In the Staffordshire farmland of England, the sun was just beginning to rim the horizon. In the early light, a group of geologists, engineers, excavators, and botanists were standing in an open field, in a semicircle around a mammoth hole that had been opened in the ground. Off to the side there was a collection of earth-digging equipment and several trucks.
In the middle of the group, leaning on a walker, was Lord Magister Dee.
They were all gazing down into the space, where below, several men were excavating the bottom of the area. The dirt was being hauled up to ground level by a bucket-and-pulley system. They had been working from the day before and through the night.
Lord Dee was clutching an area map and a photocopy of an entry made in a late 1600s journal of Dr. Robert Plot.
Then Dee heard the voice of his chief archaeologist from down in the pit. The voice came over the walkie-talkie that Dee’s personal secretary was holding up next to his ear so he could hear.
“Lord Dee, we are now clearing the floor, sir. Trying to be careful…though I must say that this is much too rushed for my liking, frankly. We are dealing with a several-hundred-year-old underground structure—a room of some kind. It could be of great historical significance. But I feel, honestly, that we are being pressed too quickly to clear it.”
“As long as I’m the one paying the bills here,” Dee yelled back into the walkie-talkie, “you will press ahead with as much speed as…you…can…can…muster.”
Then he added, “I bought this field, and I hired all of you. You work for me. Please try…try…try to…remember that.”
“I think we are getting close, sir,” his personal secretary said enthusiastically.
Dee nodded. He knew he was now very close to completing the task he had been pursuing for decades. He thought back to how he had been brought to this final, consummating chapter.
When he learned how the Vinnie Archmont case had ended, Dee bribed a courthouse official to send him a copy of the Horace Langley note. Dee steadfastly refused to believe that the note was a fake or that its message had been invented by Horace Langley, Vinnie, and Victor Cheski to fool him into buying it for millions, despite the mounting evidence they had been out to defraud him from the beginning.
After Lord Dee had reviewed the Langley note, he quickly deciphered it and gained immediate access to the records in the Ashmolean Library, where he then reviewed every journal and diary written by Dr. Robert Plot, Elias Ashmole’s curator and disciple.
In one journal entry, he found that Plot had written down a precise description of a farmer’s field for some reason. The page was intriguing because Plot had decorated the page with drawings of roses and crystals.
That was when Dee proceeded to consult an old book he had in his extensive personal library of Masonic literature.
The book was an old, massive volume entitled History of Freemasonry and Concordant Orders. It had been written in 1890 and had a thick brown-leather cover with the Freemason’s insignia embossed on the front, and it smelled of mustiness and aged paper.
Lord Dee had flipped through it until he got to the very last section of the book. Then, at page 872, he read something that took his breath away.
It was an excerpt from Dr. Plot’s History of Staffordshire, first published during the reign of King Charles II of England. And it contained the astonishing tale of a “countryman” who happened on a strange structure while digging a trench in his field. As the story went, the man broke through to a staircase that led downward a considerable depth to an underground room.
What Dee read had lit up his mind like a roman candle. Dr. Plot had said of the seventeenth-century discoverer,
Overcoming his fear and summoning his courage, noisily with his feet he descended the remainder of the stairs; the light grew brighter, until at last, at another turn, he came upon a square chamber, built on large hewn ancient stones. The pavement was flagged, the roof lofty, and in the centre of the groin, was a rose exquisitely carved in some dark stone.
But now a voice broke through into Lord Dee’s thoughts. It was the chief archaeologist.
“We’ve uncovered the floor, sir,” he said on the walkie-talkie. “It appears to be a floor made of stone. Large stones. Like huge flagstones.”
“Wonderful, wonderful!” Dee exclaimed. “Do you see anything else?”
“Say again?” the archaeologist called back.
“I said…do…you…see…anything…else?”
“Not yet…we are clearing the stone floor.”
“To the center!” Dee cried back. “Go to the very center of the room.”
“Righto.”
Several minutes went by. Dee could hear the sound of brushes sweeping dirt against stone over the walkie-talkie.
Then a voice. Then several voices, talking now very excitedly.
“Lord Dee!” the archaeologist called up. “There is something here.”
“What is it, man—speak! Tell me!”
Then a few moments went by and more sounds of sweeping and brushing.
“Lord Dee,” the man called up, “there is a design on the stone in the very middle of the room…something carved into the stonework…give me a minute…”
Several agonizing minutes went by. Then his voice again.
“Lord Dee, I have illuminated the design so I can see it clearly.”
“Tell me exactly!” Dee called back.
“It appears to be a design of a red flower or a rose, inlaid into a stone tile.”
“This is it!” Dee cried out. “Anything else?”
“Just the design in the stone.”
“Break the tile—dig under the rose design, man, do it…now…do it now!” Lord Dee cried back.
“You want me to break the tile, sir? Are you sure? This is very old…it could be a Restoration-period structure, Lord Dee.”
“Hang the Restoration, man, break the tile!” Lord Dee cried out. “And tell me what is underneath—but carefully…oh, very carefully, find what is hidden there…buried, I am sure of it…buried beneath the rose crystal design.”
