Текст книги "Keystone"

Автор книги: Luke Talbot

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Chapter 44

Captain Kamal was waiting when he arrived at the police station in a daze. He didn’t accept the Egyptian’s outstretched hand and was quickly ushered into the building and immediately down a short flight of stairs.

“Thank you for coming,” Kamal said gently.

His attitude was now entirely different, almost as if he felt sorry for the Englishman, possibly even slightly nervous.

George could barely bring himself to grunt unintelligibly in reply.

He was led past an open lift and through a long corridor flanked by half a dozen windowless doors on either side. The passage was well lit, leading to a set of hospital-style double-doors. George did not need to be able to understand the small sign in Arabic; a general sense of foreboding told him he was about to enter the station morgue.

Kamal held the left-hand door open and he walked in.

He stopped in his tracks as he laid eyes on the row of trolleys along one wall. About half were covered by thin sheets, and it was obvious to him that they concealed human bodies. Only one, at the far end of the room, was of a shape that could be his wife. With all his might he told himself that it couldn’t possibly be Gail, but deep down inside an overpowering dread informed him that it could be no one but her.  His wife was surely under that sheet, but if he didn’t get any closer, it somehow made it less real.

Kamal had continued forward into the morgue, and was now standing beside the trolley. He looked back at George, waiting patiently for him to follow.

“Where did you find her?” he said without moving from the doorway. “Gail wouldn’t have been far from the Museum or the Professor’s house.” His voice was monotonous, going through the motions, dodging the fact that lay ahead of him, cold.

“There is a series of canals running to the west of the city. Some are but a trickle of water, as Cairo nowadays gets most of its supply from the purification plants to the north. The canal is used mostly by vagrants. We received an anonymous call some hours ago that a body had been found under a bridge.” He looked down at the still-covered body between them. “It’s a long way, but still within walking distance of the Museum, Mr Turner. We need you to officially identify the body.”

George walked forwards slowly. As he approached the trolley, Captain Kamal gently peeled back the cover to reveal the black hair and white skin of a woman in her late thirties to early forties. Her skin was undamaged and had a frozen, plastic-like quality. Her eyes were closed, but as he looked down at her lifeless corpse, George imagined her looking back at him, her infectious smile lighting his life. What had previously been a weight on his stomach lurched uncontrollable, welling upwards, no longer held back. He stroked her hair, touched his cheek to hers, and as he held her lifeless body tight, wept.

His tears were confirmation enough for Captain Kamal, who after barely a minute moved him away from the table quickly and moved the sheet back across the woman’s face.

“How?” George asked eventually, trying to control his voice. It seemed so wrong that Gail should be lying lifelessly in front of him. So wrong because she was such a good person, and could never hurt anyone herself. So wrong because he hadn’t had the chance to say goodbye. So wrong because he loved her, because he lived to make her life perfect, and her death only meant that he had failed. Gail couldn’t be dead.

Kamal hesitated. “It’s not easy to explain, Mr Turner. I am very sorry for your loss.”

George looked up at the officer. “How did it happen, Captain?” he asked more forcefully.

“She was stabbed several times in the lower abdomen with a knife, probably a switchblade. They are unfortunately very common in the city. We believe that she was robbed,” he said.

“What was she doing in the canal in the first place? Why would she want to go anywhere near it?” George raised his voice. Everything seemed to be wrong. Gail was dead, and all because she was wandering around some silly canal? It didn’t make sense to him.

“Your wife was found clutching several pages of torn paper.” He looked nervously at the grief-stricken man before him. “The book they were ripped from was – and probably still is – extremely valuable. It was part of a collection of similar books that were taken from Professor al-Misri’s office yesterday evening.”

George felt the hairs rise on his forearms and on the back of his neck. He rose to his full height, towering over the policeman.

“There is no easy way to say this, Mr Turner. However we believe that your wife took these books from the Professor’s office.”

“Are you’re suggesting that she killed him, too?” George challenged him.

“Your wife had a strong motive to take the books: her career was at risk and the books would have offered financial security. We cannot be certain at the moment that it was intentional, as he fell and hit his head on the side of his desk. However shortly after the incident CCTV footage shows your wife running from the museum holding the stolen items.”

“You can actually see Gail doing that?”

“There were no other women in the museum that night, Mr Turner,” he said. “We can only assume that she did not know where to go from there; she probably did not plan the crimes beforehand, and so simply ran in the approximate direction of the airport. She will have stumbled upon the canal around midnight, and been robbed herself shortly afterwards.”

George couldn’t believe what he was hearing. To find out that his wife had been murdered was bad enough, but to be told moments later that she had robbed and killed one of her closest friends and colleagues was simply ludicrous.

