“Look here, Brother Scion.”
Daniel snapped himself out of his reverie to see where Nikos was pointing. To the left of the cave entrance was an immense stone outcropping that had been shaped by human hands. It looked like stairs for giants. “What is this?” he asked.
“It was once an altar where offerings were made to the pagan god Zeus. See up there, on the topmost step.”
Daniel looked upward to what appeared to be a rectangular stone slab. It was large enough to be a stage much less an altar. He turned his attention back to the entrance of the cave. “You understand what we are searching for?”
“Yes, of course.” Nikos bobbed his head vehemently. “The same symbols you came to find before. I still have the photographs.” He waved the snapshots in front of Daniel’s face. “We are to look at the walls and ceiling of the cavern for these signs.”
Daniel was about to advance, but Nikos laid a restraining hand on his arm.
“Please. You must take this.” The young convert handed him a flashlight. “It will be very dark at the back of the cavern.”
The scion nodded and took the flashlight. He glanced behind them down the trail. There were no other tourists about. Nor did he see any sign of the archaeologists who were reputed to be digging here. That was good. Daniel didn’t want any curious eyes watching them. He was glad Leroy Hunt had decided to wait for them at the taverna at the bottom of the hill. He always tended to attract attention wherever he went because of his cowboy attire.
Since Nikos was a Cretan by birth, he seemed to feel it his duty to act as tour guide. “It was in this cave that the god Zeus spent his childhood. His mother the goddess Rhea gave birth to him in another cave on the island but moved him here to hide him better from his father Cronos who would have eaten him.”
“Yes, I am aware of the heathen myth,” Daniel commented. “I also know that the winged demons called Kouretes protected the infant. Whenever he cried, they would beat their shields and make enough noise to muffle the sound of his wailing. That way his father wouldn’t know he was still alive.” He had spent weeks researching the strange deities of Greece. The notion of a father devouring his own son might once have felt alien to him. It didn’t now.
“There is something I have never understood about this myth,” Nikos said. “If Zeus is called the father of the gods and all are descended from him, then how can he have a mother?”
Daniel raised his eyebrows. “I’m not sure.”
“And also, the pagans say that he was born in a cave and each year he dies in a cave. If he is an immortal god, how can he die?”
The scion shook his head. “There is a great deal about the heathen religions that makes no sense. The ancient peoples had the minds of children. They did not use reason as we do.”
Seemingly satisfied with that explanation, Nikos switched on his flashlight and moved forward.
The two men left the sunny afternoon behind and descended down a steep flight of stairs into the recesses of the Ideon Andron.
Daniel had learned much about the cave and its structure on the internet and in books. The main chamber of the cavern was approximately 150 feet wide with two horizontal chambers leading to an inner sanctum. He knew all the facts about the place, but nothing in his research had prepared him for the actual experience of entering it. He became aware of the dampness. Water dripping from the ceiling and trickling down the walls. The wooden viewing platform was slippery. Green moss grew from the stones high above his head.
From where he stood at the bottom of the central chamber, he looked up toward the cave mouth illuminated by a bright blue sky. As he stepped back a few paces, he felt a line of shadow cross his face. The darkness seemed to swallow him.
The side chambers had been blocked off because of the archaeological excavation. Since nobody was around, Daniel decided there was nothing to prevent them from investigating the inner recesses of the cave. The two men agreed to split up. Nikos would search one of the side chambers while Daniel searched the other. As the scion slipped past the gate and moved down the gallery, he could no longer hear Nikos’ footsteps echoing off in the other direction. He became acutely aware of how still this underworld was.
Following the twists and turns in the tunnel caused him to lose his orientation. It grew increasingly dark. No brightness from the outside world reflected on the walls in here. Only the meager beam of his flashlight. The rock walls on either side were so narrow in places they seemed to fold in on him.
