by M. J. Rose
He was waiting for her to answer.
“Only children can be much more precocious than other kids. They pick up on a lot of adult conversation. Things you don’t realize you’re saying, they hear and remember.”
He frowned.
Oh, no, did he think she meant that after this was over Quinn might be able to describe him? Her heart started racing.
Quinn had been listening; she knew some of the words the grown-ups had used. She looked at Carl. “Do you remember a lot?”
“Enough.”
“What’s enough?”
“I remember enough things.”
“From before or from now?”
He considered the question, then turned back to Bettina. “Get her to quiet down. Isn’t it her naptime or something?”
She pulled Quinn into her lap, reached over for the little girl’s teddy bear and put it in her outstretched palms.
“Story?” Quinn asked. This was the ritual at home. Bear in arms, one story, and then sleep.
“Yes, honey, story.” The problem was, Bettina was too frightened to think of a single story except for crazy ones about what was going to happen to them and what would make him use his gun and why his eyes were dead. She’d studied faces for her acting classes.
Bettina’s teeth started chattering. It had been happening on and off since they’d arrived. It wasn’t that she was cold; it was a manifestation of her fear.
“Stop making that noise,” he grunted at her.
“I…can’t.”
“Yes, you can.” He didn’t raise his voice. All he did was move his hand one inch closer to his waistband where the gun was. He’d done this off and on since yesterday, as if he were training her like a dog, to respond and obey.
She put her forefinger in her mouth to try to stop her jaw from moving of its own accord.
Quinn stared at her. “Tina, are you sick?”
“Yes, baby, a little.”
Quinn reached out and put her little hand on Bettina’s forehead. “No temperature.”
Bettina grabbed her hand, kissed it, pulled her closer and hugged her, whispering, “Everything is going to be okay, Quinn. We’ll go home soon.”
“Soon?” the toddler asked.
Bettina nodded.
“I miss Mommy.”
“I know, sweetheart.”
Bettina hated herself. Hated that she was so damn scared. So stupid. First for getting in the car and then for not coming up with a single idea of how to get them out of there. It was all her fault.
Her teeth started chattering again.
“I said quit it,” Carl barked.
“She’s scared,” Quinn said in a brave little voice, staring right at him.
“I’ve had enough of her jabbering,” he said to Bettina. “You’d better make her go to sleep now, because if you can’t, I will.”
Chapter 57
The tomb is not a blind alley: it is a thoroughfare. It closes on the twilight. It opens on the dawn.
—Victor Hugo
San Rafael Swell, Utah—Wednesday, 1:10 p.m.
The only entrance to the section of the canyon called the Lower Sphinx was a slit in the boulders, and the path beyond it, through the sensuous, undulating rocks, was treacherous. In some places it was so narrow they could only walk sideways. Gabriella was managing it fine, but Josh, because of his claustrophobia, was fighting back a full-blown anxiety attack: he was shaking, sweating and dizzy. Each step was an exertion that took his breath away.
Their descent was guided by a student who worked for Larry Rollins and who kept up a lively chatter about where they were and what the different formations meant. Gabriella walked behind him, and Josh was at the rear. He watched her, seemingly unafraid and resolute, trudge on. Intellectually, he knew that the pull of saving her child was driving her, but it didn’t take away from how impressive she was. He watched her, sleek and graceful like a cat, climbing down the ladder that led to the next level, down into the earth, into a deeper part of the canyon. She looked back at him only once, holding his eyes for a beat, and then she followed the guide into the darkness.
“Wait!” he called out too late for her to hear him.
Seeing her disappear down into the hole had made his panic worse. He didn’t know why he had called out to stop her or what he’d wanted to say to her, only that it seemed he would have just this one chance, and after that he would lose her again. He shook his head. It didn’t matter, not now; there was no time to analyze it.
He climbed down after her, certainly not as surefooted, or as calm. He was in good shape but this wasn’t a smooth path around the reservoir. Where the ground here wasn’t rocky it was muddy, and sometimes the puddles hid hazardous outcroppings that could trip you if you took the next step too fast.
What made this dangerous trek so frustrating as well as frightening was that these canyons were a pilgrimage that every serious photographer hoped to make one day. So as much as Josh knew how urgently they needed to reach Rollins and get his help, as much as he was fighting his paralyzing phobia, he desperately wanted to stop and shoot the underground landscape.
They were still on earth, but they might as well not have been. This was not a familiar or known environment. For thousands of years, rushing waters had charged through these rocks, year after year sculpting the sandstone into waves of warm orange and red. Looking at them, you could envision the currents, running, running against the rock, wearing it down, year after year, until finally they had changed the face of the stone. And until Rollins had found a series of ancient drawings and markings deep inside the gulch, there had been no evidence that ancient people had ever explored them.
Only the first quarter of the Sphinx canyon was open to visitors, the guide continued to explain, but they were headed for the second section. More danger lurked there than the snakes that hid in the shallow pools or the shards of rock that could slice open your skin if you fell on or brushed up against one. If it started to rain anywhere nearby, the canyons were known to flood.
