The Atlantis Keystone Read Online Free Page A

metal door he put down the sledge hammer for a moment. His hands were shaking as he fumbled with the keys. The familiar squeak from the door opening was almost submerged by another chilling scream. It came from upstairs, just as he knew it would. He went into the dark, cold entrance hall. There was a smell of mould mixed with wet clay. He had not brought a torch so he felt his way with his hand on the wall towards the stairs. The surface was uneven like rough sandpaper. Up until that moment he had been glad to be tall and broad shouldered but his size proved to be a major obstacle as he struggled to move in the constricted space. His large slippers didn’t fit on the steps. The weight of the sledge hammer slowed him down. For a moment he thought he was going to get stuck in the bend of the stairs but he managed to break loose. There was another cry, this time much closer. He knew she had been imprisoned inside a wall at the top of the stairs. Now he could hear what she was saying, voice weak and quivering but yet loud:
    “Let me out!”
    The words were not wholly unexpected coming from someone essentially buried alive. Now that he had reached his destination he felt calmer but he couldn’t bring himself to answer. He took a deep breath and used all his strength to swing the sledge hammer on the wall. It remained intact. He hit it again. Not a scratch. By the third strike he was getting tired. It was as if his slippers were nailed to the ground and as if the floor had turned into a gigantic magnet pulling the hammer down. Frustration and tiredness started to take its toll…
    Erik woke up from a stifled thud followed by pain in his left foot. He looked around, drowsy from deep sleep. He found himself in the downstairs library. It was quiet and the room was dark but moonlight from the window illuminated the room to some extent. Three large books had landed on his naked foot. He had been sleepwalking. It had happened many times before. He would sometimes wake up trying to eat soap in his on-suite bathroom or peeing in the walk-in wardrobe but it was the first time he had ventured this far. In front of him was one of the bookshelves. He was alarmed when he noted that he had managed to pull out some of the oldest books there. He stretched down and picked one up. It was one of the valuable Torpa journals; oddly enough the older one that the student, Emma Johnson, had suggested he had a look at a month earlier. He had meant to deal with the student’s request by delegating the whole thing to his mother but after London it had slipped his mind. He hadn’t been back to Torpa since then. His mother had given permission for Professor Simmons to get access to Torpa to search for the tablet and a visit had been planned for August but Erik had forgotten to ask her to arrange for someone to study the journals further in advance of their visit. It was weird but perhaps his subconscious mind had remembered it and brought him there to remind him. As he was sliding the books back onto the shelf he was relieved to see that they were intact despite the fall. Only one page from the oldest one had come loose but he could easily slip it back in.
    Trying to gather his thoughts he went over to the window to look at the moon which appeared unusually bright. It was full moon. He glanced down at the old castle further down the garden and thought about his strange terrifying dream. He almost expected to find the front door open but it wasn’t. Anna had been trapped inside the space in the wall where the medieval girl had died. He wasn’t sure what the significance of this dream was but he thought it was strange that he had ended up in the library in front of the journals when dreaming of Anna and the space in the wall. Was there a connection which he had missed? It occurred to him that a potential hiding place in which no one had looked in the last few hundred years was the gap between the inner and outer wall of the legend. Could the other half of