by Nick Pollota
Standing in the rectangle of sunlight, I could see a nearby iron wall bracket for holding torches, sans any torches. Oh well. Twisting the lens on my flashlight to its widest aperture, the bright beam illuminated the vast expanse of the dim room; floor, walls and ceiling made of seamless flecked stone. Seamless. Wonder how they did that trick?
“Clear,” I announced.
In brisk order, the rest of the team followed inside. The last to enter, George put an unbreakable Bureau pocket comb in the jamb and let the door close partially.
Except for us, the place was empty, the only thing of interest was the rear wall neatly lined with metal plates. Coffin niche covers. Four by twenty five, an even hundred. The place more resembled a morgue than a mausoleum. We turned our attention to the niches. Donaher took guard by the door. Desecrating graves was a bit beyond the call of duty for a priest.
Getting in was easier than expected. The wall plates were held in place by four bolts, easily removable. The coffin in the niche slid out on grease caked rollers. But it took three of us, each using a small crowbar, to remove the lid. Centuries underwater had sealed the coffin tight. Success came with the sound of splintering wood and the lid crashed to the floor.
Laying inside was a human skeleton, its broken fingers embedded in the wooded lid, stained shavings hanging in mute testimony of the occupants last frantic struggle. Underneath the poor unfortunate was the cracked bones of who-knows how many others. Why the casket had been so easy to breach was now explained. Somebody used it over and over again. This wasn't a graveyard, or a place of execution, but a torture chamber. PIs are by nature peaceful fellows, but I was beginning to think a brisk radioactive bath was just what this stinking rat hole needed. Being buried alive. It was my secret nightmare.
“Father!” I called.
At once, Donaher was nearby, his shotgun searching for danger. “Trouble?” he asked.
“Yes and no. Can you lay an entire building full of dead folks to rest?”
He blinked. “At the same time?”
I nodded.
“Certainly. But why?”
We explained and as he glanced into the coffin, his face took on an expression of such unbridled fury that I nearly felt pity for the people who did this abomination. Nearly.
As the only other Catholic in the group, I got to play altar boy for the ceremony. Donning the purple sash of his church, Donaher read a brief ecumenical ceremony from his pocket bible, the words sounding large and important in the gloomy still. When he finished, we chorused amen. Instantly, a thumping could be heard, a banging within the mausoleum walls. Oh crap.
Rapidly, the pounding built until the building shook and we fought to stay erect. The bolts holding on the wall plates rattled free and rained to the floor. Then the plates dropped and beams of blinding light erupted from within the coffins. There was no time to head for the door. I only hoped what we had accidentally unleashed was benign, or killable. An explosion of wind roared from the niches to batter us backwards and whip our clothes with stinging force. But not Donaher. He alone stood calm and unruffled in a hurricane of screaming wind. Violently, the door to the outside slammed open, and the tempest of force and noise faded into the distance.
In the ensuing still, the bronze door slowly closed.
“What the hell was that?” I asked, my voice sounding incredibly loud in the sudden silence.
“Ghosts,” George said in a tone that made me pivot in a fighting crouch.
Floating above the coffin was a young woman. A vision in white, the lovely apparition was only a glowing torso, the long folds of her flowing gown fluttering where her legs should be, the atmosphere now scented with the honey sweet smell of fresh ectoplasm.
Nobody was frightened. A ghost was no big deal. We had one in the cellar of our apartment building that regularly stole the sports section out of the newspaper and ordered out for pizza.
“Beware” she spoke in a hushed whisper, the words echoing slightly.
In my opinion, a warning was a bad way to start a conversation. Of course, we could understand her, despite that fact she had died eons before English was developed. Ghost are strange that way. Anybody they talk to hears them in the listener's native tongue. I always got mine in Spanish and George in French, even though he barely spoke the language. Born in Paris, when he was two years old his folks moved to Ohio. Drove him crazy. He spent two months learning French so he could speak to the dead. Welcome to the Bureau.
“Beware of what, my child?” Father Donaher asked gently.
