The Pharos Objective

by David Sakmyster

  —and collided with the wall as it sealed. The seven signs wheeled back to their preset positions, and something beyond the great door made a low, wheezing sound like a heavy sigh.

  Over the next few days Caleb attempted it eight more times.

  Every time the same. The fire, the water, the air . . . and then nothing. He read and reread everything he had on alchemy. He studied the teaching of Balinas of Tyna, who had claimed to have mastered the Emerald Tablet, and who had performed miracles, healed the sick. He studied all the theories about what the tablet was supposed to contain. All of these interpretations had become infused in his mind, into his very breath. And yet he came no closer to wisdom.

  And despite Lydia’s belief in his eventual transition, nothing happened. He may have passed the first two tests, but he still felt trapped in the flames of Calcination. He couldn’t let go. Not of her, not of his past, not of his fears.

  And I can’t draw down a power I never really had. His visions had always been passive, reactionary. And try as he might, immersing himself in the depths of the lighthouse sub-chamber, opening his spirit to its mysteries, he was denied and could go no further.

  She was right, he had failed.

  10

  On a crisp, surprisingly cool morning, Caleb checked out of his hotel and made his way to the airport.

  The authorities stopped him at customs, and he spent eight hours with the local police. He detailed how he and Lydia had gone on a cruise, and he insisted that she had been swept away during a dive. They asked why he had never reported her missing. Caleb couldn’t come up with a good excuse. They called the hotel, where the manager only fueled their suspicions by relating the odd nature of Caleb’s nocturnal comings and goings, his reclusiveness since the sudden absence of his lovely bride.

  Caleb didn’t blame them. Because of his vague and rattled responses, they seemed sure he had killed Lydia, and he was prepared to spend the rest of his life wasting away in an Egyptian jail.

  As it turned out, it wasn’t that bad, but it was bad enough.

  Egyptian laws were incredibly complex and quite often subjective. He asked for a trial, begged to be shown the evidence against him. Where’s the body? he demanded. Witnesses? A motive? Caleb told them to look for a man in a gray suit, with matching hair. He knew her. They had planned her disappearance together. Set him up.

  The police didn’t budge, and they told Caleb they could hold him indefinitely if they felt like it.

  Doubleday sent a lawyer on Caleb’s behalf, but his efforts proved ineffective. Caleb began to believe even the lawyer thought he was guilty. Their star publicist, and his co-author, was missing, and Caleb was the sole suspect. It didn’t make good press. His book sales plummeted. They took the stock off the shelves. Cancelled further printings.

  And left him to rot. Day after day, month after month in a dank cell.

  He asked for his research materials and they refused.

  He begged to be allowed a few encyclopedias. A book. Anything.

  Again they refused.

  It was killing him, this separation from books. More than anything else, even more than his own imminent mortality, he longed for a book, a newspaper, a magazine. He had never been apart from his life’s blood for so long. He missed the feel of pages, the touch of a leather spine; missed the smell of the binding, the sound an old book would make as it opened.

  Finally, he pled for pen and paper, and they grudgingly obliged. And on a cool day when the wind blew gently through the barred window of his cell, he began to draw. Just random images at first. Then the visions came.

  He asked for more paper. They gave him scraps at first, but then a guard with a shred of compassion smuggled in a thick sketch pad. And Caleb drew.

  For hours on end, skipping meals, neglecting his body, avoiding sleep, he drew. Pain and hunger were mere inconveniences compared to his insights, compared to his growing sense of purpose. The days and weeks flew by and his portfolio grew as he allowed his practice to become an obsession. Every night he looked over the day’s output, and then never looked at the pages again. He awoke every morning and meditated—just sat and listened to his breathing and his heartbeat, learning to tune out the cries of the other inmates, the banging on the walls, the shrieking, the pleading and find a measure of peace residing deep within. He was lucky to have his own cell, but it would not have mattered. He was passing onto a new level of being.

  And he continued to draw.

