| Article Index |
|---|
| The Return 2: Day 1 - Afternoon |
| Page 2 |
| All Pages |
Luke just stared at the blank wall where the communicator had been, still bewildered. Things were happening way too fast for his brain to process. Finally he took a slow, deep breath, then realized he no longer heard the voice. Looking back toward the dais, all was as he recalled, except now the form’s left eye no longer glowed. Odd, it seemed. Was he just imagining all of this? He really had to stop eating that pickled land toad he thought he liked. Yet his bowels still gurgled, signaling the residuals of the stress he had just felt. Something unique had indeed happened here.
He stepped back toward the dais and slowly walked around it, looking for any shapes, markings, or other irregularities. There were none. The dais had a black smooth surface all around, just like the walls of the cube. The tall form—which he was beginning to think of as a statue—towered over him as he came again to face where the eye had been. The statue, too, was all black, its various facets smooth with sharp edges. It just stood there, roughly shaped, inert, and still inanimate.
“Hello?” Luke ventured.
Nothing.
“Hello!” This time a little louder.
The “face” on the statue remained impassive, and only an echo greeted him.
Luke walked back toward the elevators. The message was still there, but the drawer had now closed. Reflexively he reached into his pocket. He still had the pass key from the drawer, except now it, too, was blank. That surprised him. He quickly put it back into his pocket, exhaling noisily. He then looked at the wall more closely, touching it where the drawer had been. He traced his fingernail along the surface. The wall was as smooth and unfeatured as it had always been before this morning. There wasn’t even a hint of a seam or edge to mark a drawer or anything else.
A barrage of questions bombarded him. What was this place? And why was it suddenly so different from what it always had been? Was there a reason it was set up the way it was? Did any of the other cubes hold hidden statues like this first one? And why did some things change back and forth—the eye, the drawer, the card—and others not—like the message on the wall and the statue’s cube, which remained enlarged to its 40-foot square dimensions? And, most importantly, why hadn’t Uncle Gerald told him to expect this kind of thing?
Clearly, he needed more information.
Luke reached to his bag, which he had dropped at the lift, and pulled out a pad, a marker, and a measure. When one is confused, his uncle had mentioned to him once in one of his more pontifical moments, one should start again with what one knows for sure. Luke was good with measures, layouts, electrical maintenance, and mechanical drawings. So, he would start with the basics: the layout of the entire floor. At least that would be something he could understand. And something concrete and obtainable that could keep him from going nuts.
The measuring took Luke the rest of the morning, but eventually he arrived back in front of the message. He slumped down against the wall by Lift 8 and studied his notes. He had learned a few things. The area’s basic layout made sense: geometrically precise, carefully planned, symmetrical. In addition, the floor-to-ceiling distance of 40 feet and the 240-foot diameter of the inner area were as he expected. From these and other details he calculated that where he sat at the center between the lifts was also at the precise center of the Left Nut. That in itself was interesting, but Luke did not know if it was significant or not. He felt good about what he had determined so far; but there remained a further, more compelling, question his notes didn’t even begin to answer yet: why?
Luke looked up and stared at the message again. It continued to glow at him with its now familiar, pervasive blue light. He tried to read it more carefully, applying the same principle of “back to basics” that he had just applied to the entire floor. He knew all the words and numbers, at least as words and numbers. But only three of them—“fear,” “masks,” “time”—were ones he felt he could understand in this context. Yet, their connection to each other and to the rest of the message totally escaped him. He focused first on the numbers, which especially baffled him.
4 6 8 12 20
4 8 6 20 12
They seemed entirely random, with no connection other than the similarity of the numbers between the two lines. Except they seemed each divisible by 4. No, that wasn’t true of the 6. Was there meaning in that distinction? Was there meaning in the two lines being in sets of five? Luke didn’t have a clue. He looked back at the first line.
Fear of the gods is the beginning of wisdom.
Luke definitely had felt fear at times, but not of any gods. Mostly because he just didn’t believe in “gods” of any stripe, regardless of their number. When he was much younger, before Uncle Gerald had called him to this job, Luke briefly had joined a religious sect back on Teutonica, called rather cumbersomely “The Whispering White Wanderers,” or “The Whisperers” for short. They obtained their name from their habit of “wandering” about the countryside speaking only in whispers and wearing as clothing only white sandals and white, full-length linen robes with hoods. The Whisperers worshiped and preached total submission to a vague divinity called “The Five.” The most important thing for the group, though, was its sacred word: JMGSA, which could only be thought and must never be uttered. He had no idea what the word meant or how it fit into the Whisperer’s worldview; but that was fine with Luke, as he thought the word unpronounceable anyway.
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
