2013: Beyond Armageddon (37 page)

“Zeke? Mordecai? Are you up there?”

Nothing. He tried again. Silence.

The voice comm must be gone. Mordecai had said it probably would be.

He extended his right arm until his fingers began to slide across the welcome hardness. Reluctant to lose contact with the one thing that was keeping him from slipping over some dark precipice within himself, he kept his hand sliding over the craggy surface.

Suddenly the feel of the rock changed. The archaeologist in him snapped to attention. This was a find. He stopped to inspect it, knowing he was falling behind but confident he could catch up quickly by following the penetration line. He shone his headlamp in the direction of the find, but even at only an arm’s length the beam didn’t reach.

As he moved his head closer the light went out. Cursing his bad luck, in the next instant he thanked Mordecai for insisting that each diver have two backup lights. Hassan’s first backup was on his wrist, and only required the turn of a switch. Before turning it on, he ran his hand over the anomaly, wanting to fix its location in his mind before momentarily losing contact.

Softer than the surrounding rock, it felt smooth and spongy to the touch. When he pressed his fingertips against it, it gave slightly, then sprang back. Probing further, his first two fingers left the softness and plunged into a hole of some sort. He moved his fingers around the edges of the cavity. It wasn’t very large, and seemed to have a thin rocklike ridge.

Removing his hand, he clicked on the light on his wrist, reluctantly letting go of the penetration line to swing the light into place. It took several seconds before he found the anomaly.

An involuntary cry escaped from his throat as he jerked his head back.

A dead face stared at him.

His archaeologist’s curiosity quickly took over, and he leaned closer to inspect the bizarre find.

A disembodied skull was embedded in the stone wall of the tunnel. Judging from the amount of decay, Hassan guessed it had been here for centuries, perhaps millennia. Even so, the degree of preservation was remarkable.

Patches of skin still clung to the rotting bone. Gelatinous gray matter, the preserved remains of the eyeballs, bulged from each socket. Though death had long extinguished their luster, some final spark still gave them the appearance of staring in shock at the monstrous cruelty of being left here to rot.

As if to punctuate the horror, the lipless mouth appeared frozen in an eternal scream. The chill crawling up Hassan’s back broke into an icy sprint when he realized that the cavity surrounded by blackened, jagged teeth was where his fingers had just been.

He steadied his breathing and gathered himself. He needed to get moving. He’d fallen way behind.

He attached a small marker buoy to the penetration line to indicate the location where he’d found the skull, then began moving swiftly through the water. The need to reunite with his team temporarily took precedence over any further archaeology. A few minutes later he came to the point the dredge operator had told them about, where the shaft ended its downward slope and started going upwards. The penetration line kept going. He debated whether he should follow it. He looked at his dive computer.

From a depth of ten feet at the entrance to the tunnel, he had descended to a depth of over two hundred. The computer said he’d need two ten-minute decompression stops on the way up.

He had forty-five minutes of air left. If he spent much time exploring that next section of tunnel…

He could afford five more minutes. Then he’d have to turn the dive. The same would have to be true for Mordecai and Zeke. Where were they? Could they have gotten in trouble?

He tried the voice comm again. Nothing. He couldn’t leave without them.

He kicked his fins and entered the upward section. He hadn’t gone far when a spot of light came looming toward him, like the eye of a Cyclops descending into the deep.

A few seconds later Mordecai stopped just short of bumping into him. Using hand signals and gestures, he communicated that, yes, the voice comm wasn’t working, and that it was time to head back. On a small slate he wrote on a small slate that Zeke had insisted on finishing something and would catch up.

Mordecai began to lead them out of the tunnel.

Suddenly Zeke’s world changed.

With startling force his head burst out of the water and into open air. He struggled to get his bearings. From the chest up his body was clear of the sloshing water. He aimed his light to see what was in front of and above him.

The beam glistened off a stretch of damp, craggy rock that continued sloping upward at about a 45-degree angle. At the edge of the beam’s range, about ten yards above, he saw a roughly circular shadow. Encumbered by his equipment, he clipped the reel for the penetration line to a D-ring on his waist, then scrabbled crablike up the slope until he reached the shadow.

