Infinity Cage (16 page)

Liam forced his way past the press of people, all of them heading the opposite way, curious to see what was causing the chorus of raised voices, the crash and splintering of wood and the cacophony in the portico beneath the northern wall.

He stepped over the low bench-high barrier that marked the exclusion point for non-Jews, this time unnoticed by anyone, and stepped warily into the hallowed space beyond. A dozen temple guards wearing ceremonial purple-and-gold robes pushed past him as Liam casually climbed the dozen shallow steps, approached the tall entrance, doors wide open, and entered the temple’s inner court.

He found himself in a square of dazzlingly white stone slabs, dotted here and there with dark specks of sacrificial blood. The court was starting to empty as word began to spread that something was going on outside. He crossed the square towards a pair of enormous silver-and-gold-plated doors that were open enough to allow one person through at a time. He stepped aside as a priest emerged from them.

‘What is happening outside?’

Liam shook his head and muttered a reply. The bud returned an answer. ‘There is a big fight outside.’

The priest cursed then pushed past Liam. The large silver-and-gold door remained ajar. Checking that no one was about
to bark out at him to halt, he slipped through into the inner courtyard. Ahead of him was a long ramp leading up to a wide platform. The sacrificial altar. Its white stone floor was awash with watered-down blood, and a junior priest armed with a leather bucket was on his hands and knees mopping up the gore with a rag. A queue of those pilgrims who’d been allowed in with their animals, all men, were on the ramp and patiently waiting their turn. The sound of thousands of voices outside raised in alarm was drifting over the high walls. The pilgrims looked concerned. Curious. One of them reached out and grabbed Liam’s elbow. For a moment he thought he was about to be stopped again.

‘What is causing that noise outside?’

Liam muttered his reply and then listened for the bud’s soothing voice. ‘The speaker from Nazareth has arrived.’

The man’s face creased with anger. ‘The Galilean troublemaker? I heard him call himself the son of God … and he used the Lord’s name too.’

The queue suddenly came alive and erupted with exchanges of outrage and indignation. Some of the men abandoned their goats where they cowered and began to hurry down the ramp towards the doors leading out. Liam carried on up the ramp and across the blood-soaked altar floor, towards what he guessed must be the only entrance to the temple’s forbidden inner sanctum – a doorway draped with long patterned curtains, which were pulled partly aside to reveal a forbidding dark interior. He looked around quickly; the junior priest was still busy scrubbing the floor and the waiting pilgrims had abandoned their queue to witness the outrage outside.

Liam took a deep breath and stepped through hesitantly, again half expecting a voice somewhere to call out after him.

My God … now I’m inside
. If he could be stoned to death for
merely stepping over that knee-high wall
outside
the temple, he shuddered to think what would happen to him if he was caught in here.

Out of the glare of the midday sun, he gave his eyes a few seconds to adjust to the gloomy interior. He was standing in a tall ceremonial chamber of marble walls trimmed with gold. The meagre light came from a thin shaft of daylight stealing in through a gap in the drapes and the many sputtering tallow candles and oil lamps within. The air was thick and misty with incense. The noise coming from the compound was muffled now and sounded far away. In here it seemed the ordered business of devotion was still being conducted as usual. A junior priest in white-linen robes swept ashes from beneath an incense burner; another priest in a purple shawl read scripture aloud with a slow, melodic chant, almost singing but not quite. It echoed around the marble walls, a soothing, meditative sound.

Liam skirted the edge of the large hall, trying to appear nonchalant – as if ignorance of the fact that he shouldn’t be in here was going to be any kind of a defence – but at the same time trying to make himself as invisible as possible in the gloom.

He made his way towards a heavy decorative drape, then cautiously he pulled it aside and snatched a glimpse behind it. An alcove. Unoccupied. He slipped behind the drape and then allowed himself a moment to double over and catch his breath.

I’m gonna get caught. I’m gonna get caught and butchered like a goat
. He puffed out air as quietly as he could.

