Ancient Echoes (23 page)

He returned the phone to his backpack. They were on their
own.

“Before we waste time with this technical junk,” Jake said,
“let's see if we can find those kids and give them food and first aid. After
that, we'll figure out how to get a helicopter out here. The kids’ tracks are
heading straight for the pillars, so they might be camped nearby.”

“This is all beyond weird,” Charlotte said, noting the quiet
all around them. The isolation unnerved her.

“We will understand the strangeness as soon as we learn
what's causing it,” Quade stated in his usual emotionless, cerebral manner.

Michael, however, saw perfection in the symmetry of the
straight, matching dark gray posts atop the pyramid-like hill. They reminded
him of Miyajima in Japan's Inland Sea, where a tall vermilion
gate
, a
torii,
had been built so that at high tide
water surrounded it. Beautiful and symmetrical, the
torii
was considered
a gateway between the physical and spiritual world. A gate in such an unlikely
location made it startling to behold. Just like the two pillars.

He saw footprints leading to the pillars, but none away.

The air grew colder as he neared the pillars, and then a
bolt of lightning streaked across the sky and a boom of thunder sounded.

“What was that?” Charlotte stopped short.

“It seemed to come from them,” Jake said. He, too, froze in
his tracks.

Once more, lightning flashed above the pillars and thunder
rumbled. Jake and Charlotte moved together, but didn’t speak.

“People nearing the pillars must create a displacement of
air,” Quade said, “like wind booming through a cave.”

“Wait!” Michael held out his arms as if to stop them. “The
thunder could be a warning to stay away.”

“Now you're out in
Twilight Zone
territory,” Jake
declared. “It’s dry lightning and thunder. Happens now and again, and I'm not
letting it stop me from going where I please. Or from finding those kids! I say
ignore it. Let’s go.”

“All of you talk about the noise, but what about the
lights?” Michael asked.

The others glanced at each other. “What lights?” Jake said.

“Those!” Michael pointed at the ground from the foot of the
mound to the top. “Don’t you see them? They’re fantastic, like intricate Celtic
knots all jumbled together, and yet, overall, they form a large-scale pattern,
a definite pattern that works its way up the mound to the pillars.”

“I sure as hell don’t see any lights,” Jake said, staring at
him as if he’d lost his mind.

Charlotte and Quade moved a bit closer, hoping to see the
same thing as Michael. He could tell from their expressions they saw nothing.

“I know what I see!” Michael hurried a few steps forward
then dropped to the ground and scooped away bits of dirt, eventually ending up
with a small hole. He sat back on his heels. “They won’t go away. They aren’t
on the earth; not in the earth. They’re
of
the earth.”

“What you are seeing is an array,” Quade said calmly. “It
holds and focuses energy. However those pillars came to be here, they are held
in place by energy. For some reason, you alone can see it.”

“See energy?” Jake cast a beady eye on both Quade and
Michael. “Sounds like witchcraft. Which, I hasten to add, I also do not believe
in.” He marched forward, Charlotte and then Quade close behind while Michael
followed.

When they reached the foot of the mound, lightning flashed and
thunder boomed every sixty to ninety seconds. Static electricity charged the
air.

Michael walked away, while Quade sat cross-legged gazing up
at the formation.

“Now, what the hell's he doing?” Jake muttered to Charlotte.

She shook her head, too stunned by the pillars themselves to
bother about Quade. She moved closer to Jake. “Remember how I told you I
studied ancient Egypt? I hate to say it, but now that we’re close, those
symbols at the top are Egyptian hieroglyphics.”

“You’ve studied hieroglyphics??” Jake rubbed his chin,
looking at her with equal parts awe and befuddlement as a dopey grin spread
over his face. He had never met anyone like her, and as much as he tried to
ignore the feelings she caused in him, he couldn’t. “At this point I’m ready to
believe anything. Can you read them?”

“Not without my books and dictionaries.”

He forced his attention back to the problem at hand. “So,
now you’re telling me ancient Egyptians, the guys who built the pyramids, were
once here in Idaho?”

“No.”

