by Richard Farr
“Yes.”
“Weird. But good.”
“Thanks.”
I’m turned the other way when Kit responds to this by saying, “Daniel is genius for cook.” Hearing her speak about me this way makes my ego inflate like a party balloon—until I turn round, and see that she’s saying it to Rosko while leaning in close with a little giggle to brush a crumb off his chin.
Shrugging it off, telling myself it’s nothing, I grab a root beer. We all gather around the TV, where Aaron is saying we should watch “something really bad, like 1970s Dr. Who.”
The chance to escape into another dimension for a while sounds good to me. “ ‘Brain of Morbius’?” I suggest. “That’s extremely bad. In a good way.”
Julia picks up the remote to start searching. But we never do get our dose of the Time Lord.
CHAPTER 11
GOAT ROCKS
Breaking news, breaking news. From a place in the middle of nowhere that I know like the back of my hand.
A guy in a studio, pale and stunned as if his doctor has just given him three months, is saying, Strange story, but they seem hysterical, and we don’t yet have any clear account of what happened. Then they cut to an overdressed woman in the back of a news helicopter, shouting into a mic over the noise: “We’re about a hundred miles southeast of Seattle, approaching Mount Gilbert in the Goat Rocks Wilderness. Reports came in late this morning of an explosion that rattled windows as far afield as Longview and Yakima. At about the same time, a group of teens from a multifamily camping trip found their way to a campground near here and reported that the adults in their group—”
Someone cuts her off and points. As she turns, the camera follows her eyes out the open door. A mile away you can see a sawtoothed ridge that seems to grow dramatically as the helicopter loses altitude.
“You can see Mount Gilbert now. We’ve been told—”
But someone off-camera interrupts her again—down there, down there to the right of the ridge—and a hand comes into the frame, pointing urgently. In the scrubby vegetation a perfect ring is visible, perhaps twenty yards in diameter, like the raked dirt on a baseball field, except that everything is swept outward from the central circle. Inside the circle, a ring of human figures is visible.
The chopper dips forward, like a dragonfly hunting, then swoops in through a litter of cloud and settles in a whirl of dust. Then the frame veers away. The next shot—wobbly, handheld—shows three or four of the people from the helicopter, backs to the camera, hiking and scrambling across a ravine. You can hear the camera operator wheezing and cursing as he slips and tries to balance. Then a girl’s voice: “This way.” The lens glances in her direction. Reddish ponytail, freckles, maybe fifteen—obviously she’s one of the survivors.
They come out onto less difficult ground. The wind against the mic makes a sound like someone moving furniture in an old house.
The circle is thirty feet across and has a perfectly sharp boundary, as if cut by a knife. Outside, the vegetation has been gouged away in a ring twenty yards wide; inside, the grass looks untouched. The camera examines this border, then comes up behind the motionless back of a woman, who stands with one hiking boot right on it. She’s wearing a puffy green hiking jacket. The cameraman lingers, as if hesitating, taking in the sheer stillness of her body—nothing moving, except the loose end of a red scarf that twitches in the wind. Then he steps around her, keeps the lens pointed at the ground. Twenty paces later, on the other side, he raises it again.
Four people standing, the woman and three men. The other eight are lying in the snow, and there’s no question from the postures: they’re all dead. Spilled among the bodies, at all angles in the mud, several copies of a small red book.
Now you see that within the ring of grass, beneath the dead, there’s something else—a pile of rocks. It’s just rubble: a pitiful mound as wide as a small room and maybe three feet high at the center. But it has the look of something constructed. The cameraman lingers on it, then sweeps dramatically upward to reveal one of the standing figures. A young man, midtwenties, with thick, dark eyebrows sprouting from under a cloth cap. He looks skinny and frail, but his hands are holding out, like an offering, an angular chunk of rock as big as his own head.
The camera moves in to examine the rock, the hands, then pans sideways to his face. And the world gets its first close-up of that look.
That look.
