The Edge of Temptation: Gods of the Undead 2 A Post-Apocalyptic Epic

by Peter Meredith

  “Please! At best it’s a box of hundred year old cans of...of...whatever they canned back then,” she replied. “It could be turn of the century liverwurst or peaches.”

  “Also very valuable,” he said. When he picked the box up, something shifted inside and the sound it made was that of bare bone on tin. No other sound on earth was quite like it. “There’s a head in there.”

  Cyn rolled her eyes. “Is that right?” she asked sarcastically. “You sure that wasn’t the sound of gold doubloons? Or the Hope Diamond? Pop it open and check, Jack, you never know.”

  He put the box back on the black stone lid. “Ok, so sue me. I’m a kid at heart sometimes. I like adventure and I like discovering the unknown. And we have discovered something. Now we know there’s a skull in the box, but did Robert put it in there? That’s an entirely different question and I think the answer is no.”

  Jack didn’t elaborate and Cyn knew well enough to know that he wanted her to figure out what he was hinting at. Normally, she would just stare at him until he explained himself like any normal person, but she was also caught up in the excitement of discovery and had it not been for the evil coming from the place, she would’ve had the same gleam in her eyes that Jack had.

  The gold light from the magic motes was not keen enough for what she needed, and so she shone her light on the green box. She read the dull label and noted the dust...and noted that it had been recently disturbed. Someone had handled the box recently, but hadn’t lifted the lid.

  That suggested that the head had been in the box for a while. Cyn said. “Ok, I agree, the head was left by our great-great grandfather. Why?”

  “Because it’s part of a ghoul or demon,” Jack said. He pointed at the bodies and shone his light at the dull brown smears on their long white shirts and the tears in their flesh. “The expedition was attacked by a ghoul, killing all the locals but one. It must have been overcome by my great-grandfather and the pieces placed in boxes to keep them from reforming.”

  “Your great-grandfather?” Cyn asked. “Why not Robert Montgomery or Lord Blackburn?”

  “Because the three spells are my birthright. I am more in tune with all of the spells than either you or Robert. I believe the original Jonathan Dreyden defeated this ghoul and claimed the spells as was his right as victor. He must have then divided the spells, keeping one and giving the other two to his cousins, who later passed them on to you and Robert.”

  That made sense, but what didn’t was why the spells hadn’t been destroyed in the first place. It was something that they hadn’t been able to puzzle out. “Without further evidence, I think we can assume you’re correct,” Cyn said. She gave him a wan smile. They had figured out one puzzle, but a much darker one lay in front of them. Across from the black stone was another opening, and the golden light particles showed more old blood.

  Jack led the way down a short hall to a second room, which again had white marble walls and floors. Judging by the sprays and pools of blood, the room had been the site of a long ago battle. Other than the dried blood, there was only an elaborate stone sarcophagus in the room.

  “The necromancer,” Jack said in a whisper. The lid of the sarcophagus had been cast to the side and had broken into a number of large pieces, but the image painted on the front was the same as the one that had been painted on the golden sarcophagus back in Meroe.

  The remains of the coffin were empty and yet the fear in the room was palpable. Both Jack and Cyn flashed their lights all over the room. Cyn saw nothing but the blood, the lower, intact section of the coffin and the larger chunks of the upper part.

  Jack saw something else. With excitement in his voice, he whispered: “There’s a secret door! Look at the chips and crypt dust from the broken lid.” He shined his light down at the floor near the far wall. “Look at this straight line!”

  The scatter pattern from the broken upper portion was star shaped and properly random—except near one of the walls, where there was a neat line as if the debris had been brushed back. Jack went down in a squat and shone his light at the stone splinters and then at the wall. He then reached out and first felt the air and then the wall.

  It didn’t budge. Not even when he threw his shoulder into it. He came away from it, rubbing his arm, but he wasn’t the least bit upset. “There’s either a lock or it’s magically held.”

  “Then why are you smiling?” she asked. “If we can’t get in then…wait! The opening spell that Robert used to try to trap us back at the pyramids! But what if it doesn’t work? We’ve never tried it before.”

