The Pharos Objective

by David Sakmyster

  At least that part of my past is over.

  Caleb took a deep breath as a trio of buzzing gnats flew about his face. Lydia helped him up, and they walked out of the ruins toward the distant tourist area and the two cabs waiting patiently for fares.

  “So, if your vision is true,” Lydia began, “then we have an even more tragic picture of what was lost at Alexandria.”

  Caleb stopped. For a moment, the sunlight skipped like a dozen flat stones across the Nile and he had a flash of clarity, a moment of understanding, as if he had somehow restored a waking connection to the historical vision. A rush of faces passed before his mind’s eye, a tumultuous crowd of men and women. He had the certainty that they were all involved in a grand legacy, a noble plan, a cosmic secret. Plato’s words echoed in his mind: “. . . you have to begin all over again like children, and know nothing of what happened in ancient times.” Then it vanished as Caleb saw something out of the corner of his eye—a blurry figure in the distance. He squinted. There on the opposite bank stood a man. Out of place, looking like the stump of a diseased palm tree. He was so narrow, so motionless—until he lifted his arm, and pointed at Caleb.

  The air shook, an invisible ripple extending out from that finger to Caleb’s heart. He jolted back, spun and Lydia just barely steadied him.

  “Do you see him?” Caleb shouted, frantic, pushing away and running toward the river. “There!” But the far bank was empty. Only desolate shrubs and a jumble of rocks. Caleb turned to see Lydia giving him a frightened look.

  She came to him, held his hands, kissed his sweaty forehead. “Let’s get you back to the hotel.”

  6

  Venice

  Whatever had let loose his visions at Sais, whatever jolt had restored the sight, it was responsible for releasing a chain of successive dreams of such realism over the next week that Caleb and Lydia decided against returning to the States until they had sorted them out.

  Caleb filled one sketchbook, then another. He tried to force daytime trances to get more clarity, and he again slept with a coffee cup full of sharpened pencils and a pad of paper next to the bed. Lydia would sit quietly by his side, run book errands, and bring him water and food. Watching and biting her nails from the shadows.

  Finally, he gave up; the visions were not progressing past the point he had already reached. Lydia coaxed him into talking, and he described what he’d seen, the same rush of images he had been privy to back in the harbor in Alexandria. In an excited, breathless voice, as the song of cicadas drifted on Mediterranean breezes through their window, he said, “It starts on Pharos Island. Alexandria. I believe it’s two hundred and seventy-nine BC. Just before Dedication Day.”

  “Dedication of what?” Lydia asked.

  Caleb smiled and told her the story of what had come in pieces and jumbled images, like video clips in his mind. The story of Sostratus and Demetrius, the tour of the lighthouse, the cryptic words of its builder . . . all the way to the point where Sostratus had led his visitor down those stairs. But then it ended. And despite his attempts to go farther, to venture below through the vault door with Demetrius, the visions wouldn’t oblige.

  “Maybe you need to give your mind a rest,” Lydia proposed. “A vacation.”

  Before returning to Alexandria, where they’d hoped Caleb’s visions would continue and lead them to further answers, they took a month’s vacation on a cruise up the Nile, visiting the Valley of the Kings, Luxor, Karnak, Abydos and other amazing sites he had only read about. Caleb’s dreams were filled with enormous pyramids, sprawling pillars, cyclopean roofs, rows of hieroglyphs and painted wall reliefs. Then they spent a week in Cairo, at the museum and in the markets and among the Pyramids. But before embarking on the last leg of the cruise and making their way to Alexandria, they went to Venice.

  To get married.

  They crossed the Mediterranean, passed within ten miles of Rhodes and then Malta, and continued past the tip of Sicily and up the coast of Italy. Caleb pointed out the Bay of Naples and the Royal Palace, where he could almost see the scholars in white coats still teasing millimeters of carbonized papyrus from the Herculaneum scrolls. They went around the boot of Italy, circled back and continued north past Tuscany until they entered the canals of Venice. While Caleb ordered dinner, Lydia secured a room on the eastern side of the city, overlooking St. Mark’s piazza. And that night, under velvety purple skies, they were married.

