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The Gutenberg Rubric

Thirty-Two

“JOEY!” Maddie screamed. Fry charged into Keith and Maddie, knocking them to the floor behind the door as the explosion rocked the outer chamber and the shockwave extinguished the torches. Absolute darkness claimed the space.

“Maddie! Maddie!” Keith called frantically as he groped for her hand in the darkness.

“Joey, no!” she wept. “Why? Why?” Keith caught her hand and soon had her cradled in his arms.

“Maddie, are you injured?” A flashlight flicked on and Agent Fry swept the area toward them with the beam.

“Are you two okay?” he asked at the same time.

“No. Yes.” Maddie said answering both questions. “My baby brother.” She turned her head and wept into Keith’s shoulder.

“I think we’re all right,” Keith said to Fry. “Shine your light over here. I dropped my flashlight.” Fry’s beam crisscrossed the area near Keith until it lit on Keith’s flashlight. Keith grabbed the light and turned it on. Rubble was sprayed across the floor in front of the door and dust still hung in the air.

“Do you have matches?” Fry asked. When Keith nodded, he continued. “See if you can get a couple of torches lit. I’ll take a look at the damage.” Fry’s left arm hung limply at his side as he moved toward the entry. Keith helped Maddie to her feet and she pulled the flashlight from her belt and helped to look for her lighter. In a moment they had two torches lit. Keith turned off his flashlight and took the torch from the bracket and lit three more to fully illuminate the room. Fry appeared in the doorway once more.

“Ms. Zayne, I’m sorry to say this, but you need to come out here.” Keith put his arm around Maddie as they made their way into the outer chamber. He lit more torches as they came. Half way across the chamber, Fry was kneeling beside Derek Zayne.

“Madeline?” Derek whispered. Maddie knelt beside the agent and her ex-husband. “You know what’s funny? I never changed my will,” he whispered when she touched his hand. “It’s all yours now. Everything I built. You won’t need this anymore,” he said, reaching for the locket that hung from Maddie’s neck. Grasping it tightly in his hand he pulled, “I know right where you are now.” The chain broke and his hand fell to his chest.

He was no longer breathing. She stood and backed away. Keith caught her as she nearly fell sideways.

“He can’t have my sympathy,” she said quietly. “He never understood. It’s his fault Joey did this.” She looked at the entrance to the cave. Rubble filled the opening. Somewhere under the rubble her brother’s remains lay buried. With all the people he believed were chasing him, it was his own hand that had proven fatal.

“We’re trapped,” Maddie said flatly. “There’s no way out.” She fell to her knees in front of the rubble that blocked the chamber entrance and covered her brother’s body.

“Not necessarily so,” Fry said. He staggered as he stood and Keith steadied him.

“You’re woozy from the blood loss,” Keith said. “There’s water in my pack.” Fry took the offered canteen and moved into the inner chamber. “What are you thinking?” Keith said. He picked the second backpack out of the rubble and dragged behind Fry into the room.

“Look at the shape of this room,” Fry said. “You said it wasn’t big enough to hold all the books. The wall slopes in from the doors, the back wall is flat. I’d say we are only in the foyer.”

“But where is the entry?” Keith said. “Maddie?”

“Could I just have a couple of minutes to deal with my brother blowing himself up?” Maddie yelled at him. “Just a couple of minutes before I have to pretend that I’m all right and here to solve the great puzzle of some ancient practical joker who got us all trapped here.”

“Maddie,” Keith began.

“Just give me a minute!” Keith started toward her, but Fry caught hold of his arm.

“We can wait,” the agent said.

The two began surveying the walls of the room for any sign of a hidden doorway. They were intent on their task and did not hear Maddie re-enter the room. A rock hit the floor outside and both men turned to the doorway. Maddie was scraping the floor with her boot, tossing the larger stones that were in the passage out of the room.

“Maddie, darling, I’m sorry,” Keith said going up to her. She leaned against him for a moment as if to accept the apology and then kept sweeping the floor with her foot.

“You could help,” she said. Keith began scuffing the rubble out of the doorway.

“What are we doing?” he asked.

“We’re getting ready to close the doors,” she said.

“If we close the doors, there is no guarantee that we could ever get out of this chamber and no one would be able to get in without the key,” Keith said. “If Agent Fry’s men come in hunting, they’ll try to dig us out.”

Maddie pulled her grandfather’s key out of her pocket along with the cut leather thong. She re-tied it and hung it from the braided handle.

“There, now they’ll have a key. They’ll figure out how to use it,” she said.

