The Great Tome of Forgotten Relics and Artifacts: The Great Tome Series, #1

These stories are works of fiction.

Any resemblance to persons living, dead, or undead is coincidental and vaguely disturbing.

© 2016 Bards and Sages Publishing. Individual stories are © there respective authors and reproduced here with permission.

All rights reserved.

Internal Art © V Shane. Used with permission

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or copied in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except as allowable by United States law regarding Fair Use (such as criticism, review, commentary, research and scholarship, etc).

Print Edition Library of Congress Control Number 2016931646

FIC003000    FICTION / Anthologies (multiple authors)

FIC009040    FICTION / Fantasy / Collections & Anthologies

FIC028040    FICTION / Science Fiction / Collections & Anthologies

Prologue:

Where the Ancients Read

"What is this place?" asked Specialist Darwin Gree as the probe shined a bright light into the chamber.

The ancients called it a library, replied Scribe Cassandra Delth. I don’t believe this structure has been touched in centuries. Maybe even a millennium!

This is what passed for a library? I don’t see a single ResearchBot anywhere. All I see are wooden racks and, Darwin leaned forward and squinted. Stacks of...I don’t know.

Books.

Now you’re just messing with me. How can those things be books? Books are stored on data cards. Darwin took a step into the room.

Cassandra placed her arm in front of Darwin to stop his entry. Let the probe finish its preliminary scans first.

Darwin sighed. Fine.

You in a hurry or something? This assignment is scheduled to last six weeks. We aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

How did the Council even know this...library...was here?

"After the earthquake, excavation crews found the ruins of an ancient educational facility used to train younglings. Unfortunately, by the time the Council sent a reclamation squad, most of the site had been rendered useless from excavators and civil engineers trampling around everything.

But they did find, believe it or not, an actual printed atlas! Still somewhat readable! They were able to cross-reference the location of the ruins with an address they found on something called a Library Card that was in a well-preserved wallet.

What’s a wallet? asked Darwin.

Wallets were small containers, usually made of leather, which the ancients used to carry around things like their identification and money. Darwin stared blankly at Cassandra. Didn’t you take any of the courses on Elder Lore or Ancient Civilization?

Those were electives, replied Darwin. All that nonsense is for you Scribes. My job is to keep you safe and make sure we can preserve whatever you find.

The probe returned and Darwin downloaded the preliminary scan data into the communicator. Relative humidity is 32%. Temperature 18.3 degrees Celsius. No indications of class one or two contaminates in the air. Presents of class three contaminates within acceptable parameters.

Did it pick up any evidence of living creatures?

Darwin shook his head. I think you were right. Nothing has been in here for centuries.

And the conditions are perfect for preserving paper! Do you have any idea what this means?

It means those books are actually made of paper? Darwin shrugged.

Yes! Cassandra marched into the chamber, oblivious to Darwin’s sarcasm. Put on a mask and gloves. I don’t want body oils or residual moisture from your breath damaging anything!

Right. Darwin sighed as he removed the mask and gloves from his kit. "Scribes."

The pair wandered through the racks of books, spending most of the day creating holo-recordings to preserve the location data. Thankfully, the transcription software had been recently upgraded, so most of the titles were duplicated into the program without too much garbling.

As Cassandra settled in to manually correct the handful of titles that were garbled, Darwin examined the archaic monstrosities that the ancients had used as computers.

"I don’t know if we’ll be able to get these...things...working. The Reverse Engineering Division doesn’t even make adapters to convert power cores to the sort of current required for these. And even if I could rig something, I’d need a half dozen matrix translators to even attempt to get the software functional."

We’ll just ship them off to R.E.D. then and let them deal with it. Cassandra finished her task and clapped her hands together. So, where should we start?

I don’t know. I guess call in Movers to start boxing the books up.

No! Nothing is getting boxed up until I’ve had a chance to catalog everything as it is. That’s why we’re here. The Council saw this as an opportunity to really learn about how the ancients stored and shared their knowledge.

