The Genesis Secret

25

The streets were red with blood. Rob was walking through the old town to meet Christine, at the caravanserai. It was dusk. Everywhere he looked: he saw great splashes of blood-up the walls, along the pavements, outside the Vodafone outlet. The locals were slaughtering goats and sheep-and doing it publicly, in the streets. Rob presumed that it was part of the holiday Christine mentioned, but it was still unnerving.

He paused at the corner, by a clocktower, and watched as one man struggled to hold a white-skinned goat between his legs. The man wore baggy black pantaloons-shirwals, the traditional Kurdish dress. Setting the fuming cigarette on a stool beside him, the man picked up a long, glittering knife and plunged the blade into the lower stomach of the goat.

The animal screamed. The man was unfazed. He turned, picked up his cigarette, had another puff, put it down again. Blood was drooling from the stomach of the wounded goat. The man leaned further over, grimaced, then vigorously ripped the knife straight up the quivering, pinkwhite belly. Blood pissed out of the animal, showering the road in front. The goat no longer screamed and struggled but whimpered, sensuously. Its long-lashed eyelids fluttered as it died. The man yanked open the great gash, and viscera slithered out, the pastel-coloured organs tumbling neatly into a shallow plastic bowl on the pavement.

Rob walked on. He found Christine by the archway, that led to the caravanserai. His expression of surprise and perplexity obviously said it all.

‘Kurban Bayram,’ she said. ‘The last day of hajj.’

‘But why the goats?’

‘And sheep.’ Christine threaded her arm through his as they walked along the shuttered streets of the bazaar. Cooking smells wafted. Roasting goat and broiled sheep. ‘It’s called the Sacrifice Holiday. It commemorates Abraham and Isaac, the near sacrifice of Isaac.’

‘Kurban Bayram, of course. They have that in Egypt and Lebanon; I know it well: it’s called Eid…But,’ he shook his head, ‘They don’t kill animals in the street! They do it inside, and they slit the throats.’

‘Yes,’ She agreed. ‘The Urfans treat it as a special, local festival. Because Abraham comes from here.’ She smiled. ‘And it is quite…blood-thirsty.’

They had reached a small square with cay houses and cafés in which men were smoking shishas. Many of them were wearing, for Kurban Bayram, the long black baggy Kurdish trousers. Others had special embroidered robes. Their women passed in front, decked in flashing jewellery, or sporting purple headscarves trimmed with silver. Some were tattooed with henna, their hands and feet liberally and gorgeously painted; their headscarves were hung with silver trinkets. The scene was pungently colourful.

But they weren’t here to sight-see.

‘There it is.’ Christine nodded at a small house down a shady road. ‘Beshet’s address’.

The heat of the day was draining from the streets, like water after a flood. Rob squeezed Christine’s hand. ‘Good luck.’

Christine crossed the road and knocked on the door. Rob wondered how unorthodox and unsettling it would be for Beshet to have a white western women come to his house. When Beshet opened the door, Rob scrutinized his expression and saw surprise and anxiety there, but also that puppydog languish again. Rob was confident Christine would get the keycode.

He walked back to the square and surveyed the scene. Some children, carrying firecrackers, greeted him.

‘Hey you, American!’

‘Hello…’

‘Happy Bayram!’

The children laughed, as if they had stirred some exotic and slightly frightening beast in the zoo; then they scattered up the road. The pavements were still red with blood but the slaughter had stopped. Moustachioed Kurds, smoking their shishas at café tables, greeted him with a smile. Sanliurfa was, Rob decided, the strangest place. It was implacably exotic, and somehow hostile; yet the people were some of the friendliest Rob had ever encountered.

He barely noticed Christine as she stole up to him, and said: ‘Hello.’

He turned, alerted. ‘You got it?’

‘I got it. He wasn’t keen…but he gave it to me.’

‘OK, so…’

‘Let’s wait until it’s dark.’

A quick walk brought them to the main road out of the old town. A taxi took them to Christine’s apartment, where they spent a nervous few hours surfing the net, trying not to worry, then worrying. At eleven they crept out of the apartment block and walked to the museum. The streets were much quieter now. The blood had been washed away; the holiday was nearly over. A scimitar of moon shone above them. Stars glittered like tiaras around the spires of the minarets.

At the gates to the museum Rob looked up and down the street. No one was about. He could hear Turkish TV voices from a shuttered house a block down. Otherwise, there was silence. Rob pushed and the gate swung open. At night the garden was an intensely atmospheric place. Moonlight silvered the wings of the desert demon Pazuzu. There were busts of Roman emperors, broken and crumbling; and Assyrian warlords, frozen in marble, their lion hunts never ending. The history of Sanliurfa was here, in this garden, dreaming in the moonlight. The demons of Sumeria screamed silently; stone beaks open for five thousand years.

‘I need two codes.’ said Christine. ‘Beshet gave me both of them.’

She approached the front door of the museum. Rob hung back, checking that they were alone.

They were alone. There was a car parked under the fig trees. But it looked as if it hadn’t been moved in a few days. Rotten figs were splattered across the windshield. A smear of jam and seeds.

The door clicked. Rob swivelled to find the front door was open. He paced up the steps and joined Christine inside. The air within the museum was hot: there was no one here to open windows or doors. And no air conditioning. Rob wiped the sweat from his forehead. He was wearing a jacket to carry everything they needed: flashlights, phones, notebooks. In the main room, the oldest statue in the world glowed dimly in the darkness, with his sad obsidian eyes staring mournfully into the gloom.

‘Down here,’ said Christine.

Rob saw, in the gloom, a small door in the far corner of the room. Beyond was a flight of stairs, leading down. He handed a flashlight to Christine and turned on his own. The two torch beams flickered in the dusty blackness as they descended the stairs.

