He’s not you, and they’re not us. And…
Alexander reached out his hand. “I need you dad. We all do.”
“Who?”
For the life of him, Caleb couldn’t remember. What was different? Why was Alexander acting so weird and not out back helping Lydia pick berries for dessert or chasing Clea around? Why did none of this make sense, and yet, it did?
He looked up to the sky, expecting to see something, something that shouldn’t be there. A star, a comet?
It’s coming, Alexander imparted, and now Caleb marveled that the boy seemed to be wrapped in a coat of electrical energy. Pulsating charged particles dazzling the eye and making his hair stand on end, yet causing no pain.
Except that grimace of concern and the look of fear in his eyes.
Dad…
The weight in Caleb’s hand seemed heavier now, and when he tore his eyes from Alexander, and his inner sight away from the glories of this world’s past, he saw he had been holding something this whole time.
They were down there.
In the vault below the lighthouse, the vault he had constructed without Lydia’s knowledge in his own universe. A vault to protect the Emerald Tablet, the most elusive and dangerous of the works discovered the library vault under the Pharos.
How did I get that?
It was here, in his hand, still present in this world.
A rolling montage-flashback of he and Lydia, carefully poring over this artifact by firelight. Sharing everything with her. No secrets, they had plumbed its mysteries together.
The weight — or non-weight — of the thing triggered the break that he had been fighting. Severed the pull of this place and reset his vibrational frequency, separating himself from himself.
He was seeing Alexander, the other Alexander, but something didn’t quite seem right with him. For a moment he shifted and took on the form of another boy, almost the same age, and a name floated around in his head…
Jacob…
Caleb stood back, and the world turned dim as if the clouds had thickened by a factor of ten, and the only objects to have any brilliance or solidity were the Tablet, himself and Jacob, who was now changing back to Alexander. The boy had stepped out of some indistinct rectangular portal, dazzling with a lightning-chiseled frame, and grabbed his free hand.
“Dad,” he implored with wide eyes that held their own lifetime of indispensable wisdom and shared experiences with his father, “you have to come with me. Now…”
And he pulled.
“But…” Caleb pulled back, looking in shock now at his son — who flickered, his image stuttering like a projection, turning a shade different color. A flash of gold, and a superimposed figure — that of a woman.
Not Lydia. Not his beautiful wife, but someone else. Something else.
Alexander’s pleading face, smiling, begging sweetly — suddenly melted away into this other woman’s mask of triumph as she pulled with extraordinary strength.
“Got you,” Miriam exclaimed.
They went through the door that snapped shut behind them, resealing the fabric of another universe.
27
Along the center walkway that branched out from their location to the main spoke under the Bell, a crack in reality formed like a lightning bolt tearing through, pushing, separating and then creating a door.
A door which admitted two figures.
A woman all too familiar to Montross, as Miriam had been his escort down here and had only left through a similar portal just minutes before Diana arrived.
Now she returned, dragging with her…
A shell-shocked Caleb who looked like he had just seen the ghosts of several lifetimes. Disoriented, in shock maybe, but…
Diana pointed with her free hand. “What’s he holding?”
“That…is something that shouldn’t be here,” Montross said. “They found another one.”
“Not another one,” Miriam said, composing herself and shoving Caleb a short distance toward them. “The same one that you callously destroyed.”
“How is that possible?” Diana asked, still amazed at seeing two people materialize from thin air.
“It’s possible,” Caleb said, reorienting himself. He was holding the artifact and gazing into its depths. It was like he hadn’t even noticed his surroundings. “It’s possible because it is. Where this came from, we never needed to destroy it, at least not yet.”
“I don’t want to ask,” Montross said, still holding Diana. “But brother, I’m sorry. You have to send it back. You can’t let her have it.”
Caleb gripped it tighter, pulled it close to his chest and gave Montross a dark look born of jealousy and hate.
“Easy Frodo,” Montross reached for him. “Don’t want it myself, just don’t give it to her.”
Miriam spread out her arms. She was framed in the phosphorescent swirling lights and the electrical haze. “It’s beyond my reach in any case. One of you has to use it.” With that, she made a motion to something overhead, and the platform they were all on started to rise.
“Oh this is really bad déjà vu,” Montross said when the platform finished its ascent and left them not only even with the wildly spinning bell, but on the same level now with a dozen or so black-clad technicians, a wall of server banks, dozens of monitors, tons of wires, electrical pylons and… a throne-like chair.
Caleb took a step toward the central furnishing in the room.
“One of you,” Miriam said, “has to do it. Channel its power, link it with your consciousness. Both of you have accessed it before. You’re familiar, and I imagine it will be like driving your own personalized race car again.”
“Why can’t you do it?” Diana questioned, letting go of Montross and taking a wary step toward the other woman in the room. Or was she a woman? Something crazy weird about her…
Miriam’s eyes flashed with the electrical firestorm behind Diana, but her eyes were only on Caleb and Montross. “They know why.”
“She’s only one half of the requirement,” Caleb said absently, now staring at the Tablet’s lettering, his eyes scanning not just back and forth over the symbols, but deeper. “Consciousness — pure energy that has been masked and contained in a false material form.”
“Isn’t that what all of us are?” Montross wondered. He was wrapped in thought as well, cataloguing the position of all the attendants and guards, weighing options for resistance — or at the least incapacitation of the equipment here, something to buy them time or disrupt Miriam’s plans.
“No,” Caleb replied. “We are unified. Material and spirit bound up in one composition from the beginning.”
“Not true, when I left my body, I could go into another one…”
“That had the same vibrational signature, as all corporeal matter in this universe. Trust me,” Caleb said, pulling his eyes briefly from the Tablet to Montross, then to Miriam. “She is other, here but not here. Which allows her and the few others like her, extraordinary abilities to exist in not just different places at once, as you’ve learned, but in different times, different heres. You, Xavier, can glimpse ahead your own demise, while they can, with some limits and the need to focus apparently, foresee and prevent any harm and even prevent discovery. But this Tablet, it was especially designed for only those with the ability to see, those limited by mortality. A means to even the scales with the gods.”