The Starry Sphinx

by V X Lloyd

  "You know we're meant for each other, don't you?" she said. He knew she meant it.

  Thinking back now, he couldn't recall what he had said to her in response. He had probably just muttered something before planting one on her lips and taking her hand and walking upstairs with her to his apartment so they could make love. For him, it hadn't just been sex, but lovemaking. What had it been for her?

  Moony's sensual reverie was brought to a halt. As they rounded another bend, Perry's flashlight revealed that the hallway split abruptly into two opposing hallways. Shining the light down either of them revealed a path so straight and long the light revealed nothing distinct, just a bright beam vanishing into the horizon. Both options, left or right, looked the same. Neither showed a door or distinguishing feature. Both long, straight hallways offered equally deep darkness. Moony still heard the faint hissing sound but couldn't make out which direction it came from.

  "Which way, Pheelix?" Deb asked.

  He shook his head. Then he shrugged. Then he said "I don't know," all in the span of a couple of seconds. It wasn't convincing.

  "Maybe we should split up," he suggested.

  "That's a terrible idea," Perry said. "Either you tell us which way to go, or we'll split you up."

  "Well, I'm telling you, I don't know which way to go. And if you shoot me, that won't get you there any more safely."

  "If I smack you in the head, will that help you remember?"

  "Forget it. He's stalling. Let's just head this way and be careful." Deb gestured to Pheelix to head left. "You lead the way."

  Pheelix did so, but as soon as he had taken more than a few steps, his pace slowed. His breathing came fast and hard. By all appearances, the path was no different than any other.

  "Pheelix, are you trembling?"

  "Interesting," Moony said.

  Deb cocked her Magnum. "Stop. Stalling. You keep walking, or I swear to Perry here that I will paint the walls with your brains. I'll take a 50/50 chance if it means the end of your namby-pamby ass."

  Their guide's breathing became even faster, and he refused to budge another inch.

  "I-- I.." His pace stopped. "This is the wrong way. The way with the traps. Please. Don't make me go any further! If we make it around that bend, we'll get pricked by poison darts. It's trapped, I'm telling you."

  "Hmm. You're one tricky goose, aren't you?" Deb said. "Well, now that you got that out of the way, how about you lead us down the right hallway?"

  Pheelix avoided eye contact as he walked past them toward the opposite hallway.

  Moony tried his best to muster some clue from his empathic sense but he couldn't pick up anything from him.

  *

  On the floor in front of the door was what looked like several duffel bags or maybe small piles of rubble.

  "That's the door to the cave," Pheelix said. He sounded disappointed that they had made it there.

  As they got closer to it, the stuff that at first had appeared like debris turned out to be the remains of two human bodies, now little more than skeletons wearing tattered rags.

  They sat leaning against a stout oak door with heavy metal hinges and a tremendous latch with a big keyhole.

  "I don't get it."

  "Don't get what, dude?"

  Moony pointed. "Those hinges should be rusty as hell, down here in all this damp."

  Perry shrugged. "Yeah, but they aren't, though."

  "I know they aren't. I was just pointing out an inconsistency in the realism of this scene. I don't get it. Does someone come down here twice a month and paint them with grease or something?"

  Perry shook his head approvingly. "I guess we have to admit it's at least a possibility. This place has a lot of servants and stuff. I guess I could maybe see that happening. Somebody just gives the order, and it's like, hey dude, go down there all the way to the end of the hallway and -- it's fine about the skeletons, don't bother moving them – I want you to do what you did last week, and lube the door hinges so that they don't get rusty. Hell, place like this, it's totally possible."

  Moony nudged at one of the skulls with his shoe. It lolled backwards, falling to the floor with a thwack like a stone coconut. After doing it, he wondered if it was bad luck to disturb the human remains of strangers. He decided that he didn’t care. He was in his darkness and going deeper. He was a killer. Heads were bound to roll.

  Perry stood there for a moment, staring at the headless pile of rags. From all appearances he was trying to think of a joke or something clever to say about the way the skull had fallen off the body. I'll leave it to you to imagine what Perry might have come up with.

  Deb stepped toward the door and tried to turn the handle.

  Nothing. It was as sealed as a vault door.

  A wave of silent frustration passed through the group.

  Perry stepped forward and tried the handle himself. It budged as much as a sealed vault door.

  "Yep. That fucker's locked," Perry said. Deb raised one eyebrow at him.

  Moony brought his face close to inspect the lock and see if anything was jimmyable.

  His conclusion: It was as jimmyable as a sealed vault door. There was no free play, no gap or way of slipping anything inside to unhitch the lock. Maybe the lock itself could be picked, but none of them had any tools.

  "Well, this sucks," Moony said. "We're going to end up just like these poor bastards."

  "Hey," Deb said. "For all we know one or more of them might have been female."

  "Be that as it may, I don't get it. Are they dead because ... I mean, did these idiots just wait here until they starved to death? I can understand that this door is not going to be easy to open. But does it make any sense for that to lead to a couple of dead bodies?"

