The Crypt Trilogy Bundle

by Bill Thompson

  Five members of the rebel band were in jail in Guatemala City, facing charges of kidnapping and terrorism. The wounded one who’d been in the cave joined the four who surrendered when Rolando died at the camp. The last rebel, the one Paul shot in the stomach, died before they could get him out of the jungle.

  The Ochoa cousins Ruben and Pablo were the boat drivers that night. The authorities questioned them off and on for two weeks. The police wanted them charged as accessories, but the federal prosecutor declined to press charges, saying their involvement was at best incidental and their biggest error was failing to disclose what had happened. The two went free and still run boats on the Usumacinta today.

  Then there were the funerals. Over four days Paul went to every one of them. Why, he didn’t fully understand himself. It wasn’t out of a sense of obligation. It was more to honor the people with whom he’d become bonded through fate – people who thought they knew him, but really didn’t know anything at all.

  The first funeral had been in a small town near Cuernavaca, Mexico. He had been the only non-Hispanic at the service for Manuel, the bus driver whom Paul had known for only two days. He’d stood outside the Catholic church, waiting to see if any of the others would come. When no one did, he went inside and paid his respects.

  He flew from Mexico City to Kansas City the next day and drove to a Presbyterian church for a memorial service honoring David Tremont, the insurance agent and archaeology buff. David had been lost on the Usumacinta River that night when he tried to swim to shore. Paul stood across the street and watched. Just before the service started, Doc and Mary Spence arrived in a taxi. Paul walked away, hailed a cab and went back to the airport. He’d known he might run into some of the other people who’d been on the bus. These were the same people who still wondered what Paul Silver actually was all about. He’d begun the process of separation from everyone, and he couldn’t allow that window to open again.

  In Waco, Texas, there was a graveside service for Win Phillips, the Baylor psychology professor who’d brought his girlfriend, Alison Barton, along for a fun trip to Mexico. Rolando shot Win point-blank just to make an example. Doc and Mary showed up for that service too; they lived nearby, up I-35 in Dallas. Alison didn’t come; Mark later told him Alison’s therapist thought it would be too difficult for her. Once he saw the Spences, Paul left once again.

  Finally there was Hailey. That was the difficult one, the only one where he had a real connection. He had to attend her funeral. He had loved her spirit, her grit and determination, her enthusiasm for life. Maybe he loved her too. Who knew? That concept was so unfathomable he would never understand if it applied to her. What he did know was that he had lost something real, something tangible and he’d never have it again.

  He went to a little congregational church in Napa, sat in a rental car across the street, and saw every other person still alive from the kidnapping arrive one by one. Mark gave a eulogy. He let Paul read it later. It was a tribute to a strong female who’d helped them all in different ways.

  “You should have been there,” Mark told Paul later, not knowing that he’d sat outside.

  She was laid to rest in a beautiful cemetery surrounded by vineyards. The guests stood in a circle as the pastor gave his final remarks. No one noticed a person standing by a tree a hundred yards away. He watched them listen to the closing prayer – the last words for Hailey Knox. As her casket was lowered into the ground, he watched the one person he could have loved leave him forever.

  From brutal experience Paul knew how dangerous it was to open himself to anyone – anyone at all. He’d let it happen with Hailey. He had never felt emotions like that in his entire life. Even his parents hadn’t deserved nor received that kind of love: unconditional, caring and free. His father had sold him. That hurt lasted for decades, but he’d overcome it. Then Hailey showed up, and for the first time in his life he cared about someone. Now she had been ripped from his heart. Two months after it happened, he was handling things fairly well most of the time. Only rarely did he allow himself to open the little compartment in his brain that held the hurt, the memories, the thoughts of her – holding her, loving her, touching her face.

