The Apocalypse Club (27 page)

He waved a hand and motioned for me to follow him down the hall. I paused.

“Uh, before we get to the long tale that must be told,” I said. “Do you, uh, have a bathroom in this place? I forgot to go before we left and now the matter has become, if you will, more urgent.”

Max groaned. “Unbelievable.”

“Hey,” I said. “It was a long ride. I know this is a cave and all, but I didn’t think that entitled me to just piss on the floor or anything. Food would be good, too. All my beef jerky expired.”

Max grabbed my arm and started hustling me down the hall. “Come on, dumbass,” he grunted. “We’ll take you to go wee wee and then get a snack. Would you like nap time, too?”

“Now that you mention it, I am kind of tired.”

“Can’t take you anywhere.”

“There is actual plumbing in here, right? I’m not just going to be pissing in a hole?”

“How about you piss in a toilet and then I throw you down the hole?”

“Does the hole complain as much as you do? If not, then that might not be so bad.”

“If you shut yours, then maybe you won’t have to find out.”

“You really should have been a flight attendant. I think you would have been awesome at that. Or a valet. Really any sort of service industry job. You have a real knack for it. The human touch, if you will.”

“Why can’t you ever just shut the fuck up?”

“There you go. That would be perfect as AT&T’s new marketing slogan.
Why can’t you ever just shut the fuck up?
That’s gold, Max. Gold.”

Max groaned more expletives under his breath and elected not to say anything more. The toilet, fortunately, did not turn out to be a hole in the ground.

“I
was born on my parents’ estate in Devon on May fourteenth, eighteen eighty-nine –”

“Fuck off!”

We were sitting on ratty canvas chairs in some sort of antechamber next to an underground spring. I had eaten two GDI ration packets of vacuum-sealed pork and beans and some sort of granola bar full of what tasted like candied rat turds. Water burbled past while Tristan made himself comfortable in a chair opposite me and started his story.

“Excuse me?” Tristan said, not really surprised but obviously pretending to be.

“That would make you almost a hundred and thirty years old,” I said.

“Yes,” Tristan said. “As I mentioned earlier, I am in fact considerably older than I appear.”

“But –” I protested.

“Just shut up and let the man tell his story,” Max muttered, cracking his knuckles.

I thought about arguing the point and then decided against it. “Sorry. Please continue.”

“Thank you,” said Tristan. “Now, as I was saying. I was born on my family’s estate in Devon in eighteen eighty-nine. My father, Lord Talmadge Smythe, was a mathematician of some renown who also dabbled in cartography. My mother had no interest in natural sciences. The occult and the supernatural were very much in fashion in those days, and she delighted in having séances and other ‘spiritual gatherings,’ as she called them. These events also had the added attraction of embarrassing my father and driving him to professional distraction. He believed anything he could not factor or chart was nonsense, so it was one of many points on which they did not agree.”

“Understandable.”

“I did not have my father’s aptitude for numbers, which was a source of great consternation and disappointment to him. My father was universally acknowledged to be a great man by all who knew him, and so more than anything, I was desperate to live up to his expectations and the burden of the family name. I followed him to Caius, where I had middling success, and then to the Royal Society, where I attempted to make a name for myself as an explorer. I travelled all over the world without, as the expeditionary committee noted, ‘making a single discovery of any scientific note whatsoever’.”

“A rather harsh assessment,” I said.

“But not an inaccurate one,” Tristan said. “In my younger days, I was prone to rash flights of unscientific fancy, and in my eagerness pursued more than a few Piltdown Men down proverbial rabbit holes. My father, naturally, saw this as a source of great professional embarrassment. Had he not died, I’m sure he would have been one of the loudest voices to have me expelled.”

I took a sip of water and rolled the remains of my granola bar furtively back into its wrapper. What any of this had to do with my sitting in a cave after a terrifying but near-silent motorcycle ride I had no idea, but I was willing to continue to sit.

