The Secret of the Stones (36 page)

“Mr.
Wyatt, if you would be so kind as to join us now.”
 
Ulrich motioned for him to return the way he’d just
gone.
 

Going
down was much easier than the jumping up had been and in less than a minute,
Sean was back on the ground.
 
The
guard had retrieved his gun and now had it trained on Wyatt.
 

To
say that Sean was frustrated would be an understatement.
 
He’d forgotten the cardinal rule of his
training.
 
Always check a detainee
for other weapons.
 
Now they were
all back to square one.
 
Worse than
that, now Allyson was in danger.
 
“Leave her out of this,” he demanded.

She
squirmed against the Ulrich’s grip and a look of terror filled her eyes.
 

“Now,
now,” Ulrich whispered.
 
“Don’t
struggle.
 
I would hate to have to
kill you, my dear.”
 
He didn’t
respond to Sean’s request.

Her
mouth couldn’t form the angry words she wanted to say.
 
The man’s vice-like grip around her throat
barely let in enough air.

“Let
her go!”
 
Sean shouted this
time.
 
“She has nothing to do with
this!
 
The cops are on their way.
 
What are you going to do?
 
It’s over!”

The
blonde man answered with a twisted smile.
 
“Then I suppose we should hurry.”
 
He motioned with his gun at the area Sean had pointed out a few minutes
before.
 
“Now!
 
Or I kill her right here!”

“We
can’t just leave him here.” Wyatt motioned to his friend lying on the ground,
motionless.

“You
will do as I say, or she dies!”

Tommy
and Sean had no choice.
 
For a
moment, their eyes locked, desperate and bewildered.
 
Then, they started trudging into the forest, Sean
leading the way.
 
The guard was
right behind them, holding his gun at waist level, followed by Ulrich, who’d
taken his arm from around Allyson’s neck and forced her to walk in front of
him, holding the pistol at the small of her back.

“What
are we gonna do, Sean?”
 
Tommy
asked.
 
His voice sounded like a
child’s.

“I
don’t know Schultzie.”
 
He looked
around as they waded through the tall grass, hoping the police were on their
way.
 
“But we’re running out of
time.”

Chapter
55

Eastern
Georgia

Ulrich
forced the group to move quickly through the forest.
 
He had overheard Sean’s conversation with the police so
time, he knew, was running out.
 
With a feverish urgency bordering on madness, the blonde man trudged
through the undergrowth.
 
He
snapped his head left and right every time a twig broke under someone’s foot.

The
guard, too, looked uneasy, making sure he covered a 360 degree area with his
gun as he swung it around wildly.

Sean’s
thoughts wandered to Joe.
 
He hoped
that the police would find him fast enough to get him medical treatment.
 
The wound hadn’t looked good, and Mac
must have lost a great deal of blood in a short amount of time.
 

After
a few more minutes of marching through the trees, the group arrived at what
Wyatt had seen earlier.
 

Tommy
stared at one of the most impressive monuments he had ever seen.
 
Loose dirt surrounded it indicating
that the massive thing had been mostly buried, if not totally underground.
 

The
woods had been somewhat flat up until they got to that point.
 
There, the forest floor gave rise to a
small hill with the enormous totem pole at its base.
 
Just beyond it, at the foot of the hillside gaped an opening
to a cave.

Ulrich
motioned towards the entrance, “Quickly, inside!”
 

The
three captives obeyed and swiftly scurried over to the opening.
 
It was a hole about seven feet high and
four feet wide.
 
A pile of grass and
dirt lay next to it, alluding to the fact that the entrance had been covered
for centuries.
 
Ulrich removed a
pen-sized aluminum flashlight from a cargo pocket.
 
The guard did the same.
 

Sean
turned around at the edge of the dark corridor.
 
“Are we supposed to just go on through the dark?”

The
blonde replied with a fake pitying grin and tossed him the small light.
 
“Lucky for you, I brought an
extra.
 
Now move!”
 
He flicked the gun, herding Sean and
the others into the darkness.
 

