Oracle

by David Wood

  “The conjurer is almost certainly Dr. John Dee,” she explained. “He was Queen Elizabeth’s occult advisor.”

  Professor nodded. “He also claimed to have received visions from angels and was known to use a crystal ball—he called it the Shew Stone—for divination. That’s the ‘Eye’ Perez was talking about.”

  “I don’t get this reference to Grey Sisters. Maybe I translated it wrong. Hermanas could also mean ‘nuns,’ like sisters of a Holy order.”

  “The exact words were ‘Eye of the Grey Sisters.’ I think that’s a reference to the Graeae—three blind witches from Greek mythology who shared a single crystal eye, which in some versions, gave them the power to see the fates of men.”

  “So now we’ve got Greek mythology added to the mix.”

  He shrugged. “If this Alvaro received a Classical education, he might have known about the Graeae, but I’m sure he only meant it as comparison. It doesn’t mean there’s a connection, In any case, the Shew Stone is real. It’s part of the collection at the British Museum. And that manuscript was probably written in Enochian script, a language Dee claimed was the language used by angels, and which only he and his initiates could interpret. Maybe the crystal ball polarized the light and revealed something written in invisible ink.”

  Jade frowned as if he had overlooked the most obvious explanation, which in fact he had, and not by accident. “Somehow, Dee knew about Teotihuacan, about the stone spheres and what they could do. And this explains how Perez came to be in that cavern. He followed the clues Dee had left in that manuscript and ended up down there.”

  “What clues?”

  Jade wrinkled her nose in irritation, then looked back at the journal. “It says here that the angel told Dee that these stone orbs could be found in the Navel of the Moon.”

  “Lunar belly button lint?”

  “Orphaniel is the angelic ruler of the moon and stars,” Jade continued. “And more importantly, in the Nahuatl language, the word for ‘moon’ is mētztli and ‘navel’ is xīctli, which combine to form the word Mēxihco—Mexico literally means ‘navel of the moon.’”

  “I’m impressed,” he said, and actually meant it.

  “You’re not the only one here who’s ready to play Final Jeopardy,” she retorted.

  “Still, that doesn’t exactly narrow it down to Teotihuacan.”

  Jade scanned the journal again. “Perez just seemed to know where to go. He and Alvaro traveled to the New World and somehow knew exactly where to look to find the entrance.” She snapped her fingers. “The entrance was in the Plaza of the Moon. And which stone was missing from the map of the solar system? The Moon stone! It all fits.”

  Professor wasn’t quite as enthusiastic about the web she had spun to connect the disparate facts, but he couldn’t deny that it was a near-perfect fit.

  “Listen to this,” Jade continued. “‘In the bosom of the earth, we found the orbs just as described in the vision. Blinded by pride and ignorance, we believed that we had discovered a great prize and decided that we would bring one of the orbs with us, so that our King might at last have an advantage in the war with Heretic Queen. We chose to bring along the smallest of the orbs, that which circled another just as the moon circles round the earth.’

  “That’s why there wasn’t a Moon stone,” she said, looking up. “They took it. Or rather, Alvaro took it. Perez was stranded.”

  “How were they able to move the stone?” asked Dorion. “We weren’t able to budge the Earth stone out of the dark matter field.”

  “It explains that here. ‘When first we laid hands upon the orb, a dark sleep came upon us. Alvaro awoke first and roused me with the story of a dream in which he presented the orb to the King. I had dreamed as well, but my dream was strange, as if I had dreamed the dream of another man. We feared to touch the orb again, but Alvaro proposed that we place it in a casket in order to convey it away without having to touch it. This we did, though the orb was heavier than lead shot and when we began to move it, the earth began to shake. The earthquake caused the tunnel to collapse. Alvaro escaped with the orb, but I was trapped.’”

  “The dark matter field would have added mass to the Moon stone,” Dorion conceded, “but I don’t know why it would have caused an earthquake.”

