Book of the Dead

by Greig Beck

But so did Adira. Her black spike knives had materialized in her hands, and she parried, blocked and ducked as Kroen’s trunk-like arms swung and thrust.

  The giant jabbed with one arm, while spinning and thrusting with the other – he was blindingly fast and caught Adira on the bicep, opening a line of red. But even before the big man could recover from his extended arm thrust, Adira had slid down, and jammed one of her eight-inch spikes deep into his inner thigh.

  She ripped it free, and her target, the large femoral artery, spurted like a tap.

  Kroen fought on, but already the carpet beneath him was becoming sodden. He lunged again, becoming more furious, possibly knowing that his biggest advantage, his great strength, was leaking away. He was an imposing figure, huge and maddened, but though he would have had no trouble disposing of any other adversary, the person he fought that day had been trained in a dozen different fighting techniques, many of them designed to combat and kill bigger foes.

  Kroen’s hand, gripping one curved blade came down fast. Adira blocked it, and then swung high, and around to jam her remaining spike into the back of his neck. His eyes widened, and his mouth hung open in shock – revealing to Matt the tip of Adira’s blade in the back of his throat, like some sort of sharp metal tongue.

  The spike had severed his spinal cord, and Adira leaned in as if to caress him, with her lips just brushing his ear.

  “For Baruk.” She pushed the huge lump of dead flesh from her, and watched it fall heavily to the red carpet.

  Sirens sounded from out in the street, and then jarringly loud in the small room was the sound of gunfire. Adira went down hard. Abrams leaped to his feet just ahead of Andy. The two Egyptians were unconscious, and Matt pushed one off and crawled over to the fallen Adira, turning her over, he saw the blood on her body – it still pumped. He pressed his hands on the wound and looked up at the shooter. Tania.

  Drummond was edging to the door, and Abrams, who hadn’t seen what Matt had, roared to Tania. “Captain Kovitz, take that man down.”

  Tania turned and fired – at Abrams. The bullet went past him and he froze, his face screwed in confusion.

  Drummond walked to her, and took the gun. “Thank you, darling. Pretend time is over now.”

  Tania walked calmly to the table and took the Book. She turned to Matt and smiled. “You talk better than you fuck.”

  Matt knew he looked like a stunned fish, but he just couldn’t get his mouth to close.

  The sirens stopped just outside, and they could hear the sound of car doors opening.

  “I bid you all a good evening.” Drummond panned the gun around the room. “You haven’t got the Book, but you do have your lives.” He gave them his Hollywood smile. “At least until the Great Old One rises.”

  Tania motioned toward Matt. “He’s read it.”

  Drummond shrugged. “The Father said the ape wouldn’t understand it even if he did read it. It’s of no matter now. Without it, they can do nothing but wait and become more…cattle.” He looked out the window and then at his watch.

  “The police are here, and I’m betting you all have a lot of explaining to do – especially with those bodies and fake passports.” He looked down at Kroen’s body. “Kroen, you’re fired.” He looked up and grinned. “One needs to retain one’s sense of humor, right?” He gave them a small bow, and went out through the door.

  Tania turned and blew Matt a kiss, and then followed him.

  *

  Matt cradled Adira’s head. Her eyes opened, and she sprang immediately to her feet. He tried to reach for her.

  “You’re hurt.”

  She looked down, pulled her shirt open.

  “Ach, it’s nothing.” She looked around quickly, and then went to leave the room.

  Abrams caught her. “Forget it; they’re gone. We need to tend to your wound.” He looked to the door. “And the police will be here in about thirty seconds.”

  She punched her thigh. “Shitza!” She pressed the wound in her shoulder. “Stick to the cover story, it’s solid.” She pulled out her phone and walked away a few paces, speaking rapidly in Hebrew. She listened, grunting now and then, and keeping her eyes on the street outside. She disconnected and turned.

