Catacombs

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John Lee Farris (born 1936) is an American writer, known largely for his work in the southern Gothic genre. He was born 1936 in Jefferson City, Missouri, to parents John Linder Farris (1909–1982) and Eleanor Carter Farris (1905–1984). Raised in Tennessee, he graduated from Central High School in Memphis and attended Southwestern College (now Rhodes College) in Memphis . His first wife, Kathleen, was the mother of Julie Marie, John, and Jeff Farris; his second wife, Mary Ann Pasante, was the mother of Peter John ("P.J.") Farris.

Apart from his vast body of fiction, his work on motion picture screenplays includes adaptations of his own books (i.e., The Fury), original scripts, and adaptations of the works of others (such as Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man). He wrote and directed the film Dear Dead Delilah in 1973. He has had several plays produced off-Broadway, and also paints and writes poetry. At various times he has made his home in New York, southern California and Puerto Rico; he now lives near Atlanta, Georgia.Book List

Author's Website – Furies & Fiends

Other
John Farris books
currently available or coming soon from Crossroad Press:

All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By

Catacombs

Dragonfly

Fiends

King Windom

Minotaur

Nightfall

Phantom Nights

Sacrifice

Sharp Practice

Shatter

Solar Eclipse

Son of the Endless Night

Soon She Will Be Gone

The Axeman Cometh

The Captors

The Fury

The Fury and the Power

The Fury and the Terror

The Ransome Women

Unearthly (formerly titled The Unwanted)

When Michael Calls

Wildwood

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Catacombs is dedicated to

Mary Ann,

Julie,

John,

Jeff,

and Peter.

My friends, partners, and fellow explorers

of adventures unknown,

lives not yet lived.

The pictographs in this book have been adapted from drawings made by Jonathan Kingdon and published in East African Mammals: An Atlas of Evolution in Africa, Volume 3, Part A (Carnivores) by Academic Press, Inc.

March 19/0930 hours

Day 173

F
or the first time since we arrived nearly six months ago, I feel afraid of the Catacombs: this enormous burial ground of an elite society, carved into our familiar rock of Earth. Yet they are as distant from what we regard as human as the alien life forms of a planet a million light years across the galaxy.

The Priests of Zan are not dead: I believe they will never die. We have just begun, after exhausting exploration, to grasp the idea of their continuing power, a mastery of eternity. They stand mute but dreaming in a reliquary of their fabulous civilization. All has been revealed to us; too little we understand. They have not been waiting for us. We don't matter. We are transient, vulnerable, inferior, possessed by the smoke of their dreams, helpless to divine the meaning of their continuing existence.

Of one thing I am certain: They live on through the power of the bloodstones. And the bloodstones should never have been disturbed, despite their accessibility and immeasurable value. We should have approached them with the care and caution of anthropologists studying a new species, not as a group of intoxicated treasure-hunters.

Jack Portline is dead, the back of his head shattered by repeated blows from a mattock.

He had been missing for five days. We found his body in a previously uninvestigated chamber on the seventh level of the Catacombs, near the Repository. He was dragged there in a clumsy attempt to hide the remains, but the trail of blood, still fresh after several days, wasn't difficult to follow even in the available light from the central core. (It is worth noting again, despite the horrible circumstances, that nothing seems to spoil in the Catacombs. Fresh milk remains fresh after weeks without refrigeration. Growth–hair, fingernails–is severely retarded.)

We concluded that Jack had surprised his assailant at work, looting the Repository. There was a small pool of blood on the stone floor near one of the crystal vaults, and more spots on the vault itself. From this vault as many as fifty bloodstones have been removed: Chips and I didn't take the time to count all of the empty sockets. One man could carry, without difficulty, that many stones down the mountain in a rucksack. They would weigh only about seventeen ounces. In what passes for civilization in our time, the red diamonds would have a value well in excess of one hundred million dollars. So much for motive.