  Eagles and suns, gates and stars. A river flowing beside a large complex of stone buildings. He sketched his father, or at least his recollection of him. He no longer suffered pain, but his essence remained for Caleb to capture and put to paper. The signs were the same. Caleb didn’t understand them, but this time he didn’t try.

  And he drew.

  Once, he awoke to see that dreadful man in the green khakis sitting cross-legged in the shadows of the cell, just beside the door. He breathed heavily, as if he were sleeping. He stared, propped up on his scrawny arms. Caleb told himself it was only a dream, but he knew better. He finally called out.

  The man breathed in. Wheezing. The darkness at his head shifted and Caleb froze. He knew the man was looking right at him. A mumbling sound reached him from the darkness, and Caleb smelled something—iodine and alcohol.

  “Caleb,” came the word, grating, guttural. “Go . . . home.”

  Caleb sat up and looked closer. The darkness wasn’t quite as dark as he had first thought. He could see the grimy wall, the blood and vomit stains beside the urinal.

  The room was empty.

  Caleb slid back onto the cot and reached for his pad of paper.

  He had more images to draw.

  A government lawyer stopped in one day. He was polite and smart-looking in a tailored white suit, but he acted disinterested. Looking around Caleb’s cell at the piles of discarded sheets of paper, he asked what he liked to draw. Caleb only smiled and replied, “Whatever comes to me.”

  The lawyer left, and Caleb took up the nub of his pencil and went back to work.

  Another month passed. At least, he thought it was a month, having given up keeping track of time long ago in this Alexandrian jail while the world outside went on. He had thought about Phoebe a lot. But he knew, somehow, that she was okay. His mother too. They were both fine, though unfulfilled and desperate. Still driven for answers beyond their grasp.

  He knew it. He saw it all, and more.

  Knowing that it might prove fatal to look upon the dead, he attempted to remote view Lydia anyway. He fasted for almost a week, and even the normally callous guards were getting uneasy about his health. They didn’t want someone dying of their own volition.

  In Caleb’s haze of detachment, his body yielded to his soul, merging, coagulating; and deeper visions came. It was as if he had immersed himself in something of the transcendent, like he had gone skinny-dipping in the cosmic pool of consciousness.

  He thought of the mystic Balinas and he laughed. A long beard hung down Caleb’s chest. His hair was matted and in stringy clumps. His skin was full of sores, lice and ticks. If I only had a mirror . . . maybe we’d look like twins.

  But he didn’t care.

  His consciousness existed elsewhere. Caleb Crowe was gone. In his place emerged someone new. Someone focused, dedicated. And he saw things—some he wanted to see, and others he never asked for.

  When he thought of Lydia, when he really thought of her—the scent of jasmine, the touch of her silken skin, the way the ankh had dangled on her chest—he saw a rush of images: the Great Pyramids lit up at night; a congregation of people in gray cloaks, mumbling to themselves about keys and doorways, about lost secrets and betrayal; a massive, fanciful construction project along a familiar shoreline—an upward-sloping structure that looked like a sheared-off dome with thousands of windows and dedications from every modern language on its walls, with hundreds of workmen, cranes and hoists assailing it from all angles. In the distance, a dozen men and women in dark gray
suits stood atop a ridge, watching in silent appreciation.

  One of those figures, a blond-haired woman, turned away from the others. Her face was hidden in shadow, the sun burning at her back. But it seemed she looked in Caleb’s direction, and she gave a secret, almost unnoticed nod of her head.

  He saw Phoebe next, seated alone in a specially designed chair, peering into a microscope in a dimly lit lab. She wrote with her left hand and moved an ancient fragment delicately with her right.

  Then he saw his mother standing outside the family’s lighthouse, looking out over Sodus Bay. She held an apple in both hands and rolled it gently back and forth as if willing from its skin memories that were long lost, but definitely not forgotten. Down the hill, the rusted lightship had received a facelift. People were walking across a remodeled pier, snapping pictures of the old boat, but Helen paid them no heed. She glanced up once at the lighthouse beacon, and in her eyes flashed a distant recollection, as though she expected to see Caleb’s father waving back at her.

