Cryptozoica (35 page)

“What the hell is that?” Kavanaugh asked. “Where is that light coming from?”

“The outside, perhaps,” whispered Honoré.

“Why are you whispering?”

“I have no idea.”

The passage stretched toward a narrow archway. Upon either side of it loomed a pair of twelve-foot tall statues sculpted of dark stone, with their arms crossed over their chests like Egyptian pharaohs. Although the finer details had long eroded away, the shape of their heads and faces resembled those of serpents.

Belleau said faintly, “Those look like Sumerian statues of the Annunaki, uncovered in Ur a couple of hundred years ago.”

“The Naga,” Bai said quietly.

Mouzi said, “They look like bloody lizards to me.”

“Same thing, young Miss Mongrel.”

The chamber on the other side of the archway was vast and echoing. Every rustle of sound was answered from the high, vaulted ceiling. The walls were tiled in confusing patterns of blue, red and yellow, displaying Enochian glyphs.

The chamber opened onto a broad foyer, bracketed on either side by crumbling colonnades. They walked onto narrow, smoothly paved causeway, rising several feet above the cave floor. On either side towered obelisks of obsidian, with Enochian glyphs still visible upon their faces.

“What the hell are we seeing here?” murmured Crowe, playing the beam of his flashlight over the monoliths. “The style almost looks Egyptian, but they have Mayan or Olmec characteristics, too.”

“A little of all three, I should say,” stated Honoré.

“Who built it?” Kavanaugh asked, feeling dread knot up inside of him. The wavering green patch of light had not grown any brighter, but the roaring grew in volume.

Belleau laughed suddenly, but it held a note of hysteria. “Off the top of my head, I would guess
they
built this place.”

Everyone came to halt, shining their lights around, hearts pounding, moisture in their mouths drying. All around them dark shapes loomed. Blurred by the shadows, at first glance the figures looked like hideous travesties of humanity.

The beautifully polished stone of the ceilings and walls had been carved in elaborate reliefs, depicting events in the lives of creatures taller than Oakshott and leaner than Kavanaugh, lizard-things wearing high headpieces, holding scepters and dressed in the trappings of nobility. 

Honoré, Crowe, Bai Suzhen and Kavanaugh stared wide-eyed, stunned, shocked and awed. The frieze stretched down the length of the great hall, displaying many different scenes, most of them surrounded by inscribed Enochian symbols.

“What are we looking at?” Crow demanded, the ghostly echoes of his voice chasing one another in the shadows. “A history of some sort?”

He played the beam of his flashlight over a sequence of reliefs that stretched out for several yards. The images depicted a naked human male and female surrounded by Enochian glyphs, twisting in on themselves to form a helix pattern. Even in the dim light, the features of the male and female looked brutish, with small craniums and pronounced brow arches.

The next frieze showed the humans standing on either side of a reptilian-featured entity, his arms around them. Their lower bodies were not visible. Instead, they appeared to rise from a stylized oval.

The final image depicted the male and female and holding the tiny hands of a baby as if they were drawing it up from the oval. The baby’s features looked very smooth, not possessing the outthrust supraorbital ridge.

“Watch your eyes,” Honoré warned, lifting the Nikon to her face. She snapped flash-pictures of the frieze, moving sideways so she could capture a continuous panoramic view.

Belleau quoted quietly, “ ‘And it came to pass when the children of men had multiplied, and the Watchers lusted after them and Samyaza who was their leader, said unto them, 'Come, let us choose us wives from among the children of men and beget us children ourselves.’”

Honoré lowered the camera. “What are you babbling about?”

“It’s a verse from the Book of Enoch…quite possibly the most important clue to solving the mystery of
homo sapiens sapiens.
”

“Are you claiming the Watchers are the same as the lizard people, what you’ve called the anthroposaur?” Kavanaugh snapped.

“Exactly.
Anthroposaurus sapiens
. Just consider—a small group of late Cretaceous-epoch dinosaurs survived the K-T extinction event here on Big Tamtung, the Troodon among them. Partly due to the effects of Prima Materia on their genetic structure, they followed the original design Nature had for them, if not for the K-T.

