The Cross

Chapter Twenty-One

Oxford

For the last three years, Matt Dempsey’s home had been a rambling three-storey Victorian terraced house in a quiet street in North Oxford, fifteen minutes’ bus ride from the city centre. The place was much too big for a solitary academic, but over the years he’d nonetheless managed to fill it with stuff his ex-wife would have called junk. In many cases, Matt secretly admitted that she’d have been right — the collection of antique brass lamps jostling for space on the mantelpiece of his downstairs study, for instance — but he prized them just as highly as the fourteenth-century Chinese statuettes on his bookshelf, the rare Mayan pottery in the display cabinet and the Italian medieval-period lute that hung on the wall behind his battered desk.

At this moment, though, they were the last things on his mind as he struggled to figure out the strange markings that ran around the circumference of the stone cross’s outer ring and along its pitted crosspieces.

It took him a while to root out the books he needed: the most useful of the cracked, musty leather-bound volumes were Crosman’s 1822 Lexicon of Ancient Tongues and Kerensky’s 1906 edition of Lost Runic Symbols of the Early Dark Ages, both long since out of print and very difficult to come by. Matt pored over them so intently and for so long — flicking through the yellowed pages, filling a pad with detailed notes and scribbles and furious crossings-out, one false start after another and a pile of crumpled paper mounting up at his feet — that he lost all sense of place and time.

Finally, after what could have been three hours or thirty, he found himself staring with bleary eyes at what he reckoned was the closest possible translation of the markings on the cross.

Bizarre. Had he got it right? Some of the inscriptions that hadn’t been destroyed by the ravages of time still eluded him, and not even the scholarly erudition of A.P. Kerensky could shed light on them. But there it was, as best he could figure it out:

He who wields this cross of power shall gain protection from the dark revenants of Deamhan, drinkers and plunderers of the life of Man. May the Divine Virtue of Our Lord descend upon thee and hold thee safe.

Matt studied the smooth, creamy-white stone of the cross and wondered how old it must be. There could be no question of sending it off for testing through the normal Pitt Rivers Museum channels — that could take weeks. But what about his pal Fred Lancaster? Stiff from being bent over the desk for so long, Matt hobbled over to the phone and looked up his number at the Oxford University Department of Geology.

‘Fred? Matt Dempsey here.’

‘Matt, old boy. How long has it been?’

‘Listen, I need a favour. Wondered if I could run by the lab with something interesting that’s come my way?’