  Perry sighed, the look of nostalgia on his face. "Reminds me of this one time, years ago. Hell, decades ago. I was headed out to work one morning. I worked out in the mountains west of town. There was a major ice storm that night, and my lousy Datsun truck got stuck. I don't know what it was about those rear differentials, but I swear to Christ I had one tire on solid dry asphalt. Only one tire was on the ice, but it was stuck as stuck is stuck. I had to walk the rest of the way, and when I made it to the office, damned if the door wasn't all iced over too. The lock, I guess it had blown rain, then the rain froze the water inside and all over the front of that lock. I had to basically perform cunnilingus on the damn thing to get it warmed up so I could stick my key in there. I breathed on that thing till the ice melted. I thought to myself, this might be how I die. Like this, just outside the door, my face stuck to it, frozen."

  "But it didn't happen that way after all, I note," Pheelix said. "And now, perhaps it will be this door that sees the last moments of all of us."

  "Psh," Deb said. "When you were born your mother should have named you Gus, because that's what you are. Gloomy Gus. Nothing but negativity from you."

  Moony's ears perked up.

  The sound of footsteps from the hall behind them.

  Perry shut the flashlight off. Together, they all fell silent and watched.

  Sure enough, faint but unmistakable traces of light danced on the wet stone walls of the hallway. Someone was coming.

  "What do we do?" Deb asked. "We can't just sit here."

  "Christ," Perry said. "Guess we know what turned these two guys into skeletons."

  "Turn on the light," Pheelix said.

  "No, stupid, they'll see us."

  "They already know we're here. Because I'm an idiot, and I told them. But like I told you, they'll kill us all, me included. Turn on the light. Do it!"

  The sound of the approaching footsteps grew louder.

  Perry's flashlight lit up, pointed at Pheelix.

  Pheelix's hand went into his pocket. He pulled out a big ornate key.

  In a rare feat of swiftness, Moony managed to snatch the key from Pheelix, put it in the lock and turned it. The door swung inward without so much as a creak.

  Light from their pursuer's flashlig
hts shone Moony's sillhouette against the wood of the door.

  He shoved Pheelix backwards, and raced through the door, pulling Deb in with him.

  "Perry, get your ass in here!"

  The former cop somersaulted through the open doorway as the sound of gunshots echoed from behind them.

  Pheelix made a mad dash towards the cave, but Moony slammed the door on him and turned the key in the lock.

  For a moment he felt terribly guilty that he had left a man to his death. Then he heard voices. Pheelix was talking with the others. He didn't sound wounded. He would come through this all right.

  Three gunshots rang out from Pheelix's side of the closed door. Moony gulped.

  Fists pounded on the door. He could hear voices, but couldn't make out any words.

  "We may not have much time," Moony said to Deb and Perry. "We need to secure this door."

  He looked nearby for a wedge or something that would make it harder to get inside if Shakahara's men had another key.

  Perry had the same idea, and together they scooted several big rocks against the door. Together with Deb's help, in a matter of minutes they had managed to mound and stack a whole wall of stones and rubble to block the door from opening.

  "I don't know how we're going to get out," Perry said, wiping his brow. "But that ought to hold them for a long, long time."

  *

  Shafts of pale white light entered the huge cave from high overhead. Many small pools collected in puddles and carved stone basins. Stalagmites hung from many spots in the cool wet stone ceiling high overhead, and the walls around them opened into all sorts of dark cracks and crawlspaces.

  The room was bright enough to see without a flashlight. Moony noted that Perry put the flashlight away into his jacket pocket rather than down the front of his pants.

  From the far end came a slow-moving stream that collected a wide low pond at the other end. Where it wasn't rocky, the ground beneath them consisted of soft sand.

  Deb was beside herself with joy. She kicked off her high heels. "Can you believe it? We made it!" Her laughter echoed as she danced and hopped barefoot around the floor of the cave.

  It was beautiful. The lights high above danced off the water and painted wild silhouettes across the room. It felt peaceful and safe, surrounded by the soft melodies of the stream.

  Perry gestured upwards. "The light. I guess that means it's morning."

  Moony nodded, thinking of Celia. It only just now occurred to him that he was angry with her about blabbing to whoever had captured and almost killed them. Even so, he just couldn't hold it against her. Looking back, how could anyone hope to make sense of his actions? He had drug her halfway across the world on a vacation to Spain only to suddenly vanish with Perry and Deb under what had apparently been an urge to do some late-night gambling. He had left her alone with no explanation. He wondered how long she would wait before giving up hope and returning home.

  Was it likely that if he disappeared forever here underneath this Spanish mansion that she would even try to search for him? Based on how rocky things had been, it didn't seem likely.

  Maybe she would only spend a few hours waiting on him to return before moving on. He imagined her calling the guy he had seen her making out with at the mall. No wait, that was who Moony had just shot and killed. But maybe she was lying in bed now, texting some other guy, even more attractive than Elysio. Sending him erotic photos.

  These were morbid thoughts, and now was not the time to indulge them. Regardless of where Celia's heart lay, whether he was to live or die, he had a potion to brew.

  "Hey Moony!" Perry's voice echoed like a happy child's. He stood a stone's throw away, pointing toward the stream. "Off over there. You see that?"

