Chapter Text
January 7th 2013
Beloved Enthusiast,
This is the first page of the journal.
I dislike giving titles to my journals, so you’ll have to settle for the date -though, to be fair, the date does not mark the day I began writing. I keep journals so I won’t forget everything again, as I once did, and I would rather not go through the hustle from seventeen years ago. I’ve learned from that ordeal. These days, I maintain one personal journal for ordinary matters -usually holidays, since I can’t bear to take weekends off -and some for my research. I’ve copied here the entry from the day before the beginning, so the story of how we arrived here might make sense to whoever reads it although I most probably will choose to not publish.
This is your author, Fyodor M. Dostoevsky. I shall waste no more paper on filler words.
We were here for an ongoing project around Luxor, Naqada for its subject, and I had left the prefab cabin as usual. I couldn't choose to work or not, that day. It was off. And since I had no family to visit in my free time and did not want to leave the city for one single stupid day, I decided there was no other choice but to break some rules. It isn't like they can fire me, I have high lead in the research, and I didn't think the project could afford another man as talented as me. So I went by that and broke rule.
Egypt wasn't as charming and rich as your average western country. It is far from that. But if you had the right eyes to see, it just became normal. You'd get used to it. What you'd get used to, in fact, might have been the fluorescent lights, prefab walls, a dozen maps that make more sense when you are drunk. That was something only a person who would foolishly choose this profession would understand, though.
The project was funded jointly by a local university, a research funding agency and my old department at Penn -on paper, at least. I haven’t seen Pennsylvania since my post-doc. Everything since has been documents and polite lies. I still wait for a directorship or a raise, but I suspect both require sins I’ve yet to commit.
What we did, there for the project, was to work with a bunch of great lads that did mapping of sorts, identify some artifacts here and there, and maybe a whole layout of this old grave would be done. In the end it fascinated my poor soul that a finding so old could still be researched.
I went, and there it was: sunlight burning my eyes. I do not prefer such warm places, actually, but when I was twenty-one years younger and chose my major -in which I had no memory of- supposedly I had picked a job that meant I'd most likely sacrifice my pale and cold physique in sake of research. Either way I was this genius and made sure no one else would perchance know of my absence. No one. No one except this one particular man.
We had allegedly met before university. He would always say that the senior year of high we'd made some odd choice and both applied to the same college. He was my colleague even then -strange that we were always together in the same projects. This was a man that helped through many things, I wouldn't admit to his face, but I would consider him a brother deep in my mind as I felt like I didn't belong to my family either. Seventeen years ago, when the incident happened, strange it was that he bothered and helped. I would willingly take him as an assistant if one day I were a director.
His name was Sergey Nikolaevich Syromyatnikov. For short, we would refer to this man as Sigma when it was just us and our close employer, since strange enough he was fluent in Greek and it was a pen-name that once belonged to an author he really liked. A reader of a journal like this would probably know Dr. Syromyatnikov from his papers as I too admired the articles and essays he's an author of. Especially the articles he'd written on his period as a professor was what I would consider as his prime. Never once had I seen another man of my field publish so greatly. He had my respect.
To find two Russian men in a project conducted in North Africa was odd enough, not to mind that politically we do not stand very close. But yet Syromyatnikov and I both had been working on these things for so long, you would not expect a quitter. Our personalities differed much, he was a pawn and I was a king. And to know that despite we could even breathe together if we could, I could still not believe that I was bound to my fellow colleague in such levels.
So, a man like Syromyatnikov would definitely expect my mischief and declare me a villain upon my attempts such as A) Breaking in a tomb I'm supposed to use director permission to enter B)Running a test on a shitty stone I happened to think looked ancient or C) Deceiving some grad students into starting a random site with my all knowing position.
Today my option was all of them.
The labs were empty, so I took the liberty of running a quick scan on one of the basalt fragments catalogued last week. Strange, I know. A place built on limestone shalt not have any basalt. Yet here we are, here we are studying things that are not supposed to be there. Sigma would have stopped me, of course. I usually took an undergrad with me to these things, they were useful creatures that I could hand back to their professors after work and they'll shine like I taught them the world. The university’s lab structure was held together by bureaucracy and duct tape, it would not be allowed to do any such on paper as taking inexperienced people or doing random tests alone wasn't allowed. But again, cares who?! The equipment flickered oddly -temperatures off, readings unstable -and for a moment, the monitor displayed an image that couldn’t have been there: a face I didn’t recognize, looking directly back at me.
