The Burning Man

1

Hunter kept the pedal to the floor as he steered the stolen truck along Sharia al-Haram towards the Giza plateau. The road was lined with nightclubs and casinos, a tacky neon strip permanently in conflict with the majesty that lay beyond. At that time of evening, the pavements should have been thronging with tourists with too much money, posses of Egyptian businessmen and the street trade that preyed on both groups. But the road was eerily deserted. No traffic moved, which made it easier for Hunter to ignore the red lights.

Occasionally, impossibly beautiful women would attempt to flag them down, or injured, desperate children. Hunter never slowed. Sometimes they would step into the path of the truck, but there would never be an impact.

‘Are you sure we’re doing the right thing?’ Hunter said without any sign of emotion.

‘Why are you asking me?’ Church said.

‘We’re going right into the heart of where these gods exist. The chances of getting Laura out are almost non-existent.’

‘She is one of us,’ Shavi said quietly.

‘I know,’ Hunter said, ‘but this is in direct opposition to our primary mission. We make a hopeless attempt to go in there, we stand to lose everything. Smart strategy suggests we abandon this futile gesture and focus on what we’re meant to be doing. Or lose everything.’

‘You are suggesting we abandon Laura?’ Shavi said incredulously.

Hunter didn’t reply.

The truck sped past the Maryutia Canal, the pyramids huge against the night sky. Behind them the stars formed a milky river across the heavens, as though the Nile was reflected above.

‘We save Laura,’ Church said. ‘No argument.’

Fayed leaned between Hunter and Church. ‘We are nearly there.’

‘You can take the truck straight back,’ Hunter said to him. ‘It’ll be too dangerous to wait for us.’

‘No. I have spent all my life studying the great culture of Ancient Egypt. If what you say is true and the gods really do walk the Earth, then this is too great an opportunity to miss.’

‘You idiot,’ Tom said quietly.

The road passed the security perimeter of the Giza complex where armed guards would normally have been patrolling, but it was as deserted as the city’s suburbs. Hunter brought the truck to a halt before the ancient monuments. Not far away, three jackals tore at bloody remains that did not appear animal. As two of them fought over a long bone, another loped up, but although jackal-headed, this one had the body of a man. It attacked the remains with relish.

Filled with awe, Fayed scrambled to get a better look. ‘Anubis,’ he whispered.

The jackal-headed creature looked up as if it had heard him, and then loped away across the moonlit sand.

‘I’ll stay here,’ Tom said.

‘It’s not safe,’ Church responded.

‘Oh, it’s much safer going in with you,’ Tom replied sarcastically. ‘I think I’ll take my chances.’

The night was warm. The aromas of the city had been replaced by the dry scent of the desert and the cooling stone of the pyramids. Disturbed, the remaining jackals ran. Church decided not to check what they had been eating. There was an air of foreboding that put them all on edge.

‘Where’s the mortuary complex?’ Hunter asked.

Fayed made an expansive gesture. ‘The entire site has been a necropolis almost since the beginning of pharaonic Egypt. In fact, there are two distinct areas separated by the wadi. Here are the more familiar monuments. There-’ he indicated a ridge to the south-east ‘-are the private tombs of citizens of various classes.’

‘Such monuments to the dead,’ Shavi said in awe.

‘They believed that death was not the end,’ Fayed replied, ‘just a point of transition from this world to the next.’

‘Like the Celts,’ Church noted and glanced at Shavi, ‘and just about every other culture.’

Shavi smiled. ‘Do you think they were on to something?’

Nearest was the smallest pyramid of Menkaure, with a causeway leading to the mortuary temple before its entrance. The pyramid of Khafre had the same layout, with the Sphinx lying next to its causeway. And beyond was the Great Pyramid of Khufu, still breathtaking even without its sheath of gleaming white stone that had been stolen many generations before.

A figure separated from the shadows near the causeway and came towards them. Church drew his sword when he recognised Etain, her dead face as white as the moon.

Fayed fell to his knees. ‘What is this? The dead come for us?’

‘No sign of Veitch or the others,’ Hunter said. ‘Why’s she not riding that freakish horse you talked about?’

Curiously, Church sensed no threat. Despite her appearance, he saw the Etain he had first met in the Iron Age, beautiful and strong, the woman who had fallen in love with him and paid the price.

‘No visible weapons,’ Hunter said. ‘Take her down?’

‘Wait.’

Etain came to a halt in front of them. Church tried to read her intentions, but there was nothing in her eyes beyond the suffocating blankness of death. She waited for a moment, fixated on Church’s face, and then turned and walked north.

‘Well, I’ve followed worse,’ Hunter said. ‘Shall we?’

Sand swirled around their ankles as they made their way past the two smaller pyramids. After fifteen minutes they were standing before the Great Pyramid, and only at its foot did its scale become truly apparent. A mountain of steps rose up high overhead, a single star peeking out behind the summit.

‘Each block weighs around two and a half tons and there are more than two million of them covering thirteen acres,’ Fayed said, recovering from his shock and clearly finding comfort in graspable facts and figures. It was as if he was seeing the monument for the first time. ‘The mystery of mysteries. A true wonder.’

