“Let’s not waste a second. Let’s open it and see what this translation tells us.”
The drawer contained only a simple blue cardboard envelope, most certainly the result of Sir Wilbur’s work—his final work.
Lauren took out the manuscript. It had fewer than a hundred pages. The paleographer surely had not had time to translate the complete book. But if he had contacted Lauren to have her take possession of it, it was because his work, even unfinished, could be useful to her. Together, she and Eliott began to read the first sheets in silence.
Half an hour later, Eliott raised his head from the text, his face seemingly brightened by a sudden revelation.
“I understand, Lauren. The ruins are the answer to all our questions. Dammit! Why didn’t I think of it before?”
He repeated aloud the last passage he had just read.
The novice changed into a Sentinel will be the receptacle of the ancestral lineage, deep in sleep. Under the ageless black stone, from the depths of the earth, the call will come, and the Sentinel will open the doors. Thus, it will work for the awakening of the extinct lineage and the return of the reign of the Elders.
“I don’t understand, Eliott.”
“Because you haven’t seen these ruins. The black stone . . . Lauren, let’s go; you’ll understand when we get there.”
“Okay, but where are we going?”
“We’re going back to the forests of St. Marys.”
He stood up suddenly, animated by a new energy. Lauren put the drawer back in the safe deposit box and followed him to the bank’s exit.
Once inside the Jeep, he rolled up his jacket sleeve and looked at Lauren dejectedly.
“First of all, we‘re not taking any more chances. Give me a shot of sedatives. This abomination may try to take me by surprise.”
Lauren wanted to object, but resigned herself to doing it. As soon as the syrupy liquid had penetrated his body, he sank into the depths of his seat.
“Now we . . . don’t have to worry,” he mumbled.
“So I’m heading to the point you marked on that map?”
He half-opened his eyes and could only nod his head.
“What if I ask you for more explanation about what we’re going to find in these ruins?”
He gathered enough strength to formulate these words: “The secret the Sentinel keeps, Lauren.”
“What’s the Sentinel, Eliott?”
“The creature that I’ve become.”
As soon as he finished his sentence, a deep pain tore through his guts. And now this secret has been betrayed, he thought to himself. And he let the force that possessed him catch his conscience in a bottomless pit.
*
Lauren managed to reach the point nearest to the ruins as best she could by driving the Jeep on the muddy tracks that got progressively narrower as they went. Then they would have to continue on foot, as the dense vegetation and rugged terrain made it impossible for the vehicle to go on. Daylight was fading. Lauren got out to wake Eliott. He didn’t look like someone asleep. He just seemed to be turned off. His face was so pale, so cold. She opened the door and whispered a few tender words in his ear. He opened his eyes.
“Let’s go, my prince. If your itinerary is accurate, we have a good three hours’ walk ahead of us.”
“I need coffee,” he said, struggling to sit up.
“Okay, let’s have coffee,” she agreed.
She went to the trunk and lit the burner to boil water. Once he had quickly drunk his nectar, he regained his strength and a little color, but she still found him shockingly pale. Both of them put on their night-vision goggles. They outfitted themselves with their backpacks and the necessary equipment to be self-sufficient for several days. Lauren had stocked up on extra weapons and ammunition. She hadn’t forgotten Eliott’s ways: a Glock 21 for the handgun and the latest-generation FAL rifle for a more decisive response.
They set out on a path that wound between the trees in the hollow of a small valley. Eliott was leading the way. Lauren had wanted him several times, but she felt a kind of repulsion in him, as if she had hit a cold wall that stood between them. She had felt clearly that they weren’t alone, that a third entity was present, lurking in his body, acting within him. Now she was starting to be afraid of that thing because she was aware of it. Was his gait no longer his own because of the sedatives, or was it something else? Stranger still was the fact she found him unusually tall. Rangy was the appropriate word. It seemed to her he had grown at least an inch or two. He moved differently. Yet watching him walking on the path lit by the half moon, it was still him.
There were his eyes too. Several times, she had glimpsed reflections of a darkness so intense that it had frozen her blood. How long, she wondered, before this unspeakable monstrosity invaded him to the point that it would replace the man she loved?
“How do you feel?” That was all she could think of to say to break the silence.
“Still weak. I’m going to skip the next injection. That will slow us down too much.”
“Are you going to be able to manage that?”
He turned and looked at her. “Manage what?”
A deep uneasiness suddenly ran through her. “Well, your thing.”
“Do I scare you, Lauren? You see only a monster in front of you. Is that it?”
“I . . . I’m not reassured, Eliott. Yes.”
“Lauren . . .”
He came close to her and tenderly ran his hand through her hair.
“We haven’t even thought about making love since you joined me. Would that reassure you?”
It was like he had read her mind.
He tightened his hand around her hair and pulled her head back slightly, exposing her throat from behind the collar of her jacket. Then he put his lips on her burning artery, which was fluttering with excitement—and fear. For just an instant, he felt an impulse rise in him, commanding him to use his teeth to tear into this flesh calling him, this body offering itself to him in the moonlight. She was so vulnerable—so beautiful.
