Black Rain

It took three tries, but Susan Briggs finally found a mask that fit her face. Kaufman then introduced her to Norman Lang, his chief scientist, explaining that she was to help him in whatever way he asked.

Lang seemed nervous. Only a few inches taller than her and probably no more than 140 pounds soaking wet, he certainly wasn’t cut from the same cloth as the mercenaries, but there was an edge to him that made her uncomfortable. He was constantly licking his lips and flexing the muscles in his jaw, as if he were clenching and unclenching his teeth. He must have cleaned the lenses on his black-plastic-framed glasses five times in the ten minutes they stood together waiting for Kaufman.

The three of them entered the temple together, along with two of Kaufman’s hired guns, all of them breathing heavily through the charcoal-filter masks.

They descended the steps carefully, with Lang videotaping the journey on a digital camcorder. The walls were tinted in places, painted long ago in some reddish hue, but they were also scarred and discolored, with bright yellow stains and splotches. Where the stone was bare it glistened in the light, dripping with condensation.

Lang zoomed in for a close-up on what appeared to be some yellowish form of rust. “Sulfur,” he said. “Eating away at the granite.”

They walked into the first chamber. Susan stared at the piles of skulls. Professor McCarter’s description had not done the sight justice.

Lang ordered all the lights off and switched on a black light in their stead. The UV light illuminated their eyes and teeth and the laces on Lang’s tennis shoes, all glowing purple-white as if they were lit from within. It turned the skulls into a ghostly sight and brought out a million speckles hidden within the stone of the floor and walls. But whatever Lang was searching for, he didn’t see it. He switched back to normal light and the group continued, through a doorway into a second room.

They examined this room as they had the foyer, regular light first, ultraviolet second. Again nothing of interest was found.

Lang turned to her. “What’s next?”

She was navigating from McCarter’s descriptions.

“It should be the altar room,” she said.

The next room was indeed the altar room, but to enter it they had to pass through the falling beam of light.

Lang held his hand in the stream. It was wide but less then a centimeter thick, a long, narrow slit allowing the sunlight in from somewhere up above. He seemed suspicious.

“Are there any traps here?” Lang asked.

“Traps?”

“Yeah, booby traps, like spears triggered from stepping into the light?”

She blinked though the mask. “You’re kidding me, right?”

Lang did not look as if he were.

“You’ve seen too many movies,” she said.

Looking no more comfortable, Lang set himself to go forward and edged through the beam of light. The altar room lay on the other side.

Susan watched as Lang wandered about, probing this section and that, looking through the viewfinder and recording things he saw. Several times he used the black light and occasionally he looked at other instruments he’d brought along. He seemed mostly underwhelmed. Finally, he made his way to the platform, where he switched off the lights once again.

This time something appeared in the presence of the ultraviolet rays: geometric markings hidden within the stone face of the altar.

Susan stared at them.

Kaufman noticed her gaze. “Do you recognize these?”

She didn’t. “They don’t look like glyphs.”

Lang aimed his camera at the top surface of the altar, and another set of marks appeared: two elongated grooves embedded within the stone, running from the front of the altar to the back. Widely spaced at first, the grooves narrowed near the middle, forming parallel lines for several inches before bending outward again. As they neared the back edge, the lines diverged completely, until they ran away from each other, in opposite directions, spreading across the top of the design in flowing, rolling swirls. At various points on the altar there were carved depressions in the stone, all of them within the boundaries created by the two lines.

Susan stood on her tiptoes to peek and Kaufman waved her up. “Does this look familiar to you?”

She studied the pattern. “No, they’re not glyphs either.”

“No,” Kaufman agreed.

She cocked her head. “But it almost looks like …”

“Like what?”

She turned to Kaufman. “Like a tree.”

Kaufman examined the lines again. He seemed unable to visualize it.

She tried to assist. “Here are the roots,” she said, pointing to the closest part of the markings. “The bottom of the tree. And this would be the trunk,” she said, as her finger traced the lines to the top. “And these swirls are the branches and the leaves.” She turned to Kaufman. “A tree.”

Kaufman and Lang stared at the design. The lines were thin, little more than scratches. It was hard to see the pattern as a tree.

Susan realized their hesitance. “I mean it doesn’t look like those other marks,” she said. “They were angled and straight. These are all curves.”