Moon Mask

by James Richardson

  Behind the carnage, Agent Jones skidded the black SUV to a halt while beside him, and for miles behind, hundreds of other vehicles did the same. Within moments, Interstate 83 was gridlocked. Car horns echoed and angry voices shouted out, indignant about the sudden halt to their journeys home.

  “Did you see that?” Tomskin asked beside him. Glancing at his subordinate, Jones noted the younger man’s face had lost its colour as he stared ahead. All in all, there were about a dozen vehicles that had been caught up with Emmett Braun’s death, the wrecked hulks of cars, trucks and buses belching smoke into the sunset.

  “Of course I bloody saw it,” Jones snapped without sympathy. He clambered out of the SUV and headed towards the remains of Braun’s rental car. Tomskin had the good sense to follow.

  Emergency sirens wailed as the first responders battled through the gridlock to the site of the crash while people from the first rows of cars to escape the carnage rushed to help the survivors.

  “Well, I don’t think we’re gonna get our rental deposit back on that,” Tomskin tried to joke. Jones, ever the professional, ignored him and focussed on the charred and bloodied figure crushed within the folds of metal that had once been the sedan. Then he pulled his cell phone out and called the pre-programmed number.

  “It’s done,” he said simply.

  On the other end of the line, the man who had answered did not smile. He simply replied, “Good,” and then hung up and began dialling another number.

  As he waited for the encrypted connection to be answered, the man glanced at the information on his computer. It displayed a medical report for Doctor Karen Weingarten, signed off by one Emmett Braun who had known the sick girl only as Jane Doe. It confirmed everything he wanted to know.

  Weingarten had been an archaeologist working on the UNESCO funded Sarisariñama Expedition in Venezuela, one of the last places on earth he had expected someone with her ‘condition’ to be discovered.

  Of course, he knew all about the expedition. It had been on the news for over a year now, ever since a billionaire playboy with nothing better to do had illegally base-jumped into an enormous sinkhole on one of the country’s famous table-mountains. His chute had been caught on the holes’ thick foliage, swinging him into the vegetation encrusted wall. But there, totally unexpected, hidden for hundreds of years by the thick vines and lush tropical vegetation, was a doorway, hewn into the rock. That doorway had led to a series of passageways tunnelling into the three-hundred square mile summit, sparking enormous academic debate over its origins.

  Over eight thousand feet above sea level and defended by almost vertical cliffs on all sides, the summit of Sarisariñama had a uniquely isolated ecosystem with numerous endemic species of fauna and flora. Its four giant sinkholes burrowed over a thousand feet into the mountain and one of them, Sima Humboldt, was over a thousand feet wide. No thorough scientific study had been conducted on the summit since 1976, and no archaeological expedition had ever had cause to set foot there.

  Hundreds of miles from the nearest road and accessible only by helicopter, Sarisariñama was one of the most isolated places on the planet. And it hid a secret far more powerful than a simple doorway.

  A voice on the other end of the phone answered. “Yes?”

  The man was quick to the point. “Braun confirmed it.” He eyed the computer screen again, looking at Weingarten’s plump but pretty face and wondered, not for the first time, how she had managed to get herself caught up in all this. Then he thought about the rest of the U.N. expedition- a multi-disciplined team of archaeologists and anthropologists, along with a host of biologists, botanists, zoologists and entomologists. The scientists were supported by a team of local workers, cooks and porters and an international film crew documenting the adventure.

  But now, the entire expedition was in his way.

  They had to be removed.

  His next words, his orders, were cold and hard. “You have a go.”

  2:

  Black Death

  The Labyrinth,

  Sarisariñama Tepui,

  Venezuela,

  With a final shove, Benjamin King burst through the prison of thick vines and fell unceremoniously onto the ground.

  “Ben!” he heard Sid cry out in shock as her boyfriend suddenly vanished in a cascade of rotting greenery and crumbling stone. She wafted away the plume of dust from King’s passage and pushed into the hole in the wall, shining her torch through the gloom.

