“Something is wrong here!” James shouted loudly. “Something is very wrong when my wife, the person I’m supposed to be able to trust, sneaks around listening to my confidential phone calls! You could get me fired, Sarah!”
“Good! I hope you do get fired! This job is not good for you, for any of us. The Bible says—”
“Don’t you start throwing your verses at me, woman! Wake up! Can't you see what's going on in the world!? Wars everywhere! Children dying! Diseases! Poverty! And what is God doing about it… what is the church doing about it? Sitting on its hands until it's time for the offering! And when someone actually tries to make a difference, you just stone them with Bible verses! Well, cast the first stone at yourself! Lying, sneaking around, and nagging. That’s the thanks I get for coming home?”
“I wish you would come home!” Sarah implored. “And get away from that company which is more interested in exploiting and killing people than helping them. Our people, James!”
“Those are lies and you know it! All I’ve ever been doing is supporting my family and helping my community the best I can. But no one appreciates the sacrifices I've made!”
“You’ve been blinded, James. Please, listen. This is dangerous and you don’t belong in that world of secrets and blackmail.”
“Danger? This job puts bread on your table, Sarah. Let’s you live in a palace! When was the last time you saw a mosquito? Or had as much clean, hot water as you wanted, or had a cook and cleaners so you could concentrate on your job and family instead of housework? What about the huge debts our community has been able to pay off? The health system, the education…No. The only danger here is losing this job because my wife can’t keep her nose out of my business, which, for being such a ‘good Christian’ doesn’t sound like a ‘Christian’ thing to do!”
“God is not in this, James Mode—whatever this business is—and you know it! Please, stop now. I don’t care if we have to sell the fancy car and move into a cheaper house. I don’t care if we have to take Tolu out of the most expensive charter school and put her in a public one. I just can’t handle—”
“Ungrateful! That’s what you are. You can’t appreciate anything that I’m trying to do for you, for our family!” James stomped past her to the front door and snatched up his coat.
“You’re selling out,” entreated Sarah. “Can’t you see? You’re not doing this for us; you’re doing it for yourself!”
The sound of a slamming door was the only reply given, and Sarah listened in tears to the diminishing clap of shoes on the walkway.
Chapter 65
It was eleven the next morning, and there had been no word from James. He hadn’t even sent someone to pick up his things. Fearful thoughts, boiling in a bleak mixture of the strange conversations and encounters she’d had recently, left Sarah feeling overwhelmed and helpless. She was still very shaken by their fight, at the words he had spoken to her. And as much as she tried to convince herself otherwise, she couldn’t completely rule out that he had really meant them.
A tear slipped down her face and she quickly brushed it away. She had to get away, get out of this environment and calm down. Thankfully, Tolu had been invited to a birthday party that afternoon—that would, at least, be a start.
The drive to the party was quiet. Sarah had already done what she could to soothe her daughter’s feelings, assuring her that the shouting she’d overheard last night was nothing to worry about - that everything was going to be fine.
Tolu seemed to believe her words. Sarah wished she could believe them as well.
After dropping her off, Sarah decided to head over to the museum. Work would help her take her mind off things, she hoped. Though she hadn’t told the Commissioner, she felt as if she had come to a dead end with the tablets. She had translated all the cuneiform symbols that she could, and working on the multi-lingual ones seemed to be going nowhere—they didn’t mean anything. At least, anything that she could find. The translations of the strange ciphers were only groups of gibberish, like letters randomly spooned out of a bowl of alphabet soup that don’t spell anything coherent.
But, she reasoned to herself, sitting down in the lab staring at stone was currently much preferable to sitting at home and staring at her memories of last night.
After parking in her usual spot in the employee car park, Sarah went in a back entrance and made her way down through the winding hallways and stairways to the section her lab was in. Using her cardkey, she opened the door and was shocked to find the room already occupied.
Equally shocked were the faces of Kate, John, and Commissioner Moreau that turned toward her, holding expressions equivalent to that of children caught digging in the cookie jar.
“Oh! Sarah! You gave us quite a fright!” the Commissioner exclaimed as he impulsively smoothed out his suit. “What are you doing here on this fine Saturday?”
“Sorry,” Sarah smiled a little as the sudden tension in the room deflated. “I didn’t mean to startle you all. I thought I’d come in and work on the tablets for a while. Looks like you had the same idea. Did you…” But she trailed off as she glanced around the room and noticed that pictures of the tablets were up on the monitors. Two images were familiar; one was not. She stepped closer to the screen and stared in alarm at what was displayed upon it.
Tinted in a reddish hue was a picture of an image drawn by crude lines. There was a circle made up of crowns and moons—seven of each, she counted. In its center were two inverted triangles overlapping each other, which played only a background part to the dominant central figure: a monstrous head with frightening eyes, jagged teeth, and several horns spiking from around its head—the longest horn, rising straight up and touching a crown at the top of the circle like a clock hand signaling twelve and etched across the forehead of the creature looked to be more cuneiform writing. However, it was overlaid by English words which had been handwritten with a computer stylus on the screen.
