by Sean Ellis
Higgins stared back at Kismet, his expression pained and confused, as if he could no longer remember the reason for the choices he had made. He turned, looking meaningfully back at his daughter.
“Maybe it will,” he whispered.
He sprang at Kismet, catching him in a low tackle and thrusting him against the tunnel wall. Kismet rebounded and sprawled face first into the impact zone as Higgins dashed past him, running all out as if pursued by a predator.
His first step crunched loudly on the littering of limestone chips.
Every movement and noise seemed to take place in slow motion as Annie watched; the crunch of her father’s boots on the limestone chips, the sound of her own scream, distorted into a ghastly howl.
Higgins' left foot came down, six feet from where Kismet was struggling to rise, and suddenly, the floor beneath him buckled, collapsing away. He froze, his expression both terrified and purposeful.
It was the look of a martyr.
The entire section of floor beneath the cracked ceiling collapsed in chunks. Kismet too slipped forward, caught in a wave of rubble that was rushing into the newly exposed pit. A cloud of dust swirled up from the shower of rock.
Even louder than the rumble of the collapse however, was the twanging sound of a metal wire, concealed by a facade of limestone cement plastered to the cavern wall, being pulled away from the side of the tunnel.
Annie watched in horror as the singing wire exploded from the wall, working its way swiftly toward the ceiling where it would trigger the release of the enormous boulder onto her father and Kismet.
* * *
The wire went taut, like the string of a musical instrument stretched between the pit and the wall, just a few feet below the ceiling. It held there for a second, and then snapped with a final discordant twang. The loose end whipped around and disappeared into the rising cloud of dust above the pit.
Kismet felt a sting as the wire lashed across his back, but it was just one of a dozen sensory assaults that he barely noticed in his frantic scramble to get out of the shallow pit. He began clawing at the stone that was piling on top of him, trying to get free of its weight, and out of the pit before the ceiling crashed down upon him. Higgins lay nearby, half buried in the rubble. And in front of him, just a few steps away, was the far edge of pit.
Kismet grabbed the stunned Kiwi by the collar and heaved him forward. They reached the chest high wall of the pit, slipping uncertainly on the loose rubble, and desperately began clawing up the near vertical surface while overhead the rigged boulder groaned ominously.
And stayed exactly where it was.
When Fontaneda had first designed the trap, hewing the stone block out of the surrounding limestone, he had held it in place with just a few thin rock wedges, connected to the trip wire. When the wire pulled tight, the wedges would be dislodged and the block would drop, or so the Spaniard had intended. But centuries of moisture, seeping through the rock matrix and infused with mineral particles had effectively cemented the block in place. The stone remained poised overhead, seemingly ready to drop down and obliterate Kismet and Higgins, but it refused to move.
The trap was a dud.
Kismet lay on his back at the far edge of the pit, staring up in disbelief. Beside him, Higgins sat up, an expression of amazed disappointment replacing the frightened ecstasy of a moment before.
“You could have killed us all.” He grabbed Higgins’ shirtfront, but the other man just sagged in place, shaking his head miserably. He looked as if the universe, in refusing his sacrifice, had left him completely bereft and Kismet realized that maybe getting them all killed was exactly what Higgins had been trying to accomplish. The former Gurkha, the man he’d once fought beside and nearly died with, was caught in a trap of a very different sort, a web of his own desperate choices.
“Just whose side are you on, Al?” he whispered.
Higgins’ wounded expression offered no insights.
“Well done, Mr. Higgins,” said Leeds, standing on a narrow ledge that skirted the side of the pit. “Kismet's luck seems to have rubbed off on you. Fortune favors the bold. With men such as you leading the way, I cannot help but succeed.”
Kismet turned on him. “You’re insane, Leeds. These traps are getting more complex, and more dangerous. We're in over our heads, and we're all going to end up dead if we don't turn back.”
