Ararat

by Christopher Golden

  But still it is facing him.

  Ticktock goes the pendulum. Slowly, though. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. Back and forth like a hypnotist’s pocket watch in one of the cop shows Gramma Evie lets him watch.

  Heart thumping but strangely calm now, like the hypnotist has done his job, Adam lets his hand fall to his side and then he is moving down the hallway toward the living room, toward the clock that should not be facing him. Gramma Evie leaves a light on, a three-way bulb on its dimmest setting, an antique lamp with a frosted glass dome covered in hand-painted roses. The roses turn the light a reddish hue, so the living room has a hellish little glow.

  The heat has stopped popping in the baseboards. The floors have ceased creaking underfoot. All he can hear is the pendulum in the grandfather clock. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. His heart has slowed to match that slow cadence.

  His feet are cold on the long, braided rug in the hall, the one Gramma Evie made herself.

  Ticktock. The pendulum draws him on.

  Draws him with its rhythm. Draws him with the mystery of how it came to be turned toward the hall instead of into the room. Draws him with the memory of the story Gramma Evie has told so often. The story of the dybbuk inside the clock, the evil spirit that had possessed her father and had been driven out and trapped inside the clock. The warning that if the clock ever stopped, the dybbuk would escape and poison the soul of whomever it entered next.

  An awful story, Adam’s father said. An old wives’ tale, meant to frighten small children. He’d been furious with his mother for telling it to Adam. Gramma Evie has never told it again, nor has she ever admitted it is anything but the truth.

  His bare feet slide along the floor. Now the bed calls to him. Cloaked in silence, suffocated in it, he takes another step toward the clock. And another. He tells himself to run, to hide under the covers, at the same time that his father’s voice echoes in his mind. An old wives’ tale, that’s what it is.

  The red glow from the rose-painted lamp glints off the pendulum as it swings. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. Tick.

  The next tock never comes.

  The pendulum has stopped.

  Adam’s heart stops along with it. His breath freezes in his lungs. A scream rises within him, but never makes it to his lips. He stares with a horror that makes him tremble, stares at the darkness behind the stilled pendulum, waiting. A second or two or five. Seconds mean nothing with the clock stopped.

  Something shifts there, behind the pendulum.

  Hands appear. Long, thin fingers, withered things with mere wisps of flesh-covered bones. Eyes glitter in the darkness at the back of the clock case, the eyes of the dark figure standing in the rain in his dream, and he knows what it is. That it’s here for him. Those skeletal fingers reach out past the pendulum, grip the sides of the case, and its face emerges from the darkness, nudging the pendulum aside.

  It has horns.

  Adam has seen it before. Impossible, but he knows that he has. He knows this evil. Knows it well.

  He screams.…

  He woke. The scream in his nightmare turned out to be silent. He sat up, casting aside the thick flap of his sleep sack, and whipped around the inside of his tent, searching for the grandfather clock. Fully expecting it to be there with him—there in the stall, in the ark, in the tent—facing him with the pendulum frozen.

  For a moment all he could hear was the hammering of his heart. The sachet smell of his grandmother’s house remained in his nose, but then the frigid air snapped him more fully awake and stole that dream away. A low snoring made him twist around, thinking he might see Gramma Evie there with him, but it was only Meryam. She lay on her side, a bit of drool at the corner of her mouth, snoring quietly. Her brows were knitted, her sleep troubled, having her own bad dreams.

  “Holy shit,” Adam whispered.

  The timbers creaked as cold air moved in and out of the ark. The terrified sliver of paranoia left behind after any nightmare tried to convince him to get up, to check outside the tent, look out in the passage to make sure nothing lurked there that might wish him ill, but he wasn’t about to do that.

  Neither, however, would he attempt to fall back to sleep. Morning couldn’t be very far off, and Adam decided he’d had enough dreams for one night. Enough nightmares for a lifetime.

