Ararat

by Christopher Golden

  “Listen, I don’t want to get off on the wrong foot,” Walker said. “I know you didn’t want me here.”

  “The U.S. government wanted you here and the company financing the project was willing to oblige,” Adam replied. “Which means you’re welcome as long as you’re useful or at least not in the way.”

  “Message received,” Walker said.

  Adam took him by the arm and guided him to another man, whose thick beard and weathered attire suggested plenty of experience with the mountain.

  “Hakan is our project foreman,” Adam said, raising his voice a bit louder to be sure he would be heard over the thump of the chopper’s rotors. “He’ll help you to the cave.”

  Walker glanced up to see Kim already standing at the open door on the side of the helicopter, the copilot barely visible as he coached her—apparently reminding her of the brief training they’d received on this procedure the day before.

  “Don’t worry,” Adam said. “I’ll make sure they get down safely.” His smile faded again. “Trust me when I say this is not the scariest thing you’ll encounter today.”

  Walker started to ask what he meant, but by then Hakan had already taken charge of him and he had to start climbing. Ropes had been secured above, somewhere inside the cave, and Hakan put Walker in front of him, showed him how to use the ropes as guidelines. Without the crampons on his boots, and the rope to steady himself on the unstable ground, Walker felt sure he would have fallen. On one particularly troublesome assignment, he’d incurred serious injuries to his back and leg, and with the cold and the climb, the old wounds were singing.

  He glanced up at the helicopter, saw Kim Seong being lowered down. Once the chopper returned to its base, there would be no way off the mountain except to climb down. To his surprise, this thought left him deeply unsettled. With every step upward he felt an urge to retreat so powerful that he was barely paying attention when he reached the cave. He found himself kneeling on the cliff edge in front of several members of the dig team.

  Walker recognized Meryam Karga from her books and documentaries, just as he had with her fiancé. The tension around her eyes and the hunch of her shoulders gave her an almost predatory aura, as if her default position was one of coiled, serpentine readiness. The others he saw seemed tense as well, and Walker wondered if the Ark Project had hit a snag.

  “Come along, Dr. Walker,” Meryam said, hugging herself against the wind. “We’ll get you a cup of coffee while we await your people, and then you can have a look at what you want to see.”

  He glanced around, peering at the work lights and the ancient timbers and the people working all through the cave.

  “Noah’s ark,” Walker said as he climbed to his feet.

  “We think so,” Meryam replied. “But you didn’t come to see the ark.”

  A strange calm settled into him. The pain in his leg receded.

  No, he thought. True enough. He didn’t give a shit whether or not the timbers he was looking at had really once made up the structure of a boat—Noah’s or otherwise.

  His interest lay in what they’d found inside the ark.

  * * *

  The ark—if that was really the word for it—had been buried within Mount Ararat like a tumor nested in a human body, just waiting to be discovered. Walker would have said locating Noah’s ark on Ararat was impossible after all the time and money people had spent searching for it over the years, but now he stood inside it.

  They’d had a short introductory tour to the basic structure of the ark. Lights had been strung throughout but they seemed only to offer small pools of illumination. There were generators supplying power to small space heaters in some of the stalls that lined the three decks and the lights offered some warmth, but there were no fires allowed. With timber this old, the members of what was now being called the Karga-Holzer Ark Project—KHAP—had to be damn careful not to burn the whole thing to cinders. It was damned cold, and even deep inside the warren of stalls and walkways, the mountain chill spread with every gust of wind.

  A quick visual inspection had confirmed what he’d seen from the chopper. The leftmost, or western, end of the cave showed that the avalanche had exposed the entirety of that side of the ark, from top to bottom. On the right, however, the rock and soil that had been in place for thousands of years still partly covered the ark, leaving some of the outer wall timbers still in place. On that side—the east—the opening angled down to a gap of perhaps ten feet. It would make that side of the ark’s interior much darker, but Walker knew it would be a little warmer and less drafty on that side as well.

