“It would have been an ambitious project, but we’re talking about the architect of the Hanging Gardens. And Nebuchadnezzar certainly had the resources to pull it off. Ruthless dictators never have a shortage of cheap labor.”
Hussein nodded gravely, but did not comment.
“So it is your belief that this stairway ascends to the Esagila,” Marie persisted. “Why then did we not find the other end of it when we searched the ruins?”
“Judging by the condition of those stairs, I’d say that the shaft was sealed up during the time of Nebuchadnezzar himself. He must have piled enough rock on top of the opening to keep it hidden through thousands of years of looting.”
“And archaeology,” added Hussein with a grin.
“Never mind where it goes up,” Chiron interjected. “What we want lies in the other direction.”
“For once, I can’t fault your logic.” Kismet stuck his head and shoulders through once more. “It’s a little bit of a drop. Do we have any more rope?”
“We left all of it tied to the balcony,” Hussein answered guiltily.
“A fine bunch of Boy Scouts we’d make.” His quip earned only blank stares and he thought better of elaborating. “Well, if somebody stays behind to pull us back, we can probably boost one another high enough to reach this opening. The last one down is going have to jump pretty high.”
Hussein’s expression fell as he realized that he would be the one to remain while the others pushed deeper into the unknown, but he nevertheless volunteered to serve as the anchor. “Perhaps you will find a ladder down there, so I can join you,” he offered with a weak smile.
Kismet gave him a nod of gratitude. “How about you, Pierre? Want to sit out this round of rugged adventure and daring acrobatics?”
The Frenchman’s face revealed his inner turmoil, but his answer was unequivocal. “I have not come so far to be turned aside at the very threshold of discovery.”
“I was afraid of that,” Kismet murmured. He repositioned so that he could enter the portal feet first in a reverse belly-crawl. “I’ll wait below to help you through.”
As his thighs scraped over the rough edge, he felt the familiar sensation of losing control. With his legs dangling over nothingness—worse, dangling into the darkness of an ancient crypt underneath millions of tons of earth—he felt the urge to scramble for a safer position. It was an instinctual response and easy enough to sublimate. Nevertheless, as his torso slid deeper into the hole, his anxiety increased proportionately until at last, he was dangling above the stairway, secured only by his fingertips on the flat surface to the tunnel floor.
Marie leaned in and illuminated the stairwell with Kismet’s flashlight. It would be a tricky drop. The stairs were uniform, but the treads were shallow, providing only about a hand’s breadth of surface upon which to light. Even the slightest deviation might cause him to pitch headlong down the stairwell.
To compensate, Kismet kicked his legs, working up to a gentle pendulum motion, and at the optimum moment he let go. The momentum of his swing carried his body up the stairs, and even though his feet slipped uncertainly on the short steps, his controlled fall was less painful than a chaotic slide into the depths.
The rotten smell was stronger now that he was fully immersed in the environment, and he saw the first evidence that the original unsealing of the ancient vault had exposed it to contemporary vermin. A fine layer of dust covered the stairs along with heaps of rodent excrement, petrified with the passage of time. He quickly brushed off and shouted for Marie to descend.
The petite Frenchwoman eased through the opening and the dim artificial light from above was momentarily eclipsed by her body. Kismet felt another wave of irrational fear as darkness enveloped him, but he shook it off. As her feet dropped toward him, he hugged her legs to his chest, relieving the strain from her arms. “I’ve got you. Let go slowly and I’ll do the rest.”
She hesitated for only a moment before Kismet felt her weight shift fully against his body. It was then a simple thing to deposit her on the step beside him. She gazed back up at the illuminated opening and shook her head in despair. “Are you certain we can get back up there?”
“Piece of cake,” he replied, with more conviction than he felt, then turned his attention to the hole as well. “All right, Pierre. Your turn.”
Chiron’s approach was predictably more tentative. Kismet could hear Hussein patiently explaining how he ought to position himself, but the Frenchman seemed bent on scooting through the hole from a seated position. His focus on the older man’s plight prevented him from hearing Marie’s soft footsteps as she commenced descending, but when he reached up to take hold of Chiron’s ankles he caught the subtle movement in the corner of his eye.
“Marie!”
