by Alex Scarrow
‘Just a peek.’ He stepped carefully round the edge of the crumbly bite out of the track towards the cave entrance. Several vines and creepers still made a pretence of trying to hide the entrance. He brushed them aside.
‘Yoo-hoo!’ he cooed self-consciously. His voice echoed and reverberated around inside. He heard nothing growling back at him. Encouraging.
‘There you go … nothing’s home.’
Mission Control had nothing to say at this time.
Adam took a step inside. The cave appeared to open up within a yard or so of the entrance. A natural jagged fissure, worn by time, the elements and restless geology. The vine-filtered light from the entrance was enough to push the darkness a dozen yards back. All the same, he decided to pull a torch from his backpack.
He rummaged and found it: a pencil-torch gaffer-taped to a grubby sports sweat-band. He wore it when he cycled home from university at night, fancying that, with it strapped to the left side of his mushroom-head cycle helmet, he looked just a little bit like one of the colonial marines in Aliens. He pulled the sweat-band over his dreads until it settled on the rough moon surface of his pimply forehead.
‘Hellooo? Anyone home?’ he called out, wondering what kind of response he was expecting by saying that. He snapped the torch on. The cave’s ragged contours sent shadows dancing across the rocky surface like sidewinder snakes scurrying for cover as he turned his head and panned the thin beam of light around.
‘Whoa … big-ass cave.’
From the roof, rust-coloured stalactites hung like shark’s teeth, vines like shreds of rancid seal meat between them. The floor of the cave was an uneven surface of emergent stalagmite humps and worn-away drip pools. A weave-work of dried creepers and desiccated roots snaked across the barren rock floor in a long-forgotten search for nutrition.
Adam explored a dozen yards into the dark interior of the cave. It seemed to wind back deeper than he’d at first thought. His nerves got the better of him, however. The cave entrance was far enough behind him now that he was beginning to feel edgy. This was enough solo exploration for him. Far enough in. And darker than he’d like.
A cave. Just a cave. And Adam would have turned to go back out again just then, if the beam of his torch hadn’t rested momentarily on a smooth section of cave wall.
But it did, and what it revealed caused him to catch his breath.
Carefully, he picked his way further towards the back of the cave, approaching the wall, then finally he reached out to touch the cool moist surface of the rock. More to the point, to lightly touch the faint markings of flaking mud paint – a cardinal sin – actually reaching out and touching it.
‘My God,’ he whispered as he studied the symbols painted on the wall.
Chapter 5
1994, Norwich
‘He’s going to be a little – what’s the term I’m looking for? Oh yes, freaked-out, isn’t he?’ said Liam. ‘What with you paying him another visit like this, completely out of the blue.’
‘Of course he is,’ replied Maddy.
She had visited Adam Lewis once before. Now that was something else that seemed like it had occurred a lifetime ago. She and Becks had knocked on the door of his bedsit in a shared student digs and asked him to explain himself; to explain how he’d managed to decode that one passage of the Voynich Manuscript.
The passage that had contained the word Pandora.
The whole mystery had started with the smallest time wave occurring back in 2001. Just the gentlest of ripples that Sal had managed to sense. But then computer-Bob had alerted them to the sudden existence of a minor archived article in a British newspaper called the Sun. The article had mentioned in its own distinctly low-brow style that Adam Lewis (‘hacker and computer geek, looking more like a scruffy animal-rights activist than a Microsoft pencil-neck’) had singlehandedly managed to extract a single legible sentence from the impenetrable gibberish of the legendary Voynich Manuscript.
Not exactly ‘legendary’ in the public eye. For most Sun readers Maddy suspected that article was the first and last time they’d ever hear about the medieval document. But among cryptologists, hackers, amateur code-breakers, it was the gold-standard: the One To Be The First To Crack.
Maddy and Becks had gone back to 1994, picking a date a week after the story had broken big in the national newspaper, and found an edgy young man very close to breaking point. A bag of rattling nerves.
