Ancient Echoes (47 page)

He felt the array drain his life from him as it absorbed his
energy and yet he felt it share its own.

At that moment, the villagers stepped out of their hiding
places in the forest to witness the glorious yet frightening event taking place
in front of their eyes. Jake, Charlotte, Quade, and the students did the same.

A great ball of light formed above Michael, and shined down
on them all.
A kaleidoscope of colors and images.
Michael
then spread his arms wide. The earth rumbled. A tree near the villagers
suddenly burst into flame, then another farther away. The air crackled with
charged sparks of light as those who watched fell to their knees in fright and
awe.

Slowly, he lifted his hands. As he did, the pillars rose.
His power became far stronger than he imagined, but he knew that once the
gateway opened, anyone, anything, could pass from this amoral world to his own.

The chimeras snorted and stomped as they gathered on the
western edge of the forest to watch the strange proceedings before them with a
human-like intelligence glowing in their eyes. They appeared to understand what
they saw perhaps better than the humans.

“Hurry,” Michael said to Jake. “Get the students and
Charlotte through, and then I’ll close the gateway.” Quade wasn’t with them,
but Michael could do nothing about that.

At the same time, Kohler and the villagers began to run
toward the mound.

The two groups raced toward the pillars. The villagers were
winning.

“Hurry, Jake!” Michael called, but even as he did, he saw
that the villagers would reach the gateway before the students. He couldn’t let
that happen.

The villagers reached the bottom of the mound and began to
climb.

Michael began to slowly lower his arms, afraid of what might
happen if he moved too quickly and the pillars crashed against the earth and
shattered.

“No!” Lionel cried, picking up Michael’s high-powered rifle.
“Keep the pillars right where they are. We’re leaving here! All of us!” He
aimed at his brother.

“Lionel, no!”
Charlotte screamed.

“We can’t let them through,” Michael said, both frightened
and appalled by the madness that overtook his brother. “They’ll destroy
everything.” He again began to lower his arms.

“Stop!
I swear!” Lionel cried. His
hand, his entire body, shook. Will Durham released an arrow from his crossbow
just as Lionel squeezed the trigger. His shot went wide, hitting Michael’s
shoulder, tearing it open and shattering bone and muscle.

As Michael fell, the pillars slammed back to the ground. The
earth shook and roared.

“He's not dead!” Kohler shouted to the villagers. “Get up
there! Lift him up! We must use him to keep the gateway open!”

The villagers climbed the mound to follow Kohler's orders. The
chimeras moved closer as well.

“Lionel,” Michael whispered, and dragged himself to his
brother. The arrow had struck Lionel’s heart. He lay dead. Sorrow shot through
Michael for all that might have been between them, for all their lost years,
for all that could never be. He bowed his head, overcome, as horror built upon
horror in this evil place.

“Enough!” Quade shouted. His long whitish-blond hair looked
like an aura around his head, while black eyes took in everything. One hand
clutched
The Book of Abraham the Jew
against his chest, while he raised
the other hand and said, again, “Enough!”

A profound authority emanated from him. The villagers
stopped moving, unable to do anything but obey Quade's command. Jake, Charlotte
and the students stopped as well, forming a tight knot, not knowing what to do,
which way to turn.

“I did not want this.” Quade spoke in little more than a
whisper that mysteriously carried from the top of the mound to every ear. “I
struggled to find some way to avoid it. A misfortune of our fallen arrogant
nature is that even a man—such as I—who has lived for centuries still wants to
stay alive, curious about what the future will bring to this strange little
planet twirling around a giant universe. But I cannot let more people die because
of me.”

Kohler stood, his body so riddled with bullet holes he had
been nearly shredded. “Abbé Gerard? But you cannot be him! We saw you die! We
tossed your corpse into the river.”

“Die but not dead,” the Abbé said with a small, secretive
smile. “You’ve done it yourself, time and again. Why should I, the greatest
alchemist the world has ever known, be unable to do the same? Those many years
ago, when I revived, I simply kept going. I had the power all along to escape
from this place. So I opened the gateway. Several chimeras slipped out with me.
To my surprise, in the real world their animal natures, which I did not make
immortal, caused them to slowly deteriorate. The bones of the dead created
quite a stir among scientists.
A couple of them live to this
day.”

