Restoration

Written on the wall were these words:

          Tell Lasec Roffo Erutan Eb Dednuob Ereh, Throfec Neh, Litnu a Namuh Gingeb Dluoshet Icer Eseths Drow

          Beneath them, several hieroglyphics were imprinted into the stone.  The odd thing about them was how very fine and intricate they were, seeming quite recently made — especially compared to the writings we’d seen on previous digs.  Almost too fine.

          But that wasn’t what caught my attention.  I knew something about hieroglyphics, though not nearly as much as Rachel or Kylie, but I knew enough to tell the different cultures apart, and, more importantly, I knew the Ancient dialects, though Kylie was definitely more of the linguist, and I didn’t have any idea what the words actually meant.

          They looked like a bunch of words strung together in no pattern whatsoever.  I raised my camera to the wall and took a snapshot of the writing.  Then I took another one, tilting the camera as to get the words better.  As I did this, I spoke to Rachel, who was studying the pictures, practically squinting at them, and writing some things down on her yellow pad, murmuring to herself.

          “What culture is it?” I asked her.

          She looked up from the paper.  “What?  Oh — Egyptian, I’m trying to work out what they mean, they’re done in a very odd, sporadic format…”

         “Hmm.  Do you recognize these”—I nodded to the words—“at all?”

         She had gone back to the paper, but she lifted her head again to look.  “No, I don’t.  Actual written text is more Kylie’s area, not mine.”  She, again, returned to her notepad.

          “Ky,” I called, turning off the camera, “come over here for a sec.”

         Kylie came walking out of the closest tunnel and approached me, putting her own camera back in her pack.  “What?”

          I nodded to the words.  “What do you make of this?”

         She stared at the sentence for a good long while.  Rachel even looked up after there’d been several moments of complete silence following the question.  When she finally did respond, she said,

          “I have no idea.  Did you get a snapshot?”

          “Yes,” I answered.  “You don’t recognize it at all?”

          “Not at all,” she echoed.

          “Got it,” Rachel announced suddenly.  She stood up, and handed us the pad.  On it, her handwriting spelled out seven words.

          “Grace and Glory, return to Thy Domain,” I read aloud.  “Hmm.  I wonder what that means—”

          The cave suddenly began to tremble.  The walls shook and dust began to fly from the crevices between them and the ceiling.

          “What the hell—?!” Rachel shouted over the din the tremors were making.

          It wasn't an earthquake or a cave in.  We could tell that much.  There was something very wrong about it; something that clearly said it was unlike anything we’d ever encountered.  We all stood and backed against the wall, over the words we’d just been poring and studying.

          We saw, then, on the far wall, one of the most bizarre things ever to meet our eyes.  One of the paintings that had been drawn onto the stone was changing; morphing and growing larger and more potent.  The shaking of the cavern was slowly increasing, matching the intensity and clarity of the painting, which was slowly beginning to take an entirely different form.  The picture that was emerging beneath the swirls and hieroglyphic designs was a mural of four women, one with a blazing fire on her head, another with her arms draped around two mountains, one on either side of her, the next embraced by a river wrapped around her shoulders like a shawl, and the last standing on a cloud, her hair swirling in a breeze that was somehow imprinted onto the solid rock.

          Then, as the tremors reached their height, a large crack appeared in the stone, and a sliver of piercing light shone through it.  More cracks followed it, and the painting then began to move.  The girl with fire atop her head closed her eyes and drew back one of her arms, forming a fist in her hand and lurching it forward, where the painting ended and a real hand burst from the rock, shards of stone flying back, and white light engulfing the room, blinding each of their unprotected eyes.  We threw up our hands to shield our faces from the powerful light and fell backwards against the opposite wall by a force we weren’t even aware of.  The rock continued to break, huge chunks from the wall falling out of place, smashing onto the floor accompanied by deafening booms.

          As the light began to dim just slightly, I pulled my hands down from my face and chanced a look at what was going on.  My eyes took in what was happening before us, but the actuality of it did not register in my brain.  I saw it, but at the same time, I didn’t.  Four solid, radiating beams, were revolving above the floor in a rapid motion. Each was of a different color; green, orange, yellow and blue, a brilliant streak amid the blasted rock and stone.  I watched in a sort of awed shock for several moments, totally unaware of anything else, including my conscious mind; I had no idea whether or not Kylie or Rachel were the slightest bit awake, or if they were all right.  Before I knew it, however, the lights came to an abrupt halt, and, like real bolts of lightening, shot out of the cave, down the passages and out into the open air, from which we, the three of us, had come.

          It was the solid darkness that suddenly overtook us which brought me back to myself.  Truth be told, it wasn’t really pitch dark, it just appeared to be after the absolute radiance of what had just been present, whatever it was.  Our flashlights were still on and glowing, but they hardly mattered at this point.  I stood and walked over to the doorway to the passage though which these…things…had just left.

          “Are you two all right?” I asked, one — realizing with an odd jolt of surprise that I was out of breath, and breathing rather hard — and, two — not turning around whatsoever to actually look at my friends.

          I heard them standing and groaning, along with the minute sounds of bits of rock and rubble falling off of them as they stood.

