“If the legends are true, David, there are monstrous snakes in there, unable to breed, thank God, but still practically sure to kill men where they stand,” Herman preached. “To look for a bad fate…,” he whistled and shook his head, “is madness.”
“Don’t go in there, mate,” Sully advised.
“You know that I have to know what is in there. I came all this way after going through hell to find the clues that led me here. I cannot let a bunch of reptiles deter me. To know what it holds,” Purdue admitted to them, “I would have to defeat the guardians of the Lost City.”
“Them’s not the guardians, mate,” Herman laughed resentfully. “We are!”
Purdue’s face froze in reverence and awe. Sully stepped closer and laid his hand on the explorer’s shoulder. “The guardians of the Lost City are everywhere, David. From tribal chiefs to housewives. Everywhere, from Iceland to Oz, there are people who know about the Lost City – this Lost City. It is not made of gold, because the treasure it holds is not a precious metal or riches.”
Herman tapped on his temple with the tip of his index finger. “It’s knowledge, terrible knowledge. Before you get a hard-on, genius, you have to understand that this is not the knowledge you want.”
Sully agreed with a silent “Uh-uh. And its name has deceived men for ages, mate. All for the wicked treasure of knowledge.”
Herman’s face was fraught with desperation. “Please, David, this is the kind of knowledge mankind does not need. It is bad knowledge that will destroy the world, because man does not know what to do with power.”
Purdue light blue eyes penetrated Herman’s as he took in the man’s words. “Like the knowledge given to Eve in Eden.”
“That is an accurate view of it, yes,” Herman affirmed. “For once, let mankind turn away from that apple, David. We know why you came here, Relic Hunter. Your mind is powerful and you need to feed it with information, but that genius of yours is nothing without the wisdom to know when to refuse the apple.”
Purdue was at a crossroads, mentally, but as always, his need to pursue the unknown soon overrode his common sense. He glanced at the collection of ancient markers that warned in silence of the evil black soiled mine, and proceeded up the hill.
Inside the farmhouse, it took Nina and Sam all of 10 minutes to find a small office adjacent to the master bedroom.
“Are you filming?” she asked Sam.
“No, just keeping the scene framed so that I can hit record as soon as we find something worth filming,” he answered, aiming down on Nina’s jeans. “However, that arse might be well worth filming.”
Nina slapped his upper arm so hard that he lost his balance for a moment. “Do your bloody job, Cleave,” she smiled. “Can I use one of your voice recorders to dictate what I find?”
Sam handed her a small tape recorder that looked like it fell out of a time machine.
“Look, Mr. Harding was using this office space as a walk-in closet,” he remarked as Nina pulled down on the thin string of the light switch. All about them clothing and shoes were strewn. They navigated over the small piles of laundry, enclosed by walls lined with old, peeling wallpaper that smelled like a tomb. Mold and cobwebs sat in the corners where the walls met the ceiling. Wincing, the two explorers traversed the small room to the desk against the opposing wall to inspect papers scattered across its surface.
Nina dusted off the chair and sat down, while Sam filmed the dreadful structural decay of the room. “Jesus, this room is creepy,” he mumbled as he panned across the skirting of the room.
“Aye,” she agreed, scanning the various documents. “If these bills did not kill him, the mold and rot in this house would.”
Sam turned to look at Nina through his lens. “Lots of debt?”
“Aye, by the looks of this, Mr. Harding inherited this farm just in time. The bank was about to foreclose on his own farm within weeks from when he inherited this one from Dr. Williams,” she reported as she took up several papers and dropped them again. “Even his wife’s funeral was done on account. He had no policies or insurance at all. Poor man. I venture to guess that he did not go up to the mine for a tractor, Sam.”
“He was looking for the Lost City, thinking it was an El Dorado deal,” Sam added onto her speculation. “Everyone knows there is gold up there, but he probably thought he could tap the ores with only Gary helping him.”
“That’s the epitome of desperation,” she said in an empathetic tone. With care not to disturb too much of the dust and spores no doubt accumulated in the fabric and furniture, she opened the only drawer on the desk. “Bingo.”
