Pandora's Box: Book 3 of the Crystal Raven Series

Something was very wrong. It tainted the air with such force that he could taste it. Jean-Claude crept downstairs towards the basement of the brownstone, following his disquiet towards one of the rooms they had built there. What could be causing such a stench? A new room had been added at the rear of the basement, close to the archives. The door and its lock meant nothing to him. As his curiosity drove him forward, Jean-Claude stepped through the wall. And into the face of a rather large hellhound.

“Hey puppy,” Jean-Claude soothed. “What are you doing here?”

Strawberry sat with her black tongue hanging out, panting. Her tail was wagging like a pair of windshield wipers in a torrential downpour. She leapt up, the weight of her paws on his shoulders knocking Jean-Claude over.

“Who’s there?” Ember called sleepily.

“Jean-Claude, you silly little girl,” the monk spat out.

“Jean-Claude?” Ember yawned. “You’re dead.”

“I will be if you don’t get this elephant off of me,” Jean-Claude complained. “What are they doing in my house? Elephants belong in the circus, you silly little girl.”

“I’m sleeping,” Ember complained. “What do you want?”

“I need your help,” Jean-Claude replied, struggling to keep the black tongue out of his face.

“What?” Ember complained.

“First get this hippopotamus off of me, you silly little girl,” Jean-Claude demanded. “Who do you feed it, the milkman or the postman?”

“Strawberry eats puppy chow,” Ember complained. “That’s what you feed puppies, you silly old man.”

“Who are you talking to?” Alex asked sleepily.

“Jean-Claude,” Ember called across the room.

“Who’s Jean-Claude, and why is he in our room?” Alex demanded.

“He was Crystal and Gwen’s father until he got himself killed by a vampyre,” Ember yawned.

“Tell him I’m the only ghost allowed in this room,” Alex snapped. “It’s two in the morning.”

“I’m not a ghost, you silly little girl,” Jean-Claude complained, but they both ignored him.

The fallout caused by the schism between the Church and the Brotherhood was creating a definite split in the Academy community. A line was being drawn between Brotherhood supporters and those who believed the Church was the true leader of their fight. To avoid the tension, Crystal and her cabal were keeping a low profile, meeting at places outside the Enclave. Not surprising, the Augustine monks were siding with the Church – one did not simply kill a pope and expect to walk away without consequences – and this was putting a damper on Gwen and Stephan’s relationship. It looked like the war would claim another casualty, about the fourteenth breakup in their teenage community since that night in Upyr.

At first, merely to avoid running into Stephan and the other Augustine monks, Gwen and her girls had started doing their research and homework in the Brotherhood Archives. Other reasons soon piled up. She sat now, struggling over an essay, while Alex, Crystal and Aiko flipped through random books. Alex, who had already completed high school, was auditing a few of the more esoteric courses at the Academy – a sort of remedial demon-hunting program to familiarize her with her new world. Auditing meant she did not have to write essays on the current thoughts on Transmutation of Souls – the lucky bitch. It was dryer than eating crackers in the heart of the Sahara desert or the kiss of a lover eight centuries dead.

Bored, Alex was twiddling with the Wiccan Apotropaic and Crystal’s Rosary and Raven. She kept scraping the two crystals against the wood and metal of the cross, making an annoying swishing sound. Gwen glared at her.

“Do you mind?” Gwen demanded. “Really, girl, some people’s children!”

“Have you ever noticed,” Alex asked, ignoring the other girl, “how my stone, Crystal’s bird and Jaime’s pendant thingy all fit onto this cross? Like a Chinese puzzle or something.”

Crystal set down the tome she was trying to read. Something big enough to swat an elephant with was too large to hold comfortably in your lap. Got to hate it.

“What do you mean?” Crystal asked, more for an excuse to stop reading than from actual curiosity.

Placing the cross upside down on the table, Alex picked up the Wiccan Apotropaic. Immediately above Christ’s graven head, a divot in the wood and metal created a setting for the stone. Carefully applying pressure, Alex’s nimble fingers slipped it into place with an audible snap. Next, she took up the crystal raven. The tapered end of the branch in its claws slid into a slot at the base of the cross. The raven stood out like the pommel of a sword, raising the cross of the table at one end.

“I think Jaime’s fits right here,” she pointed to Christ’s loincloth. “I can’t be sure until I see it up close.”

“Gwen,” Crystal suggested. “Text him and ask him to bring it over.”

“Why me?” Gwen complained. “Why don’t you text Drake and ask him? They’re always together anyway.”

“Because you’re the one he has a thing for,” Crystal explained. “He’s so hot for you if you asked him to jump off the Empire state building and fly, he’d do it. If you ask, he will come.”

Gwen rolled her eyes. “And spend the whole time trying to look down my top. My girls are not for public viewing.”

Crystal pulled back the top of Gwen’s shirt with a finger and pretended to take a peek. “No wonder! You need to shave that chest beard.”

“At least I don’t have to stuff myself,” Gwen shot back. “Every time one of my socks goes missing, I just have to look in your bra!”