Cassandra, this is a six-week assignment. It will take six MONTHS...no, six YEARS to manually catalog all of this! I don’t think the Council understood exactly how primitive this would be.

We’ll just see how far we can get.

We should file a 9R-3 at least.

No! Darwin, this is my first lead assignment. I file a 9R-3 on day one, they’ll send a Senior Scribe to take over the project!

Cassandra, there isn’t a single ResearchBot here. There is no master database that we can access. How are you even supposed to know what it is we are cataloging?

That! Cassandra pointed at rows of cabinets. It’s called a Card Catalog. She walked over to the card catalog and gently pulled open one of the drawers. Each card has information on a specific book: its category, keywords, date of publication, where it can be found in the library. By the beginning of the 21st century, most libraries had stopped updating the card catalogs in favor of digital tools, but kept them as a secondary, backup resource."

You are kidding me, right? asked Darwin. You’ll be here a decade doing this manually!

I know we can’t finish this ourselves, but we don’t have to. We’ll spend the next six weeks doing the preliminary groundwork, then put in our report. That way, no matter what the Council decides, history will remember this as the moment you and I unlocked the secrets of the first perfectly preserved ancient library!

Darwin smiled. What do you need me to do first?

Thank you, she patted him on the shoulder. We got a lot done today. Let’s rest until morning and start fresh. Maybe grab a random book to read? While wearing gloves, of course.

Oh joy of joys. Darwin yawned. Darwin began wandering the racks again, but found the notion of selecting a random book from a shelf daunting. He made his way down a hallway, investigating each room until he found a locked security door. The locking mechanism was hilariously primitive but probably would have been considered advanced by the standards of the ancients.

The door opened to a stairwell. Darwin thought he heard footsteps below, but they stopped almost as soon as he noticed them. He walked down the stairs and came to a second security door, which he also unlocked easily.

He opened the door, took a look inside, and slowly backed out.

Cass, you might want to come get a look at this. And bring the probe droid, he shouted.

Cassandra made her way down the stairs a few moments later. What did you... her jaw dropped open as she looked into the room.

A chandelier of lit white candles illuminated the room. The probe confirmed they were, in fact, beeswax candles burning, but they didn’t appear to be melting or giving off heat. The marble fireplace at the far end of the room also gave off no heat, despite the fact that the probe confirmed the presence of actual wood burning in it.

There were two deep red armchairs with elaborately embroidered patterns in the room and a low round polished Cherrywood table sitting between them. Around the walls of the room were marble book stands. Each stand held a single book.

Wait for the probe, said Darwin as he put an arm in front of Cassandra to stop her from entering the room.

The probe returned with the same readings as the main library.

There is something very wrong here, said Cassandra.

You think? Darwin ran his hands through his hair. We need to report this.

"We don’t even know what this is yet."

Cassandra made her way over to the nearest book stand. The book was bound in blue leather and had no title on the cover. There was a metal lock on the book, which snapped opened by itself as Cassandra reached for it.

That’s it, said Darwin as he placed a hand on her shoulder. We’re going back upstairs and calling this in.

Darwin...

No! My job is to keep you safe. This place? Not feeling the safeness, here.

How can you say that? We don’t even know what is going on, yet!

I don’t need to know the science behind a fusion bomb to know I don’t want to be in the blast radius of one.

Okay. Compromise. We’ll take the book upstairs and out of the scary room to study. Let me perform a scan and catalog the first book. And then we’ll make a decision from there as to what to do.

"Fine. One book. Upstairs. But I’m telling you right now if any more of these things start opening on their own or moving or dancing or doing anything, anything, we leave and file a report."

Dancing?

Darwin put his gloves back on and picked up the book. He closed the door behind them and they went back upstairs. He put the book on the table in front of Cassandra’s work area.

Are you going to stand there and stare at me now? she asked as she carefully opened the cover to the title page.