It was an opening. He peered inside.

The tunnel went on, flat now, at least as far as he could see. Seventy-five yards at least. He clambered up onto the flat stretch and considered whether to go on. His sudden emergence from the water hadn’t allowed for a decompression stop, but he didn’t feel any symptoms of nitrogen sickness. He needed to get back but desperately wanted to go on. This might be the tunnel to Hell. He couldn’t come this far and turn around without some idea of where it led.

He felt all right. Fatigued, but not sick. Maybe he’d gotten lucky on the bends.

Ten more minutes wouldn’t kill him. He set his timer, then took off his tank and fins, leaving his booties on. Their hard rubber soles weren’t designed for this rough terrain, but they were better than nothing. He began walking ahead, focusing his light on the ground. For all he knew, his next step could bring him to the edge of a sheer underground cliff.

The ground was much drier here. Thirty to forty yards in diameter, the shaft appeared to be mostly rock, with damp earth here and there in the nooks and crannies. He’d gone about a hundred yards when it abruptly changed course.

It was going down again. His light only revealed the first ten yards or so. It was clear of water, so he decided to venture a little farther.

In the otherwordly silence, he jumped when his wrist alarm went off. He decided he could spare just a few more minutes to get a feel for this new stretch of tunnel.

He’d only gone ten or fifteen steps into it when he began to feel uneasy. The distance from the boat, everything he had to negotiate to get back to it, the fact that he had no help if anything went wrong—all were factors in the sense of dread slowly coiling itself around his psyche. But there was something more.

A palpable sense of foreboding hung in the air down here, almost seeming to ooze from the walls, closing in around him. Still he pressed ahead.

Finally he stopped and probed the darkness all around, looking for any distinctive feature to mark his place before he left.

A gasp escaped his throat.

A skull was embedded in the stone wall.

Zeke moved warily toward it until the lifeless face hovered only a few feet from his own. Shadows danced in the empty eye sockets. Caused by his shifting light, they gave the disturbing impression that the thing had come to life. Something about the skull’s features hinted to Zeke of a sneer.

His imagination was running away with him. That could be a sign of nitrogen narcosis. He needed to get out of here and come back fresh. He turned to go, but was unable to resist shining his light on the opposite wall before he went.

Another skull hung there, its hollow eyes seeing nothing—yet seeing everything. He shone the light first at one, then the other, back and forth, back and forth.

They looked like two sentinels, two diabolic guardians, decorating either side of an entranceway.

An hour later they were all safely aboard the catamaran. After quick showers, the divers grabbed bottled waters and met in the control room, where Leah and Unger waited anxiously to hear what had happened.

“It’s a tunnel of some sort,” Mordecai said. “Where it goes, and for what purpose, we can’t know until we do a full investigation. It goes down, then up. We were five, ten minutes into the into the uphill section when I realized Hassan was no longer behind us. I went to check on him while Zeke kept going as far as he could. I’ll let Zeke tell what he found.”

“From the point where you turned around, the upward slope goes another twenty, thirty yards, then—all of a sudden—it breaks free of the water. It’s still underground, but somehow it’s above the level of the water and you’re on dry land. From there the slope goes up another ten yards or so, then levels off, like a plateau. That section runs for about another hundred yards, then it starts going down again. The downward section was free of water too, at least what I could see. I only went a little ways into it, because I knew I had to get back. How far it goes and where to, there’s only one way to find out.”

Mordecai nodded. “We can figure out that plan in the War Room.”

“I didn’t tell you the most bizarre part,” Zeke said. “In that last downward section, there were two skulls embedded in the walls. One on each side, like decorative sentinels, guarding an entranceway.”

“I saw one too,” Hassan said. He described the skull. “The worst was the eyes. There seemed to be a spark of life left in them. Shock. Like they couldn’t believe this was happening. I never looked to see if there was one on the other wall.”

“Did you have the feeling something else was in the tunnel?” Zeke asked. “A presence?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Those skulls would make anyone feel uneasy,” Zeke said, “but it was more than that.”