Sean
led the way in with Tommy just behind, followed by the stumpy guard, then
Allyson and Ulrich.
 
There were
cobwebs everywhere, and it was a struggle just to maintain sanity while
brushing them away every five or six feet.
 
Apparently, the spiders that had spun them had long since
died or given up trying to catch anything in the ancient place.
 

The
walls of the walkway were smoothly carved stone, cut with laser precision.
 
Overhead, the ceiling was also a
perfectly scored surface.
 

Tommy
broke the awed silence as they moved further underground.
 
“Do you realize what we are
seeing?
 
No one has been inside of
this hall for maybe thousands of years.
 
We are the first humans to set foot here in millennia.”

“Yeah,”
Sean responded only half interested.
 
The current situation overwhelmed his admiration of the
surroundings.
 

The
passageway came to a corner and turned ninety degrees to the left, sloping down
somewhat steeply.
 
Another twenty
or so feet, the same turn was repeated, continuing downward almost like a
spiral staircase without the stairs.

After
turning left several times, descending deeper into the earth, the group came to
a point where they could go no further.
 
In front of them stood a wall made from the same stone as the rest of
the corridor.
 
The difference was
that the other walls had no identifying markings.
 
This one did.
 

Hieroglyphics
of amazing detail jumped out from the solid rock canvas before them.
 
There was no mistaking the
inscriptions’ origin.
 
Various
Egyptian deities, animals, symbols, and other characters were easily
recognizable even for the most novice of historians.

“Amazing,”
Tommy whispered.
 

Sean
reached out slowly so the two men with guns wouldn’t freak out.
 
He traced the outline of a glyph that
he’d never seen before.
 
It was a
picture of some kind of boat, with figures of people and animals surrounding
it.

“That
must be one of the boats that brought the Egyptians over to the Americas.
 
Looks like they brought a bunch of
animals with them.
 
Probably as a
food source.”

“Would
make sense,” Sean agreed.
 
Then he
turned his attention to a couple of oddities on either side of the path.

Carved
into the stone were two hollow spaces.
 
Within each vacancy sat a stone bird.
 
The two animals faced each other from across the corridor
and both had a small inscription below it.
 

Ulrich
was obviously irritated by their halt in progress.
 
“Where is the chamber?”
 

“He
always like this?” Sean jerked his thumb towards the blonde man.
 

“You
have no idea,” Tommy chuckled in spite of himself.

“I’m
glad you two are comfortable with the fact that you are about to die.”
 
Ulrich threatened.

Sean’s
smile disappeared for a moment as he turned to face the murderer’s blue-gray
eyes.
 
Then he turned back to his
friend.
 
“Still, I think those guys
down in Peru were way worse.”

Tommy
couldn’t help but outright laugh.
 
“Yeah.
 
Probably.”

“I
knew it!” Allyson exclaimed as she gave Sean a chiding glare.
 
“I knew you guys were up to something
in Peru!”

Obviously
tired of the little trip down memory lane, Ulrich forced the gun barrel to the
back of her head.
 

Both
friends’ faces turned somber.

Tommy
spoke up.
 
“Alright.
 
Alright.
 
Obviously, we can’t just move this wall.
 
It’s got to be like two or three tons,
easy.”
 
His eyes scanned the smooth
surface.

“What
do these markings say?
 
Can you
translate it?” Ulrich urged.

“Basically,
it’s a story of how the people came here.
 
Apparently, there was one man who they believed to be some kind of a
savior for their people, someone who would take them to a new land.”

“Sounds
like the Moses story from the Bible.”
 
Allyson final spoke up.

Glad
to see she was no longer in shock, Sean turned to her.
 
“Sort of like that.
 
But this story predates that one.
 
These hieroglyphs are from a much
earlier Egyptian kingdom.”
 
He
paused for a moment, thinking.
 
“I
wonder what they wanted to get away from?”

“Yeah,”
Tommy continued.
 
“You can tell
from the construction of the characters, the lines, the way they have been
carved, these are some of the more ancient forms of Egyptian writing.