  “We were attacked, robbed.” She pointed to the two unconscious Egyptians, and Kroen’s body. “There were five of them. We overpowered three, but the rest shot at us and escaped.” She growled and lashed out with her boot, kicking Kroen’s body and cursing again. “I wish you were alive so I can kill you all over again.” She rounded on Abrams. “Your security is worthless. How did this Kovitz woman infiltrate your ranks?”

  Abrams’s mouth worked for a moment, surprised by the attack. He shook his head. “Captain Kovitz was assigned to me just months ago. She was competent, friendly, just… normal.”

  Hartogg shrugged. “I didn’t notice anything unusual about her.” There was blood covering half his face. “She must have been deep cover – no amateur.”

  Adira bared her teeth. “Ach, a sleeper. This has been years in the planning.”

  “Remember what Albadi told us?” Matt asked. “There’re cults that still worshipped Cthulhu. I bet they had infiltrators in every country, every government body, just waiting to see who got the first lead.”

  “What do we do now?” Andy asked. “We’ve lost the Book.”

  Silence stretched and Matt rubbed his eyes, the images flashing like a reel of photographs. “We don’t need it.” He leaned his head back, feeling the dull throb behind his eyes. “I can still see it – every page, every word, every curl, dot and stroke.”

  “Can you recreate it?” Adira asked, walking closer to stand over him.

  Matt opened his eyes, focusing on her. “I think so…yes.”

  She smiled down at Matt. “Good. Then we must get you home – you are now the prize.” Adira looked at Abrams, her eyes level. “Until the Professor is safe, he is still under my guardianship.”

  Abrams seemed to think for a moment, and looked briefly at Hartogg, who nodded. He turned back to her. “Okay, until then.”

  “Now what?” Andy asked, rubbing his own head and wincing. “Home?”

  Adira crouched down to Matt, looking into his eyes. “Yes, and we find this Father…he seems to be their leader. We also need to find out exactly what is going to happen in Kentucky, yes?” She placed a hand on his shoulder, leaving a print of her own blood. She looked at her hand and then felt the wound on her shoulder again.

  “Ach.” She stood and went to the electric stovetop. She removed the coffee pot, took a large spoon from a drawer, and rested it on the red coils. She turned back to Matt.

  “What do you need?”

  Matt thought for a moment. “Paper, lots of it. It needs to be written in Syriac, Arabic and Greek. Ink, pens, and then…peace and quiet.”

  Heavy footsteps sounded just outside. She turned. “Remember the cover story – it will work. As we’re foreigners, they’ll want to sweep this under the rug – we can be out of here in a few hours, and still make our flight.” She turned back to the now red-glowing spoon. She snatched it up and then held the flat end against her wound. Smoke curled, and it sizzled as the flesh sealed over. She never flinched.

  Chapter 16

  Mammoth Cave National Park, Kentucky

  Big Ben Jorghansen inhaled deeply through his nose. Instead of the sharp smell of cold, dry stone, there was an odd, burning odor. Not the hint of a clean fire: instead it reminded him of the time they were at Hank’s cookout and, for a laugh, Hank threw a handful of deer gut on the flames – it stunk to high heaven.

  He wiped his wet brow. And what was with the heat? It was always cool down in the caves, but today he could feel the perspiration running down his back and sides – it had to be damned eighty degrees.

  He sighed and checked his watch again, wishing he were out in the fresh air. The heat didn’t worry so much as confuse him. Mammoth Cave was formed by hydrological means, not volcanic. Water seeping through holes in the sandstone
layer above the limestone had eroded away the caves over millions of years. There was no geothermic activity – or at least there shouldn’t be.

  Ben took his position up on a rocky ledge looking down on the shiny sweat-soaked faces of his guests on today’s tour – the group was only half what it should be. People were just staying home. He wasn’t suprised with the sinkholes closing roads, and he’d heard a few sad sacks had even fallen into them. The government had been telling people it’d be best to stay indoors at night. Guess a giant hole is harder to see in the dark, he thought. He sucked in a deep breath, trying to ramp up his enthusiasm.

