by Amanda Vink
Father stood up, taking her hands earnestly in his own. His flesh felt cold against her skin, which suddenly felt very warm. His eyes focused on her, intense.
“Marjorie, my girl,” he said. “You need to believe in something. Believing in yourself might not be a bad place to start. Believing that you were meant to be here might be even better.”
Another wave of pain rocked her, and she fell. Father called after her, but she couldn’t understand him. Everything went dark for a moment.
Then, all was quiet again. Except she could hear her steady breaths. She opened her eyes, and she realized she was still inside the tree, lying on the dirt floor. How am I alive?
She tried to move, but pain shot through her abdomen so sharp it took her breath away. She whimpered, trying not to move at all. When she wasn’t moving, the pain became steady and dull.
She was locked in. The tree had curled up on itself so much that the entrance to the antechamber was sealed, making it impossible to leave. Not that she had the strength to make her way back to the stairwell and the entrance at the tree had she had that option. I’m in my own tomb, she thought. She lay still on the floor in a fetal position, listening to the only sound—the flickering fire on the wall. Soon the fire would burn out, and she would be left alone in the darkness.
Her face pressed against the cold, hard earth. Even if she wanted to move around, there didn’t seem to be any point to it. There was nowhere to go. Absently, she observed the roots on the ceiling. Maybe if she had tools, she could use them to pry an opening. But she had nothing, just her dirty hands, which she couldn’t feel anyway.
She lay silent and listened to her body. Everything hurt, and she no longer had energy to fight the temptation to close her eyes. She wanted to go back to that space where she could spend time with her father. It would be a more pleasant place to spend my last few hours.
No one was coming back for her, she knew that. Besides, she thought bitterly, as soon as Richard learned where to go from Frank, he would kill him too. Maybe he would hold Hamid as ransom, if not worse.
She had failed.
Belief is the most important thing. That’s what her father said. But what good did it do when you were faced with the facts? She had to face the fact that she wasn’t getting out of here.
She rolled onto her back and closed her eyes. She felt herself drifting, but she couldn’t seem able to sink down into the comforting darkness again. Instead, she seemed to be stuck in some purgatory. She considered for a moment that’s where she was.
After a long time—she couldn’t be sure how long; a minute or a day—she opened her eyes again. The light shone a bit dimmer. Her head felt dizzy.
She lingered, not moving. She couldn’t find the strength, physically or mentally. Instead, she studied the top of the antechamber. The roots were old and gnarled, and she could see that if the tree had been dying before, it was completely dead now. There was no life left. Fitting.
She thought about screaming. Would anyone at the surface hear her? Likely not. Besides, the tree may have been in the city, but who knew how far they moved away from it underground?
Belief. But how could you believe something if you couldn’t see it, if the facts didn’t line up? She had no idea. But this morning she hadn’t believed in a golden tree, and here she was, trapped with one now. Maybe, just maybe, her father’s search wasn’t in vain. Maybe Richard would find the Tree of Life … and then what? He would become the most powerful man in the world. Darius had created one of the greatest empires the world had known up to that point in history. With modern technology, what couldn’t Richard accomplish?
She realized something was in her hand. Her fingers had been gripping it tight, although she still couldn’t feel them. She must’ve been holding it for a long time. Slowly, painfully, she lifted it up so she could see it in the dim light.
A small stone, black and shiny. On it, symbols had been etched into it. She couldn’t read them, if they were meant to be read. Where was Frank when she needed him? She rubbed the stone with the side of her thumb. The symbols looked strange, not like they had been carved in, but like the stone had grown that way. It reminded her of Celtic knots. Of Frank’s necklace from his mother.
And what was she supposed to believe? That something supernatural would save her?
Do you believe that?
The question remained unanswered.
It was beginning to get stuffy, difficult to breathe. She wondered how much air she had left. She thought about miners who spent the majority of their lives underground. Once, when she was a little girl, she had toured a mine. She had been fascinated by the canaries in their little cages. One of the miners had scared her and told her the reason they brought birds down into mine shafts. “We bring ‘em down because they’ll die first—either from lack of oxygen or from bad air.”
Bad air.
The understatement of the century.
Chapter Twenty-Three
She studied the roof of the cave—a series of interconnected lines created by the roots of the tree. Her eyes went over them, again and again. They were gigantic. Large enough for her to walk on if there was only a place to go. If only she could figure out how to pry them loose and get out.
She didn’t know if it was from the lack of fresh air or from the lack of blood, but she kept having visions—she wasn’t sure what else to call them. They couldn’t be real, she insisted, but they felt so. The light was always bright and ethereal.
She had just come out of one, where she had been talking to her father again. He had been in the chamber with her, urging her to get up.
“Marjorie,” he said. His voice sounded amused, as though he might laugh, as though he didn’t have a care in the world. When she didn’t answer, he spoke again. “Marjorie, you need to get up.”
“Why? There’s no way out of here.”
He sat down next to her, using the tree root as a chair. “Come now,” he urged. “Aren’t you going to at least try?”
