Ararat

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Ararat Page 5

by Christopher Golden


  Meryam took several more shuffling steps, dry timber sighing at the shifting of her weight. “It’s real.”

  “Or it’s the greatest hoax ever,” Adam said. But no, it felt too real. Too quiet and ancient and looming, as if the ark itself had some impossible presence and awareness, like it knew they had come. Like it had been waiting. It even smelled real, though he couldn’t have described what that meant to him.

  “This way!” Hakan called, reminding Adam that Feyiz had been beckoning to them and they’d ignored him.

  Adam peered into the darkness of the deeper cave and saw the flicker of Feyiz’s flashlight beam. They’d have to learn what he wanted, but with Hakan so much closer—sixty feet away, investigating the western wall of the cave—Adam started in his direction first. Meryam blew air out between her lips, one hand on her belly.

  “You all right?” he asked.

  “Not important.”

  With torch beams lighting their tilted path, they walked carefully over to Hakan. Adam felt the soft, dry, ancient wood beneath his feet and slid back into the strange, waking dream that had enveloped him the moment he had seen the collapsed timbers and the animal bones. Now the combined light from their three torches seemed to generate enough illumination that a patch of darkness shimmered into haunting golden life. Meryam came to a halt twenty feet from Hakan, but Adam managed several steps farther before he understood what had brought her up short.

  So close to the cave wall, Hakan’s flashlight beam exposed a broad circle to detailed examination. The timbers were like long bones, almost as if they had climbed into the belly of an enormous whale, nothing but its skeleton remaining. Jonah, four thousand years on. The seams had all been treated with bitumen pitch to seal water out.

  “I’m not an archaeologist—” Hakan began.

  “Neither are we,” Adam interrupted. “Probably a mistake not getting that degree, right?”

  Hakan turned, forgetting himself for a moment as he included Meryam in his gaze. “This is not a cave at all. The whole cave is the ark. Buried all this time.”

  Adam could find no words.

  “Smashing,” Meryam said, a grin spreading across her features. Then she punched Adam in the shoulder. “What are you doing, love? Get the bloody camera rolling!”

  Adam swore. Exhausted and in awe, he’d completely forgotten. Laughing in amazement at the days and weeks—hell, the months—ahead of them, he dug out the camera and started filming, beginning on those beams sunken into the wall.

  “It’s extraordinary,” he said.

  Something shifted in the darkness to their right, farther into the cave. Adam whipped the camera around, its light revealing an unsmiling Feyiz. He had gone pale and looked like he might be ill.

  “You think that’s something?” Feyiz began, shielding his eyes from the glare of the light, staring into the camera. “Come and have a look at this.”

  Meryam started to ask if he was all right, but Feyiz turned his back on them. The beam of his torch led the way along a long passage, past a row of large stalls. Adam caught it all on film as he followed Meryam and Feyiz, with Hakan taking up the rear. The wind that howled outside did not seem to reach this far inside the cave—inside the ark, he reminded himself. Outside the temperature had fallen dramatically, but here in the recesses of the ark the air began to feel close and stagnant and strangely warm. Adam’s stomach gave a queasy rumble but he kept the camera steady as they followed the slanting passage all the way to what appeared to be the rearmost section of the ark, what had once been its outer wall.

  “Here,” Meryam said, pointing to a mummified corpse propped against an upright beam. Its teeth were bared in something never intended to be a grin, mouth lipless, eyes nothing but powdery holes in a face more like papyrus than flesh.

  “Naamah,” Adam said quietly. The wife of Noah. The name had popped into his memory and then to his lips. Odds were whoever built this ship had not been called Noah, nor his wife Naamah, but the names didn’t really matter.

  “This is impossible,” Meryam muttered, glancing around as if entranced. “No flood could rise this high. And even if … if somehow this is real … it couldn’t be this well preserved.”

  “You’re standing in it,” Adam reminded her.

