Are we just allowed to park here? Is this private property?
I dont think so, she said, shivering, and pulling up the hood of her anorak. Dads guide always indicates when a site is private, doesnt say that here. I guess the farm must date from the Templar times, but the buildings have changed? Ach. Imagine living in a house with this thing in your back garden. Staring at the vaults where they walled up people. Children entombed alive. Spookfest.
The same thought had occurred to Adam. The cold surly horror of staring at this tower every morning, knowing what the vicar, back in 1841, had discovered. Horrible.
The tower was guarded by a pitiful little railing, barely a foot high. They walked up the stoop of grey and weathered stone steps, and pressed the only door. It swung open on smooth hinges.
The interior was incisively cold, but not as cold as the heath. The light was pitiful; sad winter light filtered by an arched, eight-hundred-year-old leaded window. The interior of the tower was just a single large, tall, cold and echoey stone room.
No light switches?
Nope. Nina consulted the book, using the torch from her mobile phone to read.
He recalled her using the same flashlight when they had broken into her fathers apartment. He shuddered at the memory of the intruder: they needed to hurry. Someone could be driving down the lane right now, parking next to their car, walking to the tower.
He says there are apotropaic signs everywhere. Apotropaic graffiti.
What the hell are they?
Ritual protection symbols, used since ancient times by all cultures to ward off evil. Some of the apotropaic graffiti in the tower of Temple Bruer dates from the fourteenth century, indicating that the place had a sinister reputation from the time of the Templars demise. The carvings were continuously inflicted on the fabric for many centuries thereafter. Clearly, the local peasantry must have felt a certain desperation to rid this place of its devilish connotations. Perhaps they knew of the tormented skeletons concealed within. Nina paused, then concluded. This bit is odd. This is not like my dad. To say this bit here. She quoted, Even today the place retains a definite ambience, which might lead the most materialist of scholars to feel a frisson of doubt. Certainly, this is no place to linger.
Too true. Look. Down here. Adam, using his own mobile phone light, picked out some scratched graffiti on a wall. Suffer the child that comes unto me.
Nina examined it. Thats new, theres no weathering. Local teenagers probably. This stuff, over here, is the old stuff.
Carved ferociously into the next slant of wall was a series of ancient symbols. Runic and bizarre; deeply cut triangles and inverted letters. Adam stared: the cuts in the stone were severe, yet weathered: chamfered by time.
Heres the wee cat. She had moved away in the murk. Dad said there was a cat, a gargoyle of a cat. Its just here. And this must be the tomb, the stone effigy, in the corner.
He was hardly listening, transfixed by the graffiti. The backwards R? The inverted A? And now he realized he could hear howling.
Fierce howling.
Nina?
The howling echoed around the stone chamber. It was unearthly, and bloodfreezing. A choir of suffering and lamenting, from somewhere just outside. Who or what was producing that direful noise? Adam felt a rush of juvenile, even infantile, dread: he didnt want to open the door.
He opened the door. They stared out. The deathly, late-afternoon light was just good enough for them to see.
Foxhounds.
A man was striding down the farmyard, a riding crop in his hand; he was repetitively slapping the whip against high leather boots; and before him was a river of canine tongues and ears and tails. It was a hunting pack, being exercised; the dogs were barking and yawling, raising that horrible, humanlike whimpering. The steam rose from the torrent of dogs as they lashed into the cold, snowmelty fields, yearning to kill.
The huntsman turned, for a second, as he reached the gate and looked directly at Nina and Adam. His face was an oval of blur in the winter gloom, his expression indiscernible, and odd. What did he want? Did he know something? Adam could feel the sordid clench of fear, a dragging attachment. The terror of going to Alicias flat, after she died. Seeing all of her things; the stuff she left behind.
London. Come on! Theres no point hanging about in this horrible place. The next stop is the Temple Church in London. We can stay with my sister. You drive. Youre quicker than me. Please.
Once inside the car, Nina flung the book on the back seat. Lets just get out of here!
The ignition kicked, Adam flicked on the lights and they reversed at speed, as if they were fleeing the darkness heading their way, trying to escape night itself.
They approached the whirring traffic of the main road, where car lights shone mistily through the fogs of rain. The desolation of the Heath seemed almost welcoming now, after the creeping dreads of Temple Bruer.
Evil! Nina said, with great emphasis. Its evil.
Sorry?
