by Liz D. Marx
And with that, her best friend—her only friend—vanished with the wind.
Chloe remembered crying for several days after that. She called out for Lady, apologized for anything she might have done to push her away, begged for her to come back, but to no avail.
Days turned into weeks, weeks into months, and the hollowness in her little heart eventually faded away. Chloe had never completely forgotten her imaginary friend, but she eventually grew out of it, as adults do. She met new people, made new friends, and carried on with a normal life.
After long years of academic studies—a Bachelor of Science in history and a PhD in Native American History—she managed to get a job in the company of her dreams: The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
With nineteen museums, nine research centers and over 136 million relics in its collections, The Smithsonian was the largest museum complex in the world. Chloe had always dreamed of working there, side by side with the best archaeologists and anthropologists of her time, researching and discussing, finding new hypotheses for the world. So when she got her letter of offer, she was so overjoyed that she forgot to read it to the end. Two whole days had passed before she finally found out she’d been offered a position in the Archive Department.
“And what do people do in that department?” her mother had asked.
They were responsible for documenting, cataloguing and archiving every single one of the 136 six million items in all of the nineteen museums and nine research centers of the Institution.
And that’s what Chloe had been doing for the past two years.
But she wasn’t known for being a quitter. She was patient and resilient. She knew deep in her heart that one day she would be leading her own department specializing in Native American relics.
Not today, though; today she had been assigned, once again, to cataloguing the Black Hole. It wasn’t a real black hole of course; it was just how her colleagues endearingly referred to the Storage Room―a room located in the basement which housed more than thirty ten-foot tall shelves full of un-catalogued items that had been deemed “not urgent.” Whenever there was a quiet time in her department, they played Rock-Paper-Scissors to see who would be assigned the task of spending the day in the Black Hole. Somehow, Chloe always ended up stuck in the long, dark room between piles of boxes.
“Damn it!” Another paper cut. This one was really going to hurt. Some days she felt like just packing up and going home.
Chloe gave up on the pile of unfiled forms on the main desk and decided to carry on registering new items. Someone else was going to have to deal with those damned papers later. She went to aisle 23 and opened box number 6589B.
A cloud of dust invaded her nostrils.
She was wearing a protective mask, but it didn’t stop her from coughing her lungs up for a good three minutes. She suspected those masks were actually to protect the relics from contamination from the staff, not the other way around.
“How strange. Shouldn’t the dirt be outside the box, not inside?” she asked herself.
Waving the dust away, Chloe put the box down on the floor and peeked inside.
Rocks. There were probably over fifty rocks of all shapes and sizes.
“American, Pre-Columbian,” she read on the label.
Rummaging inside with the compulsory white gloves, she picked up a small brown rock that looked like it belonged to the Institution’s zoo rather than her department.
“Unidentified brown, circular-shaped object with no unique inscriptions or markings,” she said aloud while writing it down in the logbook.
“Right. One down, forty-nine to go,” she said and giggled at her own joke. At least she hadn’t lost her sense of humor.
A slight movement inside the box caught her attention, making her jump in fright.
She took off one of her shoes and, with her weapon ready in one hand and a pen on the other, she poked inside the box.
Nothing. No bugs came flying out; no reptiles crawled around her ankles. With a weird sense of disappointment, she prodded the contents a little bit further. A strange looking object came into view. It was a greenish-gray, triangular shape, with a wide base and a slightly narrow tip.
“Where have I seen this before?”
Chloe froze in place as her mind recalled where. Her hands started shaking, her heart pounding a million miles per hour in her chest.
Yes, she had seen that stone before―in her nightmares.
Forgetting the Smithsonian’s protocol of “how to handle antique artifacts”, Chloe threw the other rocks out of the way and picked up the gray stone. It was slightly larger than her hand, with rounded corners. There were symbols engraved all over its surface, but they were very faded—probably worn out with time.
Finding her feet again, she rushed across the room to the main desk. After carefully laying the stone on the protective sheet, she turned the magnifying lamp on and positioned it above the artifact. The first thing she noted was that there was an unnatural flake on the top.
“The tip’s broken,” she concluded.
She then picked up a small brush made of very fine bristles and slowly dusted the crevices. A few more symbols emerged as the scabs of dirt were lifted.
“They’re very similar to some Native American languages, and yet not quite the same.” A few were very simple and archaic, a clear indication of an earlier era than the Pre-Columbian.
She turned the relic upside down and cleaned the surface of its base. A circular symbol came to light. It was a circle within a cross, within a circle. A vague memory picked at her mind; she had seen that symbol before.
“The Sun God!” Her voice reverberated around the room. “Oh gosh, this is the same object! This is the... the...”
What had the Native American girl call it in her nightmare? Chloe tried her hardest to remember it but nothing came forward. Planting both hands on the table, she looked straight down at the relic and focused. She had to remember.
“It’s the something-stone... the... logging stone, no, the―” She even closed her eyes and tried to relive the nightmare, but nothing surfaced.