  He had done this many times, and it was as informative as it was theatrical. He’d turn on and off lights, showing different formations in the huge bowl-shaped cavern, and then take them over to the bottomless pit – it was only about a hundred and thirty-five feet deeper than where they were, but the lighting made it look like it fell away forever.

  To finish up it’d be off to the cave pool and point out a few of the blind crawlers in the glasslike water. Then he’d round em up, herd em out, and get ready for the next bunch, if there were any. He checked his watch; Not long now, he thought with relief. He usually loved being down in the caves – the peace and quiet, the coolness and sense of strength and permanence. But today, strangely, he wanted to be out in the air, or fishing, or home with his wife. Today, he just wanted to be anywhere but down in the Mammoth Caves.

  “Ladies and gentlemen.” He waited.

  Heads swung towards him and murmurs fell away. There was silence, except for the wheezing of a kid with a red face who looked like he enjoyed his dessert just a bit too much.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, this is one of the lowest points in the Mammoth Caves. Just to your right, you can see the railing that guards the bottomless pit, the Gateway to Hell, as it has been called, and a very sacred place for the previous locals dating back many thousands of years.”

  No questions, please no questions, he secretly prayed.

  “It’s not really bottomless is it?” one big, surly and hot-looking guy asked.

  “No, but it is a deep sinkhole dropping away further into the depths.” Ben looked over the heads, keeping his smile in place.

  “Well, how deep?” From red and beefy, again.

  “About one-thirty feet, or all the way to Hell, whichever comes first.” He winked, and started moving.

  “Please walk carefully to the railing, but secure all loose objects.”

  “Wouldn’t want then to end up in Hell, right?” said beefy.

  Oh fuck off, Ben thought, keeping his smile tight.

  The group moved quickly, almost rushing, even though there was enough room for twice as many at the railing.

  “And please…”

  There came the sound of a plastic bottle banging against rock, once, twice, three times, each strike getting fainter and fainter as it fell. Ben sighed. There was always some asshole who just had to drop something. He didn’t want to think how much shit was down in that hole by now.

  He placed his hands on the light panel, and flicked the first switch – lights came on about fifty feet down. He cleared his throat, lowering the timbre of his voice to give it the right gravitas. “And down we travel into the very bowels of the Earth.”

  Ben flicked another switch, and a light came on about a hundred feet down. “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” A few oohs and aahs let him know that at least some of the group were still impressed by nature’s wonders.

  He hit the third switch for the final ring of lights, about one-thirty feet down, and so just up from the bottom. He compressed his throat, ready to speak in a baritone he knew would resonate in the stone chamber. He was set to deliver his lines about Hades and the Underworld when the red-faced guy had something else to add.

  “Hey, Ranger Jorghansen, there’s sumthin down there.”

  Ben groaned. Probably the bottle you just dropped, jackass, he thought, wishing he could say it out loud.

  “And I think it’s coming u-uuup.” The big guy leaned out over the railing, straining to see down into the depths. “It looks like oil.”

  “Huh?” Ben came down from his perch, and walked quickly over, trying to maintain his cool and his command, in case he was being pranked. Camera phones were being pulled out, ready, even though photography was banned in the caves.

  “Hey, please don’t…” Ben knew the high intensity light could damage the mineral composition of some of the delicate formations. “That’s gonna –”

  There was a yelp from one side of the hole, and then a short, sharp scream, before the crowd started to push back – hard. The people at the rear couldn’t see what was happening, so reacted slowly. The people at the front were still jammed in against the railing.

  Ben started to increase his speed to get to the hole before there was an accident, but thought his eyes were beginning to play tricks on him – people looked to be leaping over the railing.

  “Stop that!” he yelled pointlessly. The red-face guy was at the back now, shoving and elbowing hard, when what looked like a lasso made of licorice flung up out of the pit and wrapped around his neck. He screamed, the voice much higher than a man that size should have been able to manage, and then he was pulled onto his back, and dragged backward.

  Ben stopped dead with his mouth open. The guy must have weighed an easy two hundred pounds, but he was yanked up and over the four-foot-high railing as if he were a child’s balloon.