Oh yes, he’d decoded a passage that read: ‘Pandora is the word. The word leads to truth. Fellow traveller, time to come and find it.’ And that was the bit he’d rather excitedly announced by posting a letter to New Scientist. The bit he hadn’t revealed was the sentence that had come just before that …
‘You must make public the last part of this message, Adam Lewis, and I promise you someone will come and explain everything. When she comes, it is important you tell her this: “Seek Cabot at Kirklees in 1194”. Do not reveal any more of this message to anyone else. The last part now follows. Pandora is the word …’
And that was the bit that had turned him into a jabbering nervous wreck. The inclusion of his name in an ancient medieval document. That had completely messed with his head. He’d ended up hiding away in his grubby bedroom, peeking out of the net curtains, paranoid that someone, somewhere, was coming for him.
Which was true. But instead of men in black suits and dark glasses, or some killer cyborg robot assassin from the future, or whatever else the young man’s feverish paranoid imagination could conjure up and torment him with, it had been Maddy and Becks who’d turned up and politely asked him how he’d managed to break the code when the rest of the world, including several large code-breaking computer systems, had failed to do so. More to the point … was there any more he’d decoded, but not made public?
Maddy had managed to carefully coax the truth out of him, to calmly explain that she wasn’t there to kill him, or take him away and lock him up, that she wasn’t a panic-induced hallucination, wasn’t a manifestation of his subconscious, a delusion conjured up by a mind on the very edge of a nervous breakdown. And finally … she’d calmed him down, won him round and he’d revealed that whole passage to her.
They’d left him, that night in 1994, with a promise that they’d one day return and explain to him everything that was going on. Of course, Maddy was pretty sure she wasn’t going to keep that promise. Adam Lewis, for whatever reason, had momentarily become caught up in the affairs of the agency. A hapless innocent, involved in a chain of events designed to ensure some communiqué dating back to biblical times reached its intended recipient in the year 2001. His part – in effect, the courier – was played and he really didn’t need to know anything at all about Waldstein’s little agency, about what their purpose was. She’d always felt guilty that they’d never gone back to this nervous young man, as she’d promised, and explained all to him. But, to be honest, since that night she’d been pretty damned busy keeping this world and this timeline on track.
‘So, explain to me again, Maddy,’ said Liam, ‘nice short words please, explain to me why we’re re-involving this poor fella once more.’
They were walking along Earlham Road, early morning. Rain-slicked tarmac clicked beneath their heels, beside them the disgruntled snarl of morning traffic, bumper-to-bumper cars full of bleary-eyed office workers on their way in for another soulless day of clock-watching. An unremarkable, overcast Tuesday morning in an unremarkable city called Norwich.
‘He became involved in the first place, Liam, because he’s the only person in the world who recognized a couple of symbols from a long-dead language. Incan or Mayan, or Aztec, or something … I can’t remember what he said. But I do remember he told me it was a unique language used by this one remote tribe. He said there was just this one example of the language that he’d discovered. Some painting on the wall of a cave he discovered halfway up a cliff-face.’
Liam nodded. ‘I see …’
Maddy turned to look at him. She laughed. ‘No, y
ou don’t. You do that nodding “I see” thing when you’re confused and don’t want to admit it.’
‘What? No, I don’t.’
‘Yes, you do.’ She smiled. ‘I know you far too well, Liam O’Connor.’
He shrugged. ‘All right, I’m still not sure what we’re doing here.’
‘He discovered this one example of this language … made up of these unique symbols never used anywhere else in, like, the entire history of mankind. Unique symbols, pictograms. The only other place these symbols ever turned up –’
‘– was in that Voynich Manuscript.’
Maddy nodded. ‘And just once, in one single section of the text. Just two of these symbols acting as encryption-identifiers – some sort of, like, start and end markers. And they were, like, specifically designed to attract Adam’s attention.’ She stopped, checking the number of the terraced house to their left. They were nearly there. ‘So, obviously, that meant there was only ever going to be one person likely to be able to decode that particular passage.’
‘What about the rest of it? Do you think there might be more stuff in it?’
