The Pharos Objective

by David Sakmyster

  At last Caleb arrived, standing on his legacy. He couldn’t help laughing, and wanted to spin and leap about like a young boy. He longed for those days chasing Phoebe around the deck, hiding behind the red-and-white-striped masts, ducking into the wooden deckhouse. So many memories. And then Dad, urging us to play here. He knew it would stick in our minds. He had talked this ship up as their property, a member of the family, even though it had been decommissioned and docked for good. Its red hull was streaked with barnacles and muck, the paint chipped, the steel rusted. The masts were bent and covered with seagull excrement. Old Rusty had sat here all this time, waiting patiently.

  “What’s its name?” Waxman asked, and for a moment Caleb shuddered.

  “Don’t know,” he said truthfully. “Old Rusty is all we ever called her. And boats are feminine, George. She’s not an ‘it.’”

  “Shut up and take me to the key.”

  Caleb bowed and swept his arms toward the door to the deckhouse. “After you.”

  Following Waxman, Caleb glanced up the hill, and could see the tiny figures in the kitchen. Phoebe watched nervously. He waved to her.

  She’ll understand, he hoped.

  “There it is,” Caleb said, pointing to the large gold-plated key, about six inches long, hanging over the cast-iron stove. The deckhouse interior was a mess. After they had closed down the museum, the items in here just collected dust. The windows were grimy, caked with dirt and sand, and now ice. The compass over the steering wheel was shattered, the tiny bunk bed cots brown and molded.

  I used to nap there, he thought with disgust. Phoebe on the top. After playing all morning, they would make hot chocolate and sip their drinks and tell each other grand stories about their naval conquests in the East Indies or some exotic port, and then they would snooze for an hour before running back up the hill for dinner.

  Waxman warily pulled the key from the wall, as if expecting a booby trap, some vicious metal contraption to slice off his hands. Caleb was surprised he didn’t make him take it down.

  Waxman slipped the key into his pocket, after first looking it over. “Doesn’t look that old,” he said.

  “Probably re-cast several times,” Caleb said. “Although I wouldn’t know. I only just figured this out. Thanks to you.”

  Waxman frowned, unsure if Caleb was complimenting him or still hiding something.

  Go on, Caleb thought. Take your prize and go.

  “Phoebe dies if you’re lying to me,” he promised.

  “I know.”

  Waxman eyed Caleb carefully. “I still don’t trust you.”

  “Sorry. What more can I do? This ship is the legacy Dad left me. There’s the key.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean,” he said, tapping the gun in his other pocket, “you and your sister are coming with me.”

  Before they left, Caleb said goodbye to his mother. Elsa sat cowering in the corner, but he convinced her everything would be fine. They would be back soon, and if she could just continue to care for Mom, he would be grateful.

  So he knelt by his mother’s bed and he kissed her forehead, ignoring Waxman clearing his throat in the doorway. “We’ll be home soon,” Caleb whispered. “I love you.”

  When he stood, he thought he saw a flicker of awareness. But her hands didn’t move, and her chest barely rose.

  Caleb turned and walked out, but stopped and looked first at a picture of his grandfather and his Dad, shaking hands while Old Rusty lay in pristine condition, sparkling in the background.

  4

  Alexandria

  Phoebe and Caleb stood on the pier outside the entrance to Qaitbey and watched the frenzy of activity in the water and all around the causeway. Helicopters circled overhead, news trucks stood idling with camera crews filming scenes of the fort and the shoreline, running their pre-segments. They pointed out the new Alexandrian library, its brilliant steel-reinforced glass rooftop blazing in the sun. They spoke of its predecessor and lamented the loss of knowledge, but hoped this new building could regain some of that former glory. Emergency vehicles stood off to the side, ready if necessary. Four police cars and two ambulances were in position.

  “It’s all a sham,” Phoebe said, wrapped in a black shawl and trembling in the morning winds. “Waxman has it all planned out.”