She drifted closer to him, the tendrils of her flowing garment moving without hindrance through the coffin. “The masters...”
We had already deduced a slave culture here, so this was hardly news.
“Free lady,” I said oozing charm. “What transpired here?”
Either she didn't hear me, or didn't want to tell me, so Donaher repeated the question.
She gave a ghostly sigh. “One dark night ... while they slept ... we stole their magic,” she spoke, her gaze lost in memory. “And ordered the sky to sink the land ... we succeeded ... and yet failed ... for our masters are not dead, only sleeping ... even now they struggle to waken ... to once more taint the world ... with their reign of blood and pain...”
Basked in the unearthly illumination, Father Donaher asked, “Child, what must we do?”
A transparent hand caressed his unflinching cheek. “Stop them if you can,” the spirit whispered. “Stop the island from rising...”
“How?” I asked impatiently. Damn long-winded ghosts never get to the point.
“How?” Donaher repeated.
But she was starting to fade, her time on earth finished. “...to the north is a tunnel ... look for the broken statue...”
“The broken statue of what?”
As if to implore us, the vanishing woman raised her hands. “Find the new magic ... steal it ... destroy it ... An Lan-dus must not rise ... !”
Then in a flicker of light, the room darkened and the ghostly image was gone.
ELEVEN
It was an odd pronunciation, but we still knew what she meant.
“Ann Landis?” George asked, scratching his head. “Wasn't she a movie actress in the ‘60s?”
I turned to Mindy. “You're closer, you hit him.”
Smack!
“She meant Atlantis, knucklehead,” Father Donaher explained, removing the purple sash from his neck, neatly rolling it and placing the religious accouterment into his pack.
“Oh,” George said. “I thought the island-state was supposed to be in the Mediterranean Sea, over by Greece.”
“So it moved,” Mindy snorted rudely. “Big deal.”
Richard snapped his fingers. “Hey, didn't that guy on the beach have a Greek dictionary?”
Without a word, Father Donaher produced the volume from his jacket pocket. Thumbing through the volume showed it was not modern day Greek, but in Hellenic. Ancient Greek.
“How did they know?” Donaher mused.
The reason hit me like a punch in the spleen. “They're the new source of magic!”
After so many years of trying, Satan Department had finally found a way to conqueror the world and destroy the Bureau. The details could be worked out later, at the moment all that mattered was we made damn sure they failed. Unfortunately, everybody in the place was bare bones, no hands to borrow. Our only course of action was to try this mysterious tunnel.
I dug a compass from my equipment belt. North was towards the garbage dump. Best place for a broken statue.
“Double time,” I snapped. “Five meter spread. I'm on point, Richard take the rear.”
Leaving the cemetery, we moved through the line of trees to the far side of the dump. There we found something else not shown on the map in the pavilion, a sort of military encampment.
A stainless steel picket fence some thirty meters tall surrounded the place, the top of the barrier strung with wire supported by glassy knobs. Electrified wire, without a do
ubt. An ornate double gate, slightly ajar, fronted the fence. Plus, the gateway was bracketed by a pair of giant purple crabs resting on marble stands, their claws raised as if to do battle. The team exchanged puzzled looks. Purple crabs the size of a school bus? These folks either had strange taste in decorations, or some really bizarre sea life around here.
Using binoculars, I gave the place a fast once over. Filling the encampment were row upon row of iron bar cages, some large, some small, a few on stilts, others in sunken pits. Hmm. There was easily a hundred cages little more than piles of rust and quite a few of the standing cages had broken doors, the metal framework hanging loosely from twisted hinges.
“It's a freaking zoo,” I declared, lowering the binoculars.
Mindy pocketed her own field glasses. “Agreed. Well, this certainly explains the weird monsters.”
“Why a monster zoo?” George asked, around a fresh stick of gum. “Doesn't make any sense.”
“Zoos never make any sense,” Jessica retorted angrily.
Glumly, Richard shook his head. “No, George has a good point. What was its purpose? This island is hardly designed for the tourist trade.”
