“When can we expect her to show up?”
“I don’t know,” Dani said. “Any minute. Unless she has trouble finding her car again.”
“She’s not stupid,” Tommy said. He stepped closer to her. He wanted to take her hands in his, put his arms around her, kiss her, but he didn’t know what was allowed anymore, and he didn’t know what she wanted anymore.
“What’s happening to us?” Dani said, tears welling.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I truly do not know.”
They were interrupted by a knock on the door to the study. When Tommy answered it, his aunt was at the door, announcing that they had a visitor—a woman had buzzed the intercom at the gate.
“It’s Cassandra,” Ruth said. “Should I tell her you’re not home?”
“No,” Tommy said. “No lying. Open the gates and let her in. I’ll be right out.”
When the silver Nissan Maxima eased to a stop in the courtyard, Tommy was surprised to see that Cassandra wasn’t alone. She’d brought Julian Villanegre and Ben Whitehorse with her.
“What the heck did you tell her?” Tommy said.
“I said we were having a party,” Dani said. “Or that you were, since she thought I was you.”
“Cass tends to believe what people tell her,” Tommy said.
“Cassandra Morton? The actress?” Quinn said, joining them at the window. “She’s here?”
“I didn’t know you were impressed by celebrities,” Dani said.
“I’m not,” Quinn said. “How do I look? Do I have anything stuck in my teeth?”
Tommy picked up the wooden box. There wasn’t time to put it in the safe, so he hid it in the oven just as Cassandra knocked on his back door.
“Hello,” she sang out with a bright smile as she entered. “Hello, everybody. I’d say let me introduce you to my new friends, but you already know—”
She stopped where she stood when she saw Dani.
“You’re the woman from the parking lot,” she said.
“I am,” Dani said. “Or I was.”
Cassandra smiled. “Well, I found someone to have dinner with at the pub you recommended.”
“We saw her eating all by herself,” Ben said. “Seeing people eating alone makes me sad. First I saw Professor Villanegre eating alone and then her, so I suggested we all eat together. It turned out we all know you, Tommy.”
“Small town,” Tommy said.
Cassandra looked cheerfully around the room. “So where’s the party?”
“This is it,” Tommy said. “Can I get you anything?”
“I would love a root beer float,” Ben said. “Why do you have a Himitsu-Bako box in your oven?”
“I do?” Tommy said, unable to come up with anything better.
“Yes. It’s right there,” Ben said, pointing.
“Oh,
that
Himitsu-Bako box,” Tommy said, while Ruth just looked at Quinn, who shrugged in reply.
“Is it like the bento boxes you get at sushi restaurants?” Cassandra said.
“No,” Tommy said. “It’s—”
“May I see it?” Villanegre said. “The young lady at the inn gave me your message that you’d found something of Abigail’s. I got a later flight when I heard—may I?”
Tommy took the box from the oven and placed it once more on the food island where the art historian examined it from every angle before speaking.
“Napoleon had one of these,” the Englishman said. “He used it to hold his war plans. They say it required an exact sequence of over one hundred moves to open it.” He ran his fingers along the edges and traced the inlays, pressing and prodding gently, like a pediatrician examining a child with a stomachache. “You’ve obviously tried to open it.”
“Many times,” Tommy said.
“I thought we might bring it to the hospital and X-ray it,” Dani said. “We were worried that it could be booby-trapped.”
“Yes,” Villanegre said. “That is a possibility. Have you shown it to anyone else?”
“No,” Tommy said. “We just found it yesterday, in the desk Abbie Gardener was using in the library archives.”
“Ah,” Villanegre said. “I strongly suspected that this was part of the Gardener collection. I have something here that we might be able to use to open it.”
He reached into the inside pocket of his coat and pulled out a brass cross, six inches by three, holding it out in front of him like a shield. He tucked the box under his arm and said, “
Qui faceret opera Diaboli—ut ejiciant vos invoco Angeli ex domo! Abire iubeo!