“Principal spirit with ten horns."
Like a runaway train careening downhill, Sarah’s frightening dream of the rising beast with ten horns reaching for James smashed into her consciousness at full speed.
She gasped and fainted.
Chapter 66
There was salt in the air, and a harsh wind whipping at her clothes and hair. Sarah looked around and immediately observed a still figure standing a few yards away at the edge of a rocky precipice, its back toward her. Feeling unafraid, she stepped closer and saw familiar blue stripes patterned on the garment enshrouding the figure.
It was the rabbi!
As if she had acknowledged him out loud, the rabbi turned and gestured for her to come forward.
“Look and see,” he said, his quiet voice cutting through the howl of wind and roaring of waves; for as she got closer, Sarah realized they were on a high cliff above a raging sea. White-tipped waves smashed into the worn, stony wall below like battering rams, sending cold spray flying into the air. Sarah stepped back as a few freezing drops hit her face, but the rabbi lifted his arm and pointed toward the horizon. Hugging herself, Sarah crept back to the edge and stared out into the endless grey-green stretch.
A sound as deep as thunder and as metallic as splitting stone shook the cliff, causing the ocean waves to abandon their assault against the face below and recede to a rallying point about a mile out. Here, the waters began to churn and spin clockwise, as if guided by a giant, invisible hand. Faster and faster they swirled until an abysmal funnel appeared in their midst, the dark reaches of its downward pull unfathomable.
Then, Sarah watched in wide wonder a movement in the center of the maelstrom. Something was emerging. It was a pair of enormous, golden wings whose pinions seemed to slice right into the sky. Below them was attached an equally golden back of smooth fur. A moment later rose a head comprising of a gigantic square muzzle bearing long, ivory canines tiered underneath two glittering, solid black eyes which reflected not the light from the sun. Surrounding the fierce face was a thick forest of wa
vy hair, ranging in hues from bright gold to chestnut brown.
Placing its whale-sized forelimbs on the edge of the swirling water, which held for it like a solid glass surface, the winged lion lifted its terrible head and roared till the whole earth trembled. Then, it shook its wings open and leapt into the sky, circling once before flying away toward the east.
No sooner had its silhouette completely vanished from view than a second beast began to emerge from the spinning pool. Its head, a dark grizzled brown with rounded ears and a long snout, the bear stepped out from the abyss onto the ocean surface. Beneath its glowering eyes, Sarah saw in its mouth a slab of meat from which three glaringly white rib bones protruded. Fresh blood from the carrion dripped to the sea and mixed with the roiling waves.
The bear, appearing slightly lopsided as if the limbs on its left side were longer than its right, hunched its towering shoulders before springing forward in a huge leap; its giant paws landing miles away like forgotten islands abandoned to the ocean fates. From its landing point, the beast harnessed the momentum and ran toward the northern horizon; leaving behind a vast wake of colliding ripples.
With haste, Sarah’s eyes snapped back to the water-whirl to witness yet a third creature’s accent. Four wings of polished silver tinged with steel blue appeared out of the depths and glinted sharply as they caught a ray from the sun. They began to beat immediately, hoisting to view the beast from which they issued.
Sarah’s hands flew to cover her mouth in shock as four enormous spotted heads of distinctly feline nature arched upward from the sea, each moving on its own short neck to appraise its surroundings. The heads were connected to one long, sleek body of a leopard, whose tail twitched back and forth in anticipation. The silver wings carried the leopardous-creature high into the sky before they spread out in full force and shot off on a current toward the west.
Beside Sarah, the rabbi now turned to look at her.
“And mark this…” he uttered through the wind. His gaze returned to the oceanic portal, which, if possible, began to swirl even faster.
Sarah hugged herself tighter and watched with bated breath as the shape of a fourth creature materialized. It took only one look to fell her to her knees in horrible disbelief. It was the beast—the creature of her dream, the creature she couldn’t seem to get away from. Its ten hateful horns forked into the sky like black lightning sent from the underworld, while its mangled head of teeth, fur, skin, scales, and bare sinews turned toward the spectators on the cliff and stared menacingly with furious, fiery eyes.
Sarah hunched herself lower to the ground, trying to get out of its sight. But a strong hand suddenly gripped her arm with a confident gentleness and urged her to her feet. Feeling strengthened, she stood and faced the beast whose hideous visage was now marked a violent red by the rays from the setting sun.
Then, from behind her, Sarah heard an ear-splitting crack and felt the earth shake beneath her feet. The rabbi turned and pointed toward the hills cresting behind them. Instantly, a figure began to rise from a hilltop, larger than any of the creatures they had seen so far seen. It was a man of cast metal, differing in colors, which moved not nor gave any indication of holding within it vestiges of life. Being drawn or pushed up by an invisible force, the metal man’s accent stopped only at its complete emergence, its sandaled feet resting upon the peak of a hill.
But no sooner had the statue become still than the purple clouds above it expressed a bright flash of light from which a large, rounded boulder fell. It hit the feet of the image, at once, smashing them into millions of pieces. As if in concordance with the defeat, the rest of the metal statue suddenly burst into a cloud of dust and was carried off by the wind.