  After the introductions, Meryam and Adam guided Kim Seong and Father Cornelius up to level three. Walker hung back on the first, stopping to watch a team of archaeologists at work around a dusty collection of human bones hung with gray remnants of both skin and clothing—human hide and animal hide were indistinguishable from each other. He noticed one of the bodies had a thick leather cord around its neck, a sharp chunk of black rock hung from it like some kind of charm. Studying the other cadaver, he thought there might be another necklace on that one.

  “Two bodies?” he asked, because there seemed to be more limbs than there ought to be.

  One of the archaeologists lifted her head, blinking in surprise, so entrenched in her toil that she had not realized their work was being observed.

  “Three. Two adults, one child,” she said in a British accent.

  Walker winced at the mention of a child, then admonished himself. These remains were thousands of years old. In ancient days, children had lost their lives for any number of reasons. If a flood in any way similar to the one described in the Bible had actually taken place, countless children would have perished. Reacting to the news of this one child made him feel like a rookie, new to the kind of tragedy the world had always offered.

  The flood, he thought, mentally tracking backward, surprised that he’d accepted the concept so readily. Could this be real?

  He’d encountered monsters before, things that would make an ordinary person scream just from learning they existed, but all of them had turned out to have a solid, scientific explanation. Unnatural, perhaps, but not supernatural. Yet the very presence of this ship, buried in the side of a mountain, implied that there was truth at the core of one of the most widely known myths of world religions. Walker had made some hard choices where his family and his life were concerned and, in doing so, he’d lost faith in himself. Now, he was here, looking for something to believe in.

  Christ, he thought. All you need now is a bottle of beer and a sad country song on the jukebox. He forced himself to focus on the archaeologists as they worked to preserve the ancient remains.

  They were four thousand meters above sea level. All kinds of theories had been put forward regarding real events that might have inspired the original tales of the great flood. Some of those theories came from crackpots and others from respected researchers, but Walker had not seen a single nonreligious theory that would explain the ark landing at this elevation.

  Yet here it had landed.

  The ark lay at an angle, tilted toward the mountain. At some point it had come to rest on a mountain ridge and centuries of landslides had covered it, filled the ridge, packed rock and dirt around the ship. Meryam had said that her team believed there might be a crevasse beneath the ark, so they should all be treading carefully.

  “Sorry, who are you, exactly?” the archaeologist asked.

  When he introduced himself, she frowned, maybe wondering why the United States would send someone from the National Science Foundation—someone whose inability to identify aged human remains marked him as clearly not an archaeologist. Or maybe she’s wondering why nobody told her the project was getting new blood.

  “A pleasure to meet you, Dr. Walker,” she said. “I’m Helen Marshall. Marginally in charge of the archaeological team. They dragged me out of Oxford for this. This is Polly Bennett, my right hand among the group of graduate students I shanghaied for this p
roject.”

  Tall and muscular, Polly had a spray of birds in flight tattooed on the back of her neck, and she’d shaved the left side of her head and dyed the other side of shoulder-length hair a vivid green. Walker thought she didn’t look the part of the archaeology grad student, but then he admonished himself for it. This job wasn’t about how you looked.

  Polly barely glanced up from the seriousness of her efforts, but she did offer a slight salute of greeting.

  Professor Marshall cocked an eyebrow. “I’d shake, but…”

  She held up both dusty, gloved hands and gave a small shrug.

  “Understood. And I’m sorry to interrupt your work.”

  “Not at all. I’m glad you’re taking an interest. It’s not every day you see something impossible.”

  Walker nodded. “Agreed. Though why do I have the feeling you’re not just talking about the elevation?”

  Professor Marshall opened her arms to take in their surroundings. “This thing is at least five thousand years old, by my best guess. That’s about the same time the Egyptians figured out how to lash planks together to build a hull, though this might be even older. But this ship—”

  “The ark.”

