The Atlantis Keystone Read Online Free Page B

the Torpa tablet somehow have ended up there? It was certainly a long shot but Erik decided to have a look in the journals.
    He quickly picked out the oldest book from the fifteenth century, sat down behind the antique desk and turned the table lamp on. He opened the desk drawer and found a pair of white gloves placed there for the purpose of handling old books. With great care he turned the fragile pages. He could almost feel Anna’s presence as he started to look through the old scribbles. She had spent a lot of time going through the journals. Erik found it all very uninteresting; rows and rows of purchases, sales, expenses, revenues. The Swedish was almost incomprehensible, clearly old-style. It also included some notes about particular assets, such as new horses and cattle, as well as comments about staff, meetings with some named people and tax collections. He noticed a morbid headcount – appearing to be naming people in the district who had died from the plague, old age or been executed for one reason or another. There were also some haphazard comments about church visits and godly punishment displaying a mixture of guilt and deep faith. After an hour he had managed to skim through about hundred and fifty pages of unexciting scribbles. Though he had to admit that this record of daily events from a time long gone was a fairly unique collection of notes, he simply could not understand Anna’s fascination, bordering on obsession, with these useless doodles. Just as he was about to give up he came to the page which had come loose when he dropped it on his foot. It was the page with the drawing showing the cartouche of the Egyptian Pharaoh. It was very small and shakily illustrated and he was impressed that the student had spotted it. Next to the miniscule drawing was a comment stating “Fräls oss ifrån ondo”, appearing to be an extract from the Lord’s Prayer: “Deliver us from evil”. He asked himself whether this could give a clue as to where the tablet may have been hidden away – maybe it had been disposed of to ‘deliver them from evil’. The reason why the tablet had been cut in half and why one half had been retained in the house was still a mystery but he suspected that it had been accidentally damaged, judging by the uneven cut which he had seen in the photo. He glanced at his watch and saw that it was nearly morning. The house was still quiet. He continued his deliberations. The tablet was certainly impressive enough, with beautiful writing on both sides. It could perhaps have been sufficiently exotic to the Torpa occupants of that time to create a possible assumption of magical powers. It was generally known that people in the area around the lake had been particularly superstitious, living by an enormous amount of unwritten rules created solely by reason of strange old traditions. This tablet would certainly have been a mystery to them. It could have been put down to ancient spells. Something could have happened to the family at the same time as the tablet had been broken which had made the author of the journals think that the tablet may have had supernatural influence on their lives; inflicting war or ill health or perhaps even protecting them from evil. He immediately thought of the plague and the girl.
    Erik started to browse the following pages. The plague had killed thousands of Swedes in the fifteenth century and the journal illustrated this with chilling clarity. The death count showed that the region had lost many lives to the plague. It must have been a terrible time in history, Erik thought. Only a few pages on from the Egyptian Hieroglyph passage there was a reference to a key which belonged to a door which had been removed. There was even a drawing of the key but no further explanation. Erik guessed from the illustration which key this note in the journals referred to – it was still in the family’s possession. It was rusty and had been on a shelf in the grand hall ever since Erik