Chapter Three
The Shadow Beckons
We made our way up the coast to Baltimore. It was evening by the time the ship was all squared away in the bustling harbor of the Chesapeake Bay. I headed for shore alone in the dinghy. When I had left I had seen Christina at the railing staring at the wharf in the distance like she was contemplating swimming for it.
Poor girl had been nothing but seasick ever since we had left Charleston. I had almost debated about taking her along with me to shore and giving her some cash so she could make her own way home, but it wasn’t my place to do that.
Tough love was one thing, but I hoped that the girl’s mother reconsidered the next time about the wisdom of abandoning her child to the mercy of the sea. That was if there would be a next time.
I tied the dinghy off and slung the heavy pack over my shoulder as I stepped up onto the dock. A feeling of foreboding significance haunted my steps, as I made my way up the boardwalk to hail a taxi at a nearby street.
It took a while to escape the congestion of the city to make our way into the more posh suburban neighborhoods at its periphery. The taxi stopped outside of a Georgian style house at the end of a cul-de-sac in one such posh neighborhood.
I gave the taxi driver enough money to wait and got out with the bag in tow. The evening was a noisy one with the sound of cicadas and other insects filling the evening breeze with their cacophony of sound.
I made my way up the paver driveway and then up the walkway that led to the pretentious looking pillared entrance of the house. I knocked heavily on the door and waited. After a moment the door opened to reveal my former brother-in-law, Matthew Reese.
He gazed at me in shock for a moment before pushing the glasses back on the bridge of his nose as he recovered from his shock somewhat. In a dazed tone he asked, “What’s it been Eli, three, four years now?”
“Six.” I said.
I’d never particularly had an invested relationship with Laura’s brother, but he was good at what he did, which was anything to do with the field of archaeology.
He stepped back and held the door open wider and I stepped in. I’d been here once before and while the exterior was the same the interior of the house surprisingly wasn’t.
I glanced around surprised at the bare rooms empty of furniture and embellishment. The house appeared as if its contents had already been moved elsewhere. I hadn’t pictured Matt as the moving kind.
I glanced questioningly at him and he shrugged, “I lost my job at the University two years ago and I couldn’t find another one. Cindy left me six months ago and with the divorce now final I have to sell the house.”
I looked around again at what had once been a home in better times.
“I’m sorry to see it come to this between you and Cindy.” I said with genuine regret.
He nodded and looked choked up for a moment before he looked away. He looked back to me with a mask firmly in place and with a hint of curiosity pervading his voice he asked, “So what’s in the bag?”
I looked around for a table and he gestured into another room that was dark. I stepped toward it, but stopped dead, as he flipped the light switch on and revealed the big oaken dining room table that the room held within its confines.
The one time I’d been here before had been for a Thanksgiving dinner. I’d had my family with me then.
“I’m sorry Eli! I wasn’t thinking! I’ve got a table in another room we can use.” Matt said apologizing all over himself.
I broke free of my trance and headed to the big table, which I unloaded my bag onto, as I concentrated on getting my emotions firmly in check.
“This is for your eyes only Matt. I’m trusting you to keep what you see in the strictest of confidences.” I said firmly.
He nodded eagerly, as he pressed closer to the table.
I started to take out the five petal pieces followed by the central crystal piece, which I sat down in the middle of the petals already arranged on the table.
“It’s the….”
“Orlanis Star!” Matt said finishing for me in a daze, as he stared down at the artifacts on the table.
He shook his head back and forth, “It’s not at all what I expected!”
“Me neither. I found them with this note from Captain Rogers in the attic of a house he once stayed in.” I said, as I handed the note over to Matt and watched his eyes go big as he read.
He reread it through several times before glancing up at me, “My friend I fear you’ve traded one treasure quest for another.”
I sighed bitterly at the confirmation of my thoughts.
Matt shook his head at me smiling wryly, “I swear you must be the one man on God’s green Earth that would react just so to finding out that your Civil War treasure hunt just became one of a far grander scale.”
“So just to confirm you think that this could be a clue as to the whereabouts of Atlantis?” I asked hanging on to my last hope for simplicity, but he nodded in confirmation dashing all of my hopes of the simple treasure salvage operation I had envisioned.
Matt talked then as if to himself, “I wondered how that ship could come out of nowhere like that after twenty some years had gone by. There must be a gateway and this is the key.”
“Key?” I asked, as I remembered what was said in the note about a key in the most gloomiest of overtones.
“Yup.” Matt responded abstractly, as he picked up a petal of the star.
“What kind of a key and a gateway to where?” I asked growing more perturbed by the moment.
“Couldn’t say, but that ship was somewhere for twenty years.”
I glanced at the note laying on the table before asking, “What do you know about Atlantis?”
