Lara Croft: Tomb Raider: The Lost Cult

by E. E. Knight

  “The Méne shouldn’t be spoken of,” his father said. “It’s too dangerous.”

  “Dad, your whole career as a scientist has been about bringing forgotten cultures and religions back into the light. You’ve rejected ignorance and superstition!”

  “You have much to learn,” the elder Frys said. “When Von Croy and I started researching the Méne, we thought as you do now. But we concluded that there are some things that should remain cloaked in ignorance. Not all knowledge is a good thing, Son. And not all myth is mere superstition.”

  “What is it you’re so afraid of?”

  “I’ve said too much already. And why are you so curious after all these years? Has Kunai been expounding his theories to you?”

  “No, of course not,” Alex lied.

  Frys shook his head. “He was a good man, once. Now … His search for old secrets has warped him, I’m afraid. He worries me. I know that the two of you have kept in touch. I can’t forbid you to see him. But be careful, Son. Not everything he says can be believed.”

  But his father’s warning had only made Kunai seem more interesting to Alex, a figure of mystery and ancient wisdom possessing a courage his father lacked.

  Alex and Kunai traveled to the country house in Cornwall after making suitable arrangements with the elderly couple. Kunai did not go to the door, but waited in the lane in a rented car.

  The couple lived the sort of life the newspapers always called “quiet.” They offered Alex tea and took him up to a study. Alex found it difficult to believe that this polite and friendly old couple had nearly come to blows with Kunai. Surely it had all been a misunderstanding.

  The proud gentleman turned off a burglar alarm, opened a wall safe, and took out his seafaring ancestor’s souvenirs one by one, explaining their provenance to Alex as he did so. Alex examined an old spyglass frozen open, a sextant, some maps and buttons, leather-bound journals, and a triangular piece of clear crystal mounted at the end of an ivory and brass handle.

  “We’re not sure what this is,” the old man said. “At first we thought it was a sort of monocle, but it doesn’t appear to alter an image for the better. A doctor told us that surgeons used to put a mirror under a man’s nose to see if he still lived—it would fog if he breathed, you see—and thought it might be a unique tool for that purpose. The glass in it is most smooth, you see.”

  The old man held it under Alex’s nose and showed him the telltale moisture.

  Alex sat down and made a show of taking notes from one of the journals. The couple retired from the upstairs, leaving the door open and saying he should just call out if he needed anything.

  Once alone, Alex went to the double-glazed window and waved to Kunai, sitting in the car below, out of sight from the ground floor of the house but visible from this height, parked on the other side of a hedge. He returned to the table, looked through the strange glass. The old couple were right; it didn’t appear to refract light, or magnify. If anything, objects seen through it looked a little cloudier. Not knowing what else to do, he traced its shape in his notebook.

  The doorbell rang downstairs.

  Alex heard the door open, then a startled cry, then a crash, a shout, and another breaking crash. He rushed down the stairs. Kunai stood, a blood-splattered pipe in his gloved hand, over the bodies of the old couple. “They put up a struggle! Can you believe it? The crazy old bitch picked up a poker from the fire!” He laughed and tossed the pipe aside.

  A frightened family cat hissed from beneath the television carriage.

  Alex might have said, “Good Lord, man,” or something even more ineffectual. He couldn’t remember very well. He leaned against the wall, his legs threatening to buckle. Kunai dashed upstairs, squeezing past Alex on the stairs and giving his shoulder a reassuring squeeze as he went by.

  When Kunai returned moments later, he held the strange triangular glass in one hand. “Well, I’ve got it,” he said happily. “At last, I’ve got it!”

  Alex could only stare at the mess in the parlor.

  Kunai squeezed his shoulder again. “Never mind them, lad. They’re dead, and overdue for it, too. Natural life span should never have risen much above fifty. Causes difficulties the world over. We’ll set that right.”

