Syphon: Guardians of the Fractured Realms (17 page)

Frank walked over to the desk. After a moment of moving and shuffling stuff, he returned, handing the professor a notebook while pulling a pen out of his pocket.

“Here.”

The professor gave a vague nod, grabbing the notebook and pen. Laying the photos out, he started rapidly taking notes. Without looking up, he started talking.

“You said his name was Samuel. If he didn’t have any memory, how do you know his name?”

“That’s another mystery. A woman by the name of Sybil showed up at his room shortly after he escaped. She’s the one who identified his name as being Samuel.”

“Interesting. What did she look like?”

“Well, she was dressed head to toe in black and wore a black trench coat…”

She paused when the professor snapped his head toward her, locking his eyes on her.

“A woman dressed in black wearing a black trench coat? I don’t suppose it was a leather one, was it? About midway down her shin in length?”

Cora nodded at him before glancing at Frank.

The professor turned back to the photos as he waved at her to continue.

“Anyway, she mentioned his name while looking around the room. I got distracted for a moment. When I looked back, she was gone.”

The professor nodded to himself, mumbling.

Cora wasn’t sure, but she thought she heard him say, “not surprised.”

Picking up the crime scene sketch that Cora had drawn on, he held it up toward them.

“Nice piece of detective work there. I’m surprised any of you caught that. Might I ask if there were any mysterious piles of ash there, or maybe slashes or other marks that didn’t make sense? Maybe gouged right out of the concrete floor?”

“How’d you know?” she asked as she exchanged glances with Frank.

“Just a hunch. I don’t suppose you have a picture of this ‘Samuel’ person you’re looking for do you?” he asked as he puffed on his pipe.

Cora pulled out her phone, turning it so he could see the screen. As she flipped through them, she said, “These are really the only pictures we have of him. I took these just before he woke up in the hospital. We really didn’t have a chan—”

She was interrupted by the professor slumping back against the table, sucking air in through his teeth.

Looking back up at her, he asked, “You said this guy was unconscious, with no memory of who, or what, he was?”

Cora was shocked by the sudden change in the professor’s appearance. Up to this point, he had seemed to be confident and robust for his age, almost to the point of being rude and condescending. Now he was leaning against the table, shaking slightly. His face had gone ashen in color, and it took him a minute to compose himself. He finally straightened himself up and walked briskly over to his desk, almost ignoring his cane in the process. Dropping down in his seat, he opened a drawer and pulled out a glass and a bottle.

Frank sucked in a loud gasp.

“Is that what I think it is…?” he asked, his hand shaking slightly as he pointed at the bottle.

“By that, do you mean a rare bottle of Glenfiddich Janet Sheed Robers Reserve 1955?” the professor asked, a slight smile playing across his face as he pulled the stopper out of the bottle.

“I picked up three bottles of the stuff when it went up for auction back in ‘05. It’s quite nice, actually. Would you care for a dram?”

Cora looked over at Frank to see his eyes bulge out before hesitantly nodding yes. The professor reached into his desk, pulling a couple more glasses out before nodding toward Cora.

“Would you like a dram yourself, detective?”

She shrugged her shoulders before nodding as well. She watched as he poured two fingers worth into each glass. As he handed the first glass to Frank, she continued to be confused by Frank’s actions. He carefully took the glass from the elderly man’s hand before slowly bringing it up to his nose, inhaling the fumes deeply. A look of bliss crossed her partner’s face as the professor handed her a glass as well.

Looking back and forth between the two men, she sniffed the contents of her glass.

“From my partner’s reaction, I’m going to guess this isn’t your everyday swill from the local liquor store?”

The professor smiled back at her, chuckling slightly as her partner replied.

“Not in the slightest. Do you know how rare this stuff is? I remember reading about this stuff on the top ten most expensive scotches ever sold. This one,” he said, taking a small sip with his eyes closed, savoring it before continuing, “went up for auction for ninety-four grand a bottle.”

Cora’s almost dropped her glass before she caught herself.

