“Is everyone a lunatic now?” Walker asked. “People are losing their minds up here.”
“Your team included,” Helen muttered. “And you’ve only been here twenty-four hours.”
Father Cornelius pulled back the plastic curtain. “I’m sorry if I caused that. But prayers are a way of purifying the space around us and it had to be done. Whatever you want to call this dead thing, from what I’ve gathered so far it was something truly wicked. Natural or supernatural doesn’t matter, really.”
“It matters to me,” Calliope said from behind the camera.
“Whatever you do, Professor Marshall—Dr. Walker—do not let Meryam move that body before the translation is completed.”
Walker, Wyn, and Helen stared at him.
Then Helen sighed. “Go and talk to Avci, Dr. Walker. If he’s unreasonable, Zeybekci may be helpful. The last thing we need is more turmoil on this project.”
Father Cornelius clutched his crucifix. “Would you like me to come along?”
Walker glanced at Wyn, who shook her head.
“I think that’s a bad idea,” she said.
Walker turned and hurried off in the direction the student had gone.
“All right, Father,” Wyn said. “Let’s get you to your quarters. Maybe you’re just overtired, but I want Dr. Dwyer to take a look at you.”
Father Cornelius didn’t argue. He dropped the plastic curtain back into place, endured the kind, concerned gazes of the three women around him, and let Wyn lead him away. But even as he left his work behind, he could feel the horned thing watching him go, could feel the pressure of its regard, the malevolence of the dark shadows that stirred in the empty orbits of its eyes. He had never believed in tangible, physical demons. Though he had trouble confessing it aloud, that had changed.
A malignant aura surrounded the cadaver, poisoned the air around it and the people who breathed that air. Father Cornelius knew the truth of it, felt it in the trembling of his hands and the sweat upon his brow.
Thank God it’s dead, he thought. Nothing but the memory of evil now.
Thank God.
TEN
Walker ran a hand through his hair, using a thumb to massage his temple. He’d had a low-level headache since waking up, and nothing that had happened so far this morning had done anything to make it go away. The current of hostility running under the surface of almost every interaction in the cave could have been ascribed to any number of origins. Most of these people had been crammed together inside the ark for weeks, unable to get truly warm or comfortable enough for a deep, restorative sleep. The Kurdish guides and workers shot one another suspicious glares, some kind of fracture within their own group. The project foreman, Hakan, seemed to hate pretty much everyone on general principle. And that whole stew of animosity existed even before they brought religion into the mix.
“This cannot happen,” Mr. Avci said, lecturing Walker like some 1950s private school headmaster. He had little rectangular glasses and a thick gray caterpillar of a mustache. The gun at his hip should have looked ridiculous on this man, but instead it seemed very much a part of his wardrobe. A part of him.
Walker knew many such men. In truth, he was such a man. His own pistol sat snugly in a holster clipped at the inside of his waistband, at the small of his back, hidden by his sweater and jacket. He’d rarely been without it since arriving on Ararat, but he wasn’t going to show it off, mainly because there would be questions and objections, and it might jeopardize his presence at the ark. As far as anyone knew, he was here for the National Science Foundation. If the Turks knew he worked for DARPA, they would pack him off home immediately.
“Should I assume that you forgot to instruct the priest that he was included on your team as a linguist and historian and not for his spiritual affinities?” Avci went on. “That you neglected to pass along our explicit instructions that no prayers or rituals were to be performed outside of private quarters, and that any claims asserting the primacy of one religion’s doctrine over any others’ would be unwelcome?”
Walker had his arms crossed, leaning back in the same chair Father Cornelius had been using to examine the broken pieces of the bitumen encasement. He glanced at the coffin lid, which still stood against the wall. Meryam had led them all down here, into the cold recesses at the back of the ark, because no one else was supposed to come here. It would be quiet, and they could shout at one another in peace.