Chapter 67
“And, then, it was over,” Sarah spoke lowly as she stared into the mug of warm tea in her hand. “How long was I out?”
“For good fifteen minutes, I’d say,” Pierre said from his chair across from her. “I was about to call the medic down here.”
“Thank you for not doing that,” Sarah said. “I mean, I’m embarrassed enough as it is already. I wouldn’t want the entire staff to know that I…”
“We’re all friends here, Sarah.” Kate, sitting next to her on the little couch in the empty staff area, pulled Sarah into a side hug. “You have nothing to be embarrassed about. But are you sure you’re okay?”
“You didn’t hit your head or anything?” asked John from a seat next to the Commissioner. “No pain anywhere?”
“I promise I’m fine. I just…” Sarah’s voice cracked as memories of her dreams, strange encounters, and troubles with James raced mercilessly around in her head. “I’m sorry. I’ve been going through some personal challenges lately and having these weird dreams—”
“There are more like the one you just told us?” inquired Pierre, his face full of concern.
Sarah nodded and quickly divulged to her friends short versions of the dreams that had been hounding her lately.
“Hmm…” surmised John when she was finished, “a dark creature with ten horns, flying beasts, an ancient city, a stoic guide. Do you… well do you think these dreams are connected to your work on the tablets?”
“I don’t know,” Sarah stated. “It’s all so strange. I mean how could I have dreamed of that beast before I saw it on the screen today?”
Everyone pondered in silence.
“How did you get that image anyway?” asked Sarah after a moment. “Is it from the tablets?”
“It’s something Kate and I have been working on,” replied John. “We weren’t ready to bring it to your attention yet because we didn’t want to interrupt your work of interpreting the cross-cultural symbols.”
“Last week,” jumped in Kate, “I was staring at a clay tablet of cuneiform in thought and suddenly noticed that my vision had pulled an image from the blank spaces between the impressed markings. As soon as I tried to lock on to the image, it faded from my focus. I rested my eyes and let them slightly blur again, not focusing directly on the space and out popped the image again! I called John over to try it because, once defined, that blank space looked amazingly like the Egyptian hieroglyphic for “temple.”
She reached to the small coffee table next to
the sofa and drew a quick picture on a scrap of paper.
“And that’s when we got the idea—”
“To look past the symbols themselves,” stated Sarah in awe. “And literally read between the lines.”
John nodded. “We used the computer to distinguish the new shapes of ‘empty spaces,’ but initially came up with just another pile of indecipherable. It was Pierre who broke us through the wall.”
“You just needed a fresh eye, that’s all,” the Commissioner brushed off the praise. “One that hadn’t been staring at it for several nights in a row.”
“He noticed several half-moon shapes and suggested we put them together to make full circles,” finished Kate. “Which became the pattern of moons. From there we kept working it like a puzzle and…well, as you saw, the image we finally came up with was like nothing we ever would have imagined.”
Sarah glanced from one face to another, still processing their narrative.
“Well,” she finally commented, “it sounds like you have had a lot of time on your hands.”
The three companions smiled at her joke; but their faces quickly faded back into seriousness when they noticed that Sarah herself hadn’t grinned. Her eyes had locked onto a spot on the floor; she was still clearly thinking about all that had transpired.
“Has this ever happened before?” Kate ventured returning to the subject that seemed to still be greatly bothering their co-worker. “Have you had dreams like this before…with the same characters and scenes over and over again?”
“No,” Sarah answered lowly. “This has never happened before.”
“When did they start?” asked John. “You said it was before we brought the tablets in.”
“My first dream with the rabbi started j
ust before we moved here from Nakambwe, when my husband accepted a new job with GED.”
John let out a low whistle. “I didn’t know your husband worked at GED.”
“You never asked.”
“What does he do?” Kate asked with interest as she dug a newspaper out from the stack of media and placed it on top of the pile. Sarah couldn’t bear to look at the grinning CEO shaking hands with some national delegate to signify their “Paving the Way…” for something she had no interest in finishing the headline to find out. Based on the video conversation she had heard last night, nothing this man was doing could be good; and she felt afraid for all those who were taken in by him, especially, James.
“Sarah?” Kate prompted, with concern in her eye.
“Oh. To be honest, I’m not sure,” Sarah said reticently. “We don’t really talk about his work.” She took a sip of her tea in an effort to close the subject.
Pierre gallantly took up the hint. “Well,” he declared as he stood from his chair and re-buttoned his suit jacket. “I suggest we all get back to the task at hand. Kate, John, keep working on that image. See if there is anything in the translated cuneiform text that mentions the seven moons or crowns or possibly what that…thing with the horns represents. We need to figure out how they are connected to this ritual…to the ‘Chosen one.’
“Sarah, you should probably go home and rest. We—”
“If it’s all the same, Commissioner,” Sarah interjected, “I’d like to stay for a while and help. I’ll be okay now that I know what to expect.”
“If you’re sure.”
Sarah nodded. “I’m eager to get to the bottom of all this as quickly as possible.”
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