Last Message by Shane Peacock Page B

found an electric tool of some sort—it was hard to tell exactly what it was—and began buzzing the rest of the barnacles off the rock. Once he’d sheared them almost to the surface, the two of us picked up screwdrivers again and carefully chipped off the last bits. Le Punk stood beside us, still peeved.
    Another tiny word emerged and then another. Soon there were fifteen.
    I have made him my friend and now he is unique in all the world.
    I stood there with that rock in my hands, my mouth wide open, just staring at it. Halliday was moved too. He put his hand on my shoulder. Though he likely knew it was a sentence from The Little Prince , he had no idea what it meant to me. All the same, he was stunned. It was as if this item had appeared by magic, out of the ocean and into the plane of the soul of France. He looked at me as if I were a messenger from God.
    I turned to the boy, emptied my pockets of Euros, which he took with glee, and walked out the door, still almost in a trance.
    â€œMonsieur!” cried Halliday at the door. “Where are you going?”
    â€œI have a letter to read,” I said.
    That made little sense to him, of course, but he nodded. A messenger from God can do and say what he wants.

TWELVE
    THE THIRD ENVELOPE
    The minute I got back to my hotel, I put the rock in the suitcase with the painting and opened the third envelope. It wasn’t as thick as the other two. This is what it said:
    Dear Adam,
    Wow! You have reached the third level! If I am in any way conscious right now and aware of what is going on down (or up!) on earth, I am certain that I am dancing in the air.
    I wouldn’t be so sure about that, Grandpa.
    You are ready for the most difficult task of all. Read this and make your choice. Do not feel compelled to try it. In fact, I am reluctant to ask you. There is danger involved.
    Here it is.
    The Noels were not, as I mentioned in the first letter, a literate family. But like so many people (or peoples) who do not write, they loved to tell stories, believed in legends and had many superstitions. I remember Yvette throwing a pinch of salt over her shoulder at every meal because she was certain it would help her and her husband live long lives. And when they had had a great deal of wine, their stories would become more and more fantastic. During the month I was with them, they told me tales—using gestures, drawings and what little French I could grasp—of ghosts and giants who, they claimed, used to roam southern France long ago; and of lions and rhinoceroses that, in their imaginations, were the French beasts of bygone days.
    They also liked to talk about caves. I understood from them that many other people in the region did as well. The area they lived in, and more exactly the land to the north and northwest, was very hilly and rocky, actually mountainous in places, and prehistoric passages ran into and through these elevations. Jean’s stories often started in such caves and told of ferocious men with superhuman powers emerging from them to do extraordinary things. Those men, he said, had the power to create wonderful art. They were, Provençal folklore insists, the world’s first artists. They drew fabulous depictions of themselves and of animals on the walls inside their mountains. Jean’s yarns sometimes started from that artwork—stories of incredible beings stepping out from the stone and coming to life.
    He said that several ancient caves with drawings had been found in the past half century. But he was fond of predicting that THE cave, the GREAT cave, had yet to be discovered. In it, the world would see history’s oldest art—and when modern people viewed it, they would be astonished. This work, he often said, would be magical. It would show the world the meaning of life. He insisted that this was not a dream—one day such a place would actually be uncovered. The discoverer would be a local person, because they can almost