“You’re welcome. I never take sick days, was overdue. More important, how are you?”
“I truly do not know how to answer that,” Caitlin said. “Physically, fine. But tell me about Jacob.”
“Relying on just the medical evidence, he’s manifesting a form of hyper-sopor. I would have taken him to the emergency room except that there are no obviously actionable symptoms, he did not have any trauma, and the only food he had was what he hadn’t finished yesterday. His tendon reflexes are normal, there’s no fever, resting heartbeat and respiration are consistent with clinical lethargy, it’s not drug-induced, obviously, and I wanted to talk to you first. Anyway, a relative would have had to sign off on further evaluation.”
“That is absolutely what I would have done,” Caitlin told her. “Has he moved, said anything?”
“Moved—he was half-awake, rapping on the wall, then back asleep. That was about—dawn, I guess. Since then, very little. Opened his mouth slowly as if he was cracking his jaw. Eye movement. Not like REM, only sporadic and definitely deliberate.”
“Like lucid dreaming?”
After considering that for a moment Anita said, “Yes, that’s actually what it’s like. As if he’s awake and consciously, purposefully looking at something. But with his eyes closed.”
“Bless you again for not moving him,” Caitlin said. “It’s a form of trance, like the one I experienced.”
“I figured, but hold on, Caitlin—there’s more,” Anita said. “You had visitors.”
“Who?”
Anita said quietly so Caitlin’s father wouldn’t hear, “From Haiti. A Vodou priestess and her son.”
Caitlin felt a sudden boiling in her gut. “Go on.”
Anita told her about Madame Langlois and the snake, both of which surprised Caitlin but also comforted her in a strange way: the Galderkhaani Priest Yokane was dead and the transcended spirit of the Galderkhaani Azha was gone. Caitlin was glad to have someone around who understood. And there was another snake: a physical manifestation, unlike the others. That was information, even if she did not yet know what to make of it.
“Did Madame Langlois say anything about the serpent?” Caitlin asked.
Nancy frowned, deeply. Caitlin waved her hand as if the question were irrelevant.
“Nothing that made it any less creepy,” Anita said. “A conjurer’s trick, I suppose, though she kept referring to the snake with a plural pronoun—‘they.’ ”
Then she told her how the Vodou-summoned snake was made up of smaller parts, just like the snake in her own recent vision. That too was fascinating . . . but elusive.
“I don’t assume they are still there,” Caitlin said. “I can’t see my father allowing that.”
“No,” Anita said. “Ben found somewhere to put the madame and her son, though he didn’t tell me where.”
Caitlin quickly scrolled through her e-mails, saw nothing from Ben. He was probably afraid someone else might look at it. She worked hard to remain calm. She had to fight the pressing urge to be with Jacob, to see the Haitians, to get back to Flora Davies, to find out why all the stones on the planet seemed to have gone quiet, to return to Galderkhaan somehow. Instead, she took an uncharacteristically small, single step:
“Ben is at work?” Caitlin asked.
“Yes. He called here at least a half-dozen times asking if I’d heard from you, making sure Jacob was still the same.”
Just talking about him brought a sudden, welcome equilibrium, as if she’d downloaded all the cautions and safeguards and different points of view that were lodged in his sane British brain. Her mother was a mother, loving and concerned with a strong vein of I know better, but Ben had been a comrade in all this . . . in so many things going back to their university years.
Caitlin heard dripping then, saw that her pillow was getting soggy and had started to overflow. Caitlin hadn’t expected to be here still, and reluctantly shut the flow. A few moments later a nurse entered.
“I gotta go,” Caitlin said to Anita and ended the call after thanking her again.
The young nurse frowned when he too heard the dripping and looked at the bed.
“Dr. O’Hara—”
“It—came out,” Caitlin told him.
“Did it?”
“Well . . . clearly.”
“I see.”
“And as you can also see, I’m okay now,” Caitlin went on. “Except that I need a fresh pillow.”
