The Spirit Well

CHAPTER 25

Brendan proved himself an able and erudite guide to the attractions of Damascus. He led his willing charge on a leisurely tour of the Old City, visiting the Great Umayyad Mosque with its golden domes and shrine to John the Baptist; the Pasha’s Palace with its serene palm-shaded fountains and room after room of ornate tile and scrollwork screens; the Chapel of Saint Paul on the very spot where he escaped the city in a basket from the city wall in the dead of night; Bab Faradis, or Gate of Paradise; the Great Souq al-Hamidiyya, with its miles of aisles and dizzying myriad of shops; Straight Street and its marble columns and Roman arches. And while they strolled and took in the sights, they talked, and Cass got a better grasp on the nature of ley travel, to be sure, as well as the work and philosophy of the society, which, she learned, had all started with a man named Arthur Flinders-Petrie.

“An extraordinary fellow-inquisitive, resourceful, fearless as the day is long-an explorer of the highest order.” They were sitting at a tiny round table under a striped awning sipping sweet, fragrant hibiscus tea from glasses in silver holders as the day faded around them. “Ever come across that name at all?” asked Brendan.

“No, never,” said Cass.

“Pity. But I’m not surprised. That he is not now remembered in the annals of human achievement is due to the fact that his work was largely clandestine and confined almost exclusively to exploration of the lines of telluric energy-ley lines, in other words. That alone, I suppose, would be reason enough to found a society in which to carry on his work. But there is more.” Brendan paused and regarded her closely, as if gauging her readiness to hear.

Cass felt her pulse quicken. “I’m listening.”

“Arthur discovered something,” Brendan said, lowering his voice. “On one of his many journeys he discovered something of such unimaginable magnitude that it changed the course of his life. Though he continued his travels, he held his discovery a close-guarded secret, refusing to speak of it to anyone.”

“What did he discover?”

Brendan leaned back, frowning. “The truth is, we do not know.”

“That’s it?” blurted Cass, exasperation pinching her voice. “Since we’re speaking frankly, I don’t mind saying that, frankly, I expected more.”

“And I truly wish I could tell you more. Members of our society have been working over many lifetimes to answer the riddle of what it was that Arthur discovered and did not feel he could share with the rest of the world. We have sworn life and blood to this quest, and some have died in pursuit of it. We trust their lives have not been given in vain.”

Cass leaned back in her chair and stared at the gentleman across the table, fighting down her frustration and disappointment. “But you must have some idea what you are searching for?”

“We have no end of ideas, theories, notions, suppositions, and so forth,” Brendan replied with a rueful laugh. “Too many, in fact. But the very best theory-and this is not mine alone, others share it-is that Arthur Flinders-Petrie discovered nothing less than the means to alter reality.”

“Excuse me?” said Cass, disbelief edging into her tone once more. Scientific training and her own native scepticism-honed by years in academia fighting from her corner against considerable odds-made her wary of anything that sounded even remotely oddball. “For a moment I thought you said alter reality — what does that even mean?”

Brendan nodded. “I don’t blame you for being dubious. It took me years to accept it myself. Even now I’m not sure I fully grasp all the implications, but it would seem to be bound up in the ordinary mystery of time. Arthur may have found a way to manipulate time itself.”

“That would be the greatest discovery in human history,“ Cass observed dryly. “Your man Flinders-Petrie must have been one heck of a discoverer.”

“Oh, he was,” agreed Brendan. “Of course, that is only a theorybut it is the best one we have so far. Consider,” he said. “What if, just for example, you possessed the ability to change the past-”

“Then instead of a dirt-sucking PhD grunt, I would be fabulously wealthy and living on a tropical island paradise, and we would not be having this conversation-that is, if I could change the past.”

“I’m afraid I’ve presented you with too much, and all at once,” Brendan sympathised. He drew a deep breath and gazed at a sky fading from gold to violet as evening came on. “We should get back. Rosemary will wonder what has become of us.”

