User:JohnB/Fanfiction/Buried Treasure

(Not long after I brought "The Book and the Stone" to full completion, I was in a neighborhood used-book store where the English language books cost only ¥100, less even than for a can of soda. There to my great delight I found a small hard-bound volume called Selections from the Prose Tales of Edgar Allan Poe from the Macmillan Pocket Classics series dated 1928. I actually haven't read any of his tales since staying up all night as a junior high school kid, so here was my chance to go back and revisit some of those stories, especially "The Gold Bug".

The narrator in the story tells of a visit he made to an old friend, a descendant of French Huguenots who settled in the New Orleans vicinity and enriched themselves. Having fallen on hard times, this friend moved to Sullivan's Island off South Carolina, which was in those days a scene of desolation, with a freed slave who voluntarily accompanied him to care for him in his mood swings that seemed to be descending into madness. One day while hunting for their dinner, they find a kind of beetle that had the appearance and weight of pure gold. The friend is stung while picking it up, so the former slave, having found a scrap of paper in the sand, uses it to grab the bug and stuff it in his pocket. From there, they convey the bug to a local naturalist for study.

I won't say what happens after that so as not to toss out any spoilers. My title is in itself a spoiler, but you come to realize very early in the story that this is what it's really about. However, in my early teens, I found it very long and hard to read. Especially cumbersome is Poe's lengthy exposition on how to decode a message by counting the occurrence of particular symbols. The most common symbol in the story had to stand for the letter E, which is the most commonly used letter in English, and then work from there. I imagine this was all cutting-edge technology in Poe's time, but it's way outdated now where computer encryption can give a single letter a godzillion permutations. Besides, you cn wrt a sntnc wtht vwls nd cn stll rd it. I decided to forego Poe's decryption method and use the "Caesar Cypher" device instead.

Anyway, I still found myself skipping paragraphs to get to the gist the story, and it was clearly not about the gold bug at all. The bug's reappearance later in the story was a way of justifying the story title, which is totally unconvincing. I wondered how it would read if the focus was shifted away from the bug. This is what I'm attempting here.)

I hadn’t seen my good friend Jacques Legrand in a very long time, at least not since his financial troubles that robbed him of his ancestral manor, not far from Suran, and unsettled his mind. After my making inquiries into his whereabouts, I learned that he had become a hermit on a certain uninhabited island not far from Vivec where he built a shack for himself and his former slave Ra’Karim.

Tamrielic law stipulated that if a slave owner couldn’t financially support a slave, the slave had to be released in order to fend for himself. And, no, “clearance sales” were disallowed—anybody so indigent should not profit from selling a slave, and other slave owners should not buy slaves out of charity to the indigent. Slavery was a social blight, but consideration was given to slaves whose masters were unfit to own any.

However, the symbiotic relationship between these two went back many years, and Ra’Karim couldn’t bring himself to chuck the crazy coot. Somebody had to help him maintain his tenuous grip on reality, which wasn’t easy given that he had alarming mood swings and could be very abusive. Ra’Karim responded blow for blow, and that helped keep the bugger in line.

At length I found the island and Jacques’s shack, but there was no response to my knock. I tried the handle and found the door unlocked, so I ventured in to get close to the fire because of the chill outside. Very soon the door opened and Jacques and Ra’Karim entered. They mistook me for an intruder, but Jacques very quickly recognized me and grasped my hand in welcome.

“You are just in time for dinner!” he said showing me the bundle of marsh-hens they’d caught.

“Do you often go hunting so late in the evening?” I inquired.

“No, we took our skiff to a neighboring island where a naturalist resides to give him an unusual scarab beetle we found on the beach here.”

Jacques told of the beautiful coloring of the beetle, like burnished gold all over, the likes of which had never been seen before. When Jacques picked it up from the sand, he received a painful sting and dropped it, so Ra’Karin took a scrap of parchment he found in the sand and used it to grab the beetle and stuff it into his pocket.

“It was the most wondrous thing I ever saw.”