Matt glanced at me and then at the note, “I know many things, but separating fact from myth and legend is what’s difficult. However I would say this note, if it’s to be believed, is rather full of clues. Did you catch this line here?” He asked pointing to the line I had looked up.
“Yes I did. It’s part of a verse in Isaiah.”
“And what did the word ‘dead’ translate across as?” Matt asked knowingly.
“Rephaim.”
He nodded having already known the answer.
“It would seem of all the available myths of Atlantis and for that matter Lemuria that the one that rings with the most truth is the darkest of all. A story that is a far cry from the romanticized version in the imaginations of those who came after. If we wish to go down the mythical road to Atlantis from the route that this note suggests than the legend would go like this. The legend as a whole takes and is understood from a Christian bibliographical understanding. Constantine was the first Roman Emperor to convert to Christianity. He soon thereafter made Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire. Now up to that point there were many cannons of Holy Scripture, which were taken to be inspired by God. Now Constantine took issue with one of the books and declared it to be not of Divine inspiration. That book was the Book of Enoch. His reasoning for his decision was because he thought the heavy mention of angelic influence and behavior found within the Books of Enoch were too hard to understand and presented a picture of the origin of strife and contention before the great flood that was not true. Many early church fathers insisted he was in error to remove the Books of Enoch from the canon of Holy Scripture contained within the Bible. Some churches still have it in their Bibles, namely, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Many of the oldest surviving manuscripts are written in an early Ethiopian area language. Anyway compared against the body of Holy Scripture, the Book of Enoch, seems to have no contradictions with what is viewed as Divinely inspired, but what it does do is go into the detail of the state of the world before the Genesis flood and why things had gotten so bad that God was moved to destroy His creation. It contends that it wasn’t just commonplace wickedness that led to man’s downfall and straying from God, but rather fallen angels were of primary blame. At several points in the Bible it is clearly copied down of the transgression of some of the heavenly angels having intimate relations with the daughters of men and creating an offspring referred to as the Nephilim. The Nephilim were the giants of old and it was with them, along with the fallen angels that helped corrupt both man and man’s pure bloodline to the point that God even repented that he had made man. It wasn’t just man that the fallen angels corrupted, but all of creation including the animals and the plants. Now the Book of Enoch goes into the actual names of the angels involved in this lustful falling away. Not only according to Enoch did these angels commit the sin of lusting after human women, but they gave secret knowledge to humanity that God had not intended for them to have. So you can see according to this extra Biblical view into the past how such a civilization such as Atlantis could’ve happened. If you go into the more secular tale of Atlantis and examine it through a Biblical lens some compelling clues are revealed as to who the Atlantean’s were. Now according to the Greek mythology, in Plato’s story of it, long ago there was a large island continent, which the god Poseidon came down to. It’s helpful to remember that from a Biblical perspective that all the false gods of the ancient world were personified after either fallen angels or demons, with the latter being the spirits of the offspring of the fallen angels and human women known as the Nephilim. This Poseidon of Greek lore, who is linked to one of the angels who lusted after the daughters of men, saw the daughter of Cletus a human woman and married her. She bore him ten sets of twins, which ruled as king’s over both Atlantis and surrounding satellite kingdoms. All of her sons were giants according to Plato’s account. Atlantis then was a place of giants. They were fed information in the form of an angelic being, who set himself up to be worshiped as a god. The Holy Scripture clearly points to the giants as a race of beings at sharp enmity with the race of mankind. They even fed upon mankind, which lines up with what we know of Atlantis being a nation always at war with the ancient world around them. The demise of Atlantis and all of its great knowledge is telling. According to Plato, Atlantis is defeated in battle by the Athenians, who will one day become the models of gods like Zeus and Hercules. Through some corresponding unfortunate weather patterns Atlantis is flooded and lost forever beneath the waves. Now Biblically speaking, throw out the Athenian part of the story, because that’s just more preening being done on the part of demons in the guise of false gods and focus in on the one truth of the story, which is Atlantis sunk beneath the waves. What they’re not telling you is that everything else was also sinking beneath the waves during the Genesis flood. Now extensive research has been done today to find the remnants of both the island continents of Atlantis and Lemuria, without any luck. Hence why one might need a key to unlock a gateway or channel.”
I held my hands up, “Whoa Matt! Everything you’ve said up to now is at least somewhat believable given a little faith, but do you seriously intend to try to convince me that this device is the key to getting to other worlds?” I asked skeptically.
“Not at all.” Matt replied before tapping his foot on the ground symbolically.
I glanced down and then it clicked in my thinking. He couldn’t be serious?
