A Circuitous Route

A Circuitous Route

  “Take my pieces and find the Mines,” Alex said urgently. The handle of a thief’s stiletto jutted from his back - giving him the look of a cast-aside wind-up toy as he lay dying on the drawing room floor. Excitement rose in Marc and mingled with his grief as he suddenly understood what Alex was about to reveal.

  “Where are they, Alex? Tell me for God’s sake.” A finger of guilt probed his heart at the covetous tone of the question, but Alex would forgive him that, surely. A glistening crimson stain grew steadily upon the threadbare rug and Marc fancied it as sands through an hourglass. If Alex did not reveal the location of his pieces of the map, ten years of work and unfathomable wealth would be lost forever.

  “Two of the three are there,” he said and gestured weakly toward the man who lay in the doorway with Marc’s bullet in his heart. Alex wheezed as he spoke; frothing blood oozed past the glinting tip of the blade, which protruded from his chest and straight through the buttonhole of his lapel - as if it were no more malicious than a new trend in fashion.

      Coughing violently, Alex tried to spit. But weak as he was, the viscous red liquid only dribbled pathetically down the side of his cheek. He reached a shaking hand to Marc’s coat and, with a grip that was surprising in its strength, pulled him close.

  “The third piece is in the...” Another coughing fit seized him and a freshet blood spouted from his mouth.

  Despair seized Marc and he gripped Alex’s shoulder tight, hoping that perhaps through the force of his will, he may sustain his friend a moment longer.

  The coughing and flow of blood stopped as abruptly as they had started. As Alex sluggishly rolled his eyes to meet Marc’s own, Marc noticed that his corneas were completely swallowed by heavily dilated pupils, giving him a demonic black-eyed appearance in the light of the single candle.

  “It’s in the Cog,” he said. His words were all but unintelligible as they bubbled past his life’s blood.

  “The cog?” Marc was perplexed. Could it be a riddle? Perhaps a final offering of his indecipherable British wit? “I don’t understand you Alex.”

  “It’s in the Cog,” he repeated. His eyes wandered, slightly independent of one another, as his focus waivered. Then, with what seemed to be a final and tremendous surge of will, the dying man’s eyes lined-up on Marc’s own and he spoke two final words, “Big Ben.”

  The last word trailed-off into a wheezing sigh and his expression of deep concentration slackened and was replaced by the vacant aspect of the eternally at rest.

  Marc thought of what Alex had said, perplexed by the ambiguity of his words. In the cog? Big Ben? Could Alex have hidden the precious fragment of map inside the famous clock tower at the Palace of Westminster? Alex had often boasted about the extensive engineering plans that he had contributed to the tower’s construction. Marc knew that he had discovered two pieces of the map prior to leaving Great Britain, and the castle was perpetually under guard, making it difficult for rival treasure hunters to search the fragment out.

  Turning the idea over in his mind, he realized that it made a certain sense. Alex had only three passions in life. First and ever foremost was his drive to discover the fabled Mines of King Solomon. But his intermediate hours were spent constructing model ships, and repairing clocks; work which helped him to relax by focusing his attention on minute details and complex problems of engineering.

  It would be a frightening gamble; to make the voyage across the Atlantic to search a guarded castle for a small scrap of parchment. And what did he mean, ‘in the cog’? There must be a hundred of cogs inside clock tower. The possibilities were staggering. If only Alex had told him earlier.

  But they had always kept the location of their own pieces secret from one another. The constant threat of other, more devious parties had loomed over their endeavour from the start. If, God forbid, himself or Alex should be taken and questioned, he could not reveal the whereabouts of their collection in its entirety. Half would always be safe, effectively keeping the location of the Mines a secret.

  By some strange twist of fate, Marc had found the final piece of the map this very evening in the possession of a Madam in a New Orleans brothel. She had been promised some great treasure by an aging patron, and given what she had regarded as a useless scrap instead. Marc had paid her fifty dollars for the scrap, barely containing his excitement.

He had been rushing into Alex’s drawing room to tell him the good news and reunite the two halves of their collections for the first time since the map had been ripped into six pieces and scattered around the globe. But of course, events had taken an ill turn.

    Marc stood and looked morosely at the sad figure of his partner and friend, and then moved to the murderer and would-be thief who lay cooling in the doorway. Swallowing his revulsion, he bent over the man and quickly snatched the two fragments of map from his limp hand. After a quick glance to be sure of what he held, he placed them in his breast pocket with the other three.

  A sonorous gong sounded behind him and he pivoted toward the sound, his still-warm revolver held ready in a shaking hand. But it was only one of Alex’s clocks sounding the hour of midnight.