Maddy shook her head. ‘The rest doesn’t matter. Those markers were there to point him to the one important bit. The rest of the Voynich might as well be a medieval cookbook for all we care.’
Liam tapped his temple with a finger. ‘Somebody’s been very clever.’
‘Yes …’ She nodded. ‘Somebody has been.’ Maddy glanced at him. ‘You … perhaps?’ She shrugged. ‘An older, wiser you?’
Or if not, someone who knew them very well.
‘And so,’ Liam continued, ‘what’s with that name? The Windtalkers …?’
‘Well, duh!’ She looked at him. ‘That’s the name of the Indian tribe, isn’t it? Well, the name Adam decided to give them.’ She nodded at the front door ahead of them. Number 97. This was the house she and Becks had visited all those months ago – although, from Adam Lewis’s perspective, here they were again, the morning after that visit. Above the front door she could see the grimy net curtain hanging in the small window of Adam’s bedsit. She fancied she caught a faint glimpse of a pale face beyond it, ducking out of view as she looked up.
‘It’s a long shot, Liam. But I’m certain Becks spat that phrase out for a reason. I think she wants to help us, wants us to know but isn’t able to break her code-lock. So she gave us that.’
‘A clue.’
‘A place to start.’ She pressed a buzzer beside the front door. ‘Who knows? Maybe the answer lies in that cave of Adam’s? Maybe there’s more of that writing daubed on those walls. Maybe the cave itself is some kind of drop-point document?’
Liam grinned. ‘Now that would be a thing.’
She wrinkled her nose. ‘It’s all I’ve got at the moment. Other than that … I’m winging it.’
He looked at her. ‘You know, this might just be a wild goose chase, Maddy. Don’t get your hopes up.’
‘Might be. But it’s all we have.’ She pressed the door buzzer again. ‘You want to know what that message is, don’t you?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘I can’t help thinking this might just be the key to everything. Who knows? It might explain why we were made. Why we were set up to protect a timeline doomed to end in the year 2070. It might –’
The door was wrenched open and a tousle-haired young man stared at them bleary-eyed. ‘Yup?’
‘We’re here to see Adam Lewis.’
His eyes narrowed. ‘Hold on … you came here last night, didn’t you?’
She was surprised he remembered. This one and the other lads had been quite drunk. She nodded. ‘Yes.’
He looked cautiously out of the doorway, up and down the street. ‘Where’s that other girl you were with? The psychotic one?’
Maddy recalled he’d tried his luck with Becks. Big mistake.
‘Don’t worry – she’s got lectures this morning. Just me and my friend here.’
Liam nodded and offered a wave. ‘Morning.’
‘So, is Adam in?’
‘Yeah, sure … the wacko never leaves his room these days.’
‘Can we come in?’
He shrugged. She presumed that was his version of a ‘yes’. He turned and headed barefoot down the uncarpeted floorboards of the hallway. ‘Up the stairs, first on the right,’ he called out over his shoulder as he opened the door to his room and slammed it behind himself.
Chapter 6
1994, Norwich
‘Adam?’
Maddy was about to rap her knuckles again on his door when she heard the clatter and snick of a lock turning inside. The door creaked open and she saw his pale face peering through the gap.
Her heart skipped inside her at the sight of him. After all these months, now finally seeing him again. She’d almost forgotten what his face looked like, almost convinced herself she’d imagined that spark of ‘something’ between them. Now he was standing right before her, wide-eyed and open-jawed: like soon-to-be roadkill caught in the headlights of an approaching truck.
Now here she was with her heart hammering in her chest. That took her completely by surprise. Not for a moment had she thought that there was anything more to this re-visit than following the flimsiest of clues. There he was, the edgy young man she’d encountered a lifetime ago: scruffy ginger-brown locks, a chin tufted with a poor excuse for a goatee, ghostly pale skin dotted with freckles and wide green, intelligent eyes, sunk deeply beneath a furrowed brow, puffy and red from sleeplessness and anxiety.
