The Call (The Magnificent 12 1)

That’s a

full-blown, out-of-control phobia.

And of all Mack’s phobias, none was more like a crazed, penned-up gorilla than claustrophobia.

In school Mack had been required to read Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado.” It was the story of a man walled up and left to die. Not a happy story for anyone, but for Mack it had been agony.

And now, he was to be walled up, buried alive. So he screamed and screamed as the bucket descended. Screamed at blank, invisible stone pressing in all around him.

He was wet with sweat and hoarse by the time the lift reached the bottom of the shaft. Karri and Jarrah had already managed to free themselves from their ropes using some of the objects lying around: a pickax, the sharp edge of an open can of sardines, and a rock shaped like a wedge of cheese. Cheddar. Not that that matters.

A small flashlight waved eerily in the dark and came to focus on Mack. He felt hands busily untying the knots of his ropes. His hands and feet fell free.

He had stopped screaming but only because now the screams themselves had become frightening to him.

“So, definitely claustrophobic,” Karri said with the unmistakable Aussie dryness of tone that Mack might have appreciated had he not been on the verge of vomiting.

Jarrah peered up the shaft. “No, I can’t see any stars. They’ve blocked it.”

“And the winch control is dead,” Karri said calmly. “But I should be able to find some lights.”

Mack saw the flashlight jerk here and there and finally settle on a bank of switches. A second later there was a click, the sound of a generator put-put-putting to life, and then glaring bright light.

Mack was still shaking from the effects of his panicky meltdown. The fear was far from gone. But at least now he had a distraction to occupy some part of his brain.

The four of them were at one end of a cave so large it was impossible to see the far end, even though a row of lights had been strung from the arched roof. It was as long as a football field and almost as wide, although it was in no way regular or rectangular.

And sadly there were no bright exit signs.

One wall of the cave was lit with its own set of spotlights. It was too far away for Mack to see details, but he could see that something, lots of somethings, had been chiseled or drawn onto the rock face.

“That’s what we came here to see,” Jarrah said. “Can you handle it?”

Mack stood up. His legs buckled, but Stefan grabbed one arm and Jarrah caught the other and kept him from falling. On wobbly pins, stomach clenched, heart pounding but no longer quite as if it intended to beat a hole in his ribs, he walked the few dozen steps to the rock face.

The wall went thirty feet up. It was the same reddish rock that all of Uluru seemed to be made of, but this surface was polished to a near-mirror shine.

This polished area went forty feet to his left as well. And all of that square footage, a space that would equal thousands of pages of a book, was covered in what could only be writing. The letters were strange, nothing recognizable, although here and there one of the shapes would look a little like a T or a stylized Z.

The wall was scarred in places by deep fissures. In other places the rock had simply collapsed, fallen down to make a pile of pebbles and fragments.

“What is it?” Mack asked.

“We’re not totally sure. But my mum thinks it’s the last ten thousand years of history,” Jarrah said in a voice full of awe.

Mack looked at her, skeptical. “How could that be?”

Jarrah pointed to a series of marks that ran like the lines of a ruler across the bottom of the wall. “We think each one is a year. At the far end there’s a vertical set of marks. We think those are days. And do you see these smaller markings, these curlicues? That’s how I knew where you would be. We think they are sort of the equivalent of GPS numbers. Each indicates a place relative to here. Distance and angle from Uluru.”

“That’s crazy. I can see how maybe someone could do all this to show things in the past, but there’s no way to predict what happens in the future.”

“Yeah, well, that makes sense, mate,” Jarrah said cheerfully. “Except for the fact that all these markings, this whole chamber, are more than ten thousand years old.”

“What?”

“Mack, when this was written, all of it was in the future.” She led him to the last chiseled inscription. It barely peeked out from the edge of a massive rock collapse, the last visible thing on the wall.

Jarrah pointed. “That right there? That’s yesterday. And the curlicues? Those show distance and angle from here to the place where you fell from the sky.”