‘Julius Caesar. Genghis Khan. Napoleon. All great men. All assholes, too. As for me, I guess I have a certain set of talents that make me the right guy to do certain missions. So I do what I have to and then I go home. I don’t need anyone to know. In the end, I’d rather be good than great.’
As Lily had got older—and followed Jack on his adventures with the Ramesean Stones, the Great Games and the Three Secret Cities; and gone abroad to study at Stanford—she had grown to admire his brand of humble heroism more and more.
There were, especially at Stanford, lots of guys who had money and flashiness—and sometimes she fell under their spell, as in the case of Dion—but as she matured, she found herself looking for a guy with that same quiet heroism underneath the surface.
Of course, she found it in Alby.
As for Alby, during the three-week period after the team had found the Three Secret Cities, he had also done a lot of thinking.
He’d lost a hand during the mission to find the cities: that had been Dion’s cruel revenge when Alby had been captured by him and the Knights of the Golden Eight.
It cut at Alby’s self-image more than he thought it would. As a child, Alby had always been small, nerdy and geeky. His mother had been a little over-protective and his father had not cared much for him.
And then he’d become friends with Lily at school and met Jack and discovered a whole new world, a world in which his intelligence had value and where physical stature meant nothing.
Still, while Alby had grown into a tall young man of twenty-one, losing his hand had brought back all his childhood anxieties of being the small, weak kid.
He had never forgotten the time Jack had stood up for him during a parent–teacher conference with an arrogant sportsmaster at his school.
(The sportsmaster, a garden-variety muscle-head, had not listened when Alby’s mousy mother had asked him if Alby could be excused from gym class. He had listened when Jack had quietly crushed a softball in front of his eyes with his titanium left hand.)
That incident had long stayed with Alby because the way Jack interacted with people intrigued him.
Whether he was talking to a prince, a prime minister or a lowly minotaur like Easton, Jack treated everyone with the same courtesy. (Or, in the case of self-important sportsmasters, courteous but firm forcefulness.)
Alby’s own father, a senior mining executive, didn’t do that. He measured people by the titles on their business cards.
Alby had also seen various players in the shadow royal world—people like Dion and the Knights of the Golden Eight—showing obeisance to those they considered their ‘betters’ or of higher social rank.
But to Jack there didn’t seem to be any such thing as social rank.
‘There are only people,’ Jack answered when Alby asked him about it just before Jack left for Mont Saint-Michel.
‘Money comes and goes, and rank is relative to time and place. And if having money is the only thing that gives you rank, then you’re living a life based on a foundation of sand. For what if you lose all your money? Way I see it, if you treat everyone with decency and respect, whether they’re a prince or a pauper, you’ll always do okay. It’s worked for me so far.’
‘Yes, but you’re smart and tough and strong,’ Alby said, nodding at Jack’s physique. ‘I’m deaf and kinda nerdy.’
Jack snuffed a laugh.
‘Oh, really.’ He rolled up his left sleeve, revealing his titanium forearm and hand.
‘Look at this arm,’ he said. ‘I was a one-armed man before this.’
They both knew how it had happened: on the day of Lily’s birth, inside a volcano in Uganda, to save Lily, Wizard and himself, Jack had thrust his arm through a waterfall of sizzling lava.
‘I knew when I did it that I would probably never be a soldier again,’ Jack said. ‘The army doesn’t have much use for a one-armed trooper. But then Wizard built this for me and it’s fricking awesome. Better than the arm I was born with and it’s got me out of a lot of sticky situations.’
He sighed. ‘It’s funny, sometimes what people think is your greatest weakness can actually be your greatest strength. Take, for instance, your deafness. Some might see that as a weakness. But because of it, you taught Lily, Zoe and me sign language, and thus made us more capable people. And hey, look at what just happened in Moscow. Because you’re deaf, those bells don’t affect you. The way I see it, that’s an enormous strength in the battle ahead.’