“Are you serious? No, it’s not possible. None of what you’re saying makes sense!”

The officer gave an uncomfortable smile and tilted his head sympathetically. “I’m afraid that we have all of the evidence we need, Mr Turner. Your identification of the corpse was the final detail, and as far as I am concerned the case is now closed. Of course, we are still looking for your wife’s murderer, but that is being handled by a separate department, who have your contact details.”

George’s mind was a mess of grief, confusion and anger. He looked down at the now covered body of his wife, and then back at Kamal. The forced smile, a dismal attempt at sympathy,  was still painted on the Egyptian’s face, his head tilted in that patronising manner. His account of the incredible story had left George speechless; there was only one thing he could think to do.

He wasn’t a violent man, by any means, but he felt a sudden surge of adrenaline as his fist hit the officer so hard on the chin that the small man literally spun round on his heels and fell over.

By the time Captain Kamal was back on his feet, nursing his chin, George Turner had already left the morgue, with the doors swinging closed behind him.

Kamal fished in his pocket for his phone and toyed with the sheet covering the body as he dialled a number with his free hand. As the phone rang, he pulled the sheet back to reveal the frozen face beneath. He shook his head to himself. Someone answered the phone.

“It’s Captain Kamal. Mr Turner has just left.”

A short pause.

“Yes, it’s done.”

He snapped the phone shut and tossed the sheet back over the face before marching quickly out of the morgue.

Chapter 45

Gail opened her eyes, but could see nothing.  She blinked twice, each time chasing away an army of frenzied white dots, like TV static. The darkness in which she found herself was so complete that she had to work out if her eyes were open or not by mentally checking the position of her eyelids.

She blinked half a dozen more times, a reflex of her eyes trying to adjust to the total absence of light, then lifted a hand up to her face, but it was like moving through treacle; eventually her fingers reached her cheek and made their way numbly to her eyes.  Her eyelashes brushing against her fingers told her that they were indeed open, and that there was nothing obstructing them.

Her second hand made its way towards the first and together she let them run over her face and body. To her relief, everything was there as it should have been.

Sensation, slowly, began returning and she started to feel a cold, hard surface against her back and head.  She was lying down on what her palms told her was a flat, metallic material.

Gail swung her body weight over to the right, ending up on her hands and knees. She craned her neck upwards and peered into nothingness: where am I? she wondered.

Placing her hands palms-down, she shifted along the floor for several minutes, first in one direction, then in another, then back again, until she had returned to what her mental map told her was pretty much her starting point. There were no walls, no chairs or tables. No grooves in the floor and no grit or dirt. In her immediate environment, there was nothing.

Somehow her subconscious mind knew it would be pointless standing up in complete darkness, and so she didn’t try.

She opened her mouth, but no words came. Closing it, she forced a gulp and tried again.

“Hello?” The word sounded muffled, as if by the darkness that surrounded her. “Hello?” This time she heard herself more clearly. She pushed away from the floor with her hands and rose to a kneeling position and shouted the word out: “HELLO!”

From the darkness, nothing replied.

“Where the hell am I?” she exclaimed.

She let herself fall back onto her bottom. Where the hell am I?

She thought back to the evening’s events. She had been with the Professor in his office at the Museum; he had just finished telling her about the book. The book! She remembered now: he had lied to her about the Library at Amarna, about the book on the plinth. All these years, he had known the truth and yet he had never told her.

Aliens in Egypt! No wonder he had never said anything: his career would have been in ruins. If what he had told her was true, then everything she thought she knew about Amarna, Nefertiti and Akhenaten had to be false. She tried to imagine the pictures the Professor had described; of towering cities with flying cars. It was like something out of a science-fiction movie.

So how had she ended up here – wherever here was? She remembered that there had been a knock at the office door, and then – nothing.

She shook her head in frustration. How could she not remember more?

 There was a knock at the door, and then – the Professor had said something. What had he said? And then the door had opened. After which she drew a blank. Nothing.

“Bloody hell!” she cursed herself for not knowing. “Professor!” she shouted, but there was no reply.

She suddenly remembered her husband. “George!” she exclaimed.  She fished around in her pockets and was surprised to find her phone. As it flipped open, the light from the screen almost blinded her, and she blinked several times before she was comfortable with it.

There was no signal. Wherever she was, whoever had put her there, had either no concerns about her contacting the outside world, or they knew that she would not have a signal.  To all intents and purposes, her phone was nothing more than a glorified pocket-watch.

She snapped the phone shut and was plunged into darkness again. She blinked several times and banished the static once more; each time her eyes closed she fancied she could still see the screen of the phone, shining brightly in the palm of her hand. Opening the phone again, she was once more bathed in its blue-grey light.