  Facing each other in a gondola, as the full moon painted them in ghostly auras, they said their vows before a priest, in Latin. They held hands and kissed, and people cheered—people on the bridges, people in their homes looking down, people at the edge of St. Mark’s.

  They celebrated with a wonderful seafood dinner unlike anything Caleb could remember. And then there were three bottles of wine, some Chianti to wrap up the night before they stumbled back to their room. Dizzy, Caleb promised Lydia they’d consummate the marriage in the morning, and she giggled and agreed as she pulled up the sheets.

  Under the covers, away from the lights from the cathedral, she whispered in his ear, “I have to tell you something.”

  Caleb laughed and kissed her fiercely. He felt her nakedness entwining around him completely. He could not have been happier. His only regret was not the suddenness of their decision to marry, but the fact that he hadn’t told Phoebe.

  “What is it?” Caleb whispered back, nibbling at his wife’s lips.

  “Something about me,” she said. “I need to tell you—”

  “Can it wait?” he asked, trying to stop the room from spinning. He wished he had taken some aspirin. Mildly curious about what she had to say, he suddenly imagined that the alcohol had freed some inherent block, and a small window had opened, which he could peer into and learn whatever dark secrets his new bride harbored.

  “No,” she said. “It can’t wait. But . . . I don’t know if I can say.”

  “Tell me,” Caleb insisted, barely able to keep his eyes open. But at that moment, his stomach lurched, the room spun even harder, and he ran to the bathroom, which happened to be down the hall, shared by six other guestrooms. Fortunately it was empty, and when he returned to the room, Lydia was snoring. He slid under the covers and fell fast asleep beside her.

  In the morning, the phone woke them up.

  Lydia got to it first. “Wrong room,” she said, slamming the receiver down. Her hair was a mess, and sheet lines were written over her face. She turned to Caleb. “Ugh. Sorry, I don’t think that was the most romantic of wedding nights.”

  “No.” He groaned. “But the ceremony was nice.”

  “Sure was.” She sighed and looked out the window, closing her eyes and feeling the cool Venetian winds. “Let’s get something to eat and go see the cathedral.”

  Caleb got up, then sat back down, the room still pitching. He put his head between his hands and groaned. “Was there something you were going to tell me last night?”

  She shot him a glance of surprise. “I don’t . . . I don’t think so.”

  “You’re not already married, are you?”

  She walked over, bent down and gave him a long, lingering kiss. “Yes, that’s it. I’m actually married to the prince of Monaco, and when his royal soldiers find out what you’ve done, your death will be unspeakably cruel.” She smiled and tousled his hair. “Of course I’m not married. You know I’ve been waiting for you.” Her eyes, like emerald pebbles, searched his face, his eyes, his tangled hair. “I don’t remember what I said last night, honey. But I do remember you saying something about consummating our marriage?”

  He grinned and pulled her back onto the bed.

  Inside St. Mark’s Cathedral they jostled in and out of crowds, shuffling from the gorgeous statues of one saint to another, from one sprawling mosaic to the next, only to find themselves standing before a wall-length image depicting, of all things, a lighthouse.

  “Didn’t you know about this?” Lydia asked, and for a moment Caleb had the suspicion that she had directed him to
this spot on purpose, maybe to get him thinking about the past again.

  “I did, but I forgot. I remember something in my father’s research about one of the earliest surviving depictions of the Pharos being found here.” Caleb traced the tiny facets making up the image. “Not quite to scale, and smaller than I’ve seen, but that’s it.”

  “Why is it here?” she asked.

  “St. Mark was thought to be martyred in Alexandria. And later, in 829 AD, Christians made a daring raid into Alexandria, stole his body out from under the Arabs and buried him here, under the main altar. Along with his body may have come the legacy of the Pharos, and one of few surviving pictures of what it really looked like.”

  Lydia raised her eyebrows. She poked Caleb in the side and hugged his arm. “Sorry for bringing it up, but I just thought . . . well, I had an idea about our next book.”

