He was sixty feet into the mountain, and the tunnel remained snug but not impassable. He saw no signs that animals ventured this deep. In fact he saw nothing at all except the futility of what he was attempting. Rather than mourn the loss of Abraham Jacobs as a proper friend should, and attend his funeral and swap stories about a great man with others who had loved him, Mercer had turned Abe’s death into a quest, a personal obligation to find those responsible. Here he was, in the bowels of a desolate mountain in the middle of one of the most dangerous places on Earth, putting his life and the lives of the others in jeopardy because he couldn’t face Abe’s death head-on. As he had so often in the past, Mercer had taken a tangent when faced with one of life’s roadblocks, and this time it had gone too far afield even to try to justify. Mercer realized the tightness in his throat and the burning behind his eyes had nothing to do with the dust.
Feeling as distraught as when he saw Abe’s crumpled body in the Leister Deep Mine, Mercer shifted so he could start sliding back out of the hole. His light swept across the rough wall and something caught his eye — a smudge on the wall at the very limit of its glow. Unsure about anything, he slithered forward and saw what looked like letters painted onto the wall, as crudely as if they were drawn by a child. It was the black crustiness of the medium that made him realize they had been drawn with human blood.
They read: MD.
14
Michael Dillman. It had to be. Mercer scanned the ceiling of the cave just a few inches over his head, and he saw the rock protrusion where Dillman had hit and subsequently split open his scalp.
Mercer’s doubts evaporated, and he knew now more than ever that he was on the right path — not just the physical trail of the lightning stones, but also the goal of avenging Abe Jacobs. Mercer needed this wrong to be righted. Someone had murdered his friend, possibly for what was to be found in this cave, and Mercer owed it to him to see this through, no matter where it ended and what it cost.
He moved now with renewed vigor, the near hypoxia he’d been experiencing almost forgotten as adrenaline saturated his blood. Mercer squeezed deeper into the tunnel-like passage, forcing his body through the constricted space and allowing his cave training to take over. Fifteen feet farther, and the walls and roof suddenly opened into a chamber about the size of a small bedroom. The ceiling wasn’t quite the standard eight feet, more like six for the most part, but in one corner it had collapsed into a pile of loose stones with a hole above it. No light made it down from the surface, but Mercer could feel air being drawn up through the ceiling as if from a chimney. It was cold enough for him to see his breath.
Three other things caught his attention as he swept the flashlight beam around the room. One was the odd jagged stripes radiating from the hole in the ceiling and etching their way down the walls and across the floor. It looked as though the gray stone had been painted with snaggy black lines. The second thing was the grotto at the far end of the room. It was a natural formation, about four feet high and two wide, and it seemed most of the black scorch lines terminated at its entrance. The final thing, and the one that held his interest, was the body.
The corpse was obviously ancient. It was little more than black parchment skin drawn over a skeleton that had shrunk and shriveled over time. The dead figure was sitting in the meditative lotus position, with wrists resting on its knees and feet crossed over onto the opposite thigh. The only incongruity was that while the corpse maintained this most Eastern of poses, it was actually resting on its side, so one bony knee stuck up in the air and the head had detached from the neck after it no longer had support. Mercer immediately understood that the body had once sat guarding the entrance to the grotto and someone, Dillman most likely, had moved it out of the way by simply setting it aside without any thought to repositioning it.
Looking more carefully, he saw that ragged holes had been punched through the body at random places and that the skin had discolored around these spots in zigging streaks of darker char. He looked again at the pattern of lines on the walls and the spokes of darker coloration coming from the hole in the ceiling and shooting for the grotto, and he finally understood what was taking place, or at least had taken place here.
He trained the light into the grotto to verify that with a storm still expected topside he was safe, and saw the hollow behind the grotto was empty. The grotto was, in fact, a large geode, and someone — Mercer had to assume Michael Dillman — had removed the crystals that had once lined its interior. Left behind like empty honeycombs were the sockets in which the crystals had formed, and judging by their size the crystals themselves would have been the size of bananas or larger. He flashed back to the wax-paper wrapping recovered from Abe’s trash can. It had spent decades encasing something tubular about the size of a carrot. One of these crystals, he was certain.
As to the rest of the mystery, whatever molecular composition and atomic structure had gone into the crystals’ formation, they had interfered enough with the surrounding natural geomagnetic forces to turn the geode into a big fat lightning rod. The cave had been hit so many times over the past millions of years that the shock had cracked the ceiling, and the natural bolts of searing electricity had scarred the stone and eventually punched holes through the body of a Buddhist or Jain mystic who had decided to crawl in here to die, at what must have been considered a sacred place.
Dillman’s moniker for the stones now made sense.
This all came with another, troubling realization. Mike Dillman had plundered the cavern completely. Mercer scanned every inch of the phone-booth-size geode with his light, contorting his body and craning his neck to see each square inch of its otherworldly interior. There wasn’t a trace of Sample 681 left anywhere.
The locals who settled this area would have experienced the lightning striking this particular piece of mountain. Maybe they had explored the cave, but seeing the corpse had persuaded them to leave the site alone. But Dillman came along, a field geologist who, if he was anything like Mercer, would take local lore and custom into account when prospecting. He figured there was something underground attracting an inordinate amount of lightning, and he came in to investigate. Mercer didn’t know if Dillman had cleared it all out in one trip, or taken a few samples and only returned later when it was found the crystals had real value. Either way, Mercer thought as he slashed his light back and forth one last time, Dillman had been very thorough in cleaning out the cache of crystal gems. The bastard. Mercer had quickly developed a distinct dislike for the old prospector. Mercer was decades if not a century or more too late.
His light rested on the macabre remains of the long-dead mystic. The cave was too tight for someone to have dragged the body down here and set it in its current tableau, so the swami had come down to accept death willingly. Mercer wasn’t too sure of the rites of Buddhists or Jains, but he didn’t think suicide like this was strictly forbidden like it was in Islam or Christianity. He considered the spiritual and physical path this man must have taken to reach this point. He would have seen the mountain take strike after strike every time the sky opened up with bolts of blue fire. That had to have had some higher meaning to him, so the shaman came here to learn why this happened and decided this was such a sacred spot, a womb within the living rock, that he wanted it for his sepulcher. He had to recognize that it was the crystals that attracted the sky fire, so they were the real power here.