The vaults were surprisingly big. Much bigger than the museum above. Doors and corridors led in all directions. Shelves of antiquities glimmered as Rob flicked his flashlight beam this way and that over broken pottery, chunks of gargoyle; spears, flints and vases.

‘It’s huge.’

‘Yes. Sanliurfa is built on old caves and they converted the caves into cellars.’

Rob leaned and looked at a broken figurine lying on its back. Snarling at the shelf above. ‘What’s that?’

‘The monster Asag. The demon that causes sickness. Sumerian.’

‘OK…’ Rob shivered, despite the stifling warmth. He wanted this over: the cold dread of what they were about to do was building up. ’Let’s get a move on, Christine. Where’s the Edessa Vault?’

‘Down here.’

They doglegged down another corridor, past a Roman column, brutally truncated, and more shelves of vases and pots. The dust was thick and choking; Christine was leading them to the oldest part of the cave system.

But then a big steel door barred the way. Christine fumbled with the keycode. ‘Shit.’ Her hands were shaking.

Rob poised the flashlight so that she could see better as she keyed in the numbers; at last the lock snapped open. They were greeted with a rush of hot air as the Edessa Vault exhaled. There was badness in the breeze. Something indefinable, and remote, but organic and unpleasant. And old.

Rob tried to ignore it. They stepped inside the cellar. Blunt steel shelves led down the vast cavern. Most of the antiquities were in big plastic boxes with names and numbers scrawled on them. But some were left in their natural state. Christine named them as they walked. Syriac or Akkadian goddesses; a big head of Anzu; a chunk of a Hellenic nude. Ghostly hands and wings extended into the gloom.

Christine was walking up and down beside the shelves. ‘There’s nothing here.’ She almost sounded relieved. ‘It’s all the same stuff I saw before.’

‘Then we’d better go…’

‘Wait.’

‘What?’

Christine was gesturing into the darkness.

‘Here. This is from Gobekli.’

Rob paused. He was getting the bad signals again. The suicide bomber in Iraq. He could never forget the bomber’s face, staring over; just before the explosion.

Rob felt the urgent need to exit-to get out of here. Now.

Christine said: ‘Shut the door.’

Reluctantly, Rob closed the door behind him. They were alone in the furthest vault, with whatever Franz had found. Whatever he felt should be compared with the horror of the Cayonu Skulls.

‘Rob, come and look.’

Her torchlight was shining down on an extraordinary statue. A woman, with her legs open: the vagina heavily engraved, and obscenely large. Like the open wound in the fur of that goat.

Next to the woman stood a trio of animals: wild boars, perhaps. All of them had pronounced, erect penises; they were surrounding the splayed woman-like it was a gang-rape.

‘This is from Gobekli.’ Christine whispered.

‘Is this what we were looking for?’

‘No. I remember when we found this. Franz put it here. He must have been hoarding the…stranger discoveries in one place. So whatever it is he found should be here. Somewhere.’

Rob flicked his flashlight left and right and left. The dust whirled in the gloom. Faces of sombre gods and leering demons greeted him, then faded to black as he moved along. He couldn’t see anything; he didn’t even know what he was looking for. It was hopeless. Then his torchlight illuminated a large polystyrene box with the word Gobekli written on it in marker pen. Rob felt his heart thump. ‘Christine,’ he hissed.

The box was lodged at the back of the steel shelf, by the cave wall. It was obviously big and heavy; Christine struggled with it. Lying his torch on the shelf behind, Rob reached in and assisted her. Together they dragged the box out and set it on the floor.

Rob picked up his flashlight, his heart racing, and kept the beam high as Christine opened the box. Inside there were four old-fashioned olive jars about half a metre long, packed in bubblewrap. Rob felt a thudding pang of disappointment. Half of him had wanted to find something obscene and horrifying. The journalist half; the juvenile half of him, maybe.

Christine took one of the jars out.

‘Is it from Gobekli?’

‘For sure. And if it is, then it must be ten thousand years old. So they did have pottery…’

‘Amazingly well preserved.’

‘Yes.’ Handling the jar with great care, Christine turned it over. There was a curious design on one side. A sort of stick with a bird at the top. ‘I’ve seen that somewhere,’ she said. Quietly.

Rob took his mobile out and took a brisk set of pictures. The flash from the phone-camera felt like an intrusion, in the sombre darkness of the vault. Djinns and emperors scowled in the brief and vulgar dazzle.

Pocketing the phone, Rob reached into the box and took out one of the long jars himself. It was surprisingly heavy. He wanted to know what was inside. Some kind of liquid? Grains? Honey? He tilted it and looked at the top. It was stoppered and sealed. ‘Shall we open it?’

‘Careful…’

Her warning came too late. Rob felt the jar suddenly sag in his hand: he had tilted it too brusquely. The neck of the jar seemed to sigh, and it fell onto the floor: then the crack in the neck opened further, ripping into the body of the ancient, rotting pottery. The jar was crumbling in Rob’s hand. Just crumbling. The shards scattered on the floor, some of them shivering immediately into dust.

‘Oh my God!’ The smell was hideous. Rob put a sleeve to his nose.

Christine shone a torch on the contents of the jar. ‘Fucking hell.’

A tiny body lay on the floor. A human body: a baby, forced into a foetal position. The corpse was half mummified, half viscous liquid. Still decomposing after all the centuries. The stench drilled into Rob’s face till he gagged. Gurgles of liquid were pouring from the skull.

‘Look at the face!’ cried Christine. ‘Look at the face!’

Rob shone his flashlight in the baby’s face. It was locked in a silent scream. A scream of a dying child, echoing across twelve thousand years.

Suddenly lights filled the room. Lights, noises, voices. Rob spun and saw: a group of men standing in the back of the vault. Men with guns and knives, coming for them.