The Pharos Objective (15 page)

Or
, thought Caleb,
he’s the only smart one in this bunch.

“Well, we’re not waiting for him,” Waxman said, a little ruefully.

After adjusting his knapsack to the other shoulder, Caleb followed Nina, moving through the first hallway. “Wait up! Do you even know where you’re going?”

“Sure, I’ve seen it, remember? The stairs should be just past the mosque.” The hallway suddenly opened into a large chamber. They both peered at the beautiful dome three levels up. A single dove flew around the red brick ceiling, circling gracefully. “There it is,” she said, pointing to a faint outline in the far wall. “That’s where the door will open when you pull the lever.”

“When
I
pull the lever?” Caleb put his hands on his hips.

“I’m not a glory hound, you get the honors,” Nina said, sliding up to him, giving his leg a squeeze. “After all, you did all the hard work last night, you deserve it.”

Blushing, Caleb looked up the stairs. “If it’s even still there.” They went up to the next level and walked side by side through the slanting shafts of sunlight down the narrow sandstone corridors. When Caleb realized their strides were matching, step for step, he almost burst out laughing. He felt like they were the fort’s defenders, marching on patrol.

At a shadowy recessed area in the western corner beyond a chain with an “Off Limits” sign preventing public access, Caleb dug out his flashlight, switched it on and cut through the darkness. The beam continued inside an alcove about the size of a supply cabinet and illuminated three fist-sized rectangular slabs of rock, all about waist high, protruding from the wall. He had a moment’s hesitation. He had not seen three. He had not even seen this arrangement.

“Come on, slowpoke. It’s the middle one,” Nina said, leaning forward. She gripped the lever with both hands, pulled it up, then to the left and down. A grating noise echoed below, and Nina smiled into the flashlight beam. “You didn’t see them do that?”

Caleb slowly shook his head.

She patted his shoulder as she walked by and said, condescendingly, “Now, now, it’s okay. Just keep practicing.”

They squeezed into the narrow opening beyond the massive, three-foot-wide door. It had opened just far enough to let one person through, and they inched forward in the darkness, letting their eyes adjust. Caleb wondered how someone could bring any kind of significant treasure out this way.

The flashlight beam played off a narrow space and a wall just ahead of them. Caleb aimed it down. The shaft of light, alive with the thick dust stirred by opening the door, illuminated the steeply descending stairs.

“Ready?” Waxman’s voice dwindled and was quickly swallowed up by the dust and gloom. “Go on, Caleb.”

“How did I get into the lead role, here? I’m not even a member of this team.”

“You’ve always been a member, Caleb.” His mother’s hand on his shoulder. “But if you don’t want to go first—”

“Fine, I’ll do it.”

“I’ll understand,” Helen said. “Belize, and—”

Nina gripped his arm from the other side, digging her fingers into his flesh. “Don’t listen to her,” she whispered. “This is your time, make it up to Phoebe now.”

He started down.

“Should have brought sweaters,” Helen said, and Caleb cursed his stupidity. A cold, stale breath rose from the depths, chilling them to the bone. “How deep do you think it goes?”

An image materialized in Caleb’s mind. It was like an architect’s diagram—the tower, hollow and inscribed with its ramps and statues and fuel transport hoists and the same thing projected beneath it, as if a mirror were held under the design.

“As above, so below.”

Waxman looked up. “Huh?”

“Just a feeling.” Caleb took the first tentative step. “Sostratus might have built this according to the Hermetic tradition, representing below what is above.”

“So you’re saying we might be going four hundred feet down?”

“Maybe.” Or maybe the door he had seen was almost two hundred feet down, then there would be another stairwell or shaft to take the visitor to the “beacon,” the light—the treasure at the bottom.

Or maybe he was way off.

They descended toward the mystery slowly, one long step after another. Nina walked behind Caleb, clutching his t-shirt with one hand and steadying herself against the cold wall with the other. The subterranean gloom did its best to resist the feeble light cast by the flashlight, but they could see well enough to continue.

