He was exhausted, sore, and confused.
T. G. sat sprawled on his couch, still in his climbing gear. His head back, he struggled to recall the events of the last few days—the images, the sounds, the feelings—but he kept hitting the same dead end. He remembered first the campsite, then the hike, then the storm, then—nothing. There was a tender place on the back of his head, a decent-sized lump that felt as if it might earlier have been even more painful and swollen. Earlier—when?
T. G. looked again upon the leathery stranger resting before him, atop the coffee table. Only its solid presence kept him from believing himself totally mad, yet at the same time it made him doubt his sanity.
He rolled his head to one side and just breathed, resting, not moving a muscle, letting gravity have its way with him. It was night, and the room was lit only by the dim, golden light of a table lamp in one corner. He absently and vacantly stared at its yellowed lampshade for several minutes, wanting to drink in the sight of something very ordinary, very everyday, very earthbound.
He was home, in his apartment in the old four-story Brookfelder Building. It had a largely undeserved reputation at the university for being “Nerd Central” and was occupied by more than a dozen Cornell students, but also among its residents were older folks who had lived there for twenty years or more. Although he largely kept to himself, T. G. knew many of them and, with his quiet lifestyle and taste in music, had been welcomed into the “family” of the building’s elderly occupants.
He rolled his head toward the dining-room ceiling, toward the toppled dinette set and no-longer-hanging light fixture that lay in a shattered tangle on the carpet beneath. He had broken them, had crushed them less than an hour before.
When he had landed on them.
He sat there looking at the splintered table, his memory a blank. In the quiet of his apartment he fought to drag images up from the murky depths, before they vanished into an abyss of things cold and damp and forgotten.
At least in part, he began to remember—
He was in a free fall within a hungry darkness, tumbling through a rush of acceleration and dizziness as his equilibrium was tossed and scrambled. He feared that he had fallen from that high point on the cliff face, that his rope was no longer tied at the top. For nearly ten seconds he plummeted until finally, with a loud, echoing, faraway crash, he collided with something solid and came to an abrupt, jarring stop. Lying on his back in the sudden stillness, gathering his wits as he opened his eyes, he found shapes beginning to form in the darkness, angular shapes that began to define structure and form around him. His ears heard the familiar comforting sound of a dog barking in the distance somewhere. He then noticed something soft against the back of his hand and knew it to be carpet. And familiarity finally crept in, comforting him.
T. G., groaning, rolled slowly onto his knees. Hard wood was beneath them. He stood up on wobbly legs, bracing himself against a solid form he knew, a wall. Something threw off his center of gravity. A weight of some kind.
He stumbled for a few steps, then reached out into the darkness and found a lamp switch exactly where he hoped it would be. Daggers of light flared outward as the bulb ignited, forcing T. G. to squint as his weary eyes adjusted to a scene that was one he needed to see.
His apartment. In Ithaca, New York. Two thousand miles from the cliff down which he had been rappelling.
He saw that his dining table, two of its chairs, and the overhead light fixture lay broken on the floor, and realized that he had been lying upon the tabletop since coming to rest there. He looked up at the ceiling and found not a gaping, man-shaped hole, but the same intact plaster that had always been there.
Yet I fell through it!
Looking down, he saw a segment of rope looped through his carabiners, its cleanly cut ends lying loosely a few feet away. He banged on the wall, wanting proof of the solidity of the room around him. It was quite real.
So was something else. A heavy, leathery object dangled from a wide, tooled strap slung over his shoulder, a cylindrical thing some twenty-four inches long and nine in diameter. He had no clue as to where he had gotten it, yet it seemed to belong to him. T. G. looked at the odd animal hide from which it was constructed, a purplish leather unlike any he had ever seen. Small bony nodules protruded here and there, glistening like pearl. Transparent yellow jewels, oval in shape, were embedded among tooled characters of a language he did not recognize. The object’s entire presence seemed to speak of antiquity, of a time thousands of years past.
He lifted the strap over his head and laid the thing on the coffee table, studying its engraved symbols and jeweled inlays in the hope that some flicker of memory would come to him.
Nothing.
Running a hand along its gently pebbled surface, he was startled by a sudden pounding on his front door. “Police Department,” came a deep voice from outside. T. G., still in full gear, walked over to the door and answered it as casually as was possible.
