by Layton Green
He flicked his eyes toward the rear of the establishment. “Let’s go find out.”
Moving as one, they picked up their teas and hurried to the row of computers shielded from view by a beaded curtain. On their left, at the end of the row, a pair of teens huddled around a social media website.
Thankfully, the late-model Toshibas in the café were far faster than the dinosaur of a computer in the hotel. After a quick search, Andie found what she was looking for: a painting in the Alexandria National Museum depicting Ra holding a serpent by its throat. She had assumed the ouroboros was part and parcel of the sun imagery, a creative interpretation, but she had been wrong. In Egyptian mythology, the serpent symbolized Apophis: an ancient god of darkness, chaos, and destruction, and the mortal enemy of Ra.
The god of light holding the god of darkness by the throat. She had the feeling there was a message there.
More importantly, they had found their serpent.
The museum itself was the third symbol.
Cal let out a small whoop. “That’s got to be it!”
Andie was already pulling up the trilateration website. “Let’s see where it takes us.”
After typing in the GPS locations for the library, the catacombs, and the museum, she was able to pinpoint another site in central Alexandria, not far from where they were. When no commercial establishment popped up on Google Maps, she switched to a street view, which allowed her to identify a structure near the middle of the road, a nondescript house or building.
“What the hell is it?” Cal asked.
After making a careful note of the location, Andie logged off and turned to face him. “I don’t know. But let’s go find out.”
Twenty minutes later, another taxi dropped Andie and Cal in front of a residential villa surrounded by a high, crumbling stone wall covered in desiccated brown vines that snaked across the surface as if trying to squeeze the life out of it. Through the closed iron gate, Andie spotted a brick walkway overgrown with weeds. The walkway led to the stoop of a three-story mansion with arched Moorish windows, balconettes on the upper two stories, and stripped gray walls with hints of the original mauve plaster.
A similar state of entropy defined the neighboring properties. The entire street was a nursing home of forgotten glory, dying a slow death from neglect, eerily calm and deserted. It felt like a living time capsule cordoned off by decree from the rest of the city, awaiting discovery from some future civilization.
“Okay,” Cal said. “What now?”
As Andie stepped up to the gate, aiming for a better look at the grounds, she felt the Star Phone vibrate in her pocket, followed by the buzz of an electronic lock. With a click, the tall iron doors slowly parted, offering them entry. Andie whipped the device out of her pocket and scanned the grounds, but the face was unchanged.
There was no one in sight. No cameras they could see. Heavy drapes on the windows protected the interior of the mansion from view.
“I liked the gas station better,” Cal muttered. “This looks more like a field trip to a haunted house than a step toward uncovering the Leap Year Society.”
“I don’t like it either, but the gate opened for us.”
“Maybe it has an automatic sensor. Anyone could set it off.”
“The Star Phone buzzed in my pocket at the same time.”
He gave her a sharp glance.
“We’re supposed to be here,” she said.
As the gates started to close, forcing their hand, Andie glanced nervously down the street before stepping inside. She could always climb back over, she reasoned. After mumbling something under his breath, Cal slipped through as well.
Crickets chirped from the high grass as she kept to the brick path. The grounds sprawling a hundred feet to either side must have once been magnificent, but now they were a mess of shaggy palms, overgrown foliage, and dry stone fountains.
“What do you want to do?” Cal asked in a low voice.
“Whatever this place is, it’s connected to the Star Phone. If the people chasing us knew about it, they’d be here already.”
“Maybe they are.”
Andie had come too far to stop now. Shoulders straight, she waded through the weeds choking the walkway and climbed the marble steps to the front door. Cal stayed close at her heels, and she knocked on the door with no response. After a louder knock, she called out to anyone who might be home.
Nothing.
No one.
She bit her lip as she scanned the grounds again. Not knowing what else to do, she reached for the brass handle that had long since lost its gleam. The wooden door was outlined in weatherworn but beautifully carved trim, with metalwork inserts shielding stained-glass panels in the center.
After a groan of complaint, the door pushed right open.
24
The creak of the door as it opened caused little fingers of unease to creep down Andie’s spine. A musty odor wafted out of the house, from decades of mildew and rotting floorboards. She took a step inside and found herself in an empty foyer with a patterned tile floor, thick gold carpeting, and a faded fresco on the ceiling of nubile Egyptian maidens lounging around an oasis, guarded by men with the heads of scarab beetles. A wire cord dangled a foot down from the center of the fresco, the remnant of a chandelier.
After making sure it did not lock from the outside, Cal closed the door behind them, cutting off the rays of sunlight that had penetrated the old home. As her eyes dilated in the gloomy interior, Andie felt as if they had sealed the door to a tomb. Two side corridors led deeper into the house, and she used the light on her phone to illuminate a wide staircase with an ornate iron railing on the far side of the foyer.
“What do you want to do?” Cal asked in a low voice.
“I suppose we explore.”
“You sure about that?”
“Of course not,” she said. “You have a better suggestion?”
“Why is no one here?”
“Maybe they are, and we’re supposed to find them. Maybe Dr. Corwin is trapped inside, or set this place up and couldn’t return.”
