Hunt Through the Cradle of Fear gh-2

by Gabriel Hunt

  Was stone.

  Gabriel ran his fingers over the surface. His heart began trip-hammering again, worse even than when he’d been dangling at the edge of the pit. “What happened? Did he touch something? Did he…did he step on something? Inhale something?”

  Sheba shook her head vigorously. “I was running away. I heard him coming after me, and then a sound…”

  “What sound?”

  She didn’t answer. But, then, she didn’t have to. Because they both heard the sound then. It was a low, rumbling growl, accompanied by the slow padding of clawed footsteps against stone.

  “Get back,” Gabriel said, taking the flashlight from her.

  The footsteps came closer, then stopped, just out of sight.

  “And you,” came a voice from the darkness. “Have you come to disturb my peace as well?”

  It spoke in Greek. Not the modern Greek the men of Avgonyma had used—the voice had the same ring of antiquity about it that Tigranes had had when declaiming his verses of heroism and disaster.

  “No,” Gabriel responded in the same tongue, “we do not wish to disturb anything.”

  A shape appeared then at the edge of the pool of light the flashlight cast. The figure was low and muscular—an animal’s body. And when it moved it was with the languorous rippling grace of a jungle cat, a jaguar or a lion. But its torso rose higher than any cat’s, and the silhouette of its head was…

  Gabriel gripped the flashlight tighter.

  The silhouette of its head was a man’s.

  “You speak the language of Olympos like a foreigner,” the sphinx said, stepping forward into the light. “Like an invader.”

  It reared up, its paws extended fully. It was almost Gabriel’s height this way—and clearly many times his weight. The hair cascading over its shoulders was as gray as the fur upon its chest, and its face was lined, drawn. But its eyes were fierce and clear, their irises a piercing sapphire blue. And stretching along the creature’s back Gabriel saw a folded pair of wings.

  He blinked to clear his vision, thought back to the brief moments of vertigo he’d felt climbing the mountain, the stings he’d suffered from the wasps, the hours since he’d eaten. Could he be hallucinating? But if he was, Sheba seemed to be as well, judging by the strength with which her fingers were digging into his arm from behind.

  Gabriel made himself step forward. “It’s true,” he said, “that we are not from Greece. But we are no invaders.”

  “You come here,” the sphinx said, its voice rising as it spoke, “you discharge your weapons, you shatter a peace of centuries, and yet you say you are not invaders! How dare you?”

  “We came to stop this man,” Gabriel said, gesturing behind him, toward Karoly’s remains, “and another you’ll find dead on the mountaintop. They were the invaders—they were searching for your treasure, to use it for terrible ends.”

  “My treasure? I have no treasure.” The sphinx shook its head roughly, and its hair flew about.

  “Maybe you don’t think of it as treasure,” Gabriel said. “But whatever you used to…to do this.” And he gestured backwards again.

  “All men have stone within them,” the sphinx said brusquely. “All living creatures do. When I wish, I bring it out. I don’t use anything to do so.”

  “You do it just by…by looking at them?” Gabriel said.

  “What does looking have to do with it? I could make a statue of you just as well with my eyes closed,” the sphinx said. “Both of you. Any of you! I could salt the earth with statues! I could end all of your kind at once, however many millions you now pestilentially represent. Or is it billions now, I wonder? You multiply so…”

  “That can’t be,” Gabriel said. “It can’t. You can’t turn billions of people to stone.” But hearing himself say this he wondered—a day ago he’d have said it was impossible to turn even one person to stone. Was a billion less plausible?

  “Don’t test me, human,” the sphinx said. “You will rue it. Perhaps I will leave you alive, the last of your kind as I am of mine, to lament to the end of your paltry days that you doubted me.”

  “I don’t,” Gabriel said quickly. “I don’t doubt—”

  “You lie!” the sphinx roared. It began pacing, walking in a tight circle around them. It had a musky, unwashed smell, a smell of exertion and lassitude. For all its explosive anger, Gabriel got a sense of fatigue from the creature, of extreme age and isolation.