The nurse scowled. He summoned an orderly and a fresh pillow was brought in. Dr. Yang followed briskly with a look that was half-concern, half-disapproval.
The physician made quick work of his patient, finding nothing in her eyes, blood pressure, or chest to alarm him. He agreed not to replace the IV if Caitlin promised to stay in bed. Nancy O’Hara assured him that she would.
“If we weren’t understaffed—” he began.
“I’d help, if you’d let me,” Caitlin said. She was serious.
“Thanks, no. Management prefers when their doctors aren’t also patients.”
“Phuket and the Philippines weren’t so picky,” Caitlin muttered to his back. Sometimes, American health care—and liability—just got to her.
The physician left, along with the nurse, the orderly, and Caitlin’s considerably medicated pillow.
Nancy sat heavily and gratefully in the chair. “This is your life, isn’t it? Urgent, urgent, urgent.”
“ ’Fraid so.”
“I’m too tired to keep up,” Nancy said. “I only slept for three hours last night. I’m going to shut my eyes.” She fixed those eyes on her daughter. “You will stay there?”
“I will,” Caitlin said. She wiggled her smartphone. “Barbara will be here in an hour or so. I’m just going to send e-mails while there’s still life in the battery.”
Her mother nodded agreeably, folded her hands on her waist, and settled back. Caitlin looked at her a moment longer. She understood the woman’s concerns for her daughter because Caitlin shared them for her own child. She could not let on how concerned she was. If Jacob were in Galderkhaan—spiritually, at least—she only hoped Standor Qala had believed what she told her, and that the commander’s physician was a man of curiosity and caution who would do nothing rash or extreme. Caitlin prayed—to a dead man in a dead civilization—to try to understand rather than undo what had occurred. Restoring Vilu by some dramatic, potentially traumatic means could cost Jacob his soul.
Once again, Caitlin had to prioritize as she did in Phuket and other devastated regions around the globe. Jacob had slipped into the past while she was there—possibly drawn by her through some spiritual mechanism she did not understand. There had been a few moments of overlap, of transition. Perhaps it was a variation of what had happened with Maanik, some version of the cazh, their powerful bond pulling his spirit to where she was.
But there was a problem, Caitlin thought. With Maanik, Gaelle, and Atash, the souls from the past tried to drag them into the past. Had Caitlin’s longing to be with Jacob been strong enough to unwittingly create a cazh? Had it failed after a moment or two because it had been subconscious, without the ritual that helped the souls to focus? Had Madame Langlois or her snake done something that prevented them from bonding?
You’re just spitballing, Caitlin told herself. Not that there was anything wrong with that, if she had the time. She did not. Hopefully Barbara could get some answers through hypnosis.
In the meantime, she had to contact Ben and find out what he may have learned from the Haitian mother and son. After the serpentine vision she had experienced in Haiti, and again in her dream, she was particularly interested in the snake Anita had mentioned. That was now too prevalent to be a coincidence.
Jung believed in synchronicity and so do I, she thought.
In this case, she had to.
Jacob’s safety might well depend
on it.
She wrote to Ben: I’m awake. Thanks for all. Barbara coming for hypnosis. Anything?
It took several battery-sapping minutes for Ben to text back: I arranged for Technologists to take Haitians to CT HQ. Don’t ask. Plus new twist. Halley VI reports there was massive fireball yesterday. Vibrations under ice, suspected drilling. Brit ambassador told Security Council that Royal Navy and RAF sending assets south. Suspect Russia of military ops out of Vostok Station.
Caitlin wrote back: What will UK do?
Ben answered: Land troops. Investigate.
Caitlin wrote: Flora has a man there.
Ben texted back: Will tell US reps. Gotta go. Love you.
Oddly, the last comment didn’t bother her like it used to. Maybe she wanted it—or maybe she was troubled by this new development and desperately needed a partner. She actually felt violated by all the attention from London, as though her private world were about to be invaded.
Which it was.
The tiles might be active down there, energy that was being picked up at Halley or by satellite but wasn’t giving her “juice.” That was worrisome enough. But the thought that the military, any military, might obtain the power of the Source was more frightening still.