‘Yep, it’s a building,’ Hunter said. ‘Now, a woman, there’s a mystery of mysteries. And one worth spending your life uncovering.’

‘I spent two thousand years getting back to my own time,’ Church said, ‘and this was ancient when I started the journey.’

Fayed clapped a hand on Hunter’s shoulder. ‘You are a military man, I can tell. Where you stand now, Alexander the Great once stood, ruminating on the great mysteries.’

‘I’ll do my ruminating when I’m a few hundred miles from here.’ Hunter scrambled after Etain as she made her way to the entrance.

The transition from the heat of the evening to the dank cave-chill of the tunnel made them all shiver. Hunter took out his pencil-torch, but Etain appeared to need no light.

‘Is it true that no body of Khufu was found, nor any tomb goods?’ Shavi whispered. His words echoed much further than he had anticipated. ‘Indeed, is it not said that this pyramid was not a tomb at all, but served some other mysterious purpose?’

‘The Supreme Council of Antiquities does not accept that theory,’ Fayed replied with some hesitancy, which suggested he was not wholly convinced. ‘I do not know what you expect to find in here. For the vast size of the pyramid, there is very little space inside. A few passages, a shaft, the tiny Queen’s Chamber and the slightly larger King’s Chamber. Nowhere for the gods to gather.’

‘The space you see is not always the only space there is,’ Church replied.

‘Don’t get him started,’ Hunter said to the baffled Fayed. ‘Next he’ll be drawing you diagrams.’

They hauled themselves up the steep, treacherous Ascending Passage, breathing heavily from the exertion in the claustrophobic tunnel. But when they entered the Grand Gallery and the quality of the echoes changed with the high ceiling lost to the shadows above them, Etain came to a halt.

‘What’s she doing?’ Hunter whispered.

‘Listening, I think,’ Church replied.

‘It’s too dark in here,’ Hunter said. ‘Why couldn’t they set up their camp out in the desert?’

‘Hush,’ Shavi said. ‘Can you hear it?’

A whisper of movement, a scratch and a scurry, growing louder.

‘It’s coming from the other side of the wall.’ Church pressed his ear to the stone.

‘This can’t be good.’ Hunter shook the torch. The beam was growing noticeably dimmer.

‘The batteries?’ Fayed suggested.

‘They’re new.’

In the growing gloom, Etain’s face glowed spectrally. She moved further along the Gallery and waited. The scurrying and scratching behind the wall was now clearly audible, and magnified by the odd acoustics of the passage.

Church pulled away from the stone. ‘Spiders. They’re moving behind the walls.’

Hunter glanced at Etain. ‘She led us into a trap.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Church said.

Fayed picked up on the others’ anxiety. ‘Then we must retreat,’ he said, skidding down the steep slope to where the Grand Gallery met the Ascending Passage. He came to a sudden halt. Peering into the dark of the tunnel, he caught sight of tiny fronds waving from the almost imperceptible gaps between the monolithic blocks. The impossible logic of the sight meant it was a moment before Fayed realised he was seeing the legs of the spiders Church had mentioned as they pulled their bodies out through a space that could not possibly admit them. The first emerged with a plop, black and shinily metallic. And then they were falling in streams from the ceiling and bursting from the walls, a seething wave rising up the passage.

His eyes wide with fear, Fayed scrambled back up the Grand Gallery. ‘Yes, spiders. Thousands of them.’

‘What if,’ Shavi said, ‘the entire pyramid is filled with them. A repository, a base, perhaps even the place that allows them passage into our world.’

‘Now you’re just trying to upset me.’ Hunter bounded up the slope behind Etain.

‘Stating-the-obvious time: we can’t go back,’ Church said, watching the spiders spilling into the Grand Gallery. ‘We have to stick with her.’

They followed Etain into the stark King’s Chamber, which contained only an empty granite sarcophagus.

‘No exit.’ Church cursed under his breath. The Grand Gallery was now alive with spiders rushing across every available surface towards the entrance to the King’s Chamber.

‘Might as well draw your sword,’ Hunter said. ‘We could probably squash a couple of dozen before they take us apart.’

As the torrent washed towards the entrance, Etain stepped past them and placed one hand on a barely visible indentation in the stone. Instantly, a block fell from above and crashed into the door space. Once the dust had settled, they saw they were sealed in.

As they breathed with relief, Shavi held up a hand to his ear; from every side of the small chamber came the sound of spiders.

‘Let’s review our situation,’ Hunter said. ‘We’re trapped in a tiny room, at the heart of a mountain of stone, surrounded by what could very well be ten billion lethal spiders.’ He looked to Church. ‘Now’s the time to tell us your plan.’

Etain gently edged Church towards the sarcophagus and made it clear that she wanted him to lie in it. Unsure, he complied. When he was lying flat in the cold stone box, Etain pressed something out of his line of vision. The bottom of the sarcophagus fell away, and Church plummeted into the dark.