Marjorie was feeling lightheaded. She felt like a small child again, one who had done something naughty. “I already tried,” she pleaded. She raised an arm and put it over her eyes. The skin of her forearm felt smooth against her forehead. Her arm felt very heavy.
Maybe she fell asleep, but when she woke again she was standing in her father’s library. She was the only person there. She felt cold now and a little sick—goose bumps pricked her skin. But something told her she needed to focus. What was she doing here?
She rested her hand on top of the books. There was a musty scent coming from them. It soothed her—being so close to old knowledge that had been wrapped up and contained. It was known. It wasn’t going anywhere. There was nothing to question here.
Although she knew that wasn’t true. Question everything. That was what journalists did.
In this dream world, she missed her camera. She wanted to hold it again, to go out into a field and take wide shots of nothing but the grass. But it was back with her body in the golden tomb.
She rested her head on the books. The spines felt soft like pillows.
Marjorie looked down. One of the books there had pulled away from the rest. Gingerly, she reached for it, easing it from its space. It was old and worn, but she couldn’t make out the name of it.
She had read somewhere that the human mind often works like a reference library. You can’t store all the information—in a day alone there is too much for the brain to process. Instead, a human brain stores the bare bones of experiences. When the information is needed, the brain finds that information and recreates it. It’s very much like going to a library and pulling out a book.
She opened the book in her hands and realized it was the bible. It opened at Genesis 1:28, and an image of her and Uncle Charlie in her father’s study came to mind. 1:28. Of course!
“… and that by means of these the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished.”
The story of the flood. She closed the book. Anot
her tome on the shelf called to her then. The Epic of Gilgamesh. She had read it as a child. It was the Sumerian story of the flood. What does the flood have to do with any of this?
The original clue written on her father’s map indicated the Tigris and the Euphrates. But as she fingered through these new sources, she realized they had been wrong the whole time about its location. Coming out of the Garden of Eden were four rivers, two of which were named the Tigris and the Euphrates. But the world had been flooded. The Garden of Eden had been completely destroyed during the flood, along with those rivers.
But the Tigris and the Euphrates existed, obviously. That’s where they found the dead tree.
Or maybe not, she considered. If the people renamed two new rivers after the old ones, it’s possible the Tigris and the Euphrates weren’t even close to the original locations.
She felt a burst of energy—of her old self. She was a cat batting the end of a string that was slowly starting to unravel. She felt curiosity stir within her.
She dug into the books on the shelf. She didn’t know what she was looking for. The entrance could’ve been anywhere. After all, most civilizations on Earth had some kind of variation of the Tree. She thought about Frank’s pendant, given to him by his mother.
This was impossible. She let out a huff, which moved the hair hanging over her head. She noticed another book on the shelf and pulled it out. This was a different kind of text, a Buddhist text.
“At first I was thinking about it the way you are now.”
It was her father’s voice. She turned and smiled, happy to see him again. He wore a silk robe, and in his hands he held a tray full of two tea cups and a steeping pot of tea. He set it on his desk and poured it, then handed her one of the cups. Its warmth radiated through her hands. Her heart was also warm again, seeing him and talking to him.
“I thought it was a place too,” he continued. “A place I could get to if only I drew the right coordinates. If only I knew the latitude and longitude.”
“You’re not making any sense,” she said, aware of the knot of tension building in her shoulders. This wasn’t getting any clearer—only more difficult and more dangerous.
“Humans have a difficult time thinking spiritually,” he said. “Our brains want wood and stone, flesh and blood.”
She wasn’t getting it.
“Look at my map again,” he instructed.
To her amazement, it appeared completely intact on the table. She moved too quickly, spilling the tea on the carpet. But she needed to know. She needed to know if all of this was real or if she was just in the middle of some strange delusion. She knew her body was still in the cave. But where was her mind? Or was this her spirit?
She studied the map. The original letters—the clue in Cairo. All of that was still there. She definitely did not understand.
“Look again,” her father said.
She did as she was told. On the map now other places had been circled—these places existed all over the world. She saw one in Ireland, near Belfast, and her thoughts turned to Frank. I hope you’re alright. But she needed to focus, for his sake. What were these circled places trying to tell her? She hadn’t paid them much heed until that moment. Were they circled on the original map? She couldn’t remember.
“There are shrines that exist all around the world called dargahs,” he continued. “They are connection points, really—portals to a spiritual world.”
Marjorie remembered what Frank had said back at the Tree of Knowledge—about using portals to find Paradise. Maybe this was the same thing.
“My dear,” her father said, pulling her thoughts back. “Dear, I believe you already know where to go.”
And suddenly she looked up at nothing.
She still stood in the underground chamber, still trapped. Still nowhere to go. And what had she learned? That the two rivers weren’t the two rivers? Or they weren’t the original two rivers. If she could get out of here, she would have to walk into the desert.
Her fingers ached. She realized that she still clutched the shiny stone. She held it in her hands so tight that her knuckles were turning white.
