The Cleric's Vault (17 page)

The
cavernous room they’d just left clearly had manmade components to it.
 
He was amazed by the constructive
ability of the ancients to build such elaborate and large-scale things.
 
At the moment, though, he was more
concerned about where he was going.
 
As he peered through the darkness in front of him, something terrifying
came into view ,or disappeared from view as it were.

The
river seemed to drop over the edge of an underground waterfall.
 
Swimming against the current would be
impossible.
 
The only thing Tommy
could do was brace himself and hope the drop wasn’t a big one.
 
He neared the edge and pulled his legs
and arms in tight, preparing for the fall.
 
The sound of crashing water grew louder as he got
closer.
 
The moment he went over
the lip of the river’s end, he felt the air below him open up.
 
Instinctively, he kicked his legs back
and forth, wondering when the fall would end.
 
It only lasted a few seconds before he hit the churning
water below.
 
He sunk deep into the
black pool of liquid until he felt the bottom.
 
Frantically, he pushed hard off the floor with his feet and
shot towards the surface.
 
His head
emerged and he took a big, wet breath of air.
 
Quickly, he searched around the area with his flashlight and
spotted what looked like an underground beach where the water met land.
 

Tommy
paddled hard and soon found himself staggering up onto the sandy earth.
 
He hunched over with his hands on his
knees, gasping for breath.
 
Out of
the corner of his eye he caught movement on the ceiling.
 
Another flashlight was bobbing
around.
 
Someone was coming down
the river.
 

*****

Adriana
walked back over to the corner of the short corridor and stretched out,
wrapping her foot around to the ledge.

“I
hope you know what you’re doing” Sean said as he looked on with a concerned
eye.

“So
do I,” she sighed.
 
“That path
leads to another corridor on the other side.
 
It’s our only way out, now.”

He
didn’t like the sound of that.
 
But
there was no choice.
 

“What’s
that noise?” Emily asked as she stepped closer to the lip of the drop off.
 

“I
hear it too,” Adriana said, breaking her concentration for a moment as she
brought her right foot next to the left on the ledge.
 

“It
sounds like a lot of squeaking and flapping…oh crap,” Emily backed away from
the edge slowly, eyes wide with fear.
 
“Bats!” she screamed loudly as she jumped back.

A
gust of air blew up into the alcove where the three were standing and within
seconds they were engulfed in the small, flying beasts.
 
Hundreds of bats fluttered around them,
squeaking incessantly.
 
The three
occupants of the ledge covered their faces and heads and crouched low to the
ground in hopes that the creatures would ignore them.
 
Emily screamed as one of the animals got stuck in her hair
momentarily.
  
She stood up,
yelling, and swatted her hands wildly at the winged rodents like she had walked
into a cobweb.
 

Adriana
pressed herself hard up against the shaft wall and tried to remain calm.

After
what seemed like several minutes, the horde of bats gradually disappeared.
 

Emily
was still waving her hands around in the air as if the bats were still
there.
 
Sean smiled at her.
 
“Hey, Em!
 
They’re gone.”
 
She stopped waving her hands and looked around, uncertain.
 
“By the way,” he added, “don’t ever
give me crap about being scared of heights again.”

*****

Tommy
didn’t know who was coming down the river.
 
Even if Will had seen what happened and tried to make a
break for the trap door he could have been shot by the remaining two
pursuers.
 
Hurriedly, he turned off
his own light and crept into a recessed area of the cave.
 
He watched as the person in the river
above tumbled over the waterfall and into the pool.
 
The man broke the surface and as his light floated near by,
it illuminated his face just enough for Tommy to tell that it was Will.

“Will,”
Tommy yelled over the sound of the crashing water.
 
He turned on his light as he emerged from the dark
corner.
 
“Over here!”

Will
grabbed his light and shone it on the shore where Tommy was waving.
 
“I took out one of them, but the other
guy is still up there,” he said after he climbed out of the water next to
Schultz.

Tommy
looked around, shining his light onto the drab walls of the cavern.
 
In a corner about thirty feet away he
noticed that the sandy floor seemed to continue around the cavern wall.
 
“Over there,” he said quietly.
 

The two men took off towards what appeared to be a path.
 
They reached it a few moments later and
Tommy looked back at the waterfall.
 
Nothing.
 
He and Will turned
and darted into a narrow corridor, not seeing the dark figure of a body falling
into the black pool.

*****

In the pale light of their flashlights, Sean could see that the bats
were making their way through the door across the abyss.
 
Apparently, the alcove provided no
means of escape for them either.

After
a few minutes the obnoxious noise had grown quieter.
 
He looked at Adriana who, for the first time since he’d met
her, appeared to show a little uncertainty.
 
He nodded reassuringly and stepped carefully over to where
the ledge jutted out from the left side of the pit’s wall.
 
Then he turned with a feigned playful
grin.
 
“Ladies first?” he motioned
with his hand to Emily, obviously not excited about traversing the deep
crevasse over the narrow stone bridge.
 

Starks
had gotten over her moment of weakness and was back to being her confident
self.
 
She stepped out boldly,
pressing her back up against the wall as she shuffled along the ledge right
behind Villa.

Once
the two women were on their way, Sean lingered momentarily at the edge.
 
His former partner looked back at him
and shined her flashlight on his face.
 
“You realize this is the only way out, right?” She asked
sarcastically.
 