“Maybe it was a sanctuary for endangered species,” I offered. “Or a kind of wildcard defense against invaders.” But both ideas sounded pretty lame.
“It could have been a quarantine pen for pets,” Mindy added.
George jerked a thumb. “Pets that required those kind of restraints?”
“Okay, maybe not,” she relented.
“Excuse me,” Father Donaher hesitantly spoke. “But wasn't there a coliseum sort of building inside the town?”
I scowled. That raised a few chilling possibilities. The old Christian-and-lions routine had occurred in the decadent period of ancient Rome just prior to the collapse of the empire. Maybe the same scenario was played here, with some magical Nero fiddling away while the island sank into the ocean? Sure fit the psychological profile of “The Masters.”
Thoughtfully, Richard munched on a thumbnail. “If it is for the coliseum, then there might be an underground transport system for moving the animals that we can use to gain entrance to the city.”
That's my wizard. Always thinking.
“Must be what the ghost was talking about,” I said. “Let's go.”
Thoughtfully, Donaher ran a hand over his endless forehead. “Okay, how do we get in?”
“Something wrong with the front gate?” I asked.
“What about the Cancer twins?” Mindy said, fingering the hilt of her sword. “With explosives banned, how are we supposed to take them out? Drown them in our blood?”
“Bah, I'll use a medium grade sleep spell,” Richard said, twirling his staff like a majorette's baton.
“Nonsense, a dose of BZ gas will do the trick,” George said confidently, tapping a military gas canister. “That'll have them so confused they may start dancing with each other, or order out for Chinese.” Good ol’ BZ gas was the unofficial party favor of the US Army.
“There are no detectable organic components,” Jess said, scrunching her forehead. “They must be either statues, or robots.”
That stopped conversation for a second.
“Either could be the broken statue,” Mindy whispered, notching an arrow to the bow.
“Interesting,” Donaher said. “But if robots, programmed to do what, I wonder? Greet guests, or repel invaders?”
Jacking the cover on his mammoth assault rifle, George checked the indicators. Even from a meter away, I could see the digital display said 14,000 rounds remaining in the mammoth weapon.
“Who cares?” George announced confidently, sliding the cover to the former position. “We can take them easy.”
“Barbarian,” Richard admonished. “Why not just walk past the things first and if that fails, try talking?”
None of us could really find a flaw in that plan.
“Well, Ed?” Donaher asked, extending a palm ahead of the group.
I shrugged. “A short life, but a merry one.” Experimentally, I rustled a bush to see what would happen. Nothing did. In attack formation, we exited the shrubbery and slowly approached the zoo, our boots silent on the fresh green grass. Keeping a careful watch on the crabs, our weapons at the ready, we came abreast and then passed beneath the towering crustaceans. At one point, I could have sworn that I heard a metallic creak, but neither seemed to have moved, so maybe it was only my imagination. Hope, hope, hope.
Moving through the dusty paths of the zoo, we gave the timeworn cages a cursory inspection. The place was spartan to the point of being crude. This was definitely no entertainment complex. Reminded me more of a prison. Chains and locks were everywhere, more than seemed necessary. The bars of the cages were barbed on the inside and the sanitary facilities were painfully obvious. The things in the cages were mostly skeletons covered with stripes of fur or bits of scale. However, a few were fully composed, merely desiccated corpses and a couple whole and alive.
Nasty hairy things, with a jointed proboscis and stiff wings, sort of like a cross between a bat and a vacuum cleaner. Strange that the animals were reviving, but no people yet. Slaves, or masters. Where were the damn inhabitants?
“Yuck,” Richard said, curling a lip. “Mosquitoes.”
I blinked. By gad, he was correct. A hairy black mosquito. Warily, I stepped closer and that was when I noticed something odd on the floor of the cage. Took me a second to identify it, and when I did, the world became very quiet.
“Something wrong?” Mindy asked stepping close, her sword drawn.