“Oh but I am. Jules Vern got quite a few things right after all. Something else that you should consider is that there is a lot of Biblical evidence to suggest that there is a body of water at the Earth’s core or near it anyway. Many times it is mentioned of the water beneath the Earth being separate from the water bodies above. In one of the verses in Psalms it actually mentions that God laid the foundations of the land on water and then of course there’s the Genesis flood where the fountains of the deep are broken up and extra water came from somewhere below.”
I stared at Matt in shock. I had never imagined anything like this even being remotely possible.
“So you think that the actual landmass of the island that Atlantis was on could’ve sunk down to this inner body of water at the Earth’s core?”
“I think it’s a plausible theory to explain why we don’t find any evidence today of the landmass existing where Atlantis was supposed to have. We know from fables that Atlantis had a volcano and that they supposedly tapped into the thermal energy to run some of their advanced technology. To have had a volcano Atlantis would’ve had to of been located on a hotspot. Today we have the Atlantic tectonic coastal ridge, which is the site of where Atlantis was reported to have been. It’s possible that the oceanic plates opened up briefly and Atlantis’s island continent sank through into the void below. The same could’ve happened to Lemuria in the Pacific and to other landmasses. One thing is for sure, we have a Captain Rogers who turns up with the Mary Belle twenty years after the voyage of the treasure fleet. Where was he and the ship for over twenty years and why would he leave a note that has a symbolic tie in with Atlantis? It’s clear that this device is not of Southern Confederate manufacture, but much older. The scrollwork here on the petals is reminiscent of the earliest Babylonian writings and design patterning. No, I’d say you have a very believable working hypothesis and it would seem that you even have the key to unlock the truth whether the mystery of Atlantis is fact or fiction once and for all. In either case count me in for the expedition. When do we start?” Matt finished on a resolute note.
This was getting completely out of hand! First it had been the girl and now my estranged brother-in-law that I hadn’t seen in six years.
I started to voice my objections, but Matt held up a hand forestalling me, “Think about it, if the objective is to find Atlantis then it would be very helpful to have someone like me along with you to help interpret any clues or puzzles that there might be, which are rooted in antiquities’ past. I could be very useful if…….”
“Matt my goal is not to find Atlantis! I don’t want anything to do with the nightmare hassle of what something like discovering Atlantis or a whole new realm of the Earth would bring me!” I said in hot anger, as I felt myself being closed in on by a box of someone else’s fabrication.
“Be that as it may dear brother-in-law the fact stands that the Southern treasure fleet you are in search of in order to continue eating and living a perpetual life at sea is likely to be found with Atlantis. Find Atlantis and you will find your treasure fleet.”
“Now how can you claim to know that?” I exclaimed in exasperation.
Matt looked at the pieces on the table contemplatively, “As you know I am a lover of history and this is not the first time you’ve brought up this treasure scheme to find sunken Confederate treasure. It’s been an idea that you’ve batted around for a long time. Do you recall what I told you the first time eight years ago?” Matt asked leadingly.
“You said my theory of the fleet being an actual reality was faulty, because under no circumstances or amount of bribe money were the British going to join in on the side of the South and even if they had whatever help they could have provided would’ve been too little and too late to do any good.”
I said remembering Matt’s putdown of my theory quite well.
“I continue to hold firm to that opinion of mine as well.” Matt affirmed.
“Then where was such a fleet headed for?” I asked.
“Why to Atlantis of course.” Matt said matter-of-factly.
I blinked.
That idea had never occurred to me and Matt now built on the seed he had just planted, “The South in late 1864 knew they had no chance of winning the war even with British aid. They only fought on into 1865 for pride’s sake. Something else that stood out to me about this mythical fleet was that the few dock manifests that are available suggest a very different cargo than that of a fleet intended as a treasure convoy. There were a lot of passengers. Entire families of high class southern plantation owners, but they only made up roughly half of the human cargo. The rest were slaves. Now why would they take slaves that would only be set free by the British authorities upon their arrival in Great Britain? They weren’t all house slaves either. They were field slaves. I think they knew the significance of the Orlanis Star and where it would lead them. The island of Atlantis for them represented a chance to escape from the threat of losing the life style of wealthy plantation owners that was ingrained in them from birth. On the island of Atlantis they would be able to set up a new plantation empire untouchable by the Yankees. Perhaps even find the technological ability to return and win the war for the South. I think it’s a plausible occurrence given what evidence we do have that the intention of the fleet was never to reach England, but rather the island of Atlantis.”
I stared at the pieces on the table thinking it all over for a long moment.
“Do you think they could still be there living out their utopia like setting?” I asked wonderingly.
Matt shrugged, “I suppose it’s a possibility, but I’d say from the nature of this message that something ill willed befell them and then there is the matter of Captain Rogers escaping this island realm with the key to finding it in tow. He never made it public that he had a key to such a realm, which makes me think that he wouldn’t have brought the key back with him if there hadn’t been a good reason to remove it from the land below.”
