by Paul Sussman
‘What the hell did you say to them?’ gasped Freya as she and Flin ran out through the monumental pylon and across the narrow clearing in front of the temple.
‘I told them I’m a Red Devil.’
‘What?’
‘Long story. For the moment I just want to get out of here. Come on!’
They leapt down the steps that led up to the temple platform. Reaching flat ground, they charged on through the trees, slipping and stumbling on the uneven paving, the pulses now coming at regular intervals, each one sending a rippling tremor through the oasis, as though the rock itself was shivering at the sound.
‘Wasn’t there something about a crocodile? And a snake.’
‘The Two Curses,’ replied Flin, hurdling a giant root that had driven its way up through the path. ‘May evildoers be crushed in the jaws of Sobek and swallowed into the belly of the serpent Apep.’
‘Which means?’
‘I haven’t the faintest bloody idea. Come on!’
They continued downwards, sphinxes and obelisks lining the causeway to either side of them, the gorge starting to narrow. So insistent was the throbbing of the Benben that it was only now Freya noticed that the screech and chatter of birdsong – previously so pervasive – had disappeared, as had the buzz and hum of insects. She looked around and up, but aside from a couple of what looked like vultures circling high in the sky above, the valley seemed suddenly empty and denuded of wildlife. Flin must have noticed the same thing because he slowed to a walk and then a halt, surveying the trees and cliffs before breaking into a run again, pushing on with even more urgency than before. The absence of fauna seemed to have spooked him as much as, if not more than, the booming of the stone.
‘At least all Molly’s people seem to have gone as well,’ called Freya, pounding along behind him. She’d been scanning the undergrowth as they descended and hadn’t spotted any of the shadowy figures she’d glimpsed on their way up through the valley. Her hopes were rising that they might actually make it down to the tunnel and out of the oasis without being challenged. ‘They must all have …’
Flin came to an abrupt stop. A giant dum palm reared to their left, a colossal granite arm to their right. Ahead, standing in the middle of the causeway, was a man in a flak jacket and sand-coloured army combats, a Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine-gun pushed tight into his shoulder, its muzzle aimed directly at them. A second flak-jacketed figure stepped out from behind the palm tree, also wielding a submachine-gun. Flin reached out and took Freya’s hand as another shudder reverberated through the valley. For once he didn’t seem to have anything to say.
Molly Kiernan had always loved fireworks, ever since the annual Fourth of July displays in her home city of North Platte, Nebraska, when she and her family would gather to watch in wonder as sparkling explosions of colour lit up the night sky above the Lincoln County Fairgrounds on the edge of town. Since then she had seen bigger, more spectacular displays – the one at the Pyramids to mark Egyptian National Day was always impressive – but nothing came close to the scenes she was now witnessing inside the glass isolation chamber.
Every time one of the deep, sonorous pulses rang out from the Benben – and they had been coming more and more frequently over the last twenty minutes – it was accompanied by a brilliant burst of illumination. The flashes had grown brighter and fiercer with each repetition and Meadows had insisted they all don radiation goggles as back-up to the protective tinting of the chamber’s leaded glass screens. Colours had started to appear inside the stone, faint at first, barely noticeable, minute glittering pinpricks of red and blue and silver and green that flared momentarily within the dark mass of rock before disappearing again. As the pulsing grew more frequent and the light flashes more blinding, the colours grew commensurately stronger and more striking. Pinpricks turned into streaks and streaks into swirls, the entire stone burning with a brilliant kaleidoscope of hues, a dense aura seeming to rise off its surface like steam, enveloping it in a rich golden haze.
‘It’s beautiful,’ cried Kiernan, clapping her hands in delight. ‘Oh Lord, it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen! Don’t you think? Aren’t I right? The most beautiful thing ever!’
No one responded, everyone in the room gazing speechless as the display intensified in front of them, the monitors and printer now silent, the computer screens blank, the electrics having long since burnt out and died.