“Wait a minute, that means…”

“That you hold about eight grand worth of alcohol in your hand,” the professor said as he took a sip, “like I said, it’s quite nice.”

“So you mean to tell me you keep a bottle in your desk that’s worth more than some people’s houses? And you have no problems just giving us a glass of it?”

“Well detective,” he said as he took another sip, “I felt the reward fit the gift.”

Frank glanced at the other man.

“Gift?”

“Why yes, detective Giani. A most wonderful gift. One that I might never have received if you hadn’t been so rude, I might add.”

Cora exchanged confused glances with her partner before looking back at the professor.

“I’m not sure I follow you,” she said.

She watched as he got up from behind his desk and limped over to a colorful wall hanging. Sliding it to the side, she saw that it had hidden a six foot tall safe embedded into the wall. As he spun the dial, he started talking to them over his shoulder.

“Long before either of you were born, I was on an archaeological dig over in Egypt. We had found a partially uncovered pyramid buried centuries earlier. What made this pyramid unusual, other than the fact that the top of it barely stuck out of sand, was that the stones in it were significantly older than what was used in the Cheops pyramid in Giza. The fact that the pyramids in Giza were still pretty much at the surface while this one was almost completely buried suggested that it was built by an unbelievably old, unrecorded culture. If our guess was correct, this pyramid was centuries older than what was currently believed to be the age of the human race. This one find would have proved that humans had been around thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of years earlier than originally believed. If I would have been able to make this knowledge public, it would have changed the course of archeology.”

“Anyway,” he said, finally unlocking the safe and swinging the door open, “our dig lasted for several months before we were able to uncover a doorway to the interior.”

As he said that, he gently lifted what appeared to be a silk-wrapped package from the interior. Holding it reverently, he carried it over to his desk before going back to the safe and carrying over an accordion file brimming with documents. Setting the file down, he glanced up at them.

“Detective Blanchett, could you please lock my office door? I don’t want to be disturbed while I show you this.”

Cora walked back over to the door and locked it. As an afterthought, she closed the blinds on the door as well. Returning, she watched him gently start unwrapping the object.

“So after months of careful excavations, and days of slowly mapping out the interior, we finally made it to the Kings chamber, where we found this…” he said as he finally revealed what he’d had hidden in his wall safe.

Shimmering under the dim lights of the office, Cora glanced down at a near twin of the jewelry Samuel wore on his arm.

“What! You found that in an ancient pyramid? How old IS that thing, exactly?”

Cora stared at it intently. Granted, it wasn’t exactly the same as the one on Samuel’s arm. For starters, this one was shades of red and gold while his was blue and silver. The head and body of this one appeared to be more powerfully built while Samuel’s would be better described as sleek. She tried to spot more differences as Professor Waide gently laid it down on his desk, on top of the silk wrapping.

“Honestly, we haven’t been able to determine it’s exact age. Every method I’ve tried to identify it with has come up empty. Acids, files, hammers, and more recently, X-rays, ultrasound, and lasers, have had absolutely no effect on it. I haven’t found anything yet that can even scratch it, let alone test it. The best I’ve been able to do is estimate it’s minimal age, based off other things we recovered from the pyramid. Some of the pottery dates the pyramid back to around one hundred and eighty thousand years B.C., based off carbon dating.”

“What! How’s that possible? If all that’s true, then how come we haven’t heard anything about all this.”

Cora noticed the professor’s face sag slightly before he took another sip of his scotch.

“Therein lies the great tragedy. Apparently, that whole structure was designed to protect that thing,” he said, waving at the jewelry on his desk.

“As soon as I picked it up, there was a brilliant flash of light before the entire structure started shaking. I barely remember grabbing it and trying to get to safety before the whole place collapsed and was buried under hundreds of tons of sand and rock. We lost over thirty people that day, some of whom were buried alive in there. Others were sucked to their death in the quicksand that formed as the structure sank.”

