Exodus 2022 (15 page)

“Would you have lunch with me?” he asked, as they caught their breath. “Or dinner? Or both, maybe, if you want.”

She laughed again. “I was hoping you’d ask.”

Joe said good-bye to the volunteers, hung up his robe, and in the warm afternoon sunshine left St. Anthony’s hand in hand with Ella Tollefson.

They saw each other four more times that week, which wasn’t nearly enough for Joe. He was falling hard for the beauty with the red hair. Falling fast. Enjoying every thrilling second of their budding romance.

What wasn’t to love? Ella Tollefson was beautiful, intelligent, athletic, funny, playful, and occasionally silly.

She was also—as Joe had intuited during their first conversation—sad; burdened with a weight invisible to the casual observer. It wasn’t something she discussed easily—and Joe never pressed.

After three weeks, with their romance growing more intense by the day, she told him the story. She shed no tears upon the telling. She had cried long enough and hard enough about it already. Joe listened, and wept, and fell even more deeply in love.

THREE A.M.
A disheveled, bleary-eyed group sat in a semicircle around Ring’s workstation—Beck and Collins, Phelps and Edelstein—waiting for Ring to reveal why he’d summoned them at such a godforsaken hour.

Ring, who slept four hours a night, was wide-awake and chipper, humming to himself as he fiddled with a tablet PC.

Beck said, “You have something?”

Ring looked up from his tablet and blinked, as if noticing them all for the first time. “Ah.”

“You’ve found something new in Stanton’s captures?”

“Yes.” Ring clicked a button, and the monitors flashed to life. “A bit more detail. And…something else.”

There was a collective gasp as images filled the screens. “A bit more detail” was a spectacular understatement.

They stared.

And stared some more.

The familiar chamber mouth hovered before them. Same as what they’d seen in Whittaker’s thought captures. And there was the whale fall, in the foreground. The bleached bones of the dead whale jutting against the gaping chamber entrance like broken teeth. The glowing fibers splaying out, like anchor lines tethering a hot air balloon to Earth.

It was the vast
interior
of the chamber that caused the gasp. That looked so different.

Ring adjusted some controls, accessed a different set of Joe Stanton’s thoughts, and the perspective changed. No one spoke.

They were entering the chamber now, passing over the whale fall, drifting forward, hard against one wall.

The familiar phosphorescent strands were there, running like tracks from the gracefully curving bell of the structure deep into its core. But now the lithe, liquidy wall shimmered with color.

Where before there had been only muted shades of green, now there were splashes of blue and red and yellow.

The perspective changed again, and they were facing the wall head-on. Drifting over its surface, close enough to touch.

The wall was alive with light: Nodules of light. Ribbons of light. Points of light so numerous and diffuse it was like gazing into the Milky Way on the blackest winter night. It was impossible to tell how thick the wall was. It seemed infinitely deep, as if one could travel into the wall itself and be lost in a foam of stars, a universe vast and mesmerizing.

Nearer to the surface of the wall, a latticework of interlocking snowflake-like structures stretched away—geometrically perfect, multifaceted plates of light imbuing the fluid superstructure with an air of fantastic strength.

The perspective changed once more, and on into the chamber they drifted, on and on. The walls narrowed, gradually, elegantly, and the tracks of light coalesced, spiraling into a funnel that curved away before them, bending and arcing toward an unseen, unknown terminus.

Ring touched his keyboard and the familiar
throom, throom, throom
rumbled through the speakers.
Throom, throom, throom
. Steady and constant and soothing. Like a heartbeat, like a chant. The sound was pleasing. Reassuring. In just seconds, it penetrated the mind, conferring an almost subconscious sense of peace and tranquility to the listener.

But not to Beck.

The steady
throom, throom, throom
made Beck’s head throb. He squeezed the skin between his eyes and felt his face flush, his mood sour. The sound caused him pain.

He tried to analyze it. Understand why. But it was impossible to think with such a vile noise assaulting his ears. Clogging his brain. He struggled to keep his composure.

“Turn the sound off. Please.”

Ring turned it off.

“Any update on the sound?” asked Phelps, oblivious to Beck’s discomfort. “In the ocean, I mean. The
real
sound.”

