The Lucifer Gospel fr-2

by Paul Christopher

  “Twilight Zone,” murmured Hilts, looking out across the parking lot. At the far end was the burnt-out hulk of what might have been a school bus.

  “I was thinking more along the lines of Nightmare on Elm Street.”

  “Part twenty-six: Jason Takes Rutgers Bluff.”

  “So what do we do now?” said Finn.

  “Check it out. See if this was what Devereaux really found.”

  “Is there anything about this place in the guidebook you bought?”

  They’d picked up a local guide in the same place they’d bought the ponchos and the rest of their things. Hilts picked the small booklet up off the dashboard and leafed through it.

  “Fourth Chute, Winter River. First discovered by English cabinet-maker and infamous drunkard Tom Woodward in 1829. Woodward fell down a sinkhole and had a vision of the Redemption after being trapped in the lightless caverns for six days. For the rest of his life Woodward decorated the caves in a glowing tribute to his religious conversion and sobriety. His Shrine of the Holy Mother in the Ninth Grotto has been the site of several miraculous and unexplained natural and unnatural events. Ten-dollar admission. Includes prayer pamphlet and glow-in-the-dark Caverns of Wonder key tag. Bus Tours welcome. Parking. Refreshments.” Hilts closed the book. “Natural and unnatural events.”

  “Glowing key tag.”

  “This is not what Devereaux discovered.”

  “Yes, it is,” said Finn. “At least part of it. He died leaving a clue to this place. There must have been a reason.”

  Hilts sighed. He reached across her and took a flashlight out of the glove compartment. “Come on.”

  She followed him out of the car and into the grinding rain. It was the kind of rain Noah must have faced; not much in itself, but relentless, as in Northern Ireland, where it hasn’t stopped raining for a thousand years, merely paused from time to time. They crunched across the parking lot to the screen of trees and the burnt-out bus. On closer inspection, she thought the bus had probably been the source of the Refreshments mentioned in the guide. The remains of a scorched metal sign offered hot dogs, Stalactite Burgers, Stalagmite Chili, and fresh-cut Bat Fries. A path to one side led between the trees and down a rocky path that led toward the river.

  “Listen,” said Finn, putting a hand out and grabbing Hilts’s arm.

  They paused.

  “I don’t hear anything,” he said. “The rapids. The rain.”

  “Keep listening.” Deep behind everything else was a steady chattering sound, muffled and distant. Every few seconds there was a stuttering thump.

  “What is it?” said Hilts, finally hearing it. “A generator?”

  “A pump,” said Finn, after a long moment. “A sump pump, like the ones they use on flooded basements.”

  “Down in the Wonder Caves?”

  “Caverns of Wonder,” corrected Finn.

  “Whatever.” The photographer sighed.

  “Maybe something automatic that starts up when it rains.”

  “I’d like to see that warranty,” scoffed Hilts. “Nobody’s had this place as a going concern for years. Decades maybe.”

  They were headed downward, the trail actually becoming a set of steps cut into the stone. Hilts saw a crushed and flattened soda tin on the ground and picked it up. Recognizably Coca-Cola. Even in its condition it was obvious that it had been opened with an old-fashioned spear can opener. “How long ago were zip tops invented anyway?” He threw the can into the bushes.

  “In 1962,” said Finn. “A guy named Ermal Fraze from Dayton. My mother went to grade school with him. I wrote a paper about it for an archaeology class: ‘Interpretation of the Zip Top opener as ornament or tool; aids for the historian of the future.’ I got an A.”

  “You should have been committed. Ermal Fraze?”

  “Ermal Fraze,” she said and nodded. “Strickley Elementary School. Mom says they have a plaque. Girl Guides Honor.” The steps flattened into a broad plateau overlooking the rapids and the quieter water beyond. Half shrouded by young sugar maple saplings, wet green in the rain, was the entrance to the Caverns of Wonder. The bare limestone above it showed undulating cakey layers filled with dirt and moss, slick and muddy. The entrance itself had been squared off with timbers so old they seemed part of the stone around them. There were the remains of a heavy plank door, but it had long ago been torn off its hinges. There was a sign over the entrance like the one on the gate, only smaller, branches nailed to plywood, the upright for the D in Wonder missing so it read CAVERNS OF WONCER. Rainwater was running down the squared log steps leading down to the hole. There was a handrail made of a gray, dead and rotted spruce bough.

