Bleak History (20 page)

They descended a dirt path. Loraine looked down at the dig, estimated it was about a hundred feet across, the artifact just seven feet below the surrounding surface. Just above the dig was a flattened-out dirt terrace supporting four tents. A man in long sleeves and straw sun hat sat at a table in front of the largest tent, looking into a microscope. “That's Dr. Pierce over there, at the microscope,” Helman said. “Koeffel is probably in one of the tents poring over the diagrams. Difficult sometimes to drag him away from them.”

She only just glanced at the man across the pit; she was drawn to gaze raptly down at the artifact.

“It's been there over three hundred years,” Helman was saying. “Using the documents, and other indications, we estimate it was placed here in the year 1709.”

The artifact looked to her almost like a miniature Chinese pagoda, undecorated and composed of metal. It seemed made of brass—or was that copper? Could it be copper and still have new-copper sheen, after all this time?

“Did you polish it?”

“No!” Helman seemed delighted with the question. “It looks it though, yes? When I first saw it, I thought it must be a hoax, it can't be ancient, looking like that. But it is.”

“How'd they get down through the permafrost, when they buried it here?” she asked, as they trudged closer to the artifact, a little ahead of Morris.

“An intelligent question,” Helman said, patronizing as always. “We've found charcoal in the dig, and the broken heads of iron picks. We believe they brought fuel, melted the frost a layer at a time, used a work gang to dig down a ways, then melted the permafrost some more—quite an elaborate process, with a large crew. There are indications that the crew never made it back. There are bones under rocks in a gulley, nearby. We think they were killed to keep them quiet.”

She winced at that. To cross half a world, only to be murdered in this barren place—so far from home. “The artifact...it's not very big,” Loraine remarked, as they took a switchback on the path, ever closer.

“And what I did, you see,” Morris interposed rather loudly, “was I used a
particular tool
that moves dirt but at the same time never really risks the artifact. It's very precise—” “Morris!” Helman interrupted, coming to a stop and turning to him. The engineer seemed startled. “Yuh?”

“That'll be enough—why don't you go consult with Dr. Pierce on the other side of the site. I understand he wants to set up some kind of weather shelter for the artifact.”

“A weather shelter for the...Yuh, okay, I was just...” Morris stumped off toward the tents, muttering, shaking his head.

Helman gestured for Loraine to follow him, and they descended another loop in the path till they stood just thirty feet above the artifact on a graveled embankment. Helman made a gesture taking in the dig. “There was a nice pocket of clay and primeval sand here, so they didn't have to cut into the stone of the mountain. They wanted the artifact buried, and they wanted it up on the mountain, and they wanted
this side
of the mountain—the artifact had to be within a certain distance of the magnetic north pole.”

“But the magnetic north pole shifts around over time, doesn't it?” Loraine asked, staring at the object. Aware of her heart thumping; a thick feeling in her throat, like a difficulty swallowing. And another sensation—a feeling of loss. As if she'd just been cut off from something she hadn't known she was connected to. Things around her seemed unreal; missing some sheen of life that had been thenar before.

“The magnetic north pole does indeed shift a certain amount, yes, very good, Loraine,” Helman said, with his bobblehead nod. “But the magnetic pole stays within a certain elliptical zone, up here, otherwise compasses would never have been of much use, eh? You see?”

“The artifact is only four feet high?”

“Oh, that's just the top of it. We think its center column goes down another thirty-eight feet! It's shaped rather like a wand, with a ziggurat-style top. They probably brought it here in sections.” “How did you know it was here?”

“Newton's
Cryptojournal,
partly. We'd already known there was something anomalous going on in the area—satellite readings of magnetic fields, the unusual charged particles coming up out of the ground here. I'll tell you what has Dr. Koeffel excited, Loraine.
Shall
I tell you?”

Hadn't he just said he would?
“Sure. Please.” She swiped at a mosquito buzzing too close to her eyes. That odd feeling of disconnection nudged her again. And another feeling like a hand pressing heavily on top of her head.

