Prophecy. An ARKANE thriller. (Book 2) (14 page)

Suddenly a gunshot sounded in the dark hallway behind her, echoing off the high vaulted ceilings. Instinctively, Morgan crouched low behind the altar but the sound was further away and she realized quickly that she wasn’t in immediate danger. Jake, she thought, her heart racing. Pulling her weapon from the shoulder holster, Morgan ran on light feet towards the sound, as silent mummies looked down on her with vacant eyes.
 

*****

Jake had dived behind a huge casket a moment before the shot came, alerted by a slight stumbling step. The bullet thunked into the hard wood of the ancient coffin, splintering it but not passing through. He pulled his gun and returned fire, a double-tap in the direction the bullet had come from. It might keep them back for a few moments, he thought, willing Morgan to return as backup. Then he saw the grenade rolling across the floor towards him. No time to stop it. There was a stone sarcophagus on the other side of the room. Jake commando-rolled over and threw himself behind it as the grenade exploded and the world went black.
 

*****
 

Morgan tried to stay silent as she ran towards the gunfire but with the explosion she gave up and just ran as fast as she could, weapon drawn. If Jake was pinned down, she had to get to him. She reached the entrance to the children’s corridor where Jake had been searching. It had seemed a small explosion but the bodies were shredded from the walls and smoke billowed from the inner crypt. Tatters of cloth fluttered down in the carnage and ravaged skeletons lay broken on the stone paving. It was a massacre of the already dead, their bodies submitted to a final reckoning, but there was no sign of the living. Where was Jake?
 

She was too late to catch who had done this. The perpetrators must have left immediately and her thoughts flew to the Abbot and the security guard. Would they come running at the noise? Had the Thanatos team found them already? She had to find Jake.
 

The smoke cleared a little as it was sucked out by the ventilation system towards the main stairwell. Morgan held her sleeve over her mouth and nose and ducked down, crawling into the crypt. Her eyes pricked with tears from the smoke but there were no billowing flames. Clearly the grenade had been a mechanism to stun rather than aimed to kill, but she still couldn’t see Jake and there was no human body amongst the mess of broken bones and ripped cloth on the floor. Then she spotted the sarcophagus, an ideal shield against the blast. It was where she would have hidden. She crawled below the smoke and saw Jake, his body wedged into the space between the wall and the stone.

“Jake, are you OK?” She shook his shoulder anxiously.
 

He groaned, eyelids flickering. There was a nasty slash wound on his head, a bruised bump swelling around it. It looked like some masonry had been dislodged and hit him in the blast. Blood trickled from the wound, highlighting his corkscrew scar. She pulled a sterile dressing from her pack and pressed it against his face, fingers lingering briefly on the puckered flesh as she added surgical tape to hold it in place. It would do for now. Jake was covered in slivers of bone and rags from the tattered clothing as well as fine masonry dust. Morgan almost gagged to think that they were now breathing in the bodies of these long dead children, powdered by the attack.
 

“I think you’re concussed. I need to get you out of here,” she said. With the smoke clearing, she was able to stand and assess how to move him. The rest of his body looked intact but with concussion he would be nauseous and dizzy. A big man, Jake was over six foot of muscle now crammed behind a stone mausoleum.
 

“I’m going to need your help partner,” she said.
 

Jake groaned again, his eyes fluttering open. He put his hand against the wall, as if to anchor himself in the physical world.
 

“Did you get them?” he whispered, the effort causing him to wince with pain.
 

“No, by the time I arrived, there was no one else here. Now we need to get you out of here. You’re going to have to shuffle back this way.”

Jake pulled himself up.
 

“Lean forward,” Morgan helped him around the end of the sarcophagus, appreciating the brief moment of being close to him. He coughed, a racking sound that echoed in the chamber. She passed him some water from her backpack. “How are you feeling now?”
 

Jake smiled with half-shut eyes.
 

“Like they blew me up, what do you think?”
 

His mocking tone reassured her. He wasn’t too badly injured if he could still be so cocky, but he looked pale and ready to vomit at any point. Concussion could have other side effects and he needed to rest.
 

