Solomon's Jar (5 page)

Still breathing easily after a brisk two-mile ride, mostly uphill, Annja swung off the bicycle before the gateway to the manor house. Red brick gateposts rose from pale granite bases. The gate had a black wrought-iron arch across it with a tree worked in the center and painted white. The gates themselves stood open. A brass plaque, on the near upright, kept polished to a bright yellow, read Ravenwood Manor—The White Tree Lodge.

The sun hung low over green hills to the west. The clouds, strung across the sky like clots of cream, had toward the horizon begun to take on evening tints of cream and gold below, pale blue and dove-gray above. The hills were fairly sharp for England, though their outlines were softened by grass and copses of trees. They
stretched west from the ancient Cinque Ports town of Hythe, bounding the fabled Romney Marsh. The Kentish Channel coast had become heavily encrusted with urbanization, especially since the building of the underwater chunnel from Featherstone, and the green countryside of Kent as a whole had been reduced by the encroachment of suburbs and bedroom towns from London.

The hill rose in a gentle slope toward a big white house on the crest. An immaculately tended crushed-shell drive curved subtly up through an equally compulsively manicured lawn, as uniformly green as a carpet. Annja saw no formal garden around the three-story Georgian house. Rather it stood amid a stand of trees, big ashes and vast, spreading oaks with massive, bent, cracked-bark trunks, themselves probably older than the nearly three centuries the house had stood. They masked several outbuildings, at least one of substantial size, which stood behind the great house on the back slope.

She took a drink of water from the bottle clipped to the bicycle frame. Then she swung a long, lithe leg over the seat and started pedaling up the hill. She felt no fatigue, only a bit warm, and that from exertion in the thin high-latitude sun more than ambient temperature, which had been on the cool side since she'd set out. Annja's rented bike was an ancient but well-repaired blue machine with a white fender on the front tire and
no top strut on the frame, what was often called a “girl's bicycle” back home.

She wore khaki pants with some subtle cargo pockets, a cream-colored shirt with the sleeves unbuttoned and rolled up her tanned forearms. It was practical yet not disrespectfully slovenly to the people she meant to talk to.

It was an excellent disguise, she thought. She'd masqueraded as herself.

Crushed shell crackled beneath her tires as she rode up the sloped drive. She studied the house and its environs as she reflected on what her research had unearthed. A moldering stone wall encircled the structures behind it. The largest took shape as a half-ruined slump of stone, its walls almost obscured by ivy. It was an ancient abbey, built, according to legend, on a sacred site immeasurably more ancient, sacked and burned some said by Henry VIII's looters, and others by Cromwell's iron-clad iconoclasts. The manor itself had been destroyed during the English Civil War. When, decades later, a new noble master had built the current manor house atop the hill the ruin was left in place as a sort of garden ornament.

Not that the derelict abbey had remained unused. Legends spoke of unholy rituals—or orgies outright, depending on point of view—conducted between the once consecrated walls by the well-connected members of the
scandalous Hellfire Club from nearby London. And the current proprietors likewise conducted rituals within its precincts. Annja had read all about it on their Web site.

The house was built of local limestone, with a sloping roof of gray slate. Though carefully pruned shrubberies huddled against its foundations like green sheep, its walls were kept clear of climbing vegetation, giving the manor an austere but not quite stark look.

Annja leaned her bike against the concrete footing. As she did she felt a curious chill, as if the sun had fallen behind a cloud on its way to the horizon. At the same time her nostrils wrinkled to a faint but unmistakable stink of decay. It was as if a breeze had blown over a recently opened grave. Just a random smell from the old graveyard out back, she told herself, though she had felt no actual motion of the air.

She put it from her mind and walked between stone lions weathered almost to outsized pug dogs to ring the bell. A medium-sized man with dark receding hair, middle-aged and trim in a butler's garb, greeted her. He accepted a business card embossed with the name of Amy Corbett, archaeological researcher and the name of a private North American institute—one that actually existed and would vouch for her identity thanks to
Chasing History's Monsters
.

