The Daykeeper's Grimoire Read online

Point only upward to explain the ages

  “The secret to 2012? Love a force like gravity?” Uncle Li says as he looks up to the ceiling and pulls on the skin of his neck “What do you make of this?”

  “No clue. I’m going to start decoding another,” I say. “Maybe you need them all to make any sense.” I get the next set of symbols into the program and ask Dr. Li what he wants to do.

  “We need to get inside that tower. Let’s go back into the chamber.” He walks over to the panel and I follow and open the door with my pendant.

  “There just has to be another way out of here,” he says walking around the room, his face an inch from the walls, looking up and down and feeling everywhere for some way out. I concentrate on the ceiling, thinking there might be some kind of hatch up there.

  I hear Mr. Papers huffing and puffing and look down to see him burrowing under the enormous Oriental rug. Uncle Li and I look at each other, thinking the same thing. Moving the fainting couch and side table, we roll the carpet back and right there in the center of the floor is a round stone, like a manhole cover, with a pattern of circles carved into it.

  “You found it,” he says as we kneel down to touch it. “The Flower of Life.”

  “What do you know about this thing?” I whisper. Every hair on my neck is standing at attention.

  “It’s a symbol seen all over the world, but no one knows its origin. Many people believe profound knowledge about how the universe works is encoded in it.”

  I bite my lip. “Now what?”

  “Open it!” he says. “You found it, you get to open it.”

  I am seriously freaked out. Too many horror movies. “Will you do it?” I beg. “Please?”

  He laughs, pulls out his pocketknife, unfolds the longest blade, and slips it under the stone cover, prying it up enough to get his fingers under it. I wouldn’t do that in a million years, I think to myself, imagining tarantulas and maggots scurrying around under his fingers.

  We feel a whoosh of air when he lifts the stone. It’s not musty or rotten at all; it actually smells good, like the inside of a cornhusk right after you peel it off the cob. Clean, but earthy.

  The hole is pitch black. Uncle Li holds his hand over it like a psychic trying to feel what’s in there, and Mr. Papers has his whole head down it. I try my flashlight, but all we can see is the top few rungs of an old ladder. There’s nothing moving around down there and there aren’t even any spider webs—it’s the lack of anything creepy that seems creepy.

  “We need more light,” Uncle Li says and I tell him about the lanterns I saw out in the shed where Thomas used to keep Mr. Papers, then run out to get them.

  Back in the chamber, I give them to Uncle Li. “I’ll light them once I’m down,” he says, holding the lanterns in one hand as he descends the ladder using the other hand. I shine the flashlight down to light his way. “Made it!” he yells up at me. “Come on down.”

  I figure since the air smells okay and there are no rats or snakes so far, I’ll follow. Mr. Papers holds on tightly to my shoulder. Once I’m down, Uncle Li lines up the lanterns. I wave away the throat-closing smell of match hitting lamp oil, and then the room lights up.

  It’s slightly larger than the secret room above. Where the room above ends, this one goes on, as if my secret room is just nested and hanging inside this larger space. Other than that, there’s nothing to see. We walk over to the wall that butts up to the tower and look closely for a way through, but can’t find anything.

  Mr. Papers grabs my flashlight and points it up. We follow the beam and see the outline of a door on the wall above our heads. Mr. Papers runs over to the ladder and hops on a rung, so Uncle Li moves the old thing over to the wall at the base of the high door. With the flashlight pinned under his arm, he climbs up then pushes the door as hard as he can.

  It moves.

  I can’t believe we’re finally breaking through to the hidden core of the tower. More than a little bit nervous, I’m not going to tell Uncle Li that my legs are shaking so bad I can hardly stand up.

  As I run each lamp up the ladder to Uncle Li, he pushes them through to the other side of the door. Then he climbs through and Mr. Papers and I follow. Once on the landing, we each take a lantern and leave one there so we can find our way back.

  The space is too large to see much of anything from where we are, so we start down the stairs that lead from the landing to the tower floor below. I hear the sound of water moving; must be the spring that feeds out of the base of the tower. With each step a bit more is revealed, and we see that there are big boulders arranged in either two circles or a figure eight. Inside one of the circles is a flat round space, like a stage, and inside the other is a fountain.

