The Watchers

by Kaitlyn O'Connor

  It might be nothing more than the statue she’d seen herself. That would be enough, she was sure. And they would have set up after finding that to see what else might be in the cavern.

  It boggled the mind to think of a statue being so far down. She couldn’t see much likelihood that it had been deliberately buried so deep. And, unless this cave system that had been revealed had an opening at the surface somewhere else, it would’ve had to have been buried.

  There had been fossilized sea creatures in the crust that had been around the base, though. As bad as the lighting was, she was convinced of that.

  Who could’ve put the statue there long enough ago that something like that could have occurred?

  She specialized in rock formations. She didn’t know a lot about the history of the area—Archeology had been her mother’s passion and was her sister’s. But she did know enough about the accepted/proven history of the continent to realize that the statue was completely out of place.

  Unless the Spanish had left it?

  Maybe they were the origin of it? From what she could recall, the Spanish that had explored and settled Florida had been Christians—Catholics to be precise. And the Catholics loved statuary of their deities. A huge statue of an Angel—which was what she thought she’d seen—wouldn’t have been out of place in a Catholic church.

  She studied over that, frowning in concentration as she tried to recall dates that would help place the statue’s origins firmly with the Spanish explorers/settlers in the area. Maybe.

  That still didn’t explain how a religious artifact from 500 years or so ago had ended up in a cavern forty feet or so below the surface. It had been standing upright. It didn’t seem likely that it could’ve fallen or been dropped and remained in that position—as if it had been placed.

  And beyond that there was the crust that had formed around the base.

  Of course it might have been standing in water for a long time ….

  There were caverns in Florida. She’d been to the caverns near Marianna herself and taken the walking tour. She knew the entire state sat on a limestone shelf that was honeycombed with caverns but, mostly, they weren’t accessible from the surface. And that made it unlikely, to her mind, that the Spanish would’ve discovered them.

  Then there was the ‘why would they hide treasures underground?’ question.

  Pirates?

  Maybe.

  She shook the mystery off after testing it a few minutes. Maybe if she tumbled it around in her head a while she could develop a decent, logical reason but that eluded her at the moment.

  She was already leaning toward abandoning her half-baked idea of exploring the cave to see if anything else had been found when she spotted the area where the archeologists had clearly started working. It didn’t look like anything but a rock formation until she drew closer and could see where they’d scraped away the barnacles and other dead, petrified marine life. Then she could see a pattern—manmade.

  Her heart tripped over itself with a spurt of excitement. It looked like some sort of carved inscription, but either it wasn’t any language she’d ever seen, it wasn’t an inscription at all but simply a pattern, or it was too worn with time to be readable any longer.

  She crouched down and examined it in the weak light for a few minutes, trying to decide which scenario seemed most likely, and then straightened to study the object it was attached to as a whole.

  Well, it clearly wasn’t whole. There were chunks of stone littering the area and some seemed to be regular enough they might once have been part of whatever it was the archeology team was working on. She couldn’t decide whether they looked like pieces that belonged together or not.

  The question was, had time worked to demolish whatever it had been? Or had there been something like an earthquake, meteor strike—or a sinkhole opened beneath it?

  Unfortunately, there just wasn’t enough light for her to tell anything about it. She couldn’t see well enough to do more than guess at the type of stone she was looking at—let alone whether it was naturally occurring or stone that had been worked, or even stone that might have been transported to this spot from another area entirely—say Spain/Europe.

  Like the statue she was sure, now, that she’d seen. She hadn’t gotten to see it all that well before it had been removed, but it wasn’t at all likely that it had been worked by indigenous people. It had looked far too sophisticated to be the handiwork of natives—incredibly life-like!—besides the fact that the only stone available would have been limestone—which wasn’t great for carving statues since it was very soft stone—and she hadn’t heard that the natives were prone to carving a lot stone.

  It was frustrating enough she gave up on trying to figure out what the inscription was part of and moved on, studying each mound of stone she came to that looked like it might be regular enough to suggest it had been worked at some time in the distant past.

  It was as she reached the end of the lit area and turned to look back that she caught a glint of something in a crack on the stone floor of the cave. Curious, she moved to the spot and crouched down for a better look. Deciding this definitely looked like something manmade, she looked around for a tool she could use to try to extract it. Coming up empty, she searched her pack for something she could use to scrape at it. The pointed fingernail file she’d brought because it was the closest thing she owned to a knife looked to be the most likely, and only, thing that might work.

  It took her perhaps ten minutes of scraping before she’d managed to scrape away enough sandstone to wiggle the object—which she then saw appeared to be either a gold button or a coin. She was so focused on her task that it wasn’t until she managed to pry the object from the crack that she realized she’d been dimly conscious of some sound in the darkness behind her for some time. A rash of goose bumps cascaded down her spine as that thought took form at almost the same instant as the object popped loose, flew up, and then landed with a distinct, metallic tinkling on the rock floor again.

