Scavenger (32 page)

“He isn’t moving,” Amanda said.

They stepped warily forward, the flashlight providing details.

“Oh, my God,” Amanda said.

The man had no eyes. His cheeks were shrunken. The fingers that clutched the object to his chest were bones covered with shriveled skin. Dust filmed him.

“Dead,” Amanda murmured.

“A long time,” Balenger said. “But why didn’t he rot?”

“I read somewhere that caves have hardly any insects or microbes.” Amanda’s voice was hushed. “And this tunnel’s deep in the mountain. The ice.”

“What do you mean?”

“Another clue the Game Master gave us, but we didn’t realize what it was. He said, in the winter the town harvested ice from the lake and stored it in the mine. The tunnel was cold enough to preserve the ice through the summer. The town used it to keep food from spoiling.”

“The cold mummified him,” Balenger said in awe.

“The object he’s pressing against his chest looks like a book. But what’s holding him up?” Amanda stepped closer.

Now it was clear that the corpse was tilted slightly back against a board supported by rocks at its base. Ropes at the knees, the stomach, the chest, and the neck secured the mummy to the board.

“Who tied the ropes?” Balenger shivered and not just from the cold.

“The knots are in front. Maybe he did it himself.” Amanda moved the flashlight up and down. “He could have kept his hands free until he tied the final rope around his chest. Then he could have shoved his right hand up under the rope to press the book to his chest. Next to him, we see how the illusion works, but at the entrance to the chamber, he looked like he was greeting us.”

“Meet Reverend Owen Pentecost,” the Game Master said. But this time, the voice didn’t come from Balenger’s headset. Instead, it came from speakers in the walls. The echoing effect was unnerving.

“The bastard had a sense of drama,” Balenger said.

“You have no idea,” the Game Master replied.

“I suppose the book in his hand is a Bible.” Amanda tilted her head to try to read the title on the spine. When that didn’t work, she set down the lantern, hesitated, then directed a finger toward the book, reluctantly intending to nudge it and expose the title.

Balenger grabbed her hand. “It might be booby-trapped.”

In the flashlight’s beam, the bruise on Amanda’s cheek contrasted with her sudden pallor.

“Iraqi insurgents loved to hide pressure-sensitive bombs under U.S. corpses,” Balenger explained. “As soon as the bodies were lifted or turned, the explosives would detonate.”

Amanda pulled her hand back.

“It’s not a Bible,” the Game Master said. “It’s called
The Gospel of the Sepulcher of Worldly Desires
.”

“Not exactly catchy,” Balenger said.

“Pentecost wrote it in long hand. It predicts the evils of the coming century and the need for people to understand the truth.”

“So, what’s the truth?”

“See for yourself.”

Amanda aimed the flashlight toward an opening in the wall behind Pentecost. Ready with his gun, Balenger stepped forward while Amanda guided him with the flashlight. They went through the opening and entered a much larger area.

Amanda gasped.

Balenger tasted something bitter. “Yeah, it’s a sepulcher, all right. Worldly desires.”

3

A cavern loomed. Stalactities and stalagmites partially blocked what Balenger and Amanda stared at. Because of the limitations of the flashlight, it was impossible to see everything at once. Amanda needed to move the light from object to object, place to place, tableau to tableau.

Corpse to corpse.

The citizens of Avalon awaited them. They wore what might have been their Sunday go-to-church clothes, now dusty and drab after more than a century. Like Pentecost’s, their faces, too, were sunken, cheekbones made prominent by withered flesh. Mummified in the tunnel’s preserving cold, they looked tiny. Their clothes hung on their bodies like shrouds.

The group nearest Balenger and Amanda consisted of four men, who sat at a table, playing cards.

“Remember not to touch anything,” Balenger warned her.

The men were tied to the chairs, but unlike the ropes that secured Pentecost, these were concealed. The cards were glued to their hands. Their bent arms were nailed to the table. A pile of money lay before them.

At another table, men sat before a whiskey bottle and glasses covered with dust. Ropes and nails held the corpses in place.

“Sins,” Balenger murmured.