He trained his light toward the ceiling. Wavy curtains of stalactites pressed down from above, their bottom-most tips dripping with moisture. Looking up at them made him feel dizzy. He studied the walls for any evidence of the symbols from the key. The bare rock swirled and twisted into grotesque shapes. Daniel’s mind began to play tricks. He saw faces in the stone. Lost souls feeling the torments of hell. Their mouths gaping in endless screams of terror.
He continued moving down the gallery searching the walls and ceiling as he went, but all he found were unnerving images from hell. By now, he knew he was far beyond the reach of the world above. With no warning, his flashlight faltered and went out completely. He shook it to reseat the battery but accidentally dropped it. He could hear it rolling down the slope in the tunnel floor.
He fought the urge to scream as a surge of panic shot through him. He felt the darkness like a living thing. It was pressing into his eyes and ears and nose. He lost all sense of spacial orientation. Everything seemed to be tilted at an angle. Which way was up? Which was down? He couldn’t feel the dimensions of his own body. He tried guiding his fingers to reach for a wall, but his fingers weren’t where he expected them to be. Nor was the wall. He flailed around in an absolute void.
He didn’t like this underworld. He couldn’t understand why anyone would choose such a place to worship a god. He was used to divinities who lived in the sky. Worship was conducted from a pulpit by a minister who told him what laws God expected him to obey.
There was no law here. There was no reason here. That had been left behind in a world of light and order and the works of man. Here there was only feeling. What kind of god might one meet here? Nothing in Daniel’s religion had prepared him for an encounter with the deity of this place. He was sure it wasn’t Zeus. Something older than time itself lived in the silence here, and it marked his presence. He remembered a word he had discovered while researching the heathen religions. Chthonic. Primordial deities that presided over birth and death. Womb and tomb seemed to fuse together in this place. The combination unsettled him. Weren’t they supposed to be distinct? He felt his mind, his very identity, collapsing into the darkness.
He dropped to all fours. At least he could feel the ground. He knew which way was down. Groping around, he finally grasped the cold metal tube of the flashlight. He tapped it sharply against the stone and tried switching it on again. A feeble beam of light emerged.
Daniel scrambled to his feet and ran out of the gallery, afraid that the battery would fail for good if he lingered to complete his search. He shouted for Nikos and told him to come outside when he was done. Racing up the stairs toward the sky, he felt his legs trembling under him. He leaned heavily against a boulder at the cave entrance, commanding himself to calm down. For several minutes he did nothing but concentrate on breathing in and out. Slowly, by degrees, he felt the ordinary nature of the world returning. Even so, he couldn’t shake the sensation that something—a shadow of something—had glided across his soul. Was it evil? The devil? He didn’t think so. It hadn’t felt either good or bad. It was simply a presence. A something alive inside the darkness.
He felt the need to climb high to shake it off. He turned to look up at the altar stone several feet above where he stood. He scaled the boulders until he reached the top of the stone table. From here he could see the Nida plateau below where the earth was blanketed in summer green. Small white dots speckled the landscape - sheep grazing peacefully. He took comfort in those ordinary
sights. His shallow breathing finally relaxed. He sank down heavily on the altar, his feet dangling over the edge.
From this vantage point, his began to reconsider his strategy for finding the relic. He realized it had been a mistake to search the cavern on the mountain and not simply because it unnerved him. He thought of the words of the riddle. “When the soul of the lady rises with the sun.” Surely, this referred to something in the sky and not in the ground. The eastern sky to be exact. This altar table where he sat faced east. From here he might see something dawning in the eastern sky. But what? The three clues were all a muddle that made no sense.
Daniel rubbed his forehead wearily as a disturbing thought struck him. How could he be sure he had the right translation of the riddle at all? He hadn’t actually looked at the symbols himself. He had relied on the interpretation of the strangers that Hunt had killed. What if they had been wrong? What if they had translated the glyphs incorrectly?