“Over a period of several million years, their forelimbs became hands, their claws turned into opposable thumbs, their vision developed binocularly and of course, the fact that they were already bipedal gave them a big advantage over any primitive mammals that might have been on the island.”

Mouzi stared at him blankly, and then intoned, “So lizard-people built all of this, all of those buildings outside.”

Belleau nodded. “I think so, yes.”

“That’s what you think because you’re crazy.”

Before Belleau or Oakshott could respond, Crowe asked, “If the Troodons evolved into humanoid forms, then why didn’t the other dinosaurian species do the same over the last sixty million years?”

“A chimpanzee will not evolve into a gorilla no matter how much time you give it,” Belleau said. “The Troodon were already predisposed genetically to evolve in that direction…upright bipeds with hands, opposable thumbs and forward-facing eyes…not to mention the boost provided by the Prima Materia.”

Kavanaugh pointed the flashlight toward the arch at the far end of the causeway. “Let’s see what’s on the other side there.”

As they strode through the arch, their flashlight beams dissolved into a mass of green-white illumination. A wide fissure high in the rock ceiling allowed for fog-diluted sunlight to shaft in. It gleamed on the litter of bones and skulls spread out over the cavern floor. The chamber was a catacomb, a vast crypt. Hundreds of skeletons were strewn around them.

Bai Suzhen prodded a rib cage with the point of her sword. “These aren’t human bones.”

“No,” said Honoré kneeling beside a huge hollow-eyed skull topped by a bulging crest.” They look mainly like the remains of Hadrosaurs, with some tapirs mixed in, too. Animal bones.”

“Not all of them,” Mouzi said, pointing with the barrel of the autorifle. “Look over there.”

A yellowed human skull grinned up from the tumbled skeletons of animals. Crowe toed aside a rib cage, dislodged a big femur and uncovered the scraps of a khaki shirt. A gold wristwatch and ring glittered among the fragments of bone. Picking up the ring, he revolved it between thumb and forefinger in a shaft of sunshine, highlighting the insignia of the School of Night.

“Dr. David Abner Perry, I presume,” murmured Belleau.

“What is this place?” asked Bai Suzhen.

“A bone-yard,” Kavanaugh stated grimly. “Like those in the backs of slaughterhouses or rendering plants. I worked in one when I was in high school in Evansville.”

Honoré eyed him wonderingly, anxiously. “You’re saying someone—or something—brought these animals in here for the sole purpose of slaughter…to butcher them?”

“That’s what it looks like to me.”

No one spoke for a long moment, but Honoré suddenly shivered as if with a chill.

Mouzi tensed, her shoulders stiffening. “I think I’ll have to vote with Mini-me on this one…best we get out of here.”

As they turned toward the archway, they glimpsed a hint of stealthy movement in the murk beyond. Pinpoints of red fire glowed, moving points of flame that seemed to dance and shift in weird rhythm. They heard the rustle of scales and the clatter of claws on rock, like the clicking of giant castanets, echoed in waves throughout the cave.

The sound was followed by a series of high-pitched, piping skreeks. A dozen Deinonychus advanced on them through the gloom, spreading out to surround them.

“Demons,” muttered Mouzi, putting the M16 to her shoulder.

Several more of the Deinonychus emerged from the shadows, spreading out in a semi-circle. They thrust their heads forward, skreeking and hissing, eyes darting back and forth. Their angry cacophony filled the cave, pressing in on everyone’s eardrums.

Crowe, Mouzi and Kavanaugh put Honoré and Belleau behind them, tracking the movements of the creatures with their guns. Oakshott picked up a big bone, a tibia, to use as a bludgeon while Bai Suzhen sidled to the rear, sword held high, to make sure they weren’t attacked from that quarter.

