Part 2
Walking back to campus the next day was hard. Not that I
told my parents about my experience in the storm; frankly, I had no idea what
exactly happened. My subconscious had latched onto the sight, though, and my
dreams were full of strange people made of water, malevolent beings intent on
smothering and drowning me over and over. I would wake up struggling to
breathe, my heart racing. I needed something else to think about. I wanted an
alternative for my mind to obsess over, and leave the water-demons behind.
The crisp almost-spring-but-not-over-winter breeze curled
around my ankles as I walked past the Regenstein Library for the second time in
less than twenty-four hours. I almost made it by without glancing warily around
the columns as if the face would manifest again—but the only thing to approach
me was a lanky senior with short, curly hair and the faint wisp of a goatee
across his chin. He had a familiar sheaf of papers in his hand.
“Priscilla?” he guessed my name, eyebrows arching over
dark-brown eyes.
I nodded. “Yeah, that’s me.”
“Oh good.” He gave a chuckle and thrust the sheaf at me,
still in their paper clip. “I’m Ryan, Tony’s TA. He said you needed these back
first thing.”
I took my notes, slipping them into my bag. “Thanks,” I eyed
Ryan with more than a little confusion. “Is he okay? He was supposed to meet me
last night.” I’d meandered the entire breadth of the Regenstein three times
before I gave up and sent Tony a hasty “Where r u?” text and marched back home
to eat my dinner.
Now it was Ryan’s turn to look puzzled. “Last night? I don’t
know anything about that. All I know is, he was in a big hurry this morning
when he dropped these off at study hall.” Ryan gave a little half-shrug. “He
looked a little flushed, but that was it. He left before I could say anything.”
His lips quirked in a tiny grin. “I had to ask around the study hall to find
out what you looked like.”
He stopped like I was supposed to react in some way, but I
was still in the middle of processing what “he looked a little flushed” meant,
or why Tony might be in a hurry.
“Oh,” I muttered to avoid hesitating any longer. “Well, I’m,
uh, glad you did.” How else could I end the conversation quickly? I was going
to be late for class! “Thanks Ryan; see you around.”
“You bet, Priscilla,” he waved as I walked away.
I stepped into Natural Sciences just as Mr. Gorden walked
behind his desk. He looked up, as he normally did, taking a visual roll of the
class. I dropped quickly into the nearest seat, and saw his face relax only
slightly.
“Good morning, everyone,” he said. “Don’t get out your notes
just yet.” He waited a moment for the projector to flicker on, revealing a
slide with two words designed to strike fear in the heart of even the most
ardent student: “POP QUIZ.”
A groan worked its way through every row.
Mr. Gorden waved a wrinkled, arthritic hand. “Now,
now—before you all get too excited, we won’t be taking the quiz right away.
First, I have a very special guest I’d like you all to meet.” He stepped back
and beckoned forward a man I’d hardly even noticed.
He was very round, both his gut and his face. His eyes were
tiny, pinched behind wire-framed glasses. His hair was gathered in one very
thick, curly patch on top of his head, with the sides shaved so severely, one
could see the fluorescent lights reflecting of his shiny scalp. He grinned at
us, displaying most of his enormous teeth.
“Greetings, everyone,” he warbled in his strange,
high-pitched voice. “My name is Edgar Montaine, and I want to tell you about a
very exciting opportunity coming right to you all the way from—“ he stopped and
fumbled with the projector remote until the screen jumped two slides and we
were left looking at a random map depicting several known ancient civilizations
in Eastern Europe, coded in bright, garish colors. Edgar gestured to one of the
areas, a bright-cherry-red blob, and finished his sentence, “Macedonia!”
Half the class promptly leaned back and lost interest in the
man. The other half—myself included—leaned forward, eager to learn what the
exotic and the unknown lands on the other side of the globe might hold for a
bunch of land-locked nobodies like us.
Edgar gripped the edges of Mr. Gorden’s podium with his
pudgy hands. “Quick question, who knows where Macedonia is located?”
I raised my hand, and it was only when Edgar looked straight
at me and nodded that I realized I’d been the only one.
“Um, it’s an ancient kingdom that used to be part of Greece,
isn’t it?” I guessed. Not to mention, last I checked, “Macedonia” wasn’t even
supposed to be its name, but I wasn’t about to heap a bunch of information on
him like a wannabe-teacher’s-pet.
Edgar’s jowls wobbled as he nodded. “Quite right, excellent!
And technically, the area I’m speaking of is part of the ancient kingdom, not the land-locked region currently known
as the Republic of Macedonia.” He punched the button on the remote again, and
we were treated to a charming aerial photograph of what looked like a raised
patch of forest in the middle of a wide expanse of water.
