"Ashley..." whispered Helen, stepping forward on shaky feet. The size of the tomb was immense - at least thirty feet to the roof and a hundred foot long. With several layers of steps weaving in around the lines of paint flecked pillars, there were many corners left hidden from view.
A steady creak came from above. Helen, momentarily forgetting the danger, descended the sand covered stairs and screamed up to the roof, "Ashley!"
Ashley was curled around a rope, dangling from a small metal ring in the ceiling. Her head was slumped forward and one leg hanging limp with a gash through her leather pants. She swung gently, like a curious pendulum or angel not quite fallen from the sky.
Helen watched a steady trail of blood drip out a line on the sand. It looked as if Ashley had been here for some time, injured and alone.
Will skidded in behind the circling mother, glancing nervously about the unexplored room.
"We've got to get her down, Ashley!" Helen continued to call, trying to get her daughter's attention.
Her persistence worked. Gradually, Ashley began to stir. It started with a strand of dirty blond hair slipping over her shoulder to brush against her face, tickling her nose. Ashley shifted as her eyes parted, laden with sharp deposits of sand.
"Mum?" she muttered, trying to focus the blurry shapes running frantic circles beneath her.
"Don't move Ashley, I'm coming up there."
Will frowned with his head aimed at the ceiling. He wasn't sure how Helen planned to get up there. Ashley was hanging from the centre of the room out of reach from everything; indeed, he still couldn't work out how on earth she'd gotten up there in the first place.
He took a few steps after Helen and felt his ankle roll. Will landed on his arse in a cloud of dust and sand, coughing with surprise. That had hurt. Feeling around for the cause, he found a scattering of ammunition shells sinister enough to make him suspect Ashley as their owner.
"Helen, wait..." he said. Helen hadn't even noticed that he'd fallen. It took him catching hold of her arm to gain her attention and even then, he wasn't sure that she was listening. "Something went down here – these things are all over the place." He pointed out several more piles of shells at variously locations all over the room. Either there had been a small war or Ashley'd found what she had been looking for.
Ashley renewed her grip on the rope, grimacing as her nylon-warn wrists and hands burned. Almost a day, that's how long she'd been hanging on, hoping that the rusted metal would hold her in place. The left side of her shoulder was useless with a shard of hot metal burrowed into it. Damage from the scuffle itself was widespread and ranged from severe to superficial. To be honest, she was more worried about the claw marks leaving a scar than potential infection. That was the one thing the desert had going for it. Her adrenaline was all but gone and the actual pain was well established, seizing whatever functions remained.
"Get out of here..." she croaked, lifting her head up. Her mother and Will were scurrying over the floor beneath like a pair of rats, sniffing and hunting.
"I'm coming, Ashley..." Helen repeated, searching for anything that she could use to reach her daughter.
Underneath the layers of sand was an exquisitely tiled floor. Most of the walls displayed intact hieroglyphs, several of which Will paused at, if only in fright. Now that he looked hard at the room, there was something wrong with it. Tombs were tributes, houses for the dead to live on in – that much he had picked up from the History Channel. Will seriously did not want to meet the person who had chosen to live in this place for all eternity.
The trail of fire that he had lit in the corridor, circled the whole room. "Wait..." he breathed, eyeing the ochre urns nestled in several corners. The sand on the ground wasn't flat as it should be, nor were Helen and his trails visible. The ground was chaotic – a whisper of what had taken place and was still going on...
There – it happened again, another set of footprints appeared in the sand from nowhere.
"Get out of here," Ashley repeated, trying to see catch sight of her mother. All she found was Will, standing rigid against the far wall with his head jolting at every new movement.
"Helen!" Will said, panic rising in his voice. His plea echoed through the room, creating a few more footprints over the floor.
Helen felt the cool snap of breeze on her neck before anything else. Turning, gun and knife drawn, she saw only a frightened Will limping to the side. Her eyes betrayed her – she knew that her guard had dropped and that now they were in deep trouble.
"Talk to me," she instructed Ashley.
The figure on the rope wiped sweat and tears onto the back of her hand. "I'm really sorry, mum," she leant her cheek against the rope. "I never should have come here without you. They all told me to wait but I wanted –"
"I'll deduct it from your allowance," Helen was turning in very slow circles, gradually edging back into the centre of the room urging Will to do the same. "Right now I need to know what you found down here."
"You seeing this," said Will, watching smears of sand stain the air. Helen nodded, tracking each one.
*~*~*
"Why do you want to find her?" Henry swallowed harder than he meant to, clutching the book protectively across his chest like a shield.
John Druitt continued his expedition through the room, turning things over with his elegantly long fingers. So far he thought that he was doing a good job of appearing friendly.
"Because, little Henry," John leant over the low bookshelf behind Henry, sliding his elbows over the wood. "She's about to walk into something that she can't handle and I don't much fancy the prospect of spending eternity alone."
Henry scoffed. "You want to help her? I don't believe you."
"I may not be the ideal husband, but there are worse things in the world than me." He watched the city lights start to blink-out through the window behind Henry. A pretty scene – the new moon peeking out from a cloud, silhouettes of night birds cruising overhead, kept his eyes aloft for a moment. "And she's about to meet one of them," he said, as if to the night.
He could be sincere, Henry would grant him that much. Still, this smelt of a set up. He'd had no indication from the others that there was trouble and for all he knew, John's other personality was the approaching danger. "She told me what you did, all those years ago. We all know. Boss told us so that we'd never believe a word from you."
John's eyes flicked down, quietly burning. "I'm being pleasant right now, as an act of good faith but there are more ways that we could do this. My daughter's in trouble – so are your friends. I'm prepared to cut you a deal on this."
"A deal, like you slit my throat after I tell you what you want?"
"I wouldn't make suggestions if I were you, Mr. Foss. They don't do your imagination justice."