In 1997, a group of hikers had been trapped and drowned in nearby Antelope canyon. A year later, three others had drowned in the Sphinx.
Rollins had been coming here for two years to study a group of caves that were highly decorated with animal figures and markings that turned out to be an ancient language never before seen. Since he had finally cracked the code, six months ago, his work was going faster.
Now, Josh thought, he and Gabriella were bringing him a new puzzle, but he wouldn’t have eighteen months to decrypt it.
He wouldn’t even have eighteen days.
Gabriella slowly sidled forward. The rocks rose up around her, enclosing her; amber light shone down on her, bathing her in earthy underground colors. This was inner space, as foreign and fantastic as if they had shot off a rocket and arrived on another planet.
Absorbed by the wonder of the geography, Josh automatically reached for his camera, but there was no time to shoot this scenery. He continued on.
Would Rollins be able to decipher the markings on the photographs Gabriella had brought? He was, Alice had said, their only chance. That was why they’d flown from New York to Denver, then to Utah, rented a car, driven more than a hundred and fifty miles, and now, half a day later, were wending their way toward him.
They’d reached another drop, and as they descended, spiraling deep, deep into the earth, the darkness was relieved only by the pin lights on the helmets they wore. Although they’d been at it for an hour, Gabriella still moved at a steady, strong pace that Josh had trouble matching.
One hundred and ten minutes after entering the Sphinx, the guide delivered Josh and Gabriella to Rollins, who knelt in a twelve-by-twelve grotto examining a small wall drawing, one in a series of over a hundred, with a magnifying glass.
After they’d greeted each other and Josh had been introduced, despite everything on her mind, Gabriella managed to ask Rollins about his discovery. She didn’t look away or fidget while he explained what they w
ere looking at, but Josh knew that she was churning inside. Listening without hearing. Counting the seconds until Rollins would finish explaining his recent work and she could ask him for the help she had traveled so far to find.
Finally, Rollins asked to see the photos. Opening her backpack, Gabriella pulled them out and handed them to him. Readjusting his torch, he peered down. Time passed slowly as he pored over the glossies for at least five minutes. Meanwhile, Josh lifted his camera to his eye to shoot his surroundings. Moving around, looking through the viewfinder, he examined and photographed as much of the area as he could. He was shooting the drawings and panning to the right when he caught Gabriella in the frame.
He hadn’t looked at her through the camera since that day in Rome in the car. It hadn’t been a conscious decision. Or at least he didn’t think it had. Maybe he hadn’t wanted to be reminded that there was no aura. But now he focused on her.
Looking hard.
But what he hoped to see still wasn’t there.
Josh leaned against the wall of the Sphinx canyon. Why couldn’t he stop wanting this woman to be the woman? Why was he still searching for a clue that she might be? No matter how hard he looked, there was no glimmer of light around her head or resting on her shoulders. What surrounded so many of the children Beryl and Malachai worked with, what had bounced off of Rachel just a week ago, what had shone like a nimbus around his father twenty years before, wasn’t there.
In his father’s case, Beryl had suggested the light was the shadow of his present soul preparing to move on. With the children, she suggested the light was the shadow of another soul, the residue of a past life, fighting through the barrier of forgetfulness to make itself heard or felt in its new human vessel so that this time the wrongs of the past would be righted and the soul would be at peace in the next life.
He changed his focus and moved in tighter on Gabriella’s face. No, the chimera he had spent the past twelve months trying to reproduce with his camera as proof of reincarnation wasn’t hovering over her or anywhere near her.
In the library at the foundation, Josh had read about efforts to photograph auras as far back as 1898 when electrography was first invented. He’d seen Yakov Narkevich Yokdo’s early examples as well as others, many of which were obviously darkroom manipulations. In the 1940s Seymon Kirlian invented a process that involved photographing his subjects in the presence of a high-frequency, high-voltage, low-amperage electrical field and produced what looked like multicolored auras. But Josh didn’t just want to photograph biological energies—he believed he was seeing evidence of the souls of men, women or children who had died tragic or violent deaths and had unfinished, unresolved lives. That’s what he yearned to capture on film.
“This is some puzzle you’ve brought me,” Rollins said. Gabriella turned, and Josh put the camera down. Rollins was still talking. “But I think I’ve found a clue.
“These markings here are numbers from the Harappan language,” Rollins said. “And these are Indus script. Alice was right.”
Gabriella’s facial muscles tightened.
“What’s wrong with Indus?” Josh asked.
She looked as if she was going to cry, but she explained as if she were in a classroom, giving a lecture. “Indus was the first major urban culture of South Asia, covering an area that now includes some of Afghanistan, large parts of India and most of Pakistan. There is a very large cache of writing samples from the mature period, which was from 2600 B.C. to 1900 B.C., but there’s been no significant developments deciphering the language in the last seventy years.”
“That was true until last year,” Rollins said as he bent down over the photographs again. “But I’ve been working on it, with Parva in India, and we’ve made some breakthroughs.”
It was as quiet in Rollins’s cave as it had been in Sabina’s tomb, Josh thought, and the idea of that day blew over him like a chill wind.
