seymoure

Deep Within the Bull

“Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee... I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now. ”

- Margaret Atwood

One of the first gifts I ever gave Eddie was a wooden puzzle box that I found when I was touring in Turkey, looking for some clues about the original Trojan Horse. Those who have followed my written adventures know that a hoax involving the horse had nearly cost loss of life. Therefore such a search would always be interesting.

Since a child, I have loved puzzle boxes. What was inside was never so intriguing as the quest to find the way in. So whenever I could, I bought them and gave them away. This one was a proper old one. Heavy wood and took hours to find the way in. It was a joy.

The box so fascinated my actor friend that he searched them out everywhere. Starting in Chinatown in San Francisco, it expanded all around the world as he could find them.

He had sent me one every Christmas after that. It was part of my yearly ritual on Christmas morning, to set to the opening and not stop until I succeeded. This had held up more than one breakfast, but always pleasantly.

Now I knew that I would have to approach the statue with that mindset. Eddie would not make it simple for anyone else to access whatever was within the Golden Calf.

There were grooves all over the length of the statue, so it looked like plates of gold molded to a figure of a calf, just as the golden calf was supposed to be.

So I began to test the movability of the plates, like the panels of a wooden puzzle box. Nothing seemed to move in any way. Frustrating!

I even tried to lift the tail, since that would be just Eddie’s kind of humor. To lift the tail and then find the message present itself would be a laugh. But the tail did not lift.

I locked my arms around the horns and tried to twist the head, but, again, nothing. Poking the eyes did nothing, neither was there anything in the mouth. Then I moved to the nether regions. But neither the penis nor the testicles anted up anything, except some uncomfortable snickers.

We decided to give it a few moments. I have often found that the best way to find something is to stop looking. When you are throwing all your energy into hunting, you stop looking at the whole thing, and may pass over the same thing time and again.

We all drew back into chairs at least 3 feet away. We must have looked like perspective papas waiting for the calf to give birth (hard thing to do since we had already found proof it was male).

Then there was a banging at the door, most insistent. We glared at each other. No one was supposed to enter that way! Deliveries were intercepted on the lower floor by police officers and brought up. Then they just came in. Nobody coming up to our floor would knock.

But if they didn’t know that because they came down from a higher floor….

We all had our hands on our guns when the door exploded into a thousand wooden shards and flew in all directions.

Unbelievable as it seemed a dozen men in black attack armor and carrying automatic assault weapons stormed into the room.

Not the way I would want to finish our scavenger hunt!

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Continue on to Chapter 32