“That’s what Aleister Crowley called it. He and Jane Wolfe decorated the entire room with mystical murals, but apparently only some of the paintings remain. Cameron said they have records of Crowley consulting the Codex Gigas in there. Who knows where it might lead, but it’s all we have.”
They stepped into the next room and knew instantly it was the one they sought. Large areas of green painted plaster contained images of trees and portraits, symbols and animals. Uneven text ran in crooked lines around the images, all of it with an almost child-like bearing. Crowley and Wolfe had not been great realist painters, it appeared, but their work was evocative and powerful nonetheless.
“So if clues are to be found, they’ll be found in here,” Crowley said. “At least, let’s search here carefully before we start poking around in the rest of this garbage dump.”
They walked opposite ways around the room, peering closely at the murals. Crowley remembered some of the names from the top-up research he had done on the journey here. La Nature Malade, the Mural of Heaven, the portraits of the Degenerates. He paused to look more closely at one detail of the Mural of Heaven, a shape almost like a keyhole, with sharp points to either side, rendered in red paint. Words and numbers in white in Thelemic script were contained inside. Rose joined Crowley as he crouched and stared.
“I can’t find anything,” she said, voice heavy with disappointment. “What’s that?”
“‘Aiwass gave Will as a Law to Mankind through the mind of The Beast 666’,” Crowley quoted from memory. He sat back on his heels. “You see, Aleister Crowley never claimed to have thought up the religion of Thelema himself. Rather it was dictated to him via Aiwass. By his account, a possibly non-corporeal being that called itself Aiwass contacted him and dictated the text that became known as Liber AL vel Legis, or The Book of the Law, which outlined all the principles of Thelema.”
“Fascinating,” Rose said. “But that’s not what I meant.” She leaned forward to point past him, to a tiny depiction not far from the red keyhole design. “What’s that?”
Crowley shuffled sideways and squinted to see more clearly. “Well spotted!” he said. The painting showed a dark gray man of short, wide proportions, almost exactly like those of the giant golem he had recently seen below Dalibor Tower. The depiction of the golem was separated in the center, its upper half hovering above an even smaller depiction that was nevertheless undoubtedly the squatting Devil from the Codex Gigas. Below the recreation of the Devil were the golem’s wide legs, and below the legs a series of small vertical lines.
Rose moved closer, pressing against Crowley as she leaned in for a better look. He enjoyed the proximity of her, the warmth of her body. He also enjoyed the unselfconscious way she leaned against him.
“They’re arrows,” she breathed.
“Hmm?” Crowley jumped slightly, felt his cheeks redden as she looked at him with a crooked smile.
“Keep your mind on the job at hand, soldier.”
He laughed. “Sorry, slightly distracted there.” He looked to where she pointed, secretly ecstatic that she made no move away from him, their hips and shoulders still touching. And she was right. The small vertical lines were arrows pointing downwards.
Crowley looked to their feet and the detritus they squatted on. Reluctantly he made the move away from Rose’s warmth and picked up a broken roof tile to scrape at the floor, dragging dirt and broken wood aside. Under the filth was nothing but a floor tile. Crowley frowned, pulled a penknife from his pocket. As he dug the tip of the blade under the tile, it lifted easily.
“Not fixed down,” he muttered, almost to himself, and slipped his fingers underneath to lift it. It came up to reveal plain cement beneath, but written on the cement were several tiny letters and numbers, with strange symbols at the start of each line.
“They look like coordinates,” Rose said. “But they’re too short to be actual map coordinates, I think.”
Crowley nodded, lips pursed in thought. “They are. I’ve done more than enough orienteering and stuff in the military to recognize any kind of map notation. That’s not what this is. But maybe it’s something similar.” He stood and looked around the room. “Hmm, maybe…”
Rose stayed crouching, quietly watching, as he paced back and forth a couple of times. After a moment he returned to the revealed notes and placed his hands on the floor. He put one hand against the wall, placed his other hand in line with it, then moved on his knees marking out the width of four fingers at a time, hand by hand, doing a strange crab-walk as he counted. After a few feet, he stopped. “What’s the second line say?” he asked.
Rose looked down, brow creased in confusion. “Well, there’s a strange symbol like the first line, then W, and hash marks totaling nine.”
“Right.” Crowley turned ninety degrees to his left and measured out nine sets of his fingers.
“Next?”
Rose read out the next line and Crowley moved again. After a couple of minutes and Crowley zig-zagging across the room, hands and knees filthy now, she said, “That’s the last one.”
Crowley was across the room from her, smiling. He dug around under where his hands had last been and his smile widened. He lifted a floor tile out of the way and then pulled against something. A leather strap emerged from the dirt. He pulled harder and a section of tiled floor lifted as one like a trapdoor.
“Wow,” Rose said. “What did you just do?”
“History in effect!” Crowley said. “The symbol at the start of each line is a shesep, an old Egyptian unit of measurement. It’s based on hands. The shesep is four fingers wide. I remember teaching this earlier in the year. So those notes are a unit of measurement, then a compass direction, then the number of units in hash marks. They’re like a code to find this strap that was concealed under a tile. The strap released the mechanism of this trapdoor.”
“Well, look at you, genius history teacher.” Rose moved over to kneel beside him. “What’s down there?”
Wooden steps led down into darkness. Crowley pulled a small flashlight from his pocket and flicked it on. “Only one way to find out.”
They descended the steps and immediately came to a solid-looking wooden door. It had two iron hasps — one high, one low. Each hasp was secured with a padlock, each padlock the kind with rolling wheels and numbers.
“Well, that’s annoying,” Rose said. “Any guesses at the combinations?”
“One has three numbers, the other four,” Crowley said, looking more closely.
“666 might be a little too obvious,” Rose said doubtfully.
“But Aleister Crowley did attach significance to it,” Crowley said and turned the tumblers. The three wheel lock popped open. “That was easy!”
He crouched to the lower lock, with four rollers. “Now what? Maybe dates?”
“When was Aleister Crowley born?” Rose asked.
“1875.” He put that in, but the lock remained closed.
Crowley pulled out his phone and tapped up the browser to look up some more dates. They tried the birth dates of several of Aleister Crowley’s partners and lovers, the date the house in which they stood had been purchased, but quickly ran out of ideas and the lock remained stubbornly closed.
“This is infuriating!” Crowley said. “Maybe I should just kick it down.”
“Looks pretty solid,” Rose said. She flicked him a grin. “Not that I doubt your strength and manliness, of course.”
He couldn’t help smiling, despite the frustration, but he turned back to the door, seriously considering violence against it.