Keystone

by Talbot, Luke

  Gail swung her body weight over to the right, ending up on her hands and knees. She craned her neck upwards and peered into nothingness: where am I? she wondered.

  Placing her hands palms-down, she shifted along the floor for several minutes, first in one direction, then in another, then back again, until she had returned to what her mental map told her was pretty much her starting point. There were no walls, no chairs or tables. No grooves in the floor and no grit or dirt. In her immediate environment, there was nothing.

  Somehow her subconscious mind knew it would be pointless standing up in complete darkness, and so she didn’t try.

  She opened her mouth, but no words came. Closing it, she forced a gulp and tried again.

  “Hello?” The word sounded muffled, as if by the darkness that surrounded her. “Hello?” This time she heard herself more clearly. She pushed away from the floor with her hands and rose to a kneeling position and shouted the word out: “HELLO!”

  From the darkness, nothing replied.

  “Where the hell am I?” she exclaimed.

  She let herself fall back onto her bottom. Where the hell am I?

  She thought back to the evening’s events. She had been with the Professor in his office at the Museum; he had just finished telling her about the book. The book! She remembered now: he had lied to her about the Library at Amarna, about the book on the plinth. All these years, he had known the truth and yet he had never told her.

  Aliens in Egypt! No wonder he had never said anything: his career would have been in ruins. If what he had told her was true, then everything she thought she knew about Amarna, Nefertiti and Akhenaten had to be false. She tried to imagine the pictures the Professor had described; of towering cities with flying cars. It was like something out of a science-fiction movie.

  So how had she ended up here – wherever here was? She remembered that there had been a knock at the office door, and then – nothing.

  She shook her head in frustration. How could she not remember more?

  There was a knock at the door, and then – the Professor had said something. What had he said? And then the door had opened. After which she drew a blank. Nothing.

  “Bloody hell!” she cursed herself for not knowing. “Professor!” she shouted, but there was no reply.

  She suddenly remembered her husband. “George!” she exclaimed. She fished around in her pockets and was surprised to find her phone. As it flipped open, the light from the screen almost blinded her, and she blinked several times before she was comfortable with it.

  There was no signal. Wherever she was, whoever had put her there, had either no concerns about her contacting the outside world, or they knew that she would not have a signal. To all intents and purposes, her phone was nothing more than a glorified pocket-watch.

  She snapped the phone shut and was plunged into darkness again. She blinked several times and banished the static once more; each time her eyes closed she fancied she could still see the screen of the phone, shining brightly in the palm of her hand. Opening the phone again, she was once more bathed in its blue-grey light.

  No more than a glorified pocket-watch, or a torch.

  The phone pushed the darkness back at least three metres, whereupon it started losing intensity. Pointing the screen directly in front of her and at arm’s reach, she studied the matt-grey floor. Shifting her body round, she noted its uniformity in all directions; it had seemed metallic to her touch, but she had never seen anything like it. Even the smoothest of floors always tended to have a joint, where two sheets or tiles would meet. Here, there was none of that. It was like a gymnasium floor, but more perfect.

  Cautiously, she stood up, immediately increasing the draw distance of the light. The absence of any objects in her field of view meant there were also no shadows; judging distance was difficult, and the uniform floor didn’t make it any easier.

  Almost against her will, her left leg moved forward, followed soon after by her right. Before she could think, she was walking in a straight line, as if the act of standing up had given her purpose, direction.

  “Hello?”

  Still no response.

  Her pace quickened, despite her limited visibility.

  “Hello!”

  Nothing.

  She was almost running now, and still the perfect smooth floor spread out before her. Her voice boomed out into obscurity, again and again, and not one reply came back. In her mind, she knew that if the room she was in had walls, eventually her voice would hit one and return to her as an echo. And yet when she shouted there was no reverberation, as if the darkness was swallowing the sound waves whole.

  Slowing to a walk, she stopped to catch her breath. Her phone told her she had been running for just under a minute, and moving forwards for a little over that. In over sixty seconds, she had seen nothing but the flat monotonous floor.

  “How bloody big is this place?” she wondered out loud. “I mean, for crying out loud! I’m not exactly an Olympic champion, but in a minute I can run a good two hundred metres, easily!” She turned around, pointing the phone in all directions. “And for all I know I’m probably back where I bloody started.”

  She laughed. “And now I’m talking to myself: first sign of madness.”

  Exasperated, she dropped to her knees, before lying flat on her back, to stare up at the ceiling of obscurity that pressed down on her. Her phone snapped shut against her chest; its light extinguished, she lay in darkness once more, her eyes shut.

  As her breathing evened out she became increasingly aware of a dull ringing in her ears; the kind of ringing that she remembered from years ago would assault her eardrums after stepping out of a busy nightclub into an otherwise peaceful night-time street. She held her breath for a moment and concentrated on the noise, wishing it away with her mind. Instead, its intensity grew. Sticking her fingers in her ears, she scrunched up her face and begged the ringing to stop. It continued, louder than before, throbbing against the inside of her skull until it was all she could do to press her palms hard against her eyes, her fingers still pushed firmly inside her ears, hoping to force it back. The ringing was now so loud that she could not hear herself breathe.

