by E. E. Knight
“I know.” This was the second time she’d gotten her Irish up since he’d taken her, more or less forcibly, to Capricorn Atoll.
She persisted. “Gassim should be in a hospital. And that old trout, Mr. Van Schwellenkammer or Seven or however you say it, looks ready to keel over at any moment.”
None are so blind as those who refuse to see. “I don’t doubt it.”
“Yet you’ve got them propped up, clapping along to the drums and pipes and that abalone shell horn like it’s a summer Baptist revival.”
“Different people choose different ways to say good-bye to earthly life.”
“One other thing. In the lagoon last night, I saw … eyes. Sets of eyes, like those of cats or raccoons or something reflecting the firelight.” She shuddered.
He’d told Boris to keep her away from the shoreline. But then Boris had been drinking last night. “Seabirds floating,” he said.
The Prime reached into his pocket, felt the reassuring handle on the crystal. Heather didn’t know how right she was. But, again, willfully blind. Still, she could be useful. Perhaps even fun. He’d woken up from an afternoon nap feeling randy, rested, and ready. He’d hoped to finally become intimate with Heather. But all this talk of death…
“Tonight is important,” he told her. “The most important night of my life. I thought I’d get it off to a good start by dining with you.”
“Why so important?” she asked, finally looking up at him.
“It’s the solstice. A planetary tipping point. Revelations are at hand.” Well, not at hand, if one wanted to speak precisely.
“You want me to see these ‘revelations,’ too?”
“Absolutely,” he said, sitting on the bunk next to her. He poured her some wine. “It will be the biggest story of your career, and I’ll be happy to guide you as you shape it.”
“Shape it?”
“The world isn’t quite ready yet for the full truth. We have to give it to them a little bit at a time.”
“I’ve been a journalist since junior high school. I think I know how to report a story, thanks.”
Frys raised the crystal on its ivory and brass handle. He practiced the gesture in the mirror a lot, trying to look like an eighteenth century gentleman with his monocle. Heather Rourke’s fuzzy outline was black as midnight, closed to him. “We could accomplish great things together.”
He leaned closer, brimming over with lust. With other women, with Alison, it was the simplest thing in the world to pour it through the lens and into them, until they exploded into red-orange flame and fell back for the taking.
The same pinks and greens formed in his lens. “The wine is good,” Heather said, and the pink grew brighter, then faded away again.
Frustrated, he took it from his eye. Kunai had told him there were people like this, people resistant or even immune to the effects of the crystal. But until now, he’d never actually met one. Heather wasn’t immune, but she was highly resistant. And the more he used the crystal to influence her emotions, the more resistant she seemed to get. He would spend hours trying to coerce her with the crystal, only to develop a splitting headache. Instead of the passion he’d hoped to instill in her, she’d regard him with a kind of wary neutrality, as if she were using him as much as he was using her. The most perverse thing of all was that this only made his desire for her stronger than ever.
One of the magazines lying open on the floor caught his eye; the latest issue of People. He got off the cot and picked it up. It was open to an article about Ozzy Osbourne, but that wasn’t what drew his attention.
The article had tiny black letters scrawled in what looked like crayon between the lines. He read aloud:
Cults don’t thrive on faith alone. It takes money, and in the Méne’s case the Prime can draw on bank accounts set up from Sydney to London, Tokyo to Rio de Janeiro. But money can only buy so much power. The true influence of the Méne might be measured in the portfolios of ministers rather than…
That was as far as she’d gotten. He looked up. She was
watching him coolly.
“Very resourceful,” he admitted. “My men must not have searched your clothing thoroughly enough. Did you have a pen sewn in the lining?”
“No. Just an eyeliner with my makeup.”
