The Weight of Souls

30 SO MANY HAD BEEN SENT INTO THE DARK

Silence surrounded me, as oppressive as snow. The feeling of being watched was intense enough to make my skin prickle, but I couldn’t see a thing.

Heart hammering, I tried to haul in a breath, but the silence was suffocating as an avalanche and I couldn’t raise my chest against it. I needed oxygen. Sparks burst in the blackness behind my eyes as my brain frantically fired off electrical impulses.

My last breath tinged the void with its tiny warmth and nothingness pressed on my eyelids like deep water.

So it was death that waited in the Darkness.

Abruptly I was in freefall. I spread my arms and dropped like Alice down the rabbit hole. There was no sound as I descended. No rushing of air around me, no breath from my own body.

Then I landed, with bone jarring force, on a hard floor.

I opened my eyes to find that I was still shrouded in Darkness. I was no longer breathing, so I lay motionless, on my back, waiting fearfully for oblivion to take me.

Nothing happened.

After a while I rolled onto my front. I had no need to inhale and where there had always been a thudding in my chest, now there was nothing. Otherwise I felt like myself. The blackness was absolute but I patted myself down with trembling hands. Everything else felt normal. I just wished that I could see. Finally, skin tingling with anticipation, I groped around me.

The floor appeared to be made of stone. As I swept my arms in widening circles, my fingers sent something rattling. Immediately I pulled my arm in, waited for silence then reached out once more. My hand closed around a thin strip of metal and I pulled it towards me. A heavy object rasped along the stone floor. I took the shape onto my lap and frowned; it felt like something I’d seen before. Mum had once shown me pictures of our ancestor’s expedition and I was certain this was an old lantern.

I had no way of igniting it, but it represented light so I clutched it to my chest, as if to remind me that there must be a way to banish the Darkness.

I don’t know how long I crouched, there was no way to tell, not even breaths to count. Finally though, I stood and started to walk. Strange as it seemed, I held the lantern out in front of me and moved like a kid in sand, pushing my toes along the ground. As I progressed I knocked things clattering across the ground. They sounded like dice in a box. Once I toed something large and solid, and carefully skirted around it.

Eventually though, the empty lantern knocked into a wall and I felt along it with my fingertips. Bumps and grooves told me the stone was carved, but with what? Again my mind went to Mum’s old pictures and I thought about hieroglyphs, and wondered where I was.

There was no way to know but at least the wall gave me something to follow.

My calves started to ache and I realised I’d been walking downhill. Suddenly the wall I was tracing ended and I stumbled. I froze immediately, sensing the edge of a cavernous space. I hefted the lantern and wondered whether to enter. On the one hand I didn’t know what was waiting for me but on the other, I had nowhere else to go.

A few paces into the space the blackness surrounding me started to turn grey. Half a dozen more steps and the light had grown stronger. I peered up to find the source of the illumination, but could see nothing. Puzzled, I looked down and shapes resolved themselves into a silent crowd.

I opened my mouth and stared. The word “crowd” wasn’t sufficient to describe the horde massed in front of me. I couldn’t count them but there had to be ten thousand men and women ranged in rows.

Barely perceptibly the darkness continued to lift. I strained my ears. With so many people ahead of me, surely I should be hearing something.

Pimples burred my skin but I took yet another step. Each face I could see was turned in my direction. The wordless regard of the horde chilled me and although the cavern was blanketed with quiet, animosity pressed upon me like a rock-fall.

All were differently dressed yet there was something indefinably uniform about the stances and facial expressions. Another word for the throng occurred to me: army.My eyes flicked around the cavern in search of an exit. Now I took the time to look I could see that the walls were riddled with black spots that could only be other tunnels. My fingers fell open and the lantern dropped to the floor with a clatter that sounded like the end of the world. I was standing in the entrance to one of what must be hundreds of tunnels.

I was at the centre of a labyrinth with no idea how to get out.

For an age I stood, trembling, in front of the army then I saw a face I recognised: James. I ran forward, kicking the lantern and sending it clattering. Then I stopped in front of him. He was posed like a Greek statue, not a hair out of place. Only his eyes burned with hatred deeper and stronger than a black hole. Abruptly I jumped back, almost afraid of being sucked inside.

He didn’t chase after me. He was awake and I was certain he was aware, but something was holding him in place. I recalled the look on his face when I Marked him. His face was still red where I’d slapped his cheek, but the Mark was gone.