Sam swerved the lens to the drawer. “Are you filming?” she asked.
“Nope.”
“You should,” she suggested. “Look at this. It is the deed to Nekenhalle. Attached to it is an envelope with a blueprint of the house, as well as contour lines noted on a basic map of the place.”
“Alright, so why do I need to film this?” Sam asked. Nina grinned and lifted the blueprint up to him.
“Zoom in,” she said. He did and instantly noticed what she was referring to.
“Holy shit,” Sam gasped. “Is that an alternative entrance to the Lost City, lying under this little room?”
“Looks like it,” she affirmed. Nina took a deep breath, her pretty features twisted in grave concern. “But if you cross reference the map of the exterior of this house, Sam, the mine is completely separated from the Lost City lying under us!”
Sensing his friend’s panic, Sam tried to ascertain what she was trying to impress on him. Nina could see that Sam did not quite fathom her anxiety. “Sam,” she gulped, “the mine is a decoy, luring men in after the promise of gold. It is in no form part of the Lost City, and only someone who understands the discrepancy in the geology of the notes left by Dr. Williams will be able to put this together. I don’t think Mr. Harding had any clue what this information meant!”
“So, the mine is a trap for greedy men to take them to task? Is that what you are saying?” Sam frowned, filming every word the dark eyed historian revealed.
“So to speak,” she panted. “Sam, you have to go and get Purdue the fuck out of there right now! The mine is nothing but a snake pit!”
Without a response, Sam turned and bolted through the old deserted house to rescue Purdue. Stumbling over loose floorboards and slamming into corners he could not turn at the speed he was rushing, Sam eventually made it out of the house and into the merciless weather outside. Sully and Herman were in the woods, looking for the lost farmer among the markers.
“Purdue!” Sam shouted in sheer panic as he slipped and slid along the muddy black gravel. “Purdue! Get out of there right now! It is not the Lost City! Get out!”
The Harding brothers and Eddie Olden peeked from the darkness to see what the commotion was about. All they could see through the deafening thunder and veil of rain, was the Scottish journalist waving his arms madly.
From the woods, the elders came out to Sam, who was trying to get up the hill.
“Leave it, mate! He made his choice,” Sully told Sam. “They all did.”
“Are you daft? I have to warn him! Why didn’t you warn him? Why?” he screamed at the two native men.
“We did!” Herman defended. “We told him to stay away from the mine, a few times over, but he wouldn’t listen.”
“You could not just have told him that the mine is not the way to the Lost City? That would have kept him out!” Sam seethed, his clenched teeth gleaming white between his wet, open lips. His black hair was drenched and clung to his wet face. Under his shirt, he kept the compact HD running.
“What do you mean; it is not the entrance to the Lost City?” Herman scowled. “This has been the site of the Lost City for centuries, mate.”
“Yes, the site of it, but not the entrance!” Sam explained, realizing at once that the elders knew as little as he did about the deceit. “The Lost City lies under the house, under the entire farm! It stretches the entire width
and length of Nekenhalle, but it does not exceed the surface of the house’s ground floor.” Sam pointed to the flat ground where the vehicles stood, way below the slant of the hill. “Everything higher than that ground level is fake! This is just a decoy!”
Purdue had emerged from the black chasm as Sam was elucidating the facts, standing alongside the dumbstruck Olden, Anaru, and the Hardings. Sam saw his tall friend step out, Purdue’s white crown drawing his attention through the pouring rain. “Purdue! Get the fuck out of the mouth of the mine!”
“Yes, I heard. I heard,” Purdue replied casually. Sam was relieved that he got to them on time, having no idea that Louisa was still inside, trying to find the monstrous specimen she was hired to retrieve for the Order of the Black Sun.
33
Bitter
Nina knew better than to descend into the Lost City by herself, but she searched the floor for the trapdoor marked on the blueprint annexure, for when Purdue and Sam joined her. With a lot of groaning and grimacing, she evacuated the loose boots and dirty clothing from the room and proceeded to tear the carpet from the skirting.
