Paw-Prints Of The Gods (12 page)

“Thanks,” he said.
“For nothing.”

* * *

Professor Cadmus
paused beneath the arch and raised the lantern high above his head.
The ancient door had yielded easily under his determined attack
with the mattock, whereupon he had stood and stared for what seemed
an age into the dark ‘Y’-shaped passage beyond. The star chamber
was built of glass blocks as perfectly aligned as those of the
grand gallery in Khufu’s pyramid at Giza. The moment he set eyes
upon the meticulous architecture within he knew without a doubt
that he was right, Doctor Jones was wrong and the mysterious
construction on Falsafah was indeed the work of an unknown alien
intelligence.

Years before in Egypt,
Cadmus had led the team that discovered the secret vault behind the
wall of the king’s chamber and been the first to gaze upon Khufu’s
long-sought sarcophagus and treasures. The thrill he felt on that
occasion was nothing compared to the fever that gripped him now. At
Giza, he was lauded for finding the prize missed by countless
archaeologists before him, but singularly failed to find the proof
he personally sought that extra-terrestrials built the pyramids.
Here in the Arallu Wastes was something beyond archaeology, beyond
history; this was a discovery to make humanity a mere footnote in
the universal story, the history of everything. To go it alone was
a daunting prospect.

The floor of the
entrance chamber sloped down and split into two tunnels, leading in
different directions sixty degrees apart, equally dark and
mysterious. The walls were bare and incredibly smooth to the touch,
reflecting the light of his lantern with a muted matt glow. Cadmus
slipped the oxygen mask onto his face, took a hesitant step forward
and paused. His academic mind knew he ought to be recording his
observations in some way. On the other hand, the adventurer in him
suspected that after smashing the door to smithereens it was
probably too late to think about doing things properly. With a
determined step, he strode forward and on an impulse selected the
right-hand tunnel.

He did not get far.
After no more than twenty metres the passage veered again to the
right, continued for the same distance to a sharp left, then
carried on a little further before ending at a solid wall.
Undeterred, Cadmus retraced his steps, carefully scrutinising the
walls and ceiling along the way to make sure he had not missed
anything. Once back at the entrance chamber, he barely paused
before heading down the other passage to the left.

Around twenty metres
later this passage veered left, mirroring what he found in the
right-hand tunnel. As expected, when he had gone the same distance
again, the passage turned sharply right, only to split into two
parallel tunnels, the right one sloping down. Confused, Cadmus
shuffled to a halt and shone his light down the descending passage,
conscious that the trench entrance was now far behind. Without the
lantern the darkness would be absolute.

“A labyrinth,” he
murmured, his words muffled by his mask. “Crafty aliens.”

His suspicious were
confirmed when a quick exploration of the right-hand tunnel led him
around a bend to another dead end. Upon returning to where the
original passage split, Cadmus took a few steps down the left-hand
tunnel and then stopped to root through his pockets for a piece of
chalk. He was just about to leave a mark to help him find his way
back when something further along the wall caught his eye. Curious,
he shuffled across to look and then gasped. Barely a metre away
along the same wall was a neat white cross. Someone or something
had been here before him and had the same idea.

He returned the chalk
to his pocket, his hands shaking. As far as he was aware his
expedition was the first to excavate at this spot, but the cross on
the wall and Govannon’s earlier remarks about the odd
stratification and a buried oxygen tank were making him think
again. Yet he was certain there were no published archaeological
reports on Arallu.

He lifted a cautious
finger to the cross and found it was indeed white chalk. With a
casual sweep of his jacket sleeve the mark was gone. This was his
moment in history and he wanted nothing to suggest otherwise.

“This is my
discovery,” he murmured. “Mine!”

“The past belongs to
all, I think you said,” a small voice replied.

Cadmus froze. For a
moment he thought he saw a small furry shape sitting on the floor
ahead, then in a blink of an eye it was gone.

“Hello?” he called,
his voice wavering. “Is anyone there?”

Silence greeted him
like a heavy shroud.

“Anyone?”

