by Talbot, Luke
“Has it ever really been Plan B?” he mumbled to himself as he shuffled in his seat nervously. He didn’t think so. Deep down inside, he had wanted to see Plan B in action and now, while it was being carried out, he felt a surge of excitement. Another, conflicting part of his mind cried megalomaniac, which he chose to ignore. “This was always meant to be,” he soothed himself. “The Book of Xynutians showed me the way, it’s no coincidence that it fell into my lap!” he started to raise his voice. “What would be the point of me having all of this if it didn’t have a purpose?”
He stood up and started pacing around his desk. The search for answers to the ancient riddles and a possible way of avoiding the wrath of Aniquilus had certainly been fascinating, but ultimately it had done little more than confirm what he already knew.
“I am Aniquilus,” his face lit up as he said the words out loud for the first time, as if some internal flood barrier had finally been breached. Years of pent up emotion started to pour out. “I am Aniquilus,” he laughed. “I am Aniquilus,” he roared, sweeping his arms over his desk sending paper and pen and telephone flying. “And I will rain down fire on this world!”
He barked orders at the computer and the screen lit up, filling with video feeds and streams of text.
For him, secretly having complete control of the country’s defence satellites had more than one advantage. Not only could you spy on whatever you wanted to, such as a covert operation in Egypt, you could also make the Department of Defence see things that simply weren’t there, like unauthorised fighter jets entering US airspace, or a build-up of foreign troops on a disputed border.
You could even make it look like three nuclear Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles had launched from deep inside Asia towards densely populated targets within the United States of America.
And while the powers that be scrambled to verify and counter the imaginary attack, three very real unmarked utility vans with nuclear bombs inside them would arrive unchallenged in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York.
And so the Apocalypse would begin.
He rounded the desk and made for the door. As he slammed it behind him the lights automatically shut off, and the screen went dark.
Chapter 71
“Wait, no!” Gail exclaimed as Ben approached one of the ancient wooden shelves inside the Library, intent on upending it to examine what lay beneath.
He paused briefly, the time to turn and offer a brief apology; it was more for Gail than for the archaeological world as a whole. Taking hold of the middle shelf, he tentatively rocked it from side to side, to get a feel for its weight and structural integrity. After thousands of years, it was surprisingly solid, offering little give.
Applying more force, he managed to obtain a groan from the thick timber. He stepped back and took in the room as a whole, before turning to the rest of the group.
“What do you think? If we lean on it together it will budge quite easily.”
“And then topple into all the other shelves like dominos!” Gail cried. “Thousands of years perfectly preserved, then destroyed in seconds by us. We have to look for another way.”
“And die in here, for the sake of a few bookcases?” Ben said. “I understand how hard this must be for you, Gail, but if there’s another way out of this place, we have to find it very soon.”
Patterson approached the shelves and gave them a quick nudge. “Bear in mind that even if we do find another way out, the air inside whatever tunnel or room we uncover may be toxic,” he shook his head soberly. “It’ll quickly mix with the little air we have left, and we may simply pass out and die within a few minutes.”
There was a long silence as they digested what he had said. There was no denying the fact that air trapped for thousands of years wasn’t going to be fresh, and there was a strong chance that it would be quite toxic. The air inside the Library was finite, and wouldn’t last them for long if the area it had to fill suddenly became a lot larger.
Eventually it was Walker who broke the silence.
“Not wanting to use up any of your precious air by talking,” he began patronisingly. “But tipping the bookcases over will make a lot of mess, and it won’t uncover your hidden door.”
They turned to him in surprise.
“Oh, and how would you know?” Patterson said sarcastically.
Walker got to his feet, waving away their protests and Ben’s raised gun barrel with the back of his hand. He sauntered over to the circular entrance to the Library.
“You made me climb through a tunnel carved into solid rock to get in here,” he began. “The Ancient Egyptians make that?” Gail shook her head. “No, I guessed not. You lot cut your way in because you couldn’t find the door in the first place. Did you find any bodies in here?” Gail didn’t need to shake her head, she could already see where he was going with his argument. “Not even a dead fly. So the entrance to this damn place remains to be found. But it ain’t just the entrance is it? It’s the exit too.” He turned on his heel and waved his arms around him. “Millions of years ago –”
“Thousands,” Gail cut in.
“Whatever! It don’t matter if it was yesterday, personally, I don’t give a damn. Thousands of years ago some guy closed the door on this place for the last time. Are you suggesting,” he pointed at Ben, “that when he closed it, he somehow managed to build a bookshelf on top of it?” he flapped his arms and jutted his jaw out at him. “And you can stop pointing my own gun at me for a start. You think I’m gonna try and stop you escaping from here? This is my funeral too.”
Ben looked back at him, but was reluctant to lower the pistol. Somehow, he didn’t believe Walker was harmless at all, even if they were in the same boat.
“He’s right, of course,” Gail said matter-of-factly. “If there’s a door, it won’t be under the shelves. They were stacked with parchments and scrolls when we came in here. Even if they did somehow slide into place when the Egyptians left, it would have been difficult not to drop something on the floor.”