  “Looks wet,” said Hilts

  “That’s because it’s raining,” replied Finn. “It’ll be drier inside.”

  “Famous last words.”

  “Are you coming or not?”

  “Lead on.”

  Finn went down the steps carefully, holding on to the rail. Hilts was close behind. As she passed beneath the entrance he snapped on the flashlight. There were more steps beyond and a maze of supports and roof beams. The steps went down into darkness. It looked more like an abandoned mine shaft than a holy grotto. So far she hadn’t seen anything even faintly religious. Her mind flailed around desperately trying to find some connection between an old limestone solution cave on the banks of a raging river in southern Illinois and a gold medallion in the possession of a mummified corpse in the Libyan Desert.

  Based on the actions of Adamson and his colleagues the connection was more than tenuous-in fact, it was as solid as a steel bar. Solid enough for them to kill for, and more than once.

  The steps ended and became a meandering boardwalk through a series of roomlike openings that were barely worthy of the word “cave,” let alone “cavern.” It looked as though at some point the Winter River or some tributary of it had cut through the rocks and over time had worn a narrow pathway, rarely wider than an arm span. Here and there along the walkway were stalactites and stalagmites and lavalike tables of accreted stone, but for Finn, who had been raised in a world of Mayan tombs and subterranean archaeological sites, the Rutgers Bluff Caverns of Wonder were pretty small potatoes. A minor show cave or roadside attraction, like the giant concrete egg she’d once seen in Men-tone, Indiana, or seven-story concrete statues of Jesus in Arkansas. What was here that could have affected the outcome of World War Two or interested anyone in the Vatican? It was absurd.

  “There,” said Hilts.

  “What?” she answered, stopping as his voice brought her away from her thoughts. He switched off the flashlight. Suddenly the narrow, arched cave they were standing in was alive with green, glowing images.

  “Glow-in-the-dark key tags,” said Hilts. A goggle-eyed Jesus looked down from a stalactite. Mary prayed by a pool of stone. Fish swam across the ceiling with teeth like sharks’ and tails like guppies’. The Sermon on the Mount was rendered in knobs and blobs of stone painted with staring faces, and banners were crudely lettered with quotations from Scripture.

  “Like the Haunted Mansion at Disney World,” said Finn. “Only God is doing the haunting.”

  “It’s awful,” said Hilts, staring. They continued along the boardwalk and into the next cave. It was the size of a front porch and about as exciting. It was also grotesque. A huge Last Supper undulated across the arching ceiling, like a huge picnic table in flight, Apostles and cherubs and clouds, Judas with a hairline like Dracula and a winding tale like a bad dream by William Blake. Tasteless, talentless, and badly researched. Christ facing left instead of right, Simon the Zealot with long hair rather than bald, chalice in front of Christ when there was none. Thirteen disciples, not twelve.

  Now that’s interesting, thought Finn. Even an illiterate who was even remotely Christian in this nation knew there were twelve, although almost no one except a priest or minister could actually name them. She had specialized in religious art of the Renaissance and she wasn’t sure she could do it herself. She stared u
p at the gigantic, hideous meal floating above her on the stony dripping ceiling and ticked them off in her mind, left to right: Bartholomew, James the Lesser and Andrew, Judas, Peter and John, or Mary Magdalene if you were a Dan Brown fan, followed by Thomas, James the Greater and Phillip, then Matthew, Jude, and lastly, Simon the Zealot. So who was the thirteenth figure, looming off to one side behind Simon in this ghastly rendition of the world’s most famous painting and second most famous literary meal? She stared. There wasn’t a lot of detail in the eight-foot-tall figure glowing on a slime-covered rocky wall made even slicker by the volumes of rain seeping through from above. It was a male, wearing a robe, bearded, one arm at its side, the other raised and pointing at… what?

  “The last figure on the right?”

  “The one pointing?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “What about him?”

