Changeling

by David Wood

  As Jade drove off the tarmac and navigated roads leading out of the base, Professor launched into a quick recap of everything that had happened, beginning with his capture in Sydney and ending with the crash on the Murchison Highway, a few miles outside of a remote Tasmanian mining town called Rosebery. When he told her about the uncertain but almost certainly terrible fate of the passengers on Flight 815, Jade was a little less inclined to worry about the prisoner’s civil liberties. If even half of what the woman—Eve—had revealed was true, then she and her Changeling brethren were beyond the reach of ordinary justice.

  Jade almost interrupted Professor when he recounted his conversation with Eve regarding the Changelings’ true objective, but managed to contain herself until he finished his story, just as Jade turned east onto California state highway 58.

  “There’s no trace of them now?” she asked.

  “None. The fire is being investigated as a possible arson but it will be weeks before anyone can get in there to sift through the ashes. They covered their tracks pretty well. The investigator I met in Sydney, Sousa, supposedly went missing when the search plane he was riding in went down in the Pacific. According to the news reports, I was on that plane, too.”

  “Wow. So you’re officially dead?”

  “Officially missing,” he corrected, then added in a somber tone. “Like Flight 815.” He looked away, staring out at the barren landscape outside the car. “Where are we going?”

  “The Vault,” she announced triumphantly, grateful for a chance to change to topic and share her discoveries. “It’s not what Roche thought it was.”

  He returned a blank look.

  “I sent you a text about this.”

  “Somebody stole my phone, remember?”

  “Oh, right.” She launched into her own account of recent doings, carefully glossing over the repeated attacks by Shah and his minions, focusing instead on what they had discovered with each successive stop along the way. When she mentioned infrasound, and related what had happened in the underground chamber in Peru, Professor sat up straighter. “You should have told me about that.”

  She frowned. “You were supposed to tell me how clever I was for figuring it out on my own.”

  “Well, obviously. But you shouldn’t keep things like that to yourself. I could have helped you figure it out.”

  “At the time, I didn’t know what was happening. I only put it all together when we went to the Hypogeum.”

  Professor rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “The chamber in Paracas and the Hypogeum have two things in common. Unusual acoustic properties and deformed skulls.”

  “You think there’s a connection?”

  “Let’s just say I don’t buy into Roche’s theory about artificial cranial deformation as a defense against the Changelings. But it would be interesting to compare the frequency shifts in a regular round human skull versus a flattened one.”

  “Flat skulls can pick up more channels?”

  “Actually, I was thinking the opposite. A lifetime in close proximity to those resonance chambers would probably drive an ordinary person insane.”

  Jade grinned at him. “I’m so glad you’re back.”

  He looked askance at her. “I’ll just pretend you really mean that.”

  “Of course I meant it.”

  “And still not convinced. So, what did you find at the Hypogeum?”

  “God, it was incredible. Way more than just seeing ghosts. I had an out-of-body experience. I flew up into space, went halfway around the world, and then landed at the vault. I actually saw the lock mechanism that Archimedes described.”

  “And was it a timelock like Roche said?”

  Jade shrugged. “It was like looking at an electrical schematic. I can tell what it is, but I have no idea what it means or how it works.”

  “Could you draw it from memory?”

  “Possibly. There’s one thing I remember vividly. It was the last thing I saw before…” Her eye found Shah in the rear view mirror. “Before the vision ended. Three circles. They looked like they were linked, sort of like the Olympic rings, but they weren’t really. It was just an optical illusion.”

  “Sounds like Borromean Rings.”

  “Is that a Tolkien thing?”

  Professor laughed. “Not quite. It’s a math problem. Complex geometry. It would be easier to show it than try to explain it. Got any paper?”

  Jade took a notepad and the stub of a pencil from her shirt pocket, and passed it over. Professor flipped through page after page of sketches and field notes until he found a blank page. He spent a few minutes drawing a figure, then held it up to show her.

