Beneath the Rising

by Premee Mohamed

  “You might be able to get a whole bunch of mine in a minute,” I said, watching as greenish, sickly light began to fill the blind corner, shadows overlapping, bumbling, as if it were unused to enclosed spaces, or limbs, legs, gravity.

  “Well, if you’ve got any to spare sooner than that...”

  I peeled a hand away from the wall, picked quickly at a scrape on my arm—a bright flare of pain in the just-knitted flesh—and held it out, still trying to keep my back protected. She gingerly dipped her index finger, then touched it to a part of the door that, I saw with shock, was actually moving—slowly, but detectably, turning, like an embedded gear.

  The blood stuck for a second, then dribbled down, and there was a heavy thump as something moved deep inside it. Pink light shone out, brighter than the flashlight, illuminating the hallway behind us at last. It was filled with horrors, more legs and eyes than anything should have had, antennae, tentacles, other things that weren’t either, but mostly teeth—lots of teeth. I swallowed a reflexive scream, and spun back to Johnny.

  The door wasn’t opening, but the turning stone had sped up. It wasn’t going to be fast enough. I stooped and picked up the shovel just as the first thing leapt, connecting not with the end but with the wooden haft, slapping it against the wall. It lay stunned for a moment, and something else jumped, shooting out a long, ropy tentacle to grab the shovel.

  “Ha! Saw that coming, motherfucker,” I shouted, dropping the flashlight to get both hands on the shovel, connecting with the glistening limb, the metal slicing almost through it, clinking musically against whatever it had that passed for bones.

  “Holy shit,” I said dazedly, adrenaline making everything buzzy and distant. “They’re like, fuckin, uh, Jell-O. Johnny, look, they’re like Jell-O.”

  “Nick! Get in here!”

  “Can’t. Too many of these, uh, jelly mofos.” Something was reaching for her ankle where she knelt in front of the half-open door, which I wouldn’t have fit through anyway, not yet. I brought the shovel down, cutting through the limb and sending up sparks where I hit the floor. They all screamed in unison, almost making me drop the shovel. A white light wavered into my face and away—Johnny picking up the flashlight. I felt her, or something, pull at my t-shirt.

  Something dark dropped in front of my face, a glimpse of red eyes, and there was a tearing pain in my shoulder. I heard its teeth rip into fabric and then flesh, not the pain at first of being bitten but of burning, searing, so that I groaned rather than screaming, and instinctively bodychecked it into the wall, hearing it squeal and pop, thin fluid running onto my shirt, into the bite wound, down my arm.

  “Nicky!”

  Her voice rose over the screaming. A perfect descant. Her mom’s church choir, when we were kids, the rows of grumbling kids in white skirts and black pants, everyone in white and black, a black bow at their throat, clipped on, not tied, so they wouldn’t have their air restricted, and John with the descants in the back row, you only needed three of them to be heard over the—

  “Nick, goddammit! Please!”

  I turned, barely able to hear over the roar in my shoulder, hit something at shin-height, and fell through a membrane of pink light, into the clean embrace of sand.

  MY EARS WERE ringing. I slowly returned from half a blackout, the ringing receding, to see Johnny framed in rosy light, sobbing and dabbing at my arm with a shirt—one of hers, from her open bag on the floor. The flashlight lay next to it, lens cracked but still shining.

  I fumbled for the shirt, trying to get her to stop. “...Ow…”

  “Shush!”

  “What are you crying for?” I said cautiously, pulling the t-shirt out of her hand and pressing it hard to the bite. I was sitting on spotless white sand, not like the sand outside. Like playground sand, the kind you could buy bags of in Home Depot. “Should I be crying too? Are we in the right place?”

  “Yes...”

  “The tomb? The king’s tomb?” I squinted, seeing dozens of tall, stone boxes, glittering in the flashlight’s circle. The statues encircling them were smooth black stone, ornamented with gold, their heads disappearing into a dome so high I couldn’t see the top of it. Beyond the light, the door closing back into stone, the frustrated growling and screaming so high it stung the ears. Then the stone closed completely and we were left in blessed silence. I wondered if she was crying simply out of relief. I knew how she felt.

