Preston Child - The Fountain of Youth

“Wait a minute,” Sam stopped him. “Are you telling me that they’d already used this water back in the War?”

Gunnar nodded. “They knew about this life force long before we ever did. I always figured that this was why they didn’t think it crazy to look for something like that here too. The Polish woman told Jon that they were on holiday from England, where they lived. She said she’d heard of historical sites where the fountain of youth ran from the stones. Naturally my brother had never heard of anything like that, so we laughed it off.”

“That sounds like a mistake,” Heri said.

“It was. It was a fatal mistake. After we took them up there they kept us there to camp with them, offering to let us use their trawler when we got down to Hvalba. That’s when we knew we were in trouble. That was the night Jon and I moved the rock for our tent and saw the glowing ground, but we just replaced it because it frightened us, you know?” Gunnar explained, sounding like a juvenile talking about a prom date. “When the brutes finally went to sleep the pretty woman snuck out to warn us that her organization would never leave us alive, whether they found the fountain or not. You see, their henchmen had unsuccessfully dug all day to find the spring, but the stones of the ruins were bone dry. No spring of life poured from a wet rock or whatever they’d imagined.”

“So the spring they were looking for was, in fact, the glowing ground you and your brother found?” Sam asked. Gunnar affirmed with a single nod. “But the Nazi blokes couldn’t see it in the daylight, I suppose.”

“Plus, it was hidden under a stone, so they wouldn’t have seen it anyway,” Johild chipped in. The others agreed with her. “Why didn’t you just flee, Papa?”

Gunnar’s eyes were heavily laden with emotion. “We tried. Once it was dark we ran away from the camp. But Jon went back to try and save the woman he’d fallen for, to bring her with us.” His words broke as his voice failed him. “Hiding a good distance away while I waited for Jon and the girl, I knew something was wrong when she screamed in the quiet tent. I listened to how my brother screamed during the first few blows, cussing and crying out in pain.”

The vehicle buzzed as the broken man recalled the moment of his brother’s death. There was not a word, nor a whimper, from any of the others listening to his dirge. Gunnar tried to be strong, but his nose was red as his eyes. Sobbing, he finished what he needed to tell them. He made up his mind to tell them everything, and from then on he would never speak a word about it again as long as he lived.

“I ran toward the tent, but it was far and I…I took t-too long to save him. The woman crawled from the tent, her face a bloody mess and through broken teeth sh-she mouthed at me the words… ‘he is dead,’” Gunnar forced. His body shook under the strain of his sorrow, but he spoke slowly in order to breathe in between words. “She waved wildly to tell me to run for my life. Th-they…they had beaten my brother to death with a stone…a s-stone…from that very site, and then those godless motherfuckers threw his body over the cliffs where fishermen found his shattered corpse four days later, floating in a churning rock pool at the base of the cliff.”

“Christ, Gunnar! I’m so sorry,” Sam said softly.

“I’m glad that I told you all the truth after all these years.” Gunnar sniffed and wiped his face with his beanie. Johild gave him a few tissues from her bag.

“Now I know why you hate journalists more than I do,” she concluded, just as Heri’s car slowed down, approaching the last few hundred meters to the rising crest of the very site where Gunnar’s tale was set.

Nina was a little concerned about who may be listening, as the small room was missing its door. The narrow stairs ran down from the ground floor and landed right inside the small archive room, leaving no room for a door anyway. She placed her laptop, leather sling bag, and pile of papers on the desk and chair.

Upon her desk the small cooler box stood, stocked with bottled water as she’d requested be delivered every morning. But she had no time for drinks or food, because the incomparable Dr. Gould possessed an innate curiosity that would not be denied. A delicious plethora of information was stacked about her, wall-to-wall records and files others had become too lazy to study. On the other hand, perhaps they put things down here they were afraid might be discovered.

Nina’s hunch was riper than she realized.

She vigorously started going through the masses of documents and old files shoved into the cabinet Gertrud suggested might have what she was looking for. Applications, statements of bursaries, and trivial memos about new price hikes and rules of conduct — that was all Nina could find at first. But eventually the large drawers yielded more interesting files, such a lawsuits pending, transfers of property, and letters addressed to prospective benefactors.

“Ewww, if my lungs weren’t already full of shit they certainly would be by now. Geez, don’t they ever dust down here?” Nina mumbled as her dirty fingertips paged. By now she’d learned not to lick her finger to separate the papers better. The drawers hadn’t been touched for what seemed to be decades. Spots and spills on rusted manuscripts tainted the words upon them, but she could discern some of the dates.

“Whoa,” Nina whispered to herself, ignoring the steady nausea that came with her slowly creeping chest pain. Her lips moved rapidly as she quickly read short excerpts here and there, but her voice was very subdued and her dusty hands were shaking between the excitement of what she might find and the tremors of her condition. “We herewith wish to welcome you…” she breathed as she took the next document up between her two hands, “…and on retainer, but due to unforeseen circumstances…” She tossed it aside for the next sheet of yellowed parchment, typed out by a typewriter, “…please. Professor Gregor Ebner, Honorary 3rd Level Member and owner of the Norman Fortress now known as St. Vincent’s, will be interred this Sunday, 19th of July 1992.”

Nina’s blood ran cold. Some of the words in this particular newspaper obituary hit home in a very bad way for her. The mention of the term, ‘3rd Level Member’, suggested that Ebner, Mrs. Patterson’s adoptive father, was a member of the Order of the Black Sun. There was no report on how he’d died, however, but it disturbed the pained historian that her good, elderly friend and the Dean’s mother, was raised by a member of that sinister organization.

“Oh my God, Mrs. Patterson,” Nina moaned as her dark eyes stared up at the ceiling. She had to take a moment to take it all in. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, Nina set that particular snippet aside on the seat of her chair next to her. With the concerning news fresh in her mind she kept on digging into the last drawer right at the bottom of the old locker cabinet.

“More accounts,” she sighed, “more kissing ass for money, invitations to awards that don’t mean squat, more…” Nina stopped. The next document was far too much of a coincidence for her to dismiss. Her heart went wild as she read it, but to her surprise, her feelings veered towards sadness instead of anger.

“Purdue?” she frowned, keeping the page under direct light from the bulb above her just to make sure she was not reading it wrongly, what with her dwindling eye sight and all. But she would’ve given anything to rather have had a bout of blindness and been mistaken. Unfortunately for her, she’d read correctly. “Purdue was a benefactor of this college right after the death of Ebner, right as Dean Patterson took over from his grandfather? Holy shit, Dean Patterson is part of the Black Sun! And Purdue is funding him!”