chapter 24
The Pictish stones of the Brough of Birsay stood guard over a patch of green earth fifty feet wide, and Astrid and Alex wandered through hurriedly after hiking across the fifty-acre island. Every few minutes, one or the other of them would stop to look out at the water and the dark shadow offshore, wondering if they would be discovered. They stopped in the middle of the graveyard—barely observable as it was, just a series of rectangles of worn low stones. A high Pictish slab stood at one end, before three long strips of stone in the grass.
There was a ruined church nearby, roofless and mostly destroyed, its walls made of flat stones. That was a more recent building, but even it would have lain in ruins when Polidori was here. Alex was lost again.
He threw Astrid a dismayed look. “All I see here are ancient stones. Is there any way we can do another incantation, something like what you did with the saltshaker?”
“I’m afraid it’s not a bag of tricks,” Astrid said. “You know, I’m sensitive sometimes to spirits? But, Alex, I don’t feel anything here. Maybe because it’s so old.”
“Wouldn’t you feel it?” he asked, searching. “In ghost stories a body that’s been moved always feels wronged because it’s not in its proper place.”
Astrid shrugged. “Could be. But I’m not sensing it.”
Alex backed up several yards from the circle, looking at the ruins as they cast their dark silhouettes against the gray sky.
He studied the grass, watching its dips and hills, thinking of the letter from Polidori. Something had to give them a stronger clue.
“The coarsest sensations of men,” he said.
“Yeah,” Astrid said.
“It’s a line that brings us to this island because it was used in the part of the book that was set on this island. But that’s not enough. You do the saltshaker magic and we get to this area, but that’s not enough.” He paused, thinking. “The coarsest sensations of men.”
She put her hand on her hip and looked back at him, waiting for him to make a point.
Once again Alex wished he had Sangster with him. He shook his head. Screw that. I can do this. “What is a coarse sensation?”
Astrid went along with him. “Something…rough? Like rubbing a cat the wrong way?”
“Yeah…” Alex trailed off. “Everything here is rough. Rough Viking ruins, rough ancient Pictish ruins, rough Christian ruins. So maybe something else, maybe rough like, rough, like nasty.”
“Vikings were pretty nasty,” Astrid said.
Alex nodded. He’d read about some of the ways Vikings slaughtered their enemies. “But sensation,” he went on. “That’s like a feeling—a coarse sensation, right? But sensation, what else does that make you think of?”
Astrid thought. “Something amazing, or impressive, like a…spectacle?”
“A sensation is a spectacle.” Alex nodded, circling again. “So what’s a coarse sensation?”
“An ugly spectacle,” Astrid said slowly. “A debased, big, ugly spectacle.”
“Polidori lived here,” Alex continued. “He had a hut here, which is gone now. But these ruins would have been here. He’s telling us to look for the place of an ugly spectacle. There’s only one thing I can think of that would fit that bill.”
“Human sacrifice.” Astrid’s eyes lit up.
“You said that pain leaves a mark on the world, is that right?”
“Yes. Absolutely.”
“Somewhere around here was a place of human sacrifice. Can you find that with your skills?”
Astrid nodded slowly. “I can try.”
“Do you have to…cut yourself again?”
“I don’t think so,” she said, a little distant. “I just have to be willing to…”
“What?”
“Feel it.”
Astrid stepped away from him a few paces, turning her back to him as she stood facing the sea. She bent and took off her shoes, and in her bare feet stood still in the grass, surrounded on all sides by the legacy of ancient peoples.
Alex thought he heard her whisper, Mother Gretel, open me up, let me feel, and then her whispers twisted into a language he couldn’t understand.
The wind off the ocean bit his ears as it picked up, and he felt his flesh crawl, his mind tingling with something like the static. She was setting him off but in a different way. She began to tremble as she brought her open hands to her sides, and then her right arm shot out and up to her hair, and she pulled away a ribbon in one of her pigtails. The ribbon whipped in the wind and extended with her arm, flipping and pulling her hand off to her right.
He heard her let out a tiny sob and let go of the ribbon, and it drifted, landing in the grass.
Alex hesitated, and then Astrid started to walk toward the ribbon as it tumbled in the grass, finally catching in the crook of a stone.
The ribbon flitted against a long gray slab with a stone marker rising out of it. Alex walked swiftly toward it and dropped to the ground, staring at the carvings. Etched into the slab he saw a tall figure leading his followers. It was Pictish.
He was aware of Astrid dropping to her knees next to him, her hands in the grass. She wiped her cheeks. “Here,” she said. “There were so many of them here. Pictish captives. They knew they were going to die.”
“You can tell all that?”
“Only the feelings.”
He put his hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry you had to feel that.”
“It’s worth doing, Alex.”
He nodded and pointed directly at the base of the slab. “Then we dig here.”
He rose and scraped at the earth with his heel. “Let’s churn up the earth around this wall.”
Luckily the earth was soft, even a little muddy. For several minutes they scraped, kicking a few inches of earth.
Alex used the stock of his Polibow to rip away at the ground at the base of the stone. After a moment he saw a sliver of blue—another ribbon, rotten and disintegrating.
“Yes,” he said. He began to dig around the ribbon, tearing away chunks of dirt at least a foot down, exposing the ribbon as he went and widening the hole.
He looked back, studying the space between the slab and the strips of stone in the earth nearby. Was there room for a casket, even a child’s casket?
Finally the ribbon ended in a knot, and Alex felt past it, swiping earth aside to reveal an iron ring. He brushed more dirt aside, exposing old, mottled metal. Breathing harder now, he began to dig and run his fingers along the metal, finding edges that he desperately tried to clear. “It’s a box,” he said. “Help me with this.”
They tugged at the iron ring and wrestled with the box in the earth, watching the dirt slide away. It wasn’t a casket at all. It was a box about a foot long and seven inches wide.
With a great heave they wrenched it free, and Alex fell back, sprawling on the grass before catching himself and setting the old metal box on the grass. Then he rose and kneeled next to it, Astrid joining him.
“I don’t know. You think we should take it back to the lighthouse and inspect it there?” Astrid asked.
“No way; I want in this thing.” Alex clawed at a rusty clasp on the front of the box. It was not locked. “Okay, this could be…I don’t know. It could be awful.”
He breathed, flipped the clasp slowly, and pried the metal box open, forcing the ancient, rusted hinges. For a moment he hesitated, then looked at the contents. He saw a slim leather-bound booklet, held closed with a strand of leather, and a glass jar with a wide cork.
Alex picked up the jar first, holding it up. It was impossible to see through a layer of dust that had caked around it. Alex swiped at the dust and held it up again, and watched as strands of sunlight glinted off a swirling lock of human hair.
“That,” said Alex, “is DNA.”
“What about the rest?” Astrid said. She picked up the book, which seemed to be only a few pages long. She undid the string and opened it. Alex could see the writing was a dramatic, clear longhand, in English.
“‘On my greatest failure, a testament of John William Polidori. In 1822…,’” she read aloud, and then fell silent. “This isn’t right,” she said, handing him the book. “He’s your founder. You be the first to read it.”
Alex’s eyes shot across the page. He did not speak again until he had read it through.