Sunny’s second henchman sloshed desperately back toward the entry tunnel, fighting against the inrushing torrent, fleeing for his life, pushing past the still-kneeling figure of Sunny who had apparently lost his gun when the sudden flood had felled him.
As he watched the chamber fill with seawater, Jack realised that the weird trench-shaped nature of the steps slowed the rising of the water. Without the trenches, the water would have just risen fast, unimpeded.
And then Jack saw that the very top step of the platform was perfectly level with the roof of the doorway to the entry tunnel.
To anyone else, it was a meaningless detail, but to Jack West Jr, it was pivotal.
‘Oh no . . .’ he breathed.
He snapped to look up at the Medusa tile set into the uppermost point of the dome, his gaze falling on . . .
. . . the small black-grey pills set into Medusa’s eyes.
Black-grey pills.
Those pills are made of grey matter, greystone, Gorgon Stone, the powder that creates liquid stone.
‘Guarded by Medusa . . . one of the Gorgons,’ Jack said to himself as Medusa’s famous mythical power suddenly became very real. ‘Her gaze turns people to . . .’
And suddenly the full terrifying extent of the chamber’s trap system became clear to him.
In his mind, he saw the other Medusa tile attached to the roof of the entry tunnel.
The inrushing water wasn’t designed to drown them.
First, it would fill the entry tunnel, which was the exact same height as the top step of the platform.
Thus, as the entry tunnel was completely filled . . .
. . . thanks to the trench-steps, for at least a few short minutes, a level lake would be created in the chamber, ringing the platform with the tomb on it . . .
. . . at which point, inside the entry tunnel . . .
. . . the rising water would touch the two small black-grey pills in Medusa’s eyes . . .
. . . the pills made of grey matter . . .
. . . which would turn all the water in the tunnel and the chamber to stone.
The immediate ramifications of that hit Jack.
The exit would be closed forever: the thirty-metre-long entry tunnel, plus the bottom of the ladder-shaft, would be clogged with solidified liquid stone.
But that wouldn’t be the end of it.
There was still the second tile with Medusa painted on it at the peak of the chamber’s dome.
After pausing for a few minutes at the platform—thanks to the trenches—the inrushing water would resume its rise, now quickly filling the rest of the chamber!
First it would drown anyone still in it—like Jack and Aloysius—but then as a final punishment for trying to steal the Mace, when the rising water finally filled the chamber completely and touched the two dark grey eyes on the second Medusa tile, all the water in the chamber would also turn to stone, sealing Jack and Aloysius in it forever.
Jack gazed in stunned awe at the scene around him.
‘Oh, we are so screwed,’ he gasped.
He turned to Aloysius and yelled above the din, ‘Keep hold of the Mace and follow me!’
Jack sloshed through the chest-deep water to the wall of the chamber and started climbing up it, using the raised protrusions of its gorgeous bas-reliefs as handholds.
Aloysius jammed the Mace into his belt and chased after him. ‘Where are you going?’
‘We have to push our way out through that shaft!’ Jack said, pointing at the shaft immediately above them: the one allowing seawater to pour into the chamber in a powerful gushing stream.
‘Are you crazy!’ Aloysius protested.
‘It’s the only way we don’t die here!’
‘Then let’s move!’
As for Sunny and his men, several things happened at once to them.
The fleeing henchman had made it almost all the way down the entry tunnel, pushing through the neck-deep water there.
Sunny, his search for his gun now abandoned, had remained in the chamber and clambered up the trench-steps to get out of the raging, swirling waves.
Beside him was the thug who had been shot in his bulletproof vest by Aloysius. Groaning and staggering—he didn’t know it, but two of his ribs were broken—this thug fell back into the water from the bottom step.
And then it happened.
Inside the entry tunnel, the rapidly rising water hit the ceiling and touched the two tiny black-grey pills that were Medusa’s eyes.
As long as he lived, Jack would never forget the sight.
He’d been right about the trench-shaped steps.
As the incoming water completely filled the tunnel, the trenches created—at least for a few short minutes—a kind of level lake inside the chamber.
Halfway up the wall, Jack looked down behind him and saw the body of clear flat water ringing the platform turn a dense, dark grey.
It was like watching a virus take over the water: creep through it and infect it, and rob it of its essential nature.
The entire ‘lake’ went grey and then . . .
. . . craaaaack.
It was the same sickening sound Jack had heard when he’d been entombed in the liquid-stone tub at Erebus.
The sound of the infected water hardening.
The thug inside the tunnel had no hope.
He’d managed to take a deep breath just as the water had filled the tunnel completely.
Then he’d opened his eyes and seen the ladder-shaft ahead of him . . .
. . . only for the water all around him to suddenly darken and he could see nothing.
Then, to his horror, that same dark water abruptly hardened around his entire body. At first it felt like jelly but then it started cracking and crunching, and abruptly, to his complete confusion, he found himself suspended in the stuff like a fish caught in ice, entirely encased in it and unable to move.
