The Ben Hope Collection: 6 BOOK SET. Scott Mariani

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СКАЧАТЬ he mopped up the spilt water and picked up the limp flowers and broken pieces of porcelain, cursing under his breath, something else suddenly occurred to him. What an idiot–of course. He dropped everything and ran over to rummage in his bag. Inside it he found the fake medieval map, depicting the old Languedoc, which had been hanging on Anna’s wall.

      He unrolled the ornately drawn script and spread it across the table.

      When he found the place, he checked its location against the modern map. There was no doubt about it. The ancient name for the medieval village of Rennes-le-Château, not twenty miles from St-Jean, was Rhédae. He banged his fist on the table. CHERCHEZ A RHEDAE suddenly had a new and very real meaning: SEARCH AT RENNES-LE-CHÂTEAU.

      And, according to his guidebook, Rennes-le-Château was the site that legend associated most strongly with the lost treasure of the Cathars.

58

      As he drove through the rugged countryside along the D118 heading towards Rennes-le-Château, Ben was thinking about what he’d read about the place in his new guidebook. It was a name he’d vaguely recalled from some half-watched television documentary, but he hadn’t realized that the once sleepy medieval hamlet was now one of southern France’s most sensational tourist attractions. His guidebook read: ‘an important centre for seekers of holy treasure and magical phenomena. Whether or not you believe in the occult, kabbalistic ideas, UFOs or crop circles, there is no denying the strange mystery of Rennes-le-Château’.

      The enigma of Rennes-le-Château rested on the story of a man called Bérenger Saunière. He’d been the humble village priest who, in 1891 during a renovation of the old church, was said to have discovered four parchments sealed inside wooden tubes. The parchments were dated between 1244 and the 1780s, and, so the story went, had led Father Saunière to find a great secret.

      Nobody knew what Saunière had found, but immediately after this discovery the priest had seemingly been transformed from a pauper to a millionaire overnight. Where the money had come from remained a mystery. Some sources said that he’d found the fabled treasure of the Cathars–a fortune of gold that the heretics had hidden from their oppressors in the thirteenth century. Others claimed that the treasure wasn’t money or gold, but a great secret, some kind of ancient knowledge, that the Church had bribed Saunière to keep quiet.

      Unsurprisingly, rumours of treasure and the obscurity of the facts had combined to provoke a hysterical flurry of interest when the story had hit the media in the early 1980s. It had sparked a feverish cult following for anything to do with the mystery of Rennes-le-Château. Mystics, hippies and treasure-seekers flocked there in droves every summer. The Languedoc tourist industry had been Cathar-crazy ever since.

      Ben turned off the main road at Couiza and the car wound up a tortuous mountain path. After four kilometres of increasingly wild scenery he arrived at the little village of Rennes-le-Château.

      The church was set back a few metres from the street behind an iron gate. Beside it was a tourist centre which marked a strange contrast to the ancient, crumbling medieval village. There was a tour in progress, a crowd of camera-snapping travellers following a guide. Ben joined them, and from the buzz of conversation he realized that they were British.

      ‘And now, ladies and gentlemen,’ droned the languid tour guide, ‘if you would all like to come this way, we will enter the mysterious church itself. Now, like all medieval churches the building faces east-west and the floor plan is shaped like a cross. The altar is…’

      Ben followed as the group filtered in through the narrow doorway and milled around inside, gazing about them at the florid décor. Immediately inside the entrance was a vivid statue of a staring horned demon. Above him stood four angels, looking out across the church in the direction of the altar.

      The guide motioned towards the demonic figure. His voice echoed in the church. ‘This frightening fellow here is believed to represent the demon Asmodeus, custodian of secrets and guardian of…hidden treasures.’ This seemed to delight the crowd but Ben could already see it wasn’t going to enlighten him. He broke away from the group and walked back into the sunshine, kicking a stone across the dusty street in frustration.

      Rennes-le-Château was perched high on a rocky hillside overlooking a sweeping panoramic landscape. At the western edge of the village the ground fell away in a sheer drop of escarpment. Ben stood on the edge of the cliff and looked out across the hills and valleys, shielding his lighter from the wind as he lit a cigarette. He sighed. He wondered where Roberta was now. It had been years since he’d felt so painfully alone.

      Here and there in the distance he could see quite a number of old towers and ruined buildings, as well as a couple of ancient ochre stone villages. Far below him in the arid valley was the village that his map told him was Esperaza. He smiled at the name. Hope. His eye followed the horizon to some faraway ruins, which the map identified as Coustaussa.

      A memory stirred him. It had been a scene just like this one. They’d been standing high on the hillside near her villa, looking across the valleys. He remembered what she’d told him. In some special place, the relative positions of ancient sites gave a clue to a secret that would bring great wisdom and power to the one who solved the mystery.

      ‘What were you trying to tell me, Anna?’ he muttered as he looked out to the horizon. Fulcanelli. The Cathars. Lost treasures. It was all linked, had to be. Had the alchemist discovered the ancient scroll and cross around here somewhere? Was that why Usberti had chosen this part of France for his Gladius Domini headquarters?

      He wandered around the village a while, dragging his feet. Not far from the church he found a little tourist café that sold postcards and souvenirs. The place was almost empty, and the coffee smelled good. He took a table in the far corner and sat sipping on a cup while he tried to get his thoughts in order. What the hell was it all about? He pulled Rheinfeld’s notebook from its plastic covering and flicked it open. His eye landed once more on that odd rhyming stanza.

      These Temple walls cannot be broken

       The armies of Satan pass through unaware The Raven guards there a secret unspoken Known only to the seeker faithful and fair

      Maybe it was the wild thinking of a burned-out, sleep-deprived brain, or perhaps it was a ray of clarity piercing through all the fog of alchemical riddles. But a sudden thought hit him like a thunderbolt.

      He flipped back through the notebook until he found the twin-circle design from the dagger blade. As he’d remembered, what distinguished the notebook’s version of the diagram from the blade inscription was the raven symbol that marked out its centre. If Rheinfeld had copied this accurately from the original, it meant that Fulcanelli had deliberately added the new feature to the motif. It had to be significant–but how?

       The raven guards there a secret unspoken.

      He looked again at the other page, where the same raven symbol appeared together with the word DOMUS. The House of the Raven.

      He sat and pondered. A hypothesis: if the House of the Raven–leaving aside for the moment what it actually was– stood at the centre of the geometric twin-circle shape, was it possible that the twin-circle shape represented an actual place? A place, as Anna had hinted, marked out by lines superimposed on the physical landscape and using ancient sites as reference points?

      It seemed crazy, but in its own way it made the most perfect sense.

      He СКАЧАТЬ