  Then as we walk around the circle of rocks, something amazing happens: each rock lights up until the whole place is glowing dimly with yellow and pink light like a sunset. The whole scene starts to look like some kind of Maxfield Parrish painting.

  “Phosphorescence!” Uncle Li says, excitedly. “The electrons in the rocks store the energy from our light and then play it back. Extraordinary!”

  “It’s beautiful,” I say as I shine my lantern on each one for a few moments to get the whole group glowing strongly. It’s hypnotizing, like a campfire. Their glow lights up the space below but is not bright enough to allow us to see the ceiling. Looking up is like looking into a dark well—it’s pure black and makes me feel dizzy.

  I walk over to the fountain. A tall cylinder, maybe eight feet high and a foot wide, has been carved from rock and made into a pipe for the water to flow up through. Then the water spills over the sides of the pipe and is caught in a stone basin. From there it flows down another stone pipe about a foot wide that goes directly out the side of the tower where I saw it the other day.

  “Let’s walk the perimeter of the tower,” Uncle Li says. Always a slave to the power of Yin and Yang, he adds, “Clockwise, of course.”

  We start at the left of the staircase and walk slowly. As we hold the lanterns up, the walls become visible and we see carvings. Instead of symbols like in the secret room, these are just holes with rings around them, like bull’s eyes, most about the size of my hand. Some overlap and some stand alone. I run my fingers over the cool, sanded carved circles.

  “What’s the deal with the circles?” I ask.

  “You find these at ancient sites all over Scotland,” Uncle Li replies, looking closely at one. “They’re called cup-and-ring carvings.”

  “Do you know what they mean?”

  “No one really does. They could represent the sun, as does the Egyptian symbol that looks like this. Or perhaps they represent the galaxy.”

  Mr. Papers starts jumping on my shoulders, pointing to the wall. He brings his hands together and then spreads out his arms, like people do when they say, “All this can be yours.”

  “What’s going on?” I ask him.

  He uses his finger to make figures in the air.

  “Is he … writing something in the air?” Uncle Li asks, as if he doesn’t believe it himself.

  Setting my lantern on the floor, I take Mr. Papers off my shoulder and hold him out in front of me. He starts over, tracing letters slowly in the air, wearing the exasperated look that Mom gets when she’s told me a million times to do something.

  “Look,” Uncle Li says, “he’s making an R. And a U …

  and … a … an N!”

  “Run?” I look around, terrified. It feels like someone shoved a shot put in my throat and it sunk right down to my gut. This is like a bad slasher film. “Run?”

  Mr. Papers points to the wall and then makes that grand gesture with his arms again. Uncle Li’s eyes are huge and he doesn’t say anything, which makes me even more scared.

  “There’s no way this monkey can spell, can he?” I ask.

  “Doubtful,” Uncle Li says. “But, he could be tracing something he sees …” He backs up, holding his lanterns as high as he can.

  When the wall lights up, I see it. �
�Look! Do you see it?”

  “What? I don’t see anything but the cups and rings.”

  “Look at the big picture,” I tell him. “They’re not random at all, they cluster together in letters.” When you adjust your eyes differently, the ring carvings come together to make three letters that must each be twelve feet tall. It spells Rùn.

  “Oh, yes! I see!” Uncle Li says. “Look, there’s an accent mark over the U. Must be Gaelic.”

  Walking quickly to the next wall, I say, “Let’s see if there are any more.” We stand back a bit and adjust our eyes to see the big picture. Sure enough, there’s another word: Fuaigh.

  “Has to be Gaelic,” Uncle Li says as he walks to the next wall. Again we step back and light it up. The word there is Cruitheachd. Each one is getting stranger than the one before. I wouldn’t even know how to try to pronounce these—when’s the last time you saw “chd” together in a word? We move on to the last wall, above the staircase. The word is written higher up and we can barely make it out. Finally Uncle Li reads off the letters: Creid.

