“Come on!” he yelled at the top of his voice as they heaved at the mass of sandstone. “Come on!” As the outburst left his lungs they fell back and the stone crashed down on its side. Tariq fell on top of Leena, and they cheered triumphantly, seeing the stone well and truly clear of the hole.
Tariq got up and stretched over to slap George on the back, but his hand swiped thin air as George grabbed a torch and launched himself down the hole, landing on the bottom steps of the ancient staircase with a thud.
Sweeping the ante-chamber of the Library with the torch, and ignoring the shooting pain that ran across the top of his foot following his spontaneous dive down the stairs, he quickly moved on to the hole in the wall and the Library beyond. He searched between the empty bookcases, and in every corner of the room, but there was no one to be found.
“Gail!” he shouted. “Gail, where are you?” Tears were streaming down his face as desperation made him lose all self-control. “It’s me!” he sobbed.
The torch beam fell on the podium that had held the Stickman book. Wiping the tears from his eyes, he blinked several times before understanding what lay before him. Beyond the podium, where previously there had been a stone wall, there was a corridor, plunging down into the depths of the Earth.
Zahra arrived at his side and handed him his borrowed AK-47, which was still fully loaded. It reminded him that two of the Americans were still down here with Gail and Ben, and he checked the position of the safety.
“Where are they?” she asked.
George collected himself and took a deep breath. “Down there,” he said pointing down the corridor. Before she could answer he’d left her behind and was half running, half limping down into the unknown, the AK-47 in one hand, the torch in the other, and with renewed hope in his heart.
Chapter 79
Walker was the first to take a step towards the Xynutian, who hadn’t moved since the door had opened. Its steadfast gaze, although very lifelike, was utterly lifeless.
The statue was in the centre of a large hall, about thirty feet on each side. Directly opposite was another doorway, towards which Walker now marched.
Gail entered the hall slowly. When she reached the Xynutian, she turned and looked back down the corridor.
“They’re looking at each other,” she said in wonderment. “They’re acknowledging each other across the millennia.”
Walker hurried her up. “No time for history lessons now, sweetheart. You promised to get us out of here, and part of that means you going first.”
The entrance hall gave onto a larger room, as brightly-lit as the first but almost twice as large. Along the middle of the room were three benches with glass tops. The opposite end of the room housed three doors.
It seemed that each door corresponded with one of the benches.
“It’s a worktop,” Patterson said. “They must have worked almost lying down, though.” He looked back through the door at the statue, and tried to imagine the Xynutian using the knee-high displays.
“Or they used their feet,” Ben joked.
Gail knelt down and touched the glass on the middle one. Immediately, shapes sprang to life in mid-air, hovering several feet above the worktop. Three concentric circles rotated at different speeds in front of her. The largest of them was also the slowest, barely moving at all, while the smallest rotated fastest, completing two revolutions in the time it took the middle ring to rotate only once.
Gail touched the two remaining screens and they sprang to life in a similar fashion. Soon, they all showed what looked like three clocks, with varying symbols and colours.
Examining the doors, she noticed three symbols etched into the floor of the room, one in front of each. The middle door was the outline of a Xynutian; the left hand that of a bear, while the one on the right showed a tree.
She went back to the right hand console. Whatever this place was, trees sounded less scary than Xynutians and bears.
Moving her hands over the display, she touched all of the symbols in turn, hoping for some response. Occasionally, the symbols would reconfigure, bringing incomprehensible charts and graphs to the foreground, before automatically fading them away to return to the spinning concentric circles.
“There’s something we’re missing here,” she concluded. “The ancient Egyptians were able to write a whole book on this place, showing what happened to the Xynutians in some detail, and also, correct me if I’m wrong, Henry,” she gestured at him, “they spoke of Mars, hence the Mars mission and what’s going on up there.”
Patterson didn’t disagree.
“Unless they made it all up from the pictures and writing they saw back in the main hall, there’s no way they could have written so much from what we see here. And more importantly, we know they’re called Xynutians from the cartouches in the book. By the same token, Aniquilus too. So where did the Egyptians hear those names, unless they could interpret the Xynutian writing on the walls in the hall?”
She didn’t have time for hypotheses; instead she strode back to the previous room and searched for any hidden symbols.
The room was bare, the walls perfectly smooth and featureless. Running her fingers along the surfaces, she had a sudden flashback to the vivid dream she had experienced just before waking inside DEFCOMM. It was that same seamless floor, almost too perfect. There, she had been in the dark save for the glow of her mobile phone; but here light was coming from recesses in the ceiling about six feet above the tip of the Xynutian’s raised staff.
She gave the statue her full attention. From the nails of its toes to the pupils of its frozen eyes, it was absolutely perfect. Like a waxwork model of a celebrity, she could almost feel it breathing down her neck as she studied the intricate needlework on its tunic, which fell between its legs, leaving the powerful thighs exposed.
If this were a prime example, she was certain it would have been able to use those legs to run faster than any human athlete, and she could only imagine how strong it was.
It was human in every way, and yet somehow different.
Curiosity getting the better of her, she carefully lifted the tunic and peered underneath; there was no doubt this Xynutian was a man. Suddenly realising that she was staring at the Xynutian’s private parts, she quickly dropped the tunic, her cheeks reddened. Whatever its culture, their gender had been private enough to cover.
She wondered for a moment about Nefertiti and Akhenaten, at the opposite end of the corridor, completely naked. There was some definite symbolism in the use of clothing going on here, she realised. Perhaps some form of submission to the Xynutians, as she had first suspected; but instead of submission to Aniquilus, this suggested it was submission to the Xynutians.
She shook her head and cursed herself for not having at the very least a notebook and pencil.
She stood back and stared at the creature head on. The Xynutian was huge, about two feet taller than her, its raised staff reaching a good three to four feet above her head.
The staff itself was a rod of what looked like solid gold. Certainly there was no tainting of the metal after so many years, and she could think of few other metals that possessed that property. It culminated in a clear-stone ball, perfectly spherical and, it occurred to her, as near as damn it in the exact centre of the room.
“Is that a switch?” Patterson asked, pointing up to where the Xynutian gripped the staff.
Ben and Walker had been staring at each other in the other room, but at Patterson’s question, Walker pushed the Egyptian through the door and they joined them next to the statue.
“Too high for me to reach,” Gail said. “Walker, you’re the tallest, you press it.”