Hunt Through the Cradle of Fear gh-2

by Gabriel Hunt

  “Oh, don’t worry, my dear,” DeGroet said. “You’ll be next.”

  Gabriel felt the flat of DeGroet’s blade strike his calves.

  He handed the torch silently to Sheba, bent to set the pail down within the hole, and shoved it far enough in that he could squeeze in behind it. The tunnel walls just barely accommodated his shoulders and for a few feet he feared he might actually get stuck, but the tunnel widened slightly after that, the left and right walls angling away from one another at the top, almost like an inverted trapezoid. He found the fit snug but not uncomfortably so. He had been in tighter spots—while caving, for instance. And he’d gotten out of those, hadn’t he?

  With his arms outstretched, he pushed the pail ahead of him, a few inches at a time, and then followed slowly behind it, feeling his way. The darkness was complete, not a trace of light from either end. He dug beneath the fabric of the burnoose to his jacket underneath, straining to reach the closed inner pocket with the Zippo lighter inside. He brought the lighter out and flicked it open. A tiny orange flame bloomed.

  The inner walls the flame revealed were smooth, though hand-carved. They were damp, not just beneath him, where the smell of Rashidi’s blood explained it, but on the sides and ceiling as well. He could see the pronounced V-shape the walls made—though the hole in the other room had been circular, the tunnel itself was more like a trough or a channel, with the tops of the side walls significantly farther apart than their bottoms. And there were no carvings on either of the walls, no further instructions for those of Sekhmet’s priests who made it this far.

  He thought about the text Sheba had read, describing the required offering. The opposition of “heavy” and “light” wouldn’t have been accidental. Not when the instruction involved placing something heavy—he pushed the pail forward another few inches—into a receptacle; not when it was the descent of some sort of heavy mechanism that had separated Rashidi into top and bottom halves.

  He crept another foot forward and then, feeling ahead of him, found the rim of the basin into which Rashidi had poured his bucket of mud. The bucket was nowhere to be seen, and the top half of Rashidi’s body, similarly, had vanished.

  From outside he heard a voice, DeGroet’s. “What have you found?”

  “Nothing,” he called back. It was the truth.

  “Well get a move on,” came the shouted reply.

  He held the flame of his lighter to the basin—it was empty. How that could be, he didn’t know, given that it had been full just minutes earlier. He felt around the basin for any drainage hole through which the mud might have escaped—nothing.

  Turning over, he looked up at the ceiling. At a glance it looked no different from the rest of the tunnel, but upon closer inspection he could make out the concealed edges of a distinct block, much like those of the section of the Sphinx’s paw Zuka and Hanif had manhandled out of the way at ground level. Clearly this block could move, too—specifically, it could come down, with great force, and anything lying beneath it would get driven violently down along with it.

  But what would happen then? Wouldn’t the stone block hammering down shatter the basin beneath it when it struck, or at least leave crushed, pulped matter behind when it rose again?

  It would—unless, Gabriel realized, the block containing the basin moved as well, swung out of the way at the same time the block descending from above came down. He pictured the block containing the basin and the one above it as teeth on a giant stone gear that rotated when provoked. You poured your mud into the basin, after a moment the weight caused the wheel to turn, the basin block fell out of the way and the new block from the ceiling rotated in to take its place—with a new empty basin of its own on its upper surface.

  And anything that happened to be lying between the two blocks at the time got chopped as the upper block rotated down to take the place of the lower.

  It was a devilish trap—clever but simple, and a marvel mechanically. The stone gear must weigh tons, many tons; how it had been carved and moved into place and mounted on some sort of axle and hidden within the rock he couldn’t imagine. But then no one had figured out how the Egyptians had managed to build the pyramids either. There was no shortage of mechanical marvels on the Giza Plateau.

  Of course, the question of how one might build a trap like this was of secondary importance. The first order of business was surviving this one.

  So: what to do?

  Not pour the mud, clearly; he couldn’t even move the pail onto the stone surface surrounding the basin, since the weight would set off the trap. Nor could he put his own weight on it—but how could he make it across to the other side without doing so?

