Michael Gruber - The Book of Air and Shadows

A short flight on a tiny powerful Learjet, the pilot uncommunicative, efficient, moving his craft through angles eschewed by mild commercial aviators. Midflight, Rolly got through to her children, or so Crosetti imagined: she did not share but sat damp-eyed, staring out at bright whiteness. But she let him take her hand.

Landing at some Midlands airport whose name Crosetti never caught, they were met by Mr. Brown of Osborne, dressed in yellow coveralls and work boots. Mr. Brown conducted them to a white Land Rover painted with the insignia of the Severn Trent Water Board. On the motorway he explained the plan: go right in, bold as brass, find the thing, if it were there to find, drive off. Another plane waited near London to take them back to New York. Crosetti asked him if he knew what they were after.

“Not me,” said Brown, “no need to know, I’m just the help. There’s a rental van behind us with all the equipment and a couple of lads to run it, ground-penetrating radar, resistivity gear, the lot. If there’s a well there they’ll find it. We’ll all do the digging, I expect.”

“This is pretty expensive, all this,” Crosetti observed.

“Oh, yes. Money no object.”

“And you’re not curious?”

“If I was the curious type, sir, I’d be long dead,” said Brown. “That’ll be Warwick up ahead. We’ll be able to see the castle in a bit.”

It rose white above a line of trees, hung there for a while, and then vanished when the road dipped, like a vision in a fairy story. After some driving through anonymous suburbs it appeared again on their left, huge, looming over the river.

“Not like Disneyland, is it?”

“No, that’s the real thing,” said Brown, “although Tussaud’s have tarted it up like mad. Still, there’s real blood soaked into the stones. A horrible time, of course, when that was the last word in military technology, but still…”

“You would’ve liked to live back then?”

“On occasion. A simpler time: someone got on your nerves, say, you put on your tin suit and chopped away at ’em. Half a sec, I think we’re just on our mark.” He pulled over to the side of the narrow road they were on and consulted a large-scale ordinance survey map, then folded it and turned the Land Rover into the ditch on the right and down a track through a grove of oak and beech.

“There’s gear for you in the van,” he said as he got out. “It’s important to look authentic and official.”

Crosetti and Rolly went to the rear door of the van, which opened to reveal an interior that included a steel table, tool racks, long steel pipes, ladders, rigging gear, electronic equipment, and two men, who introduced themselves as Nigel and Rob, Nigel owlish and bespectacled, Rob broad-shouldered and gap-toothed with a tan buzz cut. They handed out yellow coveralls and boots and yellow hard hats with lamps in them. Crosetti was not surprised to find that the boots and the coveralls fit him perfectly. Carolyn reported that hers did too.

“Osborne seems like a very efficient outfit. Does it make you nervous to learn that they have both our shoe sizes?”

“Nothing surprises me anymore,” she said. “What are they doing?”

“I have no idea,” said Crosetti.

They watched the two men roll a four-wheeled cart made of steel pipe out of the van, and Crosetti was conscripted into off-loading various pieces of heavy electronics and car batteries from the van and lifting them onto the cart.

“By the way, what is all this?” he asked Rob.

“It’s a ground-penetrating radar set, absolutely top drawer. It produces a picture of the subsurface from a few feet to a hundred feet down, depending on the soil. We should get good penetration here. It’s Triassic sandstone.”

Nigel said, “Unless there’s a clay intrusion.”

“What if there’s a clay intrusion?” asked Crosetti.

“Then we’re fucked, mate,” Rob answered. “We’ll have to go to resistivity, and we’ll be all week.”

“You both work for Osborne?”

“Not us,” said Nigel. “University of Hull geology. We’ve been corrupted by corporate gold, haven’t we, Robbie?”

“Utterly. What’re you lot after anyway? A Viking hoard?”

“Something like that,” said Crosetti. “We’ll have to kill you if we find it though.” They both laughed, but nervously, and both looked around for Brown, who seemed to have wandered off.

Rolly was poking at the ground some distance away and Crosetti walked over to see what she was doing.

“You don’t have to claw at the earth with your fingers,” he said. “We have all this high-tech equipment.”

“Look what I found,” she said and held out her hand. In it was a flat, roughly triangular white stone upon which had been incised a perfectly straight double line and below it what appeared to be the petal of a rose.

“It’s the priory,” she said. “This is the place. I’m getting chills.”

“So am I. You look terrific in coveralls and a hard hat. Would you whistle at me as I walk by?”

One of her stern looks followed this sally, and then Nigel and Rob called him over to help draw the cart. They heaved the thing through the wood, over ruts and roots, with Nigel leading the way, staring at a Global Positioning Receiver and Rolly trailing behind carrying several picks and spades across her shoulders.

“Let’s stop here and light up the radar, people. If that satellite view we had from you is correct, Mr. GPR says this is the place.” They were in a shallow dip of land thickly littered with golden beech leaves between three old gray trees, whose reaching limbs crisscrossed against the milky sky above. Nigel made some adjustments and switched on his set. It hummed, and a broad paper tape emerged from a slit in one of the metal boxes. Nigel shoved his glasses back up his nose and studied the colors printed on the paper. He hooted and cried out, “Well, I’ll be blowed. Got it in one. There’s the void and it’s full of what looks like chunks of cut stone. Clear as a bell. Take a look, Robbie.”

Rob did and confirmed the find. They cleared away the leaves and surface soil and began to dig, and before too long had uncovered the remains of what looked like the coping stones of a well, in the center of which was a mass of irregular pale stones.

“It’s dry,” said Crosetti.

“Well, yes,” said Rob, “the hydrology’s changed a good deal in the last four hundred years, what with digging canals and ornamental ponds for the gentry and public water schemes. Still, bit of a job, here,” he said, frowning down at the opening. “Some bastards have stuffed the thing with rocks. How deep did you need to go?”

Crosetti said, “Something like eight meters.”

“Oh fuck,” cried Rob. “We’ll be all fucking day.”

It was nasty, heavy work of the type that all their ancestors had done every day of their lives in the not too distant past, the movement by human hands of massy bits of the planet’s fabric from one place to another. Only one person could fit down in the hole at a time, and this man had either to lift a rock onto a canvas sling attached to chains that led to the steel pipe tripod and pulley that the two geologists had rigged above, or else, if the stone were too heavy to lift, he had to drill a hole, anchor an eyebolt into it, and secure it to a hook. An hour into the work it started to rain, a steady chilling drench from the greasy low clouds, just enough to cause slips and frequent painful injuries and the dull stupidity that comes from cold. Crosetti’s mind went dim as he worked. He forget Shakespeare and his fucking play. The world shrank to the problem of the next stone. Each of the three men worked half an hour and then clambered up an aluminum ladder to collapse exhausted on the bed of the van. Rolly had found a Primus stove and kept the kettle going and fed them all pints of thick, sweet tea. When she wasn’t doing that she stood at the head of the well with a steel tape measure and dropped it down after each layer of stone had been raised and called out the depth: five meters, twenty: six and eighteen; and made jokes and encouraging cheerful noises and laughed at the snarls and curses she got in return.