Passage Graves (2 page)

Chapter 2

FRIDAY 3:35 p.m.

St. John the Baptist Cathedral

Bathwick, England

Ian opened his eyes to darkness. His room, like his soul, was black. It was time to convey his father to the grave site. David hadn’t bothered to attend the funeral, so Ian had to deliver the body alone.

Something slid through the crack underneath his door
. It came to a stop near his feet. Ian picked it up. It was a photograph. He clicked on the desk lamp and was surprised to see his father’s handwriting. On the back of the picture, the words of a ghost were scribbled in faded ink:
Arise my beloved, my beautiful one, and come.

It
was the same scripture Lang quoted during his eulogy a few hours earlier.

Ian squinted, tryi
ng to make sense of the message.

He
turned the card to study the picture. It was a grainy snapshot, a busy city street—European by the look of the automobiles and storefronts. At the center of the shot was a restaurant called Al-Fairoz Kebabish, Kebab and Curry House. The eatery was squished between two tall buildings. The establishment to the left was vacant and dilapidated, its windows covered with plywood, and on the right was a pub with quaint German architecture. Under glinting midday sun, the kebabish’s window reflected Brenton as he took the picture from across the street. A digital timecode was burned into the frame: 11:51 Oct 21.

Was this the sign he had been asking for?

Ian slid the photograph into the breast pocket of his shirt and reached for his cassock. It didn’t matter if this was a miracle or coincidence. His father was trying to communicate from beyond.

Chapter 3

FRIDAY 3:40 p.m.

Near Lybster in Highlands, Scotland

“Welcome to Camster Round, the best preserved cairn in mainland Scotland,” David said
. He stood at the center of the main burial chamber. Seventeen college students huddled around him, their backs to the curving stone walls. The only exit from the chamber was a 20-foot-long claustrophobic shaft that opened onto the rolling bog of northern Scotland. Although the passage grave stretched nearly sixty feet in diameter and stood twelve feet tall, its inner chamber was uncomfortably cramped.

“What have you learned about the
se ruins?” David asked. A few yawns accentuated his students’ disinterest. “Come on, nobody remembers anything?”

“
They’re wicked boring,” a tattooed student with a nose ring whispered, not expecting his words to amplify off the walls.

Near the back of the group one hand shot up over all the heads and waved back and forth. “Professor Hyden!”

David sighed. “Go ahead, Scott.”

An
acne-challenged teenager stepped forward adopting an authoritarian air. “Camster Round was built over 6,000 years ago, but it is astronomically oriented so sunlight only enters this inner chamber during the winter and summer solstices and solar eclipses, which suggest its origin could be extraterrestrial.”

David cleared his throat. “Apart from the ode to an alien master race, you pretty much nailed it.”

Scott beamed.

“
Okay.” David pointed down the passageway toward the entrance. “Passage graves consist of a main chamber that can only be reached by a narrow, lengthy shaft.” He pointed behind the group, first to the left and then to the right, at two low arch openings where small, square rooms branched off the circular chamber. “Small burial tombs, called ante chambers, stem off of the passageway and off of the main chamber, separated by vertical slabs of rock. When Camster Round was excavated, archeologists found the remains of several bodies in the ante chambers, but nothing could definitively explain why the ruin was built or what people did here.”

Scott’s squeaky voice echoed throughout the chamber. “There’s an archeologis
t at Cambridge who said shamans used the graves to travel to alternate dimensions. That’s why they are called portal tombs or passage graves.”

“There’s no mystical power
,” David corrected him. “However, science gives us the tools to make an educated guess about what
might
have taken place here. These tools are our senses. They allow us to reason empirically.”

The nose-ringed student interrupted with a loud yawn.

“Professor?” Scott tried again, raising his hand.

David reached into
the backpack at his feet and pulled out a sound level meter and frequency counter. Plugging each device into a mobile battery pack, he switched them on and tapped the sound level monitor with his finger. The decibel needle came alive, bouncing back and forth until he stopped tapping and the stylus dropped, registering the grave’s subtle ambient noise. “I need a volunteer.”

