Destiny

by Alex Archer

  “Yes,” Annja declared. “Me.”

  The old man blew a raspberry. “You’re a child. What would you know about anything of antiquity?”

  “I know that old men who think they know everything don’t know everything,” she said. “Otherwise children like me wouldn’t be discovering new things.”

  “Learning about them from a book is one thing,” the old man said. “But to truly appreciate them, you have to live among them.”

  “I try,” Annja said. “I’ve been on several dig sites.”

  “Good for you. In another forty or fifty years, provided you don’t die of a snakebite or a long fall, perhaps you will have learned something.”

  A tremor passed through the ground.

  Annja froze at once, not certain if she’d truly felt it.

  The old man turned around to face her. His face knitted in concern. Irritably, he tapped his staff against the ground. “Did you feel that?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Annja said. “It’s probably nothing to worry about.”

  “It felt like an earthquake. This isn’t earthquake country.”

  “Earthquakes take place around the world all the time. Humans just aren’t sensitive enough to feel all of them,” Annja said.

  The ground quivered again, more vigorously this time.

  “Well,” the old man said, “I certainly felt that.” He kept walking forward. “Maybe we should think about getting down.”

  Annja stayed where she was. Whatever was pulling at her was stronger than ever. It lay in the direction opposite the way the old man had chosen. Before she knew it, she was headed toward the pull.

  “Where are you going?” the old man asked.

  “I want to check something out.” Annja walked along the ridgeline, climbing again. A small trail she hadn’t noticed before ran between bushes and small trees.

  A game trail.

  Despite the tremors, Annja went on.

  FOULARD’S MOOD HADN’T lifted. A burning need for some kind of revenge filled him. The woman, Annja Creed, had to be delivered alive to Lesauvage, but she didn’t have to be unbroken.

  He parked his motorcycle beside a new SUV. The five men with him parked nearby.

  They dismounted as one, used to working together. Jean had been one of them, one of Lesauvage’s chosen few.

  Drawing his 9 mm handgun, Foulard took the lead. The other men fell in behind.

  They went quickly. Over the past few years, they had learned the Cévennes Mountains. Lesauvage had sent them all into the area at one time or another. Foulard had been several times.

  None of them had ever found anything.

  Foulard truly didn’t believe the woman had found anything, either. He hoped she hadn’t. Once Lesauvage saw that she knew nothing, he would quickly give her to them.

  Eagerly, Foulard jogged up the trail. His face and arms still hurt, but the pain pills had taken off the edge.

  When the first tremor passed through him, Foulard thought it was the drugs in his system. Then a cascade of rocks rushed from farther up the grade and nearly knocked him from his feet.

  “What the hell is that?” one of the men behind him yelled.

  “Earthquake,” another said.

  “We don’t want to be on top of this mountain if it’s about to come down.”

  Foulard spun toward them. “We were sent here to get the woman,” he said. “I won’t go back to Lesauvage without her.”

  The men just stared at him.

  The ground quivered again.

  “I’ll kill any man who leaves me,” Foulard promised.

  They all looked at him. They knew he would.

  Another tremor passed through the earth, unleashing more debris that sledded down the mountainside.

  “All right,” Croteau said. He was the oldest and largest of them. “We’ll go with you. But make it quick.”

  Turning, Foulard kept his balance through another jarring session, then started to run.

  THE GAME TRAIL LOOKED old and, judging from the bits and pieces of it Annja saw along the mountainside, it went all the way to the top.

  The ground heaved this time, actually rising up and slamming back down beneath Annja’s feet. She dropped to all fours, afraid of being flung from the mountainside.

  “This way,” the old man shouted. “Come back from there before you get yourself killed.”

  This is insane, Annja thought. She felt the earth quivering beneath her like a frightened animal.

  “Don’t be foolish,” the old man said.

  Frustrated, Annja took out her Global Positioning System device. She took a reading.

  Twenty-four satellites bracketed the earth. Every reading taken by the device acquired signals from at least twelve of them. When she returned to the mountains, she’d be within inches of the exact spot where she now stood.

  Returning the GPS locater to her pack, she turned and started back down the mountain. The compulsion within her surged to a fever pitch with a suddenness and intensity that drove her to her knees in an intense attack of vertigo.

  “Are you all right?” the old man asked.

  She wasn’t. But she couldn’t speak to tell him that.

  Without warning, she was no longer on the mountaintop. She stood in the middle of a blazing fire. Pain threatened to consume her.

  Her whole life she’d suffered from nightmares about fire but, for the first time, it was happening while she was awake.

  “Girl!” the old man bellowed.

  “Girl!” he roared again. Panic strained his features. Some other look was there, as well. Perhaps it was understanding.

  Annja didn’t know. The nightmare abated. She focused on the old man.

  Forced to use his staff to aid with his balance across the heaving earth, he came toward her. He held out his hand. “Come to me. Come to me now!”

  Feeling drained and totally mystified, Annja tried to walk toward him. Then the ground opened up at her feet. In a heartbeat, the earth shifted and yawned till a chasm twenty feet across formed. Rocks and grass and debris disappeared into the earthen maw.