  * * *

  Morning had arrived, but only barely. The sky hung low and dark, the clouds enveloping the mountain itself, and the snow swept lightly across the ledge and accumulated inside the cave, covering the timbers of the ark. This wasn’t the storm they were expecting, just a taste of what was to come. At first light—what light there was—the crew had managed to erect new plastic sheeting to keep the snow from blowing in and covering up the areas where the archaeology team were focusing their work.

  Feyiz didn’t care about the snow. He stood three feet from the ledge and stared at Meryam. A pale calm had settled into her, though her face ought to have been pinked by the brutal wind.

  “He wouldn’t do this,” Feyiz said. “Arjen wouldn’t just leave.”

  Meryam glanced around as if to be sure she wasn’t overheard. Feyiz thought she must be looking for cameras, but Adam and Calliope were up in the back of the cave with Father Cornelius and Walker. There were no cameras here.

  “I’m telling you—” he went on.

  “I heard you,” she said curtly. Feyiz flinched. He understood the stress she had been under, but she had been harsh these past few weeks. He wished for a way to soothe her.

  “Meryam—”

  “Kemal wouldn’t have just taken off, either,” she said, meeting his eyes, and for the first time he saw her fear and vulnerability. “He’s solid. A thinker. I’m not saying he wouldn’t have left, but at the beginning of a storm…”

  Feyiz wiped snow from his eyes. “Arjen could have gotten him down safely.”

  “Without saying good-bye?” Meryam asked.

  The question hung there between them. People shouted inside the ark. A piece of plastic sheeting had torn away and the team were doing their best to protect the dig. Feyiz knew that he and Meryam should both be helping, but the mystery that had confronted them this morning had stopped them both in their tracks. He feared for Arjen and for Kemal, though he didn’t know the student more than the occasional hello.

  “Shit,” Meryam said, shaking her head. At a loss for rational words, Feyiz knew, because he felt the same way.

  She glanced past him and he turned to see what had gotten her attention. Hakan strode toward them through the blasting, snowy wind. Several of the workers followed him at a distance, but they paused twenty feet from Feyiz and Meryam. The younger Turkish monitor, Zeybekci, stood with them and several members of the archaeological team, watching Hakan approach.

  When first he spoke, the wind stole his voice.

  “What now?” Meryam called.

  Hakan stepped nearer to them—nearer the edge. Feyiz felt the urge to move away, but he also felt the morbid, magnetic lure of the fall that awaited if he stepped too close. That was always the case with danger, he’d found. His heart felt drawn to it, even as his mind made him back away.

  “They left on their own!” Hakan said.

  Feyiz glanced at the people gathered a short distance away, sheltered by the walls of the cave. Could they hear from there, over the wind? He didn’t think so.

  “How can you know that?” Meryam demanded. “Did someone see them go?”

  Hakan shook his head. “No witnesses. But I checked their sleeping quarters myself. They cleared out their things. Everything personal is gone.” He turned to Feyiz. “I know you and Arjen are close. He is my family, just as you are, but he has always been lazy and cowardly. I have no trouble believing he would slip off in the dark—”

  “He would not,” Feyiz said.

  “—rather than face me,” Hakan finished.

  Feyiz hesitated. His nostrils flared, the cold air freezing them inside as he dragged in a breath. Was it really so hard to imagine that Arjen would have snuck
away rather than having to tell Hakan, man to man, that he was leaving?

  Perhaps not.

  But he still did not believe it.

  Meryam and Hakan kept talking—both of them still tense and wary after the confrontation last night—but Feyiz had stopped listening. Spiders of anxiety crawled up his back and along his arms and neck, and he shuddered as he stared over the ledge, down into the yawning gorge. It would be some time before they could confirm whether Kemal and Arjen had reached the bottom safely—likely until the coming storm had passed and the chance of getting a mobile phone signal increased. Until then, he would pretend to himself that they had abandoned the project overnight, slipped out of the cave, and begun the climb down Ararat in the dark. In the snow and the wind.

