Justice League of America - Batman: The Stone King (3 page)

Reconstruction of the dam was due to begin in another three or four months, after the structural engineers had finished their investigations. In the meantime, Robert Mills and his select team of top students had been asked to excavate and analyze as much of the site as they could in the brief time left.

They had found an enigma, wrapped in a mystery.

"We've all heard the legends surrounding Silbury," one of the other students, David Rymel, had said. "A giant king buried at the center, a hidden chamber filled with treasure. Any chance of that here, Professor Mills?"

They were digging a trench into the side of one of the chalk layers, their progress impossibly slow as every trowel of soil was painstakingly sifted for artifacts. They'd found a pea-sized bead of black jet, some charred animal bones, and a single broken deer antler with a crude spiral incised on it.

"Unlikely," Robert Mills replied. "Remember, nothing was ever found at Silbury. Still, it's not completely impossible," he admitted. "Only a full-site sonic scan would reveal if there's anything inside, and unfortunately, that's a resource we don't have this time around."

Under Mills, the same team had spent the previous summer on excavations at Sipin in northern Peru, working on vegetation-covered ruins that dated back more than two thousand years. It was a well-funded operation, meticulously planned, and it paid off in spectacular fashion. They'd found elaborate tombs buried deep inside the ruins, in several layers, and a rich profusion of priceless jade face masks and jewelry.

"The Gotham pyramid is much older than its counterparts at Sipan, and of completely different structure," Mills went on. "They were tombs, especially built to house the bones of the tribe's religious leaders. Our pyramid would appear to have been built for a different purpose entirely. Religious, perhaps."

"That's what they always say." There had been a sneer in Peter Glaston's voice, one that was often there these days, Jenny had reflected sadly. "When they don't know what something was for, they say it had 'religious' or 'ritual' significance."

"Then perhaps you could enlighten us, Peter," Mills said coldly, for the first time visibly stung by the younger man's criticisms. "Why do
you
think the pyramid was built?"

"I can't say for sure, of course." Peter rose to the challenge. "But I can make several suggestions. First, the chalk/granite makeup: alternate layers of organic and inorganic material. Almost like a gigantic storage battery. But what kind of energy would such a thing store?"

Peter's eyes were alight as he took off on one of his flights of fancy. Speculative archaeology, he called it.

He'd continued, the words falling over themselves to get out: "Well, science has recently shown that Earth energies
do
exist"–he cast a quick, knowing glance at his teacher–"despite most archaeologists having denied it for years. There's
piezoelectricity,
generated by the grinding of quartz rocks under the surface. On a small scale, Japanese scientists can now duplicate it in the lab, where it manifests as plasmoid light.

"Then there's
telluric
energy, the flow of natural energy from points of varying resistance on the earth's surface. Almost every sacred site ever found has stood on one of these flows–raising the possibility they might once have formed a worldwide grid. And the magma mantle, deep in the earth's crust, may have properties we can't even guess at."

Peter paused, noting the skepticism on the faces of his audience before plunging on with his theory. "It's suspected that at least some of these energies are capable of interacting with electromagnetic fields . . . such as those generated by the human brain."

"Phew, Peter!" Lorann Mutti, the youngest and prettiest of Mills's team, whistled. "That's some stretch of the imagination you're calling for. How exactly do you think it affected humans?"

"Who knows?" Peter shrugged. "But if things like this pyramid were built to store the energies, someone must have been able to
use
them. My guess is that the shamans, the tribal priests, somehow used it to cause hallucinations in their people.

"Imagine the degree of control they'd have if, for instance, they could make people see a giant representation of whatever gods they worshiped. Or maybe the shamans could directly access the energies–which would explain how supposedly primitive tribesmen could move stones that weigh tens, even hundreds, of tons."

"Interesting theories, Peter," Mills had observed, "but as you admit, not a shred of proof. And definitely not the sort of thing to be preserved in the archaeological record. So we've no way of ever knowing–"

"Yes, we have," Peter broke in. "If we can rediscover precisely
how
they harnessed the earth energies, we can replicate anything they did."