  Rolling onto her knees, she arched her back and pushed her chin upwards. She opened her mouth and felt the rush of air streaming from her windpipe as she screamed. The ringing was now so omnipresent that it drowned her cries before they had even left her throat.

  Gail pulled her head down towards her knees and clasped her hands behind her neck, ripping tufts of her hair in the process.

  “Stop it!” she moaned. “Stop it, please!”

  The ringing persisted, louder than before, louder than any music she had ever heard, more piercing than the sirens of an ambulance. Managing to pull one hand from her head, she felt for the phone, but it wasn’t in her pocket any more. With what little faculty still remained for thought, she realised that she had placed it on her chest when lying down. As she had rolled over, it must have fallen to the floor. In a panic, she groped around her with one hand. As she stretched her arm round behind her, her hand struck the phone and sent it flying. Spinning round, she brought her other hand down and scrambled in vain to find it.

  “No!” she cried in anguish.

  Emotionally exhausted, she didn’t even bother bringing her hands up to protect her ears against the constant ringing. Her last drop of energy was used to punch the floor with both fists and shout out into oblivion: “I know! I know! Please stop it: I know!”

  As the final word left her lips she collapsed against the floor. Know what? She thought briefly, but she was too tired to try and understand what she had said, and why. At the same time, the noise stopped, and the red glow through her closed eyelids told her that the darkness had been replaced by light.

  Chapter 46

  What was the exact opposite of complete and utter darkness? She wondered. Complete and utter light?

  The last time she had tried to open her eyes, the receptors in her brai
n had been so confused by the absence of any light that they had forced her to try opening her eyes again, as if the human psyche was not capable of understanding such an environment. Even at night-time, there was always some light, some reflected glimmer with which the fully dilated pupil could function.

  For some reason, she thought of bats, bouncing sound waves off obstacles and prey within a cave. Blind as a bat, the expression went, but even Gail knew that that was a fallacy: bats used sight for many things and rarely relied on sonar alone. She wondered if bat-like ability would have helped her to see earlier.

  Earlier. The concept of time struck her suddenly, and her mind shot back to the dark room – could she be sure it was a room? – that she had been in before, and the bright screen of her mobile phone: Thursday, November 16th 2045 – 2:05pm. The time flashed repeatedly in her mind’s eye, and as she held the thought it changed to 2:06pm. Her attention moved to the date. Thursday the 16th? In a flash the phone display disappeared and she found herself back at Heathrow Airport, standing in front of the automated ticket assistant. She tapped the screen and was rewarded with a pre-punched card that fell from a slot beneath. The date on the boarding-chip jumped up at her: Monday, November 13th 2045.

  She’d lost more than two entire days.

  The Professor was standing beside her now, and she was at the entrance to the Library in Amarna. The hot winter sun bathed the archaeological excavation in bright warm light. Behind her she could feel the eyes of the other students burning into her back. They must hate me for going in first, she thought as she descended the steps cut into the bedrock. She ducked as the passageway swallowed her – surely it’s smaller than it used to be?

  From outside, she heard Ben’s laugh, joined shortly after by her husband’s. George! She turned to run back up to see him, but was met by a wall of darkness; the steps leading up were gone. She span round again in a panic, to find that the stairs leading down had also disappeared, replaced by the smooth sandstone of the Library floor.

  She was now inside the Library, walking slowly past the rows of bookcases. On the end of each row the engraved symbol of the Stickman drew her eyes from the path ahead, until she had passed the final row and was standing in front of the stone plinth.

  Behind it stood a man, shorter than her, and dressed in an off-white robe that fell from his shoulders down to his sandals. His wispy hair was thick with dust and sweat after a long day’s work. He was looking at the plinth eagerly, his hands clasped in front of him as if in prayer.

  Gail stopped.

  “Who are you?” she heard herself say. The sound of her voice surprised her; although she knew what she had wanted to ask, she hadn’t spoken in English.

  The man behind the plinth looked at her, puzzled. He was about to hazard an answer when she spoke again.

  “What is going on?” Still the words were not English, although for some reason she understood them all.

  “I am showing you the plinth, where the books will be placed,” he said nervously.

  Ancient Egyptian, she realised with a start. But what a strange accent? The man’s hands un-clasped and demonstrated the stone surface in front of him. It was unremarkable, but he seemed proud, as if it was exactly what had been ordered.

  “What books?” she asked.

  “The book of Aniquilus, and the book of Xynutians,” he replied tentatively under the interrogation.

  Her ears prickled as the sentence reached them. Aniquilus and Xynutians. His accent was softer than she had imagined an Egyptian’s would be, and she wondered if she had misunderstood the words.

  “An-ee-qwe-lous?” She broke the word down into phonemes; she’d worry about writing it later.

  The man shifted uneasily. He looked like he was running over the question and its possible answers in his head before offering an answer, like a chess player would mull over possible moves to avoid falling prey to a dangerous rook. After a while, he pointed to the bookcase behind her and repeated the word.

  She followed his trembling finger to the edge of the bookcase, where she found the symbol of the Stickman. Looking from the nervous man to the symbol etched into the wood and back again, her eyes widened.

