Attempts to engage in a dialogue with the individual were not successful, however, and the priority became to find a way to lower a rescue worker into the pit. As a police officer radioed a request for mountaineering equipment, Otto let himself into the ruined villa. The condemned building now sloped in the direction of the sinkhole, creating a feeling of drunkenness in Otto as he entered the dining room. Here, the former grandeur of the house was still evident, but its strange angles and partial destruction made it resemble the interior of the Titanic as she started to slip beneath the waves.
Otto desperately wanted to straighten every uneven floor and lintel, but somehow the impossibility of that desire freed him from the lunacy of attempting to pursue it. He ripped a curtain down and took it with him into the cellar. As he made the journey downstairs one final time he saw fresh cracks in the concrete, some of which seemed to be growing before his eyes.
When he reached the lowest level of his laboratory, the air was different. Gone was the stale mechanically processed air to which he had grown accustomed. Now the air tasted sweet and cool. And it moved. He followed the breeze until he came to a chamber that had split open at one end, creating a magnificent view of the bottom of the sinkhole. And there was his patient ... lost. Bewildered. Hurting.
Otto sat quietly by the gaping brickwork and waited for the rescue attempt to begin.
There was a trickle of soil part way up the vertical wall. The gentle movement triggered an avalanche of collapsing earth all the way to the top, growing louder and widening the mouth of the hole. Otto shielded his face from the choking dust with the curtain, occasionally checking through the haze to see if the rescue was underway. Finally, a rope flopped to the ground and he saw the silhouette of a brave soul starting to climb down.
Otto climbed through the brickwork, carefully keeping the curtain over him so that his presence would not be obvious to those at street level. He moved unsteadily over the loose earth to get to his patient and wrapped the curtain around the naked man, guiding him back through to the laboratory. With the thick dust in the air and with the focus on the abseiling rescue worker, no one saw that the mysterious, pale man had vanished. In fact, they soon could see nothing at all, as a further landslide sucked down a portion of the road and forced everyone to move back from the edge. Otto’s villa moved again. The police decided to abandon the rescue and pull their man back up. They tugged at the rope and it came up easily – too easily. Frayed strands of rope soon emerged from the dust with no one attached to the other end.
Concentric cracks began to open up around the hole, each forming a ring that stepped lower towards the centre. A circle of buildings shifted, their roofs splitting loudly in half, their windows shattering. The crowd around the sinkhole began to disperse in panic. The mouth of the hole appeared to yawn, engulfing those who were too slow or too fascinated to move. The roof of Otto’s villa curled and the higher levels of its cellar system were fully exposed, hanging in space, seemingly unsupported. Another concentric ring appeared, carving its way instantly and violently through the centre of the house and beyond. The cellar walls could take no more. They disintegrated and fell into the void, followed by the entire property above, as if vacuumed down into the ground, but no one remained close enough to witness it. No one other than two men, wrapped in a dusty fabric, who staggered out of the villa seconds before its demise.
Thursday 29th November 2012
‘Go in there, get changed, then meet me in the lobby.’
Before Ruby could question him or protest, Orlando was gone. Having nothing better to do, she walked into the room and opened the wardrobe. Designer outfits – Emporio Armani, Prada and Gucci – hung neatly from the rail. Exquisite bags sat in a line on the end of the bed. There were high-heeled shoes, a little gaudy for her taste, but obviously expensive. She turned to the make-up, all set out neatly in a professional make-up artist’s toolbox. An impressive collection. She quickly picked a Gucci dress and matching shoes and bag, applied a light dusting of the latest mineral-based foundation, some neutral lip-gloss and some mascara. It was blissful. Just as she was about to leave the room, she thought, what the hell, and swept a line of black liner across the top of her lashes. Now she looked subtly, but suitably, awesome. If the world was going to end, as the paranoid President seemed to believe, she was going out in style.
Arriving at the hotel lobby, Ruby looked like she had just stepped off a catwalk. Dozens of male heads turned her way, medals swinging, leather holsters creaking. The hotel had been taken over by the military hierarchy, and any sense that this was once a vacation resort had been subsumed by campaign maps, crates of ammunition and the stench of overdressed and under-washed men.
Orlando came striding along the corridor.
‘They were having trouble setting up the autocue, Ruby, but I think we have it sorted now. You look great. Follow me.’
‘What? What autocue? Hey, I’m talking to you. Have you dressed me up to film something?’
He took her by the hand and half-dragged her to a bedroom. Thoughts of a grubby régime financed by presidential pornography rushed through her head. She clamped her hands around the door frame as Orlando inelegantly pushed her into the room, and she only relented when she noticed amid their tussling that the improvised studio set contained no bed. Instead there was a bright green cloth covering one of the walls, two television cameras, some other technical gear on a table and a sprinkling of bright lights. A crew of five was busily adjusting equipment settings.
‘Why wasn’t I told about this?’ demanded Ruby, rising to the challenge of her new diva’s look.
‘What you have to do now is perfectly simple. You need to stand on the small cross marked with tape, just in front of the green screen. This is the autocue, and all you do is read out the words that appear in front of you.’
