Chapter Thirty-Four

Scorching heat. Imogen, trapped inside a little girl’s body, runs through a cloud of smoke. Somewhere in the house a baby cries. Men and women shout. In other rooms, the house begins to collapse. People scream in the haze behind her. A giant serpent of fire slithers across the ceiling above. The little girl keeps running, coughing from all the smoke. Ahead stands a woman ensconced in flames. Her fiery arms reach for the girl. “Come to Mum, Immy.”

Imogen woke up gasping.

* * *

While the others slept on bedrolls around the fire, Caleb took watch duty at four a.m. He sat near the alcove’s entrance, just a few feet behind the torches. The darkness beyond was quiet, but still it thrummed with energy. He sensed movement out there. At times he thought he saw the air ripple with bubbles. Shapes floated just beyond the firelight, like bodies drifting at the bottom of a black sea. When he blinked, they were gone. But a familiar pain awakened at the core of Caleb’s chest, old wounds reopening.

Will I ever get over what happened? he thought.

He began to ponder why he’d been so strongly drawn to this expedition, into the depths of these caves. At first he thought he’d come here to write about Dr. Trummel’s discovery of a hidden tomb. The thrill of adventure drew him. But after crossing through the gate and learning about what this place was, Caleb began to wonder if he had been drawn here for a different reason. He remembered a quote from St. John of the Cross. “If a man wishes to be sure of the road he’s traveling on, then he must close his eyes and travel in the dark.”

Caleb stared at the infinite blackness beyond the burning torches. God, is this my “Dark Night of the Soul”?

Footsteps approaching from behind startled him. He looked through the stalagmites toward the campfire. Imogen climbed up the slight incline and sat beside him, leaning against a rock outcropping. Her skin shone pale in the torchlight. Her eyes scanned the dark, more cautious than afraid.

“Can’t you sleep?” he asked.

“I got a few winks. How’s the watch?”

“I was on the verge of boredom until you showed up.”

She gripped a gold necklace. He’d seen her reaching for it several times before.

“What’s that you’re wearing?”

She opened her hand. A half-heart pendant lay in her palm.

“Does someone own the other half?” he asked.

She nodded.

Of course, a woman this fascinating would have a man in her life. He felt his heart drop. He had enjoyed the sparks he felt between them. He had secretly hoped getting to know her might lead to something more.

She said, “You wear a necklace too, I’ve noticed.”

Caleb pulled the silver chain out of his shirt.

She lifted the pendant from his skin. “Saint Michael, the archangel. It’s beautiful.”

“When I turned twelve, a nun in Chicago gave this to me. She said I had angels all around me. She could see them watching over me.”

Imogen smiled. “So you’ve hung out with nuns, have you?”

He released a small laugh. “Quite a bit, in fact. I attended a private Catholic school and later went to a seminary. I was studying to be a priest.”

She looked at him sideways. “You, a priest?”

“Does that seem impossible?”

“A little.”

“That was a lifetime ago.”

She leaned forward, resting her arms on her bent knees. “What made you want to become a man of the cloth?”

“At the Catholic school, priests and nuns were my teachers. I admired their devotion. When I turned twenty, the priesthood seemed like my calling.”

“What changed your mind?”

“Celibacy didn’t agree with me. I couldn’t imagine my life without a woman in it.”

“Do you have a girlfriend then, or a wife, waiting for you somewhere?”

Caleb smiled and shook his head. “I travel too much to settle down. Marriage can come later, when I’m older.” He squeezed the St. Michael pendant and dropped it in his shirt again.

A sound, like an animal scuttling over rocks, echoed outside the cave. Imogen and Caleb looked toward the darkness beyond the torches. They listened for a moment. A long silence, and then the footfall seemed farther away.

“Have you seen anything moving out there?” Imogen asked.

“Nothing like we saw in the maze. I’ve seen other things, though.” He hesitated.

“Go on.”

“A memory. It almost seemed like the dark pulled it from my mind.”

“What kind of memory?”

“A bad one. An incident that happened three years ago while I was researching a story for National Geographic.” His feelings of guilt returned as he told her what happened. “I had gone deep-sea diving in a cave with a team of marine explorers in Egypt’s Blue Hole. It’s north of Cairo, near the city of Dahab. It was my first true dive after a day of training. I chartered a boat from an Egyptian skipper named Ahmad and paid two Greek divers, Nicolai and Christoph, to take me down with them so I could capture their dive on film for the magazine. We wore these heavy copper Siebe Gorman helmets and full bodysuits that inflated with air. The helmet, which fitted over my entire head, made me feel claustrophobic. My vision was reduced to small circular windows on the front and sides. I remember being confused as Ahmad’s hollow voice began speaking into my ear. The skipper turned me around and showed me how his telephone box had lines that connected to our helmets for two-way communication with him. Our breathing hoses tethered us to the boat. The crew made jokes about me as I stood at the edge of the deck in this awkward suit, staring into that blue water. As air pumped into my helmet and suit, I had a brief moment of fear seize me; then Nicolai tapped my shoulder and signaled to climb down the ladder.”

A chill washed over Caleb as he remembered that day. He, Nicolai, and Christoph had plunged deep into the vertical cave. They’d planned to dive no more than sixty feet to study coral fish. After Caleb took a few photos in the sunlit waters with a bulky underwater camera, he noticed something intriguing farther below. He asked the skipper to drop him deeper. Christoph objected, waving his arms in protest. But Caleb was adamant. What mattered most in that moment was gathering research and photos for his story. He spoke through his helmet’s phone with the skipper up top and offered to pay everyone more if they let him dive deeper. Ahmad and the Greeks finally agreed, and the lines dropped the divers lower.

