Donald Tyson is a Canadian writer of fiction and nonfiction dealing with all aspects of the Western esoteric tradition. He is the author of Necronomicon: The Wanderings of Alhazred (2004), Grimoire of the Necronomicon (2008), The Necronomicon Tarot (2007), and The 13 Gates of the Necronomicon (2010), as well as a biography of Lovecraft titled The Dreamworld of H. P. Lovecraft (2010) and the novel Alhazred (2006), all of which were published by Llewellyn Publications.
THE SIDE WINDOW OF THE UAZ-452 WAS SO COATED WITH dust, Howard Amundson could barely distinguish the brick-colored desert from the cloudless blue sky above its flat horizon. Not that there was much of interest to look at from the jolting, grinding minibus, he admitted to himself. Over the past ten hours the scenery had transitioned from the grassy plain that lay just outside of Mandalgovi to red dirt with only the occasional trace of green to show that anything was alive in the desolation.
There was no question in Amundson’s mind that the Gobi Desert was the most desolate place he had ever seen. The sheer bleakness of it held its own strange grandeur. It was nothing like the deserts in Hollywood movies, with their rolling sand dunes. The Gobi was carpeted with rocks. They lay scattered everywhere, ranging in size from pebbles to Volkswagens. For the most part the empty landscape was flat, but here and there a low ridge broke the monotony.
A jolt beneath his seat clicked his teeth together on the corner of his tongue. He tasted blood and cursed. The ruts in the track the driver followed were so deep, they bottomed out even the Russian UAZ in spite of its spectacular ground clearance.
The Mongolian in the front passenger seat turned and grinned, then spoke a few words to the driver, who glanced back at Amundson and laughed. Neither of them understood English, so there was no point in talking to them. They had been hired to transport him to Kel-tepu, and obviously were not concerned about what condition he might be in when he arrived.
He wrinkled his nose. The inside of the minibus smelled like a mixture of oil, sweat, and camel piss. God alone knows what it had transported before Baby Huey. Amundson twisted in his seat to study the straps that held the canary-yellow case of the multi-spectrum electromagnetic imager on its palette. The machine was the only reason he was in this desert. When Alan Hendricks, acting dean of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had offered him the chance to give it a field test, he had jumped at the opportunity. A successful trial would clinch the grant of tenure he had been lobbying for over the past two years.
Only later had he paused to consider what would be involved in moving Baby Huey halfway around the world to the backside of nowhere. The machine was as small and as light as modern electronics could make it, but even so, it took a lot of energy output to make electromagnetic waves penetrate solid rock, and Huey tipped the scale at more than a quarter of a ton. Beside it sat the generator he had demanded from the Mongolian authorities. He had made it clear to them that there was no way he would take Huey into the desert without its own power supply. The government had agreed to his demand. The Mongolians wanted the test to be a success almost as much as Amundson.
I should be back at MIT going over term papers, he thought, scowling through the dirty window. If this thing runs into some glitch and fails, I’m going to look like a fool, and there won’t be anyone else to blame. I’m naked out here—no assistant, no colleagues, no one to cover my ass.
It was not a comforting thought. He had been quick to claim credit for the basic design work on Huey, even though the initial concept had come from one of his graduate students, a bright Chinese named Yun. The grad student had kept his mouth shut—he wanted his doctorate and knew better than to try to upset the natural order of things at the university. But that only meant that if Huey failed, Amundson would have to shoulder all the blame.
The UAZ-452 lurched and shuddered to a stop as the driver killed the engine. Amundson pushed himself halfway out of his seat and saw through the windows on the opposite side of the minibus that they were not far from a cluster of khaki field tents, beside which were parked several trucks.
“Are we there yet?” he demanded of the driver.
The Mongolian grinned and jabbered in his own language. He threw open the side door and gestured for the lanky engineer to get out. Hot desert air rolled into the air-conditioned interior. Amundson unfolded himself with difficulty. After sitting for so long on the uncomfortable seat, stiffness had found its way into his very bones.
From the open door of the largest tent, a group of Westerners and a single Mongolian emerged. The leader, a white-haired man with a pot belly and a bearded face, extended his hand. He was a head shorter than Amundson and had to look up to meet the engineer’s gray eyes.
“You must be Amundson from MIT,” he said in a resonant voice. “I’m Joseph Laski, and I rule in hell.” He let out a booming laugh at his own joke.
Amundson accepted the calloused hand and shook it, surprised by its strength. There was soil under the fingernails.
“This is my wife, Anna, my assistant James Sikes, Professor Tsakhia Ganzorig from the National Museum of Mongolia at Ulaanbaatar, and the head of the American student team, Luther White.”
“From Pittsburgh,” the athletic young black man said with a grin. “You’ll meet the rest of the students at dinner.”
“Supper,” Anna Laski corrected with a slight smile. “We dine late.”
“No point in wasting the light,” her husband explained.
“Pleased to meet you,” Sikes said. “I can ’ardly wait to get a look at that machine of yours.”
He was a small man with narrow shoulders and a bald patch at the crown of his head.
“You’re English,” Amundson said with surprise.
“Cockney by birth, but I’ve been with the Smithsonian for near on twenty years.”
The Smithsonian had put up the bulk of the money to finance the Kel-tepu dig, which was named after a local geological feature. Satellite photographs had revealed the faint outline of buried ruins on the track of an ancient silk road. They were invisible from the ground, but had looked promising enough for the Smithsonian to gather a team of archaeologists. The students were all unpaid volunteers, of course—they always were. They worked for the experience of being part of an important expedition, and for the improvement of their résumés. From what Amundson had read about the find at Kel-tepu, they had all hit the jackpot.