“But why?” Keith asked again.

“Airlock,” Maddie said. “Something my grandfather used to say: ‘You can’t go on until you can’t go back.’ The chamber can only be opened from one side at a time.”

“That’s part of the mantra for the Guardian’s Ritual,” Fry said. “At every stage of the steps, the initiate recites words that roughly translate, ‘the only way out is in.’”

Once the floor was clear, they began sliding the doors back closed. They were completely silent when they opened, but now the gravel grated between the bottom of the doors and the floor.

“Well, here goes,” Keith said and pushed the door into place. Nothing happened. The back of the door was as ornately decorated as the front had been, however, and Keith explored the carving near where the handle was. Three stars crossed the seam, one split between the two panels. Keith grasped both the outer two and tried turning them left then right. They moved and he could hear the locking mechanism drop into place. A moment after the door had sealed, they heard a second hissing. The torches flickered. On the other side of the obelisk, stones in the wall slid aside. They each took a torch, their backpacks, and flashlights and crossed the room to the darkness beyond.

As soon as they crossed through the passage between the chambers they could hear a difference in the echo of their steps. All three shined their flashlights ahead and could see the beams pick out massive pillars on either side. They glowed, ghostly in the dark, even when they turned off their flashlights.

“I think this room would be big enough for your library,” Fry said. His voice echoed in the hollow chamber. As their eyes became more accustomed to the dark, they realized the room was dimly lit. Pillars a yard across and at least 50 feet high stood in rows at least 30 feet apart. The pillars glowed softly. At the end of the central corridor was a colossus figure.

“What are these columns made of?” Keith asked as he approached one and laid his hand on it. Now that their eyes were adjusted to the dim illumination, the three turned off their flashlights. Surprisingly the pillar was not as cold as Keith expected.

“How deep are we?” Maddie asked.

“According to the topo map,” Keith said, “the spring where we entered is about 200 meters lower in elevation than the terraces on the mountain. I couldn’t tell if we gained or lost any elevation in the darkness between the spring and the first doors.”

“Gained,” Maddie and Fry both said at once.

“Drainage,” Fry said. “The entrances slope away from the main pyramid.”

“Pyramid?” Keith and Maddie looked at each other.

“Look at the walls,” Fry said. On all four sides of the square chamber, the walls sloped inward. It’s what gave me the first clue about the entryway. That wall only sloped in one direction.”

“Wait a minute,” Keith said, calculating in his mind. “If this room is about 300 feet in each direction, and we are on the ground floor, that would mean that the top of the pyramid is still 200 feet above us. It’s not as big as the Great Pyramid of Giza, but that’s pretty impressive for an underground structure.”

“We may not even be on the ground floor,” Fry said. “It just happened to be an entrance level. Very likely there are more entrances hidden around the mountain.”

“Are we under the tumulus?” Maddie asked.

“Yes. That must be how it’s lit,” Keith responded. They were nearly to the colossus at the end of the chamber.

“What do you mean?”

“The tumulus above us acts as a heat sink. The pillars are not exactly warm to the touch, but definitely not stone cold. I don’t know what they are made of, but the stored heat must be what makes them glow,” Keith said.

“Did you notice, by the way, that we can only see that statue up to about the top of his knees? He must be nearly a hundred feet tall,” Maddie said.

“It makes sense,” Keith said. “No wonder none of the soundings that have been taken have ever shown anything down here. If a chamber this deep showed up at all, it would diffuse the sounding and they wouldn’t get a reliable reading.”

“Why is it so empty?” Maddie asked. She was looking around the chamber and it appeared to be little more than rows of pillars extending to a ceiling some fifteen meters above. “Where are all the books?” she asked as she looked down into alcove after alcove.

“We need to decide where we’re going,” Fry said. “Flashlights won’t last forever and we can’t count on magical lighting in every chamber. We should bring a couple of torches each, too.”

“There are stairs that seem to go up around each side of the statue. Which way?” Keith asked.

“Just a minute,” Maddie said, running back down the corridor of pillars. When she was about a hundred feet away she began coming back, looking first at the left pillar and then at the right as she passed each pair. When she had rejoined the men at the foot of the statue she said, “Right,” and headed for the stairs on that side of the statue. Keith and Fry were directly behind her as she began to climb.

“Why right?” Keith asked.

“That’s where the stacks are,” Maddie said. “This is a library. Even one that professed to send the documents out must have had some that were too fragile to move. That’s what we keep in the stacks.”

“But how do you know?” asked the agent.