  Caleb nodded and recalled Waxman’s words from an hour earlier, just before he’d gone into the sea with his team of six divers. They had chosen the underwater route, going in through the ascending passage so as not to give away the Qaitbey entrance and encourage future investigations. Waxman had announced to the public that his team of archaeologists had reached a breakthrough and discovered an entrance point that seemed to fit with the legends.

  “This is going to end the controversy before it even begins,” Waxman had told Caleb, with his mask hanging around his neck. “There won’t be any more Alex Prouts running around claiming conspiracies.” And there it was, confirmation of Caleb’s suspicion that it hadn’t been the Keepers who had killed Prout.

  “We’ll film our dive, and then we’ll document the dramatic descent to the final door, and inside . . .” Waxman made a grinning, devilish face. “Just like Capone’s vault, that televised fiasco back in the eighties? I’m going to take the fall on this one. I’ll be the laughing stock,” he said, thumping his chest like a primitive. “There will, of course, be nothing inside.”

  “Because you will have already removed and destroyed everything.”

  “Precisely. And that will effectively put an end to all future searches. Nothing spurs on the spirit like a little mystery. Take that mystery away, and people are left with only what they can see and hear and touch. And life will go on as it always has, as it should.”

  “If you say so.”

  He scanned Caleb’s face. “Just so you know, you and your sister are going to be watched by my best men. A lot of them. They will be in the crowd, disguised as spectators. I would suggest keeping quiet and staying put. I don’t trust you anywhere else.”

  “And after?”

  Waxman spit into his diving mask and rubbed it around to coat the plastic. “After? I haven’t decided. You’re free to go, of course. But I would strongly suggest you get out of the publishing business for good. Or maybe turn to children’s books. A word of this in any public forum, even a Web blog, and all bets are off. I’ll start with your sister.”

  Caleb nodded. “Just so we understand each other.”

  “I think we do.”

  “Oh, and George?” Caleb called after him as he was getting into the motorboat with his diving team, their cameras and equipment.

  “What is it now?”

  “Good luck!”

  Waxman patted the gold key secured with a chain around his waist. “Got it right here.”

  “I think I can feel her here with us,” Phoebe said.

  “Me too.” Caleb held a hand to his eyes and looked up, imagining the great Pharos Lighthouse taking shape, a shimmering mirage, glowing and superimposed over the existing fort, rising in all its initial splendor. And he imagined his mother at the observation balcony, with her big red sunglasses and her hair tied in a kerchief, waving down at him.

  “Don’t worry,” he said to Phoebe, and to his mother, if she could hear. “The Pharos protects itself.”

  5

  “Caleb Crowe,”—Phoebe turned her chair sideways and looked up at her brother—“that key was made in 1954 to fit the lock on the steering column.”

  “And it was just what I needed.”

  “So where does that leave us?”

  Caleb crossed his arms over his chest and stared over the choppy waves. The divers had been under for close to an hour. His guess was that they were in the main chamber by now, at least exiting the water tunnel and approaching the first sign.

  “We wait,” Caleb said.

  “What are they going to find?” Phoebe asked.

  “You know what they’ll find. Do
you want to watch?”

  She looked down at her hands. “In a minute. First, tell me what you know. If they don’t have the right key, then where is it? Or did Dad move it?”

  “He didn’t move it,” Caleb said calmly, and he breathed in the crisp air and watched the gulls circling over the spot where the divers had entered the harbor. Overhead, cirrus clouds streaked across the sky. “It’s still there.”

  “It is? Then, we’ll have to go back and get it!”

  “No, we won’t. We have what we need.”

  Phoebe looked around. She looked at Caleb, at her chair, her feet.

  “Actually, Phoebe, you have it.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you. You were its part-time curator. You know Old Rusty’s history.”

  “Of course, but what does that have to do with anything? Is the key on the boat or not? If it is, what could it be? There’s nothing that old. Whatever that Keeper Metreisse stole and passed down in his family from generation to generation, from boat to boat, all those lightships can’t be anything I’m familiar with. Maybe there’s something in the hull, or stored in a hollow mast?”