Yeah.

She shook her head, pulled out her scanner, and read the title page.

The Great Tome of Forgotten Relics and Artifacts

That doesn’t sound ominous at all, said Darwin as he read over her shoulder.

We’re scientists. When did you get so superstitious?

When I saw a lit fireplace that magically gives off no heat in the hidden chamber of a library that had been closed for centuries.

Cassandra smirked and began carefully scanning the pages.

Seamus Tripp & the Golden Plates

by Jon Garett and Richard Walsh

––––––––

Chapter One: Travelogues and Telegrams

Elie Doolittle closed her book, Travels into the Salt Lake Valley, and closed her eyes, trying to conjure in her mind an image of what she had just read. According to her book, the Mormons’ fabulous Salt Lake Temple was a granite Gothic architectural masterpiece embodying the work ethic and perseverance of the folks who had settled the region.

At once a castle and a church, it boasted turrets, spires, holy rituals, secret chambers, and even code words. What a place!

She picked up the travelogue from her lap and leaned forward in her seat to talk to Seamus Tripp, who was riding across from her in the passenger car. He was a world-famous adventurer and a scholar of all things exciting and arcane. She believed that reading him the passage about the Temple would surely break him out of his current doldrums.

For Seamus had been cranky the entire train journey from Boston. They were in the middle of Nebraska now, nearly to Utah and headed eventually for San Francisco. In fact, he had been cranky even before they had started!

She thought she knew why. The day before departing, their trunks packed and their fare purchased, Mister Seamus had indulged Elie and his nephew, Gordon, to a new treat: a matinee moving picture. A novelty in Boston and all the rage, particularly the picture they saw: Captain Excursion Versus the Pirate King.

Though Elie and Gordon had loved it, Seamus came back from the movie sorely disappointed. The dialogue, he complained, was trite. The action poorly executed. The plot convoluted. Why, he asked, had Captain Excursion followed the Pirate King into the Forbidden Lair in the first place? The whole story, he claimed, unspooled from that rather unbelievable premise.

This being Elie’s first moving picture, she had not known the answers he sought. But now, several thousand miles west and a week removed, she realized that they must have been important answers indeed to have caused such a gloom to settle on the usually gregarious man.

She leafed through the travelogue and pretended to read again, looking over the top of it as Seamus muttered to himself. He held in his hands a telegram from his business partner, Mister Myron Fish. It was this telegram that had summoned them out west to begin with. Seamus had read it multiple times during their trip, and it quivered a bit in his hands as he reread it now.

Elie smiled, trying to look both awed and engaging, stood up in the narrow space between their seats, and extended Travels into the Salt Lake Valley in Seamus’s direction.

He looked doubtfully at the book. What’s this?

She put her hands on her hips. I just read the most exciting passage, she said with as much conviction as she could. The train lurched and she sat back down in her seat with a thump.

I’m sure it’s better than what I’m reading. He took her book and passed her the telegram he had been mulling over.

The Temple sounds amazing, said Elie. It’s a Gothic architectural marvel!

This is the place, is that it? said Seamus. Brigham Young had said this is the place when he had led the first party of Mormon pioneers into the Salt Lake valley sixty years earlier. Elie had read about Brigham Young’s famous proclamation in her travelogue.

Teasing tended to improve Seamus's moods, so she laughed. Just for a day.

The American West is an integral part of our national character, said Gordon Tripp from his seat beside Seamus; interrupting, as usual. He was Seamus’s twelve-year-old nephew, an aspiring writer, and an insufferable know-it-all.

Thanks, Horace Greeley, said Elie, eliciting a laugh from Seamus, a very good sign. I was just telling your uncle that he ought to read the captivating description of the monuments in Salt Lake City.

Seamus began paging through the travelogue. His brow was still furrowed, but he had stopped muttering to himself. Elie peeked down at the telegram Mister Fish had sent.

