by Nathan Swain
Eastgate tried to pry the woman off of him, but his arms seem to flap like clothes on a line.
Look at your hands.
He gathered his strength and tried rotating his neck to the right. He couldn’t see his right hand. In its place appeared a mound of cotton rags. He lifted his head slightly and looked down at his right foot. It looked like a pear fruit.
What in the hell is happening? At last, he remembered. I’m dreaming. I’m not awake. None of this is real.
At last, his eyes fluttered open. He recognized the pictures on the bedroom wall. He had memorized them before he went to bed—a technique he had developed to help navigate mornings like these. Those are the same pictures from the night before. This is real. I’m not dreaming.
Eastgate lay in bed for several minutes. He was calm but still unable to move. In an effort to ease his mind, he started running through the line-up of the 1995 Atlanta Braves. Chipper at third, Blauser at short, Crime Dog at first. Slowly, his limbs loosened. His lungs filled with air. His eyes opened. The light and sounds of morning flooded his senses and he returned to life. His rational, waking mind began to reconstruct itself. Will Eastgate from Sea Island, Georgia. Parents killed by terrorists. Captain, US Special Forces. Afghanistan. Iraq. London. The safe house. Olivia.
Eastgate sat up in bed. A cold, dried sweat clung to his face. His shirt was drenched.
Good lord, that was terrible.
Eastgate had been suffering from sleep paralysis for the past five years. The first time it happened was just hours before an op was set to kick off in Eritrea. He was sleeping in a make shift barracks in the middle of the desert next to guys in his unit. When he saw the old woman’s face hovering above him he thought it was a witch doctor from the local village. He tried to kick her off of him but he couldn’t kick. He couldn’t move. When his movement returned minutes later, he thought he had been poisoned by one of the local teenage boys. It was a miracle he was able to complete the op later that night.
When it happened a second time on the deploy, the medic subtly suggested that he had been enjoying some of the local khat—a plant with hallucinogenic properties that Eritreans chewed like tobacco.
His condition was only diagnosed as sleep paralysis when he returned to Fort Carson for training. According to the Army psychiatrist, he hadn’t dealt with his grief caused by his parents’ death. His sleep paralysis resulted from all of those suppressed emotions. Eastgate thought the diagnosis was crap. He grieved for his parents for months. But then he made a choice to move on, and direct his grief toward a productive end: fighting bad guys around the world. How could he have reacted better? Psychiatrists thought every problem was about parents. This was different.
In his spare time, he worked to find out the real cause of his sleep problem, and amassed an archive of literature in the process. Investigating his ailment became a second career. After a few years, he could have written a dissertation on it. He eventually developed a working theory. Georgia folklore was full of stories of an old hag who leaves her body at night and sits on the chest of her victim. Most of the stories came from the lore of the Gullah people—a community of African Americans that lived in the coastal regions of South Carolina, Florida, and Georgia, including the Sea Islands where Eastgate grew up. In Europe, the old woman was associated with a mythological creature called a mare, and was known as a nightmare. In Gullah lore, the experience was called being hag-ridden.
In researching these accounts from Gullah lore, Eastgate realized it was exactly what he experienced—a moment in between sleep and wakefulness when the old hag appears and sits on her victims’ chests. Her victims have difficulty breathing and are unable to move, even as they lie in bed with their eyes entirely open.
Eastgate’s research also showed that the experience of sleep paralysis can be genetic. Because the Eastgates had lived in Georgia since the middle seventeenth century, he suspected that someone in his family had been infected with this sickly aspect of Georgia culture at some point, and that he was just the latest carrier of the disease.
One Army physician linked his condition to his language abilities. Across the service, Eastgate was marveled at for how quickly he learned to read, write, and speak foreign languages. It was a skill he had since he was a toddler, when a local child psychologist diagnosed him as a polyglot savant.