  Then Caleb saw Waxman. Saw him again and again, like a recording slowed down on a VCR. Unbidden visions swirled around in a choppy soup, pictures of Waxman’s childhood, tormented dreams of his mother. She had inflicted her wrath on everything he did. Interfering in all aspects of his life, turning him into a loner. Waxman had studied all the time. He’d trained by himself, pulled away from friends, from strangers, from life.

  Then Caleb saw him enter a familiar white building beside a winding river.

  Overhead, an eagle soared, circling, then rising above the sparkling sun.

  At the doorway, Waxman turned as if aware of someone’s snooping gaze. “You’re asking the wrong questions,” he whispered, and Caleb snapped out of his vision, jerked awake, gasping for air. His mouth was a desiccated old prune, his limbs too weary to lift.

  Two armed guards stood in the doorway. “You’re free to go,” one of them said, and handed Caleb his knapsack.

  “Get a shower,” said the other, “and something to eat on your way out.”

  Caleb didn’t know it at the time, but he should have figured it out. It was too easy. He’d had help. Probably a simple phone call had sprung his release.

  He didn’t ask any questions. He just went with the flow and tide of Fate, accepting this sudden transition in his life and hoping that the long months of confinement had somehow prepared him for something meaningful.

  So, after several weeks of recuperation, after cleaning up, after eating and nursing himself back to health, he prepared to leave Alexandria.

  “Caleb, go home.”

  While he waited for the porter to get his single bag, he looked out the hotel window at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, nestled impressively between the beachfront and the mass of white hotels and offices. He held out his palm to block the glare from the sun glinting off the windows of the dome, and in the spots dancing his vision, he imagined the ancient structure after which it was patterned. And it filled him with hope.

  A knock came at the door. Somehow, when Caleb opened it, he wasn’t surprised by who had come to find him.

  11

  A year ago, Caleb’s first inclination would have been to run. But now he stood firm, calm and settled. He focused on what was important. He saw Phoebe’s face light up, that big grin and her teeth biting her bottom lip. A touch of her handrest controls and her wheelchair shot forward, zipping around Helen and rolling right up to Caleb. She threw her arms around his waist.

  “Missed you, big brother.”

  Caleb held her, squeezed her with an emotional intensity that surprised him. “Do I have you guys to thank for my release?”

  “George,” Phoebe said, nodding back to the threshold of the door. “He worked for months with the authorities, finally pulling enough strings.”

  Waxman offered a weak smile. “You can thank me later.”

  Phoebe squeezed Caleb’s arm. “By the way, where was my invite to my own brother’s wedding?”

  “Sorry,” Caleb gulped. “It all happened so fast.”

  “Even after my warning,” Phoebe said, shaking her head. “Was it her, the girl with the green eyes?”

  Caleb nodded.

  “I tried to tell you—”

  “Shhh. Later, okay? Now’s not the time.”

  She took his hand and looked at her brother with new eyes. “Come on, we have a lot to tell you. You’re going to be amazed.”

  Caleb held his ground, and the wheels on her chair spun. “No, I don’t want to go with them.”

  “Caleb,” Helen walked into the room. She was thin and pale, her hair cut short and dyed a California blond to cover her gray. Her eyes were lined with crow’s-feet, hooded but no less crystalline. The blue shook Caleb, and he felt an electric current spark when she touched his arm. “Jail! My poor boy. We were so worried. And they wouldn’t let me see you.”

  “Hello, Mother.” He gave her a peck on the cheek. “Why are you here?”

  “You shouldn’t have gone down there without us,” she scolded. Waxman sauntered over, his hands in the front pockets of his suit pants. He wore a black turtleneck under his navy blue jacket, and his hair seemed just as wild as Caleb remembered, only now flecked with gray. A lit cigarette was trapped like a worm dangling from his lips.

  “Listen, I just want to go back to New York and sleep for a month.”

  “You’ll want to hear this,” Waxman said.