“You
see,” he went on, “eventually, the Egyptians went to a more abbreviated form of
writing called Hieratic.
 
It was
much simpler and faster for their scribes to use than what you are looking at
right now.
 
This must come from the
time around the first kingdom.”

While
Tommy kept reading the wall, the guard’s attention had been distracted by the
bird in the left wall.
 
His right
hand held the gun, but the man’s curiosity led his left hand to the smooth
stone of the carving’s head.
 

He
was just about to feel it when Tommy yelled, “Stop!”

The
guard yanked his hand back, startled.

“Don’t
touch anything,” Tommy ordered.
 
“There is a riddle here.
 
I
think this whole place might be booby trapped.”

Ulrich
cast the guard a warning glance.
 

“It
says, “To find the way, the birds will guide you.
 
The one that returns shall doom bring forth.
 
The other shall lead you home.”

“Ok,”
Sean said sarcastically.
 
“That
seems simple enough.
 
To move the
wall, we have to do something with one of these birds.”
 
He looked at one and then the
other.
 

“Yeah,
but if we choose the wrong one, we may not get out of here alive,” Tommy added.

“How
do you know which bird?
 
They look
the same to me.”
 
Allyson asked.

“I’m
not sure,” Tommy replied, scratching his head.
 
“The one who returns…I wonder what that means.

“It
must have something to do with the writing beneath the birds.
 
But the language is different than on
the wall.
 
Looks a lot like the
writing on the back of the stone I found at the Vann house.”
 
Tommy pondered the problem.
 

“Can
you read it?”
 
Ulrich butted in.

“Not
really.
 
That was why I sent the
stone to Frank to begin with.”

Sean
reached into his pocket.
 
“You mean
this stone?”

He
opened his palm, producing the medallion.

“Where
did you get that?”
 

“Joe
had it.
 
I guess Frank mailed it to
him before Blondie here could get his hands on it.”

Tommy
took the stone and examined it closely, then looked at one of the stone
birds.
 
He stepped over to the
sculpture and pointed to the word underneath it.
 
“These birds must be the raven and the dove.”

“Which
is which, though?”

Ulrich
watched silently off to the side, keeping his gun on the hostages.

“We
have to assume that this one here is the raven.
 
It is the first one in the riddle and the word on the stone
matches the writing below.
 
But
that is only half of the solution.”

“Which
one returned?”

“I’m
not sure.”
 
Tommy stepped across
the small space to the other bird.
 
“Both of the birds look the same.”
 

Then
he leaned down to look at something that appeared to be clutched in the bird’s
claws.
 
“Looks like some kind of
branch.”

“That’s
it!” Sean exclaimed.

“What’s
it?”

“It’s
an olive branch.
 
In the flood
story from the Bible, Noah released a raven and a dove from the ark.
 
The raven came back.
 
At first, the dove did as well, and when
it did, it carried an olive branch.
 
A week or so later, Noah sent the dove out again; the second time it did
not return.”

Sean
knelt down at the base of the stone dove, examining it closely.
 
With both hands, he reached around the
bird’s head and pulled.
 
The
sculpture gave way to the force of Wyatt’s hands and bent forward.
 
A deep grinding sound reverberated
through the ancient passageway and the dusty floor beneath them shook violently
as the huge stone wall began to rise slowly.
 
All five of the visitors could not help but stare at the
site of the heavy door being lifted.
 
Even Ulrich looked a little shocked by the power that must have surely
been required to move such an enormous weight.

Not
surprisingly, a tremendous amount of dust hung in the air after the huge
stone’s journey had finished at the top of the portal.
 
Ulrich motioned for the prisoners to go
on through to the other side.
 
Beyond the cloud of debris in front of them, more darkness awaited.
 

Sean
stepped cautiously across the threshold, hoping there weren’t any crazy booby
traps like he’d seen in so many movies.
 
In his experience, he’d only come across a few things like that.
 
For the most part, though, measures
that were set up thousands of years ago to prevent intruders had long since
rotted away or lost their effectiveness.
 
Still, better to be safe than sorry.