The Spirit Well Read online

  “What if there was another way?” suggested Brendan. “One hypothesis of time holds that the future exists only as a cloud of possibility—no form or substance, just pure potentiality. Now then, what if you had the ability to reach into that cloud of possibility— that fog of all possible outcomes to any action—what if you could reach in and pluck out the particular outcome you desire?”

  “Choose the future you want,” mused Cass. “Which would alter the present reality and also, by logical necessity, change the past as well.”

  “That,” declared Brendan, “is what I believe Arthur Flinders-Petrie discovered.”

  No more was said; Cass remained quietly thoughtful as they made their way back to the society headquarters, where Mrs. Peelstick welcomed them and said, “You two carry on. Supper’s almost ready. I’ll call you in a few minutes.”

  “Thank you, Rosemary. You’re a peach,” Brendan told her. Crossing to the stairway, he called to Cass, “Come, I want to show you something.”

  Cass followed her guide up two floors. Taking a key from his pocket, the Irishman unlocked a heavy door and stepped across the threshold. He twisted a switch on the wall, and lights in sconces flickered on to reveal an absolutely enormous room with a high, beamed ceiling and small diamond-shaped windows. The room occupied the entire second floor of the building, and appeared to be stuffed with books and scrolls and manuscripts and papers of all kinds. There were books in wooden crates and crammed into the floor-to-ceiling shelves lining the long wall on either hand; books piled on the floor in unsteady towers; books lying in untidy heaps in the corners, cascading from under canvas sheets, and spilling from disintegrating boxes. Three large library tables groaned under the weight of oversize volumes, and another table was piled high with rolled parchment scrolls and bundled manuscripts tied with ribbon and string. The air was musty with the scent of mouldering paper and dust.

  “Come in, come in,” he said, ushering her inside.

  Cass took in the chaotic clutter. “This reminds me of the graduate reading room in the library of the university,” she said.

  “Oh, it’s not a library,” countered Brendan. “Nor a reading room. This is a genizah.”

  “Genizah,” repeated Cass. She had never heard the word before.

  “The ancient Jews considered it sinful to throw away a book, and it was anathema to destroy any book bearing the tetragrammaton— the four letters making up the name of God. So, when their holy texts or other materials became worn out, they were consigned to a genizah to await official burial on holy ground.” He spread his hands to the room. “This is our genizah, but we do not bury the books anymore. They are far too valuable.”

  “Your treasure is books.” Cass stepped to the nearest table. The volumes were old and well worn, it was true, and most were in languages other than English. “Where do they all come from?”

  “They are gathered from here and there by society members on their various travels and donated to the cause. Those books we deem most worthy of preservation we keep. Who knows when something written in one of these pages—some little scrap of observation, an obscure record of an historical event, a word, a name, a report from a source now forgotten—some little gem of truth will prove valuable to furthering our investigations. Then the book will be resurrected, so to speak, to fulfill its destiny.”

  He walked to a smaller table at one end of the room. “Here, I want to show you one of the rarest of those gems.” He reached for a large, rectangular, but very thin, book bound in red leather. The cover was stamped in gold with the words Maps of the Faerie. Brendan pulled the book to him and opened the cover. “This was compiled by a Scottish eccentric writing under the name Fortingall Schiehallion—not his real name.”

  “You think?” sniffed Cass.

  “His real name was Robert Heredom, and somewhere around 1795 he published this treatise on the cartography of what he called the Faerie Realms.” Brendan began leafing through the book, pausing now and again to show a page of elaborate drawings of strange landscapes with stranger names.

  Displayed on the yellowed pages, Cass saw tracts of enchanted forests with twisted trees, magic fountains and rivers, islands of glass, and valleys ruled by immortal kings—all of it rendered with the precision and skill of a draughtsman.

  “As you can see from the maps he has drawn, Heredom had an active imagination.” Brendan turned to a page and directed Cassandra’s attention to an odd map unlike any of the others she had seen so far. “But this map,” he said, “this map is different.”