  Caleb stared at the gold band around his ring finger as he lifted his cigarette, then he looked blankly at Helen. “Speaking of not being invited to weddings . . .”

  “Caleb,” Phoebe pinched his arm.

  Waxman turned his head to watch a pair of hotel maids walk past in the hall. He put his arm around Helen’s shoulders. “I told you he hasn’t changed.”

  Caleb slung his bag over his shoulder. “I’m going. Thanks for the jailbreak.”

  “Caleb,”—Phoebe wheeled into his path—“we know where it is.”

  “Where what is?”

  Helen smiled. “Don’t be modest, Phoebe. Tell him how you found it.”

  “Okay,” Phoebe said, beaming. “You were right, Caleb. We weren’t asking the right questions.”

  “About what?”

  “The scroll. Caesar’s scroll.”

  “I saw it,” Phoebe said, “by refining the question. Remember when I said I kept having visions of a castle on a steep hill, and a prisoner in red robes being led up to it? Well, I decided to follow that lead. I remembered that those ancient scrolls were coveted by aristocrats in the nineteenth century, and it was considered fashionable to have one among your personal treasures, even if you could never read it.”

  Caleb’s heart started to race. “Of course. But still, the possibility that just that one scroll, of all the thousands . . .”

  Phoebe continued. “I decided to work from the assumption that it had been removed from the collection. I asked to be shown how Caesar’s scroll was taken from Herculaneum, and then I saw it.”

  “Saw what?” Caleb asked. He started to feel faint.

  “That man again, in long red robes and fur-lined lapels. But this time, he was standing before a series of machines. Several blackened scrolls, coated with a silvery substance, were stretched out, hanging partially unrolled and glued together where they had started to rip.”

  “The Piaggio machines,” Caleb said, recognizing the description. Vatican scholar Antonio Piaggio had invented the device in an effort to stop the wanton destruction of the scrolls by other investigators. It was the only thing that worked until the 1970s, when the Norwegians came along with their gelatin solutions.

  Phoebe nodded, and her eyes glazed over, as if seeing the vision all over again. “Someone came up to this red-robed man and said, ‘Welcome, Count Cagliostro, what brings such an esteemed visitor to inspect our work?’”

  “Cagliostro,” Caleb whispered. “He was an alchemist, a magician of the old Egyptian mysteries. It fits. He would have been drawn to this scroll, but how did he—”
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  “‘A dream,’ the Count said, walking from machine to machine, ten of them with scrolls in various stages of unrolling. ‘A dream told me there was something I needed to see here.’”

  Phoebe blinked, and quickly focused on Caleb. “Cagliostro stopped in front of one scroll that had only been opened about an inch. He bent over, gasping as he peered at a faint symbol and a few visible letters.”

  “What symbol?” Caleb asked, although he could guess. Exalted Mercury . . .

  Phoebe shrugged. “I didn’t get a clear enough glimpse of it. But anyway, he sent everyone from the room, then carefully removed the scroll from the machine, boxed it up and hid it under his robes. He took a random scroll from the hundreds on a nearby table and set it up on the machine. He began to clumsily unroll the first inch when a group of priests walked in, ushered by one of the papyri officials. Discovered in the act, he ran. Fled the library and disappeared into the shadows of the palace corridors.

  “My next vision was of Cagliostro in shackles being led up an uneven rock path beside a sheer cliff to a fortress overlooking a valley. The castle, with its turrets and walls, stood against the rough winds and made me think of Qaitbey.”

  She let out a deep breath and rubbed her palms together. “And that was it. I did some research and found that Cagliostro had been imprisoned at a castle, the same one I’d seen, jailed on charges of heresy.”

  “He was tricked,” Caleb said, “into performing an ancient Egyptian rite of initiation on two Vatican Inquisition spies, who then arrested him. Classic entrapment.”

  “So you know.”

  Caleb nodded. “He was first imprisoned in Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome, but after trying to escape, he was moved to the fortress you saw.”

  “San Leo,” she said, pouting. “I spent days looking through Italian guidebooks trying to find a picture that matched, and you knew it all along!”