“The island of Fourtouna, off the coast of what is now
Greece,” Edgar narrated like some first-century travel guide, “and the last
untouched segment of what used to be a thriving kingdom under some of the
greatest empires in history.” He flipped through some close-up photos of
strange men digging around an astonishing array of artifacts almost too fast
for us to follow, talking all the while. “We thought we knew everything there
was to know about the place, but once we learned of this island that didn’t
show up on any map, we realized that if such a location had lain undiscovered
for centuries of exploration, it could potentially carry secrets that would
disprove most—if not all—of what we had built around the known borders of the
ancient kingdom.”
A tiny shiver worked its way down my spine, and a cool
breeze seemed to brush over the little hairs on my arm. A brand new corner of
the world, an intact time-capsule of sorts, right in the middle of the Aegean
Sea! How exciting!
Edgar must have sensed our growing enthusiasm, because he
grinned at us and wagged a thick, stumpy finger. “That’s where you all come in!
My group, Fortune Research and Educational Discoveries, otherwise known as
F.R.E.D., has been approached by Daeva-Staite Foundation to invite a group of
eager students from colleges all across the U.S., to use Fourtouna as a
hands-on learning experience, training you in some real archaeology!”
He flipped through pictures of small groups of grungy
twenty-somethings like ourselves, giving squinty thumbs-up and usually gathered
around a large fixture, like the base of a pillar, or a largely-intact urn. “As
you can see, we’ve been digging around Fourtouna for quite some time, and yet,”
he flipped to a map roughly in the shape of the island, with a small section
highlighted orange, “we’ve only managed as far as this first ridge—there’s
still so much left to discover!” His beady eyes wandered over our faces. “Who’s
up for the adventure of a lifetime?”
“Not it!” yelled Skylar from the back of the room, garnering
loud hoots and snickers from the clowns sitting nearest him, and setting off an
extended murmur, peppered with shouts of “That sounds awesome!”
“No it sounds boring as heck!”
“What would you know, loser?”
“Count me in!”
“Do we have to?”
Mr. Gorden took his place at the podium, waving his hands.
“All right! All right! Quiet!” he thundered.
The chaos evaporated. The instructor waved a few people
bearing stacks of paper forward.
“The blue sheet is a flyer explaining the visit by the
Foundation and what it promises for each of our students who are interested.
Everyone please take this home and discuss it with your parents. The flyer also
provides details about a scholarship opportunity attached with this. If you are
definitely interested right now, there is a quiz going around with questions
about the Natural Sciences aspect of an archaeological dig. Please take this
quiz and turn it in on my desk if you are interested and serious about
participating with this opportunity. The highest scores on the quiz will be
considered for the trip. That will be your exit task!”
For the rest of the class, there was little noise beyond the
rustling of paper. I took a blue flyer and also a quiz. Being a World History
major, I knew I could do fairly well. Certainly I was one of the few who
actually paid attention at any given moment.
Question 1: Label the geological strata of this core
sample taken from a dig in Macedonia.
Question 2: How would the climate of the Aegean Sea
affect the preservation of artifacts on the Greek islands?
Question 3: approximately how many known civilizations
settled around the Aegean Sea?
Question 4: What natural advantages did the Mediterranean region
possess?
I stared at the quiz; a few of the questions, I could figure
out, but the more I went on with the short responses and multiple choices, the
more it felt like blind guessing. They were all centered around the
Mediterranean region, which made sense, but some of the things they were
asking, I had to work hard to remember what was the correct answer, and not the
easy one.
By the time I sat through Edgar’s spiel in my Ancient
Civilizations Class and started the quiz, I finally put together what was
confusing: some of the events mentioned in the quiz weren’t ones necessarily
that we’d discussed in class, but they were ones that my dad had told me about,
when I was younger. He called them bedtime stories, but they were really just
legends and myths and epic battles that he would describe before I went to
sleep, so that my dreams were filled with super-strong characters or scenes of
key moments in bygone eras—whether or not they were historically accurate. Most
often not, but now that I was being quizzed about it, I struggled to delineate
which was learned in class and which one was fictionalized by Patrick Thiele,
Master Storyteller.
To top it all off, I went the entire day with no reply from
Tony. I tried asking anyone I knew where he’d gone, or if he’d said anything
before he just vanished, but nobody had noticed anything out of the ordinary,
and those who did said the same thing as Ryan: “He was really nervous about
something, but he never said what it was” or “he did seem really out of it the
other day, but the next day he was fine.” After three unanswered texts, and one
attempt at calling that rang until it went to voicemail, I just decided to
leave it be for the day. I could only hope that whatever it was, he would be
back soon, and I’d finally get a straight explanation.
When I arrived home, I stepped inside just in time to see
Mom headed across the foyer carrying something gingerly in her white-gloved
hands. She paused and smiled at me briefly.