His shout caught her by surprise and she turned to face him with a guilty expression. Her chagrin turned to surprise and horror however as she lost her balance and wavered backward over the decline. Forgetting Chiron, Kismet impulsively reached out for her frantically waving hands, but his fingers closed on nothing. Marie gave a shriek and tumbled down the stairs.
Kismet dashed after her, shouting her name, but the steps were so steep that he could not match the runaway rate of her fall. She vanished into the darkness before he could take three strides, and each subsequent foot forward dropped him deeper into the absolute subterranean night.
Marie’s cries of surprise were quickly replaced by less strident grunts of pain, which punctuated the thudding of her body against the stone. These noises however were abruptly replaced by a sound like the breaking of tree branches.
Or bones
, thought Kismet.
“Marie?”
There was a low groan then the sound repeated. “I’m all right,” she finally said, with far less misery than he would have expected. “I’ve landed in something…I’m not sure what it is.”
“I’ll be right there.” He backtracked to the opening, where Chiron was scrambling out of the opening, and called for Hussein to throw down the flashlight. Thus armed, he stabbed the beam of light into the depths and charged after his fallen companion. Yet while he was bracing himself for the discovery of Marie’s broken form at the end of the flight, he was completely unprepared for the sight that awaited him at the bottom of the stairwell.
His initial impression was of zebra stripes: a haphazard pattern of light and dark which either reflected his light at oblique angles or swallowed it whole. Yet there was no mistaking the unique spherical shapes, each uniformly marked by a pair of smaller craters, that were scattered throughout the endless web of shadows: human skulls.
Marie’s fall and subsequent movements had left her partially submerged in the skeletal sea. As her eyes focused on the area revealed by Kismet’s light, she lost any semblance of control. However, her hysterical attempt to flee only shifted the interlocking puzzle of bones, opening a chasm that drew her deeper into the charnel embrace.
The bones were everywhere, stripped clean of flesh and gleaming white. Beyond the area where Marie had landed, the arrangement was more orderly. The corpses had been stacked in tight rows and heaped several layers deep. The descending stairs continued out into the midst of the vaulted ossuary, completely obscuring the floor.
“Hold still!” shouted Kismet, wading into the jumble. At the first crunch of bone beneath his boots, he felt an otherworldly chill; there were unhappy ghosts here.
He tried to think of it like quicksand.It was certainly swallowing Marie down like a quagmire and her frantic thrashing was only exacerbating the situation. He shouted another unheeded exhortation for her to be still, then cautiously stretched himself horizontally over the skeletal bed. For a moment, the bones shifted beneath his weight, opening a rift to snare him and he could feel thousands of fleshless fingers closing around him to pull him under. The urge to break free and scramble to safety was almost overwhelming, but he forced himself to remain motionless, with his arms and legs spread-eagled. Despite the initial settling, the bony lattice bore his weight. Buoyed by the minor success, he began rolling with deliberate slowness toward her.
Though her panic had left her deeply mired in the ossuary, Marie had regained a degree of self-control. She continued trying to extricate herself, but with more deliberation and less hysterics. When Kismet was close enough to extend a hand, she simply took hold without succumbing to the drowning victim’s impulse to drag her rescuer under.
“Good.” He tried to inject a note of optimism into his tone. “Now, carefully pull yourself toward me. Focus on trying to stretch yourself out. It’s just like swimming.”
She gave a nod then cautiously brought her other hand up to grasp his wrist. The skeletons beneath him shifted again and he felt Marie’s grip tighten as both of them settled deeper. Neither of them moved, patiently hoping the network would stabilize before swallowing them completely, and after a moment it did.
“Okay, let’s try that again.” Kismet could barely get the words out. Trepidation and exertion had conspired to rob him of his breath and left his throat so tight that his voice had to struggle to reach his lips.
Marie resumed pulling and this time the bones merely groaned in annoyance. She released her grip on his hand and extended incrementally up his forearm. In this fashion, she worked her way toward him, hand over hand as if climbing a rope. She managed to draw her torso up from the embrace of the long since departed occupants of the chamber and laid flat atop the surface, until only her legs remained caught in the snare.
