The Alchemist

beat against the windows. Something occurred to him. He went back outside into the downpour and saw he was right.

From inside the house, the fireplace seemed to be set into the outer wall-yet as he stood in the garden, wiping the rain out of his eyes and sweeping the torch beam along the line of the roof, he saw that the squat chimney stack protruded from the roof inboard of the gable end by about three metres. He’d noticed that the window in the wall adjacent to the fireplace was about a metre from the corner, but looking from the outside it was about four metres from the end of the house.

As he hurried back inside, dripping and shivering, he realized that unless it was some quirk of the ultramodern design, it meant there was a hidden cavity behind the fireplace. An insulation space? Too big, surely. It had to be about three metres deep. Maybe it was a corridor, or even a cupboard, that could be accessed from some other room.

But where was the way in? He tried all the doors, but nothing led in the right direction. The room above was a bedroom with solid floorboards and no way down. There was no cellar beneath the house, from where the hidden room might have been accessible through a stairway or trapdoor. He returned to the living-room and scrutinized the fireplace again. If there was a way through, it must be here.

He turned on the lights and tapped around the wall, listening to the sound. All around the fireplace, the wall was solid. Moving to the left of the fireplace, his tapping made a different note. Another metre to the left and the wall sounded quite hollow. There were no cracks or joins anywhere, nothing that could have been a hidden doorway. He tried levering away the wooden panels on the walls, in the hope that one of them might reveal something. Nothing.

He reached his arm up behind the fireplace surround, groping up into the sooty chimney. Maybe there was a lever or some mechanism to open a way through. There wasn’t. He wiped the black dusty soot off his hands. ‘Must be something,’ he muttered. He ran his hands all over the fireplace, down the sides, his fingertips running over the intricate carvings, feeling for something that would press in, or give or turn. It seemed hopeless. The rain hit the windows with a crackling like flames.

He stood back from the fireplace, thinking desperately. There was nothing for it. He was going through that wall, and if there wasn’t a ready-made doorway he’d make one himself. Fuck it.

He found a wood-axe in a tool-shed outside, buried in a chopping block surrounded by a pile of split logs. He grasped the long axe-handle and wrenched it out of the block. Back in the house, he swung the axe up over his shoulder and aimed it at the hollow part of the wall. If his guess was right, he could smash a hole through to the other side.

What if I’m wrong, though? He lowered the axe, suddenly filled with doubt. He shot a guilty glance at the raven, and its glittery red eye seemed to meet his knowingly.

He looked thoughtfully into its impassive face. The bird was so lifelike that he almost expected it to fly at him. He put down the axe and ran his hand along the smooth lines of its wing and neck, up to the glassy red eye. Suddenly seized by a crazy idea, he pressed the eye, hard.

Nothing happened. He supposed that would have been too obvious. He took out the LED pistol-torch again and shone it all around the contours of the carving, carefully examining it. He passed the beam over the raven’s eye and a sudden glare of powerful reflected light dazzled him. There seemed to be a complex system of tiny internal mirrors in the eye that were concentrating his torch-beam and firing it back at him.

Another idea came to him. He walked to the light-switch on the wall and turned it off, plunging the room back into darkness. He shone the LED into the raven’s eye again, standing a little to one side to avoid being dazzled.

The reflected light from the raven’s eye hit the wall across the room and cast a circular red spot, about three inches wide, on the painting he’d noticed earlier. It landed exactly on the oddly blank round shield that the old man in the painting was holding up.

Ben kept the light on the eye. He moved a little closer to the painting and saw with astonishment that the red dot contained the twin-star-circle motif from the dagger blade and the notebook.

He remembered that Antonia had said the architect had been a jewellery maker in his time. You clever bastard. It was a work of almost unbelievable intricacy to have engraved the reflecting mirror with a minute yet perfect replica of the geometric design. But what did it mean?

He pulled the picture away from the wall and his heart leapt. There was a concealed safe behind it. He switched the lights back on and hurried back to examine it more closely. What might be inside?

The safe was from the same period as the house, its steel door adorned with enamelled designs in art nouveau style. In the middle of the door was a knurled rotary combination lock with two unusual concentric dials, one with numbers and the other with letters of the alphabet.

‘Oh, Christ, please-not more codes!’ he groaned. He pulled the notebook out of his bag. Folded between its pages was the sheet on which he’d written out the keys to crack the code. The combination to open the safe might be something from the notebook. But what? He flipped through the book. It could be anything.

He sat down with the notebook on his knee, guessing wildly at a few possibilities and quickly working out the coded versions in combined letters and numbers. First he tried the French for ‘House of the Raven’. It was a long shot, but he was desperate.

LA MAISON DU CORBEAU

He twisted the dials this way and that, entering the complex sequence. E/4, I/26; R/2, I/26…It took him a minute or two to dial up the entire phrase. He sat back and waited for something to happen. Nothing did. He sighed impatiently and tried another combination. The Cathar treasure.

LE TRESOR DES CATHARES

No good either. This could take for ever. He glanced at the axe lying on the floor and wondered fleetingly whether he should just hack the damn thing out of the wall and try to shoot his way into it from behind. He smiled to himself as he recalled what a grizzled Glaswegian sergeant-major had once said to him: ‘If in doubt, lad-resort tae violence’. Maybe it wasn’t a bad maxim, in the right circumstances.

Then his eye fell on the painting that he’d taken down from the wall, and he stooped to look at it more closely.

What an idiot I am. The key!

The large silvery key that the old man was clutching had something written in tiny letters up its shaft. He dropped down on his knees to read it.

LE CHERCHEUR TROUVERA

The seeker shall find. Ben grabbed his pen and feverishly scribbled the phrase out in code.

E/4, R/18; N/22, V/12, R/18, A/17, N/22, V/12,

R/18, A/11, A/17;

O/13, A/17, E/23, A/11, U/9, R/18, A/17, I/26

His heart was thumping as he dialled in the last number. From deep within the safe’s mechanism he heard a metallic clunk. Then there was silence. He grasped the handle of the safe door and yanked it. It held firm. He swore. The combination must have been the wrong one, or else something had gone wrong with the safe’s mechanism after all these years. The door was stuck fast.

A sound from behind startled him, and he twisted around as his hand went for the Browning.

The fireplace was opening. A gentle shower of dirt fell from the chimney as soot-encrusted panels swung slowly open to reveal a space just large enough for him to walk through.