Gideon steps from the shadows. He levels a shaking gun at the older man in the red robe. ‘Father—’ He spits the word out.
The Henge Master glances at Draco on the floor, his blood leaking onto the stone. ‘What have you done?’
Gideon waves the gun. ‘—I need the key to the Crypt.’
The Master lifts the string from around his neck, his face full of contempt. ‘I knew you wouldn’t be able to leave without stealing something precious. You’re just a grave-robber like Nathaniel.’ He throws the key into the pool of blood near Draco.
‘Get it,’ Gideon says to Caitlyn, the Glock still levelled at his father.
She bends to pick it up.
Draco grabs her by the ankle, pulls her over.
The Master charges Gideon like a bull elephant, crashes him into a wall.
There is another deathly explosion.
176
The two men slump to the ground. Locked together. The Glock clatters over the blood-spattered stone slabs.
Caitlyn’s survival instinct kicks in. She stretches her arm through the cloying pool of Draco’s blood and grabs the fallen weapon. He’s still pulling at her. Strong hands moving from her ankle to her knee. She twists around. She has no choice but to go with the thought in her head. She pulls the trigger. Shoots him in the face. Point blank. The report is deafening.
Blood and brains spatter her. She drops the gun and holds her crimson-soaked hands in horror. She sits frozen until Gideon gets to her.
‘Come on, we have to go.’
Caitlyn can’t move. Multiple images of what she’s done are already branded in her mind. The way he looked at her, then the blood-red mist, flaying skin, saliva, flying bone. He’s dead. She just killed someone.
‘Caitlyn! Get up!’
She feels Gideon grab her hand. It’s wet with blood and brain. He is pulling her along, the stones feel soft beneath her feet. Her vision blurs. She stops and retches. Heaves the last specks of moisture from her empty stomach.
‘Come on!’
She retches again and looks to the side. Gideon is unlocking a door just a few metres away.
He rushes back and gets her, drags her with him through the new opening.
Blackness. Total blackness.
She stands shaking while he searches. The blood red mist sprays up before her eyes again. Flesh. Saliva. Bone. The final, frozen look in his eyes. Like a broken doll.
Light. A wall torch finally starts to burn close to her. Orange. Orange not red. Gideon has lit it. He leads her by the hand, lighting giant candles around the room. The blackness dissipates, dribbles away like water on hot sand. The room tilts. Her knees buckle and she feels a sickly warmth course through her.
‘Caitlyn!’
She hears his voice, tinny and distant, a shout from down a long, dark tunnel, as she falls.
177
The bullet from the Glock has gone straight through the Master’s thigh. He’s lucky. As a career soldier, he knows two simple truths. First, there’s no such thing as a non-fatal shooting. Let any wound bleed long enough and you’ll die. Second, unless you shoot your enemy in the skull or the spine, you’re not going to incapacitate them with a handgun. They’re going to be shocked to hell, but once they’re over that, they’re going to be up and at you again. And that’s what he’s going to do.
He wipes away the blood and examines the entry and exit points. Clean. He feels tentatively around the traumatised skin. The bullet was low velocity, so it’s a straight hole. Little effect on the surrounding tissue. He presses and watches the cavity fill. If it had been a high-velocity rifle, the injury may have been much worse.
He probes and pokes until he’s sure there’s no fragmentation in the wound, no shattered bone that has ripped up masses of muscle tissue. He tries to stand, but it’s hard to balance. Difficult to straighten his leg and painful to put any weight on it. He leans against the wall and pulls the cord belt from around his waist. He loops it around and pulls a tight tourniquet. It’s a temporary fix but good enough for now.
He’s risking nerve damage. Better that though, than to bleed to death. He looks down and sees the sticky puddle of blood and brain matter that has seeped from Draco. No point even checking for a pulse. In his peripheral vision he notices the flickering lights from the candles in the crypt. He hears his son shouting. Shouting to the woman to hurry up.
He dips in the deep pocket of his robe. Feels the sacrificial hammers and the ceremonial knife.
Enough to stop them.
Enough to fulfil the ritual.
178
Gideon reluctantly leaves her slumped and twitching in her faint. He carries the torch high and quickly makes his way around the crypt. He has to find the clue. Some proof that he hasn’t made a fatal mistake.
From the dozens of inclined coffins, empty eyes in skinless skulls seem to follow him. They trail him like ghosts. He can feel their wispy hands on his neck, cold like a dead-of-night shiver down his spine.
Egyptians ensured the dead who they honoured were surrounded by their most prized possessions. From what he can see, it seems to be the same with the Followers of the Sacreds. But the Egyptians equipped their tombs with something else. Secret passages into the afterlife. Long tunnels that allowed the reborn kings to rise again and rejoin their people.
Gideon tries to think of everything he knows about the pyramids. Of the modest structure honouring young Pepi II. The stepped Pyramid of Djoser. Sneferu’s Red Pyramid. And Giza — built two thousand five hundred years before Christ, around the same time as some of Stonehenge, and just after the completion of the Sanctuary. The Great Pyramid had chambers similar to those now surrounding him. Mysterious shafts stretched from the King’s and Queen’s chambers to the outside world. Secret corridors allowed freed spirits to escape to the heavens.
Gideon moves the coffins. Stirs the dead. Hears their bones grumble discontent. Cobwebbed skeletons creak and crack as he searches behind and beneath the caskets for trapdoors or concealed passageways. There are none.
He hears Caitlyn moan and walks over to her, stoops and holds the flame so he can see her face. She is coming round but she’s deathly pale. Glassy eyed. Her energy is spent.
He touches her shoulder reassuringly. ‘You’re all right. You fainted.’
Her eyes flick from him to the horrors of the room. Coffins. Skeletons. Candles. Her nightmare isn’t over.
He thinks back to his studies, to the dusty files of his research, his academic past. His mind tries to see beyond the obvious. A fleeting memory of a massive maze. It is that of Amenemhet. Reputedly an architectural work that surpassed the great pyramids, hundreds of rooms, passageways, corridors, false chambers, star shafts and hidden trapdoors.
There had been a hidden exit in the ceiling. Concealed by a stone trapdoor. A small hole opened up into a series of hidden rooms and passageways. An exit route filled with decoy chambers and deadly shafts. But still an exit route.
He remembers Scandinavian archaeologists discovered that the symbol of the maze represented the spring equinox, the time the sun was supposed to escape from the winter’s blackness. He looks up. His gaze drifts to the top of the giant cube of artefacts in the room’s centre. Even if they climbed it, they couldn’t reach the stone blocks above their heads. But it looks like the only possible way out.
He hopes Caitlyn is strong enough to make it.
‘We have to get moving, come on,’ he grabs her wrist and leads her to the giant stone block. Gideon starts to climb and then pulls her up the first set of stone shelves.