“So now we’re trapped,” Alexander said, looking about the room. In the dark, Montross had managed to find a flashlight on Marco’s right side, clipped to his utility belt. It was small, but more than sufficient to probe the room’s meager dimensions.
“No,” said Caleb, taking the light from Montross and aiming it into the far left corner. “I saw something in my last vision. When this room was designed and furnished. The man, almost familiar, in a blue robe, with a staff as he ordered the box sealed. There’s another exit.”
“It can wait,” said Montross.
“What?”
“They’re not getting back in here any time soon. So we have time. Time to open this box, time to get the books inside. Time to talk.” The light hit his face and he squinted, turning away.
“Yes. Let’s talk.”
“Talk about what?” Alexander asked. “How we’re going to get out of here?”
“No,” Caleb replied. “We need to talk about what Montross has seen, and what I saw. Compare our versions. And I need to understand how much is fact, and what’s merely imagination playing with myth.”
“Can’t it all be fact?” Montross asked.
Caleb held his head, then massaged his temples. “I don’t know if I can believe what I’ve seen. It’s too much to contemplate.”
“Well, let’s start with what we know to be true.”
Caleb aimed the light down at their feet. He took slow breaths, not knowing if the air down here was circulating somehow. It tasted stale, but yet still pure as if its isolation through the millennia had protected it from outside contamination. “So here’s what I know. Robert Gregory believed the Emerald Tablet possessed the power of the universe: a concept similar to the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian Epic of Creation. We know he somehow allied himself with the cult of Marduk, whose members seem bent on reacquiring what the god Anu took from Marduk and delivered to Enki, better known as Thoth, for safekeeping, thousands of years ago.”
“But why?” Montross guided him. “What was the supreme honcho worried Marduk might do with it?”
Alexander scratched the back of his head. “Make a mess of the universe?”
“Precisely,” Montross said, smiling as the flashlight beam drew away from his face and settled on the enigmatic iron chest. “You asked about my dreams? What I’ve seen to make me plan that assault on your team, on your home? And cause such regrettable loss.”
“Yeah,” Alexander said, finding himself choking up again. “Why?”
Montross hung his head. He scratched over his shoulder, where the backpack would have been, the one confiscated in the helicopter, the one with his sketchbook.
He closed his eyes, and when he spoke, the descriptions echoed the visions he had suffered. Dreams pervading into his every waking thought, nightmares parading about his nocturnal slumber; images that never relented, despite every attempt to thwart the final assault on his mortality. Visions that never, ever let up.
All his life.
He stands in the shadow of an immense statue, a figure whose crown blots out the sun, and whose upstretched arm has served as a beacon to millions of hopeful voyagers.
He stands with his arms out, ready to embrace what he knows is coming.
What he has failed to prevent. What he can never prevent.
At least, not alone.
His face turns to the heavens, but first settles on the face of the Lady high above, on her sad, impassioned eyes that seem to cry for him.
For the world.
The ground trembles.
In the harbor, the water boils.
Something crashes beside him, shatters into thousands of pieces, none of which hit him.
Her arm.
The torch bounces, rolls, then falls into the seething water where boats are capsizing, tankers exploding. The air sizzles. Beyond the statue, the city’s skyline erupts from an invisible wave that crashes through the buildings, exploding glass and concrete as if they’re mere castles of sand. But the debris-instead of falling, seems to suck back, vacuumed to the west, along with huge chunks of earth. Central Park’s trees are uprooted, skyscrapers topple, then shatter, collapsing and hurtling away.
The shadow is gone.
Lady Liberty is bent backwards, spine broken, head sheared off, crown tumbling.
And trails of phosphorescent light streak across the globe, rending the fabric of the very air, tearing through the world, splitting the earth, the seas, sweeping away the atmosphere itself until only the blackness of space, bedecked with frightened stars, remain.
Montross opened his eyes, then looked deep into Caleb’s before shifting to see Alexander.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, and pointed to the box. “But that is all that matters. Preventing it from falling into their hands. Or destroying it utterly. Nothing else. I’ve done what I could. Stopped every vision of death from coming true, all my life. Countless times, I’ve cheated mortality. So I know it can be done. But this one… this vision. I’ve tried everything, RV’d every strand of my future. I know what causes my death. And I know, this time, it’s not just me.” He lowered his eyes.
“It’s everyone.”