“Yes … can I help you, officer?”
“Are you T. G. Shass?” the tall, uniformed patrolman asked. He looked with some surprise at the sit harness and daypack the young man wore, noting the strands of rope trailing behind him. Odd way to dress—
“Yes sir,” T. G. replied, knowing his appearance was unusual, if not suspicious.
“We were instructed to check on your whereabouts, Mr. Shass. May I see some identification?” T. G. fished into his pocket and produced his wallet, then handed his driver’s license to the man. “Okay, son, may I come in and use your phone to call the station?”
“Sure,” he answered. Closing the door behind the man, T. G. absentmindedly reached up to rub his normally clean-shaven chin. His fingers found there more beard stubble than he had ever allowed himself to have. Puzzled, a question leaped from his lips. “What day is this?”
“Tuesday.”
“No, I mean the date.”
“It’s the twenty-eighth … for about another hour.”
“October?”
The middle-aged policeman studied him, having noted the smashed dinette. There was no sign, no scent of alcohol in the room. “You sure you’re okay, son? Did you fall?”
“Uh, yeah … sorry,” he said, having no real idea what to say and hoping the man would not question him too heavily. “Lost my balance.”
The officer eyed him a bit suspiciously, but determined nothing untoward had taken place. “Yes,” the man concluded. “It’s October.”
After a moment, T. G.’s addled mind finally remembered the wrist-watch he wore. He glanced down at its familiar round face and wide leather band. Silver metal gleamed in the dim light. Its hands read six forty-five. Its calendar read October 25. Its second hand was moving.
Assuming it was correct, he had lost three days somewhere.
T. G. shook his head slightly and muttered quietly to himself, his jarred mind struggling to make sense of the facts. “We were hiking … it was Saturday … and that was the twenty-fifth … but that was just now …”
And T. G. suddenly realized just how intensely he really, really had to use the bathroom.
When he reemerged, he found the policeman still on the phone, looking at the mysterious object on the coffee table.
“What is this?” the uniformed man asked.
“Just an, uh, art project. For the school.”
The officer turned his attention back to the phone. “Okay, Mr. Shass, your ID checks out. I’m being hooked into long distance, here … seems someone wants to talk to you.” The officer handed the receiver to T. G., and the call was patched into another one to Aspen.
It was a short conversation. As T. G. set the phone back on its cradle, the officer headed back toward the door. “You’re sure you’re okay?”
“Yeah. I’m fine … I just … fell. Clumsy … lost my balance.” He glanced at the phone. “The guy I was just talking to … David … where was he?”
“I don’t know, son. They didn’t tell me.”
T. G. nodded. Wherever David was, T. G. assumed, at least he had the car and could get home.
“You’re sure?” the officer asked, leaving.
“I’m fine … thanks.”
The officer took one final glance at the smashed table. “Well, from now on, Mr. Shass, you might want to do your mountain climbing on a mountain. Good night.”
T. G. looked at the collapsed furniture. He was grateful that his pack had at least partially cushioned his fall from—no, through the still-intact ceiling. For some reason, it occurred to him that the crushed dinette was a rental. He smiled when he caught himself wondering about the damages he would have to pay.
Like that matters now …
He knew that something transcendent had happened to him, something larger than he was ready to comprehend. He hoped that all would be explained to him somehow—and soon—for he was dying to understand. His factual, normal, explainable existence had melded with the supernatural, the paranormal, the unreal. He did not know what had happened to him, but he did know that his life had changed forever. He was not ready for that.
He was too wound up now to sleep. His body was physically weary, but he was mentally alert and pumped on adrenaline. What to do? There was no immediate way to reach David—he would just have to wait for him to call again. What had he seen? Had he been with T. G. those three lost days? Did he know where this artifact had come from? Was he as sound as he had seemed on the phone?
Running down a mental checklist, T. G. leaned over, reached for the phone, and dialed a number he had dialed many times over. After a few anxious rings, a sleepy, feminine voice answered with the unmistakable seasoning of an upbringing in Hertfordshire, England.
“Hello?”
“Dr. Abelwhite, this is T. G.”
