The Pandora Room: A Novel Read online

  Back where she’d begun, her team gathered in the worship chamber and urged her forward, or pleaded with her to let them draw her back, but Sophie thought going backward might be just as dangerous as going forward. Either way, she could disturb the thousands of tons of stone above her. What kind of example had she set for them, doing something so foolhardy? The question came into her mind unbidden, but immediately she had an answer. An ambitious one. A determined woman. Sophie heard the response in the voice of her boss, Alex Jarota. He’d ignited that fire of ambition in her …

  No. That was bullshit. Sophie could lie to herself, but not in this moment. Here and now, she had to admit that all Alex had done was unleash the ambition in her, as if she had been waiting her whole life for permission to pursue her dreams.

  Of course, her dreams would die with her if she couldn’t get out of this.

  Trembling, breath catching in her throat, she fought away despair and refused the tears that wanted to come to her eyes. Instead, she dug down beneath her fear to the iron core inside her. Her life had been in peril before. She’d broken bones and suffered at least one concussion doing her work, and she’d been many places where she wasn’t welcome. Her life hadn’t ended on those days, and it wouldn’t end today. Not yet. Not without the answers for which she had risked herself.

  With one enormous huff of exhalation, she stretched her arms out farther, dug her fingers in, and twisted her hips to the left, much harder than before. To the right. To the left. Stone scraped her back as she inched and dragged herself forward, her hips coming free.

  Back in the worship chamber, someone shining a flashlight at her feet cheered for her.

  That sharp, low-hanging rock scraped against her ass, pressing down. Stone dug in, something shifted overhead, and mortar rained down again. This time she heard rocks moving, a quiet rumble, like something shifting chairs in the room next door.

  But her right hand found open air. She waggled her fingers, reached around to see, and knew she had made it to the secret room. Or her hands had. Only that low rock, pressed against her sacrum, held her back.

  “You’re beyond our reach now,” Alton said from behind her.

  Sophie inhaled. He had no idea.

  She exhaled. Grasped the outside edge of the hole with both hands, tucked her hips down as low as she could manage, and then dragged herself forward. The rock dug into her tailbone, scraped hard, and shifted with a groan and the cracking of mortar. Her arms floated free, dangling at the elbow, but only for a fraction of a second. The whole wall above her seemed to bulge, and she whipped her arms out, pressed against the interior of the secret room, and thrust herself in. She heard the rock thunk down in the tunnel as she slid free.

  Stone cracked and collapsed, even as Sophie tumbled out of the hole and onto the dusty floor of the secret chamber. A wan shaft of light came through from that hole, but as she scrambled to her feet, more rocks dropped down to block the passage, and in seconds she found herself in near darkness, only the dimmest bit of illumination still showing through.

  “Sophie!” muffled voices called from beyond that hole. From the other side of a wall that had let her slip through, but would now not let her out.

  “I’m okay!” she called back.

  Shouts of alarm continued, so she put her mouth to the opening in the wall and called through to them again. “I’m fine! I’m not hurt!”

  Someone shushed the others, and she was shocked, standing there in the mostly dark, to hear the one voice she did not expect.

  “What the hell have you done? Are you insane?”

  Lamar, she thought with a smile. He worked for her, but she couldn’t help feeling that she had made it into this room just in time, that as her dear friend and her colleague—maybe her one real friend at the dig—Lamar would have had a much better chance of talking her out of this than any of the others.

  “I think that is a very distinct possibility,” she called back to him. “But I’m in here now, which means your job has just become trying to figure out how to get me out before I starve to death.”

  At first there came no reply. Sophie frowned, thinking that more of the wall might have blocked the hole, but then she realized she’d heard no more rumbling. Narrow shafts of light still streamed through, illuminating bits of mortar that floated like motes of dust. Sophie drank up those bits of light, thirsty for something other than the darkness that embraced her all around.

