“Looks like mine,” she said, sipping at her tea. “Oh yeah, that’s one of mine. Got two others there.”
“In a minute, we’ll look. What question were you asking yourself for this one?” She had given them two questions to focus on, to guide their minds. Not that they couldn’t perceive something else if their thoughts took them in another direction, as had often happened to her at least, but Victoria was interested now in this one. This…she looked at it again. A clear mushroom cloud, an atomic explosion over some kind of desert landscape.
“Oh, let me think.” Marla swallowed slowly while all eyes were on her. “That was you telling us to think about the Morpheus leader. Crowe. Try to see where he was at. I don’t know why I drew that thing. Probably daydreaming. Mind wandering, all this talk about the end of the world and stuff.”
“It ain’t going to end with a bomb,” Jack grumbled. “Everyone knows it’s gonna be disease, like Ebola or that Zika thing gonna wipe us out.”
“Okay, just hang on. What’s this here?” Victoria pointed to a figure inside the cloud itself that looked like a crude long-haired rock art drawing, but asleep on its side.
“No idea,” she said, frowning. “I got another image of the place as if it had something to do with dreaming.”
Atomic bombs and dreaming? Why did that ring a bell? “That’s great, Marla. I think this might be helpful, especially because I see other drawings here that others have to do with sleeping figures and…clocks. Sleeping and time.”
She thought, trying to shut out the whispers, the ticking of the clock.
Sleep time, sleepy time, dream clock. Dream hours, dream…
Time.
“Dreamtime,” she said aloud.
“That’s what I just said,” Curt spoke slowly, chewing at a piece of crust. “It’s a thing, a conspiracy site I saw on one of those shows. Ancient Aliens or UFO Hunters, I think.”
“What is it? Where is it?” I should know this.
“Oh, uh… Australia. It’s actually just their name for Aboriginal mythology. Like the time of Gods, or the time before time when the world was created. Or something like that.”
“Oh yeah,” Jack added. “I heard of that too. Trippy stuff about spirit beings who traveled across the land before anything was there, creating mystic places and stuff, leaving magical trails of power in the earth called ‘song-lines’.”
“Don’t know what that has to do with our objective, though.”
“Unless it’s just to point to Australia. That maybe Caleb Crowe is there.”
“If he is…” Curt stared at the table, then moved across from Jack who was doing the same, arranging certain drawings. Green shaded things, creating a sort of prison or cell in one, with a person inside.
“Pines…pines…” Curt stared a little longer, then pointed at the sheet, one of his: “Pine Gap!”
“Yeah! Hence the pine trees,” Jack noted, scratching his chin.
Confused, Victoria let them talk amongst themselves for a moment, and she listened to stories about secret installations and research. Then she cleared her throat, holding up her hand for silence.
“Can we still get that break?” Jack asked, interrupting what she was about to say. “I’m really itchin for a smoke.”
“Hang on. And yes, just one second. Which of you drew anything related to the other question?”
A heavy-set older man with a graying beard and a t-shirt with Gandalf on it coughed. “Yeah I saw something. Not sure what it is, and uh…I suck at drawing, but that’s mine there in the corner.”
Victoria picked it up and stared at it hard. “Okay I asked you to concentrate on what these Hunters, our enemies are looking for. And you drew this…what looks like a pyramid and these are?”
“Waves,” Gandalf said. Victoria had forgotten his name, so the wizard would do for now. “I got an image of lots and lots of waves, and pyramids. A city maybe, under the water.”
“Atlantis?” asked Jack.
“No, I don’t think so. These ruins were, gosh, like really shallow. Some of them visible above water. And… lots of green stuff around too.”
“Like in a jungle?”
“Yeah maybe.”
“Well the pyramid looks Mayan,” Curt noted. “Or Aztec or something.”
She thought hard, mind racing. Again, she felt the cross’s shadow on her forehead, the figures of silent saints and angels on the stained glass upstairs, looking down on her expectedly.
“Break time,” she said quietly, setting down Gandalf’s drawing. “But while you’re taking a breather, free your mind and come back ready with one focus, one question.” She placed her finger on the pyramid.
“I want to know where this is. Where it is, what’s there, and why they want it so damn badly that we’re all suffering for it.”
14
Caleb was in the facility room one minute and in another far more familiar one the next.
The view out the window now was one he had seen for years, growing up in the lighthouse home on Sodus Bay in upstate New York. This, his room, recreated (pulled from his memories, can Boris do that?) in exact detail. The posters of Egyptian pyramids and gods on the walls, books crammed everywhere.
He grudgingly fought the temptation to remain right here, to linger in the childhood glory of all these books and so, so many memories. But there were more familiarities, sounds this time, coming from beyond the door. Shuffling his feet like a little boy, he emerged into the short hallway leading to the kitchen, where a woman had her back to him, her head in the refrigerator, until she backed up and turned, setting down a tray of strawberry Jell-O squares.
“Mom?”
She smiled at him, and it was a smile that brought back another slew of memories, including her last moments under the Pharos Lighthouse. Hit by a diabolical trap that Caleb should have foreseen, dying but offering a last smile, perhaps reliving visions of her own life. Times just like this one.
“Phoebe’s out back,” she said. “Go play and take your nose out of a book for a while. Then you can have snacks.”
Caleb blinked, looking harder at the scene. The spiral staircase in the corner, leading up to the tower; the piles of Dad’s old books in every other corner, the pads of paper and tear-outs from their weekly Morpheus meetings.
He found himself at the window, looking out over the field of green grass laced with yellow dandelions. At the girl rolling and laughing and chasing bubbles.
The lure was even stronger here to run out and join them and run right up to the water’s edge. He could smell the frothy waves, the summer turning of the lake, the hint of a fishy smell carried on the breeze. The pull from those stairs, however, was stronger, and soon he found himself rising.
Looked back to the kitchen, which was empty now. Mom gone, if she had never been there, and outside…through the slanted angle out the window, it now looked like his son, Alexander, sat against a tree, his nose in a book.
What was real?
Certainly not this, he thought, and only now noticed the light tone to the edges of what he was seeing, but still it was fluid. In motion still, as if he was playing a video game, moving where the action took him — in this case, up the stairs.
Boris’s doing this, he knew — wherever he really was. Probably still sitting in the isolation room at the Pine Gap facility.
He wants to show me something? Fine, get on with it.
Up the stairs, into the apex, the room before the final ascent to the light. Here was where Dad spent most of his time, studying (Caleb had thought back then). Since then, however, he realized his father had most likely used this space, with its panoramic views of the waters leading out to the lake and the rolling hills stretching out behind him, to pursue other ‘objectives’. To see farther and fine-tune his remote-viewing skills, seeking the ultimate of treasures.