Preston Child - The Fountain of Youth

“Everyone’s ready,” she confirmed.

She jumped into the 4x4 with her father and they led the way. The two large vehicles trekked over winding roads and hills that rose and fell in the cold dark that breathed saline air through the slits in the windows.

“Keep her warm, please,” Sam said to the ladies in the back.

“Don’t worry. She is snug as a bug back here,” Ami smiled. “Hold on Dr. Gould. We’re almost there.”

“Are we?” Purdue asked.

“Yes, it’s just a few more kilometers to the north,” Ami directed.

Heri’s pristine eyes glimmered in the dashboard lights as he peeked in the mirror at the woman in the back. “Have you been here before?”

“A long time ago. I came to look for the Empty Hourglass,” she smiled, but Heri and Sam glared at one another in distrust as the lady continued. “I met the sweetest two locals here. Wonderful young men…” her voice cracked. “But it ended in tragedy.”

“Why? What happened?” Anna asked.

“I was with bad people who wanted to use the Empty Hourglass for greed and to corrupt the weak even more,” she said angrily. “The Empty Hourglass — the name was given by a man called Jon. I never got to know his last name, but that was what he and his brother dubbed it because it had no sands of time.”

“Lovely,” Anna said, smiling.

“Yes, it was,” Ami agreed with a sad smile. “Guterman, the fiend…he killed Jon right in front of me. His brother got away, thank God. But I made sure they never found the place where the two young men found the pool. Even when I returned years later, I never betrayed their secret. I saw Jon’s brother, but out of fear that the Order would notice him, I ignored him.”

“Lucky for him. You seem to be death on legs,” Heri said sharply. “I’m the nephew of those two men. My uncle Gunnar has told us all about you.”

Ami did not reply. She could not possibly convey how sorry she was, but Heri had not had enough yet. “Gunnar is in the vehicle ahead of us. I suggest you keep your identity hidden.”

“How can she?” Purdue asked. “She has barely aged.”

When they reached the site of the Empty Hourglass, they all braved the ice-cold wind and the darkness to crack open the rock over the pool. Gunnar did the honors, happy to impress the woman he secretly recognized, the one who’d hidden him from discovery so many years ago when the Black Sun’s dogs came back. But it was the beautiful woman who resembled her that he was most interested in. “Hello, I’m Gunnar.” He smiled and shook her hand.

“Lovely to meet you,” she said. “I’m Anna Patterson from England.”

“Good to meet you, Anna Patterson from England. Do you have any Viking in you?” he asked.

“Uncle Gunnar!” Heri interrupted and dragged him aside. “Help us lower Dr. Gould into the water.”

“Is the pool’s water as cold as this bloody ocean air?” Purdue asked.

The locals chuckled. “Fortunately not. It’s temperate, from a lava presence deep in the underground caverns,” Heri explained.

“Ah,” Purdue said, “that would explain the strange properties of the water I analyzed. There seems to be magnetic particles prevalent in the water. They seem to be influenced by the geographical location of the rock. Like the Northern Lights, it’s just a magnetic storm of particles differing in intensity, influenced by the stronger polar influence.”

“That causes the slowing of age?” Johild asked Purdue.

“In theory, yes. The unnatural application of geomagnetic particles coupled with its influence on the molecular structure of red blood cells has something to do with impairing rapid cell destruction without compromising the natural process of cell division,” Purdue explained. He shrugged, “As far as I could gather, anyway.”

“Oh my goodness! Isn’t that beautiful!” Anna Patterson said in awe of the slowly blossoming colors exuding from the lukewarm water. Apart from the flashlights Sam, Heri and Gunnar held, it was the only illumination of the area. In wonder, Purdue and his elderly accomplices stood staring at the phenomenon.

“It’s like a portable Aurora Borealis,” Ami jested. “I can’t wait to see that young lady catch her breath.”

Nina was barely conscious when they brought her to the pool at the convergence of the ruins. The night was black and cold, but she was in so much pain the temperature hardly agitated her. Before Purdue and Heri lowered her into the water chute, she looked at Purdue and whispered with a smile what she hadn’t said in the torture chair, “I know you. You are David Purdue.”

Purdue only smiled as she went under for a moment to cover her entire body in the dancing colors of the lazily bubbling spring. But behind his smile a warm tranquility took hold of his heart, knowing that Nina had made peace with him at last.

A hail of bullets rained down on them from the dark. Johild was struck and she fell to the grass before her cousin could catch her.

“Jo!” Gunnar screamed. He jumped up and raced to his daughter’s aid just as a man appeared from the dark, pointing a gun at him. With a grin on his familiar face, Guterman said, “Time to join your brother, boy!”

He pulled the trigger, hitting the woman who jumped to shield him. Heri and Sam tackled Guterman, wrestling the gun from him while Guterman’s goons burned up bullets against rocks. So far only Johild and Ami had been hit, but Johild had crawled to where Anna Patterson was holding out her hand.

Nina was drowning in the spring. The surface of the water was too far down from the edge and the shaft too narrow for her to effectively tread water. Purdue’s arm came over the edge and grabbed her forearm, just holding her above the surface until the shots ceased. A distance into the darkness many male voices could be heard shouting for help and barking orders.

Anna was compressing Johild’s bullet wound behind the rock. Ami Cotswald was lying in Gunnar’s arms, barely alive.

Lights came on one by one, surrounding and illuminating Guterman’s thugs; then more at a time, until Order’s henchmen realized that local fishermen brandishing knives, guns and harpoons surrounded them. They had gathered around the ambush Guterman had planned for Purdue’s party, just as Purdue had predicted. He’d told Sam to make sure Nina could be baptized without the danger of being captured again, and between Sam, Heri and Gunnar they had arranged an ambush of an ambush, should there be one.

Gradually they narrowed in closer, but the surrender of foreign devils like Guterman and his men meant nothing to the locals. They’d grown tired of their own constantly being killed for the greed of the Black Sun and its Nazi ideology. Such pursuits for their land’s secrets and beauty would end this night.

“What’s happening?” Purdue asked Sam.

“Just look away. Tonight it’s time for a different kind of whale hunt,” Sam advised him.

They both lay on their stomachs with their arms dangling down the shaft to hold Nina up as her body absorbed the miracle elements.

“It tingles,” she slurred with a dreamy smile. Her cheeks flushed, even though she was still struggling to breathe. “But it doesn’t hurt. Like a hundred fingertips tingling…”

Purdue and Sam smiled at each other, relieved that she was coherent.

“Did they kill anyone?” she asked, barely having enough breath.

Sam looked back to survey the casualties. “I think they killed the limping lady.”

“Mrs. Cotswald. She saved my life,” Nina wept for the original Vial commissioned by the Order of the Black Sun.

“It looks like she saved another one,” Sam reported.

Anna had joined her mother who was lying in Gunnar’s arms, while Johild, supported by her cousin, came to Gunnar’s side. He was crying for the limping ballerina he’d once known under the darkest of circumstances. She reached up and wiped Gunnar’s tears. “Hey, hey,” she said through bleeding lips, “now we’re even.”