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Chapter 4
The Sleeping Beauty

 ark opened his eyes to complete blackness. He looked at the luminous numbers on his digital watch and realised, with dismay, that he must have fallen asleep in spite of his efforts to stay awake. Sleeping wasn’t going to get him out of there and free Esmé from Ignarius’s clutches, he told himself. He sat up, wondering what had woken him.

   It was only when he looked up in the darkness where he knew the purple glass was spread that he understood what had disturbed him. The very air seemed to be vibrating. The sound was too low—somewhere close to twenty cycles per second, Mark guessed—for him to really hear it. But he could definitely feel it. And it seemed to Mark he had heard the sound—or something very like it—before. He remembered it hadn’t felt threatening then. But it did now. For not only had he no idea what was making the sound: he might as well have been totally blind.

   Panic rose in his throat. He battened it down, telling himself how stupid it was to allow himself to be frightened by something that was, after all, only a noise. Except noises were usually made by something, even if it was only the wind.

   Thrum! Thrum! Thrum! Thrum! Where had he heard—or rather felt—that sonorous, almost grinding sound before? And why had it not called up terror as it did now? Had it been the church organ on which he’d often practised over the past two years? The notes from the largest pipes in a church organ were quite capable, he knew, of making the very walls of a church vibrate. But this noise was for some reason different—not really musical. And yet he was still sure he’d heard it before. He remembered his father saying that a pipe organ was the only instrument capable of playing down to the very edge of audibility. So what else could it be? An electronic gadget?

   He groped around trying to work out where he was in relation to his surroundings. When his fingers felt the floor come to an abrupt end he knew he had found the steps. With care he followed the edge of the first step to the right until he felt the smooth curve of the marble pillar at the centre of the tower. Then his heart felt as though it jumped into his throat. For he was sure the polished surface under his fingers moved. And at the same time the low-frequency sound seemed to get louder. As though, Mark thought, someone had turned up the bass or volume control.

   That was when he knew where he’d heard the sound before—on a recording his father had played to test a new pair of speakers. And he even remembered the recording’s somewhat odd title: How to Give Yourself a Stereo Checkout. Mr Willoughby had called the sounds “pink noise”. And many of the high and mid-range frequencies had sounded to Mark like the chirping of weird insects, causing his imagination to conjure up line upon line of huge creatures that looked more like giant cave wetas—which he’d recently seen on television—than any noise-producing insects such as crickets or cicadas. The lower frequencies had filled his mind with pictures of places underground because they had been the sort of sound he imagined would be heard in caves deep in the earth.

   But the marble pillar—four metres thick, taller than an eight-storey building and weighing many thousands of tonnes—wasn’t an underground cave. Nor was it an insect. And yet it was revolving like a turntable—rotating on its axis with such apparent accuracy that it didn’t even shake the stairs that wound around it. And didn’t crack the glass ceiling, let alone shatter it.

   What, Mark asked himself, could be the purpose of a precision engineering that on Earth was probably not possible and if it was would cost many billions of dollars to develop—apart from terrifying the very life out of him?

© Laraine Anne Barker, 1992
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