Decipher (24 page)

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Authors: Stel Pavlou

BOOK: Decipher
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Sarah stepped out of the glittering company Land Cruiser to find the blue marquee humming with the buzz of generators and halogen lamps, glowing brightly among the ill-lit monuments. Her ID checked, she made her way through the checkpoints and arrived at the well shaft.
A couple of night-workers were climbing out of the shaft and taking their harnesses off. There was a cool light emanating from the well, flickering as the lights below were obscured by the final Rola Corp. employee making his way to the surface.
Sarah slipped into a coverall two sizes too big, and found she had to roll up the sleeves. She checked the charge on a walkie talkie and hung that on her belt alongside a flashlight, notepad and pencil.
Someone was updating a map on a makeshift table, and Sarah noted the information before taking a final look down the shaft to check that the ladder was clear.
She climbed down.
There was a communications pod at the base of the ladder, with a wire running up to the surface. Thick black cables led out from the device and along the tunnel walls, which was highly useful—they allowed her to use her cell phone deep underground.
She followed the trail of lights and wires until she came to where the plug had been inserted into a narrower section of the tunnel. Chains were still buried into one end. Some high-pressure hammer had been used to knock grips into the rock, and the makeshift pulley system was still piled to one side awaiting a packing trunk for its return to the storehouse. There were hooks in the ceiling as well, which meant the chains had originally been attached to a high-powered winch on the surface. But that was long gone.
Luckily when they removed the plug it had stayed in one piece, and it now lay along the side of the tunnel where it would no doubt remain. A note in red paint had been daubed onto its surface:
7.5 feet long. Approximate weight: 30 metric tons.
The tunnel ahead was a crawlspace into what appeared to be some kind of anteroom.
Sarah peered inside first. Called out: “Hello?” and waited for a response as her voice echoed off the cold sandstone walls. But no reply was forthcoming.
She dropped to her knees and crawled through.
The room itself was circular and very plain. There were two exits up ahead, one on either side. Each exit led to a
staircase that spiraled downward. And each exit was also guarded by a statue.
Both statues were in human form. The one on the left was overtly male, while the other was definitely female. But both also had animal heads in the classical Egyptian tradition. The one on the right, the woman, had the head of a lioness and was difficult to identify, while the male had the long curved beak of the ibis bird and was instantly recognizable. It was Thoth, the Egyptian god of wisdom.
As far as the other one went, there were a number of Egyptian gods and goddesses who bore the face of a lion. Sarah would have to seek advice on who this one was supposed to be. She unclipped her radio and flipped the channel open. “Eric?” she said. “Eric, where are you?”
“Sarah!” came the faint excited response. “I'm down in the tunnels! Where are you?”
“I just reached the anteroom,” she explained, looking at the statues. “I'm with Thoth.”
“Oh, you're back at the beginning,” he chuckled. Clemmens had to be overtired. The man sounded way too happy. “Hey, did you bring waders?”
Sarah didn't understand. “Are you sure I need them?”
“We're below the water table down here,” he explained. “Trust me. You'll need them.”
“Uh, which staircase do I take to get to you?”
“Doesn't matter,” Clemmens confirmed. “They both end up in the same place.”
When Clemmens signed off, Sarah radioed to the surface for them to send down a pair of waders. A few seconds later she heard them clatter to the ground as they were unceremoniously lobbed down the well shaft unannounced. After pulling on the thigh-high boots she carefully made her way down the stone steps that wound around in a spiral, descending over forty feet. The lights ended at twenty, so for the rest of her journey she had to depend on her flashlight.
It was dizzying. Disorienting. Especially since she still had a significant amount of champagne in her system. And it was due to a combination of those factors that she tripped over her own feet and dropped her flashlight on the final few steps.
She watched it tumble end over end, bouncing off each step in sequence until it disappeared around the bend and she heard it land with a splash.
“Shit!” she spat. Furious with herself. “Stupid! Really stupid!”
She hugged the wall and cursed some more. She daren't go for the radio in case she dropped that too. Instead she followed the line of the wall and felt her way with her toe, hoping that the flashlight would still be switched on when she got to the bottom. She found that the last two steps were completely submerged in water. She thanked Eric silently. Waders were a good idea.
The steps ended at a doorway that led out to a cavernous room beyond. And under the rippling water ahead Sarah could see her flashlight, its beam cutting into the darkness.
“Thank God,” she muttered, getting deeper into the water and trying not to slip on her ass. “Goddamnit …” The ground beneath her feet was uneven. And though she could sense there was a pattern to it, she couldn't quite figure out what it was. All she knew was that the ground would alternate between higher and lower sections.
When she got to where her flashlight lay, she rolled up her sleeve to retrieve it.
And that's when she heard it. A sound that could only be described as a breath being taken, but on a massive scale. It was followed by silence, and then an eerie scratching, scuttling noise, like a mass of whisper-like clicking. A thousand gem picks tapping on rocks. Or fingernails down a chalkboard.
Hand clenched around the flashlight, Sarah stood bolt upright. “What the hell … ?” She whirled around. Sweeping the flashlight over the walls. And couldn't believe her eyes.
She wasn't in a room. She was in a tunnel. But a tunnel like none she had ever seen before. Perfectly circular along its length, it seemed to stretch into infinity in one direction, and arc around a bend in the other. The size of a truck in width, and the same again high, the most distinctive feature of the tunnel was the fact that it was made up of two continuous spirals, like the rifling in the barrel of a gun.
“Good God,” she whispered. “I've never seen anything
like this.” One spiral was sandstone, pure and simple. It constituted the raised portions and was covered in Egyptian hieroglyphics.
The other spiral was indented. And entirely different.
Sarah edged closer to the wall and ran her fingers over the material. It was prickly, like static. And blue. Covered entirely in a language she had never seen before. It was: Carbon 60. Suddenly the scurrying around got louder. Ominous. Then something small and glassy shot across her hand.
Sarah gasped and pulled away quickly. She shuddered. “What was that?” she asked herself. “What the fuck was that?!”
She ran the torch across the C60 and was amazed to see the light pulse through veins within the crystal and spiral away from her, as if the light had been trapped.
And then came the next breath, loud and harsh. Not quite like some ancient mummy waking up, but weird nonetheless. She swept the torch beam across the crystal once more. And that was when she found the nest.
 
