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Lost Egyptian City, Grand Canyon
CROWLEY STARED FOR a few seconds at the swirling blackness. His eyes drifted to the strange hieroglyphs carved around the doorway, then back to the darkness ahead. He shook his head and pointed at the cultist lying prone on the floor, whose face was a solid black mask. Crowley crouched, felt for the man’s pulse and found none. He shook his head again at Lily and Rose’s expectant faces. “Whatever that stuff is, it’s deadly. How are we going to get in there?”
To his surprise, Rose smiled. “I’ve got it covered, Action Man.” She pulled a gas mask out of her backpack.
Crowley arched his eyebrows. “What the hell?”
“Well, at least I remembered what Shepherd told us. I suspected some kind of hostile atmosphere. I grabbed it at the army surplus store while you were buying the new climbing gear. Figured it wouldn’t hurt. Turns out I’m a genius.”
Lily rolled her eyes and Crowley couldn’t help but laugh. “Maybe you are.” He was genuinely glad she had bought it, but chilled at the same time. The sight of the mask called to memory the eerie murals at the Denver airport. The Illuminati connection Lily had revealed made it all too real. He took a deep breath and reached for the mask, but Rose jerked it back.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
Crowley paused, his hand still halfway out for the mask. “Well, we don’t know what’s in there. Or if this mask will even help. I mean, look at that guy.” He gestured down at the dead cultist. “Let me be the one to go in. Please?”
“Your friend is right,” Lily said, one hand on Rose’s forearm. “Please, let him go. We only just found each other again.” She smiled. “Well, you found me.”
Rose looked from Lily to Crowley to the black doorway, then her shoulders fell. “Okay.” She handed over the mask. “You’ll want these, too.” She handed him thick, rubber gloves. “Hopefully avoid the withered hands?”
Crowley slipped on the gloves and then donned the mask, the task familiar from tours of Afghanistan and Iraq, in training and in combat. He took a couple of deep, calming breaths, and turned to the doorway. He looked at the alien-looking curtain of black, his breath loud inside the mask, and thought that perhaps this was the stupidest thing he’d ever done. And he’d done a lot of stupid stuff in his life.
Before he could change his mind, he stepped through. It was like stepping into a warm swimming pool, only the water was as thick as milk. Or blood. The stygian cloud enveloped him. He had half-expected it to be painful, like a WWI soldier exposed to chemical warfare, but instead it was merely... creepy, like being caressed by a million tiny tentacles.
He stood just inside the door for several seconds, listening to the rasp of his breath, checking his senses, wondering if the blackness was affecting him. But he felt largely normal, uncompromised. His eyes began to adjust to the darkness and he saw swirls and shifts in the cloud, like it was thicker in some places, thinner in others. But overall it was dense and claustrophobic. The sooner he got out of it, the better.
The cultist he had rolled inside lay on his back, his skin jet like his friend outside. He was equally dead. Crowley stepped over him and made a slow circuit of the room, following the wall to his left, his fingertips sliding over the smooth, carved surface. The room was circular and obviously small, maybe only seven or eight meters in diameter. He noticed a band of unfamiliar hieroglyphs running around the wall at waist height, beautifully carved in intricate detail. If he leaned close enough they were quite visible despite the cloud. It was as if the surface of it was thicker, more opaque, than its internal structure. Another mystery of its composition he couldn’t fathom.
When he reached the door again, he took out his phone and made another circuit, moving slowly and carefully in order to record the hieroglyphs on video. When he had finished, he put his phone away and turned to move toward the center of the room. Surely there as more here than a single line of hieroglyphics. After ten short, careful paces and he found himself standing in front of a golden pyramid two meters high. The dark cloud dulled its gleam, but still it was remarkable in its perfection. How much gold was in the thing, he wondered. Or was it merely a thin veneer of gold laid over a more common substance? Native rock perhaps. He wouldn’t be able to find out unless he cut into the gold, and he wasn’t about to damage something so remarkable. So flawless. That task would be best left to more capable and qualified archeologists.
But how could a golden pyramid create this alien black cloud? Did it emanate from here? His eyes drifted upward and he had his answer. The capstone of the golden structure was made of something solid and dark. An obsidian-like substance, impossibly black, and perhaps a quarter of a meter in height. It made a perfect miniature pyramid itself, equilateral on all sides and base, atop the golden host. As he watched, a single drop of water fell from the darkness above and struck the tip of the capstone. Where it hit, a thick, black tentacle of smoke twisted out and merged with the surrounding swirls, vanishing into the cloud. He stared, counting seconds in his head. When he got to twelve, another drop fell, another writhing black swirl joined the cloud. He counted, twelve again and another drop, another writhing tentacle of darkness.
“This is...” Crowley whispered, his voice unnatural in the mask. He didn’t know what is was. “Alien?” he said, needing to hear the word aloud yet still unable to process it.
But what it was didn’t matter at this juncture. What mattered now was what to do about it. The fact that it could so easily produce a poisonous cloud from single drops of water, spaced many seconds apart, made it not only inconceivable, but genuinely dangerous. Lily was correct. If the Anubis Cult, and the Illuminati, though it still felt odd to think of that group as real, knew the capstone was here, they wouldn’t stop until they possessed it. He could not allow that to happen.
He shrugged off his backpack and sat it open on the floor by his feet. He dug around in his pack until he found a plastic bag. He reached up high, stretching to drape the plastic over the capstone. Biting his lip, bracing against the potential weight, he lifted the capstone off the pyramid, careful to touch only plastic. He took a sudden step back, surprised as it came away easily and had almost no weight. He set it down, found another plastic bag and wrapped it carefully. He tucked the two coverings around it as thoroughly as he could, then managed to get the small pyramid inside his backpack. It sat neatly on its base in the bottom and he shouldered the pack and was glad to leave the small chamber.
The air in the dim passage outside felt thin and cold, but an enormous relief after the cloying denseness of the cloud inside. He could only imagine that it might slowly dissipate now he had removed the capstone. He turned and put a gloved hand to the surface of it, pressing out from the carved stones of the doorway, but not emerging into the passage.
He realized Rose and Lily were both talking, exasperated as he ignored them. He turned, pulled the mask off. He grinned. “We’ve got it.”