He knew what he had to do and the thought of it upset him even more than the idea of encountering that thing in the darkness again. He would have to go back to Karfi. The place where three bodies were buried under an avalanche of rock at the bottom of an underground tomb. He would have to look at the carvings on the stone stele and decipher what was written there for himself.
Chapter 17 – Father of Lies
Abraham strode purposefully through the door of the girl’s dormitory. He glanced down the long row of vacant cots, the blankets all folded with the precision of a military barracks. On a bed at the opposite end of the room sat a lone figure. Her back was turned to him, and her head was bent.
She didn’t look around to see who was coming even when his footfalls clicked loudly across the polished wooden floor.
“Hannah!” he barked.
She jumped up and spun around. “Oh, my goodness! Father Diviner.” An object flew out of her hand and clattered to the floor.
Abraham bent down to pick it up. It was some sort of doll. About four inches long and carved out of a solid piece of wood. The figure of a woman in a long straight gown. Her arms were pressed stiffly against her body. An attempt had been made to give the carving some life with a layer of paint. The hair was yellow, and the lips pink against a cream face. The eyes and the dress were both painted blue though the color had been chipped and rubbed away in many places. The face itself was expressionless and discomfiting. Like a sphinx. The diviner found the entire effect grotesque. He turned it over in his hands. “What is this thing?”
“Oh, it’s nothing,” the girl said hurriedly, snatching it out of his palm. “I…uh…I’ve had it for as long as I can remember.” She slipped it back into her apron pocket with shaky fingers.
He attempted a light tone. “Soon you’ll have babies of your own and no need to play with dolls.”
“Yes, sir,” she agreed dutifully.
“Be seated,” he instructed her.
She obeyed and flounced down on the bed.
He stood over her in silence for several seconds. He hadn’t spent much time noticing her before. Too many other people around and too many distractions. She wore her thick blond hair braided and coiled around her head in the prescribed manner of a married woman, but her skin was far from matronly. It glowed with the freshness of a rose petal. Her body was far from matronly too. The girl’s shapeless grey shift somehow managed to reveal graceful feminine curves. Her eyes were green, a curious almond shape. Almost like a cat’s. Abraham didn’t much care for cats. They were sinuous and slippery and had minds of their own. Willful, unruly creatures. Small wonder they were so often associated with Lucifer, that most insubordinate of God’s angels. Still, the shape of her eyes held an exotic appeal. They were wide open in alarm at the moment.
“Calm yourself, child.” He sat down on the bed next to her. “I had a few questions for you, but you weren’t in your quarters. What are you doing here?”
She eyed him anxiously. “This is where I slept before I was married, Father. With all the other girls.”
He gave a thin smile in an attempt to put her at ease. “But surely you must prefer to have a nice room all to yourself and your husband?”
She didn’t meet his gaze. “It felt lonely there, so I thought I would sit here for a while.”
“Of course,” he patted her hand reassuringly. She recoiled from his touch and clasped her hands together in her lap.
Ignoring the gesture, he observed, “It’s understandable. You miss your husband. I know he had to depart on his journey very soon after you were joined in marriage.”
“That’s not it,” she said tremulously, her eyes misting with tears. “I don’t think he likes me very much.”
Abraham was taken aback by the comment. He drew himself up. “What do you mean he doesn’t like you?”
“After we were married...” She hesitated. “He didn’t stay with me on our wedding night.”
The old man waited for her to elaborate but she offered nothing further. The girl sat silently on the edge of the bed, swinging her feet to and fro since her legs were too short to reach the floor.
“Can I please go now, Father?”
“Not quite yet, my child. I have a few more questions to put to you.” Abraham was at a loss as to how to interpret this story. He was wary of accepting her words at face value. Women were liars by nature. What else could one expect from the daughters of Eve? Daniel’s other wives had certainly lied about their relations with his son. They had all failed to produce numerous offspring, and now they wanted to lay their own inadequacies at their husband’s doorstep. Could they have persuaded Hannah to join their conspiracy by fabricating this outrageous tale? The diviner scrutinized her face closely but couldn’t detect any evidence of guilt in her expression. Just a pretty confusion. He tried another approach. “The day a girl becomes a woman is a very big day in her life, don’t you agree? A very busy day.”