  “That’s it,” she confirmed.

  “Borromean Rings,” he confirmed. “They appear to be linked at the center, but when you follow the individual circles, you see that they’re actually sitting on top of each other, which is physically impossible. Well, with true circles anyway. You’ve never seen anything like this before?”

  “Don’t think so. Archimedes was a math guy, yeah? Would he have known about them?”

  “They don’t show up in the historical record until the 6th century, almost eight hundred years after Archimedes, but he was a genius. Way ahead of his time. And most of his writings have been lost. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he at least toyed with the idea.” He stared at his sketch for a moment. “You know, according to most accounts, Archimedes was working on a problem right before he died. Supposedly, his last words were, ‘Don’t disturb my circles.’ Something to that effect. Maybe he was trying to solve the riddle of Borromean Rings.”

  “Well, that was the last thing I saw. I think it’s important. Maybe the key to opening the vault.”

  He nodded, then looked at her with the same suspicious glance. “Wait a second. You said we were going to the vault. But we’re driving toward Death Valley. Don’t tell me…”

  “I saw where it is. In my vision.”

  “And it’s in California?”

  “Arizona, actually.”

  He shook his head. “No. This is crazy. You had a bad trip, Jade. Infrasound stimulates different parts of the brain, but it can’t put ideas in your head that aren’t already there.”

  “Why not? When you hear a song on the radio, it’s just a bunch of high frequency radio waves assembled a certain way. Maybe the ancients who built the Hypogeum built it so that it would play a specific pattern of resonance waves, to produce a specific effect.”

  “Jade, think about it. You’ve done most of your work in the Southwest. Of course that’s what you would see. It’s just your brain trying to make sense of it.”

  “If you had been there, you’d know that it wasn’t a hallucination. But it doesn’t matter. We’ll be there in a few hours. If we find it right where I saw it in my vision, then we’ll know I’m right. If it’s not there, I’ll admit I was wrong. Does that work for you?”

  “If I may,” Shah said, breaking his long silence. “The Hypogeum is important. My partner knew that Jade would go there, and I think she knew what you would find.”

  Professor craned his head around and stared at Shah. “Why is he here, again?”

  “That was part of the deal for saving your ass,” Jade said. “I made the call. Get over it.”

  He frowned but did not push the issue. “I’m still pretty skeptical about the role of infrasound in this, but I’ll allow for the possibility. We’ve seen too much crazy stuff to dismiss it out of hand. And like you said, if it’s not there, we’ll know. But has it occurred to you that, if it really is there, the Changelings know about it and will probably be waiting for you?”

  “Which is why I’m glad that you’re back. One of the reasons, anyway.”

  “So where is it? Exactly, I mean.”

  Jade glanced at Shah again. She had not revealed the exact location to him or anyone else yet. But Professor was right. The Changelings weren’t looking for the vault. They almost certainly knew where it was. They were only interested in keeping anyone
else from finding it. She was keeping the secret only to keep Shah from trying to double-cross her. Even a few hours’ advance notice would be enough for him to set up an ambush. But if that was his plan, then he would not make his move until the door to the vault was open, if it could be opened. She would only know his true intentions then.

  “The Vault,” she said, “is in Sedona.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Village of Oak Creek, Arizona

  Although he initially greeted Jade’s declaration much the same way that he might have reacted to Jeremiah Stillman or someone of his ilk going on about extraterrestrial astronauts—for very nearly the same reason—he had to admit that it made a lot of sense.

  The area surrounding the northern Arizona town—equal parts artists’ colony and tourist trap—situated about halfway between the city of Phoenix and the Grand Canyon, was renowned for a wide range of paranormal activities ranging from frequent UFO sightings to energy vortices capable of transporting people to parallel dimensions. The sheer volume of anecdotal evidence suggested that something might actually be happening at Sedona. There were simply too many stories to discount them all as cynical hoaxes or delusions brought on by too much time in the hot desert sun and unrealistic expectations.

