by Brian Lumley
It had taken only ten minutes for Khumnas and Mhireni to clear away the loose sand and soil from the square scratched out by Guigos. A little more than fifteen inches down they had reached a stone slab and quickly cleared its surface until clean edges could be seen to form a rectangle some two feet wide by three long. A heavy iron ring at one end of the slab was large enough in diameter to allow both men to get several fingers through, but strain as they might the slab would not come up. By now, as they cursed and struggled with the ring, it was almost as if they had forgotten Guigos was there at all; their minds were full of what might lie below. The old man’s chuckle seemed deliberately contrived to remind them of his presence.
‘Ihya Khumnas, you were chosen to assist me because you are a cheat, a liar and an expert forger. Not the very best I might have obtained for the money, but you were also young and strong.’ He omitted to add that Khumnas would not be missed in this world, not by anyone, but the thought crossed his mind and caused him to smile hideously.
‘As for you, Yakob Mhireni,’ he continued, ‘– you are here because of your great strength, also because you are brutal and devious and utterly untrustworthy. Oh, don’t worry: these are qualities I greatly admire, else you would not have been chosen.’
He stared at both of them, his yellow eyes glowing in the shadow of his terrible face …
‘So?’ Khumnas finally growled, sweat drying on his back and causing him to shiver. ‘And what use to sit there like an ancient mummy and insult us? Do you want the slab tilted or not?’
‘Of course!’ Guigos snapped. ‘And with your cunning and his strength it should have been the very simplest of tasks – and now I think perhaps I chose unwisely after all! If you are not clever enough between you, what now? Should I ask these poor dumb beasts of ours for help?’ He turned his head and stared pointedly at the tethered donkeys.
Khumnas followed his gaze, frowned, finally believed he saw what the other was getting at. Mhireni merely scowled and stood watching while his companion took one of the shovels and weighed it in his hands. Khumnas propped the head of the shovel against a flat stone, jumped on it with both feet together and broke off the metal blade. This done he took rope from a pack on his donkey, passed it through the handle of the shovel and made a knot. He had left about five and a half feet dangling, which he now tied to the iron ring. At the other end of the slab, he jabbed the broken wooden stock of the shovel into the loose earth until it found purchase, then tested his device by hauling on the rope. The slab grated and moved a fraction of an inch, but Khumnas was not an especially strong man. The handle of the shovel formed a satisfactory fulcrum but Mhireni would prove to be the better lever; and if Mhireni’s strength alone should not suffice, then they could always employ a donkey. Doubtless Guigos had meant as much with his cryptic comment.
Mhireni had got the idea at last; he took the coil of rope from Khumnas and wound it round his arm and shoulder, then leaned into it until the slab gratingly shifted and raised up an inch or two. Khumnas gave a small cry of triumph, jammed several stones under the rim, said: ‘More yet. Pull, Yakob, pull!’
The big Iraqi strained, but though the slab shuddered and grated some more it would not lift. ‘Donkey!’ gasped Mhireni finally. ‘Fetch a damned donkey before I break my back!’ He stood panting until Khumnas brought one of the animals and tied the rope to its saddle, then together men and beast hauled on the rope until the shovel’s handle came over and upright and the slab was suddenly yanked two-thirds of the way toward the vertical.
‘Hold it there!’ cried Khumnas. The shovel’s handle was visibly flexing; before it could break he ran to the slab and threw all of his weight against it, standing over the hole beneath to do so. And at last the slab passed through the perpendicular and leaned back at a slight angle, jamming itself in that position.
‘Done!’ grunted Khumnas. ‘We’ve done it!’
He stared down into the darkness of the pit, wrinkling his nose at the stenches which came welling up. ‘All done,’ he repeated then, a little less certainly. ‘And the treasure’s down there, is it?’
Mhireni went to stand beside him, and both men stared hard at Guigos in the darkness. One thought was uppermost in their minds now, and it was as if the gargoyle read it there:
‘The treasure is hidden down there,’ he said. ‘Well hidden - and I alone know where.’ He glanced at his watch. 11:25, and time growing shorter with every passing second. ‘Come, let’s get below.’
‘Where’s that idiot Greek?’ growled Mhireni. ‘Is there more hard work below? Are we to do everything?’