‘Is it safe?’ Girgis kept demanding. With his shiny rubber goggles, slicked-back hair and thin, lipless mouth he appeared even more reptilian than ever. ‘Are you sure we’re safe? I don’t want to end up like that!’
By which he meant Usman, or what had once been Usman. There wasn’t much of the Egyptologist left, each successive burst of light having stripped away a little bit more of his body, reducing him layer by layer like an unpeeling onion until all that remained was a bleached crumple of bones lying on the floor at the foot of the Benben. Still – surreally – tangled up with his shoes, socks, underpants and glasses.
‘We’re perfectly safe, Mr Girgis,’ Meadows assured him. ‘As I told you before, the glass membrane is unbreachable. Whatever happens inside the observation zone will remain inside the observation zone. Nothing’s getting out that we don’t want to.’
But as the reaction within the rock continued to gather force, the pulses coming ever faster, the light-bursts growing ever brighter, even Meadows began to look uncertain. He paced up and down, scratching at his balding head and conversing in hushed, anxious tones with his fellow white-coats, all of them clearly wondering where this was leading and whether perhaps they had underestimated what they were dealing with here.
Kiernan alone remained unfazed by the pyrotechnics. Standing well forward of the others, she beamed and clapped her hands like an over-excited schoolgirl, occasionally reaching out a finger and touching it to the glass wall as if trying to connect with what was going on behind it, convince herself it was actually happening.
‘Look at it, Charlie!’ she whispered. ‘Will you just look at it! All these years you’ve kept me strong, kept me believing! And now … Oh my sweet holy Lord in heaven will you just look at it! Beautiful! Beautiful!’
So absorbed was she, so utterly hypnotized by the extraordinary sound and light show playing out in front of her that she didn’t notice when someone started calling her name – a crackly-sounding voice with an American accent. Only when Meadows came forward and handed her the walkie-talkie she had left beside one of the monitors did she finally pull her attention away from the stone. Holding the apparatus to her ear, she listened, eyes flicking towards Girgis, her head shaking as if in disapproval. Then, with a curt ‘Terminate them’, she handed the set back to Meadows and returned her attention to the Benben.
‘Oh blow ye the trumpet in Zion,’ she whispered as a crackle of static echoed from the walkie-talkie, followed by muffled gunshots. ‘Sound an alarm in my holy mountain, for the day of the Lord is coming, it is nigh at hand!’
Shock can play strange tricks on the mind, and for a brief, scrambled moment Freya thought she must be dead and having some sort of out-of-body experience.
It wasn’t just that she had heard Kiernan’s voice ordering their execution, and then the sound of gunfire and of two bodies thudding to the ground, but that everything had suddenly gone deathly quiet and still, as though the world had come to an abrupt stop and all that was left was a freeze-frame of its final moment.
It only lasted an instant before she realized that, whatever else had happened, she most certainly hadn’t been gunned down. She blinked and looked around. Everything was exactly as it had been a few moments ago – the oasis, the avenue of sphinxes and obelisks, the giant dum palm, the monumental granite arm. The only noticeable difference was that the sound of the Benben had ceased, plunging the gorge into a silence all the more profound for the intensity of the noise that had preceded it. That and the fact that the two men in flak jackets – who only a few seconds ago had been about to open fire on th
em – were now lying sprawled on the ground. One was face down, the top part of his skull blown away, his hair, neck and flak-jacket collar matted with a viscous porridge of blood and bone and brain. The other was on his back, arms splayed, a dark, fleshy hole gaping where his left eye had once been.
‘Jesus,’ she mumbled, uncertain whether to feel horror at the carnage, relief that their assailants were dead or alarm that this was merely the prelude to some new and unexpected assault.
She glanced across at Flin, who seemed to be struggling with the same slew of emotions. He raised his eyebrows as if to say ‘I’ve no more idea what’s just happened than you have’, and looked around, trying to see where the gunshots had come from and who had fired them. As he did there was a rustle of branches and something – someone – dropped from the dum palm above their heads, landing with a soft thud to their left. Simultaneously there was a whirl of robes on the far side of the causeway. A figure scrambled over the top of the giant granite arm and hurried towards them, rifle in hand. Flin moved in front of Freya, fists clenched, ready to fight. The figure stopped, held the rifle out to his side and with his free hand tugged away the scarf that was wrapped around his head and face. Flin and Freya gawped.