  He turned the book so she could see it clearly. It was a drawing done all in sepia tones as if to evoke a bit of parchment made from the skin of a goat or sheep. The piece was roughly oblong, with irregular edges and crease marks, a few tiny holes, a number of cracks or tears—the better to make it look as if the artist was actually copying an object from life. The surface of the parchment was decorated with a number of fanciful markings: spirals and whorls with dots, intersecting lines and overlapping circles, curious cryptic symbols that looked like primitive petroglyphs of the kind found on rocks in deserts, or letters from an imaginary alphabet, or stylised monograms from names in languages that never existed.

  “How very strange,” murmured Cass. “Maps to imaginary places.”

  “The map before you”—he brushed the page lightly with his fingertips—“this map is different. It is a record of what must be one of the most remarkable discoveries in the history of the human race.”

  Cassandra lowered her head and peered at the drawing more closely, concentrating her attention on the arcane hieroglyphics. She had seen such things before, scratched or painted on rock walls by long-extinct tribes the world over, and like all the rest the symbols meant nothing to her. “Parchment, is it?”

  “It is that,” confirmed the Irishman, “but of a very rare and special kind. What you are looking at is a drawing of the map Arthur Flinders-Petrie kept to record his more significant discoveries—discoveries that he inscribed on his own skin.”

  “They’re tattoos,” concluded Cass.

  “That is exactly what they are. When Arthur died, his skin was removed and made into parchment in order to preserve the map, that the record of his discoveries should not be lost. We call it the Skin Map, and it is of central importance to the work of the society. Those symbols hide wonders. For example, somewhere on that map is the Well of Souls.” Brendan glanced up. “I see you are not familiar with the legend?”

  “Not as such,” Cass confessed.

  “It is a myth that finds expression in many cultures. One of the most common is an Arab belief associated with the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem; the Spirit Well is known as a place of limbo where the souls of the dead await Judgement Day, or maybe the chance to be reborn. But the myth is far older than that—in fact, it seems to be as old as the human race itself. Almost every culture has a similar tale— the Fountain of Youth, the Elixir of Eternal Life, the Philosopher’s Stone. All variations on a theme, you might say—the myth of the Spirit Well. Many other sources indicate that the well is located in the original paradise, Eden.”

  Cassandra’s mind leapt ahead to the conclusion. “You believe that Arthur found this Spirit Well, and that this has something to do with manipulating time, selecting the future, changing the past, and all that—is that what you’re telling me?”

  “We cannot prove it,” confessed Brendan. “But some of our members have reason to believe that Arthur discovered it and recorded its location on his map.”

  “And this,” Cass said, indicating the open pages of the book before her, “you think this is a drawing of that map?”

  “I do, yes.” Brendan pursed his lips in a frown as he contemplated the image on the page. “Alas, it is not a reliable copy of the original map—merely an artist’s conception, no doubt based on a verbal description of the map—perhaps someone who had seen it described it to Heredom, who made the drawing. Unfortunately, Heredom doesn’t say. But inadequate as the drawing may b
e, it nonetheless serves to authenticate the original provenance of the map.”

  “Forgive me, Brendan,” objected Cass lightly, “but who is to say this artist’s rendition isn’t itself simply based on pure fantasy—like all the other fairy-tale maps in this book? Is that not a more likely explanation?”

  The thin Irishman smiled. “I shall very much enjoy working with you, Cassandra. Your scientific instincts serve you well.”

  Cass brushed aside the assertion that they would be working together. So far as she was concerned nothing was decided yet. “The simplest explanation is the most likely to be true. In this case, the simplest explanation is that Schiehallion, the fantasist, merely dreamed up the map—in the same way he dreamed up all the others.”

  “And you would be right, of course, if not for the fact that we have independent corroborating evidence that confirms the existence of the map. I can assure you that it is much as you see it here.” He took a last look at the picture, then closed the book and returned it to its place. “I have seen it with my own eyes.”