A quick head count showed Kavanaugh at least twenty of the sinewy, red-and-black striped raptors, many them with fresh blood glistening on their snouts and talons. Several others held chunks of raw, dripping meat in their forepaws. Their combined hissing hit painfully high notes, like a score of teakettles on full boil. Almost as one, their tails rose, the tips pointing toward the ceiling.

“I think they’re getting ready to rush us,” Crowe announced, finger curling lightly around the trigger of the Colt Python. “I sure hope this ammunition is still good after all these years.”

Kavanaugh sighted down the barrel of the revolver, targeting the head of a Deinonychus who seemed particularly aggressive. “I guess we’ll find out the hard way. Dr. Roxton—”

“—Honoré,” she corrected tersely.

“Honoré…when we start shooting, you and Aubrey run like hell for the next chamber.”

“We don’t know what’s in there!” Belleau objected.

“We know what’s out here, don’t we?” snapped Honoré sarcastically. “Do as the man says.”

Opening its jaws wide, a Deinonychus lunged forward—then halted, closing its maw with a loud clack. It tilted its head up, and then cocked it to the side, as if listening to a sound that both puzzled and enthralled it. Slowly, its tail drooped. Kavanaugh stared in astonishment, then he heard the trilling of a bird, a rising and falling note. The sound touched off sweet, corresponding vibrations somewhere deep inside of him.

The Deinonychus slowly retreated, their sibilant hissing becoming a brief confused babble of little yips and chitters.

In a voice sounding as if it were forced through a constricted windpipe, Belleau husked out, “Darwin reported hearing a birdsong when Hoxie was attacked.”

“Yeah,” Kavanaugh said, not lowering the pistol, even though the Deinonychus no longer made a threatening display. “I heard it, too.”

The trilling whistle came again, a complicated series of notes. Several of the raptors stepped toward them, their heads jerking in upward nods, as if they were responding to the string-tugs of a puppeteer. Kavanaugh turned toward the aperture leading out of the bone-yard. “I think we’re supposed to go that way.”

Crowe eyed him worriedly. “You think? Why?”

“The monsters are being told to herd us over there.”

“I don’t necessarily believe that,” Belleau said fearfully.

“It’s either go that way, or try to walk through the raptors. They don’t seem inclined to allow us to do that.”

Bai Suzhen gazed at the greenish gloom on the other side of the opening, gingerly touched her injured shoulder and said quietly, “All things being equal, let’s go that way.”

She stepped through the arch, leading with her sword, held in a two-fisted grip. Kavanaugh followed her closely, and his sense of danger, of foreboding grew, so that he moved against it as a man breasted waves. He wasn't the only one who felt it––even Oakshott’s normally placid expression showed apprehension.

The roaring increased in volume, becoming a steady thunder. Shafts of late afternoon sunlight speared down from a dozen round holes cut in the rock ceiling. Each one appeared to be at least three feet in diameter.

The waterfall cascaded past the openings, spumes of mist collecting around the rims, glistening with a greenish glaze. A shifting umbrella of steam hung just below the cavern ceiling. Water dripped down from above––not quite a drizzle but every surface glistened with moisture.

Kavanaugh came to a halt, and then moved aside to allow everyone else to come through. Belleau stopped dead, blinking owlishly at the contents of the chamber hewn out of solid rock.

It wasn't so much its contents that startled Kavanaugh, as the sensation of stepping back in time several thousand years into a central clearinghouse of several ancient cultures.

A tall, round pillar bearing ornate carvings of Enochian glyphs alternating with animal heads was bracketed by two large sculptures, one a hawk-headed man and the other a serpent with wings.  Lacquered ivory screens depicting Asian ideographs hung from the walls. There were other screens, all bearing twisting geometric designs, a combination of cuneiform, Enochian and even hieroglyphics.

Ceramic effigy jars topped by animal-headed gods and goddesses from the Egyptian pantheon were stacked in neat pyramids. On the far wall hung tapestries worked in multi-colored threads that depicted scenes from ancient times––ziggurats from which sprouted terraced gardens, representations of animals long extinct, like the mammoth and the megatherium, of human and not-human faces. The images offered brief glimpses into a world lost many millennia ago.