  Gabriel thought about it. It had taken perhaps half a minute between when Rashidi had poured the mud and when the mechanism had crushed him. In theory Gabriel might be able to rush across in that time and be out of the way of the descending block before it fell. In theory. And in practice, too, if he’d been upright, with room to maneuver. But not in this tight, narrow tunnel—he couldn’t inch his way far enough fast enough, which no doubt had been what the men who built the tunnel had in mind.

  But there had to be a way through. Unless the builders were merely playing a cruel game and there was no reliquary to be found, only a tool for slaughtering unwary priests who were foolish enough to follow the instructions you gave them, to deposit the treasure of the Nile in the place you provided for it…

  The place provided for it.

  If Gabriel had had more room, he might have slapped himself on the forehead. Of course. What if there had been more than one place provided for it? A priest of Sekhmet would know how to follow the instructions properly, while an impostor would make the same mistake Rashidi and Sheba had made, and that Gabriel had nearly made himself.

  Where did Hathor’s floods deposit the life-giving silt that brought fertility to the Nile Valley? In a basin at the bottom of the river? No—on the river’s banks, for Egyptians to find and harvest.

  And here he was in a V-shaped channel, with the walls angling away to either side—like a river.

  Who said the blocks before him were the only portion of the tunnel walls that could move?

  Gabriel reached into the pail, grabbed a handful of mud, and smeared it on the wall beside him, as high up as he could reach. He coated the surface and went back for more. He slapped the mud onto the stone, piling it up, replacing it when bits slid down. Bit by bit, he built up the upper portion of the V, filling in the angle, adding the weight of the mud to the stone surface. He felt it move, very slightly, as the mud accumulated—and as he reached the bottom of the pail, he heard a soft grinding noise deep inside the wall.

  This was it. A mechanism was turning.

  But which mechanism?

  He looked up at the deadly stone above him, ominous in the flickering flame of his lighter. If it came down, it would come in an instant, snuffing him out like…well, like the flame went out now as he hastily pocketed the lighter.

  The sound grew louder, and apparently it was audible outside, too, because he heard Sheba scream, “Gabriel, no!”

  “Gabriel?” DeGroet said, and then he said something else, but Gabriel couldn’t hear what it was because the grinding of the stone was too loud in his ears—

  And then the angled wall beside him began to turn in earnest beneath its mantle of mud.

  As the wall rotated counterclockwise, the top portion headed downwards—but the bottom portion, the portion closer to Gabriel, turned upwards, and it wedged itself under Gabriel as it went, lifting him, till finally a long section of the side wall was horizontal and he was lying on top of it, his burnoose thickly covered with mud.

  And it wasn’t done yet.

  One more turn of the hidden mechanism and the wall was now angled downward again—only in the opposite direction, facing away from the tunnel rather than toward it.

  At which point gravity took over, and Gabriel went sliding through the mud, off the edge, and out into space.

&nb
sp; Chapter 9

  He fell for just an instant—then landed with a thud on a stone floor. Standing, he stripped off the ruined burnoose, flung it down and flicked open his lighter again.

  The room was large, the flame tiny. But bit by bit it revealed his surroundings. There was a wall covered with hieroglyphs beside him and, leaning up against the wall at an angle, a huge stone carving of a Pharaoh’s face, similar to the face of the Sphinx itself. Just past that were two upright caskets, both standing open. The dead body in one was partially mummified, its head and arms and upper torso preserved in linen bandages, the rest of its body uncovered and worn down by the centuries till all that remained were prominent bones encased in shrunken, leathery flesh. The other casket was empty but for a handful of broken lengths of bone at the bottom.

  Gabriel picked up one of these, returned to where he’d landed, and tore the driest strip he could from the burnoose. It took half a minute, after he’d wrapped the fabric tightly around the bone, for the flame from the lighter to catch and the fabric to ignite. What he wouldn’t have given for one of those accelerant-treated torches now…

  A voice slithered in through the tunnel, a shout in tone but muffled due to the distance it had to travel. “Hunt! I know it’s you. And I know better than to believe you’re dead. Say something, damn you!”