‘I told Kastrouni to be back by midnight,’ Guigos snapped. ‘That’s when I want him and not before. As long as he’s back by then I’ll be well satisfied. Meanwhile he’s ensuring that no one can come up behind us - and that is important! Now get down there. Time’s wasting and there’s more to do yet.’ He stood up, shuffled awkwardly to the hole where steps went steeply down into darkness.
The two Iraqis stood there undecided; the thought of a hidden hoard lured them magnetically, but the darkness and the odours wafting up from below deterred them. Khumnas took out a candle from his pocket, shielded it with a cupped hand, lighted it. He stooped low over the hole. The steps went down, down, well beyond the limit of the candle’s illumination.
Khumnas gave an involuntary shudder. ‘It stinks like hell!’ he said, turning his face away. ‘Like a charnel house. Like a corpse overdue for the worm.’
Mhireni didn’t like that; irreligious he was, but he was also superstitious. ‘Tomb-looters, you called us,’ he prodded Khumnas accusingly. ‘But I didn’t think you meant it! Is that what this is, a tomb?’
‘Dolts!’ Guigos chuckled throatily, elbowing them aside. ‘Out of my way, both of you …’ He descended into the reeking opening until only his head and shoulders protruded. ‘Well, are you coming? Or don’t you want the rest of your pay?’
Without waiting for an answer, the grinning, half-crippled gargoyle stepped down out of sight. As he disappeared, so Mhireni’s hand snaked inside his robe and snatched out a curved dagger. ‘So help me,’ he harshly whispered, ‘the moment my eyes light on that treasure, I’ll slit that bag of filth open from his belly to his balls!’ A deep scar on the left of his long nose and down his cheek almost to the jawbone glared white in the moonlight.
Khumnas’s teeth were even whiter, twin bars of savage anticipation as he answered: ‘Only if you reach him before me!’ Then he controlled himself and grasped the other’s arms. ‘Look, we both hate the loathsome old dog, that’s agreed; but just remember this: we can’t touch him until after we have the treasure. Then he’s fair game.’
Mhireni nodded. ‘Right,’ he growled. ‘And the same goes for the Greek.’ Then, Khumnas leading the way with his candle, they followed Guigos down into what was otherwise a Stygian darkness.
The steps were steep and narrow but dry; worn in the middle, as from the passage of countless thousands of feet over the centuries, they wound down in a semi-circle until the way suddenly widened out and grew straight. To the left the steps were hewn from a wall which overhung just above shoulder height, so that the two must go in a half-crouch; on the right stood empty space, inky black and echoing to their half-hearted footsteps. Mhireni deliberately kicked a pebble over the rim, listening for the rattle as it hit bottom. After several seconds his patience was rewarded, but with a distant splash. Water down there - a long way down there.
On the far side of the cleft the opposing wall beetled black and jagged, with stony projections throwing wavering shadows in the dim, flickering light of Khumnas’s candle. A thought – how panicked they would be if the candle should go out – struck both men simultaneously; so that even as Mhireni grabbed Khumnas’s shoulder, so the other half-turned and produced from a pocket a second stub of wax and wick.
‘Have you counted the steps?’ Mhireni whispered hoarsely, his great hands trembling slightly as he accepted fire from the other.
‘Two dozen,
’ said Khumnas at once. ‘Twenty-five with this next one.’
‘Only twenty-five?’ Mhireni was surprised. ‘God! And already it seems we’re half-way to hell! Anyway, how does he do it?’
‘Eh?’ Khumnas queried, his face pale in the candlelight. ‘Old gargoyle? How does he do what?’
‘See in the dark,’ Mhireni answered. ‘How does he do that? I mean, did you see him light a candle?’ Damned if I did!’
