The Judas Strain - James Rollins [178]
“Stay in sight!” Nasser called down.
Gray glanced up at the ring of rifles pointed at him. One of the soldiers was already on the ladder heading down. Gray jumped to the floor, landing near the bodhisattva’s stone face.
He stared around. Four massive pillars studded the vault, equally spaced. Possibly load-bearing pylons for the tower above. Supporting this, the floor underfoot was not stone blocks. It was solid limestone. They’d hit bedrock. Here was definitely the structural foundation for the Bayon.
The clanking of the ladder drew his attention back up as the soldier approached. Gray considered jumping him and grabbing his rifle. But then what? His friends were still above; his parents were still under Nasser’s fist. So instead, he stepped over to the carved face. He circled it. It was carved sandstone like all the others. It rested flat on its back, staring up, sculpted out of a single waist-high block.
The face appeared no different from the others: same upturned corners of the lips, same wide nose and forehead, and those shadowed, brooding eyes.
The guard dropped to the floor, landing hard on his boots.
Gray straightened—then caught it out of the corner of his eye.
He turned back, noting something odd about the face, about those brooding eyes. Dark circles lay in the center of each, like pupils. Even the sunlight could not dispel them.
Gray had to lean atop the stone cheek to investigate. He reached a hand across and probed the dark pupil with a finger.
“What are you doing?” Nasser called down.
“There are holes! Drilled into the eyes, where pupils should be. I think they may pass clean through the face.”
Gray searched up. Sunlight flowed down the tower’s chimney, and with the altar removed, the beam struck the face hidden here.
But did the light travel even deeper?
He climbed higher onto the face, sprawling across it. He leaned his own eye to peer into the pupil of the stone god. Closing his other eye, he cupped around the sandstone eyeball. It took a moment for his vision to adjust.
Far below, lit by the sunlight passing through the other pupil, he could see a shimmer of water. A pool at the bottom of a cavern. Gray could almost imagine the vaulted space, domed like the shell of a turtle.
“What do you see?” Nasser called down.
Gray rolled away, onto his back, staring up from the bottom of the well.
“It’s here! The cavern! Under the stone face!”
Like the altar stone above, the bodhisattva guarded a hidden doorway.
Gray remembered Vigor’s explanation for the hundreds of stone faces. Some say they represent vigilance, faces staring out from a secret heart, guarding inner mysteries. But as Gray lay there, he also remembered another man’s words, much older and more forbidding, from Marco’s text, the very last line of his story.
The words chilled through him.
The gateway to Hell was opened in that city; but I know not if it was ever closed.
Gray stared up at the shattered altar and knew the truth.
It had been closed, Marco.
But now they were opening it again.
10:36 A.M.
THE TUK-TUK STOPPED at the end of a paved road.
Lisa climbed out.
The way ahead was a jumbled stone plaza, half uprooted by giant trees. Beyond the plaza, the Bayon rose, framed in jungle, a jagged cluster of sandstone towers, covered with crumbling faces, etched with lichen, riddled with cracks.
A few tourists gathered on the plaza, taking pictures. A pair of Japanese men approached their tuk-tuk, plainly wanting to commandeer their vehicle once Lisa and Susan had vacated it. One man bowed his head toward Lisa. He lifted an arm toward the temple and spoke in Japanese.
Lisa shook her head, not understanding.
He smiled shyly, bowed his head again, and struggled out one word of English. “Closed.”
Closed?
Lisa helped Susan out of the tuk-tuk, still wrapped head to toe in the blanket. Only a pair of sunglasses stared out. Lisa felt