‘I’ve never done autocue before. How fast does it go?’
The director, who today doubled up as the autocue operator, stepped into the conversation.
‘I will go as fast as you speak. It’s Ruby, isn’t it?’
She shook the hand of the portly man who was dressed in black from head to toe, with a small goatee beard. Very beatnik, thought Ruby.
‘My name’s Jean-Pierre. I’m the director of this film.’
‘This film!’ echoed Ruby. ‘What film? I don’t know anything about this. Who are we making this film for?’
‘Initially, Ruby,’ said Jean-Pierre, ‘we are making this to be broadcast at the IAC.’
‘The International Archaeology Conference?’
‘Your film will be shown to the assembled experts,’ Orlando explained, ‘and to a selection of the world’s media. After that, of course, it will be shown on every news channel around the globe. Your presentation of the show will give it the credibility we need in order to be taken seriously. This is no easy matter for the world’s scientists to digest, and many of them will claim we are attempting a hoax. Our discoveries will hurt their pride. The tone of this broadcast will help to persuade them that we are not fooling with anyone.’
‘I’m not sure about this,’ she said.
‘You cannot deny the appeal of fronting such a broadcast, Ruby?’ asked Orlando.
‘It’s repugnant. I’m being forced to become the face of a dictatorship.’
‘And yet?’ he nudged, widening the obvious gap in her divided feelings.
‘And yet, you give me no choice.’ She almost sounded pleased.
A woman abruptly appeared in front of Ruby and wordlessly dabbed some powder onto her nose and forehead, then led her over to the small cross on the floor. Ruby looked into the autocue camera and saw the words: ‘Hello. I’m Ruby Towers. I’m here to talk about a recent discovery in ...’ That was all she could see on the screen, but it didn’t look too difficult. She cleared her throat and prepared to give it a go.
Jean-Pierre told everyone present to shut up and cued Ruby for a practice run. She ground to a halt almost immediately, shading her eyes again
st the glare and trying to see beyond the autocue.
‘Hello. I’m, er, sorry. Can we start again? The words started moving and kind of took me by surprise.’
‘No problem,’ called Jean-Pierre from the laptop that controlled the script. ‘From the top, Ruby. At your own pace.’
‘Hello. I’m Ruby Towers. I’m here to talk about a recent discovery in Central America that adds a new and exciting chapter to our previously unknown ancient history. It’s not a discovery that many of you will immediately accept. It’s shocking, it’s unexpected, and it will force an unprecedented reinterpretation of our sense of identity and history. Before I show you what we have found, I just want to remind you of some obvious facts.
‘Homo sapiens reached its current evolutionary state at some point between thirty and sixty thousand years ago. Perhaps earlier. We don’t know exactly when, but you can safely assume that a person born twenty-five thousand years ago had exactly the same brain capability as you or I. That’s the first fact. The second is that ... oh God, sorry, it’s going too fast. I can’t keep up.’
‘No, it’s you, Ruby,’ said Jean-Pierre. ‘If you want to slow down, just do it. I will always follow your pace. Try to relax and it will be fine. Pick up from where you were.’
‘The second is that in our known history it took us only a few thousand years to develop from cavemen to spacemen. The final part of that process, from simple society to today’s computer age, took no more than two hundred and fifty years. Because we have no record of any previous advancement before our own, we naturally assume the recent generations were the first to soar to these great heights, but there is no reason why it could not have happened before, at any time in the past thirty thousand years. Now, remember that period included the end of an Ice Age, a phenomenon catastrophic enough to globally raise sea levels – excuse me, sorry to stop again, but I can’t say that.’
‘Which bit?’ asked Jean-Pierre.
‘Enough to globally raise sea levels. It’s not correct.’
‘You don’t believe in the science?’
‘No, I don’t believe in using split infinitives. It’s not an elegant way to speak. “To globally raise” sounds like I’m uneducated. Can you put “globally” either before or after the verb, not hammered into the middle, please?’
Jean-Pierre took a deep, frustrated breath as he re-keyed the text. Seconds later he cued Ruby again.
‘Now, remember that period included the end of an Ice Age, a phenomenon catastrophic enough globally to raise sea levels, reshaping coastlines everywhere. If there were advanced societies at that time, this factor could, if combined with other disasters or war, have reduced them to the primitives we always thought they were. Untamed nature over a period of thousands of years is a powerful force that obliterates signs of human achievement. So, if there had been a great civilisation on this planet before the ice melted, there is every possibility that we would find no trace of it today. Except, we have found trace of it. Astounding traces in various secret locations. Ruby points to ... oh, sorry, I wasn’t meant to read that bit, was I?’
‘You’re doing a good job, Ruby,’ said Orlando. ‘You make me proud of my choice of front person.’
‘Yes,’ added Jean-Pierre, ‘you’re doing fine. At this point in the script I would like you to point at the green screen to your right. Our editor will superimpose the image of the aircraft artefact there, but please don’t take your eye off the autocue, otherwise you will get lost and we will have to start again.’
Ruby practised pointing at the screen without actually looking at it, then returned to the script.
