Posted by Thanatos on June 24, 2000 at 15:47:42:
At last, I get a story finished that I must have started nearly two months ago. Here's one for all the sharp instrument fans, as a few nasty nightmares come to life for an archeological team exploring:
The Tomb (c) Thanatos Reborn 2000
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SOMEWHERE IN SOUTH AMERICA, PRESENT DAY
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With each stroke of Julie Chambers' machete, the undergrowth lost more of its grip on the underlying stone.
The sultry midday heat in the dense jungle was overpowering, but Julie was accustomed to it, and a fine sheen of sweat covered her honed body as she slowly and deliberately swung the machete, cutting away the layers of plant growth from the ancient stone. Like the other members of the expedition, she was dressed for the jungle; T-shirt, khaki pants and rugged lace-up boots.
She had to restrain her excitement as she saw carvings revealed on the stone block underneath the falling vegetation.
Another large chunk of tree growth fell away.
An eye socket glared at her.
'Oh my God,' breathed Julie, and she tugged the remaining small branches away with her hands, and flicked a damp strand of hair from her eyes as the statue was revealed.
A strange noise began in the clearing, and Julie turned in puzzlement. The guides were shrieking in fear, and drew back to the furthest edges of the clearing, chattering fearfully in their language.
Julie turned back to what she had uncovered.
The face of Death stared out at her, its ghastly profile cut in stone, and a necklace of shrunken and crumbling human skulls lay at its feet, fallen where the strands had rotted, long ago.
Julie surveyed the stone in rapture, shaking her head. Her chest heaved with emotion, and she felt salty tears stinging at the corners of her eyes.
'Well, Julie, looks like you were right, after all,' said Kathryn Marsh, clapping Julie on the shoulder. Julie turned round and hugged her, and she could barely speak.
'After all these years... all those bloody years. I've finally found it.' Julie tore herself away and turned to the stone again. 'It really is here, girls. We're going to find it!'
Julie's cries rose up into the forest, and as the other members of her team came up to congratulate her, nobody noticed that the forest had fallen strangely silent, and that the numerous birds that wheeled over the canopy had fled.
* * *
Julie walked back from the terrified natives and gathered the rest of the expedition round her.
'Okay. They say they're not going any further. Bad Magic. The last statue was bad, but this one; it's like scared the shit out of them. I've tried more money, but it's not working.'
Above Julie's head, another statue leered. This one, twice the height of the first one, was surrounded by human skeletons, and it was plain to see that it had once stood in a grove of death; the skeletons had nails embedded in their hands and feet, and had been crucified in rows around the statue.
From the half-open mouth of the statue, a stone tongue was held poised in mid-air, and it shrieked a silent warning that all could hear.
'So what do we do?' asked Alison Caldwell, their linguistics expert. Julie could see that Alison's nerve was failing; she was looking anxious.
'We go on. We didn't come all this way to listen to stupid native superstition. We can manage from here on anyway. Can you all carry some extra supplies?'
They all took off their packs and set about redistributing the supplies that the porters had been carrying; mostly the food and water. The tents they wouldn't need anyway once they were inside the tomb complex.
As they repacked, Julie glanced at each one of them in turn, checking that they were okay.
Alison was the team's expert on the ancient inscriptions that they hoped and expected to find within the tomb. The work had helped her to compose herself, but she still looked anxious and worried.
By her side, Kathryn expertly repacked. She was the team's climbing master, and would be responsible for managing all their descents and traverses that they would have to make. Tall and athletic, she exuded quiet confidence.
Behind her, Danielle Arnault, the team's doctor, was going through her medical supplies, trying to figure out what she could leave behind that would save weight. She hefted a small oxygen cylinder in her hand, and eventually set it aside as being too heavy.
Lastly, Nicole Boyle, the antiquities expert from the British Museum. Julie didn't really know her very well, but Nicole had proven herself to be very reliable during the ten-day hike into the jungle that they had endured to get here. Nicole felt Julie looking at her, and she raised her eyes and grinned with excitement.
Clearly, Nicole was looking forward to the prospect of exploring an unopened tomb, and Julie tried to put her own fears behind her as she finished sorting out her own pack. She had thrown out most of her spare clothes, and some of the stuff that just wouldn't be needed, but she still kept her compact underground surveying equipment and GPS locator.
Eventually, they were all sorted, and Julie left the guides with strict instructions to remain here for them, not that she had any doubt that the moment their backs were turned, they would run off into the jungle, even without their pay.
Their spare supplies she stored by the feet of the hideous statue, in the hope that its presence would dissuade the porters from looting them. It certainly seemed to be working; the natives wailed every time Julie even approached the statue, and they shrank away from her when she returned, as if she was somehow tainted by its touch.
'So, guys, where's the entrance?' asked Julie brightly, and Nicole laughed.
'We're close, that's for sure,' Nicole said, 'It'll be well hidden, but with a bit of luck we should find it today.'
* * *
They didn't find the entrance that day.
