Afterworld Page 30

  She was unapologetic as she began to climb the rocks. They weren’t completely sheer. There were plenty of handholds to clamber up. ‘He is a god of vengeance. He punishes. I didn’t know you would fall. I didn’t know what would happen. And I thought maybe you were still special like before, in the City. I thought maybe everything would just work out for you.’

  ‘Apparently not. Apparently I needed to be punished.’ Dom struggled up the cliff behind her.

  Pulling a torch from his pack, Dom passed it to Deora who held it to a torch burning brightly on the wall until it burst into flames, offering them enough light to find their way back to the Horus urn. The torch was dry enough now to burn brightly and the walls still seemed to have an inner light that travelled with them, so they could see clearly quite a few feet ahead. When they arrived back at the intersection, the Horus relief was now firmly pointing in the other direction.

  Dom hit the urn with the back of his hand as they walked by. ‘Thanks for nothing.’

  The tunnel was identical, but this time, rather than disappearing down a sheer cliff, it sloped gently downwards. It also seemed to narrow a little, but it was so slight that Dom could not be sure if he was imagining it or not. The air was fresh enough, but he felt a strong sense of claustrophobia. At first the pair were walking side by side, but the walls forced them into single file and again, Deora casually slid to the rear with the torch, forcing Dom to advance cautiously into the half-light.

  He was alert now, listening and watching carefully for whatever trick was next, and yet all he observed was the constant narrowing of the walls, to the soundtrack of his own quickening breath. He pulled the notebook from his backpack and tried to decipher any of the instructions Eva had given him. It was useless, the book was beginning to dry out, but the words were illegible. He sighed, but held onto it anyway, taking comfort in the feeling it gave of being connected to her. The walls began to gently brush his shoulders as he walked, slightly at first and then more firmly until he had to twist sideways and walk more slowly to squeeze through. Behind him, Deora crouched and twisted and her face was fraught with concern. Dom felt a slight feeling of kinship in their discomfort and reached back to put his hand on her arm for a moment.

  ‘There will be a way – there’s no point to any of this if it’s impossible.’ She smiled, but didn’t respond further and after a few more minutes of walking Dom found the most effective method of continuing was on all fours, crawling. Doubts flooded him. What was he doing here? In a tunnel on his knees. He should be in school. Playing basketball. Living a normal life. A familiar, heavy feeling rose in his throat, making it harder to breathe. It was the feeling of being completely lost. The sense of hopelessness coursed through his body, drowning him from the inside, filling him with despair. The walls narrowed even more and he realised that if it got any smaller they would have to back out. The air was still fresh, but it did little to lessen the fear of being stuck and his heart pounded, adrenaline pumping. He sped up a little, desperate to find some way out. Deora matched his speed, and he could hear her scrambling, clawing at his heels, the light bobbing erratically as she tried to hold the torch steady.

  ‘Look.’ Dom pulled to the side so she could see past him. ‘It ends. It ends.’

  The relief of it was like a wave of renewed optimism. The end of the tunnel was abrupt, a simple sheer drop into blackness. Across the chasm was a doorway, brightly lit, wide and tall. It wasn’t far away. It would have been an easy jump from a standing position, maybe three or four feet, but it was a near suicide-mission from a crouch. He groaned.

  ‘Can we use the rope?’ Deora spoke from behind him.

  ‘There’s nothing to hook it onto. It’s just another tunnel like this.’ He looked at the walls carefully. There was no Horus figure, but there was a strange relief carved into the rock above the tunnel entrance across the way. He had to squint to see it in the faint light, but could tell that it was an image of a half-man, half-goat holding something in its hands. Dom twisted to his other side to get a better view. ‘Is that a faun? It’s got horns and furry legs. Is it holding one of those flutes?’

  Deora twisted around him. ‘It is Pan. The god, Pan.’

  As with Horus, when the figure heard its name it moved. It danced and played the pan flute and the music echoed around them so loudly that Dom winced. ‘So what do you know about him? Do we trust him?’

  ‘I don’t know much, he is a god of the wild. Of fertility maybe?’

