by Sean Ellis
Annie felt her father’s hands close around her and he began pulling her toward the cairn. She didn’t have the strength to fight him, but she tightened her hold on Kismet’s body and refused to let go. Higgins just dragged them both, and then covered his daughter with own body.
For several seconds, absolute pandemonium reigned.
She heard shouts and more laughter from Leeds, but there was another noise—a crackling sound like a hissing live wire—that soon drowned out everything else. The harsh smell of ozone filled her nostrils, scrubbing away the sulfurous odor of burnt gunpowder.
And the light—the cavern was lit up like daylight. At the center of the Fountain, Dr. Leeds was blazing like a supernova.
Annie struggled free of her father’s protective embrace and gazed out at the chaos.
The remaining commandos continued to hurl rounds at the transformed occultist, but their resistance was merely a desperate effort to distract him so their leader and Elisabeth could escape. But instead of seizing that opportunity, the pair was trying to make their way to the dais.
Leeds seemed not to notice. He reached out from the heart of the plasma storm again, this time enveloping the still form of one of his fallen hirelings, instantly vaporizing him and consuming the resulting cloud of organic molecules. Annie felt a cold rush of horror as she realized what Leeds was doing.
He’s feeding,
Behind the veil of pervasive energy, Leeds was undergoing a startling transformation. His hair spilled over his shoulders, a prodigious beard sprouted from what had been a clean-shaven face. Beneath it all, his skin had darkened to a feverish, ruddy hue, and before Annie’s eyes, he started to swell.
Another finger of fire lanced out, striking Major Russell, whose scream was cut short as his wounded body disintegrated.
At the center of the raging tempest, Leeds’ skin stretched like an overinflated balloon, and then burst, revealing new flesh underneath. Immersed as he was in the Fountain’s waters, there was no end to the process; it just kept rebuilding him again and again, and would continue to do so as long as it had the raw materials to work with.
Tendrils of lightning began reaching out of his body, seemingly at random, without any conscious control. The plasma trails stroked the walls, disassembling stone as easily as flesh. Limestone, calcium carbonate, was nothing but than the remains of ancient life forms, compressed together by time and pressure—the perfect fuel for the fire of Leeds’ astonishing and endless transformation.
The intensity of the lightning was both blinding and deafening. It soared up into the high reaches of the cavern, dancing between the dangling stalactites like sunbeams in a crystal chandelier. The cave resonated with thunderclaps, vibrations that shook the ground and sent cracks shooting across the smooth stone.
Leeds’ clothes had been completely burned away, or perhaps vaporized and ingested like everything else, and he stood naked and exposed in the center of the pool. His skin was peeling away like bark from a tree, but as soon as it sloughed off, new flesh was revealed. Annie saw that something else had changed as well.
Dr. Leeds was growing.
When it had begun, he had been waist-deep in the pool, but now he stood like a titanic colossus with the water splashing around his knees.
Except something was wrong.
The growth wasn’t proceeding uniformly. Some parts seemed to be growing faster than others, giving the impression of a hideously deformed creature. Under his beard, his face had become distorted beyond recognition. His torso had grown bloated, top-heavy, on legs that seemed to be atrophying before Annie’s eyes. The ribbons of skin peeling away weren’t dead layers of epidermis flaking off, but living tissue that also continued to grow haphazardly. In a space of time that might have been measured in heartbeats, Dr. Leeds ceased to be anything remotely human.
And still it did not end.
The misshapen giant form collapsed back into the pool; a grotesque island of flesh that grew like a tumor, drawing still more material into itself with cataclysmic discharges of energy.
Annie felt movement against her body and cried out as something squeezed her arm.
Was this what it felt like? Was it her turn to be ripped apart, reduced to a spray of molecules and consumed by the thing Leeds had become?
But it wasn’t the jolt of an electrical discharge she felt.
It was a hand.
Kismet’s hand.