  For the moment, Feyiz would allow himself to believe that. Even force himself to believe it. The alternative—that they’d been victims of some unknown violence, some hidden malice—was too disturbing to consider for very long. But as he turned to study Meryam and his uncle again, he knew he would be keeping a closer eye on them. A closer eye on everyone in the cave.

  For their safety, and for his own.

  * * *

  Father Cornelius sat on a plastic chair at a table that had been set up just a few yards from the tented area around the cadaver and its casket. A space heater helped take the edge off the cold, but still his bones ached. At his age, arthritis had become a constant companion, sometimes so familiar that it seemed it would never abate. With the icy wind drafting around, the ache seemed deeper than ever before. But he had work to do, so he offered his pain up to God and continued to study the broken chunks of the casket’s bitumen encasement.

  Bright lights had been set up around the table. The lid of the coffin—what the KHAP team liked to call “the box”—stood leaning against the tilted wall. Father Cornelius removed his glasses, rubbed at his eyes, and then put them back on before resuming his focus on the large fragments of bitumen. Professor Marshall—Helen—had helped him lay them out as if putting together the pieces of a puzzle. She had photographs, she said, of the unbroken encasement, but he wanted to see the actual bitumen, to run his fingers over the smooth, glassy black surface, to feel the slashes and curves of ancient language that had been carved there.

  “What’ve you got?” a voice said.

  Father Cornelius blinked as if waking from a dream. He glanced up to see Walker standing at the end of the table as if he’d just manifested there, but from the expectant look on his face, he had the idea Walker might have been standing there awhile.

  “You all right, Father?”

  The priest nodded, but he did not feel all right. Despite the cold that had settled into his bones, he felt a prickling warmth on his face and the back of his neck. His skin felt clammy, almost feverish, and he wondered if he had contracted some kind of virus.

  Walker moved around the table, crouching beside him. “Father?”

  “I’m sorry. It is just a bit overwhelming. You understand.” He took off his glasses and used them to gesture toward the wooden lid where it leaned against the wall. “You see the inscriptions there?”

  “I see them,” Walker replied, but he wore an odd expression. Unsettled, worried.

  “There are elements reminiscent of Nashite, the language of the Hittites. But some of the symbols are variations on the Akkadian language. There is a third element, one with which I am unfamiliar, and I feel it would be the key to my unlocking the morphological, syntactic, and phonological bridges that make this its own fourth, original language. It’s even possible that this—what’s written there on the lid, and engraved here in these fragments of the bitumen encasement—is not a variation but the parent language from which the other three eventually sprang.”

  Father Cornelius rubbed his thinly gloved hands together for warmth, fingers aching with arthritis. He shifted one of the large fragments on the table, trying to match it up more closely with its neighbor.

  “Maybe it’s time he stepped away,” another voice said. “Took a little rest?”

  Irritated, Father Cornelius turned. He flinched, startled to find so many other people gathered around him. Helen stood there with Wyn Douglas and one of their Turkish students. A few feet away, Calliope held her camera, filming the exchange. How long had she been there? How long had any of them been there?

  “Don’t talk about me like I’m not here,” he said, unsure which of them had spoken.

  “Father,” Helen began, her eyes so kind.

  “I’m not a child you can send off for a nap,” he said, heat flushing his cheeks and rushing down his chest and along his arms. “What I am, young lady, is your best hope at deciphering these writings. And I will tell you this much…” He turned to stare into Calliope’s camera. “Based on what little I’ve been able to translate thus far, I can say without a doubt that this ship is the biblical ark, built by a man whose name could be translated as ‘Noah.’”

  Feeling a sheen of sweat on his brow, he wiped his sleeve across his forehead. His throat felt dry, but as he glanced from Walker to Helen, he was all too aware of the eye of the camera upon him.

