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 16th 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 16th? 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 13th 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.