  It took a few seconds for Sid’s eyes to discern King’s dark skin, betraying his African descent, amidst the gloom. “Ben?”

  “I’m okay,” he coughed.

  The passageway they had been exploring had led to a dead-end but King had realised that the blocking wall was different to the surrounding walls. Whereas the rest of the underground labyrinth of tunnels running through the mountain had been constructed with painstaking precision, every block cut perfectly to fit on top of the last, this wall was imprecise, sloppy even. The blocks were a haphazard jumble of irregular shapes, loosely piled up and then cemented together with a thick grey mortar. Unlike the smooth, almost marble-like finish to the rest of the passageway, these rocks were jagged and rough, allowing the jungle’s hardy vines to find purchase and spread across it like a spider web, concealing the narrow gap where some of the wall had fallen away.

  It was through that gap that King, while slashing away at the vines with a machete, had fallen, part of the structure giving way beneath him.

  He scrambled up onto his feet, chunks of ancient masonry and decapitated vegetation tumbling to the ground, and picked up his own torch, scanning it across the walls.

  “Wow,” he mumbled under his breath. “This is amazing.”

  “Uh . . . a little help here?” Sid called. King ignored her as he ran his light over the walls, his eyes picking out the intricate detail.

  “Ben!” she snapped.

  King whirled around, shaking off his astonishment, and hurried to assist her. She was part way through the newly excavated opening and had become intertwined in the crusted vegetation.

  “Here,” he said, helping her to untangle herself and jump into the passageway. Another shape appeared behind her, a form even more lithe and athletic than Sid. Ben offered her a hand.

  “I do not need any help,” a clipped Russian accent replied. Sure enough, moments later Nadia Yashina slipped into the hidden passageway unaided. Her sharp eyes surveyed her new surroundings and astonishment flashed across her normally stoic face.

  “What is this place?” Sid asked, awed.

  “I’m not sure,” King replied excitedly, scooping up his satchel and notes from where they had fallen on his less than elegant entry. He hurried up beside Sid to study the wall. “It’s absolutely amazing though.”

  From top to bottom and stretching all the way into the gloom beyond where their flash-lights could penetrate, every single block in the wall had been carved into the near perfect shape of a human skull.

  “They’re all like it,” Sid said enthusiastically, moving from block to block, running her hands over the polished craniums. “I’ve never seen anything like it. I mean, most of the ancient South American cultures had their fascination with sacrifice and death and decorated their temples with images of skulls and skeletons, but I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

  “They’re all so lifelike,” King said. “I wonder what sort of stone they’re-”

  “Bone.”

  King and Sid both looked, mouths agape, at Nadia, but no elaboration was forthcoming.

  “Bone?” Sid repeated. “You mean . . .” her voice trailed off as she realised what her friend was saying. Reverently, she removed her hand from a shiny plate and her face twisted into a slight grimace. “Oh.”

  Each and every one of the skull-shaped blocks was in fact an actual skull.

  “Well that’s a little on the spooky side,” King commented.

  “Why?” Nadia asked shar
ply. She continued to study the bone-encrusted walls with her usual detachment. “As Sid said, the ancient peoples of the Americas were particularly fascinated with sacrifice and death. You’ve been to the Cenote Sagrado.”

  King remembered his explorations around Central America very well, following his father on what some scholars termed a ‘lunatic’s quest to find the origins of civilisation’.

  Believing that the sacrificial wells at Chichen Itza might hold clues to what he called the ‘Progenitor Race’ which seeded civilisation across the globe, Reginald King had camped near the sinkholes for three months. Ben had spent the summer before starting at Oxford with his father and still now remembered the surrealism of the site. So still, placid and beautiful now, the waters had once turned red as the remains of those offered to ancient gods were dumped in them.

  “Yeah,” he admitted to Nadia, “but I’ve never seen the victims used in the foundations before.”