The ground was deeply rutted and thick with impenetrable vegetation, and every meter they advanced was won by sweat and the tears of frustration.
They had split into two groups, each checking out their assigned squares of a grid pattern.
Midday came and went, and the afternoon, and still no result, and the afternoon brought a downpour, so that they were working in mud most of the time. Their spirits, so high after finding the two outmarking statues, sank again, and that night they were mostly silent, sipping their tea and busy with their own thoughts.
The next morning was different.
It started in much the same way as the day before, with hardly any progress, and no result, up to midday.
Then, shortly after their rest at noon, Danielle uncovered a stone animal head. It was lying on its side, and broken, as if it had been part of a larger statue, and they fell silent as they saw it was the broken head of a jaguar, its mouth gaping open, its fangs bared in warning.
They started to search near the fallen head.
They found the body of the statue soon after, crouched on top of a stone plinth of crumbling stone. Then, three meters away, a similar plinth, with a statue of another jaguar mostly intact on top of it.
And between the two plinths, guarded by the twin statues, and covered by impenetrable growth that took hours to clear, was a flight of broken and tilted stone steps.
The girls worked until nightfall to clear the top few steps, and most of the next morning too.
Finally, by late evening on the second day following the discovery of the steps, they had cleared away sufficient of the tree growth and packed soil to reveal a stone door at the bottom of a flight of twenty steps.
It was over two meters tall, and it vast bulk loomed over them, caked with soil from its long immersion in the jungle floor.
* * *
Kathryn's muscles stood out as she strained on the crowbar. For long moments, nothing seemed to be happening, then with a tearing of roots that had grown into the cracks, the stone door started to move. Immediately, the others jammed in their crowbars into the gap that Kathryn had opened, and then slowly, slowly, the slab was torn open.
A damp, fetid air rolled out, like the exhalation of a ghost, and they smelt the air of the sealed tomb. Julie could hardly conceal her excitement, as the smell indicated that the tomb had remained sealed, and had not been disturbed in antiquity by robbers.
Insects tumbled from the lintel of the door and pattered down on the stone floor that was revealed behind the door.
'Jesus Christ,' muttered Nicole, 'this really could be it. It's the right kind of design, and will you look at the condition of the stone - it's never been opened!'
She was right. They stood around, marveling at the preservation of the stone corridor behind the sealed door, and glanced at one another in their excitement.
'Okay,' said Julie, and breathed a long sigh, 'I know you're all eager to go in, but we've got to wait for the air inside to clear a bit - it's too foul right now.'
They all looked at Julie in disappointment.
'I know,' she continued, 'I'm just as keen to go in as you are. But we'll make camp here, and go in tomorrow morning.'
* * *
Midnight in the jungle, and the dreams of a lifetime rolled past the young woman lying awake, listening to the squeak and chatter of the night animals, far away.
For some reason, there were no animals in this region of the forest, but Julie was too tired to try to figure out why. The entrance to the opened tomb was a few meters away to her right, and Julie could see it, a deeper darkness against the faint glow of the night sky that peeped in through the canopy above them.
The night wind stirred, and the tomb exhaled its sepulchral breath at her. She smelt darkness, and wet, rotting stone, and the teeming life that multiplies in darkness, and something else besides.
She shivered, and turned away from the side where the opened tomb lay, but she could not shake the feeling that something was going to come up out of the opening behind her.
She found herself facing the severed head of the jaguar statue. It stared back at her in the night of the jungle, its eyes of black obsidian glittering by the light of the stars.
* * *
Darkness in the jungle tomb, and the air of ages slowly crept out of the unseen depths and flowed over the forest floor.
It rolled, silent and unseen, over the sleeping bodies of the five women, entering their nostrils and penetrating deep into their sighing lungs, and crept out into the jungle.
There was a sudden scurrying as a lone rodent changed direction and retreated back the way it had come, sensing something unwholesome in the air.
The women moved uneasily in their sleep, and their eyes moved suddenly behind their closed lids as they entered the world of dreams.
And in their dreams, the Sun blazed down on the pyramids of a thousand steps, and on the throng of people that ringed the base of the pyramid, and the crowds gazed up to the top, where the priests in their finery moved against the sunlight.
A fierce light seared Julie's eyes, and she screwed them up tight and tried to turn them away, but strong hands were holding her, restraining her, and she strained to open her eyes against the light to see where she was.
She lay on her back, spreadeagled on a stone altar under the blistering sun.
The hands of the priests held her down, by her wrists and her ankles.
She realized where she was, and what was going to happen to her.
She was about to be sacrificed.
She struggled; fighting to escape as strong hands tore away her thin white robe, leaving her naked to the clear blue sky. Her frenzied screams went unheard as the obsidian knife was raised aloft, until it eclipsed the Sun, and the light was scattered and refracted in rainbow colors by the volcanic glass as it was held poised above her struggling body.
Then ancient words were spoken, and the power of the gods ran through the priests' hands, and Julie knew that she was going to die.
