Bones of Angels Read online

  Table of Contents

  About Christopher Forrest

  Also by Christopher Forrest

  Praise for Christopher Forrest's thrillers:

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  TEMPLE OF FIRE

  Bones

  of Angels

  A Novel

  by Christopher Forrest

  Copyright © 2012 Christopher D. Forrest

  Published 2012 by Christopher D. Forrest

  Layout by Cheryl Perez: www.yourepublished.com

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author or publisher.

  About Christopher Forrest

  Christopher Forrest has lived on a sailboat, explored Mayan ruins in the jungles of Central America, been struck by lightning, free-dived the barrier reefs off the coast of Belize, and solo-hiked through the Everglades.

  He is the bestselling author of The Genesis Code, Savage Bay and Bones of Angels. Hard at work on his next Titan Six novel, Forrest lives in Sarasota, Florida, with his wife Amy and four chihuahuas who think they are people.

  www.facebook.com/titansix

  www.christopherforrest.com

  Also by Christopher Forrest

  The Genesis Code

  Savage Bay

  Temple of Fire (coming soon)

  For Steve Carle

  May you find eternal peace.

  Praise for Christopher Forrest's thrillers:

  From New York Times bestselling author JAMES ROLLINS: "Be prepared! Cutting edge science and lost history collide in a thrilling tour de force."

  From BOOKLIST: "[Will] keep thriller fans panting."

  From New York Times bestselling author DOUGLAS PRESTON: "Launches the reader into a story of science and ancient mystery that will blow your mind."

  Chapter 1

  "And war broke out in heaven; Michael and his angels fought against the dragon. The dragon and his angels fought back, but they were defeated, and there was no longer any place for them in heaven.

  The great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world - he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him."

  - Revelation 12:7

  June 13, 1098

  Mount Moriah

  The walls of the subterranean passage were made of human bones. Stacks of femurs and tibias, capped with rows of chalky, white skulls, framed the narrow passageways that led deep beneath the earth. Below the temple that the Saracens called Qubbat-as-Sakhrah, Godefroi St. Omer raised a sputtering torch above his head.

  The flickering light reflected off the dented metal of his breastplate and illuminated a stairway leading down into the catacombs. St. Omer’s white surcoat, emblazoned with a large red cross and stained with the crimson blood of the many Turks he had slain, hung in tatters over his armor.

  We shall call this place Templum Domini.

  * * *

  After the defeat of the Saracens in the first Crusade to reclaim the Holy Land from infidels, Godefroi St. Omer and his weary knights had taken up residence in the battered ruins of a Saracen mosque on Mount Moriah in Jerusalem. The mosque was inhabited by monks who fasted and prayed daily in order to rededicate the holy site to Christ. They chanted hymns of thanksgiving by candlelight. Islam had been banished from Mount Moriah by valiant men such as Godefroi. As St. Omer had proclaimed, the site was once again the Temple of the Lord — Templum Domini.

  Mount Moriah. The Temple Mount.

  The site where Abraham had raised his knife, ready to obey Yahweh’s command. Ready to sacrifice his son, Isaac. The site where an angel had stopped Abraham’s hand from its downward movement at the last moment before blood was shed.

  The site known as Jerusalem.

  But the monks had been agitated, nervous. Even frightened. They spoke of ancient legends revealed by scrolls buried in the walls of the mosque. The scrolls were in tatters, but they seemed to speak of a holy treasure beneath the temple.

  For the next three months, St. Omer and the monks diligently explored the ruins of the ancient temple and the catacombs beneath it.

  * * *

  St. Omer beheld the wall of chalky human bones in the catacomb — bones of perhaps the earliest believers in the new faith that had spread outwards from Jerusalem after the resurrection. He crossed himself at the thought of where he was.

  “It’s just through there, m’lord,” said the grimy monk behind him, pointing with a dirty, split fingernail to an open door at the bottom of the stairway.

  A stone lintel above the door was engraved with a line of ancient letters. St. Omer squinted as he read the inscription.

  TO THE TRUMPETING PLACE

  St. Omer descended the stairway to the lowest level of the catacombs, favoring his wounded leg as he walked down the stone steps. The still air smelled foul. A large crypt dominated the center of the chamber below.

  “Here, m’lord.”

  The top of a wooden ladder protruded from the ragged hole in the stone floor at the far end of the room. Smoky torchlight struggled to illuminate the ancient crypt.

  St. Omer knelt above the ladder and peered into the void beneath him. A narrow passage twisted down into the rock. The base of the ladder rested on a stone landing twenty feet below.

  “Wait here,” said St. Omer.

  The monk nodded and wrung his hands nervously.

  St. Omer slowly lowered himself on the rungs of the ladder. His knee wouldn’t take his body’s full weight, and St. Omer was forced to hop down awkwardly from one rung to the next, using the strength of his arms to maintain his balance and absorb the impact of each drop down the ladder with his good leg.