“You’re home early,” she remarked.
I shrugged the bag off my shoulder and set it in the
armchair next to the coat rack nestled in the crook of the stairs. “Just a
bunch of quizzes this morning. We had an archaeological team visiting, talking
about a new dig off the coast of Macedonia, so they wanted to get us interested
in doing a student internship trip over spring break.”
Her slender eyebrows arched. She gave me a little nod and
kept walking. “Archaeology trip? You would be interested in that sort of
thing?”
I followed her down the hallway to the wide room on the east
side of the house known as the “exhibition room.” In the original floor plan it
might have been a masculine study, but Dad wasn’t much of an “office” person,
so Mom used it as a place, she said, to “maintain the display quality of
artifacts that were not in use by the museum.”
I stopped in the doorway, the way I usually did when I
wandered this way on a whim. The room always felt creepy to me, particularly
when it was devoid of people. Mom stopped next to a glass case containing the
remains of a woven basket along with the ancient coins found inside.
“Priscilla, why do you hesitate?” she demanded. “Come talk
to me.”
I crept forward. The bank of hellish masks leered at me from
the walls on either side of the doorway. The one time Tony had ventured into
this room, he had immediately voiced his assumption that the masks concealed a
network of invisible lasers designed to fry any unwanted intruders. I knew they
were just masks, but I scurried past them as fast as I dared.
The entire back wall was lined with pottery fragments and
cases of metal implements: a ceremonial knife, a few belt buckles, a necklace,
some hinges and brackets from a building that had long-since crumbled. Normally
I would be completely weirded out by the time I’d ventured this far into the
room, but this time, the artifacts made me think of the Macedonia trip. What
would I help find in the heart of Fortuna?
Mom finished lightly placing an ornate bronze pendant in the
glass case and sighed. “So,” she slid the pane shut and turned to me with a
dubious glance. “Archaeology?”
I huffed. “Mom, I’ve practically grown up with half my house
used as a museum; my bedtime stories were all about epic battles and demigods
duking it out over petty things that was a simplistic society’s way of
explaining science and why things were the way they were...”
“Didn’t you recently ask Pat not to tell you those stories
anymore?”
“Not the point!” I pursed my lips. “My point is, why
wouldn’t I like archaeology and learning about bygone civilizations and ancient
cultures from a logical, informative standpoint.” I glanced past a gilded
relief depicting a horribly twisted face. “My problem wasn’t Dad’s stories, per
se; it was the way he told them.”
“Priscilla,” Mom wagged her head. “Pat can be a little
enthusiastic with his storytelling, but you really can’t fault him for—“
I turned away from the wall of creepy and raised my eyes to
glance out of the vaulted skylight. “A little? Mom, he wouldn’t stop giving me
the folktale version, all sensationalized and triple-dipped in paranormal. I’d
ask him how a thing really happened and he’d launch into this whole big scene
with spirits and magic and whatnot, that is what I minded!” I snorted and
shuffled after her as she checked moisture levels in the display cases
requiring a lot more delicate treatment. “Believe me, I tried asking him to
dial it back, to just give me the facts without having to weird me out every
time, but he just couldn’t.”
She turned to face me and folded her arms. “What makes you
think those weren’t the facts?” she challenged.
I couldn’t understand why a collected, logical person like
my mom would be so wishy-washy on the subject of her husband’s version of
history. “Mom, honestly! Shapeshifters turning the tides of great battles? Immortal demigods causing the geological anomalies? Trickster spirits altering the course of history? You really think those things could actually happen
and we have no actual physical remains of what should be left behind?”
Mom turned to check on a collection of fantastic quartz
crystals set or bound with metal, each with a different exotic location across
the globe. “Who is to say they didn’t?” she asked.
I wagged my head as we both moved back toward the foyer.
“Um, try a whole panel of archaeological experts consulted as content editors
for the book that all archaeological students must read.” I didn’t mean to be
disrespectful or sarcastic, but I did make a point early on as an adult to be
honest with my parents, as they were with me.
Mom frowned at me, and I could feel the goosebumps rippling
across my skin at her gaze. “Just because your father has a unique way of
telling stories doesn’t make him an idiot,” she warned tersely.
I shrugged. “I never said he was. I just think I am a little
over the fictionalizing and sensationalizing of historic events.” My phone
buzzed, and I hoped it was a response from Tony. I didn’t dare check it while
Mom and I were still talking, though.
She stared at me for a long time in complete silence. Her
lips parted, and she looked ready to unleash a verbal smackdown, but instead,
she closed her mouth and walked back toward her office.
I sighed and checked my phone. It was a text from Caroline,
another classmate, asking if I’d heard from Tony. I sighed and texted her a
thumbs-down emoji. Had I missed something important? Where did everyone go?
