“Certainly. Just leave everything as you found it, and be sure to lock up when you go. We are…how should I put it…bending the rules a bit tonight.”
“You won’t even know we were here,” Jade promised.
Eco brought them inside, revealing an interior that was far more promising than the modest exterior suggested. After passing through a museum gallery featuring artifacts recovered from the Hypogeum and other Neolithic sites across Malta and Gozo, they reached the literal centerpiece, a glass enclosure that looked down on the entrance to the subterranean temple.
Before descending the metal staircase into the first level, Jade and Kellogg donned LED head lamps. The sections of the Hypogeum on the tour route were equipped with electric lights, but Jade preferred to see what she might discover on her own, peering with fresh eyes into the unlit corners of the site.
Weather and the passage of millennia had softened the edges of the Hypogeum’s upper reaches, blurring the handiwork of ancient craftsmen who had carved it. At first glance, it looked more like a naturally occurring cave, and indeed, many of the chambers in the complex had been created from existing hollows in the natural limestone. Below the entrance however, sheltered from the wind, she saw the temple as its creators intended, and perhaps as Archimedes might have seen it two thousand years before, with rectangular niches and doorways, and trilithons — monumental arrangements of laboriously carved stones, two vertical and one laid across the top like a lintel, strikingly reminiscent of the interior ring of Stonehenge in England.
Jade’s light picked out the geometric shapes and spirals etched upon the walls and ceilings and painted with red ochre, which would no doubt have been of great interest to the mathematician Archimedes, but reminded Jade more of petroglyphs she had seen in the American Southwest. Spirals, she knew, were a symbol of fertility, but also harmony with the natural order of the universe.
The first level was both shallow and relatively small, but the second level, nearly twenty feet below the surface, was where the Hypogeum earned its magnificent reputation. After passing through several spacious chambers, they entered a vast hall, decorated with what had been dubbed “the Monumental Facade.” The room, with its decorative entrance to the “Holy of Holies,” had become the public face of the Hypogeum, its image adorning posters and postcards. The half-domed chamber had been hewn out with astonishing precision to produce an effect not unlike the Pantheon in Rome, a feat all the more remarkable considering that its craftsman had used primitive flint tools.
The marked route took them next into a room known as “the Snake Pit” surrounding a six-foot deep well believed to have been used for the keeping of snakes, an ancient totem of fertility in cultures around the globe. Thankfully, it had been many thousands of years since a snake had slithered there.
Their destination, the Oracle Room, lay just beyond the Snake Pit. As she entered, Jade immediately sensed the strange acoustic properties of the chamber. The sound of her own footsteps were muted — the closest analogy she could come up with was the sense of being inside a glass jar — but she could hear Kellogg moving with astonishing clarity. Even the creak of his leather shoes was amplified.
She turned a slow circle, playing the light on the ceiling with its vivid red spirals. They almost seemed to be moving whenever she looked away from them. “Turn off your light,” she said, her voice whisper-quiet in her ears. There was no echo.
“Why?” Kellogg’s voice boomed in the enclosure and Jade could feel it vibrating in her bones.
“Just do it.”
He complied, and a moment later, Jade switched hers off as well, plunging them into funereal darkness. She stood motionless, eyes open, waiting to glimpse an infrasound induced hallucination.
Nothing.
“That’s enough of that,” she said, clicking the light back on. She took out her phone and turned it on. Even without the SIM card, this far underground it was useless for communicating with the outside world, but it was still a functional audio playback device. Jade opened a frequency generator app she had downloaded earlier and set it to 110 Hz, the same frequency as the Oracle Room itself, then pressed the play button.
There was no sound, but that was not completely unexpected. When she had played the tone earlier, even at maximum volume, it was barely audible when she put her ear next to the speaker. Although the theoretical low end of the human auditory range was 20 Hertz, many people could not differentiate the very low tones. It was also possible that the room’s unique acoustic design was cancelling out the frequency waves, creating a dampening effect. She moved the setting down to zero, and then began advancing it slowly, adjusting the frequency about ten Hertz every few seconds. It was a frustratingly tedious process and Jade had to fight the urge to simply crank the tone generator up to produce some kind of audible result.
Finally, at about 120 Hz, she heard something, a low hum like the sound of a refrigerator compressor with a discernible pulsing at each wave peak. The sound quickly grew in intensity until, even with the phone held at arm’s length, it was almost painfully loud. A queasy feeling settled in her gut, the sensation almost identical to what she had felt in Peru.
She looked over at Kellogg, saw the discomfort on his face. She managed a smile and mouthed, “It’s working,” then adjusted the tone generator again.
In the corner of her eye, she saw someone moving into the Oracle Room. Her first thought was that their enemies had tracked them down, but when she whipped her head in that direction, there was no one there.
Despite the nausea churning in her gut, Jade broke into a triumphant grin. She advanced the tone again, and the room began to spin.
She glimpsed movement overhead, not another ghost figure, but something else. The red spirals on the ceiling appeared to be spinning like whirlpools draining out of one reality and into another. Suddenly, she felt lighter, as if the swirling vortices were sucking her out of the Oracle Room. She reached down to change the frequency…or perhaps to stop the tone generator altogether…but her hand refused to move and before she could do anything else, the world around her dissolved into darkness and she was swept away.
EIGHTEEN
As a journalist, Shah was especially appreciative of irony. Gabrielle had cajoled and goaded him relentlessly, appealed to his heritage and his faith, teased him with the promise of her affections — a promise he now realized she never intended to keep — all to transform him into a leader, a new Mahdi to unite the factions of the Islamic world and lead them to greatness. Her scheming had cost her dearly, not just her eyesight but ultimately the respect — the love — Shah had once felt for her. And yet, it had at last borne fruit. Shah was now the leader she had pushed him to become.
A leader of only four perhaps, but great things often arose from small beginnings. Gabrielle was not the only person to suffer lasting, perhaps even permanent damage from the strange light-burst in the Syracuse museum. But four men — five counting him — would suffice. They would put an end to Jade Ihara’s plot to destroy the faith, and when it was finished, these four would tell the rest of the world how he had led them into battle.
The door to the Hypogeum was unlocked, just as Gabrielle had said it would be. He did not know how she knew this, and she refused to explain, just as she refused to explain how she knew that Jade would be there. Her obstinacy had been the final straw.