Sneaking out of bed to get her lunch tray, Caitlin ate—something she hadn’t done for too long. Then she lay back on her fresh pillow, tried to clear her head, and awaited Barbara Melchior’s arrival.
CHAPTER 14
Lowered by the growling winch of the truck, showered by chips of ice and dead bugs that were being cut from the lip over which he’d been suspended, Mikel Jasso descended slowly into the pit. His goggles were around his chin, his eyes struggling to adjust to the darkness. As the rope-sling was lowered into the pit, twisting slightly from side to side, the archaeologist had time to think. And as he thought, one phrase kept running through his tired, overworked brain:
One day, Dr. Jasso, your rope will fray. One day the hastily crafted sling or raft or ladder will fail you.
Mikel was one of those who believed it was better to die in the saddle than on the sidelines, but that came with an acute awareness that the thick of things was never the safest place to be.
From his early childhood in Pamplona, through his years in Harvard and his adventures with the Group, Mikel had relished any and all physical challenges, especially those that logic told him were beyond his means. Going underground, into the ruins of Galderkhaan . . . soaring through a wind tunnel on a sled made of millennia-old animal hide . . . that was madness. Communing with the souls of the dead was not exactly reckless, but believing in them lacked the kind of empirical science in which he was schooled. But in every instance, the rewards had been vast. There was rarely a middle ground when it came to risk-taking in his field: either you squandered years or risked your life, but that was how you located King Tut. Or Amelia Earhart’s airplane.
Or Galderkhaan.
But now he was sitting in this makeshift support, descending into a dark pit that had been newly cut by a flaming—what? An eternally burning soul, a soul that might still be down there, angry as hell and looking for lost Galderkhaani souls?—doing all this with a broken wrist; that was new, even for Mikel.
Fortunately, he thought, curiosity still slightly—very slightly—trumped fear. He wanted to know more about the phenomenon, and also what Casey Skett had planned.
When light from the outer world no longer reached him, Mikel pulled a flashlight from the shoulder bag slung over his bad arm. He threw a cone of white light against the wall to his right. Here and there midges still clung to the stone walls, walls that revealed dark stone beneath serpentine, fast-frozen mounds of ice. Dr. Cummins had reported that the remainder of the insects, those which hadn’t frozen where they last stood, had wandered aimlessly from the truck, a strange column of brownish black crawling along the ice as if they were disoriented, no longer stuck between the two powerful tiles. Like the other animals Mikel had witnessed or been told about, some herding quality in their brain—an atavistic version of cazh?—had been revved by the tiles.
Which is probably why the Technologists thought the tiles were all that was required to join souls, Mikel thought with sudden clarity.
Physically, the pit itself was a chimeric thing. On closer inspection, not only ice but what looked like shale had been flash-molten and quickly hardened, like melted ice cream. Here and there were large stone bubbles where air had been released then quickly trapped by fast-hardened rock. Ice, melted from above, was frozen in sheets across large areas. They reminded him of a Japanese waterfall by Hokusai, thick rivulets of water stiff at the end of the floes, slender and reaching. He angled the flashlight down. Below was flat, silent darkness, save for what appeared to be a large, inexplicable bulb of opalescent white that sat at some distance below. It reminded him of a pearl seen through seawater. It rested in the center of the darkness, with fuzzy edges that blended slowly into the blackness. The deeper Mikel went, the pit became wider and less light fell on the surrounding walls. Yet the milky hue remained constant, glowing, growing slightly in diameter but not luminosity as he descended.