  Barely staying on her feet, Annja backed away. She didn’t want to try leaping down into the crevasse. During a quake, the earth could close back together just as quickly as it opened up. If the earth caught her, it would crush her.

  “I can’t reach you,” she said.

  The old man pointed, leaning on his staff as another quake shuddered through the earth. “There’s a trail. Back that way. Just head down.”

  Turning, Annja gazed down the other side of the mountain. Here and there, just glimpses, she thought she saw a trail.

  “Do you see it?” the old man called.

  The earth heaved again, shifting violently enough that Annja almost lost her footing. “Yes!”

  “Go!” the old man called. “Not much farther down, you’ll find a campsite. I have a truck there. I will meet you.” With more agility and speed than Annja would have believed possible, he started down the crest where he stood.

  Annja didn’t know what the old man was doing in the mountains. There were a number of hiking trails. Even famed author Robert Louis Stevenson, though in ill health, had been compelled by his curiosity about the Beast of Gévaudan to try his luck at solving the mystery in the mountains. The trail Stevenson had taken was clearly marked for tourists interested in the countryside, the legend or the author of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

  The mountain shook again and Annja started running. Never in her research had she heard of any earthquakes in the area.

  She followed the narrow path across worn stone that led through boulders and cracks along the mountainside. As she ran, the ground trembled and heaved. Several times she tripped and fell against the rock walls. Her backpack and the pouch containing the climbing chalk thudded against her.

  “There she is!” The young male voice ripped across the sound of falling rock.

  Going to ground immediately, Annja peered around.

  Farther down the
slope, one of the motorcycle riders, still wearing his riding leathers, peered up at her. For a moment she thought perhaps he was coming to help her.

  Then she saw the small, black semiautomatic pistol in his hand and the bruises on his face. It was the man from the alley.

  She turned and fled, racing back up the mountain.

  The earth shook even more violently than before. A horrendous crack sounded nearby. Nearly knocked from her feet, aware that hundreds of pounds of rock and debris were skidding toward her, she pulled up short and tried to alter her course.

  The ground opened up and swallowed her.

  4

  Out of control, Annja threw her hands out instinctively in an effort to catch hold of the sides of the fissure. Stone whipped by her fingertips, but she managed to somewhat slow her descent from a fall to a slide something short of maximum velocity.

  Not a fissure, she told herself, her brain buzzing at furious speed the way it always did when she was in trouble. This is a sinkhole.

  She felt the roughly circular contours of the shaft around her as she stretched to fill it. A sinkhole was a natural formation of a cave that finally hollowed out to the point it nearly reached the surface. As a nation, France was probably more honeycombed with caves and cave systems than any other country in the world.

  The Cévennes Mountains held many volcanic caves, created by lava after it had cooled and the volcanoes had subsided. Along the coast, sea caves formed by waves had provided hidden harbors in the golden age of piracy. Limestone caves in the interior were made by erosion. There were even many caves made by the passage of glaciers across the land millions of years ago. Cro-Magnons had lived in caves at Pech-Merle and Lascaux, leaving behind cave paintings millions of years old.

  Annja wasn’t surprised to find a new cave in the mountains. In fact, in scaling the cliff she’d been hoping to find some sign of one. Le Bête had taken up refuge somewhere all those years ago.

  However, she hadn’t expected to plummet into her discovery.

  In a hail of flying stones, she hit the ground hard. The impact drove the breath from her lungs. Blackness ate at the edge of her conscious mind, but she struggled through it and remained alert.

  It’s not the fall that kills you, she reminded herself. It’s the sudden stop at the end.

  She covered her head with her arms as more debris rained down around her. Several pieces of stone hammered her back and legs hard enough to promise bruises for a few days.

  Then everything was quiet.

  You’re alive, she told herself. Get moving.

  She pushed herself up. Nothing felt broken. That was always a good sign.

  When her lungs finally started working again, dust coated her tongue. Reaching into her backpack, knowing by touch and years of experience where the contents were, she took out a bandanna, wet it with the water bottle and tied the material around her nose and mouth. The water-soaked cloth would keep her from suffering respiratory problems caused by inhaling too much dust.

  Wet cloth won’t protect you from carbon dioxide buildup or poison gas, she reminded herself. Carbon dioxide wasn’t a natural byproduct of a cave the way coal gas was, but if humans or animals had frequented it, the gas could have filled the chamber. She hoped the opening created by the sinkhole would help.

  Echoes sounded around her, indicating that the cave was large or long.

  Fishing out one of the two halogen flashlights she habitually carried, she turned it on. Then she took off her sunglasses and stored them in the backpack, marveling that they hadn’t broken during the fall.

  The flashlight beam cut through the darkness but was obscured by the swirling dust that filled the cave. The chamber was at least thirty feet across and almost that high.

  The sinkhole was at the back of the cave. At least, it was in the area she decided to refer to as the back of the cave. Almost four feet across, it snaked up but the twists and turns were so severe that no outside light penetrated the chamber.

  Going back up is going to be a problem, Annja realized. If it’s possible at all. She carried rope in her backpack. Over the years spent at dig sites, she’d learned that rope was an indispensable tool. She never went anywhere without it. But she wasn’t sure it could help her now.