“So where is it then?” Ben said desperately. “There’s nothing else in here! No gaps or grooves in the wall we can prise open, the only other feature in the whole place is the plinth.”
They all looked to where he was pointing. It was the structure that Gail had originally seen on the x-ray screen all those years ago. It protruded from the floor, its top tilted with a lip at the bottom edge, in which had sat the books of Aniquilus and Xynutians. Roughly three feet wide and two feet deep at its base, it sat in an alcove at one end of the rectangular room, the bookcases lined up in front of it like pews in a church.
Walker was already there, inspecting the base of the plinth. Gail joined him, despite Ben’s best efforts to stop her from going near the man who barely half an hour earlier wouldn’t have hesitated in shooting them all.
“It’s a separate stone from the floor,” she told him. “We know that much already.”
He grunted in reply, then looked up at her. “No drawings of Egyptian things and cats and shit? I’ve seen all the adventure movies, there’s always some writing somewhere that someone leans on, then the secret passage opens up; hey sesame.”
“This isn’t a movie,” she said bitterly. “Yes, there are usually inscriptions inside Egyptian tombs and monuments, but not in this one. The only recurring symbol is the stickman – Aniquilus.”
“Aniqui who?” Ben asked, surprised at hearing the name for the first time.
“It’s a long story,” she said dismissively. “Anyway, there are no other hieroglyphs in here. We’ve always focussed our research on the literature that we found, the contents of the bookcases rather than the structure itself. I mean, how many times do you check the walls out when you go to your local library?”
“My local what?” Walker joked. He stood up laboriously and looked at Ben. “If there’s one thing we should try knocking over, it’s this.”
No one disagreed, and soon they were pushing with all their might to try and topple it sideways.
They tried again from the other side, with the same results. After a few minutes, even Walker conceded that the plinth wasn’t going anywhere.
“Could we lift it?” Patterson suggested.
“Bit of a heavy trapdoor isn’t it? How would they have dropped it in place behind them?” Ben commented.
“Fill the space underneath with sand and then take the sand away slowly from below,” Walker said, as if it was the simplest thing in the world. “But then we have the same problem: how’d the last person get out?”
They stood looking at the plinth for several long minutes.
“In any case,” Patterson said finally, “whether it was dropped in behind them or slid across, I don’t see how they could have done it. It’s too heavy and it would have left marks all over the floor if it was dragged, and there are no signs of anything like that.”
Gail sat down and leant against the back of the alcove, exasperated. Letting her head thud against the cold stone, she buried her face in her hands and groaned. “What’s the use? We’ve been down here nearly an hour, and we’re already running out of air. Our only hope is that someone up there digs us out.”
Ben got up onto the plinth, so that he was leaning against the book holder, his backside wedged into the lip that originally stopped the books from falling to the floor.
Gail gave him a disapproving look, then shook her head and closed her eyes.
“What?” he said. “I’m sorry Gail, but we’re going to die down here, the last of my worries is damaging the –”
“Ben, shut up!” she said suddenly, sitting bolt upright, her eyes wide open.
“Oh great! First I’m not allowed to –”
“No seriously, Ben, shhh!” she put her finger to her lips and everyone listened: somewhere beneath the floor, a rumbling had started, like the rolling of a bowling ball making its journey down to the pins.
Then there was the muffled sound of something clicking into place, followed by silence.
After waiting a few seconds longer, Gail got to her feet and pressed her ear against the back wall of the alcove.
“Whatever it was, it didn’t do much,” she said, disappointed. “When you sat on the plinth you must have set off the first part of some mechanism, but over the centuries whatever function it had has probably rotted away.”
They all returned their attention to the plinth, but despite Walker, Patterson and Ben pressing down on it together as hard as possible, nothing further happened.
Gail turned and kicked the wall hard, swearing both out of frustration and pain for having kicked the stone with soft shoes. As she crouched down to nurse her toes, the distinctive grating of stone against stone filled the room, and before her eyes the entire back wall of the alcove slid downwards, revealing a long corridor, the end of which was so far away the lights in the Library left it in darkness.
The air from both spaces mixed in a cloud of dust where they stood, causing more than one of them to cough. But despite their original concerns, the air remained breathable. Walker took a couple of steps forwards, crossing the threshold of the corridor by stepping over the half-foot of door still protruding from the floor.
“How the hell would that work? That stone is over a foot thick, and must weigh tons,” he said, amazed.
“You said it yourself,” Patterson answered. “Put the stone on a load of sand. When the mechanism is activated, in this case probably a ball or roller of some description taking a series of pins or plugs with it as it goes, sand pours out of holes, and the door slides down.”
“But instead it got stuck and didn’t budge, while the sand poured out underneath it,” Gail continued. “That kick was all it needed to start falling down. It was a pretty tight fit!” She was inspecting the gap between the wall and the groove into which it had been placed.
