Eternal Horizons:
On the Trail of the Templar Treasure
Chapter Nine:
When Giants Walked the Earth
 Arthur spent much of the rest of the day hiking across the sand and stones on the south side of the island. Without permission to walk on the island itself, he had to limit his wandering to the area below high tide. And without access to any of the significant artifacts, he was feeling especially depressed. Here I am, he thought, a stone’s throw from one of the greatest mysteries in the modern world. All I have to do is hold one of the artifacts, and I’d know, I’d know, he thought, hammering his thigh with his fist, what the truth about Oak Island really is. And I can’t even touch so much as a single nail!
He kicked at a piece of exposed limestone, coated on the top with sand and mud, flipping it into a pool of seawater. It came to rest against a larger stone, more weathered than the smaller one, scarred from being beaten against harder granite boulders in the bay. The second stone contained what looked suspiciously like two pairs of drilled holes. Could this be one of the drilled stones the original Builders left? he thought excitedly. He splashed over to the stone, bent down to look at it closely, and brushed away some of the mud. But as he looked closer at its surface, he realized the ‘holes’ were nothing more than eroded depressions. To someone with a willing imagination they might have been holes, maybe a thousand years ago or more, made perhaps by people who preferred to hide clues rather than make anything useful. But to any rational person without a private agenda, they were merely signs of erosion.
Picking up the stone, about the size of a loaf of bread, he stared at it in realization. The image he first had of the stone containing four drilled holes, and the overwhelming desire he had to see some proof of the Builders’ existence, had swamped his normally good sense about such things. That same desire to see their own individual theories confirmed had overwhelmed so many others before him. Even if he couldn’t get any closer to the mystery of the Money Pit, he realized as he hefted the slab of limestone, he at least felt somewhat closer to the people who’d been bitten by the Oak Island bug.
But as he hefted the stone again, a crazy idea took shape in his head.
Back at the hotel, he called down to the local Western Shore newspaper and asked to have a press conference set up for tomorrow, Thursday, at noon in the Oak Island Tourism Society’s main conference room.
“You mean the Western Shore and Area Improvement Association building, also known as the Bingo Hall?” the lady on the other end asked.
Arthur swallowed his grumbling remark. “Whatever it’s called, I need — ”
“Because that’s what they use, ya know,” the lady replied. “They haven’t got their own building, so they use the Western Shore and Area Improvement Association building. But we just call it the Bingo Hall.”
“Whatever it’s called,” Arthur said in frustration.
“I didn’t know they had a ‘main’ conference room at the Bingo Hall,” the lady said.
“I really don’t care if they do or not!” Arthur replied, exasperated. “Whatever the biggest room is that they do have, that’s where we’ll need to hold this press conference!”
After convincing the lady that it wasn’t a prank call, he confirmed an actual room inside the Western Shore and Area Improvement Association building, though the elderly gentleman who took his reservation made sure Arthur knew, “Around here, we just call it the Bingo Hall.”
He then spent a dizzying three hours emailing half the newspapers and TV stations along the East Coast, alerting them to a significant archeological find associated with the Oak Island mystery.
“What are you doing?” Connie asked, as Arthur sent another email alert, this time to the Oak Island Forum website. “I mean, what are you trying to prove?”
“I’m trying to prove how human nature works,” Arthur replied, typing feverishly.
“Human nature being what it is,” Neville added, “you’ll probably get all of two people to show up at your press conference. And one of them will be leaning against a mop.”
Promptly at noon on Thursday, the three members of Eternal Horizons stood behind a large folding table in the smaller of the two conference rooms at the Western Shore and Area Improvement Association building. The bigger room down the hall had already been reserved for the local Chamber of Commerce’s monthly luncheon. A wooden lectern stood atop the table, fixed with a single microphone. A towel-draped object was the only other item on the table.