“T. G.? It’s …” She checked her alarm clock. “It’s after midnight. Are you calling from Colorado?”
“No … but I was there, until just now … I mean … something’s happened. I need to see you up at the lab.”
“Now?”
“Yes.”
“Can it wait ’til morning? I’ll be up there first thing.”
He looked down at the tooled leather object. “No … I don’t think so. I have something here … and I need to talk to someone. Someone I can trust. Things have happened … and I found something.”
“What is it? What did you find?”
“I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure it’s an artifact of some kind. It’s in great shape, but I get the feeling that it could be older than, well … it could be older than everything.”
“Is it Shoshone, do you think?”
As T. G. looked at the intricate artifact and its odd tooling, a slight smile snuck into the corner of his mouth. “I really don’t think so. This isn’t exactly a pine-needle basket.”
There was a pause, then the professor continued. “Okay. Can you give me about forty-five minutes?”
“Sure. Thank you. I’ll see you then.” T. G. hung up the phone and stood, hefting the object by its carry strap before setting it on the couch. “What are you?” he asked it, half expecting an answer. He shivered and noticed for the first time how cold his apartment had become.
The thermometer on the thermostat read in the low sixties. He adjusted it up and heard warm air streaming from the vents. The room only got colder.
After pausing to shower and shave, T. G. dressed in fresh clothes, treated his scraped-up forearm, and began to gather those things he would be taking with him. He found the exposed rolls of film in his daypack pocket, but did not remember taking them all. Perhaps there’s an answer there! He put them into a paper bag and left the apartment, the artifact once again slung over his shoulder. As he made his way down the dimly lit hallway, looking back every few steps, he had an intense, very uncomfortable feeling of being watched. Of being followed.
Of being hunted.
He finally reached the front door of the building. Swinging it open, he was hit by a wall of frozen air. It had snowed, transforming Ithaca into a wonderland of white and crystal. His breath fogged, the phantom cloud vanishing as it glowed in the yellowish glare of the parking lot lights. There was a heavy silence hanging all around him, one so intense that he could almost feel its pressure against his eardrums. No wind, no sirens, nothing, as if he were indoors within a huge domed enclosure of some kind. He had always been amazed at the way snow muffled sound.
He quickened his pace, almost running, and found his car safely in the parking lot outside. He never saw anyone else, except for an elderly man in the distance who routinely walked his cocker spaniel each night at midnight. But the feeling persisted, and even as he tried the ignition he continued to check his rearview mirror. The old blue Chrysler started after only a couple of attempts, but not soon enough for T. G. He felt an intangible panic that screamed at him—hurry!
It had been an early snow. The white blanket shrouded everything except the streets themselves, which were dark and wet, reflecting street lights, stoplights, and even a smattering of Christmas lights put up by a family who could not wait for Halloween and Thanksgiving to pass first. He drove quickly down the slick road, checking his mirror one more time as he turned onto a wide well-lit street. A measure of relief set in, which increased with every mile he put between himself and his apartment.
“What’s the matter with you?” he asked himself aloud, banging the steering wheel as he tried to talk himself out of the feeling. He glanced down at the artifact on the passenger’s seat, watching as the cold light from the passing street lamps played upon it again and again. It looked like something alive, somehow.
As a comfort he turned on the radio, but found himself still checking his back every so often. The heater in his car blew warm air against his sneakered feet, which felt colder than they should have, despite his thick cotton socks. T. G. cranked the fan up all the way, but even with his heavy coat he remained uncomfortable and could not get warm.
The feeling that he was being followed finally disappeared as he neared the school and saw, above the trees, the familiar lines of the bell tower, bathed in floodlight against the dark gray night sky. One hundred sixty-one steps to the top, he smiled, remembering a time the previous spring when, with an hour to kill, he had counted them.
He arrived at a parking lot near one of the science buildings. T. G. had seen but a handful of other cars on the lots around Cornell, for there were few night classes and none that ran so late. He allowed himself a slight smile as he pulled into a space, for he recognized one of the few vehicles nearby as belonging to Dr. Abelwhite. Good she’s already arrived.