‘No, he didn’t have one,’ Khumnas frowned. ‘I know he was carrying prepared torches under his robe; I prepared them, didn’t I? But he didn’t have a candle.’ He shrugged. ‘Anyway, I’ve heard of people like that, people who see in the dark. So what? Cats do it, don’t they? Probably those bloody poisonous eyes of his! Come on, let’s get on …’
In the space of another five or six paces the walls of the cleft came together again, even narrower than before, so that the two must turn almost side-on to proceed. But still the steps went down. And then, as they rounded a sharp bend, light blazing ahead! – and Guigos waiting for them, sitting on a boulder, where suddenly the cleft opened into a large cave …
Chapter Two
The light came from a pair of torches sputtering in brackets on the rough walls. The yellow, uneven flames eddied this way and that, as if from some intermittent draft. Khumnas started forward into the cave, and … yes, there was a draught; he could feel fresh air striking his face. Good, clean, fresh air – wholesome air – unlike the vapours of the cleft.
The cave was perhaps fifty feet long by thirty wide, roughly oval, low-ceilinged and obviously natural. There had been some work here: a single ledge circled the cave like a bench, cut where the walls met the floor; chippings from the work were still evident and had been packed down into the floor to give it something of an even surface. Equally obvious, the work was thousands of years old.
Khumnas, still looking the place over, put up a hand to touch the ceiling just above his head. His fingers came away cold and slightly slimy. In places the seepage had formed into stalactites, most of them long since broken off to allow headroom. A few large stones were bedded into the floor’s centre; George Guigos sat upon one such.
The Iraqis moved toward him but, as they approached, Khumnas’s eyes stared beyond the bent, withered form of the old man to the far extreme of the cave. It was darker back there, and yet strangely luminous in one small area. Khumnas had thought he spied, in that luminous area, tiny bright points of light glittering like diamonds in the upper darkness.
Diamonds? Guigos’s treasure?
Passing the old man by without a second glance, Khumnas went into the farthest part of the cave. Mhireni followed close on his heels. Now, in the greater darkness, both men could see the points of light. Also, the influx of fresh air was stronger, colder. With his hands groping before him, Khumnas came up against the wall. On a level with his chin, a jagged hole two feet across looked out to a far, night-black horizon tinged with indigo where the earth met the sky. The bright points of light were stars. Standing on his toes and turning his eyes down, the Iraqi saw the same stars mirrored in the Sea of Galilee some seven hundred and fifty feet below.
‘An observation hole,’ Guigos’s harsh whisper echoed gratingly in the cave’s confines. ‘Also, ventilation. Crawl out of there and the fall would turn you to jelly – literally!’
‘What is this place?’ growled Mhireni. He went back to Guigos.
‘It’s a place to hide,’ the old man answered. ‘Or at least it used to be. More than two thousand years ago, when first the town was built, tribal wars were frequent and bloody. The old men, the women and children, would come down here and sit it out in times of extreme danger. The all clear would be signalled from down there on the Sea of Galilee: the bright flash of the sun reflected in a mirror of polished bronze.’
None of this was guesswork; the old man knew irrefutably that what he had said was one hundred per cent correct, fact. The brutish Mhireni sensed the truth in Guigos’s explanation, but by his nature he couldn’t accept anything unless there was concrete evidence.
‘Huh!’ he grunted. ‘Oh, you’re an old ’un, sure enough – but not that old, George Guigos!’
At that the gargoyle laughed, a choking, croaking, gasping laugh that echoed and reverberated – and ended in a strangled coughing. The way he coughed, it was almost a death rattle. He rocked where he sat and fought for air, one bony claw clutching at his stone seat for balance and support, the other clawing at his robe where it seemed to obstruct his throat.
Ihya Khumnas came quickly from the darker part of the cave, stood over the old man and stared at him in the light of the flickering torches. Guigos’s face was parchment now, with all the leathery texture seemingly leeched away. He looked bleached, dry as fretted bone; he looked as if a puff of wind would tumble him to dust. Something had happened to him in the last few minutes. Something terrible. It was as if his years had suddenly decided to catch up with him, all of them at once.
He is a mummy, yes, thought Khumnas, except his metabolism works in reverse. They only crumble when you fetch them up from their tombs …
But out loud he asked: ‘Are you all right?’ It wouldn’t do to have Guigos die here, now. Not just yet, anyway.
Guigos’s coughing bout was over. He stopped rocking, lifted a spindly wrist and blinked eyes which were now turned rheumy at his wrist-watch. It was 11.40. ‘I’m … all right, yes,’ he coughed. ‘But now we must hurry.’ With an effort he turned his face up and stared at Khumnas. There was a film over his eyes and his gaping, diseased nostrils were red raw in his papier-mâché face.
