some dark force, then why hasn’t it influenced you? Acerbi blood courses through your veins, yet somehow you have managed to escape this so-called curse, while your son has not.”
Eduardo paused as he looked down at the table and ran a wrinkled hand over its polished surface. “That which once dominated my every waking moment no longer has any power over me.”
The three men watched the old man with a growing sense of fascination.
“What happened to you, Mr. Acerbi?” Leo finally asked.
“The love of a good woman, Cardinal … the love of a good woman is what happened to me.”
The men waited for him to continue, but it was obvious from the way his vacant eyes stared at the table that his mind had drifted off into the past. When finally he looked up, they could see tears running down his face. Whatever mental journey he had just taken had affected him deeply.
The old man cleared his throat and wiped his eyes. “I’ve been an admirer of your work with the Bible code for some time now, Professor Wasserman … but you’re not the only one who enjoys breaking codes.”
“I’m afraid you have me at a loss, Mr. Acerbi.”
“Please, call me Eduardo. I can see the caution in your eyes, Professor. Let me repeat the fact that you have nothing to fear from me. As I said, I have been an admirer of your work for some time now, because I too have uncovered hidden codes in ancient texts … three to be exact.”
Lev stiffened in his seat. “You say
“Yes, three … and the Bible is not one of them. Allow me to explain. The year before I disappeared, the Acerbi Corporation purchased a medieval house in the town of Carcassonne. The house was an ancestral treasure. It had once belonged to the sister of Marie Acerbi … the woman from whom all modern day Acerbis are descended. This important link to our past had been allowed to fall into a sad state of ruin, so I decided to have the property professionally renovated with some help from a team of historians and archaeologists. They did a beautiful job of taking the house back to its historical roots, but during the renovation the archaeologists discovered a small wooden box behind one of the crumbling walls. Estimates are that it had been there since the crusades against the Cathars sometime in the 13th century. Inside, we found three parchment scrolls, but the writing on them was ancient. The archaeologists had no idea what the symbols inside meant, so they sent me to a scholar who was familiar with long-forgotten languages … a woman here in the town of Foix.
Our first meeting was rather difficult. She refused to let me into her house until I opened the box and showed her the scrolls. Her demeanor totally changed and she invited me in. Her hands were shaking when she lifted the scrolls from the box and laid them out on the table. After examining them for less than a minute, she looked up at me and began to weep uncontrollably. I didn’t know what to think or what to do. I thought perhaps she was just overly emotional or maybe even unbalanced, but when she was finally able to compose herself, she informed me that I had just handed her the long-lost scrolls of the Cathars.”
“But how did she know what they were?” Leo asked.
“Because she was a Cathar, Gentlemen … a Cathar who, as a scholar of medieval history, had made the study of the scrolls the focal point of her entire professional life. Like every other Cathar, she had heard the story of how the scrolls had disappeared shortly before Marie’s daughter, Catherine Acerbi, had been burned at the stake for being a heretic, and for the past seven hundred years, the legend of the scrolls had been passed down from one Cathar generation to the next.”
“What was in them?” Leo asked. “I mean, what did they say?”
“Ah, I see the fire of a scholar’s curiosity blazing in those green eyes of yours, Cardinal. I told you we are kindred spirits.”
Leo was beginning to feel an admiration for this man, but even more, he was beginning to trust him.
“Just like your Old Testament, Cardinal, they told the story of our faith. Those scrolls were our Bible, and they changed my life forever.”
“What happened to them?”
“I didn’t dare take them home, so I left them with the Cathar woman. Every few weeks, I would drive alone to Foix, where I would spend the weekend with her in her small house. There, in her living room, we would sit in front of the fireplace, and she would read to me from the scrolls by the light of the fire. Over time, I began to realize what had been lost to my family. The scope of the loss was almost unbearable. Instead of being guided by the Cathar message of love, our family had been shielded from the light by a dark force that flowed from an unseen presence. Without the scrolls to guide us, the Acerbi clan had been turned from the light down a path of hate and revenge by Catherine Acerbi’s son, a cruel man by the name of Guillaume Acerbi. His mind had become twisted from seeing his mother burned at the stake when he was only a child. As the flames burned the flesh from her body, she had called out to Rex Mundi, and Guillaume had heard every word. From that day forward, Guillaume made sure that the Acerbi clan would no longer follow the faith of their ancestors. Instead of praying to the God of Light, they prayed to Rex Mundi, who filled them with a burning desire to accumulate wealth … wealth that would one day give them the power to spread his message of hate around the world.”
Leo was transfixed by the old man’s story. “But what about the remaining Cathars … the ones who escaped? Didn’t they have copies of the original scrolls?”
“Of course, but therein lies the problem, Cardinal. They were just copies. For hundreds of years, our people had assumed that the originals had been lost to history. The Cathars who survived the brutal medieval crusade against them fled here to Foix and brought the story of the scrolls with them, but over time, the story began to take on the quality of a myth. Many began to doubt their existence and even compared the tale of the scrolls to a fairy tale. That’s why the discovery of the originals was so important.”
“And your family … the Acerbis?”
“They remained behind in Carcassonne and grew rich and powerful, eventually branching out into the rest of France. They had no idea that the original scrolls lay hidden within the walls of a house that had belonged to one of their ancestors.”
“Didn’t they have any contact with other Cathars?”
“Several years after Catherine Acerbi’s death, some of the Cathars who had been close to her discovered that Guillaume had made a fortune as a ruthless mercenary by offering his services to the French nobility in the north … the same men who had killed his own mother. It was said that he even burned Cathars at the stake when he discovered them in hiding. Thinking to save his soul, the Cathars here in Foix sent an emissary to find him and give him a copy of the scrolls, but when the emissary failed to return, they found his body floating in the Aude River with Guillaume’s name carved into his chest. After that, the Cathars hiding here in Foix dared not show themselves again to the outside world. It continues to be this way today.”
“But times have changed,” Leo said. “Why remain in hiding?”
“To a modern Cathar, finding the original Cathar scrolls can be compared to finding the Ark of the Covenant. Like the Ark, the scrolls hold great power. To hold the very scrolls that were said to have been delivered from the hand of God into this world of sin was a transcendent experience, and it changed me forever. The material world no longer held any meaning for me, and I began to hunger for the spiritual life. In time, I converted to the true Cathar religion of my ancestors in a secret ceremony right here in Foix. Afterward, I wanted to shout out my newfound faith to the other members of my family so that they too could see the light, but I was cautioned by my new Cathar friends not to disclose my conversion, lest I reveal their presence to the outside world and expose them to its influences. Cathars live in this world, Cardinal, but they are not of this world. I soon discovered that the dark force that had ruled over my family for the past seven hundred years was reaching out to me, and from that point on, I realized that my life, and the lives of the Cathars living here in Foix, would be in danger if I revealed to outsiders what I had become.”
The old man exhaled before he stood and walked to the window. The sun was just beginning to rise over the mountains in the east, its orange glow infusing the room with the sleepy light of morning as the old man watched the shadows being erased from the crevices in the side of a nearby mountain.
Leo poured some more tea into his cup, wishing instead that it was coffee. “So you chose to leave your family over a matter of faith?”
“There were other reasons. You’ve probably guessed by now that I had grown very close to the woman who translated the scrolls for me. Her name was Colette, and to put it simply, we fell in love. It was a very hard time for me, because despite the fact that I was married and the head of a vast multi-national corporation, I had undergone a spiritual transformation that made it impossible for me continue leading the type of life I had been born into. I felt the tendrils of Rex Mundi trying to tear me away from the God of Light, and there was no way I was going back to