  “You can live without food for weeks,” Lamar called through to her, his voice somehow sounding farther away. “You can go without water for maybe six days, but it won’t be fun. I’m worried about something else.”

  Sophie frowned. She inhaled the dust of age, tasted it on her tongue and teeth. She peered at those thin beams of light, and then she froze. Oxygen. Lamar was worried about oxygen. If this part of the underground city had the same sorts of ventilation shafts they’d found elsewhere, and they were unblocked, she would be okay, but now the worry settled heavily on her.

  “You’ve got to excavate the wall without letting it collapse completely,” she said, speaking loudly as if to someone hard of hearing.

  “We’re on it!” Alton called to her. “Don’t be afraid.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  Sophie rested her forehead against the cool stone on the inside of the wall. No strange mortar here, no effort to make this wall look like anything other than a pile of rocks. She spread her arms out to either side and found the place where the false wall became smooth, ancient rock, the soft volcanic stone—tuff in English, tuffeau in French—that had allowed these caves and tunnels to be easily carved but which slowly hardened after exposure to air. In the Cappadocia region of Turkey, there were well over one hundred such warrens, dating back to the Bronze Age and earlier. During a period where villages were constantly under attack, locals had been forced to create entire subterranean cities, with markets, living quarters, and religious centers going many levels deep into the earth below their aboveground settlements.

  The most remarkable thing about their dig, about this subterranean city—which she had named Derveyî, the Kurdish word for beneath—was that it had been discovered a thousand kilometers from Cappadocia. Derveyî might be part of Kurdistan, it might belong to the Iraqi government and fall under the auspices of UNESCO, and even of her own employers, but as far as Sophie Durand was concerned, Derveyî was hers. Her project. Her home for the past year.

  Now, she began to wonder if it might also be her grave.

  A chill went through her. She felt unsettled, her skin clammy and damp. A twinge of nausea hit her gut, and she shook herself. What the hell was wrong with her? It felt as if she’d developed a sudden fever. Sophie blinked and shivered and wrapped her arms around herself, and for ten or fifteen seconds she felt panic seizing her as she wondered what she would do if something happened to her in here, in the dark, before the others could dig through the wall.

  Then the moment passed. Her thoughts seemed to clear. In her peripheral vision, she thought she saw the shadows shift, like something silver moved there in the cave with her.

  Get ahold of yourself, woman, she thought. And she forced herself to smile at the darkness.

  Sipping at the air around her, wondering if she would be able to tell if oxygen grew short, she reached into her right-hand pocket and withdrew the slim but powerful flashlight Marissa had given her. It was the only thing she’d brought, the one thing she had known that she could not do without, thinking that she would want to be able to investigate the secret room immediately. What she hadn’t counted on was it being her only source of light.

  Sophie clicked the flashlight on. Its narrow beam illuminated enough that she felt some of the nervousness dissipate. Inhaling deeply, she reassured herself that she could breathe, that her paranoia would not be enough to deprive her of oxygen.

  “You’re okay,” she quietly assured herself as she had so many times over the years.

  Then she began to look around. The narrow beam
of the flashlight moved smoothly, slowly, as she took note of her surroundings. Other than the false wall, the rest looked much like they’d found elsewhere in Derveyî, smooth, as if it had been carved from soap instead of stone.

  The writing, though, that was different. The chambers and corridors were filled with symbols and ancient writing, but not like this. The cuneiform language seemed different, as she’d observed from outside the room, but now she saw that it had been painted and carved throughout the chamber. Words leaped out at her. Lamar was the expert, but she figured she would try her hand at translating some of it while her team excavated the wall.

  She swept her flashlight around in a slow circle. The secret room felt larger than it was. Perhaps eighteen feet square, it had nothing that suggested it had been furnished, save for a raised area and what appeared to be some sort of altar or table carved from the same stuff as the room itself. The beam of the flashlight continued to move, and Sophie noticed a recession off to the left of the altar, a place where the flashlight’s illumination did not seem to reach.

