The Stag Gem: Part 1 Chapter 3
Tarchon, Tuamotu Islands, French Polynesia
“Boys, don’t wander off too far!” The father yelled out to his sons as they splashed in the warm waves. “Be careful of the undertow!”
“We know, Dad,” yelled back one of the piglets.
The father opened up his beach towel and let it float down onto the sand. He glanced out to the shore once again to make sure his eldest was not splashing his little brother too much.
“Percy!” A female sheep holding a briefcase wearing a large straw hat and business suit walked towards the elderly pig as he opened up an umbrella and stuck it in the sand next to the towel. Her thick wool plunged out of the edges of her clothing.
Percy slid his sunglass down his snout to get a better look at his approaching friend. “Lucy! What brings you down here? I thought your preferred the comforting hum of fluorescent lighting over the warm rays of sun?” He leaned in and gave her a hug.
“You aren’t quite dressed for the beach,” Percy commented as he pulled out of their embrace and gave a playful look at her clothing. “The hat is a nice touch, though. Is that your only wardrobe accessory that insinuates that you have a life outside the laboratory?”
“Actually, the heat was a little less bearable than I expected, so I just grabbed this hat off of that fellow over there on my way over.” Further down the beach a middle aged balding rooster lay on his own towel asleep in the sun with a book perched on his stomach.
“Oh, I see. It looked a little big on you anyway,” As Percy sat down on the blanket he winced in pain.
Lucy sat down next to him under the umbrella’s shade, “I see your back is still bothering you?”
Percy nodded slowly as he rubbed his lower spine gently. “It’s getting worse by the day. Can you grab my pills? They’re in my bag.”
Lucy leaned over Percy and went through his beach bag, rummaging past sunscreen and towels until she found a large orange prescription bottle. “How many do you want?”
“Just give me two for now.”
The sheep shook out two large blue pills and handed them to her long-time friend. “Well, I wanted to catch up with you because I found that information you asked me for.”
The pig swallowed the pills and took a swig of water. “What did you find?”
Lucy opened up her briefcase and pulled out a small stack of papers and plopped them on Percy’s lap. “This is what I found.”
“What is it?” Percy began to thumb through the stack of photocopies.
“Well, it took a little bit of leg work, but you mentioned that your symptoms developed shortly after our final adventure.”
Percy looked up from the pages, “Yes, with the mole tribesmen in the Atlas Mountains. But I don’t understand?”
Lucy began to haphazardly flip through the stack of papers until she came to an ancient drawing of a large stone door. “Does this look familiar to you?”
Her friend removed his sunglasses. “Wait a minute,” he went into his beach bag and pulled out a pair of wire rimmed eye glasses and slipped them on. Percy peered closer to the picture’s detail. “Isn’t this that old mountain side doorway that the moles were guarding?”
“Exactly. We thought the girl we were sent to rescue was behind that door because the bulk of the tribesmen were protecting it. Of course we later found out she was trapped in a cage in the nearby pine trees.”
“Daddy, can we get some ice cream,” Percy’s youngest son yelled up from the shore.
“In a little bit, Tanner,” the father yelled back. “I’m talking with Lucy now. Once I’m done we’ll go together!”
“They grow up fast, don’t they,” remarked Lucy as the boys went back to building a sand castle.
“They sure do. They look more and more like their mother everyday,” Percy smiled as he stared back briefly into a memory.
Lucy put her hand on her friend’s shoulder, “She would be extremely proud of what you have accomplished with them.”
Percy smiled and put his hand on hers, “Thanks. All of you have been an incredible help to me over these past few years.”
“Well, we were a team. Just because we hung up our uniforms doesn’t mean we were going to turn our backs on each other.”
Percy nodded and looked back down to the papers. “I’m sorry I got a little bit off topic. You were saying something about the doorway?”
“Oh right,” Lucy continued with her discoveries. “What do you remember during that day?”
“Even after Boris and I fought through the moles the door was sealed shut. When I tried to force it open, that’s when I first got the sharp back pains.”
“When you told me that, I began to research the history of that door. It appears that the mole tribesmen had nothing to do with the creation of the stone door. It was there long before that area was inhabited.”
“Well, who made it?”
“I don’t know. The only reference I found about that door was in this,” the lamb removed the top half of the stack of papers, leaving the rest in Percy’s lap. He looked down on the top page. It was a photocopied cover of an ancient and barely legible manuscript; written in a forgotten language. The cover displayed a spiral symbol with runic writing above and below it.
“What does it say,” asked Percy.
“I have no idea what it says, but I do know what it is,” she picked up the papers from her friend and waved them in front of him. “This is a scanned copy of the ‘Grimoire Ancien.’ The only text I could find that has any mention of that stone doorway.”
“And you think this stone doorway has something to do with my sickness?”
“You’re falling apart, Percy. The doctors have no idea what is wrong with you and you even said yourself that the pains are getting worse and more frequent.” Lucy continued, “I spent months trying to decipher the section of this book that talked about the doorway; and that’s with the help of my headband…”
“What are you trying to say, Lucy…”
The lamb looked down, not wanting to make eye contact. “You’re dying Percy.”
Silence fell between the two of them. Even the sounds of laughter and splashing in the distance seemed to fade as the silence grew underneath the umbrella shade.
“What am I supposed to do? I can’t leave my boys too…”
Lucy looked back up at Percy, “I could be way off here; I don’t want to give you false hopes…”
“What is it?” Her friend hung onto her next words.
“I have a theory…” She turned back to the photo copy of the doorway. “The doorway had a defense mechanism built into it,” she pointed out a couple of sketches she made on the corners of the paper. “I think when you tried to force open the door without its proper key, it reacted by giving you this unexplained fatal sickness that every doctor you went to were unable to diagnose.”
“And?”
“And I think the key that opens the doorway also holds your cure.”
Percy lit up. “So I have a chance; a chance to get my health back?”
Lucy smiled pensively. “It was hard to translate, but I think the descriptions in the book stated that the key needed to be placed in clear water and ingested.”
“Drink the key?”
“No-no, just the water,” Lucy responded hesitantly.
Percy stood up with renewed strength and hope. “This is great! I can do this!” He looked down to his friend, “Do you have any idea where I can find this key?”
Lucy grabbed the other stack of papers she previously removed from Percy’s lap. “That’s what these papers are. It took me a while to find the name of the key and where it’s most recent location was…”
Percy took the papers from Lucy and skimmed through the contents. “Chester Cantaloupe?”
“Yes, he presently owns the key. It’s called The Stag Gem.”
“The Stag Gem,” Percy mumbled.
“He’s a fairly well respected business man in the human world. Lives up in Glasgow, Scotland,” said Lucy.
“It looks like I’m going to Scotland,” responded Percy
“Well, a talking bipedal pig is going to draw some unwanted attention,” Lucy pointed out.
“There is only one talking bipedal pig whom the human world is familiar with then.”
“That was forty years ago, Percy. Too much time has passed. You, me, the whole team has passed onto legend and turned into fiction now.”
Percy leaned in and gave his friend a long and poignant hug. “It’s the only way I can get this gem. Percy can’t do it, but we all know who can. It’s time the world was re-introduced to The Piggy Ham Bacon Boy.”