“I was at my lowest point in those years. My young son, Edward, had died of a fever in the spring of nineteen eighteen and my beloved wife took her own life in a fit of despair only a few months later, leaving only me and my older daughter, Elspeth. I needed to get out of England, so I sent Elly to live with my sister, Pip, whilst I went on what I believed to be my final expedition. I would either make my name or accept defeat and become a bank clerk or some such similar position. Had I been a man inclined to wager, I would not have placed more than a farthing on my chances.”

“But obviously you found something,” I said.

“Yes. We were conducting an excavation at an old crusader fort in Turkey near Yedra. It was there, digging through an old antechamber that we believed may have functioned as a library of sorts, that we found an ancient stone box, roughly the size of a modern microwave oven. Inside were two scrolls and a fraction of a tablet. The scrolls were written in some sort of language we had never seen before. After a great deal of study, we were able to determine that it wasn’t a language, it was some sort of code. The only problem was, we had no way of breaking the code. The fraction of tablet we had was promising, but we only had the top portion, which contained all the same symbols included in the scrolls. If there was a bottom portion featuring the corresponding characters as they would appear in something more comprehensible, like ancient Greek, it was missing.”

“Like finding only the top third of the Rosetta Stone,” I said.

“Exactly!” Tristan said. “Most frustrating. Especially when radiometric analysis of the scrolls placed their age at more than a million years.”

“Say what?”

“The results were immediately dismissed as either false or forged, and it’s easily understandable as to why. If they were accurate, that would mean the scrolls pre-dated all known forms of human verbal communication by, well…no one agrees on that. There are many who consider the origin of language to be the hardest problem to solve in all of science. About the only accord you will find on the matter, even today, is that no two scientists will agree with each other on the point. Suffice it to say, none of them would dare to suggest the existence of a code written on a scroll almost 800,000 years before
homo sapiens
made their first appearance in the fossil record. It was the archaeological equivalent, as one of my colleagues at the time said, of unearthing an
Australopithecus
wearing a pocket watch.”

“Did you believe it?” I asked.

“I didn’t know what to believe at the time, although subsequent carbon dating has verified the age of the box and its contents with more accuracy.”

“And?”

“The box is closer to one point two million years old than a million. The age of the scrolls could not be determined.”

“What?”

“Indeed. One result came back at 7,000 years. Another seven million. The results were, as we in the scientific community like to say, inconclusive.”

“How is that possible?”

“Possible?” Tristan said. “It isn’t, but that’s a question I have asked myself many times over the years. If you can present a valid hypothesis of your own, I would love to hear it.”

“What about the scrolls? Did you ever figure out what they said?”

“In part, yes. We were able to locate a fragment of the missing codex, which was written in a much older but still vaguely recognizable version of ancient Sumerian, and from there we were able to pick out letters and even the occasional word.”

I realized I was leaning so far forward in the chair that I was in danger of falling over. “And?”

“The scrolls seemed to be referring to an ancient legend,” Tristan said quietly. “The story of the
Piotrsgete
.”

I frowned. “The what?”

“The Peter’s Gate,” Tristan said. “To the devout, it would be interpreted as the door to heaven, guarded by old Saint Peter himself, keys in hand. A somewhat more broad interpretation of its meaning would be the entry point where life made its first appearance on this earth. The origin point. The cradle of our existence. The beginning, if you will.”

I tried to not look too confused. “And this scroll identified it?”

“No,” Tristan said. “But it did offer some tantalizing clues. The current thinking is that our direct ancestors made their first appearance somewhere on the continent of Africa and then, for reasons unknown, started wandering off about fifty thousand years ago to populate all of the otherwise uninhabited corners of the globe where you find us today. Not everyone agrees with this, but it is the most widely accepted. The scrolls seemed to suggest an alternative explanation.”

“What? Where?”

Tristan took a long drink of water from his flask. It was all I could do to restrain myself from knocking it out of his hand and shaking the answer out of him.