Not being known for throwing in the towel easily, she took the white gloves off and opened her bag. Sometimes, when her dreams were too real, she wrote them down; just in case one day they would all make sense. It was an impulse she couldn’t stop, so she had embraced it a long time ago.
After rummaging through her larger-than-life purse for a couple of seconds, she found what she was looking for―a little notepad with a red leather cover that had seen better days. Chloe flicked through the worn-out pages, her eyes focused on anything that could give her a clue, but there was no mention of the name of the damned artifact in her notes. Just its description in several passages.
“Darn,” she swore.
Exhaling in frustration, she shifted her focus back to the relic in front of her. Maybe its name would come to her later. Due to the fluttered frame of mind that she was in, instead of using the as-per-protocol “gloves plus brush” to clean the relic, she picked it up with her bare hands.
A light electric surge shot up her fingers, making her lose her grip and drop the stone on the floor.
“Impossible!” Chloe paused above it, staring at the thing in shock. “Stones aren’t conductors of electricity.”
Tentatively, she crouched down to touch the relic again and straight away her muscles cramped up.
So, being the good scientist that she was, instead of calling someone else who was obviously more experienced and qualified to deal with the unusual situation, Chloe folded her long sleeves up, took a deep breath, and grabbed the stone with both hands.
An immediate rush of power soared up her hands, through her elbows, along her arms and all the way to her neck, bringing warmth and something else that Chloe couldn’t put her finger on. It wasn’t painful, and certainly not the massive electric shock she was expecting. The rush was almost...inviting.
“Holy cow...” she whispered, unable to eve
n blink.
Turning the artifact in her hands, she noticed that the symbols barely visible just minutes ago now carried a strange glow, as if they were multicolored drawings, easily distinguishable now. She brushed the outlines with her index finger and each segment lit up at her touch. The longer she held the strange stone, the stronger the feeling of familiarity, of belonging.
Utterly in awe, Chloe focused on deciphering the symbols. She had studied a few of the major Native American languages as part of her PhD, so she knew that if the stone was American, she would be able to read it. And soon enough her hopes were confirmed; she could read some of the carvings, but not all. A few were very archaic and didn’t have the trimmings of the modern Cherokee or Caddo languages.
Chloe then turned the stone upside down to take another look at the image of the Sun God she had recognized earlier.
Her heart skipped a beat. In addition to the circle-cross-circle diagram, there were now a number of tiny icons around the symbol’s outer ring.
Being careful not to drop it again, she moved the stone underneath the magnifying lamp in the hopes of getting a clearer look. But it did the opposite. The lamp’s bright light only made the illustrations fade away.
“Argh!” she cried out in desperation.
Chiding herself for having possibly ruined everything, Chloe quickly took the totem away from the light and waited.
“The drawings should now resume their colorful state from before,” she told herself, as if saying it out loud would make it happen.
Nope, it didn’t.
“Crap.” What had she done?
Desperately, she rubbed the stone, cradled it with both of her hands and blew on it, as if it were a wounded bird. After a few seconds she felt warmth emanate from the relic once again and energy radiate up her arms. She let out a long sigh of relief when she opened her hands and saw that the symbols were back in full color. She brushed their outlines, mesmerized by that stunning occurrence and, once again, each little crevasse lit up with her touch.
“Holy moly a thousand times.” She was lighting them up! Her touch was what made the colors come out.
“So focus on reading them, you goose!” she scolded herself.
But it was easier said than done. The drawings around the Sun God were even more foreign to her than all the others on the stone.
In a rare eureka moment, Chloe killed all the lights and brought the artifact underneath the magnifying glass. She then slowly brushed the first symbol with her index finger. The shape of a thick arrow pointing upwards emerged in front of her. Her crazy idea had worked.
“What is light without darkness?” Chloe smiled, paraphrasing her favorite quote.
After analyzing the symbol for a few moments, she paused and searched her mind for the significance of that character in the Native American languages she had studied.
“Maybe it means alertness.”
She touched the next two symbols clockwise. The first one was a horizontal line on top of a half circle, and the second was a cross with a circle on each edge.
“Ceremony or ritual and...friendship?”
Chloe contemplated the three symbols together. They didn’t make any sense!
And then it hit her.
“It’s a poem! Ha!” she shouted, as if the lamp had doubted her talents. “A number of magical rituals were passed on to the next generation through poems and songs. It was certainly easier to remember than an encyclopedia on modern medicine.”
She stroked the fourth image and, for the third time that day, her eyes went wide in shock. At this rate, she was going to have a heart attack at any moment. The symbol was made of five concave lines, one above the other. Chloe would have recognized that icon from anywhere. It was the ancient Native American symbolization for the Rainbow. More specifically, the mythical Lady of The Rainbow, Goddess of the sacred Valley of Vapors, home to the magical Mantaka Falls.
“Oh gosh,” she sighed.
“Talking to yourself again, Chloe?”