“Something spooked him, that’s all I can say.” Walker uncrossed his arms, throwing up his hands. “Did I pass along those conditions, give him those cautions? You know I did. But come on, Avci … right now people all around the world are fighting over the idea that this might actually be Noah’s ark. Did you believe you could get this project completed without the staff doing the same?”
Avci raised his chin and stared down his nose. “Several of the Turkish archaeology students have voiced their objections. They find the presence of Father Cornelius troubling. It suggests to them that their work serves a Christian purpose as opposed to a purely archaeological one. They’ve asked that the priest be sent away.”
A harsh laugh erupted from Meryam, but she cut it off abruptly.
“Come on,” she said. “Where the hell is he supposed to go?”
The monitor’s nostrils flared as if he’d just caught wind of raw sewage. “He could go wherever your two missing workers vanished to last night, I suppose. Though I don’t guess he’s in any condition to make his way down the mountain.” Avci turned to Walker. “Remind Father Cornelius that he is here on an indulgence from my government. If he cannot manage to restrict himself to nonreligious inquiries, then you and he will both be leaving when the storm has passed.”
Avci turned on his heel and marched away, clicking on a flashlight to push back the shadows that pooled in the distances between the work lights strung along the wall.
“He’s a very angry man,” Walker said when he was gone.
Zeybekci snorted laughter and then quickly composed himself, shooting Walker an admonishing glance. “If you tell anyone I laughed at that, I’ll deny it.”
“Understood.”
Meryam smiled. “It does make us love you a little bit, though.”
Zeybecki rolled his eyes, then turned and walked to the plastic tenting around the coffin. He reached out, but his fingers hesitated, and he lowered his hand without parting the curtain.
“No matter what brand of god we believe in, I think we’d all like very much to believe that thing in there is not what it appears to be.”
Seconds ticked past as all three of them stared at the thick plastic sheeting and the dark shadows within the tent.
“I disagree,” Walker said at length, crossing his arms again and leaning back in the chair.
Zeybekci frowned. “I’m sorry?”
Meryam cocked her head. “You’re saying you want that thing to turn out to be an actual demon?”
Walker smiled. “So do you. You said so yourself. I’ve been an agnostic most of my life, but I’d be lying if I said it held no allure, the idea that something could confirm the existence of God.”
The trio went quiet again. His headache had dulled a bit, but he wanted fresher air, a blast of the storm. He intended to follow it with a couple of shots of whatever liquor he could lay his hands on, but even without the cold air and the booze, he couldn’t deny he felt a little better.
With all that had been going on, it was easy to lose focus. DARPA wanted to know what the thing in the coffin could be, if it might be something other than human. They wanted blood and tissue samples and a translation of the writing on the box. If it was inhuman in some way—monstrous, or somehow altered—they wanted him to determine if there was any way its monstrousness could be weaponized and used against them, or used by them against the enemies of the United States.
So far, Walker didn’t know what the hell he would write in a report on the ark and the horned thing in that box. He hoped Father Cornelius could keep his shit together long enough to t
ranslate it all.
He started to walk away.
Meryam called him back. “If this storm gets as bad as it’s been predicted, there’s no telling what’s going to happen in here. Supports could come down, never mind the sheeting and tents. We could have plenty of snow blowing in. The worst of it is supposed to hit by tomorrow afternoon. By then, I want our friend wrapped carefully so he can be properly preserved for transport when the storm’s over.”
Walker nodded. “Which gives us until, say, noon tomorrow before you pull him out of the box?”
“Eleven a.m. Not a moment later. And I’m assigning Professor Olivieri to work with the priest. Father Cornelius isn’t going to transcribe a line without Olivieri looking over his shoulder.”
Walker snapped off a casual salute. “Absolutely.”
She studied him a moment, as if unsure whether he was agreeing with her or mocking her. Apparently satisfied, she nodded. “Go and fetch them, then.”
* * *
Walker knelt on the floor, studying the engravings in the coffin lid even as the glare from his work light made him squint. The wood bore a series of streaks, a pattern stained into the surface of the lid. They had drawn his attention the first time he had seen them, but now he had the time to take a closer look.
