Ararat

by Christopher Golden

  “You don’t understand,” Olivieri said, the wind so strong Adam doubted Hakan could hear it. “I felt it in me, like poison in my veins, and I knew God couldn’t stop it. Do you see? God isn’t here anymore. He can’t help us.”

  The words were ugly coming from a man who had spent his entire adult life studying the Bible, but the tone of Olivieri’s voice made Adam shiver in a way the blizzard never would. And his eyes … Adam had never seen hopelessness like that before. Haunted, he shuffled backward on his knees and looked up at Hakan.

  “Take him to Dr. Dwyer. Tie him down if you have to,” Adam said. “This is out of control. I’ve got to see Meryam.”

  Hakan took the man by the shoulders, making certain he would not run for the edge again.

  “You may wish to wait to see her,” he said with such disdain he might as well have spit the words. “Or you may not like what you find.”

  As they walked away, Adam stared at Hakan’s back. A tight knot of silence in his chest blossomed into something larger, a strangely calming dread that accompanied his first step and his second as he began to follow.

  His guard duties forgotten, even Olivieri’s attempt at suicide only a vague motivation, he made his way out of the worst of the wind and along the level-one passage where most of the staff made their quarters. Some had moved up a level for a bit more protection from the elements while others had simply shored up their meager shelter. Adam and Meryam had their own quarters up on level two, but the stall she called her office was here, and he knew she would still be working.

  Warm orange light glowed inside the stall, a combination of a generator-powered lantern and a small space heater.

  Adam’s footfalls were almost silent in the thin layer of snow that had drifted this far inside. He could not feel his own heart beating or the rise and fall of his chest as he came within view of the stall’s interior.

  Meryam stood inside, just as he had predicted. What he had not foreseen was that she might not be alone. In that warm glow, she had her arms around Feyiz, her face buried in his chest. From his vantage point, Adam could not see her face, but Feyiz had his eyes closed in an expression of heartbreaking contentment.

  Adam began to shake his head as he backed away. Confusion and denial gave way to a bitter rush of bile and resentment as he started back along the passage. Then came the fury, at her for this betrayal and at himself for being so stupid. A phrase floated into his mind, something from a hundred books and comics he’d read over the years. Lovestruck fool. That’s you. Fucking idiot.

  Moments later he found himself back where he’d begun, out on the ledge with the blizzard screaming around him, snow whipping at his face, cold searing what little skin he’d left exposed. He stared at the place where Olivieri had tried to commit suicide, at the way the wind and snow seemed to create little swirling ghosts that swept off the cave’s edge, mimicking the act Olivieri had intended to perform.

  Adam took another step.

  A hand touched his back. Anger seized him, a visceral inferno that radiated from within as he turned around, expecting Meryam. She must have heard him, must have followed.

  Only it wasn’t Meryam at all.

  Calliope flinched at the severity of his expression, and Adam softened.

  “Hey … what is it?” she asked.

  Pain and humiliation stoked his anger but he forced it down, shook his head. “Nothing important. What do you need?”

  Calliope refused to believe him. She searched his eyes and reached out to take his hand, shining with compassion.

  “Adam,” she said. “Please. What is it?”

  There in the midst of the blizzard, lost in the darkness and the white scream of the storm, so close to the edge of the abyss, he kissed her. Calliope’s lips were warm and soft and her breath against him had the faint scent of wintergreen.

  She pushed him away. “Stop.”

  Adam breathed deeply and stepped back. Then he saw the worry on her face and he understood.

  “Not here,” she said.

  So they went somewhere else.

  THIRTEEN

  The snow did not reach down into the farthest corners of the ark. At the back, where the coffin still rested on the slanted floor and space heaters provided at least a little warmth, Walker had no idea just how bad the blizzard might have gotten. What he did know was that nobody would be sneaking out tonight. If anyone went missing in this weather, there would be zero room for doubt as to what had become of them.

  Murder.

  The only question would be who had done it.

