The pages of the book were yellow, the corners worn and folded down from many years of use. It had obviously been read over and over, I assumed by Crane, but maybe by my dad, too. After all, the lady was his stepmother and he was probably curious about her ideas. The entire first page was underlined in red.
I, Marie Rathbone, will now tell you a story of a fair and noble race of humans, the noblest that ever lived. My story is the result of many years of research and exploration, aided by my immortal and honorable guides, Castillo and Pontor.
We are not the first civilization. Though we believe ourselves to be the highest and most wise civilization in all of recorded history, we are in fact a mere shadow of the glorious civilization that once lived on our Earth. This civilization was called the Boskops, and in their arts, culture, technology, and beauty, they surpassed even the wildest dreams of our wildest dreamers.
The skeptic among you now asks: Where is the evidence? Surely such a great civilization would leave a mark? Yet, we already possess evidence for civilizations far older than “history” admits. Can we ignore Plato, the Greek philosopher who, in painstaking detail, described Atlantis, that ten-thousand-year-old city of wonder? Or the Indian epic, the Mahabharata, which describes seventy-thousand-year-old airplane battles?
Oh, dear skeptic, I was once like you: blind to the truth.
This very book that you hold in your hands documents my long journey from ardent skeptic to true believer. In it, I will lay out the true history of our planet. Of the Boskops who lived on a vast continent that has since sunk below the Indian and Pacific oceans. They lived and flourished from before the melting of the last ice age, from 40,000 BC, until 11,000 BC. At that time, half of this wondrous civilization left the planet Earth and ventured to the stars. The other half stayed behind and moved underground, into the Hollow Center of the Earth, where over thousands of years, they mastered their minds, and eventually developed perfect immortality.
It is of this underground half of whom I now write….
I looked up from Marie Rathbone’s book and rubbed my eyes. I had tried to keep reading, but from there she started mentioning words like ectoplasm and magic trumpets and spirit guides, and I couldn’t take it anymore. What kind of nut had my grandfather married?
Thankfully, one of the flight attendants was serving dinner. I put the book down, grateful for the interruption.
“You hungry, Hollis? Smells good, huh?”
“Yeah, I’m starved. I can’t follow this movie. It’s all dubbed in Malay.”
The flight attendant brought two steaming dishes of food and placed them on the tray tables in front of us.
“What’s that?” Hollis asked her, picking up one of the plates to sniff it. His habit of smelling food before he tasted it used to drive our mom crazy.
“Kolo mee,” the attendant said. “Very tasty. Noodles and pork.”
Hollis grimaced. “You don’t happen to have any cheese-burgers up there, do you?”
“If you’d like, sir, I’ll ask Chef to make you one right away,” she said. When she left, Hollis beamed at me.
“Did you see that, Leo? They’ll make anything you want. Is this the life or what?”
“I’ll eat Hollis’s if he doesn’t want it,” Dmitri said from behind me. “I will tell you what it is like in Crane’s room if you give me your food.”
“Eat your own food, Dmitri. Don’t be such a pig,” I said.
“My boy has a big appetite,” Klevko muttered, opening his eyes from his nap. “He cannot help himself.”
After dinner, which was delicious, I tried to return to Marie Rathbone’s weird book, but every time I’d read a sentence my brain would fog up and I’d forget what I’d just read. We’d been in the air for a few hours, and I was getting sleepy. I reclined my seat all the way until it was practically flat, dimmed the lights, put on my headphones, and listened to my dad’s recording of the Byong Ku death dance.
Like all my dad’s recordings, it started with an introduction. He was whispering over the crackle of fire and what sounded like a chorus of frogs.
Kirk Lomax, November 7, the time is 8:45 p.m. I am seated by the fire outside of the longhouse. The village is mourning the death of an old man, whose name I’ve been unable to gather. His body has been placed in a traditional wooden coffin. Many young men wearing masks have begun to play a steady beat on various rocks and lithophones. I have heard enough music to know that they are preparing to begin a ritual ceremony. So, I’ve decided to shut up and let the recorder do the work.
My dad was whispering in the same way he always did when he’d tell us a fantastic story at night. And with the main cabin lights off, his voice was so soothing that I fell asleep before the ceremony, hearing only the sound of distant drums in half-remembered dreams.
We landed at one point, and in the shadows of the night, I saw a slim man get on the plane and head for the back. And, oh yeah, both Dmitri and Klevko wore sleeping caps the whole night.
When I woke up the next time, I could tell it was daylight behind the windows, even though they were still closed. Hollis was up and pacing the aisles. He kept looking at the sliver of light below the Sultan’s private quarters.
“I gotta get out of here!” he said. “I feel so cooped up.”
“Calm yourself, bro,” I said. “We still have seven hours to go.”
“Then I have to at least get in there,” he said, pointing behind the golden double doors.
We walked up to the guard. I was feeling pretty caged in, too, and a little punchy.
“Hey can we see your sword? What’s your name? Is it a special kind of sword?”
“Can we just take a peek back there?” Hollis asked him, perfecting our overwhelm-with-questions strategy, but it was a no go.
“You cannot see my sword. My name is Laclac. My sword is quite normal, yet it is exquisitely crafted. And neither of you may even glance in the private domicile.”
“What about the guy I saw go in there in the middle of the night? Or was that a dream?” I asked.
“Perhaps you dreamed something similar, boy. But yes, a man entered a few hours ago. A Mr. Singh, the gentleman from Mumbai.”
We never did get a look back in Crane’s private quarters, but we bothered Laclac for the rest of the flight. I made sure to always keep one eye on Dmitri. I would never put it past him to dig through my bag. I caught him watching me a few times. Once he was straight-out looking at me.
After a delicious breakfast of different sweet cakes and something called roti, a pancakelike concoction, we began our descent. I caught my first glimpse of land. It was green, really green, and cloudy. I’d read the first three pages of Borneo: Her Cultures and People, and it said that Borneo was primarily rain forest, one that was 130 million years old.
“No skyscrapers,” Hollis said. “I bet there aren’t any ice-skating rinks, either.”
We’d been cooped up so long that neither one of us was making much sense by then.
Our runway, which was right next to the ocean, was surrounded by green grass. As we landed, I saw that there was a crowd of people waiting on the runway, and the moment we came to a stop, they gathered around the plane.
The flight attendant explained that this was Samarinda, and not our final destination. All of us had to pile out, haul our bags through customs, get our passports stamped, and then get back onto the plane. I caught a glimpse of Mr. Singh, a tall Indian man who looked distant and bored, but no one introduced us.
Piling back onto the plane, we were told that it would be another hour flight to our final destination, Tanjung Selor. Once we were in flight, Hollis and I stared out the window. We saw no cities, no signs of civilization, just the vast green of the jungle, the brown earth, and the winding muddy rivers that crisscrossed it all.
I had never felt farther away from home in my whole life.