There was no reply.
Taking a deep breath, Cadmus swept the beam of his lamp down the
empty tunnel before him and behind, then hesitantly walked onwards
down the left-hand passage. He tried hard to convince himself that
the silence and cloying darkness was playing tricks with his mind.
Yet he was sure the voice had not been in his head.

A short while later
the passage veered again to the right, after which there was an
identical stretch of tunnel that ended in another sharp left and a
split into parallel passages, the right-hand one once again sloping
down. When he looked for a chalk mark, he found it in the left-hand
passage as before, reinforcing the idea he was following in someone
else’s footsteps. After hearing the strange voice, it was not a
comforting thought.

He was beginning to
understand the layout of the star chamber. He knew from aerial
scans that the shape buried beneath the desert was a huge
six-pointed star. It seemed he was moving clockwise within the
outer wall, with every sixty-degree turn to the left followed by a
hundred-and-twenty-degree turn to the right. As he followed the
left-hand passage onwards, this deduction continued to prove true
and two turns later he found himself at a sharp bend where again
the passage split. Here he found another white cross, this time in
the right-hand passage that descended into a darkness that felt
thicker than ever. Pausing only to wipe the mark from the wall, he
continued on his way.

Once again a familiar
pattern emerged of gentle left turns followed by sharp turns to the
right, though the gap between corners was shorter than before.
Despite the sloping passages, the ceiling level remained unchanged
and was now twice as high as in the earlier tunnels. Every sharp
right-hand bend had the same parallel split as before, all marked
with ever-familiar chalk marks that he removed as quickly as he
found them. With each half-turn around the perimeter, the white
crosses directed him to a deeper and more compact level. It dawned
upon Cadmus that the labyrinth was a concentric set of star-shaped
passages, linked together in a slow spiral to whatever lay deep at
its centre.

After the twelfth
cross Cadmus felt weary and subdued. The cloying darkness was
making him hallucinate and on more than one occasion he was
convinced he heard the patter of paws and a distant yet plaintive
yowl of a cat. He had been in the chamber for almost three hours
and was now so far underground that the light of his lantern no
longer reached the ceiling. The narrow passage was nevertheless
claustrophobic.

“My dear Professor
Cadmus,” came a voice. “I think maybe you’re in too deep.”

Cadmus came to an
abrupt stop and fearfully looked around into the darkness.

“Who are you?” he
cried through his mask. “Where are you?”

A grey tabby cat
ambled from the shadows. The professor stared at the apparition in
disbelief, his mind doing somersaults. The cat regarded him
solemnly, its yellow eyes glowing in the light of the lantern, then
turned away to lick its fur.

“No pets are allowed
on site,” Cadmus reassured himself. “Cats do not talk. Therefore,
the creature sat in front of me washing itself is clearly a figment
of my imagination.”

The cat paused in its
ablutions and gave him a hard stare. All of a sudden, the
four-legged phantom leapt dreamlike from the floor and promptly
metamorphosed into a tall, raven-haired woman, dressed in a
floor-length coat of silver and black fur. Cadmus gave a whimper
and stepped back, fearful for his sanity. There was a god-like air
to her that was both incredibly beautiful and unspeakably cruel, as
if she would quite happily stab him to death with a hairbrush. The
woman took a step forward, leaned casually against the wall and
regarded the professor with a weary gaze. He was not surprised to
see that within each yellow iris her pupils were dark vertical
slits.

“You have no
imagination,” she purred. “You profess to be an academic but you’re
nothing more than a feeble-minded bureaucrat, just one more pawn in
the great game. Do you really know why you are here, deep down in
this forgotten hole in the ground?”

Cadmus took another
step back. “Who are you?”

“Some things are best
left buried,” she told him. “You don’t have to be one of them.”

“What?”

“Turn around!” she
said, sounding impatient. Her accent, together with her olive
complexion, made Cadmus wonder if she was Greek. “Go back! You’re
almost out of oxygen. Do you really want to die down here?”

Cadmus glanced at the
eye-level digital display of his mask. He had used almost three
quarters of the contents of the tank.