  The actual scientific evidence for such phenomena was sketchy. Pictures purporting to show auras and other ghostly images were easily dismissed as lens flares, or more often than not, were the result of hucksters using techniques like Kirlian photography to produce visually stunning, but definitely not supernatural images of electromagnetic fields. Terrestrial electromagnetic energy was widely cited as the source of Sedona’s strange phenomena. The area was reputed to be a major junction of electromagnetic meridians, often called “ley lines”—similar effects were often reported at the Pyramids of Egypt, Stonehenge, Easter Island, or anywhere that New Age gurus might be able to convince the gullible to part with their money—but EM effects could be measured, and there was no observable difference in the earth’s magnetic field at Sedona to back up this pseudo-scientific explanation.

  Nevertheless, Jade’s experiences in Paracas and the Hypogeum had convinced him to give those stories a second look. In almost every case, the effects described by visitors to Sedona and the surrounding area mirrored the effects described in infrasound experiments, ranging from altered mood to hallucinations to temporary loss of consciousness and lapses of memory, which could be mistaken for teleportation—another commonly reported phenomena associated with the Sedona vortices. A resonance chamber in the hills of Sedona, either naturally occurring or constructed by one of the civilizations that had inhabited the area over the preceding nine thousand years, was a perfectly plausible explanation.

  It did not of course explain how Jade was able to “see” an elaborate Vault from the other side of the world, but, Professor thought, one impossible thing at a time.

  It took a little over seven hours to make the drive from Edwards AFB to Sedona and then a little further south to the place Jade revealed to be the actual location of the vault, a 547-foot high red limestone butte shaped like a bell—thus the name, Bell Rock—though to Professor, it looked more like a medieval castle perched atop a huge domed mountain.

  According to the tourist pamphlets Jade had collected, Bell Rock was one of the four prominent vortex sites in the Sedona area, and rumor had it the mountain concealed an enormous crystal that produced harmonic energy waves—more New Age-y nonsense, as far as Professor was concerned—or possibly a hidden alien city, which now didn’t seem quite as preposterous as it once had. Bell Rock had achieved near-global notoriety in 2012 when a Sedona retiree, obsessed with the belief that all of human existence was actually an elaborate computer simulation—probably after reading one of Roche’s books—claimed that a portal to another dimension would open up during the winter solstice, which not-coincidentally corresponded to the arrival of the overhyped end of the Mayan calendar, and that by taking a literal leap of faith from the promontory, he would be hurled through space and time to the center of the galaxy. Professor could not recall hearing the man’s eventual fate, but he could not ignore the similarities to what Jade had described. Perhaps there was some kind of doorway at Bell Rock, and a resonance chamber that could, figuratively at least, send a person on a cosmic journey.

  Was that a secret worth killing for? Evidently both the Changelings and Atash Shah thought so, though for very different reasons. Shah’s faith-based concerns he could understand, even if they were wholly irrational, but what did the Changelings hope to gain from protecting what was essentially a great big hallucination machine?

  Jade pulled the car off in a parking area at the trailhead near the highway. It was late afternoon but there were still several other cars in the lot, most of them bearing Arizona license plates, though there were a few from other states. All of the cars had an innocuous well-traveled look about them, but that was exactly the sort of attention to detail he would expect from the Changelings.

  Jade got out and went to the trunk. Inside was a small backpack along with an ample supply of bottled water. “Load up,” she said. “The entrance is in a cave about fifty feet up the cliff. We’ll have to do some climbing.”

  “That’s a pretty precise estimate,” Professor remarked. “I wonder if you were seeing it as it is now, or as it was when the Hypogeum was first built. Did the vision account for erosion and weathering?”

  “Don’t be such a spoilsport. I know exactly where to go. When we get there, you’ll either see that I’m right, or get to crow about me being delusional.”

