The shoreline curved eastwards until we passed through a narrow entrance to the enclosed sea to the north of Africa. Briefly there was land to the north and to the south of us, all of it dead and uninhabitable, and then we passed through into more open waters. The land on our right started to look less damaged now. The colour of the sand became more yellow, and although the land was bereft of life it was not scorched, just natural bedrock. And it was this bedrock and the form of the lioness that provided the answer.
I only hope that, as we build it and as I write these final words, you will have found these scrolls before it is too late. Halford is a dangerous, evil man who has technological knowledge at a level which mankind may not re-attain before his return. He may therefore be able to rule you, control you, subjugate you in the cruellest fashion. And you, my descendants, my children, must do everything in your power to prepare for his return.
I am slowly dying of the radiation sickness. I have no hair and my skin bleeds spontaneously. It is a horrible life – if indeed it can be called a life – and many of us are similarly afflicted, but between us we have found enough strength to build this Sphinx from the bedrock and to place within it our message to the future. Some of our people will now attempt to return to our homeland across the ocean, where they will build an identical Sphinx to contain another set of these writings. I hope for their sakes that the land has healed enough to be able to support them. I hope they will succeed in rebuilding the Mayan culture that was once so great, and I pray that they will be diligent in keeping their vow to measure the days, months, years and millennia until Halford’s return.
* * *
She put the pages down on the kitchen table amid the four empty breakfast plates and listened. The windows still rattled with every gust of frozen air. The water still gurgled sedately through the antique heating system. The contented snoring continued unashamedly. Ratty gave Matt a jab that seemed sufficiently forceful to be a retaliatory gesture. The American opened his eyes and yawned, expecting to find Ruby staring at him impatiently, but she was looking outside, into the snow.
‘Any sign of him?’ Matt asked, now stretching his arms into the air.
She returned her attention to her friends, searching for a sign, hoping a spark of inspiration would show in their eyes. There was nothing to give her any hope, however.
‘The scrolls simply represent the truth that any civilisation will rise and fall,’ said the Patient when it was clear to him that no one else had anything to say. ‘It has happened before and will keep happening in the future. Man’s capacity for evil and destruction is his Achilles heel. It will always trip him up in the end, and sometimes it will take millennia for him to find his feet again. It does not matter if Halford returns to us. We have enough bad people already. The same weapons that destroyed the ancient world have been reinvented. Sadly, it is merely a matter of time before one of us is forced to write our own scrolls as a warning to our descendants.’
‘So you think this Halford guy’s a no-show, huh?’ said Matt.
Ruby turned to see a desperate snow-covered fist battering the window pane from outside, rattling the glass. She leapt back from the window with a shriek, falling into Ratty’s arms. Matt growled, recognising Charlie’s chubby frozen features. Another fist was raised to the window, this one clutching a sorry-looking white cardboard box that wilted under the weight of its topping of snow.
‘Doughnuts!’ came Charlie’s muffled voice.
Ratty opened a door just enough to address the portly stranger.
‘Much as I appreciate your Shackletonesque perseverance, and whilst I cannot deny a degree of esurience in the gastric department,’ he explained, ‘I thought I’d made it clear to the master Boulanger that he must halt all deliveries of victuals pending the resolution of my fiscal –’
‘Rula! Matt!’ called Charlie, pushing the door fully open and squeezing past a confused aristocrat. ‘Great to see you guys. Hey, what was the French dude trying to say?’
‘French?’ echoed Ratty in horror. ‘Are you not cognisant with our mother tongue?’
Charlie shrugged his shoulders, blinking to prevent his eyes from glazing over.
‘Er, Ratty, this is Charlie,’ said Matt. ‘He kinda helped me out in Guatemala. Charlie, this is Ratty. Lord Ballashiels.’
‘A French Lord, huh? Coolsville Shropshire!’
‘How do you do?’ said Ratty, holding out his hand to Charlie. The lad stuck a sugary doughnut in it. ‘Gosh, most kind,’ he continued, placing the doughnut immediately on the kitchen table and wiping his hands with a tea towel. ‘It appears you already know Doctor Towers and Mister Mountebank, and that just leaves me to introduce to you this fellow, er, gosh, I forgot to ask if you’d chosen a name for yourself yet.’
The Patient shook his head.
‘Charles, please allow me the pleasure to introduce a Mister Patient.’
‘How’s it hanging, dude?’
Years of clandestine study in Otto’s extensive personal library had not equipped the Patient with the means to answer such a question. He correctly deduced, however, that Charlie had no desire to listen to a reply.
‘I came to show Matt the new love wagon. Bought it in London at the start of my European tour. Wanted to thank him for keeping his word. It’s out front. Wanna see?’
Stiff, cold legs shuffled along several corridors and hallways to the front door. Ruby’s frustration at this unexpected interruption to their planned discussion of the meaning of the scrolls was tempered by Charlie’s infectious cheerfulness. The others all seemed glad of the distraction from the imminent destruction of their planet by a mummified tyrant. They pulled on boots and grabbed heavy winter coats and hats that hung from a rack above an umbrella stand made from the foot of an unfortunate elephant.