“I don’t know why you’ve made this leap,” Olivieri said behind him.
Walker did not turn. Olivieri hadn’t been talking to him. The professor had been seated next to Father Cornelius—or hovering over the priest—for the past two hours, muttering his doubts and quietly haranguing the other man in a constant, irritating stream of words. But Father Cornelius kept to his word. Well aware of the dustup his earlier mental lapses and his fearful prayer over the cadaver had caused, he had vowed to cooperate with Olivieri as long as the man did not interfere with his work. Walker was there to make certain they played nicely together.
So far, that meant they hadn’t killed each other.
But there had been something other than gentle patience in Father Cornelius’s eyes when he’d given Walker his promise. His upper left eyelid had developed a tic and his gaze darted nervously about, as if he worried that something hostile might emerge from the periphery at any moment. Walker had asked him about it. Just keep me on track, Father Cornelius had said. If I start to repeat myself again, or do anything else strange, bring it to my attention immediately.
Walker had promised. And now he listened as he worked, wary of any shift in the priest’s behavior. The promise had come easily, but not without igniting a fresh spark of real fear in him, for it was clear that Father Cornelius did not trust his own mind. His own self. What could any of them trust if they could not trust themselves?
“What is this, now?” Olivieri asked dismissively. “You cannot simply invent syntax in a language you have never encountered before. I agree that this grouping is quite likely to mean ‘days of rain,’ and this to mean ‘darkness,’ but logic suggests this symbol translates to something like ‘eternity’ or ‘infinity’—”
“Hittite language provides variable syntax,” Father Cornelius said patiently, “and they are cousins. Surely you see that. The translation is not ‘many endless days of rain.’ Why add ‘many’ to modify something ‘endless’ or ‘infinite?’ The author is telling us that the skies delivered many days of rain, and these were summoned to wash away an infinite darkness.”
Olivieri swore loudly and pushed back in his chair. “And again I say, you cannot invent syntax! Your interpretation is nothing but guesswork! You read the message you want to find here!”
“It isn’t invention, Professor Olivieri,” the priest said quietly, almost sadly. His voice wavered. “It’s intuition. In our line of work, it’s sometimes all we have. Scribble down your own translations and I’ll do the same with mine. Other eyes will examine them both in time, and they will decide which of us is right.”
Olivieri gave a huff. “I was brought into this project for my expertise. You were brought here as a courtesy. My notes will be the official opinion of the Ark Project.”
“How nice for you,” the priest said with a twitch of his upper lip. “Can we get back to work, please? We waste time bickering.”
Olivieri fumed, clearly trying to find a legitimate way to continue the mostly one-sided argument. When he could not invent one, at least at the moment, he shook his head and began furiously scribbling notes on a pad, half turned away from the priest as though he thought Father Cornelius might copy his answers on a middle school math test.
Walker smiled to himself, despite the ache in his skull. Father Cornelius seemed entirely himself, now. Troubled, yes, but not in the midst of any kind of mental crisis.
He focused again on his work, and his smile faded. The cold seeped up through the angled floor beneath him, emanating from the timbers as if the mountain were itself the icy heart of winter.
Flexing his fingers inside his thin gloves, Walker picked up the small scalpel he’d been using and reached into his kit for a tiny, plastic, sample container. Careful not to damage the engraving on the lid, he dug into the wood where one of those streaks seemed darkest. He carved a sliver, then another in the same spot, surprised at how deep into the wood the stain had spread.
Setting the scalpel down, he capped the container and held it up, staring at those two slivers. They’d come from the outside of the lid, not the inside, so they weren’t stains from the bodily fluids of the cadaver.
He suspected they were bloodstains, but if that proved true, it meant the blood splashed across the lid had come from someone who’d helped close it, or cover it in thick bitumen paste. Walker knew it was a mystery he could never possibly unravel, but it troubled him almost as much as the way Kim had gone briefly off the rails yesterday, or the way Father Cornelius had suffered some kind of cognitive slippage this morning. It suggested that violence had been erupting around the horned thing’s remains from the moment it had been sealed into that box.