“We still need to find that book,” Jake said. ”Did you find anything?”
 

“Nothing and I don’t even know where we should be looking,” Morgan glanced around the ruined room. “We’d better get out of here soon because the explosion will have attracted attention. Perhaps the Abbot is hurt as well.”
 

“It wasn’t a professional attempt to kill me,” Jake replied. “Perhaps more to dissuade us from our search. The shot was clumsy, and the grenade was old. I think we need to keep looking. Maybe we’re closer than we think.”

He blanched and Morgan could almost see the wave of pain rocket through him. He rubbed his head, fingers gently exploring the plastered wound. She turned away from his vulnerability, knowing she would want that courtesy from him and looked around the room. The little coffins were devastating in their size, many of them open caskets where tiny bodies now lay broken. One stood out as a newer addition to the vault and the explosion had ripped a large crack through the middle of it. It had a plaque on it, ‘Rosalia Lombardo, 1920’ and the glass top was covered in dust and debris.
 

Morgan used her forearm to swipe the fragments off the coffin and then gasped at the face within. For a moment she saw Gemma, her little niece, perfect face frozen in death. But then the vision cleared. It was a little girl, her skin a waxy orange-brown but still real skin. Her hair was caught back in a ponytail with an orange ribbon tied in a bow and curls were tangled on her forehead. Eyelashes lay upon perfect cheeks and a cupids’ bow mouth gave the image of a sleeping beauty, innocence captured in a glass cage. She was wrapped in sienna silk, tucked in by the loving hands of a parent.
 

“Jake, come and look at this. She was laid to rest in 1920. That’s the most recent burial and perhaps the one people would least notice changes to back in the 1940s.”

Jake lurched over, using the remaining coffins as support. He looked down at the little girl.
 

“She seems to have beaten death at least in the physical sense,” he said. “But it just doesn’t make sense to me how these bodies can look so real. There’s no life spark here, just a treated bag of skin and bones.”
 

Morgan was startled by his vehemence and she realized that she didn’t actually know that much about his past or what drove him in this work. There would be time for that later, she thought.
 

“The glass has been cracked by the explosion.” Her fingers probed a fracture in the smooth surface. “The air will destroy her perfect looks now. She’ll soon be a ghoul like the rest of them.”

Morgan followed the crack down the side of the coffin and into the base. It sat upon a dais of sorts and the explosion had dislodged it. She knelt for a better look.

“Give me a hand moving this,” she said, the body of the little girl forgotten now, collateral damage in the hunt for something far more dangerous. Jake braced himself and groaned with the pain, but he helped her to lift the coffin from the top of the raised platform and place it gently on the floor. In a hollowed out compartment beneath lay a huge rectangular shape wrapped in sackcloth.
 

“That’s got to be it,” Morgan said, barely suppressed excitement in her voice. “Help me get it out of there.”
 

Again they lifted together, Jake grimacing as he heaved. Blood dripped down the side of his face from under the dressing. The book weighed seventy five kilos and Morgan could see the strain was increasing the pain in his head as they dropped the huge parcel on the floor with a thump. Jake leant on the wall as Morgan knelt and pulled back the sackcloth to reveal the book. Its front cover was decorated in an ornate pattern that hadn’t been clear on the images Marietti had shown them. Morgan stretched out her hand to open a clasp.
 

“Don’t,” Jake said, his words a sharp rebuke. She looked up at him.
 

“You seriously think there’s something to these curses?” she asked.
 

Jake was silent. Morgan could see that he was wrestling with rationality that fought hard against his spiritual side but she felt an almost palpable energy emanating from the book. It wanted her to open it and she didn’t want to resist. Taking Jake’s silence as a kind of permission, she flicked open the clasps one by one and opened the book, hefting the large wooden cover so it lay on the floor.
 

Hi curiosity piqued now, Jake came to kneel unsteadily next to her and together they gazed at the intricate colors of the richly illuminated pages. The initials of the first word on every page were decorated with medieval images of saints and Biblical figures. Angels and demons roamed the margins, hunting each other through the forest of pages.
 

