by Bob Mayer
Dane had been a member of Recon Team Kansas and had accompanied the other three members along with a CIA operative from Foreman on a cross-border mission deep into Cambodia in 1968, which was his first encounter with a gate. During that mission, three of the four men were killed, and the team leader, Sergeant Ed Flaherty, was snatched away. Dane had been the only one to come out alive, and he’d sworn never again to be in such a situation.
But he’d gone back into the Angkor gate on a rescue mission for Ariana Michelet, again being manipulated by Foreman. Actually, the real reason he had gone was the copy of a radio broadcast from Flaherty. At Angkor Kol Ker, the ancient and abandoned capital of the Khmer Empire, he had met Flaherty once more, a Flaherty who had not apparently aged a day since disappearing over forty years previously.
Flaherty had warned him of the Shadow and told him of the Ones Before. He’d also said he could never come back. But the Scorpion had come back, although they now knew that had been a trap sent by the Shadow. It appeared that only the Shadow had control of the gates, and the Ones Before could do little inside them. Too many unknowns. For Dane, who had always been able to anticipate what others would do, this was a very unnerving situation.
“Are you ready to leave?” Loomis indicated the helicopter, which was warming up on the back deck. The colonel was uncomfortable with silence, a trait Dane didn’t understand or respect. He’d always believed that as much could be learned by what wasn’t said as by what was. “The Salvor will stay here and await the arrival of the Grayback.”
“What about Chelsea?” Dane asked.
“I’ll have someone in the crew take care of her until we get back.”
Reluctantly, Dane rubbed Chelsea’s head and said good-bye, then followed Loomis to the helicopter.
*****
Rain was falling, something Ariana recollected to be standard for England. A helicopter from one of her father’s subsidiary companies was waiting for her as the Learjet rolled to a stop. Her dash across the Atlantic in the middle of the night after leaving New York had brought her to London early in the morning, just after sunrise.
She hurried across the tarmac, not bothering to open the umbrella that had been thrust in her hand. The skulls she had gathered remained on board the Learjet, and she had ordered the pilots to refuel and await her return. When they’d complained about mandatory crew rest, she’d gotten on the phone and ordered up two new pilots. There was to be no rest on this mission, as the incoming date from Mounts Wrangell and Erebus indicated.
The chopper was in the air within a minute, and it headed from Heathrow on the very western edge of the city toward downtown London. It was only about a dozen miles to the London Natural History Museum, and the helicopter landed in Hyde Park, three blocks from the museum, startling some early-morning walkers and joggers. A car waited. Ariana ran past the man who was waiting with an umbrella and jumped in the open door. The man climbed in after her and offered his somewhat damp hand.
“Professor Atkins, at your service.” He was an old man with thick white hair and a long beard. “I am the collection leader for the mineral collection.”
“Ariana Michelet.”
“Your father has a long reach,” Atkins noted as the car began moving. “I’ve never met a helicopter before for a research request. Especially such a strange request.”
“You do have a crystal skull?” Ariana asked.
“Yes. Quite an odd duck. We’ve never displayed it. Doesn’t quite fit in, you know.”
“What do you mean?”
They were passing Royal Albertson Hall and then turning onto Exhibition Road. Ariana had been here before, and London was one of her favorite towns, but she knew there would be no time to savor the trip.
Atkins laughed, a deep, mellow sound. “My colleagues are not fond of displaying things they can’t explain. You don’t want some school-age child asking, “What’s that?” and not being able to tell them. Would be quite embarrassing, don’t you think?”
The car came to a halt at the Earth Science entrance to the museum, and Ariana was out the door before Atkins could move. She waited impatiently as he slowly got out and opened the umbrella every English person seemed to have permanently attached to one of their hands. They went up the stairs and into the museum, a guard opening the door for them.
“We have over three hundred fifty thousand specimens,” Atkins said as he closed the umbrella and shook it. “We actually have twelve meteorites that we believe are Martian in origin. Quite unique.”
Ariana had to wonder about a career that was based on the number of rocks one had and the uniqueness of them. “The skull?” she prompted.
Atkins led her through a room full of cases exhibiting various gemstones. “Yes, yes. As I said, it’s not on display.”
He unlocked a door and led her into an office crammed with professional journals and crates of all sizes. There was a desk in the corner, under the lone window, a narrow, barred affair ten feet over their heads. Atkins took off his coat and settled back in a deep leather chair and regarded her through rimless glasses as he reached behind himself and pulled a piece of cloth off an item on a shelf revealing a crystal skull. It was an ancient, just like the other six.
“Quite odd,” Atkins said as she came around the desk and ran her fingers lightly over the skull.
“What do you mean?”
“I know this sounds strange, but it makes people feel… hmm… I’m not sure what the words would be. Weird? Uneasy? Queer?”
“Where was it found?”
“Most fascinating history, most fascinating,” he said. He had a file folder that was open, but he didn’t need to refer to it. “It came to us from the estate of Lord Withingham. He was a rather eccentric member of the archaeological society, and his widow gave us quite a few strange and wonderful objects.