‘Someone should tell the French guy his doorbell’s busted,’ Charlie shouted above the icy wind that whipped around them when Ratty pulled open the oak front door. ‘I was ringing for, like, ever, and no one came. Same with some delivery dude. He quit and got me to sign for this crate. Anyone order something off eBay lately?’
It was a cube, roughly six feet on each axis, made from unplaned planks of softwood nailed together and reinforced at the corners. Snow was already starting to settle upon its roof, but its contents appeared to be protected by a layer of heavy plastic sheeting that protruded here and there between the planks. Ratty inspected the documentation stapled to it. Country of origin: Guatemala. He grinned.
Behind the crate was parked a long wheelbase high-top Volkswagen campervan. No rusting panels or crudely-painted motifs on this one. No fading echoes of the swinging sixties and free love culture. This was a new van. Immaculate. Sensible. Grown-up.
‘You bought this with my money, huh?’ asked Matt. ‘Sweet. Shame you won’t get far before Halford comes and vaporises us.’
Ratty crunched through the snow to a barn at the side of the house, and returned with a hammer and a crowbar. He set to work dismantling the crate while the others were engrossed in inspecting the finer points of the campervan’s interior.
‘Very posh,’ declared Ruby.
‘Am I to deduce that you have chosen this device for your habitation, and have done so of your own volition?’ asked the Patient. ‘I too was once imprisoned in a vehicle such as this. It was the best of times and the worst of times. Do you not find it inconvenient?’
‘Bathroom’s at the back,’ replied Charlie. ‘Easy to find.’
As they exited the van at the completion of the tour, they found Ratty engrossed in a struggle to prise open the front of the crate. With grudging assistance from Matt, the final nail slid out with a loud squeak. The panel fell onto the snow. Ratty tore away the plastic sheeting with his hands and stood back in admiration.
He had seen it before. A symphony in stone. A sculpture in white marble with a teasing smile and a sparkle in the eyes. A face from an ancient time, preserved for eternity by the chisel of a long-forgotten mason. But it was a face that w
as always in his head, guiding him, castigating him, confusing him, yet never loving him even though he loved her.
And it would become the ultimate suitor’s gift to his paramour. It would end the uncertainty. This miracle of history, this profound impossibility, this accurate portrayal of the face of Ruby Towers that had been buried beneath a Caracol pyramid for millennia, would finally win Ratty the affection he craved.
Or so his naïve thought processes led him to believe. When he explained the origin of the piece the tirade of bitter fury that subsequently flew from Ruby’s mouth almost knocked him backwards. The Patient found himself instinctively protecting his friend by standing between the crazed female and the target of her vitriol.
‘An angry woman is again angry with herself when she returns to reason,’ the Patient pointed out.
‘Well quite,’ said Ratty. ‘Although I believe Publilius Syrus also remarked that one should make a woman angry if one wishes her to love.’
‘Is that what this is about?’ screeched Ruby. ‘If you wanted to make me angry you could have told me my arse was too big or made one of your stupid remarks about the deficiencies you perceive in the lower social classes. But that would have been too easy. So instead you’ve raped the cultural heritage of the Maya for a token of love. This isn’t the nineteenth century any more. You’re not great-great-great Uncle Bilbo.’
‘Great-great,’ corrected Ratty, almost immediately wishing he hadn’t.
‘That’s no Mayan face,’ chipped in Charlie. ‘I liberated a few antiquities myself, and they sure never looked like Ruthy.’
‘Keep out of this, Charlie,’ Ruby hissed.
‘It’s obviously you,’ he persisted. ‘Look at it. That’s your face. Although you don’t have a crack on your cheek.’
Ratty called on the might of his gentlemanly powers in order to resist the temptation of pointing out that such a scar could be arranged if she neglected to calm down.
‘This stone is nothing like me,’ she continued to rant without actually looking closely at it. ‘There is no rational way in which it can be me.’
‘Perhaps not,’ said Matt, jerking his head back and forth between the artefact and Ruby as if watching a tennis match. ‘But it sure is you, hun.’
‘Rubbish!’
‘Sure, maybe it doesn’t look like you now,’ said Charlie, ‘but that’s because your face is, like, all screwed up in anger.’
‘It is not!’ she retorted furiously.
‘The serenity captured by the stonemason depicts Ruby as she might look when her rage has dissipated,’ said Ratty. ‘Such a state may be hard to imagine, but perhaps it exists during her periods of somnolence.’
‘Let’s assume that this priceless artefact that you’ve looted does resemble me in some way,’ grumbled Ruby. ‘And if it only looks like me when I’m not cross then you may never really know, because right now you’ve wound me up enough to last a lifetime, though a lifetime may not be very long in the present circumstances. But there is no significance to it. A one-off chance resemblance means nothing.’
‘You are logically correct in your observance, Ruby, whilst being simultaneously incorrect from a factual standpoint,’ said the Patient.
‘Did you have something to do with this crime?’ she sighed.
‘If any crime has been committed, it was the fault of my brother who sent his soldiers into Belize without the permission of the Belizean authorities. Those men returned with hundreds of items found within the temples of that land, including this face. And dozens more. All identical.’