Aiko looked at Alex. “And to think I once wanted to eat these two.”

“Bad move, girlfriend,” Alex warned. “They’d give you the trots for a month.”

“If not two,” Aiko agreed.

“Ha!” Gwen shot back. “I’m so sweet I would go straight to your hips and stay there.”

Gwen would not budge. The Brit made her feel too uncomfortable for her to encourage him in any way, not that he seemed to need the least bit of encouragement. In the end, Crystal texted Drake and made him promise to bring the recalcitrant Brit. She spent the entire wait staring at the strange object that Alex had created. Something about it struck Crystal as familiar, vaguely so, as if it were somewhat incomplete. But what? She read so much these days she was beginning to feel like Jean-Claude had possessed her. Images from pages and television and magazines inundated her brain, blurring into a kaleidoscope of nothingness. Was it shaped like some common item from a past life? Sometimes these stray memories could be so frustrating.

Sometimes her half-remembered past lives made Crystal feel schizophrenic. It was like watching a hundred television sets while listening to a thousand radios and still trying to read a complicated treatise that was her here and now. The object was not the first time she felt this sense of déjà vu, although many items in this time and place were too new for her to have seen in any of her past lives.

Despite their teasing Gwen, it still took forty-five minutes for the boys to find the energy to walk the three blocks to the brownstone. When they finally did arrive, the girls’ curiosity had to wait while they finished exchanging banter. Crystal stuck her chest out at Gwen when she caught Jaime peaking down the other girl’s top, and she and the other two girls laughed at a blushing Gwen. Mystified, the boys pestered the girls, trying to pry the inside joke out of them, certain one or the other was its butt.

“Could Alex borrow your pendant for a moment?” Crystal asked a little too sweetly.

“It was me Mums,” Jaime objected.

“She’s not going to keep it,” Crystal complained, sighing in frustration. Boys could be so moody. More so than men, she seemed to remember. “She only wants to see it for a second.”

“It’s important,” Gwen threw in, blushing. “Maybe.”

Reluctantly, Jaime fished out the pouch where he kept the pendant. It was the only thing he had left of home and family. It never left his person, hanging around his neck from a leather thong in a pouch, along with dried herbs blessed by various native and aboriginal holy men. Carefully slipping it over his head, Jaime took his time loosening the drawstrings of the pouch. The pendant and chain came out covered in bits of leaves and other vegetation. Painstakingly cleaning it off, gathering every crumb and bit of leaf and pouring them back into the pouch, the entire ritual was designed to wear on Crystal’s nerves. Where had her patience all gone?

Alex picked it up, studied it for a moment, and then slipped the pendant off its chain before Jaime could object. Setting the chain aside, she picked up the crucifix and held the pendant an inch above it. It really was like a Chinese puzzle – everything fit together, but only in a certain way. The backing on the pendant was not perfectly symmetrical, and one side had a slight ridge. Nimbly, she jiggled it until it snapped in place with an audible snick.

“There’s still something missing,” Alex sighed, setting her creation down on the table.

“It looks like a fairy wand,” Jaime teased.

“I think it’s a supercharged vampyre zinger,” Gwen threw in.

“It looks familiar,” Crystal complained. “But is that because I’ve seen all this stuff so often, or what?”

“It does kind of look like something I’ve seen somewhere,” Alex admitted.

“Maybe in one of our textbooks,” Gwen offered, “or something in Jean-Claude’s writings. He’s always drawing weird things in the margins, even in the books he’s just reading.”

“We’ve read so much lately,” Drake complained, “I couldn’t tell you where I’ve seen anything, not even my picture in the yearbook. I still have three essays to write and mid-term exams around the corner.”

“Me too,” Crystal smiled in sympathy.

“Me three,” Gwen piped up, “and I’m only halfway done this one. But I can tell you that it isn’t in this pile of books.”

She hugged a pile of seven or eight books, protecting her precious bookmarks. She would never find those passages again if any of these baboons started messing with them.

“That only leaves a couple of thousand to search,” Crystal complained.

“You should discipline your mind,” Aiko scolded. “Perfect recall is only a matter of training.”

“Easy for you to say,” Crystal teased, poking the vampyre in the ribs. “A young thing like you does not have the memories from hundreds of lives cluttering your brain. Why I remember when fire was first invented…”

“Think about it logically,” Cantara advised as she wandered into the room to check on the girls. She pointed to Alex. “You read that Game journal almost exclusively.” She turned to Crystal, “and if Jean-Claude’s pen hasn’t touched it, you pretty well ignore it.”

“That narrows it down to a thousand books,” Crystal griped.

“A thousand and one,” Alex teased.

“Okay,” Gwen said practically, “let’s divide it up. Half of us will take his travel journals and the other half his research.”

“Count me out,” Cantara said, holding her hands up. “I’m looking for Ember. April wants to talk to her about these visions of hers.”