  Kunai went into the kitchen. Alex followed listlessly, as in a dream. The older man rummaged around, found cooking oil, and dumped it into a deep pan. He poured the cooking oil all over the stovetop, the wooden cabinets, and the floor. Then he placed the pan on the kitchen floor and turned on the burner full blast. The oil on the stove top began to flame and stink immediately.

  “That’ll do.” Taking Alex by the arm, Kunai led him out of the house and put him into the car. He went around the front of the car and climbed into the driver’s seat, then calmly stripped off his blood-spattered gloves and stuffed them into a plastic bag, which he slid beneath the seat.

  “You’re a murderer,” Alex managed to say once the engine started.

  “Great men have great responsibilities, Alex. These responsibilities require them to do unpleasant things at times. I’m the leader of a movement that’s one day going to make a new world.”

  “You’re a mad murderer, then.”

  “Let’s have dinner, Alex. Chinese food is conducive to—”

  Suddenly Alex’s strength and will came roaring back, as if he had just awakened from a dream. Except it had been no dream. “I’m getting out of here! I’m going to the police!” He pulled at the door handle; he would jump, though the car was moving swiftly now.

  “Look at me, Alex.”

  Such was the commanding tone of Kunai’s voice that Alex did look. Sparkling and shining between them was the piece of triangular glass on its ivory and brass handle.

  “It’s quite reasonable, really,” said Kunai, glancing at him through the glittering glass. “A bargain, when you think about it. Why, a whole civilization perished once, warring over possession of this thing. The death of two old codgers is a small price to pay.”

  “A small price.” Yes, when you put it that way, Alex thought, it was a bargain. Suddenly he felt much better about everything. He even had a bit of an appetite.

  ***

  They talked it out over noodles and plum wine. Alex found himself in the mood to listen, in the mood for anything Dr. Kunai suggested.

  Kunai told him that humanity, from time immemorial, could be divided into three groups. Ninety percent of the run of mankind weren’t much more than cattle. Stolid, unimaginative, easily led as long as everyone else in the herd moved in the same direction around them. Of the remaining 10 percent, 90 percent of them were useful enough thanks to charisma or skill to serve as guides and overseers of the herd, setting the standards for culture, thought, behavior. From policeman to pulpit-pounder, politician to professor, this middle order could be counted on to move the herd without even realizing they were part of it.

  Then there was the third group. Kunai thought it numbered less than the traditional one out of a hundred, but the ancient texts, added to by ages of secret learning, quoted that figure, so he accepted it. Visionaries who could keep their light a little ahead of the rest. Some became madmen or artists or prophets, unable to channel what burned within but desperate to relay it to the world somehow. A few more, unable to bear seeing the human world for what it was, committed spiritual suicide and fell back into the herd by adopting conventional religion or politics or commerce, drugs, or sex. A very few were suited by temperament to take on real responsibility for the control of the beautiful, terrible virus that was mankind. Stalin. Mao. Hitler.

  History called these men monsters. And perhaps they were. But they had at least risen above the common herd and dared to stamp their dreams into flesh and blood.

  “You admire Hitler?” Alex was aghast.

  “Admire? No. One does not admire failure.” The glass twinkled again in Kunai’s hand, and Alex realized how reasonable the older man was being. How wise. Of course one did not admire failure. But to succeed in su
ch a world-shaping dream … that would be worthy of admiration. He heard himself saying as much to Kunai, and Kunai nodded his head in agreement.

  “But there’s one thing I don’t understand,” Alex said. “Why didn’t you kill me with those two in the house?”

  “Why do you think?”

  “Is … is it because I’m one of the one in a hundred? The third group?”

  Kunai laughed, the crystal winking in his hand. “Perhaps … someday. I think you have a destiny, lad. I’ve had the most brilliant dreams of late. Every now and then your face appears in them.”

  Kunai then told him of the Méne and the Forgotten Gods.

  They dwelled in the deep places of the world, mostly sleeping, awaking only now and again to glance at how the world had grown. Long ago they’d channeled some small part of their formidable mental energies into a dexterous life-form on the African savannah that showed an aptitude for tool use, intending to fashion living tools of their own to gather information on the constantly changing, and therefore inhospitable, surface of the world. The Deep Gods selected the Méne to act as conduits to this new race so that the work might be performed efficiently.

