The Thieves of Darkness (51 page)

“Could you imagine if your mother could see this?” Venue said as he looked between KC and Cindy. “Me and my two girls sitting in a temple that is over four thousand years old. She’d die all over again.”

KC’s eye bore fire into Venue, who only smiled at her stare.

“How dare you. You have nothing to do with us. You left our mother on her own.”

“Prison has that effect.”

“And you faked your death.”

“Everyone has to die sometime.” Venue let his silent threat hang in the air. “So this guy, Michael, he really cares about you.”

“Don’t you dare bring him up.”

“Most guys can’t be trusted. I guess most women, too, huh, KC?
Sometimes things aren’t what they seem; sometimes we think we know what’s going on.”

KC didn’t respond.

“People can be so surprising, so unpredictable,” Venue said as he stared at KC.

“What are you talking about and what the hell just happened down there?” Cindy blurted out. “What’s behind that door?”

Venue looked between them. “Perhaps KC could answer that?”

KC sat in silence, staring at Venue, an unspoken argument going on between them. Cindy was a nonentity; the conversation and chess match was only between KC and Venue. “I have no idea,” she said, not wanting to imagine the truth.

Venue relented with a smile. “It’s got to make you think. This place predates Islam, Christianity, Judaism, it’s older than Gautama Buddha and the gods of Hinduism. Makes you wonder who built it, who were they worshipping, who do they worship now? What are they protecting?”

“If they were protecting something, don’t you think those monks would have tried to resist?” Cindy said.

“Maybe what they are guarding doesn’t need protection,” KC said, her eyes still on Venue. She paused, bringing home her point. “Or maybe they aren’t protecting it from the world; maybe they are protecting the world from it.”

Cindy nervously laughed. “Always such a drama queen.”

Venue stared at KC as if not hearing Cindy. It was as if she wasn’t in the room.

“Do they look old to you?” Venue asked KC as he shifted in his seat.

“Who?” Cindy asked, trying to enter their conversation.

KC remained silent. She knew Venue was making a point with his question; he wasn’t looking for a validation of his observation. She had seen the same thing. While none of the monks were young, none of them were hobbled by age, or bent and broken by life. It was not that their hair wasn’t gray, or their skin wasn’t wrinkled. The wisdom in
their faces came from experience, from many years lived, but each of them possessed young eyes, filled with life and optimism, eyes undiminished by hopelessness.

“There are things about this place…”

“What kind of things?” Cindy said, growing frustrated.

Iblis came quickly into the room. “We found the other rooms.”

“Good,” Venue said calmly as he continued to sit with no sense of urgency.

Iblis looked at him, confused. “Don’t you want to see them? It’s incredible.”

“Not yet.” Venue remained seated. “We’re waiting for someone to arrive.”

“Who?” Iblis asked.

Venue continued looking at KC, holding her eyes, and smiled. “Michael St. Pierre.”

Michael stepped into the temple. It was cavernous and dark. Great columns bordered the central pathway, which led to a large altar. Large rounded cages hung from the twenty-foot ceiling on heavy chains, each with a glowing fire that provided a dim, constant light. Along the wall, hundreds of candles shone, their small flames refracting off their brass holders. The smell of incense drifted about in the smoky air, which rose and vented out of the cathedral’s ceiling.

As Michael walked up the nave, he expected to see a large Buddha as a central figure, but nothing was at the temple’s focal point. There was no crucifix or holy cross, no tabernacle or obscure deity. There was nothing but several purple and deep-red pillows stacked upon the floor.

The sanctuary was large, over one hundred feet deep and equally wide. There were no pews or chairs, though there were individual prayer rugs, fifty of them, in intricate designs, made of wool, filling the floor on either side of the aisle.

Michael walked to the edge of the raised platform and looked at the altar. He did not step up, out of respect: There was no doubt this was a house of worship, the dais reserved for those anointed or deemed worthy.

And then Michael saw the blood: It was fresh and new, staining the back wall of the dais and the ash-colored altar floor.

There had to be occupants, monks, but they did not concern Michael; it was Iblis and his guards who were a threat, who kept Michael on edge. Michael drew the Sig Sauer from the small of his back, flicking off the safety. He tightened his knapsack and moved off toward a hallway to the left. He hugged the corner, listening, but the temple was silent.