“That’s good,” Jake sounded relieved, as if he had feared
for her sanity.

“The stones would be more weathered, and the ground much
more reclaimed if these were thousands of years old. They’re much more recent.”

“That’s it!” Jake said. “It’s a prank! Some college kids rigged
this up. Maybe even as a joke on the visiting professor. Now, you’re talking.”

Much to her surprise in this crazy situation, Charlotte
found herself smiling at him. “I should have said recent,
archeologically
speaking.” A glimmer filled her eyes “They’re probably no more than two or
three hundred years old.”

“Good God!” Jake groaned.

Michael hurried toward them. “There’s a problem.” He
beckoned Quade to join them. “I walked all the way around the mound and I saw
footprints going up, but none coming down or walking away from it.”

“Impossible,” Jake said.

Charlotte said nothing as she tried to understand all this.

“There's an explanation.” Quade’s tone was firm,
all-knowing.

“What, they flew?” Jake put his hands on his hips. He’d had
it with Quade’s arrogance. “I know the old legends talked about people
disappearing, but I don't buy it!”

Quade peered up at the pillars. “If we want to find the
students, we’ll have to follow them.” His frosty gaze turned to Jake. “The
wisest move might be that you don't join us, Sheriff,” Quade said. “We don’t
know what’s on the other side.”

“Other side of what?”
Jake asked.

Michael answered. “That’s what we need to find out.” He felt
drawn to the pillars, compelled to go nearer to them.

“Are you the only sensible one here, Charlotte?” Jake asked.

His question churned in her mind.
Sensible?
If it was sensible to believe these pillars held answers about her husband,
then she was. After thirteen years of not knowing why he died, what he pursued
those last few weeks of his life, the answer seemed to be within her grasp.
“I’m going with them,” she replied softly.

Despite her words, he saw her fear, and it burned inside
him. He hated that she was afraid, hated that she was anything but safe and
happy. He faced the others. “I think you’ve all lost your goddamn minds,” he
yelled, far too gruffly. His gaze met Charlotte’s as he said, “I’m not letting
you go anywhere without me.”

Quade climbed up the mound first, Charlotte next, Michael,
and then Jake. As they neared the top, the booms struck with less frequency
rather than more, and then stopped completely.

The earth at the top was the same as the earth everywhere
else on the mound. They found no hole that could swallow people up.
Nothing.

And yet, they could not deny that footprints rose up to the
pillars, but none descended from them.

In the center, between the two pillars, Michael saw a glow.
He thought of Lady Hsieh and the certainty struck that through the pillars, he
would find her. “I’m going to walk between the pillars,” he said. “But before
anyone else
does
, you should realize there’s a
possibility you won’t be able to come back.”

“That’s crazier than Quade!” Jake said.

“Maybe we tie a rope around Michael’s waist,” Charlotte suggested.
“If something goes wrong, or he finds himself in danger, we can pull him back
out.”

“I don’t believe that will work,” Quade said. “Any link to
this world will stop one from entering another.”

“We can try,” Charlotte said.

“Ropes aren’t needed.” Quade held Charlotte’s outstretched
hand as he alone stepped between the pillars. Nothing happened and he came back
to her side.
“As I suspected.”

“I can’t believe any of you are serious about this!” Jake
yelled.

“Are you ready?” Michael asked Quade and Charlotte. They
nodded.

“Hell no!
Not if we can’t come
back!” Jake thundered.

“We’ll have to find that out on the other side,” Michael
answered. “It’s what all scientists must do at some point.”

“But don’t you—” Jake began his question but didn’t have a
chance to end it as he watched Quade, Michael, and finally Charlotte step
between the pillars and disappear.

“Oh, shit!” Jake muttered. Against his better judgment, he
followed.

New York City

JENNIFER VANDENBURG STOOD at the
window of her corner office on the PLP building’s forty-third floor, and looked
out over Central Park. The lights of the city burned bright. She found
Manhattan more beautiful at night than during the day.

She should have been home now, but she couldn’t face being
there. She couldn’t face her own daughter.

Vandenburg had achieved much in her life, more than she ever
thought possible. Now, if she could succeed once more, she would finally be
happy.