  For now, the work in that back corner of the ark continued. Everyone else had gone to hunker down until morning, bury themselves in as many layers as possible, but there were pressing questions now. Questions that wouldn’t wait for the sun to rise or the storm to pass.

  Father Cornelius worked over the now-empty coffin, bright lights still shining into its interior. Kim stood next to him, taking notes longhand in a journal the priest had provided. Her position as UN observer didn’t include assisting Father Cornelius in this way, but a trust gap had existed between Walker’s team and the KHAP staff from the moment of their arrival and it had grown into a vast gulf.

  Polly Bennett and a couple of other members of the archaeology team stood watching. The distrust in the faces of the young archaeologists spoke volumes, but Walker knew it had been earned. Kim and the priest had both exhibited strange behaviors around the coffin and its occupant. Walker had contributed nothing in the past few hours, but he had stuck around for the same reason these archaeology students had—to make sure nobody went off the rails and decided to damage the coffin or, worse, themselves or someone else.

  A short distance away, at the bottom of the ladder that went to level two, the cadaver had been treated and tightly wrapped, then placed inside a body bag and further sealed inside some kind of zippered canvas enclosure that would be simpler to transport. Ready to go, the moment the storm abated.

  Walker tore his gaze away from the zippered canvas, forced himself to stop thinking about the ugly, twisted corpse inside and the wicked-looking horns on its skull.

  “Well, that’s not very nice,” Kim said, frowning as she took a step back from Father Cornelius.

  Walker felt a tremor inside him. No, no, he thought. No more of this bullshit.

  But then Kim glanced over to let him in on the joke.

  “He just said he wished Professor Olivieri was here,” she said, nudging the priest playfully. “Honestly, I am offended.”

  The priest fumbled sheepishly for words. “It’s only that, well, Olivieri would be able to understand the difficulties in translating—”

  “He’s disagreed with every word you’ve spoken since you arrived,” Walker said. “He’s unstable and, sorry Father, he was a prick even before he showed us he was unstable.”

  “No argument,” the priest replied. “But he’s a knowledgeable prick.”

  The archaeology students stared at him. Kim raised an eyebrow and pretended she hadn’t heard, but Walker only laughed. It wasn’t the first time he’d been in Father Cornelius’s presence when the older man had said something off-color. If anything, it told him the priest was feeling more himself, more in control.

  Polly Bennett joined Kim and the priest beside the coffin. In Helen Marshall’s absence, Polly had become the senior member of the archaeological crew, their de facto boss.

  “How different is this from what was on the lid?” Polly asked the priest.

  Father Cornelius glanced back at Walker, so Polly turned as well, watching the silent exchange. The message was clear. This might be the Karga-Holzer Ark Project, but when it came to what Father Cornelius found here, the priest answered to someone else.

  Walker nodded his authorization. All three of the grad students stared at him a moment—they didn’t like the idea that they might be on the outside of new information.

  “Same methods,” Father Cornelius said, pointing into the coffin. “Whatever methodology was
used by whoever wrote on the lid and engraved the symbols in the bitumen casing, the same mix of languages was employed here. I’ve found some things that are echoed. The Sumerian element is key. I feel as if I’m just not looking at it correctly, that if I can just make sense of why certain languages were used for certain phrases, I’ll get it.”

  Polly glanced back at Walker again, although she did not work for him. “Languages are my specialty. I could help.”

  Walker expected the priest to scoff. There were times when he certainly would have. Instead, Father Cornelius cocked his head and studied the young woman with her half-shaved, green hair.

  “I welcome it,” he replied, but there was something in the way he said it—a kind of tremor in his voice, a darting of the eyes—that made Walker wonder if it was help he wanted, or just the solidity of Polly’s nearness. The company of someone who seemed steady and strong when so many among them were frayed at the edges.

  Kim shuffled to the side a bit to make room for Polly. Walker thought she might make a joke out of it, something about knowing when she was wanted, but instead she scribbled something in the journal and then stared at nothing for a few seconds. She seemed to waver on her feet. Concerned, Walker started toward her.

