The Crypts of Eden

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

“Hold up,” Butcher Boy said with his hand raised. Everyone stood still, listening. “Anybody hear that?” It was a repetitive pounding noise. It wasn’t close, but it wasn’t too far, either. “Another tripwire somewhere?” he threw out. They listened further.

“I doubt it,” said Alyssa. “Who would set it off?”

“Maybe one of those things,” said Hall.

She shook her head. “There has to be some type of catalyst to manually set it off. They don’t have the physical capabilities like we do to initiate a temple shift.”

“Then perhaps we’re not alone.”

“We’re alone.”

“Then what’s causing that racket?”

…Bang… Bang… Bang…

“Ms. Moore?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know.” They moved onward with Savage in the lead.

The level appeared without challenges, without death-determining riddles, the corridor as inky black as all the rest. But there was an indescribable calm here, the type that drives a person into a false sense of complacency. The molasses-like weight of a pall was gone.

But not everything was serene. The banging continued, causing Alyssa to sneak a peek over her shoulder. What is that?

“What’s the matter, Ms. Moore? Getting concerned, are you?” asked Butcher Boy.

She shook her head and lied. “No.”

In return he gave her a wry grin. The type that said, I know better.

Savage also felt a personal calm — an inexpressible feeling of peace that had eluded him for years. He looked at Alyssa and smiled. What lifted him even more was that she returned his smile with a grin of her own. They were getting close to something wonderful. Whether it was driven by anticipation or by something else not understood, they didn’t know.

They finally came upon a chamber doorway with no riddles or obstructions. Above the opening were characters that read: The Chamber of the Primaries. Alyssa’s heart skipped, a hand unknowingly going to her breast. “The Chamber of the Primaries,” she whispered in awe.

Savage stood aside to give her room to enter. “The privilege should be yours,” he said, gesturing like a matador allowing a bull to pass.

She stepped inside an incredibly massive room, much larger than the ballroom-sized chamber above. The ceiling was domed and sparkled with star-point glitters of light from the glow of the lanterns. The ceiling was encrusted with chips of pure crystal marking the constellations in perfect facsimile, the entire ceiling a planetarium.

Every square-inch of the black silica walls had been used as tablets with characters in pre-Sumerian script, pictograms, cuneiforms, pre-history shapes, and hieroglyphics. In the central part of the arena was a rise with wraparound steps that led up to the main level.

They were in awe, the crystal against the pitch-black ceiling as real as a universe could be.

Aussie and Butcher Boy lowered their weapons, feeling oddly content.

Obsidian Hall raced around like a little boy in a candy shop, throwing caution to the wind.

Savage stayed close to Alyssa, who for the moment seemed to forget that people around her existed. “It is something… else,” he said.

Alyssa shrugged off her backpack, grabbed her father’s crumpled paperwork, and pressed it close to her. For you, Daddy. We do this together. She took the steps to the main level.

The top of the rise was even more magnificent. It was perfectly circular and acted as a platform to hold the incredible sculptures they discovered at the temple level, the carvings of the bull and the bear and the lizard, as well as other creatures discovered as bas-relief carvings on the Göbekli Tepe pillars. She looked above each sculpture and immediately understood. They were representations of certain constellations: the bull, Taurus; the bear, Ursa Major; and the lizard, Scorpio — the forepaws and curving tail of the Megalania Prisca mistakenly considered to be the celestial shape of a scorpion over time. There was a correlation between Heaven and Earth, the stars and the indigenous creatures within the fauna of Eden, a single concept of uniform existence.

“This is amazing,” she whispered to no one in particular. “Absolutely… amazing.”

“There’s no gold!” shouted Aussie. “No bloody gold at all!”

Within the circle of sculptures, the center point of the landing, two pods were standing approximately four-feet tall. They were egg-shaped, and their casings appeared to be fashioned from veined marble. But they weren’t. They were crafted from the non-porous composite.

