“Lily look at me”. No I screamed in my head. I don’t want to look at you, go away. “Lily please”, and he grabbed my chin and turned my face to look at him. He held my head here, not letting go, waiting until finally I looked up.
One of the things I remembered most about Axel from when I was a little girl were his big blue eyes. They actually sparkled when he was amused at something I did. This stopped when I was older, his eyes and face growing impassive, but I’d seen it, the sparkle in that deep blue ocean that looked at me fondly, proudly and made me feel safe. I always remembered that when I looked at him, even to this day, except I wasn’t looking into his big blue eyes anymore. The eyes that were looking back at me right now were golden in colour. The same colour as my eyes.
It wasn’t a conscious thought. I didn’t command any action from my body, it did it all itself. My body picked itself up and ran for the door. In retrospect Axel could have easily stopped me but something tells me he felt a little defeated himself. He let me go. I ran, ran until I was outside, by the river. I ran along the river until I finally collapsed onto the fallen tree trunk, my tree of safe haven. The last thing I remember was wondering if what I was looking at was real or is my small sanctuary a lie as well.
Chapter 8
Lily
This was going to turn into a nasty headache. My neck was sore. My eyes were all cried out. My body was still numb and cold. I finally opened my eyes after fighting it for a while. I knew I wasn’t alone in the room and I wasn’t yet ready to face anyone. Not even Axel. I never, ever believed I would ever think that. Not about him. And yet I knew him well enough to know that he would stay there until I was awake. He probably knew I was awake and was just waiting patiently for me to find some courage to face him.
I saw him sitting on the recliner by the fire place opposite the sofa, that’s where I had been laid. I was surprised to see the fire blazing, I should be feeling warm right now lying here but I wasn’t. I was chilled right down to the bone. He was watching me, waiting. I just stared back at him. He hadn’t bothered to mask his eyes, they were still goldy brown and I hated them. This wasn’t Axel, my Axel had blue eyes. This man was a stranger to me. Oh God, there aren’t supposed to be any tears left.
He was the one that finally broke the silence.
“I found you by the fallen tree trunk. I thought you were asleep but I couldn’t rouse you so I carried you back here. You’ve been asleep for most of the day. You’re cold too”. I didn’t answer him, didn’t speak. My throat felt raw, paralysed. All I could do was stare at him, stare at his eyes.
We just stared at each other in silence for what seemed like an eternity. I wanted to say so much but my brain couldn’t process anything into one single thought. Although I did hear the start of a screaming sound in my head.
Eventually, unconsciously I whispered “You lied to me”
That was a laugh of sorts, something I hadn’t heard out of Axel in years. “Is that all you have to say after everything you’ve heard, that I lied to you”
“You told me you would never lie to me. You told me I could trust you and only you absolutely”
His elbows were on his knees now, he dropped his face into his hands. Weariness was beginning to push its way through his calm defences. It was unsettling seeing Axel this way. I knew the Axel I had grown to love was gone forever, somebody else had taken his place.
“You know, trust isn’t black and white Lily. You trusted me to keep you safe and I have, I always will. I lied to you to keep you safe, so you would always feel safe”
“So why do I get the feeling I’m not so safe anymore, now that the big secret is out. Or shouldn’t I be saying any of this, you know cos the scary Curator is watching.”
“I’ve disabled the surveillance cameras in here, in all places in fact. They’re not necessary any more. The Curator didn’t know I knew about the ones in here. I played along with him though, to keep you safe. I played dumb, to keep you safe.” Was it my imagination or was he growing a smidge hysterical.
“Safe from who?” I was starting to reach a new level of hysteria myself.
“Safe from the Curators plans for you. I’m worried now. This isn’t how it was meant to play out I’m sure of that now and I’m worried about what he’s going to do. He’s always wanted to impress the Palace, find a way into the top. He had a plan for you and it was all going to end with him revealing you to them. This has thrown his plans and I’m afraid of what’s coming next. Lily we have to get out of here, just you and me. I know of a place we can go where we can be safe, figure out what to do next. Our bags are packed. The Curators gone, he left the Library and won’t be back for a week. I’m afraid of who he might bring back with him.”
OK, hysterical now. I started shivering; I had no idea where this was coming from why this feeling of dread was starting to creep its way up my spine. And then…Axel was on the couch, holding me to him. Repeating over and over, “we have to go, we have to leave here”
“What are you doing?” I yelped a little too suddenly.
“What” he replied, startled.
“This, this hugging thing. What are you doing”? He smiled then. “Lily, you’re shivering, your cold, this room is hot and it’s having no effect on you. You’re trying very hard to mask how scared you are right now. So this hugging thing, I’m comforting you. That’s what people do for one another at times like this”
I really liked it, the feeling of his arms around me. It made me feel safe. It made me miss all those times when he never hugged me, never touched me, never showed any emotion. And it made me more scared.
“You never do this. Hug me, why now. You’re just freaking me out more.” Again the smile.