“Withingham bought this skull in Ireland from a retired naval officer who had fallen on hard times. The officer, who was in his late nineties and in ill health, said he had found it in a burial heath at Callanish, on the Irish coast. Last year, during holiday, I was visiting friends in Ireland, and I went to check this area. Quite amazing, to be frank.”
“Why?” Ariana asked.
“Why, the stones, of course.”
“Stones?”
“Yes, Megaliths. Do you know anything about them?”
“I’ve been to Stonehenge. That’s about it.”
“Stonehenge is the most well-known of the megaliths, but there are hundreds of megalithic sites all over Europe. This,” – he pointed at the skull—“was found inside the Callanish ring near the Great Menhir. The Menhir is a standing stone over sixteen feet high, while the ring has dozens and dozens of smaller standing stones, arrayed about it. The burial mound where the skull was found was right next to the Great Menhir."
“As I said, we have many megalithic sites throughout Europe, and Callanish is one of the most intriguing. The outer stones are aligned in patterns. Many have tried to orient these patterns on various astronomical alignments. Hard to do, though, because you have to regress the sky to the time when the stones were placed, and it’s difficult to date that. After all, we can’t carbon date stone, now can we? Even Stonehenge, which has been studied as deeply as any of the megalithic sites, has just rough approximations for dating various phases of its construction.”
Ariana didn’t see the connection between the crystal skull and standing stones. “Could ancient people have found the crystal skull and set up the standing stones around it as some form of worship?”
Atkins ran a hand through his thick beard as he considered her question. “Possibly. But Callanish is the only place where a skull has been found, as far as I know. And these sites have been thoroughly combed; Stonehenge, Averbury, Carnac, and the like. Doubt they would have missed that.”
“What other theories are there about the megaliths?” Ariana asked.
“The most popular here in England is that Druids built Stonehenge and the like, but that’s popp
ycock, as Stonehenge predates the Druids. Others say the sites were a form of astronomical observatory. Some of the sites do orient on certain stars when we regress the star field. At Callanish, most of the small outer stones are oriented on the cardinal directions. A tremendous amount of effort went into moving and setting these stones, some of which are quite heavy, and we don’t quite know why the ancient people did it. Seems like they would have had more important things to do, like gathering food and such.”
“Any theories, no matter how strange, would be helpful,” Ariana said.
Atkins sighed. “There are those who see a grander scheme to all this, but it’s quite a leap to take that in.”
“What do you mean?”
“There are some who believe that there is a worldwide pattern to the megaliths and other similar structures, which, of course, is ridiculous, given the time at which they were built.”
“Maybe not,” Ariana said. “We very much believe now that there was an Atlantis and it was destroyed and the survivors scattered about the world. What if they were responsible for the megaliths?”
“Ah, yes,” Atkins said. “I’ve been following the news. Most terrible what happened in Iceland. Damn shame.”
Ariana had always been fascinated by the English ability to view disaster with a certain dispassion.
“We know these gates are connected,” Ariana said. “So there are strange forces at work within the Earth.”
“Hmm. Yes, I suppose. You know, there’s a fellow near Oxford who’s done some rather interesting work,” Atkins said. “Conducting a thing he calls the Dragon Project. He’s run tests on some of the stones and picked up strange energy readings emanating from them, which confirms local legends of the power of the stones. They also found slightly higher levels of radiation around megalithic sites. He did some checking and found that megalithic sites around the world are also tied to uranium-rich areas, which is quite strange, if you think about it.”
Ariana felt her jet lag fade as she listened to Atkins. There was more to all this than just the skulls, she was beginning to believe.
“The most interesting readings, though,” Atkins continued, “involve electromagnetism around the megalithic sites. Project Dragon picked up rapid and extreme electromagnetic fluxes around the various sites they tested. They checked this because they heard many reports that megalithic sites were almost always locally rumored to have healing properties. In ancient days, people brought the sick and would leave them inside standing circles. In some cases, I suppose, there was some recovery, but most likely due to a placebo effect rather than any magical properties.”
“It has been documented that certain frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum have healing properties,” Ariana noted.
“Well, I don’t know much about that,” Atkins admitted. “Of course, the man running Project Dragon, a chap named Davon, couldn’t stick with just the facts he picked up, and that’s what caused him trouble among the more literal of our scientific community. He also reported that he and other members of his team saw things inside some of the circles. Strange creatures, strange people, different places. Most bizarre, and of course they had no proof of these sightings. This tainted the proof he did have.”
Could the megalithic sites be some sort of alternate gates? Ariana wondered. Or maybe just a weak point in the field between Earth and whatever was on the other side?
“And well, some of these visions…” Atkins fell silent.
“What about them?”
“They showed people from other times, if one is to believe those who say they saw something.”
“What happened to Project Dragon?” Ariana asked.
“As far as I know, they’re still plugging away,” Atkins said.
“Where can I get hold of Davon?” she asked.
Atkins leafed through the file folder. “Here’s the address for the Dragon organization. I imagine you’ll find him there, unless he’s out gallivanting about. I’ve heard he’s expanded his work overseas.”
Ariana took the address, then pulled a cloth bag out of the pocket of her raincoat. “The skull, please.”