“Uneasy,” Hassan said. “A good word to describe it. Mordecai, I can think of no reason for these skulls to be there. Can you?”

He shrugged. “Mining went on in this general area thousands of years ago, when it was dry land. Slaves were used to work in the mineshafts, digging out the copper that gave rise to the Bronze Age. Sodom and Gomorrah would have existed during that period. Who knows? Maybe if a worker got too slow, they lopped off his head and stuck it up there, as an example to keep the other workers in line.”

“So you think maybe that’s a mineshaft?” Zeke said.

“Could be. Could be many things. I’m just giving you theories my mind is trained to give.”

“Whatever it is,” Zeke said, “we need to check it out. Let’s figure out the strategy for going the rest of the way, then start tomorrow, when we’re fresh.”

On the trip back to base, Zeke tried to think of more pleasant things, but his mind kept returning to that opening in the earth, wondering if it was the doorway to Hell.

Late that night Unger was in the room with the relics, trying to reach hesychasm with a very specific goal in mind. Tonight he must purge himself completely of the stubborn remnants of Anthony Unger. His former venal self was polluting the vessel he’d spent years purifying as John the Baptist. Sowing his seeds of doubt and jealousy, Anthony Unger was the opening through which Satan might enter. Tonight that portal must be sealed off forever.

He sat in one of the hotel armchairs, near the center of the makeshift altar he’d fashioned by placing folding tables end to end. Jesus’s burial shroud was fastened around his shoulders like a cloak. On his head was the Crown of Thorns. Not pushed down, merely resting there. He didn’t want his blood tainting any blood of Jesus that might still be on the thorns. The blood-stained Sudariam was around his face, just as it had been around the face of Jesus in the tomb. With it pulled over his nose like a mask, he might be inhaling actual particles of Jesus that had remained embedded in the fabric. He felt his faith strengthening as the sacred energy flowed into him.

He’d left the chests with the crucifixes and holy water on the floor at either end of the altar, unsure if the folding tables could support their weight. The lids of the chests were open so he could feel the full effect of the relics inside. Pilate’s mirror was in front of his chair.

Unger closed his eyes. As his mind cleared, he saw himself walking along a golden path. Ahead, he saw Jesus on the cross that fateful day. Satisfied that he was now ready for divine communion, he opened his eyes and stared into Pilate’s mirror, hoping to see something to reassure him that his ministry was still important.

The faint flutterings of an image began to appear, gradually gaining strength. It was not the image he had hoped to see.

His monk’s clothing slowly disappeared and was replaced by an impeccable suit and tie. His beard got shorter and shorter until he was completely clean shaven. His unkempt hair became a neatly manicured stylish cut.

He was looking at his vain former self. In the mirror Anthony Unger preened, smoothing back his hair, adjusting the knot on his tie, looking at himself from all angles until he was satisfied.

The gigantic head of a serpent burst up from the bottom of the mirror, its huge mouth open. The image jolted him back in his chair so hard he almost fell over.

Like some impossibly large python, the serpent clamped down on Unger’s reflection in the mirror, halfway up his body. With deliberate swallowing movements it slowly drew him, screaming and writhing, into its body. The serpent’s eyes glowed a demonic red.

He tried to look away but couldn’t. Some palpable force kept his eyes locked on his own body being devoured. Finally the ingestion was complete, and the snake’s swollen body lazily withdrew back into the bottom of the mirror. Just before it disappeared completely, it turned its head to glower at Unger. He could have sworn it was smiling.

Then it was gone.

Numb with horror, he continued to stare at the mirror, waiting for his own image to reappear. Instead he saw only an empty chair. It was as if he had ceased to exist, as if his soul had been swallowed.

He jumped up and began to pace. He had to do something to reclaim his destiny. His true self. Only as John the Baptist did he have any reason to live. What was his purpose now? What did God want him to do?

He heard tapping at the door. Someone punching in the security code. It had to be Zeke. He was the only other one who had access. Thank goodness. He needed to see a friendly face.