I raised my own hand and my eyes widened. It too, was clean. So passage through the Darkness cleansed the Mark which had called it; perhaps the Darkness absorbed the stain back into itself.

I shuddered with relief. If I got out of here, I wouldn’t have to Mark Pete.

If I got out.

I searched automatically for other familiar faces. Tamsin was in the row behind James, highlighted by her blonde hair. Harley stood next to her. Tamsin’s face was twisted with so much terror that it made her ugly. Whatever had happened to her in here, it hadn’t been good.

I walked on until I saw the agoraphobic housewife, still in her nightclothes, her eye-mask askew on the top of her head. Her face was more confused and resigned than anything else. I wondered if she thought she was still dreaming, or if she’d somehow been waiting for retribution all the time.

Then I found the gang member, Jay, his gun still in his hand. Surely if anyone would have been able to escape it would have been him. Whatever was down here, he could have shot it.

My mouth felt dry as bone. Assuming these people had arrived as I had, still mobile and alert, what had turned them into living statues? And why hadn’t Jay’s gun been able to save him?

With increasing speed I searched through the rows, finding face after face. I didn’t recognise every figure; there had to be others like me spread around the world. Who knew how many of us were sending murderers here day after day? But at last there he was – the killer of the clown – my first mission.

The man, Bill, still wore his money belt bulging with fairground ticket stubs and cash. His muscles bulged from his wife-beater vest. Appropriate. This man had beaten his girlfriend then killed her friend when he tried to help her. By sending him into the Darkness I’d prevented him from hunting down the girl and probably saved her life. I looked around at the overwhelming mass of humanity. How many lives had been saved by removing these people from the world? How many could I yet save? Suddenly I understood what my mother had meant when she said she was proud of what she did.

Thoughts of my mother turned to her book The Tale of Oh-Fa; that was where my story had really begun. A great need to find the first of all the murderers burned in me. Oh-Fa’s first Mark had been given to him by his overseer. He and the rest of the workers had been killed by Anubis; but it was the leader of the expedition, the Professor, who had made them break through the image of the jackal-headed god of death and sent them inside, knowing what was trapped in the darkness, waiting for them.

My mind raced back over the passages containing the Professor’s description:

Due to an excess of coffee and lack of hygiene, the Professor’s incisors are dark yellow and the colour ensures that his giant tombstone teeth are the locus of his narrow face… The glare of the sun on his round spectacles erased his eyes.

I had always imagined the Professor like the German baddie from Raiders of the Lost Ark, so that was who I searched for.

I was racing through the middle of the lines to the back of the room, expecting the Professor to be the first man in the first line, when I spotted a pattern: not in the formation of regimented lines, but the dress of the entombed killers.

Bands of fashion cut through the rows like the circles of a tree, growing more modern as they extended to the outer edge of the cavernous space. In fact, it felt as if I was running through a museum of evil waxworks demonstrating fashions through the ages. I followed the lengthening of skirts, the smattering of changing army uniforms, the rising collars, the roughening materials until I found him in the centre, the crowds having grown around him.

He was taller and thinner than I’d pictured, but it had to be him. He sported old-fashioned desert dress and a gold insignia on the third finger of his right hand. He was just as Oh-Fa had described. And he wore a bag across his chest.

Oh-Fa’s tale was true.

As if following its own plan, my hand reached for the bag. It had to contain the Professor’s book, with translations of the hieroglyphs and most importantly, maps showing the location of Nefertiti’s tomb.

Dad had said he wanted to find the original vector and this could tell him where it was.

Perfectly preserved, the man stood completely unmoving, without life or breath. But I didn’t take my eyes from his face as I pilfered his notes. He looked sadder than James, as if his anger had long ago burned out. I wondered if he felt the passage of time.

As I tucked the book under my shirt I hesitated. The people here were all alive, even those that should have naturally been long dead. The Darkness did not kill, it preserved; in some cases for over two hundred years.

So if Anubis did not want their lives, what were the killers being saved for?

I swallowed, wishing I had some way of moistening my dry lips. If this really was an army, what was it for? And where was its General?

Something else was down here, hidden by the Darkness; something that had caught these people, frozen them and placed them in their lines.

I started to run back through the terrifying multitude.

Then I heard my name.