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Authors: Eliot Pattison
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extracted a key wrapped
in a scrap of leather.
He
walked with a lantern along the cliff face behind the cottage,
probing the vegetation hanging on the rock with his hands for nearly
a quarter hour before finding the one place where the surface
underneath was not natural ledge stone but mortared rocks. He and
Jonah had erected the wall years earlier to obscure the opening,
leaving only room for a man to slip sideways into the narrow passage.
Hadrian raised the lantern over the small but heavy-timbered door
with the iron lock plate, which Jonah had helped his father erect
fifty years earlier. Jonah's father, owner of an engineering firm,
had insisted the cavern chamber was necessary to preserve his wine
collection. When the wine had been depleted at the first Carthage
Thanksgiving, Jonah had decided to use the chamber for something
else. A brittle, dusty paper with a carefully rendered skull and
crossbones was tacked to the door, over a hand-lettered sign that
warned toxic
contagion: entry will result in fatal exposure.
Only
the older among the colony's inhabitants would remember the great
debate about the bodies of the wretched souls who'd stumbled into the
fledgling settlement dying of typhus. Sure of his own immunity, Jonah
had insisted on singlehandedly sealing the tightly wrapped bodies
inside the little crypt, taking the corpses away over the ridge in a
handcart at night.
Now
Hadrian nervously held his lantern close to the door. The dust of the
years coated the wood, but the lock plate was clean. Clenching his
jaw, he inserted and twisted the key. The door swung open with a
groan. With a hesitant step he entered the vault, lifting the lantern
to survey the chamber, then stepped inside and shut the door behind
him.
Knowledge
is the contagion that all tyrants fear. At
least one of the old man's jokes had outlived him. Here was no crypt,
but rather a secret vault of knowledge protected by the myth of
contagion. As he began lighting the candles scattered around the
room, Hadrian remembered once encountering Jonah bringing a dinghy to
shore late one night. No one would have questioned Jonah about the
bodies at the time, but Hadrian realized now they had been given a
watery grave.
Above
a table made of planks and crates and lining the adjacent wall were
shelves of books, scores of books, many of them banned by the
government. On the table, beside a magnifying glass, were more
volumes, of medicine, pharmacology, and chemistry. Jonah must have
collected them in the early years, secreting them when the censorship
campaigns had resulted in thousands of books being sent for
recycling. With an unexpected rush of emotion he sat on the stool at
the table and found himself facing a plank hanging on the wall
inscribed in Jonah's careful hand, do
not go gentle into that good night, it said, old
age should burn and rave at close of day. rage, rage against the
dying of the light. The plank was at eye level for a reason. Jonah
wanted to see those words of Dylan Thomas's every time he sat at the
table.
Hadrian
pulled his own meager hoard of words from his shirt, laying the
precious book pages he carried before him, then extracted the
sword-knife from his belt. As he set it to the side, he noticed a
small stand beside the table covered with a tattered square of linen.
Holding his breath he lifted the cloth.
His
heart leapt as he lifted the book from the stand. Jonah had tooled
the thick leather cover of his secret journal with images of oak and
maple leaves. The title, inscribed in elegant calligraphy on the
first page, was simply Chronicle
of the New World. Nearly
three inches thick, the book was bound with strands of leather tied
at the back so that adding a page simply required untying it and
removing the back cover. He turned to the one most recently added.
Like the others, it had a date penciled on the back, in the bottom
corner. It was from the week before. He read the first paragraph and
smiled. It was not about secrets of state,
in a scrap of leather.
He
walked with a lantern along the cliff face behind the cottage,
probing the vegetation hanging on the rock with his hands for nearly
a quarter hour before finding the one place where the surface
underneath was not natural ledge stone but mortared rocks. He and
Jonah had erected the wall years earlier to obscure the opening,
leaving only room for a man to slip sideways into the narrow passage.
Hadrian raised the lantern over the small but heavy-timbered door
with the iron lock plate, which Jonah had helped his father erect
fifty years earlier. Jonah's father, owner of an engineering firm,
had insisted the cavern chamber was necessary to preserve his wine
collection. When the wine had been depleted at the first Carthage
Thanksgiving, Jonah had decided to use the chamber for something
else. A brittle, dusty paper with a carefully rendered skull and
crossbones was tacked to the door, over a hand-lettered sign that
warned toxic
contagion: entry will result in fatal exposure.
Only
the older among the colony's inhabitants would remember the great
debate about the bodies of the wretched souls who'd stumbled into the
fledgling settlement dying of typhus. Sure of his own immunity, Jonah
had insisted on singlehandedly sealing the tightly wrapped bodies
inside the little crypt, taking the corpses away over the ridge in a
handcart at night.
Now
Hadrian nervously held his lantern close to the door. The dust of the
years coated the wood, but the lock plate was clean. Clenching his
jaw, he inserted and twisted the key. The door swung open with a
groan. With a hesitant step he entered the vault, lifting the lantern
to survey the chamber, then stepped inside and shut the door behind
him.
Knowledge
is the contagion that all tyrants fear. At
least one of the old man's jokes had outlived him. Here was no crypt,
but rather a secret vault of knowledge protected by the myth of
contagion. As he began lighting the candles scattered around the
room, Hadrian remembered once encountering Jonah bringing a dinghy to
shore late one night. No one would have questioned Jonah about the
bodies at the time, but Hadrian realized now they had been given a
watery grave.
Above
a table made of planks and crates and lining the adjacent wall were
shelves of books, scores of books, many of them banned by the
government. On the table, beside a magnifying glass, were more
volumes, of medicine, pharmacology, and chemistry. Jonah must have
collected them in the early years, secreting them when the censorship
campaigns had resulted in thousands of books being sent for
recycling. With an unexpected rush of emotion he sat on the stool at
the table and found himself facing a plank hanging on the wall
inscribed in Jonah's careful hand, do
not go gentle into that good night, it said, old
age should burn and rave at close of day. rage, rage against the
dying of the light. The plank was at eye level for a reason. Jonah
wanted to see those words of Dylan Thomas's every time he sat at the
table.
Hadrian
pulled his own meager hoard of words from his shirt, laying the
precious book pages he carried before him, then extracted the
sword-knife from his belt. As he set it to the side, he noticed a
small stand beside the table covered with a tattered square of linen.
Holding his breath he lifted the cloth.
His
heart leapt as he lifted the book from the stand. Jonah had tooled
the thick leather cover of his secret journal with images of oak and
maple leaves. The title, inscribed in elegant calligraphy on the
first page, was simply Chronicle
of the New World. Nearly
three inches thick, the book was bound with strands of leather tied
at the back so that adding a page simply required untying it and
removing the back cover. He turned to the one most recently added.
Like the others, it had a date penciled on the back, in the bottom
corner. It was from the week before. He read the first paragraph and
smiled. It was not about secrets of state,
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