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.

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 went back to the rhyming stanza. These temple walls cannot be broken.

What kind of temple walls couldn’t be broken? Not the stone kind, that was for sure, judging by the number of old ruins around here. The crusading armies had been ruthlessly thorough in destroying the strongholds and churches of their heretic enemies.

But then another idea hit him. What if the temple walls had never been built in stone at all–had never intended to be? What if they were the lines of an invisible geometric ground-plan that lay across the land, known only to the faithful and fair who were in on the secret? The marauding armies wouldn’t even have known such a temple was there. Because its walls were invisible. It was a virtual temple.

In effect, it was a map. Whatever the House of the Raven was, it was at the centre of the layout and it seemed to be a marker for something. Maybe something that could get you into a lot of trouble. Secret alchemical treasure? Usberti was obsessed with finding it. The Nazis had lusted after it. Perhaps those who had launched the holocaust against the Cathars had been looking for it too.

Ben’s mind was racing now. He ripped his road map out of his bag, unfolded the flapping square of paper and spread it across the plastic table. His finger landed on Rennes-le-Château. This was the place Fulcanelli had guided him to. This was where the search would begin, at the very nucleus of Cathar country and the hub of the mystery of their lost treasure.

Using the edge of the laminated café table menu as a ruler, he started tracing out tentative lines in pencil on the map. He soon began to notice patterns emerging.

St Sermin–Antugnac–La Pique–Bugarach.

Couiza–Le Bezu.

Esperaza–Rennes-les-Bains.

And at least a dozen more. All were straight lines that perfectly connected the nearby churches, villages and castle ruins directly through the spot where he was sitting, the heart of Rennes-le-Château. This bizarre find seemed to confirm that he was looking in the right place. More lines, and soon he was building up an extensive grid that stretched bewilderingly across the entire area.

Visitors to the café came and went, and he didn’t notice them. His coffee cooled at his elbow. He was transfixed by the dizzying maze of controlled complexity that began to unfold under his pencil. After the first hour, he had established a perfect circle whose circumference connected four ancient churches in the area, Les Sauzils, St Ferriol, Granès and Coustaussa. To his astonishment, his projected lines generated a six-pointed star whose points fitted perfectly within the circle and touched exactly on the first two churches. The first circle centred precisely on Esperaza, the village in the valley below Rennes-le-Château.

After another hour the café staff were beginning to wonder how long the strange customer was going to sit there scribbling on his map. Ben was oblivious of them. Now a second circle was generated, and he traced it out with a steady hand. It centred on a place called Lavaldieu–Valley of God. The circles were identical in size and lay diagonally NW / SE across the map. He traced out more lines and shook his head in amazement as the complex alchemical symbol slowly revealed itself.

The hexagram in the Esperaza circle had one of its southern points at Les Sauzils and another at St Ferriol. The pentagram in the Lavaldieu circle had its two western points at Granès and Coustaussa. A perfect straight line connecting Peyrolles to Blanchefort to Lavaldieu provided the southern point of the pentagram where it touched the edge of the Lavaldieu circle. Lastly, another perfect straight line connecting Lavaldieu at the centre with the more distant castle of Arques, gave the position for the eastern most point of the star.

He sat back and contemplated the heavily lined and scored map. He could hardly believe what he was seeing. The twin star-circles were complete. The diagram was perfect in its geometry–the virtual temple, right there on a cheap filling-station road-map.

Whatever civilization had created the phenomenon, long, long before Fulcanelli had stumbled upon it, must have been awesomely skilled in surveying, geometry, and mathematics. The logistics of just spinning this elaborate web of design across a harsh, mountainous landscape were mind-boggling enough, let alone the extreme lengths they must have gone to in deliberately building churches and entire settlements on the exact locations marked out by the invisible sweep of a circle or the intersection of two imaginary lines. And all this just to set up a concealed location for some cryptic piece of knowledge? What know ledge was worth that kind of trouble?

Maybe he was going to find out. He was walking in Fulcanelli’s historical footprints. Now all he had to do was to find the centre point, and that should give him the exact location of whatever it was the alchemist had discovered. He drew out two extra lines that cut diagonally and symmetrically through the motif in an elongated X, marking out the dead centre.

‘X marks the spot,’ he murmured. The centre point was close to Rennes-le-Château. It couldn’t be much more than a couple of kilometres, approximately north-west.

But what would be waiting for him when he got there? There was only one way to find out. He was getting close now.