The Essence of Darkness

by Thomas Clearlake

  “The creatures lying in these tombs are very much alive, Lauren.”

  22

  Special Agent Fournier arrived in view of an imposing residence in the middle of the woods. He climbed a mound covered with brambles and dead shrubs before landing directly on a perfectly mowed lawn. The thorny plant bed formed a wall left in its natural state, serving as a barrier. Once he’d crossed the strip of grass, about eighteen meters farther on, there was an electrified fence over two meters high. Far behind it, surrounded by sumptuous gardens, rose a sturdy manor house made of rough vintage stone. The exterior lighting was thorough, and the auxiliary equipment was modern. He spent a few minutes analyzing the building’s surroundings and identifying the security systems.

  The Mercedes sat parked at the entrance. For a moment, Fournier observed two Dobermans coming and going on the expanses of grass. The dogs were young and obviously trained as guard dogs. The lighting that flooded the gardens limited his chances for infiltration. Farther on, he spotted a concrete slab with a trapdoor in it. He guessed that an underground corridor—probably for power supply and water pipes—was accessible and could lead him inside. The two young dogs were playing near a large fountain opposite the concrete slab. He took advantage of the diversion to run quietly to the hatch. He broke the bolts and opened it. Then he quickly slid in and closed the cast-iron plate above him. He listened to make sure he was alone. No noise came from the corridor. A ladder descended into the darkness. He lit his lamp and started climbing down.

  When he reached the bottom, he found the emergency evacuation maps for the property posted above a fire extinguisher. The house was huge. The residence had three floors and underground rooms. All the hallways and almost all the rooms had video surveillance systems. There were two possible options, Fournier thought. Either this Gustav Meyer was completely paranoid, or his activities really required such a high level of security on his property. He opted for the first theory. Meyer was definitely a first-rate whack job. This was perfectly in line with his presence in a Russian brothel and his dealings with Ukrainians who specialized in human trafficking. Maybe he wanted to buy sex slaves from Prazdniev? This category of perverts, born of depraved nobility, didn’t hesitate to invest huge amounts of cash to satisfy their sexual fantasies. As an organizer of fine parties, old Meyer must have loved ogling his guests from behind his surveillance cameras. Fournier had expected this kind of setup.

  “There is an intrusion at the first basement level in the water pipe corridor,” observed a man sitting at a console in front of a wall of surveillance screens. “What do we do?” he asked the man behind him in the shadows.

  “What kind of intrusion?” the other asked.

  “A man—he’s equipped and heavily armed.”

  “I’ll inform Professor Meyer. Lock the entrances to the complex and don’t take your eyes off him,” ordered the other calmly.

  Fournier took advantage of the safety of the location to take a break and eat an energy bar. It was nicer here than outside. Winter was early this year, and he could hear the wind picking up again, full of snow.

  He tried to establish communication with the response team, but no signal seemed to be getting through in the area.

  “This is Fournier. I don’t know if you can hear me. Never mind; I’ll keep transmitting just in case. I broke into a basement leading into the house of Gustav Meyer, owner of the Mercedes I followed to the area near the village of Niederfinow. Here’s a snapshot of the situation: everything is clear here. Two guard dogs are on the lawn. The Mercedes is in front of the house. So Prazdniev and his two-meter sidekick are talking to Meyer inside. I’m thinking they’re negotiating a transaction for a bunch of prostitutes, maybe minors. Did you gather any information about this man? In the meantime, I’ll infiltrate the house and see what I can find. There’s a classic surveillance system; it’s not too bad. I was able to get an evacuation plan. I’m going to keep moving forward. A locked entrance leads to the basements. I’m going to bypass it. These underground rooms will probably tell us a lot about Gustav Meyer’s activities.”

