Arena of Souls: A Brock Stone Adventure

6- The Room

A cool, damp breeze wafted out of the dark doorway, carrying with it a hint of mildew. Stone ran his hand along the rough stone wall, feeling all of its imperfections. He wondered what, exactly, they had stumbled onto.

“Now this is an interesting development.” Alex took a box of matches out of his pocket, struck one on the crumbling mortar between two stone blocks, and held it up. Flecks of mica in the granite wall sparkled in the flickering light, illuminating a staircase that spiraled down into the darkness. A few cobwebs clung to the ceiling. A narrow path ran through the dust on the stairs.

“I guess we know where Grandfather was going. Shall we?” Stone looked at Alex and Moses.

“How about I stay up here and keep an eye on things?” Moses asked. “Just in case whoever sent that man last night sends somebody else.”

“Thank you.” Stone retrieved an antique oil lamp from a shelf in his grandfather's study, lit it, and descended the steps. Winding down into the darkness, he wondered at the secret his grandfather kept hidden. Had Stone not disappeared when he had, would his grandfather have shared this place with Stone while he still lived?

“I wonder how far down it goes,” Alex whispered. “We must have gone a good twenty feet already.”

“Considering the age of the house, it’s an impressive feat to build something so far below ground. Makes you wonder what the purpose was.” Stone brushed cobwebs out of his face and kept going.

“It’s far too old to have been a part of the underground railroad.” Alex fell silent and paused. He stood there, stroking his chin. His gaze seemed to drift beyond their surroundings and his eyes grew misty. Finally, he shook his head. “I’m afraid I am fresh out of ideas.”

“And we’re fresh out of stairs. Look here.” Stone halted in front of a metal door. He tried the handle and was pleased to find it unlocked. As he pushed it open, he sensed a large space on the other side. Holding his lamp out in front of him, he stepped through.

He was in an oval room that appeared to be hewn from the natural rock. The floor was perfectly smooth, and shelves and cubbyholes filled with books and other objects lined the walls, running back into the darkness beyond the circle of lamplight. Up above, soot, likely from fires centuries ago, stained the ceiling.

“It’s a cave,” Alex marveled.

“But it’s much more than that now.” Stone noticed a handle on the wall and raised it. With a heavy click, it slid into place, and a faint humming from an invisible generator filled the room as a series of electric lights slowly came to life. Bit by bit, the cavern revealed itself.

The place was much more expansive than Stone could have imagined. It was at least a hundred feet long and filled with his grandfather’s treasures: books, weapons, artwork, and artifacts accumulated over a lifetime. At the far end, he could just make out several tables covered with pipes, tubes, and glass. A laboratory!

“I’ve never seen anything like this.” As if in a trance, Alex made for the lab.

Stone headed for a large wooden desk set dead-center in the middle of the room beneath an ornate chandelier. On the way, he took note of some of the relics his grandfather had collected. There were items from all over the world and from every major culture. How had he acquired them all without anyone knowing?

On shelves nearest the desk he found his grandfather’s journals, each numbered on the spine and dated on the front cover in Samuel’s spidery hand. The ending date of the last volume was nearly a year ago. He supposed the answers to his question could be found in any of these, but he wanted to begin with the most recent volume, but where was it? The desktop was clear and the drawers held pens, pencils and paper, but no journal.

He looked around, trying to think like his grandfather. Where would Samuel Stone have hidden the journal? He had left The Lost World as a clue to help Stone find this room. Could there be more layers to the intrigue? Stone thought back to all the times his grandfather had read the story to him. The details of the beloved adventure tale came pouring back into his mind: the Amazon, the rainforest, a plateau, primitive people, ape men and….

He smiled. Dinosaurs! As a child, his favorite scene had come toward the end of the novel, when Challenger, to prove the veracity of his claims to the skeptics back in England, released a live pterodactyl, which flew away across the ocean. He’d always asked his grandfather to read that scene at least twice during each reading of the book, and the pterodactyl had become his favorite dinosaur.

“Alex,” he called. “Do you see any paintings of pterodactyls?”

“No, only this skeleton,” his friend replied.

“Skeleton? Where?” Stone strode to the far end of the room, where Alex stood, inspecting a chemistry experiment in progress.

“Over there, affixed to the wall.”

Stone looked where Alex pointed. A replica of a pterodactyl skeleton, at least, he assumed it was a replica, stretched across the wall at the far end of the room. The fabled flying reptile was huge, with a wingspan of more than twenty feet. Stone wondered what it would have been like to see this magnificent creature take wing.

“Is it important?” Alex asked. He sounded disinterested, his attention focused on a vial of golden liquid.

“Perhaps not, but I have a feeling.” Stone approached the pterodactyl, or pteranodon if he didn’t miss his guess, and looked it over. If it held any secrets, he could see only one possible hiding place. He reached inside the huge beak and felt something thin and solid. Smiling in satisfaction, he withdrew a slender journal book.

“What is it?” Alex hurried forward, his interest in the experiment forgotten.

“My grandfather’s journal book.” Stone opened it to the back and paged forward until he found the final entry, dated the day before his grandfather had died. The thought caused a lump to form in his throat, and he coughed to clear it away. His moment of melancholy vanished in an instant as the final sentences grabbed his attention.

“I must get word to Brock. He needs to understand how much depends on him. And he must know that he is in grave danger.”