  Above, the monk peered over the edge of the opening.

  About halfway down, St. Omer paused to rest. The wound in his right thigh had re-opened from the exertion, and a warm trickle of blood ran down his leg.

  He uttered a curse. “Eala, scite!”

  St. Omer turned and balanced himself on the rung as best he could, reaching down with both hands to tighten the blood-soaked bandage that encircled his thigh. The weight of his breastplate pulled his center of gravity forward, and St. Omer suddenly realized that he had made a mistake.

  “Careful, m’lord!” called the monk from above.

  St. Omer frantically reached back to grab hold, but his forward momentum carried his torso away from the ladder. He lost his tenuous purchase on the wooden rung and fell, head over heels, down the shaft.

  He struck the stone, landed at the base of the ladder, bounced off the edge, and continued his fall into the nearly vertical cavern beneath.

  Were it not for his armor, St. Omer would likely have died when he struck the floor of the cavern. Precious air rushed from his lungs on impact, and he
gasped for breath. The bones of his left arm were shattered, and blood streamed down his face from a wide gash in his forehead. His torch, extinguished, had fallen into the darkness.

  “Omer!” cried the monk. “Omer!” The thin voice echoed against the stone.

  Dazed, St. Omer managed to pull himself into a sitting position in the dark chamber.

  “Light!” he called. “I need a fresh torch!”

  “It comes now!” called the monk.

  A lit torch fell from above, bouncing twice off the walls of the shaft before falling to rest on the cavern floor where St. Omer sat. The torchlight revealed an almost circular chamber twenty feet across.

  St. Omer gasped.

  Embedded in the wall of the cavern, a large skeleton reached out from the rock with one arm, as if trying to free itself from its stone tomb. It appeared to be the bones of an enormous man, well over seven feet tall. Some of the bones were encased in rock, like the stone itself had flowed around the skeleton and then solidified, trapping the remains.

  What St. Omer saw next caused him to drop his head to the stone floor, clasp his hands tightly together, and begin to pray: “Yea, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I fear no evil, for Thou art with me . . . ”

  Above the shoulders of the skeleton, a pair of massive wings were embedded in the rock.

  An angel.

  The archangel’s wings were spread wide, stretching twenty feet across, as if the entombed bones were on the verge of taking flight.

  St. Omer struggled to his knees in supplication, his heart singing prayers. He felt both terrified and blessed. He crossed himself and shut his eyes tightly.

  Then he fell silent. No, he was not worthy. Not even he, a leader of the Knights Templar, should gaze upon the bones in the stone before him. But he couldn’t help himself.

  He raised his eyes to look upon the miracle he had found. There was a great flash of light.

  Then silence.

  Chapter 2

  The Home of Mary Whittington

  Long Island, New York, 1898

  At first, Mary Highstreet Whittington was quite certain she was going mad. She felt this distressing fact confirmed whenever she would see military men standing in the corner of the downstairs parlor of her Victorian home on Long Island.

  The Confederate soldier would leer at her as he leaned on his long, slender smoothbore musket. His body was somewhat transparent, but his disdain for the thirty-two-year-old mistress of the home was nevertheless evident.

  The British colonel was a bit more formal — stiff upper lip and erect posture speaking of discipline and duty — also visited Mary regularly. A rose-shaped bloodstain blossomed on his khaki uniform, right above his left breast.

  Other soldiers frequently called on the attractive young woman: Serbian, Russian, Italian, and many she couldn’t identify. They were all dressed in bloody, tattered uniforms. Their open wounds were appalling to behold. Some soldiers were missing limbs.

  Mary would run to her bedroom and hide under the bedspread, trembling.

  Her nightmares soon became regular. She dreamt she was standing on dusty battlefields, the smell of leather, steel, and gunpowder heavy in the smoky, acrid air. Canons fired, and horse-mounted cavalrymen rode past her with bloodcurdling cries. Infantrymen, dead and wounded, lay everywhere on the ground about her, vacant looks in their eyes.

  Fields of madness. Complete and utter madness.

  To soothe her jangled nerves, the family physician prescribed various tonics and elixirs, but to no effect. Since Mary’s parents had died from a fever while taking the Grand Tour in Europe, the doctor confided to her younger sister that he feared Mary might need to be institutionalized. She appeared to be suffering from paranoid delusions.

  As time progressed, Mary felt certain that the disturbing visitations were real. Since the early 1800s, her Whittington ancestors had known that warfare was a constant in human history. As sage entrepreneurs, they had also known how to capitalize on this grim fact of human nature. Throughout the decades of the nineteenth century, they had done business with men such as Benjamin Henry, Lewis Jennings, Horace Smith, Daniel Wesson, Richard Gatling, Walter Hunt, William Mason, and many other inventors and dealers of firearms. Her family had quite literally fueled dozens of wars across Europe and America. Bloodshed was their stock-in-trade.

