Ararat

by Christopher Golden

  Kim nodded sagely. “Yes, and there are always those who would like nothing better than to make a fortune thanks to the ignorance of others.”

  Walker knew she was right, but as he went to the ladder, took the handrail, and started down, he couldn’t get the deep crease in Olivieri’s brow out of his mind. There were millions of religious fanatics in the world, but Olivieri was a biblical scholar. Walker had encountered the arrogance of the faithful many times, but what he’d seen from Olivieri just now hadn’t been judgment or disapproval.

  That had been fear.

  SIX

  As Walker descended the ladder, he encountered a stale odor that made him wrinkle his nose. Something like rust. When he passed through the second level and down to the first, the now-familiar twist of nausea returned to his gut but he breathed evenly and told himself the power of suggestion had gotten into his subconscious. If so, it had deep roots there.

  “What is that smell?” he heard Kim ask, below him.

  Meryam admitted they didn’t know, without bothering to offer a theory. In the wordless seconds that followed, Walker marveled at that. People like Adam and Meryam never seemed to be at a loss for theories. As unwelcome as he and his team might be, Walker decided KHAP needed them. New eyes, new ideas.

  The ladder ended in what could only be one of the rear corners of the ark. A plastic tent had been erected, opaque sheets that blocked out a space that seemed to be a fifteen-foot square. Lights flickered and the plastic sheeting flapped in the draft that whistled through the timbers and along the several passages that seemed to end here. A generator hummed, but most of the lights it powered were inside the plastic sheeting.

  “Weather conditions on the mountain are deteriorating quickly,” Adam said. He made a slow sweep of the faces around him with his camera as he spoke. “The deeper into the winter we get, the more dangerous it’s going to be to move people and materials up and down. The temperature gets unpredictable. There’s a storm on the way, but up here the wind can make it much worse. We’d like to get this all packed up and preserved before that storm arrives in full.”

  “We get it,” Walker said. “No worries.”

  Adam glanced worriedly at Meryam. Hesitant.

  Father Hughes sighed audibly. “If you don’t mind, Mr. Holzer, we didn’t come all this way to stare at plastic.”

  Meryam turned to the camera. “For the record, Adam and I know Dr. Walker and Father Cornelius Hughes by reputation, but we’ve never met them before.”

  Walker smiled at her. “What, you’re worried people will think we’re all part of some kind of conspiracy?”

  “I’m not worried at all,” Meryam said. “I am absolutely certain of it. There are people who still think the film of astronauts walking on the moon was staged.”

  Kim gave a soft laugh. “It’s not like we’re on the moon.”

  Meryam pulled back the plastic curtain. “It’s a little bit like that, actually.”

  Walker stepped toward the open curtain. He heard Father Cornelius speak his name but he shook his head, as if the priest’s voice were a fly buzzing at his ear. That low hum seemed to build up inside his skull, a vibration in his bones. He almost asked the others if they felt it, too—almost asked Meryam and Adam if it might be the whole mountain trembling, precursor to a quake—but then he felt fine beads of sweat pop out on his skin and a terrible prickling sensation, like the legs of a hundred insects alighting on him.

  “What the hell?” he muttered, pausing just outside the plastic sheeting.

  “Yeah,” Meryam agreed. “We know.”

  She had turned pale, a jaundiced yellow cast to her skin.

  Father Cornelius took Walker by the elbow. The priest had a sheen of sweat on his own forehead but his grip was strong.

  “We mustn’t hesitate,” Father Cornelius said.

  Walker agreed. They had come a long way to see the one discovery that the Karga-Holzer team had done their best to keep under wraps. KHAP was a Turkish, American, and British co-venture, with backing from museums and the financiers of the documentary. But so far the handful of people in various governments who had seen the report and the short bit of video KHAP had sent about the “sarcophagus” agreed on only one thing—nobody was to discuss it. Not until they had some answers.

  Superstitious bullshit, Ben thought. But it was a superstitious world.