“I wanted to. The times you were sad, upset, when you bounded through that door with a smile on your face, but I couldn’t. The Curator watched every move we made, every day of your life. I couldn’t let him know how I felt about you. How I had come to love you. You’re my daughter Lily. It’s that simple but I couldn’t let the Curator know that. He had to believe that I was unattached to you. I needed to know what he was up to. Once he found out what you were he became obsessed, searching for your origins, your parents. He never found out where you came from but he started forming a plan. I have my suspicions but I don’t know for sure that I’m right, it’s more a feeling. To keep you safe, I needed him to believe that you were little more than a burden thrust on me because nobody else here wanted to raise you. He did in fact order me to raise you. It was the greatest day of my life, something I never shared with him.”
The water works were on. I couldn’t’ help the tears, they were streaming down my face and I didn’t care that Axel could see them. He slowly caught my face in his hands and started wiping away my tears.
“You really love me, like I’m your daughter and you’re my dad”. As I looked at him I noticed how shiny his eyes were with unshed tears. Axel was starting to cry. ‘Yes” he said. “You’re the most precious thing to me and I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you this before. You have to know Lily, I never believed I would have children and when you turned up, it was like my greatest wish had come true. I couldn’t have chosen a better daughter. You and I, we need to survive whatever’s going to happen next because we have a lot of time to make up for”
“Do I have to start calling you dad now?” Axel chuckled through his tears. We were both blubbering. The unmovable, passive, uncaring faced Axel was crying by my side. This definitely was the beginning of a new world.
“Lily listen to me. We have a small window of opportunity, we have a few hours before we absolutely have to leave. The Curator won’t be expecting us to take off, he will have left the Library unguarded. I think you need to see the Library, the real one. I have to pick up some stuff from there anyway. Then we’re leaving. Once we have time, distance and safety on our side we can discuss our options and decide our
next move”. I still felt numb.
“I know you don’t feel like getting up right now”.
He had magically pulled a cup of his special this will cure anything tea out of thin air and shoved it into my hands. “Here, drink this. You’ll feel better in no time. I will finish up here and then we have to make a move”.
He stopped for a moment and smoothed down my unruly I’m feeling hysterical hair and smiled at me. “It’s going to be ok, we’re going to be ok. Do you believe me?”. “Yes”, I whispered. How can I not believe my dad.
And that’s the moment it happened. The moment my life changed forever
Chapter 9
Lily
There were times when I used to delay returning from my errands in town. I never told anybody that I would sneak into the local town library and just sit there. It wasn’t anything like our library. There was hustle and bustle and people coming and going. Students studying, librarians reading to children, someone always was trying to hush someone else-that was my favourite part, it made me smile, our library was noisy. I would think, ‘this must be what a library is supposed to look like’, that is until I saw the ancestor’s library.
We rode an elevator I never knew existed down to the lower ground. I nearly said level except there wasn’t just one level. There were three. The first held all the literature, the second all the equipment and on the third is a lab. Axel sounded like a tour guide as he was explaining all this. He spoke very patiently, very academically as if we were safe and he had all the time in the world. His description didn’t prepare me for what I saw when the lift doors opened. Axel had to push me out of the elevator so that I wasn’t left behind in my stunned silence.
I could see all three levels from the platform we were standing on. Gangways joined sections of the library all encased in glass. Down along the central platform of every level stood desks, computers, writing facilities, copying facilities like hundreds of students could be accommodated for study on any given day.
“What I need is on the next level down.” said Axel.
“Wait.” I said. “Don’t leave me, I just need to see one thing that these people have written then I will come down with you get your stuff and we’ll go”. He was impatient but he didn’t speak, he knew my curiosity was masking my shock. He walked over to a shelf taking the gangway to our left, looked through the shelves, he chose a book and motioned me to meet him at a desk in the centre aisle.
It was eerie and quiet down here. I was starting to feel like there were eyes everywhere watching me, waiting for what, my reaction? Maybe they were trying to keep me down here, seriously this place was huge and I could live a lifetime down here and still not have seen everything. Axel placed the book in front of me.
“Do I need a magic spell, code or key to open this book” I asked. ‘You watch too much TV Lily, quick now just open and have look through we should try and get out of here sooner rather than later”.
Well nothing exploded. I was onto the fifth page, my hands were still intact, there were no strange winds burning off my skin once I’d opened it. Oh Boy, Axel was right I do watch too much TV. I blame Indiana Jones. Of course, my mind was trying to distract me because the only other option it had was to explode with everything that was happening right now.
The writing in the book, it was like something I recognised but couldn’t read. Like I knew it was English but not a dialect I recognised. “Can you read this Axel?” I asked. “Yes” was all he said. He was trying very hard to be patient. My mind blew apart a little more with every page that I turned. Then came something I recognised. Writing, a gene sequence, hieroglyphs and pictures of pharaohs?
“Axel, what is this?”
He peered over my shoulder and took a deep breath. “What do you think it is”, really Axel we’re playing twenty questions now.