  He reached a ventilation duct and forced it open to get inside. Once he had climbed up into the narrow duct, he crawled to grates through which he could see the first room. It was an equipment-storage room, almost thirty square meters in size. He couldn’t accurately identify the equipment; it looked like some kind of medical instruments. Clear plastic protected everything. A white sanitary covering like those used in hospitals covered the walls and floor. He continued to crawl until he entered a tubular conduit that passed over the middle of a large room.

  Fifty-some people lay down there, some on the ground, others in bed—women, children, men of all ages, indiscriminately. Very few beds were available. Pale wall lights dimly lit the room. Comfort was minimal, at best. Fournier listened closely. Silence reigned in the secure dormitory. It didn’t have windows because it was in the basement, but he was able to catch the half-whispered conversation of two women. They were speaking Romanian. Fortunately, Fournier understood a little. They were complaining about their treatment; they said they were hungry, they smelled, and they’d give anything for a shower. What struck Fournier wasn’t their words but the tone in which they spoke. The two women were terrified; their voices trembled. And although he couldn’t see their faces from the conduit, he could guess what was going on. In all likelihood, these people were illegal refugees from Romania. The men in Prazdniev’s network had no doubt suggested they leave the country and get papers to go to the welcoming lands of Western Europe. Unfortunately for them, these poor people had fallen into the wrong hands. They had started as cross-border travelers and ended up human merchandise. Prazdnev was probably negotiating the sale of this merchandise with this mysterious Mr. Meyer.

  In view of the equipment he’d just seen and the configuration of the premises, a hypothesis emerged in Fournier’s mind. Meyer was conducting experiments that required live human guinea pigs. The Ukrainian was responsible for providing them, at the lowest possible cost, of course. The circle was complete. The agent lingered a few more minutes above the dormitory to try to pick up clues about what was going to happen to these people. He could only hear the muffled wails and moans of children crying softly, so as not to wake others. He started crawling through the conduit again, wondering how guys like Prazdniev could exist. He then crossed over smaller rooms, counting four in a row. The rooms—or most likely, cells—had only five beds each. They were empty of occupants. Then he was over another dormitory similar to the first. Like the other, this one had occupants. But here, only about twenty men and women were locked up, most of them asleep.

  He continued to advance and arrived above galleries with ventilation grates reinforced with cast-iron bars. The temperature had dropped sharply in a way he couldn’t explain. When he reached the first opening, he could see it was over a very large room. The walls were of an extremely dark rock; the slabs on the ground were also made of this smooth, cold stone. The contrast with the sanitized, white, medical-type rooms he had seen to that point was surprising. Although Fournier wasn’t an expert on the subject, the instruments he observed here were of an unknown origin, at least for him. A raised circular platform nearly eight meters wide was in the center of this room. Around the circle lay ten boxes evenly distributed, large enough to hold living beings. A massive apparatus with different units and an imposing control panel stood in the middle. This device was made from the same blackish mineral material. It suddenly reminded him of the stone from the tomb he had seen in Isolde Hohenwald’s castle. Next to the control panel was another box, different because it was much higher and wider than the ones placed around it. Flexible tubular networks connected all the boxes to the one in the center of the device.

  Fournier took out his camera to take pictures of the room, but his telephoto lens didn’t work. He suddenly caught a sound farther down the ventilation duct, which immediately put him on alert. It was like a scraping repeating on the metal. It was coming closer
to him. Instantly, he put away his camera, pulled out his handgun, screwed on a silencer, and waited, perfectly motionless, for the thing to appear. That’s when he heard the same sound coming from the other end of the duct. It scratched the metal with regular jolts in exactly the same way. And it was coming closer from that side as well.

  Abruptly, as he was trying to estimate in the dark how far away from him these noises were, a loud growl erupted. He lifted his head to see the sharp-toothed, threatening mouth of one of the two watchdogs. The Doberman was crawling toward him, teeth bared, uttering rabid growls between bursts of barking intended to intimidate. The beast was ready to jump at his throat, but it held back at a distance, not because it was afraid of him, but because it had no doubt received an order. Suddenly, the other dog arrived on the other side, identical to the first, both in its contained fury and its terrifying appearance.