Deep below the natural arch, where the sunlight faded into gloom, they found a watery grave. Skeletons floated one against the other, so many it was impossible to guess their numbers. Fish had eaten the flesh from their bones. Some skeletons still wore fins; free divers, Caleb guessed. They must have ventured so deep their lungs had burst. The underwater cemetery was exactly the kind of discovery that would get him a feature story in National Geographic.

Christoph wanted to leave and tapped his wristwatch. Caleb signaled to wait till he got a few more photos. Nicolai posed for pictures with the dead. Christoph pulled out his knife and cut off a finger of one of the corpses. He wanted the gold band. Some of the skeletons broke apart as the Greeks swam through them. A skull covered in plankton floated toward Caleb. He batted it away.

Suddenly something began to go wrong with the air in Caleb’s suit. He felt pain in his joints and bones, knotting around his shoulders. His skin began to itch, as if insects were crawling all over him. He gasped for air, became disoriented and terrified. This was decompression sickness. That knowledge brought a fresh jolt of adrenaline.

Caleb let go of his camera. It sank and dangled from a tether below his feet. Nicolai and Christoph began to panic. They jerked violently as if they were also getting decompression sickness. Their movements caused the skeletons to drift closer, crowding the divers. Bubbles clouded the water around them. Caleb searched through the chaos for the others.

The Greeks’ air hoses had gotten tangled. Caleb reached them. The two men were struggling to unravel themselves. Ahmad’s voice was screaming through Caleb’s helmet speaker, asking what was happening. In an act that could have only been spurred by delirium, Christoph severed Nicolai’s air hose with his knife. Nicolai’s suit, releasing air like a balloon, shot off into a cavern wall, then sank, vanishing into the wide black hole.

Caleb tried to go after him, but his air hose locked at this depth. He watched the dark abyss in shock. He’d never witnessed anyone die. Suffering from stomach cramps and ringing in his ears, Caleb feared he was seconds from death.

Christoph flailed his arms in a cloud of bubbles. Caleb tried to calm him, but the man jerked and kicked, then went limp in his arms. Blood covered the glass of Christoph’s faceplate as his eyes and nose hemorrhaged. Then Caleb, shaking badly from the bends, found himself alone among the floating dead. He was down there for what felt like an eternity until the crew on the boat pulled him and Christoph’s body to the surface.

Retelling the story caused all the guilt and pain to fully surface. “Had I not pushed them to take me deeper, Nicolai and Christoph would still be alive.”

“They were experienced divers,” Imogen said. “They were responsible for their mistakes.”

“I’d been warned that diving past a hundred feet increased the danger of getting the bends. At the time, I had thought I was invincible. After I surfaced, I spent several hours confined inside a hyperbaric chamber shaped like a coffin. It cured most of my symptoms. I still occasionally suffer from vertigo. But it’s the guilt that never leaves me. I’ve been carrying the weight of their deaths in my heart ever since.” They both fell silent for a moment, and then Caleb said, “There’s something else you should know…. When I first crossed through the portal earlier, I saw skeletons floating around me as if I were back in the Blue Hole. A diver grabbed my ankle. It was so real. He looked so much like Christoph, even the bloodstained faceplate. For me, it was reliving the worst moment of my life.”

“It’s this place,” Imogen said. “If you stare into the darkness long enough…”

“Bakari said it knows our darkest secrets. I think it somehow projects them.”

She pondered this a moment with an inward gaze. “According to the Amduat, the underworld is a place for a person to confront oneself on the way to the afterlife. The soul is tested before it reaches the Hall of Judgment.”

“Like coming face-to-face with your sins in purgatory,” Caleb said. “I feel better after sharing mine with you. What secrets have you been holding on to?”

Imogen never talked about her childhood with anyone. Grandfather had tried a child therapist once, but Imogen had refused to talk with him. She couldn’t bear to relive the nightmare of what had happened to her family, even in her mind. “I’d rather keep my secrets to myself.”

“Are you sure?” Caleb prodded. “Perhaps, sharing them lessens their power.”

“Maybe another time, Father Beckett,” she joked. “Not tonight.”

Quig approached, rubbing sleep from his eyes. “My turn. See anything moving out there?”

Caleb shook his head. “Stare into the dark long enough, though. You’ll know we’re not alone.”

Imogen walked with Caleb back to where the others were sleeping. He added more coals to the fire. She went to the pool of clear water and washed her face. As the ripples on the water’s surface smoothed out, she stared at her shadowy reflection. Constant dread had frayed her nerves ever since she’d learned they weren’t alone down here. Now, as she considered that the spiritual laws the early Egyptians had believed in might be true, she feared more than dying. Her whole life, her scientific mind had believed death was an end to consciousness. The moment her brain and body died, so would her awareness. In a strange way, she had found that comforting. Not having to think anymore. But what if she had been wrong? What if there was an afterlife and it offered two possibilities: ascension or descending into darker realms? According to early Egyptian texts, the souls who failed to prove their spiritual worthiness suffered among the demons and lost souls of Duat. Is that what’s in store for me if I die down here? The thought filled her with dread.

Imogen returned to the campfire, where Caleb was getting ready for bed. “Do you mind if I lay my bedroll next to yours?” she asked. “I might actually sleep.”

He nodded.

She dropped hers a short distance from Caleb’s. Lying on her side, Imogen closed her eyes.

Something skittered outside the cave. She inched closer to Caleb and finally fell asleep.