Canyon of the Sphinx (40 page)

Marcus cast his wife a
reproachful glance; she was coming off sounding high-handed, as if Murphy’s
project wasn’t nearly good enough for her presence. She caught Marcus’
expression.

“Sorry,” she said to Christopher.
“I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. I just meant that I like to be prepared
for anything, that’s all. I’ve done this kind of thing a few times and know to
expect the unexpected.”

Christopher gave her a lop-sided
smile. “I defer to your experience, of course. You’re the professional. I’m
just sorry we don’t have everything you need.”

“It’s not that I need it, but I’d
like to have it,” she went down on her knees, crawling to the yawning mouth of
the hole. “Give me a flashlight, some rope, a couple of flares and a bottle of
water and I think we can get going.”

Christopher moved to gather the
items from his crew of people hovering around them. They hadn’t been prepared
for any manner of exploration today so the selection was limited. Marcus took
the rope and shoved a couple of flares in his back pockets. Kathlyn also took
another length of rope they had been using on the bobcat as well as one of the
machetes they had brought with them. Mark and Otis also loaded up, leaving
Debra Jo, Larry and Andy to anchor the team from the outside along with
Kimberly.

 Otis made sure to take
Christopher’s video camera from the foreman of the dig, noticing the battery
was only three-quarters charged. He hoped it would be enough. He’d been on
these little expeditions before that had lasted days, not hours.

 More than any of them, Otis knew
what to expect on these jaunts. They weren’t simple. He thought this one was
rather rushed, but if Kathlyn was willing to go along half-prepared, he would,
too.

The last two members of the team
saddled up. Adam and Tony completed the group. Though Tony wasn’t an
archaeologist, he was protection, back up and military brains. Marcus wanted
him along and no one questioned him.

 Once Kathlyn had everything she
thought she might need, she sank to her knees before the jagged opening and
switched on the MagLite. Studying the black, dank hole carefully, she entered.
Christopher followed closely, as did Marcus, Mark, Otis, Adam and Tony covering
the rear.

They were able to stand once they
moved through the hole. It was surprisingly roomy. The atmosphere was dank,
eerie, as one would have expected in a chamber than hadn’t seen human
occupation for thousands of years. Kathlyn felt the ghosts the moment she
entered, howling through her senses and filling her brain. But she fought the
sensation of Death that surrounded her and battled the instinct to turn back;
she pushed forward. There was a job to do and she would be damned if she wasn’t
going to do it.

A tall, rectangular-shaped
entrance stretched over their heads and she stood under the corbelled arch,
shining the flashlight into the void beyond. She could see a large hall; so
large, apparently, that the flashlight beam didn’t go all the way to the end of
it. It was just a wide-open room as far as she could see.

 While Mark and Tony remained
outside the entry, Marcus stood over to the right of his wife, writing
furiously in the notebook he had brought with him. Even though he was an
Egyptologist, he was foremost an archaeologist – a trained observer. Copious
notes were part of the package. The last time he had entered an unopened tomb
had been four years ago when he had entered Ay’s final resting place. He’d had
tape recorders, two-way headsets, and all manner of advanced recording devices.
Now he was back to the basics; truth be told, he didn’t miss the fancy stuff.
Too much could go wrong. He was perfectly comfortable with the bare-bones,
unlike Kathlyn.

Christopher was off to the left,
inspecting the archway with a trained eye. Adam stood behind him, sketching
quickly, while Otis filmed the arch the best he could. It was a primitive
camera without a light source or an adjustable lens. He hoped it would come out
on tape.

“The only carving I can see is
something that looks like a cat,” Christopher said. “But nothing like I would
expect. The ancient Mesoamericans would decorate their doorways and temples
with spells, usually in praise of whatever god the temple was dedicated to.
There was usually so much of it that it looked like graffiti. I think the
Egyptians did the same thing to a certain extent. Right, Dr. Burton?”

“They sure did,” Marcus replied,
focused on what he was writing.