  “Hey,” I said. “John?”

  “What?” she said, face still in her hands.

  “If the world makes it, where do you want to go?” I said. “To visit, I mean. Not for work.”

  A long pause, emphasized rather than broken by her muffled sobs. “...Petra,” she said. “I always wanted to go there. Touch the pink stones. And the Giant’s Causeway.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Ireland. It’s these tall basalt columns all together, like—”

  “Why do both of your places have to do with rocks?”

  “Well where would you go then?” she said, drying her face on her t-shirt, leaving translucent smears of blood and tears and snot.

  “New Zealand,” I said. “I want to meet a hobbit. Antarctica, so I can meet penguins, which are the hobbits of the bird world. And the Exclusion Zone.”

  “Me too. Like it’s gonna be worse than here.”

  “Yeah, at least you can wear badges that say when you’ve got too much radiation,” I said. “You should’ve invented a badge that showed when we were getting exposed to too much magic.”

  “I will if we get back.”

  “When,” I said. “Come on. Up.”

  She walked off slowly, bag bumping at her side, flashlight held high. After a minute I got up and followed her, not wanting to be so close to the door. Who knew if those fuckers could open it again somehow? We were stuck in this dome, like a spider under a cup, skittering around, waiting to see daylight again. I swallowed hard. Best not to think about it.

  There was no mistaking the king’s tomb—it towered above the others, wild with shards of gems and gilt, and the baked glass stuff that Johnny had told me was called faience, as colourful as a painting. We approached it reverently, churchlike, shining the light low rather than high. Ancient plants crumbled as they felt our breath, dried rather than rotten. The reddish dust of petals, the golden dust of pollen. Someone had laid flowers on the king’s tomb.

  There. I had been expecting it for so long that when we finally found the first skeleton, I exhaled sharply in relief. The bones had crumbled so dramatically that it was more of an outline, though some of the bigger bones remained—pelvis, skull, part of a femur. Teeth scattered like pearls. All were surrounded in a soft, bluish-pink glow, showing the remnants of a dark blue gown, jewelry—earrings, necklace, bracelets—shining in the dimness. Even a few scraps of dark hair remained on the sand. It was sitting up, leaning against the tomb. They hadn’t been lovers, Johnny had said; but she’d stayed, she’d put the flowers there. More than one kind of love. Remember that. Loyal to the end. Past the end. “Thank you,” I whispered as we went past. Had I imagined the light flickering, just for a moment?

  Johnny got her notebook out and scribbled briefly on it as we walked around the tomb, then stopped at one of the flat faces, which had a small door on it, maybe six inches high. “Here goes nothing,” she said, and leaned close to whisper something at it—the Old Tongue, I knew at once. I backed away as she finished.

  A minute went past, then two. Just as she began to say, “Maybe I wrote down the—” the door opened. We stared at it. I had been expecting lights, fireworks even. But she reached inside and came out with a small clay ball, maybe the size of her hand, the seal on it so distinct I half-expected the clay to be damp. “Is that it?” I whispered. “That was disappointing.”

  “This is how they used to seal important documents,” she said. “The clay ball proved that no one had tampered with it.”

  I held my breath as she tapped it against the side of the tomb, breaking the cla
y like an egg and extracting a tablet with the same seal on it—an animal, horned and winged. There was just one line of writing on it.

  “It’s the Word of Power,” she said softly. “All we need now is the hua-shinoth.”

  “Whatever that is. You could just be making shit up at this point and I’d never know. Is that here? How do we get out of here?”

  She glanced at the shut door. “Not through there,” she said. “It’s locked from this side, too.”

  “So we’re hooped.”

  “...Let’s just walk around and see how hooped we are.”

  Finally, I found a tiny staircase and called Johnny over, pointing up at the dome, the darkness uninterrupted by so much as a speck of light. “They wouldn’t have built a staircase if it didn’t go out.”

  “Are you out of your mind?”

  “A little bit. But we can always climb back down, right?”

  I let her go first, then crept up myself, able to hear faintly again the pounding outside the burial chamber. We had gotten our break, our little vacation from danger, and now we were headed back out. Story of my life.