“This will have to stop.” He raised the crystal again, looked at her shifting energies, now dark and closed. He tried to turn them white, a new, clean slate for him to begin on, but even with all the force of his will, she only sparkled a little, like the white dots of stars against an evening sky. And the black engulfed them as soon as he stopped straining. It was ironic. In his experience, journalists could be led around by the nose, even without the help of a piece of Deep Gods technology or magic or whatever the hell it was.
If he couldn’t control her better, or if she couldn’t be persuaded to behave herself, he just might have to give her a more active role to play in the coming ceremony.
22
From the top of Nuku Hava ridge, Capricorn Atoll became a paradise again.
Lara and Borg surveyed what they could of the central lagoon in the star-bright Pacific night. They might have been able to see more of the Méne camp, but their German optics were rolling around with more mundane forms of sand beneath the upended Zodiac. A few tiny figures walked along the beachfront, standing on a lava rock flow to look into the lagoon. The mass of stone, descending into the lagoon like a boat ramp the width of the M-4, had regular enough lines to make Lara think that it had been shaped.
Lara strapped on her VADS gear and readied her guns in their holsters, then tested the headset.
“What next?” Borg asked.
“I want a better look at their camp. We’ll try and get in. I’d like a word with Alex Frys.”
The trek down from the ridge was easy, the slope gentle on this side of the lagoon. When Lara finally saw the tents in the distance, she climbed a mango tree for a better look while Borg hid their remaining gear among its roots.
Lara saw a few casually dressed cultists and shirtless natives, muscular islanders who had shaved their heads smooth and covered their scalps with tattoos. Evidently the French frigate had not been as thorough in destroying the as the Fijians had believed.
“Any sign of Alison?” Borg asked when she descended again.
“No. One strange thing, though. The big tent in the center is a hospital. IVs, blood in ice coolers, two men who look as though they are attending to casualties. Either their plane crashed on landing, or they brought their injured with them.”
“Interesting way to run an expedition.”
“Maybe it’s a healing,” Lara half joked. “The plates we found are supposed to draw their gods, or allow communication.”
“Lara Croft, the look on your face says we will find out soon.”
“Exactly. Best way to learn about a religion is to observe the rituals. Barring joining, that is. I don’t imagine you’re interested?”
Borg ran his fingers across the rainbow arc of a red-tipped fern. “Over Frys’s dead body, as the English say.”
“That sounds more like John Wayne than Oscar Wilde. Not that I don’t agree with the sentiment.”
***
As the moon rose at the end of this, the longest day of the year, they had all the time they wanted to explore the Méne campsite.
It lay empty. They’d watched the entire camp pick up and file away, carrying tiki torches.
As the long arms of the twin storms reached for each other overhead, the evening became hazy, with confused winds blowing the trees first one way, then the other. A curtain of clouds boiled up on the horizon beyond the toothlike shards of volcanic rock at the eastern end of the lagoon.
The Méne had left their tents open and bags of waste lying around what had once been the hospital tent. Rats, the living residue on any island visited by shipping, nosed around in the trash, occasionally squealing and fighting for choice scraps. Lara even found a charcoal fire still alight in a cooking pit.
Like many tiny streams joining to form a river, the individual tracks all led out to the beach, where they joined into one trail leading toward the volcanic rock ramp that led into the lagoon the French frigate sailors had named Blood Bay.
***
The Méne looked more like they were preparing for a luau than a sacred ceremony: no robes, no chanting, no strange arm movements and lifting of holy relics. Even the drumming had stopped.
Lara and Borg, hidden a hundred meters away behind a fallen palm on the beach, watched Frys lead perhaps thirty Méne from the jungle, walking, and in the case of the wounded and infirm, being carried on stretchers down the wide stone path. Ajay brought up the rear, hands ready on the machine pistols at her hips, searching the jungle around
the volcanic ramp.
