She examined the ancient door. It looked like it had been made out of solid iron. She tapped on it, and the metal resonated loudly — meaning that it was hollow behind the door. Her heart raced as she worked quickly with the acetylene blowtorch to melt the snow and ice surrounding it. She reached the edge of the door, where it met perfectly with rhyolite, the glassy volcanic stone. Billie ran her gloved hands along the edge, and stopped at a set of massive iron hinges. They were frozen solid. She focused the acetylene blowtorch gently over the top of them until the ice turned to liquid.
She put the blowtorch down and ran her hands along the edge of the door again. It started to move. She stopped what she was doing and gently applied pressure to the ancient door. Again, it moved freely. Centuries of ice had protected the iron from oxidizing and turning to rust. She stopped pushing, as though she needed to savor the moment.
Her eyes, dilated and piercing, focused on Jeremy. “It’s free. I think I can open it.”
“This is it,” Jeremy said. “Moment of truth. Are you sure you want to know what lies behind this door?”
Billie switched on her flashlight. “No, but I need to.”
“Good luck.” He shined his light at the door.
She pushed hard and the iron door moved inward. It slid easier than she expected. There was no creak as it opened. A strong scent of decay teased at her nostrils. It was distasteful but not overtly offensive. More like opening the lid to an antique box left sealed for centuries. It was the absence of life, yet a cold and solemn sense of what there once must have been. The only thing close to it she could remember was the first time she entered a sealed section of the King’s Chamber inside the Great Pyramid of Khufu near Giza. Billie shined her flashlight in horizontal swathes, revealing the entrance to a large obsidian vault.
She’d never seen anything like it. The ebony colored, glassy volcanic stone had been carefully chipped away with rudimentary tools to form a large, vaulted room. The smooth walls reflected the light so powerfully that for an instant she thought someone was alive inside, shining their own flashlight out at her. She took a breath and paused.
“Are you all right?” Jeremy asked.
“I’m fine.” She took her first step inside. “I just got startled by the sight. It’s not quite what I was expecting.”
Billie heard the echo of her voice as she walked toward the center of the room. She shined the flashlight around until she could gather a clear image of each end of the room and then stopped. She turned to face Jeremy and swallowed hard. Billie couldn’t believe what she was seeing. She felt her stomach cramp, and wore her heart in her throat as she spoke. “It’s empty. The Temple of Illumination’s been stripped bare!”
The place was completely deserted. Billie cursed loudly, like a teenager who’d only just discovered the length and breadth of the more colorful elements of the English language. After all these years of searching, and to get so close, only to discover it had been raided before she could reach her legacy, made it all more painful than had she never found the hidden temple at all.
“Someone’s moved it!” she said. “I thought it was too easy to open the iron doors after all these years. Someone must have more recently discovered we were on the right track and broken inside to hide the evidence.”
“The evidence?” he asked. “I wasn’t aware we were investigating a crime?”
“I’m talking about the truth. You said yourself that there were many among us who would go to dire lengths to make certain it was never discovered.”
“Or it was never here to begin?” Jeremy suggested.
She breathed out a sigh. “No. It was here.”
“Must have been raided years ago. There was nearly twenty feet of hardened snow above the gateway.”
She nodded. “It could have been stolen at any stage in the past seventeen centuries since Gregory the Illuminator first sealed it. It was all for nothing!”
“Some secrets are best left hidden,” Jeremy said. His voice was soft and sympathetic.
She took a couple steps forward and stopped. “Wait. I see something.”
Jeremy placed his hand firmly on her shoulder. His voice suddenly hard as his cold, steely gaze. “Are you sure you want to see it?”
She shrugged his hand off her shoulder without saying a word, and moved to the back of the vaulted cavern. There was a small ledge near the end of the room. Carved out of the same piece of pitch black obsidian, the two ledges formed a visual illusion of the continuation of the floor.
The closer she got to it she realized with certainty, that it formed a small canyon. There was part of a small handprint on the edge. It appeared dull, making it stand out compared to the gloss of the obsidian floor. At a glance, she guessed the owner had placed his or her hand into some sort of liquid. It was so dull and impossible to accurately determine without equipment.
She peered over the edge. It was pitch dark. There was something that felt sinister about the scarred opening in the earth. Like some sort of evil abyss. She felt cold despite her thick mountaineering jacket. The dry almost musky smell seemed richer, too. She shined her flashlight into the chasm. At one end the light never reached the bottom. The crevasse simply swallowed the light indefinitely. She shined the flashlight in the other direction. This time the light reached the bottom. The crack had formed all the way through to the left of her and it appeared to have been unwilling to rip clear through the one to her right — the result was a second ledge, where the depth of the chasm was no more than twenty or thirty feet. She was close enough that she could clearly see the bottom as she shined the light across it.
At the far end, where the chasm ceased, sitting with his back against the wall was the remains of a long since deceased mountain climber. The cold weather and high altitude had protected him from bacteria, and most of his bloating had been contained within his clothing. He almost looked lifelike from that distance. Billie had to climb down to see the man. She had to be sure. She owed that much to him after all — didn’t she?
She felt Jeremy’s hand on her shoulder again. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s all right,” she said. “I always knew in my heart what we’d find.”
She had a fair idea what she would find, but she needed confirmation. She moved to the right where the edge of the chasm stopped mysteriously at the base of the obsidian wall. It was as though the tectonic shift that had caused the scarred crack to form was unable to splinter the impervious obsidian room. It was as though some kind of higher power had forbidden it to do so.
Billie studied the opening. The chasm was narrow enough that she could have comfortably stepped over it, yet wide enough for her to easily fit through. She carefully placed one hand on either side of the opening and slipped her legs inside until they found a foot-hold to support her. She focused the majority of her attention on each hand and leg individually as she progressed. Confident the dark stone wouldn’t crumble under her weight, she started to climb down.
She glanced at Jeremy with a hardened resolve. Her brown eyes piercing and challenging. “Are you coming with me?”
“Me?” He shook his head. “I’m afraid if I climbed down there I would never make it back up again.”
She nodded. It wasn’t his place. He didn’t have to see it. The truth wasn’t his problem to solve. It was hers. Billie climbed down slowly. She made careful, purposeful movements. Testing each hand-hold and foot-hold as she climbed. A few minutes later she reached the first ledge.
Billie carefully tested the strength of the ledge with her weight while bracing the walls with her hands. Confident the ground wasn’t going to fall away from under her, she flashed the light along the crevasse, until it reached the remains of the man. The body, well protected by the cold, was still intact. He could have been any other mountain climber, taking refuge on a ledge to catch his strength.