The Millennium Express: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume Nine

  “Three weeks ago. We’ve known this tunnel was here for a long time, but it was thought to be empty. I happened to be doing some sonar scanning overhead and I got an echo back from a previously uncharted branch, so I came down and took a look around. Nobody knows about it but me. And you.”

  Gingerly I ran my hand over the face of the marble slab. It was extraordinarily smooth, cool to the touch. I had the peculiar illusion that my fingertips were tingling, as though from a mild electrical charge.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked.

  “Open it.”

  “Now?”

  “Now, bro. You and me.”

  “You can’t do that!”

  “I can’t?”

  “You’re part of an expedition, Charlie. You can’t just bust into a tomb, or whatever this is, on your own. It isn’t proper procedure, is it? You need to have the other scientists here. And the Turkish antiquities officials—they’ll string you up by the balls if they find out you’ve done a bit of secret free-lance excavating without notifying any local authorities.”

  “We break the seals. We look inside. If there’s anything important in there, we check it out just to gratify our own curiosity and then we go away, and in the morning I discover it all over again and raise a big hullaballoo and we go through all the proper procedure then. Listen, bro, there could be something big in there, don’t you see? The grave of a high priest. The grave of some prehistoric king. The lost treasure of the Temple of Diana. The Ark of the Covenant. Anything. Anything. Whatever it is, I want to know. And I want to see it before anybody else does.”

  He was lit up with a passion so great that I could scarcely recognize him as my cool brother Charlie.

  “How are you going to explain the broken seals?”

  “Broken by some tomb-robber in antiquity,” he said. “Who got frightened away before he could finish the job.”

  He had always been a law unto himself, my brother Charlie. I argued with him a little more, but I knew it would do no good. He had never been much of a team player. He wasn’t going to have five or six wimpy colleagues and a bunch of Turkish antiquities officials staring over his shoulder while that sealed chamber was opened for the first time in two thousand years.

  He drew a small battery-powered lamp from his sack and set it on the ground. Then he began to pull the implements of his trade out of the sack, the little chisels, the camel’s-hair brushes, the diamond-bladed hacksaw.

  “Why did you wait until I got here before you opened it?” I asked.

  “Because I thought I might need help pulling that slab out of the wall, and who could I trust except you? Besides, I wanted an audience for the grand event.”

  “Of course.”

  “You know me, Timmo.”

  “So I do, bro. So I do.”

  He began very carefully to chisel off one of the clay seals. It came away in two chunks. Setting it to one side, he went to work on the second one, and then the third. Then he dug his fingertips into the earthen wall at the edge of the slab and gave it an experimental tug.

  “I do need you,” he said. “Put your shoulder against the slab and steady it as I pry it with this crowbar. I don’t want it just toppling out.”

  Bit by bit he wiggled it free. As it started to pivot and fall forward I leaned all my weight into it, and Charlie reached across me and caught it too, and together we were able to brace it as it left its aperture and guide it down carefully to the ground.

  We stared into the blackest of black holes. Ancient musty air came roaring forth in a long dry whoosh. Charlie leaned forward and started to poke the flashlight into the opening.

  But then he pulled back sharply and turned away, gasping as though he had inhaled a wisp of something noxious.

  “Charlie?”

  “Just a second.” He waved his hand near his head a couple of times, the way you might do when brushing away a cobweb. “Just—a—goddamn—second, Tim!” A convulsive shiver ran through him. Automatically I moved toward him to see what the matter was and as I came up beside him in front of that dark opening I felt a sudden weird sensation, a jolt, a jab, and my head began to spin. And for a moment—just a moment—I seemed to hear a strange music, an eerie high-pitched wailing sound like the keening of elevator cables far, far away. In that crazy incomprehensible moment I imagined that I was standing at the rim of a deep ancient well, the oldest well of all, the well from which all creation flows, with strange shadowy things churning and throbbing down below, and from its depths rose a wild rush of perfumed air that dizzied and intoxicated me.

  Then the moment passed and I was in my right mind again and I looked at Charlie and he looked at me.