  Gabriel didn’t say anything. Instead, he took a quick tour of the room. On the surface of one wall there was a recessed rectangular groove, roughly the shape and size of a door—this was the other side of the panel with the writing on it in the entry chamber, Gabriel realized. It was barred crosswise by two long pieces of granite resting in stone brackets protruding from the wall, which suggested that the giant block the groove outlined might be movable, if the bars were removed.

  “Hunt!”

  The neighboring wall was the one with the hieroglyphics and the caskets. Beside the caskets there were shelves carved into the wall with rows of canopic jars lined up on them, their tops sculpted with images of the sons of Horus: Duamutef, with his jackal’s head; Qebehsenuf, with the head of an eagle; and so forth. These would have held the organs of the mummified man in the coffin—or of some mummified man, anyway.

  “Answer me, Hunt! I can hear you walking, for Christ’s sake!”

  He kept walking, his flickering torchlight illuminating the walls as he passed them.

  The third wall was bare, nothing on it or before it. But the fourth—

  The fourth was something else entirely.

  “Hunt,” DeGroet shouted. “Hunt, if you don’t answer me, I will kill her.” And he heard Sheba scream.

  “You won’t kill her,” Gabriel shouted back, “or I will destroy what you came here to find.”

  The canopic jars, the caskets, the half-wrapped mummy—these things were priceless, it was true, and sufficiently impressive additions to any man’s collection to warrant the expense and trouble DeGroet had undertaken to find them. But as soon as he approached the fourth wall Gabriel knew that DeGroet was after a much bigger prize.

  The wall was painted, from floor to ceiling, with a map. Or more precisely with part of a map, since what there was ended at a jagged line and was clearly, deliberately incomplete. The outlines of a triangular landmass were traced, and the upper portion of a teardrop-shaped island below. But the lower portion of the island was missing.

  And seated before the map, directly below this missing portion, was a stone sculpture of a sphinx.

  Not the crude sort of monumental stonework that defined the Great Sphinx itself, or even the more careful, delicate sculpture of the canopic jars—that was still stylized rather than naturalistic. But this sculpture…Gabriel approached it, circled around to view it from all sides. It was almost like a piece from Europe’s Baroque period, with loving attention lavished on realistically depicting the rippling muscles beneath the skin of the leonine torso, the sunken cheeks and troubled brow and half-open mouth of the human head. It was life-size, perhaps a bit larger—maybe nine feet long and four feet tall. He’d never seen Egyptian sculpture that looked like this. He didn’t think anyone had.

  And on its flank was carved an inscription. His Ancient Egyptian was rusty—Sheba would have done a better job of translating it. But as best he could make out, it said something like,Here reposes for eternity the Father of Fear,His mortal portions entombed,His secrets kept by stone tongue,His divine treasure returnedTo the Cradle of Fear

  DeGroet’s voice thundered: “You wouldn’t dare destroy it, Hunt. An artifact this important, you wouldn’t—”

  “Let her go,” Gabriel shouted, “or I swear to you there’ll be nothing here but rubble.”

  “All right,” DeGroet said. “All right.” Then, after a moment: “Tell him you’re free, my dear. Go on.”

  Sheba’s voice floated in: “I’m…free, Gabriel.”

  The tension in her voice made him skeptical.

  “There’s a hidden doorway to the room you’re in, Lajos,” Gabriel said. “It’s the only way you’re going to get in here unless you want to crawl through the tunnel, and I don’t think you do.” He was still looking at the extraordinary statue. His secrets kept by stone tongue…He wondered how literally the inscription was to be taken.

  “I am willing to open the doorway,” he called, “but only if you promise that no harm will come to either Miss McCoy or myself. Do you agree?” He knew DeGroet’s word was worthless and paid no attention to the man’s shouted response. Gabriel was just playing for time while, holding the torch close to the head of the sphinx, he stuck the smallest finger of his free hand into its mouth and felt beneath the statue’s tongue.

  There was something there.

