The Tomb Part 1
A red sunset behind the eastern peak. In with a chilly November, breeze came long tendril fingers of fog, swirling and settling at the base of Sardinia’s tallest mountain, Punta La Marmora. The gathering of villagers exhaled puffs of mist, adding to the haze with every angry shout. Lanterns, pitchforks, rusty metal flashlights, and furious fists rose and fell, rose and fell above a snarling host of raven-haired locals.
A blonde young man with the face of a cherub kept in step with his fellow archeologists. Hugo Morgan was fresh out of university but the top of his class. There wasn’t a hieroglyph or cuneiform wedge he couldn’t read. Hugo did not, however, need a degree to read the villager’s expressions. His scholarly heart fluttered at the sight of these snarling beast-men. A coiled cobra of a man came swinging with his right. Hugo jumped back. The assailant stepped in for another with his left. Hugo flinched behind his flashlight. Flesh slapped against flesh. Hugo opened his eyes to see an officer clasping the red-faced villager’s fist. “Come osi!” the mustached officer barked. “How dare you?” He wrestled the farmer backward into the mob. Hunched over and eyes flitting this way and that Hugo took cover between his fellows, Barnes and Preston as they proceeded. “What on earth are they in such a fuss about?” Hugo asked them. “Oh, them, yes,” said Preston. The course hay of his whiskers pulsed with every movement of his invisible mouth. “Superstitious lot, these,” Preston said. Little but Preston’s wrinkled eyes were visible between the mask of his beard and the rim of his silly safari hat. “Some legend I think,” Preston said casually, “A curse of the dead and all that. This happens more often than you think.” “Makes you feel like an Egyptologist doesn’t it?” Barnes asked, whipping his head around and grinning at Hugo. Young Barnes had gray dewdrops for eyes and a massive black mole on his forehead, peeking now and again from under his neatly combed bangs, ruining an otherwise handsome face. Yet the wonder in his smile had no competitor. “Exciting isn’t it, Hugo ol’ chap?” Barnes asked. “We’re real Howard Carters and this is our King Tut.” Barnes gestured dramatically toward the site. Hugo craned and walked up on his toes, lifted high struggling for a glimpse of the thing over the heads of yelling villagers. He could still only the see the grassy top of the fabled burial mound. “God bless it,” Hugo said, “No one has told me a thing save that I should come immediately. What is this curse?”
Dr. Fenn whirled around all of a sudden, his turtle shell backpack and white wizard’s beard side-swiping an officer as the he came with a pointed finger jabbed at Barnes. “Don’t you tell him nothing! Ye hear me ye little upstart? It’s bad enough we have to deal with these heathens. Don’t ye go scaring the lad with your fantastical nonsense!”
“Doctor, I like fantastical nonsense!” Hugo said, “and I will not be scared. Not one bit. I promise.”
Dr. Fenn spun back round with a sneer and a dismissive wave, continuing onward through the throng.
Hugo bent into Barnes’ ear. “Tell me.”
Barnes cupped his mouth and whispered to Hugo. “The mound is said to be the grave of a genuine monster and all who enter either die or become monsters themselves.”
“Silly,” Hugo said with a laugh but it was a nervous laugh and it earned him a sidelong eyeball from the Doctor over one shoulder. “I’m not scared of silly things,” Hugo insisted.
“Aye, it is silly,” said Dr. Fenn, “for I have been inside and neither happened to me, did it?”
Someone wailed like a banshee. A brute of a man jumped at Dr. Fenn with a knife. Dr. Fenn put out his left hand. Barnes and Preston rushed ahead. Hugo heard the doctor yelp. Yet before his fellows came to the rescue Dr. Fenn reached out an arthritic claw, grabbed the brute by the wrist, and twisted it. Bones cracked. The brute shrieked and fell over. This tall, young male with chorded muscles moaned and wailed at the feet of the crooked old Doctor.
What manner of man is Fenn? Hugo thought. Some seventy years old and he put goliath down.
Dr. Fenn looked at his left hand. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph! Ye done cut me ye barbarous son of a bitch!”
“Are you alright, Fenn?” Preston asked, motioning to see the doctor’s dripping fist.