She screamed like an animal as the blade fell towards her, propelled by powerful muscles. It plunged deep into her right breast, directly between the second and third ribs, and her head arched upwards and the ghastly cry was wrung from her throat as the knife was raked across her chest from one side to the other, exposing her breastbone, ripping into her pleural cavity, collapsing her lungs.
She couldn't breathe.
She couldn't breathe. She tried to draw breath, but her lungs had fallen in, and her mind screamed silently as the pain seared through her like a flame of agony beyond anything she could have imagined, and she writhed, unable to cry out or breathe.
Her body convulsed, but they held her down, forcing her back down on the slab, and a stone axe was placed over her breastbone, and a hammer thudded down, breaking it open so that her exposed ribs could be wrenched down by the bloodsoaked hands of the priests, the enormous wound exposing her still-beating heart.
Sprays of her blood, crimson in the sunlight, arced into the sky as her body thrashed and kicked as the knife came down again and again and again, tearing her heart from her chest, slicing through the ligaments and blood vessels that wriggled with life besides it.
But still she lived, experiencing every sight, every sound, and every last fragment of the pain and the terror. The hands descended into her chest cavity, and she felt a terrible ripping and tearing, and as her pupils contracted to pinpricks with shock, her dripping heart was wrenched out of her body, still beating with the vigor of her youth.
Blood spattered over Julie's body in fine droplets like rain as her beating heart sprayed out its contents over her, and her body quivered on the slab in a mass of twitching nerve endings, her arms jerking.
A great cry went up from the crowd far below as her heart was held up to the Sun for them to see; a cry of delight, and excitement, and a hunger that could not be assuaged.
Then in Julie's dream, the Sun went out in a dying explosion of dirty yellow light, and the rain of blood on her body went black, and her body went black, and decayed, though her spirit still yelled inside it. Fetid liquids welled up inside her and burst from her corpse, and her skin peeled back, and her bones showed through, and she was invaded by carrion beetles that fought over her rotting carcass, and the stench of her decay rose to overpower her.
Then the entire world went dark, and hot, and tons of soil were heaped over her, and she was buried alive, alive under the ground...
No, nooh!, Julie screamed in her dream, not that, not that, I want to live, I want to live, but she had no heart, and she couldn't move, still less draw breath as the soil filled her eye sockets, her mouth, her nostrils, her body, her life, tons and tons of it, pouring down, soil and blackness and suffocation and death, death, DEATH crushing her until her head was going to burst...
* * *
Julie awoke, and the others were up and about, packing their rucksacks.
She sat up, her head throbbing with pain.
'Why the hell didn't anyone wake me?' she demanded, pushing off her sleeping bag.
'We tried,' came Kathryn's laconic reply.
Julie dressed in silence and threw down the meager breakfast that they allowed themselves from their limited supplies, and gulped down a mug of tea. She crammed her belongings into her pack and joined the others, who were standing round the entrance stairs, staring down the stone steps.
The air in the tomb smelled better now; they had no way of knowing how well flushed it was, but they couldn't delay any longer.
'Let's go,' said Julie, 'Kathryn, you take the lead and remember to probe ahead for traps.'
They entered the tomb.
The impenetrable darkness was broken by their flashlights as they clicked them on, and as their eyes adjusted to the darkness they saw that the entrance passageway ended in another flight of stone steps, wonderfully preserved in the darkness of the tomb.
Forty steps down between high stone walls that closed over their heads as they went under the slab, and then they went under a high stone lintel and their flashlight beams vanished into the distance.
They had come into a large chamber with stone walls that stretched away around them. Tree roots had driven down through cracks in the stone ceiling and hung like groping hands from the ceiling, and in one corner the roof had partially fallen in, and the roots of a vast tree had coiled over the stone floor, breaking it up in large slabs.
The others were spreading out into the room, checking out the intricate carvings on the stone floors and wall. Danielle swung her flashlight to take a closer look.
She froze in surprise, and her expression turned to disgust.
'What is it?' asked Alison, 'I don't see... oh.' She turned to view the scenes of murder and death that crowded at her feet and on every wall. Males were shown skewered on spikes, and females impaled through every orifice. Blood ran like a red river through scenes of rape, impalement and death. A huge pyramid was depicted, and around it, a mass of bodies, all with gaping wounds in their chests. Julie unconsciously put her hand to her chest as her eyes lighted on the picture of a young woman, writhing on the altar, a stone knife poised over her naked body.
Over this dreadful scene of death, a deity with exposed human bones and a skull-like mask presided, and a line of supplicants waited before him, their right hands dipped in blood.
'Mictlantecahtli,' breathed Nicole in the stunned silence of the tomb, 'The Lord of the Dead. They come before him, their right hands dipped in blood, to gain favor from him for their own deaths. He rules over Mictlan, the land of the Dead.'