  “You lie,” it repeated. “And you must pay for it.” It leaned in close to Gabriel, its breath hot on his cheeks. “But I shall be fair. My kind always has been—we have always dealt by the rules we’re bound by, though we suffer grievously for it.

  “I will pose for you a question, a simple question. It calls for a simple answer, and if you give it I will let you live—all of you. But if you do not answer, if you cannot answer, if you choose not to answer, if you fail to answer, then, human, I will let only you live—you alone of all humanity, and a world of stone to keep you company in your grief.”

  “Gabriel, you can’t—” Sheba said.

  “Ah, the female speaks as well,” the sphinx said. “It is unfortunate she counsels you so poorly.” It turned a baleful glare upon her. “Not only can he, he must. It is my will.”

  “What’s the question?” Gabriel said, thinking of all the legends he’d read, all the stories about the Theban sphinx. There was the famous riddle: What walks on four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three in the evening, and is the weaker the more legs it has? The answer being man: the crawling infant, the erect adult, and the infirm elder. And there was its sometime corollary: What two sisters are they, the first giving birth to the second, and then the second once more to the first? To which the answer was night and day. Either of those he could answer, and he thought he could manage others of their ilk.

  “The question is this,” the sphinx said. “What is my name?”

  “Your name?” Gabriel said.

  “My name!” the sphinx screamed, its voice echoing from the walls. “You will know my name. I will teach you my name. But—” It put a paw against Gabriel’s chest. “—only when you fail to guess my name.”

  Rumpelstiltskin, Gabriel wanted to say. Your name is Rumpelstiltskin, and you can spin straw into gold…

  Your name. Your name. How in God’s name, you’ll pardon the expression, am I supposed to pull the right answer out of the thousands, the hundreds of thousands, the almost infinite possibilities? This is no riddle! He wanted to shout it: This is a fix-up, a fraud, a pretext for slaughter!

  But no—it wouldn’t be. If the beast had wanted merely to kill them it could have. If it really had the power it claimed, it could have slaughtered all humanity at any time. It needed no pretext. If instead of killing it had asked this question, there had to be a way to answer it—a clue, a hint…something. Gabriel thought back to his first glimpse of the Sphinx in Egypt, the great and terrible Abul-Hôl, looming in the night. He thought back to the inscriptions, to their talk of a divine or holy treasure, and to the statues into whose flanks they were carved—which statues, with their impossible degree of sculptural perfection, must, he now knew, have been actual, living sphinxes once. And he thought of the story Tigranes had recounted, of the Theban sphinx’s journeys and her tribulations.

  And then suddenly he realized he knew the answer.

  “Your name is Fear,” Gabriel said.

  The sphinx stepped back, silent.

  “You’re their child,” Gabriel said. “The child of the Father of Fear. What else would have been sufficient to bring the men of Taprobane on a voyage halfway around the world? No ordinary treasure would, no mere prize, no artifact. But a sphinx cub, unlawfully bred, the unlawful child of an illicit union—that they could not let alone. They came for you, they found you, and they brought you back here. You were the treasure—your father’s divine treasure, your mother’s holy treasure. And then they…what? Punished them? By turning them to stone?”

  “They
gave her a choice.” The sphinx’s head was bowed, its eyes downcast. “I was tiny then, a newborn practically, no more than a century and a half; but I remember it as if it were this morning. She could die, or I could.

  “They told her my father had already chosen, that they’d left his body deep within his temple, at eternal rest. That he’d gone with her name on his lips. And they showed her a coin, I remember, from his land…”

  Gabriel reached into his pocket and drew out the pair of coins. He held them out on his palm. The female sphinx and the amphora on one, the male profile on the other, the two facing one another in his hand.

  The sphinx’s cheeks trembled as it looked from one to the other. It threw back its head and howled, tears running down its face.

  “And this place,” Gabriel said, “became your cradle, this dark and terrible mountain. Have you never left it? For two thousand years?”

  “Longer,” the sphinx said. “Even longer.”