The almost-blank eyes: they move about, a little, even follow you as you move, but then they drift away and never quite seem to settle on anything. The almost-blank mouth: motionless, held half an inch open with the tongue moving almost imperceptibly between the teeth as if saying Th—, Th—, Th—.
As if arrested midword. As if just moments ago robbed of words.
The four figures just stand there, facing the summit, almost but not quite smiling. Unbearably docile. Waiting.
There’s a new sound now. The camera turns toward it, seeking it out. The girl they have brought with them, the one who said, This way, is on her knees among the rocks at the center of the circle, with her arms flung across one of the fallen figures, wailing. The camera goes to her face, then the man’s, her dirty fingers moving against his cheek.
Same hair, same nose, same chin. The girl looks up into the camera, half-talking, half-crying. Behind her, her father’s eyes are still visible, staring blankly.
“They were doing this chanting thing, and they didn’t reply when we said hello, and then they went off up this track, miles and miles, and we kept saying, ‘Hello, hello, where are you going,’ and I said, ‘Daddy, Daddy, stop,’ but they wouldn’t listen, and we couldn’t keep up because we were trying to look after the little ones and we got lost—”
Now the anchorwoman fills the frame again. She’s struggling to hold it together. “It’s hard to describe what has happened here,” she says, faltering. “Hard to understand what has been done to these people. We seem to be at the center of an explosion, yet the people who are, who are still standing seem to be physically unharmed. Mentally—”
She waves her hands. “And the others—”
An Asian guy with spiky hair and latex gloves, some sort of paramedic, indicates the ones on the ground. “They’ve been dead for approximately eight, ten hours. Ten hours ago is when the explosion was reported in Yakima.”
The woman’s lips tremble and she looks away into the green mountain distances, her professional composure shredded. Someone not in the frame, perhaps the cameraman, finishes the thought for her. “Shit, man. The way they look at you. As if they’re expecting something. Like they’re dogs.”
The truth is, it’s worse than that. The camera goes from face to face, lingering on the eyes. And looking into those eyes is as uncanny, as deeply and unspeakably wrong, as going to your bathroom mirror to look at your own face and seeing nothing there but the reflection of the wall behind you.
The paramedic is kneeling next to the girl. “Are they all here? Didn’t you say thirteen people?”
She nods, trying to compose herself enough to speak, then picks up one of the fallen books and holds it tight to her chest, rocking slightly. A comfort object. Finally she says through her tears: “Reverend Hollar. He’s our leader. He’s the one who taught us the chanting. But he’s not here.”
The TV people have lost the thread, gone off-script, as if they’ve forgotten or don’t realize that the camera is still live. The frame jumps from the paramedic to the anchor, to the girl, then to each of the victims in turn, as if the camera operator is desperately trying to take it all in. Someone says, “What’s happened to them? What’s happened to them?” And by chance the anchorwoman is caught, half in frame, crying openly, just as she says, “Mystery, a complete mystery.”
It’s a strange moment. Nobody who sees it forgets it. And something about her choice of that word instantly guarantees its status as a label. She has captured something: it’s not just that the situation is a mystery, not just that the facts are a mystery. So are
the victims, the silent standing people that the camera now lingers on. All over the world, that is what these people will become.
Misteri. Misterier. Mysteerit.
Rätsel. Gizemleri. Verborgenheden.
Blank faces. Parted lips with the tongue just visible, as if halted in the act of speaking. An air of expectation, combined with a profound, inexplicable absence.
The Mysteries.
People talk about them a lot. Not so much about the ones lying in the mud, who they assume are merely dead.
On the pretext of clearing up, I pick up a pile of stuff for the kitchen, nudging Rosko in the ankle on the way past. When he joins me, leaning against the fridge, I check behind him to make sure that no one has followed.
“What the hell do you make of that?” I say, piling dishes into the sink.
He shakes his head—and I’m so wrapped up in what I’ve just seen on TV that at first I don’t even understand that he’s ignoring the Goat Rocks thing, is already on another subject.
“I looked again at their website. Figured out who hosts it. They keep an archive of business files on the same server.”
“You what? You—oh, the Colberts? That’s good. Anything interesting?”