  “What’s he pointing at, exactly? Can you tell?”

  “Looks like some kind of drapery over in the corner,” answered Hilts, pointing the flashlight. On the far side of the room a large flow of soluble lime had dropped down to form a pool. When the water in the cave had receded or been pumped out there was nothing left behind except a flowing cascade of stone called a Baldacchino canopy.

  “I want to take a look,” said Finn. She slipped under the guardrail of the boardwalk and stepped carefully onto the wet surface of the cave floor beyond. Water trilled coldly up to her ankles. Slipping now was not an option.

  “Why?”

  She still wasn’t quite sure, but she suddenly knew that something from her distant childhood was calling her. The excitement of opening the secret door in the wardrobe to Narnia, of entering Merlin’s Crystal Cave, stepping into Dr. Who’s phone booth or Ray Bradbury’s Green Town, which if she recalled was also in Illinois.

  “Did you know that they call this whole part of Illinois Little Egypt, and nobody knows why?” she called out, her voice echoing in the semidarkness. She kept carefully in the cone of light thrown by Hilts’s flashlight and concentrated on the slippery footing.

  “I didn’t know that, no,” said Hilts, following her off the wooden boardwalk.

  “Some people say it’s because southern Illinois supplied a lot of grain to the north in the bad winter of 1830-31. Other people say it’s because the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri reminds them of the Nile Delta. For some reason people gave places a lot of Egyptian names around here: Cairo, Karnak, Dongola, and Thebes. Even Memphis, if you want to stretch a point. They even have a giant glass pyramid for a basketball arena.”

  “I’m not sure I see the point.”

  “If you’re in a Catholic church, where do you hide a candle?”

  “With all the other candles,” he answered.

  “Exactly,” she said. She reached the Baldacchino canopy, braced herself, and slid around to one side.

  “What?” Hilts said, coming carefully up behind her.

  “I think I found it,” she whispered.

  “What?”

  “The candle.” She moved two feet to the right and disappeared before his eyes. Hilts stared, playing the light over the waterfall-like slab of ancient flowstone. There was no sign of her.

  “Where are you?”

  “Right in front of you,” said her disembodied voice. Suddenly she was there again, her bright face and wet, spiky dyed hair shining in the flashlight beam.

  “How did you do that?”

  “It’s the Caverns of Wonder. A miracle.”

  “Show me.”

  “Give me the light and take my hand.”

  He put his hand in hers and squeezed. She squeezed back and he handed her the flashlight. Suddenly the cave was plunged into total, blind man’s darkness, the complete absence of light. She tugged his hand and he slipped behind the canopy with her.

  Hilts found himself in a stiflingly small passage directly behind the oozing apron of rock. It was a space so close he could feel the wet stone brushing against him front and back. He was in some terrible crawl space: a crack in the world.

  “Oh, jeez.”

  “It’s okay.” A click echoed in the stifling space. Light flushed to the right and he saw that the narrow passage led to his right. There wasn’t even room enough to turn around.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Come on.”

  She shuffled to the right down the stick-thin passage, and he had no choice but to follow. It was either that or be left in the darkness. The farther he went the higher his heart moved into his throat. He thought of a hundred situations: a fall of rock, more rain, mud, simply getting stuck, glued in place. Some basic Freudian-Jungian-Stephen Kingian thing: man’s unholy heart-pounding nightmarish fear of being buried alive; the slight tension as a train goes into a tunnel under a mountain of suffocating rock.

  He shuffled forward, concentrating on the feel of the soft pads of flesh on her palm and the curl of her fingers around his own. She was as small and light as a child, but there was a fierceness in her that he would have associated with a drill sergeant. It was as though times like this brought out the strength in her, a steel core able to withstand the worst that man or nature had to offer. Survival instinct. Something in her DNA that went back a million years.

  “Look,” she whispered. Hilts suddenly realized that he’d been shuffling along with his eyes squeezed tightly shut. He opened them. Directly ahead the tunnel seemed to widen. Finn reached up with her free hand and touched the stone.

  “This has been worked,” she said.

  “Worked?”