  “Wait a second,” Polly said, staring into the coffin. “The markings there—”

  “The stains,” Father Cornelius replied. “Yes?”

  “You thought they were from bodily fluids.”

  “I still do.”

  The other students moved nearer. Shaken from her reverie, Kim craned her neck for a better look into the coffin. Walker stepped up behind Polly and the priest, peering between them at the etched symbols and the dark, striated stains where the body had lain. The pattern reminded him of the chalk outlines police made around dead people at crime scenes.

  “I’d have to take samples to confirm,” Polly said. “But to me, the outline is too clean to have been made only by stains.”

  Kim had her pen at the ready like some eager cub reporter. “What are you suggesting?”

  Walker felt all of his doubts begin to unravel. All along he had come up with other explanations, not only for the behavior of the staff but for the one, huge, looming bit of impossibility that hung over it all—the location of the ark. There were ways to explain it, but they all stretched credulity. There had been several times in his career when believing in the supernatural would have made his work and life simpler, but he did not, and in each of those cases, he had found a tangible, biological explanation. Extraordinary, sometimes horrible, but not supernatural. He sought something more—that had become clear to him, hard as it was to admit to himself. But the occult, true evil, had no more bearing on his life than a bunch of fairy tales.

  Now he stared into the coffin and he saw what Polly had seen. The darker part of the bottom of the coffin, where much of the writing had been hidden beneath the cadaver … the outline of that corpse hadn’t only been darkened from being soaked in the fluids that escaped the body during putrefaction.

  “The wood is burned,” he said.

  Polly had begun to explain, but now she looked at him and nodded. “I think so, yes.”

  “How is that possible?” one of the other students asked.

  “There are ways to explain it,” Polly replied.

  And there were. Whoever had put the cadaver into the box might have burned the pattern into the wood beforehand, as part of the message. But Father Cornelius crossed himself, pulled the crucifix from inside his collar and kissed it before slipping it back within the cloth.

  “I don’t…” Kim began, lowering her head as she took a couple of deep breaths.

  Walker moved over to her. “Kim?”

  She straightened, closing the pen inside the journal. “I’m very tired. Would it be all right if I went to lie down? I think I’d like to sleep.”

  “Of course,” Walker said. He glanced at Father Cornelius. “Unless you need her?”

  “We’ll muddle along,” the priest said, studying Kim with only fleeting concern before he turned his attention back to Polly. “It may help me put all of this together if I talk through the various language elements I’ve already found.”

  As the priest started running through his observations anew, Walker took Kim by the elbow and escorted her away. They passed the wrapped cadaver of the horned thing. Walker barely looked at the zippered canvas transport bag, but he could feel its presence behind him as he waited for Kim to climb the ladder to level two, then made the ascension himself. Like the gaze of a spurned lover burning into the space between his shoulder blades, it seared him, until at last he was off the ladder. His thoughts were a jumble of questions, most of which had no satisfying answers.

  “Walker,” Kim said quietly, as they walked together. “Do you feel all right?”

  “No,” he said immediately, and then laughed at his dire tone. “But how should I feel?”

  Kim bumped against him, keeping stride but somehow huddling into him with every step. “Cold, I suppose. But you know that’s not what I mean.”

  Did he?

  “Watched,” he said, hating to admit to such a nebulous fear. “I feel watched.”

  Kim nodded, glancing around as if whoever might be observing them lurked in the shadows they passed, the dark places between the lights that were strung every ten feet or so along the passage. The stairs to level three were ahead, but Kim stopped and faced him. They were in the gloom between bulbs, but still he could see her breath plume in front of her. Winter had not just intruded, it had invaded.

  “I feel that, too,” she said. “But even more, I feel marked.”

  “As a target?”

  Kim shook her head. “Not like that. I mean the way a dog marks its territory, puts its stink everywhere so the other dogs will know to stay away. I feel … claimed. And I know it’s foolish, but I want to leave. I know I agreed to be a part of this mission. But now I … I’ve got to get out of here.”