* * *
Death, it seemed, had no secrets to reveal. Kismet's plunge into the abyss of darkness was unremarkable in its similarity to countless reports given of near death experiences. His world had collapsed into a tunnel of darkness, and at its end...heaven?
And he had died, hadn’t he? His lungs had filled with blood, drowning him and causing asphyxia. His brain deprived of oxygen, shut down. The electrical impulses from his central nervous system that regulated the rhythm of his heart were cut off. Neurological flat-line; the clinical definition of ‘dead.’
And yet, every few seconds, his heart contracted within his chest.
Another source of electrical stimulation was at work within him. The mysterious element that had empowered the water of the pool to rejuvenate his cells—the very substance that reacted with that water to create the stunning plasma storm in the air above the Fountain—was generating random and discordant electrical shocks throughout his muscles.
His blood pressure had dropped to virtually nothing, no oxygen was being carried by the red blood cells that remained in his circulatory system, but something more important was going on. There were still traces of the Fountain’s water in his body, generating those tiny sparks as they went to work stimulating his cells to keep regenerating and reproducing.
What had happened to Leeds on a grand scale was happening to Kismet at the microscopic level. Damaged and ruined cells were consumed, broken down into raw material, transformed into healthy tissue.
After a time, perhaps only a minute or two, his blood vessels were whole again, his chest cavity repaired, the deluge of blood absorbed back into his body. His diaphragm twitched and the tiniest gasp of air was drawn in. His heart gave a spasm, and the blood in his arteries and capillaries and veins...moved.
* * *
Kismet sat up, like a sleeper awakening from a bad dream, only to discover that he was in the middle of a much more terrifying nightmare.
“What the...?”
He looked up into Annie’s eyes, then past her to Higgins...
Higgins! He felt a surge of anger as he recalled how his old comrade in arms had betrayed him, held him at gunpoint turned him over to Leeds...why exactly, he couldn’t remember.
Then what?
It came back to him in chunks. The ordeal on the lake bottom...traps...giant bats...The Fountain. I drank from the Fountain of Youth!
And that was it. The last thing he remembered.
He stared into the heart of the raging tempest at the center of the pool; there was something alive there, something that had once been human. “Leeds?”
Annie nodded.
The sight held him rooted in place. He could vaguely recall what he had felt after tasting the water, and thought he had at least a rudimentary grasp of the principles at work. It was probably beyond the grasp of science to explain, but there was certainly no magic to it. But what was happening in the center of the Fountain was like nothing he could have imagined.
Then he recalled something else, the thing Leeds had truly sought—the Seed.
He turned toward the elevated dais, and that was when he saw the man standing next to Elisabeth.
It had been twenty years since their last encounter, but he recognized the man as easily as if it had only been yesterday.
“Hauser!”
It was a barely a whisper, but somehow the man standing on the platform and likewise captivated, heard him.
Kismet felt a cold chill wash over him that had nothing to do with the cataclysm building in the pool.
Ulrich Hauser.
&
nbsp; That was what the man had called himself—the man from Prometheus—the man who had somehow known all about him.
You are their grand experiment.
Ulrich Hauser had left him to die in Iraq—
Or had he?
Kismet, if I killed you, your mother would have my head.
Hauser had said that, all those years ago, just before leaving him on his own—he and Higgins had been captured, tortured—and then, for no apparent reason, they’d been allowed to escape. Had Hauser, or someone else acting on his orders, orchestrated that?
Higgins was right, he realized. I’ve never been anything but their bloodhound, their puppet. I found the goddamned Fountain of Youth, and here they are—here he is—to take it away.
Kismet had wondered if Leeds might be an agent of Prometheus; how else to explain his knowledge of a society so secret that twenty years of searching had not revealed to Kismet even a single clue regarding its existence. Leeds had used his knowledge of Prometheus to coax Higgins into joining his cause, and neither man had suspected even for a moment that their agent was already in place; the beautiful blonde—the disillusioned Sultana, the actress, the professional liar.
