Changeling

by David Wood

  Jade raised an eyebrow. “Then who?”

  “Do you know the story of Hiram Abiff, the widow’s son?” Paolo did not wait for an answer. “It is a very important part of our tradition. Hiram Abiff was the chief architect of King Solomon. He possessed all the secrets of the building craft, and was the grandmaster of the craftsmen’s guild of his day.

  “One night, three hooligans attack him and threaten to kill him if he does not reveal to them the secret passwords of the guild. With these passwords, they can demand more money from the guild. Hiram refuses and the men stab him to death.”

  Emotion glistened in Paolo’s eyes and he paused momentarily. “It is a story we tell to remember the importance of keeping faith, even unto death. Death comes to all men of course and the brave man does not fear it, but when we come face to face with death, even the bravest man may try to explain to God why it should not be his time. Hiram Abiff was the keeper of the secrets of stone craft. Some say he was not merely a craftsman, but the king of Egypt, and keeper of the secret knowledge of the builders of the pyramids. Who can say if this is true? If he died, much knowledge would be lost forever. He could have said, ‘I am too important to die,’ but he did not. He kept faith, and was struck down. The traditions of our fraternity honor the sacrifice of Hiram Abiff, and cherish his secrets.”

  Jade wondered if Professor would have been able to make sense of the story. She certainly could not. “Paolo, I don’t understand. Even if that story is true, it would have taken place hundreds of years before Archimedes lived. What does this have to do with the vault?”

  “I told you. Archimedes did not build the vault.”

  “You’re saying this Hiram built it? Centuries before Archimedes?”

  Paolo’s cryptic smile told Jade that he was not about to give her a straight answer. “Archimedes was a genius, si, but even a genius must learn from a master. Sir Isaac Newton, another of our great heroes, he say, ‘If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.’ Archimedes traveled to Alexandria to study mathematics and philosophy from the giants of the ancient world. Alexandria,” he repeated. “In Egypt.”

  “And Hiram was the king of Egypt.”

  Paolo nodded. “Si. Just so.”

  Jade turned this over in her head, trying to find the connection. “Are you saying that…” No, he couldn’t be saying that. “Archimedes was a Freemason?”

  She expected Paolo to shake his head, but instead he seemed almost gleeful. “The Masonic lodges as we know them today were created only three hundred years ago, but the Masonic tradition goes back much further. We trace our ancestry back thousands of years. The Knights of Malta and the Templars. The Library of Alexandria. Archimedes.”

  “Hiram and Solomon’s Temple.”

  “Si, but even Hiram was not the first.”

  Jade stared at him for a moment. “The pyramids?”

  “And before that, the Tower.”

  “The Tower…you mean the Tower of Babel?”

  “These are just stories. Allegories. Most do not believe them, even among the brotherhood.” He paused then leaned forward and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Everything that I have told you is known outside the brotherhood. There are many things I cannot tell you. I have sworn an oath. But, you already know more than most, and if you keep looking, you will find what you seek.”

  Jade let out a growl of frustration. “Damn it, Paolo. You said you had answers.”

  “And I have told you much. The rest, you will find for yourself.” He rose from his chair. “I can hire a car to take you to Pozzallo. You can catch a ferry there to Malta.”

  “Malta? Why should we go there?”

  Paolo smiled. “If you keep looking, you will find what you seek.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Malta

  Even before making landfall on the tiny windswept island, a mere half-hour ferry ride from the Sicilian port city of Pozzallo, Jade grasped that Paolo’s hint was not nearly as obtuse as it had first seemed. She needed only to see the place as Archimedes might have seen it 2,200 years before. Or if Roche was correct, 1,900 years.

  Malta, despite its size, had a remarkable history that stretched back well beyond the time of the Greeks or Romans. The megalithic Ggjantija temple—the word literally translated to “Giant’s Tower”—which dated back to 3,600 BCE, was just one of several scattered all over Malta and the neighboring island, Gozo. The Stone Age temples, built to honor an unnamed Mother goddess, were some of the oldest man-made structures on earth, older even than the pyramids of Egypt, a fact which had not escaped Jade’s notice. Only the ruins of Gobekli Tepe in Turkey were believed to pre-date the temples of Malta, and those had been buried and lost to history thousands of years before the emergence of the Neolithic culture that had settled Malta. The temples to the Mother goddess on the other hand, had still been extant in the time of Archimedes. One of these, Jade felt certain, concealed the entrance of the vault. By the time they debarked, she had a list of sites to visit, but one site in particular stood apart from the others.

  “This place,” she told Kellogg, showing him the entry in the local tourist guidebook. “The Hypogeum of Hal Saflieni.”

  “What makes it so special?”

  “For starters, it’s underground. Exactly where you would expect to find a hidden Vault. It was discovered in 1902 by workmen digging cisterns for a housing development. An entire temple complex carved into the limestone at least five thousand years ago. Three levels have been discovered, though there could be more. They haven’t explored all the rooms on the third level yet. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

  “The complex was used as a burial chamber later on, but it was originally a temple to the Mother goddess—Astarte, or the local variation on that. The upper levels are decorated with the usual symbols of fertility you would expect, but there are also dozens of strange spirals and other geometric shapes.”