Together, Myron Fish and Seamus Tripp owned Tripp’s Imports & Antiquities, a shop in Boston that traded in rare, exotic, and, sometimes, magical items. Mister Tripp, the world famous adventurer, was the face of the operation and its namesake. Mister Fish was its brains and its ledger. He was also the more high-strung of the business partners.

Seamus was still reading. Elie began to read the telegram:

ALL PARTIES RENDEZVOUS SAN FRANCISCO FOR DEPARTURE [STOP] SOUTH SEA VOYAGE IMMINENT [STOP] MEET MORMON JACK IN OGDEN [STOP] ACQUIRE TRADE GOODS [STOP] BRIEF VISIT ONLY [STOP] REPEAT BRIEF

* * *

Seamus Tripp was not a man who took orders well. He had spent a lifetime building the cachet to live the life of a free man. He traveled when he wanted, ate what he wanted, slept where he wanted, and visited with whoever he wanted for the duration of he wanted.

So to receive Myron’s telegram, replete with not one, nor two, nor three, but FOUR orders? To be summoned as though a djinni from a lamp; it was all aggravating beyond description. Travel to San Francisco. Immediately. From there to the South Seas. Imminent. Stop to pick up trade goods along the way. Briefly. Briefly, lest the immediate, imminent, preplanned South Sea voyage be delayed.

The nerve.

Seamus ruminated on this as he paged through the girl Elaine’s travelogue. It was the type of travel writing one would read instead of traveling to the actual locale. A very descriptive, florid, and romantic passage described the Great Temple in Salt Lake City.

A touch of purple prose never hurt a literary work, particularly something as potentially pedestrian as a travel guide. But it seldom illuminated the true nature of a place.

Such also was the monstrous moving picture production they had attended before this trip. The Captain and the Pirate, or whatever the blasted thing was called. The same over-the-top fluff as the travel book; an adventure as imagined by someone that had never so much as stirred from their sitting room. To see actors pantomiming the absurd plot had at once saddened and enraged Seamus.

Why had every scene ended with a blasted cliffhanger? he had asked. Gort was quick enough to answer.

It’s like an adventure novel! he exclaimed as if the original question had not been purely rhetorical. Then again, the lad would not recognize a bit of rhetoric if Cicero himself slapped the boy across the face with it.

But perhaps Gordon was right. Perhaps literature, too, was going the way of these moving pictures: action and adventure instead of substance and verisimilitude.

Seamus flipped through the section on Salt Lake City absentmindedly.

One thing they missed, he said to no one in particular, is all the stuff the Mormons built over. My understanding is there’s more packed beneath the salt flats of the valley than this reporter realizes.

He looked up. He had unwittingly caught the children’s attention. Gordon had stopped writing in his journal, which accompanied him at all times and to all places, and Elie had put down the telegram.

What'd they build over? asked Elie, always quick with follow-up questions.

I wouldn't know, but they arrived after a decade of travails in the east. Chased around like a herd of antelope. I can see why they'd simply want to settle down.

Probably some old treasure, Gordon suggested, taken up again with ideas from Captain Pirate.

They brought treasure of their own! said Elie, clearly pleased that her travelogue was coming in so handy. "I bet they still had the Golden Plates upon which the original Book of Mormon was inscribed!"

I wonder where those are kept? said Gordon.

Probably at the top of the Temple!

They must weigh a lot, said Gordon. "I've read the Book of Mormon. It would be a pretty heavy set of plates to inscribe all that."

Unfortunately, said Seamus, taking back the reins on the conversation, I believe the plates were hauled up to heaven by an angel, not out to Deseret.

The children’s countenances fell.

We’ve neither the time nor the gumption to explore. There would no doubt be plenty to occupy our interest in lovely Deseret, but it would be a blatant violation of our master’s summons.

The boy looked down, to go back to his writing, but Seamus snatched the journal from his lap. Now let’s see what Gort has recorded about the trip thus far.

