by Linda Stasi
“Are you ready?”
“I’m ready,” I answered. “I can’t wait to get someplace where I can call home to make sure everything’s OK.”
He didn’t look at me. Not good. Even so, I let him be the one to press down on the door handle’s old metal lever, which he finally got to budge after being rusted shut for God knows how long. He pushed the door with his shoulder, but it wouldn’t budge so he leaned his shoulder into it.
“Pardon me,” he said, and reached into my hair and took out a glop of guano. “And wipe the smug look off your face,” he said, pretending to threaten me with a handful of bat droppings.
“It’s too dark to see if I have a smug look on my face.”
“I can smell the smug,” he joked.
“That’s bat shit you smell. And by the way? You’ve got a frigging hard hat on, so your hair is probably clean.”
“Jesus, no wonder your ex-husband wanted to leave you in war-torn Iraq.”
“As a matter of fact, I’m the one who carried him home from there. On a stretcher in a cargo transport plane.”
He pushed again. “Once more with feeling … move, dammit!”
“How about pulling it instead of pushing?” I said.
He glared at me and shoved hard. Nothing.
Reluctantly he pulled it inward, and I could hear the squeak, and the ancient, stuck-with-time door budged open a crack! Ha! A tiny shaft of light appeared on the side of the cave wall. As he was applying more guano to the hinges, without acknowledging my suggestion, I peered into the crack.
I turned to face him, astounded, then turned back and peered back in, to make sure of what I’d seen in the dim light. Astounding.
“What is it?” he asked. “What do you see in there?”
“Either a stairway to heaven, or Liberace lived here. I’m looking, I swear, at a glass staircase!”
28
Without uttering a word, Pantera came up behind me, his body almost touching mine, and I still felt an old stirring, dammit. He peered over my head into the crack in the doorway. I remembered then that he was more than a head taller than me.
“Perfect,” he finally whispered almost in my ear.
“What?”
“Perfect.” He took both of my hands and put them on the lower part of the massive door handle, which I gripped as he placed his own above mine. “Pull!”
We pulled and pulled again, as he popped on more guano to keep the creaking to a minimum. Finally the heavy door began to open millimeter by millimeter until there was just enough room for us to fit through. The shaft of light—dim as it was—illuminated the glass stairs and its elaborately braided banisters.
“Let’s go. Hold on to my jacket and stay right behind me…”
I grabbed the back of his jacket while he grabbed onto a banister. “Unbelievable. This thing’s made of crystal, not ordinary glass.” Then reaching down, he said “And so are the steps.”
“Glass steps into a tomb? What the…?”
“Or out of a tomb…”
“You don’t think it leads to another tomb, one level higher? Maybe above for the nobility, servants below…”
“I sure as hell paid a king’s ransom to get the location.” Then to himself, “This better be right or that miserable bastard is counting down his last minutes on Earth.”
Unlike almost everyone else on Earth that says things like that without meaning it, when Pantera said such a thing, he meant it. Literally. It would, I figured, actually be “my friend’s” last days on Earth. I couldn’t help but to compare them: Donald took shots with a camera, but this one preferred taking shots with a Glock.
We climbed the fifteen or so stairs, and saw that at the top there was a gold door built into the rough tunnel walls. “Shit. Not again!”
“Yes, again.”
“How do we get in, and if we do, where in the hell does it lead to?”
Shining a light on the door, then around it, Pantera touched it and whispered, “Twenty-four karat—the entire thing.” We could see that it was also engraved with images and hieroglyphs, so he took out a pen with a miniature camera and photographed the door from top to bottom.
“What’s with the 1960s spy equipment?”
“Jesus Christ almighty, can you just stop being a reporter for a minute?”
“No. What’s it say? What does it mean?”
“Not now.”
“Yes, now. What’s it say?”
“I disabled the alarm. OK?”
“How?”
“Didn’t I just ask you to stop asking questions every second?”
“And didn’t I just tell you I wouldn’t?”
He pointed to a hieroglyph. “The same glyphs as in the prison. Seven spices and the bird.”
He pushed his shoulder against the shimmering door, but it was locked solid.
“I thought you could figure codes out with that Get Smart spy pen.” He ignored me.
There was no handle visible and no keyhole that I could see, so clearly my giant glitter key wasn’t going to be much use opening this door.
“Think, think,” he said to himself aloud, and I swear he actually was beginning to break a sweat.
“Were there any other numbers on that piece of paper the man sold you?” I asked, trying for any clue possible. “Maybe there’s a code key built in somewhere.”
“No, I felt all around for any kind of keypad. Nothing.” He looked again at the paper. “Let me think. What am I missing?”
I interjected, “What about those coordinates? Could they be the combination here as well?”
“Could be…”
“Maybe like in the old movies, you have to say it aloud.” He just looked at me like I was nuts. Ignoring him, I picked the note out of my bag, and looked at the coordinates: 31.780231° N, 35.233991° E. I whispered them.
The door did not swing open magically. In fact, it didn’t even budge.
