Amber

Chapter 18

A spacious chamber awaited them through the new door. Once again, though, no artifacts were present. Leopov frowned as she surveyed the new surroundings, lit only by half a dozen flashlights. “It’s the perfect size for the amber chamber. It could definitely have been brought here and put together.”

Bones threw his hands up. “What if somebody just made all these combination lock doors to throw us off the trail, and we’re just going to keep finding empty room after empty room?”

Professor spoke in a calming voice. “This might have been the final stopping point for the Amber Room before someone or several someones found it later and carried it away.”

The team had a glum air about them as they looked about the room. It was a daunting task, locating such an old treasure, and not knowing whether the clues they had come across were genuine, or were in fact deliberate attempts to mislead was frustrating. Maddock paced slowly along the left-hand wall of the chamber, combing every inch of it with his torch beam. He swept away a nest of cobwebs, and then brushed off some dust beneath those.

“Everybody look at this.”

The team huddled around him while he carefully wiped away more dirt from a spot on the cave wall. It was difficult to see, but under careful scrutiny the smooth wooden planks were unmistakable.

“A wall?”

“A door?”

The group speculated on what the thing Maddock had uncovered might be, but after a minute Bones stepped up and started clearing away even more cobwebs and dirt, and Willis soon followed. “I see crossbars,” Bones said after a couple of minutes.

“Looks like a door, all boarded up,” Willis confirmed. In fact, it was clear now that the original board Maddock had uncovered was in fact in front of a recessed space where a true door was fitted. Bones and Willis kicked in the boards and tore them out of the way. A simple wooden door lay behind it, with an iron handle. Bones tried it but it was locked.

“Allow me.” Willis took a step back, raised a leg and then kicked in the door, which stove to around the lock. Bones shone a flashlight through and, detecting no immediate threats, reached a hand in and unlocked it. He shoved the door open and swept his beam in front of him.

“Clear.” He stepped into the room, then adding, “But not empty!”

Excitedly, the rest of the team entered the new chamber and quickly saw that Bones was right. This room contained numerous cots, along with many human skeletons.

“The cots are very old,” Wagner noted, kneeling next to one and scrutinizing its construction. “German military.”

Leopov examined some of the clothing that was still intact on the piles of bones and skeletons. “This is odd, but some of these uniforms are Russian, as well as German.”

The team fanned out around the room, scouring it for anything else that might be of interest. Maddock called out from his position on the far wall. “Got another room here. Smaller one. I’m going in.”

He stepped into the adjacent space and bathed it with the light from his torch. A single bed. A tiny desk. And a skeleton with its armed wrapped around an object. Maddock got closer, eyeballed it, and saw a gleam of amber-colored light.

“Mr. Wagner, Professor! Check this out!”

The rest of the team filed into the small room, but it was only large enough to allow Professor and Wagner up close to the item Maddock had found. Wagner hunched down next to it and asked Maddock to move his hands away. “Just let me get a clear look!”

He leaned in closer for just that and then the group heard him gasp with excitement. Wagner left the object in place with the skeleton but looked up. “It’s the amber clock!”

Then, with great care, Wagner extracted the item from the bony grasp in which it had been held for what looked like many decades. He held it up for the group to see with all the relish of a hockey player showing off the Stanley Cup. A small sculpture of a clock tower flanked by twin vases, the amber and gold inlay positively radiating under multiple flashlight beams in the dark chamber.

“The amber clock! This was most definitely part of the Amber Room,” Wagner exalted. “It’s proof the room was here! This piece, for some reason or another, was left behind.”

Maddock glanced quickly around the chamber. “It’s a small room, probably private since it only had one cot. Maybe a private quarters for a senior officer… ” Maddock trailed off and Leopov took up where left off.

“When the Germans came to take the amber panels away, this man — I assume he was a man- must have hidden this piece for some reason. Perhaps simply for the monetary value, or perhaps more? If the panels were being crated out there… ” She jerked a thumb at the larger cavern. “…then it might make sense that he would try to abscond with a small piece of it into his private quarters. Especially if he was an officer of some type, he could have gotten away with it unnoticed.”