  “Let’s go see what these words mean,” he says.

  We go straight to my computer, which has stopped decoding the last spiral. My stomach tightens when I see the word Fraternitas. I flash back to Barend Schlacter’s foul breath and his fat fingers wrapped around my wrist.

  “Can you read it?” Uncle Li asks.

  Watch closely the Fraternitas and follow each lie

  An animal is most dangerous when it knows it might die

  Look who profits from war, who controls by fear

  At the end of this age, their end too could be near

  Uncle Li walks over to look at the page. “Did you say Fraternitas?”

  “Have you heard of it?” I ask. I’m still terrified about what Barend Schlacter said he’d do if I told my parents, so I don’t let on that I know what it is.

  “Oh, no. It’s so similar to ‘fraternity,’ I probably just recognized the word,” he replies.

  I search for Gaelic dictionaries, then type in rùn. It means intention, love, or secret. Then I try fuaigh and get stitch, knit, connect. Cruitheachd means the creation, or universe. And creid means believe. Uncle Li jots it all down.“So if we put it all together it’s something liked Secret connects universe believe.” I say.

  “Or, if it starts with creid, it could be Believe love connects universe.”

  “Cool! That’s kind of sweet, isn’t it?” I like to think that’s the right one. “Plus, that kind of relates to that spiral about love being a force or something.”

  “You are absolutely right,” Uncle Li says. “We’re getting more and more information that seems to relate, but we can’t yet put this mosaic together in any meaningful way.”

  “So what now?” I ask as I look at the clock. “It’s close to noon. Want to go back down?”

  He looks at me with a twinkle in his eyes and says, “Don’t you?”

  Once back in the tower, Mr. Papers scampers off. He heads toward the circles of boulders that are still dimly glowing. I follow him over while Uncle Li investigates the walls a bit more. Mr. Papers goes to the side of the formation that does not have the fountain in it, the side with just a flat stagelike area where one enormous cup and ring is carved, then he pats a boulder like he wants me to sit down, which makes me laugh out loud. After I sit, Mr. Papers looks at me to make sure I’m watching and walks slowly to the center of the ring.

  Then the strangest thing happens—it’s so weird that for a second it really doesn’t register—Mr. Papers starts to rise in the air. He keeps going until he is about fifteen feet up, lying back as if he’s floating in a pool. Then he manages to sit up, look down at me, and wave.

  “UNCLE LI GET OVER HERE!” I yell.

  Uncle Li turns around to look at me and then runs over. He doesn’t even see Mr. Papers; I mean, who would think to look for a monkey flying fifteen feet in the air?

  I point and he looks. He staggers backwards like he’s lost his balance. Mr. Papers motions to us to come in. I walk toward the ring, and as I get closer to the center, I feel a strange pulling sensation, the same kind of feeling you get on a spinning ride when you’re forced to the edge of the seat and you can’t do anything about it. This pull is as firm as that, yet gentler, not jarring. By the time I walk to the center of the ring, I’m floating upward too. I get about five feet off the ground, not nearly as high as Mr. Papers but high enough to really trip me out. My body naturally tips back like I’m sitting in a car with the seat reclined.

  I look down at Uncle Li coming inside the circle. As he gets closer, he too starts to rise and ends up even higher than I am. This makes me think that I probably weigh more than he does, which would really depress me if I weren’t, you know, levitating with a monkey and a Chinese man inside a castle in Scotland.

  We all look at each other and start laughing. Honestly, monkeys can laugh, or at least Mr. P can. We don’t stop until tears are coming from our eyes.

  Mr. Papers starts doing somersaults in the air. I watch how he does it and give it a try. I make it over once, but accidentally kick Uncle Li. Then I try again but hurl myself too far and end up falling. Uncle Li inches his way over to me and then juts his body out of the ring and falls to the ground as well. Catching my breath, I look up to see Mr. Papers heading over to where we are. He throws himself out of the ring and falls gracefully into my arms.

  Uncle Li is shaking his head. “I’ve read articles about this, but never seen firsthand—”

  “Articles about what? Floating?”