  A human voice came from the back of the room where the black stone device was.

  “Rolf! Volky! Bring !” the voice commanded.

  In a coordinated movement, the two dogs began to make Fournier back up toward an opening that had just appeared in the duct. A flashlight beam blinded him.

  “Drop your weapon! Now!” shouted the man shining the light at him from the opening.

  He complied.

  The two Dobermans quickly forced him out of the duct. He climbed down a ladder after the man in heavy security gear, holding him at gunpoint.

  “Don’t move!”

  As soon as Fournier put one foot on the ground, the man rushed him, pinned him down, and immobilized him by tying his legs and wrists. He then struck him hard on the back of the neck.

  Fournier lost consciousness instantly.

  23

  Eliott and Lauren were now in a huge room in the deepest part of the crypt; it was freezing cold. Eliott approached the black stone cube erected in the middle of the room. He brushed his hand over the symbols that seemed frozen in time. Lauren thought she could see some affection in his gesture. It only made her more uneasy.

  “What the hell is this place?” she asked.

  He stared at her. His irises glowed in the dark. “The site of the Elders,” he replied in a dull tone.

  She froze.

  Something had just moved in the shadows behind him.

  She pulled her gun and pointed it at the thing she sensed in the dark.

  It was coming closer.

  “Don’t be afraid, Lauren.”

  She tightened her grip on the stock of her Desert Eagle and aimed the barrel of her weapon in the direction of the approaching footsteps. The steps were so heavy, she could feel the slab shaking under their weight.

  It was coming closer.

  “You’re not in any danger,” he reassured her again.

  “What the hell is that thing, Eliott?” she stammered in a low voice.

  In the shadows, she could make out a slender silhouette, twice Eliott’s height. The form might have been somewhat human. The body was skeletal. The skin was as black as the darkness, blending into it completely despite the glow from the lamp that had turned back on. The being was dressed in a tunic made of very thick, very dark leather. Heavy seams crisscrossed it, and metallic ornaments reinforced it. They must have shone like precious metal a very long time ago. The thing’s musculature consisted of thin braids of fibers that intertwined around its ebony skeleton, comparable to a smooth, cold stalagmite concretion. Resembling a vascular network, oozing threads of thick, blackish blood ran through the emaciated body. Black fumes, like dense, suspended particles of ink, emanated from the entity in waves, floating behind and around it like a vaporous veil. However, the limbs were powerful, and the thing moved with strange flexibility, as if it were not entirely subject to the force of gravity. The face looked like a frozen mask, indistinguishable and fashioned out of darkness. It showed some barely perceptible movements. No doubt there remained a tenuous link between the thing’s psychic activity and what it manifested physically. Apart from that, Lauren felt like she was facing a ten-foot-tall fossilized corpse. The eye sockets were like two windows opening onto the void. The nose appeared as two protruding holes in the skeleton, and the mouth only showed a cracked gap, as if it had been a simple mineral scar carved into dark stone with a chisel. A lacing of metal strips—or else stone—adorned the skull. It was hard to tell; maybe it was a crown. Had the thing come from royal lineage? Lauren’s gaze plunged once again into the depths of the orbital cavities; she saw no more than that same nothingness. No matter how hard she looked for something human, she found only an indescribable void.

  The entity was still moving toward her. Lauren was petrified. It was useless to run away or try to escape its contact, which seemed inevitable. The creature bent over her. Lauren felt its hoarse, icy breath on her skin. The thing sniffed her for a long time.

  “You’re the first human being it’s ever seen,” Eliott said.

  The creature then stretched its arm in her direction and reached out one of its oversized hands toward her head. Its long fingers slid delicately through Lauren’s hair, like dark weavers, and mysteriously brushed her forehead.

  “What does this thing want, Eliott?”

  There was another sepulchral exhalation, a sinister rumbling without any real meaning. It might have been a response.