  “Walker,” Kim said, “perhaps you should…”

  He had one hand on the plastic sheeting. The prickling on his skin had begun to subside, though the knot of nausea remained, along with that buzzing in his skull. Walker glanced at Kim.

  “You coming?” he asked, thinking it strange that she hung so far back, still practically still on the bottom rung of the ladder. The UN had sent her to observe.

  Kim nodded.

  “Then come on,” he said, and pushed through the opening in the plastic. Father Cornelius followed, though Walker didn’t need his aid now. Meryam came in after them and the light of Adam’s camera gleamed behind her, adding to the antiseptic, industrial yellow glare of the work lights. Walker felt that vibrating in his teeth and realized what it must be—the generators.

  Just a rattle from the generators. That made him feel better. Comfortable.

  He started to exhale as he studied the ancient wooden box that lay near the wall ahead of him. Broken pieces of bitumen pitch lay on the ground around it like thick shards of black glass, and he remembered the glossy charms on leather cords around the necks of the cadavers Professor Marshall had been working on. They’d been shards of bitumen. Walker stared at the hardened bitumen shell around the coffin, then studied the symbols engraved into the visible wood, at the way they seemed to shift and flow in the sickly yellow light. The insect legs crawled all over his skin again, mostly at the back of his neck, and he wiped a hand across his mouth.

  Forcing himself forward, he looked down into the box.

  The corpse seemed like a pitiful thing, a bit of fakery created for a low-budget horror film. His mind wanted to interpret it that way, to perceive the wrongness of the thing as absurd instead of monstrous. But as his mind began to take it in, he knew the remains were anything but fake. He’d seen monsters before. Inhuman didn’t mean impossible, didn’t mean evil. Walker had to remind himself of that.

  The fingers were inhumanly long, curved into hooks by the millennia it had spent dead in that box. The skin stretched tight over its chest had a purplish-gray hue. It had withered, and there were spots in which the flesh had caved in. Bone showed through in various places on its skull and one cheek had crumbled to dust. The eyes had sunken to dried berries in its head.

  The horns were pale, dusty white, like ivory elephant tusks dulled by age. Six or seven inches in length, the two points jutted from indentations just above its eyes. One had a broken tip, jagged as splintered stone, and both bore a gentle outward curve. The cadaver’s skull was misshapen, bulging outward at the top and too pointed in the jaw. In life, it would have been a very odd-looking man. Ugly, even.

  If it had been a man.

  Farther back in the plastic tent, Kim made a small noise in her throat. She’d begun to breathe in short gasps, on the verge of some kind of panic attack.

  “Kim, do you want to step back out?” he asked, trying to disguise his disappointment. He’d expected more professionalism from her.

  She said something in Korean, then seemed to remember none of them spoke her language. “Does anyone hear that?” she said in English.

  Walker tamped down his own nerves, forced himself to ignore the prickling of his skin. He glanced again at the horns on the corpse in the box, then at the long, thin, jagged teeth, yellowed by time but stained a dark brown in places. Whatever it was, they weren’t going to be able to fully identify it until they got it off the mountain.

  “What do you think?” Adam asked.

  Walker sighed. The plastic sheeting rippled with a gust of wind that traveled all the way through the ruin of the ark. Despite the breeze, the a
ir felt thick and close, suffocating. “What I think is that you never should’ve opened it outside of a controlled environment.”

  Meryam stiffened. “As far as we were concerned, this was a controlled environment. The other remains on the ark had been exposed for days before we arrived and they are in the condition they’re in. We had no reason to expect—”

  Father Cornelius pushed past Walker and strode up to the box. Bitumen crunched under the priest’s boots as he got his first good look at the cadaver. For a moment he appeared to hold his breath, then he faltered. He slipped a hand into his jacket pocket and came out with a full rosary twined around his fingers, kissed it, and began to whisper a prayer that came as naturally to the man as breathing.

  Walker sighed. “Father, come on. I asked you along on this jaunt because I expect more from you than that. You’re a scholar, not some prehistoric shaman.”