In hindsight, it all made perfect sense now. Elisabeth’s sham marriage to the Sultan, at the height of her career—the pirate raid on the cruise ship—there was a commonality there: the relics of the ancient world, illicitly acquired by the Sultan’s father. And then Nick Kismet—the great experiment—had wandered onstage.
She had tried to kill him, or had she really? She had seduced him—why? And then she had joined forces with Leeds, subtly goading both men into a rivalry that would not only add yet another fantastic treasure—a Seed of the Tree of Life—to Prometheus’ secret storehouse of mysteries, but would also give them a chance to put their grand experiment to the ultimate test.
God, she’s good.
“Hauser!” he shouted, getting to his feet. He felt strong, surprisingly so, given what he felt sure he had just gone through. “Not this time, Hauser. You’re not taking this one away.”
The blond man stared back at, turning his head a little as if to bring something distant into focus, and for good reason—his left eye was covered by a square of black cloth.
Well that’s new.
He started running, only peripherally aware of the tongues of fire scorching the air above him, licking the cave walls, shattering the limestone with their kiss. Hauser lurched into motion, turning back to his goal.
Kismet knew he wasn’t going to make it time, but he tried anyway.
Elisabeth stepped into his path, aiming a compact semi-automatic at his forehead. “Don’t,” she warned. “I don’t know if a bullet will even kill you now, but I’ll pull the trigger if I have to.”
There was just enough hesitancy in her voice that he believed her. “What about your experiment? What would my mother say?”
She cocked her head sideways. “You really have no idea what’s going on, do you?”
A retort was on his lips when Hauser erupted in a string of curses. His rage was so palpable that even Elisabeth winced, dropping her guard for just a moment. Kismet took the chance and brushed past her, vaulting up the steps. He ascended the dais just as Hauser wrapped his arms around the base of the altar, picked it up, and hurled it into the pool.
It took Kismet a moment to understand the reason for the other man’s rage.
It’s not there. The Seed is gone. Did Leeds...? No, someone else.
His mind turned the possibilities like the pages of a flipbook.
“Where is it?” Hauser raged. “Where in the hell is it?”
“Looks like you were late to this party,” Kismet remarked. “No Seed. The Fountain of Youth...” He glanced back at the pool and the storm; the cavern was about to implode, and when it went, that would be the end of the Fountain of Youth. “You lose. I imagine that’s a new experience for you.”
Hauser wheeled on him. “Where is it, Kismet?”
“Why should I tell you?”
For a moment, the other man just glowered at him. Then his lips pulled back in that Big Bad Wolf smile that Kismet remembered so well. “You know where it is, don’t you? What say we make a deal? You tell me where it is, and I let the girl keep on breathing.”
Kismet glanced over a shoulder and saw Elisabeth moving toward Annie, the pistol already trained on her. Higgins just stood there, rooted in place.
Kismet wanted to scream at the man. Damn it, Al. Stand up to them; she’s your daughter for God’s sake!
He turned away. “You were probably going to kill us all anyway, right? Oh, maybe you’d let me live for the sake of your great experiment, but as I recall, you have no qualms about leaving me in a room full of dead people. So why should I tell you anything?”
Hauser leaned close, nostrils flaring. “Because there are worse fates in the world than death.”
Kismet matched his stare for a moment. “Promise me that you’ll leave her alone, and I’ll tell you.”
The lupine lips curled ever so slightly. “I swear on my mother’s life.”
“Is that some kind of joke?”
Lightning crackled between the stalactites and a chunk of stone the size of Smart Car crashed down and obliterated a section of the walkway on the far side of the pool. The impact sent a tremor through the entire cavern, opening gaping fissures in the walls, from which water began to pour.
He didn’t trust Hauser, but in a few minutes, it wouldn’t matter. “Fontaneda took it back to Spain with him.”
“How do you know?” Hauser pressed.