  “Nope.”

  “Big brother, you’re really pissing me off. Okay, I give up. Tell me.”

  “You’ll kick yourself.”

  “If my legs worked, I’d kick you. Tell me!”

  “Thoth was intimately associated with the number eight, as we know. But also with music, with the octave. It is said he set creation going by the sound of his voice, by a single uttered word.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Get on with it. What about the key?”

  “The key, Phoebe. The key isn’t on the boat.”

  “But you just said—”

  “It is the boat.” Caleb took a deep breath and scanned the crowd, making sure no one had gotten too close, that no one could overhear. “It’s all the boats we’ve seen in our dreams, all those red and white sails, all those dinghies, lightships, galleys and frigates. Metreisse figured it out. We know he had the talent as well. He experienced a psychic trance and went back, visited that last chamber, and he heard them speak the word. A single word. Then he planned, so his descendents would pass it on, ship to ship, as each one wore out. Generation to generation, every vessel—”

  “—With the same name!” Phoebe shouted. “Oh, I do want to kick myself! Rusty’s real name—”

  “Let me guess,” Caleb said. “Something Greek, or Egyptian?”

  She smiled and folded her hands together. “Only the symbol for the rebirth of the land, the flooding of the Nile. The rising of the star, Sirius, also called—”

  “Isis.”

  Phoebe nodded. “Wife of Osiris, mother of Horus.”

  “Thoth helped her reunite with her murdered husband, and brought magic to her kingdom. Isis. Just one word, spoken properly, and I believe the door will open.”

  “But can you say it properly?” she asked. “Egyptian phonetics were tricky, right? And that language hasn’t been spoken in thousands of years.”

  “I’ll find out,” Caleb said. “I’ll peer back to when Sostratus last entered the vault. I’ll listen for myself.”

  “You can do that?”

  “It’ll be easy, now that I know to ask the right question.” Isis, he thought, and had to smile, thinking back on the marble head he had first plucked out of the harbor’s muck, the artifact that had started it all.

  Together, he and Phoebe gazed out over the waves and listened to the roving helicopters. Cameras were flashing at their backs, video feeds running. The whole world, it seemed, held its breath. Caleb glanced back and thought he saw a face in the crowd he recognized. A man in a dark green coat, scruffy pants and black boots. Hair falling in unkempt strings over his eyes. But he looked . . . happy.

  The crowd moved, surged, and the man was gone. And for a second Caleb caught a glimpse of another face he knew, a man with a bald head and dark glasses. Watching from a short distance away.

  Victor Kowalski.

  “Well, big brother?” Phoebe tugged at his hand. “I bet they’re almost to the door. Want to take a peek?”

  Caleb looked away from the crowd. “Should we?”

  She squeezed Caleb’s hand. “Oh, yes.”

  They strip off their tanks, fins and masks and bring their gear up the stairs, past the great statues of Thoth and Seshat, and place it out of harm’s way. “Wait on the stairs,” Waxman orders as he tests the chain and harness attached to the ceiling above the third trap. The seven men climb two flights and remain there, watching impassively.

  Waxman strides to the great seal, steps over the chains that he and Helen had left for the second trap. He proceeds to turn the seven symbols in the proper order, and then calmly walks back to the first block, and waits. He passes through the realms of the Below: Calcination, Dissolution, Separation, Conjunction. He is relaxed, as if he has practiced this a hundred times. He ascends through the Above: Fermentation, Distillation, and finally Coagulation.

  After the seventh test, he is covered with a fine gold dust that has drifted down from a sifting stone overhead. The scent of sulfur still hangs in the smoky air, and water is heard trickling below, down the stairs and out the vent.

  And the great seal opens majestically at his touch, withdrawing and allowing him inside.

  “Come!” he shouts, and his men follow, igniting their lamps and flashlights, bringing their torches and gas tanks. They leave the cameras behind. There will be time enough to film another arranged descent, once the room below has been emptied of everything but ashes.

