Nexus Point (Meridian Series) (27 page)

Part VIII

The Wolf

“And what rough beast, its
hour come round at last, Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?”

The Second Coming
–William Butler Yeats

22

Nordhausen sat
in
the
mouth of the cave, staring
at
the russet
colors of sun and shadow painting the canyon walls of Wadi Rumm. He was still
trying to fathom the incredible revelation in Rasil’s words. The man had come
here with the intention of making a time jump through a hidden Arch that was
powered by the natural nuclear chain reaction in the guts of a bacterial
colony. What genius! How many of these sites did they have secreted around the
globe? Where did they all lead? Rasil seemed to indicate that this well, as he
called it, was a one way journey, but he would not say where it led. Poor Paul.
Was he lost in some distant past or flung forward into the future? How would he
ever know?

      
I’m responsible,
he thought. If I hadn’t dragged him out here… But that led him nowhere. Paul’s
fate was the smallest part of the dilemma he now confronted. The prospect of a
Time war was terrifying. Who knows how long it had been underway, or how vast
was the scope of its influence.

       Nordhausen realized that he had already
become an
unwitting soldier in that war,
recruited and pressed into service by
the appearance
of
Mr. Graves. A good name for the
man. The Professor wondered how many graves he was responsible for unearthing
and how many lives he had reanimated by their little stumbling sojourn to the
Jordanian desert in 1917? The inverse of that equation was painfully apparent
to him now. It was pressed into the weary features of this man Rasil. He had
seen millions of lives extinguished in an instant from the safe, yet tortured
vantage point of a Nexus.

       Now the two of them sat in another bubble of
uncertainty on the shifting eddies of Time. What would be left of the world he
now knew when it finally burst? Rasil’s comment about the dogs having their
bones before the night ran its course still
bothered
him. He could not help thinking of how both Graves and Kelly had vanished
during that last mission. Was his life, his very reality at stake now?

       Rasil sighed heavily. “I must take care of
something,” he said. “I won’t be long. The men I have with me here are not
initiates. They cannot be permitted to ride out the Nexus to the world now
waiting to be born. So I will send them out into the desert, beyond the sphere
of influence, and I must do so quickly. Otherwise the madness will take them,
and their dreams will never be whole again. They are from this time and place.
It is the least I can do for them to reward their service.”

       “I understand,” said Nordhausen, though he
hadn’t the slightest idea of what the man was talking about. Unless… he
remembered Paul and Kelly discussing the Arch bubble one night over dinner.
Without grasping all the physics involved, it seemed the operation of the Arch
created a calm spot in the eye of time’s storm when an operation was underway,
and it was limited in physical range.

       “Wait here,” said Rasil. “I need not warn
you of the danger should you leave the sanctuary of the Nexus. I will not be
far. And do not try to follow your friend.
 
You
would only fall to certain death.”

       “Indeed,” said Nordhausen, convinced that
his hunch had been correct.

       Rasil stood up, calling to the men in Arabic
as he slipped out of the mouth of the cave. The three men started down the
rocky slope, to make their way back through the winding crevasse to the valley.
Nordhausen strained to watch them go. Rasil gave him a single backward glance,
and then they hastened away into the gloaming of the dusk.

       Trusting soul, thought Nordhausen, wishing
he had the Glock pistol somewhere at hand. Was it in one of the satchels they
brought with them, or did Paul have it? What would I do with the damn thing, he
mused, hold this Rasil at gunpoint until he talks? Something told him Rasil
would die first. He called himself the messenger. I suppose he’s on some
courier mission to another time. But why?

       Nordhausen looked around, his eyes widening when
they fell upon a hiking pack that his Arab captors had been carrying when they
arrived here. “Hello,” he said aloud to himself. “Now I wonder what I might
find in there!”

       He craned his neck, squinting into the
gathering dusk  for any sign of Rasil’s return. The land was empty and forlorn,
and only the sigh of the wind through the winding fissure of sculpted rock gave
any hint of life or movement. He crept toward the hiking pack.

       A moment later he had loosened the straps
and opened the main pouch. There were obvious things inside: a two liter
canteen of water, something that looked like hardtack biscuits, and … he
rummaged to grasp at a dark metal tube in the bottom of the pack, something
like a map case, he thought.

       He had it out and opened the simple twist-on
metal lid at one end, pleased to see that there was a rolled document inside.
He drew it out, surprised at the soft texture and the unweathered condition of
the paper. No, this was made of something else, more like a papyrus scroll. His
curiosity was piqued and he slowly rolled it open, amazed to see a series of
odd pictograms that he immediately recognized as Egyptian hieroglyphics. The
two dimensional graphics were drawn in neat rows down the page and he quickly
set his mind on deciphering them.

