Matt stopped. “We’re going in there?”
“Dragonfly 2, we’ve got a problem here,” Lips radioed angrily. “It’s this kid.”
“Solve it 7. See you ahead.”
“I can’t do this,” Matt said. “It’s too small.”
“Yes you can,” Cathy said.
“Look, kid. Just imagine yourself a piece of meat going through intestines. It always comes out the other end, right?”
“What are you trying to say?” Matt replied angrily.
“I got this,” Cathy said. “He has a fear of small spaces. From the kidnapping I think.”
“I’m not going in there.”
“You can do this,” Cathy said.
“No, it’s a coffin.”
“Matt, the witch’s house. The Rottweilers . . . I came back, remember? . . . REMEMBER? I’m afraid of dogs.”
“No. I’m not going in!”
“LISTEN!” Cathy snapped. “Cowboy up. Rub some dirt on it and keep going . . . just something us hicks say.”
Matt’s chuckle lasted but a second.
“NO! It’s a coffin!”
“Don’t think about the bad that can happen,” Cathy said. “Think about the good. Come on, you can do this … I know you can.”
The absence of fear is hypophobia. Fear of everything is panophobia. Most of us fall somewhere in between.
Matt was coming to grips with the bravery thing. We all have to some time. But like with IQs, there are different kinds of bravery. We are all brave in some ways and not in others. There is the decorated soldier afraid to express his emotions. The motorcycle daredevil petrified of rats. The skydiver afraid to confront his neighbor about the loud music. The renter who boldly scolds her landlord about her deplorable behavior but fears spiders. The rock-climbing med student petrified of blood.
Inspiring someone means knowing just the right thing to say at just the right time.
“I thought you said you were doing this for the kids in the extermination camps . . . I knew you were faking. Put on your big boy pants. Let’s move . . . ”
(Silence)
“If you wouldn’t mind getting your arse in gear Mr. Legend,” said Lips.
But Matt wasn’t moving.
“Then do it for me,” Cathy said softly.
There was a profound silence.
Matt turned to face the tunnel.
“Okay . . . now do what I did . . . count back from a hundred in threes – 100, 97 … Come on, count . . . 94, 91 . . .”
Matt began to count. “And breath . . . slowly . . . that’s it . . .”
“88 . . . 85 . . . 81 . . .”
“He’s okay,” Cathy said. “Let’s go. I’ll go first if you want.”
“No way.”
“Dragon 1, we’re on the move,” said Lips.
In the darkest corners of Matt’s mind he allowed himself to fear. What if there’s an earthquake? What if it caves in? What if I get stuck? It would be like being buried alive, worse -. and drowning. He continued counting.
His ears began to hurt. He stopped kicking.
“Now what?” Lips grumbled.
“There’s pressure in my ears. It hurts,” Matt sputtered.
“Mine too,” said Cathy.
“Keep calm and do as I say,” said Lips.
He talked them through how to equalize the pressure by squeezing the nose clip inside their masks to pinch their noses shut, then blowing through their noses, pushing their jaws forward and swallowing. Meanwhile with a careless flutter Cathy disturbed a pocket of silt reducing visibility to a bowl of cream of wheat.
“Great, this’ll take even longer. How did I get stuck babysitting?”
“Don’t talk to her that way,” Matt barked.
(Long silence)
“Alright kids. Let’s do this.” Lips’ tone was more respectful. He knew the kids wouldn’t survive the mission anyway.
It was thrilling finding out what lay around the next bend until their lights fell on the bleached bones of a diver and his or her 1970s-vintage tattered yellow wetsuit. There is a rule in cave diving - a third of your air to get there, a third to get back, a third for a margin of safety. “It’ll be dangerous,” Thyme had warned. Cave diving is exponentially more risky than regular diving. In regular diving when something goes wrong, you can always go to the surface. Your reserve pony bottle provides the few extra minutes of air to do that. Not so in cave diving.
The passage began to constrict further. It was becoming more and more like Lip’s analogy to intestines. A “squeeze” cave diver’s call them. It drew tighter and tighter until it was no bigger around than the inside of a refrigerator. They removed their rebreathers and pushed then ahead of them Matt began to count backward once more. He had flushed many a bug down a toilet. Never again.
After what seemed hours the passage ended. It opened to an underwater sea. A sunken city glimmered in the crystal rays of the sunlight from above. The scene was like a surreal artistic canvas. Hanging like Peter Pan, Matt had to remind himself he was underwater.
Hundreds of dwellings dotted the dark walls. It was a rock city as spectacular as the secret mysterious above ground and underground Lost City of Petra. It stood six stories, each story four times the height of a normal building story and like Petra, built for giants. And also like Petra and many other megaliths, according to lore, built in a single night by fallen angel trash. When the sea level was lower six thousand years ago the cavern would have been bone dry. One side was bathed in sunlight. The other shrouded in darkness. Stalagmites and stalactites formed natural objects d’art against an underwater palette of reds, greens, browns and golds. Despite its brooding beauty something about it made Matt’s skin crawl. This is not your realm; you should not be here it seemed to say.
Meanwhile, to any real archaeologist it would have been the discovery of a lifetime, rivaling Machu Picchu or Gobekli Tepe. But Father Malvic wasn’t a real archaeologist.
Into the netherworld his divers pushed until they came to a halocline, the interface of the meeting of fresh and salt water, distorting their images like a circus mirror.
