The car came to a halt at the Earth Science entrance to the museum, and Ariana was out the door before Atkins could move. She waited impatiently as he slowly got out and opened the umbrella every English person seemed to have permanently attached to one of their hands. They went up the stairs and into the museum, a guard opening the door for them.
“We have over three hundred fifty thousand specimens,” Atkins said as he closed the umbrella and shook it. “We actually have twelve meteorites that we believe are Martian in origin. Quite unique.”
Ariana had to wonder about a career that was based on the number of rocks one had and the uniqueness of them. “The skull?” she prompted.
Atkins led her through a room full of cases exhibiting various gemstones. “Yes, yes. As I said, it’s not on display.” He unlocked a door and led her into an office crammed with professional journals and crates of all sizes. There was a desk in the corner, under the lone window, a narrow, barred affair ten feet over their heads. Atkins took off his coat and settled back in a deep leather chair and regarded her through rimless glasses as he reached behind himself and pulled a piece of cloth off an item on a shelf. He revealed a crystal skull. It was an ancient, just like the other six.
“Quite odd,” Atkins said as she came around the desk and ran her fingers lightly over the skull.
“What do you mean?”
“I know this sounds strange, but it makes people feel… hmm… I’m not sure what the words would be. Weird? Uneasy? Queer?”
“Where was it found?”
“Most fascinating history, most fascinating,” he said. He had a file folder that was open, but he didn’t need to refer to it. “It came to us from the estate of Lord Withingham. He was a rather eccentric member of the archaeological society, and his widow gave us quite a few strange and wonderful objects.
“Withingham bought this skull in Ireland from a retired naval officer who had fallen on hard times. The officer, who was in his late nineties and in ill health, said he had found it in a burial heath at Callanish, on the Irish coast. Last year, during holiday, I was visiting friends in Ireland, and I went to check this area. Quite amazing, to be frank.”
“Why?” Ariana asked.
“Why, the stones, of course.”
“Stones?”
“Yes, Megaliths. Do you know anything about them?”
“I’ve been to Stonehenge. That’s about it.”
“Stonehenge is the most well-known of the megaliths, but there are hundreds of megalithic sites all over Europe. “This,” — he pointed at the skull—“was found inside the Callanish ring near the Great Menhir. The Menhir is a standing stone over sixteen feet high, while the ring has dozens and dozens of smaller standing stones, arrayed about it. The burial mound where the skull was found was right next to the Great Menhir."
“As I said, we have many megalithic sites throughout Europe, and Callanish is one of the most intriguing. The outer stones are aligned in patterns. Many have tried to orient these patterns on various astronomical alignments. Hard to do, though, because you have to regress the sky to the time when the stones were placed, and it’s difficult to date that. After all, we can’t carbon date stone, now can we? Even Stonehenge, which has been studied as deeply as any of the megalithic sites, has just rough approximations for dating various phases of its construction.”
Ariana didn’t see the connection between the crystal skull and standing stones. “Could ancient people have found the crystal skull and set up the standing stones around it as some form of worship?”
Atkins ran a hand through his thick beard as he considered her question. “Possibly. But Callanish is the only place where a skull has been found, as far as I know. And these sites have been thoroughly combed; Stonehenge, Averbury, Carnac, and the like. Doubt they would have missed that.”
“What other theories are there about the megaliths?” Ariana asked.
“The most popular here in England is that Druids built Stonehenge and the like, but that’s poppycock, as Stonehenge predates the Druids. Others say the sites were a form of astronomical observatory. Some of the sites do orient on certain stars when we regress the star field. At Callanish, most of the small outer stones are oriented on the cardinal directions. A tremendous amount of effort went into moving and setting these stones, some of which are quite heavy, and we don’t quite know why the ancient people did it. Seems like they would have had more important things to do, like gathering food and such.”
“Any theories, no matter how strange, would be helpful,” Ariana said.
Atkins sighed. “There are those who see a grander scheme to all this, but it’s quite a leap to take that in.”
“What do you mean?”
“There are some who believe that there is a worldwide pattern to the megaliths and other similar structures, which, of course, is ridiculous, given the time at which they were built.”
“Maybe not,” Ariana said. “We very much believe now that there was an Atlantis and it was destroyed and the survivors scattered about the world. What if they were responsible for the megaliths?”
“Ah, yes, change,” Atkins said. “I’ve been following the news. Most terrible what happened in Iceland. Damn shame.”
Ariana had always been fascinated by the English ability to view disaster with a certain dispassion.
“We know these gates are connected,” Ariana said. “So there are strange forces at work within the Earth.”
“Hmm. Yes, I suppose. You know, there’s a fellow near Oxford who’s done some rather interesting work,” Atkins said. “Conducting a thing he calls the Dragon Project. He’s run tests on some of the stones and picked up strange energy readings emanating from them, which confirms local legends of the power of the stones. They also found slightly higher levels of radiation around megalithic sites. He did some checking and found that megalithic sites around the world are also tied to uranium-rich areas, which is quite strange, if you think about it.
Ariana felt her jet lag fade as she listened to Atkins. There was more to all this than just the skulls, she was beginning to believe.
“The most interesting readings, though,” Atkins continued, “involve electromagnetism around the megalithic sites. Project Dragon picked up rapid and extreme electromagnetic fluxes around the various sites they tested. They checked this because they heard many reports that megalithic sites were almost always locally rumored to have healing properties. In ancient days, people brought the sick and would leave them inside standing circles. In some cases, I suppose, there was some recovery, but most likely due to a placebo effect rather than any magical properties.”
“It has been documented that certain frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum have healing properties,” Ariana noted.
“Well, I don’t know much about that,” Atkins admitted. “Of course, the man running Project Dragon, a chap named Davon, couldn’t stick with just the facts he picked up, and that’s what caused him trouble among the more literal of our scientific community. He also reported that he and other members of his team saw things inside some of the circles. Strange creatures, strange people, different places. Most bizarre, and of course they had no proof of these sightings. This tinged the proof he did have.”
Could the megalithic sites be some sort of alternate gates? Ariana wondered. Or maybe just a weak point in the field between Earth and whatever was on the other side?
“And well, some of these visions…” Atkins fell silent.