  “Maybe it was a coincidence,” replied Jade. “The point is that Alvaro escaped with the Moon stone. It’s out there somewhere.”

  “Where?” asked Professor. “Did Alvaro’s vision come true? Is the Moon stone in Spain? If so, don’t you think we would have heard about it?”

  For a moment, the only sound was the low hum of the boat’s engines and the wind blowing across the water. Then Jade resumed reading. “‘Pride is a deadly sin, and this is my punishment. Yet, I have gazed upon the life that might have been, as one might gaze through a window. It is there, so close yet just out of reach. If only I could open the window and step through, I would.’” She raised her eyes. “That’s it. Nothing more but his signature.”

  Professor nodded slowly. “I guess just knowing the future isn’t always enough to save you from it.”

  Dorion said nothing.

  The mood of the group improved somewhat when the skipper of their boat pointed out a pod of bottlenose dolphins splashing along beside them, riding the boat’s bow wave like surfers shooting the curl at Pipeline. Jade briefly forgot about Gil Perez, trapped forever beneath the Pyramid of the Sun, and found herself laughing at the antics of the highly intelligent cetacean mammals.

  “Costa Rica is the dolphin capital of the world,” the skipper announced proudly. “More dolphins here than anywhere else.”

  Jade sensed that Professor was about to contradict the man and quickly laid a restraining hand on his forearm. Before she could say anything though, she caught her first glimpse of the island, and forgot completely about the dolphins.

  It looked exactly as she…remembered? Was that the right word? It seemed as familiar to her as Diamond Head in Hawaii or the Pueblo ruins at Chaco Canyon where she had done field research for her graduate studies. The memories became even more distinct as they drew closer.

  The skipper brought the boat in close to the beach then deftly came about, so that the bow pointed back out to sea for a quick exit. He reversed the outboard, nudging the craft closer to the island, then raised it out of the water so that it wouldn’t drag in the sand. A moment later, there was a crunch as the keel rode up onto the shore and the he jumped out to hold the boat steady.

  Jade recalled that this was as close to dry land as the boat would go, and without further prompting, she hopped over the gunwale and splashed up out of the surf. Dorian was right behind her, and Professor, with less assuredness, brought up the rear. The boat’s skipper gave the craft a push and then leaped back aboard. He would return, or so he had promised, just before sunset to pick them up. Jade was barely aware of his departure.

  “This way,” she said, pointing to a rock fall that formed a natural staircase leading up into the verdant wall of the forest.

  The jungle was almost preternaturally quiet. From time to time, Jade could hear the croaking of tree frogs, but these sounds would vanish at the sound of a foot snapping a fallen twig or the rustle of their passage through the undergrowth. Despite her memories of this journey, there were few distinguishing landmarks to help her recall exactly where they had found…what exactly, she didn’t recall, but there was something here, something that had not yet been uncovered. When they abruptly emerged onto one of the designated trails, Jade felt not only a sense of profound relief, but also a return of her certitude.

  The trail soon brought them to the two stone spheres that had been discovered on the island—small orbs of igneous rock, pitted and weathered by years of exposure to the weather. The smaller sphere had been completely exposed and sat on the surface, while the other was still partially buried. Nearby, other stones had been stacked and deliberately placed to form what looked almost like a primitive shrine. The brochure Jade had been given at Finc
a 6 indicated that the island was believed to have been a sacred burial ground for the pre-Columbian inhabitants of Diquis Delta. Yet her instincts—or was it something she was about to discover?—told her that those ancient indigenous people had merely repurposed the stone spheres as grave markers, without any knowledge of their origin or original purpose.

  Jade turned slowly, trying to recall where to go next, and then pointed once more into the tangle of foliage. Ten minutes of slow bushwhacking brought them to a tall evergreen tree that did not look much different than the hundreds like it they had already passed.

  “This is the one,” Jade announced.

  Professor looked around at the other trees. “The one what?”

  She shrugged out of her backpack and dropped it on the ground. “This is where we need to dig.”