  “I said I agree,” DeGroet shouted. “Now open the door, Hunt.”

  “All right,” Gabriel said, fishing out the hard, circular, metal object. “Step away from Miss McCoy. I don’t want you anywhere near her, and no guns pointed at her either. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  The object was the size of a coin, with an image of a sphinx on one side. A sphinx with wings. A Greek sphinx.

  “Sheba,” Gabriel called, “have they stepped away?”

  Sheba answered: “A bit. Not very far.”

  “Enough’s enough, Hunt,” DeGroet shouted. “Open the door now.”

  “All right.” Gabriel returned to the wall separating this room from the entry chamber and lifted the granite bars from the brackets one by one. He leaned then against the wall. Then he put his shoulder to the rectangular block outlined by the recessed groove, braced himself and shoved.

  The block rotated a few inches, as if on a central axis, then a few more when he shoved again. One more shove should do it—but Gabriel stepped back instead.

  If he pushed it the rest of the way open, he might well find himself walking into an ambush. Whereas if he made them do it…

  He darted over to the two open caskets. Ancient Egyptians hadn’t been six feet tall—but by bending his knees, Gabriel was able to fit himself into the empty one. He pressed the end of his torch to the ground, stepping on it to extinguish the flame, then dropped it and took his Colt from its holster.

  The room was perfectly, completely dark. And for a moment it was silent.

  Then a crack of light appeared as he heard the sound of a shoulder ramming against the stone door from the other side. The crack widened into a wedge, and a moment later he saw Zuka charge through the opening holding a torch in one hand and brandishing a deadly looking curved sword in the other. He was wearing an expression that contained all of his grief, transmuted into rage.

  Hanif came through the doorway behind him, his red fez tipped slightly forward, tassel soaring, mouth open in a bellow—and in his fist he held a poignard, a short dagger with a silver blade, ready to plunge it down between Gabriel’s shoulder blades if only he could find them.

  Finally DeGroet entered, forcing Sheba ahead of him at swordpoint.

  Gabriel raised his Colt. He aimed carefully at Zuka and squeezed the t
rigger.

  Nothing happened.

  The hammer fell—but no gunshot followed. The wrong bullets, damn it! But the sound of the hammer landing had been loud enough to give away his location.

  Gabriel dived out of the casket and heard it crash to the ground behind him. He barreled through the semidarkness directly at Sheba and snatched her out of in front of DeGroet’s saber with one arm around her waist. He saw her hands fly up and her mouth go wide in a terrified scream. He leaned close to her ear and whispered, “It’s me.”

  But there was no time for further conversation. Zuka and Hanif were coming at them from opposite directions, blades held high—and in the tumult he saw Karoly enter the chamber, too. No sword for him: he raised an automatic pistol and leveled it at Gabriel’s chest.

  Desperately Gabriel raised the Colt and fired again. This time, for whatever reason, the firing pin struck true, and flame spat from the end of the revolver. He saw Karoly’s hand jerk back and his pistol go flying. The short man swore loudly, a vicious Magyar curse.

  Gabriel lifted Sheba off her feet and swung her toward Hanif. She lashed out with one bare foot at the top of her arc, cracking him across the face and sending his fez flying. Gabriel, meanwhile, kicked backwards with one leg, catching Zuka in the gut. The man collapsed, gasping.

  Gabriel set Sheba down on the ground again and whispered urgently: “Run!”

  “Where?” she said.

  “Out,” Gabriel said, and fired another shot in Karoly’s direction. He looked around, but couldn’t see DeGroet anywhere. Maybe the old man had fled to a safer spot when he realized he was in a situation where a sword couldn’t offer much in the way of protection.

  Gabriel pointed Sheba toward the doorway and gave her a shove. It was all she needed—she was off and running. Gabriel followed close behind, but was pulled back by an arm around his throat. Karoly? Hanif? It didn’t matter which. He swung around and smashed whoever it was into the giant carved stone face behind him, which teetered from the impact. The man’s arm didn’t release, though. He smashed backwards again and then once more, and finally the man’s grip loosened and he tumbled off.