‘Zahir?’
Although the evidence was standing right there in front of her, Freya still couldn’t believe it.
‘Zahir?’ she repeated. ‘How the hell did you …?’
She broke off, surprise and relief giving way to suspicion. All her misgivings about the Egyptian came flooding back, memories of that last, tense meeting at his house in Dakhla. He noticed the change in her expression and again held out his rifle to show he meant her no harm. The other man did the same with his gun, reaching up to reveal his face as well – Zahir’s younger brother Said. Freya recognized him from her sister’s funeral. She relaxed slightly, as did Flin who dropped his fists and stepped back so that he was standing beside her.
‘What are you doing here?’ she asked, shaking her head in bewilderment. ‘How did you find it?’
If she was looking for an explanation, it didn’t come. Instead, after standing there a moment, both of them with that stern, slightly dour expression that seemed to run in the family, Zahir came forward a couple of paces and held a hand to his chest.
‘I sorry, Miss Freya.’
She frowned, having no idea what he was talking about.
‘I sorry,’ he repeated, his manner formal, serious, as though he was making some public pronouncement. ‘You my guest in Egypt, you sister my good friend Doctor Alex. It is my duty care for you, protect you from all danger. I no protect you; many bad thing happen. I sorry, I very sorry. You forgive me.’
Of all the things that had happened over the last few days – car chases, shoot-outs, lost oases, lumps of rock with supernatural powers – this for some reason struck Freya as the most bizarre: standing there beside two blood-covered corpses and a giant granite arm being apologized to for no good reason by a man who had just rescued her from certain death.
‘You forgive me,’ he said again, something almost childlike in the earnestness of his tone. Despite herself, despite everything, Freya burst out laughing.
‘Zahir, you just saved my goddam life. I should be thanking, not forgiving you! Jeez, you Bedouin …’
She whirled a hand beside her head, indicating that she thought he was mad. Zahir frowned, trying to work out whether the gesture was playful or insulting. Apparently settling on the former, he gave a nod and the faintest hint of a smile, no more than a brief upward twitch at the ends of his lips.
‘Everything OK now, Miss Freya,’ he said, coming forward and nudging one of the bodies with his foot. ‘You safe. Both of you safe. No danger. Everything good.’
Curiously they were almost exactly the same words Flin had used after the hornet attack back in the Antonov. Now, as then, she felt a warming surge of relief and well-being, thinking that maybe, just maybe, the odds had turned in their favour, that they were going to make it out of this alive.
Now as then it proved a short-lived respite. Barely had she allowed herself that first glimmer of optimism when, like a volley of slaps across the face, the deep pulsing sound suddenly started up again. Boom … Boom … Boom … echoing around the gorge, causing the rocks and the trees to tremble, repeating at an even faster rate now as though whatever was causing it had recharged itself and now wanted to make up for lost time.
The four of them froze, looking anxiously around. The ground beneath their feet seemed to jump with each pulse, the vibrations now so forceful that for a moment Freya was convinced the sound was not only sending tremors through the walls of the gorge, but actually causing them to move, shunting them inwards towards each other. She shook her head, certain she was imagining things, that it was just some optical illusion. But the more she stared, the more it seemed to her that the walls of the gorge were moving, slowly creeping together like a vast closing book, the geology of aeons going into reverse, telescoping into a period of mere seconds. A low, malevolent grinding sound of rock crunching against rock could now be heard, quite distinct from the booming pulse, swiftly building in volume until it had all but drowned the Benben out.
‘Do you see that?’ she said, her arms coming up, pointing at the cliffs to left and right.
Flin obviously had because he was already sprinting across to the giant granite arm, Zahir and his brother just behind. The three men scrambled up on top of the stone to give themselves a better view.