There was silence for a while, which Matt broke, “You know Eli, if they really are still there living their plantation dreams out there will be no treasure for you to salvage and you will be seen as no better than a slave.”
Now there was a sobering thought.
“It wouldn’t be the first time in my family I suppose.” I commented reflectively.
“I suppose not. Which side of your family traces its roots back to slavery in the South?” Matt asked inquiringly.
“My mother’s side.” I said not really caring about the past.
I glanced up from the pieces of the Orlanis Star to Matt and was very honest for a moment, “My boat is paid out for three more months. I have only enough money to pay my crew for one month and I don’t have any available salvage jobs other than this treasure quest. If I don’t make some dough I’m done for and since Laura and the kids………” I looked away as emotion rose up to choke me.
Matt reached out and squeezed my shoulder. I looked back to him feeling ashamed of the tear sliding down my cheek, but Matt’s eyes were equally watery.
“Look around you Eli. I’m at the end of my rope too. There’s nothing left here for me, but empty memories. This expedition on my part would be a source of excitement to help me forget all this and for you it would be the ability to keep your free roaming love affair with the sea. Both of our needs can be answered by taking this plunge into the unknown. I say we go for it and live life a little on the wild side and maybe we’ll both forget for a little while what once was.”
I nodded and he patted me on the shoulder before saying, “Let me get my toothbrush.”
He wandered off into the barren house and I proceeded to pack up the pieces of the device, while I waited for his return.
Matt was back in five minutes and together we headed for the door. I opened it and waited as I watched Matt write out a brief one sentence note.
I read what he had written as he let the page of computer paper flutter down to the tiled entryway. “You can have it all Cindy, since that’s what’s most important to you.”
I glanced from the page on the floor to Matt, “I’m not planning this expedition as a suicide run Matt.”
He grinned big and slapped me on the back as hard as his academic styled frame could muster, which wasn’t very convincing and said, “Just how do you define suicide Eli? We’re about to embark on an ocean voyage using a navigation tool that’s probably cursed and of demonic origin to find a path through the sea and Earth itself to invade a hidden realm within the core of the Earth where I’ll likely be lined up and shot as a Yankee sympathizer, while your chained to a plow and given a taste of the whip each day along with your morning gruel.”
I shook my head, “You make it sound so homey. Why don’t we just shoot ourselves and be done with it?”
Matt chuckled, “Cheer up my friend! Instead of those grim fates I just mentioned maybe we’ll go a long way to satisfying a giant Atlantean’s appetite.”
“Are you sure you’re not leaving your depression medicine behind or something?” I said only half jokingly.
“No my friend, if everything goes well you’ll find enough gold to buy a bigger boat and outfit it to the nines as they say and stay at sea for life. Meanwhile I’ll finance my own Biblical archaeology digs and live at home in ancient dirt.” Matt rejoined.
“Now that sounds like a plan!” I said, as I held the door of the taxi open.
Matt stopped, “Thanks for letting me come Eli.”
I smiled ruefully, “Did I have much of a choice about it?”
Matt grinned and got into the taxi and I piled in after him feeling excited about something for the first time in a long time. It was hard to say whatever we would find, but it promised to be an adventure of some kind.
Matt went ahead of me up the ladder and I quickly followed. Reaching the top of the ladder I was greeted by Serena, “Ready to cast off Captain?”
“Hold off for a moment. I need to speak with you in private.”
She looked surprised, but followed me over to a secluded part of the deck. I stopped and turned to her, “Serena we’re about to embark on an expedition that will be very dangerous from which we might never return.”
Serena’s face split into a smile, “That’s every day with you Captain.”
“No Serena. This trip is much more off the beaten path than all our other excursions around the globe I assure you.”
Her smile went away, as she sobered up to the seriousness of what I was saying.
“Serena I think it would be best if Christina went home. I’ll pay her way there that’s no problem, but this trip is far too dangerous to take a young girl like her on.”
A spot of moisture came out of Serena’s eye to wet her eyelashes as she bit her lip.
“What is it Serena?”
Her voice rough with emotion Serena said, “I don’t have anything to send her back to. Two weeks ago my sister got diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic cancer that’s already spread everywhere. The doctors only gave her six weeks to live. She asked me to look after Christina. I’m all she has!”
I looked out at the quiet harbor for a long moment before responding, “Well I guess she stays then.”
“Thank you Captain!” Serena said giving me a brief hug and a kiss on the cheek before she hurried off.
I stared moodily out at the dark water. May God forgive me if something happened to Christina on this expedition, because I’d never forgive myself for putting her in harm’s way!