Hunt Through the Cradle of Fear (21 page)

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.

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.

Which was just as well, since Malcolm had used up all the words he knew in the man’s language. If he’d tried to start a conversation, Malcolm would have had to make an attempt for the gun, however hopeless it might have been.

The room on the other side of the gate was several times the size of the entryway, a hollowed-out octagon with shallow alcoves carved into the walls, each containing a dish of tallow and a dancing flame. The center of the room held a freestanding stone altar in the shape of a giant hand, palm pointing toward the ceiling, fingers slightly curled.

There was one man kneeling in front of the altar and one standing behind it; on the altar itself was a pile of stones that looked as if they might have been chipped from the walls, only glowing, like the embers of a fire. It wasn’t clear what the source of heat was, if indeed there was one—maybe it was just a source of light. The man behind the altar was short and wore the same sort of robe and skullcap the other man had on, while the one on his knees wore only a breechclout, a twisted strip of
cloth knotted around his waist and between his legs. He swayed from side to side in time with a wordless chant, sometimes bowing forward to touch his head to the ground.

The robed men stood in silence, waiting, and Malcolm stood silently as well, but he used the time to steal glances around the room. There were openings in several of the walls leading off to dark corridors. Was the idol down one of them? If so, which one? And for how much longer could he maintain the charade of being a fellow worshipper? If he hadn’t walked in on a ceremony in progress, surely they would have spoken to him already, and would instantly have found him out.

The kneeling man was swaying faster now as his chant grew louder. He reached out toward the altar, toward the stones, and jammed his hands in among them. Malcolm recoiled as the air filled with the stink of burning flesh. The man was howling now, screaming, in transports of pain and ecstasy.

Perhaps there would be a better opportunity later—perhaps. But it didn’t seem likely.

Malcolm stepped up close to the man who had let him in, darted his hand into the pocket of the robe and grabbed the pistol. It was a German gun, heavy and cold to the touch. He whipped an arm around the man’s neck and held the gun to his temple. The other robed man started forward.

“Take one more step and he dies,” Malcolm said. “Do you understand me?”

The kneeling man rose to his feet. Malcolm saw that he still held a hot stone in each of his hands. His cheeks were covered with tears. His chest was scarred, long welts running haphazardly across his breastbone and along his ribs. Even barefoot as he was, he stood well over six feet tall, and his frame was formidable. But when he spoke, his voice was soft, calm.

“No, he doesn’t understand you. Neither of them speaks English.”

Malcolm found the man’s voice unnerving. It was the furthest thing imaginable from the wordless howl it had been just moments before.

“He understands this,” Malcolm said, gesturing with the pistol.

“You may shoot him if you want,” he said. “It is what he deserves for letting you in.”

Malcolm unwound his arm from around the robed man’s throat and shoved him away. He reoriented the Luger’s sight so that it pointed squarely at the giant’s naked chest. “And what about you, brother? Are you as ready to throw your own life away?”

Slowly and with a casual stride he came forward. “I am not afraid of pain. If it is Molekh’s will that I die, I shall die.”

“It’s
my
will you need to be concerned about right now,” Malcolm said. “The good news is I’m just here to do a job and leave—”

“You will never leave.”

“We’ll see. Why don’t you back up against the wall, and tell the other two to do the same thing.” The man paid no attention. Malcolm cocked the gun. “Now, or I swear to god I’ll shoot you where you stand.”

A voice spoke from behind him, a reverberant voice that rang from the stones.
“You swear to god?”

Malcolm spun to find its source, but there was no one there.

“And which god is it that you swear to? When you are in my temple, do you swear to me?”

Malcolm saw movement in the corner of his eye and turned back, but the giant was suddenly beside him, and then the stones, still hot, were pressed against his gun hand, one on either side. He strained to pull the trigger,
but the man had his hand firmly pinned. He felt his skin starting to sear.

Malcolm reached under his jacket left-handed, drew his own gun from its holster, jammed it into the man’s gut and fired. The force of the gunshot sent the man stumbling back, freeing Malcolm’s hand. He leveled the Luger at the man’s head and pulled the trigger. A bloody spray stained the chamber floor.

The other two men were fleeing awkwardly in their cumbersome robes, heading for corridors on opposite sides of the room. To raise an alarm? To get reinforcements? He couldn’t take the chance. One bullet apiece—left hand, right hand—and they were down.

Malcolm’s heart was hammering, his head reeling. He heard the sound of laughter all around him, echoing louder as the thunder of gunfire died down.
“Blood!”
The voice was exultant.
“You do swear to me—you swear in blood, the blessed offering.”

“Who’s talking?” Malcolm said, turning in a circle, scanning the shadows, a gun in each fist. “Where are you?”

“I am the Lord of this place and this people. I am brothergod to the Lord you worship, and have been since men first spoke of gods. I am many-named: men call me Melech, and Molekh, and Moloch; I have been called Legion, and Horror, and Beast, in fifty tongues and fifty times fifty, but men also call me Father, and Master, and Beloved. There is no end to the names men have given me.”

“Enough,” Malcolm said. “Save the booga-booga for the natives. Come out and face me.”

“
No man may look upon me and live.”

Malcolm worked his way along one wall of the room, scanning the rock for a concealed loudspeaker, or some other mechanism that might explain where the voice was coming from. “Let’s get one thing straight, Charley,” he said. “I’m not here for the sermon. I’m not here
for your fifty tongues or any of the rest of it. A man sent me here to collect a statue—either you have it or you don’t. You leave me in peace and I’ll leave you in peace.”