Scott waved his already raised his hand.

David looked to the other students in desperation before conceding with a sigh. “Fine. Scott.”

Handing his notebook to the girl beside him, Scott stepped away from the crowd with an overinflated smile.

“Scott, describe what you see around you.” David said.

Scott
stood beside David and contemplated the question, overanalyzing its simplicity.

“Just
anything, Scott,” David said.

“Petroglyph symbols carved on the walls.”

“How large is the chamber?”

“Approximately
sixteen square feet.”

“Is there any light?”

“No—I mean, only the open capstone on the ceiling they put in a few years ago and the torches we brought in with us.” Scott pointed to the students’ flashlights.

“What do you hear?”

“I don’t hear anything.”

The student w
ith the nose ring made a fart noise with his mouth. A few of the girls squeaked in disgust.

David waited until they were quiet and then turned back to Scott. “Close your eyes.”

Scott obeyed.

“Keep them closed.” David pulled a small drum from his backpack and tapped it lightly. “What do you hear?”

Scott smiled. “A drum.”

Carefully studying the walls, David moved
near Scott’s left shoulder. “How about now?”

After a moment, Scott opened his eyes, blinking in disbelief that David was still drumming. “I can’t hear it!”
he exclaimed.

David
moved again, this time to the right, maintaining the rhythm as he eyed the walls and stopped at a precise area within the chamber. “What about now?”

Scott grabbed his ears
. “It hurts.”

“That’s low frequency sound propagating off the walls,” David spoke over the distortion
. He nodded for the class to look at the acoustic monitors. The stylus arrow fluctuated around 120 dB and the frequency counter’s digital display read 10 Hz. A few students held their stomachs, sensing the vibrations.

“The human ear can dete
ct sounds between 20 and 16,000 Hz. What you’re feeling is subsonic noise, the interaction of sound waves from the drum and the drum’s noise reflecting off the walls. In some places, equal proportions of sound collide and create standing waves or nodes—that means you won’t hear the drum at all. In other places, resonances detach from their source and move around the chamber. The drum noise can seem like it is coming from really far away or like it’s originating inside your head. That’s amplified resonance. These are antinodes or sweet spots. Believe it or not, this drum can also be heard inside Camster Long, another passage grave 650 feet away from us, even though it can’t be heard in the open air between the two cairns.”

David smiled. For once, his students were listening. He stopped drumming. “This is science! Acoustic architecture!”

Scott lowered to his knees, still holding his stomach.

“There is nothing supernatural about these ruins,” David said. “No mysticism. No space travel.
Definitely no aliens.” He laughed. “Think about it. You’re at some ceremony centuries ago, inside a dark chamber with a rhythmic, pulsing beat. Put all these things together.”

Sixteen blank stares.
At least they were interested blank stares.

“Come on,” he said. “You just witnessed how powerful sound can be. Add fifty more people and purple mushrooms.”

“Brilliant!” the student with a nose ring shouted.

David nodded at him.
“Science just shed light on the dirty habits of a few prehistoric potheads.”

The class erupted with applause. A few of
students would leave the University of Aberdeen with an appreciation for science, even if it was based on prehistoric rock’n’roll and hallucinogens.

Scott let out an agonizing moan. A trickle of blood fell from his nose.

David set down the drum.

One of the girls offered tissue from her purse, and David pressed
it against Scott’s nose. “Sorry Scott. Give it some pressure,” he said.

Scott hunched sideways and vomited o
n David’s shoes.

Everyone backed away in disgust.

David kept one hand against Scott’s nose and waved to the student with the nose ring. “Take him outside, okay? Fresh air should help.” He handed Scott the tissue and patted him on the shoulder. “Sorry, man.”

The s
tudent led Scott down the tunnel.

David kicked vomit off his boots. He looked up at the class, surprised to see
they were intently interested. Their boring American teacher was suddenly cool. A modern Indiana Jones.