Rollins looked up. “I’m sure that one of the symbols on each of these stones is a number. In Harappan, numerals were represented by vertical lines, so look at this…and this…” He pointed, and first Gabriella and then Josh leaned down and inspected the photographs.
“Do you know what numbers?” Gabriella asked.
“Parva and I haven’t yet found a vertical-line numeral sign denoting eight, but we think the language is base eight, and we know the symbols from one through seven. There are additional signs for higher numbers, but they’re not germane to what I’m seeing here. Looking at these markings, I’d say we’re looking at stones numbered 4, 1, 5, 7, 3, and I just can’t read this last one, it’s too faint.”
“I should have brought bigger blowups.” Gabriella’s voice was pained.
“It wouldn’t have mattered. I can’t do the translations here. Parva and I have determined that Indus is logo-phonetic.” He turned to Josh to explain. “Meaning, the script has signs for the language’s phonetic values as well as signs for meaning. So far we’ve identified more than four hundred symbols. I don’t have them all in my head. To do this I need to be in my office on the computer.”
“But you think you’ll be able to tell me what they say?” Gabriella asked, her voice straining.
Rollins unscrewed the cap on a bottle of water and took a drink. “Yes, I’ll be home in another week or so and will—”
“I only have until Friday.”
“Gabriella, what is this about?” Rollins asked. “Does it have something to do with Rudolfo’s murder? With what you found in Rome? Were these stones in the Vestal’s tomb?
She looked at Josh as if she was hoping he would make the decision of what to tell Rollins for her. Josh couldn’t stand the pain he saw in her eyes.
“Larry, we can’t explain now without putting you in danger, but it is absolutely urgent.” He’d never tried so hard to convince anyone of anything.
“We’ll leave now. I’ll get started as soon as I get home.”
“We can go with you to San Jose. Stay in a hotel,” Gabriella suggested.
“There’s nothing you can do to help. I need to sit in front of a computer for about two months. I know, I know, you don’t have two months. Don’t worry. Go back home, Gabby. At least you’ll be with your dad and Quinn. I’ll call the minute I make any headway.”
Gabriella trembled at the sound of her daughter’s name.
A gust of wind blew dust around them. Amber dust that reminded Josh of Rome. He felt the first stirrings of an episode, heard a woman crying and could faintly smell jasmine.
* * *
Sabina, heavy with the weight of their baby, sat on the floor of the temple. The sound of crickets was the only noise. It was the middle of the night, and no one else was awake. They had put out the sacred fire, which in itself was a blasphemous punishable act, but they didn’t care about that. They were already facing a far worse punishment.
After the area cooled enough, they’d started digging out the hearth to find the treasure that had supposedly been hidden there for so many centuries. While they dug, Sabina told Julius how the stones had been passed down from Vestal to Vestal—stories that even he, as one of the highest-level priests, had never heard.
“Maybe we could try to use the stones before we hide them and see if we’ve been together before.”
“You don’t know that yet?”
In the midst of their fear and panic, she stopped to smile at him, and he leaned in and pressed his lips to hers.
“Do you know how to use them?” he asked.
“There’s a mantra.”
“A mantra?”
“Sounds that you need to repeat, in a certain order, that facilitate a mystical, meditative state that will draw out past-life memories.”
* * *
“What are you saying about a mantra?” It was Gabriella’s voice, Sabina’s face. The past and the present were superimposed on each other, and he was caught between them, knowing he couldn’t stay in both dimensions. Turning away from Sabina, he focused on the sound of Gabriella’s voice, bro
ke free of the lurch and found himself in the canyon, only in the canyon.
“Josh? You said something about a mantra.” Gabriella was waiting for him to explain.
“The markings could be a mantra…a string of words…or sounds,” Josh said.
“Can you sound out any of the symbols?” she asked Rollins.
He tried. Failed. And then tried again. “No, that’s not right.” He tried once more. It wasn’t a word. Instead it sounded like a dissonant note of ancient music that might have been sung out early in the morning to call the holy to prayer. The syllable came out soft and rounded and hung in the air, reverberating, echoing in the narrow space where they all sat surrounded by sandstone and topaz-tinged light.
It was possible that no one had made that particular sound in more than three thousand years, but none of them had the time or inclination to consider the historical spiritual significance of what was happening.
A little girl was waiting for her mother to save her.
“It’s going to be tough to get all this translated by Friday,” Rollins said.
“You’ll try, won’t you?” she asked plaintively.
“Of course.”
“When you figure it out and call us, don’t read the sounds out in order,” Josh suggested to Rollins.
“Why?” Gabriella asked.
“In case….” He held her gaze. “In case it works, Gabriella. If this is real and any of us speak the sounds in order, we might be affected. It’s a long shot, just a guess. But there could be something about the sounds that none of us understand. We can’t take any risks.”
Chapter 58
The first leg of the long, arduous journey back to New York was exhausting—the reverse underground trek, the drive and then the plane ride to the Denver airport. They were walking toward the gate for the last part of the trip when her cell phone rang. Flipping it open, she said hello and waited. Josh could hear that it was a man on the other end of the phone but not make out any of the words.