As a four-year old, Eastgate was fascinated by reference material like dictionaries and atlases, no matter the language. He would memorize pages and recite them back to his parents. By middle school he was conversant in three languages. Fortunately for Eastgate, he never experienced the cognitive difficulties associated with autism and Asperger’s like most other children with such ability. According to the Army doctor, the sleep paralysis could have come from the same quirk in his brain that made him a walking foreign language dictionary. “Genius has its downsides,” he told him.
But it wasn’t just a downside. It was almost debilitating. Eastgate was visited by the old hag at least twice a week. The fright of paralysis could be so intense that he often just avoided sleep altogether. Some Army doctors thought he should retire. So did some of his buddies. “Why don’t you go back to Georgia and enjoy your pension on that boat of yours?” Jarrett asked him once. “Some rest and a good woman—that’s what you need.”
Eastgate appreciated his friends’ concern. But he was a professional soldier, and this was just another battle he had to fight.
In the meantime, Eastgate had found some tools to help him cope with the problem. The Army psychologist introduced him to lucid dreaming. It was a practice developed in the 1960s where the dreamer is able to become conscious that he is dreaming and absorb and recall information about the dream with his rational mind. The psychologist recommended it to Eastgate as a reality check when the old hag visited.
The goal is for the dreamer to internalize certain techniques to apply during the dream state to verify that he is dreaming. One technique is for the dreamer to pinch his nose or close his mouth in the dream. When the dreamer realizes that he’s still breathing unimpeded, he assures himself that he’s dreaming. Another is to look at a clock, turn away, and look again. In a dream state, the clock would display a totally different time or something completely nonsensical. The techniques had helped Eastgate feel a little more control over the “episodes.”
The old hag had won every battle. He was determined to win the war. He would exhaust her. He would never give up. It would be a classic counter-insurgency.
This morning, however, Eastgate needed to focus on a new adversary. He leaned over to the table next to his bed and picked up a book: The Protectors of Paradise: The Secret History of The Society of the Flaming Sword.
It was high time, he decided, to honor Sun Tzu’s famous maxim of warfare: know thine enemy.
Chapter 39
“We need to go to the British Library right now,” Olivia shouted, barging into Eastgate’s bedroom.
“Good morning to you, too,” Eastgate responded tersely, peering at Olivia over his bifocals as he dog-eared a page in Sandwith’s book.
“I’ll explain later, just get ready.”
Half an hour later, a black cab carrying Eastgate and Olivia rumbled over the cobble-stone streets of Camden onto Prince Albert Road. Packs of tourists walked down the busy streets and massed in front of historic buildings like migrating African wildebeest resting at water holes. The morning sun refracted through the front windshield of the car, projecting a rainbow of light that bobbed and danced on Olivia’s forehead.
Eastgate rolled down his side window, filling the back seat with a turbulent rush of air. A clump of blonde curls covered Olivia’s eyes. Before leaving the safe house, she stumbled across a closet with hundreds of costumes and wigs, probably used by MI5 or the KGB for decades. She chose a curly blonde wig as a disguise.
“Are you going to tell me what we’re doing?” Eastgate asked.
“Could you shut the window?” Olivia shouted, pointing at her ears.
&
nbsp; Eastgate gestured at the cab driver. “I’d rather we keep this conversation private.”
Olivia nodded and cupped her left hand around Eastgate’s shoulder, pulling him close. “I was lying awake in that awful bed last night. Something had been bothering me since you showed me the tablet—what was the symbol etched at the bottom? It triggered a memory of an ancient Near East artifact, but I couldn’t recall what exactly.”
“And you remembered?”
“It was like an ecstatic vision. I recalled a conversation with my father. I couldn’t have been more than ten-years old. I haven’t thought about it since.”
The cab slowed. Olivia looked at the driver and lowered her voice to a raspy whisper. “We were at our sea-side summer cottage in Dorset. Daddy loved the place. We always had our best conversations there. Anyway, he told me about a man named—,” Olivia paused, as if she were about to out a double-agent, “Alexander Cyril Rich.”