“Not all of the scrolls were written in code,” he said, wiping his lips. “The second scroll contained a map that appeared to be a drawing of some sort of island. Having a father who was a cartographer, I naturally had access to a large supply of maps. The drawing on the scroll did not match the contours of any known island on the surface of the planet at that time, and I looked at them all. The effort involved was not…insubstantial.”

“I don’t doubt it,” I said. “So what happened?”

“For a long time, nothing,” he said. “The breakthrough came when I shared my findings with an explorer whose reputation was a great deal more exalted than my own. He had just returned from a long expedition of his own and his findings were being met with…well…speculation would be the most polite way to put it.”

“What findings?”

“He had spent a great deal of time in a remote and largely ignored place and found something as unexpected as it was extraordinary. During a relatively routine survey trip partially funded by the Society in partnership with a group of mineral speculators, he had descended into a large crevasse to take some drilling samples and found that, not only did the rock within the sample contain nothing of any apparent capitalistic interest, it was also much younger than expected.”

“Younger?”

“Yes,” Tristan said. “While the outer shelf was several hundred million years old, the samples from the interior were only a few thousand. Furthermore, he wasn’t looking at the crystalline bedrock he was expecting, but loose, almost volcanic soil. Naturally, he didn’t know what to make of it. He increased his efforts and expanded his search area. What he found was that he was standing on an ice sheet that covered not a single island, but three. The islands to the north and south were of little interest, but the one in the middle – the one they surrounded – was an entirely different matter.”

“What island?”

“Greenland,” he said, smiling slightly. “That large, white, blank space on the map that most of the world generally forgets is even there.”

“And the middle island was the same as the one on your scrolls I’m guessing?”

“Exactly,” Tristan said. “Hudson – that’s the explorer, George Randall Hudson, I was referring to previously – became rather fixated on the task. Hudson knew the terrain better than anyone. He had spent years mapping every moraine, ice fall and fault line. He claimed to have found subterranean ice caves containing entire ecosystems of species previously unknown to man. When he returned, we compared our findings and became convinced that a joint expedition was the best way to proceed.”

From the way he said the last part, I got the distinct impression that he was speaking ironically. “And it wasn’t?”

“Unfortunately not,” Tristan said. “Something had happened to Hudson while he was over there. Not just physiologically – the man appeared to be getting younger by the day instead of older – but more than that. My hotel room was broken into before we left. At the time I believed it to be agents of the government, or other members of the Society who were jealous of my work or seeking to discredit me. Only later did I discover that it was neither of these.”

“It was Hudson?”

“Yes. He knew I had the scrolls and wanted them for himself. He believed they would show him the precise location of what he was looking for.”

“And what was he looking for?”

Tristan stood up and walked to the edge of the brook, staring down into the dark water. “Whatever you believe it to be, there is something out there under all that ice. Whether it marks the beginning of our time on earth or the end of it remains to be seen.”

“What happened during your joint expedition?”

Tristan shook his head. “It was a disaster from the start. Hudson was becoming increasingly paranoid that people – primarily me – might steal what he considered to be his great discovery. I was largely confined to the ship and allowed out only sparingly. Hudson disguised his true motives at first, claiming that it was due to poor weather or unsafe climbing conditions, or what have you. The times I was allowed out on the ice were just an excuse to get me out of my cabin so he could have his men search it. Fortunately, I’d kept the items he was looking for locked away in a place he couldn’t get to it.”

“What, you had some sort of secret safe under the floorboards or something?”

“No,” Tristan said and pointed to his temple. “Up here. The scrolls were never taken aboard the ship. I secured them in a secret location in London before we left.”

“So you never found this Peter’s Gate, then.”

“No, we did not,” Tristan said. “But the expedition was not entirely unsuccessful.”

“How so?”

Tristan turned and motioned for us to follow him down another hallway. We seemed to walk for miles before reaching another metal door, this one much more imposing than the first. He typed in a code on the panel and the door opened with a hiss. We scurried through into what looked like the viewing room of an enormous aquarium, except everything on the other side of the glass was pitch black.