by Brett King
“What are you doing?” Raja asked.
Closing his eyes, he traced his fingers along the wall at the end of the corridor. He glided his hands in a systematic side-to-side motion. He touched a straight seam. His eyes snapped open.
“Shine the light over here.”
The seam ran vertically from floor to ceiling about two inches out from the corner. Between the seam and side wall of the corridor, the surface changed. The stone was smooth. Unlike the loculus panel, the seam here was far too narrow along its entire perimeter to slide in a finger. Moving his hands around the left corner onto the long wall, he found another smooth section. About four feet wide, this one spanned the entire height of the corridor.
McHardy had mentioned sliding something. That gave Brynstone an idea. He reached into the sticky mud. He had to go by feel rather than sight. After a minute, his fingers traced a recess at the foot of the smooth section of the wall. The floor recess was not level, but angled, so it ran lower on the end near the corner. Reaching into the recess, he discovered two tracks.
It made sense now. If Brynstone was right, they needed to slide the massive slab up the incline. It was too heavy to pull, even for several people, but he suspected a clever design at work here.
“What did you find?” Raja asked
“A Hero door,” he said.
“A what?”
“Back in the first century, a man called Hero of Alexandria invented an early version of an automatic door.” As Brynstone talked, he searched the floor, looking for a lever to trigger the door.
He explained that Hero of Alexandria had been a brilliant Greek mathematician and engineer, considered by some to be the greatest researcher in antiquity. Before his death near the end of the first century, he had invented the first-recorded steam engine, a wind wheel, military machines, a force pump, an early automatic door—and even the first vending machine.
Unfortunately, most of Hero’s writings had been lost or destroyed over the centuries. One of his works that survived? A book, On the Lifting of Heavy Objects, that described a stone slab that could function as a secret entrance. The slab would look like a wall, but could be opened from another room based on counterweight engineering. It was known as a Hero door, and only a brief surviving description hinted at its design. For the past twenty centuries, no one had discovered a Hero door.
Until now.
Chapter 42
2:17 a.m.
The Hero door didn’t resemble a door. Instead, it looked like a massive slab of rock. If it followed Hero’s descriptions, most of the ancient mechanism was hidden beneath the floor. Brynstone figured that it reached down to the third level, making it impossible to see the full design. If he remembered the sketch, the stone slab was positioned on an inclined surface. The design used counterweights, tracks for a sledge, and levers to pull the heavy stone up the incline. A series of triangular stopping devices held the stone in the open position. Inside the open door, a pressure-plate mechanism was concealed in the floor. The pressure plate could trigger the stopping device to release the stone slab. Gravity would bring it rocketing down the incline and the door would slam closed, trapping tomb robbers inside.
Searching in the mud, Brynstone found a mechanism in the floor. It was a lever.
Grabbing the lever with mud-coated hands, he forced it with all his weight. He heard a loud slap from below, then a deep groaning sound. The stone slab began sliding to the left along the smooth wall, retracting into the corridor. Cori took a step back as it approached her. Brynstone felt adrenaline surge inside. He sensed something big. If it worked the way Hero had intended, the sliding mechanism had opened a door on the other side of the wall.
“Cool,” Cori marveled.
“Yeah, but what now?” Raja wondered aloud.
“We need to get to the other side.” Brynstone patted the end wall. He spun around and headed through the muddy path back to the opening in the loculus.
As the trio climbed through the cramped opening, McHardy greeted them. Brynstone and the others were excited to see what the Hero door had revealed.
He led the group past the main tomb to the east end of the U-shaped corridor where the loculi ended. Before finding the lever, Brynstone had seen a flat stone wall that marked a dead end.
Turned out it wasn’t a dead end after all.
The Hero door had now moved to the left, recessing into the wall behind the muddy corridor. The four of them stood at the doorway. For the first time in centuries, the long-dormant Hero door revealed a forgotten chamber.
“I must confess,” McHardy gushed, “this is an incredible discovery.”
Everyone else was too awestruck to speak.
Looking past the door, Brynstone could make out a few steps at the bottom of a stone staircase. As McHardy started to move past the Hero door, Brynstone grabbed his elbow and yanked him back.
“Watch your step,” he warned.
“What is it?” the old man protested.
Brynstone scanned inside the doorway. His flashlight beam highlighted a stone embedded in the floor. It looked slightly lighter in hue than the ones surrounding it.
“See that? It’s a pressure plate. Put your foot on it and the stopping device will be released. Provided it still works after all this time.”
“That a good thing?” Raja asked.
“Not unless you want the door to slam closed. If it does, we’re trapped inside.”
“Oh-kay.”
Going first now, Brynstone stepped around the pressure plate, then made his way to the staircase. The air was dense and musty. An arched ceiling covered the staircase. The tunneled stairs reminded him of pictures he’d seen of the City Hall subway station in New York, an Edwardian-era depot that had closed shortly after World War II. This place had the same haunting and claustrophobic feel.
