Chapter Three

The madhouse peaked to a frenzy whenever Harlan Riley conversed with the gods. Patients shouted up and down the hallways, banging on steel doors with tiny windows.

Voices spoke to Harlan in tongues, gibbering from the rends in the white padded walls of his cell where he had tried to claw his way out, searching for tunnels that would lead him back to the tomb.

The voices spun around the walls and whispered into his head. Harlan nodded, understanding their urgent commands. They were calling him back. He grinned at the thought of finally being free. “Yes, I will do that,” he said to the walls, talking with rapid movements of his hands. “I will, I will.” From a hiding place beneath his mattress, he pulled out a small, leather-bound journal and fountain pen that Trummel had secretly given him. The black ink had run dry, so Harlan pressed the pen’s sharp nib into a vein in his left arm. Using his own blood, he wrote furious passages into his journal.

I have walked in the footsteps of the pharaohs, seen relics beyond imagining. I have embodied the wisdom of the gods.

Harlan studied the myriad scars covering his arms – lines and dots, crosses and spirals. He felt the welts stitched across his face, fingertips reading the symbols like Braille. He understood every hieroglyph, every scripture. He knew if he turned his skin inside out, the writing would be there too, a text more ancient than the first Sumerian tablet. And if he were to peel his flesh from his skeleton, he’d find totems of faces scrimshawed into his bones.

He was a walking codex, yet his explanations only earned him blank stares. His doctors, believing him a lunatic, insisted on keeping him sedated.

Harlan felt fresh scorpion stings of pain each time he stabbed the pen into his wound. He needed ink, needed to tell his story. Friends have abandoned me. Only two visit – my granddaughter, Imogen, and devout colleague, Nathan Trummel. And of course the ghosts of my team who surrendered their lives in the caves. I still hear their madding cries.

A loud banging interrupted his thoughts.

Outside the cell, orderlies pounded on the door. The face of Dr. McCabe, head of the psych ward, filled a tiny window stained with a red handprint. “Harlan, remove the damn chair!”

The chair, propped against the doorknob, gave way a quarter inch at a time as the orderlies slammed their bodies against the door. On the floor lay the unconscious body of Harlan’s psychiatrist, Dr. Fetter, his head bleeding from the unexpected blow.

Harlan’s pen scribbled rapidly across the journal’s page. Tears filled his eyes as he thought of his granddaughter. Upon my death, I bequeath this book to you, Imogen Riley. I beg you to believe me. I have written herein only a fraction of what happened to me and my team, but there’s more. So much more. Harlan’s shaky hand shifted from English to a rapid staccato of symbols, the codex speaking through him.

Bodies continued to slam against the door. The metal chair slid another inch, threatening to buckle.

Harlan’s mind cleared, allowing him precious seconds of lucidity. He hastily drew a crude map. The door burst open. The metal chair clanged against the bed. Two orderlies rushed Harlan with Dr. McCabe behind them wielding a needle.

Harlan backed into a corner. Before they could grab him, he jammed the pen into his throat, opening his jugular.