The team fell silent, and swung their flashlights round them, as if expecting the dread deity to step out at any moment. But the tomb returned no answer, except a faint breath of foul air that whispered from sunless depths.
They set about surveying the exits from the chamber.
There were three ways out from the stone room, not counting the steps they had come in by. All led downwards, south, west and east, and all seemed identical.
'So, which one?' Julie asked them.
'Straight ahead is too obvious,' said Nicole, 'that's where I'd put a trap. West or east for me.'
'Anyone else? Okay, east it is. Stay together, and at the first sign of a trap, stop.'
They set off down the eastern ramp.
It led down at a gentle incline that steepened as they went. The floor was polished and smooth. Nicole was at the front, and kept her eyes on the floor, watching for any cracks that could disguise a hidden trap.
They came across another flight of stone steps. They were highly polished and quite slippery, and Nicole started to walk down them carefully. The others followed, examining the increasing number of carvings on the wall. They were evidently drawing nearer to an important part of the tomb.
Nicole was several paces ahead of them, and found something on the wall that evidently excited her, because she turned back to them and shouted:
'There are more carvings here. They show the blood sacrifice to... Ohhh!'
Nicole gave a loud cry as the steps suddenly tilted underneath her feet, and her portion of the staircase became a steep, polished slope.
'Oh, my Gooood!' she yelled, as she fell heavily onto her front, her feet sliding out underneath her, her terrified face looking back up the slope towards the others.
'Help meee!' she yelled in terror, as she slid rapidly down the terrifying slope and down the passage, her legs scrabbling to get a grip on the polished, sloping surface.
Then she screamed, once, as her body shot into open space, and plunged down a vast pit.
'Oh my GOD! I'm falling! HELP ME! HEEEELP....'
Her voice trailed off into a terrified scream that fell away into the depths of the earth, leaving a high-pitched echo that ran round the deep passages of the tomb.
Then silence, and the terrified breathing of the four women in the darkness of their fear.
'No!' yelled Kathryn, as Alison started forwards, 'It's a slope trap - you'll go the way she went!'
'We can't do nothing!' screamed Alison; 'we've got to help her!'
Kathryn dropped her pack and pulled out a length of lightweight nylon rope, and looped one end onto her climbing harness and threw the other end at their feet. She drew out her hammer and a piton, and hammered it into the stone floor, and readied herself to abseil down the steep slope.
Kathryn walked cautiously forward to where Nicole had last stood, turned to face the others, and gently let herself down the steep slope.
'Shit, this is slippery as hell,' she commented, her climbing boots skittering across the polished surface as she slowly walked down the slope.
She disappeared from sight. Her voice floated back:
'There's nothing to hold onto here. I've just come to the edge, and the tunnel just goes straight down. I'll see how deep it is.'
There was the noise of something striking the side of the shaft as Kathryn dropped it, and it plunged down, clattering as it went.
The echoes faded away into nothingness.
Kathryn tried shouting for Nicole, and dropped several more objects down the shaft, but only silence was returned.
The shaft was bottomless.
Nicole was dead.
* * *
The group was still in shocked silence as Julie led the way back up the passage. They all knew the dangers in exploring ancient tombs, but none of them expected anyone to die.
They came back to the stone chamber, and the carvings on the walls and floor assumed a new and horrible significance. One in particular held Julie's gaze. It showed a helpless female falling down a steep shaft into a pit filled with spikes, and Julie's blood ran cold as she thought of Nicole's fate.
Julie called a halt for a rest to gather their nerves, and while the others rested, Kathryn and Julie explored the western arch and the path beyond. It led down, and after a couple of turns it went down a flight of stone steps, ending abruptly in a level platform before a deep pit that gaped at their feet.
'Must have been some kind of bridge here for the workers,' muttered Kathryn, inspecting some peg holes in the stone floor, 'And they threw it into the chasm when they'd finished.'
'Can we rope across?' asked Julie, probing the inky darkness with her flashlight. The sides of the shaft were rough and plunged down into darkness, and it took a few moments for her eyes to take in what lay at the bottom.
Her blood ran cold.
The floor of the pit was covered in skeletons, impaled on savage spikes that ran through their empty ribcages and limbs. There must have been forty of the things, heaped at the bottom, and most of them had come to pieces, so that the skulls and femurs and myriad smaller bones were mixed in a disordered pile round the spikes.
'I think you just found the workers,' commented Kathryn at her side.
Julie nodded grimly.
'I think I've found a way to get across.' Kathryn indicated the roof of the tunnel, over the pit. 'I can drive pitons into the roof, and I'll set up two ropes so that we can walk across.'
Julie looked up at the crumbling stone of the ceiling.
'Think it'll take it?'
'It's our only choice. Either that or we go through the central arch.'
'Okay. Get to it. I'll explore the other arch, but I'm sure it's a decoy. This is obviously the way they came out when they sealed the tomb.'
'Take care.' Kathryn unslung a coil of rope from her shoulder and set to work.