Carefully, she slid a hand over surfaces that were completely unblemished, not a single mark, scratch or chip marred the smooth and silky exterior of the pods. She then looked straight up at the cluster of conjoined crystals that made up the image of the sun, the Giver of life. Then back to the egg-shaped pods.

They were on the center of the platform, the eggs symbolic of the beginning of life, the central part of all existence that matures to all living things: the bull, the boar, the lizard — all the creatures provided by the Heavens and the sun, a unity of one acting in perfect harmony.

This was truly the cradle of mankind, she considered, where life began as the simple tool of an egg, a single celled organism, which grew beneath the watchful eyes of heavenly gods.

She was ecstatic.

Here were the first indications of religion. The planetariums, the placement of the pods, the sculptures beneath their respective constellations, were symbolic but primitive suggestions. But Alyssa quickly realized that it was like children taking their first baby steps away from the cradle.

Mankind was learning.

Obsidian Hall stood in front of a wall of pictograms.

On a fifty-foot stretch, the wall depicted images of people with elongated skulls. Other depictions showed men riding in chariot-like vehicles with long trails of fire blowing out from the aft end.

“The Chariots of the Gods,” he commented. “How… quaint.”

Nevertheless, the depictions upon this wall were key recordings of Man’s first images of his place in the universe about eight thousand years before the Egyptian pyramids where even a consideration. Such a priceless artifact of recorded history, even by the pieces, would hang well in one of the rooms aboard the Seafarer. He placed his palms against the wall. There were so many priceless artifacts to choose from.

He stood back and re-examined the wall in its entirety, a pictogram story of pagan gods with bulbous heads trekking across the sky in fire-fueled chariots.

Eden, he thought, held many wonders.

John Savage stood behind Alyssa with his hands clasped behind the small of his back. It was wonderful, he thought, to see her so enthused and so happy. It was like a father watching his child enjoy an event, the happiness of someone else also his own and something shared.

He took up beside her. And then he rubbed his hands over the surface of one of the pods. It’s like glass,” he said. “It’s so smooth.”

“They pose as the center of life,” she said. “The miracle of birth from a single cell. The concept of life from the moment of conception. The true beginning of mankind.”

“Are you happy?” he asked her.

When she faced him, he saw the gleam in her eyes, the fascination of a new world written all over her face by the expressions she wore. “You have no idea what this means to me,” she said.

“Maybe I do,” he answered.

And then: “Ms. Moore!” She took a step away from the pods. It was Butcher Boy.

“There are several holes along the floor. Is it something we need to be concerned about?”

She nodded. “What you’re looking at are drainage holes,” she told him. “They’re common in pyramids established in areas known for flashflooding and are most common with pyramids in Mesoamerica. To see something like that suggests that the area had huge amounts of rainfall at one time.”

“So it’s nothing to worry about then? No shifting of walls or flying daggers?”

“You’ll be fine,” she told him. And then she returned to the pods.

“How deep are those holes?” asked Savage softly.

“I don’t know. Why?”

“They maybe our only means of escape,” he replied. “If we’ve exhausted our usefulness to Hall, then he may see fit that we be terminated. I’m sure he doesn’t want us telling the world that he ordered Noah’s killing. Or that he admitted to having Montario murdered.”

She could feel her excitement ebb.

“I’ll toss my lamp inside to gauge the depth,” he said lightly. “Be right back.”

Alyssa stood between the pods, a hand on one, her other hand holding her father’s photocopied scripts. She held the pages out from her. “At least we got this far,” she commented.

Savage stood over one of the drainage holes. The maw was completely black, almost fathomless. With an easy motion when no one was looking, he tossed the lamp into the hole.

He expected it to fall forever, the light turning into a mote, then gone.

But the light landed approximately ten to fifteen feet down. More amazingly, it landed in water and drifted another few feet into its depth. However, the current was soundless.

He stood over the hole, taking periodic glances at the people milling about the chamber, then watched as the lantern was slowly carried away by the drift.

All currents, he knew, had to lead somewhere.

He smiled.

“Ms. Moore.”

Every time she heard Hall’s voice, she could swear that her skin crawled. “What.”