A loud bang from the open rear of the minibus drew his attention. He made an apologetic face to Laski and stalked around the vehicle.
“Be careful with that!” he said in irritation.
The two Mongolians were hunched over the imager, using a kind of wrench to release the buckles on the tight straps that held it to its pallet. Another strap let go and hit the side of the minibus.
Ganzorig came around the edge of the door and spoke to his countrymen in a quiet voice. The grins fell from their faces, and they nodded seriously.
“I’m sure they’ll be careful,” he told Amundson. “I have explained how valuable this equipment is to the expedition.”
“Thank you,” the engineer said. “If it gets knocked out of calibration, it will take me a week to put it right again.”
Laski approached. The others had gone back into the tent.
“Let me show you around the site,” he said, putting his hand on Amundson’s shoulder.
He allowed the archaeologist to lead him behind the tents, where some distance away from the camp the ground had been excavated in a series of trenches and holes. From a distance it resembled a gopher village.
“You’d never know this is a river valley, would you?” Laski said companionably. “It looks flat. Even so, satellite photographs and topographic measurements show that an ancient river once ran through here, very close to where we are digging. It dried up fifty or sixty thousand years ago.”
They stopped in front of a wall of canvas erected in a rectangle some ten yards wide and forty yards long.
“We keep our prize behind this barrier to exclude windblown dust and desert animals. You’d be surprised how many creatures live in the desert. Some say there are even wolves.”
Drawing aside a flap in the wall at the near end of the enclosure, he gestured for Amundson to enter and followed close behind him. The engineer stopped and stared in amazement.
“It’s quite a sight, isn’t it?” Laski said with a dry chuckle. “I always like to watch the reaction the first time someone sees it.”
The ground had been excavated just inside the barrier on all sides, so that only a perimeter strip a few feet wide remained of the original desert surface. The rest of the enclosure was an elongated hole, but it was not empty. Within it lay a black stone statue. It reminded Amundson of the statues of Easter Island, but was not quite like anything he had ever seen. The lines of its primitive form exhaled brute strength. It was humanoid but not quite human in its proportions. The massive erect phallus that lay flat along its lower belly was certainly not human. It seemed vaguely aquatic in some indefinable way—perhaps it was the thickness of the neck or the webbing between the impossibly long fingers.
The covering of soil had preserved the sharp edges of the stone carving, with a single exception. The face of the statue was no more than a featureless mask. No trace of a nose, lips, or eye sockets remained, if indeed they had ever existed.
“Have you identified the stone?” the engineer asked.
“Some kind of basalt,” Laski told him. “We’re not yet sure exactly what it is, to be honest. It has resisted identification.”
“You mean it’s not local,” Amundson said as he began to slowly walk around the hole.
“Not local, no.”
“So the statue wasn’t carved in situ.”
“Good heavens, no. The stone of the desert is too fractured to carve out a figure of this size. You’re thinking it’s like the recumbent statues on Easter Island.”
“The thought had crossed my mind,” Amundson murmured. He bent over to study the surface of the head.
“No, impossible. This statue was transported here from far away—how far, we can’t even guess, but there is no stone like this for hundreds of miles. And it was upright—we’ve found its pedestal buried at its base. At some point it was toppled off its support into a hole and covered with dirt.”
The burial of ancient stone carvings and ancient religious sites was not unknown. Amundson remembered reading about such a site.
“You mean like Göbekli Tepe?”
Göbekli Tepe was a twelve-thousand-year-old archaeological site in Turkey consisting of carven stone monoliths and other structures that at some point in its long history had been completely buried, but was in every other way intact.
“Yes,” Laski said, pleased at the reference. “Something like that.”
The engineer crouched and leaned over the edge of the hole as far as he could reach. He was just able to touch the edge of the smooth face of the giant.
“You’re certain it wasn’t buried face down.”
“Quite certain,” Laski said firmly. “The position of the arms and hands, to say nothing of the phallus, clearly shows that it is lying on its back facing the heavens. Even so, we excavated beneath the head. There is no face on the other side.”
“I think I see the chisel marks,” Amundson murmured, stroking the black stone lightly with his fingertips.
“You can see them better in early morning. The low angle of the sun accentuates them.”
The archaeologist waited in silence while Amundson studied the enigmatic, featureless mask. The engineer straightened his knees and turned. Lights of excitement danced in his pale grey eyes.
“It will work, I’m sure of it.”
Laski clapped him on the shoulder.
“Excellent! We’ll get started tomorrow.”
DINNER—NO, SUPPER, HE CORRECTED HIMSELF—WAS better than he expected. Sikes did the cooking chores, and he did them purely from choice, Anna Laski explained to Amundson. The little Cockney had an innate talent for cooking. It was usual on an archaeological dig to eat the local cuisine, but at Kel-tepu it was the local diggers who sampled what was to them exotic dining—roast beef, pudding, dumplings, fish-and-chips, meat pies, stews, bangers-and-mash.
“The first night of the dig, the local man assigned by Gani to do the cooking made khorkhog and khuushuur—goat meat and deep-fried dumplings,” Anna told him. “I didn’t think it tasted that bad, really, but Sikes was beside himself. He practically begged Joe to make him camp cook.”
The conversation around the long dining table in the main tent was lively and free of the tensions that so often plagued academic gatherings. In part this was due to Professor Laski’s dominating personality—his enthusiasm and good spirits were infectious. In part it was also due to his gracious wife who acted as hostess at the table. But mainly it was the general atmosphere of success that pervaded the entire team. Those participating in the dig knew they were making history, and at the same time insuring the future prosperity of their academic careers. This left them with little to complain about.
Two conversations were taking place at the same time across the table, one in English among the Americans, and the other in Mongolian among the local diggers. Gani, as Anna Laski called Tsakhia Ganzorig, acted as translator at those infrequent intervals when a member of one group had something to say to a member of the other.