  “Just the sort of thing that Archimedes would have noticed.”

  “Yup. And there’s a room on the second level called the Oracle Room, which has unique and not completely understood acoustic properties. Supposedly, if you stand in it, you can feel an unusual vibration. People report feeling energized, more creative. Some claim to have visions, which might explain the name.”

  She paused, thinking about her experience in the spherical chamber in Peru. Was it possible that a similar effect had been at work there? She made a mental note to look into that.

  “And some people,” she went on, “believe the Hypogeum is a doorway to another dimension.”

  “Just like the fogous,” Kellogg said.

  “Maybe. But maybe that ‘other dimension’ is the vault. Maybe if you go to the Oracle Room on the right day, when the timelock expires, the vault opens and you can go in.”

  Kellogg frowned. “That doesn’t help us much.”

  “Archimedes figured out a way to get in,” was Jade’s confident reply. “We will, too.”

  “Maybe he timed his visit better. No matter how you do the math, we’re at least several decades away from the next chance to get inside. Maybe several centuries.”

  “There are other ways into a locked room.”

  Jade was less confident about that statement however, but there was no actual proof that Roche was actually correct about the existence of a timelock. He had wrongly attributed the vault’s creation to Archimedes; maybe he was wrong about the thousand year waiting limit, too. She did not share this information with Kellogg. That conversation could wait until after they found the vault door.

  As interesting as the Oracle Room was, there were other features of the Hypogeum that made it, if not a likely candidate for concealing the entrance to the vault, then at least worth further exploration.

  The remains of more than 7,000 individuals had been discovered in the Hypogeum, which was not in itself that unusual. Many religions, even in modern times, placed great importance on inhuming the dead on sacred ground. What was unusual a
bout the skeletons found in the Hypogeum was that many of them showed evidence of artificial cranial deformation, just like the Paracas skulls.

  Whether or not Roche’s theory about skull binding being a defense against the Changelings was true, there was some kind of connective tissue, stretching around the world to cultures separated by time and distance. Maybe there was a reason for subterranean vaults and skull deformation that no one had ever considered. Not even Roche.

  This too, she kept to herself.

  “There is a wrinkle though,” she said. “Another locked door that might be an even bigger problem. The Hypogeum is a UNESCO World Heritage site, and access is limited to no more than ten people per hour—sixty visitors per day—and you have to purchase your tickets months in advance.”

  “You want to break in?” Kellogg’s tone was apprehensive but not surprised.

  “It wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “Maybe there’s another way. Let me try to get us permission. Money talks, and whether or not you put any stock in what he wrote, Roche’s books made a lot of it. Maybe we can unlock that door without doing anything that might get us arrested.”

  Jade weighed the offer. Breaking and entering, while risky, would keep their interest in the Hypogeum a secret. If Kellogg tried and failed to bribe their way in, it would alert the authorities to their intention, making it that much harder to sneak in. Even if he was successful, they would be on the radar of a corruptible public official. Still, Jade was no cat burglar. “Okay, give it your best shot, but be discreet.”

  “Fear not. Negotiations are what I do.”

  While Kellogg conducted his “negotiations,” Jade took the opportunity to visit an Internet café in Valletta—evidently the advent of smart phones had not completely eliminated the need for such establishments—and dug deeper into the mysteries of the Hypogeum.

  There was, as she had expected, a great deal of misinformation, ranging from unsubstantiated stories to wild speculation to outright fabrication—the kind of stuff Roche had built his fortune on—but there was a surprising amount of reliable science as well.

  One article detailed the most recent research into the acoustics of the Oracle Room, which was shaped like a bell, amplifying sound so that the voice of a priest speaking from the center of the room would be magnified to thunderous and no doubt terrifying proportions, and vibrating not only the air in the room, but the very bones and tissue of the people in it.

  Sound in the Oracle Room resonated at 110 Hertz, a design feature found in many other ancient chambers and temples in the world, and a frequency believed to induce altered states of consciousness. That this technology was understood and exploited by a Neolithic culture centuries before the pyramids, and millennia before Archimedes, was nothing short of astounding, but as she delved deeper into the physical effects of acoustic resonance waves, Jade discovered something even more amazing.

  Because acoustic waves could partially cancel each other out, it was possible to combine two or more moderately high frequency waves to produce a low frequency wave—called infrasound—in underground spaces like the Hypogeum and, Jade now realized, the chamber in Paracas.

  There were many ways to produce such sounds. Musical instruments and chanting. The movement of wind and wave action, both of which were abundant in Malta. The rotation of the earth and friction with the atmosphere produced a resonance frequency of approximately 7.83 Hertz, well below the audible range for humans, but even an inaudible sound could have a profound effect on the human body and brain. Frequencies of about 10 Hz could induce a state of awe or fear. A 17 Hz waveform could produce extreme anxiety, revulsion, and even tightness in the chest and chills down the spine. At 19 Hz, visual hallucinations were reported. Researchers were increasingly convinced that infrasound might be the cause of ghost sightings and other supernatural encounters. It was believed that the frequency disturbed regions in the brain or perhaps in the ocular fluid of the eyeball, producing indistinct figures glimpsed in the peripheral vision, exactly like the ghosts she had seen in Paracas.