I think thats what Dad found, Adam. Evil. Something evil. Thats what he discovered about the Templars, an evil secret, and someone paid him to do it. Thats why he had all that money.
Adam said nothing, because a further thought had just occurred to him. Whoever was the dark villain in this piece, the man with the tattoos, the murderer, the man guarding or seeking the secret that gets you killed that same person might be the one who had stolen Archie McLintocks notebooks.
Which meant that even though Nina had stopped alerting the world via the internet, anyone who had the notebooks would still know their route: because they were following the exact same route Archie McLintock took and noted, eighteen months previously, through the Templar sites of Western Europe. Every move that he and Nina made was therefore pitifully predictable.
The cold rain angrily lashed the window. Adam changed gear, and accelerated past a vegetable lorry, speeding through the darkness on the A456 to London. Racing across the drizzly and dismal heathland road, with all its legends of witches, and highwaymen, and ghosts.
25
Outskirts of Chiclayo, north Peru
So tell me more. Please.
Steve Venturi was on the phone. Jessica was in the cab of the TUMP Chevy; Larry was driving them the last few miles into Chiclayo.
The signal dropped for a few moments, then Venturis languidly intellectual, southern Californian drawl returned. Well, Ive written it up and emailed a PDF. Do you want to hear the summary?
Yes. Yes please.
OK. Described below are three possible cases of foot amputation in skeletal remains associated with the Moche culture of north Peru. The three skeletons belonged to young male and female adults, and date from the eighth-century AD
But-
Wait, Jess. Heres the lox in the bagel. Each case exhibits non-functional tibio-talar joints with proliferative bone occupying the normal joint space. The robusticity of the tibiae and fibulae suggest renewed weight-bearing and mobility following recovery. There is no evidence of pathology in any of the skeletons which might imply a surgical need for amputation. The osteological evidence is therefore consistent with details shown in Moche ceramic depictions of footless individuals.
Jessica kept the phone pressed tightly to her ear. They were stuck in the seething and seedy traffic of peripheral Chiclayo. Blood-red graffiti, on a low whitewashed wall behind Larry, shouted Ni Democracia! Ni Dictadura! Let me get this right, Steve. That means, in plain English, they cut off their own feet while they were alive, when they were perfectly healthy.
Yup.
Because they wanted to! They just wanted to? Whats wrong with them? Its like Jay said, this is just the sickest society ever. Who the heck are we digging up?
Steve Venturi laughed, long and laconic. The mad and terrible Moche. No?
Sure I know, but Jeez Denise.
OK, Jessica, I gotta go. Any more of these scientific coups and youll be after my job!
The call ended. Larry turned the steering wheel. So, tell me, what did he say? Give me the Full Venturi.
Jess explained the confirmation of her suspicions: the amputations were done when the victim was alive, some time before death, years before death even. Voluntary amputations: perhaps as some kind of spiritual payment, some sacrifice, to the unknown Moche god.
The first, virulent suburbs of Chiclayo loomed on either side of the scruffy road battered adobe shacks, hovels of concrete, a sullen lavanderia.
So they really He scanned the busy road ahead, and swerved past a motokar with a dead black goat strapped to the back. They really did it! Just like you predicted, uh-huh?
Yep.
I cant believe it. Its just incredible. Larry smoothed a worried hand over his jaw.
Hes emailing a PDF. You can see it if you like.
No, no. I believe you.
They passed a row of uninhabited concrete houses, one of them used as a garbage depot: a great green pile of plastic Sprite bottles was heaped within. The next corner revealed a dirt road that dwindled into a cloud of grimy haze; open concrete sewers full of trash divided the busted hovels from the road.
It was a scene of apocalyptic dereliction, a scene from Iraq just after the war: shattered suburbs of desolate beige, with helpless brown wide-eyed kids staring in mystification at a world so totally destroyed by the grown-ups. The only difference was here there had been no war.
The traffic slowed and surged, and slowed; she thought of her father, being tested. In hospital. The blood test. Jessica had already accepted her own denial, she knew she wasnt going to get the test, she wasnt even going to call her mother. She was going to live her life until she couldnt live it any more, whatever was really wrong with her. Anything else was intolerable: the knowledge of certain and appalling death was worse than the fear of her ignorance. Her conscious decision not to know actually gave her an odd elation, a kind of liberation. Self-acceptance.
Larry grabbed a slug of Inca Kola from a big yellow plastic bottle in the gear well. You hear about Jay?