Chapter 2

Dropping to her knees, Jennifer crawled toward the opening and extended her candle through it. A set of steps led downward, and she eagerly crawled through and began to descend. She was nearing the bottom, as the stairway opened onto a dusty room, when a voice from above nearly gave her heart failure.

"Zhennifer? Are you down there? What are you doing?"

"I'm here, Marie-Renee. Down the stairs. Quiet down, huh?"

"What is this place?" the French girl asked as she came thundering down the stairs.

"I was hoping it was a way out," Jennifer answered. "But it looks like a study of some sort."

"What is this?" Marie-Renee asked, picking up the only thing in the room not covered with a thick layer of dust. It was a small U-shaped instrument constructed of wood and leather, with a leather covering on the end of arm and a hand-operated crank at the end of the other. Marie-Renee slowly turned the crank, and the leather end gyrated wildly.

"I cannot think what it could possible be for," she said.

Jennifer blushed.

It's ... it's, um..."

"Do you know?"

"It's a dildo. This end rests on your belly, this end goes in your pussy. You turn the crank, and..."

Marie-Renee's eyes went wide.

"Who would have made it?"

"How the hell would I know?" Jennifer said. "Maybe the book on the table will help us find out. Shit, I have no idea what this says. And I had three years of French. True, I got B's and C's. Well, and a D. But still, you'd think some of it would make sense."

"It is Medieval French," Marie-Renee said, looking over Jennifer's shoulder at the book the young girl had found on the dust-covered desk. "Mon Dieu! The last notebook of Michel de Nostredame!"

"You read Medieval French?" Jennifer asked skeptically.

"Naturellement," Marie-Renee said. She eagerly began to skim through the book. There were only a few entries; evidently it had been prepared shortly before the seer's death. As her companion studied the book, Jennifer began to look around at the other items on the shelf.

"This Nostradamus was certainly a horny little toad, wasn't he?" she said, picking up one book. "He's got a whole book of dirty nun pictures here. Oh my God. These are the three nuns in the picture upstairs. The older two are kissing, and the younger one is using the dildo on herself. Do you think he built this whole thing as like, some sort of whorehouse?"

"Mon Dieu," Marie-Renee whispered, her voice filled with alarm.

"Hey, I'm sorry. I forgot he was your hero and all." Jennifer whipped around to find that Marie-Renee was paying her no attention at all.

"Look at this," she said, pointing to the last page in the notebook. "Nostradamus predicted that on the eighth day of the eighth month of the eighth year of the next millennium, a giant asteroid will come within one thousand miles of the earth."

"So?" Jennifer was bored already.

"So that's next month!" Marie-Renee exclaimed.

"Oh, get out. For one thing, we just had a millennium. There won't be another one for like, a hundred years or something."

"Non. The millennium comes every thousand years. Nostradamus was writing in the sixteenth century. The fifteen hundreds? Anyway, the millennium he's talking about to was the last one."

"Okay," Jennifer said, once again slowed by the need for math. "But that was like, on January 1, 2000. Y2K, ya know? So we're already in the ninth year, right? So we're fine. Nothing happened."

"Non," Marie-Renee repeated. "The millennium began on January 1, 2001. This is the eighth year. August 8, 2008 is the eighth day of the eighth month. That's next month!"

"But it's not like it's gonna hit us," Jennifer pointed out. "Thank God. I mean, an asteroid. Like somebody could get really hurt if that happened. I'd hate to be standing under that bad boy."

"Yes," Marie-Renee said, "or it could lead to the extinction of all life on the planet."

"Huh?"

"An asteroid, ma cherie, is what most scientists say caused the extinction of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous Era. It hit the earth and created a huge cloud of dust that reduced worldwide temperatures to such an extent that it killed all the dinosaurs."