The Enchantments: Book 2 - The Key of Gandar

Chapter 8: The Crypt

"Should we leave her out there alone?" Heather spouted yanking Tyler to a standstill.

"Trust me she'll be fine, the ghost wouldn't hurt her, she's an ancestor of the Harrington family."

"How can you be so sure about this whole thing?" She spat at him.

He looked towards her with an anger she had never seen before. "I'm as worried as you are about her, but if we don't trust her right now we'll lose what we're here for in the first place, she'd want it that way." He said with a definite annoyance in his voice. He turned away from her in a huff and began his search of the mausoleum.

"You better be right." She demanded.

Tyler wasn't listening anymore he was concentrating on the coffin that lay in front of him. The crest prominent within his gaze, "Seven, four, nine." He said out loud to himself.

Heather peered around nervously, this was turning out to be her least favorite place ever, even more, than the graveyard it seemed. At any moment she was expecting a corpse to jump out of the nearest coffin and waggle its teeth at her in some unseen scary manner. She slapped her head a few times trying to release the images that haunted her mind so she could concentrate on the task at hand.

'The numbers don't make sense!' Tyler thought to himself as he rubbed his face in frustration. "I NEED THE COMBINATION!!" He yelled into the air.

"What are we looking for?" Heather asked.

"I don't know it has something to do with those three numbers." He poked his finger at the numbers in the shamrocks.

"Wait a minute!" Heather turned looking around the mausoleum anxiously. Her gaze took her to every corner searching for that one important clue. Then without warning the image she wanted appeared, the ceiling, embossed into the wall were the number combination the were looking for. She had almost missed them if the light from the torches had not flickered at that precise moment the answer could have been lost forever.

There between the cobwebs the numbers nine, four and seven were etched into the stone where the two walls met the ceiling. "I bet you that's them!" Tyler yelled joyfully.

"What do we do now?" She asked.

"According to a passage in the Harrington family history, we have to place the shamrocks in a particular order of numbers. Now it also says that if the numbers are placed in the wrong positions there will be consequences."

"What consequences?" She asked, a slight nervous twitch in her voice.

"I don't know, the book didn't say. Do you really want to know?" He looked at her showing her that he was scared too.

"NO!" She said instantly. "Let's just get on with it."

Tyler moved towards the shield and with a shaky hand pulled out the first shamrock. When nothing happened he continued pulling out the second then the third. They both sighed in relief as nothing catastrophic occurred, giving Tyler the confidence to return the shamrocks in the order of nine, four, and seven, and that's when everything changed.

The rumbling started deep underground seeming to rise to the surface like a freight train through a rainstorm. The coffins around them began to shake uncontrollably; dust fell from crevices in the stone coating the floor with hundreds of years of dust and soot. Cobwebs began to dance around in the light, as it seemed the mausoleum would fall in around them.

Suddenly without warning the coffin to their left began to slide forward, Tyler noticing instantly that it was the one that the shamrocks were placed on, it shook violently for a minute then suddenly it stopped. At first, they saw nothing particularly different about the ancient coffin until they realized it had moved forward a few feet. They slipped around the outside of the casing towards the sides. Looking cautiously behind Tyler waved Heather over and they stared down a set of stairs towards a black void.