Black Onyx Duology (5 page)

11

The decline took longer than Dillon thought it should. Part of the problem was that they were on a bridge. It was about six feet wide, wide enough that he didn’t have to worry about falling off the side as long as he stayed in the middle, but the drop on either side just went on and on into darkness. It could easily have been
thousands of feet.

The cavern now opened up into something otherworldly. It appeared like a massive dome as th
e bridge led downward. Dillon had to lean back. A trick he had learned in his stint as an ultra-marathon runner. On downhill slopes, you lean back, relax your legs, and let gravity do the work. Otherwise, your quads could give out and leave you so fatigued you would have to stop and rest for a prolonged period.

He glanced back to
James, who was winded, and then kept his eyes forward.

“Just think,” George said, seemingly not affected by the hike, “this place has been untouched by man for thousands of years. I was only down here an hour or so and didn’t really look around all that much. We’re really the first people to look at this place.”

Dillon and James didn’t respond. They were focused on not collapsing from exhaustion or falling over the side into the dark.

The bridge soon began to widen and they entered what looked like a covered corridor. It was sculpted completely out of ice, but it was too smooth.
Too well proportioned. It had to be manmade.

As they made their way down the
corridor, they saw George’s light stop. They came upon him and before them was a forest of shadows. They were symmetrical and evenly spaced with empty air between them. Even from this far and in little light, Dillon could see what they were: buildings.

“You have got to be kidding me,” he mumbled.

“Incredible, isn’t it?” George said.

James
looked like he might pass out. His mouth was open as he slowly ran the flashlight over the building closest to them. They were white and smooth, made of the same material as the exterior corridor.

“This,”
James said, quietly, “is the greatest archaeological discovery in the history of our species. Do you understand what this means, Dillon? They will have to rewrite every textbook on history, geology, archaeology, anthropology…maybe even literature and philosophy, mathematics. Who knows what knowledge is held here?”

“Easy big fella,” Dillon said softly, “remember why we’re here.”

“I almost don’t want to disturb it.”

“
James, tell me you’re joking.”

“I said
almost
, my young friend.”

George
said, “There’s a path right through here. I think it used to be one of their streets. I took it down like thirty feet and then turned back last time.”

James
took out his thermos and took a long swig of tea before replacing it and saying, “Time’s wasting gentlemen,” and headed out first. Dillon let George go next and he followed them into the maze of ancient buildings.

The streets weren’t covered in snow since
the entire city was protected by a dome. They could easily maneuver and there was enough room for all three of them to walk side-by-side and maybe have enough space for a few more men.

The buildings didn’t have any windows but they did have entrances without doors.
James stopped at one and glanced inside.

“Dillon, look at this.”

He poked his head in. The interior was laid out like a modern apartment. Tables, chairs, and even rugs. A vase was up on the table and Dillon, carefully, stepped inside. The vase was the same white material as everything else. He took off his glove and lightly touched it. It was warm to the touch.

“Um, guys, this thing’s warm.”

James stepped inside and took off his gloves and touched it as well. “Amazing. It feels almost like…something is running an electric current through it. It’s the warmth you feel with a doorknob that has an electric lock on it.”

Dillon walked into another room. It was the bedroom. The bed was
n’t soft. It was a hard, gray material that felt uncomfortable. There was nothing else here. He went around to another smaller room and found a table with things strewn across it. He felt an overwhelming sensation of history just now. He was looking at something, an arrangement, that someone had left over six thousand years ago. And no one had seen it since. His stomach was all butterflies.

On the table were what appeared to be tablets made out of that white material. He ran his finger on it…and it moved.

He jumped back. He waited a moment and then walked close and took out his thermos and used the cap to run across the tablet. It left a mark and when he ran it over again, it erased the mark. It was a tablet used for writing.

There were several of the tablets and most of them were filled with writing he didn’t recognize. “
James, come in here please.”

James
came in and stood beside him. Dillon wrote his name on the tablet.

“They had writing,”
James said, barely able to contain his excitement. “Dillon, they had writing!”

“
Look at all these.”

He showed him the tablets with the writings on them.
James stared at them a long time in silence. “This is mathematics. Look at this arch and the symbols underneath. That’s the catenary equation. It’s a graph of the hyperbolic cosine function. This is advanced geometry, Dillon.”

“Gentlemen
,” George shouted from outside.

The two men looked at each other and then ran out of the building. George’s light was across the city now and they ran to it. He was staring up at a t
ower. It seemed at least five, maybe six stories tall. They stood in front of it. It was covered with symbols.

“I think it’s the tallest building in the city,” George said.

“Is there an entrance?” James said.

“I walked all the way around, I don’t see one.”

Dillon walked to it and pulled out his own flashlight, holding it up to the symbols. They were diagrams and long series of squiggly lines and curves. He touched the tower. It was warm, like the vase.

“I think we’ve done enough for today,” George said. “Let’s go make camp before nightfall. We can come back tomorrow.”

Dillon didn’t move. Something about the tower…it was electric. He was about to push on it when he felt James’ hand on his shoulder.

“He’s right. We don’t want to be caught without camp at night here. Let’s go.”

Dillon turned back to the tower, staring up at it as he took a few steps and then turned and followed the men out of the city and onto the bridge leading to the surface.