  He couldn’t argue her points—they were simple truth. And yet here they were. This ship was not evidence the biblical story had been a precise record, but it did prove the flood had taken place and that there had been a Noah—whatever his name might have been. No, the names didn’t matter. Noah would be fine enough, and so they might as well call this one Naamah.

  “What’s this?” Meryam said.

  Adam panned the camera away from the corpse, found Meryam, and let the lens follow her focus to a place on the floor where her flashlight had picked out a scattering of gleaming black stones.

  “Volcanic?” he asked.

  Hakan moved into the video frame, frowning as he knelt to pick up one of the stones. “Ararat is a volcano, yes … but no eruptions for almost two hundred years.”

  Meryam kept searching with her torch. “This thing has been here a lot longer than two hundred years.”

  “It’s not volcanic rock,” Feyiz said from the shadows ahead.

  Meryam lifted her torch and shone it in his direction. Adam followed with the camera, spotted Feyiz’s flashlight on the floor, shining its light into a pile of dust and black stone. He had set the torch down, but now the camera’s own light joined with Meryam’s and Hakan’s to zero in on Feyiz. The bright lights and strange shadows made the bearded young guide appear almost two-dimensional, as if he’d been transformed from a man into a portrait painted on the air in front of them.

  “It’s hardened pitch,” Feyiz went on.

  On the floor in front of him lay an enormous object that Adam at first took to be some kind of obelisk made of that same gleaming black pitch, perhaps some sort of altar. But then Feyiz broke off a piece of the pitch and Adam took a step nearer, zooming the camera in for a close-up.

  “What is it?” Hakan said. “A crate?”

  Adam slipped over behind Feyiz. Now that it had been illuminated, he could see that the entire black casing on the far side of the obelisk had been broken away, revealing a different texture beneath. A large, rectangular wooden box, timber heavy and blackened. Its lid had been sealed with that same bitumen, but Feyiz had begun to run his fingers over the seam and Adam zoomed in to see that the seal had been shattered, broken bits of pitch all over the floor.

  Zoomed in, the camera picked up strange markings carved in the black surface, both on the outside of the box and on the shattered seal.

  “It’s some kind of sarcophagus,” Meryam said.

  “It’s Egyptian?” Adam asked.

  She gave him a sharp look. “How should I know?”

  “Sarcophagi are Egyptian.”

  “We’ve established there are no archaeologists among us,” Meryam said. “I’m only saying I think it’s some sort of coffin.”

  “A tomb,” Hakan said quietly.

  “So, not Egyptian, then?” Adam teased, the joy of discovery buzzing inside him. He could feel that everything had changed for them. The future would begin with this moment.

  But Meryam had stopped smiling. Her features paled and fresh beads of sweat appeared on her forehead. Her pallor went an ugly yellow.

  Still crouched by the tomb, Feyiz muttered something in his own language and then slumped onto his side in a sprawl, unmoving. Hakan shouted his nephew’s name and shoved past Meryam. Adam reached for her too late. Meryam twisted to one side, dropped to her knees, and retched again. A moment later she clasped her hands to both sides of her head and began to scream in pain, crying out that her skull had split open.

  The camera saw it all.

  Outside the ark, the cold wind went on howling. A cloud passed across the moon and, atop Mount Ararat, all lay in darkness.

  THREE WEEKS LATER

  FIVE

  Ben Walker turned up the c
ollar on his coat and zipped it all the way, nestling his mouth and nose down inside its warmth. The military helicopter tilted leftward as the pilot banked toward the mountain. Thousands of feet of gray daylight separated the chopper from the ground, but it wasn’t the height that troubled Walker, it was the wind. Commercial helicopters were not even allowed to fly this close to the mountain. The only way to get on top of Ararat without climbing it was to hitch a ride with the Turkish military.

  An updraft buffeted the chopper and then they hit a moment of dead air—so thin at this elevation that when the wind died, the rotors whined and it felt like they were falling. The rotors thumped so loudly that the sound felt like a physical assault. Walker gritted his teeth and looked out the window as they came in view of the shadowy scar on the face of the mountain. His son, Charlie, a nine-year-old daredevil, always talked about his desire to ride in a helicopter one day. Walker thought he ought to take the boy up eventually, but when he did it would be in less perilous conditions.

