The Crypts of Eden

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

“I lost two men for this?” said Butcher Boy. “For some ancient scratches on the wall, a few sculptures and two—” He pointed at the pods “—whatever those things are?”

“Everything you see around you, gentlemen, is priceless,” said Hall.

“Which does us no bloody good,” said Aussie, “since they’re too bloody big and heavy to carry away.”

“Just a small piece of what you see — a memento even, can go for tens of millions on the market. And believe me, gentlemen, there’s a market for everything.”

“It doesn’t mean anything, Hall, if we don’t survive this,” added Butcher Boy.

“Do your jobs, gentlemen. That’s what I paid you for. That’s what we agreed upon.”

“Our bloody agreement is starting to mean less to me. I say we walk away from this.”

“Mr. Aussie, you have two million of my dollars sitting in your bank account with the promise of an additional three. You walk away when I say you walk away. That was the term of our contract.”

“What bloody parts about it meaning less to me did you not understand?”

“You job is to see that I survive. That’s what you agreed to the moment you accepted my money. The terms were clear, unhidden, and you had the opportunity to back away. But you didn’t. You were so confident in your abilities that you opted to nail your worthless souls to the Devil’s altar.”

Aussie retracted his KA-BAR combat knife. “Perhaps I should cut your bloody throat right here,” he said through clenched teeth.

Hall was genuinely frightened. Aussie was never a paper lion when it came to making threats. He held his hand up against Aussie’s advance. “But you knowingly agreed to the terms of the contract under a soldier’s honor.”

Aussie stopped. “That I did, mate.” He sheathed the knife. “But we signed the contract because you didn’t tell us about any of this. You said it was an easy job.”

“Just keep me alive, gentlemen, take a little piece of Eden, a small token, and I promise to find you a market.” His voice was trembling, his confidence lost. “It’ll be worth your while, I promise.”

Aussie gave him a sidelong glance with his disfigured eye. “We ain’t miracle workers,” he said. “We’re running low on ammo and all we know is that we have to go back up to get out of here — past those things.”

For a moment their gazes kept. Then Aussie waved a hand dismissively at Hall and said “Aaah,” before walking away.

Hall’s shoulders deflated, the tension melting away.

“Don’t get too comfortable,” said Butcher Boy. “We’re not out of this yet.” And then he left the billionaire alone, the man standing apart from everyone feeling horribly vulnerable for the first time in his life. So he decided to join the others, whereas there was always safety in numbers.

She could tell that John Savage wanted to tell her something, since he gave her a single nod about something she understood to be positive. So she gave him a covert thumbs-up, her hand by her side, only for him to see, the gesture asking if everything was OK.

He gave a small inclination of his head.

And they had to do this as Butcher Boy and Aussie entered their circle of light by the pods. “Odd things they are,” said Aussie, slapping a hand on one pod, which brought Alyssa to wince. “It’s as bloody ‘ard as a stone, it is. Looks like bloody marble.”

“It’s not,” she countered.

“Then what is it?”

“Some type of composite. I’m not sure yet.”

“And ‘ere I am thinking this was a burial chamber with mounds of gold for the taking. It ain’t anything but a bloody museum.”

“It’s more than just a museum, Mr. Aussie, if that’s even your bloody name.”

He took her mimic of the word ‘bloody’ as a jab. “Don’t get cute with me, Missy.”

“Look around you,” she said. “This is the cradle of mankind. This is Eden. A remarkable civilization with a magnificent planetarium, with walls that make up an incredible library that predates history with messages and information—”

“Which I don’t bloody care about,” he told her forcefully. “I came ‘ere for a treasure of some sort — perhaps a trinket or a bauble. Something that could give me a life I always dreamed about — to be anybody but who and what I am.”

A strange silence passed between them. It was the first time she’d seen Aussie exposed, to hear him admit that he wanted to be something more, if not better, than what he was. Their eyes connected. And she could see that he was not ashamed of his admittance. She even considered it to be a catharsis, perhaps the beginning of some kind of cleansing.

When Aussie looked away, the pink part of his eye glistened against the shine of the lamp, throwing off a spangle of light. And then he waited for a moment as if deliberating before heading off into the shadows.

“Be careful,” cried Butcher Boy. But Aussie didn’t respond.

“He’s a man of many moods,” Savage stated rhetorically.

Butcher Boy accepted it as such while his attention was mainly focused to the pods. “Ms. Moore — there at the bottom of this shell,” he said, pointing. “It’s very faint. But something’s there. Do you see it?”

She did see something. It was the sparse markings of ancient writing. She hunkered down and wiped a hand across the characters, drawing dust away. There were six symbols.

“Can you read it?” asked Savage.

“I can certainly figure it out,” she said. “I recognize the symbols enough to piece them together.” She immediately checked out the second pod and cleared away the dust. It also had symbols, but there were only four and they were of different markings.

“More riddles?” Butcher Boy asked. His trust for the temple had obviously waned by the way he sounded suspicious.

“No. This is something different,” she said, reaching for a pen inside her backpack. She rummaged around, found one, took a page from one of her father’s copies, and wrote down the symbols, beginning with the pod bearing the six symbols.