  “No.” He looked her in the eyes, and his smile faded. “I’m not digging up those memories. I’m not going to—”

  “—continue your father’s work?”

  That was it. She had a knack for knowing how to hit him where it counted. He pulled her aside and they made their way through a tour group snapping pictures. They walked past somber statues of the saints and elaborate woodcarvings, up a flight of stairs and finally exited back at the piazza. The pigeons whirled and flitted around the crowds, the picture-takers, the musicians, the souvenir peddlers. The flapping of their wings seemed to create a breeze that stung at Caleb’s eyes.

  “Sorry,” he said. “But, even despite my recent visions of Sostratus and the lighthouse . . . I’m just not ready for this discussion.”

  “But we’re married,” Lydia said, smiling devilishly. “Good times and bad and all that. Don’t you want to keep your wife happy? I need a new project. And in case you didn’t read your contract, Doubleday needs another book out of you within two years.”

  “Doubleday can wait,” he said, putting on a cheap pair of black sunglasses he had bought in Cairo. “They can wait forever if it means going back to my mother’s obsession.”

  “It doesn’t have to involve her,” she said. “You have your own notes, we have all the research we need. We can go to Alexandria next week and start.”

  Caleb kicked at a pigeon that came too close, missing by several feet. “Why the lighthouse, Lydia?”

  “Because,” she said, barely above a whisper, “you’re dreaming about it. And not just that, I think it fits with our research. And I think you know this.”

  “What do you mean?” His throat tightened up. His heart started pounding.

  “You know . . .” she whispered. “You haven’t admitted it, but it’s the only thing that makes sense.”

  His vision was getting blurry. Across the plaza, something tugged at his vision, the only clear image in the tide of activity. Beneath the Campanile clock tower, standing just at its base, was that man, the figure in green khakis with long hair over his face.

  “Caleb?” A blurry Lydia tugged at his sleeve. She was still talking, trying to convince him of something. He heard her speaking about impregnable strongholds, great seals, and something else.

  He blinked and wrenched his attention away from the figure, the first time he was ever able to do so, and stared at Lydia. “What did you say?”

  “Aren’t you listening? I was talking about what you saw through Manetho’s eyes. The legendary writings of Thoth, said to contain the mysteries of creation, power over life and death, and knowledge of heaven and earth. Fragments of its message may have found their way into alchemy and the Arcanum, and formed the backbone of the Rosicrucian and Freemason movements.”

  Caleb licked his lips, glanced back to the clock tower, but couldn’t find that enigmatic figure anymore.

  “Caleb, honey . . .”

  Blinking Lydia back into focus, he sighed and said, “The Emerald Tablet.”

  “Along with the collection from Sais. Transported and hidden away—”

  “—in the Alexandrian library. I already—”

  “Didn’t you hear me before?” Lydia moved her face to within inches from his, her full lips lustrous in the sunlight, tempting. “I don’t think the tablet was brought to the library. I’m betting that to find it you have to look to the other architectural wonder of Alexandria.”

  Caleb’s mouth opened, and suddenly, everything shifted. The world sparkled and everyone was surrounded by a floating nimbus, but only for a moment, then it was gone, like a flash of insight.

  The seal, the great door, the traps. Could it be—?

  “What do you think?” Lydia asked. “Worth writing about, at least? It’s a novel theory: the Pharos not only served as a beacon and an architectural wonder, it was a vault.”

  Caleb looked at her as if she had just stepped out of a lamp and had offered him three wishes. How could I have not seen it before? The implications were staggering. Everything they had witnessed and perceived had to be viewed again under this chrysalis. “The treasure—”

  “—isn’t what you thought.”

  “It’s something even more valuable,” Caleb said, and in that instant, a flash from beyond ripped through his core, revealing . . .

  . . . a dark convoy of camels, covered wagons, dozens of slaves lifting great bronze chests. The three dark pyramids dwindle at the horizon, black against the tapestry of night, . . .