He shook his head. “I think you’re reaching. If the Star Phone hadn’t opened the gate, I have a feeling you’d have climbed over anyway.”
“If we don’t do something to change the narrative, they’ll hunt us down and kill us.”
Cal ran a hand through his hair and turned in a slow circle, peering down the dark corridors. “I don’t like it one damn bit, but I guess we should look around.”
They decided to start with the upper floors and work their way down. On the third-story landing, they stepped through an arched opening at the top of the staircase and into a sitting chamber with dull wooden floors. Thick crimson drapes matched the wall paneling, and a mirror hung from the wall above a limestone fireplace. The floor-to-ceiling drapes reeked of cigar smoke.
Cal gripped Andie’s arm. “The mirror.”
Unsure what he meant, Andie aimed her light at the glass and then caught her breath. The reflection was inversed like a typical mirror, but instead of seeing herself and Cal surrounded by threadbare furniture, she saw the room as it must once have been: clean and bright, with gleaming mahogany floors, filled with people in Victorian dress holding cocktails. She lightly tapped the smudged surface. It felt like glass, and the three-dimensional image seemed real. “That’s just . . . creepy.”
“At least the people aren’t moving. Then we might have issues.”
There were no ashes in the fireplace or other signs of recent occupancy. As she had outside, Andie tried the Star Phone, pointing it at the mirror and then at the rest of the room, to no effect.
They returned to the hallway branching off from the landing. The first door on their right was open, and they walked into a bedroom with built-in bookshelves, a four-poster bed, and forest-green velvet furniture with gilded edges. As Cal moved to inspect the bookshelves, Andie stepped across the Oriental rug to a powder table in the corner, facing another mirror. Her reflection was nor
mal.
Displayed on the powder table was a goblet made of a strange, milky emerald substance that resembled smoked glass, ornamented with gold leaf shaped into the figure of a bearded Greek god. When Andie flashed her light on the goblet, it turned bright crimson, illuminating the figure with a hellish glow. The light had also added a pair of ram’s horns, cloven hooves, and a tail to the figure. She nervously replaced the cup on the powder table.
What is this place?
The rest of the house contained more of the same. Upstairs and down, they found textiles and period furniture in various stages of decay, and in each room, a single object was displayed that looked very old and exhibited some bizarre characteristic. In a bathroom on the second story, they found a rectangular crystal the size of a bar of soap, so heavy they could barely pick it up. A hall with pitted concrete floors and stained-glass windows on the ground level harbored a pair of ancient ceramic urns engraved with runes, lying on their sides on a wooden table. The bottoms of the urns were composed of copper plates that merged seamlessly with the clay. The plates each had a hole drilled through the middle, with a wire that connected the two and extended out through the tops, giving the impression of a primitive battery. Andie had never seen anything like it. The blending technique on the copper plating looked far too advanced for whatever time period had produced the urns.
When they finished browsing the aboveground stories, finding no sign that anyone had lived in the house for years, if not decades, Cal and Andie stood in a hallway behind the kitchen, poised atop a tight staircase leading to the basement. The light from their phones revealed a closed door—the only one inside the house—at the bottom of the steps.
“Don’t they make horror movies about this sort of thing?” Cal muttered.
Andie didn’t answer. She was listening to her instincts as much as for sounds of life from below. Along the way, she had come to suspect the Star Phone was not just a puzzle box of intellectual hoops and exotic destinations that led to the prize of the Enneagon. Dr. Corwin never did anything without meaning. For reasons known only to him, she knew he was trying to tell her—or whoever possessed the Star Phone—something important along the way.
“Maybe this is the end of the line,” Cal continued. “Just an old house with some weird artifacts.”
She didn’t admit it out loud, but this was her greatest fear. That the Star Phone did not lead to retribution, or to Dr. Corwin himself, if he was even alive.
Maybe the device was nothing but a sophisticated toy, the Enneagon a myth or a spark in her mentor’s imagination. But she knew in her heart how absurd this line of reasoning was. People were dying, she and Cal were running for their lives.
Yet as she stood before that unopened door, Andie realized how much she had always sought to ascribe meaning to her past. Just as fear shadows love, she had a festering dread of losing what she most desired. More than anything, she wanted to know why Dr. Corwin had a photo of her mother in some strange city in his desk drawer, what the ink drawings meant, and, most of all, she yearned to understand why her mother had abandoned her.
Except yearn was too soft a word, she realized. Too pure and fluffy, like a child waiting by a white picket fence for a lost golden retriever to return. Sometime over the past week, now that the possibility of answers might be within her grasp, a dam had burst inside her, a high-walled bulwark she had carefully built over the course of her life, brick by stoic brick, to keep the emotions at bay.
No, she didn’t long for those answers, or yearn for them, or really, really hope, pretty please Mommy and Daddy, that she wouldn’t be disappointed one day.
She fucking craved them.
“Are you coming or not?” she asked Cal, her voice rougher than she intended.
“You’re not worried it’s a trap?”
“Of course I am. You’re not worried we’ll miss the whole point of finding this place?”
