by Andrew Linke
He heard a voice and froze, listening.
The voice continued, vaguely melodic as it drifted through the dry desert air.
Oliver crept forward and leaned against the fuselage of the helicopter. He could now make out what the voice was saying.
Oliver poked his head around the edge of the helicopter door and grinned. Frank sat in the pilot’s chair, an empty morphine autoinjector laying on the textured metal of the deck beside him, white wires trailed from his lap up to his ears where they disappeared under the headphones of his headset. He had clearly raided the medic kit and, assuming he would have a few hours lonely watch, had dulled the pain of his wounded shoulder. His head bobbed slowly in time to unheard music and he sang along out of tune
Oliver pulled himself into the helicopter as quietly as he could, keeping his gun pointed toward Frank. He paused for a moment until he was sure that Frank hadn’t noticed him, then tiptoed forward and waited as Frank continued to sing along with Iron Maiden’s Fear of the Dark. He waited until Frank was just finishing the last line of the chorus in his raspy voice, and swung his arm forward and around, pushing the barrel of his gun up under Frank’s chin.
Frank started back in his seat, hand swinging down towards his sidearm, then froze as he recognized the feeling of hot steel and plastic pressing against his throat.
Oliver stepped between the seats, keeping his gun against Frank’s throat, and yanked down on Frank’s earbud wires. “Recognize me?”
Frank nodded.
“Should have paid attention to the song and looked behind you.”
Frank cleared his throat and swallowed. An expression somewhere between fear and rage was welling up in his eyes.
Oliver reached forward with his free hand and relieved Frank of what weapons he could see, slipping the handgun and combat knife into the outer pockets of his own pack. He extracted his gun from Frank’s neck and sat down on the edge of the copilot seat, keeping the weapon pointed at Frank’s face.
“Strap yourself in. Tight.”
Frank complied, working clumsily with his one good arm.
“Obviously, I’m not dead. Right?”
A slight nod.
“So here’s how this is going to work. You take this helicopter up to the top and let me down inside the wall, or I kill you now and climb up myself.”
“I can’t do that.”
“I think you can.”
Frank shook his head slightly and coughed, then replied, “I can’t see inside the walls. It’s all dark.”
“Don’t lie to me Frank. The morphine might block the pain, but I can still put holes in you.”
“I’m not lying.” He replied through gritted teeth. It was clear that Frank wanted nothing more than to rip Oliver’s throat out. “It’s like... I don’t know... like the walls are filled with oil or something. We couldn’t see a thing inside the walls when we first got here.”
Oliver considered that. From his vantage point on the dune, he had only been able to see the exterior walls of the temple complex and a few vague shapes that might have been the roofs of interior buildings.
His thoughts were interrupted by a resounding boom that echoed back and forth across the dry lakebed.
Oliver looked out the cockpit window and saw a cloud of dust pouring down from the surface of the island fifty feet above.
“Looks like Kyle got impatient and blasted the gates open.” Frank said.
“Idiot!” Oliver shouted.
“Get your panties out of a twist kid. We know how to use shaped charges. I’m sure your girlfriend is just...”
“Shut up and get this thing in the air!”
Frank rolled his eyes and laughed contemptuously. “Why the hell would I do that?”
“Because if I don’t kill you first, that stuff might.” Oliver grabbed Frank’s blond-stubbled chin and twisted his head around, pointing out the window with his gun.
The dust cloud above had already begun to dissipate and through it Oliver could see a roiling blackness welling up on the edge of the plaza above. As they watched, it began to cascade down the side of the island, moving with a slow certainty like warm molasses pouring out of an overturned bottle. The darkness oozed down the slope, cascading across the sheer rock faces and pooling atop boulders before slipping downward again. Though the body of the darkness moved like a liquid, the edges of it whipped away in the desert wind, spreading tendrils of darkness across the sky. Wherever the viscus cloud moved, it covered everything in a profound blackness that not even burning light of the desert sun could pierce.