‘This artefact is twelve thousand years old. It was built shortly before the end of the Ice Age, and it contains technologies significantly in advance of our own. I know you will all be saying “that’s impossible” and looking for some indication that it is a fake, but I do assure you it’s genuine. I was privileged to witness its discovery and to manage the team responsible for dismantling and cataloguing every part of it. We have full documentary evidence of our work, in video, photographic and written form. Two human bodies inside the craft were carbon dated to twelve thousand years ago. In itself, the discovery is the most important addition to our historical understanding since Darwin’s theory of evolution. You may find what I am saying as hard to accept as the religious establishment in Darwin’s time found his theories abhorrent and blasphemous, but Darwin’s ideas nevertheless became the bedrock of accepted knowledge.’
‘Just a small point, Ruby,’ interrupted Jean-Pierre, ‘you’re drifting away from the cross. I need you to remain absolutely still so that we have enough room to put the aircraft in the shot throughout this. We’re going to add in some graphics and some close-ups of you with the second camera, but essentially the style is very straightforward, like you are giving a lecture. I want those feet anchored to the cross on the floor.’
‘Sorry, I forgot. There’s so much to think about, and all these people. It’s quite stressful out here.’
‘You have made television programmes before, have you not?’ asked Jean-Pierre.
‘Yes, many times, but only on archaeological digs, where I just have to talk about what I’m doing off the top of my head. It’s much more laid back, more like chatting to a friend behind the camera.’
On the last series she’d filmed, that friend had been Matt, standing just behind the cameraman, throwing cue questions at her, then making faces while she answered. Matt’s constant unprofessionalism had annoyed her at the time, but in retrospect it had been kind of fun.
When everything had been performed to Jean-Pierre’s satisfaction, Ruby sat in the corner of the studio and started to take in the significance of the scripted words she had just read out. All the disparate pieces of information began to fit together. She remembered now the moment she’d first seen the aircraft in the pit, and the stratum in the soil above it that looked like molten glass, and how it had reminded her of a similar layer she had once seen in India. Could it have been the result of a nearby explosion of nuclear intensity that had fused the topsoil into this hard crystalline layer? If the ancients could power their craft with a cold fusion system, they certainly had the potential for atomic weapons. And every society in history had the potential for war.
There could have been a devastating war in antiquity, she realised. It could either have coincided with the end of the Ice Age, or it might even have been a contributory factor. No advanced civilisation could survive two catastrophes like that. If all of this had taken place over twelve millennia ago, then it was no wonder that the evidence was so hard to find. The world and human society had taken a long time to heal. Five hundred generations. The renaissance was too slow. The memory of the pain and folly was lost. The world had been rebuilt and was now capable of repeating its mistake.
Was this circle of history the great threat that the ancients posed to the modern world? Or was an ancient war somehow directly responsible for a looming cataclysm? She felt sure the scrolls stolen from the Sphinx would explain all, but there was no way she could track them down while she remained under constant guard.
Friday 30th November 2012
The chain attached to the van’s front fender strained slightly, jolting Otto from his light slumber with a sharp clink. He needed to give it some slack by driving forward a couple of feet. When the tension was released he saw the chain slither and straighten through the grass, like a long silver snake plunging its head into a hole. A shovel arced into the air, throwing up another clump of soil which landed haphazardly on an adjacent heap. Otto exited the cab and approached the edge of the hole. His feet were level with the eyes of the labourer – the man whom he had rescued from the sinkhole. Five hours of strenuous digging had created a pit five feet deep and three feet wide. Soil strata were visible down the sides. Tree roots that once passed through this space had been severed.
The stelae, according to the interpretation given by the diary that Lord Ballashiels had given him, pointed to this
spot precisely. The quest begun by his Victorian ancestor could be almost at an end.
The Patient was coping well with the new form of exercise. His muscles were already well toned, as close to perfection as Otto had been able to obtain with the subterranean programme of diet and exercise that had been practised, with Teutonic regularity, for so many years. The only medical complication today appeared to be caused by the chain around his neck, which was chafing the skin despite its lining of cotton. Using his precious possession for this kind of activity disquieted Otto. What else could he do, though? The strong body at his disposal was the only resource upon which he could call.
Inwardly he cursed that the structures of law and ethics in every country on the planet should conspire against his research, forcing him to lead a life of self-reliance. He trusted no one. The Patient did not officially exist, and therefore counted as no one. The Patient did not even have a name. He was simply a living embodiment of an experiment that was slowly maturing.
The degrading shackles were of no consequence to the Patient. He had an expression on his face which Otto hadn’t seen him wear since he was a child – he seemed contented. The mouth wasn’t giving too much away, but there was something of a glimmer in his eyes. Spending time in the open air, in natural light, in contact with nature, seemed to make him blossom.
It was time for a break, time for his patient to take on some hydration and for Otto to examine the hole. The Patient needed help climbing out, but Otto was not forthcoming in that respect. He stood by, looking down while the man in the hole slipped in his attempt to scramble out. Otto grew impatient, but he would provide no physical assistance. Finally, the Patient crawled out, leaving Otto a clear view.
The Sphinx Scrolls Page 20