Ring said, “Five transmission points in the Bering Sea right now, and three in the Gulf of Alaska. All very deep. At least three thousand meters. If the reports are accurate, there’s a new source about fifteen miles southeast of Mauna Kea, in the Hawaiian Islands, as well.”

Ring looked at his colleagues. “But the sources aren’t stable. The sounds transmit from one spot for a few days, then wink off and start up somewhere else.

“NOAA’s curious. But not curious enough to bring in special ROVs. The Navy knows about the sound, but isn’t investigating. Not yet.”

Beck asked, “Why not?”

Edelstein shrugged. “The ocean is full of sound. Man-made. Natural. Most people aren’t aware of that, but it’s true. Set aside all the human-generated noise and you still have countless sounds made by fish and mammals and invertebrates. Sound produced by geothermal activity, by pressure and wave action and the movement of the tectonic plates.

“Not all of it’s been cataloged. Not every sound in the soundscape is understood. From the reports we’ve seen, NOAA is calling this a ‘random-pattern, naturally occurring acoustical anomaly. Likely geothermal in origin.’”

“They’re wrong, of course” said Ring.

“About what?” said Beck.

Ring laughed. “Everything. It’s not random, for one thing.”

They stared as he pulled a graphical representation of the sound onto his main computer screen—the
throom, throom, throom
, displayed as a colorful waveform. The waves were bunched into tight clusters above a baseline, and the clusters formed patterns distinctive and unique. The clustered waves resembled swarms of insects zooming over flat earth.

“There appears to be a five-day sound cycle,” said Edelstein. “The same exact transmission is repeating every five days. NOAA just hasn’t been listening long enough.”

“They’ll notice the pattern,” said Phelps. “Or the Navy will.”

“Of course,” said Ring. “They will. And they’ll notice something else as well. The pulse is getting louder. Right now it’s background noise. A whisper in the soundscape Dr. Edelstein was telling us about. But that’s changing. The cycle we’re monitoring now—in the Bering Sea—is a constant ninety decibels referenced at one micropascal. The first cycle was exactly half that loud. If the pattern holds, the next cycle will wake the dead.”

Beck stared at one of Ring’s smaller monitors mounted above the main screen. This monitor displayed an image of the chamber from a distance. From outside. It hovered there, alone in the darkness. An eerie, phosphorescent shape floating in space.

“Go back to the interior view,” said Beck. “What you were showing us before you brought up the sound.”

Ring tapped some commands. Once again they were inside the chamber, facing the graceful bend at the narrow end of the funnel.

All of the glowing lines and luminous crystalline shapes led the eye to that bend, to the place where the walls narrowed and the chamber constricted.

The glowing tracks spiraled through the constriction so that staring into the funnel was like staring into a vortex. Into the whirring, roaring stem of a tornado.

It was quiet now. But the way the light spiraled through the narrowing shaft gave them the feeling of impending acceleration, the sense that if they drifted just a bit farther, they’d be sucked through the funnel’s gravitational field.

They drifted forward. Closer to the point of no return. And then they stopped and simply hovered, the great, luminous walls of the chamber close around them.

“Keep going,” said Beck. “Into the funnel and around the bend. Show us what’s there.”

Ring sighed. “We don’t have that yet.”

He pointed to a little box on his monitor where Joe Stanton’s latest thought captures were downloading. The progress bar under the box appeared frozen. If it was moving, the movement was imperceptible.

“There may be something in the next set of captures, but this is all there is right now. Nothing beyond this.”

The curious funnel of light lay before them, straight as a rifle bore at first, then arcing away, bending, to an unseen terminus.

“What is that?” Phelps asked. “That other light, coming from around the bend?”

 “The light at the end of the tunnel,” said Collins, laughing at his own remark.

No one else laughed. No one said anything for several seconds.

“It’s what I wanted to show you,” said Ring.

The light intensified, pouring into the narrow end of the shaft from an unknown source. From a place they couldn’t see.

“It looks like…daylight,” said Edelstein. “Sunlight.”

“It
is
sunlight,” said Ring. “I analyzed it. The ratios match: visible light, ultraviolet and infrared radiation. And the color temperature—fifty-five hundred degrees kelvin—coincides with the sun at midday.

