by Rick Jones
John was stunned as he watched Hillary get to a sitting position to massage his throat, then turned to the soldiers behind him. The Maroon Beret on the left remained emotionally neutral as a ribbon of smoke rose from the barrel-end of his gun.
“What the hell are you doing?” Savage was in a rage. “I could have handled that!” As he approached the commando that was far too aggressive, the soldier directed his weapon at Savage.
The message was clear: don’t even think about putting your hands on me.
Savage stopped. Then in a measure that was without emotion, he said, “I could have handled that.”
The commandos didn’t understand him. Nor did they seem to care. Savage had been rendered powerless. In the viewpoint of the Berets, the soldier acted accordingly by firing upon a man who turned savage enough to take away the life of an innocent person.
“I could have gotten to them,” he added. “I could have saved them both.”
The soldier on the left dismissed Savage by looking beyond him and to Hillary. In Turkish he called out to the archeologist who responded with a feeble wave of sincerity. Hillary then labored to his feet and began to cross the tiles by taking precise and calculated steps, the man always reminding himself that each step might be his last if not careful.
He walked across the floor with his arms out to his sides for balance, like the wings of a plane, constantly steadying himself as he took the proper path. When he made it across he fell to his knees in relief and began to sob.
Mintaka allowed him to live.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The moment Alyssa passed underneath the archway and into the chamber; the entire atmosphere seemed to have a certain thickness to it. If evil had its place, if evil had a tangible quality to it, then this area was it since an awkward pall carried heavily enough to weigh them down emotionally.
“You feel that?” she asked.
“It’s an odd feeling,” said Demir.
They moved deeper into the chamber and came upon a crystal podium. To the left of the podium was an ancient scale reminiscent of the Scales of Justice, with seesawing balances with one scale tipped downward by three stones of predetermined weight.
She traced her fingertips over the lettering upon the podium, which was in black silica to contrast against the glass clearness of the crystal. “It’s a riddle,” she said.
“To what?”
She looked ahead, but could only see shadows and darkness. “Shine your lights against the far wall,” she told him.
When Demir did his team followed his lead, congregating their beams to a single point.
Against the far wall were two doors.
Of course, she thought. These are the two doors that led to the interweaving corridors in the schematic, one that led to Darkness, the other leading to Paradise.
Choose your door wisely.
She looked at the ancient script scrawled upon the podium.
найстара পৃবিশ্বকোষ жытным থীবীর і
তালিকা হয়েছে। ўяўленьнямі бпа২০০৭ ўц তারিখে
чанасьউইকিপিডিয়া, ці дасканалযাতে асьমুক্ত ціцудаў
жанр প্রকাশিনির্মিত
бпа২০০৭ ўц তারিখে ці дасканалযাতে
жытным থীবীর іতালিকা হয়েছে। ўяўленьнямі
“Can you decipher what they say?” asked Demir.
She nodded. “It’s a riddle of multiple choices, providing me with six possible questions to ask the Guardians of the Gates. One door will lead us to Paradise. The other one will lead us to certain death.” She lifted her head and pointed to the far wall. “Place the lights on the doors, if you will.”
On the door to the left was the symbol of the First Guardian, the symbol ╗. On the door to the right was the symbol of the Second Guardian, the symbol ╚.
“Do you note the symbols on the doors?” she asked.
He nodded.
“They’re symbols representing the complete opposite of one another, since they both face in the opposite direction from each another. One represents Truth, the other Lie. But the riddle is to determine which one will lead us to Paradise.”
“OK.”
“So what we’re looking at here is a variation of the ‘guarded door riddle’ where one Guardian always tells the truth and the other always tells a lie. One door will lead us to Paradise, the other to certain Death. In order to get to Paradise, then we must ask the Guardian the correct question from one of the six questions offered here on the podium.”
“And how do you ask a door a question?” he asked. “It’s an inanimate object.”
“With these,” she said, pointing to a row of crystal stones lined up beneath the scale, all of various sizes and weights. Each stone had a carving of the question engraved onto the crystal so that the weight of the stone corresponded to the question. “Everything about Mintaka is about balances and weights,” she added. “By determining to ask the correct question from the questions provided on the podium, we then have to place the corresponding stone onto the balance, assuming that the correct stone to the correct question asked is also the correct weight that will open the correct door. Get it?”
“That’s a lot of ‘corrects.’ Six questions with two stones per question, one ‘yes’ and one ‘no.’ That’s roughly a nine percent chance of getting it right.”
“Roughly.”
Demir then translated to his team, the ministers then gesturing wildly with their hands, demanding that their minds be the determining factor as to the proper question to be asked while Alyssa stood aside only to witness and be without a voice. Alyssa didn’t need an interpreter for the sexist banter that was going on between them.