  Scooping it up, Claire absently shoved the object she’d found in her jeans pocket and tightened her hand around the file like a knife, straightening and whirling at the same time. The hair on the back of her neck prickled, but although she stared into the dark for several moments, listening intently, she didn’t hear anything else.

  Trying to shake the uneasiness and the sense that she’d spooked herself and was reacting like a child scared of the dark, she headed back toward the mouth of the cave as quickly and quietly as she could. She paused when she reached the cave entrance again, near the spot where she’d tripped, while she was still illuminated and the cave around her lit up enough for her to see, staring at the darkness at the back, waiting breathlessly to see if the movements she’d heard would translate into something—man or creature—approaching her. When nothing appeared, her gaze shifted from the darkness at the back after a few moments to the area she’d studied with the inscription. The new perspective almost seemed to bring it into focus, making the design/pattern so clear to her that she wondered why she hadn’t recognized it immediately.

  Because she’d seen this particular design many, many times among the books and pictures her mother had collected.

  It was a spiral, a design many people seemed to think must be a representation of the galaxy, although where the ancients might have gotten the idea was a mystery to her. They certainly couldn’t have seen that the Milky Way was a spiral galaxy! Even with today’s technology there was no way to be absolutely certain since man hadn’t traveled far enough to look back at the galaxy and see its shape.

  Whatever it might have meant, it was surprisingly commonly used among many cultures to represent something and here was yet another sample, although the very fact that it had been used by many cultures made it impossible to pin down to one.

  Unfortunately, whatever the words that had been carved beside it meant was still a mystery.

  It was as she reached the foot of the debris field once more and turned to surv
ey the site for any sign that there actually was something behind her in the cave that a new discovery hit her like a ton of bricks.

  She supposed it was the discovery of the inscribed tablet and the spiral symbol that made her look for patterns when she hadn’t before but, whatever the case, she noticed for the first time that the ‘tunnel’ she’d walked through was paved with square stones, arrow straight, and wide enough for a number of people, animals, and carts to pass. And it was lined with structures like the first one she’d discovered—structures built of stones, raised up from the thoroughfare by stone steps, cut in regular rectangles with columns lining the front of many of them.

  “My god!” she gasped wondering why she hadn’t noticed it immediately since it seemed so obvious now. “It’s a city!”

  Chapter Four

  Dante was running out of time to act and he knew it. So far the humans hadn’t discovered anything of any significance—as far as he could determine—but he couldn’t count on that continuing to be the case. At the rate they were going they were likely to stumble across some information very soon that the overlords would not allow them to have and then …. It didn’t bear thinking on what they might decide to do then.

  He wasn’t happy with his findings. He’d thought flooding the cavern would be the quickest, easiest, and least disastrous way to handle the situation. He didn’t know that that would prevent them from exploring and possibly discovering something they weren’t allowed to know, but it would certainly make it impossible for a time. And if access was cut off for a while that might buy him enough time to prevent any further searches.

  Unfortunately, the readings he’d just taken indicated that flooding the cavern system was likely to create a disaster in and of itself. The closest source of water sufficient to fill the cavern was the ocean and the geology above the ancient lava tube was already unstable. If he broke through, allowing the water to flood this cavern, it might completely destabilize the other and cause an even more massive cave-in.

  And he very much feared the overlords knew what he’d found because he also knew that they would not consider his qualms as anything of any significance. The humans were extremely fond of copulation. They bred indiscriminately and rapidly. The overlords weren’t likely to suffer any misgivings over taking the lives of a thousand or so in protecting the interests of the assembly.

  Truthfully, he didn’t think the overlords would mind wiping them out altogether. He thought, had always believed, that the only thing holding them in check was the convention of Hibrildaese—which stated that the willful, deliberate, and systematic elimination/destruction of any species, in particular an intelligent species, was punishable by destruction of the species that had committed the crime.

  He thought, if not for the system of checks and balances that had been put in place, they would have wiped out the human race long since.

  He—all of the Watchers—were a part of the check/balance system, which also meant, unfortunately, that they were closely monitored. It was the thing he hated most about being a Watcher—being constantly watched himself.

  It was without surprise, therefore, but with a great deal of anger, that he discovered the overlords knew he’d found a weakness he could exploit to slow or stop the humans.

  He had tried to block them from observing the tests so that he could decide on the best course without their interference—clearly without success.

  But then again, short of removing the device in his brain that made constant monitoring possible even though it had been designed and supposedly implanted purely for the sake of communications, there was no infallible way to prevent monitoring—not outside an angel stronghold. The protective shielding that surrounded those facilities prevented the overlords from snooping while they were inside any of the fortresses. Outside they could do nothing but use their telepathic abilities to try to block or interfere with attempts to ‘capture’ their thoughts.

