David Sakmyster - The Pharos Objective

“It won’t be soon, Caleb. But someday, someday we’ll try again. We’ll work at it, work at deciphering those images on the wall. There have to be clues to the way in, and-”

“Take my camera,” Caleb said with disgust. “For all the good it will do you. It’s supposedly waterproof, so maybe the film survived.” He sighed. “Take it. Hopefully it’ll prove that you can’t get in. Face it, Sostratus was too good.”

Helen was about to say something, but whatever it was, a nurse interrupted her as she came in to draw blood. When she pricked Caleb’s arm he immediately felt woozy, and he fell into an ascending tide of death.

When Caleb awoke it was night, the curtains drawn. An IV was still stuck in his arm, the entry point throbbing in counterpoint to the pulse in his head. And a man was looking down on him.

He was dressed in a gray suit. He had soft eyes and a head of thick gray hair, like snow, with straggly caterpillar-like eyebrows. His lips were moving, but Caleb didn’t hear any words-nothing but a sound like the rush of water.

The man raised a scolding finger, and for an instant the water gurgled away and the room quieted down. He leaned forward and whispered, “The Pharos protects itself.” Then he stood and made a curious bow.

Caleb blinked, and it was daytime. His arm was free, the IV gone. He sat up in bed, blinking again. His mouth felt like it was full of sand. Turning sideways, he slid out of the bed until a wave of nausea forced him back, and then he tried again. He stood up this time, made it to the window and looked down. Two stories below there was a small field with a soot-stained marble statue of some Egyptian patriot pointing toward the sea. Overhead, a lone dove circled, then landed on the statue’s head and stared up at Caleb’s window. Then Caleb noticed the man.

He stood in the field, looking down at a flat stone set in the grass. He was familiar, but not the one who had visited the previous night. This man wore a dirty green jacket and had long hair, stringy and unwashed, down to his shoulders. He knelt and set a single white flower upon the stone at his feet.

Caleb’s mouth opened. What had once been fear gave way to curiosity. But then the figure stood and turned around, looking up, right at Caleb. He raised a hand and pointed, first at Caleb, then down to the stone. Then he touched his chest.

Caleb rocked back, so startled that he didn’t even get a good look at his face, but he bumped into the bed, turned and saw his mother silhouetted in the doorway.

“What are you doing out of bed?”

Caleb pointed to the window, eyes wide, and speechless.

Helen limped past and set her good arm on the windowpane. She looked down. Caleb hesitantly peered over her shoulder, already sure of what he’d see.

The field was empty.

She turned, shrugging. “Phoebe’s on the phone, asking for you.”

Caleb had to sit again. “I can’t talk to her.”

“You’re her big brother. You saved her life back in Belize, no matter what else you think. Go, talk to her.”

“I’ll talk,” Caleb relented. “But then that’s it. This quest is over for me-once and for all. I’m done. Unless you enlist the help of a dozen military divisions and a thousand tons of TNT, I’m finished. I’m leaving.”

“You can’t-”

“I can. I have a job. Classes to teach. Books to publish.” Caleb stood and walked to the door. “It’s over, Mom. It’s over.”

“Dad wouldn’t have given up,” she whispered, and her words froze him to the spot.

Caleb hung his head. Out in the hall, the fresh air felt soothing on his skin. “Dad’s dead. Or don’t you remember?”

“Caleb-”

“He’s dead,” Caleb repeated. And now he finally believed it. He did, and he felt an utter vacancy in the place the hope of his father’s return used to occupy. It was always like Dad had been there waiting in the corner of Caleb’s mind. Waiting for me to find and rescue him.

But that chance had passed.

“Dead,” Caleb said again. “Like your obsession. Like the myth of this treasure. Like everyone who goes after it.”

He closed the door-on his mother, on the quest. On his lost youth. On hope. He put them all behind him and walked away, toward his future.

At dusk, as the other boats, schooners, trawlers and pleasure cruisers headed to the docks, and their passengers geared up for a night out at discos, bars and restaurants, George Waxman took the sleek four-seater speedboat in the opposite direction, to the center of the harbor and his waiting yacht.

Minutes later, he descended into the lower quarters, still fuming. “Get upstairs,” he barked to Victor, who he found standing before the recompression chamber window, peering inside. “Go up top and keep watch.”

Victor turned, a bruised cut on his forehead, still red and turning purplish around the stitches. “For who? Helen will be with her boy, right?”

“It’s not her I’m concerned about. How’s our patient?”

“Unresponsive. But alive.”

“Good.”

“She rose sixty feet in less than a minute, lungs half full of seawater, and… I don’t know, boss, shouldn’t we get her to a hospital?” Victor paused at the stairs, his voice cracking, betraying perhaps some newly kindled desire of his own.

“No,” Waxman snapped. “We need to leave soon, and I need to have her close. In case… in case her injuries, the blow to the head, made her forget her priorities. Or otherwise experience a lapse in judgment.”

“Understood.”

When the footsteps had retreated, and Waxman was alone with the sound of hissing gas and the vibrating echoes of the generator, he cupped his hands to the portal window and peered into the chamber.

“Sleep tight, Nina.”

Columbia University-December Three years later

Caleb Crowe hadn’t seen his sister in more than five years. It was Christmas, and he had just finished grading midterms. Now he was off to the Museum of Natural History to wrap up his research into the vanished Alexandrian library; and then he was looking forward to finally sitting down to the book that had been impatiently waiting for him to write.

He had his coat on and he was reaching for the door when Phoebe called. She was at the entrance to his apartment. His heart pounding, a thousand questions in his mind, he rushed out of his room and ran down four flights of stairs, out of breath with excitement, recalling that awful day, that tragic descent around a much longer-and older-staircase three years ago.

He stepped out of the stairwell and there she was in the lobby, two upperclassmen holding the door for her before heading out to a football game in the quad. Phoebe wheeled herself inside, gave Caleb a smile, and then spun her wheelchair in a full circle. “Like the new model?” She adjusted the chair’s controls and sped over to him. She wore a heavy fleece turtleneck and faded khakis, with a plaid blanket over her legs. Her dark hair had grown longer and had been recently colored, with streaks of auburn highlights offsetting her eyes, soft and shining, without a hint of recrimination.

“It suits you.” He looked her over, shaking his head in dismay. She was radiant, excited, just like he remembered her before the fall. “Where’s Mom?”

“Merry Christmas to you too,” she said. “She’s out in the car.”

Caleb glanced out the window to see the silver Lexus at the end of the path. Two shapes inside, the windows open a crack and cigarette smoke filtering out into the air.