by Sean Ellis
Though it would be no more significant than any other fishing hole on the lake, the Fountain of Youth was about to be revealed to the outside world.
None of Fontaneda's traps remained to slow their flight, but when they reached the corridor where the boulder-sized stone block traps had earlier daunted Leeds’ group, they discovered that the fragile cement holding the remaining block in place had crumbled, triggering the last of the Spaniard's defense mechanisms. They had to crawl over both of the stone blocks to escape. This time, Annie felt not even a twinge of claustrophobia; they were heading for the surface and that was good. If she hesitated, she would die, crushed by stone and water, so the only option was to keep moving.
Suddenly, a massive detonation from deep within the cavern split the length of the tunnel wide open. Annie was knocked flat by the violence of the tremor, which was an order of magnitude more powerful than the satchel charge Hauser had left behind to kill Kismet.
Nick?
She tried to thrust that thought from her mind. She couldn’t do anything about it now; she had to get out of this place. But before she could raise her head, water began pouring from the walls, and a freezing wave engulfed her.
* * *
The climactic blast lifted Kismet off the floor and flung him against the cavern wall, fifteen feet from where he had been standing. He felt as though his body had become a single massive bruise, though as he struggled to rise, the pain receded quickly, replaced by a tingling in his nerves.
He recalled Hauser’s parting shot, and wondered how long the potency of the Fountain's water would remain active within him? What if he survived everything—the crushing collapse of the cave, the rising flood of water—and wound up trapped forever, unable to find even the release of death.
Screw that.
A gleaming piece of metal lay nearby; it was his flask. The container was nearly full of water from the Fountain and the metal tingled beneath his fingertips. He stashed it in his pocket, then turned to survey the damage caused by the explosion.
Where the Fountain of Youth had once existed, ablaze with seemingly supernatural energy and a promise of rejuvenation, there was now only a void. A smoking crater, deeper than Kismet's eyes could penetrate, marked the place where it had flourished.
The mass of flesh and organic matter—otherwise known as Dr. John Leeds—had been completely immolated in the eruption. The walkway around the crater was almost completely gone, shattered beyond recognition, impassible, and littered with enormous chunks of rock falling out of the walls and down from the ceiling overhead. The pieces were falling all around Kismet; the next one might, without even a hint of warning, smash him to a bloody pulp.
He had to get out of here.
As he searched for an exit, he realized that, despite the fact that the plasma storm was no more, he could still see. Daylight was streaming in through a rent in the fabric of the cavern's dome. The explosive force of that final discharge had blown a hole in the roof directly over where the Fountain had been. It was ten feet across and getting wider as the edges continued to crumble away. As he watched, a huge block of stone, larger than the original hole, pulled away with a splitting noise. It seemed to hang indecisively for a moment before succumbing to gravity, plunging into the depths of the crater below. The floor trembled with its impact.
A surge of water abruptly exploded into the cavern. Kismet had time only to look up before the wave caught him. The rushing waters lifted him effortlessly, pitching his battered carcass against the fractured wall. It took a moment for him to regain the wherewithal to begin treading the turbulent water, and he bobbed up to the roiling surface as the water rose beneath him.
The suddenness of the collapse made him fear for Annie’s safety. How long had it taken Leeds’ group to reach the Fountain? An hour? Maybe the return trip wouldn’t take as long, but he feared the worst. Nevertheless, one way or another, Annie's fate had already been decided. It was his own fate that remained uncertain.
He tried to swim for the center of the cavern where there was the least chance of being crushed, but the swirling eddies caused by the inflow kept him all but pinned against the back wall, above where the last fragments of cuneiform remained as the only proof that anything he had witnessed here. He fought the currents with all his strength, but was already feeling a profound fatigue. His body had used up the last of its reserves; he had nothing left to give.
* * *
Someone pulled Annie out of the water and started dragging her along. She struggled to get her feet under her. Everything was happening too fast. The water was rising rapidly, swirling around her knees, but she found the strength to keep running.
The rushing waters threatened to knock her down again, but the flow of the current was pushing the fleeing group toward their goal. Although the passage was now entirely filled with water, they all knew it was the final hurdle in the path of their escape, and plunged blindly into it.
Annie felt her paralyzing claustrophobia rise again, but that was not the only source of despair. Kismet was gone; he’d been returned to the land of the living only to perish again. There could have been no escape from the collapse of the cavern where they had found the Fountain of Youth. In her heart, she was certain that she would be joining him soon, entombed forever in the constant night of the underworld. Nevertheless, she did not resist as someone took hold of her and pulled her into the water.
Unprepared for the dive, she immediately sucked in a mouthful of brackish water. The liquid ran up her nose and down into her windpipe, causing an uncontrollable spasm. Someone was holding her tight however, and she succeeded in pressing her hands to her face to avoid inhaling any more. She existed for what seemed an eternity in the dark chute, aware that he was pulling her downward, deeper, away from the surface and salvation. Then, just as abruptly, she was rising through the twilight shadows in the depths of the lake. Daylight loomed above her, closer with each passing second, yet impossibly far away.