And just like that, she realized she had been staring at the answer all along. She lifted the stone again in the dim light. It held the same pattern as the indentation in the ceiling. She considered, Maybe it fell out when everything moved.
She slowly rose to her feet, grabbing her stomach. Moving brought back the pain, but she had to try one last time. If there was a way out, she would find it.
“Well, here goes nothing,” she said.
Just standing underneath, she could not reach the ceiling. But if she stood on the roots, which still managed to hold up the walls—although she didn’t know for how long—she just might make it. The roots were huge, bigger than she was and long and wide from centuries of growth.
She shimmied her way onto one large root, moving very slowly. She was soaked in her own blood, which had already dried on her clothing, making it that much more difficult to move about freely.
She held her core muscles in as tight as she could, which caused her considerable pain. But she had to maintain her balance. If she fell, it was over. She had to keep reminding herself to breathe.
One step, and then another. Before she knew it, she was halfway out on the limb.
Another step. She could almost reach the center of the antechamber. From this angle, she could see a small space right at the center, perfect for the stone.
She reached out her arm and felt herself going over. No! No! With all the strength she could gather, she tried to pull herself upright, but her footing slipped and she started to tumble. She grabbed the root with her arms, pulling herself up as best as she could. Come on! She hit hard against the side of the root, scraping her arm and knocking her face. The punch to her gut pushed the air out of her lungs. She wanted to scream, but even if she could, she worried she would let go if she did. She tried not to look down or concentrate on the pain. Get up.
Somehow, she pulled herself back onto the root. When she caught her breath, she pulled herself into a squatting position. She reached her hand heavenward—but she couldn’t make it. She would have to stand.
Her legs shook as she extended her arm, and her fingertips brushed the edge of the opening. The stone slipped into place.
Suddenly, the entire room began to quake. Marjorie fell to her knees, clutching the limb with all the strength she had left. Sand started falling from the ceiling. She realized with a start that she had not saved herself after all—she had killed herself.
The light of the torch extinguished when falling sand snuffed it out. Everything went dark. Marjorie felt movement underneath her. The very roots themselves moved out from under her.
But instead of falling, they moved her up.
Suddenly, fading light shone on her face. The ceiling of the chamber opened up. She was out.
Beneath her, the chamber collapsed. The roots pulled back into the earth, like a sea creature returning to the deep. When the rumbling stopped, the roots and the tree had disappeared completely.
But one thing remained. The stone. It broke in half, and right at its center a small seed stuck out. Marjorie took it. It was so small. She marveled that such a tiny thing could do so much. She dug out the stone and pieced it together around the seed to protect it. She didn’t know why, but she slipped it into her pack.
She was far outside the city limits now. The only thing left was desert and hill and water leading to the gulf. Did we really come so far? She didn’t believe it. It wasn’t possible. But it was the truth.
She knew deep down that she had to stop Richard and save Frank and Hamid. She took a step, but the pain in her abdomen doubled. Looking down, she saw fresh, hot red blood. She hurt herself even worse getting out. She looked at her hands, covered in crimson.
Gazing up, she saw someone in the desert. Her vision blurred and she couldn’t make anything out, but she knew someone was there. She reached out her hand, but befo
re she could cry out, she felt the world go black.
Chapter Twenty-Four
When Marjorie woke up, she found herself in the desert at a small camp. She blinked in the sunlight, moving to shield her eyes from its intense brightness. When her eyes adjusted, she looked around and saw a single tent. The hide that covered it flapped gently in the breeze. Around her gathered a small handful of men. Bedouins, she guessed by their clothing and the array of materials they had with them. They were armed, but not menacing. She looked into each of their tanned faces, and they looked back at her as though she was just a sack of grain they were carrying through the desert.
She sat up, wincing as she did so. Her body ached. Then she remembered: the Tree of Knowledge. Memories filtered in, and in her mind she watched them play like a film. Frank. Hamid. How long had it been? Did she still have a chance at saving them?
She felt soft, thick bandages around her midsection. It all really happened. Without the kindness of these strangers, it was likely she would be dead. She thanked them in Arabic. Beyond that, neither party could understand the other. She just hoped they didn’t know Richard or Seif.
With that thought, she looked around for her bag and saw it draped over the saddle of one of the horses. So, she thought. I don’t have my knife or Uncle Charlie’s gun. But at least the gun is here and not buried.
One of the men, a stoic character with soft brown eyes, saw that she was awake and checked her bandages. He nodded once, and from there she was encouraged to stand up and get on a horse.
The pain in her stomach made her wince, but there was no way to refuse. The whole camp was on the move. She found herself being lifted onto the animal, and then the man catapulted himself into the saddle directly behind her. He arranged the reins around Marjorie. Dread filled her stomach. She had no idea where they were or where they were taking her. She panicked, her mind shifting to all the dire possibilities. What if Richard had left this group behind and she was doomed? All around them sand dunes rolled. No one would hear her if she screamed.