TimeRiders: The Mayan Prophecy (Book 8)

by Alex Scarrow

  She looked again at the rubbing. Now Adam was doing that, holding his hand out in front of him, at arm’s length to his face, it seemed to be exactly what this mysterious figure was doing.

  ‘My God, Adam!’ Excitement welled up inside her. ‘Do you think it could be that simple? We just go up to it and make that shape with a hand?’

  She wondered if that’s what Sal had managed to figure out on her own. If this meant they could now find their way inside and get her back again.

  ‘I can’t believe activating it is just a case of doing that. But maybe …’ He hunched his shoulders. ‘Maybe it’s a part of the process.’ He laughed. ‘Or maybe I’ve just watched far too many temple-raider movies.’

  ‘Adam, you are such a geek.’

  ‘Didn’t Jesus once say on the Mount that “the geek shall inherit the earth”?’

  Impulsively she leaned forward and planted a kiss on his cheek. Adam froze. His jaw hung open a little as he turned to look at her. Her face was still close to his, he could feel her breath on his cheek. By the soft glow of a candle on the ground he could see the light spilling across her neck, highlighting her jaw, her chin, the tip of her nose. But her eyes were lost in pools of shadow.

  So hard to read what that kiss meant to her without seeing her eyes.

  ‘Was … was that a “you’ve been a clever boy” kiss? Or … uh …’ His words faltered and faded away to nothing.

  She leaned slowly forward again. This time one of her hands pressed gently against his right cheek and coaxed his face towards her. Her breath came in shallow, rustling, nervous, soft waves.

  ‘What was the rest of that sentence going to be?’ Her voice was wobbling slightly.

  He swallowed nervously. ‘I … well … I’m n-not entirely sure …’

  ‘Me neither,’ she whispered.

  They remained like that, both uncertain. Both not sure what exactly this was, unsure how the next moment went, but neither wanting to wind this backwards.

  ‘I’ve never kissed anyone, Adam,’ she whispered. ‘I’ve never had a boyfriend.’ He thought he saw the glint of a tear dropping from her jaw into the darkness. ‘And I probably never will.’

  ‘Sure you will.’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t think we’re meant to last forever.’ She’d almost said built forever. She hadn’t told Adam yet what she was, what Liam and Sal were. It hadn’t seemed necessary to tell him.

  Adam leaned in closer to her, studying her face intently. Was that the glint of another tear disappearing into the darkness? Or was it just a speck of grit falling from the low ceiling above?

  ‘We were …’ Maddy hesitated; she seemed to be picking her words carefully. ‘We were selected to perform a specific task.’ Her lips twitched. He sensed that was a resigned smile. ‘And I can’t help feeling that task is nearly done.’

  He reached up with one hand and cupped the curve of her jaw. With his thumb, he stroked her cheek. It was damp.

  ‘Hey … don’t cry.’

  She sniffed, wiped her cheek. ‘I’m not. Just grit in my eye.’

  Adam leaned forward and kissed her.

  Chapter 51

  1479, the Lost City of the Windtalkers

  ‘Information: five minutes until the energy release is due to occur.’ Bob’s voice echoed around the cavernous interior.

  Liam sidled up beside Maddy. ‘You think this might be it? We’ll get Sal back?’

  ‘I hope so.’

  He stared at the smooth surface of the column, Adam standing next to it, preoccupied with the thousands of glyphs in orderly rows and columns running all the way round it.

  ‘If we do get her out, I’m worried about how she’ll be, though, Liam. We don’t know where she’s been or what she’s seen.’ Maddy bit her lip. ‘We don’t even know if she’s just been trapped there in chaos space. God knows what that does to a person’s mind, being stuck in that horrible mist for so long.’ Her mouth tightened. ‘She may be really traumatized when she comes out.’

  ‘What if she doesn’t step out?’

  She left that particular question unanswered. Liam could come up with his own conclusions. They’d probably be the same as hers – which she’d rather not voice out loud. If Sal didn’t emerge when the column activated, then there was no other conclusion to draw than that she was most likely gone. For good.

  Gone where, though?