I must have imagined it. But it left a pressure behind my eyes, like remembering something I’d worked hard to forget.
I minded it nothing and went about my nonsense.
When I took a reading again, it was much stable and there were no face. I recorded it.
I was supposed to take this reading with the group of five that would use this as another field performance grade. But I didn't care and spent my hour perfecting data. I honestly couldn't give a damn about what the director had to say either.
What I could not shake off, however, was the fact that the face wasn't one I had seen before and I was sure it wasn't made up either.
I remember fifteen years ago attending a conference held in Portugal that I went with the invitation of my Anthropologist colleague Madame Egawa. She was coming from Japan and originally did research regarding the Jomon Period. We had met during the Erasmus experience long before (God bless my passport) and I considered myself as lucky for being able to shift her focus. With the digression to Madame Egawa, the contents of the conference had aligned with this face so perfect that chills went down my spine.
A speaker had said "Man can not imagine any faces it hasn't seen before. You may dream of people you have never met, you bring pieces to create new faces. But not something that has never existed in your mind before. We see what we perceive."
So this face was something I had seen before.
And it wasn't printed on the stone.
And I was painfully sure that I had not seen it.
So when I worked, my hands kept going back to the surface. I had almost caressed the non-existing lines my mind once had shown me. It was of horror that my hands weren't of intent.
So I threw off the coat that I wore against the lab AC and let myself back out until I found my way back to the prefab cabins.
If this rule wasn't pleasant to break, then another interdiction was for me to do in my day-off.
______
I walked past a few corridors. I had the monitor synced with my phone without anyone’s notice, so if something had happened, I could just run back and do my stupidities. The day wasn’t passing and I started to complain again. To be honest, this research was ongoing for more than twenty years, and it could've been done in a much more solid facility. I tried to talk about this to the financial department but they did not think some history project required a budget enough for literal housing. Buy it from your own savings and drive every day, they’d said. I was being treated like this schoolboy that I was not.
I was halfway down the corridor when the monitor flickered again. A pulse. Not a light, but a pulse. At least in my eyes it was like that.
The timestamp said 03:17. I checked the clock on my wrist. 02:59. My calculated minutes did not match that 03:17 minutes, and it pissed me off as best as it could.
So I stayed. Of course I stayed. And that was where all of this began.
I walked back in, studied the screen for a while. The scan finished, but the core temperature didn’t fall. Basalt should not hold heat like that -not for minutes. I ran another reading.
The result showed layers.
There was something in the goddamn rock.
So as any other sane person would, I spent all my time until it hit around 14.05 to fix this problem of sorts that I had allegedly invented right there. It made no sense. The other plans I had about ruining everyone’s day for not letting me work was no longer possible. I had become some obsessed freak about this stone, and I was sure the second people saw it they’d think that I was just messing with the catalogues.
Then I heard walking.
I was lost in the readings, went over each value once more, theorized and got another reading and compared it to an older sample. My mind was a goner, so I could not even hear the person nearby until they were right on the other side of the door.
Before I turned my head to see, the cup was set by my pile of papers.
Sergey Syromyatnikov looked at me with his arms crossed and an expression that meant I had to speak up.
“God, I probably know why… Why’re you here?” He’d asked with that usual fed up voice that was probably panicking inside for the millionth time. I grinned, not giving a damn about what he had to say because he was probably guessing the type of answers I’d give.
“Y’know? Interesting rocks here… Business, you should try it.”
His face did not change.
“You do realize the length of the lecture director will give you, right?” He sighed slow. How could he even deal with me, it was a wonder I had from time to time.
“The work was gonna be done, and I’m doing it right now. Objections?” I replied fast, legs crossed in some position waiting to be humbled.
“I… I can’t with you,” and there he was, pacing around the room “at least five of those undergrads’ll continue here post intern! And you’re just erasing credit, for what? Fun?!”
Since both Syromyatnikov and I were technically researchers at Penn, we too had a few things to do with the undergrads and interns roaming around.
“They should’ve guessed I’d be doing these things today.”
“Guessed?! You vanished like some ghost in what- Three in the morning?!”
“Four fifteen…” I corrected like a man with no shame. “All they do is watch anyway, I use them to hold my stuff.”
Then he stopped pacing and his shadow fell on my sitting figure again.
“Why… Why do you do this? What is wrong with you? When’s the last time you took an actual break anyway..? It’s your day off, for God’s sake! And ‘m dealing with your mess instead of relaxing like I should! Say something, for fuck’s sake, say something Fedya!”