  Down the stairs, twisting through the octagon section. The tramping of their feet issue pounding echoes against walls unused to anything but the silence of the centuries. Dust follows at their heels, sparring with the brilliant shafts of light.

  Then, the final room. The low-hanging ceiling. The non-descript door with the symbol for Exalted Mercury.

  Waxman removes the key from his belt. “Here we go, men. What we do today we do for humanity’s future. We close Pandora’s Box for good.”

  He extends the key toward the hole as someone shines a light for him. “Goodbye mother,” he whispers. He inserts the key partially, and it jams. “What . . .?” is all he can say. He frowns and withdraws it with a jerk, scraping the key against the inside of the hole. A tiny spark appears, nearly lost in the flashlight’s brilliance.

  Waxman lets go as the key falls, and he steps back. A multitude of sounds arise at once: something hisses, like a flame has just ignited and is heating a small tank of water; sliding noises like thin metal flaps opening along the walls and on the ceiling.

  Flashlight beams whirl around, stabbing at shadows, blinding his eyes. Waxman covers his face and tries to peek through his fingers when suddenly he is struck with something hot and wet, steaming. His fingers close around it, and over the hysterical screaming of the men around him, he realizes he holds someone’s guts.

  Something whistles through the air. He ducks, and a great scythe rips through the man standing behind him, cutting his head lengthwise and spilling out his brains. Another scythe, rusted and serrated, gleaming in the spastic lights, whispers across the room sideways, and two more of his men fall to the floor, in pieces, twitching, their mouths open in silent screams.

  Waxman runs toward the exit. Somehow the blades have missed him. He still has a chance. This tower hasn’t killed him the last two times. Surely, he has been saved for a reason. He thought he’d learned it, had understood that patience was needed. Patience and humility. He had proven both, and had come back this time prepared.

  But it still wasn’t enough.

  He sees the stairs and he runs, but slips in a rising pool of blood. His other hand catches at a protruding rib cage. He looks back and, there on the floor, his mother’s head is lying along with the other grisly remains. And she’s laughing, cackling and spewing out continuous insults.

  He falls to his knees and faces the door, where that symbol stares at him, scolding, reinforcing his unwort
hiness.

  Both blades emerge again, one after the other, and retreat into their resting places with barely a sound, their purpose served once more.

  Quartered, Waxman makes a sound like a wet sigh, then slides apart.

  A rumble vibrates from the walls, the stairs tremble, and a rush of sea water floods into the room from above, swirling, sifting, lifting, cleansing.

  The Pharos protects itself.

  “They’re coming up!” someone shouted, and the crowd surged.

  Shapes appeared in the water. Small, irregular forms that never really surfaced. Divers without their diving gear. The water stained red, a spreading, inky pallor, and the men kept floating up. Five, six, seven, eight . . . nine . . .

  Then more.

  A woman with binoculars screamed. The floating bodies were in pieces: a head here, a torso there, legs and arms jumbled together with severed chunks of flesh. The helicopters dipped, rolled and scattered. The ambulances’ engines sparked to life, followed by their sirens.

  And more screams shattered the morning air.

  Eighteen Keepers, each wearing black Ray-Bans, moved through the crowd of spectators like a tide of gray death, each member keyed in on a target that, as soon as they had come into Alexandria, arriving ahead of George Waxman as his personal contingent, had been identified and secretly tagged with a chalk mark on the upper shoulder, visible only to those wearing the specially tinted sunglasses.

  The Keepers moved quickly, efficiently, and with a determination borne out of not just duty, but revenge. Each of them had a metal cap on their index finger with a tiny needle that had been dipped in concentrated tarantula venom. One jab would paralyze and induce convulsions, and sometimes—if it happened, it happened—death.

  Simple pinpricks. Eighteen Keepers struck with subtlety and swiftness, poisoning and then moving on, disappearing into the crowd. Only one Keeper stayed a bit longer over her victim.