Pantera looked up at the ceiling one foot above our heads, exasperated. “There’s got to be a way to open this door from this side. Has to be a way…”
“Maybe there’s a remote somewhere…”
“Unlikely that they would keep such a thing around for any random person to pick up and use,” he said, feeling all around the outer edges of the door.
“Like random people would crawl several miles through a bat swarm to look for a remote?”
“Depends what’s on the other side. This staircase did lead here directly from a working archeological site. Remember?” Without waiting for an answer, he said, “Read me those numbers again—the coordinates—would you?”
I read him off the sequence.
He shone the light on his hard hat onto the door, and said, “Now one at time.”
“Thirty-one.”
“No, let me try three and one.”
“Try what?”
“The symbols and numbers on these wheels—right here—are Egyptian.”
“And by the way, what the hell is a gold Egyptian door doing in Israel?”
“Same as why in hell is there a crystal staircase here? Stolen artifacts.”
“The stairwell looks a lot more Vegas than Sumerian to me.”
He felt around and then touched two places on the door. We went through the entire sequence, him touching each symbol that corresponded, finally coming to the end of the numbers. Nothing.
“Oh wait,” I said, “There’s an E at the end. An E.”
He found what must have been the equivalent or something and touched it. Nothing.
He shone the light over the entire door again. “It tells the story, oddly, of the Dog Star and the Dog-faced God.”
“Well, that’s hardly got anything to do with Judas,” I said.
“Maybe,” he said, feeling around the door. “The Egyptian calendar system was based on the rising of Sirius, the Dog Star, the brightest star in the sky, which happened each year just before the annual summer flooding of the Nile. That’s where the expression ‘the dog days of summer�
�� comes from.”
“And this is important right now—how?”
“The Greater Dog, Canis Major, was important to civilizations all over the globe, unbeknownst to one another. Ancient Greeks, Sumerians, Babylonians, and even a tribe, the Dogon, from what is now Mali, revered it. I believe it was even hinted at in the Judas Gospel.”
“Really? And?”
“Here, look.” He pointed to an inscribed drawing of a man with a dog’s head. “It’s the dog-faced god, Anubis, a jackal. Anubis was the Egyptian protector god of the dead. And he was connected to the star Sirius. Some believe that the gods came from Sirius.
“This star was also associated with the Egyptian god Osiris, whose parts were scattered, and his wife, Isis, resurrected him. Also a god of the dead and resurrection.”
“This is what you paid for? A history lesson on a door?” I asked. Now it was my turn to be exasperated.
“This may be a door from the tomb of a nobleman or even a pharaoh honoring the star, Sirius.”
“Right. You once told me you went to MIT and studied astrophysics. Think, for God’s sake—what are we missing here?”
“I’m trying to figure it out, as you may have guessed,” he said, annoyed and putting me behind him as he put his ear to the door.
“What the…?”
“What is it?”
“Listen,” he said as I, too, put my ear to the door to hear what the hell was going on on the other side. There was the sound of strange exotic music—live music, by the sound of it—and drumming, followed by high-pitched chanting, a flute, and the sound of rhythmically pounding feet.
“What the hell?”
“Hell is probably right,” Pantera said, shaking his head at the sounds behind the door.
29
He took some kind of micro listening device from his bag and put his ear to it, exclaiming, “Excuse my French, but c’est quoi ce bordel!”
“You are the only man pretentious enough to say, ‘Excuse my French’ and then say something in French!”
He listened for a few more seconds, not giving me much.
“What?”
“Dogon.”
“I beg your pardon? You mean, ‘doggone’—as in, say, ‘doggone right’?”
“I mean, didn’t I just tell you about the civilizations that worshipped the star Sirius and the dog-faced god, Anubis?”
I nodded.
“Well, there is a tribe in Mali, curiously enough named Dogon—as in ‘dog,’ as I said.”
“Or ‘no god’ if you spell it backward,” I threw in.
“True,” he said. “That’s even more curious, actually. Because the Dogon did then and still do worship the star Sirius. They believe that about thirty-two hundred years ago a group of fishlike beings—Nommo—from Sirius visited them. These beings told them about the dwarf star orbiting Sirius, called Sirius B, which was invisible to the naked eye and wasn’t even photographed until 1970!”
“Geez. That’s too weird for words.”
“It gets weirder. It’s smaller than the planet Earth, yet one teaspoon of Sirius B is so dense that it weighs five tons.”
“Remind me not to visit. I’d weigh five million tons there. And no pun intended, but seriously? What does that have to do with getting this door opened?”
I could see his exasperation with me even in the dim light. “It’s a connection! The Dogon probably originated in Egypt. They knew things at the time of the Egyptians that weren’t proven true until the 1970s, as I said. Even now it’s impossible to explain how they knew some of these things without going into alien theories.”
I broke in, “So it was discovered right around the time that the Gospel of Judas was discovered. And Judas hinted at another galaxy in his Gospel. But again … what does this have to do with the door…?”
“The drums, the chanting,” he answered without removing his listening device. “For sure the people on the other side of this door aren’t celebrating Shabbat! It’s Dogon.”
“I won’t ask how you know, but how in hell do you know…”
“I spent a year with the tribe … well, it doesn’t matter.”