  The waterlogged tropical soil was no match for the collapsible entrenching tools they had picked up in San Jose. Jade felt a little professional shame at the amateurish exploration—this kind of treasure hunting was more Maddock’s style—but circumstances had given her little choice. She consoled herself with the knowledge that she wasn’t just digging random holes like a relic hunter; she knew precisely where to look, even if she didn’t know precisely what she was going to find.

  There was a scratching noise as the tip of her digging tool scraped against something hard, not one of the tree’s sturdy roots, but something made of stone. With even more eagerness, she began scooping dirt away from the spot and soon revealed a large stone surface, curving gently away in every direction.

  “Another sphere,” Professor observed, not without a trace of admiration. “A big one by the look of it. At least four feet in diameter.”

  “It must have been buried centuries ago. The tree grew right on top of it. No one was ever going to find this one.”

  Professor put his hand over his mouth and coughed, though Jade distinctly heard the word: “Bootstrap.”

  I can’t disagree. Without the premonition, there’s no way we would have ever known where to look.

  In any case, this was exactly the way she remembered it.

  She kept shoveling, exposing more of the sphere. Unlike any of the others they had encountered since arriving in Costa Rica, this one was in pristine condition. It was astonishingly smooth and when she brushed away the dirt with her gloved hands, it shone like a piece of polished granite.

  She glanced up at the others and then took off her gloves. “Ok, I’m going to try touching it. I have no idea what’s going to happen.”

  She reached out, laying a fingertip on the dark stone surface. It was warm, much warmer than she expected, though she couldn’t tell if it was a real effect, or just her nerves reacting with her imagination. She placed both palms against the sphere.

  “I’m definitely feeling something,” she said. “Heat, and a tingling, like static electricity.”

  “There have been similar reports about the spheres on the mainland,” Professor said. “They retain heat and may even have their own magnetic field. That might account for what you’re feeling.”

  “But no visions?” asked Dorion, sounding almost disappointed.

  She shook her head.

  “What’s that?” Professor pointed to the still covered top of the sphere. Jade cleared away more of the dirt to reveal something carved in the surface.

  “It’s a petroglyph.” They had seen carvings on the spheres at the museum and at Finca 6, mostly spirals and other curving lines that looked like they might have been constellation maps, all of them badly weathered, so as to make interpretation a guessing game. This one was in much better shape. “It looks like a fish,” Jade said.

  “Or a dolphin,” Professor said. “In fact, it looks a lot like the dolphin petroglyphs at Easter Island. What’s that on the right side? Waves?”

  Jade brushed away more dirt to reveal a zigzag line that looked like a W but in the process, uncovered more lines carved in the sphere. Soon, she had uncovered a row of symbols that curled around the top of the sphere:

  Jade felt her earlier excitement vanish like a candle flame in a stiff breeze. “W C O M? ‘Welcome’? Is this some kind of joke?”

  Professor stared at the letters without even a trace of amusement. “Jade, that’s Phoenician writing.”

  She looked at the carving again in disbelief. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Why is that important?” asked Dorion.

  “A lot of people believe that the Phoenicians discovered the Americas two thousand years before Columbus,” Jade explained. “There’s never been anything approaching definitive proof though.” She turned back to Professor. “What’s it say?”

  “Jade, I know a few things, but I’m not Wikipedia.” He nevertheless screwed his face up in concentration. “The Phoenician alphabet—technically it was called Proto-Canaanite—was a precursor to the Greek, so there are a lot of similarities. That last letter for example is exactly what it looks like, an ‘M.’ Mu in Greek.”

  He studied it a moment longer. “Sigma… That hook shape might be lambda. Phi? Or maybe something else. The Greeks added some sounds and tossed out others. Could be a ‘Q;’ the Greeks didn’t have one of those. And of course, mu. I think ‘slphm’ or maybe ‘slqm’ is probably closer to the mark. The problem is that Semitic languages were written without the vowels, so it’s like an abbreviation, the way we might write ‘bldg’ for ‘building.’ Oh, wait. Semitic languages were also written right to left, so we have to reverse it. ‘Mqls’ or ‘mphls.’ Hard to say what the vowel sounds were supposed to be. If we had a computer, we’d crack this in about two seconds.”

