TOMB RAIDER: The Money Pit

Chapter 5: Shakespeare & the Charnal House

Oak Island

1

7:31a.m

Barely awake, the workmen working at Oak island are preparing for another day's drilling. Lucy is penetrated. The camera, safely inside the jaws for the drilling part, shows the progress of the cold, unmoving auger as it is lowered quickly down the shaft. Becker watches the monitor. Each time he watches the smooth walls of the shaft for things he missed the time before. Each time, nothing.

7:34a.m. and the auger touches the bottom. But Becker does not issue the order to begin drilling. Instead, he moves closer to the monitor, studying the grainy black-and-white picture, trying to work out what he is looking at, for it certainly isn't soil.

A lump of some kind, roughly oblong-shaped, covered in mud. He grabs up the remote control, twisting the focus dial, trying to see better. Paper. Yes, now he can see, bits of paper littered around the floor of the shaft and around the auger dug into the soil. Focus, you sod!

Workmen come to see also, alerted by the apprehension smeared all over their boss's face. They too see paper. They too try to read what are now obviously words printed on it. A couple of words are made out.

The.

Art.

Is.

The breath catches in Becker's throat as he makes out part of a dirt-covered fourth word:

Capu. As in Capulet. As in Romeo Capulet.

The remote slips from his grasp, dropping as fast as his jaw. The workmen are still trying to read the words, but Becker is staggering back, shocked, unable to breath. A vision of fame, of people saying God He Was Right All Along, flashes through his mind, and then suddenly he is pushing at his workmen, screaming at them to get the auger out, to grab that muddy lump in the drill's jaws and bring it up, NOW!

7:38a.m. and the auger finally pops free, dripping wet mud. A workman is shoved aside as Becker moves quickly forward, dipping his hands into the mud, trying to force open more quickly the jaws, shouting for someone to open them even though they are opening. He snatches the muddy lump out, cutting his hand on the jaws as he does so but hardly noticing. People gather round. Becker shakes and wipes off the mud, and now they can all see he holds pages of a book, pages and pages, and they realise that their boss was right all along about what was buried here, because as he cleans it, he reads from it, his voice shaky, and even those who don't know the story have heard of Romeo and Juliet, perhaps Shakespeare's most famous work. Or, as Becker always claimed, Francis Bacon's most famous work.

And now, as they begin cheering, Becker included, he is wiping the manuscript all over his shirt to clean it, and at about the same time that he recognises that the manuscript is actually a professionally printed and bound book, he sees the front cover, sees how modern it looks, sees the Penguin symbol on the spine, sees the title: Penguin Classics Series: Romeo & Juliet, and then sees red.

Rage consumes him in a flash and his fists fly, knocking down the nearest man, who considers jacking in his job and returning blows but quickly lets this feeling subside, and then Becker is cursing and storming away, promising that the culprit of this joke will be fired.