They looked, if anything, like a tour group off a cruise ship, save for the tiki torches they carried. Aloha shirts and shorts, sandals and boat shoes, cheap straw hats and leis adorned the Méne, and at their head Alex Frys wore swimming trunks and a loose-fitting souvenir T-shirt. Only the machine pistols at Ajay’s hips and the occasional assault rifle in the group revealed that they were on business more serious. Even those nearest the water, each carrying one of the platinum panels taken from the Whispering Abyss, bore their treasures with all the reverence of boys toting schoolbooks.
Heather, easily spotted thanks to her red hair, stood among a mix of islanders and others. One of them might have been the Peruvian park ranger Fermi, but at this distance Lara couldn’t tell.
Frys and a group of natives—she could now distinguish the black pseudo-omega symbols tattooed on their skulls—walked down the ramp and thigh-deep into the lagoon as the cloud-streaked sky turned orange. Frys raised his arms and began to speak loudly. The gusting wind carried away most of what he said; Lara caught only scattered words: “offering … not death … life … final threshold.” And then the group parted and one of the Méne limped down, stripping a bandage from his head as he dragged his injured leg into the water.
Two natives steadied the injured man in the water, and another passed Frys a square green bottle. He handed it to the limping man, who poured the contents down his throat until it ran out the sides of his mouth and he sputtered for breath. Then the injured man left the steadying arms of the natives and continued to walk down the ramp, his arms stretched wide as though he were waiting for an embrace. Lara thought she heard a wailing cry, but it might have been seabirds.
Hip-deep, then stomach-deep—
He disappeared beneath the surface of the lagoon in a flash, as though he had stepped off an underwater cliff.
Lara waited for his head to break the waters of the lagoon farther out. She waited in vain.
“What the hell?” Borg whispered. “He drowned himself? That’s seawater; his body should float.”
“Something dragged him, under. Current, or maybe a shark …” She didn’t want to think about other possibilities.
Seven more times they watched the ritual, seven green bottles used and then placed on the volcanic ramp. An old woman in a wheelchair; a wounded man on a stretcher who had to be floated out by the natives and then dumped in; an aging man who walked with the aid of two rubber-tipped canes; a young man with a shaved head who had trouble tipping his head back to accept the contents of the bottle and had to be tilted by the islanders; a man in a back brace; a woman who coughed repeatedly into a handkerchief as she waded in; and a couple who walked into the water hand in hand, wearing flowers about their necks as though they were attending a beach wedding.
Each time, as the water reached a level somewhere between their belly buttons and armpits, they disappeared in the blink of an eye.
Once, when the man in the stretcher was tipped in, Lara thought she saw a flash of something moving quickly just below the surface, but the torchlight played tricks in the rippling lagoon waters and she couldn’t say what she saw.
“If they try this on Heather, we must fight them,” Borg said.
Lara nodded. Or if even one of the … sacrifices or offerings … had resisted, she might have gone to their aid. But not one showed anything but eagerness to get into the water. And as far as she could tell, they were not drugged. They were, in fact, as she could tell by their bows to Frys, all members of the cult.
None of them broke the surface again.
The cultists waded back out of the water, and all, even Frys, turned to face the bottom of the ramp, knelt, and touched their foreheads to the rock surface. With that over, several in attendance embraced.
Including Frys and Ajay. Borg stiffened and growled at the sight.
The water took on a faint phosphorescence, brighter farther out in the lagoon than close to shore.
“What is that glow?” Borg asked.
Lara shook her head. “I don’t know. There are single-celled organisms that live on the surface of the water that glow, but usually they’re most visible near shore. I’ve never seen it that strong at a distance.”
Then a metallic groan and a fierce bubbling from the lava ramp froze them. The Méne, led again by Frys, disappeared into the ground. Their heads did not bob as those of people walking down a stairway would have, but went down smoothly.
“My God!” Borg said.
“You couldn’t be more wrong … C’mon!” Lara grabbed at Borg’s shoulder and dashed for the tree line. They kept to the growth, running for the lava ramp and startling birds into flight right and left, but Lara didn’t care. They had to reach that ramp in time to—
Too late.