“There’s a tint in the color signature that leads me to believe that what we’re seeing here is sunlight shining through about fifty to sixty feet of seawater. Give or take.”

Beck stared at Ring, confused. “Fifty to sixty feet? But the sounds we’ve identified are coming from
nine thousand
feet. Ten thousand feet. Maybe more.”

“Yes.”

Beck sighed, slumped back in his chair and massaged his forehead, which was throbbing again. “Ring,” he said, “Do you believe that the chamber structure we’re seeing in Stanton’s thought captures matches what’s really on the seabed?”

“Yes.”

Beck pointed at the screen. “So you think if we follow the sound, go to the correct coordinates and down to that depth—to, say, nine thousand feet—we’ll actually find one of these structures? A chamber? Or whatever it is?”

“Yes.”

“So how do you account for sunlight entering such a chamber—nine thousand feet underwater?”

“I can’t. Not yet.” He tapped on the box showing Stanton’s thought-capture downloads. “But I believe Mr. Stanton’s going to tell us. Very soon now.”

“Where is Mr. Stanton now?” Phelps asked after a long silence. “And what is his condition?”

The question seemed to hit Beck like a splash of ice water and he muttered something unintelligible. 

Ring turned back to his computer. Collins seemed suddenly preoccupied with his phone. Phelps and Edelstein looked at Beck, waiting for his response.

“Where is he?” Beck mumbled.

“Yes,” said Phelps. “He’s no longer on the
Northern Mercy
. Where is he?”

“At Swedish Medical Center in Seattle,” Beck lied. “We told Mr. Stanton everything we know about the phenomenon, about the anomaly, and we passed all of his charts and records on to Swedish.”

Phelps gestured at the monitors. “So all of these thought captures were run with Stanton’s permission—while he was aboard
Mercy
?”

“Of course,” said Beck.

Phelps’s expression was impossible to read. He said, “I have some new information on the anomaly—things I’ve learned studying the other victims. I’d like to share that information with Stanton’s doctors. It might prove helpful in his treatment.”

Beck smiled. “Whatever new information you have should go to Dr. Ring, and he will share it with Stanton’s medical team.” Beck leaned forward in his chair and looked at Phelps and Edelstein in turn.

“I’d ask you to please remember the documents you signed when you agreed to come to
Marauder
. When you agreed to the payment I offered. This project, this phenomenon, is…sensitive, to say the least. You can understand my wish to control the flow of information.”

“How can it still be sensitive, if you’ve told Stanton everything?” Edelstein asked.

Beck continued smiling. “Suffice it say that I’ve made arrangements with Mr. Stanton and his doctors. We’re on the same page. It’s all under control. Please, just focus on your tasks, collect your well-deserved fees, and leave these details to me and my staff.”

“I CAN’T TELL YOU
how awful it was seeing you like that,” sniffed Zelda Finch, her eyes moist with tears as she hugged Joe Stanton for the third time in half an hour.

It was 9:20 a.m. and the eight-member St. Anthony’s Episcopal Church “Bishop’s Committee” had just listened to Joe’s detailed account of the bizarre events in the San Juans.

St. Anthony’s was an old working-class-neighborhood church, and the building was simple but elegant, consisting of a main sanctuary, a kitchen, and two meeting rooms. The committee was gathered in the larger of the two meeting rooms now—seated in a semicircle around a TV monitor on a stand. Morning light shone through the windows, imbuing the honey-colored fir floors with a warm glow.

The Bishop’s Committee—dedicated volunteers who had recruited and hired Joe Stanton, and helped run the church—had just watched the infamous YouTube video of Joe’s outburst together, though they’d all seen it multiple times before.

The video had elicited fresh tears from many of the committee members and prompted another round of reassuring hugs.

“We didn’t know what to think,” said seventy-two-year-old Rachel Bell, touching Joe’s arm as if she needed to confirm that the young priest was still alive and really there. 

“We thought you had a little girl you’d never told us about,” added Cindy Dixon. “We were worried sick.”

“I was worried sick,” laughed Joe. “And poor Ella. She—” he fumbled for the words, and his cheeks reddened. “Well, Ella was amazing.”