”
Tommy and Dani and the others looked at each other. Carl, who was standing behind the Englishman, took a step for the door, as if Villanegre had brandished a hand grenade.
“Gesundheit,” Tommy said. “What do you think we are—vampires or something?”
Villanegre lowered his hand. “Oh, dear Lord,” he said. “You don’t know. You genuinely don’t know, do you? It appears we are all on the same side.” He lowered the cross.
“All on the same side of what?” Cassandra said frantically. “Will somebody
please
tell me what’s going on here? Oh, wait a minute—I get it. This is one of those practical joke shows, isn’t it? Where are the hidden cameras? Are you punking me, Tommy?”
Nobody moved or spoke.
“You’re not, are you?” she said, now frightened.
Tommy shook his head.
“This is the worst party I’ve ever been to,” Cassandra said as she plopped down on one of the high chairs beside the food island. “And I’ve been to some really bad ones.”
“If you let me,” Villanegre said, “I can explain.”
“I think we’ll all be more comfortable in the living room,” Tommy said. “I’ll throw a few logs in the fireplace.”
Villanegre promised to tell them what he knew about the box, but first he wanted to hear what they had to say. He’d produced the cross, he told them, because it was known that demons were discomforted by sacred icons, and in the obverse, his wielding it proved he himself could be trusted.
“I believe him,” Tommy said. “I think he could be helpful to us.”
“I certainly hope so,” Villanegre said. “The fact that you have the box is testament to the gravity of the situation.”
They took turns telling their story one more time for the benefit of Ben and Villanegre and Cassandra, Tommy filling in the details Dani left out and Dani doing the same when Tommy spoke. Quinn laid out the medical questions raised by the pill Dani had gotten from the Starbucks source and the “Doomsday Molecule”; two separate compounds, but they had to be related somehow. Dani ran through the list of names she’d received, and Ben recited what was understood about Hiawatha and the ancient demons that had somehow reappeared in America a thousand years ago. Tommy finished by noting that the murder of Julie Leonard had presented them with a mystery that opened into greater and greater mysteries, but each step of the way they’d been given signs to help them along the path, torches to light the way through a labyrinth where nothing was familiar and forms and “facts” constantly shifted.
Two important questions remained—what was Abbie Gardener trying to say to them, and what was the evil entity at St. Adrian’s Academy planning? Given what the school’s graduates had already accomplished, Tommy pointed out that there was a third question: how could they stop it?
“I believe I can help with the second question,” Villanegre said. “You’re quite right, young man, about the smaller mysteries opening doors to the larger ones. You know, Dr. Harris, it was no accident when I ran into you at Starbucks. I knew there was something about you when I looked into your eyes at the opening. I sensed our missions might converge, but I had to find out where your allegiances were. It is not accidental, either, that I’ve arrived in your town at this date and hour. This is something I’ve been pursuing for a long time.”
He leaned forward and gently brushed a fleck of dust from the box Abbie had left behind, examining it for a moment.
“What I am about to tell you is going to sound rather fantastic,” he said. “They say those who fail to understand history are condemned to repeat it. Understanding pre-history is even trickier, since it is by definition unrecorded. We can get only glimpses, intimations from various sources—cave paintings, stone monoliths, occasionally archaeological artifacts.
“When God sent his only Son, Jesus Christ, to die for us on the cross two thousand years ago, the world was a desperate place. As Dani’s research demonstrates, there is evil in the world. It is here now, and it was walking the earth two thousand years ago. As you all understand, Lucifer was cast out of heaven, but he was not destroyed. He survived to influence men and to send his representatives to torment us and lead us astray. There is an unseen war raging between good and evil. I would not say mortal men are the pawns or foot soldiers in this war, because there are many on the side of evil who are very much willing volunteers, just as there are those on this side, on my side—on
our
side—who believe in God Almighty and who have trusted in Jesus Christ as Savior. Men and women who will take
up arms and lay down their lives, as I would—as you would—for the cause of righteousness. We are not pawns. We participate. We
must
participate.
