Keystone (26 page)

Gail opened her eyes, but could
see nothing.
 
She blinked twice, each
time chasing away an army of frenzied white dots, like TV static. The darkness
in which she found herself was so complete that she had to work out if her eyes
were open or not by mentally checking the position of her eyelids.
 

She blinked
half a dozen more times, a reflex of her eyes trying to adjust to the total
absence of light, then lifted a hand up to her face, but it was like moving
through treacle; eventually her fingers reached her cheek and made their way
numbly to her eyes.
 
Her eyelashes brushing
against her fingers told her that they were indeed open, and that there was
nothing obstructing them.

Her second
hand made its way towards the first and together she let them run over her face
and body. To her relief, everything was there as it should have been.

Sensation,
slowly, began returning and she started to feel a cold, hard surface against
her back and head.
 
She was lying down on
what her palms told her was a flat, metallic material.

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
ear-drums 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.

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 brain 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 16
^th
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 16
^th
?
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 13
^th
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.