It actually hardened quite quickly and to his surprise, he didn’t drown. In fact, he could actually breathe, because he was now entombed in a little pocket of solidified stone perfectly form-fitted around his body.
He would not die of drowning.
No, it would be worse than that.
First, the stone, as it set, would contract little by little, slowly crushing his limbs, and then, as he groaned in abject agony, unheard by anyone in his claustrophobic little tomb, he would suffocate as with his desperate wails, gasps and pants, he would eventually run out of air.
In the chamber, it wasn’t much better for the thug with the broken ribs.
Having fallen into the darkened water, he was halfway out of it when it solidified around his legs.
He was trapped half-in, half-out of the hardening stone. As it cracked and crunched around his waist, locking him in its unbreakable grip, the man screamed in terror.
He couldn’t get out of the stuff.
He scratched and reached for his boss, begging him for help, but Sunny Malik just recoiled, wide-eyed, at the man’s predicament.
Even Malik—a cruel gangster who had executed and tortured both the wicked and the innocent—was struck dumb with fear at the situation in which he now found himself.
In this way, the temporary lake of water ringing the platform solidified into hard greystone, essentially creating a new, higher floor for the space.
But seawater kept gushing into the chamber through the shaft high up on its wall.
Jack and Aloysius kept climbing for the shaft.
Sunny Malik sat frozen on the platform, in front of his screaming henchman.
But it wasn’t over.
Now the second phase of the trap began.
For as that first flat layer of water became a new solid floor, the chamber began to fill even faster; the water now clear once again and rising toward the second Medusa tile at t
he top of the dome.
Aloysius Knight saw it all.
‘What is going on here?’ he called to Jack above him. ‘The water just turned to fucking stone!’
Jack said, ‘Keep climbing! When this new body of rising water touches that Medusa’s eyes, all the water in this chamber and in this shaft will also turn to stone!’
Aloysius Knight stared in shock at the scene. ‘Then climb faster!’
And so they climbed.
Up the bas-reliefs on the wall, toward the shaft from which the seawater cascaded.
When they arrived at it, Aloysius stopped beside Jack.
‘Here, you’ll need this,’ he said, handing Jack a small mouthpiece. It was a portable scuba breather, good for about ten minutes underwater.
‘No slips now, or we go sliding back into that chamber,’ he added.
‘Right,’ Jack nodded.
Then Jack led the way, shoving himself into the torrent of water coming out of the shaft. The walls of the shaft were rough and uneven, causing the incoming water to slosh and bounce around them.
Jack leaned into it with his fireman’s helmet, pressing his hands and feet against the shaft’s walls, straining against the flow.
Behind him, Aloysius risked a look back into the chamber.
He saw Sunny Malik and his trapped henchman down on the platform.
The henchman was gripped to his waist in the layer of solidified stone. He screamed as the inrushing water consumed him, rising around his face. He went under with a final desperate shriek.
As for Malik, he was carried up on the rising water, thrashing and panicking.
The last thing Aloysius saw of him before he followed Jack into the shaft were his wild terrified eyes.
And then the two heroes were in the shaft, forcing their way up its sloping length, fighting with all their might against the water rushing in at them.
Jack moved doggedly, one foot at a time: planting his feet against the shaft’s walls, then shifting his hands upward and repeating the process, all while water relentlessly slammed against his helmet from above.
He gripped his breather in his teeth, sucking in air.
He saw Aloysius below him, shouting through the mouthpiece gripped between his teeth: ‘Keep going, Captain! You gotta keep going!’
And then Jack slipped . . .
. . . and fell.
And in a single split second, Jack knew he was going to die.
But Aloysius caught him: caught one of Jack’s boots one-handed while somehow managing to keep himself from falling back down the shaft, and with incredible strength, he held Jack up.
‘I got you!’ Aloysius called over the roar of the water. ‘Grab hold again! Keep going!’
Jack grabbed another handhold against the wall and soon he was moving again, against the ceaseless flow, inching his way upward.
Below him, Aloysius Knight looked fearfully behind them.
They had climbed maybe eighty feet up the shaft.
In the chamber, the main body of water wouldn’t be far from the summit of the dome and the two black-grey pills that were the eyes of Medusa.
They had to get up this shaft.
‘Faster, Jack!’ he shouted. ‘We can’t let the water catch us!’
Jack strained against the powerful flow.
Through the breather clenched between his teeth, he called back, ‘We didn’t come this far . . . just to come this far!’
Down in the chamber, Sunny Malik had indeed missed his opportunity to escape.
Floating on the surface of the rising body of water, he hadn’t been able to flee into the shaft like Jack and Aloysius had.
And so he had just risen with the water, riding it to the domed ceiling of the chamber, resigned to his fate.
He came to the top of the dome, saw the snarling face of Medusa painted on the round tile there.
Unaware of the workings of liquid stone, he didn’t know the importance of the pills set into her eyes.
It didn’t matter.
With nowhere else to go, the water flowed over Sunny Malik’s face and filled the chamber entirely . . .