One of our friends and associates is demented, a murderer. Which one? There was nothing to do but summon all the members of the Chapman/Weller expedition, by beeper, from the depths where they have been working in numerous chambers of the Catacombs, and from the base camp on the mountain. It will be hours before we are sure who else is missing; and that man will have Jack Portline's blood on his hands.

We are in the expedition's "common room," if indeed you can describe space the size of a zeppelin hangar, hewn from solid rock, as a room. Level One, Sector One (our destination) of the Catacombs, which we chose because there are no tombs here, no open feline eyes to study our every move from deep within their flawless crystal sarcophagi. In a lonely area of Sector One that takes up as much space as a tablecloth on a football field are the Mylar mushrooms that comprise our home in the Catacombs: privacy for work, study, recuperation. The costly paraphernalia of expeditions on spaceship Earth. Cadmium fuel cells, fluid recyclers, field-grade microelectronics for every type of data processing.

Chips is asleep on the pneumatic mattress next to mine, a hand flung out against my side for companionship, and reassurance. I know I should sleep now, before the next ordeal, but I can't. In the beginning, months ago, was the agony of acclimatization: The Catacombs lie many thousands of feet above the migraine level for all but the most seasoned and hardy alpinists, and few of our middle-aged scientists qualified as such despite rigorous preconditioning before the expedition was assembled. After we adjusted to the altitude, sleep was still a fitful experience at best, disturbed by the nervous excitement from our continuing, phenomenal discoveries. In a place where there is no day or night, only an unvarying level of illumination several foot candles brighter than the light of the full moon, we've all wanted to work beyond our capacities to make the most of the available time. Sleep and food too often seem to be expendable, and we've suffered from this neglect ourselves.

Now, after weeks of the eerie silence of tombs, there are earthshocks, occurring more frequently during the past few days. We are, after all, in the Great Rift Valley, an area of ongoing seismic activity, of irresistible forces slowly splitting a continent apart. It's as if the bloodstones are the heart of this mountain, a heart which has been severely damaged by the transgressions of a greedy maniac. I think it may be too late already, but we must try to get the stones back to where they belong. . .

Continued:

By 1400 hours we were all assembled. All but two: Jack Portline and his murderer. I must say Chips did not seem surprised. But he was deeply shaken by guilt and rage at himself for having twice placed his trust in a man whose essential faithlessness is well known to the world. Privately I reminded him that we'd never had a choice. Yet I too feel guilty. Is a unique discovery like the Catacombs worth the bargain we are forced to make, the senseless death of a colleague?

After only six months our work here is drastically incomplete, but clearly none of us has the heart, or the stamina, to continue for now. Our sensors and computers now predict the likelihood of a major volcanic eruption; temperatures have been rising slowly inside the Catacombs, from a previously consistent 62.8 degrees. The decision was made to pack it in. Chips has gone down to the base camp to signal for helicopters. He feels it is best not to say anything about the murder, or the theft of the bloodstones, until he can speak to Kinyati.

Jumbe Kinyati will see to it that justice is done. And quickly.

Day 174

Time for only a few notes; but the habit dies hard. And I'm concerned that these tapes of mine might be the only surviving evidence of the Chapman/Weller expedition.

The helicopters, both personnel carriers, came early, just after sunrise. One landed at the base camp and another in the cul-de-sac outside. We had removed our equipment and computerized data from the chambers–and Jack Portline's body, sewn into a sleeping blanket and weighing more than the rest of our gear put together. Now there is virtually no trace of our months-long sojourn in the Catacombs.

The Tanzanian Air Force in charge of the airlift, a bearded man named Timbaroo, ignored Chips' protests and loaded all of our data into a single helicopter. He and his soldiers obviously came equipped to make short work of the evacuation. They carried portable oxygen with them to nullify the effects of the extremely thin, cold air. And they had guns, for which there was no necessity. None of us were allowed aboard; the helicopter took off almost immediately. It's a valuable find, of course, unprecedented, and the government is jealous of its prerogatives, but this amounts to confiscation–or outright theft.