  Around that recession, the language on the wall changed. In fact, the cuneiform scrawling stopped several feet from the shadows, and there stretched a gap of nine or ten inches before other writing began—this one much more familiar to her. Stepping closer, eyes narrowed, heart racing now from the urgency of discovery instead of from fear, Sophie picked out text in a distinct Doric Greek idiom and recognized it immediately. She had spent a great deal of time in graduate school studying the Pella curse tablet, a lead scroll discovered in the ancient capital of Macedonia in the 1980s. For long moments, she stared at this writing, wondering what it could signify.

  A warning, yes. Sophie had no doubt about that. But unlike the Pella tablet, this held no curse. Instead, it reminded her of the cautionary scrawl in Dante’s Inferno, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.” The Doric script seemed less dire, but the wariness came through loud and clear. This is a secret place, the city beneath the city, and none may enter except with the authority of the king of Asia.

  “The king of Asia?” she asked the dust and the shadows.

  Then it dawned on her, and she smiled. “No fucking way.”

  Only then did she realize she had moved much closer to the wall and that her flashlight beam had strayed toward that black recession and that the blackness felt so deep because instead of stone wall, a tunnel waited there, yawning and dark.

  A tunnel. And stairs, carved into the stone, descending into the secret place, the city beneath the city, where none might enter without the authority of the king of Asia. A ripple of unreality passed through Sophie, and her breath grew shallow, not because she lacked oxygen but because she had entered her dream, an archaeological find that would be talked about, written about, and taught in schools for generations to come.

  Numb, Sophie backtracked to the collapsed hole through which she’d entered. “Lamar? Beyza?”

  “We’re here!” Beyza called back. “Are you all right?”

  “Fine!” Sophie shouted, maybe too loud, giddiness overtaking her. “I’m going for a walk. Don’t panic if you call and I don’t respond!”

  “A walk?” Lamar said. “What the hell do you mean, a walk?”

  “Trust me!” was all she said.

  Then her feet were moving again, and she surrendered to the dream, and the smile on her face, and the way her thoughts spun drunkenly around one another, no single ponderance able to nest long enough to take root before the next one shoved it away.

  Only one. As she passed the warning outside the entrance to the steps that led into the city beneath the city, she whispered to herself.

  “Sorry, king of Asia,” she said as she disobeyed his orders.

  After all, there was nothing he could do to her now. Alexander the Great had been dead for more than two thousand years.

  * * *

  As she descended into Derveyî’s heart, Sophie knew the city’s greatest secrets waited below, yet with every step, she chided herself for not turning back. Her team would be furious, and rightly so. Had any one of them done something so reckless, she would have raised hell. But presently she had nothing to do but sit in the dark and await rescue … or explore a mystery labeled with warnings from two separate historical eras, including one seemingly from Alexander the Great himself.

  They’re just stairs, she told herself. I’m just walking down some stairs.

  Again, a shiver went through her. She wet her lips with her tongue and wiped at her forehead. With a deep breath, she continued to descend.

  Sophie tried not to think about what it would feel like if her flashlight battery died, how dark it would become. At the bottom of the steps—she ought to have counted, why hadn’t she counted?—she entered a circular chamber perhaps fifty feet wide. There were niches carved in the walls around the room where oil lamps and other goods might once have been placed. A quintet of columns created deeper shadows when she shone her flashlight beam upon them, as if something old might lurk behind them. As Sophie crossed the floor, holding her breath, an errant breeze whispered past her, caressing the back of her neck, and she let out a small noise of fear that would have shamed her if she hadn’t been so entirely alone.

  Something rustled in the darkness between columns, and she went still. Her breath caught in her throat. A scuffing noise, not like scuttle of vermin but more like a footfall. Her mind tried to make sense of it, to configure some way for another person to be down here with her, in the vacant heart of Derveyî, but there was no way. Sophie listened for the sound to come again and then smiled to herself. The dark beyond the light of her flashlight grew deeper, somehow, but she heard nothing more, and she knew she had to be alone.