  “One mystery solved,” Jade mused, “And I didn’t even need Professor to explain it to me.”

  The thought made her feel his absence all the more acutely, but assigning a rational explanation to her experiences in Peru not only greatly improved her disposition, it also provided the basis for a hypothesis that might explain how the Hypogeum had become conflated with the Archimedes Vault.

  Kellogg returned a few moments later with good news. “We’re in.” he declared. “I’ve arranged special permission from Mr. Eco, a local official of some sort, for us to visit the site this evening. Now it’s up to you to figure out how to open the vault door. If it’s really there, that is.”

  “On that subject, I think I may have this figured out.” She recounted her findings about the Oracle Room and infrasound. “So picture this. You’re Archimedes, on your way back from Alexandria, head full of information. You stop off at Malta, visit this crazy temple, and suddenly your head is bursting with new ideas and connections.”

  “So the ‘Vault’…” Kellogg made air quotes with his fingers, “is the place where Archimedes was inspired to become a genius, and not some a repository of secret knowledge.”

  “That’s what I think.”

  “If that’s all it is, then what about Phantom Time?”

  “It’s not real,” Jade said. “Never was. Roche was trying to connect dots that just don’t exist.”

  “It was real enough to the people that killed him. And who are, I might add, trying to kill us.”

  She shrugged. “I can’t help what they believe. But if we can prove there’s no Vault, it should get them off our backs.”

  Kellogg did not appear completely convinced. “People have been visiting the Hypogeum for almost a century. Why have there been no similar reports of such…divine inspiration.”

  “The natural state of the Hypogeum has changed from what it once was. It’s covered over, surrounded by concrete walls. Maybe those block the production of natural infrasound. If we could get down there and experiment with different frequencies, maybe we could produce a similar effect.”

  “You can prove this with a visit to the Hypogeum?”

  “I think so. The real question is, are you willing to publish our findings?” She held his stare. “Even if it means debunking Roche’s pet theory?”

  “Ah, I see your point.” He managed a tight smile. “Well, let’s see what we find first, shall we?”

  The entrance to the legendary Hypogeum of Hal Saflieni was a depressingly prosaic yellow cinder block building occupying almost half a city block in the middle of a neighborhood in the small southeastern town of Paola. There were no windows on the wind1scoured exterior, no ornamentation to speak of. Raised metal letters reading simply “HYPOGEUM” marked the recessed entrance. Because of the limited numbers of visitors allowed into the site, there was little need for additional publicity. The door was closed, blocked by a sandwich board displaying the message “SOLD OUT” in English which was, Jade had learned, one of the two official languages of the former British Commonwealth state. Kellogg stepped to the intercom mounted beside the entrance and pushed the button to announce their arrival. A few minutes later, an older man wearing a rumpled, sweat-stained linen suit appeared to greet them.

  “Ah, Dr. Ihara, the renowned archaeologist. Welcome, welcome. I am Roberto Eco.”

  Jade accepted the proffered hand and did not resist when Eco pressed it to his lips. She had no idea that she was “renowned” but if Eco believed it, who was she to disabuse him of the notion? Kellogg had greased the wheels, the last thing she wanted to do was derail things on the doorstep. Almost as an afterthought, she checked to see if he was wearing a Masonic signet ring; he was not. “A pleasure, Mr. Eco. I can’t thank you enough for allowing us to visit the Hypogeum after hours.”

  “Certainly. Just leave everything as you found it, and be sure to lock up when you go. We are…how should I put it…bending the rules
a bit tonight.”

  “You won’t even know we were here,” Jade promised.

  Eco brought them inside, revealing an interior that was far more promising than the modest exterior suggested. After passing through a museum gallery featuring artifacts recovered from the Hypogeum and other Neolithic sites across Malta and Gozo, they reached the literal centerpiece, a glass enclosure that looked down on the entrance to the subterranean temple.

  Before descending the metal staircase into the first level, Jade and Kellogg donned LED head lamps. The sections of the Hypogeum on the tour route were equipped with electric lights, but Jade preferred to see what she might discover on her own, peering with fresh eyes into the unlit corners of the site.

  Weather and the passage of millennia had softened the edges of the Hypogeum’s upper reaches, blurring the handiwork of ancient craftsmen who had carved it. At first glance, it looked more like a naturally occurring cave, and indeed, many of the chambers in the complex had been created from existing hollows in the natural limestone. Below the entrance however, sheltered from the wind, she saw the temple as its creators intended, and perhaps as Archimedes might have seen it two thousand years before, with rectangular niches and doorways, and trilithons—monumental arrangements of laboriously carved stones, two vertical and one laid across the top like a lintel, strikingly reminiscent of the interior ring of Stonehenge in England.

  Jade’s light picked out the geometric shapes and spirals etched upon the walls and ceilings and painted with red ochre, which would no doubt have been of great interest to the mathematician Archimedes, but reminded Jade more of petroglyphs she had seen in the American Southwest. Spirals, she knew, were a symbol of fertility, but also harmony with the natural order of the universe.