“If only,” remarked Cass. “The fly in the ointment, of course, is that you never know exactly what the outcome of any change might be. Since everything is intertwined with everything else, even a small change in one tiny area might result in terrible, or at least unwanted, consequences somewhere else-chaos theory in a nutshell.”
“What if there was another way?” suggested Brendan. “One hypothesis of time holds that the future exists only as a cloud of possibility-no form or substance, just pure potentiality. Now then, what if you had the ability to reach into that cloud of possibilitythat fog of all possible outcomes to any action-what if you could reach in and pluck out the particular outcome you desire?”
“Choose the future you want,” mused Cass. “Which would alter the present reality and also, by logical necessity, change the past as well.”
“ That,” declared Brendan, “is what I believe Arthur Flinders-Petrie discovered.”
No more was said; Cass remained quietly thoughtful as they made their way back to the society headquarters, where Mrs. Peelstick welcomed them and said, “You two carry on. Supper’s almost ready. I’ll call you in a few minutes.”
“Thank you, Rosemary. You’re a peach,” Brendan told her. Crossing to the stairway, he called to Cass, “Come, I want to show you something.”
Cass followed her guide up two floors. Taking a key from his pocket, the Irishman unlocked a heavy door and stepped across the threshold. He twisted a switch on the wall, and lights in sconces flickered on to reveal an absolutely enormous room with a high, beamed ceiling and small diamond-shaped windows. The room occupied the entire second floor of the building, and appeared to be stuffed with books and scrolls and manuscripts and papers of all kinds. There were books in wooden crates and crammed into the floor-to-ceiling shelves lining the long wall on either hand; books piled on the floor in unsteady towers; books lying in untidy heaps in the corners, cascading from under canvas sheets, and spilling from disintegrating boxes. Three large library tables groaned under the weight of oversize volumes, and another table was piled high with rolled parchment scrolls and bundled manuscripts tied with ribbon and string. The air was musty with the scent of mouldering paper and dust.
“Come in, come in,” he said, ushering her inside.
Cass took in the chaotic clutter. “This reminds me of the graduate reading room in the library of the university,” she said.
“Oh, it’s not a library,” countered Brendan. “Nor a reading room. This is a genizah.”
“Genizah,” repeated Cass. She had never heard the word before.
“The ancient Jews considered it sinful to throw away a book, and it was anathema to destroy any book bearing the tetragrammaton- the four letters making up the name of God. So, when their holy texts or other materials became worn out, they were consigned to a genizah to await official burial on holy ground.” He spread his hands to the room. “This is our genizah, but we do not bury the books anymore. They are far too valuable.”
“Your treasure is books.” Cass stepped to the nearest table. The volumes were old and well worn, it was true, and most were in languages other than English. “Where do they all come from?”
“They are gathered from here and there by society members on their various travels and donated to the cause. Those books we deem most worthy of preservation we keep. Who knows when something written in one of these pages-some little scrap of observation, an obscure record of an historical event, a word, a name, a report from a source now forgotten-some little gem of truth will prove valuable to furthering our investigations. Then the book will be resurrected, so to speak, to fulfill its destiny.”
He walked to a smaller table at one end of the room. “Here, I want to show you one of the rarest of those gems.” He reached for a large, rectangular, but very thin, book bound in red leather. The cover was stamped in gold with the words Maps of the Faerie. Brendan pulled the book to him and opened the cover. “This was compiled by a Scottish eccentric writing under the name Fortingall Schiehallion-not his real name.”
“You think?” sniffed Cass.
“His real name was Robert Heredom, and somewhere around 1795 he published this treatise on the cartography of what he called the Faerie Realms.” Brendan began leafing through the book, pausing now and again to show a page of elaborate drawings of strange landscapes with stranger names.
Displayed on the yellowed pages, Cass saw tracts of enchanted forests with twisted trees, magic fountains and rivers, islands of glass, and valleys ruled by immortal kings-all of it rendered with the precision and skill of a draughtsman.
“As you can see from the maps he has drawn, Heredom had an active imagination.” Brendan turned to a page and directed Cassandra’s attention to an odd map unlike any of the others she had seen so far. “But this map,” he said, “this map is different.”
He turned the book so she could see it clearly. It was a drawing done all in sepia tones as if to evoke a bit of parchment made from the skin of a goat or sheep. The piece was roughly oblong, with irregular edges and crease marks, a few tiny holes, a number of cracks or tears-the better to make it look as if the artist was actually copying an object from life. The surface of the parchment was decorated with a number of fanciful markings: spirals and whorls with dots, intersecting lines and overlapping circles, curious cryptic symbols that looked like primitive petroglyphs of the kind found on rocks in deserts, or letters from an imaginary alphabet, or stylised monograms from names in languages that never existed.
“How very strange,” murmured Cass. “Maps to imaginary places.”
“The map before you”-he brushed the page lightly with his fingertips-“ this map is different. It is a record of what must be one of the most remarkable discoveries in the history of the human race.”
Cassandra lowered her head and peered at the drawing more closely, concentrating her attention on the arcane hieroglyphics. She had seen such things before, scratched or painted on rock walls by long-extinct tribes the world over, and like all the rest the symbols meant nothing to her. “Parchment, is it?”
“It is that,” confirmed the Irishman, “but of a very rare and special kind. What you are looking at is a drawing of the map Arthur Flinders-Petrie kept to record his more significant discoveries-discoveries that he inscribed on his own skin.”
“They’re tattoos,” concluded Cass.
“That is exactly what they are. When Arthur died, his skin was removed and made into parchment in order to preserve the map, that the record of his discoveries should not be lost. We call it the Skin Map, and it is of central importance to the work of the society. Those symbols hide wonders. For example, somewhere on that map is the Well of Souls.” Brendan glanced up. “I see you are not familiar with the legend?”
“Not as such,” Cass confessed.
“It is a myth that finds expression in many cultures. One of the most common is an Arab belief associated with the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem; the Spirit Well is known as a place of limbo where the souls of the dead await Judgement Day, or maybe the chance to be reborn. But the myth is far older than that-in fact, it seems to be as old as the human race itself. Almost every culture has a similar talethe Fountain of Youth, the Elixir of Eternal Life, the Philosopher’s Stone. All variations on a theme, you might say-the myth of the Spirit Well. Many other sources indicate that the well is located in the original paradise, Eden.”
Cassandra’s mind leapt ahead to the conclusion. “You believe that Arthur found this Spirit Well, and that this has something to do with manipulating time, selecting the future, changing the past, and all that-is that what you’re telling me?”
“We cannot prove it,” confessed Brendan. “But some of our members have reason to believe that Arthur discovered it and recorded its location on his map.”
“And this,” Cass said, indicating the open pages of the book before her, “you think this is a drawing of that map?”