This was simply a cultural divide where the men still insisted that a woman’s decision was immaterial. Alyssa, however, would have none of it. So she challenged them with that good ol’ American female exuberance by offering them a hard glare that spoke volumes: don’t even think of saying what you’re thinking. Don’t even begin to challenge me.
The ministers fell silent, their words trailing into quiet submission.
Eventually, Alyssa turned back to the writing upon the podium and read the characters.
The questions were as follows:
Will this door lead us to Paradise?
Will you tell me that the other door leads us to Paradise?
If I asked you which door leads to the city of Paradise before, was ‘yes’ your answer regarding the door on the left?
Does this door lead to Death?
Will the other Guardian tell me that this door leads to Paradise?
Does the other door lead to Paradise?
She read them out loud and Demir translated. She was trying to make this a group effort. But everyone remained quiet, their minds working as Alyssa examined the crystal stones. There were two rows of six beside each hand of the balance. Six beside the right balance, signifying the left door, and six stones situated on the right for the right door. They were evenly spaced and their sizes were marginally larger or smaller from the one beside it, their weights so precise that a wrong decision, even with a crystal that was more or less in weight by mere milligrams, could prove costly.
She picked up the first crystal on the left side and studied the answer beneath it, the answers were either ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’ But on the underside of this crystal, the one with the engraved question on its topside, Will this door lead us to Paradise? was the engraved answer ‘No.’ She laid the stone back down. Then she went through this process with every crystal on both sides, trying to determine the best answer to the questions offered.
But it wasn’t until she picked up the third crystal on the right that something clicked. Math was the universal language, and everything tied to Eden and Mintaka had certain mathematical configurations
from precise angles, placements and geometrical forms which ultimately governed everything the temples did.
John would be proud of me!
She cocked her head, her mind making sense of a mathematical tie between the question and the answer to this particular stone.
If I asked you which door leads to the city of Paradise before,
was ‘yes’ your answer regarding the door on the left?
The answer etched to the bottom of the stone that was situated with the grouping of crystals on the left side was ‘No.’
If the Guardian to the Left answered ‘Yes,’ then following the logic of the question with the keyword being before, and if the question was asked before and the Guardian first answered ‘Yes’ but this time answered ‘No,’ as stated by the answer on the stone, then he is the Guardian who Lies since his answer was not the same as before. So mathematically speaking, a positive and a negative equal a negative; therefore, it would have been the wrong door.
But this third crystal on the right side, the one corresponding to the question, said ‘Yes.’
She looked at the stone. Following logic, if this Guardian first answered ‘Yes’ and answered ‘Yes’ a second time, then he is the Guardian who tells the Truth since he did not lie about the answer as did the first Guardian. Therefore, you have ‘Yes’ + ‘Yes,’ two positives that equal a positive, the only positive answer among the grouping of crystals. Brilliant, she thought, a mathematical equation hidden within the riddle of a question.
“This is it,” she said, raising the crystal. It was hardly larger than a golf ball.
“You know the consequences if we get this wrong, don’t you.”
She then explained the reasoning behind her decision, which was translated to the ministers, who in turn took a stance like a bunch of Republicans and Democrats disagreeing for the sake of argument, the ministers gesticulating wildly that she was wrong, that the correct answer lie beneath one of the other stones.
They were beginning to drive her crazy, a man’s ego so colossal. As their voices steadily rose to be heard over the other, and without fearing any possible consequence, she placed the crystal on the scale.
And the ministers immediately became quiet.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
At one time Gani Malas could run like the wind. He was so fast, so quick off the line, that he had been prognosticated to make Turkey’s Olympic team in the 1000 meter relay. Unfortunately for Gani, however, he placed sixth in the preliminaries, which disqualified him from the competition squad. But the speed was there—to be the sixth fastest man in all of Turkey. His parents were proud. He was proud. The village he came from looked upon him like a rock star, as the man who ran so fast that his shadow had difficulty keeping up.
But now he lay here in the darkness of Mintaka with two horrifically broken legs, his bones so shattered that rods and pins would not be able to piece him whole. One leg would be shorter than the other, a malfunction that would most likely cause a noticeable limp for the rest of his life and, without a doubt, the end of his career as a Maroon Beret.
Gani grimaced against the pain as he looked upon his smashed legs.
He had taken the fall wrong when he fell into the hole, landing straight down without a bend in his knees, his bones then snapping and collapsing in his legs like the retractable parts of a handheld telescope upon impact, the bones forced upward toward his hip until the sharpened ends eventually punched through his flesh in compound fractures.
Worse, and if he didn’t get help soon, he knew his body would go into shock. He could already feel a certain coldness sweep over him, his body shuddering in intervals that were getting closer to one another, like contractions.
Often he would pass out, providing him with quick snippets of salvation from pain that was mounting to greater heights every time he came to.
He then realized that he was dying by the inches with horrible slowness.