She was close enough now to grasp his shoulder and her fingers knotted in the fabric of his shirt. He nodded encouragingly. “Good. I’m going to start rolling back toward the stairs. Do the same, but don’t let go.”
He waited for an affirmative reply then slowly twisted away from her. As his right cheek lighted on the irregular surface, he spied a subtle movement in the shadows. A careful turn of his wrist pointed the flashlight that way and Kismet realized with a start that he and Marie were not the only living creatures in the mass tomb. A shiny black scorpion, as long as his hand, was silently stalking them.
“Marie, don’t move a muscle.” He tried to keep the panic out of his voice, but there was a faint quaver in his undertone.
Marie did not ask for more information, but as the venomous arachnid drew closer, she began to utter a low wail. The tip of the scorpion’s tail, pregnant with a toxin that could paralyze or even kill, wavered in her direction. Kismet grimaced, but with the creature’s attention thus diverted, he saw his opening. Using the small flashlight like a club, he struck the scorpion a glancing blow that launched it several meters across the bone pile.
“Nick!” Marie’s voice was growing frantic again.
“It’s okay. There was a scorpion, but I took care of it.”
“It?” Her voice was incredulous. “What about them?”
He gingerly raised his head and peered over her supine form. In the broad circle of illumination cast by his MagLite, he saw the reason for her anxiety. An army of vermin was emerging from the bones, swarming toward them with a collective goal. There were more scorpions in their midst, along with enormous cockroaches, centipedes and dozens of other scavenger and predatory insect species.
It was easy to imagine what had happened. Once upon a time, when the bones had belonged to recently deceased slaves and prisoners, a few insects had found their way into the chamber. Trapped though they were, there was a seemingly endless feast of flesh, sustaining not only the insect and arachnid populations, but likely larger vermin such as mice and rats. The supply was not infinite however, as food began to dwindle in the closed environment, its denizens adapted to a new diet, devouring one another as occasion arose. No doubt, the scorpion’s deadly sting had moved it to the top of the food chain, but now that fresh meat had been delivered, there was no longer reason for anyone to go hungry.
Kismet turned back to roll the remaining distance to safety, then froze. Dozens more insects, spiders and scorpions had materialized and were relentlessly advancing from every direction. Before he could even begin to think about a way of hastily quitting the tomb, he espied movement on his own person. An enormous black scorpion had emerged from a nearby cavity and made its way stealthily onto his trouser leg. He could just make out its shiny carapace and the curl of its venomous tail as it scuttled along his thigh, moving higher in search of a place to plant its sting. Then he felt something tickling the back of his hand.
He flicked his eyes downward and saw a second multi-appendaged creature meticulously working its way toward the glowing lens of the MagLite. The scorpion’s pincer feet were lightly gripping the skin of his hand, securing itself with each step forward.
Kismet’s familiarity with the scuttling crab-like creature was limited. The only thing he was certain about was that he didn’t want them crawling all over him. He knew that not all members of the animal kingdom relied upon sight to stalk and locate prey. Some used sound, smell or even the ability to detect changes in body temperature. He did not even know if the stings of this particular species would prove fatal, but only that he didn’t want to find out.
There was another tickle in his hair and he barely restrained himself from reaching up to scratch the sudden itch. It occurred to him that the scorpions might have been drawn to motion, in which case the heaving of his chest as he fought to control the adrenaline coursing through his veins was like a brass band announcing his presence. He carefully sucked in another deep breath, holding it so that no movement would betray him. His heart continued to pound against the walls of his chest cavity, but slowed in response to his cautious breathing. The scorpion continued meandering along his scalp and onto his forehead.
In spite of the chill in the subterranean air, Kismet could feel perspiration leak from his pores, pooling wherever the scorpion gripped his skin. The creature stopped abruptly as if curious about this subtle change in its environment, or perhaps sensitive to the pheromones of panic that his body was pumping out in each drop of sweat. Its tail curled and flexed slowly over his left eye, and despite a furious impulse to blink, Kismet remained motionless. The scorpion on his hand meanwhile settled near the end of the flashlight, drawn to the unfamiliar warmth and light, but at the same time tentative in its approach, while the one on his leg continued its journey seemingly unaware of the living body upon which it traveled.