“I can’t hack it. Not yet anyway.”
“Password protected?”
He looks at me as if I’m even stupider than he thought. “Of course it’s password protected, yes. That’s not the problem. I have a piece of freeware called Hacksaw that can crack your average password in three seconds. Criminals helping criminals, you know. The Colberts, their password took ten minutes. That was my first little surprise. But the thing is, the files inside it use fucking 128-bit Rijndael.”
“English, Rosko. Speaka da eenglish. I have no clue what you’re talking about.”
“Rijndael is a high-level symmetric-key encryption standard.”
“English, Rosko.”
“OK, let me put it this way. The labs at Los Alamos design a new type of nuclear warhead, and want to email the blueprints to the Pentagon? They’ll use 256-bit Rijndael as the wrapping paper. Nobody knows how to crack that. The 128-bit version is faster and easier to use. It takes us all the way down from impossible to—well. Still impossible.”
“You’re telling me that’s what the Colberts use to hide their movie clips?”
“Who knows what they’re hiding—that’s the whole point. But I have to say, Daniel, I take everything back. What the Colberts using military-grade encryption has to do with that”—he gestures toward the TV—“I have no idea. But you’re totally right. Something we don’t understand is going on, and the Colberts are just not who they say they are.”
I feel a strange emotion. It’s a relief that Rosko believes me. It’s also worse, because he’s confirming that this whole thing is not going away.
“Something else, Daniel.”
“What?”
“Remember what my father said in Patagonia? That the Colberts left in a hurry because Sophie’s father was sick?”
“Sure.”
“After I found the archive, I asked him to remember Sophie’s exact words. He did a nice parody of her.” His voice goes all squeaky. “ ‘Stefan, wir haben, wir gehen, wir müssen nach, eh, Paree zurück. Meine Vater hat der, den, uh, krankenheits.’ ”
“Which means?”
“It means ‘My German is crap, and I’m trying to tell you that we have to get back to Paris because my father is sick.’ ”
“So? Her Vater wasn’t sick?”
“Not in any way he would have noticed, no. He died in a car accident. Ten years ago.”
“Rosko, get into those files, OK?”
“You have to understand: me and my laptop against that, it’s like getting into Fort Knox with a bent paper clip.”
“Get Aaron to help.”
“I will. He’s so twisted, he’ll think this is fun.”
There will be a lot of insomniacs tonight: all over the city, all over the world, people staring into the dark, haunted by the faces at Goat Rocks. I don’t even bother with bed, just sneak back down to Mom’s office, try to work again, sift through the news chatter. But at some point everything catches up with me. Eyes blurring, yawning till my jaw hurts, I put my head down for a break. And I wake up two hours later, stiff and chilled, thinking I’ve just heard her voice again.
My forehead has been resting on her desk. There’s a taste of stale pizza in my mouth and a big crease across my cheekbone where it was resting against the side of the keyboard. Four in the morning. It takes a minute to get a grip on the fact that what really woke me up was my phone buzzing. A series of messages:
Progress maybe.
Five minutes later: Yes. They set this up wrong. Won’t help me get into the files themselves, but I might have a backdoor into the folder lists.
Ten minutes later: You there?
And five more after that: Bingo. Wake up. Just retrieved a partial list of plaintext filenames.
When I call, Rosko explains that there are actually two lists, and they’re all folders. The first are place names or tribal names—dozens of them:
Strongyle
Babylon
Hattusa
Troy
Mohenjo-daro
Rapa Nui
Mycenae
Angkor
Akkad
Nineveh
Cahokia
Peruvian Amazon Kulamiru
Chogha Zanbil
Mount Kailash
Mogollon Rim Sinagua
Chaco Canyon Anasazi
Göbekli Tepe
Greenland Western Settlement
I don’t recognize every name, but I’ve heard enough over the years to know what I’m looking at—a list, stretching across the globe, and across thousands of years, of events that particularly bug Dad. Or Jimmy and Lorna. Or Derek Partridge. Cultures, cities, whole civilizations associated with sudden disappearances.