  She stepped around the column, swung the light back and forth. For a moment, she thought she saw a figure dart out of the reach of her flashlight, a pale gray curtain of fabric swaying like something undersea, but she blinked and found nothing there. As she searched with her light, she confirmed it. Nothing. Her anxiousness had her seeing things.

  Her heart still pounded, and her face felt flush with something not quite relief and not quite disappointment but a mixture of the two.

  Taking another calming breath, she surveyed the room. Nothing waited in the shadows. The columns were only that—carved from the same soft stone as the rest of this subterranean city—though one of them, in the center of the chamber, doubled as a fireplace. Broad and softly moaning with a breeze that drifted up its flue, the fireplace seemed larger than most they’d found. There were ventilation shafts all through Derveyî, some long since clogged or collapsed or covered by some change in the land aboveground. Sophie shone her beam into the fireplace and saw gray ash and bone there, and a flutter of excitement touched her heart. She looked inside and upward, but although it was clear that at least some air moved through, no light reached her from above.

  Two tables had been carved as well, a part of the stone around them just as the columns and the walls were. Some kind of communal space, then, likely to take meals. She paused to take stock and felt a tremor of guilt, knowing her team would be working hard to free her and would be worried if she remained out of communication for too long, but she made a quick circuit of what she had already begun to think of as the column room.

  Throughout Derveyî, there were tunnels and passages, some right on top of one another. There were stairs and ramps, water tanks and stables, family dwellings and places of worship. The architecture had not been constructed but burrowed and carved, and the design seemed all the more remarkable because of it. Outsiders tended to be most astonished by the moving stone doors. In the era when Derveyî had been created—built seemed the wrong word—threats from above had been a near constant. The weather posed certain perils, as did those who might want to take the settlement by force. In the event of attack, they could not only survive below … they could live well.

  The doors were few, but they were remarkable feats. Round like millstones, they were balanced perfectly and could be
turned into place in the event of an attack. Better still, once the doors were closed, they could only be opened from the inside.

  As she walked the perimeter of the chamber, Sophie’s flashlight beam found three other, smaller rooms and a corridor leading away into narrow, claustrophobic darkness. But it was the other set of steps that interested her most. Opposite the stairs she’d descended to reach this place was an exit, beyond which were thirteen steps down to a doorway.

  Closed.

  It couldn’t be closed, of course. Not unless someone had remained on the other side.

  “What in the hell is this?” she whispered, running her hands over the smooth stone of the door.

  Her flashlight beam found symbols carved into the stone, both in cuneiform and in the language of Alexander. Sophie put both hands on the door, sighing and quietly cursing. She leaned her forehead against the stone as the almost narcotic buzz of discovery began to seep out of her. Lamar would be waiting for word. The whole team would be desperate to hear from her. Slithering through the hole they’d dug had been one level of irresponsibility, but staying too long down here and making them worry … that was another level entirely.

  An image rose in her mind of soldiers standing in this very spot, men in the uniform of Alexander’s army. Alexander the Not-So-Great, she thought.

  But a frown creased her forehead, and she stepped back from the door. With her flashlight, she began to investigate the edges. The Doric Greek writing in the altar room she’d found had been a clear warning, a decree from the emperor not to descend those stairs. Not to enter this portion of Derveyî, which they’d endeavored to hide from anyone who might discover the city.

  Which meant that Alexander’s men had gotten to see what was on the other side of this door.

  Sophie set the flashlight on the floor. Carefully, she ran her fingers along the edge and gave a gentle push every few inches, trying to nudge it aside or to find some kind of leverage. When her fingers found a thin gap, she exhaled loudly and her heart began to pound. Fearful of what might happen if the gap closed instead of widened, she worked her fingers inward until she felt the stone door shift.