  The Whittingtons amassed an incredible fortune, and Mary came to know in her soul the ugly truth: their fantastic wealth was little more than blood money.

  For unimaginable carnage, she was now being punished by the spirits of the dead.

  She wandered aimlessly through her two-story, forty-room home, but her nervous disposition was not allayed by its opulence and splendor. She mumbled to herself as she walked down hallways: “The Napoleonic Wars. The Bosnian Uprising. The Russo-Persian War. The Italian Wars of Independence. The American Civil War. Wars . . . and rumors of wars.”

  On dozens of walls were displayed the instruments of battle that had shed the blood of millions, mostly young men who had never really tasted adult life: the Volcanic Pistol, the Winchester Repeating Rifle, The Smith & Wesson Revolver, the Volition Repeating Rifle, the Colt .45, and muskets and blunderbusses of every make and model.

  At times, Mary held her head between her hands and shrieked.

  The Tearoom of Madame Zelovich

  Manhattan, New York, 1899

  The spiritualist, seated at a small round table with a checkered tablecloth, stared into the forlorn eyes of Mary Whittington. Her long black hair fell in ringlets over her shoulders. Her deep-set, dark brown eyes were intense and seemed to see far beyond Mary’s physical features. Incense burned on a table situated next to a red bead curtain admitting to Zelovich’s bedroom in the back of the humble tearoom that bordered a Chinese laundry.

  Madame Zelovich held both of Mary’s frail, white hands in her own and closed her eyes. She was silent for several minutes. Then she spoke.

  “My dear Mary,” she said, opening eyes rimmed with black mascara, “you are most definitely not mad. The spirits you see are quite real.”

  Mary sobbed quietly, copious tears running down her high cheeks. “But what can I do?” she asked. “I’m tormented. I would rather die.”

  “You are not to blame for the sins of your family,” proclaimed the spiritualist.

  “But the ghosts won’t leave me alone. What can I do?”

  Zelovich sighed heavily, causing large breasts to rise beneath her white peasant frock. “A ghost is a being of energy that can move among the three-dimensional forms of our world. These soldiers who visit you are not at peace.” She paused. “Some spirits are tied to various places. Others are tied to people. These men — they are angry at your family. It is written that the sins of the fathers are visited upon their children — unfairly, of course — but you can outwit these spirits.”

  Confused, Mary lifted her head and wiped away her tears with a lace handkerchief. “How?”

  “You must confuse them. They are easily disoriented since they spend much time in the shadowy realm between worlds. Their vision is imperfect, as is their understanding.”

  “Confuse them?”

  “Yes. You must move about constantly. Make it hard for them to find you. Or . . . ” She paused again. “Or you can make them move about. Spirits have a vague sense of right and left, up and down. They are easily misdirected.”

  A thin smile crossed Mary’s gentle features. She knew exactly what she would do.

  Chapter 3

  Whittington Manor

  Long Island, New York, 1903

  Begun in 1901, construction of the new 233-room, four-story mansion on Long Island never ceased. Day and night, carpenters and contractors labored to build the sprawling complex that would forever be known as Whittington Manor.

  The carpenters and masons, not to mention the architect himself, were themselves confused at the work they had been commissioned to create. Winding staircases led to plaster walls with no openings. Sev
eral dozen doors throughout the manor opened onto brick walls. Many doors were situated in the outer walls of the structure and opened onto the expansive gardens below — opened onto thin air!

  Hallways off the main corridors resembled a maze more than a recognizable floor plan. They wound through the spacious manor, turning at odd, oblique angles. Many either dead-ended or turned back upon themselves and led right back to their starting points.

  Some rooms and basements were only accessible through revolving panels and camouflaged doors.

  The manor was a monument to complexity, a shrine intended to confuse and misdirect the countless spirits who wished to seek out the heir to the bloody Whittington fortune.

  Spacious galleries were located throughout the manor. These were filled with priceless antiques and artifacts, as well as religious art and sculpture from the Old Masters of Europe: the paintings of Giotto, Fra Lippo Lippi, Bruegel, Raphael; the sculpture of Donatello and Brunelleshi. In every wing, depictions of Christ, the Blessed Virgin, saints, and angels stared from gilded frames or stood on marble or bronze pedestals.

  In the many libraries of the manor were rare Bibles, sacred texts, and illuminated manuscripts from the Middle Ages. It wouldn’t hurt, reasoned Mary, to have religious icons and artifacts to intimidate the restless spirits that sought her presence.

  In time, Mary was no longer bothered by apparitions — just an occasional nightmare or strange sound in the home. The architect assured her that with such unorthodox blueprints being executed, the house could be expected to settle and creak more than usual.

  Mary Whittington was content. Ongoing construction included lush foliage and landscaping around the manor, with winding gardens, statues, fountains, tall hedges, raised flower beds, and wooden and iron trellises laced with English Ivy.