There was the sound of hammering and shattering and the prying of stone out of the place where it had rested in darkness for hundreds of years.
And then a voice.
“Lord Dee.”
“Yes, man, tell all…tell it all to me, hold nothing back,” Dee was saying, almost out of breath, gasping.
“I have completely removed the stone tile with the design of the rose.”
“Yes? Yes?”
“And have revealed what is under it.”
“Tell me now, sir, now, tell me!” Dee exclaimed, clutching his hands together.
“Underneath the rose stone, sir—”
“Yes?”
“There is nothing, Lord Dee. Nothing, I am afraid, but dirt.”
J.D. Blackstone had been unaware of the Staffordshire expedition, or that at that very moment, as he drove his Maserati over to the storage unit, Lord Dee, on the other side of the ocean, was receiving the empty news that his decades-old pursuit of esoteric and secret truth had yielded only dirt and stench.
It was early evening on the East Coast. There, at the storage facility in a back alley of the Georgetown area, Blackstone leaned out of the window of his car to punch in the gate code that would give him entrance.
He drove over to the metal storage unit marked 308 and parked his car. He walked to the door and fit a small key into the lock. It had not been opened for years and he had to jiggle the key several times. Then the key turned.
I have to do this, he was thinking to himself.
So he rolled up the steel door, clicked on the flickering fluorescent light overhead, and the dusty contents of the storage unit were revealed.
He did not know exactly what he was doing there or why he felt compelled to come.
Blackstone walked among the stacked boxes, randomly opening them. One was a collection of Marilyn’s cooking books. Another contained Beth’s school papers and report cards and projects she had done for classes. And her music books.
In another box he found an album of photographs of Marilyn and Beth and himself.
In the far corner were plastic bags of their clothing, carefully packed by him after their deaths.
Here were the accumulated traces of the lives that had once been a part of his but were now gone, the only physical evidence that these people whom he had loved had once actually been, but now were no more.
It was becoming harder for Blackstone to endure as he rummaged through box after box. Until he couldn’t do it anymore. So he turned to leave.
He caught sight of the wide-brimmed hat that Marilyn used to wear when she worked in the flower garden.
He lifted it up off a box.
Something appeared from underneath the hat.
It was Marilyn’s faded blue Bible.
In one particular page she had inserted a bookmark. Blackstone opened it to that page. It had been placed at the eleventh chapter of the Gospel of John.
He closed up the Bible, and with it in his hand, turned off the light, pulled down the metal door, and locked it. He had decided to take one memento of his wife, and it would be the Bible he had seen her leave with every Sunday morning on her way to church with Beth while he stayed home, drinking coffee and reading the Sunday paper.
When Blackstone got back to his condo, he turned on the lights and checked his voice mail. There was one message. It was from Julia.
“Hey, partner,” she said brightly on the message. “So we are set for horseback riding tomorrow. Sounds great. I’ll swing by your place at nine. Can’t wait! Can’t wait to see you! Bye.”
Blackstone smiled and looked through his pile of mail quickly.
Then he took his wife’s Bible and carried it into his bedroom and plopped down on his bed with it. He flipped it open to the bookmark at John, chapter eleven. He now noticed that the page had some of Marilyn’s notes written in the margins.
The notes were next to the part where Jesus had been told that Lazarus had just died a few days before.
Marilyn had underlined, with red ink, the verse that recorded Jesus’ response: “Jesus said to her, ‘I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in Me will live even if he dies, and everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die. Do you believe this?’ ”
“How can I believe that?” Blackstone muttered out loud.
Then he noticed the writing in the margin next to that verse.
It was as if Marilyn were standing next to him, with her gentle smile, reminding him of something deceptively simple. But something said so very truly that Blackstone could not shake the feeling of it, could not hide the sense that until that moment he had been living in a dark, closed room with no windows, no light…and it was just then that a door was cracked open.
The note read, “Because forgiveness is forever, death isn’t.”
Blackstone read it again. And then again. Then he read through the chapter about the miraculous raising of Lazarus by Jesus in the presence of a crowd of witnesses in broad daylight.
Lying in bed, with his head propped by a pillow, he turned to the very beginning of the Gospel of John.
He would begin reading.
And then he would keep reading.
But before he did, he said something out loud, very quietly, but enough so he could tell it had been said. Was it a prayer, exactly? He couldn’t say, not then at least.
If this is truly true, help me find the way to believe so I can know for certain that it is true…so then I can truly believe…
Then he started at the first verse of chapter one of John. He would not stop reading until sometime very close to the end of that Gospel, the time he reached the twenty-first chapter, when his eyes began to close.
That was when Blackstone noticed his eyes growing heavy, and so he kept them shut for just a moment.
An instant after that, he was deeply, and deliciously, and soundly asleep.
And J.D. Blackstone would remain asleep, straight through the night, until the next morning, when finally he would be awakened by the sound of Julia ringing the doorbell.