Before them sat the municipal beat reporter, a high-spirited brunette in her early fifties, wearing a yellow-and-purple size twelve sun dress, the one person the paper’s editor felt he could spare. She had the added task of poking her head in at the end of the Chamber meeting down the hall to find out about next Friday’s clambake.
A second person, a rail-thin man in a yellow windbreaker, slumped in the second row of folding chairs, and from the sounds he was making, he’d be doing more dreaming than reporting. A third man, tall and graying, a weathered flannel shirt covering his frame, stood near the back of the room by the open doorway, with crossed arms and a scowl on his face to match.
“Well, the turnout exceeded my wildest imagination by a solid fifty per cent,” Neville commented. “However, I don’t see any mops yet.”
Arthur ignored him and approached the microphone. “Thank you all for coming today.”
The skinny fellow in the yellow windbreaker snorted loudly and brushed an invisible fly away from his nose.
Just then, a man in a green suit and a bad hairpiece hurried into the room. He went right up to the podium and disconnected the lone microphone and, without a word, scurried away with it as fast as he came in.
“Yes,” Arthur said, trying to ignore the intrusion, “well, let’s get to it.”
 He whipped aside the towel and carefully picked up the limestone rock. “This artifact was found off the South Cove of Oak Island yesterday. You’ll notice there are what appear to be four holes, arranged in two pairs, on this face.” He kept the reverse side of the limestone close to his chest. “This stone is going to go down in history as one of the most significant finds in all of Oak Island history.”
“What are you doing?” Connie whispered, as the sole conscious reporter scribbled furiously in her steno pad. “You know those are just erosion marks.”
“Believe me,” Arthur whispered back, “I know exactly what I’m doing.” He faced the room again and said, “The marks on the other side of this stone are clear and incontrovertible proof of a highly advanced civilization whose presence on Oak Island can no longer be denied.”
“Aliens, Doc?” the reporter asked.
“Ah, well, uh,” Arthur hemmed, “no, that’s not exactly —”
“The Lost Tribes of Israel? Mormons?” The reporter was running out of ideas. Then, she snapped her fingers. “Atlantis!”
“Exactly!” Arthur shouted back, jabbing the air with his right hand. “You hit the nail right on the noggin. Atlanteans, my friend,” he said, as he swept the air with his right hand, “Atlanteans came here thousands of years ago, looking to hide their most valuable secrets: buried treasure of inestimable wealth.”
“The Holy Grail?” Connie asked derisively.
“Intelligent movie scripts?” was Neville’s suggestion.
“No — crystals!” the reporter chimed in.
“Bingo!” Arthur yelled. “The Atlanteans, knowing their island was sinking, came here to bury huge power crystals deep in the bowels of the Oak Island bedrock.”
“I knew it! I knew it!” the reporter mumbled happily, scribbling all the while.
Though he sounded more like a sideshow barker than he’d ever imagined he would, Arthur kept right on going. “The Atlantean crystals are buried two hundred feet below the surface, and are still active to this very day.” He held out his right hand. “Wait! You feel that?” He pointed at the reporter. “You feel that?”
Without a moment’s hesitation, the reporter nodded her head emphatically. “I sure do, Doc!”
“Well, then, that’s proof right there!” He grabbed the stone with both hands. “Tomorrow at this very same time, I will unveil the enigmatic message on the reverse side of this stone. A message which will go down in the annals of archeology for the...well, for the message it carries.” He placed the stone down triumphantly on the folding table. “Be there, or be square!”
The elderly man at the back of the room shook his head, spit out a few words that may have been “What a crock!” then left.
The reporter finished her scribbling and almost jumped from her seat. “Can I get a picture of you and the artifact, Doc?” she asked breathlessly.
“Why not?” Arthur replied. He bent down, and turned to motion Neville and Connie closer.
“Oh, no, Doc,” Connie replied sweetly. “This is your show. You should take all the credit.”
“Wouldn’t do to have us get in the way of your crowning moment,” Neville said, smiling.