“There’s something else here!” Maddock was rooting around the skeleton where the clock was. He dug around beneath the bones some more and came up holding a crumbling leather book of some type.

“Let me take a look.” Maddock handed the book to Professor, who gingerly opened its cover. Leopov shined her flashlight on the book while Wagner continued to fawn over the clock. Professor concentrated as he read the pages, which were handwritten in ink.

“It’s a journal, written in German.” He leafed through it quickly. Most of the pages contained entries of dense longhand, but there were a few illustrations as well. He stopped on a page with an artistic pencil drawing of a wolf, a large one, judging by the simple line drawing of a human male standing next to it, given for scale rather than to be part of a scene. The man’s head was even with the chest of the canine. The beast was fitted with a studded collar decorated with a swastika. Professor raised an eyebrow and then skipped to the last page, filled with more scrawled German. “We’ll probably want Mr. Wagner to translate this to be thorough, but I think I know enough to get the gist of it… ”

He read some more while tracing a finger just over the lines he concentrated on. “The last entry says something to the effect of, ‘we’ve been taken ill, infected by the devil’s amber, quarantined and left to die. To escape the sickness, the amber panels will be reassembled in a new location. I have seen the light and it has shown me the curse that the eagle holds. It must be destroyed. Not even the waters of Golden Lake can wash it clean.’”

Professor looked up from the book. “That’s where it ends.”

Leopov sighed. “I was afraid of this.”

“Afraid of what?” Wagner finally looked up from the amber clock. “The curse?”

Leopov shook her head. “No. Not the curse. Something I consider to be much worse than the curse if happens to be true, although, it is deemed to be very farfetched. It may be connected to the curse, though.”

“Do tell.” Wagner carried the clock away from the skeleton which had gripped it for so many years. Maddock and Professor walked around the rest of the small room, making sure they weren’t overlooking anything else. Willis and Bones examined the area around the long-dead military officer to see if they could find additional items near where the clock was found while Leopov spoke.

“I have heard a rumor that there might be an ancient pathogen of some sort — a disease-carrying agent — imbued in some of the amber that makes up the panels of the room.” She paused a moment to let this sink in before continuing. “Over time, as the amber deteriorated, people were exposed and some grew sick, giving rise to the rumor of the Amber room curse.”

Professor turned to Leopov from where he’d been pacing the back wall. “Nice of you to bring that up now, I must say.”

Leopov threw her hands up. “I didn’t say anything before because it seemed so implausible.”

“There are a lot of dead soldiers in here — Russian and German. What if this was like the quarantine room for those who got sick from handling the amber panels to move the room? Anyway, if the panels do hold the potential for some kind of biological threat, and they’re still out there somewhere, we need to get our hands on them before the Russians do.” Professor turned back to the wall, looking for more possible hidden door switches.

Bones carefully put the skeleton back down from where he’d lifted it to look beneath it. “It’s starting to sound to me like the whole freaking Amber Room just needs to say lost.”

Willis turned around from the skeleton. “I hope that clock ain’t infected.” The mention of the clock made them all look for Wagner, who was last holding it.

“Hey, what happened to George?” Willis called out, “Mr. Wagner?”

“The clock’s not here, either,” Leopov noted.

Bones started walking to the larger chamber. “He must’ve gone to the other room. I’ll make sure he’s okay.”

Suddenly they heard a crashing noise in the distance. Maddock took off like a shot into the other chamber, the others following. The large room was empty, so Maddock and Bones ran for the exit. They emerged into the cul-de-sac with the bridge at one end, only the bridge was no longer there. It dangled into the chasm from the opposite side. The sound of retreating footsteps running fast echoed through the chambers.

Bones shook his head in disbelief while the others caught up to him and Maddock. “Wagner’s gone with clock!”

Maddock eyed the sizeable gap between them and the other side of the chasm. “And he left us stranded.”