  Sitting here tonight in this cave where he’d held her as she died, Paul allowed it to overwhelm him once again. This would be the last time. It had to be. He consciously let go, opening the memory box. Here came the tears. Here came the memories laced with stabs of pain – the vivid recollection of how he’d carried her out of the jungle in his arms, how he’d screamed at the others when they tried to help him. “She’s mine! She’s mine! You can’t take her!” He’d yelled it over and over as they walked down the trail for an hour to the shoreline, Paul leading the way, carrying her lifeless body.

  Tonight he let the emotions out for longer than ever before, because he was back here where it all happened and because this was the last time. He allowed himself to feel the torrential gushes of grief. He experienced his feelings like he’d savor a fine wine. He drank in the horror, the loss of the first person he’d ever cared for.

  Then it was over. He forced out the pain, the anguish, the knife-slashing hurt that burned through him. He locked the compartment for the last time. He became cold and distant again, back to who he really was. He focused on tomorrow and the opening of the doorway. He returned to the reality of a future all by himself, with no feelings to complicate his life. Just him. Nobody else. Just like it had always been.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  Paul sat on the beach at dawn, watching the floatplane land smoothly on the river. He saw Mark wave as the pilot pulled close to shore, opened the door and dropped an anchor. Mark jumped out, gave him a bear hug, and they waded back to help the pilot unload four large rolling suitcases.

  After the plane left, Paul handed over a pistol and holster. “You know this place as well as I do. You’ve heard the stories about bandidos. We don’t need any surprises.”

  Mark understood. He unbuckled his belt and put the weapon on his hip.

  “Did you bring your rock collection?” Paul joked as they struggled to move the heavy bags.

  “Gotta have the tools to open that door. You can thank me later that these bags are on wheels. These damn things weigh a ton. American Airlines is going to make a profit this quarter purely because of my overweight baggage fees!”

  Even with wheels, the going was tough. First there was the sandy shore and then the trail itself. When Paul had arrived yesterday, he saw that his sentries hadn’t kept it up in the past two months. He used a machete to clear the pathway better, but it was still rough going. Each of them tugged two large cases.

  The trail that had earlier taken Paul an hour to walk took twice that long this time. When they finally got to the sinkhole, they decided it was too dangerous to maneuver the heavy cases down the steep, rocky pathway. They unloaded everything up on the surface. He’d brought along portable lights, saws, drills and an assortment of hand tools. He was ready for anything.

  They hauled down his personal gear and the equipment they planned to use first. They pushed and pulled everything through the tunnel, and soon they were standing in front of the painted wall. Two strong LED lights lit the room like they were outside.

  Mark and Paul took turns operating a tile saw with a diamond blade, cutting slowly along the seams of the doorway. They’d taken over a hundred pictures of the necropolis seals they were going to destroy in the process, an unfortunate but necessary step to open the door.

  Two hours later they stopped for lunch and a beer, then they went back to work. By mid-afternoon they had sawed along each seam, and the room was filled with dust. They paused to let it settle, and then dragged a hand-operated ratchet lever winch – a come-along – into the room. They snaked wires with hooks on the ends through both sides of the stone they’d cut out and prepared the come-along. There was no way to know how long it would take to remove the door – if it were four feet thick, it might take days due to the weight, moving it an inch at a ti
me.

  They got a big surprise when they started turning the winch. The rock door slid forward easily. It wasn’t that heavy! Only an hour or so using the winch and the rock would be out of the doorway. The exciting part – what at least they hoped was the exciting part – was about to begin.

  Off and on all afternoon they’d tossed around ideas about what was behind the door. The hieroglyphs were indisputably Egyptian, and Hailey claimed they were the same as Tutankhamun’s burial chamber glyphs. How in hell did they get here? Did Egyptians paint them? Why?

  Earlier they’d discussed if there could have been Egyptian activity here. Paul found Mark refreshingly open-minded and willing to engage in lively debate. As Mark worked the winch, Paul asked, “What do you think about Atlantis?” Most academics would have shied away from that question like you’d asked if they believed in aliens.