She glanced at the clock. Her visitor was late.

The phone rang, startling her. On her personal line was the
investigator employed by PLP’s lobbying firm in Washington D.C.

“We found a student in Lionel Rempart's condo gathering
information,” the private eye announced without introduction.

“Did you check him out?” she asked, irritated at the bizarre
intrusion.

“So far, all we know is his I.D. was a fake. We’re working
on finding out more.”

She didn’t like the response, but she could do little about
it. “Keep me posted.” She hung up.

When Rempart and his students dropped off the face of the
earth in Idaho, she immediately suspected him of something underhanded. He
might have found the book and decided to keep it, or had gotten sick of the
hardships of life trekking around the woods. She had his home watched in case
he went back there for something, such as his passport. Her plan depended on
him being a reputable anthropologist, and he had taken her money. But she still
didn’t trust him.

If he couldn’t be found in Idaho, and he hadn’t snuck back
home, where was he? Had something truly happened to him and the students?

A tentative knock on the door, the one she had been waiting
for, interrupted her thoughts. “Come in.”

Milt Zonovich, Phaylor-Laine's first vice president, entered.
He was a small man, with short gray hair, horned-rimmed glasses, and a nervous
habit of excessive blinking.

Zonovich had hoped to get the CEO position ten years ago,
but it went instead to the young Jennifer Vandenburg after she'd resurrected a
chain of home improvement stores from the doldrums into one of the country's
top retail businesses. She'd campaigned hard for the position and eventually
the executive board offered her a fortune to make sure that Phaylor-Laine
maintained its hold as the world's premier pharmaceutical company, despite
numerous lawsuits stemming from side effects from the latest “super-drugs” that
do everything short of curing the common cold, but have an unfortunate tendency
to be fatal to a small number of the population.

Cure or kill...that was the question in
twenty-first century medicine.

So far, Vandenburg had managed to keep the Phaylor-Laine
name surprisingly positive in the mainstream press.

That didn't mean, however, that Zonovich either liked or
respected her.

 
“Milt, thank you for joining me.
Would you like a drink?”

He looked at the well-stocked bar against the wall, and his
lips thirstily rubbed together before he forced himself to say, “No, thanks.”

They sat on the sofa, one at each end. “Fifteen years ago,”
she launched directly into her reason for calling him, “the company began an
inquiry into an ancient text on alchemy. Do you know about that?”

Surprise flickered across Zonovich’s face.

Blink. Blink.
“Yes. It was Calvin Phaylor’s idea,” he
explained, then nervously bit his bottom lip before continuing. “He had
interest in many strange things he thought might provide possible
pharmacological breakthroughs. It was a lark, nothing more. I think he hoped to
spend some time in Idaho at company expense. He loved sports fishing, salmon,
steelhead
—”

“I’m curious about a team sent into the area,” she
interrupted. “The reports don’t say what happened to them. That troubles me.”

His blinking sped up and he rubbed his chin. “Kohler. Thad
Kohler. He led the group. They were supposed to be experts.
All
ex-military.
Supposed to know how to take care of
themselves in the wilds.”
He stopped speaking suddenly.

“I'm surprised you remember his name after all these years,”
she said. She not only knew about Kohler, but knew the others’ names as well:
Ben Olgerbee, Will Durham, Gus Webber, Sam Black,
Arnie
Tieg.

“I remember only because the whole thing turned so very
bizarre,” Zonovich exclaimed, his voice too high now. “We never heard back from
them. We made inquiries, did some searches. We couldn't do too much in the way
of publicizing our activity—we didn't exactly want our stockholders to know
that PLP paid to investigate alchemy.” He laughed nervously.

Vandenburg didn't join in.

“The money we paid Kohler”—
blink, blink, blink—
“had
been distributed by him to his team before they left. Some of the families made
a fuss when the men didn't come home, but we pointed out that they were paid by
PLP for work that wasn't, as best as we knew, accomplished. We compensated them
out of the goodness of our hearts, I might add, and simply asked that they
remained silent. There's not much more I can tell you.”