That was Jack West Jr for you, Alby thought as he remained in Hades’s estate while Jack’s team was at Mont Saint-Michel and Zoe’s team was in Rome.
No-one would ever call Jack a superhero but he did have one superpower: the ability to make you feel like you could do anything.
Hades’s Estate
Alsace-Lorraine, France
24 December, 2250 hours
Alby blinked out of his thoughts.
It was late and all was silent at Hades’s estate in the forests of eastern France.
Alby was manning the radio room, waiting anxiously for word from Mont Saint-Michel and Rome.
Easton was out near the lake house. He’d just finished the ‘special task’ Stretch had given him and was leaving the finished product—packed into a dozen boxes—in a special concrete-walled storage basement underneath the lake house.
As Alby had waited here, he’d done a deep dive into the five iron mountains and their connection to the moon.
The moon, it turned out, really was a strange celestial body.
That it perfectly blocked out the sun during an eclipse—by appearing to be the same size—was simply a coincidence beyond calculation: the sun is four hundred times larger than the moon, but it is also exactly four hundred times further away from the Earth. The moon also only ever shows the Earth the same face. In addition to this, like Jupiter, the moon protects the Earth from bombardment by rogue asteroids and meteorites. It is as if the Earth is somehow defended by it.
One thing that took Alby a lot of time was figuring out an astronomical track of the moon’s orbit and spin, giving him the ability to note where it would be over certain points on the Earth at any given time, but he eventually got it done.
Then he set about following Jack’s order to discover whatever he could about the Supreme Labyrinth.
Using some hieroglyph translation programs, he found a few references to mazes and labyrinths in Jack’s collection of artefacts and documents from the farm; the ones relating to his mission involving the Seven Ancient Wonders and the Great Pyramid at Giza.
The first reference he found was a partial Greek scroll, torn and in terrible condition, that mentioned the most famous labyrinth in all of history: King Minos’s elaborate maze on the island of Crete that housed his dreaded monster, the Minotaur.
Alby gazed at the image of the partial Greek scroll on his computer screen.
According to the translation program it read: —I ventured into—labyrinth accompanied by—brother’s son, the noble Theseus, and a—man named Asterion sent by—my other brother—
The rips in the scroll made it a little hard to read, but it appeared to be just another retelling of the Theseus legend.
Alby knew the story well. Like many young boys, he’d loved it all his life. It was one of the world’s most enduring myths of heroism and bravery.
Every nine years, the tyrannical King Minos demanded that the city of Athens send seven young men and seven maidens to him as tribute. Upon arriving at Crete, these poor youngsters would be sent into the labyrinth to be hunted down and killed by the Minotaur.
Appalled by this, Theseus—the Athenian king’s son—volunteered to go as one of the sacrificial victims. He entered the labyrinth, slayed the Minotaur and, aided by a length of thread given to him by King Minos’s daughter, Ariadne, he managed to find his way back out of the labyrinth.
The sec
ond reference to a labyrinth that Alby found was far more exciting.
It was a photo of some Egyptian hieroglyphics on the wall of a tomb underneath the Step Pyramid in Saqqara, Egypt, and it was in much better condition. As soon as he read its first line, Alby leaned forward with interest.
For these hieroglyphs had been written by Imhotep the Great himself, the designer and builder of that pyramid.
It read:
I, Imhotep, beheld the Labyrinth. It is the most magnificent structure in the whole world, the greatest achievement of my illustrious forebears. It is beyond compare. I am honoured to have seen it with my own eyes.
Oh, what a terrible and terrifying thing it is. Woe betide any who would seek to conquer it! You would rather count the stars in the sky than attempt such a task unaided.
It took me many days to penetrate its fearsome depths and countless tunnels, and I had the wisdom of the ancients to guide me and the benefit of travelling mostly via the Emperor’s Route. Even then I barely escaped with my life.