“But I’m a historian, not a theologian,” he said.
A log in the fireplace popped loudly, causing Arlo the cat to jump up from the sofa where he’d been lying. Otto, dozing before the fire, wuffled in his sleep and his paws twitched, while Villanegre continued. He spoke of a time when the world had been ready for change, when the pagan Egyptian and Greek and Roman and Aztec and Incan civilizations had all failed, but had prepared mankind for the coming of a brand-new idea, the message Christ brought in a narrative that began in a manger in Bethlehem and ended on a cross at Golgotha. But that was a false ending—the true ending to the narrative came when the stone was rolled away and it was learned that Christ had defeated death, and that he’d shown us all the way that we too could find everlasting life.
“But as Christ’s message began to spread, Satan and his forces redoubled their efforts. He sent his demons out to attack mankind and to teach them the ways of black magic and sorcery. In the ancient world one of these heathen pagan groups was called the Oak-Worshippers, or People of the Oak. The proto-Indo-European word for them was
deru-weid
, which Latinized as
druides
. The Welsh root
dryw
means ‘seer,’ but the meaning is more that of sorcerer or fortune-teller than visionary.”
“Druids?” Dani said. “Are you saying East Salem has a
Druid
problem?”
“There go the real estate values,” Tommy said.
“I warned you it was going to sound fantastical,” Villanegre said. He explained that the Druids, who worshipped Satan and practiced his dark arts and engaged in cannibalism and human sacrifice, established themselves in Gaul, which at the time spread across most of modern-day France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and parts of Holland and Germany. They were driven out by the Romans, as one pagan civilization replaced another, but they always knew that Christianity was the true threat.
“As of about the second century AD, the Druids were pushed from the
continent and had relocated mainly in England and Ireland, where they managed to hang on by keeping a lower profile. As Christianity gradually transformed the Roman Empire—”
“Into the Holy Roman Empire?” Tommy guessed.
“Not quite,” Villanegre said. “The HRE was a German affiliation of royal houses. But the word of Christ could not be stopped by artificial boundaries drawn on a map by man. By the end of the first millennium, the pagans had been essentially crushed in England and Ireland too.”
“St. Adrian,” Carl said. “The man who drove the last Druids from Great Britain.”
“With the help of Charles the Black,” Villanegre said. “Very effectively, it seemed. The name makes him sound a bit evil, but it refers to the color of the armor he chose, matte black, which allowed him to make stealthy attacks at night. His war horses were black as well. Charles was as ruthless as any warrior who’d ever drawn a broadsword, but he also fancied himself a rather clever chap and thought of a way to slip a spy behind enemy lines. He sent a fellow named Tibald into the Druid camp, where he pretended to worship with them. Tibald convinced the Druids he was one of them. Funny thing, though—”
“They turned him into a double agent,” Quinn said. “Just a guess.”
“Quite a good one,” Villanegre said. “The Druids managed to flip poor Tibald. Some think Satan tempted him with a female demon. A succubus. Tibald, under the control of Satan, told Charles the Black precisely where the Druids were, and Charles and his men rode in on their mighty war horses and slayed them all. Two hundred and eight men and women. Brought their heads back to Adrian on pikes. The skulls are still at the abbey, buried in a sealed vault in the basement. And that, they thought, was that.”
“Except?” Dani said.
“Except the 208 souls Charles slaughtered were not the last of the Druids. They weren’t even Druids. They were Picts dressed as Druids. He’d
been duped. I don’t know what manner of sorcery got them to carry out that fatal masquerade, but it isn’t hard to imagine.”
“What happened to the real Druids?” Ruth asked. “They obviously wanted Charles to think he’d killed them all.”
“And by the way, has anybody bought the film rights to this story?” Cassandra said.