  “Aniquilus?” she gasped. So the Stickman was ‘Aniquilus’!

  At this the man looked positively frightened, as if what he thought to be Aniquilus had in fact turned out to be something entirely different, and his engravings inside the Library had all been wrong. Gail reacted quickly, sensing her control over the small man.

  “Aniquilus!” she repeated more authoritatively, confirming that the Stickman was indeed known by that name.

  A smile broke out on his face as he started breathing once more. “Yes!” he said, bringing his hands together in front of his chest again.

  She walked back towards the plinth and looked at it. There were no books on it now. This reminded her of the shelves she had just been looking at; twisting her head round, she noticed that they, too, were empty. She looked at the small man, who avoided her gaze as if his life depended on it.

  “And Xy-New-Shuns?” Again, she pronounced it slowly, emphasising each phoneme. In her mind, there was no question that it had to be a person. “Who is Xy-New-Shuns?”

  “What do you mean?” he replied. His nervousness had returned, and he held his hands together so tightly she could see his knuckles go white.

  “Who is Xy-New-Shuns?” She repeated, saying each word individually, in case she had mispronounced them the first time. As she repeated the question she actually saw a bead of sweat run down his forehead, from his hair to the bridge of his nose. He looked left and right, as if trying to spot an escape route, his shadow dancing against the wall of the Library in the flickering light of an oil lamp next to the plinth.

  Finding no way to avoid the question, and having exhausted all possible alternative responses in his mind beforehand, he turned his eyes solemnly to the floor and raised his arm. He was pointing straight over her left shoulder.

  She turned on her heel, but just as she did the Library disappeared, and she slipped once more into darkness.

  Chapter 47

  Dr Patterson entered the Administrator’s office, leaving the door wide open behind him.

  “She’s been unconscious for almost twenty-four hours now,” he said angrily. “What did your man Walker give her?” He stood boldly in front of the desk with his legs uncharacteristically apart. Realising this, he shuffled his left leg slightly closer to the other and regained some of his more reserved self.

  Seth Mallus turned round in his chair to face him. “Nothing that will harm her, Henry. Simply a facilitator for sleep.” He stood up and walked to the video wall dressed as a window. Reaching behind a blind to the left-hand side of it, he switched it off. “She was very reluctant to go with Walker, aggressive even. The drug was to protect her, more than anything else.” He ushered Patterson out into the corridor, and then followed him. “Which is also why she has been restrained,” he continued.

  “To stop her hurting anyone?” Patterson asked bitterly.

  “You are cynical. To stop her hurting herself, ” he corrected.

  Still walking along the same corridor, they arrived at a long window on their left. Patterson stopped and gestured to the small room beyond the glass.

  “Is this really necessary?”

  In the middle of the small room was a single hospital bed in which Gail lay, fast asleep. Nonetheless, thick restraints wrapped round her body and limbs and held her to the mattress. Set into the headrest of the bed was a small computer screen, on which a line made its way from left to right, jerking rhythmically to the woman’s pulse. Apart from this and a small bedside table, the room was bare and sterile.

  Mallus nodded slowly. “You seem genuinely upset. And yet Dr Gail Turner was brought here on your request.”

  “I did not request her specifically, and I wouldn’t have requested anyone had I realised it would have been against their free will!” he retorted.

  “I think tha
t you may be forgetting yourself, Doctor,” Mallus warned sternly. “Dr Turner will be awake within the hour, sometime after which I will arrange for her to join you in your office.” He didn’t leave much room for argument, but just as Patterson was about to reply, he continued, more softly. “We would not normally have gone through this process, as you can see for yourself from the perfectly normal way in which I recruited you. However I know you understand that the situation, despite our best efforts, was beyond our control.”

  Patterson said nothing, but dipped his chin almost imperceptibly.

  “Good,” he said. “Because together, and with her help, we have to find out what Aniquilus is.”

  Chapter 48

  Gail awoke, opening her eyes slowly, tentatively, like a child who dare not peek at what was under the Christmas tree for fear that it may all disappear without warning.

  Please, not another dream.

  The past few hours, days, maybe even weeks, had been the strangest of her life, notwithstanding the fantasy of youth, where as a small person barely four feet high you could walk in a land of giants, dragons and adventure every day.

  What the hell? The fact that she was even thinking of dragons and giants raised fears that she was again dreaming, and that she had not woken up after all. Widening her eyes she let the bright white light of her surroundings flood her pupils, which shrank to the size of pin heads as a result. She forced her eyelids to stay open against their will for as long as possible, until eventually they snapped shut and opened again, less wide this time, like the shutter of a high-speed camera.

  Instead of bright-white light, she saw a bright-white wall directly in front of her.

  “Hello!” she shouted. Immediately, the pressure in her inner ears reported back to her the fact that she was lying on her back. The wall in front of her had to be the ceiling. This is good, she thought. The fact that she heard herself perfectly, and understood what she was saying, had to be good. The fact that her sight and ears were now working together as a team, giving her balance and a sense of direction, was even better. I am awake. Within milliseconds of this realisation, Gail decided to get up and see where she was.