Oli, A Very New Moon

by Carl Derham

  *

  The hole in the floor of the passage had closed as soon as it had opened, leaving Stephan alone, open-mouthed, with the torch trembling in his hand. His immediate thought was that the tunnel had collapsed. But when the small amount of dust cleared, he realised that there was no hole and no debris. His mind was working in overdrive, organising the visual evidence into a completely incomprehensible mush. He hurried back up the tunnel to where Oli had been standing, dropped to his knees and began feverishly scraping the dust with both hands. The wooden boards were unbroken as they ran their course to the entrance above. He ran his hands down the corner between the wall and floor, looking for some sign of an opening, but there was nothing. The only evidence that Oli had ever been there was his inactive, shattered torch, the glass lens fanning out in ever decreasing fragments along the tunnel floor.

  “Oli! Can you hear me?” he shouted, pausing for a few seconds to wait for the echo to fade. He waited a further few seconds for any reply, but none was forthcoming. No sound of stone hitting stone, and no Oli. What the hell was going on? One minute Oli had been there and the next he was gone. During Stephan’s time in Egypt, he had examined this tunnel in minute detail more times than he could begin to remember and had come to the conclusion that there were no doors, cracks or anything that could explain the incident that he had just witnessed. He froze to the spot, his head and eyes darting from side to side looking for an answer to the impossible riddle that had been set. He could feel a state of panic welling inside of him and the only thing that he could think of doing was to rush back to the surface and get help. He scrambled up the passageway on all fours, his legs slipping and his knees bashing against the wooden battens. He felt no pain as he removed a layer of flesh from his knees. On reaching the base of the stone steps, he tripped and fell face first into the sand of the plateau, picked himself up and ran.