No more than a glorified pocket-watch, or a torch.

The phone pushed the darkness back at least three metres, whereupon it started losing intensity.  Pointing the screen directly in front of her and at arm’s reach, she studied the matt-grey floor. Shifting her body round, she noted its uniformity in all directions; it had seemed metallic to her touch, but she had never seen anything like it. Even the smoothest of floors always tended to have a joint, where two sheets or tiles would meet. Here, there was none of that. It was like a gymnasium floor, but more perfect.

Cautiously, she stood up, immediately increasing the draw distance of the light. The absence of any objects in her field of view meant there were also no shadows; judging distance was difficult, and the uniform floor didn’t make it any easier.

Almost against her will, her left leg moved forward, followed soon after by her right. Before she could think, she was walking in a straight line, as if the act of standing up had given her purpose, direction.

“Hello?”

Still no response.

Her pace quickened, despite her limited visibility.

“Hello!”

Nothing.

She was almost running now, and still the perfect smooth floor spread out before her.  Her voice boomed out into obscurity, again and again, and not one reply came back. In her mind, she knew that if the room she was in had walls, eventually her voice would hit one and return to her as an echo. And yet when she shouted there was no reverberation, as if the darkness was swallowing the sound waves whole.

Slowing to a walk, she stopped to catch her breath. Her phone told her she had been running for just under a minute, and moving forwards for a little over that. In over sixty seconds, she had seen nothing but the flat monotonous floor.

“How bloody big is this place?” she wondered out loud. “I mean, for crying out loud! I’m not exactly an Olympic champion, but in a minute I can run a good two hundred metres, easily!” She turned around, pointing the phone in all directions. “And for all I know I’m probably back where I bloody started.”

She laughed. “And now I’m talking to myself: first sign of madness.”

Exasperated, she dropped to her knees, before lying flat on her back, to stare up at the ceiling of obscurity that pressed down on her. Her phone snapped shut against her chest; its light extinguished, she lay in darkness once more, her eyes shut.

As her breathing evened out she became increasingly aware of a dull ringing in her ears; the kind of ringing that she remembered from years ago would assault her ear-drums after stepping out of a busy nightclub into an otherwise peaceful night-time street. She held her breath for a moment and concentrated on the noise, wishing it away with her mind.  Instead, its intensity grew. Sticking her fingers in her ears, she scrunched up her face and begged the ringing to stop. It continued, louder than before, throbbing against the inside of her skull until it was all she could do to press her palms hard against her eyes, her fingers still pushed firmly inside her ears, hoping to force it back.  The ringing was now so loud that she could not hear herself breathe.

Rolling onto her knees, she arched her back and pushed her chin upwards. She opened her mouth and felt the rush of air streaming from her windpipe as she screamed. The ringing was now so omnipresent that it drowned her cries before they had even left her throat.

Gail pulled her head down towards her knees and clasped her hands behind her neck, ripping tufts of her hair in the process.

“Stop it!” she moaned. “Stop it, please!”

The ringing persisted, louder than before, louder than any music she had ever heard, more piercing than the sirens of an ambulance. Managing to pull one hand from her head, she felt for the phone, but it wasn’t in her pocket any more. With what little faculty still remained for thought, she realised that she had placed it on her chest when lying down. As she had rolled over, it must have fallen to the floor. In a panic, she groped around her with one hand. As she stretched her arm round behind her, her hand struck the phone and sent it flying. Spinning round, she brought her other hand down and scrambled in vain to find it.

“No!” she cried in anguish.

Emotionally exhausted, she didn’t even bother bringing her hands up to protect her ears against the constant ringing. Her last drop of energy was used to punch the floor with both fists and shout out into oblivion: “I know! I know! Please stop it: I know!”

As the final word left her lips she collapsed against the floor. Know what? She thought briefly, but she was too tired to try and understand what she had said, and why. At the same time, the noise stopped, and the red glow through her closed eyelids told her that the darkness had been replaced by light.

Chapter 46

 

What was the exact opposite of complete and utter darkness? She wondered. Complete and utter light?

The last time she had tried to open her eyes, the receptors in her brain had been so confused by the absence of any light that they had forced her to try opening her eyes again, as if the human psyche was not capable of understanding such an environment.  Even at night-time, there was always some light, some reflected glimmer with which the fully dilated pupil could function.

For some reason, she thought of bats, bouncing sound waves off obstacles and prey within a cave. Blind as a bat, the expression went, but even Gail knew that that was a fallacy: bats used sight for many things and rarely relied on sonar alone. She wondered if bat-like ability would have helped her to see earlier.