“Metal analysis suggests that the core of the artifact is from a much earlier era.
Perhaps as far back as thirteen thousand years ago.
Yes, the Lodge had found a more ancient artifact than what you see here—an artifact within the artifact. And that most ancient artifact is within this shell. Koeffel sneers, 'Some would call it Atlantean.' He doesn't want to admit that it
is
from Atlantis. If it wasn't from Atlantis—what civilization was it? There are no markings of known pre-Columbian societies on it. Nothing Native American or First Nations. Nothing Chinese. Nothing Viking. The object is too internally sophisticated for those cultures. No, nor could Newton's Lodge build it, except for some

detailing. No. All he did was repair it, set it up.... And clearly it's Earth-make—not from some...” Helman gestured toward the sky. “You know. Aliens.” He chuckled. “No.” “So Isaac Newton brought it here? Personally?”

“Not personally—but he was involved. His people brought it here from Norway, in the early 1700s. Newton—and a faction of the original Rosicrucians, the Lodge of Ten. They learned about it  through a series of Sarmoung scrolls found in Athens—which directed them to a remote site in Norway. Magnetic north shifts from time to time, and it had drifted from Norway. There were dark things afoot in the world, in Newton's time—and they thought that if they could repair this artifact, activate it once more, it would protect them. Protect all of humanity, yes? So they brought it here, set it up, and activated it...and as a direct result, nearly all magic receded from the world! The artifact you see before you radically changed human history. It's one of
the keys
to history—and yet it's unknown to all but a handful of historians! Who are not permitted to speak of it.”

“And...it's still working? As a device?”

“It is what creates the 'dam'—the wall in the north, as the ShadowComms say. Yes, it is still working. And thank God for that. It is all that stands between humanity and chaos. It is the great magic-suppressor. The small ones we have at Central Containment are based on it. We've learned to amplify its signal, to intensify it in a small way—though we don't entirely understand it. There are particles emitted by the device we can barely detect and certainly can't quite identify.”

“If it's a working machine—what powers it?”

“It appears to take power from the fluctuation of the earth's magnetic field. The artifact transmits its suppression signal uniformly over the world, from here. It uses the magnetic field of the planet as a kind of carrier wave. It continues to put out its signal—but...lately, that signal is going out erratically. It is faltering—more. Has been erratic, we suspect, for thirty years. This has created some interesting effects, which we have taken advantage of. But it also creates a great danger—” Helman broke off to slap at a mosquito.

“Faltering more lately—because it was exposed by the dig?”

“That doesn't seem to have affected it—just made it possible for us to get a good look. We assume simple corrosion is reducing its output. We must know—we're trying, working feverishly to understand the artifact without taking it apart. So that we can repair it. Because if it stops working entirely...” He took a deep breath. “If it stops working, it just might be that the human world will spini° out of control.”

She looked at him, startled. “You're just...guessing that. It couldn't be that bad.”

“It's a calculated guess. Newton, and the ancients before him—they knew what they were doing! Newton and the Lodge of Ten discovered that a shift in the poles of the earth would open it up to new planetary influences...magic would flood over the earth! Civilization would have descended into chaos! But... there is a use for magic. If properly controlled.” Helman looked at the sky. “The air out here is really quite bracing. Strange smells.” He looked at her, pursing his lips. “Can you feel the energy from the artifact, by the way? Some can.”

“I think so. I do feel...something out of the ordinary. I'm not such an intuitive person, but...” She shook her head, unable to express it.

“You're sensing Newton's Wall of Force itself! We wanted you to get a sense of the”—he waved a hand at the artifact—”the
importance
of what's going on here. The mission of the Lodge of Ten goes on: the suppression of those forces that cripple science, or at least challenge it; forces that threaten to overwhelm reason with the chaos of the so-called supernatural. The mission that made the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason possible. You have an important role to play. You're to be our interface person, our liaison. A bit later. For now, I wanted you to look at this artifact and feel
the awe,
the sense of /ju/posethat...” Helman broke off, seeing Koeffel striding urgently toward them: a shaggy-haired, hyper-energetic man in a dirty white shirt, thick, dusty glasses. He waved a small archaeological brush, scowling. “Oh, I say, Helman! I want a word with you!”