“On the pillars,” Maddie said as she climbed. “They are all carved like pillars in ancient Egypt. Only the figures on the right get progressively higher on the pillar, like people standing on ladders. On the left, the figures progress downward.”

“But both stairs lead up.”

“‘One long staircase just going up, and one even longer coming down,’” Maddie recited. “It’s the one on the right.”

“I’m following,” Keith said. The stairway disappeared behind the colossus and kept going into darkness. Keith tried to picture the position of the staircase on the other side and was sure that they should cross each other at this point, but instead, the walls closed in on the sides and soon they were going up the staircase sideways, dragging their packs, in order to get through the passage.

When the narrow passage opened into a room, they discovered they were standing facing the waist and torso of the colossal statue. His head must still be above, Keith thought. This chamber was significantly smaller than the chamber below and the room was dark. When they flashed their lights around the room, they could see open doorways leading off the central room about every 15 feet around all four sides. Keith began to worry about the lifespan of their lights if they had to explore every room before they found a way out. As if reading his mind, Agent Fry pointed to a torch in a sconce on the wall.

“We’d better go by torchlight when we need it and just by the dim light in the walls when we can,” he said. “It will save our batteries.”

“It’s remarkable that they don’t smoke much,” Maddie said. “We can hope they don’t do too much damage to anything we see.” She poked her head through the first door on her right where she took a torch from the wall and gasped.

“What is it?” Keith asked, coming up beside her.

“Not what I thought,” Maddie said. “I thought it was a room of mirrors, it’s so shiny.” They pushed into the chamber together and looked at the flat shining surfaces.

“They are windows,” Keith said in awe. He took their torches back outside the room and placed them in the sconces, then went back in. Fry left his outside as well. The windows weren’t crystal clear, but it seemed they also radiated a muted light.

“How could there be glass and light in here if this was created in the first century B.C.?” Maddie asked.

“Alchemie,” Keith said. “Turning stone transparent. I wonder what the composition is.” He tapped the glass. It had a metallic ring. “Did you hear that?” he asked. “It sounds like transparent metal. And look at the edges. It isn’t in a frame. It seems to come right out of the rock.”

“And look what you can see,” Maddie said, pushing her face right up to the glass. “Books.”

“In every chamber,” Keith said. “By the looks of it, these books may be a thousand or more years old.”

“Sealed in stone,” Fry said.

“We’ve got a lot of work to do down here,” Keith said. “How can we get access to the books without damaging the glass?”

“The real question is ‘why should you?’” asked the agent. “Maybe they should just be preserved, not shown.”

“It’s a matter of authentication,” Keith said, “—to prove that a concept came from a particular time and individual.”

“I’m beginning to understand my responsibility as a Guardian of the Word as exactly that. We’re supposed to keep it safe, not expose it to danger,” Fry said. Maddie laughed. Both Keith and Fry looked at her.

“It’s a little premature to think about getting the books out of here when we don’t know how to get us out. I think we should keep going up,” Maddie said. “We aren’t close to getting out of this place yet. If we find a way out, we can discuss what to do with what we’ve found.”

There was only one staircase this time, the opposite side clearly going down the way they had come. Maddie went first again, dragging her pack behind her and holding her torch in front. It was narrow, but did not get narrower. When they reached the top and came out into another room, they stopped to stare in awe. They were face to face with the colossus. The head rose fifteen feet before its headdress began. It was in perfect condition, having never been exposed to the eroding effects of weather, and like the pillars and the glass, it glowed softly, giving great depth and texture to the carving.

“Spiral once and then once more, until the head is on the floor,” Fry said.

“What’s that?” Keith asked.

“The chant that goes with the ritual steps,” Fry said. “It didn’t come to me until we came face to face with the head on the floor. The ritual is a map.”

“The chant’s in English?” Maddie asked.

“No, but several of us have moved away from our tribes and we decided to do an English translation in case we have children that don’t speak the old language,” Fry said sheepishly. “It’s easier than Farsi.”

“Then you can get us out of here,” Keith said.

“If what I have is complete,” Fry agreed. “Like I said, a lot of the ritual was lost when our people were scattered. There was no one to compare one person’s version with. My cousins know the same version I do, but I know of other clans that have different twists.”

“Well, before we go following any more of it, come and look at this,” Maddie said. She was standing near the center of the room facing away from the massive head. In front of her was a stone dais.

“Did you find an altar?” Keith said.

“I guess you might call it that,” Maddie said. Keith and Fry joined her. In the center of the dais was a plinth on which rested a single book.

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