          “What on earth just happened?” Kylie asked.  I knew it was going to be said.  Something like that doesn’t happen without this particular phrase being said.

          “Whatever it was, it was because of us,” Rachel replied, and the strange note in her voice caused me to turn around and take my eyes off the long, dark tunnel.

          “What makes you say that?” I asked her.

          She moved over to the wall where the “emergence” had taken place; it was now an enormous hole, embedded in the wall, and the edges were actually smoking.  She was rubbing a hand over the cracks and looking at the empty space within the wall, which couldn’t have been more than two and a half feet deep.

          “We caused this reaction,” she told Ky and me, both.  “It was something we said or did right before it happened.  Otherwise, it would not have occurred.”  She turned her head towards us for a brief moment.  “We prompted, or provoked, this happening” — she paused — “whatever it was.”

          “Whatever it was,” I repeated, going back to my position at the doorway, “was highly remarkable.  I can’t even begin to guess what.”

          “Oh my God...”

          Kylie’s voice took Rachel and I both by surprise.  We turned to glance at her, and found her bent over, with a piece of old and yellowed parchment in her hand.  She was looking at it with the widest eyes I’d ever seen.

          “What did you find, Ky?” I asked.

          Her jaw moved up and down a few times before her voice actually croaked out.
     
          “It’s an official Government document — of some kind — most of the ink is blurred and smudged or dried — but it — it says something to the effect of encasing the...‘Forces’...to” — she squinted, trying to read the finer print — “protect and...something...the climate control.”  She swallowed and tilted her head to the left in an odd sort of way, as though trying to reorient herself.  “The end of the document, is signed and then stamped with” — she looked up at us, an unreadable expression on her face — “The ELEMENTS Project.”

          “The what?” I asked.

          “The ELEMENTS Project,” Ky repeated.

          Rachel didn’t exactly gasp, but it was certainly more than a sharp intake of breath.  Or was it me who did that?  Either way, it was Rachel who whispered the title into the silence which returned to the room.

          “Do you have any idea what this means?” I asked, also into the void, with no one really to hear or answer me.  But an answer I received.

          “We’re in trouble,” I heard Rachel whisper behind me.

          We had no idea how right she would be.



          We spent no more time there.  After Rachel’s words we simultaneously moved to leave.  We climbed out of the cave, after the two of them had taken a few more samples, and made our way back to The Den — our lovely, little, dingy townhouse where we worked, slept and ate — to clean up and make further sense of what we’d witnessed.

          We didn’t speak to one another for a long time.

          The setting sun blazed orange on the horizon as Rachel sat at her desk below the skylight in the far, back room of the place, her microscope before her, laptop to the right of it.  Kylie was sitting on the couch, her headset on, listening, she’d said, to the news, even with her eyes closed.  I, however, had chosen the chair on the opposite side of the room from Ky, and was reading through Maps and Timelines, hoping to find clues hidden in the events, possible leads that pointed to...something.  Anything.

          We were going along fine, all quiet, with the exception of rapid clicking of the keyboard and faint buzz from Ky’s earphones, when the oddest thing happened—even odder than the incident in the cave, if you ask me.  I was looking over a certain year, I can’t even remember which, my eyes going back and forth between map and line of events, when the room suddenly went dark, as though someone had covered up the sunset with black velvet.  Taken aback, I looked up quickly towards the windows behind Kylie.

          A moment ago, if I’d have looked up, Ky would have been a black silhouette against a red-and-orange backdrop, but now, as I stared through the windows, Kylie was fully clear, down to the color of her clothes, while behind her, the sky had become pitch black.  And if I didn’t know better, I would have sworn I heard a distant rumble in the distance.  As I stared, utterly perplexed, I heard and saw, simultaneously, Rachel complain, “Hey!  Come back on, you stupid thing!”  hitting her laptop for emphasis as Ky opened her eyes, and began fiddling with the walkman; shaking it and messing with the tuning wheel.

          “I lost the signal,” she said, sounding confused.

          “So did I,” Rachel complained further, “on the modem.”

          And then we lost the power totally, plunging into almost total darkness.  I grabbed my flashlight from my back pocket, and twisted it on.  Rachel came in from the other room, hers on as well.  Kylie twisted around on the couch, as we all approached the windows, staring out into the dark, dark sky.  Thunder crashed; so loud, we all threw our hands to our ears.

          Rain — huge, fist-size drops — came pouring down without warning.  It was so sudden, all three of us lurched backwards, Kylie jumping up off the couch and tumbling into Rachel.

          Thick, thrashing gallons of water came splashing down even harder, accompanied by a second and then third roar of thunder.  Lightening lit the dark clouds so brightly, they turned white, all traces of black vanishing for those few seconds.  Wind began to blow.  Violent gales that swept up almost immediately.  Too quickly to seem natural.  Before long, our windows were so blurred, we could hardly see through them.

          The shock and horror of what was going on hit us then and there.  Slowly, we turned our heads to look at one another.  And we knew.

          Quietly, in a voice much unlike her own, Kylie said, “What on earth have we unleashed?”

          There was no answer we could give to answer the question fully, but in an attempt, Rachel gulped.

          “We are in serious trouble."


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to be continued...

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