The Lucifer Gospel (31 page)

“Like the Haunted Mansion at Disney World,” said Finn. “Only God is doing the haunting.”

“It’s awful,” said Hilts, staring. They continued along the boardwalk and into the next cave. It was the size of a front porch and about as exciting. It was also grotesque. A huge Last Supper undulated across the arching ceiling, like a huge picnic table in flight, Apostles and cherubs and clouds, Judas with a hairline like Dracula and a winding tale like a bad dream by William Blake. Tasteless, talentless, and badly researched. Christ facing left instead of right, Simon the Zealot with long hair rather than bald, chalice in front of Christ when there was none. Thirteen disciples, not twelve.

Now that’s interesting,
thought Finn. Even an illiterate who was even remotely Christian in this nation knew there were twelve, although almost no one except a priest or minister could actually name them. She had specialized in religious art of the Renaissance and she wasn’t sure she could do it herself. She stared up at the gigantic, hideous meal floating above her on the stony dripping ceiling and ticked them off in her mind, left to right: Bartholomew, James the Lesser and Andrew, Judas, Peter and John, or Mary Magdalene if you were a Dan Brown fan, followed by Thomas, James the Greater and Phillip, then Matthew, Jude, and lastly, Simon the Zealot. So who was the thirteenth figure, looming off to one side behind Simon in this ghastly rendition of the world’s most famous painting and second most famous literary meal? She stared. There wasn’t a lot of detail in the eight-foot-tall figure glowing on a slime-covered rocky wall made even slicker by the volumes of rain seeping through from above. It was a male, wearing a robe, bearded, one arm at its side, the other raised and pointing at… what?

“The last figure on the right?”

“The one pointing?”

“That’s the one.”

“What about him?”

“What’s he pointing at, exactly? Can you tell?”

“Looks like some kind of drapery over in the corner,” answered Hilts, pointing the flashlight. On the far side of the room a large flow of soluble lime had dropped down to form a pool. When the water in the cave had receded or been pumped out there was nothing left behind except a flowing cascade of stone called a Baldacchino canopy.

“I want to take a look,” said Finn. She slipped under the guardrail of the boardwalk and stepped carefully onto the wet surface of the cave floor beyond. Water trilled coldly up to her ankles. Slipping now was not an option.

“Why?”

She still wasn’t quite sure, but she suddenly knew that something from her distant childhood was calling her. The excitement of opening the secret door in the wardrobe to Narnia, of entering Merlin’s Crystal Cave, stepping into Dr. Who’s phone booth or Ray Bradbury’s Green Town, which if she recalled was also in Illinois.

“Did you know that they call this whole part of Illinois Little Egypt, and nobody knows why?” she called out, her voice echoing in the semidarkness. She kept carefully in the cone of light thrown by Hilts’s flashlight and concentrated on the slippery footing.

“I didn’t know that, no,” said Hilts, following her off the wooden boardwalk.

“Some people say it’s because southern Illinois supplied a lot of grain to the north in the bad winter of 1830-31. Other people say it’s because the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri reminds them of the Nile Delta. For some reason people gave places a lot of Egyptian names around here: Cairo, Karnak, Dongola, and Thebes. Even Memphis, if you want to stretch a point. They even have a giant glass pyramid for a basketball arena.”

“I’m not sure I see the point.”

“If you’re in a Catholic church, where do you hide a candle?”

“With all the other candles,” he answered.

“Exactly,” she said. She reached the Baldacchino canopy, braced herself, and slid around to one side.

“What?” Hilts said, coming carefully up behind her.

“I think I found it,” she whispered.

“What?”

“The candle.” She moved two feet to the right and disappeared before his eyes. Hilts stared, playing the light over the waterfall-like slab of ancient flowstone. There was no sign of her.

“Where are you?”

“Right in front of you,” said her disembodied voice. Suddenly she was there again, her bright face and wet, spiky dyed hair shining in the flashlight beam.

“How did you do that?”

“It’s the Caverns of Wonder. A miracle.”

“Show me.”

“Give me the light and take my hand.”

He put his hand in hers and squeezed. She squeezed back and he handed her the flashlight. Suddenly the cave was plunged into total, blind man’s darkness, the complete absence of light. She tugged his hand and he slipped behind the canopy with her.