After a muttered curse, he followed her down the steps. Despite her bravado, she was very afraid and wished she had a weapon to defend herself, though she doubted anything would help against the likes of Zawadi or the dark-haired man.
The wooden door at the bottom was reinforced with iron studs and arched at the top, as if leading to a dungeon. Yet when she pulled on its iron ring, it creaked open as easily as the front door. Unlike the main entrance, another door lay behind this one, a chunk of solid steel that looked as thick and impenetrable as a bank vault.
Before they had time to ponder this new dilemma, the inner door clicked and swung silently inward to expose a tubular corridor with walls, floors, and ceiling made of steel. Andie felt as if she were staring into a giant pipeline, or the cold core of a nuclear reactor.
“What the hell?” Cal said.
A faint glow emanated from an opening on the right, thirty feet ahead. Cal called out for her to wait as Andie strode down the dark corridor, her footsteps echoing on the steel.
She could not see where the passage ended, but the light was coming from a room revealed by another open steel door. Andie blinked in surprise as she peered inside to find a cube-shaped room lined with onyx partitions embedded in the walls, divided at six-inch intervals by laser-like slivers of light.
The main source of illumination was a cylinder of violet light in the center of the room, stretching from floor to ceiling. Like the walls of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the cylinder was filled with words from many different writing systems, projected in a swarm of motionless white characters.
Andie moved closer and spotted a phrase in English.
The store of all knowledge is the memory of humankind.
“Welcome.”
Andie jumped at the sound of the computerized voice. She looked up and noticed a tiny speaker embedded in the ceiling, at the top of the cylinder of light. “Hello?” she said. “Is someone there?”
“My name is Hypatia.”
From her research at the library, Andie recalled that Hypatia was an ancient philosopher and astronomer, the first female mathematician of note recorded in the annals of history. She was also reputed to be the last keeper of the Library of Alexandria.
Cal whispered, “Is this some kind of AI?”
“I guess,” Andie whispered back, then said in a louder voice, “Hi, Hypatia.” The exchange of pleasantries with a voice assistant in an abandoned house felt bizarre in the extreme.
Not abandoned, she thought. Staged, for some unknown purpose.
Unsure what to do, she navigated the perimeter of the room, noting the symmetry of the onyx partitions and the cool sterile air. “This is a data storage room, isn’t it?”
“Indeed,” Hypatia replied.
“Is this the Hall of Records?
“It appears to be more of a square than a hall.”
Andie felt as if someone unseen were laughing at them. “Then what is it?”
“All libraries, in all forms, are an attempt to mold chaos into order. A library is a physical symbol of the soul. A torch lit by the fire of Prometheus. The most powerful creation of humankind.”
“Do you know anything about Dr. James Corwin?”
“I am a keeper of lost knowledge, and do not concern myself with modern affairs.”
“Can you at least tell me if he’s dead or alive?”
“I am a keeper of lost knowledge, and do not concern myself with modern affairs.”
Andie raised her voice in frustration. “Hypatia—and whoever else might be listening—if you know anything about Dr. Corwin, whether or not he’s still alive, or where the Enneagon is—if you know anything at all that might help, then please tell us.”
“I am a keeper of lost knowledge,” the voice repeated, “and do not concern myself with modern affairs.”
Cal shook his head, and Andie sucked in a breath, working to corral her anger. “Fine,” she said. “What kind of lost knowledge do you protect?”
“The library preserves the fruits of humanity’s intellectual labor, as well as higher secrets.”
“What secrets?” Cal said. “Who preserved them?”
“Over time, as methods of transcription increased in sophistication, an abundance of knowledge from many different cultures was preserved. Yet opposing forces were at work. War, migration, successions, natural disasters. The destruction of information became more and more commonplace, and fearing even more devastating losses, the decision was made to preserve the most significant works in a safe location, shielded from the capricious forces of nature, the ravages of time, and the whims of kings and tyrants. Even today, such destruction continues in many parts of the world.”
“You’re not telling us anything,” Cal said in frustration.
Andie laid a hand on his arm. “Was the knowledge in the Library of Alexandria preserved somehow?”
“Over time, as methods of inscription increased in sophistication, an abundance of knowledge from many different cultures was preserved. Yet opposing forces were also at work. War, migration—”
“Yeah, yeah, we got that,” Cal said. He took out his phone to take a video of the room. “That’s weird. The camera isn’t working.”
“No recordings of the premises are allowed,” Hypatia said. “Violators will not be allowed to leave.”
“There’s probably a security system,” Andie said in a low voice. “Better not to risk it.”
Startled, Cal looked over at her. “Can they do that? Jam my camera?”
“I don’t think it’s public yet, but, yeah, there’s remote camera-blocking tech out there. Concert venues have lobbied for it for years.”
“I’m sure the government would love it too. Scratch that: I’m sure they have it.” He slowly lowered the phone, his eyes flicking about the room as if searching for a hidden camera. “I should know better. I’m never leaving the house without my SLR again.”
“What happened to the library in modern day?” Andie asked Hypatia.
“With the methods of preservation unbound by traditional restraints, information can now be encoded in the grains of matter itself, the building blocks of the universe.”