* * *

Gordon Tripp cringed when his uncle Seamus took the journal from his lap. Though he aspired to be a published writer, he was dreadfully shy about the things he wrote. Certainly, someday he would feel confidence and satisfaction in his writing as all published writers did. But for the time being he hated to share his journal with anyone, even his uncle, and especially Elie, who was sitting across from Seamus, watching expectantly as Seamus began to read.

She had put down the telegram, so Gordon picked it up quickly, thinking that if he feigned nonchalance they would tire of the journal and return it.

He was surprised, reading the wire, of the intensity of Myron’s short sentences. Imminence and immediacy leaped from the telegram. Mister Fish was always the sober one of the pair, the one who put the kibosh on outrageous trips and unnecessary expenses. The yin to Seamus’s yang.

But the telegram was not all bad news: there was to be a stop in the little town of Ogden, at the foot of the Wasatch Mountains north of Salt Lake, to meet Seamus and Myron’s old mountain man contact Mormon Jack. If past experience was any indication, that detour might turn into a great unexpected adventure.

Gordon settled back in his seat, telegram in hand, thinking of the Mormon settlements scattered high on the mountaintops of Utah, or Deseret, as many of them still called it. What kind of strange monsters might they find? Or perhaps a robber baron fled to the wilderness? Or a great colony of fervent religionists, like the notorious Mormon assassin Porter Rockwell?

So caught up was Gordon in this vision, in fact, that he had forgotten that Seamus was reading his journal. Just then, however, Seamus spoke.

As always, you've opted for description over accuracy, where Madam Gristmill is concerned, Seamus said, referring to the shop’s best customer. Mrs. Dahlia Gristmill had visited them just the day before their departure, the same day they had gone to the excellent moving picture Captain Excursion Meets the Pirate King. You’ve misrepresented her visit completely. Allow me.

Here he cleared his throat and began to read aloud:

"Dahlia Gristmill, wife of Captain Mortimer Gristmill, Esq., a soldier in rank only, his commission granted to him by the Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for charity work rendered to the city’s destitute, was a lady of the highest class, all skirts and hats and fine manners.

"She was bundled accordingly in a great skirt, a tremendous bustle, and an elaborate hat crowned with a great golden brooch, which stood straight up atop an elaborate tangle of silk and beads, like the oversized face atop a clock tower. As she perused the front parlor of the shop, the width of her wardrobe and the enormity of her ensemble knocked from the shelves an assemblage of items for sale: books and trinkets, beads and baubles, holy statuettes and ornamental weaponry.

Such was her path of destruction that the proprietor of the store, an Irishman of notorious temperament...

Here Seamus paused and looked meaningfully at Gordon.

"...became distraught, attempting to corral the capaciously clothed client to a less cluttered area of the salon.

’Madame! he exclaimed. ‘Tis our pleasure to serve you and provide you with the rarest collection of occult items available in our fair city. But alas I must, perforce, speed you through your visit this day. We are soon to depart for parts unknown and for days unnumbered. May I leave you with a sample of a bit of our Dover Juniper? It will have to do until we’ve returned, no doubt laden with many mysterious and magical mementos of our trip.

Seamus stopped reading, closed up the journal, and placed it on his lap.

How to begin? he said, though he clearly had some idea. The alliteration, while admirable, is a bit distracting.

"I loved it! said Elie. I thought all the big words were sensational!"

Seamus clucked his tongue. That’s one way to put it. He turned back to Gordon. I don’t really talk like that, do I?

Not exactly, said Gordon. But I consider it literary license.

So you’re writing less a journal and more a novel?

Gordon did not know how to answer that. Certainly, their trips were the basis for many of his journalistic flights of fancy, but the journal itself was never meant as a historical record of the trips themselves. He said as much.

Seamus opened his mouth to respond when there was a knock at the door.

Now who could that be?

Chapter Two: Gordon’s Lost Journal

Tabby Wright paused in the vestibule between the dining car and the sleeper cars and took a deep breath of