The cab idled at a stoplight. The trumpet solo from the Beatles’ song “Penny Lane” played from the radio of the cab next to them. “Rich was one of the first great gentlemen explorers of the British Empire, and one of the first Europeans to write about the antiquities of the Near East. He was head of the British Munitions Company in Baghdad. He explored the buried cities of Babylon, Nineveh, and Persepolis.”
The light changed and their cab lurched forward. “Mind you, I hadn’t remembered any of this until last night.”
“During your ecstatic vision?”
“Correct. Anyway, what matters for our purposes is that Rich kept journals of his journeys. Daddy read them, of course. He loved them dearly, wanted to write his dissertation on them until he heard the unholy call of politics. “Rich’s journals are jewels from our imperial past,” Olivia said in a stentorian voice, mimicking her father.
Eastgate nodded in acknowledgment, but wondered if she was going anywhere with this, or if she was just happy to be talking about her daddy.
Olivia leaned in closer. “Now, listen. Daddy said the journals contain a reference to the Garden of Eden, including—,” she paused for effect, “a drawing of a symbol that Rich said was etched into a tree by Adam himself.”
“And Rich knew this, how? Did Adam pin his business card to the tree?”
“The discussion of Eden was ‘creative license,’ Daddy said, which even Rich indulged in during ‘the horrid age of Romanticism.’ Daddy abhors Romanticism,” Olivia explained.
The cab pulled behind a queue of identical squat black cabs in front of the British Library.
“When Rich returned, he was a celebrity. The British Museum put on an exhibit of the artifacts he collected. The museum purchased his papers and manuscripts when he died. For years, Rich’s journals were kept in the Reading Room of the British Museum. That’s where Daddy read them. I’ll give you one guess where they are now.”
“Scranton, Pennsylvania.”
Olivia ignored the quip. “No, right here. The British Library,” she said, pointing out the window excitedly. “The largest collection of books in the world second only to your Library of Congress. The symbol in Rich’s journal could match up with the symbol on the bottom of the tablet. Rich’s journal could be the clue we need to interpret the full meaning of the tablet.”
They stepped out of the cab. The red-brick plaza leading to the library’s foyer seemed to go on forever, funneling a wave of pedestrians between them and the entrance. It was a security nightmare. Eastgate had seen men assassinated in public at point blank range walking shorter distances.
He felt the M11, holstered around his shoulder, as it bounced with each step, and tried not to show his relief as they made their way into the foyer. “OK, I’ll wait for you here,” he said, adjusting an Atlanta Braves baseball cap he found in the safe house.
“You’re not coming with me?”
“I can’t. I’m packing,” he said, patting the shoulder harness and nodding at the metal detectors in the lobby. “Anyway, since 9/11, I imagine this place has more security than Windsor Palace. If you get into trouble, just scream. They’ll come running.”
Olivia wondered why she wasn’t packing. Wasn’t she Samir’s principal target? But maybe it was just as well. She would probably accidentally execute an innocent librarian. Besides, if her hunch was right, it wouldn’t take long to find what she was looking for.
A short elevator ride took Olivia to the European Archaeology special collections room. Black and white photographs of icons of antiquity—the Parthenon, the Sphinx, the Coliseum—hung on the walls in the reception area. A long, cherry wood desk separated Olivia from the stacks in the back. A door on the wall to her left led to the reading room. Olivia had spent thousands of hours in rooms just like it. They were her happy place. Now, amid the horror and turmoil of the past 24 hours, she longed to be inside that room, not only to read Rich’s journal but to be wrapped for just a moment in its comforting silence.
But she would need to get the journals first. She opened the mammoth, multi-volume index of the European collection in the reception area. She flipped to the listings under R. The Journals of Alexander Cyril Rich. There it is!
Because they were part of the special collections, the journals couldn’t be checked out and taken home. Indeed, because of their historical importance—not to mention financial value—viewing was limited to scholars affiliated with respectable academic institutions or on contract with major publishing houses. As a full professor at the University of Cambridge and one of the most famous archaeologists of the past century, Olivia clearly ticked the box.
