The Lost Way - Chapter 7, Part 1
Adam, Ani, and Sara find themselves somewhere. It's dark. It's steamy. It's not where they expected to be.
Last time: Things got explosive and Nikolas found himself being questioned about how a large explosion happened at his dig site. Also Dolos got called out.
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Chapter 7 - Part 1
Chapter 7
Adam fought off panic at the sudden plunge into darkness. His stomach churned as if he’d taken too many trips on a carnival ride. As his eyes adjusted, he could see the outlines of Sara and Ani exactly where they had been when Ani struck the object.
He slowly looked about, taking stock of the situation. They were in a shelf-lined room. It smelt of essential oils and damp. Along the walls were stacks of towels. He could also see the hollow where the artifact was sitting, glowing a slight shade of blue. He could hear the sound of water and low voices from outside the room they were in.
“Everyone ok?” He whispered.
“I’m alive,” said Ani.
“Very not ok”, said Sara, “What the hell is going on?”
“So we’re all alive. Good. Ani, what did you do?”
“I don’t know. I felt this stream of energy from the artifact up my arm. It’s like I was barely in control. I just had to ring it. I mean to hit it. I don’t know.”
“Okay? What is this though? Did we fall? What happened?”
“I think I’m dead and this is my dying brain trying to process,” wheezed Sara.
Ani put her hands on her shoulders, “You’re not. I’m here. Adam is here.”
She was suddenly struck by how oppressively hot it was in the room, “Is it ridiculously hot in here or is it me?”
“It’s steamy,” Adam agreed, moving towards the front of the room. His eyes had adjusted and he could now make out a heavy wooden door. It couldn’t be, he thought to himself. It couldn’t possibly be. The walls, the dimensions, it all matched. He took a deep breath before speaking.
“Ani, this is insane. I feel like I’ve gone nuts.” He swung his arms and clapped once, wincing at how loud the sound cracked in the quiet space. Why was there a ceiling? As much as it pained him, he had to say it out loud. “Could this be the room we were excavating? The walls, the bricks, the mortar... it all matches. The only difference is that there was no door here.”
Ani looked around. “I’d say you’re nuts, but with all the craziness of the last few days, it could indeed be the same room. I don’t know that it matters that much. We need to get out of here and figure out where we are and where Nikolas is.”
Sara muttered to herself, “No, no. This is all a dream or a brain death sequence.”
“I’m right there with you,” Adam responded. “But it sure is unsettling we’re all having the same dream.” Could it be the same room? He said to himself and started to look around the room and sure enough, beyond the textures and dimensions, he looked down to see the hollow near the bottom of the wall. He knelt and picked up the artifact. The letters glowed blue, but he could see immediately the writing had changed. Not a letter adjustment he hasn’t been able to identify, but a new phrase altogether.
“Hey Ani,” he said, “Take a look at this. I may not be a linguist, but that text is different.”
Ani carefully took the bell from him. She’d begun calling it the bell in her own mind. The intense need to ring it had subsided, but she knew now deep in her bones that it was a bell. Her brain still couldn’t comprehend why such an object existed. But she’d accepted it was critically important that they pay attention to it.
She ran her thumb across the phrase which just moments ago had asked her to ring the bell. Now, that phrase was gone. In its place was a completely different statement carved into the metal.
ΣΩΣΑΤΕ ΤΗΝ ΟΔΟΝ
“Save the way,” she whispered.
“I wonder what that means,” answered Adam.
Sara interjected, “I think we have bigger fish to fry. Are we not going to acknowledge that a minute ago we were in an excavation and now we’re in a dark room. And where is Nikolas?”
Ani still held the bell, but somehow felt she didn’t want to. She slid the bell into Sara’s bag on the floor and began looking around the room.
“If it’s a dream, it’s the most real one I’ve ever had,” Ani said to no one in particular.
For a moment, she let herself imagine that she was really in the storage room of an ancient bathhouse. She ran her hand across the wooden shelves and rubbed the fabric of the towels in her hand. Was this what byzantine fabric felt like? The archaeologist in her was entranced.
