“You’ve already been with a woman, haven’t you? A grown woman.”
“How did you know that?” Lloyd cried. “Can you read minds?”
“I’ve heard that you can,” the woman answered, and her face assumed an inscrutable smile. “Can you guess how old I am?”
“Eighty?” Lloyd tried, afraid that he might offend her.
“Fiddlesticks!” She laughed.
“One hundred, then.”
“Oh, I’m every bit of that.” She sighed. “Every bit and then some.”
“I think you’re the oldest person I’ve ever seen,” Lloyd admitted.
The old coon dog dozed.
“I am. And I don’t know how much longer I have. So let me cut off the gristle and get to the meat. There’s nothing wrong with your discovery of your manhood, even if you are still a child. The first experience of the flesh is a great challenge for everyone, but it is a special trial for males and you have passed yours. That may bode well. You are destined to run well before yourself in many ways. Now, before I tell you the things you were brought here to hear I will let you ask me one question. What would you like to know about—the lights?”
Lloyd pondered for a moment, feeling for the woman’s intent.
“I think you’ll tell me about the lights,” he replied at last. “What I’d like to know is how you get this boat through such a narrow passage.”
The woman gave the cat a long, deep stroke.
“The boat never leaves this grotto. Nor do I. It wouldn’t be safe for me to move about anymore.”
She clutched the hairless animal tighter and lowered her voice.
“And I don’t mean to frighten you, Lloyd, but there may come a time, sooner than you think, when it won’t be safe for you to move about so freely, either.”
Lloyd shifted in his chair, unable to turn his gaze from the woman’s eyes, which reached out and embraced him, her words filling the sparsely furnished room like the shadows that closed in around the lamp.
CHAPTER 9
The Hunger for Secrets
“DID I SCARE YOU, LLOYD?” MOTHER TONGUE ASKED AFTER A moment of silence. “Or is your hunger for secrets so great that you are immune to fear?”
Lloyd tried to feel in his mind, reaching inside and then outward into the shadows for some sense of his dead sister’s protective presence. Why was there a museum under a graveyard and a riverboat stuck inside a cliff? How did the darkness suddenly burst into light? A wave of fatigue washed over him and he longed to snuggle with the dog on the rough couch.
“We’ll see,” he answered at last, not wanting to show that he was scared—and scared because he did not know why. “Who are the Spirosians?”
Mother Tongue gave another one of her odd smiles.
“The movement dates back to very olden times in Europe and the Middle East, but it draws its strength from even longer ago, in ancient Greece and Egypt. It is based on the thought of one exemplary man, Spiro of Lemnos. Some stories tell that he was a hermaphrodite—both a male and a female. But that may be just a legend. We do know that he was a Phoenician by birth—sometimes called a son of Atlantis, the original philosopher-scientist. But he was also a practitioner of what some might describe as magic. A man of unique genius. The superior of Thales, Pythagoras, and Archimedes, and greater than all those who followed—Leonardo, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton. He saw more deeply into the mysteries of life than anyone else before or since. In fact, his ideas were so far ahead of his time that he was constantly in danger of persecution, imprisonment, and death. So he concealed his discoveries and teachings in a secret language—hierograms embedded in beautiful, intricate puzzles that he called Enigmas. No one knows how he came by this language or the design for these puzzles, but there is a myth that this knowledge was given to him by the gods. Others believe he stole it.”
“What sort of things did he know?” Lloyd inquired.
“The intimate dependencies of energy and matter—hidden correspondences. The lights you witnessed? They are his conception. A form of electrical power harnessed two thousand years before Benjamin Franklin experimented with his kite and key.”
“Two thousand years ago!” Lloyd coughed.
“The world is not always what you think it is, and history is most certainly not what you have been told,” Mother Tongue replied.
“What else did he do?” Lloyd asked, thinking back to St. Ives’s story of Junius Rutherford.
“He grasped the most complex relationships between numbers, music, and