  “I think there could be something there. For millennia everyone thought Troy was fictional, created purely in the mind of Homer. Then Schliemann came along and discovered it was real. If the scientific community’s going to accept that Atlantis existed, it was far advanced technologically and it sank into the ocean in a cataclysmic event, there needs to be proof. Somebody somewhere needs to find something that says, ‘This is from Atlantis.’ People have tried to put Atlantis everywhere – Thera or other places in the Mediterranean, outside the straits of Gibraltar or in the middle of the ocean. It’s a fact that volcanic eruptions decimated cities like Pompeii and islands like Santorini. But who knows about Atlantis? You have to have proof. What that’ll be and when it’ll happen – if ever – who knows?”

  “Maybe it’ll happen in a matter of minutes, right behind this door,” Paul said with a smile.

  “Wouldn’t that be exciting? After my fellow academics finish decades of ridiculing us and admit they were wrong, maybe we’d be famous!”

  Suddenly the rock door slid out the rest of the way smoothly. It turned out to be far less thick than the walls surrounding it. With the door pulled out, there was a narrow opening a few inches around the sides and top, and darkness behind the door.

  “Another few tugs with the winch and we can crawl through,” Mark said.

  Paul was excited. “Want to have a sneak peek? A little ‘Howard Carter moment’? Let’s get the floodlight and see if we can tell what’s back there.”

  As eager as kids on the last day of school, they set up the light. Mark flipped a switch and the powerful beam was directed at the crack outlining the door. He gestured to Paul.

  “Be my guest – you first. It’s your find … Hailey’s, actually,” he corrected himself with a pat on Paul’s shoulder. “I wish she were here…”

  “Please don’t…” Paul’s voice quavered. He pushed away the thought, ducked under the light, pressed his face against the narrow crack, and looked inside.

  “What do you see?”

  “Wonderful things!” Paul laughed, using the answer Howard Carter gave Lord Carnarvon when they opened Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922. “Actually, the room’s huge – much bigger than this one. The angle of the light’s not great, and there’s not much light getting through this little crack. I can’t see the walls. There are some square stones out in the middle of the room, and there may be things sitting on top of them. They’re like displays at a museum. Here, have a look.”

  The archaeologist was eager with anticipation. Whatever this was, he’d never expected to find it in Mesoamerica. He put his face against the rock and stared, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the half-light. Then he saw what Paul had described – pedestals maybe three feet square and four feet tall. He noticed that something was sitting on top of each one. There were maybe twenty of them in all.

  “It does look like a display at a museum. How about we quit wondering about all this and get this damn rock pulled out enough so we can get in there?”

  “Here’s a few ideas. It’s almost eight o’clock. We can stop where we are and have dinner, then come back and open it up, however long it takes. Or we can keep going and skip dinner until we’re finished. Or we can stop now, eat, sleep and pick up tomorrow when we’re fresh.”

  Mark smiled. “I’m going to assume you threw that last one in just for kicks. I’m a scientist, a professor. I don’t get chances like this every day. If you think I’m going to vote to stop for the night, you’re crazy!”

  “Yeah, I figured that one wasn’t really an option. I’m excited to see what’s in there, but think about this. It could take another hour to finish winching the stone. After that, there’s no way we’re going to take a break until we’ve seen whatever there is to see. As much as I want to keep going now, I think the best idea is to stop and eat dinner. Let’s take a break, come back, and keep going until we’re finished.” They crawled back into the other chamber.

  There was much more camping gear now than before. When Paul hired twenty-four seven guards, he bought the basics to set up housekeeping. There was a camp stove, insulated packs, lister bags to capture rainwater, and basic provisions for months of occupancy.

  “Everything your basic Boy Scout troop needs, we have,” he said as he started water boiling on the stove. Soon they were eating military surplus freeze-dried MREs – meals ready-to-eat. Mark thought they were surprisingly good. Coffee followed, then a bathroom break. Mark glanced at his watch. 8:45.

