by Brad Ricca
Monty looked out again at the snow, falling quietly in the night. He put his hat back on because he didn’t know what else to do. He was cold, tired, and alone at Christmas.
Monty stood there for a long while, stiff and ungiving, until he closed his eyes for a moment. He then summoned Macasdar, who was never far.
“I need a dragoman for tomorrow,” said Monty. “To take me to Gehenna.”
Macasdar smiled.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing, effendi. Forgive me. It is just … Gehenna has another name.”
“Which is?”
“Hell,” he said. “You want to go to hell.”
Thirty
Monty Parker
GEHENNA, 1911
Monty’s donkey clopped through the bushes, its head low and parallel with the path, at least where they guessed it should be. It was still snowing, and they were headed east, into the Hinnom Valley, which was adjacent to the Kidron. They were wrapped up like mummies in cloth and wool against the cold. The dragoman led the way ahead of them. Macasdar was behind. They had donkey boys, but almost no supplies to speak of. They were only going to make a quick survey.
In the snow, it was harder to see, though the landscape looked similar. They took an open road alongside a low gorge. It was certainly much quieter. Monty looked for some of Rothschild’s walls; he hoped the snow and cold would at least keep the spies away. Monty knew it was perhaps not the best time to go on an afternoon trip, but the cipher’s suggestion of a third way had seized his mind, along with a terrifying question:
Were they digging in the wrong place?
It was very quiet indeed. Monty’s toes were already sharp with cold.
“Why is this place called hell?” asked Monty. He had asked for a dragoman with knowledge of the area. Given the amount of tourists who visited Palestine for the holy sites, this was easy to arrange. Macasdar translated.
The dragoman spoke in a slow voice. He talked for a bit, before Macasdar broke in: “This is the Valley of Hinnom,” he said, “which means Gehenna, which is this gorge.” He pointed down to the thin crack at the bottom of the valley. “There was an ancient cave from which smoke issued out. Some thought it went to the underworld.”
“If you believe such things.” Monty wondered if he didn’t hear a laugh. He had seen this man around the camp before, he thought, but could not be sure. It was hard to say; he was wrapped up so tightly, though some parts necessarily appeared at times for breathing and speaking.
“You have picked a strange place to visit, effendi,” said Macasdar.
They rode crossways up the grain of the rock—Monty could feel it—and into an olive grove. There were open caves here and there, full of mystery in the falling snow. They made their way up a low ridge, to a patch of even ground. Nearby was a small ridge of stone that was riddled with rectangular caves. The dragoman stopped. The snow slashed across him.
“Here is where Molok stood.”
Monty looked. The place had changed, but the ground had not. It was still here, somewhere in the past.
“It was made of copper. They heated it with coals and played horns and great drums,” the dragoman said.
“Why?” asked Monty. The dragoman had already started moving forward.
Macasdar answered himself, just as he passed Monty. “So that they wouldn’t hear the screams.”
Not so long after, they came upon a much higher ridge. Monty spied a white building on top of it, flush against the edge. It certainly was not an ancient structure. The dragoman stopped and swept his arm across the landscape.
“The Monastery of St. Onuphrius, a desert hermit. Here the man came, the Christian, the seller.” Macasdar seemed confused by his words. The dragoman pointed to the ground. Then he understood.
“His thirty pieces of silver spilled on the ground.”
Monty had heard of the monastery that had been built where Judas Iscariot, the traitor to Christ, had hanged himself. The dragoman continued, pointing to the rolling ground around them. “This Hakeldama,” he said, “this Field of Blood, called so because there was no place else to bury them.” Macasdar explained that the silver was used to buy this accursed land for those who could not afford burial elsewhere.
They turned a corner, and Monty saw a pylon of loose stones and a ruin of what might have once been a tower, extending into the air in patches, next to a stone arch. The dragoman stopped in front of the ruin.
“The Knights Templar built this place.” Monty tried to look inside. It was not even a building, more like some leftover shadow, still visible only because no one had dared test it. The scene looked like one of the pencil drawings his mother made. Realistic, but somehow a step removed, as if there was something behind it. As a boy, he would stand next to her as she drew and look at her teardrop earring.
He looked at the ruin. The roof was mostly gone, and the floor—at least what he could see of it—looked very uneven, with sticks pushing out from the snow.
“The Knights Templar ran a hospital in the city for Christian pilgrims who came to Jerusalem. When they died, they put them here.”
“Buried?” asked Monty.
“No,” he replied.
Here the dragoman pointed to what might have been a roof and made a motion downward. Monty looked at the sticks again. It was a charnel house. They had dropped the bodies in from the roof. And left them there.
They made their way slowly up the trail and away from the house.
The dragoman began talking again, with Macasdar catching up. When the Christians finally took Jerusalem in 1099, the Knights Templar took over the newly constructed Dome of the Rock, on the spot of the old Temple. It was there, it was said, that the Knights began excavating the forbidden space underneath the cave. People whispered that they found great relics there, such as the head of John the Baptist, the Holy Lance that pierced the side of Jesus, and even the sangraal, the Holy Grail. The Knights were rumored to have found the Ark as well. They were not just warriors, but smart bankers. When they were excommunicated and burned at the stake by the French, their order inspired the Freemasons, the brotherhood of secrets. They knew how to hide things.