A pedestal rose at the far end and huge stone figure loomed atop it, sitting cross-legged in the lotus position. Six arms curved out like snakes from a body that was half-snake and half-woman with provocative breasts and the coiled trunk of a serpent for legs.

The huge room was an archeologist's paradise. Kavanaugh struggled to comprehend the enormity and age of the collection and why it was here. Finally, he realized it was a representative sampling from every human culture ever influenced by the long-dead race Belleau called the anthroposaur, and Bai Suzhen knew as the Naga. Empires had risen and fallen, their histories long forgotten and nothing was left of their glory but their art.

“Amazing,” Belleau said. “Beyond belief. Darwin was right again.”

“About what?” Honoré asked.

“That humankind's earliest ancestors may have been reptiles. According to the Darwinian explanation of the origins of the human species, mammals evolved from reptiles and gained dominion over the Earth.”

“What?” Crowe demanded incredulously.

Belleau gestured to the artifacts. “See for yourself…Egyptian, Sumerian, even Chinese. Don’t you think it’s rather remarkable that in so many ancient creation stories humans are said to be related to a superior reptilian race? In most cases, a great global cataclysm eradicated the earlier species and the survivors of the disaster started anew, eventually evolving into humans. Convergent evolution.”

“Specious pseudoscience,” said Honoré disdainfully, but she sounded doubtful.

Belleau shrugged. “An advanced reptilian species evolved from the Troodon would explain a great many mysteries about the origin of human civilization. Even Carl Sagan speculated that the leap in brain evolution among hominids in Africa and Asia was mysterious. He felt that it would have taken five to ten million years for humans to evolve, but the fossil record doesn’t bear out that conclusion.”

“And what’s your conclusion?” Bai Suzhen challenged.

“I don’t have one, per se, but I can propose an alternative.” Belleau smiled slightly. “It is possible that advanced beings had a hand in accelerating the human evolutionary process. The anthroposaurs—let’s call them the Naga for the sake of convenience—developed their own culture long before humankind graduated from stone tools and spread out over the world.

“They became culture-bearers, the source of all legends about wise serpents and dragons. Their interaction with humanity formed the basis of the belief that human royalty was descended from dragons…the kings and queens of Europe for example...the so-called Dragon Sovereignty, which allegedly can trace its origins back to the Annunaki in ancient Sumeria.”

“I doubt there’s any way you could conclusively prove that hypothesis,” commented Honoré dryly.

Kavanaugh shifted his flashlight away from the tapestries and played the beam over a recess in the rear wall. Two figures sat there on seats of glassy volcanic stone, roughly hewed into the likeness of thrones. The lean figures seemed at first to be strange works of sculpture, but as Kavanaugh stepped closer, he saw that the nearer figure was a cadaver. He felt the hairs lift on the nape of his neck.

The head was tilted back, with the mouth hanging open. A central ridge of bone curved down from the top of the domed skull to the bridge of a flattened nose. The dry flesh, stretched tight over the skeleton, had the texture and color of dusty leather. The eye sockets were empty black hollows. The body shone with a waxy sheen, as if it had been in dipped in lacquer.

In a voice hushed and thick with awe, Honoré whispered, “No myth, then. The serpent folk, the anthroposaurs.”

“No myth, no mere legend,” Belleau said. “The Oannes, the Anunnaki, the dragon kings actually existed, co-existed with humanity.”

“The Naga,” said Bai Suzhen faintly.

Impatiently, Mouzi asked, “Who the hell was doing that bloody whistling?”

The body seated in the second throne stirred, the lipless mouth opening slightly, and from it issued a prolonged rhythmic whistle.

Everyone watched with wide eyes as a sudden spasm of movement shook the lean form. It turned its head and for the first time, Kavanaugh accepted it was a living creature, breathing and moving, aware of its surroundings. Its gold and black eyes swept over the people, then fixed on Kavanaugh. They stared straight into his soul.

“Jah-Kuh.”