. . . and touched Medusa’s eyes.
The reaction was instantaneous.
The water filling the chamber instantly turned dark, infected by the grey powder.
It solidified around Malik, encasing him as it had his first henchman, entombing him alive in his own personal nightmare.
It also solidified inside the entire chamber. As far as any future generation would know, that chamber had never existed. It was now solid black-grey stone.
In the shaft, Jack West Jr and Aloysius Knight climbed desperately.
Incoming water pounded Jack from above.
Aloysius peered fearfully behind him.
He saw the body of water rising up the shaft below them, ravenous and relentless . . .
. . . and then to his horror he saw it turn a deep grey.
‘Jack . . . !’
It was barely fifteen feet below them and rising fast.
Then, without warning, Jack’s feet leapt out of Aloysius’s view to be suddenly replaced by Jack’s hand, gripping his around the wrist and hauling Aloysius out of the shaft and onto the seabed at the base of an underwater cliff.
Biting into their breathers, Jack and Aloysius pushed off the sea floor and swam for all they were worth away from the shaft-hole cut into the underwater cliff’s base.
They swam and swam, with broad powerful strokes, until they were twenty, then thirty feet clear of the cliff-base.
And then, with a foul, explosive sound, like a supersized snake reaching out for them, a great black-grey finger of semi-solid stone extended out from the shaft-hole, lancing out into the water for a full twenty feet.
But it wasn’t strong enough to reach them and, as it hardened, it fell, drifting in slow motion to the sea floor until it looked no different from the many other rocks and stones that lay there.
Jack and Aloysius surfaced moments later.
They bobbed in the water off the northern tip of Santorini, gasping and heaving for air, but alive.
A giant luxury cruise liner rumbled by, sounding its horn as it headed into the caldera. Throbbing dance music could be heard.
Aloysius pulled the Mace from his belt and held it in one fist.
He glared at Jack. ‘Honestly, I’m gonna kill Scarecrow for introducing me to you.’
Hades’s apartment
Rome, Italy
30 November, 1500 hours
Alby Calvin sat alone in a study filled with computers and communications gear, the stump that was his left wrist bandaged, typing with his right hand.
He was in Hades’s secret apartment in Rome.
Of course, Hades’s ‘little’ hideaway wasn’t that little at all. It took up a whole floor of an old building and through the window beside him, Alby could see the Coliseum and the Roman Forum and, in the distance, the Vatican.
Zoe and Hades were working away in other rooms, keeping track of Jack and the others around the world.
Wounded as he was, Alby was restless—restless to help in the quest—so he buried himself in the task Jack had set him: finding the Altar of the Cosmos and discovering the nature of the ritual that needed to be performed there.
He started with the documents Iolanthe had taken from the Hall of Royal Records.
The first was a very old scroll written in Hebrew with a translation attached. It was titled: THE REAL GENESIS 22.
‘The real Genesis 22?’ Alby said aloud.
As Alby knew, the book that people know as the Bible was not really one complete homogenous text.
In truth, it was a disparate compilation of writings, gospels and scrolls written by many—often unknown—authors that had been assembled over a period of three hundred years both
before and after the birth of Christ.
And that wasn’t even mentioning the many changes to the text that had occurred in Arabian libraries and European monasteries over the next thousand years.
This scroll appeared to be a chapter from the first book of the Bible, the Book of Genesis.
Genesis 22.
Alby knew of it: it was the chapter where God tested Abraham by asking him to kill his son, Isaac. Abraham obeyed, but, as everyone knows, God stepped in at the last moment and stopped him.
Alby read this version:
And it came to pass that God said unto Abraham, Take thyself or thy son Isaac, whom thou lovest, to the mountain-altar at the end of the world; and there, in the altar’s bath, offer one of you to me.
After five days’ sail, Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw the place afar off.
There Abraham laid his son Isaac in the sacred bath and plunged the holy blade deep into his son’s breast, spilling his sacred blood into the water, slaying him.
‘Oh, that is messed up,’ Alby said. ‘No wonder they rewrote this.’
The pious and noble Abraham, father of the three great religions of the Middle East, had killed his own son instead of himself.
Alby re-read the chapter, zeroing in on the details:
A mountain altar. With a sacred bath. Five days’ sail from Judea. And a choice for Abraham: either kill himself or his son. So Abraham had killed his son.
Alby went to Iolanthe’s next document: a parchment written in Spanish by King Alfonso X of Castile. Iolanthe’s translation of it read:
From my summer palace here in San Roque, I watch over both flooded Atlas and the glorious Altar for the Rebirth of the Cosmos every day.
Alby looked up San Roque. It was a small town in the south of Spain, near the Mediterranean.
Then he came to the last document.
It was the report labelled K.E.O.—King’s Eyes Only. It had a notation from Jack saying that the Altar was ‘the size of a mountain’.
‘Like Abraham’s altar,’ Alby said aloud.
He read the report:
K.E.O. REPORT
The Three Secret Cities Page 24