The Forbidden Tomb

43

Garcia tapped a few buttons on his digital tablet. A moment later, the footage from Jasmine’s flashlight was streaming to the television.

Cobb, McNutt, and Sarah watched as he sped through the first portion of the video. They had been with Jasmine when she first entered the cisterns, and there was nothing in those images that they hadn’t seen before. They were much more interested in what her flashlight had recorded after she crawled through the wall.

When Jasmine reached the reinforced tunnel on the screen, Garcia allowed the video to play at normal speed. The footage wasn’t as smooth as the others. It was a rough, choppy assembly of the segments that Garcia was able to save. It looked more like an aged 8mm movie than a modern digital film.

But it met their basic needs.

Sarah saw glimpses of the pictograph. ‘Those are the carvings we found.’

Jasmine’s narration played over the images. Like the video, portions of the audio had been mangled as well. Her voice sounded as though it were coming from the wrong side of a bad telephone connection.

‘I tried to double-check her comments; at least, the ones I could decipher,’ Garcia said. ‘But I had no luck at all.’

‘Why not?’ Cobb wondered.

‘Because my keyboard has letters, not ancient Egyptian symbols. Try as I might, I couldn’t figure out a way to type in “a face with horns next to a squiggly line”.’

Eventually, the final panel of the pictograph came into view. They could see the depiction of the tunnel, the waiting boats, and the symbol of Alexander the Great. They listened to the brief exchange between Sarah and Jasmine that they had heard previously on Sarah’s footage and watched as Sarah disappeared into the tunnel.

Once she was gone, Jasmine retraced her steps to the beginning of the wall. She scanned every inch of it, making sure to capture the images for posterity.

To her, it was the opportunity of a lifetime.

When she reached the final panel for a second time, the image froze on the screen. At first, Cobb and the others assumed that it was another glitch in her hard drive, but that wasn’t the case at all. Garcia had stopped the video on purpose.

‘Guys,’ he warned, ‘the rest is… it’s hard to watch.’

Cobb nodded in understanding. ‘Maybe so, but we need to see it.’

Garcia swallowed hard and restarted the footage.

On screen, Jasmine didn’t have time to notice anything suspicious. There were no investigations of unknown noises, no calling out to mysterious shadows. One moment she was focused on the wall, and the next she was fighting off an attack.

At first glance, there was little to be gleaned from the frantic images on the screen. The footage showed little more than a panicked blur of movement as she reckoned with an unknown intruder. The muffled screams and agonized groans confirmed that she had been taken by force, and the haunting calm of her sudden silence left them wondering how badly she was injured when she was finally subdued.

A moment later, the video stopped abruptly.

Several seconds passed before anyone said a word.

‘That’s it,’ Garcia whispered. ‘There’s nothing left to see.’

McNutt shook his head. ‘Play it again.’

‘No, don’t,’ Sarah pleaded, still feeling guilty for losing her teammate. ‘We know what happened. I don’t need to hear it again.’

But McNutt was insistent. ‘Play it again. I think I saw something.’

Cobb knew better than to challenge a sniper on what he had or hadn’t seen. ‘Hector, you heard the man. Play it again.’

McNutt walked closer to the screen. ‘Go to the part at the very end, right before the footage stops.’

Garcia rewound the video and played it again.

McNutt stepped even closer. ‘Again.’

Garcia played it one more time.

‘Again,’ he demanded. ‘This time in slow motion.’

Garcia adjusted the playback settings, and the footage ticked by slowly. Halfway through the segment, McNutt’s hand shot forward and he pointed at the screen.

‘Freeze it!’ he shouted with glee. ‘I told you I saw something!’

Garcia and the others leaned in, trying to see why McNutt was so excited. But all they could make out were patches of light and dark on the screen.

‘Where?’ Sarah asked.

McNutt pointed to the center of the screen. ‘Right there.’

Cobb glanced at the blob of pixels, then at Sarah, who was scrunching her face in total confusion, then over to a squinting Garcia. It was quite obvious that none of them was having any luck with the image. ‘Josh, what are we trying to see?’