The surface of the ramp closed with a last hiss of air. The bubbling in the lagoon to either side of the lava ramp trickled off to nothing. Lara watched, her ponytail flapping in the fluky but strengthening winds.
She probed and explored and went so far as to wade into the water where Frys had stood. Borg almost danced with anxiety on the shaped volcanic stone as she stuck her hands into the water, looking for some device to operate the door. All she could do was find the fissures marking the ramp. She thought of the counterweighted platform in the ruins of Ukju Pacha and ran up the ramp to the other end.
The ramp ended in a natural amphitheater. The hill wall had been flattened and shaped into a rectangle about the size of a movie-theater screen, and in the darkness she could make out a huge version of the pseudo-omega symbol worked into the stone, the carving filled with silvery metal. This one had arms longer than the others she had seen, and what could only be eyes bulging from either side of the elongated skull-like shape. In its size, the skill of its artistry, and its evident age, the carving would be a great discovery, but she had no time to admire it. Instead, she searched the inlaid rock and surrounding stone for a device or trigger for the ramp, but came up empty again.
The Méne had locked the door behind them and taken the key.
23
“The glow is getting brighter,” Borg said as they wandered back down the ramp to the beach. With the strange ceremony over, Capricorn Atoll was once again a South Pacific paradise save for the growing wind kicking up surf and sand.
Lara had never seen a glow like that. And it wasn’t at the surface; it was deep, coming up through the water as a uniform light, rather than as the flows and tendrils of the surface organisms which were caught by the currents and moved by the wind.
Borg rubbed his chin with a mechanical claw. “Lara, they all disappeared toward that glow. Ajay went down through a tunnel in this rock. But the others, the ones who waded into the water, perhaps they were going to the same place by a different path?”
“You could be right, Nils. Let’s go get the flippers and masks and have a look.”
They hurried back to their remaining gear at the mango tree. It took Lara a moment of casting about outside the Méne camp to determine under which tree they’d placed it. Lara cut a two-meter length of line and tied knots at each end. Then they slung the bags and ran back to the beach.
She watched him fit his mask. She spat in hers, wiped the saliva around. The new plastics
didn’t fog, but she still did it out of habit. “You sure you want to try the lagoon? There could be … sharks. You saw what happened to those people. It looked like something … took them.”
“I can go anywhere you will.”
They tried an exploratory swim out into the lagoon. Lara helped Borg along by pulling him with her knotted line. Borg kicked with water wings on to compensate for the weight of his arms, the water growing clearer and clearer the farther they got from shore. The ground sloped away fast from the lagoon beach; the water here was a good deal deeper than in a typical atoll. Lara spotted a strange round shape below.
“Wait a moment,” she told Borg, and dove.
Away from the surface, she could see better. The ocean floor sloped away toward the source of the bluish glow coming from the sea bottom. She saw more orbs like the one she had dove to investigate, only deeper down.
She looked at the nearest one more closely. The four-meter orb, like a crystal mushroom top, was tethered to the sea floor by a net of vines joining at a taproot and was open at the bottom like a diving bell. She swam farther down, saw row after row of sea grasses, but—and she thought this strange—no fish. She rose and broke the surface inside the sphere, took a small, cautious breath. It invigorated her like pure oxygen.
The translucent interior of the crystal dome glowed faintly from little splotches, like blue algae, growing on its outer surface. More roots clung to the interior walls.
Within the sphere, woven sea grass nets held little grape-like bulbs. The baskets had been fashioned, filled with the bulbs, and then hung there, but for what purpose she couldn’t begin to guess. Curious, she reached up and gave one an experimental squeeze. It broke easily; milky liquid flowed down her hand. She felt a tug at her ankle, gasped—
Borg floated beneath. She kicked over, and he shot up into the air pocket. He’d partially deflated his water wings.
“What’s this?” he asked, gasping for air.