Gani then allowed the back of his head to rest against the wall as he rode out a new wave of pain, his teeth grinding until muscles in the back of his jaw flexed continuously.
When the wave passed it left behind a heightened sensitivity to touch and feel. Every time he moved or shifted or reached out for something with his hand, it was like striking an exposed nerve in a tooth, the pain was that raw.
Settling back down and taking measured breaths shallow enough not to fire up the pain in his legs, he sat there and listened, allowing his mind to play music in his head, reminisced about the moments he bested his opponents in races, and the time where he nearly grabbed the scepter that would have propelled him to the Olympics.
He thought of anything that would dull the pain.
And he was failing.
Darkness finally swept over him mercifully and rendered him unconscious for a moment, a slight reprieve granted, only for him to awake inside of a world suffused with a far greater pain.
So when Gani could hold back no more he screamed at the top of his lungs with his voice carrying deep into darkness.
And something within the depths honed in.
#
Scarabs, like most beetles, carry a built-in infrared system to see images in the dark. Whereas their antennae can pick up sound waves and decipher them in a migratory way, their olfactory system directs them as to the direction to follow.
When Gani’s screams reverberated off the surrounding walls, the pores within their antennae processed the waves; their olfactory senses offering them a pinpoint location of the source.
As a collective, the scarabs turned and moved as a single unit the same way that shoals of fish quickly alter their course within a blink of an eye. The solidarity was inbred, the creatures hungering as one.
So they followed the source, their senses registering a wounded life force.
They pressed forward, the mass as long and winding as a river, their shells glistening like tar as mandibles sounded off in anticipation of what awaited them.
Gani had no chance.
#
The Turk was exhausted, the man screaming as long and as loud as his body would permit without sending him into another state of unconsciousness.
The world was dark. The shadows were even darker. The walls and angles clearly defined in Gani’s light. But something loomed beyond the light’s fringe. It first began with a hum, then a disharmonious resonance of a flat line, the sound long and steady and continuous, the measure heightening with every passing moment, the noise getting closer, getting louder.
Then he saw them.
A rolling black tide that was as alive as he was, a life form that had no sense of contrition or remorse, without any compassion or willingness to absolve the man for his trespasses against the temple of Mintaka, and simply saw him as prey.
They moved in and gathered close, surrounding him as if to study their best approach, building upon one another until a wall was mounting and getting higher, the scarabs like children climbing over one another for a better look, their curiosity piquing.
They were coming down at him from the walls, their scaling abilities defying gravity as they clung to the angled surfaces.
Their mandibles clacked in a deafening manner, a raw form of communication, each message an appraisal of the man who lay against the wall all going off at once, each trying to convey a message where it appeared that everyone was talking but nobody was listening.
Gani reached into his backpack and immediately found what he was looking for by its unique shape. He quickly pulled out a hand grenade and exhibited it to the scarabs, not sure why he did so other than it would somehow provide a possible deterrence.
But it didn’t.
The scarabs were closing in.
From above and around, their mandibles pinched at his feet, testing, teasing, each one examining to see if their foe was a formidable one.
It wasn’t.
They began to pinch off pieces of meat as Gani screamed, the pain immeasurable as they began to climb his legs, their mandibles attachi
ng themselves to the exposed bone and then breaking it off, the insects quickly scrabbling off with its bounty to get at the marrow.
Bones and flesh began to tear away, the man breaking down to nothingness as he reached over and pulled the pin of the grenade.
Gani then waited for what he believed would be the eventual coming of the ‘Light of Loving Spirits.’
#
The grenade had a four-second fuse.
After having been swarmed over by the scarabs, his body now covered until it was nothing but a black lump in the configuration of a man, the grenade went off.
The detonation was powerful, its explosiveness reaching out to everything in its radius by destroying every beetle and scarab nearby, their carapaces becoming shattered bits as their innards, yellow and white meat, landed against the walls and surrounding floor in gruesome designs. The fiery sparks and burning shrapnel carried to all ends of the hall, some of the hot pieces landing in pools of oil, igniting them. Bonfires quickly arose, flaring into fiery columns of intense heat, the flames licking at the walls, the ceiling, the scarabs scrambling for safer havens that weren’t there, their bodies heating, their shells cracking, the meat spilling through the fissures, bubbling, the creatures dying out, burning. The tunnel became entirely engulfed as a back draft of fire raced down both ends of the corridor and lit more pools of oil. The scarabs then scrambled in a wild panic as self-preservation kicked in, each one possessing the desire to live as their escape routes had been clogged at the thin breaches with some getting through with smoking shells, whereas others blackened and burned.
The fires crackled on, hardly tempered as they were fueled by oil. Carapaces and beetle shells lay in pyramidal heaps and mounds, the smell of their suffering coming in indescribable aromas far worse than the smell of death and decay.