  I gritted my teeth and followed her up the narrow staircase, maybe just a foot across, leading impossibly, terrifyingly to the top of the dome, into the darkness. The faces of the statues loomed over us, then drew level, staring with eyes made of a stone so blue they seemed like summer sky, then fell below us. My stomach was spinning even though I couldn’t see how far down it was. Johnny held the flashlight between shoulder and ear, needing both hands and both feet to climb.

  “Well, they did put a door up here,” Johnny called down; I had fallen several steps behind, my shoulder screaming with pain, hands sweating and slipping, the shovels scraping against my back where I had tied them to the bags.

  “Great,” I panted. “Probably under a ton of dirt.”

  “Probably.”

  “And outside of which, the entire Polyphonic Spree of the Them could be waiting, because we’ve been down in this thing for hours and have no idea what’s up there any more.”

  “Could be.”

  “Fantastic. Can’t wait. Do you want a shovel?”

  “No, I’m going to see if there’s a lock. Can you hold the flashlight on it while I look?”

  She crawled down a couple of steps to hand it to me, but somebody fumbled it, and it plummeted to the ground hundreds of feet below, not breaking. The light shone on the king’s tomb, small and clear, sending crescent flares of gold onto the colourful stone.

  I looked over the edge, carefully, and sighed. “I’ll go get it. I dropped it.”

  “I did. And anyway, forget it.”

  “Forget it? It’s pitch black up here!”

  I heard the rustle of her clothing, and then a click and a moment of bright light. I realized she’d gotten her cell phone open and was holding it in her teeth to look at the door. “Mmph. ’Ep. Ooh, another ten ’issed calls. And a lock.”

  I watched the tiny, bluish light waver as she put the cell phone back into her pocket. “Cover your eyes,” she said, “and get low.”

  With my head buried in my arms, I barely heard the lock opening and the noises above us—hissing, chittering, clicking. But there was nothing we could do about it; I followed her into a brick-lined conduit that led up to a trapdoor, which we both had to pry at with the shovels to get open. I heard it flop onto the sand and weeds outside, and then Johnny:

  “Shit.”

  “Considering that your ass is directly in my face, yes. What are we dealing with up there?”

  “Uh... can you pass me a shovel?” she said, beginning to climb again; I could see her hand in the bright sunlight, and handed one up. I had to push everything else up through the square opening to get out myself, or I would have gotten tangled, and emerged into light so bright I couldn’t see at all for a minute, just—through slitted lids—a kind of blur hitting something with the shovel, something I couldn’t see.

  I scrambled up out of the tomb, letting the trapdoor shut again, and stumbled to help her, still half-blind. More of the allu, the skinless dog-things, more like jackals in the daylight, long-snouted, eyeless, crusted with sand. She whirled and connected, sending one howling, actually airborne. The ground was crawling—rats, scorpions, spiders, snakes, tangled together, many attacking each other. I stood back to back with her, careful not to let our backs touch, lest I get hit with a shovel too. The smaller vermin was too terrified of the lunging, snapping predators to be much harm; I stamped and kicked, clearing a circle.

  It was good to have a weapon, get some reach. They screamed and snarled, trying to get inside my swing, but I’d seen that before and was watching for it now. One managed to latch onto the wooden handle, but I got a foot up and kicked it in the chest, dislodging it enough that I could back up and get a clean hit. At least with these you didn’t feel bad about hitting them, hearing them shriek in pain; at least you didn’t feel like you were hitting a human. Johnny blasted a few of them with green fire, sending them scurrying.

  When it all seemed to be over, we stood catching our breaths in the low sunlight, reaching at once for our bags and the precious water bottles still left. The corpses of the skinless things had already begun to bubble and melt into the sand, sending runnels of black liquid down the slope. The surviving creatures, wounded and maimed, were slowly retreating for the most part, teeth bared in their skull faces. I looked away.

  The sky was filling with tall, liquid-looking, greenish-grey towers, too regular to be clouds.

  “Please tell me that’s totally normal,” I said, gesturing with my bottle.

  “Wish I could.”