“Nonsense. We are beating the Spaniard at his own game. Keep your eyes on the prize, Kismet. Onward!” To underscore the fact that his statement was a command, not an admonition, Leeds caught Annie’s wrist in the crook of his prosthetic and pulled her along.
The tunnel turned just beyond the pit and grew increasingly cramped. The naturally formed walls seemed to close in around them, while the floor sloped up sharply. The rock underfoot was no longer the chalky white of limestone, but increasingly dark and oily, stained with a substance that reeked of ammonia and decay.
“Bat guano,” Kismet whispered to Annie. “That’s a good sign. It means there’s an opening to the surface somewhere nearby.”
He didn’t add that, for a colony of bats to come and go as they pleased, the opening would need to be only a few inches wide.
The tunnel leveled out and then abruptly ended, but this time, instead of a solid rock wall, the passage was blocked by what looked like densely packed soil. Kismet probed it with the tip of his kukri, dislodging a large chunk and releasing an almost overwhelming stench of nitrates. Fontaneda’s secret lay somewhere on the other side of an enormous heap of bat excrement.
Kismet could still feel the movement of air, and in the flashlight beams, he saw a narrow gap at the top of the mound. Reasoning that the accumulation was looser there, he started digging, using the kukri like an entrenching tool. In just a few seconds he broke through to the other side and through this hole he could see dust motes drifting in a shaft of sunlight that stabbed through the darkness of the cavern beyond.
The sight roused him. This was the chance he’d been waiting for. Though it would mean abandoning the search for the Fountain, probably allowing Leeds to seize his prize uncontested, he couldn’t pass up this opportunity to escape.
He backed out of the narrow crawlspace he had dug. The rest of the group had backed away from the shower of guano dislodged by his excavation. “It’s clear. No sign of any more surprises from our Spanish friend.”
Leeds gazed up at him suspiciously. Kismet could almost see the wheels turning in the man’s head. Was Kismet trying to trick him? He smiled and gestured forward. “Then by all means, lead on.”
It was exactly what Kismet was hoping for. He looked directly at Higgins. “It’s a pretty tight squeeze, Al. Keep Annie close so she doesn’t freak out.”
He couldn’t tell if the other man had understood the subtle message, or the implicit offer of trust and forgiveness in his tone.
Are you reading me, Al? We fought on the same side once. I dragged you out of that hellhole in Iraq. Now do this for me.
Higgins just nodded and pulled his daughter close.
Kismet crawled back into the hole and pushed through to the other side, spilling forward down a forty-five degree slope into the cavern beyond. The floor was covered in a thick layer of moist guano, like a peat bog, and his feet sank several inches as he struggled to stand up. From the hole behind him, he could hear Annie whimpering, seemingly on the verge of hysteria, as Higgins prodded her forward.
Perfect!
Kismet scrambled up the crawlspace and reached in, seizing hold of Annie’s arm, pulling her through. They tumbled down the slope together, but he quickly got her up and pointed to the shaft of sunlight streaming into the chamber, lighting the way to freedom.
That was when he realized that source of the light was at least twenty feet directly overhead. The almost perfectly round hole might have been big enough to crawl through, but it remained impossibly out of reach.
The ceiling around the hole began to ripple, like a still pond disturbed by a cast stone, and then large
pieces of it came loose and started to fall—except they didn’t fall. Instead, the shapes began to flit about, swooping back and forth through the air above them. In the brilliant beam of natural light, Kismet could just make out the winged shapes.
Bats.
Enormous bats.
Bats with bodies the size of housecats and leathery wings as long as his arms. There were thousands of them clinging to the ceiling overhead and they were waking up.
Kismet knew that most bats were insectivores, subsisting entirely on winged insects that they plucked out of mid-air with uncanny precision thanks to their natural sonar. Bats could often be found near large bodies of water, where mosquitos provided an endless food supply, which was an absolute necessity since their metabolism demanded that they consume a third of their body weight daily. Most bats weighed only a few ounces. Kismet didn’t want to think about how much these monsters would have to eat to sustain themselves, but he doubted that they had gotten so large on a diet of insects alone. In fact, there wasn’t any natural explanation for how these creatures had grown to grow to such an extraordinary size.