“Professor Hyden, look.” A
girl pointed at the frequency counter.

The digital readout
fluctuated between 5 and 10 Hz but everyone was quiet.

David tapped the plastic co
ver. The counter continued to rise and fall.

“Must be broken,
” he said. He unplugged the machine from its power source. The readout faded then disappeared.

Some of the students tittered nervously.

“Let’s call it a day,” David said shoving equipment into his backpack. “I’ll see everyone next Thursday at the University.” He zipped up the bag, keeping out the broken frequency counter. “Hey!” he yelled after the students. “Reread the chapter, and this time, try to actually learn something.”

The students groaned as they shuffled one-by-one down the passageway.

David pulled the backpack over one shoulder and looked at the frequency counter. It didn’t make sense. The reading had displayed subsonic noise after he’d stopped playing the drum. Even a residual echo couldn’t account for the measurements they saw. He reexamined the counter, unzipped the bag, plugging it back into the battery and flipping on the power switch. It was silent, but the digital readout continued to bounce at subsonic levels.

“What the hell?” He
turned the device over. The metal tag affixed to the bottom said manufactured in the U.S.S.R.

“
Thing is older than the ruins.”

He threw
everything into the bag and exited the chamber, careful not to touch the walls. Ducking under the shaft opening, he continued to his Jeep. The sun was almost set. It colored the fields a dark hazy orange. The last few students waved goodbye as they pulled out of the parking lot onto the empty highway back to Aberdeen.

David tossed
the pack into the back of his Jeep and smiled at Darwin who sat in the passenger seat.

“P
rofessor Hyden?” Scott’s nose bulged with tissue. The bloody cotton protruded from both nostrils and fanned over his mouth, blowing up and down as he spoke. “Are you going to Maeshowe for the weekend?” His arms were full with archeology textbooks bursting with torn scraps of paper that bookmarked hundreds of pages.

“You feeling better?” David asked.

Scott shrugged, still looking dizzy. “I get nosebleeds. Mum says I don’t eat enough meat, but more likely it’s due to a Vitamin K deficiency because I have an aversion to green vegetables.”

“Who doesn’t?” David forced an uncomfortable smile. People weren’t his thing.

“Are you going out to Maeshowe again this weekend?” Scott asked again. “I saw a documentary about Maeshowe. William Shatner narrates and they interview an archeologist from Cambridge named Dr. Brenton Hyden. Do you know him?”

David looked down at his watch. The sun was lowering below the horizon, and he still had to catch the last ferry to the Orkney Islands.

Scott didn’t pause. “I couldn’t help notice you both share the same surname. The other Dr. Hyden is trying to prove Maeshowe is aligned toward fixed stars and—”

“There’re no aliens, Scott.”

Scott looked down at his feet. “I know…I just hoped you might know if—”

“There’s no mystical power
either. It was just a bunch of ancient nomads worshipping a fictitious star god…like William Shatner.”

Scott laughed uncomfort
ably as David climbed into his Jeep and started the engine.

Dejected,
Scott started toward his car, a pastel pink Robin Reliant that boasted more testosterone than its owner.

David watched Scott in the rearview mirror. Images of his own discomfited youth
came to mind. “Scott!” he called to the kid as he backed out of the parking space. “How ‘bout I take a few pictures of the more unusual petroglyphs while I’m at Maeshowe and bring you back some prints?”

Scott’s jaw droppe
d. He pushed his glasses up the ridge of his nose.

For the first time since David had known him, the kid was speechless.

“Have a good weekend, Scott.” David waved as he pulled onto the highway. “You’ve got too much time. Find yourself a girlfriend!”

Scott beamed. “You too, Professor!” His face turned red. “I mean about the weekend.”

David smiled.

T
he engine accelerated with a roar. Photographs were a great idea. Hell, what if he brought back more than a few snapshots? Imagine Scott’s reaction if he came back with an Orkney Island “intergalactic” pebble? He planned to find him something.

This was going to be a great weekend.