“Just don’t look
down and keep your body pressed to the wall like we’re doing.”

Adriana
was already halfway to the other side of the pit when he finally forced himself
to step over to the narrow walkway.
 
He gripped his flashlight tightly and pressed his back to the wall as
hard as he could.
 
A slight draft
of cold air drifted up from the abyss below.
 
Wyatt felt a vein of fear tear through his abdomen as his
nerves went on overload.
 
A quick
glance to his side told him that the two women had nearly reached the door
already.
 
So he shuffled his feet,
inch by inch, trying hard not to look down into the empty blackness.

“Come
on, you’re doing great,” he heard Emily encourage him loudly from the ledge
about twenty feet away.
 
“Just keep
moving slow like that and you’ll be fine.”
 

He
continued inching sideways, his intense focus was on the wall just behind
him.
 
But his peripheral vision
couldn’t help but register the chasm below.
 
Momentarily, he wavered and had to stop to take a deep
breath.
 
After regaining his
thoughts, he pushed himself onward.
 

When
he reached the other side he hopped down and leaned against the wall just
inside the door.
 
Then he glanced
down at his Relic watch.
 

“I
can’t believe that only took ten minutes.
 
Seemed like I was out there forever.”
 
He just stared ahead at the other side of the
passageway.
 

“You
did great,” Emily comforted.
 
“Now
can we please keep moving?”

He
nodded and stood up straight.
 
“Yeah.
 
It’s going to be
getting dark soon, and we have no idea where this passage leads.”

Adriana
smiled at his resolve.
 
He’d just
faced one of his greatest fears and seemed ready to take on the next hurdle
without reservation.
 
She’d seen
many men come and go in her life.
 
But Sean Wyatt seemed different.
 
He could take a punch and keep going.
 
What was it about
him?
 
Was it his sense of
adventure, his determination, his vulnerability she’d just witnessed?
 
Or was it something else?
 
She left the questions lingering in
her head and came back to the moment.
 
“I scouted up ahead.
 
This
corridor starts sloping down.”
 
Adriana took off, leading the way down the passage so Sean and Emily
followed behind quickly.
 

“I’m
getting real tired of being underground,” he commented as they moved along the
tunnel.

They
found themselves in a narrow hall, carved out of the canyon rock.
 
The jagged walls and ceiling of the
corridor were done roughly, carved for usefulness not aesthetic appeal.
 
But the sheer volume of rock that had
to be removed was simply staggering.

They
walked for nearly twenty minutes, continuing downward into the mountain.
 
The path had been a slight grade with a
series of right hand turns, winding deeper and deeper into the earth.
 
Sean wondered who had constructed the
place and why they would go to such great lengths.
 
The group marched on in silence for another ten minutes
until finally, they reached a point where the floor leveled off.
 
Up ahead, their lights shone into what
appeared to be a room.
 
As they
drew near, their flashlight beams shone through the dust particles in the air,
illuminating an enormous chamber.
 
The ceiling was at least fifty feet high with walls separated by the
same distance.
 
All three of their
flashlights searched randomly around the room until Sean’s light came to rest
on something in the center.
 
A
stone pillar sat conspicuously in the middle of the room.
 
On top of it rested another piece of
gold, similar to the one that had come from the mountain near Adriana’s home
outside of Las Vegas.
 
In unison,
they moved towards the pedestal.
 
Sean aimed his light around on the floor to make sure they were stepping
safely.

“It’s
just like the other one,” Emily stated quietly.
 
Even though her voice was just above a whisper, it echoed
throughout the giant room.
 

Adriana
had taken her focus off of the shiny object in the center of the room and was
checking out the rest of their surroundings.
 
There were four enormous columns in each corner, every
single one engraved with a separate set of writing.
 
And every language was one of the most ancient in the
world:
 
Egyptian hieroglyphics,
Sanskrit, Cuneiform, and Old Hebrew.
 
The inner corner of each pillar pointed towards the pedestal in the
center.
 
Then she noticed the
design of the floor.
 
When they
walked in, all she had seen was a plain, stone floor.
 
But from each of the corner columns, a line about one foot
wide ran to the center where the small stand held the golden artifact.
 
The wide lines were unmistakably
bluish-green.

Sean
noticed what had gotten her attention, and he too broke away from admiring the
golden leaf in the center of the room to get a closer inspection of the
distinctly colored lines.
 
He
looked up at the massive stone column that had Sanskrit on it.
 
“Can you read it?” Emily asked from
across the room, this time turning towards him and shining her light his way.

Sanskrit
was one of the ancient languages Sean had learned almost fluently.
 
It was the only language that was
mathematically perfect.
 
The
writers of the Hindu Vedas had delivered their entire set of scriptures in
Sanskrit, and it was believed by many to be the language of the gods.
 
He’d been fascinated by it in
college.
 
And while his friends
wondered why he would take classes to learn about a three thousand year-old
dead language, he continued to attend.
 
There had only been a few dozen students in the small lecture hall.
 
Word had it that it was anybody’s guess
if the course would even have enough people enrolled to run it each
semester.
 
But it always did,
probably due to several students waiting too long to get signed up for one of
the other more contemporary languages.
 
With no options left, they had to go with Sanskrit.
 
At the moment, Sean was glad he’d taken
it.
 
“It’s a little different from
what I learned, probably an early pre-classical form of the language.
 
But yeah, I can read it.”