Amundson noticed several of the Mongolians toying with small carved stone disks about the size of a silver dollar. When the opportunity arose, he turned to the young woman seated on his right, a blonde graduate student from the University of Southern California named Luce Henders.
“Could you tell me, what are those objects?” he murmured.
She followed his eyes, fork poised before her lips, and smiled.
“You mean our good luck charms? That’s what Professor Laski calls them. We’ve been finding them all over the place, inside the graves.”
“Graves?”
Luce chewed and nodded at the same time.
“This whole site is really one huge graveyard. There are graves all around the colossus—that’s what we call the statue. Hundreds, maybe thousands of them. The bones are gone, but when we dig we find stone ossuaries that must have held them, with those carved disks inside.”
“What happened to the bones?”
“Time happened. Thousands of years ago this was a wet river valley. Bones don’t last under those conditions unless they petrify.”
“Is the stone of the tokens the same as the stone of the colossus?”
“We’re pretty sure it is,” she answered. “It’s not local stone.”
“I wonder if I might have one,” Amundson said apologetically. “I can use it to adjust my projector before I set it into place.”
“I don’t see why not; we’ve got dozens. Everyone’s got one. Give me a minute.”
She stood and left the tent. Amundson continued his meal. In a few minutes she resumed her seat and with a smile pressed something cold and hard into his hand. He studied it.
The black stone was surprisingly heavy and not quite circular, he noticed, but ovoid, some two inches across on its longest dimension and half an inch thick. Its edges were rounded like those of a beach stone. Into one face a simple geometric figure had been deeply carved. It was a kind of spiral with four arms. Amundson realized that it was a primitive form of sun wheel or swastika.
“Thank you,” he told Luce Henders. “This will be very useful.”
One of the grads, a red-haired Irishman from Boston College named Jimmy Dolan, noticed the black stone and pointed at it across the table with his fork.
“I see you’ve joined the cult of Oko-boko,” he said. Several other students laughed, including Luce.
“When we first started finding these stones, we noticed that they were going missing,” she explained to the engineer. “Professor Laski was upset because he thought we had a thief in the camp. He and Gani started to question everybody, and it turned out that the Mongolian diggers were taking them for good luck charms. This valley is supposed to be real bad luck or something, according to local superstition, and the Mongolians believed that the stones would protect them from the evil whatever-it-is. They got upset when the Professor tried to take the stones back, so he realized he’d better let them keep them or he’d have a mutiny on his hands and we would never get any work done. Anyway, Gani made all the local diggers promise to give the stones back when the dig is finished. You’ll have to give yours back, too.”
Amundson dropped the black stone into the vest pocket of his shirt and laid his hand across it.
“I do solemnly swear to return it,” he said.
Luce laughed, her blue eyes sparkling with something a little brighter than the table wine. Things are looking up, Amundson thought to himself, things are definitely looking up.
THE ENGINEERING PROBLEM WAS SIMPLE. THE IMAGER had to be positioned directly above the face of the colossus, and no more than three feet away. Since the statue could not be moved, it was necessary to build a superstructure above it to support the machine.
When Amundson mentioned the problem to Sikes, the little Englishman said he had just what was needed, and came back with two aluminum ladders. The ladders easily spanned the sides of the trench in which the colossus lay. It was necessary to support them from below with diagonal bracing so that they would bear the weight of Baby Huey without buckling, but this was not difficult.
Within an hour the framework was ready and the squat yellow machine in position beside the hole. Amundson had already spent the previous evening setting its sensors for the density of the black stone, which appeared identical in every respect to the stone of the statue. It was surprisingly easy to skid the imager along the ladders, and only a bit more taxing to get it positioned precisely above the face using the built-in camera as a guide.
Laski had been right, Amundson thought as he looked at the camera image of the blank face on his monitor. The statue was oriented with its head in the west, and the beams of the morning sun slanting along its body highlighted the marks of the chisels that had been used to cut away its features. He wondered idly what strange compulsion had caused a primitive people to cast down the statue and mutilate it. Perhaps they were some warring tribe and thought they were defeating the god of their enemies. He shrugged. He was an engineer, not an archaeologist. There was no need to bother his mind with such questions, which were probably unanswerable.
Amundson found himself less nervous than he expected, considering that his future career at MIT was riding on the performance of the imager. He smiled to himself. Not all of last night had been spent on work. The latter part of the evening he had devoted to the relaxing task of exploring Luce Henders. She was interested in him only because he was the first unfamiliar male to walk into the camp in months—that much was obvious—but it had not diminished his pleasure.
Why make life complicated when it could be simple? That was his personal motto. It had served him well enough through the first half of his life, and he saw no reason why it should not serve equally well through the second half.
This morning, Luce was away from the camp with Laski and his wife, Gani, and most of the others, excavating an artificial passage that had been found amid the graves. The discovery had been made by chance, while digging exploratory holes. When first found, the passage had been completely choked with rubble and its entrance covered with dirt. Laski was removing the rubble slowly so as not to miss any objects that might lie in it. He had the students screening the dirt and gravel as it was taken out of the passage by the diggers.
Amundson noticed Luther White across the trench. When he looked at the black grad student, White turned his head away. He had worn the same sullen expression all morning and had failed to respond when Amundson greeted him at breakfast. Apparently it was impossible to keep anything secret in so small a camp. He wondered if Luce had even tried to conceal her late-night visit to his tent? Or had she taken some perverse pleasure in relating the details to Luther?
After a few minutes dithering around, White found his way around the hole and approached Amundson. All the cheerfulness of the previous day had vanished.
“Stay away from Luce,” he said in a low voice.
