The Fire. Katherine Neville

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СКАЧАТЬ the only place in the United States where four states – Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona – come together at right angles to form a cross.

      Long before anyone ever thought to draw dotted lines on a map, this land was sacred to everyone who ever walked across it. If my mother was going to have her first-ever birthday party in the nearly twenty-two years I had known her, I could understand why she wanted to have it here. Regardless of how many years she had lived abroad or away, like all the women in our family she was part of this land.

      For some reason, I knew that this connection with the land was somehow important. I knew that was why she had left a message so strange to bring me to this spot.

      And I knew something else, even if no one else did. I knew why she’d insisted I come here today. For today – April fourth – actually was my mother, Cat Velis’s, birthday.

      

      I yanked my keys from the ignition, grabbed my hastily packed duffel bag from the passenger seat, and plowed my way through the snow to our hundred-year-old front doors. These huge doors – two massive slabs of heart pine ten feet high, cut from ancient trees – were carved in bas-relief with two animals that seemed to be coming right at you. On the left, a golden eagle soared straight at your face. And from the right door burst an angry, upright female bear.

      Despite the weathering of these carvings, they were fairly realistic-looking – with glass eyes and real talons and claws. The early twentieth century had loved clever inventions, and this one was a doozy: If you pulled the bear’s paw, her jaw dropped open to reveal very real and frightening teeth. If you had the nerve to stick your hand into her mouth, you could twist the old-fashioned door chime, to alert those within.

      I did both, and waited. But even after a few moments, there was no response. Someone must have been inside – the chimney was active. And I knew from practice that stoking that fire pit took hours of tending and a Herculean effort to haul the wood. But with our hearth, which was capable of receiving a log of fifty caliper inches, a fire could have been laid days ago and still be burning.

      My situation suddenly dawned upon me: Having flown and driven a few thousand miles, I was standing in the snow on top of a mountain, trying to get access to my own house, desperate to know if anyone was inside. But I didn’t have a key.

      My alternative – wading through acres of deep snow to peep through a window – seemed a poor idea. What would I do if I got wetter than I already was and still couldn’t get inside? What if I got inside and no one was there? There were no car tracks, ski tracks – not even deer tracks – anywhere near the house.

      So I did the only intelligent thing I could think of: I yanked my cell phone out of my pocket and dialed Mother’s number, right here at the lodge. I was relieved when her message machine picked up after six rings, thinking she might have left some clue as to her whereabouts. But when her recorded voice came on, my heart sank:

      ‘I can be reached at…’ and she rattled off the same number she’d left on my D.C. phone – still missing the very last digits! I stood before the door, wet and cold, and fuming with confusion and frustration. Where did one go from here?

      And then I remembered the game.

      My favorite uncle, Slava, was famed throughout the world as the noted technocrat and author, Ladislaus Nim. He’d been my best friend in my childhood, and though I hadn’t seen him in years, I felt he still was. Slava hated telephones. He vowed he would never have one in his house. Telephones, no – but Uncle Slava loved puzzles. He’d written several books on the topic. Through my childhood, if anyone received a message from Slava with a phone number where you could reach him, they always knew it wasn’t real – it must be some kind of encrypted message. That was his delight.

      It seemed unlikely, though, that my mother would use such a technique to communicate with me. For one thing, she wasn’t even good at deciphering such messages herself, and she couldn’t invent a puzzle if her life depended upon it.

      More unlikely still was the idea that Slava had created a message for her. As far as I knew, she hadn’t talked to my uncle in years, not since…the thing we never spoke about.

      Yet I was sure, somehow, that this was a message.

      I jumped back up into the Land Rover and switched on the engine. Decrypting puzzles to locate my mother sure beat all hell out of the alternatives: breaking into an abandoned house, or flying back to D.C. and never learning where she’d gone.

      I phoned her machine again: I jotted down the phone number she’d left there, for all the world to hear. If she was in real trouble of some kind and trying to contact only me, I prayed that I would decipher it first.

      ‘I can be reached at 615-263-94…’ my mother’s recorded voice said.

      My hand was shaking as I wrote out the numbers on a pad.

      I’d been provided eight numbers, rather than the ten numbers required to make a long-distance call. But as with Uncle Slava’s puzzles, I suspected this had nothing to do with phones. Here was a ten-digit code, of which the final two numbers were missing. Those two numbers themselves were my hidden message.

      It took about ten minutes to figure it out – much longer than when I was running neck and neck with my crazy but wonderful uncle. If you divided the string of numbers into twos (hint: we were missing the last two digits), then you ended up with: 61–52–63–94.

      If you reversed those numbers, as I quickly saw, you ended up with each two-digit square number, starting with the square of four. That is, the product of four, five, six, and seven, when multiplied by themselves, resulted as follows: 16–25–36–49.

      The next number in the sequence – and the missing number – was 8. So the missing last two digits of the series were the square of 8 – that is, 64. In the real puzzle, of course, if you reversed the number, the answer would have been 46 – but that wasn’t it.

      I knew – and so did my mother – that 64 had another meaning for me. It was the number of squares on a chessboard, with eight squares on each side.

      In a nutshell – that was the thing we never talked about.

      My distraught and intractable mother had refused ever to speak of the game of chess – even to permit it into her house. Since my father’s death (the other thing that we never talked about), I was forbidden to play the game – the only thing I’d ever known how to do, the only thing that helped me connect with the world around me. I might as well have been ordered, at the age of twelve, to become autistic.

      My mother was so opposed, in every way imaginable, to the idea of chess. Though I’d never been able to follow her logic – if indeed, it was logic – to my mother’s mind, chess would prove as dangerous to me as it had been to my father.

      But now it seemed that by bringing me here on her birthday, by leaving that cryptic phrase with its encrypted message, she was welcoming me back to the game.

      

      I timed it: It took me twenty-seven minutes and – since I’d left the engine running – a gallon of hog-guzzling gas until I had figured out how to get inside.

      By now, anyone with half a brain would have guessed that those two-digit numbers were also combinations on a tumbler. But there were no locks on the house. Except there was one in the barn. On a lockbox. The keys to the cars were kept there.

      Would СКАЧАТЬ