She approached the circulation desk. “I’d like to see Rich’s journals. Item R134.110. Here’s my university ID,” she said.
“Professor Olivia Nazarian. University of Cambridge. Department of Archaeology.” The circulation librarian looked up at Olivia and down at the ID, frowning.
Olivia wondered what was wrong.
The librarian looked up at Olivia again.
“Professor, you’ve really changed your look, haven’t you?”
Bloody hell. The wig. I forgot. “Oh, yes. Well, I decided that blondes have more fun.”
The librarian frowned. “That’s why you’re at the special collections library, is it? To have more fun?”
Olivia could only muster a nervous titter.
“Please wait here.”
Does she think I’m an impostor? Has she heard about Allison’s murder? Is she connecting the dots? If she calls security, I’m done for.
Olivia started to inch toward the exit, but before she could escape, the librarian returned, bearing two fifteen-by-eleven inch notebooks wrapped in cloth. “You have until close. Good luck, professor.”
Olivia nodded politely as she accepted the notebooks from the librarian and secluded herself in the reading room. It was empty and deathly quiet: her ideal working conditions. She pulled the golden ball at the end of the chain hanging from a green desk lamp. It cast a warm orb of light onto the desk surface.
The pages of the journals were thin and brittle, like flakes of coconut. The writing was faded and nearly illegible. Olivia forgave Rich the sloppy penmanship. He probably wrote much of the journals in less than ideal circumstances—amid swarms of mosquitoes, flash floods, and blistering heat. Surely, he had no idea that scholars would be puzzling over his chicken scratches for the next two centuries. A half hour later, Olivia had finally deciphered Rich’s scrawl.
Olivia always found reviewing old, primary source documents to be exhilarating. But this moment was particularly meaningful. Rich was one of the original Assyriologists. And in her hands, she held a chronicle of one of the West’s first efforts to explore and understand the antiquities of the Near East. The journal was also something that had been reviewed by only a small number of people, many of them pivotal figures in the archaeology of the Near East and pioneers of her field. She thought of Professor Allison. He had probably held this journal in his own hands years ago. Olivia’s eyes welled with tears.
Then there was
her father. Olivia pictured him, a young man in his early twenties, absorbing these pages with ferocious curiosity. At least she still had him in her life.
Olivia looked at the clock. It was half past two. She pictured Eastgate pacing the lobby, giving each passerby the once-over for any sign of malintent.
Right. Get on with it.
Olivia had no idea where in Rich’s journey he wrote about the Garden of Eden. But she recalled Dashni mentioning that Rich had made a sketch about the experience. She slowly moved through the delicate pages of the journal, flipping through several pencil drawings of mounds, tablets, and pictograms.
It was the last sketch in the journal that caught Olivia’s attention. There it was: the same symbol etched into at the bottom of the tablet—infinity. Olivia’s heartbeat quickened. She looked at the first entry of text above the sketch, which was dated February 1, 1818:
I came upon a village; a peasant spoke to me. He said there was a plain where man was born called Eden. He said he had been waiting in the village many years to show it to me. He took me to a canyon with a very large lake. We walked toward the sun and into a cave near the lakeshore. The water came up to our chest and then we were submerged. I swam after him and almost ran out of breath when the water filled with light and I surfaced to a meadow of tall grass and wild flowers.
In the middle was an enormous cedar tree. Seven men could not wrap their arms around its trunk.
Carved into its wood, below the bark, was a symbol drawn by Adam. Not having my sketchbook with me at the time, I draw it from memory now:
∞
I walked around this majestic land, which appeared to be uninhabited. The man had disappeared and I returned. Despite repeated inquiries, I never found him again.
Chapter 40
Olivia opened her shoulder bag and removed the 3D scan of the tablet. There it was, at the bottom of the tablet—the same drawing in Rich’s journal. Olivia quickly copied Rich’s entire journal entry into her notebook. A frisson of joy ran up her back. Goosebumps sprouted onto the skin of her neck. It was a feeling most scholars never experience—the ecstatic joy of discovery.