He looked around the alcove. There was a wooden bench and a straw mattress here. Perhaps a place the priests used to rest between duties? On a low table, he saw several prayer shawls carefully folded and beside them the purple-and-gold robes he’d seen the more senior priests wearing. He stepped over, picked one of the robes up and wrestled with the heavy material.

How do I get this thing on?

He found a small hole for his head and pulled the robe down over his shoulders and wriggled and hopped until the thick material shook free and hung down to his ankles.

Just then he heard a voice beyond the drape.

The melodic chanting of scripture suddenly ceased. Liam heard a weary sigh. ‘What now?’

‘There is trouble in the Gentiles’ court!’

Another long-suffering sigh. ‘When isn’t there trouble?’

‘But … but this is a riot! That prophet who was in Galilee last week, he has come here!’

Liam heard the rustle of material, the clink of ceremonial chains as the priest got to his feet. ‘Clear the temple courtyard. Have the guards close the outer doors and keep watch outside.’ He heard those orders being passed on, heard the swish and rustle of movement and the slap of hurried bare feet against the marble floor, then the echoing groan of heavy doors being swung to and their clunk reverberating round the cavernous temple. Finally … 
finally
, it sounded as if he might be entirely alone.

He peeked through the drape. It appeared that he was.

Cautiously, he stepped out and crossed to the middle of the hall.
Where do I start? What am I looking for?

He remembered.
The Foundation Stone.

And, beneath that, there was supposedly that cave and from there passages that led further down.

… to the underworld? To Hell?

He shook that stupid notion from his head. He was looking for a way down beneath the temple. And quickly. He wondered how long Bob was going to be able to provide a distraction. He looked around. The walls of the hall were largely smooth facades of pale marble. Nothing that seemed like an invitation to be inspected more closely. Ahead of him was another altar, smaller
than the public one outside. It was covered with candles and smouldering incense sticks. Beyond was another pair of heavy drapes that ascended all the way up to the high ceiling of the temple … some fifty or sixty feet.

That’s important
. He looked at the drapes.
Tall. Surely symbolic?

He walked round the small altar and stood before the drapes. The material was thick and heavy; dark purple, blue and scarlet patterns swirled across it. Tentatively he pulled the drape aside; it swung heavily and Liam glimpsed into the dimly lit space beyond. He saw nothing but a stone floor. Not the smooth marble he’d been walking across but roughly hewn stone worn smooth.

That’s it … the Foundation Stone!

In the middle of the uneven floor was a carved hole approximately one and a half feet in diameter. A pale light was shining up through it. To his left, Liam noticed a bigger circular opening in the rock floor. He wandered over to it and saw that rough steps were carved into the bedrock leading down into the opening.

And that’s the entrance to the cave beneath it.

He took the first few uneven steps down, then crouched down low to see what lay ahead. He could see what appeared to be a small natural cave. Not something built, or even carved out … a natural void caused by geology. He took the rest of the dozen steps down, swerving past a tongue-like bulge of bedrock on his left that projected out. At the bottom of the steps he found it was just that; he was standing in a small cave with a low ceiling. A single thick tallow candle sputtered on a low table just beneath the hole in the ceiling.

No palm tree holding up the roof of the cave.

No wailing voices of tormented souls as Barton’s book had promised.

The light was dim, and jumped and flickered unreliably as the candle’s flame danced. He needed more light. He reached under the robe for his satchel and fumbled around inside until he felt the cool metal of the torch. He pulled it out and snapped it on.

Light reflected off the smooth, damp walls of the cave. This natural space was not quite as empty as he’d suspected; against one uneven wall a wooden rack supported several hundred dusty scrolls on wooden spindles. In one corner, a roughly hewn low archway led on to more steps heading down deeper into the bedrock.

Deeper we go, then.

He followed the steps until they brought him into another low-ceilinged space: a long and narrow cave that looked like it had been chiselled and chipped at in places to widen it and make it a more practical, usable space. The cave walls were lined, like a postal sorting office, with rows of two-foot-wide cubbyholes. He peered into several of them and curled his lips at the rags, desiccated flesh and brittle bones within. A mausoleum. He guessed the bones had belonged to the temple’s previous serving priests and Pharisees.