  Don’t be an idiot, he thought. Amanda would never go for it.

  His ex-wife, Amanda. Charlie’s mother. The longer they’d been together, the more frequently Walker had been away, and the situations in which he’d found himself had only grown more dangerous and more frightening. His scars unsettled Amanda, but not as much as his unwillingness to talk about how he’d acquired them. She’d told him his secrecy meant that he did not trust her, and though he’d denied it, Walker knew it was the truth. Amanda had a beautiful smile and a carefree laugh that made her eyes gleam with genuine joy. She tried to see the best in people, which made her the worst sort of person with whom to share things that must be kept secret. Keeping secrets would have eaten away at her. Just knowing the world contained some of the horrors Walker had encountered would have tainted her, and he refused to be responsible for that.

  Charlie couldn’t have asked for a better mother. Amanda would raise him to greet the world with openness and optimism. So when she’d told him that his sullenness and privacy was poisoning their marriage, Walker had agreed. The stunned look in Amanda’s eyes—the painful epiphany as she realized he would not change for her—still haunted him. But she had found a path away from him, started to build a life without him, surrounding herself with friends. Last time he’d seen Charlie, his son had told him that Amanda had started dating an artist named George, who would draw the boy cartoons full of ghosts and wizards and funny animals. It hurt him to hear the fondness in his son’s voice, but it made him happy as well.

  An elbow nudged him and he glanced to his left, realizing belatedly that Kim Seong had been speaking to him. With his collar up and the thrum of the helicopter, he’d missed the words.

  “Sorry, what’s that?” He leaned toward her.

  “I said ‘if this is weather they feel safe to fly in, I’m very happy you didn’t persuade them to come up when it was snowing!’”

  “So am I.”

  He smiled as he spoke, but he had not yet decided what to make of Ms. Kim. The Korean woman made a strange and possibly unwelcome addition to this excursion. Meryam Karga and Adam Holzer had reportedly promised the Turkish government excellent coverage in the documentary and book they were working on as well as a share of earnings from those ventures, but Walker thought the adventurers must have made other promises as well, having to do with media coverage, tourism, and their willingness to accept any rules the Turks wanted to lay down.

  When Karga and Holzer were pulling their initial team together they brought in people from various nations and disciplines, and the Turks only insisted on having a pair of government underlings on site. But the moment the United States had asked to send a representative from their National Science Foundation—Walker himself—the Turkish government had decided they needed an independent observer and had appealed to the United Nations to provide one. Kim Seong was that observer. An expert on global policy, trained in international negotiation, Kim seemed a strange choice for the job, but from the moment they had met in Istanbul she had struck Walker as professional, intelligent, and most importantly, intrigued by whatever the adventurers had actually found on Ararat.

  Still, he didn’t like the idea of a babysitter, no matter how well he might get along with her.

  Walker strained at his seat belt so he could glance over his shoulder. Father Cornelius Hughes had gone as pale as the snowy crest of the mountain but gave a quick nod to indicate his general well-being. The aging priest had a deeply lined face and an air of wisdom that seemed to come from another era entirely. He was an expert on ancient civilizations and languages, but despite the priest’s academic background, Walker had been pleasantly surprised to learn that Father Cornelius had an open mind regarding the biblical story of the flood.

  Not much of a team, but if Walker had tried to bring a security officer, it might have led to the revelation that the National Science Foundation was nothing more than a decades-long facade, a placeholder name for use when the U.S. Department of Defense didn’t want anyone to know that DARPA was on the scene. Even the priest didn’t know who he worked for, and Walker sure as hell wasn’t going to tell Ms. Kim. The UN rarely approved of DARPA sniffing around without authorization, and they’d have informed the Turks, who’d have withdrawn permission for Walker to be on site.

