of exasperation, Elli started to reflect those emotions of the figure opposite her.
But then as suddenly as it appeared the spectacle ceased and the figure’s inscrutability returned and remained intact and Elli’s face responded in the same way. The figure started to speak.
‘You have won this round. You have “out-expressioned” me. Come this way. Your companion’s memory has been erased. He will not remember anything that his eyes have witnessed. His imagination is another matter. It deceives and inspires. The footprint of its memory cannot be erased. But he can do no harm. At the most he could write a book about it and wonder where those ideas came from.’
The figure led Elli to an antechamber and the door was firmly closed shut behind her.
‘But first, you have a gift for me, don’t you?’
Elli looked surprised. The figure indicated the parchment. She shook it in the air between them.
‘This?’
‘Yes.’
‘What does this have to do with what we are here for?’
‘Firstly, please put the parchment on the stand in front of the glass plate over there next to those items.’
Elli turned and saw the plate. The relics and the book on the huge structure were positioned beside it. She walked to them and did as the figure asked.
For some time nothing happened and Elli started to think the figure was playing with them. She was about to say something and opened her mouth to that effect, but was silenced by a sound coming from the parchment which began to vibrate and then jumped into the air and unfolded layer after layer until the whole of the floor was cluttered with its constituent parts.
Elli’s eyes opened wide and stayed that way until the seemingly alive parchment had no more tricks to throw at her, its ability to give birth and multiply finally exhausted.
‘I had no idea it could be so long. What on earth is going on?’
The figure smiled and instantly became the likeness of the last Emperor and then the Sultan Mehmed II and kept switching between the two.
Elli was not impressed by the spectacle, but was becoming rather exasperated. ‘I’m overwhelmed by this exhibition of royalty paying their respects. There really is no need. You are remembered fondly. Now what’s going on? I presume this is not a courtesy visit.’
In the meantime, part of the parchment flew back onto the plate and started to burn through and become one with the glass which was also melting, revealing a gaping hole underneath, a hole that kept expanding into a passage. The ghost of the Sultan was speaking.
‘Elli, follow me.’
He took her hand and she was shocked that it felt solid and warm.
The moment they touched the mouth of the passage, they were sucked in and walked easily through it. The passage was expanding as they were walking along and was lighting up to show them the way. Behind them the passage was gradually collapsing in on itself.
They came onto a rock chamber. Elli shivered. The chill speared right through her bones. A light descended above her head and the chamber turned into the great hall of the Great Palace of Constantinople, the one built by Constantine the Great when he founded Constantinople in 330 A.D.
The hall was empty apart from a revolving sphere in the middle of the room. It was a representation of the globe, with blinking lights like those of an airstrip at various locations on it. Next to the revolving sphere stood two figures that had their names strapped across their midriff.
The names were floating, moving forward to meet Elli, then reversing course, as if under chase to return chastised to their owners, repeating the feat over and over again, as if intending to drill the identities of the two missionaries in Elli’s mind, until finally stopping, presumably when they judged that their mission had been accomplished.
But Elli didn’t need that performance to know who they were. She recognised them instantly from their likeness on icons she had seen, though most saints looked more or less identical, in simple attire and long hair and beards, doing one of a short list of things, like kneeling and praying and supplicating and offering a hand or some other gift, looking enthralled at an adult or baby Jesus Christ, but mostly standing or sitting holding the Bible or a cross, or writing or doing nothing at all, looking wise and ravaged by time, and staring out ahead, piercing you with their gaze, as if posing for a professional photographer and at the same time trying to appear natural and unscripted and oblivious to the one who captures them for posterity or to their future captive audience. They were Methodios and Kyrillos or Cyril, the Byzantine missionaries that brought Christianity to the Russians.
Elli went closer. The sphere split horizontally in half, one half suspended above the other. In the space between the two halves was a halo and within it there were two icons in a perpetual motion of merging and splitting apart.
One icon showed the figures of Methodios and Kyrillos. She could not make out the other. She stared in disbelief when suddenly something made touch-down, fitted into place and clicked inside her head.
‘Are these what I think they are? They are…, aren’t they?’
The ghost’s appearance stopped at the likeness of the last Emperor. ‘Indeed, they are. The famed Likureian icons.’
It was then that the surface of the upper half of the sphere slid back in a semi-circle movement and the book of the story of the construction of the structure appeared floating inside. The book opened up its pages, releasing its secrets and offering them to Elli’s greedy and supplicating eyes for consumption as an appetising course to temporarily sate their demands. Images, inventories and plans flew by.
The structure was materialising in front of her very eyes. Once it had been completed she stared in awe at the three-dimensional hologram of the structure. Its complexity defied reality and her own imagination. Her brain was still struggling to process it when it disappeared as if in a puff of smoke.
‘Remember. Wake me up when the time is right and I’ll show you all that you can achieve.’ With those last words the ghost was gone.
With a feeling of dizziness, as if thrown around in a washing machine, Elli was back to the normal surroundings, colours and sounds of one of the world’s greatest museums and in the same room she was standing in with the director beside her and the items still covered on the table in front of them.
In reality time had not moved while she travelled through the strange vision. The director, dazed, was leaning his head from side to side as if to shake off something that bothered him and that he could not remember. Elli, whilst not saying anything about what she had just witnessed, broke the impasse.
‘OK, Mr Sumarov, let’s see what we have here.’ The director uncovered the items. Elli allowed him to give her a pair of gloves. She put them on and then began to turn the pages of the book. What she saw was what she remembered seeing in that vision-like experience she just had. She said nothing, but kept turning the pages.
‘I would like to study this book further, but I would not want to use any more of your time.’
The director, as if expecting her to say that, moved to the side of the table and opened up a specially made small chest that Elli had not noticed before. He carefully put the relics and the book inside and then led Elli back to his office where he buzzed for his personal assistant. He gave instructions for the chest to be brought to his office. A few minutes later there was a knock on the door and two well-built security men came in with the chest.
‘You are to go with Mrs Symitzis here and only when that chest is in her plane, you are to come back.’
Although Elli trusted the director, she wanted to make sure that the chest now in the director’s office was the chest she saw a few minutes earlier and that it contained the items she was taking away with her. She phrased her request politely.
‘Mr Sumarov, may I please have a quick look at the contents?’
The director understood and did not take offence. He waived his hand at the men who set the chest down onto the floor and opened it. Elli went close, put on the special gloves, flicked through the book and checked the relics and was satisfied with what she saw. She turned to the director and nodded. He bowed to her and smiled in reply.
She was already holding her bag with the parchment inside. She thought it had burned, but that only seemed to have happened in the strange experience she had a few minutes earlier. She found the unharmed parchment in her bag when she opened it to check her phone for any message from Aristo or Katerina.
‘Mr Sumarov, I am indebted to you for your help. Anytime I can do something for you, please let me know.’