  “You felt it too, didn’t you?” I said.

  “Felt what?” he demanded fiercely. He seemed almost angry.

  I searched for the words. But it was all fading, fading fast, and there was only Charlie with his face jammed into mine, angry Charlie, terrifying Charlie, practically daring me to claim that anything peculiar had happened.

  “It was very odd, bro,” I said finally. “Like a drug thing, almost.”

  “Oxygen deprivation, is all. A blast of old stale air.”

  “You think?”

  “I know.”

  But he seemed uncharacteristically hesitant, even a little befuddled. He stood at an angle to the opening, head turned away, shoulders slumping, the flashlight dangling from his hand.

  “Aren’t you going to look inside?” I asked, after a bit.

  “Give me a moment, Timmo.”

  “Charlie, are you all right?”

  “Christ, yes! I breathed in a little dust, that’s all.” He knelt, rummaged in the tool sack, pulled out a canteen, took a deep drink. “Better,” he said hoarsely. “Want some?” I took the canteen from him and he leaned into the opening again, flashing the beam around.

  “What do you see?”

  “Nothing. Not a fucking thing.”

  “They put up a marble slab and plaster it with inscribed seals and there’s nothing at all behind it?”

  “A hole,” he said. “Maybe five feet deep, five feet high. A storage chamber of some kind, I would guess. Nothing in it. Absolutely fucking nothing, bro.”

  “Let me see.”

  “Don’t you trust me?”

  In fact I didn’t, not very much. But I just shrugged; and he handed me the flashlight, and I peered into the hole. Charlie was right. The interior of the chamber was smooth and regular, but it was empty, not the slightest trace of anything.

  “Shit,” Charlie said. He shook his head somberly. “My very own Tut-ankh-amen tomb, only nothing’s in it. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  “Are you going to report this?”

  “What for? I come in after hours, conduct illicit explorations, and all I have to show for my sins is an empty hole? What’s the good of telling anybody that? Just for the sake of making myself look like an unethical son of a bitch? No, bro. None of this ever happened.”

  “But the seals—the inscriptions in an unknown script—”

  “Not important. Let’s go, Tim.”

  He still sounded angry, and not, I think, just because the little chamber behind the marble slab had been empty. Something had gotten to him just now, and gotten to him deeply. Had he heard the weird music too? Had he looked into that fathomless well? He hated all mystery, everything inexplicable. I think that was why he had become an archaeologist. Mysteries had a way of unhinging him. When I was maybe ten and he was thirteen, we had spent a rainy evening telling each other ghost stories, and finally we made one up together, something about spooks from another world who were haunting our attic, and our own story scared me so much that I began to cry. I imagined I heard strange creaks overhead. Charlie mocked me mercilessly, but it seemed to me that for a time he had looked a little nervous too, and when I said so he got very annoyed indeed; and then, bluffing all the way, I invited him to come up to the attic with me right then and there to see that it was safe, and he pun
ched me in the chest and knocked me down. Later he denied the whole episode.

  “I’m sorry I wasted your time tonight, keed,” he said, as we hiked back up to our cars.

  “That’s okay. It just might have been something special.”

  “Just might have been, yeah.” He grinned and winked. He was himself again, old devil-may-care Charlie. “Sleep tight, bro. See you in the morning.”

  But I didn’t sleep tight at all. I kept waking and hearing the wailing sound of far-off elevator cables, and my dreams were full of blurry strangenesses.

  The next day I hung out at the hotel all day, breakfasting with Charlie—he didn’t refer to the events of the night before at all—and lounging by the pool the rest of the time. I had some vague thought of hooking up with one of the German tourist ladies, I suppose, but no openings presented themselves, and I contented myself with watching the show. Even in puritanical Turkey, where the conservative politicians are trying to put women back into veils and ankle-length skirts, European women of all ages go casually topless at coastal resorts like this, and it was remarkable to see how much savoir-faire the Turkish poolside waiters displayed while taking bar orders from saftig bare-breasted grandmothers from Hamburg or Munich and their stunning topless granddaughters.