“Of course you did and of course it doesn’t. Whether they’re praying to a cat-faced dog or a raccoon-legged fish—it won’t matter if we can’t open the door.”
“I’ve got an idea,” he said, reaching for his satellite phone in his backpack and punching something in. Yes, somehow his phone worked even down there.
“Here! Look at this,” he said, holding out the phone.
I grabbed it from him. “I thought you shut it off. Liar! I’m calling home. I need to find out if my parents picked up Terry.”
He grabbed it back. “I told you it’s not safe.”
I grabbed it back. “You’re lying. Why don’t you want me to call home?”
Trust no one. I started dialing.
He grabbed it back again. “It’s offline. You can’t dial out. You’ve got to trust me on this right now.”
“But it’s safe to surf the Web?”
“That’s not what I’m doing. I swear on Terry’s life.”
“You don’t care about Terry’s life!” I shot back.
“I do,” was his answer. Then, shoving the phone at me, he said, “Read these to me very slowly.” It was an entry from some astronomy book.
“Oookay…”
He shone the light on the gold door again and I read, “It says, ‘The position of Sirius is…’”
“Slowly now, one at a time.”
“RA.”
“Ra! That’s the sun god, right here,” he whispered excitedly, touching a symbol RA on the door, “exactly as in the prison!”
When I read, “Oh six H,” he looked around and pointed as he touched six separate etchings. “Horus” (the eagle-headed god). I then read, “Forty-five M, oh eight point nine,” and in turn he found and touched each of the matching symbols. Finally I read, “Dec: sixteen, forty-two,” and then “fifty-eight.” He touched what he called a “civil calendar”—a round disc, and touched each in turn, one month and three days: sixteen, forty-two, and fifty-eight days of the year. Nothing.
Then something.
A small creaking sound, then another. The mechanism on the dead bolt was slowly sliding back! “Whoever stole this door configured this touch-locking system. The calculations match the hieroglyphs in the prison!”
“Damn! We’re good!” I said, almost jumping up and down on the glass stairs.
He pushed on the heavy, large, gold door and it opened a bit. We peeked into a candlelit, ultramodern, white, high-ceilinged room, the walls covered with modern artwork, and shelves with ancient artifacts. There was no furniture to speak of, but kneeling on the floor were a group of people, some robed, some—both men and women—topless (thirteen of them to be precise), their heads to the floor, chanting. A few others circled the people on the floor, playing on African drums and clay pipes. At the center, there was a perfectly round fire pit that was lit, the incense-infused logs burning brightly.
Behind them all, sitting in an elaborate chair, was another robed figure—this robe embroidered in gold—calmly petting a beautiful, medium-sized brown dog—a Pharaoh Hound to be precise.
The figure on the chair, a man with a full, long black beard and a shaved head, then rose and walked over to the fire pit, still holding and stroking his dog. As we watched, Pantera covered my mouth to keep me from screaming as the man held the dog aloft. The poor thing sensed what was happening and began struggling to break free, howling pitifully. The man pulled a knife from the pocket of his robe, and in a split second, slit the dog’s throat. After a few more seconds the little guy just stopped moving. Then, holding the dead beast’s body over the pit, he let its blood drain into the fire, the blood spitting and sizzling as the crowd ooh’d and aah’d. When the little dog’s blood was drained completely, the head man or whatever he was, tossed the dog’s body into the fire pit, sparks flying as the stench of burning hair and flesh nauseatingly fil
led the beautiful space. They all knelt and began applauding, then broke into chanting and dancing, their faces glowing in the firelight as the dog’s body shriveled and burned until it was charred.
When the dog’s body had been totally consumed by the flames, they all came ’round to kiss the mad monk.
“Jesus H. Christ. What savages!” I whispered to Pantera when he finally took his hand off my mouth. “What? What? Just say it!”
“This guy—the chief muck-a-muck there?—his name’s Jean-Carlos Acevedo, aka the Prophet Jeremiah. He’s got the missing earring. I knew that ‘monk’ looked familiar. Must be his brother.”
“The son of a bitch who just cooked a dog? What?”
“International drug dealer out of Andalusia. Two-bit street hustler, made himself a small fortune as a professional gambler. He managed to triple that in the black market antiquities game. He is the reason Morris came here in 1982.”
Then I remembered what I’d forgotten about Morris that I’d been trying desperately to remember a few days earlier.
“Geez,” I whispered, smacking my head with my hand. “I remember when I was a kid, Mr. Golden,” I said, reverting back to what I called him then, “took to wearing a small red stone on his lapel, I just assumed it was a ‘manager of the year’ lapel pin or something. It was the other earring. Damn!” Then, “How would he know this guy, though?”
“After the so-called prophet conveniently found God, he must have also found Morris. And lo and behold! God turned out to be none other than Jean-Carlos himself. Now he’s into all kinds of black magic. Even formed his own religion. As L. Ron Hubbard once said, ‘If you want to get rich, you start a religion.’”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!”
“Well, I don’t think they went into it for the money…” he quipped.
“Your humor escapes me at the moment.”
“Rule one: if you lose your sense of humor, you lose.”
“I wasn’t aware you had a sense of humor.”
“No? Stick around.”