McHardy looked around. “It’s as black as the Earl of Hell’s waistcoat,” he said in a hushed voice.
Brynstone walked up the stairs with Raja at his side. Cori and McHardy trailed a few steps behind. It was as long as the divided staircase, bringing them back up to the first level, but separated from the rest of the catacombs. He was convinced that this chamber had not been seen with human eyes for sixteen centuries, not since Hypatia and Kyros explored its mysteries. The tingle of excitement was electric.
Arriving at the top landing, they found an alcove with pillars on each side of the entry. Near the ceiling, a decorative niche was carved into the wall above each pillar. Brynstone reached in his backpack and brought out two halogen lamps. He flicked them on, flooding the small room with light.
“Much better,” McHardy said.
Cast in the lamps’ glow, the walls revealed paintings inspired by Egyptian and Greco-Roman mythology. An engraved image of a raven, wings flared, decorated one side. Across from it, a crescent moon hovered above an alligator. An oversized sculpture of a black jackal huddled beside the wall, poised like a silent guardian on a curving fish tail. The creature’s slitted red eyes seemed to track their every move.
An image on the front wall depicted an eye with a black teardrop shape beneath it. Known as the Eye of Ra, it symbolized the Egyptian god Horus and was painted to resemble a peregrine falcon’s eye. Like the Gorgoneion, the symbol was believed to possess the power to ward off evil.
They found a door made of stone beneath the Eye of Horus. Not a real door, but a flat block of limestone that gave the appearance of one. Centuries back, it had been painted red with black spots to resemble granite. Three frames were carved to look like protruding doorjambs, and a series of engraved symbols ran along the outside frame.
Cori touched the smooth surface. “It’s a single block of carved stone. There’s no way to open it, no doorknob or handle.”
“We’re not to open it,” McHardy said in a gravel-raw voice.
“Why not?”
“It�
��s a false door,” Brynstone answered. “Thing was never designed to be opened. At least, not by us. It’s a doorway for the dead.”
Chapter 43
2:21 a.m.
The false door was a common theme in Egyptian funerary architecture. Brynstone explained that its significance was rooted in the religion of ancient Egypt. A legion of gods populated their spiritual world, including Osiris, Anubis, Isis, and Horus. A false door like this one served as a barrier between the world of the living and the land of the dead. Using it as a portal, Egyptian gods could journey back and forth from the afterlife into the human realm.
The false door down here featured an image of the goddess Isis clutching an ankh, the symbol of eternal life. In Egyptian mythology, she was the protector of the dead and also the goddess of rebirth and resurrection.
“All this for nothing,” McHardy grumbled as he slapped the false door. “No discredit to you, John. False door or not, the map led us to this chamber and tells us nothing more.”
The man was right. It was literally another dead end.
“Know what’s strange?” Brynstone said. “False doors were a dying fad when this catacomb was built. You don’t usually see one from the Common Era.”
“Maybe the answer is on the door itself,” Raja said, leaning in to study symbols engraved on a side panel.
“Could be,” Cori added. “Maybe the chrism formula is engraved on this door.”
“It’s a possibility,” McHardy admitted.
They explored the surface of the door, sometimes reciting aloud what they were finding. A few symbols were random, even chaotic. None were carved in Linear A code. A strip of Egyptian symbols spelled out a curse on anyone who tried to damage or steal from the dead. Another gave a blessing to visitors who offered drink or food in honor of the deceased. In what they could decipher, there was nothing about a chrism.
Brynstone had hoped to find symbols that matched the helmet. It would verify that the false door was the destination mentioned in the facemask map.
He thought about the Voynich manuscript, rich with mysterious symbols. It had driven Edgar Wurm to madness. Many people suspected that the Voynich document was nothing more than an elaborate hoax. Was the same true about the helmet and the false door?
Chapter 44
2:23 a.m.
The false door was a dead end.
Cori sensed it, trying to quiet a flood of frustration. Time was running out to find something Nebola would exchange for Shayna. Her heart was breaking for Brynstone. Still, you’d hardly know there was a problem. Despite the seemingly insurmountable hurdles he faced, she couldn’t detect a hint of frustration. If anything, John Brynstone seemed in constant possession of a never-say-die attitude.
Math McHardy? Not so much.
“Right, that’s me,” the professor said, signaling that he was finished. “See you at the hotel.”
“You’re leaving?” Cori asked.
“Don’t know what else to do,” McHardy grumbled, consulting the facemask.
“We can’t give up now. We’ve come too far.”
“Must have taken a misstep somewhere,” Raja thought aloud. “We need to retrace our steps.”
“I’m willing to give it one more try,” McHardy said. “Perhaps we will stumble over something we missed.”
He marched down the stairs with Rashmi Raja following behind him.
Cori turned and joined them. She knew from experience that sometimes you can rub up too close to a problem. You had to step back once in a while and return with a fresh perspective.