“They live, but they also kill,” Michael said as he somehow
managed to raise himself to a sitting position, one hand clutching his
shoulder, trying to stem the flow of blood.

The Abbe shrugged. “In any case, I never wanted to leave
this place. I created it! I loved it! And I did not miss the company of men.
They had hounded me from my beloved Paris, from Spain, Egypt, and even from
China. In this New World I could live alone in peace, with only the Tukudeka.
And then men from the secret expedition came and destroyed my peace. Now, here,
all of you shall remain. I want us to return to the village now, my village,
where I shall take my rightful place as your leader.”

Everything Michael heard, the sheer monstrousness of the
story, sickened him. “Tell me, how can a man who doesn’t age live in the real
world?”

The Abbé's thin red lips tightened with disgust. “I made my
way to the Pacific, and from there sailed to Asia, eventually crossing the
mountains to Tibet. Tibetans do not question the unquestionable. I stayed with
them until the Communist Chinese took over the country. They killed many good
men, many holy men.” His black eyes raged. “How can you call my world evil
compared to the unimaginable horror of
your
world in the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries? I left the destruction that once was the beauty of
Tibet and returned to America where, for the right price, identities and
insider knowledge easily can be purchased. A man who can make gold always has
the right price. When I learned all that happened here, I realized my creation
caused it, a creation made when I was a very different man from the one you see
before you.”

“How different?”
Michael asked.
“You still make yourself a tin god.”

“I returned here with hope of freeing the young people, and
then going on with my life. But once back, I saw that was impossible. I did not
want this horror. My deeds have eaten at my soul.” He turned from Michael to
speak to the students who stood awe-struck at the power that seemed to emanate
from both Michael and the Abbé. “Forgive me, but I cannot allow you or those
who tried to rescue you to return. Remember the curse that Abraham the Jew
placed on his book—
Maranatha
against every person that should cast
his eyes upon it
and is not sacrificer or scribe
. You have seen too
much; you know too much; you will desire too much and never again find peace in
the real world. You are all cursed! But out of kindness, I shall give you the
elixir of immortality. Without it, the men of the secret expedition will surely
kill you.”

Michael tried to stand, but the excruciating pain almost
made him black out. He willed himself to fight past it, but failed.

The scent of flowers
…Lady Hsieh.
He sensed her beside him. Her words came to him, not as a whisper, but from
inside. “You must act, Michael. Destroy this world to save your own. Look to
the philosopher’s stones, at what they do. When you understand that, you will
see that the strength is within you.”

She came once more to save him. He gazed at the red stones.
What
had she meant?
The alchemist used them to speed up change in minerals and
bring the elements to perfection. The perfect mineral is gold which never
decays; the perfect man is immortal because he never ages. To create the
change, the stones compressed time, used untold energy…

Energy! That was it! Earth, air, fire, and water—the matter
of alchemy. The alchemist sped their change…and that change provided the energy
to create all this.

He knew what to do just as she’d foretold. He removed the
philosopher’s stones from around his neck and placed them and the stone from
Lady Hsieh’s tomb on the ground.
When he did, lights shown
around them forming the symbol of immortality.
The stones lay in the
black circle, the center of centers.

He remembered once hearing a story about that circle, how a
Chinese warrior, a great man, enjoyed invincibility except in one spot—the
circle. It alone made the warrior vulnerable to a terrible, perhaps fatal,
wound to body or spirit or both. He thought of Achilles and his vulnerable
heel, and the King of the Grail Knights, Amfortas, and his never-healing wound.

“You will let the students go,” Michael demanded. “If not, I
will destroy this world.”

The Abbé faced him, shocked at his new tone. His expression
turned fierce, his gaze cold. “This world was a fine place, everything I could
possibly want until Captain Crouch and his companions wanted to take what was
mine! At first, they were good, learned men. I liked them, and fed them the
elixir of immortality. But then, they wanted to learn alchemy for themselves.
They coveted the wealth it could create, the immortality and power it could
grant. They became corrupt!”