I looked at him with a solid face and instead of saying something legit, sipped my newly bought coffee and offered him the little pack of mixed nuts that lay around the desk with a smug face.
And Sergey gave me that look he always gave as if I were crazy.
He opened his mouth to say something, then couldn’t even word it and hissed at me: “Are you insane..?”
I snickered. He sighed once more.
“Fine,” he said “What is this rock that’s caught your interest? I know you’d already be chasing trouble outside with people you fooled I believe. Never caught you on the field today...”
That had me smile.
“I caught behavior.”
Then he pulled a chair beside me so that I could fry his brain with all the things I’d done in the past hours.
First, I showed him the readings. He scrolled through the timestamps, numbers, and spectral maps with the impatience of someone who trusted machines only slightly less than my ego. I explained, brisk and efficient: heat anomaly, unexpected low-density signals, layer separations inconsistent with local geology. He tutted and muttered about calibration and thermal lag. I ran a third reading, slower, more patient.
“What does that even mean?” he asked finally. “There’s nothing porous enough in basalt to produce that signature unless-
“Unless there is a void,” I said.
“Why would such a rock have a void?” He looked at me like I was stupid. I was not stupid.
“Yes. Or something embedded.” I tapped the screen. “See these concentric zones? Not natural. The density steps like a folded paper, not strata. We’re looking at manufactured layers. Either that, or we’re both out of our minds.”
Silence. Then his eyes darted to the door. “If you tell the director-”
“He doesn’t have to know,” Said I. “We can keep this research to ourselves until we know what this is. I’m tired of him claiming whatever we do. I think it’s rather easy, we don’t even have to get our hands in the sub-temple or tomb.We can take a micro-core, extract a sample. See what’s inside. Micro-CT, if the scanner’s cooperating.” It excited me quite much to find new things, for the subject was one I favored more than anything.
He considered me as if weighing my sanity against the integrity of the project. “If that’s what you want to do, you do it with me and under my watch. No solo excavations.”
I welcomed the restraint. “Of course.”
We began calibration at 14:26.
Syromyatnikov handled the chamber diagnostics while I secured the basalt fragment on the microdrill platform. The containment booth hummed, glass panes catching reflections of white coats and static screens. I preferred working alone, but Syromyatnikov’s presence kept the instruments within the university’s insurance limits.
“Thermal variance’s still rising,” he muttered, glancing at the infrared display. “You sure you didn’t leave it near a heat source?”
“Stone doesn’t absorb phantom watts, Sergey,” I said, checking the clamps. “Unless it’s alive.”
He ignored the comment and set the baseline readings: mass, density, surface emissivity. The readings wavered between accepted parameters, but the thermal signature remained wrong -a heartbeat of warmth that refused to decay.
We marked the coordinates on the scan image: a dense anomaly 2.6 centimeters beneath the surface, near the center of fracture line 04B. I aligned the microdrill, tungsten-carbide bit angled at precisely forty-three degrees to minimize lattice stress.
Syromyatnikov called out the incremental depths. “Zero point five millimeters... one... one point five…”
The sound was soft -the grind of diamond grit through cooled stone -and beneath it, a resonance not unlike breathing through cloth. I adjusted the torque to minimum.
At 2.6 centimeters, the torque meter dropped. “Cavity detected,” I said automatically. “Depth confirmed.”
We switched to the endoscope feed. Irregular, perhaps organic texture. Syromyatnikov leaned closer, frowning. “Could be contamination. Roots. Or packing cloth from transport.”
“No,” I said. “Look at the weave. Not synthetic, that’d be impossible anyway. That’s handmade.”
“Then it's a modern intrusion.”
“Modern intrusion inside a basalt inclusion?” I replied. He fell silent.
We widened the bore carefully and extracted the core using vacuum assist. A small, compressed cylinder fell into the sterile tray -dense dust, then a soft resistance. I used the precision tongs to pull out a filament no wider than a fingernail, folded many times over, fused with mineral residue.
Syromyatnikov adjusted the magnifier. “Textile fragment. Possible vegetal fiber. Cotton or flax.”
“It can’t be,” I said. “There’s no sedimentation layer between it and the igneous matrix. This rock was molten when it formed.”
“Then explain it.”
I couldn’t.
I stared at his face and the magnifier.
There was nothing to be said.