  Lauren took a step back.

  The flow of incoherent guttural sounds continued uninterrupted.

  “We have waited for so long.” Eliott seemed to have decided to interpret the muffled fury swirling in Lauren’s eardrums.

  “Do you understand what this thing is saying?”

  “I hear its words inside me, Lauren; it speaks our language.”

  “Do you mean that it talks to you telepathically?”

  “Yes.”

  “In that case, ask it what it wants.”

  “We have waited for so long,” Eliott repeated, as if forced to interpret the voice. “Now it is time for us to resurface.”

  “Who are you?” Lauren shouted.

  The creature’s only response was to reach out one hand and stroke her hair. Lauren searched the being’s face for a distinctive expression, an emotion that could explain this gesture. The mineral face remained unfathomable. She found no more than the nothingness she had observed a few seconds earlier. Eliott remained paralyzed, arms by his side, possessed by the morbid flow of continuous babble.

  “It is time for us to reign again.”

  The vibration the creature emitted grew with such force that Lauren felt an uncontrollable wave of panic.

  “Eliott! What is this monster saying?” Eliott! Come back! We have to get out of here. This thing is going to kill us; I can feel it!”

  She used her lamp, directing its beam into the creature’s eyes. It roared with pain and shielded itself from the light with its hands.

  Lauren grabbed Eliott by the arm and dragged him toward the stairs.

  With adrenaline augmenting her strength, she almost managed to carry him. They ran toward the surface. Halfway up, she collapsed, out of breath. Eliott had more or less recovered. Lauren felt they were out of danger now.

  “Can you see their intentions in your mind?” she asked him.

  His head swung loosely between his shoulders.

  “Eliott, I have a very bad feeling. That thing didn’t look like it was fooling around!”

  He finally looked up at her. His face looked normal again. Suddenly, a thud shook the stone in the corridor.

  It came from the surface.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said.

  “Did you hear that?” she asked.

  “Yes, it’s coming from up above, from the ruins.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “The force has reduced its hold. It’s not a fan of sedatives. Let’s go.”

  Cautiously, they started climbing back up the steps. With their senses alert, they tried to figure out what was happening on the surface of the mound. When they finally reached the megalith’s entrance, hidde
n by vegetation, they slipped out.

  “Look!” whispered Lauren.

  Farther down, in the moonlight that shone in the night, several silhouettes dressed in white coveralls with oxygen masks were setting up pop-up lab bubbles. It was a scientific team of twelve agents. Presumably, they were government agents or members of an affiliated branch.

  Although they were dressed as specialists, no insignia indicated which department had assigned them.

  “Those aren’t our guys,” Lauren asserted in a half-whisper.

  “No. I’ve never seen that kind of team.”

  Eliott studied them again very carefully for a few seconds. “Up there.”

  He pointed to one of the megaliths lying flat. Two men dressed in fatigues were stationed there.

  “Did you see their equipment? They’re soldiers,” Eliott said.

  “Yes, no doubt about it.”

  “What’s the army doing here? Covering an unofficial scientific team?”

  “We’ll soon find out,” she concluded.

  “We’ve got to move.”

  He waved at her to follow him. They crawled around the perimeter of the megalith, still under cover of the thick vegetation that had colonized the base of the maze. They made their way through brambles and tall grasses to get out of the perimeter. They were now in a position to observe the structure from the outside. The comings and goings of the men in coveralls were increasing; others arrived to join the team already in place. Now they were building more bubbles. A real scientific complex was taking shape before their eyes. As for the soldiers, they continued their patrols around the ruins. There were about ten soldiers carrying heavy weapons.

  “Those guys are no rookies,” Lauren said.

  “Take a look at their weapons: an M16 here, an AK-12 up there. Those guys are mercenaries,” Eliott replied.

  “They’re coming in after the FBI, violating a crime scene, and occupying the area with weapons. They must have government support.”