At a further table, this one long, he saw men, women, and children seated before plates that might once have held mountains of food. Indistinguishable desiccated masses were all that remained. Bones from what looked like pork ribs and chicken drumsticks crammed their mouths.

On a bed, two naked female mummies lay beneath a naked man. In another bed, a man touched two naked children, male and female. Elsewhere, a naked man lay face down over a table while another naked man lay over him. Further on, a man had congress with a dog.

“It seems Reverend Pentecost had sexual hang-ups,” Amanda said.

A woman sat before a dusty mirror, a hairbrush and containers of dried makeup before her. A man lay face down on a table, a hole in his temple, a revolver in his hand. A mummy played a fiddle while a man and woman danced in a close embrace that seemed impossible until Balenger realized that they were nailed to a board positioned between them and held up by a base of rocks.

Everywhere Amanda turned the flashlight, similar tableaus came into view.

“Music and dancing? Pentecost considered a lot of things to be sins,” Balenger said. The flashlight revealed a camera attached to a wall. Taking angry steps toward it, he asked the Game Master, “Aside from the man with the bullet hole in his head, how did all these people die? What
was
this, a mass suicide like what happened when Jim Jones made his people drink poisoned Kool-Aid?”

“Flavor Aid,” the Game Master corrected him. “The poison Jones used was cyanide. His church was the People’s Temple. More than nine hundred of his followers committed suicide. At Jones’s urging, they claimed to be protesting ‘the conditions of an inhumane world.’ In recent times, it’s only one of many mass suicides motivated by religion. In the late 1990s, the members of the Order of the Solar Temple Movement killed themselves to escape the evils of this world and find refuge in a heavenly place named after the star Sirius. The Heaven’s Gate cult drank poisoned vodka so they could go to paradise by being transported to a space ship concealed behind the approaching comet Hale-Bopp. But my personal favorite is the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God. They had visions of the Virgin Mary and believed that the world was going to end on December 31, 1999, the eve of the recent millennium. When the apocalypse didn’t arrive, they recalculated and decided that March 17 was the true date for the end of the world. More than eight hundred people died in anticipation of what they believed would be the end of worldly time.”

“So I’m right,” Balenger said. “This
was
a mass suicide.”

“No. Not even the man with the bullet hole in his head is a suicide. The shot was delivered after he died.”

“Then ...?”

“A mass murder,” the Game Master said. “Pentecost killed all two hundred and seventeen townspeople, eighty-five of them children. For good measure, he included family pets.”

“So many people against one man.” Balenger could barely speak. “Surely they could have stopped him.”

“They didn’t know it was happening. Pentecost convinced them to come here on New Year’s Eve of 1899 because they believed they were going to be transported to heaven. They believed it so strongly that they braved a storm to get here. The mine, Pentecost assured them, was the appointed place. He needed this cavern. It was the only way he could kill everyone at once.”

“How?” Amanda insisted. “Poison? Was there enough food or water for him to poison all two hundred and seventeen of them? How could he have poisoned it without them noticing?”

“Not in food or water.”

“If he didn’t shoot them, I don’t see how he could have killed so many people at once.”

“Arsenic is an interesting substance. When heated, it doesn’t liquefy but instead transforms directly into a gas.”

“Pentecost
gassed
them?”

“It smells like garlic. It came from a sealed chamber with hidden air vents, so they couldn’t stop it from filling the mine. After Pentecost started the fire that heated the arsenic and released the gas, he went outside and locked the entrance to the mine. Back then, the buildings at the bottom of the slope were intact. He waited out the storm in one of them. Then he opened the door to the mine and let a ventilation shaft dissipate the gas. Later, he arranged the tableaus. He wanted the Sepulcher of Worldly Desires to be a lesson to the future. When he fulfilled his mission, he arranged his own tableau, then poisoned himself, and went to what he believed was heaven. As you noted earlier, mines and caves don’t have many insects and microbes. Along with the cold, that’s one reason the bodies were mummified. But this mine did have
some
insects. The reason those few insects couldn’t do their work is that the arsenic on the bodies killed them.”

Balenger surveyed the tableaus in disgust. “While I was on my way here, you told me the Sepulcher would show me the meaning of life. I don’t see what that is, unless the truth is everyone dies.”