DARPA would love it. But they would want to know why and how.
“What are you doing now?” Olivieri sighed behind him. “You can’t use four different languages as the basis for a translation.”
Walker turned in time to see the hard glare in Father Cornelius’s eyes, and the way the priest’s lips trembled before he finally allowed himself to speak.
“No, professor. You can’t. And that is the real problem here, isn’t it? Oh, certainly you understand bits and pieces of what I’m unraveling, but can we both just admit that you’re out of your depth?”
Walker winced.
Olivieri stood, knocking over his chair. “You arrogant bastard. I have spent decades lecturing on the finest details of ancient language. My studies of biblical history are the basis for hundreds of university classes in more than twenty countries. How can you—”
Father Cornelius set his pen down onto his open notebook and stared up at Olivieri, not bothering to stand. “Your greatest skill is in rearranging information others have provided so that you can better communicate it to those less informed and less accomplished than yourself.”
Walker hung his head, expecting Olivieri to explode in fury. When only silence ensued, he cocked one eye open and saw the professor fuming, dumbfounded, shaking his head slowly as he took one step backward.
Olivieri turned and strode away so quickly that he seemed to draw a gust of air into his wake. Walker watched him storm off and then turned to Father Cornelius.
The priest brushed at the air as if to wave him away. “I know what you’re going to say.”
“You were supposed to play nice.”
Father Cornelius’s face darkened, brows knitting so tightly they made him look like a bird of prey. “You’re not the one to instruct me on the subject of playing nice. Kim is here to do her job, just like you, but you’ve treated her like an intruder since we all met.”
“Can I help it if I don’t like having a babysitter?”
The priest’s glare darkened further, a hawk intent upon his prey. “Sh
e’s only a babysitter if you insist on behaving like a baby. She’s a professional, here to observe on behalf of the rest of the world. Don’t begrudge her that. In your words, play nice. One would have thought that surviving the ruin of your marriage would have taught you something about how to treat other people.”
Walker’s mouth dropped open. “What?”
“I’m talking about Amanda.”
“Jesus Christ, I know my own ex-wife’s name,” Walker said, shaking his head, feeling as if he’d just taken a hard blow. “Who the hell do you think you are?”
Father Cornelius still did not rise. “I’m your colleague and I suspect the closest thing you have to a friend within four thousand miles of here. You’re so lost in your own head that you can never see the needs of those around you. Change your approach to Kim, and when you get home, make peace with your former wife. Set an example for your son.”
Walker drew a hitching breath that turned into a soft laugh of disbelief. The words cut him, but the mention of his boy, Charlie, stabbed deep, twisted the knife. He knew that Father Cornelius hadn’t been himself today, that something had been troubling them all … haunting them. But the dull ache in his skull flared into a bright, suffocating pain and he felt anger uncoil inside him like a viper defending its nest. Twisting and uncontrollable.
“Hey, Father?” he said, jaw tight, fist clenched.
“Listen, Ben—”
“Go fuck yourself.”
Shaking, Walker turned and left him there, not caring what Meryam would say about broken promises or about the priest having unfettered access to the cadaver and the box and encasement. What harm could the old man do? Better that he be left to his work, tonight. Better that he spend his time with a corpse.
He sure as hell wasn’t fit to be in the company of the living.
ELEVEN
Walker missed music. He stood outside his tent in the stall and wondered how he could feel so exposed and so claustrophobic at the same time. Earbuds would have given him privacy, let him listen to the playlist of ’80s alt rock that always calmed him, but he didn’t want to block out other sounds. The only sound was the wind blowing through the ark’s upper passages, like the tide rolling in, but he didn’t trust the quiet. Didn’t trust the night. Not with people on such a ragged edge, not with two people vanishing last night. Yes, they’d probably abandoned the project, but what if they hadn’t?
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