  Marc sighed and tucked the pistol into his belt. He began to turn away...and then spun quickly back toward the clock. His heart pounded as he crossed the room to the mantle where it sat. He had not noticed the clock before now because it was partially obscured by a large wooden model of a single-sailed fat-bellied ship. As he approached it, he saw that the clock was indeed a scale model of Big Ben.

  With a vicious swing, he dashed it against the stone fireplace, shattering it to pieces. He lit a lamp from the desk, placed it on the floor and began to rummage through the mess of wood and brass - frantic at first, but then slowing his pace as excitement gave way to despair.

  There was no scrap of parchment among the debris.





  Two years passed as Marc’s resources slowly evaporated. Having sold his home and possessions, he had taken ship for Great Britain - leaving behind a small portion for the care of Alex’s house. As he lay soaked and shivering in a London alley, he bitterly lamented the useless sentiment which had caused him to decide against selling the cottage.

  He had reasoned that there was no need. He would travel to London, quickly find the fragment, and then seek the Mine. Upon his return to New Orleans, he would have rivers of wealth at his disposal; so why not keep the old house as a kind of memorial to Alex.

  But as weeks tuned into months, and months into years, so the pounds dwindled into shillings, and the shillings into pence. It had taken him two months of study to find a way into the clock tower without being noticed. He worked diligently each night thereafter; searching through the enormous racks of wheels and cogs that drove the clock’s massive hands.

  As Marc explored - wracking his brain to contrive of how a piece of paper may be hidden among the machines - the persistent clicking of the clock’s movement seemed to take on a mocking tone. He kept wads of cotton in his pockets to stop up his ears when the massive bell tolled the hour, but even so, the sound was loud enough to drive him close to madness.

  Each day as he tried to sleep, he heard the steady clicking of pendulum and cogs, as if his brain had sprouted a tumour made of machinery. The only positive matter of note was that he seemed to have incurred an impeccable sense of time.

Marc’s fruitless tenure in the clock tower came to an end on an evening in June, 1867 – two years and seven months after Alex’s murder. Working very close to some of the larger machinery, his belt became ensnared by the teeth of a large cog. The mechanism stalled an instant before he would surely have suffered a major injury to his pelvic region.

  Though he worked diligently for an hour, the belt would not come free. Both ends were caught-up, making escape all but impossible. Marc also found to his chagrin, that he was becoming drowsy in the sudden and blessed silence of the tower.

  And so, when a pair of technicians arrived to discover the reason for the clock’s malfunction, they found a snoring man who appeared to be suspended from the machine rack by his groin.

  The judge was not kind to Marc, who was laughed out of court as he raved about King Solomon’s Mines, his murdered partner, and a secret treasure map hidden inside one of Big Ben’s cogs. Vagrancy, trespassing and vandalism of Crown property was the charge and three years in prison was the sentence.

  As the judge’s gavel sounded the finality of the verdict, Marc gave up all hope of finding his fortune and settled comfortably into the depths of despair.

 

  When no less than his full sentence had been served in a hard labour complex, and his short black hair had grown long and streaked with white, Marc was finally released and summarily deported to America. 

  As he stood at the door of Alex’s small house, he was faced with the passage of time. The building was dilapidated and somehow shrunken, as if it could never have been the comfortable home in which he had enjoyed late-night games of chess or smoking sessions with a friend.

  At first the lock resisted as he turned the key, but then rotated roughly with a click. As he crossed the threshold and walked toward the drawing room, he felt intensely disappointed in himself. Nearly seven years had passed since he had left this house in search of certain fortune, only to be crippled by every obstacle in his path.

  “Seven years of bad luck,” he said to the room. He glanced at the mirror above the mantle to see if he had perchance broken it as he slammed the door on his way out, thereby bringing upon himself the requisite term of ill-fortune.

  But the mirror was intact. The model boats still sat proudly at its base, sailing away from their reflections. Marc smiled as he noticed the fat-bellied ship that had partially obstructed his view of the model clock.

  “If only you had been a tall galley,” he said to the portly vessel. “You might have covered that damned clock from my sight forever!” 

  He laughed out loud. Why would Alex have spent precious time building such a fat little ship in any case? It looked out of place next to the other models; the majestic battleship, a nimble-looking schooner, and a massive frigate.

  Marc tapped his finger against his chin, trying to recall what that simple, squat type of ship was called, but the name was just out of reach. He glanced down at the mess of wheels and gears that still littered the floor around the fireplace.

And as he looked at the gears on the floor, a terrible realization occurred to him. He looked back to the ship, its tiny, irregular sail hanging on the single mast. He knew what that type of ship was called. It was called a Cog. And as the blood drained from his face, he had an idea what he would find on the other side of its sail.

 



Word Count: 1998