“I’ll be fine Preston, soon as we get into the bloody place.”
The police officers in front of the procession, now beating back villagers with metal batons parted like curtains. The four archeologists came finally to the burial mound and stood in its twilight shadow. Freshly excavated megalithic stones, some two meters in height and five meters in width, encircled the base, serving as the foundations of the manmade earthen hill.
The shouts and cries all about went mute. Hugo, trance-like, walked onward and placed his palm against some wholly awe-inspiring symbols or pictographs, carved into a massive round gray stone. This stone could be likened to that which had been rolled before the entrance of Christ’s tomb, and great ropes, used in pulling it away from the entrance, were still attached to the thing. Though Hugo did not recognize the writing upon it he could see that it was sloppy and carved in a rush.
“You will not regret coming, lad,” said Dr. Fenn, giving Hugo a pat on one shoulder with his clean hand. “I wager my career on it. There are more of these images inside, and they are far more bony than these.”
“Show me,” Hugo said.
Dr. Fenn yanked a flashlight off his belt, turned it on and guided its electric beam into the dark and narrow passage. “After you Mr. Morgan,” he said.
Hugo Morgan passed from grass to dirt, into the stone corridor. With his leather satchel it was a tight squeeze and he marveled at the doctor plugging along behind with his backpack. Hugo fancied himself a weasel, trespassing upon the burrow of a snake for either shoulder would touch the wall if he leaned so much as a centimeter left or right. Hugo lowered the yellow beam of his flashlight to the floor careful not to the trip as he plunged deeper into the gloom. The angry shouts diminished. The passage it seemed had a very steady downward slope. A scent of soil grew more pungent. It was heavy on the thin and stagnant air.
“Keep your light on the wall lad,” Dr. Fenn said, just behind him. “The best symbols and images are here in this very passage.”
“In this cramped and narrow space?” Hugo asked with astonishment.
“Yes, rather bizarre isn’t it? Almost to them now, oh, yes, look there!”
The circles of light from multiple flashlights illuminated it and Hugo gasped.
There, both carved and painted into the megalith, hidden away for some thousands of years was a stone tapestry of symbols and pictographs. Images of strange trees with red leaves, towered above the archeologists on both sides and peculiar birds graced their boughs. Between the brown, painted trunks were both pictographs and phonetic symbols. They looked to Hugo like a bizarre amalgam of Egyptian hieroglyphics and Celtic runes. Hugo put out a hand to touch the writing but recoiled at the thought of smearing perfectly preserved paint. Certain symbols looked like people, and all of these human figures faced right. “Ah,” Hugo said, “The script is read from right to left.”
“My word Hugo,” came the enthused voice of Barnes from behind, “You can tell that already?”
“Alright, now lad,” said Dr. Fenn, “you have time enough to look at these. The rest of us want into the body of the structure, so in you go.”
Hugo peeled himself away from a panel of symbols, walking onwards. His flashlight flitted back and forth between the opposing walls. “Oh, look here,” he said, stopping. The other three archeologists practically fell over him like a bunch of dominoes. “These trees here, these symbols are all upside down. This entire great rock has been placed upside down!” Hugo paused and gasped at this and that figure or this and that line until the old doctor was practically shoving him down the very tall but very narrow passage.
The tiny corridor opened in a great round cavern of a room and the archeologists spilled and spread apart, their electric circles of light dancing as fairies on the intricate walls. These walls were not intricate in the sense that they had symbols, but rather they were made of little pieces of something. Hugo ventured closer. He yelped and staggered back. “Bones!” he exclaimed and the whole room echoed with his cry. The beams of light and judging eyes of the other three men fell upon him. “The walls in this room are made entirely of bones!”
Indeed there were skulls and leg bones and all sorts of other bones Hugo had no name for, stacked upon each other. In all directions, long dead men and women gazed at him through black and empty sockets.
His fellows laughed at him.
“Morgan, dear boy,” said Preston, “This is a crypt and a Celtic one at that. It’s fairly common to see bones in the walls. I suppose walls made of bones are different, but really, it’s not an enormous digression from the usual fare. It’s far more unusual to find such a place dug so very deep in the ground like this. Most unusual, that.”
