[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Fortunately, the Aces were able to recover many of the personal effects that had been with LeMoine. Whoever had mutilated the corpse, and left the half-eaten remains stuffed into a remote corner of a network of caves, had not bothered to go through the clothing he been wearing, or anything that he had been carrying. While this added to the mystery, it also gave the Aces some information to work with.

They discovered that LeMoine had been carrying a pistol, still fully loaded and never fired, simply lying unused in the clothing and gear that his attackers had tossed aside. They found a map of the area, hand-drawn but very accurate, including some marked entrances to the cave system that they had not yet found themselves. They found some papers written in French, in LeMoine’s handwriting, which turned out to be a collection of local folklore. It appeared that LeMoine had been researching the same matters that the Seven Aces had been studying, but he had found some stories they had missed, as well.

One such made a reference to the mysterious obelisk atop the ridge line, and even showed recognizable drawings of the some of the same symbols the Aces knew to be carven into the obelisk. The accounts made reference to another man who had visited the same obelisk, in March of 1903.

This caused a stir, because of the lately-added carvings on one side of the obelisk, carrying the date of March the eighth of that year. The papers mentioned a name that the Aces set to work to trace down, and also referred to some sort of cache of old books and information and items that had supposedly been hidden in the caves by this man. Suddenly the strange presence of LeMoine in the caves began to make a certain amount of sense, though his personal papers did not explain exactly was hidden, or why it was important.

Nor did that explain, if LeMoine was in the caves searching for the supposed cache, exactly what had befallen him. The medical examiner, on consideration, informed Conners and the rest of the Aces that he thought it most probable that LeMoine had died of blood loss, mostly probably from the wounds taken when someone had begun to feed on his body. Apparently he had been unable to struggle or resist, but there was no sign of rope marks or other means of restraint on the corpse, and the mystery of the unfired pistol remained as well.

Obviously, they could not simply contact the relevant French authorities and demand to know what LeMoine had been doing in the United States, or why he had been exploring (illegally) caves in a rural bluff. For that matter, they could not be sure that the name they knew him by, Phillipe LeMoine, was even his real name. If it was, there was no doubt that the French authorities would of course never have heard of him and would have no idea how he ended up where he finished his mortal span.

Or at least, they could not ask the French officially. Unofficial contacts could sometimes be another matter.

While McLaird and Bingham began working their private, unofficial contacts, Conners doubled up on his exploration of the caves, though now all his exploring parties worked in trios, and were heavily armed and under orders to take no chances and to assume anyone else they encountered might be a cannibalistic murderer. Conners felt ridiculously melodramatic issuing those instructions, but there seemed little other choice. They double-checked the areas of the caves listed in the papers from LeMoine, and discovered that there were several connecting passages that they had never suspected.

Among the things they found when they combined the maps from LeMoine and their own explorations was that some of the connecting passages were artificial. This seemed unlikely, but there was little question that someone had dug out artificial links between different parts of the cave system. The rocky walls still bore the tool marks, where chisels and other tools had been used to cut through solid limestone. A few of these artificial connections even had brick arch work in places to hold up the tunnel against collapse.

The sheer amount of work necessary to cut those extra passages, using hand tools, argued for a large group of people with strong motivation. That this motivation was illicit was testified to by the fact that all the man-made links were carefully hidden by false doors and concealed slabs of rock. They could be found and opened if one knew what to look for, but were well-enough hidden that one could walk or crawl past one and never suspect its existence in the darkness of the caves.

Yet there was no hint of such passages in the stories the Aces had tracked down about the area, and no obvious candidate for the identity of their makers. It was clear that the passages had been there for some times, as well, most of them were heavily laden with dust and showed no sign of any presence, not even animal presence, for at least some years, probably much longer.

Even as they were exploring the caves, their effort to track down the man mentioned by LeMoine in his notes began to bear some fruit. Apparently, he had been a Scot, the son of a wealthy man who had been forced to sell most of what would have been his inheritance to pay gambling debts. The son of this man has also apparently been active in the shadow world that swirled around the artifacts and remnants of the Antediluvian Age, but there was not much information available about the details, nor was that any trace of how he had come to the attention of Phillipe LeMoine.

In the meantime, as they had agreed to with Bingham, Conners arranged for Howard Lake to meet up with his counterpart in the Bingham-Jones group.

MORE LATER.