As she felt around the room further, a piece of parchment caught her eye under a stack of towels. She lifted the towels to find a line of scrolls. Picking one up, she unrolled it. On the scroll was carefully printed Greek writing. A familiar greeting marked the top, it was a letter, similar to a few she had seen under bulletproof glass, in a museum.
“Oh my God,” she gasped.
“What is it?” Adam asked.
“It’s a manuscript. I can’t believe this. It’s a letter from the Apostle Paul… but not one I’ve ever seen or read about.” She sounded giddy.
Adam picked up another parchment, “There are a ton of these here.”
Ani couldn’t help herself. It felt so wrong to touch them with bare hands, but for so long she’d studied the handful of surviving manuscripts from the early church. So many documents had been lost over the centuries. These could rewrite swaths of history. She read another scroll.
“Good Christ, is this Timothy?” Ani said, picking up another before she froze.
“This is addressed to the House of Lydia. It’s from John. Adam, do you realize what these are?”
“I don’t know what the House of Lydia is, but my catechism classes from middle school are quickly returning to me.”
“Lydia was one of the first European converts to Christianity, she–” Ani cut her sentence off as she heard a noise.
A splash and a series of wet footsteps sounded from the other side of the door. The footsteps came closer, and the latch began to turn. Adam slammed his foot against the door to keep it from opening.
A man’s voice yelled through the door. Ani understood it. It was Koine Greek. “Hello? I need a towel,” she translated to herself.
The other two looked at Ani as she ran the words over again in her brain. She realized neither of them would understand the ancient dialect.
Without hesitation she said, “You must wait. We need a moment,” in what she hoped was passable language.
The man grunted and they heard footsteps plodding away before the sound of someone entering a bath. Ani felt real pride in her quick reply. A reply that miraculously seemed to have worked.
“What the hell was that, Ani?” asked Adam.
“Koine Greek… well, the spoken version. I’ve only ever read it,” she said nonchalantly.
Adam’s voice strained a bit, “And you’re just ok with that? For a minute I was lost in the moment too, but we’re stuck in a room in what really appears to be an ancient bathhouse.”
She was interrupted by an anxious whisper from Sara, “Yep. We’ve lost it. We’re nuts. But I guess I’m going to accept it for a moment, because we need a plan. Dream or not, we cannot sit in this room forever.”
“Agreed,” Ani and Adam said together.
Ani moved towards the door and gestured for Adam to remove his foot. She carefully lifted the latch and peered outside through a crack in the door. A noticeable puff of hot air came through the opening.
Sara immediately began covering her equipment, grabbing towels from the shelf. She needed both to protect it and obviously hide it. She tried in vain to ignore Ani opening the door toward god knew what. What she heard was unexpected.
“Wow. That’s a lot of penis,” Ani whispered matter-of-factly.
Adam moved behind her to look, “Yes, indeed. That’s a lot of nudity.”
What they saw outside was a steaming pool with several men both in and out of the water. There were also a few women and a number of robed, hooded servants. Ani shut and latched the door and turned around. She took a deep breath, lifting her arms up with her inhalation and then down as she exhaled, trying to be as calm as possible.
“The man spoke to me in Koine Greek, which I can read but don’t necessarily speak, because no one does. They haven’t in over a thousand years. I can’t tell you how or why, but we’re in 4th Century Greece.”
Ani stood for a moment, looking at her two friends, seeing if they’d say anything. They stared at her as if she was insane.
When they didn’t immediately answer, she kept talking, “I’m going to ignore the fact that it’s impossible, but somehow, we’re in the bathhouse that was once on this site, and I think it’s safe to assume we’re in the storeroom that we were excavating.”
Sara stared at her, her breathing shallow. “Ani, that’s not a theory. If we accept that, we’re accepting time travel and a litany of other impossible things. We’re in a bathhouse? In the fourth century? At this point, the only upside is that there isn’t a woman bound and gagged on the floor.”