  Bats fluttered from the stalactites. She swept the flashlight beam after them.

  Okay, Annja thought, if you guys are in here, there’s got to be another entrance.

  Unless the sinkhole that had opened up had originally been some small holes that had allowed the bats to enter and exit. She didn’t want to think about that possibility.

  The air was thick and stank from being closed up. More than that, it smelled like an animal’s den. That was good news and bad news. If the cave did provide a home to an animal, the chances were good that another entrance was large enough to allow her passage. The bad news was that wolves were in the area, as well as bears. Large predators weren’t going to be welcome. Especially not in their den.

  A swift examination of the chamber revealed a passage. She went to it, finding she had to hunch down to pass through and that the floor was canted. At least the structure looked sound. No cracks or fissures showed in the strata. If there was another tremor, she felt reasonably certain the rock would stay intact and not come down on top of her.

  The passage went on for fifteen or twenty feet, then jogged left and opened into another chamber nearly twice the size of the one she’d fallen into.

  When she passed the flashlight beam over the wall to her right, drawings stood out against the stone. Seeing what they were, guessing that no one in hundreds or thousands or millions of years had seen them, all thoughts of anything else—the earth tremors, the motorcyclists, the old man—were gone.

  Playing the flashlight beam over the rough rock surface, Annja made out mastodons, handprints, figures of people, fires, aurochs—ancestors of modern cattle—and other images of Cro-Magnon life.

  Excitement flared through her. During her career, she’d seen cave paintings. She’d even seen similar paintings at Lascaux after the cave had been closed to the public.

  But she had never found something like this.

  Hypnotized by the images, she took a credit-card-sized digital camera from her backpack. With the low light, she didn’t know if the images would turn out, but whatever the camera captured would surely be enough to get funding for a dig site.

  The Cro-Magnon painters had used animal fat and minerals to make colors. Black had been a favorite and easy to make. All that was required was charred bone ground into a fine powder mixed with animal fat.

  She walked along the wall, taking image after image. Only a little farther on, the scenes on the wall were marred. Long, deep scratches ran through them, as if they’d been dug into the stone by great, dull claws. The claw marks were seven and eight feet high, so close together it looked as if an animal had been in a frenzy.

  An animal marking its territory? she wondered. Or the desperation of an animal trapped inside this cave?

  In that moment, Annja remembered she’d traveled to the Cévennes looking for La Bête. Then she tripped and nearly fell. Something furry brushed against her ankle.

  For one moment she thought she felt it move. Stepping back quickly, she swung the flashlight around, prepared to use it as a weapon.

  The light beam fell in a bright ellipse over a scene straight out of a nightmare. The half-eaten and mummified corpse of a sheep lay on the floor amid a pile of bones.

  Tracking the bone debris, Annja shone her beam over the stack of skulls that had been arranged in an irregular notch in the chamber. At least seventy or eighty skulls filled the area.

  Was this a place of worship? Annja wondered. Or an altar celebrating past triumphs?

  She tried to imagine Cro-Magnon men sitting in the cave bragging about their success as fierce hunters. Except that the sheep’s body was anachronistic. None of the sheep’s forebears had looked like that in Cro-Magnon times. This sheep was small and compact, bred fo
r meat and wool, not far removed from the sheep Annja had seen on farms she’d passed on her way to the mountain range.

  Looking closely, she noticed that several of the skulls were human.

  Used to handling human remains on dig sites, she had no fear of the dead. She set down the flashlight to illuminate the scene.

  Upon further inspection, she discovered that several of the ribs, and arm and leg bones were likely human, as well. Shreds of clothing that looked hundreds of years old clung to some of the bones. Boots stood and lay amid the clutter.

  A cold chill ran down her spine. Whatever had lived in the cave had preyed on humans.

  Shifting the light, heart beating a little faster, Annja spotted the great body stretched out on the floor. For a very tense moment, she’d thought the animal was lying there waiting to pounce. She froze.

  The light played over the mummified lips pulled back in a savage snarl that exposed huge yellow teeth. The eye sockets were hollow, long empty and dry. In that moment, the animal musk she’d smelled seemed even more intense.

  Death had stripped the fantastic creature of much of its bulk, but it was still easy to see how huge it had been in life. The head was as big as a buffalo’s but more bearlike in shape. Its body was thick and broad and the limbs were huge. It was unlike anything Annja had ever seen before.

  Making herself move despite the fear and astonishment she felt, Annja took pictures of the creature with the digital camera. Maybe she’d made two incredible discoveries in the same day.

  Finished with the camera, she hurriedly took out a small drawing pad and a mechanical pencil from her backpack. If the camera failed to capture images, she could at least draw them.

  On closer inspection, Annja saw a broad-bladed spear shoved through the beast’s chest. Beneath the corpse of the impossible animal was a human corpse.

  Decomposition hadn’t settled in. Locked in the steady climate of the cave environment, kept bug-free by depth and ecology, the dead man had mummified as the beast had. His hands, the flesh so dehydrated it was almost like onionskin over the bones, still held tightly to the spear. Man and beast, locked in savage combat, had killed each other.