* * *
Julie was right in her suspicions of the southern arch. The floor was covered in sand, and Julie carefully probed the floor ahead of her with her climbing hammer as she advanced.
It didn't take long before she found a stone pad set in the floor, and she carefully cleared the sand from round it. On either side, there were small holes set in the walls and ceiling.
'Tread on that and you'll be sorry,' muttered Julie to herself, as she inched her way carefully round the pad, and carried on probing. There was another pad, then round the corner a part of the floor had seemingly fallen in. Julie peered over the edge and saw that a false floor had partly collapsed, revealing a shallow pit with spikes set in the bottom. Beyond that, the passage walls became rough-hewn, and Julie realized that the whole passage was a dead end trap.
She retreated back the way she had come, and gathered the others together in the main chamber.
'Okay. We've checked out the other two exits. The southern way is just a trap passage. The western way is clearly the way that they retreated when they completed the tomb, so that's the way we've got to go. Kathryn is making a bridge for us to cross an obstacle.'
Julie paused, taking in their conditions. Alison looked scared. Danielle was very quiet; she was still reliving Nicole's death.
'Look,' Julie began again, 'We all knew the risks in coming here. And so did Nicole. Do you think she'd want us to give up and go back now?'
They looked up at Julie. Danielle shook her head decisively.
'Right. So let's do this. I need you to stay sharp. Watch your footing, and listen to Kathryn's instructions, and you'll be okay. Let's go.'
Julie waited until Danielle and Alison had shouldered their packs, and led the way under the lintel of the western arch and down to where Kathryn was completing the makeshift bridge.
The others gasped as they saw the abyss that they had to cross. Kathryn had driven pitons into the roof and slung two ropes across; one close to the ceiling for a handhold, and a single rope for them to walk across underneath it.
They had all taken climbing lessons before coming out to the jungle, but Kathryn could see that they were worried, so she leapt lightly onto the rope and shimmied her way across, and back again.
'See?' she said as she jumped off the rope in front of them, 'It's easy.'
They went across in single file.
Kathryn went back over first, Danielle, who inched across, staring down into the pit the whole time. Julie came next, carrying some of the remaining supplies, so that Alison, who came last, would not need to carry anything.
'Come on, it's easy!' shouted Julie from the other side.
Alison stared down into the gulf. As her eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, she could see something in the darkness.
'I can see spikes,' she said, slowly and carefully.
'There's nothing down there,' Kathryn yelled back.
Alison gingerly put her weight onto the rope and clung on to the two ropes near the ceiling with her hands. The rope bridge went taught, and quivered with her weight.
Alison shuffled across. The rope swayed with the alternating tensions as she shifted her weight from foot to foot.
The rest of the group was suddenly silent. Alison was showing the same fear they all felt; the fear of the ancient tomb and the evil minds that had designed it.
They were not meant to be here.
Alison was halfway across when the first piton failed.
It pulled out of the rotting stone of the ceiling without warning, and the rope on which Alison was balanced fell away.
'Ohhhh!' gasped Alison, and she was left swinging on the guide rope by one hand, hanging there above the abyss, while the main rope swayed uselessly, two meters below her flailing feet.
'Grab the rope!' yelled Kathryn in anguish, 'grab the rope with both hands!'
Alison swung in terror above the inky darkness of the pit. She tried, failed, tried again, and finally grabbed the rope with her free hand.
'Good girl!' said Kathryn, trying to keep Alison calm. 'Now, move towards me, hand over hand. It's only a few meters.'
'I... I can't...' gasped Alison, 'I'm going to fall! I'm going to fall!'
'You're not going to fall,' said Kathryn firmly. 'Just look up at the rope, and move slowly towards me. You can do it.'
Alison lifted her head and looked up as she was told, so that she was focused on the stone ceiling and the single rope from which she hung. She let go with one hand, and quickly swung it forward, then the other one. She had advanced a step. Her face showed a flash of relief, as she realized she could make it.
Suddenly, a crack opened up in the rotten ceiling.
For a moment, they all thought another piton was pulling out. But instead, a huge nest of spiders collapsed and spilled its contents all over Alison, dangling there right underneath it, and they tumbled over her as she swung there above the pit.
'Jeeeesusss! Nooooh!' screamed Alison, as the giant jungle spiders spilled from the crack into her hair, down her T-shirt, over her arms, and the myriad bodies scurried across her naked flesh.
'Get them OFF OF MEEE!' she screamed, jerking madly from the rope, as the spiders covered her body, 'I CAN'T BEAR SPIDERS! I CAN'T BEAR THEM!'
One of the spiders ran across her face, and in terror and disgust she let go of the rope with one hand to dash it away. She swung wildly on one hand, and more spiders spilled off her, falling into the pit below as she struggled.
'Alison! Alison!' shouted Kathryn, making herself heard above Alison's terrified cries, 'Get hold of the rope! Get hold again! YOU MUST GET HOLD OF THE ROPE!'