He laid a few coins on the table, and they resumed their walk through the Old Quarter’s rabbit warren of streets. After a moment he said, “Here in Syria, the grand panoply of the past is all around us-everything from pre-historic to Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Roman, Byzantine-you name it-every epoch of human existence has left its mark on the land. Here, it is easy to imagine travelling to the past because the past is never far away.”

“You are talking to a palaeontologist,” Cass said. “I spend a lot of time with my head in the past.”

“Then you should have a good feel for the mystery that lies at the heart of time itself. We live and move in time, but none of us really knows much about it. For example, in normal experience time flows in only one direction-from past to present. We can visit the past, at least vicariously, through photographs, the written word, our memories, the fossils you find, and such like. The past is always with us; we carry it around with us in the form of memories, we live in a world shaped entirely by it, and it continually exerts a direct influence on the present, yes? The choices you made yesterday affect what happens to you today, and the choices you make today will affect what happens to you tomorrow. We all reach the future at the same rate, and we have to live with what we find when we get there.”

“In large part because of the choices we’ve made,” said Cass. “We shape our reality through the exercise of intention, through the application of our free will as conscious beings.”

“Correct,” agreed Brendan. “With ley travel, however, the experience of time and reality is somewhat more fluid.”

“So I’ve noticed.”

“Indeed, ley journeys normally involve visits to a particular version of the past-a past where many things will be the same as we remember them, but other things are different. People, events, and, in some cases, even places will differ from those we recognise from our personal experience.” He paused and raised his eyes to take in her expression. “But what if the past was fully as malleable, as ripe with potential, as the future seems to be?”

“Then, by changing the past, we might make a better future than we might otherwise have had,” Cass suggested.

“That is why you get to be fabulously wealthy and live on your island in tropical splendour-because of the changes you made to your past reality.” Brendan regarded Cass with a knowing look. “In short, by changing the past one also creates a future that might not have existed if things had stayed the way they were.”

“If only,” remarked Cass. “The fly in the ointment, of course, is that you never know exactly what the outcome of any change might be. Since everything is intertwined with everything else, even a small change in one tiny area might result in terrible, or at least unwanted, consequences somewhere else-chaos theory in a nutshell.”

“What if there was another way?” suggested Brendan. “One hypothesis of time holds that the future exists only as a cloud of possibility-no form or substance, just pure potentiality. Now then, what if you had the ability to reach into that cloud of possibilitythat fog of all possible outcomes to any action-what if you could reach in and pluck out the particular outcome you desire?”

“Choose the future you want,” mused Cass. “Which would alter the present reality and also, by logical necessity, change the past as well.”

“ That,” declared Brendan, “is what I believe Arthur Flinders-Petrie discovered.”

No more was said; Cass remained quietly thoughtful as they made their way back to the society headquarters, where Mrs. Peelstick welcomed them and said, “You two carry on. Supper’s almost ready. I’ll call you in a few minutes.”

“Thank you, Rosemary. You’re a peach,” Brendan told her. Crossing to the stairway, he called to Cass, “Come, I want to show you something.”

Cass followed her guide up two floors. Taking a key from his pocket, the Irishman unlocked a heavy door and stepped across the threshold. He twisted a switch on the wall, and lights in sconces flickered on to reveal an absolutely enormous room with a high, beamed ceiling and small diamond-shaped windows. The room occupied the entire second floor of the building, and appeared to be stuffed with books and scrolls and manuscripts and papers of all kinds. There were books in wooden crates and crammed into the floor-to-ceiling shelves lining the long wall on either hand; books piled on the floor in unsteady towers; books lying in untidy heaps in the corners, cascading from under canvas sheets, and spilling from disintegrating boxes. Three large library tables groaned under the weight of oversize volumes, and another table was piled high with rolled parchment scrolls and bundled manuscripts tied with ribbon and string. The air was musty with the scent of mouldering paper and dust.