When I returned, I imparted the secrets of that maze to my body in the manner of the ancients. When I die, let the next head-priest of Amon-Ra replicate those markings in the same manner. Then seal me in stone in my tomb dedicated to Thoth within the great hill of the Oracle under the sea, with the secrets of the maze buried with me.
‘The secrets of the maze,’ Alby said. ‘You had them imparted to your body in the manner of the ancients and buried with you. So what’s the manner of the ancients?’
Whatever it was, worryingly, Imhotep had also suggested future head priests of the Cult of Amon-Ra do it. Which meant the Catholic Church—the modern face of that cult—might already have this information.
‘And what is this Emperor’s Route?’ he thought aloud. ‘Hmmm.’
Alby did a quick search on Imhotep.
Put simply, Imhotep the Great was a towering figure in Egyptian history.
High priest, royal adviser, brilliant astronomer and gifted doctor, he had lived around 2700 B.C.E., just before the building of the Great Pyramid. The reigning genius of his time, he was one of only two people who were not pharaohs whom the Egyptians had made a god.
In honour of this status, the ancient Egyptians had produced many statues and images of him.
All depicted him in the same way: holding a papyrus scroll and wearing a multi-coloured neck-ring around his throat and a solid-looking skullcap on his head.
He was ancient Egypt’s greatest architect, perhaps history’s greatest. He designed the Step Pyramid, the first giant pyramid ever built, before anyone else had even contemplated the idea of a pyramid.
He was a man thousands of years ahead of his time.
Alby also knew there was a connection between Imhotep and one of Jack’s previous missions.
Jack had told him how several brilliant priests honoured with the name Imhotep had built many of the trap systems that Jack had overcome in his search for the capstone of the Great Pyramid.
These connections to the ancient world—including knowledge of the Supreme Labyrinth—made Alby wonder if Imhotep the Great might have had some extra help in acquiring his advanced skills.
Had he had access to the wisdom of the advanced civilisation that had built all these Falling Temples and the Labyrinth?
A man who knew the Word of Thoth could easily dazzle a primitive culture like that of early Egypt.
‘So if you took the secrets of the Labyrinth to your grave, Imhotep, where were you buried?’ Alby asked aloud. ‘Where is the great hill of the Oracle under the sea?’
At the sight of the word Oracle Alby naturally thought of Lily. She was, after all, the current Oracle of Siwa.
Maybe Imhotep had been buried at Siwa. The desert town of Siwa did have a high rocky hill filled with tombs and catacombs, but Siwa was nowhere near any seas or oceans. It was located deep in the Sahara Desert, near the Libyan–Egyptian border, hundreds of miles from the nearest coast.
Alby looked up Imhotep’s tomb more generally, only to discover that no tomb dedicated to him had ever been found.
Alby made a note to come back to that. He moved on to the next hit.
It was a big one.
His translation program had found mentions of the search terms ‘impossible maze’ and ‘sacred mountaintop’ in another of Jack’s old Great Pyramid files: an aged British photo of some hieroglyphics carved into a wall of the King’s Tomb within the Great Pyramid itself.
The glyphs appeared to have been written at the order of the builder of the pyramid, the all-powerful pharaoh Khufu, or, as the Greeks called him, Cheops.
The translation read:
Oh, great and wise Overlords,
I have done as you commanded!
I have built the mighty structure that will capture and contain the awesome power of Ra’s Destroyer.
I built it near Aker, who, ever alert, watches over the impossible maze from his sacred mountaintop perch.
When death takes me, I will be laid inside this same mighty structure and use it as my tomb.
‘That’s interesting,’ Alby said.
Ra’s Destroyer was the ancient Egyptians’ name for the Tartarus Sunspot, the deadly hotspot on the surface of the sun that would have destroyed the Earth had Jack not re-erected the capstone of the Great Pyramid and caught the sunspot’s rays in its crystal array.
But Alby’s eyes were locked on one particular paragraph:
I built it near Aker, who, ever alert, watches over the impossible maze from his sacred mountaintop perch.