The Fountain. It’s close!
The realization caused him to momentarily forget his disappointment at the aborted escape attempt.
Just ahead, on the wall opposite where they had come in, barely visible in the gloom and partially hidden behind the rising mass of guano, he spied another passage. He pulled Annie close and hastened toward it, even as shouted warnings from Leeds and his men, along with Elisabeth’s strident curses, began to echo in the cavern. The noise multiplied, and suddenly the air was thick with giant bats, disturbed from their rest.
Kismet bulldozed through the accumulation of guano and tumbled through into the adjoining tunnel. It was cramped, the ceiling too low for them to stand, but the passage angled up and away from the escalating din in the cavern behind them and into the unknown darkness beyond.
Except it wasn’t dark. Kismet could just barely distinguish the outline of the walls and as he drew Annie forward through the winding tunnel, the illumination reflected from the limestone surface grew increasingly brighter until he had no difficulty making out the details of their environment—striations in the color of the limestone, patches of lichen, even a distinctive trail of human footprints worn into the path of rock chips that covered the floor.
He froze in mid-step.
Although he could see, quite literally, the light at the end of the tunnel, a wave of dread crashed over him. In his haste, he’d forgotten to look for more of Fontaneda’s traps, and now he felt as if he wandered into a minefield.
He stretched his foot out a few inches beyond what would have been his normal stride, stepping into the impression left, so he assumed, by the Spaniard. It was a gamble; did those tracks mark the safe route past another trap, or were they the bait designed to lure in the unwary?
Only one way to find out.
“Annie!” He gripped her by the shoulders and tried to hold her attention. “I need you to focus. If you want to get out of here, you have to do exactly as I say. Can you do that?”
A nod.
“There are footprints on the ground here. That’s the only place it’s safe to step...at least I think so. Got it? Step only in the footprints.”
“Got it,” she whispered.
The tunnel continued for only a few more steps, then opened into another chamber that was lit up like Times Square.
He suppressed the urge to rush forward. Between the place where he stood and the mouth of the cavern, a distance of about four feet, there were no footprints. Fontaneda always stepped or leaped that final interval.
He swung his arms back and then made the leap.
One foot touched down on the hard floor and then the other. Nothing else happened. As he turned, he saw a frame of wood, bristling with sharp stakes, poised just to the right of the tunnel mouth—Fontaneda’s final trap.
“Big jump, Annie. You can do it.”
She gave a furtive nod, and then took her own leap of faith. It wasn’t her graceful best, but she made it with a few inches to spare, and fell into Kismet’s embrace. He spun her away from the trap and turned to behold the wonder of Fontaneda’s magnificent discovery.
Almost immediately, he felt a faint tickling on his skin, as if he had walked through a strand of spider web. He brushed at his face and felt the familiar sensation ripple across the backs of his hands.
Static electricity, he realized. The atmosphere was ionized like the air around a Tesla coil, and long streamers of plasma—hues of red and violet—danced in the air all around them. Kismet had the impression of standing at the edge of a bottomless pit filled with electrical energy, but then he realized that the lights below them were merely a reflection—a reflection from the mirror-like surface of a large pool that dominated the center of the cavern.
Kismet recalled the line from the letter Leeds showed him, and similar words written by a man calling himself Henry Fortune hundreds of years later.
A cavern where fire dances upon the surface of the water.
They had found it. Fortune’s cavern. The Fountain of Youth.
SEVENTEEN
Annie watched breathlessly as Kismet advanced into the cavern, and for a moment, forgot completely that she was trapped underground.