“What?” The engineer smiled disarmingly. “What did you say?”
“You heard me,” White snarled. “I’m not going to tell you again. Luce is mine, not yours.”
He backed away before Amundson could think of a response. Sikes, working nearby on the wires that connected the imager to the data processing unit, gave no sign that he had heard the exchange, although he must have heard every word.
“I’m ready to switch on,” Amundson told the Englishman in a neutral tone.
Sikes nodded. He started the generator with its pull cord. It fired on the second pull and ran smoothly. With his laptop computer across his knees, Amundson put Baby Huey through its paces. The scanner hummed and stopped at the end of each pass, moving slowly back and forth like a farmer ploughing a field. Its beam was invisible, but a red laser cast a spot on the stone below it to act as a guide.
Sikes approached behind him and peered over his shoulder.
“You mind telling me ’ow this works?” he asked.
Amundson didn’t mind. He had the time. The scan of the machine was largely automatic, once its parameters were programmed in.
“You know how it’s possible to recover a serial number on a gun, when the number has been completely filed off?”
Sikes nodded. “They use acid. The metal is ’arder under the place where the numbers are stamped in, so the acid eats the surrounding metal quicker, and the ’arder numbers show up in what they call bas-relief.”
Amundson nodded.
“It’s the same with stone. When stone is carved using a chisel, the repeated impact of the blade aligns the molecules in the stone. The harder the impact, the greater the alignment; or the more frequent the impact, the greater the alignment—same thing, it’s the total impact on the stone that determines the degree of stress.”
“You mean a few hard ’its is the same as a lot of little ’its,” Sikes said.
“You’ve got it. What this machine does is project energy down into the stone, and then read the resonance that energy produces in the aligned molecules. The greater the alignment, the stronger the resonance. A computer assembles the data into an image.”
“It’s sort of like ground-penetrating radar,” Sikes said.
“It uses a completely different band of projected energy, but the overall idea is similar.”
“So you can use this ’ere machine to recover any image that was ever impressed on any stone surface, even after it gets worn away by erosion?”
“In theory,” Amundson said. “In practice, it’s not so simple. Some images are carved using regular pressure instead of struck using hammers. Some types of stone work better than others—usually the denser stone yields a better result.”
“Why won’t the impacts of the chisel when the face was cut away spoil the image?”
Amundson raised his eyebrows and glanced over his shoulder at Sikes. The little man was no fool.
“Because they were all uniform, more or less. They will be picked up by the scanner, but they will be like a curtain of background noise. The computer will be able—should be able—to strip away that curtain and reveal what lies beneath it.”
“Won’t that be a sight,” Sikes said, staring at the little red dot of the laser as it scanned back and forth across the face. “We’ll be the first people for thousands of years to see what it looked like.”
Amundson shrugged. The excitement for him was in the technical challenge of recovering a clear image. A face was a face. Undoubtedly the image on the colossus would be strange and uncouth, like most primitive art, but what would it signify in the scheme of things? The world was littered with old statues, each bearing unique features. What was one more such image, more or less? He only hoped it would be grotesque enough to catch the eye when printed in the newspapers.
“How long is it going to take?” Sikes asked.
“About two hours to scan. Then the computer will need another four hours or so to process the data into a coherent image. It should be ready by late afternoon.”
“I can ’ardly wait,” Sikes said with sincerity.
You and me both, Amundson thought. Everything in his life was riding on the outcome of this test. If it failed, he could always run it a few more times, but he knew that the imager would either yield a result on the first scan, or it would never yield a good result. Conditions were perfect.
“WE’LL KNOW IN A SECOND,” AMUNDSON SAID.
He had moved his processing computer into the main tent and set it up on the cleared dining table. Almost everyone in the camp was waiting to see the image when it finally formed on the monitor screen. Laski stood behind him, with his wife and Gani close on either side. The grads milled behind them, and the Mongolians clustered on the other side of the long table, their faces curiously apprehensive. Many of them fingered the small stone disks as though they really were protective talismans. Amundson got the impression that, were it up to the superstitious diggers, he would never be permitted to display the image of the face.
“It will be in black and white,” he said to those behind his chair.
A buzzer sounded in the bowels of the computer.
“Here it comes,” he said, unable to prevent his voice from rising in pitch.
The image began to appear on the monitor in horizontal strips, painting itself across the screen from top to bottom. When it was about a fifth of the way down, Amundson released the breath he had been holding unconsciously and relaxed the knotted muscles in his abdomen. It was going to be all right. He couldn’t see what the image was yet, but he could see that it was a clear, coherent image, and for him that was all that mattered. The test was a success. It was not quite as sharp as a photograph, but he had never expected that degree of clarity.
They waited in silence as the gray bands continued to paint themselves onto the screen.
“It’s human,” Gani said.
“So it is,” Laski said with excitement. “I was expecting something monstrous, but it’s human.”
“It looks female,” Anna Laski murmured.
“No, it’s male,” Sikes said.
“It looks female to me,” Luce told him.
Amundson wondered what she was seeing. The face, which by now was more than half visible on the screen, was clearly the face of a man. It was startling in its sheer ordinariness. It might as well have been a contemporary snapshot of anyone in the tent. Indeed, the more he looked at it, the more it seemed familiar to him. He wondered where he had seen the face before.
Luce laughed nervously.
“This is a joke,” she said.
Amundson turned in his chair to look at her.
“What do you mean?” Laski asked.
“Well, look at it. It’s a joke, that’s all. You got me, Professor Amundson. You got me good, guys, you really had me going. I thought this was a real test.”
“What are you talking about?” Amundson demanded.
She stared at him with wide blue eyes, the half-smirk frozen in place on her lips. She looked at the others.