“Let's kill all of these things before they finish healing and do a mass escape,” I said, checking the clip in my pistol.
“What? Why?” demanded Jessica confused.
Using the barrel of my weapon, I pointed. Laying scattered in the dirty rubbish of the cage were numerous bones, the top most clearly a human leg bone. Aside from the skull, the femur was the most easily identifiable piece of our skeleton.
The telepath gasped and I nodded.
“Bureau regulation #43,” Father Donaher quoted, working the slide on his shotgun. “If any non-sentient creature has consumed human flesh it is regarded as too dangerous to let live and must be exterminated.”
As a priest, Michael had very definite opinions on such matters. He never used his weapon on a live human. That would be murder. But blowing away monsters and hellspawn, Donaher considered a holy chore, and one he performed with relish.
“How do you know they're non-sentient?” Jess demanded.
It was a valid question that George answered by rattling the cage door. “These locks would stop a 400 pound gorilla, but not a twelve year old child.”
“Agreed,” Richard said, the tip of his staff already starting to glow with power. “That thing this morning was only an animal. The sole reason it got the drop on me was ... um...”
“It caught you with your pants down,” Mindy supplied.
He almost smiled. “Literally.”
Trying to cover every possibility, I exchanged the clip in my gun, for another in the belt ammo pouch. “A silver bullet in the head apiece should do the job.”
“Want me to gather some wood and hammer a stake through their hearts?” George offered, pausing to blow a bubble.
“Too time consuming. We're on a tight schedule. But as a fillip, lets wire the front gate with Willy Peter just in case something survives.”
Willy Peter, aka, white phosphorus, wasn't as hot as thermite, but it spread better and could fry anything this side of a cyborg whale. Now those babies are hard to kill.
“A Crispy Critter special, coming up,” George smiled, pulling wire and things from his shoulder pouch.
Mindy assumed a guard position while the man got to work. “The smoke will draw attention,” she reminded.
“Pressure switch,” George said connecting a wire to a battery. “Won't detonate unless the gate is moved.”
“How long?” I asked.
“Take me five min
utes.”
“Check.”
While the soldier prepared to rig the incendiary charge, the rest of us started moving systematically along the cages, our pistols coughing silver slugs into anything that resembled a head. Sometimes it took three or four shots to make sure we got the braincase.
The team separated to expedite things. There was little danger, we could easily see each other through the assembly of bars. Moving steadily along, I turned into an alleyway boasting a cage large enough to hold a flying elephant. In fact, I was actually wondering if it did, when the ground crumbled at my feet and I started to fall. Dropping my rifle, I made a desperate leap for the iron bars, but failed miserably.
Darkness swallowed me whole.
TWELVE
Plummeting out of control, I yelled. Who wouldn't have? Shouting and cursing has never slowed me down a bit and I guess it never will, yet still I try.
Attempting to angle myself vertical in case I could grab something, my weighty backpack pulled me over and I fell facing the dark top of the earthen shaft. As there was little else to do, I forced my muscles to go limp. Mindy taught it helped saved bones when you hit ground.
But it was a net of some kind that caught me, the strands stretching deep with the force of my drop. As the snare contracted, I tried to ride the forthcoming recoil upwards and land on my feet, but the net came with me and for a while I simply bounced up and down until the undulations ceased and I was still.
A dim luminescence pervaded the dark and faintly I could see that I was sprawled on a giant spider's web. Hoo boy, in spades.
With icy calm, I struggled to free myself, but nothing moved except my left arm, from the elbow down. Every finger of my right hand stuck to the web and no matter how hard I pulled the skin would not come loose from the resinous strands.
Craning my neck, which painfully pulled some hair free, I could see my rifle was dangling about ten feet away. Damn.
Waitaminute, my bracelet! What did I have? Flame Blast? Force Blade? Ah, no. I had Invisibility. Swell. Guess it had sounded like a good idea at the time. Unfortunately, it wouldn't do spit against a spider. They saw in the ultra-violet spectrum. It would spot me in a hot second.