Lorann Mutti laughed. "We have super heroes," she pointed out. "Superman and Green Lantern. Do they count?"

"If you won't take me seriously, then what's the point?"

There was anger on Peter's face as he turned and strode away. Jenny had hurried after him, trying to soothe his ruffled feelings. She knew that it was more than the jokes of his peers that was upsetting him.

Almost midnight, and the excavation team's patient astronomical experiments had failed to pay off. Using the surrounding hilltops as sighting beacons, they'd been trying to extrapolate the straight lines into space, to see if they aligned with any particular stars. But there was nothing that could be attributed to anything other than random chance.

Len Dors, the final member of the six-strong expedition, snapped the case shut on his theodolite. "Waste of time," he said curtly. He blew out through his mouth, making the hairs of his burgeoning mustache quiver. "It's beginning to get cold, too."

A chill breeze had blown up not long after sunset, and though it wasn't particularly strong, they'd been exposed to it on the pyramid top for hours.

"I vote we go back to the SUV and head for home," David Rymel suggested. He swung the beam of his flashlight, playing it over their equipment. "We can leave this stuff till tomorrow, rather than try to carry it down tonight."

"Oh,
very
adventurous." Scorn dripped from Peter Glaston's reply. "Good thing Werner and Evans and a thousand other archaeologists didn't say that–'Ooh, I'm cold, I want to go home'–or we might still not have discovered Troy, or the Tomb of Tutankhamen!"

Jenny saw Rymel bristle, and hastened to smoothe things over. "That's a little unfair, Peter. It's been a long day, and David's right, we haven't found anything interesting tonight We should go home and get some sleep. We'll all feel better in the morning."

"I feel fine right now," Peter snapped. "If you want to go, I'll stay here alone. I have a feeling about this place. There's something important here, and I for one don't intend to give up until I find it!"

"We're not giving up, Peter," Robert Mills added, "just taking a much-needed rest."

"And we'll be back tomorrow–" Jenny began, but Peter cut her off.

"I might have known you'd side with
him,"
he accused Jenny, and she flushed. "Well, enjoy each other's company." He picked up a flashlight, snapped it on, and started to follow its beam to the edge of the small plateau.

"Where are you going?" Jenny cried in alarm.

"Maybe there are no stellar alignments from the top," Peter muttered, "but that doesn't mean the ancients didn't use another part of the pyramid for their observations."

"Peter! Come back here!" Robert Mills insisted. The professor moved to follow him, but Jenny shook her head.

"Give him a few minutes to calm down," she said. "He's just a little overwrought."

They saw the beam of Peter's flashlight dip, and a faint motion as he clambered down the rope ladder they'd erected for access to the pyramid's lower courses. As the beam of light disappeared, Jenny felt a sudden chill that seemed to penetrate to her bones.

The breeze was picking up. It really was time to leave.

Peter Glaston's mind was buzzing as he lowered himself down the rope, picking out the rungs with his flashlight before trusting them with his weight. He didn't know what was wrong with him lately; he was always arguing, even with Jenny, picking fights for no reason at all.

A brief memory of the previous summer flashed through his mind. The long hot days in the Peruvian desert . . . the freezing nights under the brightest panoply of stars he'd ever seen . . . and Jenny, her blond hair burnished by moonlight, wrapped in the arms of . . .

Why couldn't he forget? Why couldn't he just accept the fact that what was done, was done, and get on with the rest of his life? He was an adult now. Why couldn't he control this constant frustration, these unwelcome bouts of rage?

He had just stepped off the ladder onto the fifth course, halfway down the pyramid's face, when it happened. His concentration wandered and he looked up into the star-strewn sky, idly wondering if perhaps it had been from here that the pyramid builders made their astronomical observations. Suddenly, his left foot slid on some gravel, and before Peter could recover his balance, he was wedged between two protruding boulders.

Cursing to himself at the pain that stabbed through his ankle, praying nothing was broken, Peter tried to ease his foot free. One of the football-sized boulders was slightly loose, and he trained the flashlight on it as he rocked it from side to side. Without warning, the stone dislodged, freeing his trapped foot and revealing a small hole in the rocky platform below it.