  The priest held up a finger to hush him, muttering the last few lines of the Hail Mary. Then he shot Walker a grim stare. “Better safe than sorry. Which is the reason I’m glad they opened the box up here on the mountain.”

  “You think this thing’s going to rise from the dead and go on a rampage?” Walker asked. He glanced again at the horns, the dry, leathery skin at their bases, where they jutted from the cadaver’s forehead. “You really think you’re looking at a…”

  He left the last word unspoken. Sweat dried on his skin, beginning to itch. They both knew the word Walker had avoided.

  “You think that’s impossible?” Father Cornelius said. “I certainly do not. But even assuming this is just some deformity, there are other concerns. The body is better preserved than the other remains. It could be rife with diseases we’re not ready to treat. A coffin, yes, but it could be a Pandora’s box.” He glanced at Adam. “Don’t mistake me, it was borderline idiocy to open the box here, no matter how excited you or your documentary producers might be about the moment of discovery. But better to do it wrong here than wrong somewhere more civilized.”

  When Meryam spoke next, it was to the camera. If she needed to defend her actions, Walker knew, it was to her audience and not her present company.

  “Initially we had planned to wait for Dr. Walker’s team from the National Science Foundation before we opened the tomb. We photographed all of the symbols engraved on the exterior, removed and preserved the bitumen casing in pieces as large as possible. In doing so, some of the pitch used to seal the lid to the coffin broke away, and…”

  Meryam smiled shyly, working the camera, knowing the audience would be on her side because she had given them what they wanted.

  “Curiosity got the better of us,” she confessed, finally turning that shy smile toward Walker and Father Cornelius. “We sealed off the area and only select members of our staff have been inside the tenting. Yes, we removed the lid and took samples of the wood, but no one has touched the body itself. We took what precautions were available to us. Can you honestly say you wouldn’t have opened it yourself, Dr. Walker? With some of the seal breaking away?”

  What could he say on camera? Of course he would have opened it, but he had years of experience in the field. Saying so would make him look like an arrogant, condescending prick. He didn’t care about alienating the eventual viewers of this documentary, but he couldn’t afford to alienate Meryam and Adam. Not if he wanted their cooperation.

  “We all get carried away sometimes,” he said to the camera. “Even without something like Noah’s ark coming into the conversation.”

  The entire gathering seemed to hold its breath.

  “You’re saying you do believe this is Noah’s ark?” Adam asked from behind the camera.

  Shit. “Nothing of the kind. Noah’s ark makes a good fable and the inspiration for some fun children’s toys. Whoever built this ship, he wasn’t called Noah.”

  Father Cornelius turned toward Adam. “Now turn your camera off, boy, and let’s get down to business.”

  “This is my business,” Adam replied coolly, focused on the priest’s face for a response.

  “Walker,” Kim said, her voice a soft rasp.

  He turned toward her, but she wasn’t looking at him. Her gaze had locked on the coffin, on whatever part of the cadaver she could see from fifteen feet away. Her whole body trembled, but what troubled him the most was the look of gutting despair on her face. Not fear or panic, but grief. Sorrow so deep it pained him to look at her.

  “What is it?” he asked, taking a step toward her.

  “No!” she snapped, throwing her hands up, still not looking his way.

  Father Cornelius began speaking to her in quiet tones, the kind of soul comfort that he’d been trained throughout his adult life to offer those in pain. Kim squirmed where she stood, twisting as if trying to escape an unwelcome embrace, though no one had touched her.

  “What the hell is this?” Meryam whispered.

  Adam said nothing, but he caught it all on film. Walker wanted to slap the camera out of his hands.

  “Come on,” Walker said, moving toward her. “Let’s get you out of here. I understand this is a lot to take in. I promise, it isn’t what it looks like. But there’s no reason you need to be in here while we’re—”

  He reached for her arm, wondering how the UN had chosen a representative who would fall apart like this. Kim began to shake her head, mumbling refusals as she backed away, pushing into the plastic sheeting behind her.