Frank’s neck muscles went slack for a moment as he gaped at the spreading dark. Then he snapped his head out of Oliver’s grip and set about flicking switches on the console in front of him.
Oliver felt a shudder run through the frame of the helicopter as the motors spun into sudden motion. A deep thrumming sound started in the engine compartment and quickly ramped up in pitch and frequency as the helicopter shuddered to life. The rotor blades lurched into movement and rapidly built up speed as Oliver scrabbled to find the buckle of his harness and get himself strapped in.
The darkness continued to pour down the side of the island until it pounded soundlessly into the sand of the lakebed and began to pile up on itself in the boiling, swirling mass of blackness. The dark began to spread out across the sand as it grew in height, creeping towards the helicopter in a deepening mass. The downwash of hot air from the helicopter blades pushed back against it momentarily, causing the dark to divert around the helicopter like a stream of liquid turning aside to surround a pebble in its path.
“Get us up!” Oliver shouted.
“This is already an emergency takeoff!” Frank screamed back at him, his words barely audible above the roar of the engine. “If I push it any faster, the engine will burn out.” He grasped the control yoke and rocked it gently back and forth but the helicopter didn’t move.
Oliver turned his eyes back to the pool darkness that had now completely surrounded the helicopter and begun to pile up around the invisible wall of air thundering down from the blades. As he looked, the black cloud slipped closer along the sands at the edge of the downwash. A single tendril of the darkness slipped forward, skittered back and forth across the sands, battered about by the torrent of air pounding down on it even as it continued to grow thicker and creep closer to the helicopter.
Then the rotors reached their lift speed and the helicopter shot up several feet into the air. As it lifted the surrounding darkness rushed in like walls of dark water. The darkness filled in the space beneath the helicopter and quickly grew deeper as the helicopter climbed into the air.
Oliver pulled the copilot’s headset from a hook above his head and slipped it on. Then he grabbed the pilot’s headset where it dangled behind Frank’s seat and pushed it over Frank’s head. The mercenary growled indistinctly and shook himself, tossing the helicopter about in the air, then he settled down and shot Oliver a fiery look. He brought the helicopter to a hover about thirty feet above the surface of the lakebed as the darkness continued to spread below.
Frank looked up from the spreading pool of darkness below and said, “What the hell is that?” He spoke in a soft tone that made Oliver wonder if Frank had ever been this afraid in his life.
“Darkness. A darkness that no light can pierce.”
“But what... Where’d it come from?”
Oliver looked at Frank incredulously. “Do you have any idea what Kyle has gotten you into?”
“Artifacts. Duh.”
“Not just artifacts. Relics. Objects filled with supernatural power of the sort that the average person never encounters.”
“Bullshit.”
Oliver gestured to the still expanding pool of darkness below them.
Frank said nothing.
Oliver looked toward the island and saw that the cascade of darkness had ceased to tumble down the rocks. Small puddles of black still pooled in crags of rock, but no other sign of the black flood remained on t
he rock face.
“Take us higher. We need to check on your team.”
Frank complied, adjusting the yoke of the helicopter to pull them level with the plaza just in time to see the last of the mercenaries forcing Diana to walk through the shattered fragments of bronze and wood that were the only remnants of the temple gates. The darkness had slipped past them, seemingly without any harm, and Oliver could see only a few narrow streams of it slipping through the cracks of the plaza.
“Damn it,” muttered Oliver. “You know Frank, your boss is rewriting the manual on how to be an idiot.”
Frank grumbled something indistinct and started to bank the helicopter away from the temple.
Oliver pointed his gun at Frank again and said, “Nope. You’re going to let me down on that plaza or I will shoot you the moment we land.”
“And if I don’t land?”
“Then you’ll have to keep flying until we run out of gas and crash. Either way, you’re dead. Or you can just let me down in the plaza and do whatever you want. I’d recommend flying back to Cairo and disappearing before your employers find out what happened out here.”