  “You have the original Skin Map?”

  “A piece of it, yes.” He frowned. “Unfortunately, it has been stolen. We are working to get it back.”

  Missing evidence is no evidence at all, thought Cass, and once again felt the worm of suspicion squirm in her gut. Yet here she was in Damascus, about eighty years out of joint, and with no rational way to account for it. “I don’t suppose you have anything else you could show me?”

  “To convince you?” He laid particular stress on the word. “Isn’t that what you mean?”

  “Well, if you put it that way—what have you got to convince me?”

  “One might be forgiven for thinking that your experiences up to now should have taken you a fair distance towards conviction.” He turned and gestured towards the door. “After you.”

  Cass felt the mild reproach of his words as she moved towards the door. “Do you travel, Brendan?”

  “Ley travel? Sadly, no. It is not for me.” Brendan followed her out and locked the genizah again. “But like it or not, Cassandra, you have become a traveller. You have traversed the hidden dimensions of a universe far more vast and varied than present science imagines— although some enlightened thinkers—like Einstein or Neils Bohr, for instance—are beginning to theorise about it and describe it in ways that are strikingly close to our conception of the way things are.”

  Brendan allowed these words to sink in a moment, then said, “We are on the cusp of a monumental discovery. I can feel it.” He paused on the landing and turned before starting down the stairs. “I have no doubt that we will do great things together.”

  “Assuming I agree to join you,” Cass stated flatly. “I still have a choice, you know.”

  “Oh, of course you have a choice. You can join us or not as you wish. But ultimately, knowing what you know, I believe you will find it comes down to a choice between accepting your destiny or forever denying it. Either way you will choose, and either way you will move forward. Because, you see, there is no turning back.”

  CHAPTER 26

  In Which Astral Dislocation Finds Explication

  Snipe! Put down that toad,” shouted Douglas Flinders-Petrie. “Did you hear me?”

  The pale-skinned youth paused in his experiments; he glanced around at his master storming towards him across the stable yard and whipped the bloody knife out of sight.

  “Stop torturing that creature, and come here. It is time to go.”

  With grudging reluctance Snipe dropped the wounded toad and stood. Still hiding the knife, he wiped the blade on his trousers.

  “Come with me.” Douglas started away.

  Snipe waited until his master’s back was turned, then stamped on the struggling animal and ground it beneath his heel.

  “Now!” called Douglas. “We’ve got work to do.”

  Mouthing incoherent curses, the truculent servant fell into step behind his master, fists clenched at his sides.

  “We’ve got to cut your hair, get you washed up and dressed,” Douglas told him. “And we’ve got to get to the ley by sundown if we are to have any chance of meeting up with Brother Bacon tonight.”

  Having established himself in the guise of a visiting monastic scholar from Ireland, Douglas now felt free to come and go as he pleased on the streets of medieval Oxford. In the past six months he had consulted the learned professor twice on matters related to deciphering the mysterious text of a book he had stolen from the British Museum—an arcane little volume written in the form of an alphabet of intricate symbols, which the monkish professor euphemistically termed the Language of Angels.

  Brother Bacon had yet to admit to composing the manuscript, but did allow that he had copied the text from another source. Douglas suspected the scholar was being overly modest, if not disingenuous— no doubt to protect himself from too-close scrutiny by nosy church authorities who tended to see heretics under every bush. The tome, handwritten on fine vellum, bore the intriguing title Inconssensus Arcanus, which roughly translated as Forbidden Secrets. A book like that would have spelt trouble for its author, and no wonder: its little pages were dense with close-crabbed, inscrutable text detailing all sorts of secrets—any one of which would have had the book’s owner tied to a stake in the marketplace with pitch-soaked kindling bundled around his naked feet. If, that is, anyone had been able to read it.

  Roger Bacon was no heretic, but science and magic were uncomfortably close bedfellows in the thirteenth century, Douglas knew, and so he did not press his prime source on the matter. In any event, he was more concerned with achieving practical results than arguing metaphysics with a church-bound mystic.