  “Father,” Walker said, laying a hand on his arm, a deep frown etched on his forehead. “I didn’t think you supported a literal translation—”

  “I didn’t!” Father Cornelius said, yanking his arm away. A bit of bile snaked up the back of his throat and he choked it down, wiped at his forehead again. “You recruited me for this trip, Dr. Walker. You know my credentials. I’m not saying we’re to take the story of the flood verbatim, but—”

  “Father,” Wyn interrupted, crouching on his other side, so that she and Walker flanked his chair. “You need to go and lie down. I’m worried that the elevation is affecting your brain. You seem unwell.”

  He sneered, pushing back from the table. “Don’t be ridiculous. I’ve just begun the process of translating a language no one in the world has ever documented. Could I do that if I … if I…”

  Father Cornelius stood shakily, to prove to himself as much as to the others that he was fine. The serpent of nausea coiled in his belly and slid once more up his throat, but he fought it back down. All right, he wasn’t feeling well, but that was no reason for them all to be staring at him as if he had gone insane. There were references to the building of the ark, to a warning from God about the flood, to a gathering of animals. There were other bits, phrases here and there, something about a terrible darkness that he thought might refer to the storm that brought the flood. Given time he could work out a rough translation, he was sure.

  “Cornelius,” Walker said softly, rising to stand beside him. “Everything you’ve just told us … it’s the third time you’ve explained it all.”

  First he scoffed, even scowled. Then he saw the worry in Walker’s eyes, turned and saw the wary curiosity in Wyn’s expression.

  “That’s absurd.”

  But didn’t he sense it as well, the déjà vu echo of words that seemed too familiar? Father Cornelius shook his head and walked around the table, staring at the upright coffin lid. He ran his hands over the symbols there, the language so similar to others and yet unique, like some intimate coded message from the ancient world.

  A dreadful suspicion began to form. No, not a suspicion. A certainty, though he could not express it to the others. Not yet. Memories of past research cascaded through his mind and Father Cornelius backed away from the lid, turned and stared at the plastic tenting around the box, and the terrible remains of its occupant.

  His right hand shook as he unzipped his jacket and snaked his thinly gloved fingers inside his shirt, drawing out the crucifix that hung on a chain around his neck. He closed his eyes for a long moment and then walked toward the tent. Calliope took a step toward him, her visible eye narrowing as her camera followed his every step.

  “Father?” Helen said.

  The Turkish student, a young archaeologist with the scruff of a beard, asked her something in a burst of his own language before switching to stunte
d English. “What is he doing?”

  From the corner of his eye, Father Cornelius saw Walker and Wyn hesitate, but as he drew back the curtain, they started after him. He let the plastic flap fall down behind him, knowing he had only seconds alone inside the tent. Alone with the horned cadaver, the misshapen thing that someone had taken the time to hammer into a wooden box and then to encase that box in hardened bitumen. It would take time for him to translate all of what had been written, but he could not hide from the ominous things he had already interpreted.

  He kissed the crucifix, held it toward the horned thing in the box. Black shadows stared out from the empty sockets of its eyes.

  The plastic curtain rippled behind him as others entered.

  “The Lord is my salvation, whom should I fear?” he prayed. “I will not fear evil because you are with me, my Lord, my God, my powerful savior, my strength, Lord of Peace, Father of all ages.”

  The Turkish student shouted something. Father Cornelius barely heard the words, did not try to translate them. Helen started to argue with him, but the young man thrust her aside and rushed at him. Father Cornelius lifted the crucifix and kissed it again just before the student slapped his hand down. Marshaling a strange serenity that rose within him, he turned to face the angry young man and saw in his eyes more fear than fury.

  Walker grabbed the student, twisted his arms behind his back, and marched him out of the tent.

  “Damn it, let him go!” Helen barked, following after them. “He’s just angry about the blessing. We’re not supposed to establish any religious claims regarding the remains.”

  Outside the blur of the plastic sheeting, five figures moved back and forth. Strangely numb, his mind at ease, Father Cornelius heard the student demand to speak to Mr. Avci, the senior of the two monitors sent by the Turkish government.

  “Fine, go!” Helen said. “Tell Avci I want to see him as soon as you’re done talking to him.”

  The student stormed off.