       He had always taken a great interest in
Egyptian writing, and had many notebooks of the curious script moldering away
in his office from his graduate student days. He had studied the language for
years, teaching himself to read and write the script at one time—though it had
been many years since he
worked
with it.
He
looked about for an obvious starting point in the
document. The language had evolved over time, and there were five different
phases stretching from Old Egyptian through the Middle and New periods, and
then on through the Demotic and Coptic texts. This writing looked very ancient,
probably from an early period.

       He scanned the scroll, noting the direction
the little ideograms were oriented to find an obvious starting point. The
convention was such that the pictures always faced toward the beginning of the
text. There were larger drawings here and there, and he knew that anything
purportedly spoken by a figure or god they represented would also have all its
pictograms oriented in the direction that figure was facing. One figure
dominated, and he began to read, working his finger along the line of
ideograms, which indicated objects and actions, and phonograms standing for
phonetic sounds. It was not long before he was able to construct the text in
his mind.

       “Here follows the word of the Lord of Time…”
That was the dominant figure in the script. All the other symbols were oriented
the same way. He noted how miniature duplicates of the figure he took to be
this Lord appeared here and there throughout the text. He struggled with his
memory, trying to distinguish the one letter signs from common single word
elements. “At the time of great struggle… travail… eternity at rest in…darkness
of the beast.” What was this bit here? He rephrased the line in his mind,
recognizing the icon of the beast. “Eternity lies in the shadow of the Wolf…”

       Very odd, he thought. So Rasil was a
messenger. Could this be his charge? Why would he be carrying an old Egyptian
scroll? The style of the writing would make this over 5000 years old, and yet…
The papyrus was weathered but not nearly that ancient. It could never have
survived in this condition all that time. Perhaps this man was moving from one
place to another in time, just as he and Paul had jumped forward from the KT
boundary to reach their target coordinates in 1917. Yet what was he bearing
this for? Did it have some hidden meaning or was he merely retrieving a little
souvenir from one of his missions, even as I slipped away to recover Lawrence’s
lost manuscript of
The Seven Pillars?

       He knew he did not have much time to solve
the  riddle. Rasil could return at any moment. He scanned the document again,
taking up where he left off and trying to gain some sense of what was written.
The word for time was depicted by a small circle next to a scarab figure that
gave it connotation. The circle was the sun, time making it’s daily passage
through the heavens. Later he noted squiggly lines that could also indicate the
passage of hours in the day—another way to indicate time when paired with some
other symbol. This particular icon had been had been grouped in an unaccountable
cartouche, which mated it with the symbol for the lordly figure in the center
of the script. He took this to mean “The Lord of Time.” Then there was more
about this beast…

       “The Wolf shall go forward and prey upon the
bounty of the lord... If…” He reached for the meaning. “Yet if he be slain for
his misdeed…” For his sin, perhaps, he thought. “Then all will be overthrown.”

       Humm. He mulled over the meaning of the
words, his eye drawn to two lines that seemed to be given great prominence. An
ochre line was drawn, as if to indicate ‘therefore,’ and then the darkly traced
pictograms seemed to speak some judgment or instruction.

An Old Man  Returns       Lord’s      Army        
The Gate of the West

He fleshed out the line in his mind, reading it as:
“When the Old Man returns, the Lord’s Army shall come to the Gate of the West.”

The Priest of Hour-Temple  goes with  2 eyes  to
the Lord of Eternity

Again he struggled to read some greater meaning
into the pictograms. “The priest of the hour-temple,” he said aloud. “Could
that mean the Temple Priest of Time? Yes… The Temple Priest of Time proceeds
with two eyes to the Lord of Eternity.” The two eyes were a caution, and
injunction to proceed very carefully, only after examining the issue at hand with
two eyes, as it were. Yet, even as he reached this conclusion another, more
obvious meaning came to him as well. The symbol he interpreted as ‘proceeds’
could also simply mean to go forth. Seeing with two eyes could just as easily
mean a face-to-face meeting—seeing someone with your own two eyes. In that case
he had: “The Priest of Time shall go forth and see the Lord of Eternity.”

       How odd, he thought. How very odd. The
strange mention of Time and Eternity gave him a chill, for this was a message
borne by Rasil. Where he was going with it, and what it intended, god only
knew. Then he remembered his friend. “Perhaps Paul will know soon enough as
well,” he said, the bitterness returning.

       Then caution prevailed and he carefully
rolled the scroll up and returned it to Rasil’s pack as he had found it. As he
did so he spied something that sent his pulse quickening—a phone! He seized
upon it, his mind racing as he realized it was a satellite phone.  He could
reach practically any number on earth with this, but who should he call? Was it
possible to use the phone while he was here in a Nexus? He decided to try, and
passed a fitful moment struggling to recall Kelly’s cell phone number. He
dialed, holding his breath while the phone rang and hoping against hope that Kelly
would answer. He caught sight of Rasil, returning up the slope to the mouth of
the cave. There was not much time.