Earlier. The concept of time struck her suddenly, and her mind shot back to the dark room – could she be sure it was a room? – that she had been in before, and the bright screen of her mobile phone: Thursday, November 16^th 2045 – 2:05pm. The time flashed repeatedly in her mind’s eye, and as she held the thought it changed to 2:06pm. Her attention moved to the date. Thursday the 16^th? In a flash the phone display disappeared and she found herself back at Heathrow Airport, standing in front of the automated ticket assistant. She tapped the screen and was rewarded with a pre-punched card that fell from a slot beneath. The date on the boarding-chip jumped up at her: Monday, November 13^th 2045.

She’d lost more than two entire days.

The Professor was standing beside her now, and she was at the entrance to the Library in Amarna. The hot winter sun bathed the archaeological excavation in bright warm light. Behind her she could feel the eyes of the other students burning into her back. They must hate me for going in first, she thought as she descended the steps cut into the bedrock. She ducked as the passageway swallowed her – surely it’s smaller than it used to be?

From outside, she heard Ben’s laugh, joined shortly after by her husband’s. George! She turned to run back up to see him, but was met by a wall of darkness; the steps leading up were gone. She span round again in a panic, to find that the stairs leading down had also disappeared, replaced by the smooth sandstone of the Library floor.

She was now inside the Library, walking slowly past the rows of bookcases. On the end of each row the engraved symbol of the Stickman drew her eyes from the path ahead, until she had passed the final row and was standing in front of the stone plinth.

Behind it stood a man, shorter than her, and dressed in an off-white robe that fell from his shoulders down to his sandals. His wispy hair was thick with dust and sweat after a long day’s work. He was looking at the plinth eagerly, his hands clasped in front of him as if in prayer.

Gail stopped.

“Who are you?” she heard herself say. The sound of her voice surprised her; although she knew what she had wanted to ask, she hadn’t spoken in English.

The man behind the plinth looked at her, puzzled. He was about to hazard an answer when she spoke again.

“What is going on?” Still the words were not English, although for some reason she understood them all.

“I am showing you the plinth, where the books will be placed,” he said nervously.

 Ancient Egyptian, she realised with a start. But what a strange accent? The man’s hands un-clasped and demonstrated the stone surface in front of him. It was unremarkable, but he seemed proud, as if it was exactly what had been ordered.

“What books?” she asked.

“The book of Aniquilus, and the book of Xynutians,” he replied tentatively under the interrogation.

Her ears prickled as the sentence reached them. Aniquilus and Xynutians. His accent was softer than she had imagined an Egyptian’s would be, and she wondered if she had misunderstood the words.

“An-ee-qwe-lous?” She broke the word down into phonemes; she’d worry about writing it later.

The man shifted uneasily. He looked like he was running over the question and its possible answers in his head before offering an answer, like a chess player would mull over possible moves to avoid falling prey to a dangerous rook.  After a while, he pointed to the bookcase behind her and repeated the word.

She followed his trembling finger to the edge of the bookcase, where she found the symbol of the Stickman. Looking from the nervous man to the symbol etched into the wood and back again, her eyes widened.

“Aniquilus?” she gasped. So the Stickman was ‘Aniquilus’!

At this the man looked positively frightened, as if what he thought to be Aniquilus had in fact turned out to be something entirely different, and his engravings inside the Library had all been wrong. Gail reacted quickly, sensing her control over the small man.

“Aniquilus!” she repeated more authoritatively, confirming that the Stickman was indeed known by that name.

A smile broke out on his face as he started breathing once more. “Yes!” he said, bringing his hands together in front of his chest again.

She walked back towards the plinth and looked at it. There were no books on it now. This reminded her of the shelves she had just been looking at; twisting her head round, she noticed that they, too, were empty. She looked at the small man, who avoided her gaze as if his life depended on it.

“And Xy-New-Shuns?” Again, she pronounced it slowly, emphasising each phoneme. In her mind, there was no question that it had to be a person. “Who is Xy-New-Shuns?”

“What do you mean?” he replied. His nervousness had returned, and he held his hands together so tightly she could see his knuckles go white.

“Who is Xy-New-Shuns?” She repeated, saying each word individually, in case she had mispronounced them the first time. As she repeated the question she actually saw a bead of sweat run down his forehead, from his hair to the bridge of his nose. He looked left and right, as if trying to spot an escape route, his shadow dancing against the wall of the Library in the flickering light of an oil lamp next to the plinth.

Finding no way to avoid the question, and having exhausted all possible alternative responses in his mind beforehand, he turned his eyes solemnly to the floor and raised his arm. He was pointing straight over her left shoulder.

 She turned on her heel, but just as she did the Library disappeared, and she slipped once more into darkness.