Though Monty was not a Mason, plenty of his friends were. As for knights, Monty had been a child once and knew all the stories. There was an ancient crusader buried in St. Mary’s, the church by Saltram, to the left of the chapel, in a stone tomb carved with his likeness. As Monty looked back at the dark house, he could almost see this knight and others in their armor, standing there like specters.
“A cave,” said Monty, blinking. “Ask him if there is a cave by a pool.” He pulled out the cipher. The paper was getting wet in the snow, but he didn’t care. He started to read so that Macasdar might translate:
The entrance was not in Hakeldama or in Molok’s grotto, but in a pool to the south of Jerusalem.… The second entrance is in a pool (spring) at a distance of 100 cabalistic steps(!) from Hakeldama.
Juvelius’s calculations had put that distance at three hundred yards. The dragoman listened, then looked out over the plain and started to ride. They followed.
In the first ciphers, Juvelius vehemently claimed that a third way to the Temple from Hakeldama was not an option. But in his recent set, he relented, saying that Melander, his mentor who did advocate for a valley entrance, had been right. But Melander never knew where it was. Juvelius claimed to have found it.
They came upon a recessed plain with snow-covered steps. They were looking at a basin that had obviously once been a pool, long ago, one of so many that lay hidden within the countryside. Monty wondered if it connected somehow to their own tunnels. This could be the way to the Temple after all, the “valley side” entrance of Nehemiah’s secret journey. Juvelius claimed that in addition to the Ark, it might lead to the Temple archive, a place where all the secret books and scrolls of the ancients were kept.
They started down the shallower steps toward the southeast corner. As they got closer, Monty could see that there
was a cave there, set into the edge. But the roof had utterly fallen in. A huge stone slab lay in front of whatever—if anything—lay inside. He thought of getting the men to walk from the next valley and to use their ropes and arms to pull it all loose. But they did not own this land and they did not have permission to dig into it. And he knew the stone was too big to move; they would have to use the dynamite. People would notice.
There was no way in. It was then, if not at some other time, that the darkness of the place, of Gehenna as place and idea, began to overwhelm Monty. The endless legends of death and despair, all piled upon one another like stones on a cairn. All of these people had come to Jerusalem and found only death. There was God and Satan. Good and evil. There was no third way.
The way was shut. There was nothing but death here.
Monty turned away. He should not have come here. He looked out on the field.
He could hear the shells first. Then he saw, or thought he did, the soldiers fighting, those British boys fighting Brother Boer. Then, like a developing photograph, the boys became bodies and fell into heaps. Monty felt a sting in his leg. He did not move. Everything looked like an emulsion of real life, as if someone had made it come back.
He closed his eyes, as he always did to make it go away. For a moment, things were dark. The images faded. The booming went faint. He opened his eyes again.
The only person he had told about the war was his mother. He wrote her hundreds of letters from Africa for his entire term of service, not always of towering war and death, but of the minutiae (and gift) of daily conversation. When she died, on February 10, 1908, it was only a few weeks before he first met the Syndicate. She died of acute peritonitis, and painfully. He was heartbroken. Her name was Margaret. Her friends called her Minnie.
As they started back from the closed cave, cold and silent, Monty realized something. The caved-in tunnel had to have been the one they were seeking. Why else would such impossible stories proliferate in the same few yards of valley? Because it was inherently evil in its bloody soil? Or was it because someone knew that such stories would keep anyone in their right mind away? Gehenna wasn’t just a place; it was a warning.
The sky darkened as they made their way back to the Kidron, passing Molok’s ridge before finally leaving the valley. Monty wondered what Macasdar might be thinking of him.
Monty was thinking of the cipher. He wondered why the Ark, the greatest treasure of the Israelites, might be associated with such a dark and horrific presence as Molok. But he was wrong—there was no connection between the two, not really. It was a clue. He remembered his conversation with Juvelius. “Molok” was from “M’lek,” which meant “king.”
Like the cipher, which was a clue, but also always a deterrent, what if “M’lek” was meant to scare as “Molok,” but to provide a sign to the treasure of another king, the one who built the Temple?
King Solomon.
Monty realized that the tunnel from Gehenna might have been the true path all the way through the mountain to the Ark. He realized that while they had been reading the cipher for specific directions, it must also be read symbolically. Juvelius had always insisted on that. The third way might not be a path, but a method in between, something halfway between the good of the Virgin’s Fountain and the evil of Molok. Monty looked up toward the city as it came into view. The Dome was flaked in white.
Later that night, Monty could not sleep. He looked for a long time into his Bible, reading of King Solomon. In 1 Kings 11:7, he read something that was somehow both familiar and new:
Then did Solomon build a high place for Chemosh, the abomination of Moab, in the hill that is before Jerusalem, and for Molech, the abomination of the children of Ammon.