  “I didn’t say you were... You know what, you’re right. Let’s go.”

  Jade stuffed several bottles into the pack and then handed one each to Professor and Shah. “It’s not far, but we should probably get moving if we want to get there before dark.”

  “Lead the way.” He fixed Shah with a pointed stare. “I’ll bring up the rear.”

  A frown flickered across Shah’s face but he did not reply. Instead, he fell into step behind Jade and did not look back. Professor allowed them to get a lead of about fifty yards before heading out. He walked with his hands on his hips, his right hand just a few inches from the Beretta nine-millimeter pistol tucked into his belt at the small of his back and covered by the tail of his shirt. Sievers had brought him the weapon in Australia, and though he only had one spare fifteen-round magazine, he was not as worried about being outgunned by the Changelings as he was being outfoxed by them. A frontal assault wasn’t their style, but that did not make them any less formidable.

  The well-maintained trail headed north toward the towering formation, paralleling the highway for the first mile or so. They passed several day hikers and mountain bikers returning to the trailhead, presumably after completing the nearly four mile long loop that encompassed both Bell Rock and the considerably more massive but not quite as photogenic Courthouse Butte to the east. None of the tourists gave them more than a second glance, but Professor varied his stride, sometimes falling back as much as a hundred yards to see if anyone was paying closer than usual attention to them.

  When they reached the Y-junction and the beginning of the loop, Jade paused as if taking a rest break. When she sure there was nobody in their line of sight, she left the trail behind and headed due north toward the base of the rock. Professor lingered a few minutes to make sure they were not being observed, and then headed out at a jog.

  Jade moved toward the butte as if guided by a homing beacon. Despite his skepticism concerning her supposed out-of-body experience, he marveled at the certainty with which she sped toward her goal, but that was easily enough explained by the fact that this was probably not her first visit to Bell Rock. The Sedona area had been inhabited for thousands of years, and there were ongoing archaeological excavations all over the region. He knew for a fact that Jade had done extensive field work in the Southwest as part of her search for the legendary Seven Cities of Cibola. In the great Venn diagram of life, that had been the moment where Jade’
s circle and his had first intersected; Jade had been working with Professor’s former SEAL commander, Dane Maddock.

  Even so, a prior visit did not fully account for her laser-like focus. Jade was moving with a purpose, scrambling onto the slope as if following a GPS device in her head, forcing him, reluctantly, to revise his hypothesis. Dreams—and that was the most rational explanation for the out-of-body-experience phenomenon—were rarely a perfect representation of reality. The brain had a way of mixing things up, combining memories and filling in the gaps with subconscious expectations. If Jade’s vision were nothing more than a mental rerun of a previous visit, then he would have expected her to begin exhibiting confusion, searching the terrain for familiar markers to reorient herself. She was most certainly not doing that.

  “Up there,” she said, pointing to a weathered draw that ran up to the foot of the sheer vertical slope.

  The draw, which channeled rainwater away in the path of least resistance, had been millions of years in the making, just like everything else in the landscape. Caves, like the one Jade had described, were like the bubbles in a block of Swiss cheese, disappearing as the passage of time scoured away the surrounding rock. It would be nothing short of miraculous if the cave Jade sought was actually the opening to an ancient Vault—

  “There,” Jade said, pointing up to a shadowy divot about fifty feet above the top of the draw. “That’s the one.”

  She opened her backpack and took out a bundle of kernmantle climbing rope, along with three nylon safety harnesses. “I’ll lead and set protection,” she said, as she donned the harness. “We’ll top rope Atash since he’s the least experienced climber here.”

  “And you’re the second least,” Professor said. “I’ll lead and top rope both of you.”

  She shook her head. “I know the route. It’s a piece of cake.”

  “Let me guess. You saw that, too?”

  “I saw what I saw,” she retorted. “And I’ve been right so far. Why is it so hard for you to just trust me?”