He suddenly felt a trembling in his temples, and the sepulchral voice rose inside him.
“Come on, Eliott, that wouldn’t be reasonable. You still need her.”
Immediately, he let go of Lauren and took two steps back.
She was still shaky and rubbed the back of her neck.
“What’s the matter?” she asked, dazed.
“Nothing. It’s just not the time. Let’s get moving.”
“Eliott . . .”
She grabbed his arm.
“Something’s wrong, I can feel it,” she said.
“My love, it . . . it’s gonna be okay. It’s just that I still have these damn strange feelings.”
She gazed into his eyes, in search of the answers he didn’t want to give.
His eyes.
They were different again. Their irises had taken on marked reddish tones. Any icy shiver passed through her.
“Eliott . . . you’re changing,” she said in a trembling voice.
She had made an effort to be honest. She saw that what she had just said had hurt him. She cradled his face with her hand.
“I’m here. No matter what happens, no matter what you become, I won’t leave you, Eliott.”
He took her hand in his. He was about to collapse in despair, but he controlled himself.
“Forgive me, Lauren. I don’t know where I stand.”
“I understand.”
“Let’s get going.”
They soon arrived in a gloomy clearing at the top of a hill Eliott remembered crossing. They didn’t need the map now. From there, he remembered exactly the path that would lead them to the ruins.
“Did you notice?” Lauren asked.
He turned toward her. “Are you talking about this silence?”
“Yes. It’s really not normal.”
“The surprises aren’t over yet.”
Farther on, they walked along the abandoned railway bridge that spanned the ravine;
the same young stream was roaring at the bottom of it with as much fury as ever. On the other side, they climbed to the top of the steep slope from which they could see over the surrounding valleys. Eliott took his night binoculars from his bag and swept the hills outlined by the moon’s silver rays.
He lingered for a long time on a small valley. “I knew it,” he thought out loud.
“What is it, Eliott?”
He kept looking for the thing in that valley. He explored another spot, and another. But no, he wasn’t wrong. He had first seen the blanket of mist in that valley.
“What are you looking for?” Lauren persisted.
He finally took the binoculars away from his eyes. “Remember that mist I told you about?”
She searched her memory. “I think so, yes.”
“It covered the ruins and hung there day and night. That was what made me decide to go explore the area. I thought it was so strange . . .”
Lauren held out her hand to borrow his binoculars.
“Let me see.”
She looked for the misty layer in the direction of the valley he had been looking at.
“I don’t see anything.”
“It’s disappeared,” he murmured.
“Are you sure that this was the place?”
“That fucking mist isn’t there anymore,” he repeated.
“And what does that change?” Lauren asked, giving his binoculars back.
“Lots of things. Let’s go,” he said. “The ruins aren’t far now.”
When the mound was in sight, the megaliths stood out above the trees in the iridescent darkness, in the green glow of their night glasses.
“By the way, you didn’t tell me. What were those ruins in the first place?” Lauren asked Eliott. “Because it’s really a huge structure.”
“That’s the thing. I did some research. I didn’t find anything anywhere.”
They moved to the first stones. A perimeter of fluorescent yellow plastic tape their FBI colleagues had placed surrounded the entire structure.
Lauren raised her hand as a warning. Cooper stopped immediately.
“Wait!” she exclaimed, “We need to turn on our jammers. Our colleagues have certainly left a surveillance device on standby. We’ll trip it if we go in there.”
“No risk,” he replied. “Nothing works within the perimeter anymore—no satellite transmission, no electronic equipment. We’re safe.”
She opened her cell phone and confirmed it wasn’t working. “What’s that from? It’s unbelievable. It’s like a magnetic field.”
“I couldn’t find any explanation for that either,” he replied.
They passed under the tapes marked “FBI” without touching them and entered the maze.
Eliott felt something go through him suddenly. It was similar to the force he knew, but it was different, much more powerful, and external. As the two moved toward the center of the maze, a weight began to press more and more heavily on him. It squeezed his chest to the point of obstructing his airways. He staggered and had to lean against a wall to avoid collapsing.
“Eliott, what’s happening?”
“There’s something under there.”
He pointed to the megalith in front of them about sixty feet away. This one was wider than the others were, probably because it, along with four others, was the closest to the center of the structure.
He took a few sips of water and stood up straight. “Let’s go.”
The base of the huge mineral column was overgrown with moss and climbing ivy. They went around it until they could see, behind the leaves, the contours of some kind of door cut out of the black rock.
The voice rose again in Eliott’s mind.
“Come to us . . . Sentinel.”
He froze, petrified by the pain that overwhelmed him in waves. “For God’s sake, who are you?” he asked, suffocating.
Lauren looked at him without knowing what to say. “Eliott, who are you talking to?”
She waved her hand in front of his eyes, but his gaze was completely blank. His irises were as black as ink. He didn’t see her any more than he heard her. She panicked and grabbed the sedative-filled syringe.
“Eliott, what do I do? Answer me! You’re changing! Eliott!”