  “It’s not natural. It’s man-made.” She shifted along another few feet and Hilts felt as though he’d been released from jail. There was room to move. The passage had at least a foot of leeway on either side.

  Hilts saw that she was right. In the pale glow from the flashlight the marks on the stone were obvious. Someone had carved out the passage in this godforsaken hole in the ground. They moved along with ease now and both of them became aware that the tunnel was gradually both turning and sloping downward. Sometimes the natural untouched stone could be seen; whoever had done this had followed the course of a natural fault. Thinking about the drapery of rock back in the cave far behind them, it occurred to Hilts that this might have once been the natural course of a stream or spring. Finn agreed.

  They went on for an hour. Hilts began to have fond sense memories of the huge Heartland Big Slamble, or whatever it had been at the Interstate Denny’s that morning. A cup of the worst roadside coffee in the world would have truly been a miracle at this point. The rain and the steady forty-degree chill of the caves was striking to his bones. The claustrophobia had receded but by no means had disappeared. An hour in meant an hour out if they went back the way they’d come, and his imagination was fully capable of constructing desperate, gloomy horror stories. So far at least, thank heavens, there had been no bats or other subterranean wildlife. Hilts was not a big fan of things that made your skin crawl; deserts, not storm drains, were his area of expertise. And then, instantly, the narrow path came to an end. Light.

  “My God!” whispered Finn, stepping out of the passageway.

  “Jesus!” said Hilts.

  They were both right.

  The dome rose above them in a single sweeping arc of stone, at least a hundred feet high from where they stood and half again as high from the floor of the gigantic cavern. Light shone brightly and mysteriously from a thousand niches on ten thousand figures, all of them carved by Egypt’s finest stonemasons over a lifetime in the wilderness more than a millennia in the past. Bigger than the Sistine Chapel, higher than St. Peter’s, it was something no one man could have even imagined in a single lifetime, let alone constructed. Every angel, patriarch, and saint was there, every mystery and splendor from the Advent to the Resurrection, from the Garden to the Ark. All swirling upward in an astounding vortex of living art ascending to the heavens. It was beyond breathtaking. Past awe. A gift of utter beauty without the slightest touch of vengefulness
or retribution, divine or otherwise. Around the base of the giant room small caves were hollowed out, some still with heavy wooden doors, others blank and open, the entrances like empty eyes. Cells. Once, a long, long time ago, this place had been occupied. Now it was only a massive tomb, built for the ages, unseen.

  Finn and Hilts stood frozen, stunned by the un-imagined scale and proportions of what they were seeing, diminished by a monument that could have swallowed New York’s Statue of Liberty a hundred times and might even have made Mt. Rushmore look inadequate.

  “What is this place?” Finn whispered. She found a set of stone steps carved before her and slowly made her way toward the bottom of the immense cavern, head back, craning her neck as she went. If the Great Pyramid at Giza had been hollow, this is what it might have looked like. A world within a world.

  “Many years ago, in Thomas Woodward’s time, they called this place Jeremiah’s Grotto,” said a voice, echoing in the enormous chamber. An old man stepped out of the shadows on the far side of the dome and approached them. “Which of course is one of the names associated with the Tomb of Christ. It is not that place, but it is interesting that such a reputation should still be associated with it.” He tapped his way across the floor, weaving his way through stacks and piles and racks of narrow-necked circular jars like the clay containers of the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran. “Woodward stumbled on this place but he was a drunkard and a famous sinner, so no one believed him. The Keepers then simply bought his silence and cooperation with more drink.”

  Finn peered into the flickering half-light as the old man came forward. He was tall and only a little stooped, leaning lightly on a heavy cane. In his free hand he was carrying what appeared to be a leather bundle rolled up and tied with a bright gold chain. His hair was steel gray and cut short, almost military. He was wearing old corduroy trousers and a dark blue knitted sweater that might have belonged to a seaman. He wore old, high-button boots and steel-rimmed spectacles. His voice was flat and Midwestern, but deep beneath there was a hint of something else. A sophistication that said something of foreign lands seen long ago. With a terrible lurch in her heart Finn realized that this old man reminded her of her father.