We ran a spectroscopy. Nothing unearthly. Except it could not exist in a situation like this, for basalt could not hold onto pigment, and fabric could not survive magma. Not like this. Impossible.
I (or perhaps the man I was before all this) noted the data with clinical efficiency, even as my handwriting degraded into angles. The cloth had cooled faster than the rock -implying, impossibly, that it had been there before the basalt solidified.
Syromyatnikov kept glancing between me and the screen. “Fedya” he said quietly, “this could be the find of the decade if it’s authentic. But if it’s contamination-
“It isn’t.”
He didn’t question further. I was, admittedly, acting superior at times and he’d learned not to piss me off then.
We both sat down to silence then.
I had made him coffee, the machine was about to break almost now, but the coffee still poured. For the first time in a while, I hadn’t swore on its machinery.
For me, I knew Sergey would glare the worst, so it was tea. The doors locked, this place was some break room right next to the labs.
“There was something.” I mumbled into my tea.
“I know that.”
I sighed.
“Just how close are the samples from last week’s listings?”
He then walked a bit far off and handed me the recorded locations. His eyes were worried, a kind of worry a parent would get right before their child dared to do something risky.
“What are you planning to do with the locations?”
I sighed, my eyes drifting to a single map pressed down under the glass cover of the coffee table. All samples were from a much southern region that had other ongoing projects that I hadn't engaged much with. I glanced at the list and back at him and the table for a split second. Then I said such words enough to make him think I was crazy.
“I want to start a fresh site.”
Sigma glanced at me with a face worse than I imagined. It was one of horror.
“No.”
“Hear me out-”
“No way!”
“I’ll gather some men… We’ll start with borrowed funding, I’ll pay the director enough to make up the schedule. That’s worth more than any diamond, and gold, Sergey. Do you hear me? Do you?”
He looked at me like the situation was hopeless. I glanced frustrated, my vision fell at the still reflection on my cup of tea. The man before me, oh, the man before did not trust me at times and I knew that. But this time… This time I knew I wanted this research… If I longed for an answer from this job, from this land, from this past…
This time I would find it.
“Sergey…” I said quietly. “Do you support this excavation?”
“Of course.”
“Then defend it.”
I was escorting Syromyatnikov to his cabin. The day I planned to ruin for people was ruined for me. I didn’t know what to do after that. These types of situations aren’t exactly covered in boarding school.
We’d share occasional glances. Neither of us wanted to talk about my sudden burst of crazy ideas or the material we had found.
I had an idea or two about the financials.
One thing you must know about archeology is that it’s a rich man’s plaything. Surely some sort of hobby if you’ve money enough to spend a fair life. Otherwise, in media or the words of people you know, what you might hear is that archeologists absolutely hate money or a stable life.
And that is no myth, the most true thing I could tell about this job.
Based on my income and networth, you probably would see a huge difference between what a man of my salary would own versus what I actually owned, and it was only strange because of the incident that happened seventeen years ago.
I remembered nothing of my family of sorts.
And although I knew some of their names for paperwork and inheritance, I knew not their faces, and hence why I was quite surprised about all the money I was receiving about a few years ago when two family members -who I knew not even existed- had died and had left me just enough to afford a yacht of easily two families but again, I did not like spending so when you looked at me it perchance looked like I just got ran over by a truck and lost everything. There were a few more cases of inheritance money I only newly found out about, and a lot of messages I kept blocking from this ‘family’ I knew nothing about nor cared for. I was disgustingly rich for a man of my salary, and I wasn’t even sure anyone else in the field or project knew about it. I perhaps had a networth higher than the director, but I am sure he too knew nothing significant about it. Sergey did mention me being dressed in expensive clothes and shoes before the incident of seventeen years ago back when I remembered the type of person I was, and it helped me conclude the case that when I chose my major, I wasn’t being reckless and wasn’t some miracle, the car I drove was enough to tell everything.
So I knew how I could cover the start-up funding.
Sergey had his doubts, I knew, but definitely it wasn’t about the finances. He probably thought that I was poisoned by historical pursuits, and I could not negate the claim. Either way, if not me, then after me would they find the riches of that site and it was, in my eyes, only me who could this perfectly conduct the research. It was promised to me in my mind and I would sacrifice if I could, if I must, and if I had to.
And Sergey would be my right hand man.
I had to convince him, somehow, that it would all be fine and that I would handle all the official work and let us go for the ride. I knew it wouldn’t be easy, though, for Sergey was a man that talked less than smiled, and let no one knew he was against and what he was for.