  The mission would have been scrubbed and Walker’s superiors would not like that at all. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency had a fancy name but a relatively simple job—look into emerging science and unexplained phenomena and make absolutely certain that if it was possible someone could make a weapon out of it, the United States would be first to do so. Walker had never really liked working for DARPA—he didn’t appreciate weaponized science—but he had a lifelong fascination with mysteries both natural and unnatural, a thirst for explanation that would not be quenched. And when those things turned out to be potentially dangerous, he did prefer they be in his own government’s hands.

  Not that he trusted his superiors. It was simply a case of better-the-devil-you-know.

  “Mr. Walker!” the pilot called. “Time to move!”

  Walker turned to see the snow-covered mountain beside him, the dark mouth of the cave just below. The left side of the cave measured about forty feet in height, but it slashed down across the snowy face at a jagged, seventy-five-degree angle, down to a height of only ten or twelve feet on the right side. The copilot unstrapped himself and slipped back to join them, bent over slightly. He began unraveling a length of thick cord that Walker quickly realized was a harness.

  Kim Seong had radiated a pleasant serenity until now, but she took hold of Walker’s arm and gripped tightly. “I am not going first.”

  He steeled himself. “I wouldn’t ask it. My team, my risk.”

  “I’m sure it’s perfectly safe,” Kim quickly added.

  Walker removed his safety belt and let the copilot help him into the harness.

  The copilot slid open the door on the chopper’s left side and beckoned to him. The other man would control the winch that lowered Walker toward the mountainside, but nobody could step out that door for him.

  He tugged on the harness, let a bit of the cord play out, then turned his back on empty space before pushing off into freefall. He used his right foot, not trusting the left just then. The helicopter danced above him in a sudden terrible gusting updraft and he swung side to side in a dizzying arc before the harness cable began to play out and he found himself descending toward the mountainside.

  The cave mouth beckoned below, off to his right, and he tracked it with his eyes as he began to spin on the end of the cord.

  The wind gusted again, a blast so cold that spikes of pain shot through his skull and so hard that for several seconds he swung out like a pendulum frozen at one end of its arc. The chopper tilted along with him and then dropped twenty feet in the space between heartbeats. Walker cursed even as the wind died down and he began to descend normally once more. The cold sank into his bones, cutting through his clothes.

&nbs
p; He closed his eyes tightly, teeth bared, and then it seemed a different sort of wind swept over and through him. A sickly sensation made him shudder from something other than cold. He felt as if he’d been dipped in filth that soaked deeper into his skin by the moment. His flesh crawled with revulsion and he opened his eyes, staring about him in desperation as he spun in the harness. Below, people had come out of the cave and were waving to the helicopter pilot to swing him closer. Two figures had crept down to a spot twenty feet below the cave opening, where a kind of platform had been set up, posts sunk into the face of the mountain.

  Fear swam up inside him, worming its way into his belly, roiling there like acid and bile. He felt himself go slack. For so long he had believed himself next to fearless, but this fear bit as deeply into him as the mountain chill.

  For long seconds, he went blank. What the hell is going on?

  Then a hand grasped his ankle and he snapped his head around, on the verge of a scream until he saw the face of the man who’d grabbed him. A face he’d seen in documentaries and on the back covers of books he’d skimmed on the plane from Washington, D.C., to Istanbul.

  “Holzer,” Walker said.

  The adventurer hauled him in, unbuckling the harness as soon as Walker’s feet hit the snow-covered mountain.

  “Just ‘Adam’ is fine,” the man said, giving the harness a tug. Immediately it began to sail upward, the winch retracting the cord so that the next member of the team could descend. “You must be Dr. Walker.”

  “Just ‘Walker’ is fine.” The echo was meant to be funny, but he felt dizzy and some of that sickly feeling, the malignance that had swept over him, remained, and he worried that his introduction had come off as sneering. “It’s good to meet you.”

  Holzer—Adam—thrust out a hand. “Welcome to Mount Ararat.”

  “Don’t you mean Noah’s ark?”

  Adam’s features clouded. “Why don’t we let you decide that for yourself?”

 

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