“Amazing,” she uttered quietly, using a magnifying lamp to examine the surface of the puzzle upon her lab table. “I’ve never seen hide like this. And this style of tooling is unknown to the archaeological world, as far as I know. Where did this come from? There in Colorado, you said?”
“I … think so,” T. G. cautiously answered, excitement building within him. “To be honest, I can’t quite remember. I know I wasn’t looking for anything. I must have found it … accidentally.” He leaned over the table for a closer look.
“How can you not remember? Are you all right? Did you hit your head?”
He rubbed the knot. “I do have a bit of a bump back there, but—”
“Here, let me see.” She looked at his head, gently feeling the lump. “Quite a goose egg,” she said, motherly concern in her voice. “Have you seen a doctor?”
“No. But I’m okay. Really.”
“Possible amnesia doesn’t sound okay. You may have sustained a concussion. Do you have a headache?”
“No. None. Honest … I’m okay. But I’ll see someone tomorrow, anyway.”
“See that you do,” she smiled.
The lab was well equipped, with every conceivable analysis tool placed at the disposal of Dr. Abelwhite, her staff, and her students. A tray of stainless steel instruments sat to one side of the leather-bound mystery.
“Well, I’m sorry to say this, T. G., but whatever this is, it can’t be very old. The leather’s like new. Still full of natural oils and very flexible. No dryness or cracking at all.” The hint of British upbringing that lived within each word she spoke seemed to lend added authority and finality to her prognosis. “I’d say maybe forty years, at the outside, but that’s just a guess.” T. G.’s hopes fell at that, for he very badly wanted the artifact to be ancient.
“Are you sure? I mean, it has to be older than that.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It just … does.”
Carlene Abelwhite knew her stuff. The woman had mastered archaeology at Cambridge University at the youthful age of twenty-one, attaining not only her degree but the deep and abiding respect of those who instructed her as well. She had led three expeditions to the Valley of the Kings in Egypt, uncovering two previously unknown tombs belonging to the family of Ramses, and was largely responsible for the discovery and partial excavation of a subterranean tunnel network beneath the Incan city of Machu Picchu in Peru. Her work near the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, leading to definitive proof of the reign of Pilate, had won worldwide acclaim from her peers. Museums around the world, including those in Cairo, London, and New York, prized the ancient treasures she had unearthed during her many travels, and her reputation had caused Cornell to bend over backward in bringing her to the university. T. G., who had accompanied her as a grad student on two recent expeditions, had grown quite close to her following the death of his parents, and he looked upon her as both friend and mentor—with a tiny bit of grandmother thrown in.
She had been a primary factor in T. G.’s fourth-year decision to switch his major from political science to archaeology, the course in which he had then decided to pursue his master’s degree. Her passion for the uncovering of the past had been infectious, and his time spent with her in the field had given him a personal satisfaction he had never found in any other calling. Dr. Abelwhite recognized his gift for antiquities and had taken him under her wing, sharing with him the intricacies of her chosen field and giving him encouragement in every way possible.
“It’s simply in too fine a condition to be any older, I’m afraid,” she concluded.
T. G. looked at it for a moment, a memory surfacing. “What if … what if it had been preserved somehow, so it wouldn’t dry out and would stay looking new?”
“No one in the ancient world had a method for doing that, T. G.”
She looked at him suspiciously, thinking he was holding something back. “Preserved … how?”
“Well,” he began, a fleeting image flashing in his mind. He turned away, struggling to keep a grip on it. “What if this was sealed or something, in the dark, inside a”—his hands made motions as if to define the size of an object—“inside a … something?” He shook his head, frustrated. “I don’t know. It’s as if I can almost remember … as if there’s something there that just won’t …” He sighed.
The professor ran a cotton-gloved hand along the supple surface of the artifact, considering the possibility. “Then, I’d say, it could be much, much older … but a simple vacuum would still draw the moisture out of it.” She waited a moment, looking at him, hoping to jar a memory. “What kind of container are we talking about?”
“I can’t remember …” He tried again to approximate a size and shape with his hands. “I’m not sure … I think …” His face fell. “Oh, it’s completely gone now. I’m sorry. I just can’t seem to grab hold of it.” He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out the small sack of film. “But I took these slides while I was in Colorado. Maybe something’s in one of them that will give us some answers.” Handing the bag to her, he looked down at the relic and pointed to an embedded amber crystal on the surface of the hide. “What are these things on here, anyway? Jewels?”