  He looked to where Perry pointed. Just beyond the stream was a stone shelf about waist high and maybe twelve feet across, flat at the top. It looked like an altar.

  He made his way towards it. Deb, meanwhile, was kneeling at the base of a large boulder running her hands through the sand, collecting something that glinted in the soft light.

  "There must be a hundred of these just scattered around here in the dirt," she said. "Old coins. Silver, some of them gold." She had a stack of them beside her.

  Looking down at the path before him, Moony didn't notice any coins, but the way the pebbles glistened with moisture was truly beautiful. The way began to slope a bit down hill. A few meters ahead was the stream. It wasn't running too rapidly, but he had no way of knowing how deep it was. It was wide enough he would need to wade or swim across.

  He dipped his hand into the water. It was cold, all right, but definitely doable. He took off his shoes, stripped entirely out of his clothes and gathered in his hand his two containers of checkered potion ingredients. For modesty's sake, he had the thought to wad up his underwear and toss them to the other side, so that when he got there he could at least wear something while he brewed the potion.

  He waded in, his foot tracing along the gravel and stone bottom of the stream.

  It was less the coldness of the water than its darkness that scared him. This was otherworldly water -- or, more precisely, underworldly water. He felt that this water knew the secrets of the ancient days. Somehow, to him, it felt much older than the Earth itself. Its pristine, unyielding coldness reminded him of something beyond this terrestrial sphere.

  The water was only about waist height. Difficult, but manageable, even in the current, to maintain his footing. Carefully, step by step, he plodded forward, his arms high and dry. He gripped the containers in his hand and felt forward with his toes before taking each next step.

  The water had a strange effect on him, and it wasn't merely its coldness. Actually, he heard high complex musical tones, precise and intricate tinkling notes and chords. He sensed luminosity as well. A crisp light somewhere in his periphery.

  He glanced downstream to see what would await him if he got carried away.

  The stream took a gradual curve for a few dozen meters, after which the roof grew low above it and the waters took a steep plunge downwards.

  No doubt about it. He didn't want to go that way. A few steps forward and the water deepened to about chest height. He had barely two meters more and he would be safe on the other side.

  He took another step forward and the water washed over him entirely.

  His ears submerged, the sense of high strange music grew profound, filling his awareness. His whole frame of inner vision glowed crisp, sharp and pristine, like white icing on the warm gold of the Sphinx's light.

  Seconds passed by with the length of days.

  Water rushed him downstream. For split seconds, his leg brushed against the slick ground. He flailed and kicked to press himself upward, to try and leap back towards the surface of the water. His shoulder smacked into a rock. With his free hand, he grasped onto the boulder with all the strength of his being. He willed himself to climb upwards, using his legs to move him higher.

  He once more heard the sounds of the cave, the rush of the water.

  "Moony!" came Perry's voice. "Grab my pole."

  He saw a shape above him. He reached for it, missed, and slipped. He dropped below the water's surface again and inadvertently gulped down some water. It was the purest water anyone had ever tasted. He clawed and scrambled to the surface, then flung his whole arm around the object. It was a wooden beam of some kind. He wrapped his arm around it like he had the thing in a head lock. He looked around him.

  From who knew where, Perry had found a long square wooden beam and had plopped it down so that either end rested on the ground and it straddled the stream.

  Moony had washed several meters downstream right at the bend where the roof lowered and the stream took a sharp nosedive deeper into the dark, airless earth.

  He got both arms around the beam and pulled himself on top of the thing, then inched his way over to the far side.

  He looked back at Perry, who was grinning with joy. "We almost lost your ass," he said, shaking his he
ad. "After what just happened, No way I’m trying to cross that thing unless you find me a bridge."

  Deb, too, was content to remain with Perry on the other side of the stream. "I thought you were gone for good. Oh, I was scared." She smiled. "You just do what you need to do, then let's figure ourselves a way out of here."

  Moony felt like a different man. He had come to know something. The spring -- or the Sphinx by way of the stream's water -- had introduced him to something within himself. Some pure light in the water had touched him deeply, and now he felt untouchable. Unafraid. Dangerous, even.

  With all that had just happened, it took Moony until now to realize he was nude and shivering.

  He headed over to his underwear and put them on.

  "Hey, Perry. Thanks. Thank you for that. I owe you."

  "Yeah, yeah. You know me. I'm the purveyor of life-saving poles. Let's not dilly-dally, OK?"

  Moony nodded his agreement and turned to face the altar.

  As he did so, the chill he had been feeling subsided, and his body felt warm, totally comfortable in his bare skin.

  Several beeswax candles were situated on opposite ends of it, rivulets of wax traced down their sides and collecting in small pools at their base. He wondered how long it had been since someone had lit the candles.

  It startled him, in a way, to see the candles, because it reminded him that other people had been here before. For some strange reason, being in the cave gave him the sense that they were the ones who had discovered it. The space felt so pristine, it was hard to imagine other people milling about in here.

  A few feet behind the altar, carved into the soft stalactite deposits, were several rows of long alcoves with hundreds of nearly identical looking glass vials, jars, jugs and vases, each of them capped with elaborate and unique crystal stoppers.