“The chamber is open
to the dome,” he replied, wondering why he was bothering to have a
conversation with a mirage, even one remarkably informed. “The
life-support plant will eventually fill the whole labyrinth with
air.”

“Whatever,” she
snapped. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you!”

Abruptly, the figure
was gone. Cadmus stared into the darkness, breathing heavily into
his mask and wondering if he really had just been talking to a
woman who was maybe also a cat. Yet the dust upon the floor was
undisturbed and there was no sign that anyone or anything had been
in the passage with him. Eventually, his breathing became more
regular. He pushed the strange warning into the back of his mind
and stepped forward once more.

The distance between
corners was now barely a dozen strides. The passage no longer split
away to a lower level and his spirits rose with the thought he was
near his goal. The third sharp bend on that level was indeed the
last, for beyond the final chalk mark the tunnel curved gracefully
into a tall archway that opened into the inky void at the heart of
the labyrinth. Cadmus slowly turned to the arch, placed a foot upon
the final slope and raised his lantern to the mouth of the
pitch-black cavern beyond.

“Oh my word,” he
breathed. “Incredible!”

The arch opened into a
cathedral-like chamber some twenty metres across that rose into a
dizzying darkness far above. The star-shaped ground plan remained,
for in the light of his lantern he could see five triangular
alcoves ascending like huge grooves to the distant ceiling, with
the arch opening into the sixth. Yet all of this received a mere
glance. Before him lay a tableau that baffled his archaeologist’s
eye.

In the centre of the
chamber sat a huge egg-shaped cocoon. It was at least three metres
tall with dull green skin, an oval aperture that gave a tantalising
glimpse into a dark interior and multiple-jointed spindly legs that
sprouted from the top and folded to the floor. The cocoon lay
partly-submerged in a dark pool of what looked like oil, which in
turn was surrounded by a ring of twelve grey rods that rose to
waist height. A narrow tongue extruded from beneath the oval
opening and formed a bridge to the solid ground beyond the pool.
The bizarre, multi-legged monstrosity looked like the work of a
crazed taxidermist who had taken pieces of a giant insect statue
and reassembled them into a surreal playhouse for the deranged. The
mottled pattern upon its skin suggested a biological origin, but if
it had ever been a creature of flesh and blood Cadmus was fairly
sure it had breathed its last aeons ago. The archaeologist in him
knew he had done wrong to expose the chamber to air, for the lack
of oxygen would have preserved it well.

“A shrine, perchance?”
he mused. The angular depths of the chamber swallowed all noise,
reinforcing the aura of desolation. The idea that a multi-legged
giant egg represented a strange alien deity lodged uneasily in his
mind.

Curious, he stepped
down the slope and into the vault. To his alarm the ground was not
solid and quivered beneath his weight as if it were a sheet of
stretched rubber. Cadmus cautiously circled the rods and swung his
light towards another indistinct shape lying in the shadows beyond.
When his eyes fell upon the dark bulbous body and tangle of limbs,
an uncontrollable shiver ran down his spine and he gave a little
yelp of fright.

“How gross!” he
murmured.

Half-submerged in the
floor were the remains of a huge spider, with a body a metre long
and a tangle of legs that must once have stood nearly three metres
tall. The carcass was a tarnished maroon colour, which to his
surprise was sheathed in what looked like plates of armour. Cadmus
was perturbed by the suggestion that the arachnid had somehow sunk
into the floor and he backed away, not daring to take his eyes from
the horrible sight.

There was something
else behind the weird ancient cocoon. Cadmus stepped past the dead
giant spider to get a better look and gasped in disbelief. In the
shadows beyond lay a rounded capsule, about the size and shape of a
human coffin. The faded emblem upon the white casing was the stars
and stripes of the United States of America.

“But that’s
impossible!” he muttered.

“Impossible?” came a
familiar mocking voice. “Can you not open your heart and mind to
the possibility of what you see here?”

The woman leaned
casually against one of the upright rods, examining her
black-lacquered fingernails with a tiger-like grace. Cadmus had to
admit he had a hell of a vivid imagination when it came to creating
this particular delusion.