  “Walker, wait,” Father Cornelius said.

  The buzzing hit him again, the vibration inside his skull. His guts churned and suddenly he’d had enough of this circus. He reached out and grabbed Kim by her wrists, trying to pull her away from the plastic sheet.

  A scream tore from her throat and she ripped free of him. She staggered backward, endless despair in those eyes, and then she bolted, dragging the plastic around her, pulling one corner of the makeshift tent down. The others began shouting as Walker put his hands out, batting the plastic away. He shrugged off the suffocating layer just in time to see Kim running into darkness.

  “Crazy bitch,” Meryam muttered, trying to prop up the fallen corner of the tent.

  Walker swore, racing into darkness as he snapped a flashlight off his belt and clicked it on. Around a corner, he passed the same sort of storage or animal stalls he’d seen elsewhere. Kim lunged through the beam of his torch, banged into a wall, and then whipped past a heavy blanket that must have been hung up by the KHAP team.

  Pushing through, Walker found himself in a long, rising passage along the western wall. He raced along, finding himself fighting a frigid headwind. Voices cried out up ahead. He bent forward, scaling the incline of the ark’s broken deck, and moved around support beams that had been put in place only recently.

  “Kim!” Walker shouted, knowing it was useless and feeling foolish. Despite whatever had driven her to run, his voice would not be the thing that soothed her.

  He clicked off his flashlight. There were plenty of work lights ahead. The chase Kim had led them on had brought him back to the place he’d been standing not long ago, where Helen Marshall and a few others were working to uncover and preserve the remains of three of the ark’s passengers. The British archaeologist knelt on the ground as if to protect the bones of the long dead, but the others had backed away.

  They were all watching Kim.

  She had gone to the door—the door pinned against the mountain, the door that could provide no exit—and was scratching at it, digging her fingernails into the ancient wood just as these dead people had done thousands of years before. She kept whispering to herself, the same words over and over. Though Walker didn’t speak Korean, he knew the word for “please.” That was one of them.

  He had an inkling of what those other words might be, but only when he had approached Kim and carefully laid a hand on her shoulder, only when he had knelt beside her and gathered her against him for a moment, only when she had reached out with her left hand and continued digging into the wood and finally whispered those words t
o him in English, could he finally be certain.

  “Please,” she whispered, gazing at him with that bottomless sorrow.

  “Please let me out.”

  SEVEN

  Meryam climbed the reinforced stairs that led up to the ark’s third level. As much as she had fancied herself a knowledgeable woman prior to this discovery, she had learned a great deal in the three weeks since she and Adam had made the climb, and she was still learning. The timbers were an array of different woods, from oak to pine to juniper that would have had to be imported if the ark had been built anywhere in this region.

  What most fascinated her about the ship’s construction was that it had been stitched or lashed together with woven cords, the seams filled with reeds and grass and then painted over with a hardening resin and patched with bitumen. They’d snatched Helen Marshall away from teaching classes at Oxford and Meryam milked her for information every couple of days. Same with Wynyfred Douglas, the American who was essentially second-in-command to Helen, the two of them overseeing the motley crew of graduate students from three countries.

  The trio—Meryam, Helen, and Wyn—would gather and discuss any new findings on camera, with Meryam seeming much better informed than she was thanks to having been prepped in advance. She had never seen herself as a TV presenter, but in some ways, that was what she had become.

  As exhausted as she felt, the thrill of their discovery had not abated. Word had already gotten out, and there was no question that the world understood the importance of this project. People were fighting about it across the globe, debating, arguing, and in more than one case actually coming to blows over the truth of the ancient ship that formed the cave around them.

  The word impossible seemed popular. Even if one accepted that the entire region had once endured a flood event that lasted long enough and was pervasive enough to sweep across hundreds of miles, or even thousands, there was one fact that only the very religious seemed ready to embrace. Unless someone had picked up an ocean and temporarily relocated it, no flood could have brought waters so high that the ark would have been lifted four thousand meters up the mountainside.