But Alison was oblivious now, and as more spiders poured from the crack and onto her, the last trace of reason left her, and she began to shriek, a terrible sound that echoed round the passages and halls of the tomb. The spiders filled her hair, they were inside her clothes, they were creeping into her ears, her nostrils, over her eyes, and then they invaded her mouth, creeping over her lips and forcing their questing legs past her tongue.
'She's going to let go!' screamed Danielle; 'DO SOMETHING!'
'Alison! DON'T LET GO!' yelled Kathryn, 'DON'T LET GO!'
Alison wanted to make the spiders go away. She needed the spiders to go away. She had to let go, to get rid of the spiders. She had to get rid of the spiders. She had to let go, to get rid of the spiders. Get rid of the spiders. Let go.
She let go.
With a piercing shriek, Alison fell into the darkness of the pit, her arms and legs flailing. There was a sickening crunch, and a yell of pain and despair as she was impaled on the spikes at the bottom of the pit, spikes that were twice the height of a man, she was impaled in the anus. The sharpened stone spike tore up through her intestines and internal organs and came to rest against her diaphragm, directly under her beating heart.
Like a stuck insect, she quivered there in the darkness, her booted feet twitching, her arms jerking, and a rain of spiders dripped from the roof and over her dying form.
With only the skeletons for company, she moaned her life out in the darkness, her blood dripping down the spike, and her eyes bulged and stared as her blood, her life, ran down the spike and pooled amongst the skeletons on the dusty floor.
Far above, the others heard her dying moans as they craned over the edge, and they watched in mute horror as she twitched and struggled feebly on the spike.
No swift death for the gentle linguistics expert from the chalk downs of England. Instead, the slow death of impalement, and she could see the faces of her friends, miles and miles above her, looking over the edge. She tried to stretch out an arm to reach them, but the pit just telescoped above her, until it was a chimney, an elevator shaft to hell.
Millimeter by millimeter, her body sank onto the spike, and it tore through her diaphragm, and now her lungs filled with blood, and she let out a gurgling cry in the darkness as the spike touched her heart.
'Help... me...' she whispered, then her heart burst inside her, and her legs kicked one last time, and Alison's eyes glazed and her tongue lolled out as she let out a final exhalation of despair.
* * *
Julie shook her head. It was making a strange, painful noise, a noise that clamored for attention. She held her hands to her head, and she realized that the sound was someone screaming.
Danielle was screaming. A high-pitched screech that wouldn't stop. Danielle had backed away from the awful chasm where Alison had fallen to her death, and her face was twisted into a picture of fear and horror, her hands clutched to the side of her face.
'Danielle,' began Julie, moving towards her, anything, anything to stop the noise. But Nicole backed away from her.
'You, you BITCH!' Danielle screamed, 'You KILLED her! You knew it wouldn't take her weight and you KILLED her!'
'Danielle, I...' began Julie, spreading her hands, but Danielle wouldn't listen, and suddenly, Danielle turned and ran like a wild thing, down the passageway that they had reached.
'No!' yelled Julie and Kathryn together, but Danielle was running, heading blindly down the passage.
Julie and Kathryn gave chase; taking care to step in Danielle's footprints that she had left in the dust on the floor. They couldn't keep up, and Danielle was outpacing them, her flashlight beam dancing off the walls ahead of them.
A stone block started to move down, threatening to trap Julie and Kathryn on the wrong side, and they dived and rolled underneath it, only just making it.
They plunged across an intersection of four passages, heading straight on, following Danielle.
There was a strange sound up ahead, a soft sighing, followed by a series of thuds.
A blood-curdling scream echoed down the corridor towards them and the flashlight beam up ahead quivered wildly.
'Oh my god,' gasped Kathryn as she ran up, 'Julie! Don't look! Don't look!'
Julie looked.
Danielle's body was hidden under a huge stone block that had come down from the roof to crush her. Only her legs protruded from underneath the block, and they kicked and scrabbled in the dust as the stone block crushed the life from her.
'Argghhhhh!' screamed Danielle, her voice muffled by the stone block, 'GET ME OUT! GET ME OUT! GET ME...'
Then Danielle's legs gave a wild kick, and there was a horrible crunching of bone, and Danielle's incoherent cries became muffled as her ribs were crushed, then her pelvis, and finally, with a sickening crack, her skull.
Danielle's legs quivered, once, and were still.
Blood leaked and pooled on the dusty floor under Danielle's body, and Kathryn and Julie backed away, unable to speak, down the passage, back to the junction that Nicole had raced across.
They didn't need any conversation to know that they were looking for a way out now. All thoughts of raiding the tomb had gone from their minds, and all they wanted to do was to escape from the cloying darkness and get out into the air again.
Kathryn glanced down the left passage and looked at Julie, who nodded slowly.
They walked forward slowly, as a pair, holding each other's hands now, unwilling to be parted even for a moment as they cautiously probed their way along. The passage twisted its way through several turns, and they wasted hours of precious time probing round each corner before moving on. Eventually, they made it round a final corner.