“Sara, everything is ok. Let’s just take a moment to figure this out. This is clearly before the door was bricked up with the woman inside,” Adam responded.
“Before?! Of all the things you could point out, you chose the fact that there’s not a tortured woman on the floor? In that case, yes, I’m thrilled we’re not buried alive. But someone is going to walk through that door in thirty seconds, and are we going to ignore the fact that Nikolas is missing?” She slumped against a shelf, checking her phone out of pure habit, before her breath hitched. “And why the fuck does my phone have Wi-Fi?”
Ani put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed, “Sara-jan. We’re all a little freaked out here. But the more we panic, the higher the chance someone comes in here and finds three people wearing nylon and hiking boots. I’d rather not have to try and figure out how to say that. Let’s get out of this room, and then we’ll figure it out.”
Adam, meanwhile, had fished his phone out of his pocket and checked for service.
“No shit, the phone does have wifi,” Adam said. He opened his settings to check the name of the network. “What is IFSET_NET?”
“What?! How? Your phone shouldn’t be connected to that. It’s my equipment network. The devices have to be paired and authenticated.” Sara said, “The handheld magnetometer creates a local network with my phone and laptop to feed data. But it’s local only. It can’t make calls.”
Sara froze for a moment. That couldn’t be. The base station created the local network, not the device, and the base station was most certainly not in the room with them.
She began spiraling anew, “No. It can’t work. The base station creates the network, not the tool. The base station isn’t here, so there can’t be a network.”
Adam swiped a few times, placed a call to Nikolas, and showed her. “Well, the local loop is looping. My phone is connected. Who knows, maybe we set up the connection a few weeks ago. I kinda remember we did some setup when I got here. Look, I’m calling Nikolas right now. Huh, now that you mention it, that probably shouldn’t work.”
Sara stared at the glowing screen, watching the seconds count upward on the outgoing call. “No. No, it’s a local data sync. It can’t make voice calls. It doesn’t have the routing architecture for it.”
The call, meanwhile, showed a failure after 20 seconds. Somehow, the failed call made her feel both better and worse.
“Really? IFSET?”
“Yes. Ion-Sensitive Field-Effect Transistor.”
Adam laughed, “Academics and their acronyms.”
“It’s also an Egyptian god. The god of chaos, if I remember right,” Ani responded.
“I did not name the network after an Egyptian god,” Sara hissed, though she was beginning to calm down. Phones tried and failed calls on bad networks all the time. It was a software glitch.
Adam interjected, “Well, my phone just called Nikolas. I sent him a text.”
“You did not send him a message. Can’t you let this go? It’s not a cellular network. It’s local,” Sara said before clenching her jaw and closing her eyes for a moment. “We need to get out of here. We cannot be found like this. I’m going to pack my equipment.” She began wrapping her gear into towels. She didn’t trust leaving all of the equipment in this room. While most of it was meant to be outside, it was not meant to take a steam bath.
“Let’s get the phones and equipment packed away. We’ll hide them in towels. Then we can figure out how to get out of here.
Ani meanwhile looked at Adam and shrugged, “I’m gonna go find some 4th Century clothes. I think we all need to go. I’ll go first, then Adam, then Sara. It’ll be weird if we all walk out together. If I remember the site layout, there should be another anteroom on the other side of the pool. We’ll steal something there.”
“Sounds good,” Adam responded.
“Steal something? Are you nuts? What are you gonna do, walk out there in your REI co-op shorts and boots?” Sara gestured broadly with her hands towards the door.
“Nope,” Ani said. She felt a sensation flare in her arm, like champagne bubbles rising through her skin. Somehow, she knew with absolute certainty what she needed to do. She needed to step out of the room with full confidence and find a way out. Without another word, Ani unceremoniously began removing her clothes.
“Jesus, Ani,” Sara interjected.
“Jesus has nothing to do with it,” Ani said, smiling at her, “but hopefully he’ll avert his eyes on this one.”
“But you don’t have to take all…”
Before she could interject further, Ani had completely disrobed, unlatched the door, and sauntered out into the bathing area. The door shut behind her.