“Have you found something, Ms. Moore?” Hall joined them on the tier.

“Everything’s fine,” she said, and began to write down the characters.

And then the second set of four characters:

With careful consideration, she began the process of translation.

And then the second set:

And then she struggled for breath as her hands shook and her heart pounded.

Savage grabbed her the moment her knees began to buckle. “What’s the matter?”

She pointed to what she wrote: ADEIAM and EIVE.

Adam and Eve.

“The Chamber of the Primaries! The Chamber of the Firsts! Adeiam and Eive! Adam and Eve!” she exclaimed. “These are monuments to the Firsts!”

Having found her second wind, she broke from Savage’s hold and went to the pods. With the sleeve of her shirt she began to rub the dust away from the surface. The drifting patterns that appeared like wayward markings of veined marble she realized were not random designs all, but faded lettering resembling the archaic writing along the walls throughout the temple.

Although the symbols were severely faded, she could make out the inscription: In the Land of Edin is the Garden of God, the One True Paradise.

Her breath hitched from sudden awe.

“What is it, Ms. Moore. What do you see?” asked Hall.

She immediately went to the second pod and began to rub it clean, the veined markings taking on lettered formations. It also had the same inscription: In the Land of Edin is the Garden of God, the One True Paradise.

“It’s all right here,” she whispered. “In this one… simple… line.”

“What is?” asked Savage.

“The concept of the first religion where the three main branches of faith separated and evolved into religions of their own,” she answered. “‘In the Land of Edin,’ is in correlation to Catholicism; ‘the Garden of God,’ is aligned with Judaism; and the last verse of the line of the ‘One True Paradise,’ is Islam.” Then waving her arms openly in suggestion of the entire hall, she said, “And this is where it all started — the texts, the languages, the current-day religions, everything began from this point as a single model before branching out as mankind progressed.”

Her eyes seemed bigger and brighter, shining as tears surfaced. Her father should have been here, she thought. Holding the copies taken from his journal close to her was not enough. It wasn’t the same so she looked up at the countless number of crystals embedded within the ceiling that sparkled in numerous pinpricks of light against the dull shine of the lamps. Are you there, Dad?

She wanted to believe that he was.

And she continued to look skyward as Obsidian Hall traced his fingers over the surface of the pods, his fingers skimming over what appeared to be a hairline fissure. “Ms. Moore, I believe your little monument here is less than perfect,” he said. One thing Hall was completely obsessive about was perfection. Such a find as this would have been a perfect display beneath a set of track lighting aboard the Seafarer. But it had a flaw, and an unacceptable one at that.

He allowed his fingers to draw along the line of the fracture, examining its course as he did so. The line was not taking the route as fractures do, however, which was in wild and random patterns. This one was taking on the geometrical shape of an oval that was similar to the contours of the pod.

What is this? Everyone looked on, including Aussie who had decided to return to the tier. “You find something, mate?”

“A… crack?” But when he said this he did so in a form of a question because he wasn’t confident of his assessment.

Alyssa hunkered down next to the second pod, searching. And there it was — the hairline split that ran around the front of the pod like the seam of a doorway. She looked for a latch, a lever, a button, anything that might give her access it if was truly an opening of some kind. But she found nothing. The pods were without mechanisms of any kind.

“Well, Ms. Moore, for a moment I considered these to be the outlines of an access panel,” Hall said, sounding disappointed.

She thought the same. But when Aussie tapped the top of the shell with the butt end of his knife, it sounded as if the pod was hollow. “Well, get a load of that,” he said. “The bloody thing’s empty.”

“Open it,” Hall demanded of Aussie. “Use your knife to pry the edges.”

“You can’t do that!” Alyssa protested. “You’ll damage the surface.”

“I said, open it!”

Aussie rounded the pod and jimmied the point of his knife it into the seam and worked it until it was wedged deep. After a few more pumps of his hand, the panel pulled away. Air hissed into the pod as oxygen filled the vacuum of space that had been empty for twelve thousand years.

Placing a hand over the lip of the access panel, Hall opened the door to the pod. There was a collective gasp, which was followed by whispers of incredulity.

“Well, Ms. Moore,” Hall finally said. “It appears that your father was right after all. It is a burial chamber.”

The Megalania Prisca smashed its way through the floor at the cost of a few minor bones broken in its tail. It circled the hole excitedly. The scent of its prey was strong and delectable.

It shimmied through; the sharp edges of black silica, which was really a glass, scraping its thick hide. When it got more than halfway through, it dropped, landing hard in an unfamiliar corridor, one it had never seen in its fifty years of existence since there had never been a catalyst to upset the balance of the walls within the temple before. It was a land that was alien and familiar at the same time. It was a place that harbored abominations that did not belong.

Sending up its frill, its receptors were picking up the vibrations of motion. So its brain, no larger than a grapefruit, but with the majority of it in use unlike the human brain, processed the data of its quarry and centered in on their location. Having determined their position, the alpha predator moved through the warrens.

It was just moments away from the Chamber of the Primaries.