  “A caravan,” he told her, slipping back to the present, “heading away from Giza.” The bright sunlight streamed onto his face as Lydia touched it and brushed back his sweaty hair. He sat on the rim of a fountain, a bubbling, dribbling marble façade. The choking smell of fish and dirty water entered his nostrils. He blinked and saw them . . .

  . . . carrying a secret cargo under cover of night, tracking the Nile, a man in black robes supervising the operation.

  “Do you know what year it was?” asked Lydia.

  The flow of the Nile, the passing of hills, trees and great stretches of desert. Then, through a marvelous gate into a sprawling city full of wondrous temples and obelisks, a stadium and so many people, the caravan takes back routes through the darkened alleys and emerges onto a stretch of streets and warehouses in a harbor. And there, across the water, a dark shape rises from an island. Half-assembled, it stands and waits for morning, for the hundreds to resume work on its construction.

  “Had to be around 300 BC,” he said, still watching the images flashing through his mind. “The Pharos isn’t completed yet.”

  “What else?” Lydia prodded. Her grip on his thigh was fierce.

  Caleb shook his head, resisting the onslaught of the present, the pigeons, the tourists, the accordion and singers in the distance, the tolling of the great clock tower all pulling at his consciousness. “They led the caravan past the Palace District, past the Temple of the Muses. Across the Heptastadion, to the Pharos.” He held his head in his hands and took great gulps of air. Another flash and he saw that figure again, the leader of the caravan, dressed in black robes and a deep hooded cloak . . .

  . . . stop at the first step leading up to the Pharos. All around him are great blocks, ropes, pulleys and workbenches. Discarded tools of the craftsmen. He pauses on the next step while at his back the convoy comes to a halt, and all the slaves look down at their feet.

  A man appears above. In flowing white robes he glides to the top of the stairs. “Welcome. You have what was promised?”

  The man in black nods. “I do. It is now in your safekeeping, Sostratus.”

  “This collection will be but the first of many.”

  “It is the oldest, the most important.”

  “Then it shall be the safest.”

  The man in black surveys the massive, half-finished structure masterfully etched upon the canvass of the heavens. A light mist drifts over the rocks from the sea and cools his face.

  “The ancient resting place of Thoth has been emptied. Guard his treasures well.”

  Another gulp of air and Caleb was back.

  “Wow,” Lydia said with a lo
ok of dismay. “No matter how many times I witness that, I still can’t get used to it.”

  “Me neither,” he said, wheezing.

  “I believe you.” She lifted her head, distracted by something across the plaza. “Listen, I’ll go grab you an Orangina and ice. You need some fluids.”

  “Okay.” He watched her go, then reached into the fountain, cupped some water and splashed it on his cheeks and forehead, feeling momentarily blasphemous for disturbing the sacred waters, before slipping on his sunglasses again

  A minute passed, then another. Finally, he looked up toward the drink stand. A trio of pigeons swirled over its roof and flew up and away. The stand was empty. Caleb stood and glanced around, feeling a sudden bout of anxiety. But there she was, a short distance away, talking to a man in a gray suit with a beret tilted on his head, over bushy gray eyebrows. Then the recollection struck like a hammer blow and Caleb remembered him.

  The hospital! Standing over my bed.

  “The Pharos protects itself . . .”

  Before he thought twice about it, Caleb was sprinting. The pigeons scattered at his approach. He bumped into a pair of Asian tourists, and kept running. Lydia turned as he closed in. The man lowered his head and swiftly walked away.

  “Honey?” she called as she stepped toward him in a way which seemed to cut him off from following or even getting a better look at the stranger. She caught him around the chest. “Are you okay?”

  “That man! Who is he?”

  Lydia looked around. “What, that old guy I was just talking to? Don’t know. He asked me how much a gondola to the museum costs, and—”

  “No!” Caleb shook his head, pointing after the departing figure, now stepping into a boat. “You knew him. You were talking. What did he want?”

  “I told you.” She gripped Caleb’s shoulders, that same fierce grip as before. “Caleb, you’re acting weird. Let’s get back to the hotel.”

  “No!”

  Lydia took a step back. “Hey, I’m sorry I brought up the lighthouse. I didn’t realize it would make you this crazy.”