Arthur bent down again, hesitantly this time, as the reporter clicked away with her Nikon.
 Twenty-four hours later, the scene was utter pandemonium. Camera crews from half a dozen different outlets crowded into the small conference room, the larger room down the hall having been reserved for the Tenth Annual Hunter’s Awareness luncheon. Dozens of reporters elbowed and jostled for room, with more pushing and shoving in the hallway outside. The local reporter had sent her wire story to the AP, and by now, it had been a lead story as far away as Melbourne.
“I’m not impressed,” Neville said, somewhat in awe, as he fiddled with the digital camera. “I still don’t see any mops.”
“I told them we’d outdraw the Hunter’s Awareness luncheon,” Arthur said proudly.
“And when these people expect a revelation, what are you going to give them?” Connie asked, with her headphones half on her head.
Arthur smiled grimly. “I’m gonna give them just what they deserve.”
He approached the lectern, which looked like it might collapse from the weight of the two dozen microphones, and tapped on a pair of them. “Ladies and gentlemen! Ladies and gentlemen!” It took a few more attempts before the room settled down into something of a low rumble. “Thank you all for coming. Yesterday, I announced a dramatic new find in the history of Oak Island. This artifact,” he said, indicating the limestone block covered by a plexiglass case intended to keep reporters from turning it over prematurely, “this single stone, found fifty feet off the beach of Oak Island’s South Shore, provides dramatic proof of the mystery behind the Builders of the famed Money Pit.”
Ceremoniously, Truck and another member of the Tourism Society removed the plexiglass case. Arthur picked up the stone to a cacophony of camera shutters and digital beeps. He held it level with his heart. “You’ll notice the four holes here on the front? To the untrained eye, they appear to be merely erosion marks, clefts carved by the incessant pounding of waves on rocks. But to the committed Oak Island enthusiast, these are indications of something far more significant.”
He held the stone a little higher, to the cicada-like chorus of clicks and beeps. “But what really sets this stone apart is the message on the back. For this message, this one single word, explains almost everything you need to know about the mystery of Oak Island and the Money Pit.” He glanced at the message itself, and displayed it privately to Connie and Neville beside him.
“How did — ” Connie said, startled.
“When did — ” Neville gasped.
Arthur turned back to the hushed room. “It took me longer than it should have to come to the realization about the true mystery of Oak Island. The mystery is this: how can so many people be so absolutely rock-solid certain about their own theories, to the exclusion of the facts, the carbon dating, the historical record? How can so many people claim they know exactly where the treasure is, and they’ll only need a pickaxe, a shovel, and a three-day weekend to uncover it?”
Slowly, he pivoted the stone around, as every head in the room leaned forward. There on the reverse side of the stone, the flattened side Arthur had seen wedged in the sand, was a single word that had clearly been written in thick black magic marker. It read, simply, ‘Wrong.’
A lone camera clicked. Someone in the back rom coughed. A camera spotlight flickered off.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Arthur said, placing the stone down carefully so that the single word faced the crowd, “there are hundreds of competing theories involved with Oak Island. And they all have one vital element in common: all of the theories — except one — are wrong. And that one answer we may not have even stumbled across yet. But we see what we expect to see instead of the facts. We believe rather than investigate. We claim rather than prove. We fail to do even the basics of archeology, then complain when the archeologists laugh at our skimpy evidence. We grab hold of any piece of faulty research that can support our claim, whether it’s a forged stone engraving or an imaginary map. But we fight like starving lions whenever anyone tries to set the record straight.”
He tapped the stone. “This rock here set me straight. I mistook it for what I wanted to see, not for what it actually was. And trying to get that message out to you all in the media, well...The truth doesn’t sell many papers, but a mystery without any end in sight? That’s always front-page news.”
Arthur waited for anyone brave enough to ask a question. After a moment, one man in the back gingerly raised his hand. “Yes, you, sir?”