Frank glowered at Oliver, then moved his controls until the helicopter hovered thirty feet above the temple plaza.
The plaza was too narrow for the helicopter to set down without hitting the outer wall of the temple, but stretched along the front wall of the temple for fifty feet or more on either side of the shattered gate. Keeping his gun trained on Frank, Oliver unbuckled his harness and moved slowly into the crew compartment. He stayed far away from the open doors until he had finished donning a climbing harness from a rack behind the crew seats and snapped the rappel device on the harness onto the rope that was already attached to an anchor point at the center of the cabin. He kicked the coil of rope out the door. He secured his gun in the holster on his leg and grabbed a spare coil of rope from the rack beside the door.
“Thanks for the ride, Frank!” He shouted. Then Oliver jumped out the door of the helicopter.
He slid down the rope as fast as he dared without chancing a broken leg when he hit the ground. As he had expected, the helicopter began to pull away from the plaza as soon as he was out the door. He hit the mud brick pavement hard and was immediately dragged forward on his belly by the rapidly departing helicopter. Fortunately, his hands were already squeezing the carabiner that connected his harness to the rappelling unit. He gave the carabiner a twist and the unit was ripped from his hands and clattered over the edge of the cliff as Oliver skidded to a stop mere inches from the precipice. He got to his feet and dusted the sand from his clothes, watching in silence as helicopter flew away from the plateau of the former island and settled down behind a dune at the edge of the dry lake. Down below the darkness continued to seethe as it spread out to fill the bottom of the lakebed.
He turned to face the ruined gates of the temple.
Chapter Eighteen
The exterior wall of the temple must have once stood at the very edge of the surrounding water long ago before the lake dried and left the island temple resting atop a high plateau. The exterior wall of the temple extended from the very edge of the rocky cliff, where it was stained the same dark red as the stone upon which it was built, upwards in tightly fitted blocks of white stone that reached thirty feet above Oliver’s head. The plaza on which he stood jutted out from the face of the island out to the shattered edge which he had nearly fallen over. The gates, so recently shattered by the blast of shaped explosive charges, were flanked by monumental statues of Osiris. At the feet of each statue, its heads only reaching the knees of the god behind it, stood a life sized statue of man holding a brass trumpet to his lips. Remarkably, neither the deities nor their heralds appeared to have been weathered by the ages. Over the gap where the gates had stood, a series of hieroglyphs were etched deep into the stones of the wall. Oliver could not read them, but he assumed they said something about mighty powers of the gods that guarded the temple.
The remnants of the gate, which appeared to have been made from bronze-clad wood which had somehow remained intact through the centuries, lay shattered and charred across the paved floor just inside the temple. Looking between the charred fragments still hanging from the bronze hinges, Oliver saw a courtyard with statues of Egyptian gods arrayed in twin rows. Their various heads, snouts, beaks, and muzzles gazed at one another across the court, which was open to the sky. At the end of the courtyard, a low wall of brick surrounded a sunken area, with smaller statues, which did not appear to depict gods, standing on pedestals flanking the steps down.
Oliver pulled out his gun and ran to the corner of the gateway, intending to peer around the edge and spot where the mercenaries had gone after entering the temple, but his plans were thrown out the window when a mighty blast sounded from the trumpets of the heralds on either side of the gate. Oliver dove to the ground and crouched behind one of the statues of Osiris, cursing his fortune. No such welcoming burst had sounded when the mercenaries and Diana had entered the temple, so it must have had something to do with the brass sphere, which Elder Layla had called the “key,” that he carried in his pocket. As he waited, knowing that Kyle or one of his men would come to investigate, Oliver heard the harsh squeal of bent metal twisting and rasping against itself. He risked a glance and saw the shattered remnants of the gates twisting outwards as the ancient hinges rotated to open what remained of the gates.
