The petite Frenchwoman eased through the opening and the dim artificial light from above was momentarily eclipsed by her body. Kismet felt another wave of irrational fear as darkness enveloped him, but he shook it off. As her feet dropped toward him, he hugged her legs to his chest, relieving the strain from her arms. “I’ve got you. Let go slowly and I’ll do the rest.”
She hesitated for only a moment before Kismet felt her weight shift fully against his body. It was then a simple thing to deposit her on the step beside him. She gazed back up at the illuminated opening and shook her head in despair. “Are you certain we can get back up there?”
“Piece of cake,” he replied, with more conviction than he felt, then turned his attention to the hole as well. “All right, Pierre. Your turn.”
Chiron’s approach was predictably more tentative. Kismet could hear Hussein patiently explaining how he ought to position himself, but the Frenchman seemed bent on scooting through the hole from a seated position. His focus on the older man’s plight prevented him from hearing Marie’s soft footsteps as she commenced descending, but when he reached up to take hold of Chiron’s ankles he caught the subtle movement in the corner of his eye.
“Marie!”
His shout caught her by surprise and she turned to face him with a guilty expression. Her chagrin turned to surprise and horror however as she lost her balance and wavered backward over the decline. Forgetting Chiron, Kismet impulsively reached out for her frantically waving hands, but his fingers closed on nothing. Marie gave a shriek and tumbled down the stairs.
Ten
Kismet dashed after her, shouting her name, but the steps were so steep that he could not match the runaway rate of her fall. She vanished into the darkness before he could take three strides, and each subsequent foot forward dropped him deeper into the absolute subterranean night.
Marie’s cries of surprise were quickly replaced by less strident grunts of pain, which punctuated the thudding of her body against the stone. These noises however were abruptly replaced by a sound like the breaking of tree branches. Or bones, thought Kismet.
“Marie?”
There was a low groan then the sound repeated. “I’m all right,” she finally said, with far less misery than he would have expected. “I’ve landed in something…I’m not sure what it is.”
“I’ll be right there.” He backtracked to the opening, where Chiron was scrambling out of the opening, and called for Hussein to throw down the flashlight. Thus armed, he stabbed the beam of light into the depths and charged after his fallen companion. Yet while he was bracing himself for the discovery of Marie’s broken form at the end of the flight, he was completely unprepared for the sight that awaited him at the bottom of the stairwell.
His initial impression was of zebra stripes: a haphazard pattern of light and dark which either reflected his light at oblique angles or swallowed it whole. Yet there was no mistaking the unique spherical shapes, each uniformly marked by a pair of smaller craters, that were scattered throughout the endless web of shadows: human skulls.
Marie’s fall and subsequent movements had left her partially submerged in the skeletal sea. As her eyes focused on the area revealed by Kismet’s light, she lost any semblance of control. However, her hysterical attempt to flee only shifted the interlocking puzzle of bones, opening a chasm that drew her deeper into the charnel embrace.
The bones were everywhere, stripped clean of flesh and gleaming white. Beyond the area where Marie had landed, the arrangement was more orderly. The corpses had been stacked in tight rows and heaped several layers deep. The descending stairs continued out into the midst of the vaulted ossuary, completely obscuring the floor.
“Hold still!” shouted Kismet, wading into the jumble. At the first crunch of bone beneath his boots, he felt an otherworldly chill; there were unhappy ghosts here.
He tried to think of it like quicksand.It was certainly swallowing Marie down like a quagmire and her frantic thrashing was only exacerbating the situation. He shouted another unheeded exhortation for her to be still, then cautiously stretched himself horizontally over the skeletal bed. For a moment, the bones shifted beneath his weight, opening a rift to snare him and he could feel thousands of fleshless fingers closing around him to pull him under. The urge to break free and scramble to safety was almost overwhelming, but he forced himself to remain motionless, with his arms and legs spread-eagled. Despite the initial settling, the bony lattice bore his weight. Buoyed by the minor success, he began rolling with deliberate slowness toward her.
Though her panic had left her deeply mired in the ossuary, Marie had regained a degree of self-control. She continued trying to extricate herself, but with more deliberation and less hysterics. When Kismet was close enough to extend a hand, she simply took hold without succumbing to the drowning victim’s impulse to drag her rescuer under.
“Good.” He tried to inject a note of optimism into his tone. “Now, carefully pull yourself toward me. Focus on trying to stretch yourself out. It’s just like swimming.”
She gave a nod then cautiously brought her other hand up to grasp his wrist. The skeletons beneath him shifted again and he felt Marie’s grip tighten as both of them settled deeper. Neither of them moved, patiently hoping the network would stabilize before swallowing them completely, and after a moment it did.
“Okay, let’s try that again.” Kismet could barely get the words out. Trepidation and exertion had conspired to rob him of his breath and left his throat so tight that his voice had to struggle to reach his lips.
Marie resumed pulling and this time the bones merely groaned in annoyance. She released her grip on his hand and extended incrementally up his forearm. In this fashion, she worked her way toward him, hand over hand as if climbing a rope. She managed to draw her torso up from the embrace of the long since departed occupants of the chamber and laid flat atop the surface, until only her legs remained caught in the snare.
She was close enough now to grasp his shoulder and her fingers knotted in the fabric of his shirt. He nodded encouragingly. “Good. I’m going to start rolling back toward the stairs. Do the same, but don’t let go.”
He waited for an affirmative reply then slowly twisted away from her. As his right cheek lighted on the irregular surface, he spied a subtle movement in the shadows. A careful turn of his wrist pointed the flashlight that way and Kismet realized with a start that he and Marie were not the only living creatures in the mass tomb. A shiny black scorpion, as long as his hand, was silently stalking them.
“Marie, don’t move a muscle.” He tried to keep the panic out of his voice, but there was a faint quaver in his undertone.
Marie did not ask for more information, but as the venomous arachnid drew closer, she began to utter a low wail. The tip of the scorpion’s tail, pregnant with a toxin that could paralyze or even kill, wavered in her direction. Kismet grimaced, but with the creature’s attention thus diverted, he saw his opening. Using the small flashlight like a club, he struck the scorpion a glancing blow that launched it several meters across the bone pile.
“Nick!” Marie’s voice was growing frantic again.
“It’s okay. There was a scorpion, but I took care of it.”
“It?” Her voice was incredulous. “What about them?”
He gingerly raised his head and peered over her supine form. In the broad circle of illumination cast by his MagLite, he saw the reason for her anxiety. An army of vermin was emerging from the bones, swarming toward them with a collective goal. There were more scorpions in their midst, along with enormous cockroaches, centipedes and dozens of other scavenger and predatory insect species.