She wanted to gag. Every instinct in her body wanted to force her stomach to give up its contents in one gut-wrenching convulsion. But she fought it, clamping a hand over her mouth.
Glassy and transparent, thousands of tiny spiders scuttled and crawled all over each other in a mass of seething alien life. Some shot off when they were caught in the light. Others merely sat there, glistening and twitching. Throbbing back and forth on their tubelike spindly legs as they sensed their new visitor.
How on earth had they survived down here? Kynosynthesis was the surest answer. Like the shrimp, plankton and bacteria that fed directly off mineral deposits in the hydrothermal vents found all along the mid-Atlantic Ridge, at pressures four hundred times that of the surface, these creatures did not require sunlight at all.
Sarah relaxed a little, awestruck. She couldn't help but smile. What a discovery! She put out her hand and gently stroked one of the glassy spiders on the edge of the nest.
“Hey, there. Hello there, little fella, hey.” And although it
went against every instinct in her body, she brushed her finger down one of its legs. Moved the flashlight a fraction to the left. And screamed.
A translucent spider the size of a dinner plate had crept up, intent on inspecting the situation. It tapped one of its forward legs insistently on the cold, hard crystal surface. Then flexed its tensile appendages. These things had to be blind, but Sarah was convinced it was looking at her.
Sarah backed off, nice and slow, skimming the light across the water in case there were more creatures there. She heard a splash, turned back to view the nest and froze in pure terror as the spider flew at her.
She felt the gust of wind accompanying the swift action and almost fainted as the larger crystal-like arachnid landed on her left shoulder, using it as a springboard to get to the other side of the tunnel.
It landed with a crunch, and casually scuttled away up the passage.
Sarah shuddered and gulped back a breath.
She gingerly unclipped her radio, peered into the inky blackness of the depths of the tunnel and thumbed the channel. “Eric,” she said shakily. “Eric, come in!”
A cool, damp gust of air suddenly whipped up past her and rushed onward around the bend behind her. Sarah brushed hair out of her face.
Then she saw it. A faint glow, like a pin-prick of light in the distance. But getting bigger. Rapidly so. “What the hell is that?” she murmured. “Eric, is that you? Eric, there are creatures down here!”
She could hear a whistling noise now, like an approaching train in a city metro system. A rush. And an indescribable feeling of utter inevitability.
“Eric!” she shrieked. “What the hell's going on?”
And then it hit.
 
The roar was ferocious, and the light so intense, Sarah could almost see the bones of her hand through her skin. The crackle of energy was unlike anything she had ever experienced. Instinctively she jumped back from the wall as the approaching light entirely engulfed her section of the tunnel. Every hair on her body stood on end as pure energy coursed
its way through the spiraling Carbon 60 at the speed of light. The whirling maelstrom of electricity flowed from floor to ceiling and back around again. On and on, following the endless spiral.
Sarah's eyes bulged as it suddenly dawned on her: she was standing in a puddle of water! But by the time she could even contemplate what to do, the energy had already dipped under the water and streaked through the snaking C60 beneath her feet. Sarah couldn't breathe as it felt like every single atom in the tunnel had come to life. Charged.
She shielded her eyes, and it was then that she became aware of a voice hollering through the radio. “Sarah!” It was Eric. “Sarah, can you hear me?”
She hammered on the transceiver. “Eric!” she barked. “What is this?”
“It's beautiful, isn't it?”
“What—
is
—this?” she demanded.
There was laughter from the other end of the connection. Followed by abject honesty. “I have absolutely—no—fucking—idea! But I love it!”
And then as fast as it had arrived, it was gone. Like someone had thrown some giant switch, the energy pulse ricocheted off around the corner and left Sarah standing alone in the dark, panting to get her breath back.
In the silence of the moment she tried to take in what had just happened, but it was impossible. She went to thumb the radio again, but forgetting which hand it was in, she ended up bringing the flashlight to her face. It blinded her and she dropped the thing again. “Goddamnit!” she spat, fishing around to get it back for a second time. “Sarah Kelsey, get a grip.” She thumbed the radio this time. “Eric,” she said. “Which way to get to you guys?”
“Follow the bend,” he instructed. “Just follow it around and keep going. Simple,” he said.
After a few minutes of trudging through the water, swinging the flashlight to try and find some kind of exit, she rounded the bend up ahead. It was much farther off than it appeared. And in front she could see that it narrowed upward into a funnel with the C60 forming a strip in the floor. This smaller tunnel led to a room just a little way on.
She was careful not to slip back down as she climbed the
incline. Steadying herself at the top she couldn't help but proceed by planting a foot either side of the C60 strip in the floor. Despite the lucky escape she'd just had, she wasn't taking any chances. She didn't want to be electrocuted. Up ahead she could see lights and movement. And at the edge of the tunnel, where it connected to this new room, she noted that the sandstone changed abruptly to a much darker color. The color of granite.

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