“Come on, guys, funny is fun, but this is enough.”
They all stared at her. She pointed at the screen.
“You used a picture of my face. Good one, you got me. Now turn it off.”
Laski glanced at the computer screen, then back at the blonde grad student.
“Are you feeling quite well, Luce? Perhaps you had better go to your tent to lie down.”
“It’s my face,” she said loudly. “Do you think I don’t recognize my own face?”
“My God,” Anna Laski said. Her fingers rose to her lips. “My God.”
Amundson looked back at the screen. The face had almost completely formed itself in grayscale. It was a lifelike representation of a middle-aged man with short hair.
“My God,” Anna Laski said more loudly, backing away from the screen.
“Jesus, I see it now,” Sikes said.
“See what?” Laski demanded. He turned to his wife. “Anna, what do you see?”
“It’s my face,” she said. “I didn’t recognize it at first, but it’s my face.”
Her husband looked at the image.
“It is a man’s face, my dear. If nothing else, the beard should tell you that.”
“Look again,” Sikes told him in a faint voice. “Look ’arder.”
Amundson wondered if they had all suddenly gone mad. There was no question about the gender of the face. It was definitely male, but clean-shaven. There was something maddeningly familiar about it.
“You say you see a beard, Professor?” Sikes asked him.
“Yes, a short beard much like my own.”
“I see no beard,” Sikes said.
“That’s absurd,” Laski said. “It’s right there. You see it, don’t you, Gani?”
The Mongolian shook his head. He was strangely silent, but there was fear in his eyes. The same fear was mirrored in the faces of his countrymen on the other side of the table. The tent had fallen still.
“It’s my face,” Joseph Laski said in a leaden voice.
“It is all our faces,” Gani said.
Amundson stared at the screen. Recognition leapt out at him. How could he have missed it? The image on the screen was his own face, its eyes staring impassively back into his. It was like looking into a mirror—or better to say, like looking at a black-and-white photograph of himself. A mirror reversed his face from left to right, and he had become accustomed to seeing it that way. That was why he had failed to recognize himself instantly.
“It can’t be all our faces,” he said, his voice lifeless in his own ears. “I never scanned any of our faces. In any case, it’s only one image—it can’t be all our faces at the same time.”
“But it is,” Sikes said.
One of the Mongolian diggers began to jabber in his own language at Gani, who responded in a soothing tone, but the man was in no mood to be placated. Gathering his courage, he walked quickly around the table and stared at the image on the monitor. For a few seconds he did not react. Then he screamed and began to babble at the other diggers. Gani put a hand on his shoulders, and the man flinched as though burned with hot iron. He backed away from the monitor, unable to take his eyes from it until his back pressed against the side of the tent. The touch of canvas on his shoulders galvanized him. With a cry he ran from the tent. The other Mongolian diggers quickly followed, leaving only the archaeologists beside the table.
“There has to be a scientific explanation,” Amundson said, his eyes captivated by the image on the monitor.
“Mass hallucination,” Luce said.
“I’ve been on LSD, I know what it feels like,” Dolan said with a shake of his red head. “This is no hallucination.”
“But how is the image being formed?” Amundson asked. “How can it be different for each of us?”
“Maybe it isn’t an image at all,” Sikes suggested. “Maybe it’s something that makes an image in our minds when we look at it.”
Amundson bent over one of the machines on the table.
“What are you doing?” Sikes asked.
“I’m printing out a hard copy,” the engineer murmured. “I want to see if it has the same effect as the image on the monitor.”
The printer generated the black-and-white copy in a matter of seconds. Amundson took it from the rack and held it up for the others to view. They unconsciously backed away a step when he extended it toward them.
“It’s the same, still my face,” Luce said.
“And mine,” Anna agreed.
“Mine, too,” Sikes said.
Amundson stared at them, barely able to contain his excitement.
“Do you know what this means?” he demanded.
They gave him blank stares.
“It means we’re all going to be famous.”
THE SOUND OF BANGING FROM OUTSIDE THE TENT DREW their attention away from the sheet of paper.
“I’ll go see,” Gani told Laski.
He left the tent. After a minute or so they heard excited shouting in Mongolian, followed by the sound of a single gunshot. When they rushed to the door, they were in time to see the three camp trucks speed away across the desert, leaving fantails of dust in their wakes.
“They’ve taken all the trucks,” Luce said in bewilderment.
Gani staggered from the communications tent. There was a patch of redness on his left thigh.
“Those bastards shot him,” Sikes said. He hurried over to support the archaeologist beneath the arm.
“They smashed the radio,” Gani told Laski, pain in his voice. “I couldn’t stop them.”
“Well, they’re gone,” Laski said.
The reality of their situation slowly sank home. Without a radio there was no way to call Mandalgovi and report the incident, and without the trucks there was no way to leave the camp. It might be days before anyone in the town sent a truck to investigate the radio silence. On the plus side of things, there was no shortage of food and water in the camp. The main concern was for Gani. They managed to stop the bleeding from the bullet wound, but it was a serious injury. He needed a hospital.
Anna Laski moved the injured man onto the bed in her tent, which was larger than the camp cots. She appointed one of the grads, a quiet girl in glasses named Maria Striva, as his nurse. He had collapsed almost immediately after leaving the communications tent, and continued to lapse in and out of consciousness, but whether from pain, shock, or loss of blood, none of them was qualified to tell.
As dusk gathered, the others returned to the main tent and sat around the table with Laski at its head. Sikes silently served them coffee while they talked.
“We might as well go on with our work,” the archaeologist told the students. “This dig is too important to abandon over one incident. In any case, there’s not much else that we can do.”
“It will be difficult without the diggers,” White pointed out.
Laski nodded.