They settled down to read. Cantara, who had only come to the archives to check on them – any long spell of silence with this group needed to be viewed with a jaundiced eye and a healthy dose of suspicion – found herself dragooned into service. She shrugged, taking it in good grace. Let April find Ember on her own. After all, what kind of trouble could these girls get into reading? None, she prayed. And in case God was a little busy, threw in a couple of prayers to her ancestors. What trouble could these girls get into? Demons, and vampyres and armies of the undead. With this group, she could use all the help she could get.

Ignoring the others, Crystal flipped through several books that she had read over the past week, her mind picking at a vague memory like a scab. The sculpture – she did not know what else to call Alex’s creation – haunted her. There was something important that she was forgetting, something the ‘it’ was reminding her of that had once played a vital role in one of her past lives. These half-memories were so bloody frustrating she felt a tension headache coming on. If this body was not so young, she would go ahead and have a heart attack. She was, after all, ancient enough to be senile.

She switched over to Jean-Claude’s travel journals and began reminiscing. In all her many lives, she had never met anyone like him, and it amazed her how much some individuals could cram into one lifetime. Jean-Claude had missed few experiences in the forty-nine years he had lived – except, perhaps sleeping with a woman. He had dived into a ruined temple beneath the ice flows of the Arctic, climbed several mountains, and parachuted into the jungles of South America. Fought demons and vampyres, and hunted down evil men, belong to dozens of charities, and even more organizations. And through it all, he had written and collected books by the hundreds.

Mountains? There was something about mountains that struck a chord with her. What journal was that in? Somewhere in the Seventies, when he was no more than a kid. Searching through the journals on the table, she found the one from seventy-four to seventy-six missing.

“Who’s reading Jean-Claude’s travel journals?” She asked. Several of her companions looked up. “Does anyone have seventy-four through seventy-six?”

It wasn’t here. Where could it have gotten to? Tapping her teeth with a finger, she thought back to when she had last seen it. There were a couple of misadventures she wanted to re-read at leisure – the thirty days at sea in a rowboat, being chased by a flock of possessed sheep across Northern Alberta and the sea lion that had followed him around an Inuit village for almost three weeks. Nothing important there, merely humorous, and seeded with the diminutive Frenchman’s personality. Where was the last place she had been reading it? It was before all that excitement in London, Ontario, before Shax and Morgan and Brendon’s deaths. If she recalled correctly, it would have to be in either one of their two bedrooms – they had been grounded so often back then.

“I’ll be right back,” she announced, but no-one was listening. Everyone was too intent on their own searches. Jean-Claude knew how she felt as he followed her upstairs. These young girls were hard on an old man, no?

Her apartment had begun to look more like a command centre than a home. Even the kitchen had been pressed into service as an office. There were so many strangers lurking around the brownstone that it no longer felt like she belonged. But at least her bedroom was still her own – well, she only had to share it with Aiko and Cantara. Every square inch was being used to accommodate the growing influx of refugees. If this kept up, she would need to buy a second building. Maybe three. Or maybe build a dozen closets for this bedroom. A storm of clothes littered every surface, on the beds, piled in corners, and draped over the mirror and the dresser. More spilled out of every one of its eight drawers, and lay at its feet like a pool of blood.

She found the journal under her bed along with a missing bra, three odd socks, and the Sesame Street ‘Counting Count’ doll they had used to tease Aiko. Brushing off the dust with a promise to clean her room, when she got around to it, Crystal dashed back down to the archives. Already she was flipping through the pages, perusing the spidery script that had become as familiar to her as her own handwriting. She was walking through the door when she found the passage she was looking for, and at that moment, she thought she could feel Jean-Claude’s hand on her back.

“I found it!”

With a collection of grateful sighs, her companions slammed shut the volumes they were reading and turned to wait.

“August 17th, 1976

I find myself faced with a rare stretch of quiet. Almost a month now without a crisis. Jacque Dubois and I have been discussing for years the other ῾Pandora’s Box᾿ legend. Today we embark on a journey to Mount Everest, where we hope to test one of our theories.

Pandora, seeing the evil she had unleashed on the world, spent the rest of her life filling her box with hope. We believe hope to be various powerful apotropaics capable of countering the evils she had set loose.

Much of the history of the box after her lifetime is sketchy – not even myth as much as rumour. It was believed to have disappeared sometime around the time of the fall of the Greek City-states and the rise of the Roman Empire. Jacque has found an interesting fragment that mentions a temple on one of the four pillars of the world. I suspect the pillar is Mount Everest- and the temple?

I know of so many temples, but none on Mount Everest. The only legend I know connected to this mountain is the tale of Noah’s Ark. Perhaps I could ask one of the Yeti if I could find one of these mystical creatures. With my luck lately, he is probably off visiting his cousin Sasquatch in North America, enjoying a cup of herbal tea.

Most oracles were temples located near volcano vents or other sources of gases that have hallucinogenic effects. I know of no such place on Everest, but the thin air at high altitudes might have had the same effect. Altitude fever or some such thing…”

Crystal stopped reading. Flipping through the pages, she concluded, “see here’s a drawing. And you’re right, Alex, a piece is missing.”

“What good is it to us then?” Jaime interjected.

“I think I know where the temple Jean-Claude was looking for is,” Crystal explained. “only I got to remember it again.”