The chamber was the largest of any of the caverns they had encountered thus far. It was roughly circular, at least a hundred feet across and nearly as high. The domed ceiling was spiked with stalactites that glistened with every hue of the spectrum and even a few shades that seemed completely unnatural. The pool dominated the floor of the chamber but a walkway—about ten feet wide—encircled it to form an unbroken ring, a near-perfect circle with only one minor deviation. At the rear of the chamber, the walkway became a staircase going up four of five steps to a platform that overlooked the water and another set of stairs that led back down to the walkway. There were carvings on the wall behind the dais and some kind of pedestal, an altar perhaps, but it was difficult to make out any details because the air between them was alive with brilliant discharges of energy.
The pool was the source of the light. Veils of color, red and violet, wove intricate patterns mere inches above the placid surface.
“How is this possible?” Annie asked.
“I think it’s ionized plasma, kind of like the aurora borealis. What’s making it happen here? I have no idea. But this is exactly what Fontaneda described, so whatever is causing it must be related to the...the power of the water.” He shook his head as if trying to remember something. “Leeds talked about a source; a Seed of the Tree of Life, and how it could...I guess the word might be ‘supercharge’ ordinary water into something that can make a person immortal. Maybe there are other effects, like this plasma storm.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“Fontaneda didn’t say much more about it, but we should be careful nonetheless.” He watched at the light show for a moment longer, and then glanced past her to the entrance. “Leeds’ is the real danger. We have to find the source he talked about, the Seed.”
“Then what?”
“Use it for leverage; threaten to destroy it if we have to.” He took her hand and led her out onto the walkway.
As they neared the upraised platform, they passed a cairn of hewn limestone rocks, some as large as a man’s head. At one end stood an ornately carved cross. There was a name carved on it and a pair of dates. Annie looked at Kismet for an explanation.
“Fontaneda wrote about this. In the end, his companions decided to die rather than drink...” His voice trailed off as he looked thoughtfully at the cross, and then looked down at his own hands—scraped raw and streaked with chalk dust and bat guano—and his feet which had been cut to bloody ribbons by the journey through the cave. “The Fountain didn’t just give them youth. It healed their wounds. It made Fontaneda strong; supernaturally strong.”
Then, seemingly apropos of nothing he took out his hip flask.
“You’re drinking?” Anni
e gasped in disbelief. “At a time like this?”
“I can’t think of a better time for a drink,” he answered with a roguish smile. Then he upended the container and let its contents dribble out onto the floor. When it was empty, he moved cautiously toward the edge of the pool.
The effects of the plasma storm seemed to increase with his approach. A tendril of light reached out and caught the outstretched hand with the flask. The tongue of energy vanished instantly upon contact, but Kismet jerked his hand back and cradled it against his chest.
“Damn thing shocked me,” he muttered, but nevertheless resumed his advance. For a moment, the cave grew dim, as if the jolt had somehow drained the static storm of its power, but after just a few seconds, it started growing brighter again. The brief respite permitted Kismet to reach his goal without being shocked again, and he knelt right next to the water’s edge. Annie, braving the storm, moved to join him.
He cautiously probed the air above the water. Wispy tongues of static reached out to him, dancing at his fingertips, but evidently not with the same intensity as the earlier discharge. He drew back his hand and flexed his fingers, trying to shake the memory of the jolt from them. “Whatever is at work here, it’s powerful.”
Steeling his determination, he held the flask out over the water. The electricity arced into him again, conducting right through the metal of the container, but he resisted the instinctive urge to draw back and instead lowered the flask into the water.
A dull moan escaped his lips as energy began surging through him. A mist of crimson plasma began to swirl around his arm like a veil. Annie reached out instinctively, intending to pull him back, but through clenched teeth he hissed, “Don't touch me.”
Through a sheer effort of will, he drew back his hand and with it a flask full of the potent water. The ferocity of the electricity began to diminish again as he moved away, his muscles still twitching uncontrollably from the shocks. A few tendrils of light clung tenaciously to him for a moment then vanished.