  “But you must leave it sometimes,” Gabriel said, “if just to hunt for food—”

  “I am old,” the sphinx whispered. “I hardly hunt anymore. I hardly eat anymore.”

  There was a tone of despair in its voice, a sound of finality.

  “We can get you food,” Gabriel said. “I can arrange for supplies to be flow in, I can—”

  “And face men each day? No. No.” It stepped back, toward the shadow. “You have given me all I need. You have shown me my mother’s face again.”

  “Please, let me do something to help—”

  “Gabriel,” Sheba said.

  He turned to her. “What?”

  “Look,” she said, and pointed.

  Turning back, he saw the gray of the sphinx’s fur deepening, darkening; then he saw the skin of its face turning stiff, blank, saw the liquid surface of its eyes harden. The change crept across its body gradually, but rapidly. In seconds it was over.

  Gabriel stepped forward, touched its shoulder. The stone was still slightly warm. But as he felt it, it cooled beneath his hand.

  He took the two coins, stacked them, and gently slid them into the statue’s open mouth, beneath its tongue.

  Chapter 27

  They found a stairway, carved into the rock, that led up to the top. The climb was torment—by the end, Gabriel’s legs were burning with pain and Sheba could barely walk.

  They came out into a clear night sky. The storm had passed. The stone surface glistened wetly, but the air was warm and dry.

  At the far end of the rock, near where DeGroet’s body lay, a familiar helicopter stood, its door open. The pilot was by the door, talking into a microphone, and when he spotted them walking toward him, he shouted.

  “Hold on—yes, hold on! I found them!”

  They staggered forward.

  “How did you…?” Gabriel began, but for the moment he couldn’t get any more words out.

  “Talk to your brother,” the pilot said, and handed over the microphone, then stepped around Gabriel to help Sheba up into the cabin.

  “Gabriel? Are you okay?” It was Michael’s voice.

  “I’ve been better,” Gabriel said.

  “I want you back here now.”

  “Not half as much as I do,” Gabriel said. “How did you find me?”

  “We tracked your signal,” Michael said.

  “What…what signal? I don’t have a cell phone, I don’t have…”

  “That guy, Cipher,” Michael said. “He sent me an e-mail saying he’d given you a device to track someone else, right? Well, he had the good sense to slip in a transmitter going the other way so we could track you, too. Clever, right? And we didn’t even ask him to do it, he just thought of it on his own.”

  Gabriel found himself smiling. He saw his leather jacket lying ten feet away, a wet and crumpled heap on the stone. Somewhere in the heap was a pocket, and in the pocket Lucy’s box was silently sending out a signal. “Very clever.”

  “I wish I could thank him properly,” Michael said. “But he refused to take any money. It’s strange, dealing with someone this way. I’ve never even met the man. I don’t even know what he looks like.”

  “Oh, he’s…uh…”

  “What?” Michael said.

  “Big,” Gabriel said, and wiped a tear out of his eye with the back of one thumb. “A big, big man. My size. Mean-looking.” He took a deep breath. “Lots of tattoos. Not your kind of guy, Michael. I think it’s better if you don’t meet him in person.”

  “Well…maybe you’re right,” Michael said. “But I’m still grateful to him.”

  “Me, too,” Gabriel said, climbing into the cabin. “Me, too.”

  The End

  From the Desk of Gabriel Hunt

  When I was in Istanbul, I met a pair of writers doing research in the Yerebatan Sarayi, the Sunken Palace. One of them, I learned, was an author of adventure fiction, and when the time came for me to pen the book you’re holding, I tracked him down and asked if he might give me a hand. (I would have done it myself, gladly, but I was unfortunately tied up with some matters in Brazil at the time. And I do mean tied up.)

  Happily, Charles agreed to help. And I asked him if, when the novel was finished, he might consider writing an extra adventure story of his own for the book, as a sort of bonus for the reader. Happily, he agreed to this as well.

  So I’m delighted to present you with a surprise treat, a novelette that’s never appeared anywhere before: “Nor Idolatry Blind The Eye” by Charles Ardai.

  —G.H.