  “Levitation. There’s a university in the Netherlands with some of the world’s largest magnetic field labs, and they’ve managed to levitate a live frog.”

  “One little frog and that was big news?” Imagine what kind of story this would make! “So something magnetic made us float?”

  “A magnetic field is the only reasonable explanation,” he says, rubbing his eyes with his palms. “Although the force of this must be a thousand-fold stronger than any other discovered.”

  “Let’s do it again!” I say. “You know, just to make sure …”

  Uncle Li smiles and walks back into the circle. As he gets close to the center, he tips backwards and his feet leave the ground. I follow him in, start to rise, and then sort of “swim” to the center where I get back up to about five feet. Mr. Papers runs to the center and then jumps really high, and instead of falling he stops about a foot off the floor and then slowly rises again until he’s way above both of us.

  “This is officially the strangest day of my life,” I say.

  “Keep an open mind,” Uncle Li says with a wink. “It may get stranger yet …”

  Floating is a weird sensation. It’s not as effortless as you’d think; you still have to balance your wobbly body. It’s easier if you kind of curl up in a ball and hug your knees.

  Once I find a stable position, I enjoy the ride. Taking a deep breath of the cornhusk air, I look down at the bright lanterns and the glowing rocks. I take in the cups and rings on the wall, and still shudder a little when I see the word Rùn. Now the accent mark makes it look even more sinister, like there’s an emphasis on it. I try to keep reminding myself that it probably means love.

  I look up at Mr. Papers and see him holding his arms out to each side and then spinning his body over and over. Uncle Li is a few inches above me; he has managed to get himself into lotus position and is sitting very still with his back straight and his hands on his knees, palms up with middle fingers touching his thumbs. He looks like a Buddha statue—if Buddha had hair.

  I look down at the ground, but lean too far and tip over so I’m hanging there upside down. Once in this position it’s hard to get back to sitting upright, and by the time I manage it I’m actually tired from the work. “I’m getting down,” I yell up to Uncle Li. He flinches a bit, like I startled him. I think he was meditating.

  “I suppose we should go,” he says with a sigh, as if he could hang out here for hours.

 
I nod. “Mom’s coming home soon and Dad’s probably wondering where we’ve been.”

  We decide to leave the lanterns on the landing at the top of the stairs, no sense in dragging them up and down the ladder every time, and we use the flashlight to get down and back up the ladder into the secret room. It feels like I’ve come back from outer space. I touch the fainting couch to ground myself.

  “I’ll run some more symbols this afternoon,” I say, regaining my composure. “Hopefully by tomorrow I’ll have all of them done.”

  “Good work, my friend,” Uncle Li says as he heads out the door. He turns around and says, “It’s an honor to have this adventure together.”

  I smile and nod my head, feeling guilty for not yet telling him the whole truth.

  Mr. Papers jumps onto my desk and I hand him the sandwich that Uncle Li had brought up for me. He chows down and then rolls a piece of paper and pretends to drink, so I get him a glass of water from the bathroom.

  There’s a knock on my door and Mom peeks in. I run over and give her a hug. So much has happened since she left that it seems like she’s been gone for weeks.

  My mom isn’t the warmest, kissy-kissy person in the world, but when you want a real hug she’s the one to go to. You could stand there for days because she’ll never be the first one to pull away. “I’m so happy to see you,” I say.

  “Happy to see me or to see your goodies?”

  I pull back and say, “Maybe both …”

  She picks up a shopping bag from the hall and spills three pairs of jeans, a couple of T-shirts, a cool Euro sketchbook, and a tiny polo shirt and mini khaki shorts onto my bed. From another bag she pulls out a huge bar of Toblerone chocolate, almost the size of a baseball bat. “This ought to keep you busy,” she says as she tosses it over. It’s so heavy it sinks into the duvet. I pick it up, open one end, and slide the triangular bar part way out.

  “God that’s good,” I say, sinking my teeth into the chocolate, chewy with honey and nuts.

  “Evil good,” she replies, breaking off a piece for herself. “So, ready for our big day?”