Hilts found himself in a stiflingly small passage directly behind the oozing apron of rock. It was a space so close he could feel the wet stone brushing against him front and back. He was in some terrible crawl space: a crack in the world.

“Oh, jeez.”

“It’s okay.” A click echoed in the stifling space. Light flushed to the right and he saw that the narrow passage led to his right. There wasn’t even room enough to turn around.

“You’re kidding.”

“Come on.”

She shuffled to the right down the stick-thin passage, and he had no choice but to follow. It was either that or be left in the darkness. The farther he went the higher his heart moved into his throat. He thought of a hundred situations: a fall of rock, more rain, mud, simply getting stuck, glued in place. Some basic Freudian-Jungian-Stephen Kingian thing: man’s unholy heart-pounding nightmarish fear of being buried alive; the slight tension as a train goes into a tunnel under a mountain of suffocating rock.

He shuffled forward, concentrating on the feel of the soft pads of flesh on her palm and the curl of her fingers around his own. She was as small and light as a child, but there was a fierceness in her that he would have associated with a drill sergeant. It was as though times like this brought out the strength in her, a steel core able to withstand the worst that man or nature had to offer. Survival instinct. Something in her DNA that went back a million years.

“Look,” she whispered. Hilts suddenly realized that he’d been shuffling along with his eyes squeezed tightly shut. He opened them. Directly ahead the tunnel seemed to widen. Finn reached up with her free hand and touched the stone.

“This has been worked,” she said.

“Worked?”

“It’s not natural. It’s man-made.” She shifted along another few feet and Hilts felt as though he’d been released from jail. There was room to move. The passage had at least a foot of leeway on either side.

Hilts saw that she was right. In the pale glow from the flashlight the marks on the stone were obvious. Someone had carved out the passage in this godforsaken hole in the ground. They moved along with ease now and both of them became aware that the tunnel was gradually both turning and sloping downward. Sometimes the natural untouched stone could be seen; whoever had done this had followed the course of a natural fault. Thinking about the drapery of rock back in the cave far behind them, it occurred to Hilts that this might have once been the natural course of a stream or spring. Finn agreed.

They went on for an hour. Hilts began to have fond sense memories of the huge Heartland Big Slamble, or whatever it had been at the Interstate Denny’s that morning. A cup of the worst roadside coffee in the world would have truly been a miracle at this point. The rain and the steady forty-degree chill of the caves was striking to his bones. The claustrophobia had receded but by no means had disappeared. An hour in meant an hour out if they went back the way they’d come, and his imagination was fully capable of constructing desperate, gloomy horror stories. So far at least, thank heavens, there had been no bats or other subterranean wildlife. Hilts was not a big fan of things that made your skin crawl; deserts, not storm drains, were his area of expertise. And then, instantly, the narrow path came to an end. Light.

“My God!” whispered Finn, stepping out of the passageway.

“Jesus!” said Hilts.

They were both right.

The dome rose above them in a single sweeping arc of stone, at least a hundred feet high from where they stood and half again as high from the floor of the gigantic cavern. Light shone brightly and mysteriously from a thousand niches on ten thousand figures, all of them carved by Egypt’s finest stonemasons over a lifetime in the wilderness more than a millennia in the past. Bigger than the Sistine Chapel, higher than St. Peter’s, it was something no one man could have even imagined in a single lifetime, let alone constructed. Every angel, patriarch, and saint was there, every mystery and splendor from the Advent to the Resurrection, from the Garden to the Ark. All swirling upward in an astounding vortex of living art ascending to the heavens. It was beyond breathtaking. Past awe. A gift of utter beauty without the slightest touch of vengefulness or retribution, divine or otherwise. Around the base of the giant room small caves were hollowed out, some still with heavy wooden doors, others blank and open, the entrances like empty eyes. Cells. Once, a long, long time ago, this place had been occupied. Now it was only a massive tomb, built for the ages, unseen.

Finn and Hilts stood frozen, stunned by the un-imagined scale and proportions of what they were seeing, diminished by a monument that could have swallowed New York’s Statue of Liberty a hundred times and might even have made Mt. Rushmore look inadequate.