“I erm, yes, of course,” Hugo said, flattening out the hairs on the back of his neck. Then the beam of his flashlight fell upon something at the center of the circular room. It was a massive rectangle of stone. “Wait.” Hugo edged toward it. No, it couldn’t be. Is that a-”
“A sarcophagus,” said Dr. Fenn.
“Much like the one in the Great Pyramid at Giza,” Barnes added with a crescent moon grin. “Plain, and without marking but thick and heavy. Look inside it, Hugo.”
Hugo approached and saw that a massive lid had been slid aside onto the floor. With careful feline steps, Hugo approached the open stone coffin. The light beaming from his hand glinted off of something inside. Eyes!
Hugo took a single step back. No. Not possible. Then he came closer and stood just beside the sarcophagus with Dr. Fenn. The corpse of a woman lay there in her final resting place. Hugo new little of human anatomy, and even less about female anatomy but she had long black hair and an hourglass figure. Her skin was brown and dried from age, her cheeks hollow and her arms were skeletal but her torso, still graced with traces of fabric still has some feminine curves and her long black hair, in its tiny, delicate braids flowed about her. None of these things startled Hugo so much as the eyes. They were still there in her head. A milky film clouded the fleshy orbs yet a subtle hue of green still remained in the irises. “Are her eyes marbles or gems?” Hugo asked.
“Good question, lad,” said Dr. Fenn, “but no.” He switched his flashlight into his bleeding hand, shone it down on the body and pointed to her face. “Her eyes are like that because the body stopped producing pigment.” A single droplet of Dr. Fenn’s blood fell onto her thin dry lips.
“Dr. Fenn, sir,” Hugo said, pushing the man’s arm away, “you are bleeding on her. Sir, haven’t you got some bandages in that pack?” He looked at the Doctor's palm, holding the man’s hand in his and saw the gash was deep. “Oh, goodness, that looks serious, Sir. You need a physician.”
Dr. Fenn swiped his hand away. “I do have bandages, Mr. Morgan. A full first aid kit in fact.” The doctor unloaded his backpack on the earthen floor. “Listen, lad, we all have our things to do. I worry them heathens outside have a mind to destroy this place, and in all honesty, the police are already talking about leaving.” The doctor rummages through the enormous backpack. He tossed two notebooks and of all things a pickaxe on the floor. “If the villagers want to take this place down,” Fenn said, pulling out a white box with a red cross, “ then they will take it down.”
“No!” Hugo exclaimed, “We can’t let them do that!”
“Morgan,” Preston said. “What would you have us do?” Even beyond his broomstick bristles, Preston’s gut piercing look of helplessness was plain.
“I… I…”
“What we can do,” said Dr. Fenn, “is making a record of this place, with detailed drawings and descriptions. Damn shame the photographer didn’t come. At any rate, if this site cannot live on in body then it will live on in spirit.”
“Alright,” said Hugo, “I’ll work day and night to translate. I really am honored Doctor, that you-”
“Mr. Morgan,” Dr. Fenn said. “We have one night.”
Hugo Morgan’s dinner dropped very suddenly into his bowls.
“Best get to work lad,” said the doctor. He winced as he applied some disinfecting ointment to his hand.
Barnes and Preston headed round the sarcophagus with a determined walk.
“Where are you two off to?” Hugo asked.
“Down there,” said Barnes, shining his light on an opening Hugo hadn’t noticed before. It was dug down into the dirt, a sloping ramp descending into inky blackness.
“What’s down there?” Hugo asked.
“More bones and a pool of water,” Barnes said. “Leave the rest of this place to us shovel bums, Hugo. You just copy down on paper as much of that writing as you can.”
“Quite,” said Preston, already headed down the earthen ramp, “It is the most valuable thing at this site but decipher it later, dear boy.”