  “If you like. The ark is far larger and more elaborate than anything else built in that era. The Khufu ship was entombed at the foot of the Great Pyramid of Giza about five hundred years later, and that had similar length, but that was nothing more than a barge.”

  Walker studied her. “You’re saying it shouldn’t exist at all.”

  “Don’t mistake me. I’m thrilled it’s here. It’s like a dream—the kind of thing I never imagined I would ever get to be a part of—but when I say it’s like a dream, that’s in more ways than one. It feels so surreal. If you want your mind boggled even more by just how impossible this seems, talk to Professor Olivieri.”

  He didn’t ask who that might be, assuming he’d meet Professor Olivieri soon enough. The ark wasn’t that big.

  “So,” Walker said, “you think the Bible story is true? God sent the flood to—”

  Professor Marshall shot him a sharp look. “Don’t bring God into it, Dr. Walker. We’re here to examine and report, not to explain. We’ll leave that part to others.”

  As she returned to her work, Walker stared at the wall just beyond where her team was working. He’d spotted long furrows clawed into the timbers around what appeared to be a door.

  “Are those…”

  She glanced up. “Sorry?”

  Walker pointed at the scratches on the door—a door that had been tilted toward the mountain, pressed there, trapping people inside. “Is that what it appears to be?”

  She gave a troubled, thoughtful nod, like an oncologist confirming the worst. “We believe so.”

  “But why? There were other people aboard. They must’ve had food stores—”

  Professor Marshall smiled thinly, glare from the work lights turning her deathly pale. Only her eyes were dark, skin crinkling at the edges.

  “There were food stores remaining when the last of the passengers died, not to mention animals they could’ve eaten,” she said. “There were other ways they could have gotten out if they wanted to risk the climb down the mountain. They had to know this door was blocked but still they died trying to open it.”

  “So what’s your theory?” Walker asked.

  Her smile faded. The others had continued working, one of them taking photographs while the other busied himself preparing the bones for removal.

  “We don’t have one yet,” she said, and turned away.

  Sensing her frustration, Walker did not press her further.

  “You all right?” a voice asked from behind him.

  Walker turned to see Adam Holzer approaching, bearing two cups of coffee, one of which he held out for Walker.

  “I am now.” He tugged off one glove and stuffed it into his pocket. “I take it the ark didn’t have its own Starbucks.”

  Adam raised his cup in a toast. “Oh, the coffee’s terrible. But it’s hot and full of caffeine.”

  “In other words, just what the doctor ordered.”

  Walker took a swig and tried not to scowl. Turkish coffee could be strong, but whatever the KHAP crew was drinking tasted more like rust.

  Smiling, Adam glanced back at the archaeologists. “Your team is settled in. Ms. Kim declined the coffee—maybe the smartest of us all—but Father Cornelius is warming up. Why don’t we get the formal introductions out of the way and then we’ll show you the burial casing?”

  A chill passed through Walker that the shitty coffee could not dispel.

  * * *

  He followed Adam deeper into the heart of the ark and then up stairs that had been sturdily reinforced and in some cases replaced by the Ark Project staff. On level three, they made their way through a doorway with a wide crack in the lintel timber, and Walker tried not to think about the roof collapsing on top of them and trapping them inside. He pictured the furrows he’d seen down on level one—scratches made by the fingernails of people desperate to escape—and didn’t like that cracked lintel at all.

  Voices could be heard farther ahead and Walker felt a little better when he recognized one as belonging to Kim Seong. She had a way of behaving like a queen in a room full of jesters, an arrogance that could be grating, but somehow she still managed to seem amiable enough.

  At the end of the passage, they came into an open space at the rear of the ark’s topmost deck. Something dry and withered lay on the floor in one roped-off corner, but it had no bones. Walker thought it must have been a sleeping mat five thousand years ago, though how a bunch of hay had not turned entirely to dust he didn’t know. At the back of the chamber, the wall shared the wide timber struts that he’d seen on the lower floors, the ribs of the ark. The top of a ladder jutted up from a hole in the floor—not original, but something constructed by the Ark Project.

