insight that characterizes thought unencumbered by the electrochemical filters built into the brain, Martin saw that this meant that he had once been good and gentle, but it was a long time ago. But he had seen his error and now longed to return to his boyhood state.
He had done evil, this interloper, but he was trying to say that he was not, himself, evil.
Then Martin saw hieroglyphics. They were extremely vivid, but were they coming from the soul or were they in the physical world? Telling the difference took an expert, and he was no expert.
Trevor’s mental voice said, This is what I wanted you to see. Let General North continue to guide you.
Martin saw the face of their guide again, just the eyes. The eyes were pleading.
Martin could, of course, read hieroglyphics. But there were over two thousand hieroglyphic symbols, and translation could be an extraordinary challenge, and the farther back in time from the date of the creation of the Rosetta Stone, which was the basis of all hieroglyphic translation, the less accurate translation became. He saw immediately that these were Old Kingdom if not even older, and that they were a mix of words and numbers, with bits of quickly scribbled hieratic notes here and there along the edges.
These were the most complex hieroglyphics he had ever seen, but as with all complex texts, there were simpler words, and he thought to start with these. They were lovely glyphs, really well executed. He read ur, the swallow glyph, then udjat, the Eye of Horus that has become the familiar © of modern prescriptions. He read on, recognizing the name Narmur, the first pharaoh of the Old Kingdom. Then a bit of the hieratic text became clear: the connection. This was followed by an unknown number that had been scribbled beside the hieroglyphic for copper.
Incredibly, this appeared to be a set of instructions about making electrical connections.
The souls of the kids were filling the chamber now. Pam had come, and was signaling an image of a long tunnel with some kind of a car in it. Then George showed a picture of the Rockies, then the entrance to the Cheyenne Mountain facility, easily recognizable by its huge steel doors.
This image agitated Al North. Martin could feel his sorrow. But why? They knew that somewhere the human souls were stored, and maybe what they were learning here was that it was under the Rockies.
A map was thrust into his mind as if into his hand, accompanied by a red flush of anger. It was a Google map centered just west of Holcomb.
A shock went through him. “Zoom,” he said. “Again.” The map now pointed to a particular crossroads.
And he at once understood why the seraph had scoured this part of Kansas the way they had. It wasn’t only because he was there and the gateway to the other human world was there, it was because the repository where the souls were hidden was there, at the geographic center of the continental United States, which was a few miles from the town of Lebanon, just over the county line from Holcomb, just at the crossroads he was looking down at right now.
This spot must be of enormous geomagnetic significance. But the men who had made the casual measurements that had located it, had been innocently playing around with a cardboard map.
But they hadn’t. They had been under seraph mind control and doing the work of seraph engineers.
He could feel Al North’s delight as a sense of dancing. Music came out of him, joyous chords. He had been working and working to communicate this. He had been struggling to be seen, to be heard, but until now nobody had noticed him.
Martin had not noticed that they’d gone down into the earth to find this place, but they had, they’d gone deep, and as they returned, traveling through so much stone was eerie, to feel yourself in the pull of it, to feel your sensitive electromagnetic body negotiating the smaller spaces in the dense matter—it was claustrophobic and they were deep, very deep.
Without warning, he burst up into the storms of the night and went rocketing into the sky. For an instant he saw the wide plains of Kansas whirling beneath him, then the clouds, then he was above the clouds and the second moon was high, its soft light making castles of the cloud tops from horizon to horizon.
He felt a pull upward, strong, and he saw laughing, singing children looking down from a tower above him, pleading with him to come. But he looked only for one face in the tower of song, and he did not see that face, he did not see his Winnie.
Above the tower were spreading mansions and roads in the high sky, great, flowing blue spaces, and the clouds were gone and the moons were gone and waves of pure pleasure were pouring through his body with such intensity that he could not believe that he had anything even approaching such a capacity for delight.
It was the pleasure of great love, mature and rich and filled with the resonance of long companionship, an exalted version of the love he had known with Lindy, but also there was somebody there who wanted him and to enter him and become him, too, and there was the laughter of children, and the perfect voice of a great choir.
Then something stung him. Hard. On the cheek.
“Dad! Dad!”
What was that? Well, it wasn’t heaven, so he wasn’t interested.
Another sting, harder. No, go away.
Another one, harder still. “Damn you!”
“Dad!”
Trevor was there. Physically there, because souls don’t have beads of sweat running along their upper lips. Trevor shut his eyes tight and whap, Martin saw stars.
“What the hell, you hit me!”
His son fell on him sobbing and laughing, hugging him. “Finally! Dad, you almost didn’t come back!”
He had never in his life felt as heavy as he did now. Returning to your body was putting on a lead overcoat.
“How long have I been…” He bowed his head. He could not bear to say it. He had been in heaven.
His son’s hand touched his shoulder. “I went there, too, Dad.”
Martin shook his head. He didn’t want to think, to talk, to listen to those damn drums anymore, to be here in this awful place, he wanted to be there, where flowers that bloomed forever never stopped surprising you. Eternity was not living in the same old world forever, it was discovering the world anew forever.
“Where’s the monument,” Trevor asked. “Who knows where it is?”
A few hands went up. “It’s off the roadside, near Smith Center,” Tim Grant said. “There’s a chapel there that can seat, like, twenty people. It’s all sort of nothing, actually.”
“Except for the millions of souls that are trapped under there.”
“According to Wylie’s book, it’s where General Al North was taken,” Trevor said. “It might be under Kansas, but the entrance is in Colorado, at that base.”
Martin felt that Cheyenne Mountain didn’t matter. It was just another seraph trick, a diversion.
No, the chapel would be the key. If they went there, they would find the vulnerability that the seraph were trying to hide. “Thing is, the way they’ve scoured this part of Kansas, how interested they are in us—and we’re just a quiet little corner of the world, after all—I’d say that if the monument is right above the center of their repository, then that’s where we need to go to reach it. That’s got to be their weak point.”
The atmosphere in the tent became electric. “It’s not very far,” a voice said.
“We have to go in the physical,” George added, “or we won’t be able to do anything in the physical.”
From outside came the chuckling clatter of the jaws of outriders. The drummers started drumming.
“I’m going with you,” Trevor said softly.
Martin did not reply, not verbally. There would be no way to keep Trevor here. He stood up, and so did Trevor and so did Pam. But the others did not stand. He could sense something among them, a kind of mutual agreement, but it wasn’t clear exactly what was in their minds.
Mike stood. His girl cried out, but stifled her cry. She came to her feet and threw her arms around him. They stood like this, the young couple, and Martin saw that their hearts were married.
She stayed behind, though, surrounded by the little ones.
The woods were quiet now, the outriders having gone off when they failed to smell fear here. To the west, lightning flickered. Would the storms never end? No, not as long as the seraph tortured this poor earth, Martin knew. All of that seafloor that had risen would be gushing with methane from hydrates and billions of tons of dead marine life, and hydrogen sulfide and other gasses he couldn’t even name. In a matter of days, it would change the atmosphere, and the seraph would be able to breathe easily here, and all the humans and most of the animals and insects would die.
