The Tenth Chamber

NINETEEN

Sunday

The campsite at Ruac Abbey was a melancholy place that Sunday night.

Most of the team had packed up and took off during the morning; Luc and Sara had left at noon to catch a flight to London. A skeleton crew remained to shut down the cave for the season.

For fifteen days, the camp had been a beehive of scientific activity, ground zero in the world of Paleolithic archaeology. It had crackled with excitement, the place to be. Now, it felt empty and a bit sad.

Jeremy and Pierre were in charge of the wind-down and cleanup, commanding a group of four undergraduate students itching to get back to the bars and clubs of Bordeaux. The only senior scientist who stayed to the bitter end was Elizabeth Coutard, who was setting up the environmental monitoring protocol to evaluate conditions within the cave throughout the off-season.

The chef was gone too so the quality of the meals was poor. After an every-man-for-himself dinner, Jeremy and Pierre ambled over to the office to pack boxes taking a couple of bottles of beer with them.

Well into the evening, Pierre caught something out of the corner of his eye. He stiffened and snapped his head towards the computer screen.

‘Did you see that?’ he asked.

Jeremy looked bored. ‘See what?’

‘I think there’s someone in the cave!’

‘Can’t be,’ Jeremy yawned. ‘It’s locked.’

Pierre sprang up and hit the surveillance program’s replay button, pushing the clock back thirty seconds. ‘Come here, look.’

They watched the recording stream forward.

There was a man with a backpack in full illumination.

‘Christ!’ Pierre exclaimed. ‘He’s in Chamber 9 heading towards 10! Dial 17! Get the police! Hurry! I’m going down!’

‘That’s not a good idea,’ Jeremy said urgently. ‘Don’t!’

Pierre grabbed a hammer off the table and ran for the door. ‘Just call!’

Pierre’s car was already backed up to his caravan so it took him no time to jump in and speed towards the cave. Jeremy listened to the high-pitched whine of his engine fade into the distance.

He nervously glanced at the computer monitor. Either the intruder had left or he was somewhere in between camera angles.

He lifted the telephone handset, punched in the 1 then every-thing went black.

Pierre swiftly climbed down the cliff ladder, using all his athleticism to eat up the rungs, the hammer thrust into his belt.

The gate was wide open, the interior lights were blazing. He’d never gone into the cave without protective gear but now was not the time for caution. He ran into the mouth and pulled the hammer from his belt.

Pierre had been a pretty good footballer in school and he was able to run through the cave at a good clip while maintaining his balance on the uneven matting. He burned through the chambers, the cave art blurring in his peripheral vision. He had the illusion of running through herds of animals, weaving in and out, avoiding hooves and claws.

His heart was in his throat when he got to Chamber 9. There was no trace of the intruder.

He had to be in the tenth chamber.

Pierre had never had an easy time crawling through the narrow passage. His legs were too long to fold into an easy crawl. He tried to be as quiet as he could and prayed he wouldn’t run into the man in the middle of the tunnel – a claustrophobic nightmare.

He stood in the Vault of Hands and crept forward. There were sounds of activity within the Chamber of Plants.

The intruder was on his hands and knees, facing the other way, concentrating on wires and bricks of material he was removing from the backpack. He didn’t see Pierre coming.

‘Who are you?’ Pierre yelled.

The startled intruder looked over his shoulder at Pierre, tall and muscular, wielding a hammer, an incongruously menacing sight since Pierre had the frightened look of a cornered rabbit on his face.

The man slowly stood up. He had thick, powerful arms and an untidy speckled beard. The shock of seeing Pierre quickly disappeared, replaced by a cold-as-ice expression.

Pierre got a better look at the paraphernalia on the cave floor, a jumble of wires, detonators, batteries and cakey yellow-brown bricks. He’d seen this kind of gear before, at the mines back in Sierra Leone. ‘Those are explosives!’ he shouted. ‘Who the hell are you?’

The man said nothing.

He lowered his greying head, as if he were politely bowing, but instead he rushed forward and caught Pierre with a head-butt to his chest, knocking him back against the bird man who was standing there with his open beak and his ridiculous cock.

Pierre started swinging his hammer defensively, trying to fend off the man’s fists and fingers which were swarming all over his most-sensitive areas, his groin, his eyes, his neck. The man was trying to exact as much pain and cause as much immobility as possible.

The hammer blows weren’t slowing the man, because Pierre’s sense of humanity was stopping him from smashing him on the head. Instead, he whacked his shoulders and his back but that wasn’t enough: the man kept coming.

Then, the man landed a hard punch to Pierre’s throat that hurt him mightily and set him into a panic. He coughed and choked and for the first time in his life thought he might die. In desperation, he swung the hammer one more time, as hard as he could, and this time he aimed for the top of the man’s head.

There were three men at the campsite, toting shotguns and rifles. They went from caravan to caravan in a frenzy, like a pack of wild dogs, barging in each cabin, and when they found the ones that were occupied, they dragged out frightened students.

Elizabeth Coutard heard a commotion and emerged on her own. She saw a male student being frogmarched at gunpoint.

She ran towards the abbey, her white ponytail bobbing against her shoulders, awkwardly feeling in her pockets for her phone.

She made it as far as the barn.

Pierre had only a moment to deal with the horrible sight of this man lying at his feet. He was making guttural noises and oozing blood from a hammer wound to the dome of his skull. The blood was seeping out concentrically making it appear as if he had donned a red skullcap.

Then Pierre felt the worst pain imaginable, a lightning strike to his kidney that took his breath away, making it impossible to scream.

Four students huddled with Elizabeth Coutard in the Portakabin. Jeremy was motionless on the floor. The lone woman among the students, Marie, a girl from Brittany, was shaking uncontrollably and Coutard moved to hold her, defying one of the men who menaced them with a raised weapon.

‘What do you want?’ Coutard demanded somewhat fearlessly. ‘Jeremy needs medical attention. Can’t you see that?’

One man appeared to be in charge. He ignored her and shouted at the three male students to sit on the floor. They meekly complied and he trained his double-barrelled shotgun at them and assumed a tense at-ready position. Then he nodded in the direction of the women, a pre-arranged sign.

His two compatriots responded by roughly dragging the women out the door, shouting at them like crazed prison guards, ‘Move! Move! Come on!’

At the cold campfire, Coutard and Marie were separated from each other’s clutches and prodded at gunpoint into separate caravans.

The old man with a knife watched Pierre bleed to death on the cold hard floor of the tenth chamber.

Bonnet knew the art of killing. A long blade through the kidney, piercing the renal artery. A victim would go down quickly and die fast from internal bleeding. Slashing a carotid was too messy for his tastes.

He was breathless from wending his way through the cave, crawling through the tunnel and killing a man. His knees were sore, his hips ached. He paused to wipe his knife on Pierre’s shirt and let his heart slow down a little. Then he turned his attention to his stricken comrade, turned him over and tried to shake him to consciousness. ‘Wake up!’ he demanded. ‘You’re the only one who knows how to set the damned charges!’

He looked at the tangle of wires and high-explosives and shook his head. He didn’t have a clue how to rig the charges himself, nor would the others. There wasn’t time to summon someone else. All he could do was string together a run of profanities and start shouting into his walkie talkie.

The only response was static; he remembered he was deep inside the cliffs and he swore some more.

Then he noticed the bird man on the wall behind him and instead of marvelling at the image, his reaction was more prosaic.

‘Go screw yourself,’ he said, turning away.

Then he spat contemptuously on Pierre’s body.