  Mr. Gladstone, who hadn’t been around in the morning, turned up in late afternoon. I was in the lobby bar by then, working on my third or fourth post-lunch raki. He looked sweaty and tired and sunburned. I ordered a Coke for him.

  “Busy day?”

  “Very. The Cave of the Seven Sleepers was my first stop. A highly emotional experience, I have to say, not because of the cave itself, you understand, although the ancient ruined church there is quite interesting, but because—the associations—the memories of my dear wife that it summoned—”

  “Of course.”

  “After that my driver took me out to the so-called House of the Virgin. Perhaps it’s genuine, perhaps not, but either way it’s a moving thing to see. The invisible presence of thousands of pilgrims hovers over it, the aura of centuries of faith.” He smiled gently. “Do you know what I mean, Mr. Walker?”

  “I think I do, yes.”

  “And in the afternoon I saw the Basilica of St. John, on Ayasuluk Hill.”

  I didn’t know anything about that. He explained that it was the acropolis of the old Byzantine city—the steep hill just across the main highway from the center of the town of Seljuk. Legend had it that St. John the Apostle had been buried up there, and centuries later the Emperor Justinian built an enormous church on the site, which was, of course, a ruin now, but an impressive one.

  “And you?” he said. “You visited with your brother?”

  “In the morning, yes.”

  “A brilliant man, your brother. If only he could be happier, eh?”

  “Oh, I think Charlie’s happy, all right. He’s had his own way every step of his life.”

  “Is that your definition of happiness? Having your own way?”

  “It can be very helpful.”

  “And you haven’t had your own way, is that it, Mr. Walker?”

  “My life has been reasonably easy by most people’s standards, I have to admit. I was smart enough to pick a wealthy great-grandfather. But compared with Charlie—he has an extraordinary mind, he’s had a splendid scientific career, he’s admired by all the members of his profession. I don’t even have a profession, Mr. Gladstone. I just float around.”

  “You’re young, Mr. Walker. You’ll find something to do and someone to share your life with, and you’ll settle down. But your brother—I wonder, Mr. Walker. Something vital is missing from his life. But he will never find it, because he is not willing to admit that it’s missing.”

  “Religion, do you mean?”

  “Not specifically, no. Belief, perhaps. Not religion, but belief. Do you follow me, Mr. Walker? One must believe in something, do you see? And your brother will not permit himself to do that.” He gave me the gentle smile again. “Would you excuse me, now? I’ve had a rather strenuous day. I think a little nap, before supper—”

  Since we were the only two Americans in the place, I invited him to join me again for dinner that night. He did most of the talking, reminiscing about his wife, telling me about his children—he had three, in their thirties—and describing some of the things he had seen in his tour of the Biblical places. I had never spent much time with anyone of his sort. A kindly man, an earnest man; and, I suspect, not quite as simple a man as a casual observer might think.

  He went upstairs about half past eight. I returned to the bar and had a couple of raw Turkish brandies and thought hopeful thoughts about the stunning German granddaughters. Somewhere about ten, as I was considering going to bed, a waiter appeared and said, “You are Mr. Timothy Walker?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your brother Charles is at the security gate and asks that you come out to meet him.”

  Mystified, I went rushing out into the courtyard. The hotel grounds are locked down every night and nobody is admitted except guests and the guests of guests. I saw the glare of headlights just beyond the gate. Charlie’s car.

  “What’s up, bro?”

  His eyes were wild. He gestured at me with furious impatience. “In. In!” Almost before I closed the door he spun the car around and was zooming down the narrow, winding road back to Seljuk. He was hunched over the wheel in the most peculiar rigid way.

  “Charlie?”

  “Exactly what did you experience,” he said tightly, “when we pulled that marble slab out of the wall?”

  My reply was carefully vague.

  “Tell me,” he said. “Be very precise.”

  “I don’t want you to laugh at me, Charlie.”

  “Just tell me.”

  I took a deep breath. “Well, then. I imagined that I heard far-off music. I had a kind of vision of—well, someplace weird and mysterious. I thought I smelled perfume. The whole thing lasted maybe half a second and then it was over.”

