She blinked half a dozen more times, a reflex of her eyes trying to adjust to the total absence of light, then lifted a hand up to her face, but it was like moving through treacle; eventually her fingers reached her cheek and made their way numbly to her eyes. Her eyelashes brushing against her fingers told her that they were indeed open, and that there was nothing obstructing them.
Her second hand made its way towards the first and together she let them run over her face and body. To her relief, everything was there as it should have been.
Sensation, slowly, began returning and she started to feel a cold, hard surface against her back and head. She was lying down on what her palms told her was a flat, metallic material.
Gail swung her body weight over to the right, ending up on her hands and knees. She craned her neck upwards and peered into nothingness: where am I? she wondered.
Placing her hands palms-down, she shifted along the floor for several minutes, first in one direction, then in another, then back again, until she had returned to what her mental map told her was pretty much her starting point. There were no walls, no chairs or tables. No grooves in the floor and no grit or dirt. In her immediate environment, there was nothing.
Somehow her subconscious mind knew it would be pointless standing up in complete darkness, and so she didn’t try.
She opened her mouth, but no words came. Closing it, she forced a gulp and tried again.
“Hello?” The word sounded muffled, as if by the darkness that surrounded her. “Hello?” This time she heard herself more clearly. She pushed away from the floor with her hands and rose to a kneeling position and shouted the word out: “HELLO!”
From the darkness, nothing replied.
“Where the hell am I?” she exclaimed.
She let herself fall back onto her bottom. Where the hell am I?
She thought back to the evening’s events. She had been with the Professor in his office at the Museum; he had just finished telling her about the book. The book! She remembered now: he had lied to her about the Library at Amarna, about the book on the plinth. All these years, he had known the truth and yet he had never told her.
Aliens in Egypt! No wonder he had never said anything: his career would have been in ruins. If what he had told her was true, then everything she thought she knew about Amarna, Nefertiti and Akhenaten had to be false. She tried to imagine the pictures the Professor had described; of towering cities with flying cars. It was like something out of a science-fiction movie.
So how had she ended up here – wherever here was? She remembered that there had been a knock at the office door, and then – nothing.
She shook her head in frustration. How could she not remember more?
There was a knock at the door, and then – the Professor had said something. What had he said? And then the door had opened. After which she drew a blank. Nothing.
“Bloody hell!” she cursed herself for not knowing. “Professor!” she shouted, but there was no reply.
She suddenly remembered her husband. “George!” she exclaimed. She fished around in her pockets and was surprised to find her phone. As it flipped open, the light from the screen almost blinded her, and she blinked several times before she was comfortable with it.
There was no signal. Wherever she was, whoever had put her there, had either no concerns about her contacting the outside world, or they knew that she would not have a signal. To all intents and purposes, her phone was nothing more than a glorified pocket-watch.
She snapped the phone shut and was plunged into darkness again. She blinked several times and banished the static once more; each time her eyes closed she fancied she could still see the screen of the phone, shining brightly in the palm of her hand. Opening the phone again, she was once more bathed in its blue-grey light.
No more than a glorified pocket-watch, or a torch.
The phone pushed the darkness back at least three metres, whereupon it started losing intensity. Pointing the screen directly in front of her and at arm’s reach, she studied the matt-grey floor. Shifting her body round, she noted its uniformity in all directions; it had seemed metallic to her touch, but she had never seen anything like it. Even the smoothest of floors always tended to have a joint, where two sheets or tiles would meet. Here, there was none of that. It was like a gymnasium floor, but more perfect.
Cautiously, she stood up, immediately increasing the draw distance of the light. The absence of any objects in her field of view meant there were also no shadows; judging distance was difficult, and the uniform floor didn’t make it any easier.
Almost against her will, her left leg moved forward, followed soon after by her right. Before she could think, she was walking in a straight line, as if the act of standing up had given her purpose, direction.
“Hello?”
Still no response.
Her pace quickened, despite her limited visibility.
“Hello!”
Nothing.
She was almost running now, and still the perfect smooth floor spread out before her. Her voice boomed out into obscurity, again and again, and not one reply came back. In her mind, she knew that if the room she was in had walls, eventually her voice would hit one and return to her as an echo. And yet when she shouted there was no reverberation, as if the darkness was swallowing the sound waves whole.
Slowing to a walk, she stopped to catch her breath. Her phone told her she had been running for just under a minute, and moving forwards for a little over that. In over sixty seconds, she had seen nothing but the flat monotonous floor.
“How bloody big is this place?” she wondered out loud. “I mean, for crying out loud! I’m not exactly an Olympic champion, but in a minute I can run a good two hundred metres, easily!” She turned around, pointing the phone in all directions. “And for all I know I’m probably back where I bloody started.”
She laughed. “And now I’m talking to myself: first sign of madness.”
Exasperated, she dropped to her knees, before lying flat on her back, to stare up at the ceiling of obscurity that pressed down on her. Her phone snapped shut against her chest; its light extinguished, she lay in darkness once more, her eyes shut.
As her breathing evened out she became increasingly aware of a dull ringing in her ears; the kind of ringing that she remembered from years ago would assault her ear-drums after stepping out of a busy nightclub into an otherwise peaceful night-time street. She held her breath for a moment and concentrated on the noise, wishing it away with her mind. Instead, its intensity grew. Sticking her fingers in her ears, she scrunched up her face and begged the ringing to stop. It continued, louder than before, throbbing against the inside of her skull until it was all she could do to press her palms hard against her eyes, her fingers still pushed firmly inside her ears, hoping to force it back. The ringing was now so loud that she could not hear herself breathe.
Rolling onto her knees, she arched her back and pushed her chin upwards. She opened her mouth and felt the rush of air streaming from her windpipe as she screamed. The ringing was now so omnipresent that it drowned her cries before they had even left her throat.
Gail pulled her head down towards her knees and clasped her hands behind her neck, ripping tufts of her hair in the process.
“Stop it!” she moaned. “Stop it, please!”
The ringing persisted, louder than before, louder than any music she had ever heard, more piercing than the sirens of an ambulance. Managing to pull one hand from her head, she felt for the phone, but it wasn’t in her pocket any more. With what little faculty still remained for thought, she realised that she had placed it on her chest when lying down. As she had rolled over, it must have fallen to the floor. In a panic, she groped around her with one hand. As she stretched her arm round behind her, her hand struck the phone and sent it flying. Spinning round, she brought her other hand down and scrambled in vain to find it.