The Treasure Map.

My son was a curious but not necessarily bright child. He could spend hours in a library or museum looking at everything but I’m not entirely sure how much he understood. Maybe his brain was storing it all somewhere, rearranging it into an order which he could cope with, in the hope that eventually the final connection would be made and he’d understand it all. I think that’s what happened with the treasure map.

The treasure map was a surprise, I’ll admit that. He would always stop off in antique markets on the way home from school. His mother was constantly in a stupor over where he could be until he arrived, hours later, with a few old books under his arm, or an ancient lamp or, in this case, a treasure map. Admittedly, it was a lovely piece of work and the age of it alone was incredibly satisfying. It was one of those scraps of paper that would always feel dusty and demanded to be handled with care in case it suddenly decided it had had enough and crumbled itself into fine pieces.

It was written in a ridiculous code. The owner of the stall had told my son that it had been around for years. At first it had fetched huge amounts at auctions as rumours spread of the treasure it led to but, as time went on and it began to become clear that nobody could work out the intricacies of the system, it decreased in value steadily until it had ended up in the hands of the antique stall proprietor. Now my son had it.

It took him about three days, I imagine he just left the problem alone in his head as his mind found a way to make it fit. It turned out to be the final part of the puzzle. For the rest of the school day, he didn’t leave early, that would have been dishonest, he could answer most of the questions set by his teachers with ease and, instead of shopping as usual, he came, ran, straight home.

The first I knew of it was after he’d packed his bag and descended the stairs to ask if he could borrow a few hundred pounds. At first he refused to explain, only insisting that he’d be able to pay it back within two weeks but I didn’t believe him and carried on with my work. To reply, he brought down the map and took me through the solution. I won’t pretend to understand it entirely, even now it’s pretty much beyond me, but it did make sense. I lent him the money on the condition that he’d allow me to go with him. He agreed, I withdrew the money and we got the train to Kent.

We didn’t find the treasure, of course, somebody else had beaten us to it when a large apartment block had been built and, in the course of the laying of the foundations, a huge amount of gold had been found. Millions of pounds worth according to the small section dedicated to the find in the visitor’s centre. The money had been used to restore a nearby park which had been effectively destroyed by the building work.

My son didn’t seem too worried. He had solved the riddle which had eluded many others after all. I was a little more disappointed than he was, we really needed the money at the time.

Tags: Micro-fiction