  He was silent a moment.

  Then he said, in a strange little quiet way, “It was the same for me, bro.”

  “You denied it. I asked you, and you said no, Charlie.”

  “Well, I lied. It was the same for me.” His voice had become very odd—thin, tight, quavering. Everything about him right now was tight. Something had to pop. The car was traveling at maybe eighty miles an hour on that little road and I feared for my life. After a very long time he said, “Do you think there’s any possibility, Tim, that we might have let something out of that hole in the ground when we broke those seals and pulled that slab out?”

  I stared at him. “That’s crazy, Charlie.”

  “I know it is. Just answer me: do you think we felt something moving past us as we opened that chamber?”

  “Hey, we’re too old to be telling each other spook stories, bro.”

  “I’m being serious.”

  “Bullshit you are,” I said. “I hate it when you play with me like this.”

  “I’m not playing,” Charlie said, and he turned around so that he was practically facing me for a moment. His face was twisted with strain. “Timmo, some goddamned thing that looks awfully much like Diana of Ephesus has been walking around in the ruins since sundown. Three people I know of have seen her. Three very reliable people.”

  I couldn’t believe that he was saying stuff like this. Not Charlie.

  “Keep your eyes on the road, will you?” I told him. “You’ll get us killed driving like that.”

  “Do you know how much it costs me to say these things? Do you know how lunatic it sounds to me? But she’s real. She’s there. She was sealed up in that hole, and we let her out. The foreman of the excavations has seen her, and Judy, the staff artist, and Mike Dornan, the ceramics guy.”

  “They’re fucking with your head, Charlie. Or you’re fucking with mine.”

  “No. No. No. No.”

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “To look for her. To fi
nd out what the hell it is that those people think they saw. I’ve got to know, Tim. This time, I’ve absolutely got to know.”

  The desperation in Charlie’s voice was something new in my experience of him. I’ve absolutely got to know. Why? Why? It was all too crazy. And dragging me out like this: why? To bear witness? To help him prove to himself that he actually was seeing the thing that he was seeing, if indeed he saw it? Or, maybe, to help him convince himself that there was nothing there to see?

  But he wasn’t going to see anything. I was sure of that.

  “Charlie,” I said. “Oh, Charlie, Charlie, Charlie, this isn’t happening, is it? Not really.”

  We pulled up outside the main gate of the ruins. A watchman was posted there, a Turk. He stepped quickly aside as Charlie went storming through into the site. I saw flashlights glowing in the distance, and then four or five American-looking people. Charlie’s colleagues, the archaeologists.

  “Well?” Charlie yelled. He sounded out of control.

  A frizzy-haired woman of about forty came up from somewhere to our left. She looked as wild-eyed and agitated as Charlie. For the first time I began to think this might not be just some goofy practical joke.

  “Heading east,” the woman blurted. “Toward the stadium or maybe all the way out to the goddess sanctuary. Dick saw it too. And Edward thinks he did.”

  “Anybody get a photo?”

  “Not that I know of,” the woman said.

  “Come on,” Charlie said to me, and went running off at an angle to the direction we had just come. Frantically I chased after him. He was chugging uphill, into the thorny scrub covering the unexcavated areas of the city. By moonlight I saw isolated shattered pillars rising from the ground like broken teeth, and tumbledown columns that had been tossed around like so many toothpicks. As I came alongside him he said, “There’s a little sanctuary of the Mother Goddess back there. Wouldn’t that be the logical place that she’d want to go to?”

  “For shit’s sake, Charlie! What are you saying?”

  He kept on running, giving me no answer. I fought my way up the hill through a tangle of brambles and canes that slashed at me like daggers, all the while wondering what the hell we were going to find on top. We were halfway up when shouts came to us from down the hill, people behind us waving and pointing. Charlie halted and listened, frowning. Then he swung around and started sprinting back down the hill. “She’s gone outside the ruins,” he called to me over his shoulder. “Through the fence, heading into town! Come on, Tim!”