“What is this place?” Finn whispered. She found a set of stone steps carved before her and slowly made her way toward the bottom of the immense cavern, head back, craning her neck as she went. If the Great Pyramid at Giza had been hollow, this is what it might have looked like. A world within a world.

“Many years ago, in Thomas Woodward’s time, they called this place Jeremiah’s Grotto,” said a voice, echoing in the enormous chamber. An old man stepped out of the shadows on the far side of the dome and approached them. “Which of course is one of the names associated with the Tomb of Christ. It is not that place, but it is interesting that such a reputation should still be associated with it.” He tapped his way across the floor, weaving his way through stacks and piles and racks of narrow-necked circular jars like the clay containers of the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran. “Woodward stumbled on this place but he was a drunkard and a famous sinner, so no one believed him. The Keepers then simply bought his silence and cooperation with more drink.”

Finn peered into the flickering half-light as the old man came forward. He was tall and only a little stooped, leaning lightly on a heavy cane. In his free hand he was carrying what appeared to be a leather bundle rolled up and tied with a bright gold chain. His hair was steel gray and cut short, almost military. He was wearing old corduroy trousers and a dark blue knitted sweater that might have belonged to a seaman. He wore old, high-button boots and steel-rimmed spectacles. His voice was flat and Midwestern, but deep beneath there was a hint of something else. A sophistication that said something of foreign lands seen long ago. With a terrible lurch in her heart Finn realized that this old man reminded her of her father.

“Who are you?”

“The last of the Keepers.”

“Keepers?”

“Keepers of this place. Its stewards, if you will.” He smiled sadly. “More or less the janitor who cares for the True Word of Christ.”

“I don’t get it,” said Hilts. “This place, in the middle of nowhere. It doesn’t seem possible.”

“What is the Libyan Desert if not the middle of nowhere? In relation to Rome, during the heights of empire, Jerusalem was just as much the middle of nowhere; the very ends of the earth to be exact. For Moses the Sinai was the middle of nowhere. To a New Yorker this part of Illinois is
still
the middle of nowhere. Einstein was right, Mr. Hilts; it’s all relative. I could spin you exotic tales of Lost Templar Fleets, of the ocean-spanning navy of King Solomon, whose temple is mimicked in the exact measurements of the Sistine Chapel, about Nostradamus, about the New Jerusalem your friend the madman Adamson hopes to found.”

“He’s no friend of ours,” said Finn.

“At least we beat him here,” grunted Hilts.

“As a matter of fact, you didn’t,” said the old man. “He arrived yesterday. He’s been in Olney, a few miles away, gathering equipment and information. I expect he’ll be along shortly.”

“How do you know that?”

“I know a great deal, Mr. Hilts. About you and my old friend Arthur Simpson, poor soul. About you and your father, Ms. Ryan.” He smiled again. “It comes with the job, you might say.”

Again Finn caught the faint edge of an accent in the distant past. With a breathtaking flash she had it. “You’re the monk. DeVaux.”

He nodded, smiling wearily.

“Pierre DeVaux, Peter Devereaux, Paul Devers now. Never a monk, though, that was a pretence. A priest always. A priest forever.”

“A murderer,” said Hilts. “You killed Pedrazzi. And if that’s not you on the
Acosta Star,
then who was it locked in your cabin?”

“Death and secrets are hardly strange bedfellows, Mr. Hilts. Pedrazzi tried to kill me in that terrible place in the desert. He’d discovered who I was and knew I’d never let him give the secret to a man like Mussolini to use as a trading piece in some political game. He tried to kill me; I merely defended myself.”

“And on the ship?” Finn said.

“In the cabin? Kerzner, the man sent to kill me by your father’s people, Ms. Ryan. The man bought and paid for by Adamson’s grandfather. The bishop never made an appearance. One can only presume he died in the fire.”

“How did he know the exact location of this place?” asked Hilts.

“Because I told him,” said the old man. “Just before I left him to die. It was his last wish.”

“You really are a bastard,” said Hilts, curling his lip.

“That too,” said the old man with a shrug. “Most of us were. Foundlings, orphans. The refuse of life. It seemed like a good seeding ground.”

“Us?” asked Finn.

“The Keepers.”

“Of this place?”

“Of what it contains.”