She broke through the surface, hungrily sucking in breaths. There were dark shapes moving around her in the water. She felt a rush of panic as she recalled the alligators that had attacked Kismet earlier—but no, these were humans—the last remnants of Hauser’s assault force. The one-eyed man was there, as was Elisabeth. Then she got a look at the man who had refused to leave her behind.
It was her father. Alex Higgins had rescued her from the horror of the cave, and snatched her from the lake.
The pontoon boat Leeds had used to mount his ill-fated expedition into the depths bobbed nearby, and the survivors were clambering aboard. Higgins propelled her up onto its deck, and then hauled himself up as well.
“Get us out of here.” Hauser’s breathless command warned her that the danger was not yet past.
An outboard engine roared to life and the boat began steering away from the shore, heading out toward open water. Annie glanced back and saw the lake’s perimeter transformed in an instant.
The shoreline crumbled away, vanishing into the water, sending out waves that rocked the retreating boat. Cypress trees groaned and toppled into the newly created voids. The serpent mound, which had once pointed the way to the Fountain, seemed to come alive, crawling and undulating into the depths.
Kismet was down there somewhere—lost forever.
Despair and exhaustion overcame her, and when she closed her eyes to hold back the tears, unconsciousness quickly claimed her.
* * *
Something splashed in the water next to Kismet, not a dislodged piece of stone, but something else. For a second, it looked like a snake and he instinctively tried to draw back from it, but then he realized that it was a rope, hanging down from the darkness overhead.
What the hell...?
It was like some kind of insane practical joke; a rope appearing out of nowhere, leading—where?
He reached for the line, snaring it on his second try, and clutched it greedily to his chest, but try as he might, he could not make the ascent. His arms were just too t
ired; his bare feet slipped uncertainly on the wet threads. With the last of his fading strength, he wrapped the line around his waist twice, tying it off with a crude knot, and then sagged in the noose, awaiting whatever would follow.
The rope went taut and Kismet was yanked straight up, out of the water. The line was pulled in steadily, as if attached to a reel, and after just a couple seconds, the ceiling of the cavern loomed close...and then swallowed him whole.
He spent just a moment in the total darkness of a vertical shaft, before hands reached out to draw him over a stone lip and onto a ledge. There was light here; a flashlight beam shone directly onto his face.
“Come on! Run!”
The voice was familiar, but he couldn’t place it, and there was not a single reason in the world to ignore the exhortation. He took off blindly, finding his way along the tunnel by following the cone of illumination cast by his guide’s flashlight.
The escape route chosen by Kismet’s barely glimpsed benefactor was more of an obstacle course than a tunnel. The passage had been carved out by nature, streams of water seeking the path of least resistance over the course of thousands, or more probably, millions of years, burrowing through softer portions of the rock matrix, driven by gravity and pressure. There were cramped spaces only a foot or two high where Kismet had to crawl, squirming around sharp corners and through choke points. There were places where he had to climb, groping blindly in the almost total darkness to find his way up to the next passage, visible only because of the indirect light from his savior’s lamp. The only constant was that they were going up.
The entire journey lasted only a few minutes and covered a distance of only a few hundred yards, but the tremors shuddering through the rock beneath him were a constant reminder that, at any moment, the whole place might collapse on top of him, smashing him to oblivion. And then, without any hint that the end—one way or another—was close, he spilled out into daylight.
He lay in a foot of water at the bottom of a limestone depression, a naturally occurring well perhaps twenty feet across. Above him, a vertical distance of about twelve feet, he saw the tree limbs waving gently, backlit by the azure Florida sky. Dangling down one side of the pit was a rope ladder. The man that had saved him was already halfway up, and at its top, a young African-American woman was shouting down at Kismet, urging him to climb.
He struggled to his feet, slipping uncertainly on the slimy stone at the bottom of the hole. The ground continued to shudder violently, but he managed to reach the smooth rock wall and used it to steady himself as he circled to the ladder. When his fingers curled around the rope rungs, he felt a surge of energy in his tired limbs.
The ascent was like a final insult, a parting shot from the hellish underworld he had just escaped. His bare feet couldn’t seem to find a purchase on the woven fibers, and when they did, the rope pressed painfully into the soles of his feet. Every time he tried to pull himself up, his arms felt he was lifting the weight of the world. But then, as he neared the top, he saw hands reaching down to him, and at last glimpsed the familiar face of his savior.
“Joe?”
* * *
The shoreline of Lake George expanded, claiming the new depths for itself. Standing at its edge, watching as the lake poured into the newly created sinkhole, Kismet saw that the cavern which had concealed the Fountain of Youth for untold millennia had not been far at all from the boundaries of the lake. In time, perhaps a few more centuries of pounding by tropical storms, the cavern would have flooded naturally, achieving the same result.
That he decided, would probably have been a better outcome.
Farther out, he could see the pontoon boat, scurrying away from the scene of destruction, heading north toward some unknown rendezvous with more of Hauser’s Prometheus allies. The passengers were mostly just dark shapes; he couldn’t tell if Annie was among them. He decided to believe that she was, and he knew exactly what he was going to have to do to save her.