The echoes of tortured metal died away and Oliver heard the crunch of footsteps approaching over the brick pavement. He ducked low behind the statue of Osiris to the right of the gate, keeping one eye around the base to watch the gateway, and waited for the mercenary to appear.
When he did, Oliver recognized the man as the medic who had been patching Frank’s shoulder in the chapel when Oliver awoke on the floor yesterday afternoon. He now held an assault rifle in his hands and had slung his medical kit over his back. The man came around the corner of the gate from the right side of the temple interior, gun up to his shoulder as he advanced rapidly through gate and sighted down the length of his rifle, checking first the left, then right sides of the plaza. Seeing nothing, the mercenary lowered his gun and turned back towards the temple.
“I don’t see anything, Commander.”
Kyle’s voice shouted back from the temple interior. “There must be something out there. Trumpets don’t sound for no reason.”
“And what about darkness?” Another voice now. One Oliver didn’t recognized but assumed to be one of the mercenaries, though it carried a note of panic he had not heard from any of them last night. “Night doesn’t move around like a cloud, Kyle. I say we cut our losses and get the hell out of this place. Take our chances on the free market if Leonidas cuts us off. Hell man, even the water...”
A gunshot sounded. Then the thump of a body hitting the stones.
“Anyone else want to argue?” Silence, as Oliver held his breath and waited. Then, “Right. Adams, get back in here. We’re going further in.”
The medic shouldered his weapon and walked back through the gateway.
Oliver waited until he could no longer hear the man’s footsteps then sidled up to the gateway, hoping with every fiber of his being that the trumpets would not sound again. They didn’t. Oliver poked his head around the gate and saw that the central walkway was still empty. He slipped a little further out and saw six figures standing in the shadows of the covered side court, near the low wall that divided the upper court from the sunken area. Kyle was gesturing towards the steps leading down while Diana stood nose to nose with him and waved her hands wildly. Two of the mercenaries bent and lifted a body between them and carried through the doorway of a low chamber built against the right wall of the temple as the other two watched them in silence.
Oliver saw his opportunity and took it. He darted through the gateway and ducked behind the cat-headed statue of Bastet that stood on the left side of the open walkway. He paused, holding his breath and listening for any sign that his entrance had been noti
ced, but no shout came from any of the mercenaries and Kyle continued to argue with Diana. Their words were still indistinct, but Oliver could tell that Diana was angry about something and, judging from her tone and the rapidity with which she spoke, it probably had more to do with further destruction of the temple than Kyle’s methods of imposing discipline among his men.
Oliver surveyed the left side of the courtyard. The light shining in from the uncovered central walkway was bright enough to both illuminate much of the covered area and cast deep shadows behind the supporting pillars and statues of the gods. If he moved quickly and didn’t trip over anything, Oliver thought he might be able to reach the deeper shadow of the lower courtyard without being spotted. Then he might have the opportunity to get ahead of the mercenaries and lay some sort of trap.
He darted from behind the statue and came to a halt behind one of the supporting pillars twenty or so feet down the hall. He waited there, half-expecting to hear a shout or burst of gunfire, but the mercenaries gave no sign of catching on to his presence in the temple.
Kyle’s voice echoed across the courtyard. “We’re going in, now.”
“But the guardians!” Diana cried out.
“If you’re so damn afraid of a few skeletons, which, by the way, we haven’t even seen, then stay at the back. Hell, stay in the courtyard for all I care. It’s not like you can go that far.” Oliver glanced around the pillar and saw Kyle stepped closer to Diana and push a finger against her forehead as he spoke, “Just remember, the only reason you’re still alive is I might need you to translate something by the end of this. So make sure you stay useful, or I’ll put a bullet in your skull.”
Kyle strode out of the shadows of the covered courtyard into the light of the central path between the statues of the Egyptian gods. The mercenaries followed a few seconds later, filing out between the legs of the statues, most holding their guns at the ready and glancing about nervously as if they expected the stone deities to spring to life and attack them. Diana did not appear.