  If not lost forever in chaos space, then any time in the last twenty centuries. The most likely possibility being the far end of this bizarre energy beam – Jerusalem in the time of Jesus Christ. But, of course, there was no certainty to that. They were messing with something they didn’t really understand. Sal might have popped out any time in between now and then. They had no real idea how this device worked, whether an energy fluctuation occurred every time this beam was opened. Perhaps it was specifically designed as a transport conduit from AD 2070 to year zero and not as something that could be hopped off at will? So perhaps that was the cause of this approaching energy surge … an ‘unauthorized’ exit. Something this device wasn’t really designed to do.

  ‘I guess we’ll find out soon enough,’ said Maddy.

  ‘Three minutes!’ announced Bob.

  Rashim joined them, Bertie tagging along beside him, like some kind of sorcerer’s apprentice. ‘We should be ready for other possibilities.’

  Maddy looked at him sharply. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘One of those Archaeologists might emerge.’ Rashim gestured around them. ‘We might have triggered a live sensor somewhere down here. This approaching surge might just be one of them coming back to check on things?’

  Maddy and Liam glanced at each other. ‘You’re right,’ she replied. ‘Bob, Becks?’

  Both support units turned to look at her.

  ‘Get your guns ready. Billy – you too.’

  The guide unslung his assault rifle.

  ‘No one shoots at anything, though,’ she added. ‘Not unless I say so.’

  Bertie looked anxiously at her. ‘Do you think some nightmarish creature from the future will emerge?’

  ‘Relax … I’m just being cautious.’ She called out to Adam, still standing beside the column, studying the glyphs. ‘Adam! Might be best to take a few steps back now. The energy pulse is coming.’

  Adam waved a hand to let her know he’d heard her. But his mind was still racing, trying to piece the puzzle together. The more he’d been thinking about it since voicing his theory to Maddy yesterday, the more he was convinced that the three-pronged shape was somehow the key to opening the column and accessing the energy field within.

  Feeling a little foolish and self-conscious, he had stood in this chamber earlier and held up his arm, palm outward, and made the gesture with his hand, a small part of him trembling with anticipation. He’d aimed his gesture at one of the glyphs, roughly in the centre of all the rows and columns. It was larger than the other symbols – nine inches by nine inches – about half again as big as the rest of them. Clearly it was more important than the others. Perhaps symbolically. Perhaps functionally, like the ‘Enter’ key on a computer keyboard.

  But nothing, of course, had happened when he’d held out his hand. Except that he’d felt a little stupid.

  ‘One minute!’ announced Bob.

  Maddy called out again for him to step back. He decided she was probably quite right and began to back away from the column. This surge was coming. Perhaps it would cause the thing to open up all on its own and all of his puzzling over strange hand shapes and ancient carved depictions would be rendered an exercise in pointless and unnecessary head-scratching.

  He backed up, but once again couldn’t help himself and decided to raise his hand at arm’s length again and splay the thumb, index and middle fingers of his left hand just as the figure in the carving had appeared to be doing. He was wondering if the wavy lines indicated that the gesture had to be done in conjunction with the arrival of an energy surge.

  ‘I am detecting an
increase in stray tachyon particles,’ said Becks.

  Adam squinted down the length of his arm at his outspread fingers. Beyond his hand, the tips of his three splayed digits, he studied the orderly array of symbols: rows and columns, thousands of them, silently mocked his attempt to decode them. Over the last four days how many of them had he copied carefully into his notebook? A hundred? A hundred and fifty? Every single one of them unique in some small way: a curl, a bar, a dash, a dot, subtly differentiating one from another. If there had been any kind of repeated symbol in there, one glyph being identical to another, there would have been the start of some semblance of pattern. But, like the hundreds of pages of gibberish of the Voynich Manuscript, this was a wall of cryptic markings that he suspected no one would ever be able to decode.

  ‘Thirty seconds!’

  He still had his hand out in front of him. In his other hand, his torch aimed in parallel at the array of symbols. At the very least he could test this rather desperate last-ditch theory – the hand gesture and the energy surge together? He adjusted the angle of his hand, rotating it slightly to ensure his middle finger was properly vertical, his thumb was properly horizontal. He aligned his middle finger to one of the columns of glyphs, his thumb to one of the rows, while his index finger pointed up at an approximate angle of forty-five degrees.

