The Library of the Dead

by Brian Keene

  There are factions, Neville had said as they boarded the ship for the return passage from Hawaii. He had already accompanied the artifact on its long journey around the globe, from the place of its discovery near Amedi in Turkey, through Asia by rail, and then across the Pacific Ocean to Hawaii. That was where she and the three specialists had sailed to meet Neville, to collect and accompany the object on the final leg of its voyage. Some of the crew watch us with an interest I don’t like. And those two men from the Turkish Museum in Constantinople … Halis and Saygin … I wouldn’t trust them for an instant.

  Jane had found the two Turks quite charming, and their knowledge of history gave her and them a comfortable common ground. But from the moment the ship had left Hawaii on its journey east to the USA, the two men had fallen silent, eyes hooded and sad.

  Neville she trusted implicitly—she had known him for over two decades, and there had been a time when they might have become more than merely colleagues and friends—and she knew the three specialists well enough. One of them, Bryan, she’d come to know quite well indeed. They had been companionable enough on the crossing to Hawaii, but now that they had collected Neville and the incredible thing he had found, the specialists were too focused on the acquisition to socialize.

  A knock at the door startled her from her thoughts. A telegram telling me Franca has died! she thought, fear cutting deep. She jumped up and unlocked the door, and Neville pushed his way inside. His gray eyes were wide, scared, and he had evidently been up on deck. He was drenched and smelled of the sea.

  “What is it?” Jane asked.

  “One of the crew is dead,” he said, running his hands through dark, wet hair.

  “What?” She blinked, confused and scared. “What happened?”

  “It looks like he tried to get into the hold.”

  Panic took her in its grasp. They’ve discovered—

  “Don’t worry,” Neville said. “The door is secure, and the crate inside is untouched. He had a crowbar, but whoever killed him slit his throat before he could even begin.”

  “Who was it?” The words seemed to issue from her without her forming the question. She felt numb, distant, somehow both afraid and impatient.

  Neville closed the door behind him. He even locked it.

  “Neville?”

  “The crew is blaming the Turks. And the Turks blame me. They say I’m obsessed with the thing, and now that we’re almost at the end of the journey, I’m trying to take it for myself.”

  “But that’s ridiculous! They know the arrangements, this trip is sanctioned at the highest levels.”

  She did not mean governments. It was the academics, the archaeologists, and those who knew the potential power of what they carried who had made the arrangements. The whole point was to keep governments out of it.

  “There’s something else,” he said. He sat on her bed and groaned, holding his stomach as the ship dropped and lurched. The captain had promised stormy times ahead, and Neville never had found his sea legs. “There’s someone else on the ship.”

  “Another passenger?”

  “No, a stowaway. Bryan overheard the crew talking about it. And no one seems to know who it is, or even where they are now.”

  “You think this stowaway is the killer?”

  “I don’t know. But whoever murdered the crewman, I’m willing to bet it’s the same person who killed those two at the dig.”

  Two local people, a husband and wife helping with the excavations, had been brutally murdered days before Neville and the others had departed. He had told Jane about it in a telegram, expressing his terror at what had happened and concern that he might be held accountable. But local authorities were not as thorough as they might have been in the United States. He had been saddened by such a tragedy, but pleased to leave it behind.

  “And now we’ve brought the murderer with us.”

  Neville sighed and tried to smile at Jane, but it did not touch his eyes. He was tired and looked sick, and the pressure of what they had found bore down upon him. Jane worried that it might prove his undoing.

  “So it seems,” he said. “And we’ve six or seven days left of this wretched journey.” He sighed again, then glanced up guiltily. “No more telegrams about Franca?”

  Jane shook her head.

  “She’ll be fine. We’ll get back in time.”

  In time for what he did not say, but Jane could only pray that he was right. On her journey to Hawaii her mind had been filled with excitement and adventure, the chance to make history, and the staggering idea that she might be about to set eyes upon a mythical object. Popular culture knew it as a box, though it turned out to be more of a small jar, and legend said it had belonged to Pandora, whose very name conjured up grand imaginings.

  Now, everything was about Franca. To hell with Pandora.

  They had to get back in time.

  Captain Gavriil called a meeting in the mess. He and his chief mate carried side arms, and that did not make Jane as comfortable as it should. All but two of the Greek crew—those required to steer the ship—were there, along with the Turks, Neville and Jane, and the three specialists working for the Golden Gate Museum of History. Bryan, and the others, Patrick and Cesare, had been shut away in their large shared cabin, trying to translate ancient writings and hieroglyphics, and they all looked as though they had just woken from a trance and remembered that the rest of the world existed.

  The captain spoke in reasonable English. The Turks understood, but some of the crew remained blank-eyed. Jane assumed it was because they did not understand. Or perhaps they simply didn’t care.

  “Somebody in this room is a killer,” he said. He glared around at the assemblage, gaze flitting over the crew and lingering on his passengers. “It has something to do with the cargo. That small box. One single box.” He was fishing, she knew. Maybe he himself had sent the now dead crewman to discover just what that solitary box contained.

  “What about the stowaway?” Neville asked. A few of the crew stirred, but no one but the captain spoke up.