He turned to face the pair that had rescued him: Joe—the young man from Charleston who had claimed to be Joseph King’s grandson—and his companion, an equally youthful woman. It had taken a few minutes of scrutiny for him to recognize her, but when at last he had, all the pieces of the puzzle fell into place.
It was almost too much to process. He didn’t know whether to be grateful for their last minute intervention, or angry for the deception that had thrown him into the nightmare in the first place. “Are you ready to tell me the truth now?”
Joe’s expression was contrite. “I’m not really sure where to begin.”
Kismet turned to the woman. “Let’s go with an easy one then: Are you really Joseph King’s daughter?”
The young woman, who had, the last time he’d seen her appeared to be at least in her seventies, just nodded.
Kismet turned to Joe. “Father and daughter. Joseph and Candace—those are your real names?”
Joe’s mouth twitched into a nostalgic smile. “Candace was the name given to the queens of the ancient African people, the Nubians and the Ethiopians. It seemed like a good Christian name for her. I’ve been Joseph King—Joe—for so long that I don’t think of myself by any other name. When I was with Hernando, I was Jose Esclavo del Cristo Rey, but that wasn’t my real name either.”
“Joseph, slave of Christ the King.”
“I don’t know what my parents named me...” Joe trailed off as if trying to access that memory was particularly painful, then shrugged.
“You were with him from the beginning then. One of his explorers.”
Joe nodded. “I remember that I was the slave of a Moorish nobleman. After the Reconquista, I earned my freedom, but that didn’t exactly count for much back then. When the Inquisition started persecuting the Moriscos, anyone with black skin was a suspect. So I joined with Fontaneda and sailed to New Spain, hoping to find my fortune. I did, and as it turns out, a whole lot more.”
Kismet recalled Fontaneda’s account of the discovery of the Fountain and the long ordeal that followed. “He wrote about two survivors that returned with him to the Fountain, and how they chose to die rather than drink again from the Fountain. But there was only one grave down there.”
“I almost died, too.” The wistful look came back. “Can’t remember exactly why I thought that was a good idea. When I was too weak to resist, he saved me. After that...Well, as you can imagine, it’s a long story.”
“You killed Fontaneda, didn’t you?”
Joe sucked in a breath at the abruptness of the accusation, but Kismet didn’t wait for a response. “I’m sure you had your reasons, and I don’t care about any of that. Right now, I need something from you.”
Joe’s expression was no longer wistful or contrite. “Something more than saving your hide?”
“They have Annie. They want the thing that gave the Fountain its power—a Seed from the Tree of Life, and if I’m going to save her, I need to give it to them.” He fixed Joe with an unflinching stare. “So I need you to give it to me.”
TWENTY
Granada, Spain
As she traversed the wooded path leading up the hill to La Alhambra, Annie wondered how many more times she would have to make this journey.
The magnificent palace, built by Berber conquerors in the 10th century, the very place from which Isabella and Ferdinand had, at the end of the 15th century, set in motion the discovery, exploration and exploitation of the Americas, was like something from a fairy tale. The architecture was stunning, with arches and arabesques that looked like they belonged in a tale from the Arabian Nights. The complex, situated on a hilltop overlooking the city of Granada, had endured the tides of history, sometimes falling into disrepair only to be restored again like the treasure it was. Though it was no longer a nexus of historic events, it remained fixed in the human consciousness as a place of great beauty. It wasn’t at all surprising that the Spaniard, Fontaneda, had brought the Seed here.
That was what Hauser had told her—told them all. A child of t
he southern hemisphere, Annie didn’t really know much about European history.
It was the start of their third full day in Granada. Hauser had somehow arranged to have the entire complex closed for “urgent renovations,” and brought in a team of experts—art historians, architectural consultants, sonar imaging technicians—and truckloads of equipment to survey every square inch of the historic palace. Thus far, the search had yielded no results, and today promised to be more of the same.
Not that she was involved in the actual searching. Hauser brought her along for one simple reason; he wanted to keep her where he could see her. It was a constant reminder that she was his prisoner, not his guest.
Although surrounded by people, she felt completely alone. She had her own room at the nearby Alhambra Palace hotel, a luxurious suite with a gorgeous view of the city from the balcony, but someone was always with her—either one of Hauser’s men who worked rotating shifts as her minders, or the man himself. Her father was involved in the search effort, but while she saw him daily, she wasn’t permitted to talk to him.
Not that she had any particular inclination to do so.
She had figured out a few things. Hauser, and evidently Elisabeth as well, were part of the group that Dr. Leeds had told them about in Central Park: Prometheus, a cabal of intellectuals bent on hiding away the mysteries of the world; mysteries like the Fountain of Youth and the Tree of Life.
Why?
That was still a bit unclear. Maybe they didn’t trust what humanity might do with such knowledge and power—who can blame them?—or maybe they just wanted it all for themselves.
What really troubled her was the fact that her father was now working with them. She had worked out that Alex Higgins blamed Prometheus for the deaths of his teammates in Iraq during the mission in which he first met Kismet; how else to explain his willingness to throw in his lot with the psychopathic Dr. Leeds? But then he had switched again, and joined forces with the very people who dealt that blow in the first place.