The cooing that Mikel and Dr. Cummins heard had ceased as soon as he began his descent. He still didn’t know what it had been. The only constant sounds were the distant drone and squeak of the winch, the jostling of the shoulder bag he carried, and the wind that rose and fell in volume as it swept across the opening or rushed down at him with sudden, brief enthusiasm. Those sounds and Mikel’s heartbeat and breath created quite a strange symphony. His cold-weather gear kept that sound close to his body, the drumming in his ears in tune with the physical sensation of blood pumping to his extremities. He would occasionally report what he was seeing to Skett, though the man on the other end made no comment and asked no questions. Mikel was certain he was there, however: there was a very dull, low hum from the phone, just as there had been when they spoke back at Halley VI. No doubt Skett was focused on the experiment, not on communication. Now and then Mikel would also check in with Dr. Cummins over the radio that was hooked to the cable just above his head. When she spoke—letting him know how far he had descended—she had to shout, since the winch was complaining, loudly, as it fought the icy cold.
For a place that was alive with surreal imagery and borrowed sound, the pit itself was not like a living cave with active water dripping or flowing and a feeling of flora, fauna, and biota all about. The place seemed—it was—quite still and dead. There did not even seem to be any Galderkhaani spirits in residence: Pao, Rensat, Enzo, and Jina had all had a palpable presence, a spiritual substance that registered as chill or warmth or low pressure or flame. They were immaterial but the ripples they created were real.
Not here.
And yet Mikel felt certain he was not alone. At first he suspected it was the natural fear of the unknown, where imagined dangers caused people to hallucinate spirits or predators, to self-generate hysteria. Then he began to suspect that the pit could be like the lava tube he had entered before, with an adjacent channel or tunnel that contained something alive. For all he knew, there could be tiles below him or somewhere else nearby.
Mikel got his answer after about five minutes of the slow unraveling of the cable. The ivory-like glow below him was no longer just a globe: there was a shape, a mass below it. Perhaps it had always been there, just not visible from so high up. At first glance it reminded him of Michelangelo’s Pietà but seen from above, the covered head of Mary rising from her shoulders. But the shroud was not fabric: as he neared he saw that it was long hair hanging in graceful waves over the figure’s shoulders.
At about one hundred and fifty feet down, the glow of the flashlight finally illuminated a solid floor below him with what looked to be opposing cave mouths on the eastern and western sides of the pit. They looked exactly like the Galderkhaani tunnels he had navigated previously. And then he heard it: the tunnels beyond the two mouths we
re filled with fierce winds, Aeolian fury like that which had dashed him against a rock wall, heat-generated fury that the Galderkhaani rode as a sort of rapid-transit system. This network consisted of ancient lava tubes that had been enlarged and expanded by the Galderkhaani. No doubt the earliest Galderkhaani towns and cities arose around the caldera of some ancient volcano, around hot springs, located in clearings carved by natural forces from the ancient ice sheets. Mikel believed that these natural channels were later connected by the Technologists, expanded as the civilization grew. Smokestack-like columns had been constructed throughout the ancient civilization, no doubt to allow the heat to vent, to prevent a cataclysm like Vesuvius or Krakatoa.
Mikel was nearly at the bottom of the pit when he saw that the figure in white was in a sitting position just above the ground. He could see that it was a woman and she was looking north. He wondered if this were another spirit or a recording of some kind, projected by the olivine tiles. There was a tranquility about the figure, something that didn’t fit with the others he had met. Thinking back to his first reaction—a pearl underwater—he realized it reminded him of classical views of mermaids: their long hair floating around them, their skin pale and fair, their attention on the sea and not those who would intrude from above.
Another archetype with roots in Galderkhaan? he wondered.
Whatever it was, the being did not acknowledge his presence, even when he rapped his flashlight on the utility bag. He thought he saw the chest moving slowly beneath what looked like a toga. The clothing was after the style of Rensat’s. It had to be an ascended spirit.
Mikel instructed Dr. Cummins to stop the winch. The rope-sling jerked to a twisting stop in the darkness, just a few yards above the figure. Now all that Mikel heard were his own breathing and heartbeat. He felt the condensation of his breath on the thick fabric of his muffler. He pulled it down, smelled his own musk rising from it.
Mikel reported everything he saw to Skett. There was a long silence before Skett’s voice cut through the hum of the phone.
The Sound of Seas Page 17