  Jack’s knife was already in his hand. “There’s only one way to find out,” he said, unbuckling his left arm guard and rolling up his sleeve. He made a cut just above his elbow and then half-closed his eyes as the blood ran to the point of free fall. The drops changed in midair, going from rounded blobs to fully formed glyphs, each glowing white for a fraction of a second until the next landed right on top of it, erasing it.

  In seconds the spell was written and the words spoken. Cyn expected something out of the movies: a white light around the edges of the door which would then swing back to reveal a treasure room piled in gold and jewels. Reality was much more mundane. There was a simple click as part of the wall swung back showing only another dark tunnel and letting in a noxious odor that made Cyn want to gag. Strangely, Jack looked even more ill than she did. Normally, he was tougher in these sorts of situations.

  Now, he looked ghostly.

  “Was it a difficult spell?” she asked, digging in the tight pack on her back. The town of Aswan had never heard of Junior Mints, but they had heard of M&Ms which were better in the heat, anyway. She shook out a rainbow of candy into his hands. He swallowed them with a strange look in his eyes.

  “No,” he said after he had swallowed the candy and washed them down with the brackish water from the old gallon jug. “It’s Father Timmons...I think I know how I was able to heal us the other night.”

  Cyn began shaking her head. “Don’t...no...don’t tell me, Father Timmons is in you.”

  “A little I think. Sort of like an echo or a ghost or a taste. It’s not as strong as the feeling I have with Truong, but it’s there. Timmons was the last soul that the necromancer stole—and then I killed it. Now I have this over the shoulder kinda feel, at least I did just now when I did the spell.”

  Cyn went to the puddle of Jack’s blood and lightly put the tip of her finger in it. “Huh. I can feel it too.” What she felt was a touch of disappointment that was strangely bitter-sweet. “Remember when he said he had joined the team to save your soul? I think you might have saved his.”

  “Great, now I got priest kooties,” Jack, joked. His smile faltered quickly. “I wish he was here for real. Him and Jordan, both.”

  “And Metzger,” Cyn added. It might have been the wrong thing to say. Jack’s face grew cloudy.

  He straightened and reattached his arm guard, keeping his eyes averted and acting as though he hadn’t heard her. Once again he had his sword at the ready and the flashlight in his other hand as he faced the darkened opening where the eyes stared up out of the dark.

  The smell was worse down there and the fear greater, but that wasn’t what stopped Jack. It was the roughhewn nature of the tunnel that led down into the earth that stopped him. It was drastically different from the two rooms they had passed through. He was an archeologist by birth, inclination and training. “I told you this wasn’t a tomb.”

  Chapter 14

  Nekhen, Egypt

  Cynthia Childs

  She took a long look around, not seeing anything that would dispute the idea that this was anything other than a tomb.“I think the sarcophagus gives it away, Jack. This is a tomb and only a tomb. Do you think it could use a headstone?”

  Jack had been edging closer to the secret opening. Over his shoulder, he whispered:“Yeah, I do. What’s the one thing we know about ancient Egyptians? They love their headstones. What do you think pyramids are? They aren’t billboards fo
r flea markets. They are giant tombstones.”

  “Ánd not every Egyptian had one. Only the very richest and most powerful...”Cyn paused. Wasn’t the necromancer the very definition of powerful? Being rich usually followed closely on wielding the kind of near-immortal status he had attained.

  Near immortal were the key words. The necromancer had been bound, probably when it was at its weakest, and the beheaded ghoul in the front room hadn’t been there to protect the remains of the necromancer, but to keep people from trying to set it free.

  “Okay, maybe,”Cyn said.“You know what’s also missing if this was a tomb? There’s nothing here to help the dead on to the next life as with most burial chambers.”

  “Exactly. It also explains why this is lying at the bottom of an old river bed. Whoever buried the necromancer wanted to hide him away forever. It wasn’t enough to completely tear down his home or palace that sat above this place, they shifted the course of a river to ever keep him from being found.”