  ‘Ten seconds!’

  He centred his hand over the central larger glyph, obscuring it now with his knuckles.

  ‘Five … four … three …’

  He followed the angles of his three fingers, vertical, horizontal, diagonal, and his eyes ran up along the symbols that fell along the path of those lines.

  ‘Here we go!’ called out Liam.

  ‘Two … one …’

  . . . .

  . . .

  . .

  .

  Nothing.

  They waited. The chamber echoed with their rasping breath, bouncing off distant unlit walls and coming back to them awash with reverberation.

  After a while, Maddy’s voice: ‘Talk to me, Bob, Becks – are you getting anything?’

  ‘I am detecting a significant increase in straying particles,’ replied Becks. ‘There is definitely an increase in the energy yield occurring behind the protective casing. This is causing some energy to leak out.’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Bob. ‘The level of energy has doubled and is still increasing.’

  ‘Something’s going on in there,’ whispered Maddy.

  Adam turned to her. ‘This energy isn’t harmful like radiation, right?’

  ‘No. Not like radiation.’

  Adam nodded. ‘Well, that’s all right then.’ He took a step towards the column.

  ‘Adam! What are you doing?’

  He took another measured step forward, his arm and hand extended, squinting down the length of his arm at the column beyond.

  ‘Adam! Stay back!’

  He ignored her. ‘The angles are important. Ninety degrees – the vertical axis. Forty-five degrees, then zero – horizontal axis!’

  ‘What’s he talking about, Mads?’

  Adam continued to squint down the length of his arm like a sniper lining up the sights of a gun. With his three fingers centred on the larger symbol, his eyes tracked up the vertical column covered by his middle finger, then along the symbols that lay on the diagonal path, then the horizontal path of his thumb.

  ‘Adam! What the hell are you doing?’ called Maddy. ‘Just step back until we know what’s going on here!’

  He played his torch on one of the symbols in the column, then across to another on the diagonal path. ‘Wait …!’ He panned his torch along the horizontal. Then let out a gasp.

  ‘My God!’

  ‘Adam? What is it?’

  Adam turned to look at the others. ‘There are three symbols that are exactly the same!’ He shook his head. ‘Identical! I can’t believe I missed that! They’re just rotated. One at forty-five degrees, one at ninety. But they’re definitely the same!’

  ‘Well, that’s – that’s interesting. Now please, for Chrissake … step back, will you?’

  ‘Just a sec – let me try something …’ He quickly strode to the column, reached out and touched the symbol on the horizontal tangent.

  ‘Adam!’

  Then the symbol picked out by the diagonal tangent.

  ‘Adam!’ Maddy took several steps forward. ‘Please! Don’t mess with them!’

  Then he touched the symbol on the vertical axis.

  All three glyphs suddenly glowed a soft amber. Then the larger icon began to glow. All four pulsated synchronously several times – then went dark again.

  ‘All right,’ said Liam. ‘You just did something.’

  A blinding vertical slit of white light appeared on the column, running from floor to ceiling. They all shaded their eyes from the sudden glare.

  Bertie took several steps back and gasped. ‘God help us – what is that?’

  The slit widened to a dazzling beam a yard wide: featureless white that flooded the chamber with a cold, clinical, unflinching light. It was accompanied by a deep throb that filled the air and pulsated with metronome regularity.

  ‘My God,’ Maddy whispered. ‘What have we done?’

  Chapter 52

  Where am I?

  Help me!

  Oh, God help me. Let me out!

  HELP ME!

  Chapter 53

  1479, the Lost City of the Windtalkers

  She didn’t emerge from the light. There was no sign of Sal.

  Maddy suddenly realized how naively certain she’d been that they would simply activate this device and Sal would step out unharmed and annoyed that they’d taken so long to see what she’d managed to figure out in the blink of an eye.

  ‘Oh my God,’ whispered Maddy.

