The Daykeeper's Grimoire (14 page)

“Hi Caity, are you going to join us on our walk today?” Mom asks hopefully.

“Oh, I was going to go with Uncle Li to do more analysis on the castle,” I reply.

Mom and Dad look at each other with raised eyebrows as if to say,
See, she is so much more intellectual here in Scotland.
“We’ll see you at dinner then,” Dad says.

Taking Uncle Li by the arm, I escort him out of the room. “We have a problem,” I whisper. “Tenzo came in my room. Mrs. Findlay let him take Mr. Papers from the kitchen this morning, and he had Mr. P doing origami for him! I think he’s trying to get info from him.”

“How do you know this?”

“Because the piece—a guy in a robe with a monkey on his shoulder—was made from a page of a magazine called the
Journal
of Ancient Near Eastern Languages
.”

“Do you know where he is now?” Uncle Li asks.

“He asked Alex for another tour of the grounds.”

“The houseboy?”

Somehow that word sounds demeaning. “Alex is not really the houseboy. I mean, he’s helping us while the guests are here, but he’s a friend, too. And he’s Mrs. Findlay’s grandson.”

“Have you told him or Mrs. Findlay anything?”

“No, just to watch out for Tenzo because he might be a thief. I asked them not to give him any information about the place other than the stuff he could get out of a guide book.”

“Well done, Caity.”

“Hey, since everyone is going out walking today let’s head back into the tower,” I suggest. “We should take lunches, so Mrs. Findlay doesn’t try to come find us.”

I take two of the boxed lunches in the kitchen. Mrs. Findlay always has a pot of water on the stove, so Uncle Li removes a thermos from the shelf and fills it. He carries this small tin of tea with him; he never goes anywhere without his personal stash. His sister who still lives in China has a tea plantation and she sends Uncle Li the cream of the crop. He is a total tea snob and says that the stuff in tea bags is the garbage they sweep off the floor at the tea factory. His tea leaves are hand rolled into little pearls, and after sitting in water they unroll themselves and become leaves again. The tea is so pale you can hardly tell it from water, but
man
is it good.

Once in the tower, I walk Mr. Papers over to the magnet area so he can play while we look around. Then, as I head toward the fountain, I see that it isn’t a figure eight, it is two interlocking circles, one with the magnet and one with the fountain. Kind of like the Venn diagrams we studied last year.

As I step between the two circles where they overlap, something happens.

I feel the ground move.

Hey, Uncle Li, come here,” I say, trying to keep balanced. It’s like being on a surfboard.

Uncle Li walks over and looks down. “Well look at that! A
vesica pisces
,” he says.

“What?”

“A
vesica pisces
. It’s that middle part of two overlapping circles—an old mystical symbol that ancient cultures thought to be a source of immense power and energy.”

“I don’t mean look at the symbol, I mean look at it move!” I shift my weight a bit so it wobbles.

“Oh, my—”

“Step on it, it feels weird,” I say, crouching down to keep my center of gravity low. Mr. Papers is perched on my backpack, tightly holding on to my shoulders.

When Uncle Li steps on the slab, it begins to sink. We both instinctively drop to our knees. It lowers as slowly as an elevator and stops about eight feet below the floor above. I hold up my lantern to look around, and see that we have been lowered into another dark chamber. The walls are rock, like a cave, as if this had been carved out below the tower.

Uncle Li gets on his stomach and holds his lantern over the edge. I do the same. We both turn them up as high as they will go and look down; beneath us is a massive set of stone gears.

“What is it?” I ask Uncle Li. “Some kind of machine?”

“I have no earthly idea,” he replies. “How many pieces are there?”

We start counting. They’re all different sizes, some are nested inside each other and others are interlocked so that they could move together. We count twenty.

“Do you see the faint carvings on them?” Uncle Li asks.

“I can barely even see the wheels. Do you think we should go down?” I ask, wanting to check it out more closely. “It’s only about seven feet. I could jump that.”