“God, I hope Purdue has not gone in too far already,” she muttered as she labored. She switched on the digital recorder and slipped it into her back pocket in order to have her hands free. A sigh of relief escaped her as she heard Sam return along the hallway outside the master bedroom. “Did you get him out in time, Sam?” she cried, ripping the old carpet from where it had been fixed for decades.
Cussing at the horrid clouds of dust and matter flurrying up into her face, she tossed the ear of the carpet aside to reveal the trapdoor. “I’ve got it, Sam!” she smiled, looking back at the doorway. She could hear his footsteps approach rapidly, but only when she stood up and looked out the window did Nina realize that Sam was outside in the driving rain. “Oh my God!”
Nina swung around and received a devastating blow to the face that took her clean off her feet. As soon as she hit the floor, she rolled to avoid another clout from the broomstick. She could not believe her eyes. “Jesus Christ! Sally?”
The small wife of Nigel Cockran sneered like a wild animal, wildly waving the broomstick at Nina. “You stay away from Ken’s kingdom, you nosey bitch!” Sally hissed at Nina.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Nina screamed, holding up her hands from her prone position.
“Women were his bane, my darling Ken!” the old woman growled. “Bitches like you, who thought they were special! I was the only one who understood what he was trying to accomplish down here. Not his wife. Me!”
Nina slowly reached for the weapon Purdue gave her as she kept the frantic Sally talking. “What kingdom? What does all this have to do with you?”
Sally cackled wickedly. “It has everything to do with me! I was his lover, his friend, his assistant, and his miserable wife killed him for it! I know because he would have returned to me. We made history, Ken and me. Here at Nekenhalle he furthered the work started in World War II, by his predecessors – a genius idea to eradicate Allied stations and camps without any German casualties.”
“Snakes,” Nina answered.
“Oh, not just snakes, my dear. They had four Amazon Anacondas captured in Peru for the first test of Operation Eden,” Sally explained, pressing the stick down hard onto Nina’s throat. “That ship carried the reptiles to Spain, where Kenneth used some clever genetics to engineer a hybrid species with the size and strength of a constrictor, but the venom of a viper. Imagine that.”
“The Kriegsmarine-Zwei,” Nina grunted under the force of the stranglehold. “But the Spanish route went sour.”
“That is true,” Sally affirmed. “They got loose en route to Argentina and wreaked havoc on the ship. But the mayday came through to Black Sun headquarters in Málaga, who sent a cargo trawler to the rescue.”
“That was not a rescue,” Nina argued. “Every single soldier on that ship perished.”
Sally pushed the stick deeper into Nina’s skin. “The rescue was not for the soldiers, you imbecile! It was for the specimens. My darling Ken’s creations. Then they sank the ship to eradicate the evidence, but you and your boyfriend Purdue are just too goddamn nosy to leave alone what does not concern you!”
“So how did they get here?” Nina asked.
“Two pregnant females were brought here, courtesy of Adelaide’s Department of Nature Conservation, along with a consignment of mountain goats, just to make it look legitimate,” Sally boasted. “As a failed geneticist from my young days at Halford University in Oz, I instantly found Kenneth Wilhelm fascinating, and soon we were inseparable. Of course, Nigel had no idea. Still don’t. Ken died before he could devise an anti-venom, so I have been keeping an eye on his babies.” Sally shook her head hopelessly. “Unfortunately, the Hardings’ moving has been keeping me off the farm, so I could not keep the pit secret anymore.”
Nina could not breathe anymore and Sam was nowhere to be found to save her. Realizing that someone like Sally was the enemy, and that she meant to kill Nina, the historian tapped into her innate fighting spirit. Without a second’s hesitation, Nina swung her right leg across, sweeping the old woman off her feet with a work of hefty velocity. As she fell, Nina crawled over the trapdoor and jerked at the handle with all her might.
“No, you don’t!” she heard Sally sneer, as she leapt onto Nina’s back, but Nina flung her off, sending her sprawling across the floor. She straddled Mrs. Cockran to pin her down, and punched her in the face three times before grabbing her by the ears and slamming her head don on the wooden floor. Momentarily out cold, Sally’s limp and bloody body rolled away as Nina kicked her aside to climb down the trapdoor.