  I

  The heel of the bottle cracked against the bar on the first swing and then shattered on the second. The few conversations in the room died. In the silence Malcolm could hear glass crunching under his feet. He felt his legs shake and put out his other hand to steady himself.

  There were three of them, and a broken bottle wouldn’t hold them off long enough for him to get to the door. Assuming he could even make it to the door without falling on his face. There was a time when he could have made it in a dead sprint, turning over tables as he went to slow them down, but then there was a time when he wouldn’t have had to run from a fight in the first place, not if it were a whole regiment facing him. A time when he’d been able to hold his liquor, too. But that was all part of the past—the dead past, buried three winters ago in a cold Glasnevin grave.

  He shook his head, but it didn’t get any clearer. He remembered coming to the pub, he remembered taking his first few drinks, and he remembered the three men taking up positions around him, reaching over his shoulder to collect their pints from the barman. Was that how the argument had started? Or had one of them said something? That he couldn’t remember. He supposed it didn’t matter.

  The one in the middle was younger than the other two—just a kid, really. He was wearing a navy peajacket, probably his brother’s or father’s since he looked too young to have served himself. The others were dressed in denim windbreakers and dungarees, like they’d just stepped off a construction site. Which maybe they had—there was still plenty of rebuilding going on. The one on the left had the crumpled features of a boxer who’d taken too many trips to the mat. The one on the right looked almost delicate, his thin nose and long chin giving him the appearance of a society lad slumming in a tough neighborhood. Malcolm knew which one he’d prefer to face in a fight. Unfortunately, it didn’t look like he’d get to choose.

  All three had their hands up, palms out, but it was a gesture of mocking deference, not fear. Malcolm swung the bottle by the neck and they didn’t even bother to step back.

  “Go on, old man,” the one in the middle said. “Just try it.”

  “Leave me alone,” Malcolm said, or tried to—the words sounded strange to his ears, like he was talking through cotton. He forced himself to enunciate. “I don’t want to fight you.”

  “Bugger that,” the society boy said. “You’re bloody well going to.”

  Malcolm feinted toward the boy’s face with the jagged edge of the bottle, then dodged around him. Th
e door was open and the way before him was clear, but he felt himself stagger as he ran, felt his head spin and the floor lurch up to meet him. He fought to catch his balance and then lost it again. He fell to one knee and the bottle spilled out of his hand.

  The first kick caught him in the side as he was standing up, and it laid him out flat on the floor. After that, Malcolm couldn’t say who was kicking him or even what direction the blows came from. He covered his head with one arm and tried to back up against the bar.

  One boot heel caught him in the chest. By some old reflex, he snaked an arm out and pinched the foot in the crook of his elbow. He twisted violently and its owner came crashing to the floor.

  “That’s it,” one of them said. Malcolm felt a fist bunched in the fabric of his shirtfront, felt himself lifted bodily from the floor and pressed back against the bar. It was the boxer’s meaty fist at his throat, the boy in the peajacket looking on angrily over his shoulder. So the society lad must be the one laid out on the floor, groaning curses into the sawdust. Well, he had taken one down, anyway.

  “You’re going to wish you hadn’t done that,” the boxer said.

  Malcolm swung a fist at him, but it was hardly a punch at all, and the man holding him deflected it lightly with his forearm. In return, he threw a right cross that snapped Malcolm’s head violently to the side. Malcolm felt blood on his cheek where the man’s ring had scraped a ragged groove, and he tasted bile when he swallowed. He tried to raise a knee toward the man’s groin, but he couldn’t—they were standing too close together, and anyway his legs felt like lead. He groped behind him on the bar, hoping his fingers would find something—a glass, an ashtray, anything—but all they found was another hand that pinned his firmly against the wood.

  “Teach him a lesson,” the boy in the peajacket said. He pressed down, grinding Malcolm’s knuckles into the wood. “Teach him good.”

  He felt a thumb and forefinger at his chin, positioning his head, saw the man’s fist cock back, saw it snap forward. After that, he didn’t see anything, just felt the punches landing from the darkness.