“Which is why we will go slowly. We don’t want to miss anything or, God forbid, have an accident. As you all know, we’ve almost finished clearing the tunnel of rubble. The echo gear indicates a sizeable chamber beyond. We should be able to break through to it tomorrow, even without the diggers.”
White nodded and looked around at the other grads to gauge their mood.
“We’re game,” he said.
“Good.” Laski turned to Amundson, who sat with the printout of the scanner image face down on the table in front of him.
“Run another scan,” he said.
“The result will be the same,” Amundson told him.
“Run another scan anyway. We need to be absolutely certain this isn’t some kind of chance artifact of the machine itself.”
Amundson did not argue. The order made sense. In any case, what else was he going to do with his time? He was not a trained archaeologist and therefore could not help with the excavation, even had he felt inclined to offer his services as a digger.
“You’ll have to work alone tomorrow, I’m afraid,” Laski told him. “I need every person at the tunnel.”
“Now that the imager is in place, that won’t be a problem.”
He was rechecking his test results at the desk in his tent an hour later when Luce entered, wearing only a yellow silk robe tied at her waist. Her short blonde hair was immaculate, but the powder on her cheek could not completely hide the bruise beneath.
Amundson stared at her from his chair without rising. He had not expected a return visit, given the tense circumstances. Sex was not high on his list of priorities tonight.
“He hit you?”
She touched her cheek gently and winced.
“What does it matter? I do what I want, when I want.”
She approached the desk and took up the printout, turning it over to stare at the image with fascination as though mesmerized by a serpent.
“What does it mean?” she asked in a low tone that was barely audible.
“It means we are all going to be famous, and quite possibly rich. No discovery like this has ever been made before.”
She shook her head with annoyance.
“But what does it mean? Why our own faces?”
“I have no idea,” Amundson said, wishing she would just turn around and walk out of the tent so that he could get his work done. “That’s something you archaeologists will have to determine. I’m an engineer.”
“Do you suppose the original face of the colossus, before it was chiseled off, had the same effect? Did everyone who looked at the statue see themselves?”
“Yes, I think so,” Amundson told her. “What my imager generated is an accurate reproduction of whatever was on the original face of the statue. I don’t see why the effect would be any different.”
“That’s why they cut it off,” she murmured with conviction. “They couldn’t stand seeing themselves, so they toppled the statue and struck off its face before burying it.”
“I expect you are right,” Amundson said, shuffling the printouts of readings from the machine. “Look, Luce, I’m really quite busy now—”
She sat across his thighs, her arms around his shoulders, and forced her tongue into his mouth before he could finish the sentence. Her robe fell open, and the erect nipples of her firm young breasts pressed against his shirtfront. She arched her back to raise herself and slide her breasts from side to side over his face. With a moan of desire, she dug her hand between his legs.
Amundson found himself thrusting into her as she lay diagonally across his cot. With part of his mind he realized she was naked, and that he wore only his open shirt. He had no memory of moving across the tent, or of taking off his pants. He shrugged out of the shirt with annoyance, relishing the freedom from its encumbrance. He felt wholly alive, like some powerful beast awakened from long sleep. When she bit his shoulder, he slapped her across the face, back and forth, until her upper lip split and blood marked her bared white teeth.
Only when he had exhausted his lust and lay panting across her did she push him off and leave the cot. Her eyes held a restless look, sliding over him as though he were of no further interest. Neither spoke. Shame mingled with regret welled inside Amundson when he looked at the blood on her lip. He might be many things, but he had never hit a woman. She bent to pick up her silk robe and slid into it, then flipped it closed and tied it with a sharp tug of its sash. Without a backward glance she left the tent.
Amundson lay naked across the cot, listening to the sound of his own breathing. What the hell had just happened? In an instant he had gone from bored indifference to white-hot lust mingled with violence. The sight of blood on the girl’s face had excited him. That had never happened before. Sex had always been good for him, but nobody would ever describe it as anything other than white bread. The outburst of passion had left him drained. Suddenly, it was all he could do to keep his eyes open. He shifted himself on the cot into a more comfortable posture and knew nothing more until the following morning.
WHEN HE LEFT HIS TENT, THE SUN WAS ALREADY WELL above the eastern horizon and the morning chill had been driven from the stones that lay scattered across the pebbly ground. He was almost glad to discover that he had overslept and that the rest of the camp, with the sole exception of Sikes, had already left for the passage excavation. In the main tent, Sikes gave him scrambled eggs and toast, with black coffee. He sipped the bitter liquid with gratitude. A headache throbbed between his temples, making it hard to focus his eyes.
Sikes must have had a rough night of his own. The little Englishman was uncommonly quiet and seemed to perform his housekeeping duties in a meditative daze. After he finished clearing away the breakfast dishes and silverware, he announced to Amundson that he was leaving to help with the excavation work.
The engineer nodded absently at him and did not turn his head to watch him go. His thoughts were preoccupied by the question Luce had asked the night before. Why their own faces? What did it mean to see oneself, to have one’s essential pattern exposed?
He had brought the printout into the dining hall with him. It rested on the table beside his coffee cup, face down. Turning it over, he held it up and studied it. The face, which was most definitely his own, stared back at him. There was a trace of amusement at the corners of its lips—or was that only his imagination? The longer he stared into the eyes of the image, the more variable the expression of the face seemed to become. It shifted from wry amusement to arrogance to lip-curling contempt. Its mouth trembled as though it were trying to speak to him.
Amundson set the sheet of paper down and rubbed his eyelids with his thumb and index finger. Little wonder his mind was playing tricks, given the stress he had been under for the past few days.