‘I didn’t steal it, Ruby. I found it with my scanning thingy on my way to Tikal, and when I learned that it had subsequently been taken to Guatemala along with a multitude of Ruby Towers clones in stone, I asked Mister Patient chappy if he could persuade his sibling to let me bring one here. In any case, they’re not going back into their pyramids, they’re going to museums around the world.’
‘So, there was, like, an ancient cult of Ruby Towers, huh?’ wobbled Charlie. ‘What happened? One of your documentary episodes get beamed back in time or something?’
‘Don’t be stupid, Charlie. Of course not. Some long-forgotten queen or goddess must have looked a bit like me, that’s all there is to it.’
‘Again, you speak with logic that is indisputable, but with authority that is questionable,’ stated the Patient. ‘Did you ever truly know the reason why you were so important to my brother?’
‘He told me it was because I’m an expert. I have a high profile. He needed my reputation and public persona as a front for his, for his ... no, it never really stacked up. He could never make a properly coherent case for needing me close to him. To be honest, I just thought he fancied me.’
‘He never told you about the stone face he found before he became President? And he never explained about the legend of the ruby and the towers? Without such knowledge your incarceration must have been as puzzling as was my own.’
‘He did let on about the ruby tower. Pretty weak link, in my opinion.’
‘What about the ruby tower?’ Ratty asked, intrigued.
‘It is all in the stelae, the acquisition of which obsessed my father,’ explained the Patient. ‘There is a carving on them that once contained red pigment, and another showing castle ramparts. A ruby. A tower. Orlando understood its meaning, and when he saw the ancient stone impression of your face he was convinced that he needed you. He didn’t know why; he just knew you were a vital part of the puzzle. And on top of all those coincidences, there was the lost Aristotle text. Well, not strictly lost, since it was found by Josef Mengele among hordes of artworks and priceless books looted by the Nazi thugs with whom he used to associate.’
‘A lost Aristotle text?’ repeated Ruby. ‘Now that I’d like to see.’
‘I assume you are fluent in classical Greek?’
‘Enough to order a glass of ouzo, but that’s about it,’ she replied.
‘The text now resides at the palace with Orlando, but I memorised it during my subterranean years when it was part of Otto’s collection. If you will permit me to paraphrase, it is a treatise that concerns the past and the future of the world. It begins with a retelling of Plato’s myth of Atlantis, but it has subtle differences in its description. More significantly, Plato’s story ended too soon. It failed to mention the return of the most evil man from the antediluvian civilisation. Aristotle told the whole story. He described the prophesied reappearance and what must be done to prepare for and understand the threat posed by Halford. Aristotle laid out the steps that needed to be taken, and wrote that he who controlled the ruby and the towers would control the world. Being in possession of the ruby and the towers enabled a conquest not just of the past, but of the future.’
‘None of what you’ve said answers the very obvious questions. Why me, and if me, how the hell could my presence on this planet and my name and my face have been known thousands of years ago? There is no logical way to resolve that.’
‘Piece of cake,’ said Charlie. ‘It’s obvious. Someone’s going to invent a time machine and send Ruthy back to Halford’s day. Maybe Matt ordered you a DeLorean for Christmas.’
‘Backwards linear time travel is impossible,’ said Ruby. ‘If it existed, we’d surely have seen visitors from the future. Even if traversable wormholes could be constructed, we could only return to the time they were built. If you build a road, you can only travel on it to the points you started and ended it. If I went back in time by any other means, which I couldn’t because it’s not possible, I’d enter a parallel universe, so it wouldn’t affect this reality.’
‘By that logic,’ wheezed Charlie, ‘it’s possible that a clone of you from another universe went back in time to this universe, which is why all the ancients worship you and you didn’t know a thing about it.’
‘Logic follows many paths. Only one leads to the truth,’ said the Patient. ‘The existence of ancient faces in your likeness is indisputable. The writings of Aristotle using words t
hat are similar to your name is also a fact. The reason for these phenomena is a matter of conjecture. There are logical routes we can explore. There is the possibility of an elaborate coincidence. Some philosophers believe in the circular nature of time. There is a tribe in Papua New Guinea that is convinced the cycle of time is not circular but shaped like a banana. If Aristotle was conscious of an inherited genetic memory that gave him the knowledge to write about the past and the future, perhaps that genetic memory has somehow come full circle – or banana – from now back to the beginnings of life on this planet. Many possibilities, but without more knowledge we cannot conclude any of them is correct.’
‘What would life be without a queer mystery or two? We don’t know if Halford really will manage to return to Earth. We don’t know why Ruby seems to have been a goddess, and I still have no inkling as to why the shadowy new owner of this old house of mine refuses to accept rent.’
‘Halford’s gonna show. For sure,’ chirped Charlie.
‘How would you know about that?’ asked Ruby.
‘Because it would be so coolsville if he did.’
‘But he’s been mummified,’ she said. ‘The chances of him emerging alive from all that goo are minimal.’
‘Not really,’ said Charlie. ‘That mummifying stuff works. He looks like shit, and his skin looks like a zombie and he stinks like a rotting raccoon, but he’s alive.’
The Sphinx Scrolls Page 38