  ‘So . . . we can’t trust him either?’ Dom watched as Pan spun and danced and then seemingly stopped to offer an impish grin before continuing with his gyrations.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Deora bit her lip.

  The figure finally gestured with his hand at the tunnel below and froze.

  ‘Well, I hope he’s more trustworthy than Horus.’ Dom considered their options. It was the tunnel, which sat across a small chasm, or jumping down into the blackness of the chasm itself. ‘I’m going to try and jump over to the tunnel, okay?’ He smiled at her. ‘Unless you want to go first this time?’

  Deora didn’t respond. Dom took off the heavy backpack and drew himself into a crouching position. With a deep breath he leaped across the space, pushing off the edge of the small tunnel with his feet.

  He had judged accurately and he would have made it into the entrance of the tunnel – if it had been a tunnel. But it was not, and Dominic crashed head and arms first into a hard, reflective surface that shattered and showered him with sharp, glistening shards. He closed his eyes immediately and reached out, finding a handhold on the rock to keep his body from falling, but barely enough to hold his weight. He gathered his thoughts and his breath. His arm was twisted and weak, his grip loosening. There was water dripping from somewhere above, splashing onto his head. Running down his body in rivulets.

  ‘Dominic.’ Deora’s voice sounded faint. Almost far away. ‘I will throw you the rope and pull you back up. Okay?’

  ‘Yep.’ He struggled to hold on as the rope hit his shoulder and fell across his chest, but he wasn’t sure how to grab it. His right arm was starting to feel numb, and his left arm was bearing his entire weight. He scraped his feet around feeling for some purchase on the rocks, but they were sheer, and crumbled away each time he found any foothold whatsoever. Finally, too far to his left to be entirely safe, he felt a small ledge with his foot and was able to put enough pressure on it to grab the rope with his damaged arm and wrap it under his armpits.

  ‘I think I’ve got it. I’m going to try and turn around.’ With the rope around him, he felt more confident about readjusting his grip, using his weaker arm to grasp the wall, switching his feet and swinging back around to find a handhold with his left hand. He almost fell, but the risk paid off and he found himself with his back pressed tightly against the wall. Across the ravine Deora was crouched in the tunnel, ready to pull. Her pale face was creased with concentration and he was relieved to see the thick rope wrapped around her arms. But he saw something else that made him yelp.

  ‘There’s another tunnel,’ he yelled excitedly. ‘Right next to you. The one I jumped towards was just a reflection of it!’ He gestured with his chin and she carefully stuck her head out enough to see. ‘I don’t think I can jump to it though, I don’t have enough to push off. Can you hold me if I just, kind of, drop?’

  She nodded. He leaned hard against the wall, freeing his right arm so he could pull the rope tight around his chest and wrap it around his forearm. Pushing off as hard as he could from his precarious position he leaped and, as he had suspected, fell short, and fell fast. The rope took longer to catch him than he expected and for a moment he wondered if Deora had simply let go, but then it cinched around the top of his chest, wrenching his arms up and catching him tight. He swung back wildly into the wall, crashing hard against the rocks, knocking the breath out of him for a second time.

  Deora pulled him up arm over arm and he realised he hadn’t fallen far, but his shirt was soaked. Maybe from the dripping
from above. Scraping up the edge he pulled himself back into the cramped tunnel, and in the dim light saw that the dampness was his own blood. His arm had been deeply cut. They both sat and caught their breath while they waited for it to heal. Dom noticed Deora recovered far more quickly than he did. He was exhausted, sore and winded and his arm seemed to be taking a long time to heal.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ Deora lifted his arm up and looked at it. It was a neat, clean cut, but it was deep in the forearm muscle and blood was still dripping out. ‘Why aren’t you healing?’

  Dom didn’t reply. He didn’t know the answer and it was worrying. If he wasn’t going to heal in this place full of traps and subterfuge, he was in deep trouble. He opened his satchel and pulled out his hourglass, watching the silvery liquid melt through the narrow glass neck. It was moving fast. He felt they had gotten nowhere and taken a long time doing it. He looked up at Deora and caught a calculating expression on her face. It melted when she met his eyes.