  The Méne, exalted among men and humble before the Deep Gods, carried out their duties. Their labors done, the Gods charged the Méne with the ordering of men on the surface of the world and returned to their slumbers. They wished to wait for the day when their servants might carry

  them to other worlds.

  Alex still remembered that wondrous conversation over packets of sweet-and-sour sauce and placemats covered with trite explanations of Chinese astrology. Everything seemed so clear after that, the details of the world so bright and sharp they almost hurt his eyes, like the light bouncing off the crystal that Kunai had taken from the foolish old couple. It was like that picture in the Gestalt psychology textbooks of the old woman with the gnarled, hawklike nose, and babushka, her neck buried deep in her fur collar. Tejo Kunai told him to look again at the woman’s nose, and suddenly the profile of a beautiful young woman in a feathered hat appeared, her graceful neck plunging into an elegant dress.

  Kunai went on to tell him that it was the Méne’s responsibility to weigh men, judge them, and place them in their proper category. The Deep Gods bestowed gifts to further set the Méne priests above the ordinary run of men. For the faithful, there was even a “final conversion” that guaranteed immortality on earth. Unfortunately, at some point in the mists of history, the Méne had lost control of their charges, and mankind had escaped the tyranny of the ruling Méne caste. They bred and spread and bred still further, covering and dirtying the earth as flies will a slice of fruit, fighting and ultimately hunting the Méne who tried to keep them in line.

  They even revolted against the Deep Gods, exposed and killed those that could be found near the surface. Consciousnesses that had watched the birth of stars and pondered the expansion of the universe winked out.

  The Deep Gods had made their tool too keen. They woke and reacted, turned the Earth on its head and covered the surface in water and ice. Old mountain ranges sank and new ones rose. Whole continents broke up.

  But man survived.

  Over the millennia, man grew again while the Deep Gods slept. Only now, said Kunai, the technology of man disturbs the Deep Gods’ dreams, interferes with their sight, blots out the calls from others of their kind among the stars. The Deep Gods are waking. Man must again be hushed and organized and put under the control of a firm hand.

  “They told you this?” Alex asked.

  “Not in so many words. It’s still an incomplete puzzle, but I can see what the picture is supposed to be. They send dreams on certain nights to those of the right temper, loyal through prayer and deed, saying that the time is coming, the stars are moving, and soon it will be the hour for the Deep Gods to wake.”

  “You are one of these priests?”

  “I’ve learned much. The Méne were all but dead. Much of the religion had fallen back into ritual, without understanding what the ritual meant. Even more was mere superstition, grafted on over thousands of years by the credulous, the stupid. I’ve begun to piece the true faith back together. There are more of us now. I helped get a Dutch madman out of a sanitarium in Switzerland, made contact with an owner of a Buenos Aires shipping firm who is a devout believer, recruited an excommunicated Kenyan bishop now living in South Africa. There is much yet to do, but time is running out. You’ve seen how things are going in the world. If we don’t blow ourselves up, it’ll be a slow death from poisoned air and water. The extinctions have already begun. You’re a biologist, Alex. Surely you’ve seen it coming.”

  “And you want to preserve the environment? Protect life on Earth?”

  “It’s what the Deep Ones want. What they’ve always wanted. The greatest danger to life on this planet is humanity itself. That’s why they must be kept under strict control.”

  ***

  Kunai stayed with him for a few weeks. The bodies in Cornwall made the papers, described, of course, as a “quiet couple.” The police traced phone records and visited Alex, but by then Kunai had coached him on the story. He told the police he’d visited the couple two days before the fire. Shocking. Showed them the receipts from hiring the car and a petrol station purchase. Asked if the journal of their seafaring ancestor had survived the fire.

  “It’s cooked. You open the pages and it crumbles,” the detective said.