He made his way down the rows until he came across a low archway to his left. He shone his torch in and saw it led on to a narrow passage with a ceiling so low he’d have to stoop uncomfortably to make his way along it. It ran in a straight line, sloping down deeper into the rock. Again, it looked like it had once been a natural fissure, which had been hacked at with primitive tools to widen it further.

He panned the torch around. The long cave appeared to have other low archways leading off it, but since this passage seemed to be sloping downwards – and finding a way to get deeper was what he was looking for – he decided to follow it.

He ducked his head, hunched his shoulders and made his way down the narrow passage. The thick robe was making him hot; he could feel pinpricks of sweat on his body and felt a trickle of it running down his temple from his hairline.

Twenty yards down the sloping tunnel, he picked out another small opening to his right. A thick veil of dusty cobwebs hung across it and he grimaced with disgust as he pulled at them and shone his torch in.

Just a short inlet. A dozen feet back and, at the end, some threadbare material hung down from a wooden baton. He squeezed into the narrow space and reached out for the material. It was old, fragile. He pulled it gently aside to reveal not more roughly cross-hatched bedrock …

… but a small wall of stone blocks held together by a ‘cement’ of dried clay. He thumped his fist against the wall. It was firm. Too firm for him to break through without some kind of sledgehammer.

Dead end.

He cursed and smacked his fist against the stone again. After the reverberation had died away, he heard something else. The faint clatter of something loose and brittle falling to the ground on the other side of the wall. He struck the stone once more and heard it again. Grit? Mortar? Something … was cascading down on the far side.

That wall was built to hide something
.

He wondered whether he could have a go at knocking a hole through. Perhaps the clay mortar was perished enough that it would give easily.

He set the torch down at his feet and found a seam between two stone blocks and tested it with his fingernail. The mortar’s thin crust cracked like a pie’s pastry lid and spilled a small trickle of dry sand on to the back of his hand. Liam looked around to
find something long and thin he could use to probe deeper. Nothing. Then he remembered the small bag on his shoulder under the priest’s robe. He hefted the suffocating robe over his head, off his shoulders and on to the floor, then dug into his bag. He found what he was digging for. His black leather diary, the one he had inherited from Sal. More to the point, he found the biro bedded in between the pages. He pulled it out and used it to test the mortar further, dislodging more and more of the sandy material on to his feet. Finally, after a few minutes of prodding and scraping, one stone block wobbled slightly. Liam thumped at it with the palm of his hand. It scraped inwards slightly. He thumped again with both hands and it shifted backwards a fraction, dislodging a small avalanche of grit on the far side.

‘Come on,’ he grunted. ‘You’re gonna go this time, you stubborn bugger.’ He leaned back, locked his elbows and presented the firm heels of his hands and lurched forward. The block skipped backwards, then fell into the space beyond with a clatter that echoed into the void.

He held his breath as he listened to the echo decay, half expecting to hear something unpleasant, unnatural,
super
natural uncoil itself from an aeons-long slumber.

Here there be waiting demons … waiting to be unleashed. Waiting to reach through this hole and drag you down into their eternal Hell.

‘Oh, good grief, get a grip on yerself,’ he muttered.

He picked up the torch from the floor and held it up to the rectangular hole. Beyond this small wall, the narrow passage continued, sloping downwards for another twenty or so feet. However, the arched roof and walls, although carved through bedrock, were far smoother. Far too smooth. Not like the rest of this passage, roughly hacked out by chisel and hammer.

‘My God!’ he whispered.

It looked like it had been drilled out using modern machinery.

He panned his torch around. He could see the smooth walls were marked by subtle spiral grooves along the rock. It reminded him of the rifling inside the barrel of a gun.

At the end of the passage his torch settled on a perfectly flat wall that reflected his beam like a sheet of polished nightmare-black obsidian. Running along the base of the wall he could just about make out some faint markings.