Chloe jumped in surprise. Without a second thought she quickly held the stone under the table, out of sight. William Crawford, her boss, would be very unimpressed if he saw her dealing with any antique without wearing protective gloves.
“Oh, hi William,” she greeted with a fake smile.
“So, what are you looking at?” William asked, turning the main lights back on.
Chloe blinked at the blinding brightness. “Nothing major, just a few sediments.”
“In the dark?”
“I thought they glittered,” she replied quickly. “But they don’t.”
She walked over to the mess she had left lying on the floor of the twenty-third aisle and started putting the stones away.
“Have you had dinner yet?” William asked.
No, she hadn’t. She had forgotten again. “I had a late lunch,” she lied, trying desperately to shove the magical stone in her front pocket.
William took a few steps toward her. “Good, I brought your favorite,” he said, putting two bags of Chinese take-out on the desk.
“Oh, I’m so sorry, but I actually have to go,” Chloe murmured, carelessly placing the large box back on the shelf.
William was a nice boss. The other girls in the department drooled over him, but Chloe didn’t get what the fuss was all about. Yes, he was tall, blond and had amazing abs, but she actually admired his knowledge more than his body―yes, as pathetic as that sounded, she couldn’t help it. Besides, every time he came close, alarm bells rang inside her head as if warning her against something―like she were the iceberg and he the Titanic. It had become quite a challenge to live through the monthly one-on-one meetings with him.
“Oh, I thought you were putting in extra hours tonight,” William said, looking at the state she had left the place, with all the blank forms still on the desk.
“Yeah, err, I just remembered that I have a thing,” she replied, picking up her bag and placing it in front of her protruded front pocket.
“A thing?”
“Yeah, a thing... you know, a date.”
“A date?” He arched his brows in surprise.
“Yeah, a date. Why is it so hard to believe that I have a date?” She tried her best to look offended.
William seemed to have bought it. He lowered his gaze as if lost for words. Chloe took the opportunity to get the stone out from her front pocket and quickly shove it in her bag.
“I didn’t mean to offend you, Chloe. I just...never mind. I’m sorry.”
Chloe paused, guilt clamping her heart. There was her boss with her favorite Chinese take-out, and she blew him off like a fly. Bad Chloe. Very bad.
“No, I’m sorry, William. I’m just a bit edgy today. You’re right, it’s not often that I have a date.”
“Hey, forget about it,” he said with such big puppy-eyes that Chloe almost reconsidered and stayed. “More for me,” he added, lifting up the bags.
They walked out of the room and took the elevator together. The Black Hole was located on Basement L1, William’s office was on the seventh floor, but Chloe’s car was in the internal parking lot, four levels up. The bright red numbers on the little screen indicated they had just passed the first floor. This was going to be longest elevator ride ever.
“So, who’s Mr. Date?”
Chloe blinked a few times. Darn, William was probably testing her. And why wouldn’t he? That had been the lamest excuse ever. Her? On a date? Ha! What a joke! She never went out.
She’d had a few short-term boyfriends here and there, but those had been before she started working at The Smithsonian. She was so focused on making her way up the ladder that there was simply no time for romance, or dates; William Crawford knew that.
Chloe realized she was probably clueing him in on her lie by the way her knuckles were white from clutching her bag so tightly. Forcing herself to loosen up, she replied, “It’s actually a blind date.”
And there went the arched brows again.
Way to go, Chloe.
Sink in deeper, why don’t you?
“My mother insisted, and I couldn’t say no.”
“Of course,” he replied, the way you would respond to your crazy grandpa.
Chloe had to control her inner cheering when the P symbol appeared on the small screen on the wall and the doors opened.
“So, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”
William just nodded in response. He had obviously seen through her ridiculous excuse.
Chloe stepped out of the elevator, but then something clicked in her head. Wow, the second eureka moment of the day. There must be something in the water.
“Oh, actually, William,” she said, turning back around and blocking the elevator doors from closing, “I was thinking about your request last Christmas. You know, when you asked us to try and take annual leave when it’s quiet.”
“Yes, I remember asking you that,” William replied, not even bothering to hide his skepticism.
“Well, it’s really quiet at the moment,” Chloe carried on while battling with the elevator doors.
“And...”
“Well, I was wondering if I could take a week off, you know, to relax, and then come back fresh and ready for the school season.”
“School season doesn’t affect us, Chloe. This department is not open to the public.”
“But we have the occasional school tour,” Chloe argued with a coy smile. She had to get this leave, she just had to. “And they usually come in the last weeks of fall.”
After a moment of silence, William finally released a long sigh of resignation, “Fine, take next week off.”
“Thank you, boss!”
“Send me your official leave request and I’ll file it with HR tomorrow morning.”
“You’re the best boss ever!” She gave him a peck on the cheek then left toward the exit.
“Chloe.” It was William’s turn to hold the doors open. The elevator screeched in protest. “Just out of curiosity, where are you going?”
Chloe turned back around and replied with a determined smile. “Hot Springs, Arkansas.”