Gabriel Hunt - Hunt Through the Cradle of Fear

In the clear light of day. Look at me, Malcolm thought, walking through the night at the arse end of nowhere, talking about the clear light of day. Who am I to take potshots at Burke for chasing some relic out of his past, when at least he has the good sense to do it from his armchair at home, with his fan blowing cool breezes on his brow? I’m the one on a trek through a desert I never thought I’d come back to. How’s that for useless?

Fifty thousand pounds. That’s not useless.

It is when you’re wandering in the desert, Malcolm reminded himself. Nothing more useless then.

He drank a bit of his water, recapped the canteen, and kept going.

Ettouati’s map had shown the temple as hidden inside the curve of a rocky outcropping, and in the half light preceding sunrise Malcolm caught sight of a craggy shape in the distance, listing at an angle like a ship run aground. He was perhaps forty meters off to one side, but that was just as well: he’d be able to approach it from the side instead of straight on.

He crept up to the rocks slowly, revolver in hand, circled around the long way. He saw no one. There was an opening in the rocks where Ettouati had indicated, and he stepped in with his gun raised, but no one seemed to be inside either.

It was cool inside, and dark—stepping in from the desert was not unlike entering Burke’s room back home, only less damp, and with the whirring of the electric fan replaced by the skittering of rodent feet. Malcolm lit a match, saw the carvings on the walls jump in the flickers of orange light. Animal-headed men in rows, some kneeling, some upright—the Egyptian influence was clear. But there was also an unfamiliar quality. These weren’t ordinary hieroglyphs.

The images converged on the altar, which was larger than he’d thought it would be. You could fit a fairly large animal between the posts, and the drainage channels ran deep enough to catch quite a lot of blood without spilling over.

The match went out, and Malcolm decided not to light another. It wasn’t bright in here, but enough light leaked in from outside that he could see what he needed to. He ran his hand along the surface of the altar and its underside, bent low to look closely at the wall. The carvings continued all the way around the altar and were framed by a rectangular groove extending from the ground on either side and meeting across the top. Malcolm felt along this groove, tried to fit the tips of his fingers inside it. It looked almost like the outline of a doorway, but when he pushed against the wall, it felt like pushing against solid rock.

He ran his index fingers along the length of the channels on the altar and at the far end of each, near the wall, he felt a pea-sized hole. This surprised him—it put him in mind of drainage and implied that the altar itself was hollow. He leaned forward and blew into one of the holes. A puff of dust rose and slowly settled.

He looked around. There had to be more here. Lambert’s telegram had referred to a temple—an altar in a cave was not a temple. If there was a temple in this cave, it was somewhere deeper inside, but how were you supposed to get there from here? He tried to put himself in the place of the men who had built and used this altar. If there was another area, what would they have done to gain access to it?

What, indeed. Ettouati’s words came back to him. The Ammonites were a sacrificing people. They missed no opportunity to provide their gods with a tribute.

He lit another match, watched the ground as a handful of jirds scattered. They were not large animals, about the size of rats, but—

Three or four, he imagined, might be equal in size to a small kid. Goat, that is. A small goat.

He dug through his shoulder pouch until he found his pocketknife and unfolded the longer of its blades. Then he took a few pieces of fruit—two dates, a wild fig—and cut them each in half. He pocketed the knife, placed half a fig on the ground and stood as close to perfectly still as he could. After a few seconds, he saw the dim shape of a jird nosing up to it.

He dropped his hat over the animal and scooped it up, pinning the sides of the brim between his fingers to trap it. It struggled violently and he almost lost his grip, but with his other fist he bunched the hat closed and smashed it twice against the cave wall. The jird went limp inside the hat.

He poured the body out onto the altar. It wasn’t dead, he didn’t think, but it was out cold and would stay where he left it. He put the other half of the fig on the ground and stepped back to wait.

In all, he managed to catch four. After that, though he still heard tiny claws clattering in the shadows, he wasn’t able to lure any more into the trap. He looked over the bodies arranged in a row on the altar. They were smaller than he’d thought. Would four be enough?

There was only one way to know. He picked up one of the animals, held it firmly by its hindquarters above the left channel, and with one stroke of his knife sliced its head off. Its blood flowed freely, if not for long. He held it upside down directly over the hole at the end of the channel, watched as the flow drained off into the body of the altar. He pushed against the wall, but there was no movement. He tried using the posts for leverage, gripping one in each fist and straining. Nothing.

He decapitated the second jird, holding this one over the right-hand channel. Then he did the third and fourth. His hands were greasy from their fur and sticky with their blood. He wiped his hands roughly against the seat of his pants and took hold of the posts again. This time he thought he could feel something as he strained, some small shifting of the stone. But no more than that.

He cast about for something else he could use. Could he catch more jirds? It didn’t seem likely, and even if he could, the blood from the first four would have dried up by the time he did, so he’d be starting over from scratch. There had to be another way.

He hefted the canteen. It was better than half full. He hated the idea of using any of his water this way, but—

He uncapped the canteen and carefully poured a thin stream into each channel. This time, when he pushed, he could hear the stones shift, some heavy internal counterweight slowly turning. He poured in some more, closed the canteen, took hold of the posts and pushed with all his strength.

The wall moved—slowly, with a grinding of stone against stone, but it moved, the altar and the section of the wall behind it both turning on some invisible, freshly lubricated axis.

There was light behind the wall, first a narrow orange crack and then an expanding glow like the flames of a thousand candles. And as the wall continued to turn, more smoothly now, more easily, Malcolm saw that there was also a man there, a man in a gold skullcap and patterned robe, standing with one arm crossed over his chest. The other arm was extended toward Malcolm, and held a gun.

III

Malcolm now regretted having holstered his own revolver, but there was nothing to be done for it. He couldn’t outdraw a man who already had the drop on him, never mind doing so when his hands were sticky with blood.

His mind raced. The man hadn’t pulled the trigger yet, but neither had he lowered the gun. He seemed to be weighing which would be more appropriate.

Malcolm dropped to his knees, held his bloody palms out. “Molekh sh’ar liyot bein tekhem,” he said.

Slowly, the gun lowered. “Molekh sh’ar,” the man said.

The room behind the altar stretched on for some distance and the ground sloped steeply downward. By the time Malcolm had followed the man to the far end, he suspected they were past the edge of the outcropping entirely and standing beneath the desert floor. The man slipped the gun inside the pocket of his robe and took out a ring of keys, one of which fit the lock set into the wrought-iron gate that barred their way. He swung the gate open and passed through without speaking a word.