  “There’s no proof that we have a stowaway.”

  “Your crew seems to think we do. This isn’t a large ship, Captain. Shouldn’t it be easy enough to discover whether there is one or not?”

  “As easy as revealing what the cargo is.”

  “You have been paid very well not to know,” one of the Turks, Saygin, said.

  The captain stared at him for a loaded moment, then smiled. It was a slick, confident expression, one that Jane suspected had frightened a lot of men and lured a lot of women into his bed.

  “My overall concern is the safety of my ship and crew.”

  “And your passengers, of course,” Jane said.

  “I am paid to give you passage,” he said, the implication clear. “From now on, no one will be left alone, either around the ship or in their cabins. The hold is out of bounds until we reach port. And Yanni’s funeral will be held tomorrow at midday.”

  The mess was quiet but for the constant creak and groan of subtle movement. When Captain Gavriil left the room his crew followed, whispering amongst themselves and casting suspicious glances at the passengers. One of them looked Jane in the eye and she flinched, but did not turn away. She had seen the man before—small, wiry, strong, and rarely without a smile on his face. Now he looked stern. Worse than that, he looked scared.

  When the last of the crew had left, it was Neville who stood and took control. Jane thought he would have made a natural captain. Her friend’s character always filled a room, his staggering intellect a large factor. She knew that seasick though he was, he would be feeling so constrained in this ship, as if his life was paused between one shore and the other. Even with what they were transporting.

  This jar that might once have belonged to Pandora.

  It had been discovered in a subterranean chamber, on the walls of which were ancient writings that had taken weeks to decipher, with some even now still being translated. What had already been de
termined was that the writings told a variation on the story of Pandora and identified the jar as having been in her possession. The location of the chamber, the historical descriptions of the jar, all made sense. But there was so much more they did not know, and that was why the team was working around the clock. Rumors and whispers down through the centuries spoke of two vessels, one containing all the ills and diseases and bad things of the world, the other filled with goodness and light. The writings in the chamber confirmed this variation. But while one jar might already have been opened, the other—the lost jar, mislaid millennia ago and perhaps now found again—remained sealed against the world.

  The true mystery was which of those vessels they had found. Before they reached port in San Francisco, they had to know.

  “He didn’t seem too concerned that one of his crew has just been brutally murdered,” Bryan said, with a worried glance at Jane.

  “I suspect he and his crew have been involved in more than a few unsavory situations,” Neville replied. He looked to the Turkish men. “I asked you to secure us safe passage.”

  “You asked me to find quick passage,” Saygin said. “The two are not necessarily good bedfellows.”

  “But with a pirate?”

  The word shocked Jane. It held so many connotations.

  “We’ve used him before,” Saygin said. “He’s trustworthy, and once bought, his silence is assured.”

  “Even if someone starts killing his crew?”

  “The dead man was trying to break into the hold to see what we’re transporting. You really want them to know?”

  “No,” Neville said softly, and Jane was surprised to hear such vulnerability in his voice.

  “We’ll reach dock soon,” she said. “Whatever happened, we’ll be away from it.”

  “Really?” Neville looked down, seemed to gather himself, then lifted his gaze again to Patrick and the other specialists. “How close are you to completing the translation?”

  “Come and see,” Patrick said. “Seems to me that staying together will be safest for us all, anyway.”

  As they left the mess hall Jane glanced back to see Saygin and Halis sitting at a table, heads close in conversation. Saygin saw her and smiled, then waved her on. We have things to discuss, that wave might have said. Or perhaps, We have plans to make.

  Walking along dank corridors that stank of diesel and sweat and boiled vegetables, listening to the groans and clangs of the vessel flexing and tipping through the ocean’s swell, she understood how people could go mad out here. Or if not mad then at least a bit unraveled, their ways of living, moral codes and outlook on life radically changed. Against the vastness of the ocean Man was small, and to be at its mercy every second of your life would be humbling and mind-altering.

  She also watched the shadows. Light came from shielded oil lamps set into the walls of the narrow gangways. As flames flickered, so the shadows seemed to stretch and dance, reaching for them as they walked past and then drawing away again. Any one of them might have harbored a killer.

  They entered the cabin that Bryan, Patrick, and Cesare were sharing. Neville and the museum director always referred to the men as specialists, but the men preferred the term freelance archaeologists. They were essentially adventurers for hire, traveling the globe and working for the highest bidder, no matter what the commission. Rough and harsh, Jane had also come to know them as sharp and intelligent. In many ways they were more knowledgeable than Neville, because their experience covered vast swathes of the world’s buried histories, not just one small aspect of it. Each had his own self-professed specialty. Patrick’s was societies and geography, while Cesare’s was military history and anthropology. Bryan’s expertise was in ancient languages.

  Their cabin was a mess. Three cots had been unbolted from the floor and pushed against the wall, and they were covered with tangled blankets, unwashed food plates, and scattered clothing. A fourth cot held a selection of books and papers, while the floor area had been cleared as much as possible. Across the floor lay heaps more papers, all of them indexed with a pencil mark in one corner showing where and when the rubbing had been taken. A white cloth sheet was pinned to the wall, and Jane recognized the general layout of the chamber in which the jar had been found.