I had to conquer his mind.
“Sergey,” I said “If you don’t stand for the research, I will not do it. Not in the way I imagined it to be, at least. You made yourself indispensable, and I ask you to be my right hand man, because I do not yield.”
He looked at me, oh, those concerned eyes again. When he gave me that concerned gaze, it angered me so much that I faintly urged to gouge them so that he wouldn’t look at me like that again. But that was such an intrusive thought that I refused to even admit to it in my mind. Strange, that now I could write it down.
“Don’t bring me in this mess. If you fail, then I would fail too.”
“That’s exactly why we need it, so that I don’t fall alone. We have to start somewhere. I promise you, if you agree to it, I’ll make it work. I will. I promise.”
He looked at me with more helpless eyes. These weren’t the type that pissed me off. They were those that felt like he begged for a tiny proof that it would all be fine then he’d fight harder than me for the research.
“I’ll pay everything you’ve lost, if we find nothing.”
Then I found myself shaking hands with this man as if the business -as unofficial it may be- was set. I knew he still hesitated all, but I would take everything I could. Even a very reluctant yes.
He gave me smiling eyes. Those that made me feel like yes, I may not remember my family but this man would certainly be born from the same mother as mine if he could.
That fucker…
Fyodor M. Dostoevsky
March 21st 2013
Thursdays aren't your typical starting day, but I could finally get my permit and finances to start a little site in the southernmost border of our official project area. It was still, sadly, bound to the director and he looked nothing like convinced nor slightly fazed when I first brought it up about two months ago;
"You're crazy." he'd said. "Even the most advanced GPR shows a nothing. We've run all sorts of radar in here already. What do you want, another penny to waste?"
"Then maybe it's minimal. Just hear me out."
He didn't seem to bother the slightest. Even after I showed him the anomaly, he only shrugged and said "rare cases never mean impossible."
But they did in a place like this. I had checked the rest of everything catalogued that week. And so I got him to give me a permit. The convincing wasn't easy. It sounded a bit like this:
"Fyodor, did you run all the tests I asked?"
"I surely did, but you know where else I can?"
_
"Fyodor, have you finished the seasonal schedules for the surveying?
"Sure, but if you'd allow I'd add a little break for a worthy search?"
_
"Fyodor, have you taken, without the mentions of that hollow basalt nonsense, the paperwork from the interns that wanted to work under you?"
"I have, but maybe they'd be better off working for a newer plan?"
What mattered was that I could get the permit.
Most sites take around a year to start. The funding from high organizations, employment, permits, license, structuring, schedules, government rights, surveying, inspections...
I was rather lucky it was named as a sub for the ongoing project. These types of sites do not take as much as time as a start from the rock bottom.
I could sense his eyes on me even when we started work.
I wasn't sure exactly how I even did it. He wasn't as young as I, so it made sense he didn't want extra work to pop up. In my eyes, I was even sure that he disliked the profession and didn't care enough to work on it but I couldn't prove it. It isn't alien for the head of research to reach out his alma mater to find other researchers who might catch interest in the project. For this specific reason I was there, and, I think you already figured out but I disliked the man regardless of how much I liked the site. But regardless of this digression to my hatred, I had managed to get my permit.
I took myself a little time to see exactly where I had to look into. I had a few more colleagues of my position, so it wouldn't take so long. In one hand, I had this journal. It was this simple, viridian green notebook that calmed me, and it'd fit into the largest pockets of a few of the trousers I owned. A pen was to the side, I had titled it with our location about two months ago, but it was only then and now until I could have an entry on this one rather than my general journal, for nothing major had happened other than paperwork about my frankly new idea of a research. I clung onto the journal with my life -for if something had happened again, it'd be my life. The walk was simple, it was the usual drill for inspection. I let myself get caught too hard on the texture and theories to actually think of anything else. It was nice.
I did not realize shit about just how much importance the land I was walking on had.
I am not sure exactly what left such an obvious sign get lost at large in sight.
I could swear it was right there.
Something. There was something there for sure.
And then- If I were to lead this time... The world would never be the same.
Dirt...
Dust...
Sand...
Time...
"You are going to die! You know it! ...You know it!"
"Not unless I do something to make things right..!"
Denial. A phase of never acceptance. A phase of trying to hold on.
"But you can't..!"
Goodbyes are hard frames to speak of, after all...
~The Sarcophagus of Beloveds~
The collusion of research, idolatry, craze...