  She shook her head in awe.“He must have been quite the jerk to rate that sort of treatment.”

  This made Jack smile.“You met him. He wasn’t a pleasant fellow. Now, there’s only one question: what did Robert find out down here?”

  “Something bad,”Cyn said.“There’s at least one demon down where ever that passage leads and it’s probably pissed off that it’s been stuck down there for the last five thousand years.”

  “I’d say six or seven. The stone work involved in these rooms is so elaborate and so different fromanything else found in antiquity that it was likely from one of those cultures that pre-dates our understanding of ancient Egypt. My father mentioned theWitch-kings.”

  “Then the demon will be just that more cranky,”Cyn said. She took a deep breath and added:“Let’s get this over with.”

  Her attitude surprised Jack.“Over with? This is the best part. Adventure, discovery, a hint of danger. Isn’t this what every archaeologist craves? And yes, it’s just a hint of danger. Robert went down there and didn’t seem to have an issue. We should be fine. The demon and the ghouls are all probably bound, otherwise they would have escaped ages ago.”

  This made perfect sense and yet Cyn had butterflies as they descended into the dark. The stairs here were nowhere near as nice as what was found above. Just like Robert’s tunnel into Beg 22back in Meroe, what was behind the hidden door was“hand” carved out of rock and compressed dirt. It had been made in secret most likely by ghouls under the thrall of the necromancer.

  At the bottom of the stairs was a door of heavy timbers that was bound along the edges in flaking iron. The rust didn’t make much sense until Cyn heard a slow drip of water, perhaps the one thing she hadn’t expected to find beneath such an immense and harsh desert.

  The door stood ajar with an opening of about eight inches. Jack lifted his Mag-lite and fed light into the room beyond. It was somewhat of a disappointment, at least to Jack. The room was a rectangle: fifteen feet by ten. Along the walls were shelves of cedar. Age was slowly destroying them; a couple leaned forward looking as though they were just about to topple.

  For the most part, the shelves held mundane items: stacks of odd-smelling wood, strange idols carved of ivory or onyx, and linen bags that were on the verge of crumbling into dust. Inside these were spices and herbs.

  One shelf held nothing but semi-precious gem stones: agate, jasper, jade, pearl. Another held stacks of tarnished silver coins. Another held coins of gold.

  It was a find of amazing wealth and yet Jack’sdisappointment stemmed from the fact there wasn’t another obvious doorway out of the room. His face grew cloudy as he went to the coins and picked up one of the gold ones that still had a dull shine to it.“Take a look,” he said holding it out to Cyn.

  Her mouth came open at seeing the writing on it.“Those are the same sort of glyphs that we found in Robert’s suite back in New York! Do you think he knows this language? Do you think it’s the language of the Witch-kings?”

  “I think if we can’t find the next secret door,we’ll never know,”he answered. He turned in a circle.“There has to be one.”

  Cyn had this one covered. She could feel the dead better than Jack and her hearing was also better as it turned out. The dripping water was coming from the north wall where the shelves of herbs seemed to lean forward. In reality, the left side of the wall and the shelves were two inches closer than they should have been—the entire thing was a door. She pulled it back, showing another hand-carved tunnel.

  It went straight for a good ten yards and then dipped down—this was where the water was coming from and where the eyes were staring up.

  Again, Jack took point. He moved slowly, walking on the balls of his feet, ready to spring in any direction. Cyn had her 12-gauge at the ready, pointed at the wall to her left, her finger just outside the trigger guard.

  The next room they found was much larger than the others. It had been a natural cavern with twenty foot ceilings and rounded walls. The wall on the right; however, had been carved into cells. They were tiny: six feet by three and barely enough room for a small man to stand hunched over. The cells were barred with rusting iron...and there were still prisoners“alive” in them.

  Nine living skeletons stood at the bars looking out at Jack and Cyn. All nine of them had eyes that glowed red. They were demons of some power.

  One demon was a handful, but nine demons?“I don’t like this, Jack,” Cyn whispered, keeping close.