Dr. Abelwhite looked closely at the deep yellow substance, tapping it with a steel probe. “I don’t know. It looks a lot like amber, but it seems flawless.” She tapped it again. “And it doesn’t sound organic. Doesn’t seem quite crystalline, either. I’d have to take a sample.”
“I don’t want to damage it.”
“Well, maybe the lab could run a spectral analysis without harming it. But I’d probably have to take samples to pin it down. Same goes for the other ‘stones’ and whatever’s inside this. Have you opened it?”
T. G. moved closer in order to look through the magnifying lens. “No. I didn’t see any way in, and I sure didn’t want to mess it up before I knew what I was doing. Look at it. Do you see any seams? I didn’t. It almost looks like it grew that way.”
She examined it again, rotating the artifact with T. G.’s help so as to look at it from every angle. “No. I don’t see anything either. But it must open in some way.”
There came a knock, and T. G. turned to see Dr. Al Virdon of radiology leaning through the doorway. “We’re ready, Carlene. Anytime you are.”
“Thank you, Al,” she smiled. “And thank you for coming in at this hour.” One of her standing rules had always been for unpretentiousness among those with whom she worked, meaning that titles were out. She liked to keep those around her on a first-name basis, for it had been her experience that she and her peers had always functioned more as a unit when the walls of formality had been removed. For the sake of proper respect, that rule had never extended to her students, save those few with whom she had grown particularly close. T. G., however, had never felt comfortable calling the fifty-nine-year-old scholar by her first name, despite her repeated requests that he do so.
“If you will bring this along, T. G.,” she began, rising from the lab table, “we’ll see what the x-rays will tell us.”
It did not take long. Side views, end views, exposures from every angle were shot. Then standard detail photos were taken of the artifact’s exterior, which would provide close-up views of every square inch of its surface, further aiding their attempt at analysis.
T. G. paced like an expectant father as he waited for the results. After twenty minutes had passed, a call summoned the professor and him back into radiology.
“Doesn’t look like these are going to be of much help,” Dr. Virdon said, handing the x-ray transparencies to Dr. Abelwhite. She slid them into clamps over the wall-mounted light table, then studied them for any sign of revelation. As they examined the film, it became apparent very quickly that the artifact was not going to give up its secrets easily.
“Look at that,” the learned woman sighed, pointing to a dark mass that filled the artifact to a point just within its outer edges. “It’s opaque to x-rays for the most part. It must have an inner lining of some kind. Leaded cloth, maybe. The artifact is heavy, but I don’t think it’s heavy enough to have a solid metal core.” She looked closer, focusing her attention at the dark patches along its outer contours. “This is odd. Those amber gems along the periphery, here … and here … don’t look like they should. Stones wouldn’t have this signature. Whatever these are, they x-ray like … well, like metal.”
“What could cause that?”
“I don’t know, T. G. It would seem that your prize is going to be a tougher nut to crack than I originally thought. Can you leave it with me for a few days?”
“Well,” he began, thinking carefully, “you know I’d trust you with my life. But this thing … something keeps nagging at me that, well, that isn’t like anything I’ve ever felt on any dig I’ve been on. I mean, I’ve found all kinds of pottery shards and fossils, and even that jeweled urn, remember? But this … I just can’t let it out of my sight. Not yet, anyway. I feel a responsibility connected with this somehow. You know? Does that make any sense?”
She smiled. “It’s all right, T. G. I know how you feel … I felt the same way about my first major find.” She glanced at a wall clock. “I’ll tell you what … could you meet me back in the lab in about twelve hours, say this afternoon around three-thirty?”
“Sure. What’s up?”
“First thing in the morning, I’ll show the detail shots we just took to Professor Kerrod in zoology and see if he can help in determining what kind of hide this is. That’ll help pin down its area of origin. No need for you to be here for that. Besides, by this afternoon the photo lab will have finished developing the slides you took.”
“Sure, Doctor,” T. G. smiled, wearily lifting the relic from the x-ray table. “I’ll be here. I need answers. Right now, though, what I need most is some sleep in my own bed.”