A dead end.
The two of them looked at the stone facing them in despair and frustration. They had wasted all this time to no use.
They set off back again, still taking care to make sure there were no two-stage traps set to catch them when they came back, but they encountered nothing, and they made it back to the intersection tired and thirsty.
They drank sparingly from their dwindling water bottles. They had not expected to be trapped in the tomb, and their supply was getting dangerously low. The air in the tomb seemed to make them even more thirsty than usual, and they capped their bottles with the greatest of efforts.
They rested for as long as they dared, then set off again down the remaining passage. This one had a cleaner floor and they could make out the floor better and move along faster, but it twisted and turned in a confusing way, and there were places where they had to climb over huge stone blocks, or crawl through tiny slits, until they were bewildered beyond hope of remembering which way they had come.
Then, abruptly, the narrow passage that had tormented them for so long opened into a larger space, and they shone their flashlight beams into a stone room filled with what looked like narrow slots.
'Mortuary,' muttered Julie, and Kathryn, glad to be free of the passage, picked her way to the nearest slot and peered in. A desiccated skull leered back, and Kathryn shivered.
The room was filled with the dried, ancient skeletons, and the air was musty with ancient decay.
'Let's rest,' said Julie, and slumped down on the floor, and took a mouthful of water from her bottle. Only a few more remained.
Kathryn turned off her flashlight to conserve the cells, and her eyes slowly adjusted to the dimmer light levels. Julie's flashlight was pointing the other way, and Kathryn stared blankly at the further wall, at the many gaping slots where the skeletons of the ancients watched her.
Waiting for her to die.
Suddenly, Kathryn spoke.
'Julie...'
'Yeah?'
'Turn off your flashlight.'
'Why?'
'Turn it off for a moment.'
Julie sighed and flicked it off, and they were plunged into a blackness deeper than the night, a darkness that seemed to suck the light out of the world, and in it, their other senses were magnified, so they heard the gently stir of dust from air currents, and smelt the many secret rooms of the tomb.
And as their pupils opened wide to capture the last glimmer of light, in the far wall, daylight glimmered.
Julie jumped up, and the two of them crept towards the faint light. It was coming from one of the slots, low on the wall, so that they had to crouch down to see the tiny glimmer of light properly. It was far away, and clearly coming down some kind of shaft to the surface, but it was daylight.
They flicked their flashlights back on, and looked at each other.
'Well, it's daylight,' said Julie, standing up and facing Kathryn, 'but I'm worried that it's a trap. What do you think we should do?'
Kathryn crouched down and took another look, this time probing the space beyond the slot with her flashlight. She craned her neck to try to see into the chamber, but could see nothing, and her flashlight couldn't pierce the gloom past the acute passage entrance.
'Yeah... I see what you mean,' Kathryn murmured. 'I say we give it a go, though; you can always pull me back if I get stuck.'
'If YOU get stuck?' asked Julie, 'just a second, I think we should...'
But it was too late. Kathryn dropped her pack and swung easily into the opening, and squeezed through. Her boots kicked once as she wriggled through the opening and her voice floated back:
'I'm in... Jesus, it's tight in here.' There was the sound of some struggling as Kathryn's boots scrabbled on the stone walls, and then she managed to turn round.
'It seems okay,' she shouted back, 'the light seems to be coming from a... from a small slit in the roof. It's funny; it's just a slit. Maybe I can...'
'Kathryn!' yelled Julie, her blood turning suddenly cold, 'Get out! It's a trap! Get out!'
There was a soft click, and a grinding of stone on stone, and the low entrance passage contracted until it was just a slit; a piece of stone had risen up in the gap.
'Julie, I'm stuck in here,' said Kathryn, and her normally calm voice carried a trace of alarm. 'I can't turn round in here.'
There was a shriek of ancient mechanism, and then a sudden cry from Kathryn:
'Julie, I need you to get me out of here, NOW. The roof is coming down on me, and it's got spikes in it!'
'Kathryn!' yelled Julie, and she knelt down by the slit-like entrance, and she could see the ceiling descending. Sharpened spikes protruded from the ceiling, and Kathryn was imprisoned in the chamber, on her back, staring up at the descending spikes.
'Get something in her to jam the roof,' yelled Kathryn quickly, 'pass me something through the gap!'
Julie cast about in panic for something, anything, to use to hold up the ceiling, and she grabbed Kathryn's climbing hammer, and threw it through the slot. Kathryn scrabbled to reach it, then turned it upright, holding it until the roof jammed on it.
There was an awful screeching, and the roof stopped.
'Thank God for that,' muttered Kathryn, 'for a moment there I thought I...'
The stone roof which rested on the hammer started to crack, and the roof dropped downwards by two inches.
'Oh my God! NO! Not like this!' shrieked Kathryn, unable to believe that her life was going to end this way, and she struggled like a caged animal as the spikes came closer and closer.