She nodded uncertainly.
“You must have been very tired by the time evening came.”
“I was sleepy,” she admitted simply.
He placed a hand on her knee to still her swinging legs. She became dead calm. He squeezed her thigh lightly before letting go.
“When a person is tired, the mind can sometimes play tricks.”
It was her turn to stare at him. “Play tricks?”
He smiled again. “Perhaps you don’t remember everything that happened that evening. If you were very, very tired…” he trailed off.
She knit her brows in concentration. “I think I remember what happened and what didn’t.”
He pressed the point. “I’m sure everything happened just as it ought to have done.”
The girl shook her head vehemently. “No, Father, it didn’t.”
He rose and stood over her. “Are you suggesting that I am in error?”
She gazed up at him in shock. Her mouth gaped open, but she said nothing.
“Answer me!” he commanded.
“No, Father. You’re never supposed to be wrong.”
“That is correct!” he asserted. “The diviner is given the gift of discernment in all things. You will believe me when I tell you that you are mistaken. Satan is deceiving you and has caused you to forget the events of that night.”
Rather than hastily agreeing as he expected her to do, she tilted her head to one side and gazed up at him curiously. “He has? Why would he do that?”
The question caught him off-guard. Abraham paused for several seconds before framing a reply. “Because…because… he wishes to destroy our community from within, that’s why! By sowing the seeds of error among the people.”
“Oh.” She didn’t seem entirely convinced by his explanation.
Her obstinacy angered him. He raised his arm and pointed at the door. “Now go to your quarters and pray. Pray that God will cast out the demon who has tricked you. Go!”
She jumped off the bed and pelted from the room without another word.
Abraham
sat down heavily. This was worse than he had expected. It was enough of a trial that the Nephilim were assailed every day by the Fallen World outside their gates. But this? The greatest threat to his congregation now was the cancer springing up within its own ranks. Satan had found the perfect means to undermine Abraham’s authority. Destroy the credibility of the scion. And the Evil One had chosen as his instrument this naïve child whose memory could be easily manipulated. The diviner was determined that the devil would not succeed. He would take steps to subdue the forces of hell. This delusion would spread no farther.
Chapter 18 – Ida Ho!
Cassie ventured out onto the wooden balcony of her hotel room. She took a deep breath of clear mountain air. It was shortly after sunrise, and everything felt fresh and very still. She was surprised by how piney this mountain was. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected, but the waterfalls and jagged rock formations had surprised her. Except for the elevation and the fact that nobody was speaking English, she might have been staying at a lodge in Yosemite. They were, in fact, registered at a boutique hotel halfway up the slopes of Mount Ida or, as it was now called, Kaz Daglari.
The mountain ran all the way down to the Gulf of Edremit. That’s where they’d started their journey the day before. Fred had arranged everything, acting as both tour guide and chauffeur. They’d left the concrete jumble of vacation homes lining the shore and headed upland. The foothills of the mountain were dotted with farms and miles of olive groves. They’d passed through a number of small villages that couldn’t be described as anything but quaint or maybe even charming. Tiny hamlets of old stone houses, cobbled streets and village squares complete with bubbling fountains. The higher they ascended, the fewer the villages. Farms and olive groves gave way to pine forests, rushing rivers and cooler temperatures. Just when Cassie was sure they’d left civilization behind for good, they arrived at their destination. A four-star hotel complete with Olympic-sized swimming pool and gourmet cuisine. They gratefully piled out of the car to check in and get a good night’s sleep. They would need it before tackling the summit of Gargarus which rose a mile above sea level.
The Arkana Mysteries Boxed Set Page 36