“But not us,” Amanda emphasized. “At least, not this evening. We found the Sepulcher before midnight. We won! We get to leave!”

The Game Master didn’t respond to her statement but instead told Balenger, “The meaning of life, the hell of it is that people believe the ideas in their minds. Worse, they act on those ideas. Consider the great mass murderers of the previous century. Hitler. Stalin. Pol Pot. Millions and millions of people died because of them. Did those men consider themselves insane? Hardly. They believed that the agony they caused was worth the result of implementing their visions. The ancients thought that the sky was a dome with holes through which celestial light glowed. That was their reality. Later, people believed that the sun revolved around the earth, which they thought was the center of the universe.
That
was considered reality. Then Copernicus argued that the earth revolved around the sun and that the sun was the center of the universe.
That
became reality. Reality is in our minds. How else can anyone explain what happened in this cavern? Reverend Pentecost and Jim Jones and the Order of the Solar Temple and the Heaven’s Gate group and the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God. Their thoughts controlled their perceptions. A space ship hiding behind the comet Hale-Bopp? Hey, if you can think it, it’s real. Poison two hundred and seventeen people so they can be a lesson to the future? For Pentecost, that was the most obvious idea imaginable. ‘We create our own reality,’ an aide to the second President Bush once said. The truth of the Sepulcher of Worldly Desires is that ideas control everything, and all of it is virtual.”

“Which means that
your
idea isn’t any better than anyone else’s!” Balenger’s voice rose in outrage. “
Your
thinking’s as flawed as Pentecost’s! So is your game! But now it’s over! We won! We’re leaving!”

The Game Master didn’t reply.

Balenger motioned for Amanda to turn the light toward the exit. They stepped toward the other chamber in which Reverend Pentecost had stood for more than a hundred years, waiting to greet the future.

Balenger felt the punch of a shockwave. His muscles compacted as the rumble of an explosion reached him. The walls trembled. Rocks fell. He almost lost his balance.

“No!” he shouted as the reverberation lessened. He and Amanda ran to the tunnel, but thick dust blocked their way. Coughing, they staggered back.

Amanda spun, looking for a camera. “You son of a bitch, you told us you didn’t lie! You swore you never created a dishonest game! You promised we could leave if we won!”

The Game Master remained silent.

Gradually, the dust settled. Balenger and Amanda went cautiously forward, aiming the flashlight toward the continuation of the tunnel. They came to where they’d left Ray’s body. A barrier of fallen rocks now covered him.

“Jonathan must have detonated Ray’s GPS receiver,” Balenger said.

“Don’t call me ‘Jonathan,’” the voice ordered.

“Why not? You’re not playing by the rules anymore. Why the hell should we call you the Game Master?”

“Who said the game is over?”

Balenger and Amanda studied each other in the flashlight’s glare.

“I don’t know how long the batteries will last. Did you bring others?” Amanda asked.

“No.”

After a long desperate silence, Amanda said, “Maybe we can make torches from the clothes in the Sepulcher.” She tried to sound optimistic, but her voice dropped. “Bad idea. The flames might ignite combustible gas.”

Balenger grasped at a possibility. “If there was gas, wouldn’t it have overpowered us by now? Wouldn’t the explosion have set it off?”

“Maybe. But now that I think of it, the flames from the torches would use the oxygen in here. We’d suffocate faster than if we waited in the dark.”

Her voice became still.

A growl replaced it. As Balenger and Amanda whirled, the flashlight revealed the two dogs that had stalked Balenger from the creek. They seemed larger. The light made their eyes red. Saliva dripped from their teeth. My God, they followed us inside, Balenger thought.

Snarling, the dogs came forward. Balenger raised the gun, but immediately, they reacted to it. Before he could shoot, they turned and raced into the darkness.

“They’re trapped in here with us. They don’t have anything else to eat. When this flashlight goes out ...” Amanda couldn’t finish her sentence.

“Yeah, it’s getting harder to keep a positive attitude.” Balenger kept aiming toward the darkness.

“The lantern,” Amanda said.

“What about it?”

“If it’s a bomb, we could use it to try to blow these rocks out of the way.” The flashlight in Amanda’s hand wavered.