  We’ve lost her. This time we’ve really lost her.

  They waited for fifteen minutes, with the vertical shaft of light as bright as a midday sun glaring out at them and lighting every dark recess of the vast chamber. Finally, concerned that what they were staring at was an opening directly into chaos space, Liam turned to Maddy.

  ‘We need to close it.’

  Maddy shook her head uncertainly.

  ‘Maddy! We shouldn’t leave it open like this! That’s dangerous!’

  ‘She’s in there,’ she whispered. ‘She’s in there. She must be!’

  Becks stepped forward. ‘Liam is correct, there is a danger in leaving a portal open like this.’

  Maddy didn’t respond, she merely took a step nearer to the light, as if hoping that closer she might catch a glimpse of Sal’s hazy silhouette somewhere in there, in the white light.

  ‘That’s enough,’ said Liam to himself. He called out to Adam to close the column.

  Adam nodded, touched the same three symbols in the same order but the column remained wide open.

  Liam swore. ‘All right, then – do it in reverse order!’

  Nothing happened.

  ‘Jay-zus!’ he hissed. ‘We can’t leave this thing like this! Find a way to close it!’

  ‘So this is a bad thing?’ asked Bertie. ‘Leaving it open?’

  ‘Yes,’ Rashim replied. ‘A very bad thing.’

  ‘Adam? For God’s sake, come on!’ Liam called to him. ‘You opened it, you must be able to –!’

  Adam shook his head frantically. ‘I don’t know how to close it!’

  ‘Perhaps this is a self-contained field,’ suggested Rashim. ‘Not open to all of chaos space, merely a pocket of it.’

  Adam was now swiping at symbols randomly. ‘I’m trying! I’m trying!’ But he was having no effect. He stepped back several yards from the column wall and held his hand up at arm’s length in front of him again, hoping to spot some other identical symbols lying on the same axes.

  All of a sudden the column wall began to rotate, smoothly sliding shut, the bar of light narrowing quickly until it was nothing but a dazzling slit again, then vanishing altogether. The chamber was once ag
ain silent. The deep throbbing was gone. Their ragged breathing filled the dark void.

  Pitch black now. The flaming candles they’d set up on the floor had been extinguished by the stir of air as the column had opened.

  Rashim snapped his torch back on.

  Liam jumped. ‘Jay-zus!’

  ‘Sorry.’

  Liam strode towards Adam. ‘How did you close it, Adam? Which symbols did you touch?’

  ‘I don’t know. I was just hitting everything and anything.’ He approached the column once again and looked at the symbols in front of him. ‘I’m not even sure it was me that closed it.’

  ‘Well then who?’

  ‘Maybe … I dunno, maybe it’s a built-in safety measure? If it stays open for too long, it closes by itself?’

  Liam looked the column up and down. Once again a tall silent sentinel of obsidian-black material decorated with thousands of symbols. He wondered if that was a reassuring notion. A safety measure? Something built into the design of this structure, in case the primitives tasked with guarding this thing decided to mess around with it instead?

  Or, on the other hand, was it vaguely disconcerting? Was this thing somehow aware of what was going on around it? Perhaps it had some kind of ‘intelligence’ built into it?

  ‘At least we know it does close,’ said Adam. He looked at Liam and puffed out air. The adrenalin making him grin like an idiot. ‘That was pretty intense.’

  ‘Aye.’ Liam likewise puffed out his cheeks and blew. ‘Still, I’d feel a lot safer if I knew it was us that had closed it and not something else.’ He turned to Maddy. ‘You OK?’

  She shook her head silently.

  ‘We’ve lost her, Liam. She’s gone.’

  Chapter 54

  1937, 13 Hanover Terrace, Regent’s Park, London

  FROM THE JOURNAL OF H. G. WELLS

  We emerged into the waning light, through a knot of curious onlookers. The crowd allowed us a respectful distance, parting to let us pass. But I could sense a growing unease among them. It was as if they suspected that something had transpired. That we, uninvited guests, might not be gods returned to inspect our godly devices after all, but charlatans, impostors, meddling with machinery we couldn’t possibly begin to understand.