  “They should have donated it to a library,” Alex said, shaking his head sadly.

  All the while Kunai, described as a “flatmate,” sat in front of the television, the bit of crystal in his hand along with the television clicker.

  The crystal worked exactly as Kunai had promised it would. The detective looked at the receipt printed May 29 and read it as printed May 27. Alex had the feeling he could have told the detectives he’d flown down to Cornwall on Icarus’s old wings and they’d have smiled and nodded and taken his word for it as long as Kunai was there, gazing through the crystal, making it glitter and sparkle in his fingers.

  He heard no more of the case or the CID men.

  Alex asked about the crystal. Kunai explained that it allowed him to put whatever he desired into another person’s mind: belief, fear, hope.

  “How did you find out about it?”

  “It was from your father, many years ago. I asked him about the paper he was writing with Von Croy. He mentioned legendary crystals that allowed the priests to influence others. He even hinted that there might be one still in existence. I got a little more out of him, but then he became suspicious and would say no more.”

  “Yes, once Dad clams up about something, that’s the end of it. But how do you operate the crystal?”

  Kunai answered, “It’s a little like acting. First I summon up in myself the state I wish to induce in another: in the case of our friends from the constabulary, simple credulity. Then I put it into the subject’s head by looking at him or her through the crystal. By the time that sailor with Cook discovered it, some fat old Easter Islander was using it to seduce the neighbor’s daughters and then get a feast thrown in his name when the inevitable pregnancy was announced. There was a murder, but such things weren’t closely investigated back then. Anyway, the chief died, and the sailor took the crystal away with him. The secret of its power was passed from father to son, and then from father to son again. Then some pious son suspected it to be Satanic and stole it away from his father after a wild night’s carousing, which led to the death of both father and son in a struggle over its possession. The crystal’s purpose and powers were forgotten by the family after that.”

  “Can you use it to control anyone?” Alex asked.

  “Some people are more easily influenced than others. Indeed, some seem to be immune altogether. Either I’m not able to summon up a strong enough feeling to overcome their will, or their brain is wired in such a way that it has no effect. Magic and technology become one and the same at a high enough level, as that writer Clarke pointed
out, and this thing didn’t exactly come with an instruction manual.”

  ***

  Alex began to secretly read his father’s research, at least the parts of it that weren’t under lock and key, and he and Kunai traveled to an ancient temple near Rangoon and spoke with the priests there. Shortly afterward, Alex had an omega-like symbol that Kunai told him was the oldest known sign of the Méne tattooed on the back of his head, then let his hair grow back over it. At the same time, he received his first number in the old Méne tradition. That number was four hundred and ninety-one. As the newest was always the lowest, that meant there were at least four hundred and ninety other people in Kunai’s network.

  The Méne hierarchy reordered each supplicant’s number yearly to reflect his or her standing in the cult. Always it was divided into the same 90 percent, 10 percent, 1 percent ratio. The l0 percent decided the order of the lowest 90 percent, while the top l percent decided the order of the top 10 percent.

  Only Tejo Kunai’s number didn’t change. He was number one.

  The Prime.

  Alex’s number grew steadily lower, until, after only seven years, he made it into the top 10 percent. At that point, he gave up all but a small portion of his university duties and devoted himself full-time to the business of the Méne. With his higher position, he learned more and more about the nature of his responsibilities, which were not always pleasant. And he began to have dreams.

  Sometimes he flew in his dreams, but more often he dove into deep, cool waters. Voices would whisper phrases to him, and dates. They promised him power, foretold that he would rise above all other men to a universal throne that none had ever sat upon, although many had tried. He saw Kunai’s face, still and peaceful and as composed as a death mask. He saw faces at a conference table, nodding as he spoke. He saw a beautiful woman with sharp blue eyes. He beheld himself seated upon a golden throne that shone like the sun…

  He hadn’t seen Kunai for four years when the old man showed up bedraggled on his doorstep during a spring storm. Kunai had lost weight, a little of the fire was out of his eyes, and his hair was gone.