  “Sorry about the mess,” Bryan said, not sounding sorry at all. “We’re getting there, though. I know a lot more about the jar than I did when we left port.”

  “But you know there’s a lot more you don’t know,” Cesare said.

  “Every answer poses another two questions,” Jane said, and Neville threw her a distracted smile. He’d told her that the first time they’d met, when she had taken up her post at the Golden Gate Museum. It had turned out to be so true, in many aspects of life as well as archaeology.

  She thought of Franca and her incessant questioning when she was younger. Why this, where that, when the other. As she had grown into her early teens the questions had come less frequently, but only because the girl asked them inside, keeping more mysteries to herself and not being quite so open with her curiosity. It was an adolescent thing, Jane knew, but it seemed foreign to her because she herself had undergone the opposite change when she entered her teenage years, starting to ask more questions than ever. She hoped that Franca would emerge from this phase soon.

  If she doesn’t die, she thought, and her daughter’s illness struck her yet again. I’m doing everything I can. If I could fly to you like a bird, I would. And if I can I’ll bring something that might make you better, my sweet girl.

  “Jane?” Neville said.

  “Hmm, what?”

  “You with us?”

  “Just thinking about that poor man who died.”

  “Yes, well,” Neville said, and it was evident that he hardly cared at all.

  “Death surrounds the jar like sand around a desert oasis,” Bryan said. “At least that’s what some of the writing seems to say.”

  “It’s quite common to build such myths around sacred objects,” Patrick said. “Whoever put this jar down where we found it wanted it left alone.”

  “And it’s worked, at least three times through history,” Bryan said. “See here. These sheets are from the walls lining the last passageway down towards the final chamber.”

  He pointed to the sheet on the wall, climbing onto the grouped cots and kicking aside a pile of dirty plates. The room was cramped with them all inside, but Jane was used to being in enclosed spaces with these people. Holes in the ground, stuffy library rooms, exhibit stores in museum basements. She had known them all for a long time, and trusted them in spite of their roguish approach to their work. That was why Michael had left her several years before. He claimed that she liked her work colleagues more than she liked him, and though that had never been true, she knew there was more to it than that. Michael had always been a traditionalist, and he didn’t like Jane’s adventurous side. As far as he was concerned, her place was at home with Franca.

  Just now she would have agreed with him. But she was not one for regrets. She had chosen this unusual life for herself.

  “Alexander the Great?” Neville said, snapping Jane’s attention back to the moment.

  “From what I can make out he captured the region, discovered these chambers and ordered them guarded,” Bryan said. “He didn’t even venture deep inside. Just destroyed the entrances he could find and ordered them sealed up forever.”

  “Forever wasn’t quite as long as that, though,” Cesare said.

  “Nope. The chambers were discovered again four hundred years later. A great battle was fought, thousands died, and their corpses were used to plug the access routes into the underground network.”

  Jane shivered at the thought. “We didn’t find anything like that.”

  “It must have been a route still hidden away,” Neville said.

  “So we were working close to thousands of bodies all the time,” Cesare said. “Well, that’s enough to give me nightmares for the rest of my life.”

&nb
sp; “If that isn’t enough, this last section I’ve translated will be,” Bryan replied.

  He knelt close to the sheets he had spread across the floor and looked up at them, and Jane realized that he appeared haunted. The Irishman had never seemed troubled by signs of death and decay, and they had found plenty in their searches of hidden, ancient places. Sometimes the death was ritual, the victims arranged in poses or positions designed to convey certain messages in this world or the next. Sometimes the deaths were violent, evidenced by holed skulls and scattered bones with blade scars across their pale surfaces. Even when they found dead infants, Bryan seemed able to disassociate himself from them. They were archaeological artifacts, not dead people, he would say. Mysteries for people like them to unravel. He was never spooked, and she knew that he held his faith close.

  He was spooked now, though.

  “So?” Neville prompted.

  “These were taken from inside the chamber,” Bryan said. “Remember, Alexander wanted this place and its contents hidden away forever. Those who discovered it later fought battles to keep it secret, using the dead to dissuade anyone from digging deeper.”

  “And now we’ve gone and plundered it,” Jane said.

  Plunder was not a word any of them would normally have used, but right then no one questioned her usage. They were too focused on Bryan.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t have,” Bryan said. “There are warnings. They’re quite detailed, and fairly intricate in their—”

  “Paraphrase,” Neville said. One word, and he possessed the room.

  Bryan sat back on his heels, no longer needing to read from his sheafs of notes and rough translations. He gave Jane a long, searching look before he continued. “Anyone who enters the chamber of Pandora will be forever damned,” he said.

  “Pretty standard,” Cesare said, shrugging. “In that case I’ve been damned a thousand times.”

  “The main part is more important,” Bryan said. “It goes something like: If you accept your damnation and dare touch the jar of Pandora or that of her sister Anesidora, the Keeper—which we interpret as some kind of guardian of the jars—will rise, hunt you down, cut your throat and take your eyes.”