He took up the paper and regarded it again, striving to separate himself from it. This could not be an image. It had to be some sort of symbolic code series designed to affect the human mind at the deepest level and provoke the same illusion in every person who looked at it. He was not seeing the code, he was seeing only the effect of the code, but the code itself must be printed on the paper in his hand, just as it had been impressed onto the stone face of the colossus so many thousand years in the past.
There was a popular name for a self-executing code that reproduced itself from one medium to another. Virus. What he was looking at on the paper, without actually being able to see it, must be some form of symbolic mind virus, transmitted through the visual sense.
He turned the paper face down, his fingers trembling. The sophistication required to produce such a code was terrifying in its implications. No ancient human culture could have designed it, or at least no culture recognized by science. Unless the code had been generated by some intuitive process, or channeled from some higher external source. Perhaps if he divided the code into parts, he could analyze it without being affected by it.
He slammed the flat of his hand against the table and pushed himself to his feet. It was pointless to speculate in the absence of data. He would run another scan, varying the parameters from the first scan to see if it achieved a different result. It would probably be best to do an entire series of scans under as many conditions as possible.
Bright spots of light danced before his eyes as he left the main tent. He gathered up the processing computer and the laptop from his own tent and carried them toward the canvas enclosure around the colossus, where he busied himself connecting wires and preparing for the scan. His mind was not on his work.
If a copy of the face were published in major world newspapers and shown around the globe on the nightly television news, in a single day it would imprint itself on the minds of perhaps a billion human beings. That was a sobering thought. Before releasing it to the press he would have to assure himself that the coding of the image was not harmful.
Thus far, it had not caused any damage. His thinking was still clear. It was absurd even to consider withholding the results of the test from the media: once it became public, his fame and prosperity were assured. He would write a book and it would become a bestseller. He wondered why the idea of withholding the results had even crossed his mind and laughed to himself. The eerie chuckle startled him, until he realized that it had proceeded from his own mouth.
The desert was filled with strange sounds this morning. On the other side of the canvas barrier, he heard a distant barking. It was followed by a series of drawn-out howls, like those of a wolf. He wondered idly if there really were wolves in the Gobi. It would be a fine state of affairs if the archaeologists returned to camp at the end of the day and discovered his wolf-mauled corpse. He couldn’t let that happen. Was there a weapon in the camp? He decided to look for a knife or a gun, even a good solid club.
The ghosts were waiting for him when he emerged from the enclosure. They stood silent and motionless all over the open ground, watching him with dead eyes. Their bodies were translucent and colorless, but they wore some kind of ancient apparel that resembled none he had ever seen before. There were soldiers, priests, merchants, slaves, maidens, matrons, whores. Some were even children, but they stood as impassively as the rest.
The weight of their dead eyes on Amundson was like a physical force, compelling him to do something, but he knew not what. It produced an unpleasant twisting sensation in his lower belly. Coupled with his headache, it made him irritable.
“I don’t know what you want,” he muttered to them. “You’ll have to be clearer, I don’t know what you want.”
He walked through them on his way to Laski’s tent. He needed to acquire a weapon before the wolves reached the camp and tore him apart. The touch of the dead against his skin was similar to the brush of cool silk. The ghosts made no attempt to stop him, but merely turned to regard him with mute accusation.
Inside Laski’s tent, the sweet-sick smell of fresh blood struck him in the face. He blinked in the dimness. The Mongolian archaeologist lay on his back on the bed with his throat torn out. Damn wolves, Amundson thought. The shy grad student, Maria Striva, crouched on his chest, naked, her body streaked with blood. She glared at the engineer, blood and bits of flesh clotting her teeth, her nose, the corners of her mouth, and her chin. Her bloodshot eyes were so wide open that he could see their whites all the way around their brown irises. There was no sanity there.
With some part of his mind Amundson realized that she had become a wolf. The desert was filled with wolves. Why didn’t the Mongolians kill the verminous creatures? If the wolves were permitted to roam free in this way, sooner or later everyone would be attacked.
The woman threw herself off the bed, her blood-covered fingers clawing for his throat, but her feet became tangled together and she fell heavily onto her face and breasts, knocking the wind from her lungs with a sharp yelp. Calmly, Amundson stepped across her body and picked up a short-handled pickaxe that rested on the floor next to a travel trunk. As the woman pressed herself up on her hands, he sank the point of the pickaxe into the top of her skull. She collapsed, dead.
One less wolf to deal with, he thought with satisfaction. He remembered why he had entered the tent and rummaged through the trunk. At the bottom he found a revolver. When he left the tent, the ghosts nodded their heads at him with satisfaction.
AS AN EXPERIMENT, HE SHOT ONE OF THE GHOSTS. THE report of the revolver rolled across the desert and lost itself on the dusty wind. As expected, the bullet did nothing. The ghost merely smiled at him, and its translucent head became a naked, grinning skull. That was to be expected, but he was a scientist after all, and of what use was surmise without verification? Thereafter, he ignored the ghosts, even though they followed him all the way to the entrance of the passage.
He recognized the two corpses that lay near a mound of tailings, not far from a black hole in the ground, bodies grotesquely twisted in their death-throes. One was the red-headed grad, Jimmy Dolan, and the other was Sikes. Amundson tilted his head as he studied the tableau. It appeared that Dolan had stabbed Sikes in the back with a tent spike, and that Sikes—plucky little man that he was—had managed to bash in Dolan’s brains with a rock before he died. Two more wolves taken care of, the engineer thought with satisfaction.
He climbed down the aluminum ladder into the pit and entered the mouth of the slanting passage, which descended into the solid bedrock at a downward angle of around twenty degrees. The light soon failed behind him, but he saw a tiny square of brightness at the end of the long, straight tunnel, and continued on, feeling his way along the wall with his left hand. The stone felt smooth beneath his fingertips, almost like polished marble.