When Solomon grew old, he became tempted by his many wives to please them. Though the Lord strongly warned him, Solomon obliged his wives by building many temples to their foreign gods, even one to terrible Molok. The Lord was not pleased and told Solomon that he would punish him by splitting up his entire kingdom through war and subterfuge. The Lord promised that, though Solomon would never see this happen, his son would bear the burden and be left with only one tribe left to rule.
Monty understood something about parents not seeing the ruin left for their sons. He looked out through the window. Monty could barely make out anything in the dark and the snow. It was a striking passage.
The Lord had warned him, yet Solomon did it anyway.
Thirty-One
Father Vincent
MOUNT OPHEL, APRIL 1911
Father Vincent stood at the entrance to the cave, flanked by Captain Parker. Inside, the workers were clearing out the room they had found carved into the ridge of the hill. The men were marveling at some blocks of stone they had found that had been dressed, meaning they had been squared and smoothed, ready for building, probably as the base of some columns. The workers soon found other items of rich character, including part of a grand table and some marble moldings. Father Vincent looked at each new find with an increasing curiosity. When the debris was finally cleared away, Father Vincent was examining a magnificent candelabra when he realized the room was quiet. He looked up to see the workers dropped to their knees and with their heads bowed. They were speaking in low tones. Father Vincent looked up.
Before them stood a remarkable throne of stone.
“What are they saying?” asked Captain Parker.
“They say they’ve found the throne,” said Father Vincent.
“Whose throne?”
“King Solomon’s.”
Captain Parker got the men to their feet and they argued over how best to remove the artifact. Father Vincent agreed that it was a magnificent specimen in what was surely a luxurious room. Could it really be his throne? When the workers finally pulled the malachite chair out with their ropes, Father Vincent noticed a large, circular hole in the middle of the seat. He couldn’t help but stifle a laugh, but he kept his conclusions to himself.
Father Vincent wandered back out into the sun—the works had been largely dismantled, replaced by the working fountain, which had brought much joy to the town of Silwan. The Englishmen had turned their attention to the stone ruins that could be seen poking out of the eastern slope. Even from the bottom of the valley a number of quadrangular openings could be seen in the rocks. They were caves. And though most them had been looted or destroyed, Father Vincent was happy to look at anything they found. In truth, though he was eager to begin writing, he had enjoyed his experience with the English so much that he wanted to make it last.
Days later, Father Vincent sat near the entrance to the Virgin’s Fountain, sipping water and working on his map, when he heard someone shouting to him from the crest of the hill. Father Vincent looked up and saw someone waving at him. He tucked his notebook under his arm and made his way up the trail.
When he reached the new cave this time, the look on the man’s face who had called for him revealed that this was something different from what they were used to.
“They found something,” the man said, with a pause.
“A tomb.”
This was not completely unexpected. Part of the basis of Father Vincent’s theory of why Hezekiah’s Tunnel curled around the valley to avoid some possibly important tombs was that the mountains were filled with them. Mount Olive was essentially a cemetery. Even in the town of Silwan, some of the homes built into the hillside had simply taken over older caves that had once been used as tombs. There was a secret city under the ground outside Jerusalem. Because of the laws against being buried inside the city, the nearby surroundings had become a necessary necropolis.
Up on the high path, Captain Parker greeted him with a nod.
“We’ve found three. The first we kind of stumbled onto by accident, but we have left the others for you. We have not gone inside.”
Father Vincent bowed. This is what he would miss the most. This moment of uncertainty, even in the case of some ancient death, was exciting. In this old, open space, he would learn
something new.
The first cave was low and parallel to the footpath. Some of the men stood around the edge as if it opened over some unseen cliff. The demeanor of men when a tomb was found was always heavier, more contemplative. Father Vincent thought it one of the more redeeming qualities of humanity.
“It’s a cave-in,” said Monty. “But they are undisturbed.”
Father Vincent knew that time never stood still, as much as it sometimes appeared to in caves such as these. Nor did it sympathize to protect the things they were looking for.
The first cave had indeed collapsed. It had been formed from a fissure in the limestone, the mezzy, and looked to Father Vincent like it had been open to the air long before it fell. Most of the tombs that had been found on the mountain were like this: either ravaged by time or grave robbers or locked behind immovable boulders. And even if those boulders were able to be moved, the most they could hope to find behind them was pebbles and dust.
Father Vincent made his way in, followed by Captain Parker. A few workers were already inside. Light was here, in a shaft. Father Vincent knew its slow, destructive properties. Perhaps they were too late. He looked around in the artificial dusk. There was something small piled under a rock. A small collection of dusty things. Father Vincent knew their identity immediately.
Bones.
A worker picked one up, and it crumbled to dust before them. Only its stillness had kept it solid. Only its placement had kept it real. Captain Parker ordered everyone out as Father Vincent began his investigation. As he circled around the stone, he saw an order to the things that lay there. Like the chips and edges in the tunnel, but different. There were small vectors of arrangement that combined to form meaning, like a mosaic in the dark.
“And you are certain it was undisturbed?” Father Vincent asked.
Monty nodded. He was still in the mouth of the cave.