  Meryam stood waiting for them with a cluster of people that included Kim and Father Cornelius.

  “Hello again, Mr. Walker. Or is it doctor?” she said.

  “Just ‘Walker’ is fine.”

  She gestured toward the others gathered there, rattling off introductions. The Karga-Holzer team included the site foreman, Hakan, and his nephew Feyiz. A ghostly pale, blond woman with a camera on her shoulder turned out to be Calliope Shaw, the filmmaker Adam had allied with to create a documentary about the project. Meryam introduced the professor Olivieri whom Helen Marshall had mentioned, a fiftyish biblical scholar with a thick beard and powerful girth. From a distance, he’d have looked like a future mall Santa, but up close it was clear Armando Olivieri might be fat, but he was solid.

  “We welcome you all,” Meryam said.

  Olivieri wrinkled his brow.

  “The professor doesn’t seem very happy to see us,” Walker replied.

  Olivieri’s frown deepened. “I assure you, Mr. Walker, my displeasure has nothing to do with you.”

  “But you don’t think we should be here.”

  “I don’t think any of us should be here,” Olivieri corrected. “The ark has always been a fascination for me, one of the focal points of my research throughout my career. Finding it, knowing it is real … that moment was perhaps the greatest of my life. Now I think the best thing to do would be to plant explosives on the mountain face and bury this cave for another few thousand years.”

  Father Cornelius stiffened and his eyes grew stormy. “If this is what it appears to be, it’s the greatest connection to biblical history we have ever found. And you want to bury it? Destroy it? What kind of biblical scholar are you?”

  Olivieri sniffed in disgust. “The kind who understands that some things are better left buried. Don’t pretend you don’t feel it,” the man said, scanning their faces. “It’s so close in here that you can barely breathe, and I promise you it’s not just from the elevation—”

  “Armando,” Meryam said, so quietly the word was almost lost with the howling of the wind that screamed through
the seams between timbers.

  Olivieri flapped a hand at her. “Enough, I know. Fine. Go about your business, but I’ll have no part of it. If I didn’t think someone had to keep watch over this entire, dreadful affair, I’d have left long ago.”

  Meryam looked as if she might lose her temper, but Adam took a step toward the ladder, breaking the moment.

  “No point putting it off any further, then, is there?” he said as he grabbed hold of the handrail and stepped onto the uppermost rungs. “Come along, Walker. We thought your arrival might defuse some of the tension that’s been developing up here in recent days, but apparently we were wrong.”

  “Defusing tension has never been one of my fortes,” Walker said, glancing at Olivieri. “But stranger things have happened.”

  Disgusted by their levity, Olivieri marched back the way they’d come. The other members of the Karga-Holzer Ark Project muttered things to Meryam and returned to their own duties. Even Calliope retreated after handing her camera over to Adam.

  “Where are they all going?” Walker asked when only Meryam remained of the KHAP staff.

  “Limited space,” Meryam said. “And they’ve all seen what’s down there already. None of them wants to see it again.”

  An involuntary shudder went through him. Meryam could have been going for dramatic effect, but her fiancé had just descended the ladder with the camera, so there seemed little point in trying to spook the new arrivals. Kim glared at Meryam as she started down the ladder. If she’d been a cat she would have had her back arched, fur up.

  Walker drank the last of his awful coffee, folded the paper cup and tucked it into his jacket pocket, and turned to Kim and Father Cornelius.

  “You feel anything?”

  Kim exhaled, relaxing. “A bit claustrophobic, yes, but if you mean do I feel anything unnatural, then the answer is ‘no.’ I’m not psychic.”

  “Do you believe in psychics?” Father Cornelius asked curiously.

  “Of course not.”

  “Well, I’m no psychic, either,” Walker said. “But don’t be so quick to dismiss the unnatural. There are all kinds of things in the world that we don’t understand.”