  ‘Well, we should bandage that and keep moving.’ She smiled the brilliant smile that always simultaneously disarmed and scared him. Beautiful, but so hard to read. Slipping past him in the tiny space she leaned around the edge and judged the best way to get to the tunnel entrance that was positioned next to them on the sheer face of rock. It was easy in the end, a simple swing around into the larger and brighter tunnel and she reached back and pulled Dom and the backpack around after her. It was so close it was possible to have one foot in each tunnel and to simply slide around the dividing wall. Once he was safely in the adjacent tunnel, Deora ripped a hand’s width of fabric from the bottom of her dress and wrapped it around his arm tightly to stop the bleeding. He winced as the white fabric was instantly stained wine-red. They watched it silently, unwilling to look at each other.

  ‘So how about a new approach?’ Dom finally joked. ‘What if we make sure the stronger, faster, smarter one is leading the way?’

  Deora snorted softly and let what appeared to be a small, but genuine, smile slip onto her face. She started up the new tunnel with the pack on her back and Dom trailed behind, his left hand applying pressure to the bleeding wound.

  ‘You could have at least pretended it was me.’ He smirked. ‘So, if you have done this before, why don’t you know what to do?’

  ‘I told you already. It is different every time, and for every person.’

  Dom’s arm ached violently. ‘Ahh.’ He tried to ignore the pain as he continued, ‘Perhaps everything is opposite. If the gods say one direction, we just choose the other. Pan was a trickster, wasn’t he? Eduardo said Anubis was the same. That he enjoys playing with people.’

  ‘If they are tricking us, they will not keep it up long enough for us to understand their tactics,’ she replied.

  ‘Or they will, knowing that we will think they are doing the same thing, and they’ll try something different . . .’ He was starting to confuse himself. ‘Then they will change tactics and they’ll catch us out again.’ Dom rambled, his mind half on what he was saying and half on the blood that had soaked his tourniquet and was dripping down his raised arm to leave a spotted trail on the floor. ‘It’s like Alice in Wonderland . . . “everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see?” ’

  ‘I think you are correct,’ Deora replied.

  Dom was surprised that Deora would agree with him at all. He wasn’t sure he had even been making sense. ‘I am?’

  ‘I am the smarter one.’

  4

  Eva’s Hourglass

  6070 Minutes

  Eva was feeling a vague sense of panic and the more she tried to quell it, the more it felt as though it were rising like a stone in her throat. The room was small and seemed more so with every second. The walls were covered from roof to floor with elaborate hieroglyphs and while she could decipher some of them, she could make no sense of the overall message. One wall would direct her to the corner of the room, and then another wall would point back to the same corner. After several hours, she slumped down and watched the minutes rush quietly through her hourglass. She had been reading the walls aloud to herself, but when she stopped, the silence was so dense it was oppressive. So oppressive that she imagined she was hearing things. Dogs howling in the distance. A voice echoing. Wind rushing. As soon as she tried to latch onto the sounds with her mind, she couldn’t hear them anymore. She must be imagining things.

  She closed her eyes and leaned her head against the wall to steady her mind, focusing on the smooth, warm surface. After a few minutes, she could think more clearly and heard a real sound that grew louder and louder until she could distinguish it as a call for help. She pressed her ear against the wall; it was a desperate sound, wild. Her hands gripped the wall, re-reading the hieroglyphs closer to the floor. This was the corner the messages had been directing her to, but there seemed to be nothing different about the message itself once she reached the corner. She stood back from the corner a few steps, taking it all in. There must be something she was missing.

  She lay on her stomach to read the bottom row and there it was. A pictograph of Anubis was included in the message in the furthest corner on the lowest line. She ran her hand over it, pushing into it and feeling the faint indentation with her fingers. Nothing seemed to happen. She hit the wall with her fist and called.

  ‘Hey? Is anyone there? Can anyone hear me?’ There was no sound.