‘Who watches over the impossible maze,’ Alby said aloud. ‘The Supreme Labyrinth.’
Alby quickly looked up the Egyptian term: Aker.
For a moment, he thought it might be the Great Sphinx—it was, without doubt, ‘ever alert’—but that couldn’t be right. The Great Sphinx sat in a depression below the pyramids, not on a mountaintop.
Aker, it turned out, was an Egyptian god; specifically, the god who welcomed dead pharaohs to the Underworld and guided them through it.
He was also a very old god, even by Egyptian standards.
Aker appeared in the first Egyptian myths, predating the more well-known ones about Osiris, Isis, Horus and even Ra. He predated the pyramids.
‘He watches over the maze from his mountaintop perch . . .’ Alby said.
The tallest mountain range in Egypt was in the Sinai Peninsula across the Gulf of Suez, quite a way from Giza. A closer range was the Eastern Desert Mountains, which stood where the Sahara Desert met the Red Sea.
Alby scowled. This would require further study.
He decided to do that later, because he very much wanted to chase up something Iolanthe had said before she’d left for Mont Saint-Michel with Jack.
She’d said that since ancient times, scholars like Newton, Pythagoras and Albert Einstein had debated the identities of the five iron mountains.
Einstein, Alby thought.
Lily had mentioned Einstein, too, in her quickly scrawled note to Jack: something about Einstein, Alexander Friedmann and k>0.
Alby knew what that referred to.
The Friedmann Equation. It was a complex equation that explained the expansion of the universe. But if one element of it—k—was greater than 0, it meant that the universe would collapse in on itself in an almighty singularity.
The Omega Event.
Einstein was also Alby’s hero—his hero of heroes—and had been for a long time.
As a nerdy bespectacled boy, when his brother and other boys his age had been putting up posters of sports stars and rock bands on their bedroom walls, Alby had stuck up a poster of Albert Einstein and his famous quote: GREAT SPIRITS HAVE ALWAYS ENCOUNTERED VIOLENT OPPOSITION FROM MEDIOCRE MINDS.
This also meant that Alby knew more about the world’s most famous scientist than most.
Of course, he knew all about Einstein’s most famous equation, E=mc2, his theories of special and general relativity, and his famous letter to President Franklin Roosevelt about the power of the atom to make a nuclear weapon: the letter that had led to the creation of the Manhattan Project.
But Alby also knew some more obscure facts about Albert Einstein.
Like how Einstein had disappeared during World War II.
After penning his famous letter to the president, Einstein was, bizarrely, banned from participating in the Manhattan Project. U.S. Army Intelligence felt that his left-leaning political views made him a security risk.
The U.S. Navy, however, thought otherwise and happily employed him for the duration of the war. What Einstein actually did for the Navy for four years, Alby knew, had long been shrouded in mystery.
And so Alby decided to check it out and look into anything and everything connected to Einstein in U.S. Navy records.
It took some searching and a little skirting of military firewalls, but soon Alby hit on Einstein’s Navy codename: Mr Light.
That led to several documents including one that blew Alby’s mind.
A second letter to the president, dated 10 April 1945.
Plastered across it was a series of bold red stamps warning:
DO NOT SEND
DO NOT SEND
DO NOT SEND
Alby read it:
Dear President Roosevelt,
I once wrote to you about a most grave matter: the notion of an atomic weapon and the necessity that the Allied powers acquire one before the Nazi state does.
Now, I write to you about a far greater and more worrisome event. It will occur long after you and I are dead but it threatens no less than our universe’s very existence.
In theology the study of this event is known as eschatology, and various religions have called it the end-times, doomsday or the Omega Event. Through my scientific studies, I call it real. It is coming.
Without getting into the mathematics of it all, this event concerns notions of the universe’s reversal from expansion to contraction. This event has occupied the mind of Sir Isaac Newton and, for a very long time, the Catholic Church.
The Two Lost Mountains - Jack West Jr Series 06 (2020) Page 17