At the end, Amundson had to pick his steps with care over uncleared rubble. An opening had been made that was large enough to crawl through. He emerged into a vaulted chamber of thick, square pillars. The portion of it near the tunnel entrance was illuminated by the glowing mantle of a propane lantern. From the corners of his eyes, Amundson saw carved statues resembling animals and manlike beasts. They nodded their heads at him in approval, but he paid scant attention.
On the open floor lay the bodies of Laski and his wife, horribly mutilated. Between them, a naked Luther White, his muscular dark body glistening with sweat in the light from the lantern, stretched across the corpse of Luce Henders. She also was naked and lay face down on a low platform of polished stone. With scientific detachment, Amundson noticed that her head was missing. He glanced around but failed to locate it.
White was busy thrusting his erect member into the dead girl’s pale, blood-streaked backside, and did not notice the intrusion. With each thrust he grunted, “ugh-ugh-ugh,” and the headless body jerked on the altar as though by some undead animation. From the darkness beyond the reach of the lantern, ghosts began to gather. Amundson threw back his head and howled.
“She’s mine,” White snarled at him. “You can’t have her.”
He thrust himself away from the corpse of the girl and stood up, still impressively erect, his penis coated with blood. Between the buttocks of the headless corpse there was only a mass of chewed flesh that resembled raw beef. White looked around with quick jerks of his head from side to side. He lunged and grabbed up a shovel with a short D-handle. Holding it like an axe, he advanced with cautious steps toward the engineer.
Amundson shot the black man in the chest. White looked down at the hole until it began to ooze blood, then laughed.
“Bullets can’t kill me,” he cried through lips caked with dried blood.
Amundson howled again and shot White two more times. The second bullet found his heart. The black grad student dropped like a marionette with its strings cut. The ghosts clustered close and nodded, their translucent eyes shining in the lantern glow like pearls.
The engineer thrust the revolver into his belt. The sharp tang of gunpowder cut through the cloying scent of blood. He felt strong. More powerful and more potent than he had ever felt before. His mind was clear, his thoughts ordered and supremely rational. He realized that his sexual organ was engorged with blood and gazed down at the headless corpse with a speculative eye.
“No, mine,” he murmured to himself, and began to giggle.
Something drew him more strongly than his lust. In the darkness beyond the circle of the lantern light he sensed a vast space that extended downward, like the inverted vault of starry heaven. That was what the ghosts were trying to tell him. He must explore that space. It was his destiny, the only thing for which he had been born into this world. He listened, and now he could almost hear the whispers of the ghosts. If he remained in the darkness with them, it would not be long before they could talk to him and teach him. He could remain here a long time. There was ample food. Was that his own thought, or the thought of the ghosts?
As he started forward, his boot slipped in White’s blood, and he fell heavily to the floor, the back of his head striking and rebounding from the polished stone. Something rolled beneath his hand when he struggled to get up. He blinked and held it to the light. Recognition entered his thoughts—the oval black stone he had put into his shirt pocket and then forgotten about.
As he held up the stone, a kind of sigh arose from the throng of the dead. Acting on some impulse below the level of thought, Amundson extended the stone toward the ghosts. The pallid forms withdrew like mist from flame. He blinked heavily and shook his head. What was he doing here in this dark cavern? The vague memory of leaving the camp and climbing down into the passage came into his mind. He tried again to stand, then cursed and began to crawl toward the lantern with the stone clutched firmly in his left hand.
Awareness came to him in flashes, between which there was oblivion. He was in the tunnel. He stumbled across the loose stones of the desert. He pushed through the resistless ghosts in the camp. Then he was sitting at the table in the main tent. Everything looked completely normal. He picked up his half-emptied coffee mug and felt a faint trace of warmth, or perhaps it was only his imagination. The printout of the face lay beside him on the table. He turned it over and looked at it. Fame. Fortune. Prestige. Success. Acclaim.
He let it drop from his hand. It drifted under the table. He realized with surprise that he still held the oval talisman clutched in his left fist and laid it with care on the table. He sat staring at the doorway of the tent. Through the opening he could see the ancient ghosts walking to and fro in their eternal procession of the damned.
With quick, economical motions he drew the revolver, cocked the hammer, put the muzzle into his mouth, and pulled the trigger.
GENERAL GOPPIK SURVEYED THE CORPSE OF THE American with distaste. Blood and brains had splattered the wall of the tent around the hole left by the departing bullet. The man’s pale eyes stared sightlessly, already starting to shrivel in the dry desert air. He picked up the black stone that lay on the table and regarded its carved surface with curiosity before putting it into his pocket. A keepsake for his young son, he thought.
There were corpses everywhere. The more his soldiers searched, the more bodies they found. Evidently the entire party of foreigners had gone mad and murdered one another with extreme violence—all except this one, who had taken his own life. It was a propaganda nightmare. The Western press would never stop talking about it. The archaeological dig at Kel-tepu would have to be closed down, naturally. There was no other course of action to follow. The entire site would have to be sanitized, and some story invented to account for the massacre. Terrorists, perhaps. Yes, terrorists were always useful.
Noticing a sheet of paper on the floor beneath the table, he bent and retrieved it. The paper bore some sort of computer printout of a black-and-white photograph, not a very clear one at that, showing a Mongolian man. He frowned and squinted at the image. There was something familiar about this face. He had seen it before, perhaps in some rogue’s gallery of wanted criminals.
Grunting in dismissal, he started to crumple the paper in his hand, then thought better of it and smoothed it out on the table before folding it and putting it into his inner vest pocket. More than likely it held no importance, but it was evidence at a crime scene. He would take it back with him when he returned to Ulaanbaatar. If the face were publicized in the newspapers, perhaps someone would recognize it.