“That it was,” Ra’Karim chimed in. “A real gold bug if you ever saw one.”

“It looked like this,” Jacques added picking up a pencil.

There was no paper nearby, but he found he’d deposited the parchment in his own pocket after making the bequest to the naturalist. The light was low, so he moved closer to the fire to sketch the beetle. He then handed me the parchment.

“It looks like a death’s head,” I responded.

“What do you mean it looks like a death’s head?!” he asked alarmed. “I can draw well enough for you to distinguish a beetle from a death’s head.”

“Well, look for yourself,” I responded handing him the parchment.

He grabbed it away as if to throw it into the fire, but suddenly there was a look of profound confusion on his face. He stood up, crossed the room still examining the parchment, then deposited it in a small chest that he locked and put into a desk drawer.

Ra’Karim and I watched his extreme agitation.

“Uh-oh! I think you’d better leave now,” Ra’Karim murmered to me.

I beat a hasty retreat, and found an inn on the neighboring island where I could dine and spend the night.

I pretty much forgot all about this until one day Ra’Karim arrived at my home. I had told him where to find me in case something happened. He bade me come immediately. I naturally assumed Jacques had become totally deranged; however, the skiff we were to take to the island had a miner’s pick, three spades, three travel lanterns, and a heap of gunnysacks stowed on board.

“What’s the meaning of this?” I inquired.

“Misieur Legrand is in need of your assistance. That’s all I know or can say. But he also said to purchase these tools.”

When we arrived at the shack, Jacques came bounding out in a superlative mood. He boarded the skiff and directed us to head for the mainland of Vvardenfell.

It was a wooded area with high cliffy hills. We hiked inland until we came to a tall spreading tree where he gave Ra’Karim a gold coin and bade him to climb up the trunk until he came to the seventh branch counting upward from the ground. Ra’Karim put the coin between his teeth and started climbing. He could do this with facility and was soon at the seventh branch.

"Ra'Karim," Jacques shouted from below, "proceed along that branch until you find something unusual!"

Ra’Karim removed the coin from his mouth.

"This branch is pretty dead!" he yelled back. "I don't know how far I can go!"

"Whatever you do, don't make any sudden moves!"

Ra'Karim inched forward.

"I see it!"

"A human skull?!"

"Yes!"

"Can you reach it?"

He inched forward some more.

"Ra'Karim, insert the coin in the left eye socket and let it fall."

He was just shy of reaching the eye socket. There was a slight cracking sound as he inched forward. The coin finally went into the eye socket and fell to the ground, and Jacques placed a stake on the ground and pounded it in.

Ra'Karim gingerly made his way back along the branch.

"If it breaks," Jacques shouted, "be sure to land on your feet!"

Ra'Karim rolled his eyes.

"You presume to teach a cat-person the science of falling?!"

"You have to admit you're not the sharpest tool in the shed!"

Ra'Karim made an obscene gesture in response.

Jacques took out a tape measure and starting at the base of the tree measured out fifty feet straight over the spot where the stake was. The three of us set to work with the miner's pick and spades to a depth of about five feet. There was nothing, so we enlarged the hole on all sides. Still nothing.

"This is useless!" I groused throwing the spade aside and climbing out of the hole.

"Ra'Karim," Jacques said trying to hide his extreme ire, "let's pretend that I am the skull. Take this coin and make as if to insert it into the eye socket as I told you to."

Ra'Karim did so.

"That's my right eye, you blithering nincompoop!"

He raised his hand to strike Ra'Karim, who lifted his spade to defend himself.

"I'm no longer your slave, poor human trash! So back off!"

"Gentlemen, gentlemen!" I interjected. "Let's just cool off and return to the shack. It's getting late."

"But he's the one who led us through this wild goose chase!" Jacques whined pointing an accusing finger at Ra'Karim."

"And you're the one who cooked up this wild goose!" I shouted back. "Obviously, what you're searching for is not here! It's all in your head!"

"But I KNOW it's here!"

"Honestly, Jacques! Pirates in the Ascadian Isles?!"