  Six months of migraine-inducing labour and dogged persistence had paid off, and Douglas had finished his deciphering work. It had not been easy, and without the aid of Master Bacon’s key—purloined by Snipe on their first visit to the scientist’s sanctum—it would have been impossible. He was now ready to test the accuracy of his work. To that end, the journey he planned now was to confirm all that he had learned about reading the code and how it applied to the symbols on the Skin Map.

  As to the latter, he was certain Bacon knew more about interdimensional travel than he let on. There were tantalising references scattered throughout the book, and Douglas, already well versed in the subject, was not slow to pick up the hints. Most of the text was devoted to a discussion of an abstruse philosophy of which Douglas could make neither head nor tail but somehow embraced what the writer referred to as astralis dislocationem. The treasure buried in pages of this obscure volume was a table delineating the symbology of the coded language itself, a key of sorts, showing how to interpret the symbols as they related to this so-called astral dislocation.

  Douglas pulled on his monastic robe and cowl and passed a critical eye over Snipe, who was now dressed as a lay brother—as far, perhaps, from angelic as the founders of the Cistercian Order could have reasonably anticipated. But shorn of his pale, wiry hair, his oval face scrubbed pink, he could pass for a being somewhat less diabolical than was his natural bent.

  “Tighten your cincture,” Douglas instructed. “And tie up your sandals.”

  Muttering, Snipe obeyed. Douglas, satisfied that they were ready, locked the room and departed for the ley. As it was a damp night in late autumn, the streets would be dark and, he hoped, fairly deserted. The weather was cold, and a misty fog had seeped into town from the river, so it was hoped that they could make the leap without drawing unwanted attention. Monks suddenly appearing or disappearing in plain sight tended to have a disconcerting effect on the citizenry; the uninitiated were apt to make much of the event—even in a city as sophisticated as nineteenth-century Oxford. The less dramatic Douglas could make their clandestine comings and goings, the better.

  They entered Queen Street from their rooms at The Mitre and walked with purpose into the gloaming. “Look for the mark,” instructed Douglas. “It should be right about . . . ” His gaze swept the pavement
for the chalk mark he had placed earlier in the day. “There it is.” He reached around behind him. “Your hand, Snipe.”

  The surly servant slipped his hand into his master’s. “Ready? Step lively. On three.” Douglas strode out. “One . . .” He took a step. “Two . . .” And another. “Three . . .”

  He felt his feet leave the ground and then the always slightly unnerving sensation of weightlessness and falling—but only for a step—followed by the familiar jolt in his leg bones as the ground became solid beneath him once more. The mist cleared, and he saw directly ahead the same street as before, only this time it was paved with cobbles, and instead of traffic lights there were log-burning iron braziers set up at the crossroads.

  The streets of medieval Oxford were patrolled by pike-wielding bailiffs who could be expected to challenge strangers, but Douglas did not see any around. He heard a retching sound behind him and glanced back to see Snipe bent over with his hands on his knees. “When you’re ready,” he sighed impatiently.

  While he was waiting, he heard the clock in Saint Martin’s ring. “It must be compline,” Douglas mused aloud. “Come on, Snipe. Wipe your mouth and be quick.”

  He started towards the crossroads and turned south onto the Abbingdon Road leading to the river and the bridge upon which stood the old defensive tower—a half-ruined structure now known as Friar Bacon’s Study, or, by those of a less charitable disposition, as Bacon’s Folly. The two walked along the road, their sandals slapping the damp stones. Douglas wondered what day it was, or even what month; guesswork told him it could be any time between late November and mid-January.

  The light from the crossroad beacons faded, and they walked in darkness until reaching the bridge, where another set of braziers was set up to illuminate the passage under the tower. Douglas walked around to the side and climbed the few steps leading to the stout wooden door, only to find that it was barred: rough boards were nailed across the door frame.