He raised his glistening black eyes toward her and emitted a frightening growl. Suddenly, he rushed through the opening and disappeared downstairs into the depths of the mound.
Lauren froze in front of the threshold, hesitated a few seconds, and then rushed down the stairs behind him. The steps were roughly carved from the raw rock and led down into a dark abyss. Her headlamp wasn’t able to illuminate the bottom of it. She was panting, and her heart was pounding. A layer of cave vegetation that had certainly never seen daylight covered the walls. It gave off a strong smell of mildew. Strangely, her equipment’s light seemed to dissolve in the shadows. Several times, she nearly slipped and barely caught herself. She continued to progress cautiously down the stairs that disappeared in front of her.
“Eliott!” she shouted into the darkness.
She turned her ear toward the bottom to try to pick up an answer or the sound of his footsteps. But only silence echoed her appeals. Should she keep going down? After what she had seen . . . that face, those eyes . . . that thing was no longer Eliott. Shouldn’t she turn around and flee this place, these woods, and forget everything she had just been through?
“Eliott!” she screamed, even louder this time.
No, she wouldn’t abandon him. Their bond was more powerful than this evil spell. She felt within her the strength and courage to save him from it—or at least to help him do it. He was still aware. He wouldn’t hurt her. She was sure of it.
After a moment that seemed like an eternity, the stairs finally gave way to a vast rocky slab. The room was huge. She moved forward among the shadows where huge pillars rose to disappear into endless heights. The walls were engraved with symbols in the source language that glistened with moisture. She tried unsuccessfully to compare the writings with Ravenwood’s translation. If only the paleographer were there.
She called Eliott again.
But the sound of her voice still echoed from room to room, from corridor to corridor, until it vanished into the icy void. These chambers were enormous. The ruins on the surface of the mound were in fact only the upper part of a buried structure. Her watch’s depth gauge was blinking feverishly, but according to it, she was around five hundred feet below the surface.
She came within sight of a circular platform on which there stood a cube-shaped protuberance carved in the rock. It was much colder here. A multitude of symbols adorned the cube, which looked like an altar. This room must have been a place of worship. Maybe this whole structure was nothing but a huge temple. A very dense, milky fog was circling near the ground. As she walked forward, she saw Eliott’s body, half immersed in the whitish fumes.
“Lauren,” he said weakly.
She ran to him. “How do you feel? What happened?”
“I don’t know,” he replied very faintly. “That thing is inside me. I can hear its voice echoing in my mind.”
“My God, Eliott.”
“Inject me with a dose of sedatives. Hurry,” he ordered.
She put her hand in the side pocket of her overalls and took out the syringe. She rolled up Eliott’s sleeve, uncovering a patch of skin on his forearm.
“Hurry, Lauren,” he moaned.
“I can hardly see anything; my night glasses aren’t working very well.”
She stuck the needle into Eliott’s flesh without seeing where it was going to sting. But at the moment she was going to squeeze the liquid into his blood, something wrapped around her wrist. It squeezed so hard that she thought the pressure would crush her bones. She shrieked in pain and had to drop the syringe. The thing that had grabbed her lifted her off the ground, her legs dangling in the void. It suddenly hurled her several feet. She rolled and slammed into a wall.
“Let her go!” Eliott shouted. �
��I’m the one you were looking for. You have me now.”
Lauren pulled out her weapon and swept the darkness without knowing from which side another attack might come. She stood up and ran to where the syringe had fallen; she groped for it on the ground but couldn’t put her hands on it.
“Eliott, what was that thing?” she shouted, panicked.
Silence was the only response.
“Eliott!”
She groped toward the altar where she had seen him lying. He was no longer there. In the dark, that thing that had grabbed her to make her drop the syringe might come out of anywhere. She flattened herself against a wall and checked her gun’s magazine. Suddenly, there was a sound on the stone a few yards away from her.
“Lauren.”
She could hardly recognize Eliott’s voice. It was different, deeper. It rose from his stomach and barely touched his vocal cords.
“You have nothing to be afraid of,” he told her.
The glow of Lauren’s headlamp suddenly regained energy and lit up the nothingness that surrounded her. He was standing in front of her and holding out his hand.
She hesitated. She couldn’t say what had changed in his appearance because this change was indescribably subtle, but especially because the light was still too faint to make out his features. She grabbed his hand and let him help her up. His skin felt cold—incredibly cold. She had the impression that he was nothing more than a bloodless envelope of flesh from which all human heat had evaporated.
“Are you in control of that thing, Eliott?”
“I’m afraid it’s the other way around, Lauren. All I’m sure of at the moment is that you’re safe.”
“Do you have any idea where we are?”
She turned around to light up the walls of the room, which turned out to be a huge circular nave. Stalagmites had formed in some areas. In the walls were rectangular cavities carved out of the underground rock in which there lay what seemed to be huge tombs.
“It looks like . . . a crypt,” she whispered in amazement.
“Crypts are made for the dead,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
He pointed to the rows of graves cut out of the walls.
The Essence of Darkness Page 17