As doctor Fenn set about wrapping his wound Hugo Morgan marched back up the exit corridor, adjusting the leather satchel as he walked shoulder to shoulder between the two engraved walls. The muffled shouts of villagers met his ears as he ascended. How on earth am I to inspect all of the text if I haven’t even the space to crouch down? Hugo wondered. Also, why did the builders put writing in such a narrow passage? One cannot even stand back to properly view the red leaves or the birds in those trees at the very tops of the stones. Hugo came upon the great upside-down megalith. It, like all the other giant blocks comprising the thin hallway, was perhaps five or six meters tall and two meters wide. Hugo pressed himself against the opposite wall, aiming his flashlight upwards. Unless this hallway was not designed for the text to be read. Hugo gasped in realization. Yes! These giant stones are from an even earlier building! They were stolen to make this newer structure! This mound is a Frankenstein of stones.
Hugo opened his satchel and whipped out a notebook. His flashlight wedged between his chin and chest as he scribbled these ruminations down and then walked further up toward the entrance. He came upon the first of the inscribed stones. If these are stolen rocks, not meant for reading, they are doubtless placed in a random order, which will make translating all the more difficult.
With a sigh and a quickly developing pain in his craning neck, Hugo set about the task of copying each line of symbols into his notebook. The text, of course, began high up, right under the red leaves of the trees. Given that Hugo could not step back nor get a ladder, he had to begin with much lower lines. He worked so cramped and so alone. As a splitting sensation worked is way down through his furrowed brow he thought now and again that the hallway was getting thinner. He rubbed his face. He longed for a cup of tea but on he went, line by line. When he neared the bottom of the stone he counted himself lucky. With his slight frame, he could lie down and continue copying. The text cut off at the bottom though, buried by the sloping dirt floor. Finished with that stone, he flipped briefly through his notes.
At least five of the characters were well known Egyptian hieroglyphs, and every Celtic rune he’d ever studied was represented here in its earliest known shape. There were, of course, unique symbols as well, at least four of which repeated themselves with high consistency, so here was a text both phonetic and pictographic, perhaps a transitionary form of writing from symbol to sound that his professors had long theorized about. Maybe a hieroglyph and a rune were paired together to form a syllable.
“Ruuh.” A real and audible syllable echoed up the corridor from the depths of the crypt. It vibrated across Hugo’s skin, prickling up his every hair and freezing the pump of his heart for a moment.
“Dr. Fenn?” Hugo called. Naught but silent air and scents of soil surrounded him.
Hugo aimed the beam of his flashlight on the next megalithic stone. A crack ran down the middle of this one, making some of the carvings hard to discern.
“Ruuh, ruuh, ruuh.” The gritty groans crept up his neck like a breath on his ear. So real was the sensation that someone was beside him yet when he swung his metal flashlight up and down it moved with ease through empty space. He pointed the light down the length of the passageway. The beam flew a few meters before a stomach of blackness abruptly digested it.
“Barnes?” Hugo asked. “Mr. Preston?”
No one answered.
“I am not afraid,” Hugo said to himself, “not one bit.” He plunged down into the darkness.
The passage led him into the round room with the skeleton walls. Dr. Fenn was gone but Hugo heard him speaking to the others down below, talking about the rarity of articulated remains amongst the Celts. Hugo walked gradually up to the sarcophagus. He shone his light inside. The woman’s eyes glistened. She was beautiful, insomuch as a dead person can be. Perhaps, she was more beautiful than before, her cheeks less hollow. Of course, in this horrible lighting, the mind could play tricks. Maybe the odd place played tricks with sound too. It was a villager I heard grunting. I misinterpreted the direction from which the sound came. Yes, definitely, for you are perfect their in your slumber, quiet and perfect. You are not angry or fearful like the villagers are like living people are. For, in death you are perfect.
Then came a different sound, this one more horrible than the first; a cacophony of stone grinding against stone. The entire tomb shook. “No,” Hugo gasped. “No!” He ran back as fast as he could through the narrow corridor, “Don’t do it! No!” Hugo labored with every pull upon the thin air. He sprinted. His thighs burned and then his outstretched hand went smack into hard stone, a barrier where the exit should have been. A chill permeated the Christ-like cover stone and seeped into Hugo’s palm. His hand became a fist and he slammed it against the rock. “You ignorant bastards! You pagan filth! What do you think this will accomplish? You backward, rural, book-burning slime! Open it! The authorities know that we’re here. This accomplishes nothing. Let us out!”