Malvic pointed a blurry finger downward. Two divers descended into the ghostly fog. The explosive hydrogen sulfide gas, formed by bacteria breaking down organic matter in an environment devoid of oxygen, swirled around them. They probed the dead tree branches on the bottom. No giant bones.
Chapter 37 – THE RUINS
An emerald green glow shone from within the darkened ruins. Like moths to a flame Malvic’s divers swam over a massively wide approachment of stairs cut into stone and through flanking rows of Doric columns that rendered them like fry. Toward the glow they swam. Once inside, an Olympian-style temple courtyard stood facing them in the green-effused water. A ten-foot-high pyramid sat at its center, its capstone the source of the glow. The green light was cool to the touch. A contingent of statuary mermaids and mermen stood guard. An idol of the fallen angel trash Osirus exuded a disturbing presence and its eyes seemed to follow them wherever they went.
In one corner a giant Buddha sat cross-legged, its arms extended holding a lotus flower of amethyst in each upturned palm. It towered above a gold sacrificial alter with a recessed bowl at its center with a network of blood grooves which radiated outward like the rays of the setting sun.
The elephantine one-piece ruby red Buddha with its beautiful dark-red needle-like inclusions bore no tool marks. A single ruby the size of a small hippo? Formed without tools? By whom, or what? How? Father Malvic began to obsess over it . . . and calculate . . . at a million dollars per carat it would be worth . . . . . . all the money in the world.
Unintelligible glyphs adorned the altar’s base. Disturbingly the figure bore no sediment. Strangely, it looked as if it had been wiped clean recently. On the altar lay a ceremonial dagger, its wavy twin copper blades harder than steel. Into its gold handle in the form of a mermaid were set two emerald eyes that twinkled in the cone of Malvic’s torch.
Recessed into the walls were regularly-spaced rectangular stone boxes standing on end ranging from twelve to over thirty feet tall. Each bore a unique strange set of symbols. Names? Sarcophagi? Father Malvic’s pulse quickened. Breathless, he pried with the dagger at the tallest. Its towering lid dislodged, dropping to the floor, breaking into a hundred pieces sending sediment swirling in every direction.
The divers cowered. In their torch lights a frightening sight loomed - an enormous skeleton clad in shining copper battle armor. Red hair flowed from its bleached horned skull down past its shoulder blades, in its jaws double rows of teeth. Its hands bore six fingers, its feet six toes. Another horned skull protruded from its neck - a conjoined twin. An eight-foot sword stood by its side.
Holding his breath Malvic tore the five-foot femur free. The skeleton collapsed into a pile of bones burying him. Pulling him out, the divers, sensing they were not alone, hyperventilating, on his signal made quickly for the portico, each bearing the plunder they had found; priceless bobbles, the mermaid dagger and the radiant green capstone.
The idea of dealing Nephilim DNA came from an unlikely source. One of Father Malvic’s students’ mid-term papers. It held a vague reference to an unheard of alliance between warring Native American tribes that hated each other. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Centuries ago they forged a temporary alliance to battle and defeat a common overwhelming enemy – GIANTS! As Father Malvic found, to this day every Native American tribe has age-old stories of giants who lived for hundreds of years with a sense of smell keener than bloodhounds and an appetite for human flesh. Disturbingly, archaeologists have found herbs and spices on the grilled, baked and boiled bones of humans bearing gnaw marks made by double rows of teeth. When their supply of humans dwindled, the giants spiced and ate each other.
One account intrigued him - a Paiute Indian tale of a race of red-haired human-eating giants who were their mortal enemies who they drove out of Nevada through the alliance of tribes. As the story goes, after a fierce battle all of the giants were killed except for some who retreated to a cave where they too were killed. Years later a company mining bat guano found over sixty giant skeletons and their giant weapons. Some of the giants were twenty feet tall. Again, all the evidence was sent to the Smithsonian where as usual, it disappeared.
But it was the Rock Wall that caused him to draw the connection between arms dealing and giant DNA. The little-known Rock Wall, ignored by archaeologists and a media intent on reporting sensational nonsense, is one of the greatest never heard of archaeological finds in history. Discovered in 1852 east of Dallas, Texas, it is a twenty-square mile, fifty-foot-high walled fortress of three-foot wide dense sandstone blocks. Constructed by unknown ancient builders, the virtually unexcavated site is inscribed with undeciphered writing. It has domed underground chambers and tunnels and uses advanced building technology.
It was built to keep out the alliance of tribes. Native American tribes tell of giants building fortified positions to stave off the attacks of thousands of wild Indians.
But it was the humans mostly who went underground. Underground complexes and tunnel networks dating back more than 12,000 years keep turning up. From Bavaria to the Mediterranean to Scotland to the New World they protected Man from the giants. The Longyou Caves in China are considered by the Chinese to be the Ninth Wonder of the World. More Longyous are being found all the time.
Father Malvic learned the military was developing battery-powered, hydraulic-assisted exoskeletons to enable soldiers to carry super heavy loads, run faster and leap higher. If it was interested in those, wouldn’t it be interested in dispensing with the mechanical apparatuses altogether?
His first task was to find a source of giant DNA. Fossilized remains are not suited to DNA extraction. Soft tissue is needed. The bottom of a cenoté – specifically a lentic cenoté – a cenoté devoid of oxygen - is perfect, where perishable objects are