"This was maybe a century ago. I'll explain later. It all has to do with that parchment Ra'Karim found in the sand."

He made a bracket shape with his thumb and middle finger and held them to his own eyes. He then measured that distance (about three inches) from the stake. Then holding his thumb there, he pulled up the stake and placed the point where his thumb was. He pounded the stake into the ground. Three inches may not be a big difference in direction, but they are when the lines radiate to a distance of fifty feet.

He returned to the tree and measured fifty feet with the tape measure.

"It's here," he said decisively hitting the ground with the miner's pick so that it stuck there.

“Are you absolutely sure?!”

“POSITIVE!”

We set to work again under the lantern light, and at the depth of three feet we hit human bones. There were bits of clothing and other artifacts to indicate that there were maybe four men interred there. We removed the skeletons and soon found a large chest underneath.

“You see? I told you so!” Jacques said with a malicious grin.

The chest was way too heavy for just three men to move, but we managed the break the lid open. It was full to the brim with gold coins and other items that glittered in the weak light.

“How did you know of this?” I said to Jacques in a daze.

“Well, as I pointed out earlier, it all goes back to the parchment. On the night of your first visit, you insisted that it showed a death’s head. I disbelieved you at first, but when I received it back from you, I realized you were looking at the reverse side, which did in fact display the Jolly Roger. It wasn’t there before, so it had been drawn with a heat-sensitive invisible ink.

“I’m sorry to admit that I was relieved when you chose to return home just then because my mind was screaming out to discover if there was anything else on the parchment. I carefully heated it near the fire so as not to scorch it, and this is what I found written in a simple letter replacement code.”

He took a small notebook from his pocket and read out loud in the lantern light.

“’A good glass in the bishop’s hostel in the devil’s seat twenty one degrees and thirteen minutes northeast and by north main branch seventh limb east side shoot from the left eye of the death’s-head a bee line from the tree through the shot fifty feet out.’ (p. 224)

“When I got to the second line of text, the code suddenly changed. I surmised that the writer was using a disk with a rotating face. On the outside edge was the alphabet, and on the rotating face edge was a second alphabet that lined up with the first. I constructed such a device and set to work figuring out that in the first line A = C, and in the second line A = F. In other words, there was a pattern of shifting the code three letters at the start of each line so that the writer wouldn’t stump himself trying to decipher it at random.”

“I still don’t get what it means.”

“I inquired with a local and learned that Bishop’s Hostel is in fact Bessop’s Castle, that ridge of cliffs up there,” he said pointing. “I climbed to the summit and surveyed my surroundings. I found a ledge below that I took to be the devil’s seat. I left and returned with a spyglass and a pocket compass. I carefully lowered myself to the ledge, sat down, and using the pocket compass pointed the spyglass in that direction. That tree immediately came into view. And here we are, and here is our treasure.”

I balked at the word “our”.

“Would you fellows mind if I stayed out of this?”

The madman looked at me as if I was the madman.

“Why? I trusted you—don't you trust me?”

"It isn't that at all," I lied. "First consideration: Ra’Karim, you found the parchment. Jacques you deciphered it. All I did was a lend a hand digging it up.”

I then stooped and picked up a gem encrusted pocket watch. I pressed the winding stem and the cover flipped open.

“’To Marcus from his loving wife Cornelia’,” I read out aloud then tossed it back.

“Second consideration: much of what’s in this chest is stolen goods. I can’t take any of it with a good conscience.

"Third consideration: the inscription on that watch is undated—how are you going to convince a pawnbroker that you didn’t steal it yourself?

"Fourth consideration: these poor fellows," I added pointing to the skeletons, "were bereft of their share in the horde. This is blood-gold, my friends. May it bring you the health and happiness that they didn't live to see!

"My advice to you? Take what you can carry and leave the rest.

“I’ll just be on my way back to Suran to catch a silt strider home. Now if you’ll excuse me...”

I tipped my hat and walked away. They were too stunned to say anything.

“Fifth consideration:" I said to myself, "I wasn’t bitten by the gold bug."