If the villagers were still shouting if they sang with joy Hugo could not hear it. Such was the impenetrable nature of this buried prison.
Then a scream! A masculine cry of human terror belched out of the belly of the tomb.
Hugo turned around. His knees buckled beneath him. He dropped his notebook and his flashlight, sitting in the heap of his legs and the curse of the dirt. He waited. He waited in mock silence. His pulse beat outward against his eardrums. The flashlight rolled. Darkness fell. Never had Hugo, in his modern and civilized life, surrounded with lamps and light bulbs, been so blind, so utterly encompassed in abyssal black. Frantic, he felt around in the dirt for the battery-powered contraption.
THUMP. Something soft but heavy pounded upon dirt. The noise came from the bottom of the slope, from the end of the corridor. Then it scraped through the soil. DRAG.
What was that?
THUMP, DRAG; hurried footfalls approached. THUMP, DRAG, in a rushing limp. THUMP, DRAG, ascending the slope. THUMP, DRAG, getting louder as they came.
Hugo failed his hands through the dirt, looking for his light. A page from his notebook stung him. A paper cut. The cut throbbed through the soil as he searched.
THUMP, DRAG.
Where is the flashlight!?
THUMP, DRAG.
Hugo thrashed about but the walls held him still. The place was a sarcophagus, dark and cramped with no escape. The stones behind and beside him pressed closer in, closer like the THUMP, DRAG, THUMP, DRAG, of something awful, limping its way up toward him.
Hugo stood. He reached out his arms in the void. He made ready for the monster.
An electric sun rose over the horizon of the earthen floor; a flashlight.
“Who’s there?”
“Hugo,” came a wretched breathy voice. “Hugo.” The orb of light came closer.
Barnes appeared out of the gloom, his face a phantom white. He stumbled into Hugo’s arms and they collapsed into the dirt. Hugo grabbed Barnes’ flashlight and shined it upon him as he heaved in Hugo’s lap. “Barnes,” said Hugo, “they closed the…”
Blood… it oozed in thick gushes from a wound at the side of Barnes’ neck.
“Hugo,” Barnes said, “curse of the mummy, Hugo. The curse of the mummy, Hugo, it ...” Barnes gasped for air but it sounded like more of a gurgle.
“Barnes?” Hugo cradled his friend’s face by both cheeks. “What happened? Barnes, tell me!”
“Curse,” Barnes said, spitting up blood. “Curse.” The word grew quieter each successive time he said it, “Curse. Curse. Curse,” until he stopped saying it and Barnes with his neat head of hair in Hugo’s lap, went still. His dewdrop eyes stared at the ceiling.
“Barnes?” Hugo asked in a whisper. “Barnes!” he shouted. He gave his friend a shake. Warm blood spilled onto his trousers, trickling down both legs and he dropped the man. Barnes fell face first in the dirt, lodged between Hugo’s knees.
Hugo sat there, his hands trembling around the cold metal flashlight, his gaze fixed far down toward that place where the beam vanished into the darkness. He stared so long that the sight of the stones and the dirt lost meaning. All thoughts emptied from Hugo’s head. A pool of blood formed and Hugo merely sat in it, for it was neither wet nor sticky, it was nothing. Everything was nothing and no such person, as Hugo Morgan had ever existed. Hugo viewed the archeologist trapped in the tomb, as he would a man on the silver screen, just a character in a story. This character who “Wasn’t scared one bit,” panted and wept, nodded and rocked and finally rested back against the cover stone as if glued to it. Then the man looked up at the ceiling and it spun. He closed his eyes. Hugo became Hugo again and Hugo stood up from the puddle of blood, backing himself into a corner, hugging his own torso. His notebook lay ruined, stained with crimson and his flashlight… his flashlight, there it was. He picked it up. He had two of them now but flashlights wouldn’t get him out of here.
Hugo remembered Dr. Fenn’s pickaxe, the one the good doctor had tossed on the floor in search of his first aid kit. He looked at the cover stone. The giant thing he’d marveled at only hours before now sealed him in the den… of a monster.
Hugo turned toward the darkness, standing between a literal rock and a hard place. He took the plunge, back down the corridor for the third time.