Around and around. Caleb counted seventy-two steps before the wall disappeared and the last step ended. They stood before a great darkness and had the sense of an overwhelming space ahead. The flashlight pointed down at their feet, at the dust and pebbles. The beam trembled, and Caleb realized his arm was shaking.

He felt Nina’s hand on his, and together they raised the light. It stretched across the floor, dipped into a rectangular pit, then came up the other side and struck the far wall. He moved the light higher, and his jaw dropped. There were the carvings—signs and stars, circles and moons. Shadows played among the shapes, danced around symbols, letters and images too far away to see clearly. Then he found the center and traced up the length of a painted vertical staff that had two brilliant, green-scaled snakes wound about it. He followed their coils around until they converged. Great fangs and eyes locked onto each other.

“Wow,” Dennis whispered, and pushed through the group to the front.

“Wait,” Caleb urged. He had a terrible premonition as a grating sound echoed in the chamber like something opening or sliding apart. He felt a shifting in the floor, and he quickly moved the light to his feet. One of the blocks had settled under their weight, but only a couple inches. A hissing and gurgling sound came from the pit ahead, and a
whoosh
like escaping steam whistled above. Dennis stumbled back as cries of fear and confusion rose.

Caleb whipped the light around in a frenzied sweep. He saw a crescent moon, then a bird-like face and a long sloping beak. Another pair of eyes peered at them knowingly, and huge arms clutched a giant book. Faces turned on great stone bodies that swiveled, expelling the dust of centuries.

“Statues!” Caleb shouted, taking another step back with Nina, overcoming his fright. “Only statues.” He remembered his vision of Caesar and how the immense statues of Thoth and his consort Seshat had flanked the entrance to this vault. But he wasn’t clear whether they posed any threat.

“How are they moving?” Waxman whispered, inching closer.

“Steam power?” Caleb replied, slowly panning the light from one to the other, willing his heart to settle down, his breathing to relax. “Just physics and hydraulics. Inventors back then were into making statues seem alive. It was a trick to thrill the worshippers—”

“Or scare the piss out of trespassers!” Victor offered.

“Did it work on anyone?” Elliot asked, stifling a chuckle.

Caleb tried to smile. “Okay guys, looks like the welcome is over. Let’s go in.” He played the light over the two statues one last time, then bowed his head as he passed between them. It might have been a trick of the light, but it almost seemed as if Seshat moved again as he passed, as though she bent at the knees and lowered her head in honor of his arrival.

They approached the wall. Four more flashlight beams appeared, heavy with collected dust, and darted over the floor, the walls, the ceiling. The team members gave the rectangular pit in the center a wide berth. From its depths Caleb thought he could hear plunks of tiny stones hitting water. He looked closer and saw that the pit had a set of stairs coming up from the watery gloom.

There was a tug at his arm and he moved the beam back in front of them. Before he knew it they were right in front of the wall, staring up at the great caduceus, with those snakes now appearing to eye him with quiet indignation. Caleb took a deep breath, and when he exhaled, his breath sparkled in the dusty air. He counted seven symbols surrounding the staff, each carved deeply into the limestone and bounded by a raised circle.

He figured someone could grip the symbols by their outside edges and turn them one way or the other, like wheels. “Should have brought floodlights,” he whispered, fumbling in his bag. “Hold the flashlights steady.”

“Why?” Waxman asked.

Caleb took out his camera, aimed and pressed the button. The room lit up. His eyes dazzled, and he suddenly remembered a night years ago on the hill overlooking Sodus Bay as the first bright fireworks rocked the night. He snapped another picture, then a third. Each time moving the aim a little more to the right until he was sure he had captured the whole wall. Strange symbols and images filled his vision until he could barely see even with the pitiful flashlight beams.

Waxman looked over his shoulder, and with the light blinding off the limestone wall, his face was draped in shadow, but pinpoints glittered in his pupils. He looked like an Egyptian demon ready to plunder the ancient treasures of the gods. “Guess we should have consulted Caleb from the beginning. Apples don’t fall far from the tree, do they, Helen?”