They all walked into the passage, with the exception of Gail, who continued to examine the doorway.
“Wait, this raises more questions than it answers.”
“Who cares?” Walker said, striding forwards into the tunnel. “It’s not like we have all the time in the world, is it?”
“No, seriously, this is important,” she insisted. “If this door opened from inside the Library, then whatever lies beyond this door must be further away from the original entrance. We’ve found a way to get deeper into the tomb, or whatever this is, but we haven’t found the original way into the Library.” They were all staring at her, even Walker. She tried to put it as simply as she could: “If we go down there, we’re getting further away from the outside world.”
Ben broke first, visibly agitated. “So what do we do, ignore this entrance and keep looking for another one? And what if we do find the original way in to the Library, and it actually just takes us back to the stairs that are filled with rubble? What if that was the original entrance, but we simply didn’t take the time to find the original door?”
“Makes sense to me,” Walker nodded.
“Oh, and now you’re the archaeologist are you?” she targeted him vehemently. “A little while ago you were killing people and threatening to kill us too, but now you want to go down there like Indiana Jones and find some hidden treasure while we wait to be rescued, or worse, wait to die?”
Patterson and Ben took a step away from Walker, as if Gail’s comments had suddenly reminded them who he was.
“No,” he replied calmly. “But we’re not getting out through the stairs, and there ain’t no books to read in this so called library of yours, so I thought it’d be best to have a look round and see what else there was to do. And while I’m at it, if I come across another exit, I’ll let you use it too,” he said with mock gallantry.
Before she could say anything, he had turned on his heels and was striding down the corridor into the gloom. Before he was completely in the dark, they saw him rummaging in his chest pocket, and a light came on in front of him. As they watched, the light grew smaller and smaller.
Patterson coughed. “Well, he has a torch, and we don’t. So I vote we go with him.”
Gail held back, and Ben looked at her in earnest.
“Gail, I hate to say it, but he’s right; there’s no reason to stay here, and besides, we shouldn’t let him out of our sight. He could still be planning something.”
She thought about this for a moment before conceding. “Alright, but I’m only going with you because I want to make sure that whatever we find gets treated with respect. This is now officially an archaeological dig, so I’m in charge.”
They walked along in silence for a few yards.
“Do you kick all of your archaeological digs?” Patterson said quietly.
Ben suppressed a laugh and while Gail pretended to ignore him, the darkness made it much easier for her to hide a smile.
Chapter 72
They met Walker coming back up the corridor. He shone the torch directly in their eyes as he moved the light between each of their faces.
“I think you’re gonna love what’s up ahead,” he said blinding Gail with the narrow beam of light.
“Don’t mess with that light, Walker,” Ben said. “I still have the gun, remember?”
“Oh yeah, I’d forgotten. How silly of me to forget that you have my sidearm. Jesus, what kind of soldier do you think I am?”
“One of fortune?” Gail suggested.
He turned without a word and carried on back down the tunnel at a faster pace than they could comfortably follow in the dark.
“Might be an idea not to upset the man with the light,” Patterson said.
The tunnel sloped downwards in a smooth curve, so that the doorway they had come from was now hidden from view. After twenty more yards Walker’s light disappeared, and they heard him shout back up the tunnel.
“Left turn!”
Now completely in the dark, they fumbled their way forwards.
“Walker! We can’t see!” Gail shouted back. “Come back here!”
They contin
ued to shout and complain until he returned; they had managed to proceed barely five yards in the darkness.
“Well, what are you all waiting for? Didn’t you bring torches?” They glared at him as one, and he gave them a wide grin back. “OK, game’s over, come and look at this.”
Despite the anger they all felt towards the man, there was an excited tinge to the way he was talking, and they found it hard not to be caught up in the thrill of discovery.
They followed him more closely this time, and as they rounded the corner, he made a quick adjustment to his torch, going from narrow to wide beam. Suddenly the area around them lit up and even Walker, who had already seen it, was speechless.
The corridor ended abruptly and opened up onto a landing at the top of some stone steps, which descended to the floor of a huge hall. Walker bounced the light off two rows of stone columns; they were at least fifty feet high, connecting the floor to the ceiling. While it was difficult to make out the opposite wall, the room had to be at least the length of a football pitch. From the top of the stairs, they felt like spectators looking from end to end.
Gail started walking down the steps, and Walker followed. Patterson joined them as they made their way down to the floor. Ben hesitated for a while, as he tried desperately to focus on the far end of the hall. Then, shaking his head and rubbing his eyes, he went down after them.
The staircase led down to a central avenue. Walker scanned the hall with the torch, and as far as the light would reach on either side they could see row after row of identical columns.
“My God,” Gail whispered. “It’s like Karnak, the Hypostyle hall.”
Walker continued to scan between the columns with the torch.
He let out a long whistle as he slowly moved the beam of the torch from row to row, for while the central avenue was empty, the rows immediately adjacent to it were completely filled with an assortment of crates, wooden boxes, cabinets, large pots and cloth bags.