  She studied the writing again and read the message aloud. ‘The words will lead you to the East.’ And from the other wall, ‘The words will lead you to the West.’ Still nothing. ‘The words will lead you to Anubis in the East.’ The silence felt heavier.

  Eva sighed in frustration. The Maze had not been this infuriating last time. It had been long, exhausting and stressful, but not impossible. She gazed at the words. There was a carved oval around the picture of Anubis. What was that? She looked at the rest of the wall. None of the other pictographs had the same symbol. It meant something. Closing her eyes she thought back, past her time in the Afterworld to the murky memories of life before, of high school. It was like opening her eyes underwater in a swamp, everything dim and fluid. Memories that moved constantly, and were hard to get hold of. She concentrated until her head hurt, but she found it. Cartouche. It was a cartouche. And it indicated that the figure inside it was important. ‘The words will lead you to the King Anubis in the East.’ Nothing. ‘The words will lead you to the Angel Anubis in the East.’ More nothing. She sighed. ‘The words will lead you to the god Anubis in the East.’

  There was still no actual sound, simply the movement of air, but the wall, at least a portion of it, slid open and revealed a small square hole, perhaps one or two metres square, in the corner of the room. As she leaned closer to see where it led, something scrambled out of the hole and ran into her, knocking her backwards. She threw up her hands, yelling savagely, hitting and scratching at whatever was on top of her.

  It was a man and he was far bigger than her, wild with fear, or possibly, given the roar that he emitted, rage. He pushed her shoulders into the ground and his long matted hair hung down into her eyes.

  ‘Get off me!’ she screamed, trying to find some authority in her terror. Surprisingly he responded, leaping to a ready crouch beside her as she pulled herself into a sitting position and defensively scrambled backwards to the nearest wall. The light was dim and the adrenaline coursing through her system made it hard for her to see straight. Her vision shook with each heartbeat until, breathing through her nose, she managed to calm herself. The man swiped the hair out of his face and glared at her.

  Immediately, Eva recognised him, and her heart sank. ‘You! How could you possibly be here?’ It was impossible. Implausible. And perhaps the one face on Earth or anywhere else that she did not want to see.

  He snarled at her and turned his head on the side. ‘Do I know you?’ His eyes narrowed as he recognised her and he spat out something in a rippling guttural language that
even to Eva’s ignorant ears was an obscenity. She recognised the words ‘Angelus’ and ‘Anubis’ before he switched to a language she understood. ‘You are that girl. Stupid, interfering, mindless humans.’

  Eva stood and glared down at the crouching figure. ‘Do you think, Satarial, that I wouldn’t rather be anywhere in life or death than in this room with you? And my name is Eva.’

  He stood regaining a little of his poise. ‘I suppose he is here, too?’

  ‘I haven’t seen Dom at all. Anubis put me here.’

  Satarial let loose another stream of vitriolic words she couldn’t understand. ‘I will kill him. I will kill him.’

  Eva tipped her head to the side, relaxing slightly as she realised she was not the object of the Nephilim’s rage. ‘Who? Dom or Anubis?’

  ‘Both would be satisfying.’ He leaned against the wall and rubbed his neck. ‘Did you see the size of that room? I’ve been in there for days.’ He paused. ‘Obviously I mean the Angel.’

  Eva’s mind whirled. ‘Days?’ She consulted her hourglass. ‘How have you been here for days?’

  He shrugged. ‘Do you want it to make sense? It has been many, many weeks since you left Necropolis. I don’t have an answer for you.’ He looked around at the sealed room. ‘Anubis doesn’t have this sort of power. He is working with someone.’

  ‘Who has more power than Anubis? Angels?’

  Satarial looked at her and she saw apprehension in the anger and it chilled her instantly. ‘Someone far worse.’

  5

  The Necropolis

  ‘Man, you people are always whinging! Come on.’ Kaide gazed out on the sea of contrasting faces that crowded the courtyard and garden of Satarial’s house, where she had been living for the last two months. She tried to like the Nephilim, and she did find them endlessly amusing with their uptight, aristocratic ways, but they complained about everything, and with Satarial missing for the last few days she had to deal with them whining like nervous old women.