  “Hey, we’re the opposite of grave robbers now,” I said. “We left something in there. We’re grave gifters.”

  “At least I have an excuse for all the missed calls now.”

  “SO, WHAT ARE we looking for now?” I said, looking around at the quiet site; ten yards away, a jawless, bleeding allu sulked under a bush. I shook the shovel at it.

  “We have almost everything we need,” she said. “Just the very last part of the spell to go, and I know that’s not here in the compound. The hua-shinoth is basically an amplifier—something that would let us shut the Great Gate. You wouldn’t need it for anything else, not even the big one in Nazca.”

  “I thought you said Nazca was... was a magic circle, not a gate.”

  “It’s both. Most things are more than one thing. Anyway, without an amplifier, we don’t have the reach. It’s an artifact that contains the concentrated remnants of Their magic, Their darkness, and it’ll act as a megaphone. No, don’t give me that look, I know what a red herring is. This isn’t one. You always use what They are to destroy Them. Evil to destroy evil.”

  “I thought good was supposed to destroy evil.”

  “Not when there’s more evil in the world,” she said. “Not when it’s got all the power. In a way, we humans are lucky; we happen to live in a universe where there are specific things we can use—circles, colours, words of power, places, idols, life forces—that could help create the universe we want. One where the doors and gates are securely locked. Or have enough bars to keep Them from getting in even when They have the key.”

  “And we can do that.”

  “Us? I don’t know,” she said. “I hope so.”

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  “We’ve drawn a lot of attention to ourselves trying to find everything; things are probably converging here, knowing that. And They’ll know just as well as we do that I can’t cast the spell without help. I mean, the principle is sound. It would be better if I could sacrifice a bull or something, get all the life force out of something at once, but...”

  “We could have bought that fancy camel back in town.”

  “That was the fanciest camel.”

  She dusted off her hands and looked around, chewing on her sunburned lower lip; as I watched, a droplet of blood emerged and slid down her chin, glinting transparently in the low light like a ruby. I realized with a st
art just how long the shadows were. How had so much of the day slipped away? We had only a few hours left.

  “It’s not here,” she said, “but it’s close.”

  I followed her out of the perimeter of the ruins and stood carefully on the wooden catwalk, listening to faint, high sounds in the ruins—bats, maybe? Getting ready for a night of bugs? Close meant nothing. It meant the desert, the scrubby grass and gravel around where the dig had collected a bit of dew or rainwater, and then nothing but sand, sculpted into low dunes that I knew would be exhausting to walk on.

  And I was so tired. Not as tired as Johnny, probably, who had been clambering up and down the ladders and ramps all day with legs much shorter than mine, and with fewer reserves of body fat. But we were running out of time. I thought again about the timer she’d put on her computer, discreetly set at the corner of the screen, counting down. Like something dark and poisonous in there. A scorpion, under the tough waxed canvas.

  A tiny bat, barely mouse-sized, swooped past my head; I caught a glimpse of one shiny eye, bright as a droplet of water, before it vanished into the open desert. Johnny balanced on the catwalk next to me, which creaked slightly under our combined weight.

  “Do you know where to look?”

  “I set up the spell to help find it, but it’s only good to within... a slightly weird measurement. Works out to about ten meters and then we’ll have to dig for it.”

  “What’s the measurement?”

  “Uh, the actual monster who cast the spell came up with it, so it’s his wingspan. Tip to tip. Part of what I had to look up to do kind of a conversion. All the sources said different things. So I don’t even know if it’ll be that accurate.”

  I shook my head. “Monsters and their egos.”

  She laughed. “Worse than scientists, even.”

  “Worse than geniuses.”

  “Let’s try here,” Johnny said. She set her hand-drawn map down carefully in the sand, weighting it down with a brick, and we started to dig. The sand was so soft and dry at first that it was more a case of pushing it aside, under her direction, into a big wide pit, eight or ten feet across. Then we hit a harder layer and fell silent, joshing done, waiting for a telltale clunk or chime as we hit something that even she had admitted she was barely sure existed. She called a halt after an hour, at four feet down, and I had to pull her out of the hole with her shovel handle.