An eerie stillness settled over the chamber as they passed the Hero door and trudged back up the divided staircase. This place is bewildering, she thought as she trailed behind them. Years before, she and Edgar Wurm had explored Bollingen Tower, a spiritual retreat Carl Jung had built near a Swiss lake. Inside the tower, they had discovered wall paintings that Jung had painted from his dreams. Some were beautiful; others were fantastic and haunting. The images from Jung’s tower reminded her of the catacombs.
Scattered carvings and paintings inside Kom el Shoqafa showcased a curious blend of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman themes. A few images seemed mismatched, like an Egyptian god dressed in Roman clothing, but they had an arresting presence. Like Bollingen Tower, the effect seemed to originate from an unconscious realm, not a conscious one. The catacombs had not been open to the public during the Swiss psychiatrist’s lifetime. There was no way he could have visited here. Still, she sensed that Jung shared a similar vision and spirit with the people who had created Kom el Shoqafa.
Her short hair was swept back in a sloppy bun, and she stopped to fix it. Finishing, Cori looked back. Brynstone was not walking with them. McHardy and Raja were busy trying to figure out some mistake in decoding the facemask.
Leaving them without a word, she made her way back to the Hero door. Centuries of dust coated the staircase inside, revealing ghostly footprints from their first trip up to find the false door. It felt a little creepy this time, going in by herself.
Is John still up here?
Halfway up the stairs, she saw halogen lights burning outside the hidden chamber. She stopped and glanced back, having this weird feeling that someone was down below, watching her. Rubbing goose bumps on her arms, she started walking upstairs again.
At the top landing, she found Brynstone standing in front of the false door. The outer doorjamb framed his broad shoulders and thick dark hair. She studied him from behind, her eye drawn to the outline of his body in the dusky light.
She came around to him. Absorbed in thought, his gaze was intent as he puzzled over some hidden meaning in the door’s architecture and he was unaware of her presence beside him until she spoke.
“Anything making sense?”
Brynstone turned, finally noticing her. He seemed surprised she hadn’t been there all along. He looked around.
“Where’s Rashmi and McHardy?”
“Retracing our steps. Seeing if they can figure out where we went wrong.”
“We didn’t. The mask led us to this chamber. The answer has to be here.”
A small note of desperation sparked in his voice.
In sympathy, Cori glanced at the false door. A dizzy array of symbols covered the outer doorframe and her gaze drifted over a set of them carved three feet from the bottom. She had seen similar letters the day before on stores and signs around Crete. She couldn’t read the language, but she recognized Greek characters interspersed with other symbols on the doorframe.
All at once, a realization flashed in her mind.
“John,” she said, her voice pitched high in excitement, “I have an idea.”
“You can read Greek, right?” Cori asked, lowering to her knees.
Brynstone nodded. As a paleopathologist, knowing ancient languages was a nice plus. He crouched beside her, following her gaze.
An incomplete stone border framed the false door. A six-inch portion along the side had been broken away, giving the frame an irregular concave shape.
She pointed to a line of symbols near the edge of the uneven border. “Translate this part.”
He touched the engraved characters. He had read it before, three or four times. “Says something like, ‘Open the…Discover…Pray.’”
“Make any sense?” she asked.
He shook his head.
“Me neither.” She studied it again. “But I have an idea.”
“Tell me.”
“You know that one piece of the helmet? The part that goes over the soldier’s jaw or covers his cheek or whatever? The one Raja found in Istanbul. Where is it?”
Brynstone reached in his pack and brought out the curved metal left cheek guard. She took it from him.
“The words engraved on the inside surface here. They’re Greek, right?”
“A few. They don’t make much sens
e.”
“What do they say again?”
“It reads, ‘Closed, the unknown, for the cursed.’ Whatever that means.”
She looked down at the cheek guard in her hands.
“Wait a minute.” His eyes flared with realization. “You think it matches the doorframe?”
“One way to find out.”
Cori flipped the metal piece, then pressed it flush against the broken curve in the false door. Like one jigsaw piece interlocking with another, the words on the doorframe aligned perfectly with the letters engraved on the cheek guard.
“Look at that,” she said in a soft voice.
“Amazing,” he answered.
He studied the three rows of symbols. Each began on the stone doorframe and continued onto the metal cheek piece. Cori balanced the helmet piece against the frame as he deciphered the characters and wrote them in his notebook.
She read the message. “Know what it means?”
“It means the false door is not a false door,” he answered. “We need to open the closed door. There’s something behind it. That’s my private hypothesis.”
He traced his fingers along the frame. “This door is made of fine limestone, but compare it against the wall.”
“Looks newer.”
“Because it was added later.”
Brynstone knew that the helmet code had led Hypatia of Alexandria to a deadly discovery. The characters were not inscribed in Linear A like on the helmet, so he guessed that Quintus had not made the inscription. Maybe after Hypatia’s assassination, Kyros had carved matching Greek characters on the cheek guard and on the false door. There was a good chance the truth would remain a secret.
Brynstone marched toward the stairs.
“Where are you going?” Cori asked.
“The false door is coming down,” he called from the staircase. “We have to see what’s behind it.”