Peter wrinkled his brow, for a moment failing to appreciate just what he might have found here. Then, with mounting excitement, he angled the flashlight so it pointed down into the cavity, illuminating what appeared to be a buried chamber.

Struggling to contain the feelings that surged through him, working quietly with the flashlight, Peter started to clear away the rocks and boulders that obviously formed the chamber roof. All his dark, brooding thoughts of just a few minutes ago had dissipated, to be replaced by a strange sense of wonder. The Gotham pyramid was an unprecedented find, and now he was going to enter its subterranean chamber, hidden for hundreds, possibly thousands, of years.

It wasn't the lure of treasure that drove him on as he carefully removed the small, square-cut slabs that the builders had used to roof the structure. It wasn't the thought of the ancient artifacts, buried for nearly five thousand years, that might lie inside, or the fame and fortune they might bring him. It was the purest feeling known to any archaeologist–the rolling back of the unknown, the discovery of another piece of the mysterious jigsaw that had been the culture of our predecessors.

The roofing slabs fit perfectly into one another, and Peter couldn't help marveling at the craftsmanship and the knowledge these ancients must have possessed. Who knew–maybe this chamber was the stellar observatory that he suspected the site contained. Surely this would make Mills and the others sit up and take notice!

Peter worked for a full ten minutes before he'd achieved his goal–the clearing of a circular space, almost like a chimney, that gave him enough room to lower his lean frame inside. Requiring both hands for the task, he switched the flashlight off and jammed it in his pocket before he began his descent into the darkness.

Holding onto one of the slabs, its sharp edges threatening to slice his fingers, he lowered himself feetfirst through the hole he'd dug out. A momentary shiver of fear ran through him as his legs dangled in midair. What if the chamber had no floor? What if it dropped away for another fifty feet, right to the very base of the pyramid?

But then his outstretched, scrabbling feet found solid ground, and with a sigh of relief Peter lowered himself down onto the chamber's dusty floor.

The air inside the room was thick and oppressive, and the dust his excavations had kicked up made him cough heavily. Peter stood for a few seconds in the darkness, anticipation building inside him. For the first time in uncounted centuries, human eyes were about to view a long-concealed mystery.

Peter took a deep breath and flicked on his flashlight.

Meanwhile, on the pyramid's flat top, the others had packed up most of their gear and were ready to make the descent to the valley floor. The moon had risen now, its pale silver glow lighting up the sky and blotting out the stars.

"What about Peter?" Jenny asked.

"If the guy wants to act like a spoiled brat," Lorann Mutti replied, "we should just leave him to his tantrums. Let him find his own way back to Gotham."

David Rymel nodded his agreement, and Len Dors's mustache quivered as he growled, "Serve him right, too."

"It's not as straightforward as that," Jenny said quietly. "Peter has . . . good reason to be upset." Her voice tailed off; she had no desire to go into this, not now, not ever really. She threw the professor a sidelong glance and was glad when he came to her rescue.

"Peter's been under a lot of stress," Robert Mills said, "with his postgraduate thesis due, and all the work we've been putting in here." He went on, making sure Lorann heard his words. "But we can't just abandon him. We're a team. We have to look out for one another."

Mills snapped on his flash and walked over to the top of the rope ladder. "You guys finish up here. I'll go on ahead and coax Peter out of . . . whatever's bugging him."

Without waiting for their reply, Mills swung his body out over the edge and started to descend.

Peter Glaston played his flashlight over the chamber interior and marveled.

The stone walls and corbeled ceiling had been constructed without mortar, the stones cut and shaped to fit so precisely that Peter could hardly see where they adjoined. Two larger stones set into the chamber wall had been incised with spiral shapes, and Peter frowned. Almost all of the spirals that he'd seen in Stone Age art were drawn clockwise; the two here were their mirror images, spiraling tightly into their centers but in a counterclockwise direction.

The left-hand path . . .
Unbidden, the phrase popped into Peter's consciousness. The left-hand path–the territory of witches and sorcerers. The path of black magic.