  “Are you sure they’re actual skulls?” Sid asked.

  Nadia was irritated by her friend’s questioning. Having met at Oxford, Sid was probably closer to the Russian woman than anyone, yet even she appreciated the reason most of the expedition members referred to her behind her back as ‘The Ice Queen.’

  While brilliant, she had few people skills and didn’t like her conclusions to be questioned. As an osteoarchaeologist, specialising in the study of human bones, she didn’t expect to be queried by a ‘run of the mill bog-standard archaeologist’ like Alysya “Sid” Siddiqa.

  In many ways the two women were like chalk and cheese. Sid’s grandparents had moved to London from the slums of Bombay in the nineteen fifties and with their entrepreneurial spirit selling clothing at Camden Market they had built a successful business. Eventually, Sid’s parents had taken that business global and become very wealthy. Wealthy enough to finance their most promising daughter’s education through Oxford University.

  She was attractive in a very pretty way, her mocha-coloured skin offsetting dark eyes and a round face framed by black-as-night hair. Despite coming from a very privileged family, albeit self-made, there was nothing pretentious or superior about her. She had an ever-ready smile and a gentle, caring nature.

  Nadia, on the other hand, had lived a hard life, growing up in the Dagestan town of Izberbash on the coast of the Caspian Sea. She had seen her fair share of war and horror as a young child in the troubled state which was fighting for independence from Russia, but had escaped the difficulties when her genius level IQ had been spotted at an early age.

  By sixteen, she had won a scholarship at Moscow State University and became the youngest ever graduate in Quantum Physics. She went on to study practical science and medicine and became known as one of the world’s most intelligent people.

  With three degrees to her name by the age of twenty five, she returned to her home town to work with her father, Iosef, himself a respected quantum physicist. But following his brutal murder by the militant organisation Shariat Jamaat, Nadia had fled to Great Britain, seeking asylum, both from the militants, and from the state that had declared Iosef Yashin a traitor. Traumatised by her experiences, Nadia had sought a new direction in life and earned her fourth degree, this time in archaeology, from Oxford.

  Her experiences had made her hard and cold. She rarely socialised with people and a smile was a very rare thing to grace her beautiful yet stern face. She was the epitome of sexiness, turning many young men’s eyes. Her body was toned and firm, but not as firm as her icy manner. Much as most of Oxford’s young men may have wanted to, no one got close to the Ice Queen.

  Deigning to respond to Sid’s query, Nadia instead said, “We must report this to Doctor McKinney.”

  “What?” King demanded, shocked. “We’ve not even checked this passageway out yet.” He started off down the tunnel.

  “Nadia’s right, Ben,” Sid called after him. “We’ve got to report in.”

  “But who knows what else might be down here?” he argued.

  “Precisely,” Sid pressed. “No one knows what’s down here. More to the point, no one knows that we’re here. If something happens to us they won’t know to look for us in a hidden passageway- it’s hidden, you see, that’s kinda the point.”

  “The procedure is to report any unmapped passages before proceeding down them,” Nadia added.

  “What, and let McKinney and all her brown-nosers find whatever’s down here and take all the credit? No way! This is our discovery. The three of us. You go back and make your report if you want but I’m taking a better look around.”

  He headed off again, this time with the tell-tale gait of a man whose mind was made up. Sid rolled her eyes and glanced at Nadia. “Why can’t he ever be that passionate about me?” Then she headed off after him. A heartbeat later, Nadia fell into step too, without saying a word.

  Despite the Russian’s desire to follow procedure, King could tell that somewhere under her cold exterior she was as excited as he was. And it was true. Doctor Juliet McKinney, the strong-minded, blusterous, hot-tempered Scottish bitch in charge of the expedition would swoop in and steel the glory of the moment. She was a fame seeker, spending every possible moment in front of the documentary crew’s cameras. She would relish this find. So far, after almost six months camped on Sarisariñama’s jungle-clad summit, all the archaeological team had found was meter after meter of empty tunnels. Thus, they had dubbed it, The Labyrinth.