“This is fucking suicide,” Nina moaned to herself as she closed the door above her head. “I hope Sam and Purdue find me before I meet an ugly fate. God, I am really in deep shit now.” She sank her hand into her front jeans pocket to find her Zippo. “And I really don’t want to see what is around me.”
34
Lost in the City
While Nina moved into the unknown darkness, Sam was asking the Hardings to reconsider.
“We cannot leave out father in there, Sam,” Cecil said, being genuine for once and not trying to impress Sam. “That is where he disappeared. Even if he is dead, which I am not deluding myself with, we still need to retrieve his body.”
“I understand that,” Sam said. “But wait for the authorities…”
Anaru sighed in frustration. “Mr. Cleave, I represent the authorities. Until you release that documentary you are shooting, nobody will give a shit about this rescue mission.”
Purdue came to stand close to Sam. “What do you suggest, old boy?”
“I don’t know,” Sam shrugged. “We need weapons against these things, if they are what we think.”
At the same time, the men heard two female screams coming from two different direction. Eyes stretched in astonishment and disbelief, as the men listened as it happened again.
“Jaysus,” Olden said. “That is Louisa.”
Sam looked towards the house and then to Purdue. “That is Nina!”
Purdue and Sam raced to Nina’s aid, slipping along the mud to get into the house. Purdue followed Sam’s lead into the narrow hallway that led to the main bedroom and into the grotesque little office. Stopping in his tracks, Sam tried to figure out what had happened, but another blood-curdling scream from Nina prompted both men to lift the trapdoor lid and falter their way down into the shaft.
“Nina!” they cried as Purdue pulled a portable search light from his vest pocket. With a click, the device lit up the interior of the ghastly maze they had stepped into. “Nina!” Sam yelled.
They were standing in a wet tunnel of sandstone-hosted ore, too silvery in color to be any derivative of gold. As Sam filmed the dripping walls, his high-definition lens picked up the minute carvings in the stone, similar to that of the Maori and Samoan sigils outside on the markers. Their boots kept getting tangled in old rusted barbwire and rotten rope.
“Nina! Where are you?” Sam called out in the damp vein of rock.
“Sam, do you know what this is?” Purdue gawked, running his long fingers along the rock. “My God, it is pitchblende.” Sam’s quizzical expression prompted an explanation. “Pitchblende is a type of uranium. That is why the Nazi’s kept the Lost City under wraps for their own gain. Concentrated uranium ore! All the plutonium their scientists could brew was down here.”
“Then what is that?” Sam asked, panning his camera across the floor and walls to capture the thick crescents of uranium deposits around a drop a few meters away. He used a flare to illuminate the deep chasm and found something peculiar against the opposing wall. It was a depiction of an enormous snake, worshiped by stick men. “Is that a cave drawing?”
Sam called out to Nina again. Sounds of movement directed them onward. They approached the edge along a lower barrel vault and found words etched in German at the foot of the colossal snake depiction.
“What does it say?” Sam asked, filming it from top to bottom.
Purdue looked at the etching, then at Sam. “It says ‘The Dire Serpent’, but I have no idea what it is made from.”
“Look!” Sam nudged Purdue, dropping his angle to zoom in on the maze below. “Fuck me! All those bodies are from different eras, just like the soldiers on the ship!”
“Oh my God,” Purdue gasped, as he laid eyes on endlessly winding streets and lanes inside the vast city under the eye of the strange German drawing. “More Nazi soldiers, miners, even older cadavers. Sam, they are all mummified. They are all mummified like the men killed on that ship, by genetically altered venom.”
“We have to get out of here now! Nina! Where are you?” Sam shouted into the darkness.
“I’m here!” her voice suddenly came back, but it sounded subdued. “I-I…oh, Christ, please…she’s got me!” Nina stammered through a choking throat. The two men abandoned the threatening piece of art that overlooked the Lost City below.
Order of the Black Sun Box Set 7 Page 58