“Koeffel is coming,” Helman said, half whispering to Loraine. “Do not speak of this to him. He knows some things, but...very little about CCA. He is almost useless to us now. We're going into a critical new stage of the process.”

But her mind was spinning around what he'd said a few moments before. ''You're to
be our interface person. Our liaison. “

What had he meant by that?

And before that...

“If it stops working, it just wight be that the huwan world will spin out of control.
“ w Quite suddenly, as Dr. Helman walked away from her to intercept Koeffel, she wanted badly to leave this place.

***

THAT SAME DAY, BUT far to the south. A park, late afternoon, in Brooklyn.

Bleak and Cronin walking along the path. Muddy was running along ahead of them, barking at a maple tree full of chirping blackbirds.

It was funny, Bleak thought, how small city parks were all pretty much the same, with a few old trees and a worn-out baseball field and whatever the fashion in playground climbing toys was—but you didn't feel “I've seen too many of those parks” the way you did about Starbucks or McDonald's. Each one had its own life; its own markings, like an old man's face. Like Cronin's face.

“I sometimes say,
'Ach,
this boy is crazy,' to you, Gabriel, but I know what you see is real,” Cronin said softly.

Muddy was crouched under the maple tree barking at the birds; hundreds of them sang dissonantly in the tree, some perennial blackbird ritual.

“They used to do that sort of thing, those birds, gathering that way to sing together, in the spring, but nature is all confused now,” Cronin said, shading his eyes to look up.

“The time may come,” Bleak said, “when I have to tell you more about that world—about the Hidden.” As he said “the Hidden,” Muddy's barking persistence finally dislodged the birds from the tree, so that the whole black flock wheeled around the park, chirping wildly as it went, before returning, taking up their perches on the maple's branches again.

Cronin chuckled sadly and shook his head. “Soon enough, I'll know all about it. I'm old, and not feeling like I hold to this world too well. People think they would want to live forever, but old age helps give us some... some appreciation of death.”

Bleak looked at him. “Are you sick? I mean...is something...?”

Cronin shrugged. “Nothing special.”

Bleak suspected Cronin had chosen those words carefully.
Nothing special.
It wasn't exactly lying.

“Why,” Cronin asked, “do you have to tell me more about this Hidden of yours?”

Bleak sighed. “There are things happening—a new opening in the north. Things coming through. Danger coming down. Me, I seem to be right in the middle of it, though I don't know why. And it i could affect you. And—something else. A man told me my brother might be alive.”

Cronin looked at him with arched brows. “Vut is dis?” His accent reappearing in his startlement.

“He might be a kind of permanent guest of the government. And I don't mean prison. Not exactly.”

“I see. I
thoughtyou
were upset.” Cronin was articulating his English carefully now. “You seemed worried. You know—I think you sometimes try too hard to hide from that hidden world. You use it—but then you turn your back on it.”

Bleak looked at him in surprise. How did Cronin know that? He'd never talked about it that much with him. But he was a shrewd old man.

“But when you get closer to that hidden world—as an old man does”—Cronin shrugged—”you see that things in this world mean less, because they are so temporary. The suffering here is bad, people got to try to help. But to take it too seriously? No. Because this is just between then and
there.
The Hidden, what you call it—that is just where the ghosts live for a while. You said that once, yes? It's not...what would you say...beyond time?”

“No. It's kind of between time and eternity. It's where this world and the next one overlap, I guess. It stores up life energy—seems like it encourages life to find its way out of matter. The more life there is, the more it can encourage.” Bleak shrugged, a little embarrassed at explaining anything to Cronin, who was in many ways far more wise. “That's the impression I always got.” Though he'd never again managed to contact the being he'd thought of as Mike the Talking Light, he had spoken to lesser spirits, cogent enough to talk, including one that claimed to be the magician Eliphas Levi. And they had told him some things. “But it's also a kind of warehouse for spirits that aren't sorted out.”