The Messiah Secret

68

‘You should have waited,’ Angela said calmly.

‘What?’ Donovan asked, still staring at the body.

‘You should have waited. You should have opened the coffin in a controlled environment, not way out here. There’s no way of stopping this now.’

‘Stopping what?’

‘You heard that noise, just like the rest of us. And now it’s too late. Far too late.’

‘Look!’ Masters said. ‘Look at the body.’

Before their eyes, the corpse had started to change, the flesh shrinking and changing colour, and a sudden odour of decay, sharp and unpleasant, the smell of rotting and long-dead meat, permeated the cave.

‘Sealing the coffin would have arrested the decay process,’ Angela said, her voice strained. ‘That crackling sound was some of the bones starting to crumble, and the eyes snapping open must have been caused by the muscles of the eyelids contracting as they decayed. Now the body’s making up for lost time. That’s why you should have waited.’

‘Nooo!’ Donovan howled, the sound loud in the confined space, and he leapt forward.

He plunged his hands into the coffin, grabbing for the corpse itself. Seizing the right hand, he ripped off one of the fingers, holding it up in triumph.

‘This is all I’ll need!’ he shouted. ‘This will be enough.’

The others recoiled in horror, but only one of them moved.

‘Sacrilege!’ Killian screamed, and launched himself across the end of the open stone coffin straight at Donovan.

The two men tumbled to the ground in a tangle of arms and legs, rolling over and over. They crashed into the crumbling skeleton that lay beside the coffin, a cloud of dust erupting from the ancient body as they crushed it against the ground.

Masters took a couple of steps towards them, to try to separate the two battling figures, then stopped, his head cocked on one side.

‘You hear that?’ he asked.

‘What?’ Then Bronson heard it too. A dull rumbling that seemed to emanate from the very walls all around them. And one glance told him what was causing it.

‘Get out!’ he yelled. ‘Get out now.’

Bronson grabbed Angela and shoved her towards the entrance to the outer cave. An entrance that was closing fast as the noise grew in intensity, a deafening rumbling that now echoed around the stone chamber.

They were caught in a trap that had been waiting for them for two millennia.