Christopher ran his hand over one
of the dark, lichen-covered stones. “I don’t ever recall seeing a temple or
place of worship not covered with incantations, though I’m sure there are some
examples. Any examples that you know of, Dr. Trent?”

Kathlyn was having difficulty
shaking the sensation of doom. It was everywhere. She back-tracked slightly,
gazing up at the archway he was inspecting. “La Tierra Dorada de los Jaguares,”
she said softly.

“I’ll be damned,” Christopher
murmured, realization filling him. “This could be where that legend came about.
Someone saw the cats on the temple and the lost city became The Gilded Land of
the Jaguars.”

Kathlyn went back into the
chamber with Murphy still talking to her. Marcus glanced up from his notebook
when she didn’t reply to Christopher’s chatter; she looked strained and distant.

“Kathlyn,” he called softly. “You
okay?”

She nodded shortly and he knew
she wasn’t. He put the pen down. “What’s wrong?”

She didn’t look at him. She kept
her eyes fixed on the dark chamber beyond. Suddenly, she quivered as if a giant
chill ran through her body.

 “I don’t feel anything good,”
she said. “I don’t like it in here at all.”

“Like what?”

She looked at him, then. “Death.
Horrible, violent death.”

He read the apprehension in her
face and squeezed her arm encouragingly. “Can you continue or would you rather
wait here?”

She shook her head. “Hell no. The
heebie-jeebies aren’t going to stop me from doing what I love to do.”

Marcus smiled, watching her walk
into the dark chamber beyond. Wanting to keep a very close eye on her, he
followed. Tony wandered in behind them.

The musty, creepy hall was
enormous, and the dampness was overwhelming. Kathlyn shined her light around
the walls, which were graduated from bottom to top like the slopes of the
pyramid. It was shaped like an inverted cone, with precisely cut blocks of
dark, moss-covered stone jutting out to form a sort of serrated edge. The ceiling
was easily forty feet above her head, an architectural marvel of exactly fitted
blocks.

 But it was a strange place. The
walls were completely devoid of any ceremonial carvings, etchings, or writings.
It was, literally, a giant, stale, bare room. The flashlights barely made a
dent on the sheer scale or blackness of the space. But in the center of this
room was a solid limestone block the size of an Egyptian sarcophagus. It was
enormous. Marcus’s light fell on the rectangular slab and he went right to it.

Kathlyn felt like she was being
followed by a thousand spirits, clamoring around her, desperate to be heard.
She saw Marcus move to the stone block and moved quickly to him, haunted,
trying to shake the specters that followed.

“Look at this,” she whispered,
careful not to touch the block as she took a good look. “An altar of some
kind?”

His trained eye inspected the
surface, shining bleak and harsh in the beam of the flashlight.

“Hard to say,” he said neutrally.
“It could be.…”

“Over here!” came a shout back
from the direction of the entrance. Mark was waving them over. “We’ve found
something!”

Christopher, Adam, Tony, Kathlyn
and Marcus raced back to the entrance. Mark was pointing over his head, to the
corbel that crowned the strangely shaped entrance. Otis had a flashlight beam
shining on it and they could barely make out some etchings carefully carved on
the dark, hard stone above.

進入精選的在你的死亡中將是我們的生活

Christopher and Adam strained to
see what it was. “Can’t see from this distance,” Christopher said, his voice
laced with excitement. “Adam, get a tracing of it and get it identified and
translated. Fast.”

Adam nodded sharply, moving to back
to the hole. While he shouted out orders and the dark-skinned foreman clamored
into the hole to figure out how they were going to get a tracing twelve feet
above their head, Christopher continued to stare up at the barely visible
inscription. Marcus and Kathlyn were on either side of him. The corbel, like
the rest of the stone, was covered with moss and mud. Only Mark’s sharp,
lingering eye had located it.

After a moment, Christopher
slowly shook his head.

“It looks like the same writing
that is on the sphinxes,” he said, a sense of confusion and excitement creeping
into him. “Can you see it, Dr. Burton?”