  “Ready?”

  “Getting antsy?” Paul smiled.

  “Don’t tell me you’re changing your mind. Want to sleep now? If you do, I’ll see you tomorrow. I’m going back!” He crawled into the tunnel with Paul close behind.

  It took forty-five minutes to move the rock enough for them to slip behind it. Mark squeezed sideways into the room and Paul passed the light pedestal to him. He set it up and aimed it just as Paul came through.

  The room was an enormous natural cavern. The ceiling was low, since they were only twenty feet below ground level, but the room itself was at least forty feet wide and twice that long. It was cool but not damp; the humidity was very low. That would be beneficial if there were papyrus or vellum documents in here.

  They looked at the first of the pedestals. It was square with the kind of perfect corners that proved it was man-made. Sitting on top was a complex metal object about two feet tall. It had several round dials and sat on a base. It was covered in numerals and characters.

  “What the hell is this?” Mark asked.

  “Don’t ask me how it could be here, but it looks like an astrolabe to me.”

  “I think you’re right. You know the Greeks used them for astronomical calculations. Theirs were pretty complex, but I’ve never seen anything as complicated as this. It looks like an astrolabe on steroids. There are parts of this thing that make no sense to me. And it doesn’t look that old – it’s in remarkable condition. If I saw it in a museum, I’d say it’s nineteenth century, given its physical appearance, its complexity and the intricacy of design. What do you think?”

  Paul looked at the instrument from all sides. “I don’t know anything about this. But I agree that it’s as shiny as new, it’s extremely complicated, and it looks like you could set it up and use it right now.”

  Mark added, “Since we’re standing right here, we know this device has to be old. Ancient. It has to be at least as old as those hieroglyphs in the other room that sealed the doorway. Offhand, I can’t see any other way to explain it. If those glyphs are duplicates of ones in Tut’s tomb, they’re thirty-three hundred years old. So this thing has to be at least that old. Right? That’s crazy!”

  Paul glanced around the room. He saw shelves lining every wall, each holding bright metal plates about a foot square. Etched markings in neat rows covered their surfaces. There were a hundred plates on this one shelf alone – the room held thousands. They examined the plates without touching them. Some had drawings – tiny pictures – that accompanied the strange etchings.

  Paul pointed at one of the plates. “Does this look like writing to you?”

  “Absolutely. If we
can translate this, we’re going to blow some theories off the planet! I’d say we’ve come a long way toward proving an ancient myth is true after all.”

  Mark joked, “Damn, I’ve enjoyed my academic reputation. Now I’m going to be laughed out of town.”

  “So you agree this place is what I think it is? That we’ve actually found it?”

  “The Hall of Records? The Crypt of the Ancients?” Mark stuck out his hand. “Congratulations, partner. You can’t imagine how hard these words are for me to say, because I’ve spent a lifetime insisting on concrete evidence, not fairy tales, myths and legends. Yeah, I think we’ve found it.”

  He swept his hand around the room. “If this isn’t concrete evidence, I don’t know what is. Obviously, a lot of work has to be done – someone has to translate a language we’ve never seen before. And we must figure out the other enigma. I have no idea why the Egyptians were here, but it’s clear they were. These things on the shelves – these metal plates – I think they’re some type of books. Definitely not Egyptian – but still books. That’s my opinion.

  “Here goes my career! My professional opinion is that these are the records of the Atlanteans.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  Time flew as they examined the things in the cavern. Every pedestal held a different object. Some were so similar to modern objects that they could guess what they were for. There were instruments with dials like a clock, a device that resembled a slide rule, and a boxlike contraption that might be an abacus. Other things were so unusual – so dramatically different than anything they’d seen – they couldn’t fathom what they were. One of those was a metal box with an open hinged lid that was crammed full of interwoven dials and sprockets. It had wires connecting everything, and Paul noticed something that made him gasp.