  He seemed unfazed.“They’re still in their prison cells. If they could’ve gotten out,they would’ve gone after Robert and whoever left that hunk of intestine behind. We should be fine.” To show just how safe he thought the situation was, he slid his sword back into its sheath.

  Ahead of them was an immense table of wood and iron. It was grey with age except for where the blood had seeped into the wood. The smell emanating from it was horrible. It was the smell of countless deaths, of infinite screams.

  Jack made a face at it, but the necromancer in Cyn couldn’t help but touch it. She could feel the ugly zing of evil stretch up into her fingertips.“Bloody hell,” she whispered, pulling her hand back. A second table matching the first stood five feet further on,and then there was a third. She didn’t touch any of these.

  “Well, we know how he got so strong,”she said.“There’s blood from a thousand people on that first table alone. He was storing up the power.”

  “That’s only part of what made him strong,” Jack said. He had his light shining beyond the tables where the water was dripping gently.

  “Is that?” Cyn asked in a breathless whisper, her eyes locked on the figure, the penned-up demons now far from her mind.

  In front of them was a pool of water that took up a third of the cavern. Its waters were black and could’ve been a hundred feet deep or three inches. Within the water was an island of rock and on the island was a carved statue of a girl who seemed far too young to be pregnant, and yet her breasts were heavy and her belly swollen with child.

  She was sitting flanked by the trunks of two stone trees and between her legs was a hole that went down into the earth. It looked as though her child would drop down into hell when it was born.

  The entire statue had been carved out of polished obsidian and was highlighted in gold. Her smile, a small thing similar to the Mona Lisa’s was gold. Her fingertips, gold. Her eyes, gold. Her nipples and the mound of her pubis, gold. All gleaming. Even after seven thousand years, the entire statue shone like glass and fire.

  “That’s the Mother of Demons,” Jack said.

  “Yes,” Cyn said, starting forward. Jack reached for her,but she was in the water and crossing over to the island before even she knew it. She was drawn forward. She was a necromancer and this was an altar to her…god?

  She had been drawn to the statue, unable to stop herself; however, the thought brought her up short, midway to the island. She stood in thigh deep water, blinking and afraid. This hell-creature wasn’t her god. She knew her God. Ever
since the Event she had been a devout, fully believing Catholic who went to mass three times week, when she could, and was such a regular in the confessional that frequently she would “chat” with the priest on the other side of the screen as she wouldn’t have anything to confess.

  “You okay?” Jack asked, coming up beside her.

  “Of course, yeah. I was just excited. Adventure and exploration, right?” She tried to grin, but it was strained and pleading.

  There was worry behind his eyes.“Maybe you should wait here,” he suggested.

  After a deep breath, Cyn drew herself up to her full height.“No. I got this. It’s just a b-bloody statue. There’s nothing to it but that.” That was true on a conscious level; however on a subconscious one Cyn knew there was some hidden about the statue.

  This wasn’t the Mother of Demons, but all the same it contained a part of the Mother. Maybe just an eye...one of thousands, or a small part of her spirit; an avatar, perhaps. Cyn didn’t know and tried not to think about it. After all, Robert had been here and came away unscathed, which meant that she should be fine.

  Jack paused just at the edge of the island, his feet still in the water. At first he used the beam of his mag-light to pick out the individual aspects of the statue, but it was hard to see it all as it was meant to be seen and so he pulled a pinch of sand from his pocket and lit up the island with a thousand glowing particles.

  Now they could see the statue in all of its glory—and it was fantastically beautiful, and frightful. Cyn felt a change in the air, one that had her hands shaking around the shotgun.“Sh-she liked that.”The statue’s smile was no longer small and enigmatic; it was now a full grin.

  Jack turned his head back and forth trying to get a better look at the smile.“It can’t be. It isn’t alive, is it?”He reached out a hand, not to touch anything physical, but to feel the nearness of magic.“There’s nothing I can feel. What about you?”

  All Cyn felt was awe and desperate fear. They had to get out of there before something bad happened and she was sure that something bad was only seconds from occurring, and yet she yearned to go to the Mother and kneel before her.