“It’s beautiful,” Morgan said.
 

“But deadly,” Jake whispered, his voice lowered in the close air of the crypt.
 

“Marietti said the curses were at the back,” Morgan turned the pages over carefully in larger chunks to get to the back of the book faster. She spoke the names of the books with familiarity, “Isaiah, Zephaniah, Romans, Hebrews. Here it is…Revelation. Oh, it’s amazing.”

The chapter began with the glorious vision of Christ coming on a cloud with the whole cosmos arrayed before him. The seven lamp-stands were illuminated in real gold leaf, the seven stars of heaven in silver and a sword stood from his mouth in judgment.
 

“Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy,” Jake read, his voice stronger now. “How can this be a book of curses? It’s surely a perfect tribute to God, not a way to invoke the Devil.”
 

Morgan turned the pages carefully to chapter six, where the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse rode across the page.
 

“It’s an exact match to the Thanatos tattoo,” Morgan pointed at the pale horse’s head braying to the heavens as Death rode it towards destruction.
 

“And they’ll be searching for the original. We need to move,” Jake replied.

“Just one more minute.” Morgan turned the pages further to the end of Revelation where Marietti had said the curses were written, words that turned men into beasts capable of ripping another man to bloody chunks.
 

“Look, there are some pages are missing. The curses are gone and the images of the Devil and the Kingdom of Heaven aren’t here.”
 

There were torn stubs left behind, evidence that someone had tampered with the book. Jake bent to look more closely.
 

“You’re right, they’ve been removed, and in a hurry by the look of the tears.”

“So where are they?” asked Morgan. “We need to find them before Thanatos.”
 

 
“For now, we need to get the book out of here,” Jake said. “The next puzzle can wait.”
 

Morgan nodded, her hand still lingering over the copper clasps that cornered the book.
 

“I saw a cleaning trolley in the hallway. I’ll get that and we can wheel it out.”

She retrieved the trolley and they hefted the book into it with the sackcloth as a protective hammock. They began to wheel it slowly back towards the main entrance, Jake still staggering every now and then with the pain in his head. Morgan felt the empty gaze of the corpses as an accusation, for they had disturbed the peace of the dead and blown apart their cadaverous children. She shuddered. Whether the book was cursed or not, this place felt as if the dead still lurked, wishing ill on those clinging to life. They reached the elevator and wheeled the trolley in as the door began to shut.
 

A gun thrust through the crack of the closing door, knocking it open again.
 

The Abbot stood there, his shrunken head a mask of despair but his eyes burning with fanaticism. He had seemed so harmless, so welcoming, but now Morgan could see that he had a hidden agenda, but she couldn’t try to attack him, not with Jake so weak.
 

“You should have left,” he said. “The explosion was a warning, but now God has led me to the book through the destructive fire. I’ve been searching for the Devil’s Bible and finally here it is.” He indicated with the gun. “Get out and leave the trolley there.”
 

“Who are you working for?” Jake whispered, his face grey and sweating now. Morgan could see he was suffering, and she helped him back out into the narrow corridor. The Abbot entered the elevator with the book, holding the gun towards them at all times.

“The one who will fulfill the prophecy and usher in the end times,” he said as the door closed, leaving Morgan and Jake standing in the crypt with the carnage of the dead. Jake slumped down the wall as dizziness overcame him and put his head in his hands. Morgan banged her fists on the elevator door and tried to pry the doors open with desperate fingers. She rifled through her backpack, finding her phone but there was no reception this far underground. Marietti was expecting a call by 2am and if he didn’t receive it, she knew he would send help after them.
 

She threw the pack down in frustration, angry that her first official mission with ARKANE had gone so badly wrong. Her partner was injured and the Devil’s Bible taken by the agent of Thanatos. All they could do was sit here and wait for someone to get them out of the crypt. She sank down next to Jake as the flickering lights went out and they were left in darkness.