“Quite honestly, I’m not even sure how I survived. All I know is that I had somehow made it out while others didn’t. When the survivors of my team found me, I was several hundred feet away from the opening, clutching that to my chest like it was a child.”

“I was delirious for several days before I finally came to my senses. From that disaster, I’ve devoted my life to trying to figure out who could have made something like that, and more importantly, why history makes no mention of them. Sure, I’ve seen crackpot theories, like it was made in Atlantis, or something similar. I’ve even had to fend off some folk who swore it was from aliens. None of it really answers the question of who created it or for what purpose. For that matter, the biggest question is, how were they able to create it? Our currently technology can’t even figure out what it’s made out of, yet it’s nearly two hundred centuries old. The oldest known remains of homo sapiens are around that same age, so how would a race that used rocks as advanced weaponry make something like that?”

Professor sunk back into his chair, lost in thought as he finished off his glass of scotch.

Cora stared at the piece of jewelry laying on the professors desk. After a minute, she looked up at him quickly.

“Wait a minute, if that thing is that old, then how’s our boy sporting a near replica?”

Frank looked at her, surprised by the question. His eyes widened slightly before looking back at the professor.

“That, my dear, it the million dollar question. If you can figure it out, I’ve got another bottle of scotch with your name on it. Out of all my years of searching, that photo on your phone is the only evidence that they still exist. The only other thing I’ve ever been able to determine is that they were worn by a race called Syphons, but nothing to indicate why. Even that I’m not sure of since it was based off of a translation of a translation found in some documents that were traced back to the ancient library in Alexandria. Parts of the document was damaged, so the final translation wasn’t really clear. It implied they were either protectors or destroyers, but the documents were too damaged to be sure. Whoever they were, they appeared to be more technologically advanced than even we are today.”

The professor shook himself slightly. He eyed the bottle of scotch before putting it back in his desk.

Looking up at them, he said gravely, “To answer your original question, I think you’re quite right to be concerned with the coming Halloween. Those pictures from the warehouse are indicative of a significant ritual being performed. I would suspect that there’s going to be four or five more of these rituals being performed between now and then, with the final one happening on all hallows eve, at midnight, when the curtain between our world and others are thinnest. You don’t have much time to stop whatever is going to happen, but I have to believe that the results would be catastrophic if left unchecked.”

Samuel got back to the apartment a little later than he expected. The whole way home, he kept having weird sensations when he passed by certain people or areas. He had been vaguely aware of the sensations when he had traveled to the first jewelry store, but now that he was on edge from his near run-in with the strange people dressed in black, each odd sensation fairly screamed at him, like nails on a chalkboard.

Closing the door behind him, he collapsed on the couch, exhausted. He wasn’t sure why, but he felt more tired now than he did after all the sword-fighting and sparring from last night. His nerves felt raw and twitchy. It might have been his imagination, but he could have sworn that he’d seen several weird creature-type people on the trip back. Some of them were similar to the one he’d run into at the library.

When he had looked at them, they seemed to develop a double-image effect, similar to what happened at the library. When he focused on them, they looked human while their ghost image took on all sorts of fantastic shapes. It was disconcerting enough that he debated having Blythe take him back to the hospital when she got back. He knew the doctor had said he didn’t have any lasting brain trauma, but with the continuing hallucinations, he wasn’t so sure.

Looking up at the clock, he realized Blythe should be home within a few minutes. After a brief pause, he decided to head back downstairs to meet her, hoping to work off some of the nervous energy he’d built up on the trip back.

Closing the door, he heard arguing in the distance. As he started down, he noticed the argument was somewhere below him. With a start, he realized that one of the voices belonged to Blythe, while the other was male. As he quietly descended, he noticed the volume of the argument slowly escalating.

“It’s none of your business who he is. We’re not together anymore. You can’t tell me what to do!”

As he turned the final corner, he noticed Blythe was cornered by the guy that had caused his weird sensations when he’d left earlier. As he approached, he saw Blythe try to get around the man, but he grabbed her and pushed her back into the corner.