li is in his room, I run up to check my email. I haven’t really had a chance since I sent Justine that email this morning. She’s written back.

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: RE: Spy job?

OK, Caity, if weird men are coming to your room to threaten you I think it may be time to tell your parents or call the police. I mean, I’m totally happy to dress up like a messenger and check out that company, but you have got to get somebody to protect you. I’ll let you know what I find out at FRO.

PLEASE promise me you will be careful. Isn’t Uncle Li coming soon? Maybe he could help you figure out this big mystery if you really can’t tell you parents. J

I know she’s right, but I also have to trust my gut about when is the right time to tell Uncle Li everything. Now that Barend Schlacter is off the island I feel a little better, although I know I need to stay on guard—who knows what he will tell the
Fraternitas
about me?

I still smell like sunscreen and loch water from my swim earlier today, so I pour lavender bubble bath in my big tub and fill it as high as I can. This is the longest bathtub I’ve ever seen; I am able to stretch out completely, which I do as I soak for a long time.

Uncle Li must have been tired because he doesn’t come out again until morning. I find him at the kitchen table having breakfast and catching up with Dad.

Sitting down to have some oatmeal with them, Dad fills him in on the guests who are coming. When we’re done with breakfast, Uncle Li suggests that I finish my tour of the inside of the castle.

“That’s great,” Dad says to Uncle Li. “I was a bit under the weather yesterday and didn’t get any work done. I’ve got a project to wrap up and then I’m all yours.”

“Take your time, Angus,” he replies. “Caity and I can poke around here for days.”

I finish showing Uncle Li around; he wants to see every inch. Then we go back to my room to talk and I make a fire as he looks around.

“Your room is very good, no major problems,” he says. “It’s a little big, but the oversized furniture fills the space nicely.”

“Is the bed placement okay?”

“Yes, fine. It’s on the solid wall, the dragon wall, and it has a good view of the door, two things that are key to a good bedroom.”

He stands up and walks over to a window, sticks his head out, and looks both ways. Then he comes back in and sits down. He points to the carved panel and says, “What’s behind there?”

“Are you psychic?” I ask, dumbfounded.

He laughs. “Just look out the window, you can see that distance between your back wall and tower is about eighteen feet. These walls can’t be that thick.”

“Ah. Right.”

“Not everything is mystery with me,” Uncle Li says with a wink. “So what is it?”

I take the carved metal key from my desk and lead him over to the panel. I slip the key over the rabbit ears and Uncle Li does not even seem startled when the wall gives away. “This is where it starts to get weird,” I say as I lead him in and turn on the light.

Uncle Li walks slowly around the room. “What do you know about this?” he asks.

“Not much. There’s this book I found, by accident, let me get it …” I take the book from under the tabletop and hand it to Uncle Li. “Look at this, and then look at the wall,” I tell him. “It’s a grimoire to some of those symbols.”

He takes the book, smells it, and looks closely at the binding. Then I hand him the printout of the decoded poems. “It’s a long story how I got these decoded, but this is what I’ve found out so far.”

Sitting on the fainting couch, he starts to read the poem. Then he looks through the book of symbols. “You decoded this?” he asks as he thumbs through the pages of the book, looking carefully at each symbol and its sound. I watch over his shoulder. He smells like incense.

“Someone else decoded these ones in the book, but Dad decoded the poem that I printed out.”

“So your Dad knows?” he asks.

“Not exactly … he doesn’t really know he decoded all of these, he only knows about one. I kind of tricked him into helping me,” I say.

“My, you’re a crafty girl.” His eyes sparkle.

“I’m not proud of it. I feel horrible about it actually, but I have to keep this a secret until I figure out some more stuff.”

“Well, I’m flattered that you’re telling me about it.”

“You’re different,” I say. “You can’t punish me and I know you wouldn’t take over.” I don’t want to lay down the whole story about Barend Schlacter yet; I think it might scare him away from helping me, so I angle it a different way. “Do you remember in the seventh grade when I had my first big science project, that thing where I was making batteries? My parents kind of took over and got so involved that the teacher had to have a talk with them.”

Uncle Li laughs. “I do remember that. They simply can’t help themselves, can they?”

“Nope. They’re dorks, it’s what they do. And I’m telling you, this is the kind of thing they would
totally
take over.”

“I understand completely,” he says as he puts his glasses back in his pocket.

I point to the title and ask if he knows what
As Above, So Below
refers to.

“Yes, of course. It’s a shortened version of ‘That which is above is the same as that which is
below’ from
The Emerald Tablet
.”

“What’s
The Emerald Tablet
?” I ask.

“It’s an ancient book of secret wisdom purportedly written by Hermes Trismegistus.”

“Secret wisdom? Hermes Trismewhatsit?”

He says, “Where it comes from isn’t as important as what it means.”

“Give it to me plain,” I say. “Pretend I’m in third grade.”

“It means whatever happens on a large scale also happens on a small scale. The theory is man is a part of the universe but he also
can be
the universe. Just as each strand of DNA contains all the information about your whole body, each individual human mind contains all the information about the whole universe.”

“So we know everything?” I ask.

“No,” he shakes his head, “we
are
everything.”

I roll my eyes. “How can we ‘be’ everything?”

“It’s very simple, at the most basic level, everything—you, me, this castle, are all just a bunch of waves. Matter is just dense combinations of waves, vibrations.”

“That’s just too weird to believe …”

Uncle Li smiles. “It’s not something you have to
believe
in. It’s not a religion, it’s science. Physical law. Look at water—it can be a gas, a liquid, or a solid. The form it takes is determined by how fast it’s vibrating. When it’s vibrating slowly, water becomes solid ice, when it’s vibrating really quickly, it’s steam. And when it’s vibrating in between, it’s liquid.”

I look down at myself. “So I’m vibrating right now?”

Uncle Li nods his head. “That’s all we are, masses of vibrating energy. Mystics have known this forever. With quantum physics, science is now catching up. Turns out ancient civilizations had a lot of knowledge that we’re just now starting to be able to prove.”

“So if we’re all just vibrations, then there’s no me or you. We’re all in one big pool?”

“Exactly,” he replies, “one big pool of possibility. Sometimes particle, sometimes wave, but always connected through
chi
.”

“All that from four little words scribbled at the beginning of that book?”

“Often the least amount of words speak the most profound truths,” he says with a smile.

“Thanks, Confucius.”

He chuckles and looks again at the paper with the pieces of the poem. “I think our next step is to find the Flower of Life,” he says.

“Yeah, and we need to do it quietly and fast—there’s a guy named Tenzo from Princeton coming here to find these spirals.”

Uncle Li looks surprised. “How does he know about them?”

“I know this sounds like a dumb thing to do, but when I first saw the spirals, I faxed a rubbing to Justine and she sent it to her grandpa at Princeton who is into that stuff.”

“So then how many people have seen these?”

“Just Justine, her Grandpa, and this Tenzo guy, I think.”

“And they knew what it was?”

“Well, this Tenzo guy recognized something about it but then when I told Justine’s grandfather that it was nothing, Tenzo agreed, as if to end all examination of it. Then the next thing I know, boom, he tells everyone he’s on a sabbatical and then books a room here.”

“I can stay for a couple of weeks,” he says. “We’ll get to the bottom of this.”

I sigh and look up so he won’t see me tearing up. “It means so much to have you here.”

“I know, Caity,” he says as he picks up the paper with the decoded messages on it. He folds it four or five times and then puts it in his pocket with his reading glasses.