by John Farris
Eden smiled, a loving smile for him, but shook her head. She walked toward the vault until she had nearly merged with her reflection, then raised her good hand and touched the door with spread fingers. Her head nodded forward slightly. Her eyes closed.
After almost a minute had passed she pushed experimentally with her fingers. The talisman on her breast seemed to explode with light that turned Cody away, shielding his eyes. But not before he saw the door waver like a midday’s desert mirage. He had only a glimpse of a shadowy Eden as she appeared to walk through the two feet of steel door and into the vault.
Talk about spooky: Cody shuddered. He wanted to call to her, but he couldn’t make a sound.
Stuffy inside the vault. But well lit, due to the energy pulsing from her talisman. Eden looked around without much curiosity, seeing pallets of gold bars, as many as two thousand of them. Gold didn’t interest her. But the red crystal skull glowing atop one of the pallets, lonely as a lighthouse, did.
She took off the sling she’d fashioned from the Magician’s theatrical scarf and, working awkwardly with her stiffened punctured hand, unwrapped the skull she had brought. The two skulls hummed to each other in their mysterious, conspiratorial ways. She left the newcomer on the floor and took down its twin from the pallet, placing it a few feet opposite the first one.
Just leave them there like that?
No good, Eden thought. In time perhaps the vault would be breached by those who had reason to suspect the treasure it contained, also liberating the skulls. To be sold, perhaps, to a collector of Grayle arcana. Or to someone steeped in the occult who one way or another had the means to let loose this evil in the world.
But even with the skulls safely interred there remained enough evil out there beyond the dead city to keep Eden Waring, the Avatar, busy for her lifetime. The familiar, pervasive evils employed by men of bad will for millennia.
After a while the glitter of gold gave her an idea.
Eden smiled skeptically. She wasn’t at all sure she had enough access to the Dark Energy that would be needed to seal the skulls in a golden coffin, and still make her escape.
Obviously it wouldn’t do to trap herself. She experimented at first and found that she was able, precariously, to levitate. Not exactly like a feather in a freshet, but far enough above the vault floor to keep from being entombed herself—
—As she began to melt the stacked horde of gold, turning bricks into slow molten flows that ran down from the pallets to pool on the floor, engulfing the skulls, filling every socket and crevice and grinning mouth.
When they were completely covered there were pallets of gold bars to spare. She continued to melt them until the heat building up in the vault threatened to overcome her.
Cody was sitting with his back against a rock wall of the grotto in near darkness, the batteries of his electric torch almost drained, when the vault door ten feet away did its high-noon-on-the-desert mirage thing and Eden tumbled out of the vault. She landed awkwardly on her wrapped bloody hand and bad knee and yelped in pain. Her body glowed as if it were radioactive.
“Don’t touch me, Cody; not yet,” she warned him, and lay still on her side for a couple of minutes. Cody kneeled beside her until she was cool enough for him to put a tentative hand on her.
“You’ll be okay?”
“Yes.”
“What did you do in there?”
“Buried the skulls in liquid gold. They’re probably indestructible, but—maybe for a few centuries—”
Cody helped her to sit up. Eden wincing but not complaining. She had something else on her mind.
“Cody, when you introduce me to your mom, maybe you better not say anything about—this? Me? I mean, break it to her slowly?”
Cody sat back on his heels and laughed.
Eden misinterpreted his laughter. “You are going to introduce me to your mother. Trust me, I can do something about my hair.”
“Eden, we’re practically buried in the middle of a mountain here—” He took hold of her by the waist and stood, set her on her feet. “Those flashlight batteries are failing and if we do get out I’m not sure my car will start again.”
“Oh, we’ll be okay. But would you promise me—”
Cody put her on the ladder, aiming the weakened torch beam upward.
“No problem. Just get going.”
“One good thing,” she said as they climbed, Cody giving her an occasional boost when she faltered. “You’ve seen all there is to see. I don’t have any more surprises.”
“I have been wonderin’ about—watch your step!—that doppelganger of yours. You know, like how it’ll be, havin’ her around.”
“Gwen? Oh, no. Uh-uh. Put her out of your mind, Cody! She’s banished. It’s just you and me, Cody Olds. Listen. I have a great idea. We hide out for about a week before I meet your mother and by then—hell, Cody, maybe life can actually be fun again.”
“I can help you with that.”
“I know you will,” Eden said. Having reached the top of the ladder she was breathing hard as she stood. But also flushed with a sensation that wasn’t far from happiness. She extended her good hand and found his as he climbed out of the hole in the rock, took a hard purchase for herself. “Cowboy, I’m counting on it.”
