Curse of the Druids by Aiden James Read Free Book Online

the time of Christ, seemed surreal under the glow from our flashlights. Marie’s earlier mention of her father’s tales about local royalty, along with Roman officials and officers, being buried here had sounded fanciful. Those stories were now confirmed by actual bones and artifacts laid out on stone shelves. The shelves were three bodies deep and lined both sides of the crypt, separated by a narrow brick aisle.
    The aisle was in terrible shape, and many of the bricks had long since deteriorated from moisture forming a thin layer of sludge that covered much of the floor. The corpses stored on the lower shelves appeared to be similarly affected, and the stench made it damned near impossible to view anything below the top shelves. God only knows what jeweled weaponry, helmets, and crowns existed beyond our reach. Our safe reach, that is.
    But there were plenty of relics to sort through among the dozens of corpses lining the upper shelves. Although untouched by the putrid mixture affecting the lower portion of the crypt, these former privileged folk were not unaffected by the elements. Dust and brick fragments had fallen from the ceiling of the tunnel-like tomb, where the ravages of time and nature’s determination to reclaim the mound’s contents had escalated in recent years.
    Did I mention the gold? Much of it was encrusted with jewels. After donning protective masks, Ishi and I gently sifted through decayed clothing and bones to lift the more intriguing artifacts.
    “We didn’t come here for this shit,” Marie advised, tugging on my sleeve. “Focus on finding the Ambrosius Amulet.”
    “The hell you say!” said Ishi, holding a jeweled dagger up to his flashlight’s beam. “This makes up for all the bullshit and ‘no hunts’ since Egypt!”
    “Okay,” she replied, motioning for him to carry on undeterred. “But I guess Nick and I will have to get used to life without you, huh?”
    “What?!”
    Ishi turned his beam to her face, forcing Marie to shield her eyes. I pointed my penlight’s limited beam toward his face, revealing squinty eyes that made him look almost child-like.
    “The place is cursed,” she said, turning away from the light until Ishi lowered it. “According to Papa, anyone who has taken from the dead in this tomb has met a violent end soon after. The list of victims includes a handful of earls, dukes, and princes, along with several locally famous highwayman from the 1600s.”
    “I don’t believe you,” said Ishi, quietly. Nonetheless, he lowered the dagger and dropped it near the skeleton’s left finger bones.
    “So, if there have been multiple thefts, how did they get in here?” I asked, not immediately considering the breach we discovered likely came from an invasion by grave robbers in centuries past. The hidden crevice that Ishi pushed through was completely camouflaged to where I wouldn’t have considered it ever being anything else but a fissure created by time. Normally, such thieves are not concerned about leaving a mess revealing their nocturnal deeds, since by the time anyone else found out about a break-in the thieves were long gone. Unless…. “Are you implying there was a commonly known way into this place? Like someone, or a group of permitted trespassers, came here on a regular basis to either claim or return the amulet?”
    Ishi looked at me as if I had lost my frigging mind. And, the thought didn’t exactly make sense to me either…. Except, a logical reason for the amulet disappearing and ending up back here was for people—such as the druids of ancient lore—to bring it back to the mound and rebury it, rather than the amulet magically ending up here without the aid of human beings. That made sense.
    “Don’t think that just because visitations by royalty and crooks to this place have been documented it’s the only explanation,” cautioned Marie. “Papa showed me plenty of accounts that spoke of the amulet’s magical properties. And, sometimes it did