“Have you seen the pictograms?”

“I’ll get to them.”

“I believe your father stated in his journal that you would question your faith should you find the truth. Perhaps the surrounding walls tell a significant tale he might have referenced. A most interesting narrative, I would think.”

“My father never made it this far. He was only hypothesizing from the ancient script from the walls above. He also said this place was a burial chamber. But as you see, it’s not.”

“Could you afford me a moment of your time then?” he asked her. “I’m deeply interested in the wall’s narrative, of the history behind the scenes sketched.”

She agreed to interpret. Silently, they made their way to the wall. The thought of having to talk to Hall sickened her at the most basic level, that of growing nauseous.

“Please,” he began with his arrogant tone, “explain these images to me.”

The imagery was basic and covered the world from primitive tribal caves to the pyramids in Egypt to the pyramids in Mesoamerica. The bulbous cranial shapes represented the head binding technique of ancient royalty. The chariots emitting flames from the aft suggested a royal patron on his journey to a heavenly-bound afterlife. It was theorized that the flames were actually depicted drawings of a comet’s tail or meteorites burning up in the atmosphere, giving the impression that the fire trails were preternatural when, in fact, it was a matter of magic that was really science not yet understood.

“It was believed that Nefertiti’s head was created by head binding,” she said.

“Head binding?”

“It’s a form of a permanent body alteration where the cranium is intentionally deformed. It’s done by distorting the normal growth of an infant’s skull by applying force by binding his or her head between two pieces of wood to create the conical shapes. And it’s done when the skull is most pliable when the child is about a month old and continues for approximately six months.”

He studied the image further. “Really?”

“The earliest examples of intentional cranial deformation date back as far as 45,000 BC in Neanderthal skulls. Intentional cranial deformation of Proto Neolithic Homo sapiens dated around the twelfth millennium BCE were discovered inside the Shanidar Cave in Iraq. There’s a plausible and scientific explanation for everything,” she finalized.

“Yet you believe in the afterlife.”

“That’s my personal view, yes.”

“Then I’m curious,” he continued. “Why would your father say that you might lose your spirituality if you discover the truth when all this has a plausible explanation? Was he wrong? A man of such renown?”

Their gazes held firm. And then: “Are we through? Did I answer your questions?”

His wry grin flourished at the edges. “Most of them,” he said. “But not all.”

“Then if you’ll excuse me.” Without waiting for Hall’s response, she turned and began to make haste.

“You’re excused,” he called after her.

She managed to walk away with enough resolve that kept her from making a costly remark, since Obsidian Hall had the emperor’s power of giving a thumbs-down on her life. But that didn’t keep her mind from willfully cursing him with every profane word she could think of.

There was a great divot in the black silica floor where the creature used its tail as a pile driver, smashing the mineral into lumps that were scattered about the chamber. Though it had not broken through, it was close. It rambled around the divot checking its progress, its senses telling it to complete the task by driving its tail up, then down, until a hole was big enough.

With a few powerful intakes through its nostrils, it was able to detect the scent of its prey. Since the thickness of the floor thinned considerably after the constant pounding, it acted as less of a buffer; therefore, their scents seemed stronger and more powerful. But the creature’s mind did not have the mental gymnastics to understand this. It only processed the fact that its prey was nearby.

Ignoring the fact that it had hammered its tail to raw meat in some places, ignoring the fact that the pock marks of the bullet holes were bleeding out slowly, its motivation was paramount.

Raising its head high and expanding its frill to full expansion, the Prisca cried out to keep others away. This was its territory. And it would do anything to defend it.

Circling the divot a few more times, the Megalania Prisca finally set itself, raised its tail high, and brought it down with a crashing blow, causing the first breach in the floor. From the ceiling of the lower chamber, minute particles of black silica began to sprinkle down onto the chamber floor. And then there was a loud crack synonymous with the sound of a fissure racing along the surface of ice, fracturing it. Driven by near madness, the Megalania Prisca was much closer to fulfilling its needs.