“As much as I’m anxious to find out what this is, I’m afraid that if we get off this
vesica pisces
it will rise again and trap us down here.”

“Oh my God, you’re right.” A shudder goes through my body.

“This platform seems precisely weighted. I think it’s just a viewing station.”

“I wish we could lower our lanterns to light it up.” Dying to see what’s down there, I try to think where we could get rope and then remember the long elastic cord laced through the front of my backpack. I remove the toggle, pull out the cord, and tie it to the lantern.

Because the cord is stretchy, the heavy lantern lowers almost to the floor and illuminates the wheels. “Look, you’re right; there really are carvings on them!” I say.

“They aren’t anything like the carvings in the chamber; this is a true pictographic script.”

“Like Egyptian writing?” I ask, scooting over to light up a different wheel.

“Not Egyptian, more like South or Central American,” says Uncle Li. Then he snaps his fingers. “Of course! I think I know what this is!”

“What, what?”

“Back when I taught philosophy, I had a graduate student who was doing his thesis on Mayan cosmology.”

I sit up to listen. “And …”

He pauses and looks up at the ceiling trying to remember. “I don’t recall much about it—this was years ago, you see—but I do remember that much of the Maya’s focus was on advanced astronomy and these elaborate calendars. And,” he says with emphasis, “there were twenty of them!”

I point down. “You think that’s what’s down there?”

Uncle Li sits cross-legged on the platform. “I recall this fellow’s paper describing how these twenty calendars that measure cycles of things, from insects to humans to the solar system and everything in between, work like a bunch of cogs together. While they are separate measuring devices, they all move together.”

“You know, of all the things I expected to find down here,” I say as I pull up my lantern, “a calendar was not one of them.” I was hoping for something a bit more exciting. Treasure. A time machine. Something
radical
.

“I think this is a profound discovery,” Uncle Li says emphatically. “Let me hold the lanterns and you sketch some of what’s down there.”

Uncle Li illuminates the floor while I try to sketch. It’s actually quite beautiful when you look at it as a machine.

It’s hard to sketch lying on my stomach, so I’m only able to get three of the gears drawn before we decide to break for lunch. To get back up, Uncle Li gives me a boost and I pull myself up with my arms. Once my weight is off, the platform moves up a bit. I watch Uncle Li rising up on this eye-shaped platform and realize it’s an image that wouldn’t be out of place in one of those cheesy sci-fi movies from the sixties that Dad is so in to. It stops a few feet below the floor, so Uncle Li pulls himself up like he’s getting out of a swimming pool. Once he’s off, the platform comes level with the floor.

We sit for a moment looking at it. “So what’s the deal with the
vesica pisces
?” I ask.

“Pythagoras thought it represented the beginning of creation—it’s symbolic of the intersection where the divine world meets the world of matter. Plus,” he adds with emphasis, “it’s the second step in making the Flower of Life, that intricate carving that covers the hole in the floor of your secret chamber.”

“So the first step in making the Flower of Life is one circle, right?” I ask. “That means the beginning of this story started when we entered through the hole in the floor of the chamber.”

“Excellent deduction!”

“And the second chapter started under the second step in making the Flower of Life—two overlapping circles—when we lowered ourselves into the cog room.”

“I think you’re right,” Uncle Li says. “Which means the next step would be to find three overlapping circles.”

I’m itching to do some research on these cogs, so after we finish our box lunches and Uncle Li goes to his room to rest, I do a search on Mayan stuff. It’s weird how much there is on the Internet about the Mayan calendar. They were way ahead of their time when it came to astronomy and could even predict when planetary things would happen in the future. Plus they tracked astronomical stuff like eclipses back millions of years that have proven to be totally accurate. Then I see something weird that stops me cold. The Mayan calendar for human cycles ends in 2012.

Why would a calendar
end
? That’s not really the point of a calendar. I remember that spiral about the secret of twenty-twelve:
Into arcane old knowledge you must delve, to find the secret to twenty-twelve.