“So, when did the Atlanteans bury the crystals?” he asked slowly.
Arthur smiled and shook his head. “No, no, no. There were no Atlanteans. That was just — ”
Another reporter, this one near the front, jumped in. “Are these crystals responsible, in part or in full, for global warming?”
Before Arthur could answer, a female reporter, dolled up and standing profile to one of the camera crews, asked, “Could you put a dollar amount on these crystals? Would they severely devalue the world crystal market as we know it?”
Arthur threw up his hands. “Weren’t you people listening? I just said, there were no Atlanteans!”
“So, if I understand you correctly,” one reporter asked, poking the air with his pencil, “the Atlantean race wasn’t Atlantean per se. Were they, perhaps, Phoenicians?”
“Could they have been searching for Atlantis?” asked another.
“When did the Phoenicians start using black magic markers?” asked a cynical voice in the crowd.
The next few minutes resembled a brush fire in a dry California canyon: just when one ugly blaze died down, a whirlwind would erupt from out of the hills and send the flames roaring back to life. All common sense was consumed in the firestorm, leaving little behind but the ashes of common sense.
It took quite a while to convince the herd that there was no revelation, and that that in itself was their story. Few were happy about it, and only the fact that most of them were going to report the story as they wanted to report it, the evidence be dammed, lessened their annoyance.
The one person smiling in the audience was the old man with the flannel shirt from yesterday. He’d somehow found a seat early on, before the hordes of reporters crowded in, and had remained there while they all filed out in disgust. He got unsteadily to his feet as Arthur, Connie and Neville waited for the room to empty out.
“That was some show,” the old man said, stretching his weary frame. “Well worth the price of admission.”
“Well, it was free,” Arthur said as they closed the distance between them.
“That was even better than the time Martha got up at the library board meeting and grilled a visiting legislator on why Oak Island isn’t mentioned in any of the official tourist brochures.” He laughed at the idea. “Guess you don’t advertise the crazy aunt in the attic, when you’re tryin’ to sell your house.”
“You work around here?” Arthur asked.
“Some call it work. I call it an obsession.” He jerked a thumb back towards the lectern. “Neat little joke you pulled back there,” he said, laughing again at the memory.
“Thanks,” Arthur said. “I thought it needed to be said.”
“Most of ‘em won’t get the message, you know.”
“Well,” Arthur replied, gazing back at the piece of limestone that had been so quickly dismissed by the reporters, “I can only lead the horses to the trough. Can’t make ‘em drink.”
The old man scratched the stubble on his chin. “There was a song by a group named ‘Dire Straights,’ some years back. Went something like, ‘Two men say they’re Jesus. One of ‘em must be wrong.’ You remember that one?”
Arthur blinked. “Yes, as a matter of fact, I do.”
“Well, with this island, there are a hundred new Jesus’ showing up every year. So far, they’ve all been wrong.” He slipped a mud-stained hand out of his pants pockets. “The name’s Dundee. Jack Dundee.”
He stuck out his hand to Arthur, who reflexively pulled back. But then, for reasons even Arthur couldn’t explain, he shook the old man’s hand.
“Excuse the glove,” Arthur said.
“S’cuse the dirt,” the old man replied.
“Jack Dundee?” Connie asked, pulling off her headphones. “Are you the fellow that owns part of Oak Island?”
“Guilty as charged,” Dundee said, smiling broadly.
“We’ve been trying to get an interview with you for a week!” Neville exclaimed, letting the camera slide down from his shoulder.
“Yeah, well...” He scratched his chin again. “Sorry ‘bout that. I don’t usually talk to strangers.” Then, his face brightened. “Say, how‘d you like to see something really special?”
===========================
If you liked this excerpt, others can be found below:
Chapter One: The Sincerest Form of Flattery • Chapter Three: Red Sky at Night
Chapter Nine: When Giants Walked the Earth
An Introduction to the Team • The Cast of Characters
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