Atkins reluctantly slid it into the bag. “Your father does have quite a bit of pull with the museum board of directors.”
“This is much more important than my father,” Ariana said. She paused at the door. “Do you know where there are any more skulls like this?”
“There’s a woman named Van Liten who—”
“I’ve already met her,” Ariana cut him off.
“Ah, well.” Atkins steepled his fingers, and Ariana realized he was exercising the power of knowledge over her in a subconscious way. She waited, forcing herself to be patient.
“Our field reps get approached every so often by what you might call shady characters dealing so-called antiquities or objects they think we would think would be of value. They seem to believe we have an unlimited amount of funds, which, of course, couldn’t be further from the truth, and offer us rare pieces for exorbitant amounts of money.
“About two years ago, one of our people was escorting an exhibit that we loaned to the Darwin Museum of Natural History in Moscow with whom we have a working relationship. He was approached by a fellow who claimed to have a crystal skull. Of course the price he was asking – fifty thousand in U.S. dollars – was ridiculous, so nothing came of it.”
“Did the person give any contact information?” Ariana asked.
Atkins opened a drawer and pulled out a piece of paper. He slid it across his desk, and Ariana went forward to retrieve it. “You weren’t going to give this to me?” she asked as she took it.
“A good researcher has to ask the right questions,” Atkins said.
“This isn’t a game.” Ariana had had enough with PhD’s and intellectuals. She snatched the piece of paper out of his hands. “The safety of our planet is at stake.”
“Well…” Atkins began, but then he stopped, at a loss for a moment. “I don’t see what crystal skulls have to do with what is happening with these gates.”
“I don’t have time to explain it to you.” Ariana left the room, the skull held in one hand, the piece of paper in the other.
*****
A Shadow flitted past so quickly that Pytor Shashenka wasn’t sure his eyes had actually seen something or if he was in a delusional state. But then a second went by, and he was certain. Not the white creatures but something or someone else. He also heard voices, hoarse whispers. He forced his mind to come out of the shell it had retreated to and focus.
There were people in the cavern. Free people! He saw a man, dressed in a strange outfit, some kind of armor, holding a straight, thin sword in his hand. The man was in front of a board that held one of the captives. Pytor was stunned as the man drew back the sword and with one smooth stroke cut through the neck of the body, severing it. The head remained pinned to the board by the metal ring around it, but blood pumped out of the neck, flowing down over the clear coating covering the flayed body.
The man turned and approached Pytor, blood-covered sword in his hand. Pytor could see his face now: Oriental. The man said something in a language Pytor didn’t understand. He drew the sword back, and Pytor waited, eager to be done with this horror he was in.
But then the man turned as there was a noise, a clank of metal, surprised yells. Another man similarly dressed and carrying a sword came running by, yelling something in the same strange language.
The man in front ignored his partner and brought the sword up once more. As he began to swing, a slash of gold hit him. Pytor blinked as the man’s skin changed color to gray, hardening until the man was nothing more than a statue.
Then a woman, tall, with short brown hair, also dressed strangely, ran by. She seemed to be in charge, shouting commands. She held a long slightly curved sword in her hand.
She glanced at Pytor, and he saw the compassion in her eyes, but she was too far away to do anything, and the body of her comrade was between them. Another flash of gold barely m
issed her. She turned and ran with the others. Last, a large man dressed in leather, carrying a huge ax, brought up the rear. He paused, swinging the weapon in a mighty arc as a Valkyrie came screeching toward him. The heavy blade bounced off the white armor with a loud clang, but the creature was knocked back several feet and apparently dazed.
Two more Valkyries appeared, flanking the warrior who gave a mighty shout as he swung the ax back and forth, keeping his enemies at bay. Pytor could appreciate the bravery he was seeing, knowing this man was giving the others time to escape, but in the process, his own escape route was cut off as the three Valkyries surrounded him.
Despite his own pain, Pytor was drawn into the spectacle in front of him as the man held the creatures at bay with his ax. Sweat poured down the man’s body, staining the already dirty tunic. His dark hair flopped about as he twisted and turned. A savage scar lined the left side of his face from temple to jaw.
He was yelling at the Valkyries in a language Pytor didn’t understand, but the gist was clear: The man was taunting and cursing them. Minutes passed, and the creatures made no serious attempt to attack the man, but they kept him constantly on the defensive with quick probes. Pytor could tell the man’s strength was being sapped, the ax growing heavy in his hands.
Finally, what the Valkyries were waiting for occurred. The man slipped, slamming the head of the ax into the rock floor to keep his balance. All three leapt forward at the same time. But it was a ruse, as the man rolled on the floor and came to his feet right in front of one of the Valkyries, the ax reversed, the metal tip on the end of the handle facing forward. He jabbed, and the blow struck true, right into one of the red eyes, shattering it.
The creature let loose a wicked scream.
It was a Pyrrhic victory for the man, though, as the other two were on him, ripping the ax from his hands, pinning his arms behind his back. Pytor felt useless, worse than useless, and the pain came back into him, overwhelming his mind. The sound of the battle faded, and Pytor once more slipped into blessed unconsciousness.