The ceiling was descending again, the hammer punching uselessly through he crumbling stone, and Kathryn reason finally left her, and she raged in the tiny space, banging her body against the stone, trying to get out as the pitiless spikes came towards her lean, athletic body.
'Kathryn! Noooooh!' Julie tried to reach her, her fingers scrabbling through the tiny hole, but she couldn't reach her.
Brave to the end, Kathryn tried not to scream as the spikes slowly stabbed her. They were all over; in her thighs, her chest, her breasts and then, agonizingly, in her stomach, and then she was pinned down, and there was no escape from the pain and the torment as the spikes slowly pierced her.
'Urgghhhhh,' she gasped, unable to contain herself, and outside, Julie screamed in terror as she saw Kathryn's body impaled a dozen times, and her strong, athletic body twitch as it was slowly nailed to the stone floor.
'Ohhhhh, nooooh,' Kathryn moaned, and now her hands were caught, and she couldn't move an inch, and finally she howled in pain and despair as the ceiling came down, down...
Julie jerked backwards as a jet of blood spurted out from the slit to splash her in the face. She recoiled from the hole, and Kathryn's cries sank to a gurgle, then a sigh, and finally silence.
* * *
Now, in the dark and dripping tomb, fear runs along the walls like a vapor, and Julie runs with it, her fading flashlight trembling in her nerveless hands. On she runs, plunging blindly on, deeper and deeper into the tomb.
Past ancient and hideous carvings she runs, past statues to the Lord of the Dead, that grimace down at her form, the only living thing in here in centuries.
She staggers across floors of inset gold and turquoise, past treasures of blackened gold and gems that glow in hidden colors. Huge columns support the high ceilings, and now she stumbles down a flight of vast stone steps, that take her down, down, into a chamber even vaster than the last, and at the end of it is another set of stairs, and another hall, hall on hall on hall, to the uttermost depths of the earth and the deepest hell of Chignahamictlan.
Julie halts, and she cannot believe what she is seeing. There is no end to the vastness of the tomb, and her flashlight is dim and yellow now, the filament glowing and flickering as the last electrons are leached from the cells.
And now there is a dry rustling, and across the inlaid floor comes a tide of blackness, and as it comes closer Julie sees that it is countless carrion beetles.
They see in infrared, and they can see Julie's body, as clearly as if were day, and her failing light is a bright beacon that keeps them at bay.
Julie backs away, but there is nowhere to go, and her flashlight flickers out.
There is a rustling, like a tide of death in the darkness.
Her flashlight flickers back on, once, before the darkness descends, and Julie screams as she sees a sea of beetles, piled one on top of another, filling the room, surrounding her, and their questing, clicking mouthparts are all pointed at her.
Julie screams, and the flashlight flickers out forever, and in the inky darkness of the tomb, the beetles run forward...
Julie's cries of terror run round the sepulchered walls and echo round the vast pits and traps that fill the tomb, and the skeletons shake in their sleep as she screams her life out.
Her body is covered with a writhing mass of carrion beetles, competing with each other for room on her flesh. They run over every inch of her body, tasting the sweat, smelling the warm blood under the skin. They scramble to get into every bodily orifice, and her mouth is filled with their bodies, stifling her screams. She bites down, crunching them, but there are too many, and they are climbing into her nostrils now, and into her ears, and her eyes, and her vagina, and her anus.
And they begin to feed. They are in her ear canals, and her eardrums burst as they fight their way into her brain. They force their way up into her colon, and into her vagina and the secret spaces of her womanhood. Down her windpipe they pour, and she swallows involuntarily, and they are in her stomach now, wriggling in the rush of acid as she chokes on their bodies.
She staggers about, blinded by the beetles feeding on her eyeballs, and she is choking, suffocating in the dark. Her mind is going with the terror and the pain, but she is still alive.
And finally, they are in her mind itself, and they eat away at her brain, and she can feel them inside her skull, wriggling, fighting for room, and a soft buzzing fills her head as her mind is consumed from within...
Her body drops to the floor and twitches feebly for a while as her vital organs are consumed, and then she is still, and her body is hidden beneath the mound of scurrying, feeding beetles.
And darkness and silence return to the tomb of Mictlantecahtli, and the only sound is the rustling of the carrion beetles, as they devour her flesh, until only her skeleton remains.
* * *
And on the surface, between the jaguar-guarded gate, a stone door grinds slowly shut, and slams into place, and a deep boom echoes through...
The Tomb.
- - -
Thanatos@reborn.com
Historical note: most of the historical background for this story is lifted straight from Aztec religion; Mictlantecahtli was indeed the Lord of the Dead and the description of the sacrifice (the transverse incision across the chest and the removal of the beating heart) is also believed to be correct. However, I have taken liberties with the tokens associated with him; the owl and the bat were in fact the correct animals, but try as I might, I couldn't get imagery of an owl and a bat to sound menacing enough, so I stole another deity's token, that of the jaguar. Sam can certainly tell you of its correct usage ;)
Th.