The stone hallway branched off; without thought, Michael took the left tunnel and continued through.

Michael arrived at a circular vestibule. Torches sat in wall sconces, their orange glow reflecting off an elaborate gold-inlaid mandala floor, its infinite concentric designs capturing the mysteries of the heavens. As Michael looked up he saw a perfect mirror image of the floor’s design; its intricacy was beyond complex, a metaphysical representation of the cosmos. The walls were of polished stone while seven more corridors branched off from the central room like spokes from a wheel. Michael listened, holding his breath, halting all movement, but heard nothing.

He took a tentative step into the first darkened hallway, drew his flashlight, and turned it on; its beam became lost down a long corridor that jogged left and right. He walked for at least one hundred yards before arriving at a thick wooden door. He grasped the iron handle and pulled it open, and was greeted by a large circular room, the rounded ceiling over fifteen feet high, rows upon rows of shelves along its walls.

As Michael shone his light in, the room exploded in sunlight, beams of yellow erupted and reflected, seeming to grow upon themselves. Gold, shimmering in its purest form, sat upon the shelves that lined the walls. There were goblets and plates, shields and daggers, jewelry and religious ornaments, unformed blocks and malleable sheets. It was an unlocked storage vault whose value Michael couldn’t fathom. If this was what Venue was after, it would make him wealthier than even he could imagine, but Michael feared this was not his primary goal. He was after something even greater.

Michael closed the door and headed back to the mandala vestibule, taking the next corridor, again traveling along hundreds of feet to find a far different sight.

The door was large and thick, tremendous iron hinges supported its
weight, and to Michael’s great surprise there was an enormous crosshatch lock. It was a four-bar design that rested upon the door’s exterior, protruding into the stone door frame, the crossbars joined by an intricate steel gear in its center with a hole for a large key.

But as Michael admired the simple design, he wondered why it had not been fortified to any greater extent, for the door hung wide open, the steel lock shattered by gunfire.

If a room containing over a billion dollars in gold did not merit a lock, what was the value of the contents of the room before him?

Michaels’s question was answered as he took a step in. Far larger than any of the other rooms, this was the true treasure of the monastery. This was the room of knowledge, the room of history. And as Michael stepped in and walked about, he understood it contained information far older and far more revealing than anything man had ever experienced. Upon endless shelves sat scrolls and parchments, vellum and books, even stone tablets, all meticulously arranged and labeled in five languages: Latin, Aramaic, English, an Oriental language, and the largest markings, the oldest markings, which sat above the other four, from a language Michael had never seen before. The labels displayed language through the ages, from the protolanguage before him, through its evolution, reflecting the world’s ever-changing dominant cultures.

There were simple hardwood tables and benches, and mirrors were strategically placed to reflect the torchlight, which was contained within vented stone pockets, at a distance from the flammable materials.

Michael walked about, examining the shelf tags, finding sections on Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and religions he had never heard of. Sections on prayer and meditation, divine intervention, evidence and proof of the afterlife. There were writings in the hand of Moses, Gautama Buddha, and Jesus Christ, lost gospels, and the philosophical treatise of Mein Na.

If the Ten Commandments were held as sacred, hidden away in the Ark of the Covenant, then this room, within this temple, within one of the world’s largest mountains, was a repository of knowledge thousands of times larger, more monumental, and all the more sacred. The world
had read no direct writings of Jesus but rather the written interpretations and observations of his disciples and chroniclers many years later. The teachings of Buddha were, again, penned by his followers and not by himself directly. The Ten Commandments were the only known direct writings of God. But now, with this room, the sacredness of it, the true divinity of its contents … It was as if Michael had stepped into the libraries of heaven.