“Come in, come in,” he said, ushering her inside.

Cass took in the chaotic clutter. “This reminds me of the graduate reading room in the library of the university,” she said.

“Oh, it’s not a library,” countered Brendan. “Nor a reading room. This is a genizah.”

“Genizah,” repeated Cass. She had never heard the word before.

“The ancient Jews considered it sinful to throw away a book, and it was anathema to destroy any book bearing the tetragrammaton- the four letters making up the name of God. So, when their holy texts or other materials became worn out, they were consigned to a genizah to await official burial on holy ground.” He spread his hands to the room. “This is our genizah, but we do not bury the books anymore. They are far too valuable.”

“Your treasure is books.” Cass stepped to the nearest table. The volumes were old and well worn, it was true, and most were in languages other than English. “Where do they all come from?”

“They are gathered from here and there by society members on their various travels and donated to the cause. Those books we deem most worthy of preservation we keep. Who knows when something written in one of these pages-some little scrap of observation, an obscure record of an historical event, a word, a name, a report from a source now forgotten-some little gem of truth will prove valuable to furthering our investigations. Then the book will be resurrected, so to speak, to fulfill its destiny.”

He walked to a smaller table at one end of the room. “Here, I want to show you one of the rarest of those gems.” He reached for a large, rectangular, but very thin, book bound in red leather. The cover was stamped in gold with the words Maps of the Faerie. Brendan pulled the book to him and opened the cover. “This was compiled by a Scottish eccentric writing under the name Fortingall Schiehallion-not his real name.”

“You think?” sniffed Cass.

“His real name was Robert Heredom, and somewhere around 1795 he published this treatise on the cartography of what he called the Faerie Realms.” Brendan began leafing through the book, pausing now and again to show a page of elaborate drawings of strange landscapes with stranger names.

Displayed on the yellowed pages, Cass saw tracts of enchanted forests with twisted trees, magic fountains and rivers, islands of glass, and valleys ruled by immortal kings-all of it rendered with the precision and skill of a draughtsman.

“As you can see from the maps he has drawn, Heredom had an active imagination.” Brendan turned to a page and directed Cassandra’s attention to an odd map unlike any of the others she had seen so far. “But this map,” he said, “this map is different.”

He turned the book so she could see it clearly. It was a drawing done all in sepia tones as if to evoke a bit of parchment made from the skin of a goat or sheep. The piece was roughly oblong, with irregular edges and crease marks, a few tiny holes, a number of cracks or tears-the better to make it look as if the artist was actually copying an object from life. The surface of the parchment was decorated with a number of fanciful markings: spirals and whorls with dots, intersecting lines and overlapping circles, curious cryptic symbols that looked like primitive petroglyphs of the kind found on rocks in deserts, or letters from an imaginary alphabet, or stylised monograms from names in languages that never existed.

“How very strange,” murmured Cass. “Maps to imaginary places.”

“The map before you”-he brushed the page lightly with his fingertips-“ this map is different. It is a record of what must be one of the most remarkable discoveries in the history of the human race.”

Cassandra lowered her head and peered at the drawing more closely, concentrating her attention on the arcane hieroglyphics. She had seen such things before, scratched or painted on rock walls by long-extinct tribes the world over, and like all the rest the symbols meant nothing to her. “Parchment, is it?”

“It is that,” confirmed the Irishman, “but of a very rare and special kind. What you are looking at is a drawing of the map Arthur Flinders-Petrie kept to record his more significant discoveries-discoveries that he inscribed on his own skin.”

“They’re tattoos,” concluded Cass.

“That is exactly what they are. When Arthur died, his skin was removed and made into parchment in order to preserve the map, that the record of his discoveries should not be lost. We call it the Skin Map, and it is of central importance to the work of the society. Those symbols hide wonders. For example, somewhere on that map is the Well of Souls.” Brendan glanced up. “I see you are not familiar with the legend?”

