It was a three-sided pyramid. Lagrasse had never heard of such a thing—and it was as massive as the biggest of the Egyptian or South American pyramids.
There were people scaling the structure. They looked like ants to Lagrasse, but he could have sworn a few wore the tattered remnants of Coast Guard uniforms. He tried to shout, pain be damned, but he managed nothing better than a weak gasp that they never heard. All he got for his trouble was excruciating pain.
He could hear them, though. The vast city was so still that their voices travel unnaturally far. Lagrasse searched for anything to make a noise. Two rocks to pound together. Nothing on the rooftop. He should have grabbed some stones from the rubble below.
The people were heading for a crack in the pyramid, and Lagrasse glimpsed a yellow glow inside. The glow was unclean somehow. Lagrasse, too drained of energy to climb down, slumped on the roof to rest and watch.
The climbers would get a few yards up the steep pyramid, then slide back down again. It took another twenty minutes for one of them to finally reach the crack that seemed to be an entrance. He crawled inside. He called for the others, and eventually all but one of them made it up. The one left outside was a tiny woman who didn’t have the strength for scaling the moldering rock.
She shouted for her friends to tell her what they saw. Instead, they began to scream.
The tiny woman ran, but she didn’t get far.
Something like a rope flopped out of the crack and fell across the woman, knocking her flat.
Lagrasse knew what the thing was. He had just seen one like it in the trash shed. It was a tentacle, but this one was laughably huge. A hundred feet long. His mind was playing tricks.
The tentacle constricted around the small woman and dragged her in. That’s what Lagrasse saw, anyway. But he knew it was just an illusion conjured by a sick mind.
The screams of the dying climbers—which had to be another trick of his ailing brain—seemed to last an hour.
Chapter 23
Okyek Meh Thih, the Caretaker of the People, felt sad and helpless. He stood up to stretch his legs, and strolled to the lip of rock. A narrow trail hugged the mountainside, but if one walked directly out of the cave entrance one would fall to the bottom of the mountain.
His plea was still coming from his lips, delivered gently and incessantly; after countless repetitions the words had become ingrained and delivered without thought. His throat was raw. What was the point of this? Chuh Mboi Aku was surely not hearing these words and ignoring them if he did.
He had come to guess why he was supposed to be in this cave, beseeching Chuh Mboi Aku. Maybe he could encourage Chuh Mboi Aku to show the world mercy. It might be a small chance, but it was a chance nevertheless. Taking steps that might help save the People was better than busying himself in vain over their suffering and allowing their annihilation to happen without resistance.
But would that truly come to pass? What evidence did he have of this? Nothing but an old inscription and the words of an old, dead man.
Ah, but there was another indication of the truth of the legend. There was the bird, Chak. The bird was always attentive to the Caretaker’s work, but especially so when there were dreams that appeared to come from Chuh Mboi Aku. It came to pass that the Caretaker would look to the parrot for guidance while listening to the troubles of one of the People, and the bird would show a certain behavior—nodding its great head, excited shifting on its perch—to show when the dreams were of Chuh Mboi Aku.
This behavior manifested gradually over the years, for the dreams were infrequent, even for the People, who were sensitive beyond other Peoples.
The Caretaker had a revelation one day: the bird could identify the touch of Chuh Mboi Aku. It wasn’t the training of a pet. The bird was sensing the residue of a god’s dream in the mind of a man or woman or child, and no bird was known to do such a thing.
But this bird could do it.
The bird’s behavior became more obvious, not because the bird was more skilled than before, but because the dreams came more often. The dreams became a darkness in their lives so often the People no longer came to the Caretaker for his advice. Not that he could ease their spirits about these dreams, not since they stopped believing in his tales of phalluses.
Chak became agitated for days and flapped across the village in fits, until finally he woke the Caretaker crying about “The meaning of the cave!”
The huge and brilliant creature winged off over the jungle, toward the mountain, and Okyek Meh Thih was too intrigued to not follow. He arrived at the cave at the end of the day, finding the bird there before the inscription. The bird was trembling from the high-altitude cold and prancing wildly in front of the inscription.
Okyek Meh Thih lit a fire to warm them both. The bird screeched and cried out all night, as if demanding something of the rock wall and its meaningless symbols. When the Caretaker tried to pet and comfort it, the bird wouldn’t remain in his hands, but paced and strutted and screeched. When it finally slept, it was a fitful sleep in the Caretaker’s hands.
Okyek Meh Thih awoke when the bird screeched in the late morning, jumping out of his hands, staring at Okyek Meh Thih. The bird wobbled to the cave mouth and leaped into the air.
Chak flew away, over the canopy of the jungle, and Okyek Meh Thih saw him no more for two long years.
Chapter 24
“I’m fine, Mrs. M.,” Mark Howard insisted to the elderly woman. “Hi, Dr. Smith.”
“Mark? What are you doing here?”
“They just released me from the free clinic,” Mark said.
“Why wasn’t I informed?” Dr. Smith asked the nurse who was guiding the wheelchair into the office, and fighting Mrs. Mikulka, Smith’s longtime secretary, for control.
“I insisted. Thanks, you’ve been great. Thanks, Mrs. M. I’ve got it. I’ve got it.”
The nurse took the hint. Mrs. Mikulka steadfastly refused to. She fussed with him until he had stepped out of the wheelchair and slumped into the office chair behind the desk.
“You shouldn’t be out of hospital care,” Dr. Smith said.
“Yes, I should be.”
“That will be all, Mrs. Mikulka.”
The old woman left, promising to bring Mark tea. She closed the door behind her.
“How are you feeling?”
“What’s happening. Dr. Smith? What’s the news?”
“Problems are intensifying globally, but there’s nothing new. A worsening of the same. Why?”
“Europe?”
“A mess, but the truly dangerous security threats are under control.”
Mark Howard looked dissatisfied and began snapping out commands on his keyboard. “Something’s happening.”
“Much is happening. Are you all right, Mark?”
“I mean something is really happening. I don’t know what it was that I saw. It was something big.”
Sarah pushed into the office and hurried to Mark, embracing his head against her stomach as he sat.
“Why are you here?” she demanded. “God, you know what I thought? I walked into your hospital room and the bed was empty.”
“Sorry. Something is happening. I saw it in the dream. That thing showed it to me. What it intends to do.”
“What thing?” Smith demanded, but he knew perfectly well what thing.
“I was dreaming. I was in the ocean.” Mark stood up, clearing his head, trying to see it again. “It was pulling me down deep, into the water, where it was pitch-black. It was pulling me by the leg—Jesus, it hurt even in the dream. It hurts now.” He was in baggy sweatpants and he felt the leg, felt the bandage and yanked up the sweatpants to see the bandage.