  The construction of the tunnels themselves was fascinating to any scholar and had already sparked fierce debate in the circles of academia.

  Firstly, the presence of sophisticated tunnels boring into the rock of a table-mountain had reopened the age old question about whether or not a more sophisticated and established society than isolated Indian communities could exist in the inhospitable rainforest. For decades the general consensus had been that the jungle was too imposing an environment for civilisations like those found in the distant Andes to evolve.

  But it was the design of the walls inside the tunnels that had stirred up the real hornets’ nest in halls of learning across the globe.

  Constructed out of hundreds of oddly shaped blocks of varying sizes, carved to fit snugly against one another, the walls bore an uncanny resemblance to the Inca structures scattered around the Sacred Valley of Peru.

  That the Incas could have established an outpost so far into the immense rainforest, so far from the safety of the Andes, had sparked a renewed interest in the legends of El Dorado and the Lost City of Z. The general public’s interest in the dig had been enormous and, with the power of modern technology, the expedition had been a true multi-media event. Blogs were posted on the dig’s official website, live videos were streamed whenever satellite coverage permitted, and hundreds of thousands of people followed the events on Twitter and Facebook.

  Despite being in one of the most remote places on earth, the expedition was an open book for the whole world to see.

  The biological division of the expedition had been hugely successful, the team of UNESCO scientists identifying a number of brand new endemic species of flora and fauna. But the real public interest lay in the archaeological mission and that, sadly, had been far from the roller-coaster, Indiana Jones-like adventure which many had expected.

  Seeking fame, all McKinney had been able to report on in six months was the numerous, almost identical tunnels and a few shards of broken pottery which had yet to yield the secrets of Sarisariñama.

  The discovery of a hidden passage lined with human skulls would send McKinney into fame-fuelled overdrive and King had no doubt that she would shut him, the ‘radical son of a radical archaeologist’, as she had already referred to him, out.

  Before she did that, however, he wanted to find out anything he could about his exciting discovery.

  They continued down the tunnel slowly, stopping occasionally to examine the walls and jot down notes.

  “Poor Karen,” King said. “Can you believe she missed out on this fi
nd?”

  He did feel genuine regret that Karen Weingarten, the German archaeologist who had been assigned the exploration of this section of the tunnel system, had missed out. By all rights, it should have been her team’s find, but she had been taken ill, contracting some sort of tropical disease. UNESCO had organised her emergency medical evac. The expedition’s supply chopper, a private contractor based in Caracas, had brought a medical team to the summit. Once they had confirmed that no other expedition members were showing signs of the illness, they had transferred Karen back to Caracas and, from there, flown her to a specialist hospital in the States.

  McKinney had reshuffled the eight teams of three archaeologists who had each been assigned a section of the tunnel system. King, Sid and Nadia had been reassigned to Karen’s sector.

  “I know,” Sid replied. “She would-”

  Her words were drowned out by the sudden, sharp cracking of stone and, before her eyes, King vanished!

  With a sharp lurch and a blur of motion, the ground beneath him dropped away! King fell into a black hole, the crash of tumbling rocks and a billow of dust pluming around him.

  He splashed down into icy, knee high water, his legs buckling under the impact. His head went under and for a moment he panicked, sucking a lungful of fetid, stale water in before breaching the surface and coughing it back out.

  Disorientated, he looked around, his eyes struggling to make out his surroundings. The impenetrable darkness was broken only by the eerie rippling effect of his submerged flashlight shining up through the water. He could hear Sid and Nadia shouting to him, their voices high with panic.

  “I’m okay!” he called up. It was bravado that spoke. In truth he hurt like hell, his entire body aching from the jarring impact. He felt bruising spreading across his rib cage and his left ankle shot jabs of pain up his leg. The darkness also closed in around him, claustrophobic and suffocating and he felt a jolt of fear pass through him.