“It looks like a gene sequence and hieroglyphs and portraits from ancient Egyptian times”. “Right” he said. “Look at the pictures, what’s unusual about them”.
I know the answer, oh my gosh, the Curator made me study ancient Egypt extensively. “I think this is Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti. They had elongated heads, all the royal family did back then. He was the first pharaoh to make the artists draw them in their true form so this is the first time we see these deformities depicted in ancient Egypt.”
I looked at Axel waiting for my well done. He was back to blank face again. “Do you know how the deformities came about”?
Yes, I knew this stuff. “Boards and bandages, they use to torture their poor kids and tighten the bandages around their heads and boards until their craniums were forced to grow into this shape”.
“Yes” he said “Eventually that’s what happened but that’s not how it started, at least not with these two. Here’s what the history books don’t say. When our ancestors (I wish he’d stop saying our) came here, they lived among the people but only made their true selves known to the rulers hoping they could integrate in a way where they could teach the human population on Earth all the universal truths they knew, share technology and as we said for some factions to gain power. There were some among them that thought this Earth version of humans was a little crude and tried to upgrade them to be the same as the visitors. That’s what the gene sequences here on this page are. They genetically manipulated the Earth human DNA to look like their DNA by adding the extra base pair. Something didn’t work though. In theory it should have, they had the technology and knowhow but there was an unknown factor. The offspring of these experiments grew with some anomalies and deformities. The abnormally shaped head was the most obvious. Elongated torso, arms, legs, fingers and toes was the other way to identify them physically. They were infertile, suffered from ill health and didn’t live a long time, although not many humans did back then.”
Stop. Pause.
Head exploding.
Axel was on a roll and he didn’t want to stop talking. He was getting to a point and then he wanted us out. So I take a deep breath, deep breath in I calm myself…breath out and smile…ok.
“Wait” I remembered something. “Didn’t these two have children? How’s that possible if they were infertile”. He smiled. Super stressed but still thinking. Axel was proud, my dad was proud.
“Their children aren’t the offspring of Mr and Mrs Pharaoh. They’re embryos from the lab, the next level of experiments trying to get it right. See our friend here Akhenaten was somewhat of favourite amongst the visitors. They raised him, taught him and when he was old enough and took power he absolved the many gods theology of the time and started preaching a single origin theory, one creator, one source, one universe. That’s what he was being taught. The visitors didn’t want to live in this makeshift, crude existence. They understood the universe, they did not want to worship a bunch of different gods so this was another step to transforming human existence on Earth. One that they could control and fit into, or rather make the humans fit for them. Akhenaten wasn’t very popular for this, his death was a victory for the polytheists. They labelled him a heretic, destroyed as much of his philosophy and existence as possible and went back to normal, worshipping their many gods. The Earth humans weren’t ready for what the visitors had to offer. They had to get there on their own evolutionary time, not just physically but consciously as well. The humans still aren’t there, well to be fair, some are, but this is an all or nothing deal. They’re still missing the point of their existence, that’s why the war between the factions is raging.”
“But what about Nefertiti, she wasn’t born in Egypt”.
“No” confirmed Axel. “These experiments didn’t just take place in Egypt they were worldwide. She was deliberately chosen for Akhenaten by our ancestor teachers. Evidence is found today from all over the world of these anomalies. Some of the skeletons are real deformities, genetically based. Others were mimics. You see only the people in power looked this way so the general
population started to deliberately deform the heads of their children to look like their ‘gods’. Barbaric, I understand why some of the ancestors hated being here. That’s where the paddle and bandages come into play”.
This was all starting to sound like a bad dream. “The modern history books say that Akhenaten was afflicted with Froehlick’s Syndrome, if you remember Tutankhamen, Akhenaten’s son was also afflicted with many physical ailments and deformities, the next generation of embryos still had many problems”. I remembered information buried in the recesses of my exploding mind.
“Yes, the origins of this disease lie in genetic experiments from ancient times. If you look at the humans today you can still see some of the features, not as pronounced. Eventually, the experiments gained back fertility for these people and softened some of the more obvious deformities but never quite made it to a complete copy of our DNA. It’s still a problem some of the otherworld scientists are working on although they have found more horrific ways of using what they learnt.”
Oh I really am not ready to hear about this, I remembered the scary giant ape-dog with the goldy brown eyes. Axel continued oblivious to my mounting horror.
“If you know what you are looking for you can see it in today’s population - elongated faces, elongated appendages, some of the people afflicted with this are still infertile.”
“Is that what the labs downstairs are for, for this type of experiment”? I’m not sure I wanted to know the answer.
“At one time yes. The results of these experiments can still be found here. Not anymore though, at least not by us here at the Library”. Well that sounded ominous.
“I don’t want to see anymore” I decided quite suddenly. “Can we go now”.
I’m not sure why Axel closed the book ever so carefully and returned it to its place. He stopped speaking, like he had filled his quota and just took my elbow and guided me back to the lift. We made it down to the next level and walked into tech world.