‘The treasure,’ said Khumnas. ‘Where is it?’
‘Help me up,’ Guigos held up his spider arms. The Iraqis lifted him like a child, stood him upright, held him there so that he wouldn’t fall. He lifted a skinny, gnarled finger, waggled it. ‘There … there …’
They looked. At one side of the cave a fat stalactite came down to meet an upthrusting mushroom of dripstone, forming a column. Between the column and the wall proper was a darkness deeper than mere shadow. Khumnas gasp was clearly audible. Was this a secret chamber, a second cave? ‘I’ll take Guigos,’ he told Mhireni. ‘You bring one of those torches.’
Guigos was in a bad way. All of his former strength, whatever it was that held him together, seemed to be ebbing out of him. Now he was more nearly what he should be: an ancient, near-senile bag of bones. His syphilis alone should have done for him years ago. But Khumnas knew no fear as he picked the diseased ancient up and followed Mhireni where he led the way with his torch held aloft; he merely averted his face from Guigos’s reeking breath.
Behind the stalactite a low arch led into a second, smaller cave. It was empty, almost bare, much similar to its larger companion. But close to the base of one wall stood twin levers of bronze: massive perpendicular rods, tall as a man, whose lower ends slotted deep into regular grooves cut in the floor. Between the levers, in deep recesses, the tops of a pair of polished stone tablets stood up out of the solid rock. Perhaps five inches wide by eighteen long, the thickness or depth of the tablets was anybody’s guess.
Khumnas approached the one on the right. Carved into its top edge was a single glyph, a ‘U’-shape or descending node. The one on the left was carved with the same character but inverted. Guigos seemed reluctant to look at the first but turned his eyes back to the lever on the left. ‘There,’ he croaked. ‘That tablet, that lever. They guard the treasure …’
That last word was like a spur on Khumnas’s flank; he put the old man down, seating him none-too-gently on the stone floor. He went to the lever and tested it braced his back and pulled at it. The thing wouldn’t move an inch. Whatever mechanism was involved here, it seemed that the years had welded it solid.
Mhireni jammed his blazing torch into the floor where there was a little loose rubble, went to assist his companion. Together they hauled on the lever. And as that great bar of bronze gratingly, squealingly gave an inch or two, so the stone tablet wit
h the ascending node rose up a little, revealing a dusty line of carved characters along the top of its face.
Guigos tried to stand but could not. He crawled to the tablet and laid trembling fingers on its surface, his dried-up lips moving as if in silent prayer – or blasphemy too revolting to utter out loud. He seemed to draw strength from the polished stone, brushed dust from its graven figures with suddenly urgent fingers, turned his walnut head and gazed fire-eyed at the two where they strained at the lever.
‘Rest,’ he said, something of strength returned to his voice. ‘The lever is on a rachet – it will not spring back. One line at a time – that’s how it was designed.’ He pointed at the first line of characters. ‘Can you read it, Khumnas? You, Mhireni? No, but I can. Listen.’
His eyes went back to the tablet, and the words his writhing lips then formed were terrible to hear. They made no sense to the Iraqis, though certainly they contained sounds which seemed familiar. But that’s all those words were, sounds. Primal sounds from the runebook of some ancient wizard, perhaps, or a cryptogram from a text of demoniac lore. In any event, they were terrible words, and as each one was formed so Guigos’s voice grew stronger until he came to the end of the line.
Even as the alien-sounding, eery cadence echoed into silence, so there came a rush of wind from the other cave to set the torch madly guttering; and a moment later thunder rumbled like a peal of distant doom, finding its way into the caves through the vent which opened over the Sea of Galilee and passing through them like the inner and outer chambers of a giant’s ear.
Guigos’s eyes were feral in the flickering torchlight. ‘A storm’s come up,’ he said, grinning fiendishly. He glanced at his watch – an eager glance, Khumnas thought – licked quivering, shrivelled lips, urged: ‘Quickly, haul away! The next line, let’s have it up.’
‘What is this?’ cried Mhireni, plainly bewildered and even a little frightened. ‘What’s going on? Words on a stone? What sort of treasure is that? And a storm? Why, the skies were clear and bright not ten minutes gone!’