The intercom buzz makes me jump. Alex says, “Caity? You there? May we have a word?”

Running over to the intercom to hit the reply button, I say, “I’ll meet you at the stairs,” while trying not to sound out-of-breath or overexcited.

Alex is waiting at the bottom of the stairs for me, and when Mr. Papers catches sight of him he leaps from my shoulder, springs off the banister, and then lands on his shoulder. Alex looks worried. When I get to him, he looks around and whispers, “You were right about Tenzo.”

“What?” I grab his arm and lead him to the library, closing the door.

“Tell me everything,” I say, taking a seat.

“Well, first he wanted to walk around the perimeter of the castle, following the canal. And the whole bloody time he had this long stick that he was dragging along in the water, like he was trying to find something in that little
burn
.”

“Did he?”

He shakes his head. “Of course not. Just the odd clump of moss. And then he had me walk him around every building on the grounds.”

“Including the tower?” I ask as casually as I can.

“Aye,” he says, rolling his eyes. “You’d think the man was doing a building inspection the way he was walking around that tower, poking at it with his stick, looking over every rock.”

“What happened when you finished the tour and he didn’t find anything?” I ask.

Alex sits on the arm of the chair next to me. “To be honest he seemed quite perturbed.”

I give him the I-told-you-so shrug. “The guy is a freak.”

“What do you reckon he wants?” he asks. “Why’s he obsessed with the bloody tower?”

I shrug and shake my head, weighing whether or not I want to tell him all I know.

Alex reaches for my hand, places it on his open palm, and then puts his other hand over it like a sandwich. “I’m sorry I doubted you this morning.”

I feel myself blushing. “No big deal,” I stammer. “I must have seemed kind of psycho.” I don’t want to pull my hand away so I wait for him to drop it. He holds on for a moment. Then he lets go and gives me a big smile. If I look at him any longer, I swear I’ll blurt out I LOVE YOU! So I turn away, becoming very interested in the upholstery on the chair next to me.

“Caity, what’s up?” he asks.

But being this close to him, with his pale-blue wolf eyes and pineconey smell, it all makes me want to just come clean and tell him what I’d found out about his father.

“Alex, uh, can I ask you something kind of personal?”

“I suppose so …” he says reluctantly. I shouldn’t have used the word “personal.” I think he’s expecting me to ask him about body odor or something.

“I was wondering if you know any of the details of how your dad … well, what happened here the night your dad passed away?”

“Aye,” he says as he looks down and moves the edge of the Oriental carpet with his foot. “The castle was being burgled. Hamish managed to call over to our house and Dad came by to help. He was a hero, shot dead by cowardly thieves.”

“But you never found out who it was? What they wanted?”

“They vanished before help could get there. Why’re you asking?”

“I’ve just been discovering some weird stuff. I actually don’t think it was a burglary. I think whoever shot your father might have thought they were killing Hamish instead.”

He looks at me as if I’d been speaking Japanese. “What?” he says.

I start to repeat myself and he shakes his head. “Nae, I heard you. I mean, how could you say such a thing?”

“Well, it’s just that some of the information I’ve found here—”

“Listen, Caity, you don’t know
anything
’bout my father,” he says, cutting me off. He points his finger at me like a dart and speaks slowly and quietly, which for some reason freaks me out more than if he were to scream. “Whatever you think you’re doing here, making up little detective stories to pass the day, leave my father out of it.” I see tears welling up in his eyes. He tightens his face to control them, then looks down.

Uncertain of what’s going on, Mr. Papers jumps to the floor and paces nervously. This is not at all how I thought Alex would react. My throat closes up like I’m going to vomit and my face feels white-hot. How could I have been so callous?

“Oh, my God, Alex, I didn’t mean to—”

He stops me by putting up his hand. “I don’t want to hear it. Just leave me and my family out of your silly made-up adventures.” He keeps his hand up as he walks out of the room.

I feel exactly like I did on a childhood field trip to a farm when I accidentally grabbed onto an electric fence: fried to the core.