The butler escorted her into a foyer. A spray of hot-house flowers in a white porcelain vase painted with
climbing roses sat on an antique table on one side and a silver-framed oval mirror on the other. Bidding her to wait in tones more superior than deferential, he bowed and disappeared into the house's interior. Annja used the mirror to check herself and tucked a few vagrant wisps of hair back into the severely professional bun she'd tied at the back of her head.

“Ms. Corbett?” a cultured voice said. A cultured young masculine voice.

She turned. A painstakingly well-groomed young man stood there, her height or a little taller, her age or a little older, with round pink cheeks creased by a smile and dark hair slicked back sleek as a seal's fur. The pinkness of his cheeks reminded her of her nameless companion of her adventure in Amsterdam, but the resemblance ended there. He lacked the ivory whiteness of skin that had given such contrast to that young Englishman's complexion, to say nothing of a demeanor light-years from the mildly but boyishly disheveled affect the lad who fled with her through streets and canals had displayed. And though his smile seemed genuine, as most heterosexual males't ended to be when looking at her up close, his politeness was buffed to a polish so high and hard she couldn't see the character behind.

“I'm Reginald Smythe-George,” he said. “So pleased to meet you. Please come with me.”

He bowed slightly and gestured to a hallway opening
to her left. He wore a dark suit whose exact shade she could not distinguish in the foyer's half light, subtly pinstriped, with a stand-up collar and four-in-hand tie. She had little knowledge of fashion much past the sixteenth century, but his outfit suggested late Victorian to her—or Carnaby Street in the sixties. He also wore a large silver medallion bearing an image of the tree that was on the front gate.

“Of the noted occultist family?” she asked. She started walking the indicated path.

He slid past smoothly, to open a white-painted door before her. “Indeed,” he said. “I'm surprised you know of us. So many in your profession tend to…look down upon my distinguished forebears.”

“I try to keep an open mind,” she said. “Scientific objectivity is a powerful tool. But like fire, it's a capricious master.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Indeed? You possess rare insight for one with so much of your career before you.”

Points for a diplomatic way of calling me young, she thought, given his own age. She smiled a middle-candlepower smile at him—it never hurt to keep things cordial, without lighting any fires she might need an extinguisher to put out later—and entered a white sitting room. Or what she suspected might be a sitting room.

It had chairs and tables, in any event. A low fire crackled in a white marble fireplace. Something else
practically screamed for her attention. She fixed it upon the young man's sleek, smiling visage.

“Sir Martin will see you shortly,” her escort said, and went through the next door, which he quietly but firmly closed behind him.

She took stock of her surroundings. The room fell just short of sterile. It was painted and decorated in a variety of shades: off-white, ivory, cream, bone. The chairs were upholstered in a leather that was almost pale beige. Some touches of color decorated the room, largely hues of gold, including the ormolu clock on the mantel, the frame of a large painting and the painting itself, depicting a pure white tree standing amid a green sun-shot forest.

There was one more touch of yellow metal. It was the thing that had caught her attention on entering the room. A plain container of shiny brass, like a globe with a tall narrow funnel stuck in the top and curling thin handles, perhaps a foot high.

A jar.

It looked like an antique Mediterranean jar might look, dredged from the sea bottom, if the sea-salt deposits and verdigris were cleaned off. It was a procedure no responsible archaeologist could condone, for risk of damaging the artifact. But a collector might not be so scrupulous. Nor might someone with other than strictly scientific ends in mind.

She took it from the mantel to examine it. If cleaning it didn't hurt it, picking it up won't do much, she thought—except leave fingerprints she could readily wipe away. Provided it's even an ancient artifact in the first place.

It felt surprisingly heavy in her hand. She was far from expert on biblical-era artifacts. But within her limited scope of knowledge she could discern no reason it might not have dated from Old Testament times. The wide mouth was open.

It was, she saw, inscribed with symbols. The marks were thin, shallow, spidery; invisible from a few feet away. The symbols were unfamiliar to her: lines, curved, straight and angled; circles; odd compound geometric shapes.

