Cyprus.’
Elli smiled. She decided that she liked this man already. She would not have hesitated to offer him a position in her organisation, if she knew that there was even a remote chance he might have accepted. ‘Mr Sumarov, you have gone beyond my expectations. This will make my work a lot easier and the result I seek quicker to obtain.’
‘I do not want to keep you any longer than is necessary. Please, come with me.’
Alexei Sumarov led Elli to a room a few metres away from his own. The curtains were drawn and the light was dim. Elli suspected that was so as to protect the items from direct light. The room was empty except for a table against one wall, far from the windows, with some items resting on it that seemed to be covered with velvet cloths. She assumed those would be the items she came here for.
The director went and stood by the table and she followed. She could feel the parchment becoming very warm inside her bag. The director noticed her bag glowing, which was made all the more pronounced in the dimness of the room.
‘Mrs Symitzis. Forgive me, but your bag seems to be glowing in a very peculiar way’ He thought there might have been something dangerous about to catch fire and explode but did not voice his imagination.
Elli looked at her bag and was stunned. She opened it and saw the parchment inside glowing. She took it out. The light emitted by the parchment was like holding a flame in her hand. It lit their faces in the same shadowy glow as would a fire in a dark place. It was awe inspiring and terrifying at the same time. They were both briefly lost for words.
Elli recovered first. ‘I cannot explain it, but it seems that something in this room is causing this item quite some excitement.’
She thought arousal was a more apt word, but she could not say it in such polite and formal company, such surrounds not appropriate to such honesty, not being devoid of the taboos of carrying one’s self with decorum. She unfurled the parchment and recognised the same Pallanian characters she had seen so many times lately. She traced her fingers on the page and felt the story.
It told of the imprisonment of an Emperor, his escape and death, his body carried to Cappadocia on a gruelling march being chased by Ruinands. It told of the arrival in Cappadocia, of the construction of a small chapel to take the sarcophagus and the body, of the entombment of the body with proper honours as befitting an Emperor, of the sealing of the tomb, of an attack by Ruinands, of the killing of the bearers of the body except one who survived.
It told of the Ruinands attempting to open the tomb and a horrifying event killing them all, an event attuned to an asteroid hitting the earth and causing total extinction. It told of Iraklios hearing of the opening of the said tomb a few months earlier and being surprised at the survival of the members of the archaeological expedition, surprise that the latest opening of the tomb was a non-event on the Richter scale stakes, in view of the event that killed the Ruinands that tried to open the tomb around five hundred years earlier.
That told Iraklios that the body of the Emperor could not have been in that tomb in Cappadocia, but had been moved. Iraklios asked in the parchment for forgiveness for not telling Elli about the secret before, but she would understand as he had vowed to protect the secret and not divulge it to anyone, not even to Elli or his own family.
However, he confirmed that he did not know of the location of the real tomb. That was too explosive, too dangerous a secret to be passed on. That was the end of the story on the parchment and the overwhelming torrent of words. It was almost a bit too much for Elli to take it all in, in one bite.
The director had been watching her fascinated and wondering what she was doing, what she was seeing, but he respected her silence and did not break it as she seemed to be in extreme concentration, almost as if in a trance.
He smiled inwardly at the thought of the spectacle of such an extraordinary and formidable woman as Elli Symitzis, one of the most powerful women in the world, looking like someone high on illicit hard drugs. He kept his observation and thoughts to himself.
Elli looked up and caught the eye of the director watching her with interest. She did not think it impolite and therefore said nothing. She uncovered the items on the table. At that exact moment the room looked as if it had expanded to ten times its normal size. It suddenly acquired the look of a strange wintry snowy stage and the temperature dropped considerably.
Both Elli and the director shivered involuntarily. Then it began snowing. It was as if they were in a different dimension, as if they were watching the events unfold behind a mirrored glass or through the eyes of ghosts. Elli turned to the director.
‘They didn’t used to call it Winter Palace for nothing. This is magical.’
‘I agree. But I don’t think this is what they had in mind when they gave it its name. Mrs Symitzis, do you know what is going on? Could it be connected with that parchment and the relics? There is no rational explanation for this strange event.’
‘I’m at a loss to explain it myself.’
As they stood mesmerised witnesses to the bizarre series of events, they noticed golden footprints on the floor that appeared to be made by someone moving away from them. There was a golden light enveloping them, and rushing with tremendous speed, following the footsteps with its wild tail flowing behind and grabbing Elli and the director like a lasso and pulling them forward.
The fiery tail then released them and, briefly assuming the figure of a human, beckoned them over, urging them to move quickly. They obeyed hypnotised. The room kept expanding and becoming the museum itself. They were moving through the throngs of people admiring the magnificent artefacts, which they had no time to even catch a glimpse of. The people did not give them a second glance, as if they could not see them, as if nothing strange was happening, as if only Elli and the director could see that light.
Suddenly they were climbing up the grand staircase, their faces reflected on the huge mirrors and smiling back at them like loyal long-lost friends. The footsteps and the light stopped and disappeared outside the room that used to be the Tsar’s private drawing room, now closed to the public.
It was then that the room they were in, before their weird experience and whirlwind grand tour began, stopped expanding and retracted to its initial incarnation. Except for one thing. The table was no longer there, but there was a door in its place cut into the wall.
The director was shaking his head in disbelief. He could not take much more of this kind of excitement at his age. He craved his usual routine, his boring days. A deathly silence descended.
Elli tried the handle of the newly-appeared door, but it would not budge.
‘Mr Sumarov, is there another way into the Tsar’s drawing room?’
It took Alexei Sumarov a few seconds to respond. He heard Elli’s voice as if coming from far away, through a head swimming in a haze, drowning in a stunned state.
He managed to clear the fog in his mind and emerge to the surface of reality, eventually, with a twenty- second delay, which Elli considered breaking, but thought better of it and gave the director the opportunity to recover from what would have been a much bigger shock than for her. In her line of business she was used to strange events such as these.
The director appeared to be his normal self again, apart from a face with a chalky-white pallor, when he eventually replied. ‘There should be a small door to the side leading into the Tsar’s bedroom that should now be locked.’ As soon as he said it the door to the Tsar’s bedroom appeared and they went in. Once inside the Tsar’s bedroom it did not take them long to find the small door leading to the Tsar’s drawing room. It was indeed locked and the director did not have a key.
But when Elli gently tried the handle, not only did the door open, but it came off as if Elli had used great force to wrench it off its hinges. They entered the drawing room and stood there frozen to the spot.
In front of them floated what looked like a transparent presence, a ghost, but too close to reality to be a ghost. At this point it was as if time had stopped.
Elli stared at this apparition that looked so flesh and bone real. Its face contorted as if in anguish, then as if a wave of anger was rising and it was struggling to control it, she saw it becoming livid, its eyes spitting fire.
Then its face began to change colours at the rate of two a second, its features drawn and redrawn, rearranged into a multitude of expressions of mirth, pity, anger, its brows furrowing and then frowning at the presence of the two people before it. For a few seconds it felt like a face-off between them, but with the first signs