  “The blizzard—”

  “I know,” she said, striking him on the arm, her brows furrowed. “I can’t go anywhere until the weather clears. And I am ashamed of myself for how anxious that makes me.”

  Kim left her hand on his arm, stared at the timbers underfoot as she took a deep breath, unwilling to explain more. Or perhaps unable.

  The day they’d arrived he would have admitted to at least a general dislike for her, but that had been a different woman. Beautiful, yes, but not his ally. Not his friend. Now, both of them stripped of their professional identities, he looked at Kim and saw someone smart and raw and full of curiosity, so much like himself.

  “You’re not the only one who’s afraid,” he said quietly. “I promise you, Seong, you’re not alone.”

  His hand rose, almost of its own volition, and he cupped the side of her face. She leaned into his palm, and then forward into his embrace. And here it was, another thing he would have thought impossible.

  They held each other, taking warmth and strength.

  And for a time, neither of them was alone.

  * * *

  The cave ledge was like the mouth of a badly carved jack-o’-lantern. On its western half, much more of the ark’s wall had given way in the landslide, leaving more of the interior open to the elements. The Ark Project had started work on this more exposed side in order to complete examination and collection of artifacts and samples as quickly as possible, so that their later work could be done behind whatever shelter they could take when they moved into the eastern side of the ark.

  They were running behind. This storm had come too soon.

  On the western side of that pumpkin/cave ledge, Adam huddled behind an outcropping of rock that blocked much of the wind. Still, the temperature had dropped precipitously low and he knew it had been foolish to come out here, especially in the dark. But it was the farthest he could get from the rest of the staff—and from Meryam—without trying to scale down the mountain in the storm.

  “Idiot,” he whispered to himself,
with lips that were chapped and dry behind the cloth of the balaclava he wore. His goggles pressed at the flesh around his eyes as the wind shifted direction for a moment, then eased again.

  He told himself he was out here on the ledge because he had agreed to take the first shift on sentry duty tonight, but he couldn’t make himself believe the lie. Not for a second. His hands still ached with the warmth and the softness of Calliope’s curves, the memory of the hard, unyielding muscles in her arms and back as she moved against him, and he against her. She wore some kind of body spray with traces of vanilla and cinnamon, and the aromas floated in his head, the taste of her still on his lips.

  Guilt burned in him, but guilt was not enough. When he closed his eyes, pressed them shut against reality, images flashed through his mind of Meryam holding Feyiz, of their intimacy and the contentment in his expression. But they were shuffled together like cards from different decks, mixed with images of the brief time he’d spent with Calliope only an hour ago, the way her mouth had formed a little O when she had rolled on top of him, both of them trying so hard to be quiet.

  He hated himself a little. Maybe more than a little. But if he was being honest, he hated himself for betraying what he believed in more than he did for betraying Meryam. Right now she didn’t deserve his guilt and self-recrimination.

  “Fuck!” he rasped, out there alone in the storm.

  He had to get off this mountain.

  The emotions warring inside him were burning everything in their wake, scorched earth, and Adam had never been good at hiding his feelings. How the hell was he supposed to keep going even another hour past the moment he came face-to-face with Meryam again? His partner. His bride-to-be. Bad enough she was cheating on him with Feyiz. If it had been only that, he could have taken the high road. Stood tall. Broken-hearted, but at least able to tell himself that he’d been wronged. Now he didn’t even have that.

  All for what? Calliope didn’t love him. They were friends and coworkers and they’d flirted occasionally but never with any real intent. In that moment when she had taken his hand and he’d seen the tenderness in her eyes, it had been as if someone else had taken over, as if his body had moved of its own volition. He could never say that aloud. All his life he’d hated people who fell back on the idea that they’d somehow lost control. So although her scent remained in his head and the feel of her body on the tips of his fingers, Adam would take the consequences.