  People were running now. Screams of panic subsumed all of his warnings, and groups broke away into myriad dark chambers, not caring where they went as long as it was away from whatever was coming up out of the pit. Ben was frozen in indecision, his mind trying to make sense of what he was seeing. He started to back up, all the way to his perch, and then turned to look back down on the hellish scene.

  Something dark that at first looked like a huge black cake covered the entire width of the bottomless pit. Once it reached the rim, it exploded into separate fragments – ten-foot-tall amoebic blobs of shiny blackness, covered in eyes and all thrashing limbs. The things took off after the fleeing people.

  Ben’s eyes were so wide, they threatened to pop out of his skull, and he was transfixed as one charged toward him, rolling, scuttling, gliding on centipede legs one moment and a slimy slug foot the next.

  He held up a hand, his mind now fully short-circuited. “Call the police,” he said softly as the thing loomed over him.

  *

  “I want it sealed off – the entire area.” General Decker paced as he spoke into the phone to Perry Logan, the base commander at Fort Campbell in Kentucky. Logan’s base was a big one – an army installation known for the 101st Airborne and 160th Special Operations.

  Decker stopped to look back at the live feed from the satellite of the Mammoth Cave’s main entrance. There were the flashing lights of the local police blocking all the roads.

  “And Perry, pull those local cops back; they have no idea what they’re up against.” He snorted softly. “For that matter, I don’t think any of us do.”

  He listened some more to the local commander, and his eyes closed. Sealing the area off was a pipe dream – there were hundreds of miles of caves, and literally hundreds of entrances. They were still finding new ones all the time.

  Decker exhaled. “Okay, Perry, let’s assign flamethrower units at all the major entrances – I’d like to try and at least contain them.”

  He disconnected and then checked his watch. Major Abrams was due to touch down soon, and he had a chopper waiting for him and his team to bring them straight to the compound.

  Decker now ran the entire US operations, called Project Underground. He had sent the President, safe for now in the sky on Air Force One, a recording of the interrogation of the thing that Ford had locked up in his deep containment cell and had been immediately given the green light on everything and everyone he wanted – unlimited resources.

  Decker stood back from his screen – the Mammoth Cav
es event was not the first. Across the country, across the entire globe, there were more attacks, bigger attacks – and huge seizures of all populations.

  General Henry Decker knew he was fighting on two battlefronts – one was the public’s right to know versus his obligation to keep them safe. His duty won out. National security protocols had now been brought to bear on all information traffic to shut down the collecting, reporting and dissemination of news associated with the sinkholes and mass disappearances. He had to believe he was doing good by blindfolding the masses. If not, the public would panic and then surge – but to where? The phenomena were occurring from coast to coast, and country to country. There was no safe haven any more, and he just couldn’t afford millions of people on the move.

  He sat down heavily and tapped one hard fist on the desk. And then there was the second battlefront. The public didn’t know it yet, but they were at war…at war with ground troops the likes of which they had never seen. He sat back and closed his eyes, letting his mind work.

  And these were just the forward troops – What comes next? he wondered dismally. He hoped Major Abrams was bringing him something they could use.

  *

  Matt felt he was in a dream – he saw the pair of hands working furiously, daubing the long lines of ink onto the pages and turning them into script of multiple ancient languages. The hands didn’t stop, or rest for even a few seconds, and the stack of pages began to rise. Blisters rubbed where he held the pen, but it didn’t matter – they weren’t his hands, and it was all a dream.

  The story flowed smoothly, along with the poems of beauty and horror, and the insightful advice about beings long dead, or never dead at all. But the strange symbols were not there: the fast-moving hands were not managing to recreate every curve, cross and dot – the Celestial Speech of the angels or of Hell itself, or whatever it was, remained immune to his translation or memory.

  He knew this Book, The Necronomicon, or Al Azif, or The Book of the Dead, was more than just a collection of thoughts from a Mad Arab. It was a book of war and warning about cruel elder beings, and spells and creatures that had once inhabited our world, and sought to do so again. The Book was both the poison and the cure. It was also a guide to Hell itself.