Nate fathomed the blackness ahead. “So we’re on the right track. We have to go on.”
“No, we have to go back up,” Kerri dissented.
“Now?!”
“Al said if we needed the masks, we’d better turn back!”
“We’re carrying oxygen for a reason!” (Shakes the air bottle connected to his mouthpiece.)
“Tim has no oxygen! (Points at the dog’s mask.) This is only helping him not to get poisoned, but he still needs to breathe!”
The Weimaraner had chosen to lie down on a ledge, clearly unhappy with his new accessory.
NATE: Shit. Okay, you’re right. You take him up, we’ll go on.
ANDY: No. We don’t split up.
KERRI: Then we all go back!
NATE: We haven’t found anything yet, nothing we didn’t know! (He snatches the blueprints out of Andy’s pocket.) Look, the last depth mark we passed was 5,200, and the tunnel ends at…(Reading the map.) Oh.
He put the map down, switched back to normal prose.
“We’re exactly at the end. This is uncharted territory.” He turned to the girls. “We need to split up.”
The fly-face mask amplified Kerri’s already deep, dramatic sigh. “Okay, you take Tim up; Andy and I will go.”
“No, you take Tim; we will go,” Nate countered.
No eyes explicitly set on Andy this time (the masks prevented it), but she knew the decision was on her once again.
“This is uncharted territory,” she reasoned. “So…this is the loony’s playground, not the scientist’s.”
She pulled out her pistol and offered it to Kerri, along with the extra magazines.
“Take this; we’ll keep the shotgun. You click the safety off…Hey!” She had noticed the mask in front of her was fixed on her, not on the gun. “Listen to this, it’s important. Click the safety off like this, aim, shoot. To reload, you press here to release the mag, shove in the new one, pull here, aim, shoot. Okay?”
“Okay.”
Andy turned to Nate. “Ten minutes and we come back, no matter what. Go.”
She hardly heard Kerri’s voice behind her saying, “C’mon, Tim,” but even sifted through the breathing device, Andy could tell she was mad.
—
The depth marks chalked on the rock ceased after 5,400 feet. After another while, Andy noticed the absence of any supporting beams. The ceiling often forced them to crouch; the passageway never got wide enough to extend their arms. Condensation on the walls had not been extraordinary before, but now small puddles of water on the floor were becoming a frequent sight. The notion that they had long ago abandoned a man-made tunnel for a random rift in the earth’s crust was slowly growing into an evident, choking fact.
Andy lifted her mask for a second, just to feel something resembling air on her skin. She didn’t. The reflex to breathe overruled her will, the one that sometimes manages to wake sleepers in a gas-filled room before they pass out and die. She put her mask back on and enjoyed the canned oxygen.
Neither spoke a word until they reached the antechamber.
Nate had to scan the minimal room to make sure the opening continued. It narrowed into a bottleneck, or a drain hole, just high enough to crawl through.
Without comment, Nate shrugged off his backpack and his jacket. The resulting boy in a Conan T-shirt and an aviator mask faced Andy with unperceived poise.
“I’m ready.”
Andy took off her bag, almost empty now, and crawled in first.
She did not bother to fear for spiderwebs or critters—unless Kerri taught her different, she was sure nothing resembling animal life could survive down there. Her light found and bounced off the opposite end unexpectedly near, blinding her. The bottleneck was only four or five feet long, opening into a small, final chamber.
This was where their journey ended: a room the size of a phone booth in the entrails of the world.
The one remarkable feature was the writing.
Someone had literally covered the walls with script, all over the chamber, spiraling down, creeping up, orbiting around one single drawing directly facing the entrance: a circle with geometric lines or constellations inscribed in it and some disturbed child’s stick figures with their arms raised around it. This was the secret that lay hidden at the end of the wormhole.
Nate stood up in the white-lit egg-cavern, took a pencil and started scribbling on the reverse of the blueprints.
“Holy shit,” Andy commented. “Is this…prehistoric?”
“No, it isn’t.”
“How do you know?”
“Well, for starters, the Latin alphabet didn’t come to the Americas until Columbus,” he said. “And these symbols”—he pointed at the monograms around the circle—“they’re from the Necronomicon.”
“So, this side of Columbus…Is it Debo?n?”
“I think so.”
Andy touched the drawing, only then noticing how smooth the rock was.
“How come this wall is so flat?”
“I don’t think it’s a wall,” he said, peeking up from his notes. “I think it’s a door.”
The danger, or the need for perspective, made her step back as far as the egg-cavern allowed. The wall looked a little too perfect to be natural; it must have been carved. And then there were the corners. Right angles were to be expected in a man-made slab, but on close inspection there weren’t any; all angles missed exact orthogonality by a few degrees, enough so that it gave the uncomfortable feeling of being both wrong and designed.
“What’s on the other side?” she asked.
“Something big,” Nate said in a significant whisper. “A city. A god. Nothing that’s supposed to see the light of day.”
“How does one open it?”
“I don’t think you’re supposed to open it. You knock.”
“Is that what Debo?n did? In ’forty-nine? (Thinking.) And the wheezers answered.”
“Yes, he probably didn’t expect that.” His pencil pointed at the drawing in front of them. “I think this schematic is the instructions. See, that’s a pentacle.”
“Looks like a circle to me.”
“That’s what a pentacle is, in essence—a circular field and a few symbols around it; the power comes from the sorcerer. See the five stick figures? They form the pentacle—five priests to summon the monster.” He let the light tour the whole room. “And these spells must be the equivalent of a doorbell,” he said, beginning to write them down. “I think that’s where it starts; ‘Nga?ah Metraton…’ Is that a G?”
“I think’s it’s a Z.”
“?‘Zariat…’?”
“?‘Zariatnatmik,’?” Andy tried.
“?‘Zariatnatmik, Thtaggoa kchak’ui…’?” he wrote down. “And then ‘Mflughua Mr, mflughua Ling, khtar mglofk’ui, nokt nrzuguk’ui…’?”
“Nate?”
“?‘Ia Thtaggoa gnasha uikzhrak’ui htag zhro…’?”
“Nate!”
Nate froze, suddenly noticing the trickles of pebbles rattling off the ceiling.
“You’re reading spells aloud!” Andy shouted at him, mask to mask, over the crescendo of rocks stirring below them and above. “A-fucking-gain!”
The best of the quake clapped right then, just like thunder. Only it sounded right inside their ear canals. The cave had become a cocktail shaker.