She’d met this same young man again seven years after today. Somehow he’d tracked her down in New York. Very different then. Well-groomed. There was an air of brash confidence about him by that point in time: a successful software engineer in Manhattan making a fortune designing secure systems for commercial clients on Wall Street. A young dotcom-era entrepreneur, a cocky lad-done-good livin’ it large in the Big Apple. He’d been far more confident … and yet, she had seen that the confidence was a cloak that covered a frightened man still desperately trying to make sense of the impossible – trying to get his head round the fact that someone living in the Middle Ages knew his name.
‘It’s … it’s you …’ he whispered through the gap.
‘Again.’ Maddy smiled. ‘I know.’
He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbed like a cork. ‘I … know … I know that you and the other girl came from the f-future …’
‘Can we come in?’
He nodded absently, opened the door and ushered them in. He closed and locked it behind them as they surveyed the squalid mess of his room.
‘This is Liam,’ said Maddy.
Liam offered Adam a hand. ‘Mr Lewis! We’ve met before, so we have.’
Adam looked at him, eyes narrowed, confused by that, confused by this visit. By everything, in fact.
‘Well, to be more precise, we WILL have met before, I should say.’
Adam turned to Maddy. ‘I … I thought I was losing my mind.’ He shook his head, as if trying to reshuffle the order of thoughts in his mind. ‘I thought I was going mad. Dreamed you up. Hallucinated you.’
‘No, it’s for real. We visited you last night … I promise you’re not going mad.’
A smile flickered across his thin lips, then abandoned his mouth just as quickly. ‘Yes, yes … I know I’m not mad. I – look … you left proof.’ He turned, stepping across a floor scattered with mouldering clothes to a desk cluttered with notes and balled-up paper. ‘It’s right here … here somewhere … somewhere …’
Maddy and Liam looked around the dim room, at the walls almost completely covered with sheets of paper tacked to corkboards in a chaotic mosaic of ancient symbols and dead languages. The living space of an obsessed mind. A troubled mind running in endless inescapable loops.
Adam yelped with manic glee as he found what he was looking for. He snatched it from his desk and returned, waving it in front of Maddy. ‘You left this!’
She spent a moment trying to see
what it was, held too close to her face to focus on. She reached out for Adam’s hand and steadied it. He was holding a slip of coloured paper with something faintly printed on it. Then she recalled. That day in 2001 when the older, more self-assured Adam Lewis had tracked her down and come knocking on the archway door in Brooklyn. He’d told her how he’d managed to find her after seven long years of planning and waiting, and he’d waved this very same small slip of coloured paper at her.
‘It’s a ticket,’ he said quickly now. ‘A ticket of entry … to a club or a bar, isn’t it? West Fifty-first Street.’
‘Yes. Yes, it is.’
‘And the date … the date!’ He grinned manically. ‘Look! The date –’
‘Yes, I know. The ninth of September, 2001.’
Adam swallowed again. His mouth dry. ‘This is real … isn’t it? All of this? My name appearing in a thousand-year-old document? You … coming from the future? This ticket stub? My God! It’s all real, isn’t it? I haven’t disappeared into some drug-induced psychosis?’
‘It’s all real, Adam.’ Maddy smiled supportively, reached out a hand and rested it on his arm to settle him. She could feel he was trembling.
‘It’s real. You and me, Liam here, the girl who was with me last night … we’re all caught up in this thing – whatever it is.’
He grinned again: a there-and-gone flash of a smile that stirred Maddy’s heart. The same boy-like grin that Liam flashed from time to time, when an exciting possibility, a crazy idea, occurred to him.
‘This is real!’ he whispered. ‘I … I was thinking, even this piece of paper was fake. A delusion.’ He laughed – a short shrill bark that sounded like madness, bottled, with a cap screwed tightly on. ‘To be honest, I’m not sure whether I’m relieved or, or bloody terrified by this.’
‘There’s something going on, Adam … something’s happening, or already happened long ago. And it’s as much a mystery to us as it is to you.’ She looked at Liam and he nodded. They’d agreed this earlier. Adam could know everything, if that was needed. They’d deal with the consequences of that later.