The second list is names of people. Dozens, again, a few of which I recognize:
ABalakrishnan
DMJones
CBates
IMaclean
WCalder
JChen
LChen
MChen
The first one on the list, ABalakrishnan, is the Indian dude who funded ISOC. A big fan of Mom’s in the international business community, apparently—that’s how he met Dad and discovered a mutual interest in, as he put it, what a brain really is. He’s Charlie to everyone now, has been for years: according to a much-quoted interview, he took the nickname because my name is Akshay, and Westerners kept calling me Ashkay, which sounds like ashtray, and I don’t smoke.
“Rosko, what’s Balakrishnan doing on this list? What’s anyone doing on it?”
“I have not even the faintest ghost of an idea.”
After I’ve hung up, I go to the kitchen, wash my face, boil water for a cup of peppermint tea. I want to put on music, because there’s something about the silence of the house that’s doubly bad in the predawn dark. Looking out the window, I get the creepy sensation that someone or something is moving around in the alley behind the house, decide it’s better to look away. Halfway down the mug of tea it occurs to me that I have still not really searched the office in which I’ve spent so much time.
I start with her corkboard. It’s covered with the same old clippings, some of them beginning to curl slightly at the edges like dying leaves. I have already looked at them again and again, but without touching. Now I take them all down, one by one. Immediately I discover that tucked behind the largest sheet, attached to the board by the same pin, is a small envelope with three more clippings and a note. The handwriting jumps out at me like a spider, even before I see the name.
Chère Iona,
We thought you might find these interesting too.
À bientôt! Sophie
I hold the note in one hand, staring blankly ahead of me. I’ve seen this handwriting exactly once before. On a slip of paper on the hospital bed in Punta Are
nas.
I turn in Mom’s chair, stare into space for a minute or ten while I rethink that scene yet again. Finally, when my eyes come back into focus, I go to her bookshelves and take every volume down, one at a time.
Mathematics and physics. Business and finance. Philosophy and religion. A collection of papers, edited by Maynard Jones, under the title Transhumanism. I dip into that one, can’t understand a word of it. He has dedicated it to her: For Iona, always—DMJ.
Always?
Finally, on the bottom shelf nearest the wall, almost hidden behind a fat textbook on Advanced Information Theory, there’s a slim, well-thumbed hardback. That hard, grainy red cover, with the cut golden triangle and wavy line, is instantly familiar to everyone. According to Quinn it represents our transmigration from the temporal to the eternal; from the physical to the spiritual; from the illusory to the real; from the fallible to the infallible; from the merely human to the divine.
Anabasis. The disturbing thing isn’t that Mom has read it, but that she has studied it, hard and long: every single margin, on every single page, is shaded gray with the neat tiny letters of her own handwriting.
I think at once of what Dad would say, with a little edge to his voice. Still shopping, Iona? But this isn’t mere shopping. I desperately want to ask her about this. I can’t ask her. So instead I cradle the book in my arms, sit back in her chair, rock back and forth as if I’m hugging her. Exactly like the girl at Ruapehu.
Later I notice that this book too has been dedicated to her. No signature, but it’s Sophie Colbert’s writing again:
Iona: Join us. You won’t be sorry—not ever.
Time for breakfast. But first I tiptoe back upstairs to take a shower. It’s only when I’m standing in the bathroom that I remember Dr. Lovecraft’s little bottle of pills.
Zampodex: it sounds like the name of a bloodthirsty Mayan deity. I rip off the multifolded information sheet that’s wrapped around the bottle and stand there reading the six-point type that nobody ever reads. It explains how the molecular structure interferes with a particular protein, PKMz; describes the evidence that this works just peachy in caged rodents. Then, right at the end, it mentions the more common side effects: disorientation, dizziness, dry mouth, bowel irritation, ringing in the ears, short-term memory loss, long-term memory loss, acne, visual auras, bad breath, mood changes, multiple personality disorder, bad grades in Social Studies, permanent irreversible sexual dysfunction, death.