‘A monkey man,’ he said proudly.

Sarah rolled her eyes at the assertion. ‘Monkey shit, maybe. But not—’

‘I’m telling you, there’s someone there!’

McNutt growled in frustration as he rumbled over to the corner of the lounge that she had been using as workstation. He snatched a black marker off the table and rumbled back to the monitor. Then he drew directly onto the television with heavy black ink.

‘Not the screen!’ Garcia shouted a moment too late.

‘Look here,’ McNutt said as he outlined the blob. ‘This is his head… This is his neck… And these are his shoulders… So all of you can suck it.’

He reinforced his point by circling the dark blob several times.

This time it was Sarah who glanced at Cobb for a second opinion. ‘Am I the only one who can’t see this guy? Because I’ll be honest: I’m horrible at those Magic Eye puzzles. I stare and I stare, but I never can see the dog in the funny hat.’

‘I always find the dog, but I can’t see the guy,’ Cobb admitted.

McNutt groaned as he looked around the room for art supplies. ‘Does anyone have crayons or a bucket of paint?’

‘Wait!’ Garcia blurted. The mere thought of it made him nauseous. ‘Before you do anything irreversible, let me try some digital magic. If we’re lucky, I might be able to filter out some of the diffusion.’

‘Speak in English,’ McNutt demanded.

‘I was,’ Garcia assured him as he tapped on his tablet. ‘I would have tried this earlier if our source material was a little bit clearer, but due to the missing sectors, I’m honestly not sure what my formatting palette will do to the image. It might make it better; it might make it worse.’

A few seconds later, they got their answer.

The borders of the image suddenly sharpened.

Sarah looked on in amazement. ‘I’ll be damned. The hillbilly was right.’

Cobb nodded. He could finally see it too.

A head. A neck. And a set of shoulders.

McNutt smiled in victory.

And then he suddenly stopped.

Instead of gloating, he leaned in and studied the pixels even closer, so close his nose was nearly touching the man on the screen. Then he backed away, spit on his hand, and tried to wipe the magic marker off the man’s neck. The mixture of saliva and ink on the high-end television made Garcia start to dry-heave, but McNutt ignored the gagging and continued with the task at hand, much to the amusement of Sarah and Cobb.

‘What are you doing?’ Sarah asked.

‘I see something else,’ McNutt said.

She rolled her eyes. ‘No, you don’t.’

‘Yes, I do,’ he assured her as he kept spitting and wiping.

‘Josh,’ Cobb asked, ‘what do you see?’

‘Some kind of mark. Maybe a tattoo. Maybe a scar. I can’t really tell because some idiot wrote on the screen. But it’s definitely something funky.’

‘Define funky.’

McNutt stepped back and pointed at the image. ‘See for yourself.’

Cobb studied the unusual marking. It consisted of two concentric circles supported by a pair of pillars that narrowed from their base. Unfortunately, it was a symbol that he had never seen before. ‘Anyone know what it is?’

Sarah cocked her head to the side, wondering what to make of the image that was now clearly visible on the screen. ‘It’s too shiny to be a tattoo. I think it’s a brand — like the ones they get in fraternities.’

‘I meant the shape itself,’ Cobb said.

‘Oh,’ she said as she looked closer. ‘The outline reminds me of an old-fashioned keyhole. The kind that used skeleton keys.’

‘I can see that,’ Cobb admitted, although his gut sensed that wasn’t right. It seemed more abstract. ‘Hector? What about you?’

‘Me?’ Garcia said meekly. He slowly peeked to see if saliva was still visible on the screen. Once he realized it had been wiped away, he was able to focus on the image. ‘I don’t know. Maybe some sort of hieroglyph, like the ones from the wall. I can try to check it, but like I said, I don’t know how to do that without sending it to an historian.’

His words hung in uncomfortable silence as the same thought entered their minds.

If Jasmine were here, she would know.