Marcus peered up at it; the crest
of the doorway was several feet over their heads. “It’s hard to tell.” He was
never one to get excited or commit to something until he’d had a chance to
thoroughly study it. “Let’s see what the tracing looks like and go from there.”

The God of Egyptology had spoken.
He wasn’t in Egypt, but his commands held the same power. Christopher lingered
under the doorway, absorbing what he could of the writing, as Adam pulled
Kimberly through the hole and told her to climb on the foreman’s shoulders.
Somehow they were going to try to do the tracing using a human ladder. The last
that Christopher saw of them, hoisting Kimberly up onto the broad shoulders of
the Central American employee, it seemed to be working.

Marcus and Kathlyn went back into
the main room while Tony stayed by the door. Marcus opened up his notebook
again and began writing while Kathlyn resumed her inspection of the stone
block, walking around the entire object on a careful visual inspection. It
looked simple, and harmless, enough. But looks could be deceiving. The moment
she put a hand on it, violent flashes of light filled her brain and she
grunted, physically impacted by the spiritual vibrations. The first two flashes
shook her and nothing more; the successive explosions rocked her off-balance
and she staggered.

Marcus’ notebook ended up on the
ground. He raced to Kathlyn’s side, holding her so she wouldn’t fall. This is
just what he’d feared, but not so soon. They were barely ten minutes into their
exploration and, already, she was on overload.

“Kathlyn,” he said evenly. “I’m
here, sweetheart. What’s going on?”

Christopher, Mark and Otis had
heard the commotion and came running. Once again, Kathlyn was feeling what the
hidden city was trying to tell them, the secrets of long past. This is what she
did and what she was paid for. Here in this ghostly place, it seemed fitting
that the spirits would speak to her. With every breath, every emotion, she
allowed herself to feel their silent cries.

“Oh… God,” she breathed. “I can
see them.”

“See what?” Marcus asked gently.

She felt as if something was
slamming into her chest. Crying out, she grabbed her sternum, feeling agony
from an invisible source. Pain shot through her body as phantom knives cut into
her.

“The people, the people,” she
chanted softly. One hand was still on the stone block, feeling whatever
energies were imparted to the stone those millennia ago. “They’re killing them.
Ripping their hearts out. My God, I feel it.”

Marcus yanked her hand away from
the stone block, but it wasn’t enough. She was still linked to it, spiritually
and physically. Tears streamed down her face from the pain and mental anguish
she sensed.

“Who’s killing the people?”
Marcus was feeling the familiar fear for her health. “What’s going on?”

She grabbed her chest and folded
forward. Marcus held her tightly, frightened to death that she was having a
heart attack. Given the fact that Kathlyn had, all her life, lived with a
family-trait heart defect, he was understandably terrified.

“Kathlyn,” his lips were against
her forehead. “Sweetheart, come back to me. Snap out of it.”

The brilliant light flashes had
stopped as suddenly as they had started. Left in their wake was extreme fear
and sorrow, like waking up from a violent nightmare. The emotions of what she
had seen were on the surface. Kathlyn wept uncontrollably, still clutching her
chest.

 “Oh, my God,” she gasped, sinking
back on her buttocks. Marcus lowered her carefully to the ground. “These men
were ripping people’s hearts out, right there on that stone. It’s an altar,
Marcus. A sacrificial altar.”

Christopher’s concerned face
loomed next to Marcus’. “Are you sure?” he asked.

She nodded, wiping the tears on
her face. “I saw… men with robes and these weird headdresses on. They had pale
skin and strange features. They didn’t look like any ancient Americans that
I’ve ever seen depicted in any kind of art.”

“And they were killing people?”
Marcus asked.

Her gaze moved between Marcus and
Christopher. “Yes, but what was so weird was the fact that nobody was
panicking. It looked… looked as if these people had gone willingly. They were
submissive, prayerful, resigned.” She took a deep breath, struggling to calm
herself. “It was like they were just accepting their fate.”