Caleb swallowed and glanced at the two of them as Waxman reached out and traced the path of the snakes on the wall. He had found a crack in the wall, a vertical split right down the center of the staff.

Nina moved closer to whisper something in Waxman’s ear and pointed at one of the signs on the wall. More footsteps approached, and more beams of light roamed the wall. The others gathered in a semicircle behind Waxman. “Give me a minute,” he said, after whispering something back to Nina. He traced some of the symbols.

Again Caleb was struck with the certainty that Sostratus had designed this tower and its antecedent, the “below” extension, according to the matching principle. If the visible and familiar were above, then this was the occult—the hidden and mysterious. Yet, according to the mystical tradition, it should still consist of the same basic elements. He would then expect this door to lead to the second level, the octagon-shaped section, and once inside, another stairwell would take the visitor down to the final level, ending in a small pillared chamber.

As Waxman viewed the symbols, Caleb had the notion that he was looking for one in particular; and once more, he sensed that George hadn’t been completely honest with his mother, or with the rest of the group—with anyone except for Nina Osseni. Seeing them talk, whispering together, hit him with a feeling of something stronger than mere jealousy.

Waxman pointed to the inscription ten feet up, above the caduceus. “It says, in Ancient Greek, something like, ‘Only the golden ones may pass through.’”

“‘Golden ones’?” Helen stepped past Caleb and shone her light across the lettering. Caleb’s beam joined hers, and he saw a peculiar symbol at the end of the Greek inscription.

I’ve seen that before,
he thought, recalling treatises on alchemy, illustrations and symbols in his father’s study. Reluctantly, as if its importance demanded he figure this out now, he lowered the flashlight beam from that character down to the caduceus and made a slow clockwise circle around it, highlighting one symbol after another. “Seven symbols,” he said.

“So?” Victor asked.

Caleb shrugged. “Mystical number and all. But I think . . . looking at those signs, they’re representations of the planets. Some double as symbols for elements. I see the sun and the moon, then . . . Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and Mercury.”

Helen frowned, scrunching up her face as she tried to look closer. “How does that help us?”

“Alchemy,” Caleb said, thinking back on bits and pieces of things he’d read, ideas tying back to Ancient Egyptian magic, methods of controlling the material world and preparing for the afterlife.

“Alchemy? Turning lead into gold?”

“Something like that.”

“So what are the golden ones?” someone asked as Caleb tried to see into the gloom. It might have been the heavier one, Dennis.

Waxman tapped his flashlight against the wall and listened to the echoes.

Caleb cleared his throat. “It could just mean, ‘those who are pure, those who are worthy.’ In its earliest form, alchemy was the study of spiritual transition. Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon, and all their predecessors, when they discussed turning things into gold, they weren’t necessarily talking about a physical, elemental transformation, but about obtaining spiritual perfection.”

“Hokey, kid,” said Waxman. “Even for you.” He regarded the door again, and then Nina said something inaudible, to which Waxman nodded, and then said, louder, “No, I’m thinking this is just another typical Egyptian curse, the usual scare with no teeth. They loved to put curses all over their tombs, especially the valuable ones. Threaten looters with a curse, and maybe you’ll get to rest in peace.”

He aimed his light at one symbol, about knee-high on his left, and Caleb had the sudden certainty that this was the one he had been searching for, the one Nina had pointed out. Jupiter. The planet associated with Water.

Nina tentatively backed away, but Waxman told her to keep the light still, to illuminate the symbol while he tucked away his own flashlight. He reached out, grasping the outer edges of the sign.

“What are you doing?” Caleb asked. “Nina, George, wait! You’re not seriously going to try this.”

When Waxman glared over his shoulder his face was a mask of annoyance and anger—such anger that Caleb took an involuntary step back.

Waxman grunted and started to turn the symbol clockwise.