Christopher Golden - Ararat

“You all right?” a voice asked from behind him.

Walker turned to see Adam Holzer approaching, bearing two cups of coffee, one of which he held out for Walker.

“I am now.” He tugged off one glove and stuffed it into his pocket. “I take it the ark didn’t have its own Starbucks.”

Adam raised his cup in a toast. “Oh, the coffee’s terrible. But it’s hot and full of caffeine.”

“In other words, just what the doctor ordered.”

Walker took a swig and tried not to scowl. Turkish coffee could be strong, but whatever the KHAP crew was drinking tasted more like rust.

Smiling, Adam glanced back at the archaeologists. “Your team is settled in. Ms. Kim declined the coffee—maybe the smartest of us all—but Father Cornelius is warming up. Why don’t we get the formal introductions out of the way and then we’ll show you the burial casing?”

A chill passed through Walker that the shitty coffee could not dispel.

He followed Adam deeper into the heart of the ark and then up stairs that had been sturdily reinforced and in some cases replaced by the Ark Project staff. On level three, they made their way through a doorway with a wide crack in the lintel timber, and Walker tried not to think about the roof collapsing on top of them and trapping them inside. He pictured the furrows he’d seen down on level one—scratches made by the fingernails of people desperate to escape—and didn’t like that cracked lintel at all.

Voices could be heard farther ahead and Walker felt a little better when he recognized one as belonging to Kim Seong. She had a way of behaving like a queen in a room full of jesters, an arrogance that could be grating, but somehow she still managed to seem amiable enough.

At the end of the passage, they came into an open space at the rear of the ark’s topmost deck. Something dry and withered lay on the floor in one roped-off corner, but it had no bones. Walker thought it must have been a sleeping mat five thousand years ago, though how a bunch of hay had not turned entirely to dust he didn’t know. At the back of the chamber, the wall shared the wide timber struts that he’d seen on the lower floors, the ribs of the ark. The top of a ladder jutted up from a hole in the floor—not original, but something constructed by the Ark Project.

Meryam stood waiting for them with a cluster of people that included Kim and Father Cornelius.

“Hello again, Mr. Walker. Or is it doctor?” she said.

“Just ‘Walker’ is fine.”

She gestured toward the others gathered there, rattling off introductions. The Karga-Holzer team included the site foreman, Hakan, and his nephew Feyiz. A ghostly pale, blond woman with a camera on her shoulder turned out to be Calliope Shaw, the filmmaker Adam had allied with to create a documentary about the project. Meryam introduced the professor Olivieri whom Helen Marshall had mentioned, a fiftyish biblical scholar with a thick beard and powerful girth. From a distance, he’d have looked like a future mall Santa, but up close it was clear Armando Olivieri might be fat, but he was solid.

“We welcome you all,” Meryam said.

Olivieri wrinkled his brow.

“The professor doesn’t seem very happy to see us,” Walker replied.

Olivieri’s frown deepened. “I assure you, Mr. Walker, my displeasure has nothing to do with you.”

“But you don’t think we should be here.”

“I don’t think any of us should be here,” Olivieri corrected. “The ark has always been a fascination for me, one of the focal points of my research throughout my career. Finding it, knowing it is real… that moment was perhaps the greatest of my life. Now I think the best thing to do would be to plant explosives on the mountain face and bury this cave for another few thousand years.”

Father Cornelius stiffened and his eyes grew stormy. “If this is what it appears to be, it’s the greatest connection to biblical history we have ever found. And you want to bury it? Destroy it? What kind of biblical scholar are you?”

Olivieri sniffed in disgust. “The kind who understands that some things are better left buried. Don’t pretend you don’t feel it,” the man said, scanning their faces. “It’s so close in here that you can barely breathe, and I promise you it’s not just from the elevation—”

“Armando,” Meryam said, so quietly the word was almost lost with the howling of the wind that screamed through the seams between timbers.

Olivieri flapped a hand at her. “Enough, I know. Fine. Go about your business, but I’ll have no part of it. If I didn’t think someone had to keep watch over this entire, dreadful affair, I’d have left long ago.”

Meryam looked as if she might lose her temper, but Adam took a step toward the ladder, breaking the moment.

“No point putting it off any further, then, is there?” he said as he grabbed hold of the handrail and stepped onto the uppermost rungs. “Come along, Walker. We thought your arrival might defuse some of the tension that’s been developing up here in recent days, but apparently we were wrong.”

“Defusing tension has never been one of my fortes,” Walker said, glancing at Olivieri. “But stranger things have happened.”

Disgusted by their levity, Olivieri marched back the way they’d come. The other members of the Karga-Holzer Ark Project muttered things to Meryam and returned to their own duties. Even Calliope retreated after handing her camera over to Adam.

“Where are they all going?” Walker asked when only Meryam remained of the KHAP staff.

“Limited space,” Meryam said. “And they’ve all seen what’s down there already. None of them wants to see it again.”

An involuntary shudder went through him. Meryam could have been going for dramatic effect, but her fiancé had just descended the ladder with the camera, so there seemed little point in trying to spook the new arrivals. Kim glared at Meryam as she started down the ladder. If she’d been a cat she would have had her back arched, fur up.

Walker drank the last of his awful coffee, folded the paper cup and tucked it into his jacket pocket, and turned to Kim and Father Cornelius.

“You feel anything?”

Kim exhaled, relaxing. “A bit claustrophobic, yes, but if you mean do I feel anything unnatural, then the answer is ‘no.’ I’m not psychic.”

“Do you believe in psychics?” Father Cornelius asked curiously.

“Of course not.”

“Well, I’m no psychic, either,” Walker said. “But don’t be so quick to dismiss the unnatural. There are all kinds of things in the world that we don’t understand.”

Kim nodded sagely. “Yes, and there are always those who would like nothing better than to make a fortune thanks to the ignorance of others.”

Walker knew she was right, but as he went to the ladder, took the handrail, and started down, he couldn’t get the deep crease in Olivieri’s brow out of his mind. There were millions of religious fanatics in the world, but Olivieri was a biblical scholar. Walker had encountered the arrogance of the faithful many times, but what he’d seen from Olivieri just now hadn’t been judgment or disapproval.

That had been fear.

As Walker descended the ladder, he encountered a stale odor that made him wrinkle his nose. Something like rust. When he passed through the second level and down to the first, the now-familiar twist of nausea returned to his gut but he breathed evenly and told himself the power of suggestion had gotten into his subconscious. If so, it had deep roots there.

“What is that smell?” he heard Kim ask, below him.

Meryam admitted they didn’t know, without bothering to offer a theory. In the wordless seconds that followed, Walker marveled at that. People like Adam and Meryam never seemed to be at a loss for theories. As unwelcome as he and his team might be, Walker decided KHAP needed them. New eyes, new ideas.