He didn’t want to let go. But then he looked over her shoulder toward Ray’s body. “The tunnel. The Sepulcher. Midnight.”
Amanda nodded. “If we don’t meet the deadline, all the Game Master needs to do is blast the tunnel and bury us. We’ll never get out.”
Balenger turned toward a camera on a post. “Game Master, did you enjoy seeing Ray die?”
He listened for a response, then realized that the headset and his hat had fallen off during the struggle. He put them back on, waiting for the Game Master to speak.
“Maybe the radio signal can’t penetrate the tunnel,” Amanda said.
“Oh, it penetrates,” the voice said abruptly. “Don’t worry about that.”
Balenger gave three aspirins to Amanda and three to himself. They swallowed the pills with water. Balenger’s nose continued to bleed. He put cotton batting into it, ignoring the pain.
“Ready?” he asked Amanda.
“Ready.”
She picked up the flashlight.
He put on his knapsack and reached for the rifle.
They continued along the tunnel. Abruptly, Balenger went back through the shadows. He grabbed one of the lanterns by its handle and gave it to Amanda.
“Why?” She studied it with suspicion.
“Not sure.” He overcame his revulsion and groped in a pocket of Ray’s jumpsuit, pulling out the lighter. “We never know what we might need.”
Again, they proceeded along the tunnel, the flashlight partially dispelling the darkness.
“It’s colder,” Amanda said.
They turned a corner.
“My favorite quotation comes from Kierkegaard. It’s appropriate for a time capsule,” the voice said through Balenger’s headset.
They approached a small chamber.
“What’s the quote?” Keep him talking, Balenger thought. Keep him relating to us.
“ ‘The most painful state of being is remembering the future, in particular one you can never have.”“
“I don’t understand.”
“It refers to someone who’s dying and what it feels like to imagine future events that he or she will never experience.”
The air got even colder. Amanda’s hand trembled as she scanned the flashlight across the chamber. “Looks like we found it,” she murmured.
2
In the shadows, a man faced them. He was tall and gangly with a beard that made him resemble Abraham Lincoln. His dark hair hung past his shoulders. He wore a black suit, the coat old-fashioned, its hem reaching down to his knees.
Balenger almost fired, but the man’s posture didn’t pose a threat, and Balenger’s police training took control. As his instructor at the academy had said, “You’d better have a damned good reason for pulling that trigger.”
The man stood straight, holding something close to his chest.
“Put up your hands! Who are you?” Balenger shouted.
The man didn’t comply.
“Damn it, put up your hands!”
The only sound was the echo of Balenger’s command.
“He isn’t moving,” Amanda said.
They stepped warily forward, the flashlight providing details.
“Oh, my God,” Amanda said.
The man had no eyes. His cheeks were shrunken. The fingers that clutched the object to his chest were bones covered with shriveled skin. Dust filmed him.
“Dead,” Amanda murmured.
“A long time,” Balenger said. “But why didn’t he rot?”
“I read somewhere that caves have hardly any insects or microbes.” Amanda’s voice was hushed. “And this tunnel’s deep in the mountain. The ice.”
“What do you mean?”
“Another clue the Game Master gave us, but we didn’t realize what it was. He said, in the winter the town harvested ice from the lake and stored it in the mine. The tunnel was cold enough to preserve the ice through the summer. The town used it to keep food from spoiling.”
“The cold mummified him,” Balenger said in awe.
“The object he’s pressing against his chest looks like a book. But what’s holding him up?” Amanda stepped closer.
Now it was clear that the corpse was tilted slightly back against a board supported by rocks at its base. Ropes at the knees, the stomach, the chest, and the neck secured the mummy to the board.
“Who tied the ropes?” Balenger shivered and not just from the cold.
“The knots are in front. Maybe he did it himself.” Amanda moved the flashlight up and down. “He could have kept his hands free until he tied the final rope around his chest. Then he could have shoved his right hand up under the rope to press the book to his chest. Next to him, we see how the illusion works, but at the entrance to the chamber, he looked like he was greeting us.”
“Meet Reverend Owen Pentecost,” the Game Master said. But this time, the voice didn’t come from Balenger’s headset. Instead, it came from speakers in the walls. The echoing effect was unnerving.
“The bastard had a sense of drama,” Balenger said.
“You have no idea,” the Game Master replied.
“I suppose the book in his hand is a Bible.” Amanda tilted her head to try to read the title on the spine. When that didn’t work, she set down the lantern, hesitated, then directed a finger toward the book, reluctantly intending to nudge it and expose the title.
Balenger grabbed her hand. “It might be booby-trapped.”
In the flashlight’s beam, the bruise on Amanda’s cheek contrasted with her sudden pallor.
“Iraqi insurgents loved to hide pressure-sensitive bombs under U.S. corpses,” Balenger explained. “As soon as the bodies were lifted or turned, the explosives would detonate.”
Amanda pulled her hand back.
“It’s not a Bible,” the Game Master said. “It’s called The Gospel of the Sepulcher of Worldly Desires.”
“Not exactly catchy,” Balenger said.
“Pentecost wrote it in long hand. It predicts the evils of the coming century and the need for people to understand the truth.”
“So, what’s the truth?”
“See for yourself.”
Amanda aimed the flashlight toward an opening in the wall behind Pentecost. Ready with his gun, Balenger stepped forward while Amanda guided him with the flashlight. They went through the opening and entered a much larger area.
Amanda gasped.
Balenger tasted something bitter. “Yeah, it’s a sepulcher, all right. Worldly desires.”
3
A cavern loomed. Stalactities and stalagmites partially blocked what Balenger and Amanda stared at. Because of the limitations of the flashlight, it was impossible to see everything at once. Amanda needed to move the light from object to object, place to place, tableau to tableau.
Corpse to corpse.
The citizens of Avalon awaited them. They wore what might have been their Sunday go-to-church clothes, now dusty and drab after more than a century. Like Pentecost’s, their faces, too, were sunken, cheekbones made prominent by withered flesh. Mummified in the tunnel’s preserving cold, they looked tiny. Their clothes hung on their bodies like shrouds.
The group nearest Balenger and Amanda consisted of four men, who sat at a table, playing cards.
“Remember not to touch anything,” Balenger warned her.
The men were tied to the chairs, but unlike the ropes that secured Pentecost, these were concealed. The cards were glued to their hands. Their bent arms were nailed to the table. A pile of money lay before them.
At another table, men sat before a whiskey bottle and glasses covered with dust. Ropes and nails held the corpses in place.
“Sins,” Balenger murmured.
At a further table, this one long, he saw men, women, and children seated before plates that might once have held mountains of food. Indistinguishable desiccated masses were all that remained. Bones from what looked like pork ribs and chicken drumsticks crammed their mouths.