  “M-ph-l-s,” Jade enunciated each letter as a separate syllable, and then it hit her. Professor’s eyes went wide as well; he had heard it too.

  “What?” Dorion’s gaze flitted between them. “What does it say?”

  “Omphalos,” Professor said, almost reverently. “It’s the Greek word for ‘navel.’”

  “And Gil Perez wrote about the ‘navel of the moon.’ This can’t be a coincidence.”

  “Wait,” Dorion said. “I know this word, ‘omphalos.’ There is a stone artifact at Delphi called ‘Omphalos.’ I visited there when I began my search. It isn’t a sphere, though.”

  “The Greeks believed the Omphalos—the navel of the world—was at Delphi,” Professor explained. “What you saw was their representation of it. It’s supposed to resemble an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes. Rhea, the mother of Zeus, made it to fool her husband Cronus, who wanted to devour his own children. There are several more like it all over the region. No telling which, if any, is the original.”

  “Could there have been a dark matter field there at Delphi?” asked Jade. “Maybe that was the true source of the Oracle’s visions?”

  Dorion shook his head. “I was there. I felt nothing.”

  “Or maybe it was once there and somebody took it,” Jade suggested.

  Professor pointed at the sphere. “You think that’s the original Omphalos?”

  “Or another representation of it. Think about it. The Phoenicians were sailing the eastern seas at least a millennium before the time of Christ. The Bible talks about the Phoenician King Hiram sending a fleet out from the Red Sea on a two year long voyage to the land of Ophir to bring back gold for Solomon’s temple. No one has ever been able to figure out where Ophir is, but it was located somewhere to the southeast off the Red Sea. What if Ophir was in the Americas? The Phoenicians could have sailed that far.”

  “So this sphere, and all the others, were supposed to be copies of the original?”

  “They may have been more than that,” suggested Dorion. “The spheres might have acted as dark matter collectors, especially if they were in close proximity to an existing field. The original Omphalos, if that’s what it was, may have seeded additional spheres with enough dark matter to begin accumulating additional particles on their own.”

  “Of course, that’s just a hypothesis,” he added sheepishly.

  “Okay
,” Professor said. “Let’s say I buy that. How does that explain what we found under the pyramid?”

  Jade considered this for a moment. “Okay, we know there’s no trace of a Phoenician presence in the Americas, aside from this.” She gestured at the sphere. “And a handful of artifacts of suspicious provenance. Whatever they tried to do here didn’t work out. Maybe the locals wiped them out, took the Omphalos, and headed north, where they folded it into their own religious worldview. The Omphalos became the Great Goddess.”

  Professor wagged his head uncertainly, then grinned. “Well, it’s not a bad start, but there are a lot of holes in it. If you were one of my students, I’d tell you to prove it.”

  “Your students hated you,” she retorted. “That’s why you’re not teaching anymore.”

  But she knew he was right. She was still trying to think of a better answer when Professor suddenly turned his head sideways and peered off into the jungle. “Do you hear that?”

  Jade listened. She could make out the croaking of frogs and scattered birdsong, fainter still the sound of surf pounding the rocks, but after a moment, she too heard the sound that had caught Professor’s attention, the whine of a distant engine and a faint rhythmic thumping sound.

  Professor turned away slowly, as if merely curious to see what was causing the noise, but after taking just a few steps, he broke into a run. Jade started after him, then almost as an afterthought, shouted back to Dorion, “Come on!”

  She caught up to Professor just a short distance away, on a rocky point that jutted up from the landscape like a broken tooth and gave an almost unrestricted view of the entire island. He motioned for her to take cover, and she pulled Dorion down behind a tree, but not before she caught a glimpse of two dark shapes out over the water, moving in from the east.