12

Dillon warmed his hands by the fire in front of his tent. The air was col
d but it had a dryness to it that was almost like a desert. The environment changed so quickly he wondered how it was that anyone could spend more than a few days here. He glanced up to the sky. He had never seen anything like it. Each star was bright, almost a moon in itself, and he could see the cloudy coloring of the Milky Way—something he’d seen before in the middle of the jungles of Peru, farthest away from civilization.

James
came out of the tent and bent down over the fire. He was looking directly into it and Dillon could tell he had something to say.

“Dillon…”

“I know.”

One thing Dillon had l
earned about James through the years was that he wasn’t a man that showed emotion. It was the way he was, the way he had been trained in the British Armed Forces all those decades ago. He thought a man shouldn’t show emotion if he could help it, that it was somehow weak to do so.

He rose from the fire and put his hand o
n Dillon’s shoulder. “Goodnight, Dillon.”

James
went inside as Dillon stayed and stared into the fire. Dillon had lived on the street since he was eleven years old. Thrown out by an alcoholic father. His mother had been killed in a car accident, a drunk driver, and his father, unable to cope, turned to the bottle. Soon, his mind fragmented and he was unable to deal with reality. Everything became Dillon’s fault, including the death of his mother.

His father would go on long benders and have them end with intense beatings. Dillon was the only other person in the house and any girlfriends his father had didn’t stick around for very long. He became the object of his father’s hatred and depression.

At one point, he was beaten so badly he blacked out on the kitchen floor and woke up the next day, his head slowly bleeding onto the linoleum. Before his father would take him to the hospital, he made him clean up the blood.

The last time he saw him, his father had tried to break his head open with a baseball bat. Though young, Dillon knew he would have a better life on the streets of
Honolulu than living with this man. So he left.

James
found him one night in his house, burglarizing it. He had snuck in through an outside air vent, disarmed the home alarm, and cracked the small safe James kept in the bedroom. James had been so impressed, he didn’t call the police. And in fact started giving Dillon odd jobs. He came to the boy’s shelter one day when Dillon was thirteen and sat down on the cot next to him: there were only a handful of rooms and each of those were shared by six boys a piece. So everyone else just got a cot in a gymnasium.

Dillon would never forget how he felt when
he saw James walk in. He was dressed immaculately, in a gray suit with crisp white shirt and green tie. Dillon thought he looked like a king. James came and sat down on the cot that was provided for the boys.

“Dillon, I would like to take you away from here. I’ve spoken with your counselor about your situation. My understanding is that you have been thrown out of several foster homes. I understand your rage, I can see it within you, but let me tell you something young man, rage harms only you. It never harms the object of your rage. Do you understand?”

Dillon nodded.

“
I’m doing this because I believe you can change yourself, young man. There is to be no more of this petty crime. Do I make myself clear? Good. Gather your things, you’ll be leaving with me immediately.”

Two years later, Dillon was officially adopted and his last name became Mentzer. Now, at twenty-seven, he couldn’t remember what the last name of his biological father had actually been.

He stretched and stood up and looked to the sky again and then over to the mountain. He glanced from that to his tent and bit his lower lip.

“Screw it,” he mumbled. He pulled on his crampons,
snuck away some equipment, and began the long hike up the mountain.

It was cold, even with the several la
yers he had on, but there was an exhilaration to it that he was so familiar with, he wasn’t sure he could live without it. That’s what was most shocking about James’ retirement: what exactly was he going to do with the inevitable boredom that was coming?

The hike was torturous. Each step seemed to be more difficult than the last.
His hands felt numb and he had lost sensation in his feet a long time ago. Frost was building up in his nose and he’d have to stop and snort it out every ten or fifteen minutes. But the view was incredible. A dark, icy landscape lit by moon and stars. As he climbed higher, with nothing else around him, it felt as if he were climbing into the sky.

He reached the top and found the opening. It took a moment to bolt in the cables and ropes as the ice felt much harder than during the day, but he finished and harnessed himself in. As he lowered, he looked down the mountain to the small candle flame of the fire in the distance.

The cavern became pitch-black only twenty feet down and he flipped on his headlamp. He repelled down the rest of the way. The cavern seemed smaller in the dark as the illumination from his lamp only went about a dozen feet. It was quiet down here except for the echo of his crampons digging into the ice and snow.

Over the bridge, now without the sounds of others, he could hear a slight wind blowing
, though it didn’t appear like there were any openings in the cavern to let it in. He stayed in the middle and didn’t look down over the sides into the gaping maw of blackness.

He could see the shadows of the buildings as he came out of the corridor. It felt like people could still live here and he
stood quietly a moment just to make absolutely certain no one was. He went inside a home near the tower. It appeared identical to the one he had been in before, down to the vase on the table. He went into the bedroom and the bed was the same hard, uncomfortable gray material as the other. He lay down in the groove—and felt something.

Heat. Almost like a furnace. Dillon sat up and it was cold. He lay back down, and the heat overtook him again. Taking off his gloves and raising his hand, he could tell the exact moment when it went from hot to cold. It was a heat field of some kind, just over the bed. Without any holes in the gray material, he didn’t know where the heat was coming from unless there was someth
ing just underneath it.

He sat up and left the house. Wandering through the streets, he felt like an invader. He hadn’t asked anyone’s permission to be here, to be in
their beds or looking through their homes. Reminding himself that this was a town of ghosts, he walked to the tower.

Looking in the same place as before, he could have sworn the symbols had changed. But perhaps he was misremembering because o
f the excitement the first time?

He reached his hand out and touched it. It went straight through, inside the tower.