“
This place
corrupted them, as it did you.” Michael’s
will
grew
stronger with each breath. “But these young
people are innocent. They don’t deserve such a fate. You must let them leave
and return home!”

“I am not evil!” the Abbé thundered. “What I do is for the
greater good.”

“There’s nothing good about what you suggest.”

As the Abbé and Michael faced off in a war of wills, their
audience stood muted and still, while the earth began to rumble and groan.

“You can't blame me for the evil these men did!” The Abbé
clenched his hand into a fist. “I cast an alchemical spell over the pillars
causing anyone who found them to forget about them after leaving the area. It’s
not my fault I could do nothing to prevent a person, once here, from walking
between them and entering this world.” The Abbe stood straight, regal, chin
high as he added, “To destroy the world is to destroy me. You are a part of it,
part of my family. In its destruction, you, too, will perish!”

 “Then, so it must be!” Michael yanked the arrow from
his brother’s body and plunged it into the black circle, the center of centers,
the
only vulnerable spot in this alchemical world.

“No!” the Abbé shouted.

Michael collapsed, too weak and ravaged with pain to hold
himself up a moment longer.

The earth trembled. The hieroglyphs at the tops of the
pillars developed fissures that grew and deepened. Chunks broke off and fell to
the earth.

Michael saw Lady Hsieh then. He watched her image grow
faint. “No! Not you,” he cried. “I can’t lose you, too.”

“I’m glad…” she murmured as she faded from his eyes.

Charlotte climbed the mound and tried to pull Michael away,
but as much as she struggled, he fought to stay there, as if he saw something
beyond her vision. She took Ben Olgerbee’s poultice from her pocket and smeared
the last of it thickly on the gaping wound. Immediately, it began to slow the
flow of blood. Michael could not die, she thought, not now, not in this battle
for all their futures.

Jake joined her. They lifted Michael to his feet and carried
him off the mound, just ahead of the toppling pillars. “She’s gone.” His
strange words made no sense to them.

The pillars swayed faster, deeper, until finally they
crashed to earth. Dirt and ash spewed into the air.

Jake, Charlotte and Michael fell amidst the tide, choking on
the dust.

Michael envisioned the time in Kenya, at his first dig, when
the earth collapsed on him and he felt death a certainty. But the paralyzing
emptiness that came over him in Kenya didn’t happen this time. Life was a gift,
and held far more wonders and beauty than he had ever believed. He rose to his
hands and knees, unwilling to give up.

The sea of ash blinded Charlotte and left her unable to
breathe. Strong arms grabbed her. Jake held her close as he led her away from
the thick, roiling powder-filled air. Devlin, who had been some distance away
with Brandi and Rachel, ran into the dust and helped Michael escape.

At that moment, a cold, violent wind rose out of nowhere,
swept the cloud of soot into a tornado that swirled around the village men
alone, and pinned them to one spot.

The villagers’ forms faded and then flickered and returned
as they struggled against their fate. Kohler stared at Michael with malice
while the world that kept him alive collapsed. His body shuddered as he
struggled but failed to break the paralysis that came over him.

All the others, Francis Masterson, Noah Handy, who had been
Francis’ easy-going friend and now called himself Gus Webber; the brothers
Orril and Asa Munroe, who pretended to be Sam Black and Arnie Tieg; and the
wise elder Reuben Hale, who was known to them as Ben Olgerbee, had once been
good men, but had been overcome by the evil of this unholy place.

The chimeras watched the trapped men of the Secret
Expedition. Hate-filled, they ran towards the men, their eyes glowing with the
desire to tear them to pieces. They no sooner reached them when magna from
within the earth, hot from fire, rose up and captured both men and beasts in
its fiery grasp. The cyclonic wind that circled them grew stronger, forcing
them inward even as they struggled with each other. And finally, at their feet,
black, brackish water rose up from within the earth. The water boiled.