‘What is that?’ Freya shouted. ‘What’s happening?’
Flin was shielding his eyes, his head turning back and forth, his legs braced against the trembling of the arm beneath him.
‘The jaws of Sobek,’ he murmured. Then again, louder: ‘The jaws of Sobek! My God, that’s what the curse means! May evildoers be crushed in the jaws of Sobek! The oasis closes like a crocodile’s mouth. That’s what it means. Look! You see how it’s coming together!’
Freya did indeed, even from her lower elevation. The shape of the oasis – narrow at one end, wide at the other, its cliffs forming themselves into a gigantic V – gave the impression, now she looked at it, of some gargantuan crocodile’s maw, maxilla and mandible gradually clamping shut, crushing everything in between. Rocks and other debris were starting to cascade down the faces of the cliffs; there was a distant splintering sound as of tree trunks uprooting and snapping.
‘But it’s not possible!’ she screamed. ‘How can a gorge just close up? It’s not possible.’
‘None of it’s possible,’ shouted Flin, waving his arm around. ‘None of it, from start to finish! It doesn’t matter, it’s happening, we have to get out. We have to get out now!’
He leapt down, closely followed by Zahir and his brother, the Egyptians’ brown djellabas billowing around them. Although their faces were as blank as ever, the alarm in their eyes was unmistakable.
Flin seized Freya’s arm and started moving on down the oasis towards the tunnel, but Zahir came after them and pulled them to a stop.
‘No that way. Many men below. We go other way, top of valley.’
He chopped a hand back towards the temple.
‘We climb. This how we come into oasis. Always how we come in.’
Flin opened his mouth to ask what Zahir meant by this last comment, but the Egyptian and his brother had already started running, waving the two westerners after them.
‘Come!’ Zahir shouted. ‘No much time!’
‘You’ve been here before!’ called Flin, charging along in his wake. ‘Did you say you’d been here before?’
His voice was lost within the roar and crack of grinding rock as the cliffs inched steadily towards each other, clouds of dust starting to rise to either side of the gorge as though the oasis was burning.
Vernon Meadows – Dr Vernon Meadows BSc, MSc, Ph.D., CPhys, FAAAS, FInstP, SMIEEE – had worked on what he liked to refer to as the ‘esoteric front line’ of US defence research for the best part of forty years, everything from quantu
m teleportation to weather disruption programmes, invisibility shields to anti-matter-propelled isomer warheads. And during that time, whatever project he had been engaged on, wherever in the world he had been engaged on it – and there weren’t many corners of the globe he hadn’t visited on his mission to push the outer boundaries of weapons technology – two basic rules had always stood him in good stead: stay calm and in control, however outlandish the situation; and when you can’t stay calm and in control, get the hell out quick.
It was the second of these rules that came into play now as the Benben started pulsing again – no bursts of light this time, which was interesting – and, from outside, there came a heavy rumbling sound which, one of his colleagues informed him, after rushing out to look, was being caused by the walls of the gorge slowly drawing together. Meadows had witnessed a lot of weird shit over the years, but nothing that even came close to this. He went outside himself to assess the situation, then returned to the chamber and called time out, ordering everyone to drop whatever they were doing, abandon the project and run for their lives.
No one argued. Even Girgis allowed himself to be hustled through the doorway by his colleagues, albeit with yells of ‘What about the money! I’ve kept my end of the deal and I want my money! Now, you hear! Now!’
Only Molly Kiernan refused to leave. She remained rooted where she was in front of the glass isolation zone, oblivious to the frantic exodus behind her, gazing at the stone as it pulsed and boomed and once again filled with spiralling curlicues of colour. The hues if anything were even richer and deeper than they had been before – the most vibrant, exotic, mesmerizing colours she had ever seen, as though the rock were merely a window onto some higher and more perfect order of reality.
‘Ms Kiernan, we have to go!’ cried Meadows, furiously waving at her from the chamber entrance, his legs pulling him backwards through the doorway as if they were working independently of the rest of his body. ‘Please! We have to go. It’s out of control.’