The information was vast and all-encompassing, touching on all forms of faith, on all beliefs and interpretations of the afterlife. And there were not just writings on God and Allah, on paradise and the search for enlightenment. There were parchments and scrolls on the devils of the world’s religions: Azazel, Lucifer, Abaddon, Belial, Satan, Angra Mainyu, Asmodai, Beelzebub, and the Islamic name that KC’s teacher had usurped, Iblis. There were books on Shaitan, Baphomet, Mastema, Chutriel, Mephistopheles, the anti-Christ. They sounded like titles from a bad horror movie, but Michael knew these were nothing of the sort. Loki, the Norse god of mischief; Angat, a Madagascan devil; Arawn, the Welsh god of the underworld; Chernobog, the Slavic devil Black God; Mara, the demon who tempted Gautama Buddha; the Babylonian god Nergal, who reigned over the dead; Ördög, the Hungarian entity of legend; Pazuzu, the half-man, half-beast demon of the Assyro-Babylonians; Vritra, the adversary in Vedic religion; the Celtic demon Pwcca; Samnu, a devil to Central Asiatics; Supay, the Inca god of the underworld; T’An Mo, the Chinese counterpart to the devil; Sedit, a Native American devil. Their histories and biographies were present in unfathomable depth.

Michael finally arrived at the end of the collection, where empty shelves sat in wait of new topics, new introspective writings on the mysteries of the cosmos above and below. He turned to leave but suddenly stopped and turned back, all at once understanding why the door to this repository of heavenly knowledge had been blown off its hinges.

Michael’s heart grew cold as he walked to the empty shelves. The conspicuously empty section was not awaiting new writings; the shelves were already labeled. There were hundreds of tags, yet their
corresponding texts were gone. The empty section was vast, at least ten feet of vacant shelves six feet high, a collection of works gathered through time, since the beginning of man, a segment that could only be summarized as evil in all of its forms. “Demons” and “Darkness,” the tags read, “Witchcraft” and “Malevolence,” “Fallen Angels” and “Risen Beasts.” There were prayers and incantations to the Devil and the unholy creatures of the deep. Labels that read “The Words of Lucifer,” “The Gospel of Satan,” “The Maps of Hell,” “Summoning Pazuzu,” “Possession,” “The Rape of the Soul.”

Michael had had his doubts about what Simon had said was below the temple, but as he looked at the empty shelves before him, as he read the titles of the books, scrolls, and parchments that were missing, a numbing fear consumed him. Venue was here not just for the gold; he was here for the power and secrets. He was here to unleash hell.

Michael stepped back and spun about, suddenly on edge. He wasn’t sure why, but a fear rose in him, a fear he hadn’t felt since childhood, unexplained and irrational; he white-knuckled his pistol as his eyes darted about. He had to find KC and get her out of here. He had to get her clear before he came back and stopped Venue and Iblis from what they were planning.

M
ICHAEL HEADED BACK
out through the stone tunnel, taking each of the hall spokes from the mandala room in search of KC. He found a room of silver; a room filled with jewels, precious and semiprecious stones; and a room filled with grains and food stores, understanding that “the Mountain of Five Treasures” was truly a literal interpretation.

Standing back in the circular hub, he was left with only two more passages. Michael felt like the Minotaur, forever trapped in a winding maze. One door led to a set of stairs that went down, while the other headed up.

Michael tilted his head, listening for any sound, any hint of where KC might be. Hearing nothing, he quietly ascended, his eyes scanning, his nerves on fire, gripping his pistol tight. He came out on a landing, where a door-lined hall drifted downward, but he found the stairs continued
to rise. He proceeded to the third and uppermost floor to find a candlelit room wrapped in windows that afforded views in all directions. The storm had momentarily abated; the setting sun lit the outside valley in a glorious golden haze that filtered through the warped glass, filling the room with rainbow prisms and shafts of light.

The intermittent wall space was adorned with art that celebrated life, that celebrated religion. All religions: Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Buddhism. Michael walked about, looking at the depictions; stories in varied languages hung below the art, telling tales Michael couldn’t imagine. There were drawings of monks lying prostrate in the open sanctuary on the first floor. Pictures of magical sunrises and mystical sunsets. A drawing of a bearded man with long hair, his light skin in sharp contrast to that of the brown-skinned monks he sat with in this very room. An aura surrounded him, a subtle glow, as he spoke with open, outstretched hands.

An Indian prince, in long, colorful but tattered robes, stood in conversation in the gardens, walking with men of varied lineage while birds and animals fluttered and walked around him.