“Not as such,” Cass confessed.

“It is a myth that finds expression in many cultures. One of the most common is an Arab belief associated with the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem; the Spirit Well is known as a place of limbo where the souls of the dead await Judgement Day, or maybe the chance to be reborn. But the myth is far older than that-in fact, it seems to be as old as the human race itself. Almost every culture has a similar talethe Fountain of Youth, the Elixir of Eternal Life, the Philosopher’s Stone. All variations on a theme, you might say-the myth of the Spirit Well. Many other sources indicate that the well is located in the original paradise, Eden.”

Cassandra’s mind leapt ahead to the conclusion. “You believe that Arthur found this Spirit Well, and that this has something to do with manipulating time, selecting the future, changing the past, and all that-is that what you’re telling me?”

“We cannot prove it,” confessed Brendan. “But some of our members have reason to believe that Arthur discovered it and recorded its location on his map.”

“And this,” Cass said, indicating the open pages of the book before her, “you think this is a drawing of that map?”

“I do, yes.” Brendan pursed his lips in a frown as he contemplated the image on the page. “Alas, it is not a reliable copy of the original map-merely an artist’s conception, no doubt based on a verbal description of the map-perhaps someone who had seen it described it to Heredom, who made the drawing. Unfortunately, Heredom doesn’t say. But inadequate as the drawing may be, it nonetheless serves to authenticate the original provenance of the map.”

“Forgive me, Brendan,” objected Cass lightly, “but who is to say this artist’s rendition isn’t itself simply based on pure fantasy-like all the other fairy-tale maps in this book? Is that not a more likely explanation?”

The thin Irishman smiled. “I shall very much enjoy working with you, Cassandra. Your scientific instincts serve you well.”

Cass brushed aside the assertion that they would be working together. So far as she was concerned nothing was decided yet. “The simplest explanation is the most likely to be true. In this case, the simplest explanation is that Schiehallion, the fantasist, merely dreamed up the map-in the same way he dreamed up all the others.”

“And you would be right, of course, if not for the fact that we have independent corroborating evidence that confirms the existence of the map. I can assure you that it is much as you see it here.” He took a last look at the picture, then closed the book and returned it to its place. “I have seen it with my own eyes.”

“You have the original Skin Map?”

“A piece of it, yes.” He frowned. “Unfortunately, it has been stolen. We are working to get it back.”

Missing evidence is no evidence at all, thought Cass, and once again felt the worm of suspicion squirm in her gut. Yet here she was in Damascus, about eighty years out of joint, and with no rational way to account for it. “I don’t suppose you have anything else you could show me?”

“To convince you?” He laid particular stress on the word. “Isn’t that what you mean?”

“Well, if you put it that way-what have you got to convince me?”

“One might be forgiven for thinking that your experiences up to now should have taken you a fair distance towards conviction.” He turned and gestured towards the door. “After you.”

Cass felt the mild reproach of his words as she moved towards the door. “Do you travel, Brendan?”

“Ley travel? Sadly, no. It is not for me.” Brendan followed her out and locked the genizah again. “But like it or not, Cassandra, you have become a traveller. You have traversed the hidden dimensions of a universe far more vast and varied than present science imaginesalthough some enlightened thinkers-like Einstein or Neils Bohr, for instance-are beginning to theorise about it and describe it in ways that are strikingly close to our conception of the way things are.”

Brendan allowed these words to sink in a moment, then said, “We are on the cusp of a monumental discovery. I can feel it.” He paused on the landing and turned before starting down the stairs. “I have no doubt that we will do great things together.”

“Assuming I agree to join you,” Cass stated flatly. “I still have a choice, you know.”

“Oh, of course you have a choice. You can join us or not as you wish. But ultimately, knowing what you know, I believe you will find it comes down to a choice between accepting your destiny or forever denying it. Either way you will choose, and either way you will move forward. Because, you see, there is no turning back.”