Something about the vessel felt strange. Then she realized the strangeness wasn't a result of something the jar possessed, but what it lacked.

If King Solomon had had a jar, and had once bound demons in it, this was not that jar. She felt certain such a use would leave it charged in a way that even after millennia its very touch would send a thrill like electricity through her body. This object was inert as a hammer.

She turned it over. The lower curve was curiously dented. In the indentation she thought she could see small flecks of dried brownish residue. She smelled a faint, cloying stench.

Then once more she felt a chill, and seemed to smell an opened grave.

A footfall from outside the door alerted her someone was coming. She quickly replaced the jar and turned.

Reginald Smythe-George opened the door, entered with a quick smile for Annja, and stood aside. A tower-tall and spectrally thin man entered at stately stilting pace behind.

“Sir Martin,” the young factotum said, “may I present Ms. Amy Corbett? Ms. Corbett, Sir Martin Camdessus Highsmith,
Adeptus Primus
of the White Tree Lodge.”

She stepped forward, extending a hand. Sir Martin took it in a firm, dry grip and shook, once. His hair was white and looked as if each individual strand had been arranged by hand just before he entered. His face was a collection of knobs and flanges that looked almost harsh. He wore an immaculately tailored suit with the same color scheme as the room itself—jacket, trousers, shirt and old-time silk cravat all in shades of white and near-white.

The only discordant element in the whole image was his eyebrows. They were fierce white projections, untamable as flames, above eyes of a blue so pale they were almost a shade of white themselves.

“Pleased to make your acquaintance, Ms. Corbett,” the master of the house said in a baritone voice that might have been toned by a tuning fork. “Please be seated.”

He waited until she sat in one of the lesser chairs, then took what she had rightly guessed was his accustomed place in a cream-colored wingback.

“This is a very beautiful house, Sir Martin,” she said. “Is it your family's?”

“Thank you. And no, Ms. Corbett. My esteemed ancestors frittered away the family fortune before the Great War—our estates were sold for taxes between the wars. This house is provided to the lodge through arrangement with the National Trust.”

He cocked his head at her. “You are an archaeological researcher, then?” he asked.

She smiled and nodded. “Writing an article for
Archaeology Today
magazine. On spec, I'm afraid. With, ah, an interest in the history of the Western Hermetic tradition,” she said.

“Indeed? I imagined it was the archaeological heritage of the site that drew you here.”

“To be sure, that adds interest, Sir Martin. As I understand, the manor is built on the site of one of the earliest Anglo-Saxon hill forts and the attached abbey at what is supposed to be the juncture of several ley lines.”

“You've done your homework, then,” he said, nodding approvingly. “But what I think you will find most vital—and key to our whole endeavor here—are Neolithic artifacts discovered on the grounds that demonstrate that this site has been recognized as holy throughout the entirety of its human occupation.”

His eyes had begun to shine.

“I'm afraid my primary knowledge is focused on the
Middle Ages forward,” she said, “although I was aware of Neolithic and Bronze Age discoveries.”

“
Bronze
Age,” he said as if mentioning something the dog did on the rug.

She raised an eyebrow at him. “My knowledge is incomplete and purely academic,” she said, “but I thought it was cold iron that conflicted with magic.”

“Iron. Bronze. This to them!” He dismissed all metals with a wave of a long, well-formed hand. “They are pollution in and of themselves.”

“Do they not occur in nature, Sir Martin?”

“Of course. It is when they are plundered from the bosom of the good earth and elaborated in profane ceremonies that they become taints, poisoning the human spirit and poisoning all life.”

“I had understood that Wiccans—”

“We see again that
knowledge
is not the same as
understanding
, Ms. Corbett. Therein lies one of the tangled roots of the modern malaise, prizing mere information while understanding nothing, or next to it!”

“I think I agree, Sir Martin, but I'm not sure I see your point,” Annja said.

“If you will forgive my rudeness in contradicting you, you don't understand our lodge at all if you believe we are part of Wicca. To be sure some of their rituals have merit, and a certain naive power, for all that they were largely created from whole cloth in the nineteenth century.”