  Actually, even if he could remove the communicator there would be no infallible way to prevent them from intruding into his private thoughts at will. They had the technology.

  And attempting to remove the chip would result in death—swiftly.

  Use it.

  Dante ground his teeth in anger. If you were monitoring, you know that opening it could cause an enormous collapse. It is already weak. A breach could cause a disaster of epic proportions! The area has a very high population density.

  The overlord snorted with contempt. They are like spoiled, mindless children! They have overpopulated the entire planet until it can barely support the life it must now and they are showing no signs of slowing. It isn’t likely to hurt them to lose a few thousand—even the loss of a few million would barely dint the massive overpopulation problem! At this juncture, reducing the population could be considered beneficial to the majority.

  That does not come under the guidelines of the duties of a Watcher! I am only here to guard the knowledge, Dante pointed out.

  And yet you have spent many millennia in stasis for copulating with a human woman and adding to the population problem by producing off-spring!

  A shaft of pain shot through Dante at the comment. He had done his utmost since the awakening not to think about what he had lost in the great deluge. It is unlikely my off-spring would have added to the population problem if they had survived to reach maturity since the offspring of humans and angels are rarely able to reproduce themselves.

  Ah! So you see your breach as a service? Well, that is a good point. If you angels continue to breed as indiscriminately as the humans it will take care of the big problem. The trouble with that is that it violates the Hibrildaese Treaty which states that no species may be destroyed by assimilating them into another species or causing them to become sterile.

  I see my service as unbearable without some comforts, Dante growled furiously, and was almost instantly sorry he had allowed his anger to overcome caution and good sense.

  You are one of the fallen. You have no right to any expectations—of comfort or pleasure. You are allowed to exist only because you serve a purpose—not terribly well, but a purpose nevertheless.

  Then stay out of it and allow me to serve that purpose!

  There was a prolonged pause. You have a quintem to resolve the issue your way. If you have not contained the problem, we will resolve it.

  Dante was still trying to calculate the Earth time equivalent to the quintem when he stepped into the light and spotted Claire. The rush that went through him was hard to define, the tangle of emotions nearly impossible to separate. The end result of that knot of unaccustomed and wildly divergent emotions, however, was a blinding rage he had difficulty holding in check.

  “What are you doing here, Claire?” he growled.

  As stunned as Claire was to see Father Moreno step from the darkness, the furious demand shook her from her shocked immobility. She felt a shiver skate down her spine at the ominous rumble of anger in his voice, but the end effect was to give rise to her own ire, partly in response to his anger and partly as a defensive reaction to a sense of guilt, since she knew damned well she wasn’t supposed to be where she was. “I might ask you the same, Father Moreno,” she responded tightly.

  Dante thought, later, that it was the almost explosive burst of joy and desire he felt upon seeing her—deflated almost as abruptly with the realization that she had certainly not come to meet him—coupled with his resentment and sense of impotence in dealing with the overlords more than Claire’s defiance that made him snap. But there was no denying that her anger fueled his and her rebelliousness found a chink in his control over that emotion.

  He was uncomfortably certain, however, that what drove him to throw protocol out the window was fear for her—his abrupt realization that the overlords might well know of her intrusion since he had only just been communicating with them. That he was far more powerfully drawn to her and concerned for her safety than he should have been, and that she was liable to become a distraction that cost him more th
an he could afford to pay.

  He’d been accused many times of having a weakness for humans. It was true that he had, more than once, felt a powerful physical attraction to human women. He had felt more than he should have for several human women since he had been sent to Earth, but he’d never considered feeling empathy for them a weakness, which was what the overlords referred to as his ‘weakness’.

  He hadn’t considered it a weakness before, at any rate, because he had never felt in any danger of risking more than he could afford to lose.

  Claire, he was afraid, had the potential of being his Armageddon.

  * * * *

  Claire couldn’t have said exactly what kind of a response she had expected from Father Moreno when she’d challenged his right to question her presence, but it certainly wasn’t the response she got.

  In the blink of an eye—literally—he transformed himself from a ‘man of the cloth’ to something that wasn’t human at all. One instant he was safely across the cavern from her, separated by maybe twenty feet, the next he had pinned her against the wall behind her with a bare chest and arms literally bulging with ropey muscles. In the place of the black priest’s attire, there was bare skin—a face, torso, and arms very human-like—and wings that weren’t at all human-like, curled and cupped around the two of them in a way that seemed infinitely threatening.

  “There are things, child of man, that you are not allowed to know!” he ground out from between gritted, very white teeth. “Do not come to this place again … unless you seek death, because that is what you will find—not answers.”

  Claire couldn’t do anything but gape at him, trying to assimilate something her mind found absolutely impossible to accept or interpret.

  And in another blink, he was across the cavern from her again, dressed as a priest.

  As if nothing had happened.

  For a handful of seconds she questioned her sanity.

  But it had happened!