“He wrote that he planned to hide it in the Alhambra Palace in Granada.”
Hauser fixed him with a single-eyed stare, looking for any hint of duplicity. Then, without another word he turned and fled down the stairs.
Kismet started after him, but Elisabeth warned him off. “Not another step.”
“You promised, Hauser. No harm.”
“A promise I intend to keep,” the one-eyed man assured him. “As long as you stay the hell away from me.”
He bent down and seized Annie’s arm, pulling her erect.
Kismet took another step forward, but Elisabeth waggled the gun meaningfully.
Another thunderous discharge shuddered through the cavern. The pool was boiling now, and at its center, a hideous mass of wriggling flesh continued to grow.
“Then go!” Kismet shouted. “Get the hell out of here before we all die.”
Hauser pulled Annie after him and headed for the exit where the last remnants of his commando force waited. Elisabeth however lingered. “Alex? Are you with us?”
The question seemed to perplex the former Gurkha. He stared back at her, and then turned his desolate gaze on Kismet. His lips formed words: I’m sorry.
There was only one thing left to say. “Take care of her, Al. Keep her safe.”
Higgins nodded and moved to follow Elisabeth.
“Hey, Al.”
Higgins paused but didn’t look back.
“See you in the next life.”
NINETEEN
As soon as Higgins and Elisabeth passed through the exit, Kismet started a mental ten count. He only got as far as three, when Hauser reappeared in the doorway, holding what looked like a woman’s shoulder bag, sewn of olive drab fabric.
“You probably won't die right away,” Hauser shouted. “In fact, you might not die for several years. Enjoy your stay!”
With that, he dropped the bag and took off running.
Kismet ran too, back toward the relative safety of the cairn. He threw himself flat behind the piled rocks an instant before the satchel charge detonated.
The explosion was tremendous. Kismet felt the concussion ripple through his body. He’d kept his mouth open slightly the whole time so that the overpressure wouldn’t rupture the membranes of his inner ear, but the blast left him stunned.
Because the bomb had gone off almost exactly in the entrance, fully half of the explosive energy had been direct
ed away from the cavern. Nevertheless, the half that had blasted inward was more than enough to finish what had already begun. The already gaping cracks widened, and between them, huge sections of the wall began moving independently, undulating—collapsing.
Suddenly, Kismet’s wildly long hair bristled up on end, surrounding his head like a halo, alive with a crackle of building static. Something big was about to happen.
He threw himself flat on the shattered floor.
A bolt of pure blue-white lightning arced between the ceiling and the center of the Fountain. Overhead, the few remaining stalactites began to vibrate violently and explode in a spray of deadly fragments.
In the pool, the thing that had once been Dr. John Leeds exploded in a geyser of blood and tissue.
* * *
Annie followed unwillingly but without resistance as the one-eyed man—the man Kismet had called Hauser—led her through the cave with the bats.
Most of the winged creatures were gone, frightened from their dwelling by the release of energies from the nearby cavern, though a few still flitted about overhead. The fleeing group barely took notice.
As they passed beneath it, Annie saw that the opening overhead was larger now, giving her a much-needed view of the sky above the surface world, where she desperately longed to be.
Like the other chamber, the bat den was being reshaped by the cataclysm. The walls, riddled with fissures, were groaning, shifting back and forth like earthquake fault lines. But even more ominous was the sound of rushing waters.”
“Hurry!” Hauser urged. “The entire cavern is flooding.”
Water began to pour in; just a trickle at first, like a leak in an old roof. The tremors had uncovered ancient reservoirs—pockets of groundwater that would have naturally seeped through the rock and into the nearby lake—and was diverting them into the hollow channels of the cave network. The limestone walls were but a thin membrane, holding back a tremendous underground deluge, and as those walls fractured, an irreversible chain of geological events would transform the labyrinth into a sinkhole, ultimately expanding the boundaries of Lake George.
