The Library of Sand (working title)

[Enkil]

New story I'm developing. This is just the beginning but I have the rest mapped out pretty well.

====== Section 1 ======

Victor Croix stepped from the last step and onto the final landing of the staircase that had taken him two hours to descend. He slumped down on the step and procured a handkerchief from his dusty trousers pocket and wiped the sweat off his brow while catching his breath. He panted heavily, more heavily than usual, he wasn’t a particularly fit man and he hadn’t stopped to rest for seventy-five minutes; to make it worse it seemed to him that with every hundred steeps or so the temperature in the staircase increased by several degrees Fahrenheit. Victor removed his rucksack and removed one of his water canteens and an extra set D batteries for his flashlight, which had run out of power not twenty minutes before the descent finished. Placing the batteries on the floor before him he unscrewed the lid to the canteen and took three longs draws of water, it was warm, hot even, but any water would be a relief for his parched gullet. Then he moistened the handkerchief with a bit of it, placed it over his face and leaned back against the stairs, stretching out his legs and arms.

“Sure is fucking hot down here,” he muttered to himself, “but I expect it would be, these steps haven’t been used in over two thousands years. I don’t suspect they’d have an A.C. installed.” The heat and his exhaustion had made him momentarily forget just why he was sitting in the equivalent of dark oven, hundreds of feet below the sands he left above him more than two hours ago, but his mention of the age of the stairs scorched through his memory like dry lightening.

He huffed, “Lets see what’s about. If I’m not in the right place Vincent is going to have my balls. I’ll never make it out of this goddamn desert anything more than a dried up corpse.” Fumbling around the landing on all fours he found the batteries, took out the flashlight from his rucksack and was busy replacing the dead batteries when the legs of his trousers rustled in a stifled breeze of cool air.

“Well I guess I don’t need no flashlight to tell me I’m in the right place now.” Victor thought, but flicked the switch on it anyways. For a second he was blinded, this was the first light he had seen in over two hours, and the light before that was only the pale light of a crescent moon shining softly over the arctic sands one hundreds miles south-west of Thebes. But when his eyes adjusted to the electric illumination Victor was left short of breath, no, it left him completely out of breath; he was unable to draw a single breath of the humid, still air. The only thing the shock left him with was an echoing of the words exchanged by Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter during their first peak into the tomb of the young Pharaoh Tutankhamun.

“Please, can you see anything?” a whisper from the voice chirped in Victor’s ear.
“Yes, yes, wonderful things.” Victor whispered.


====== End of Section 1 ======

It is just a rough start, haven't gone over it or anything yet. Does it draw you in at all? Does the atmosphere feel appropriate, or should it be thicker, or thinner? How's the character thus far?

Just a few questions, add whatever other comments you feel like, I'm open.

[JJ Burke]

i have no idea what's going on, but if more were to follow i would probably keep reading

[Enkil]

Well I did cut it off at a key moment. I'll post the next section tonight.

Edit: BTW, this isn't a mythos story. Originally I had planned to have mythos elements in it, but decided to stay away.

[Hodgson]

I'm interested. Let's see the rest.

[Enkil]

I'm working on it. It'll be up around 12 or so, GMT.

[Eternities End]

Seems kinda cool...I hate obvious horror stories written in the present though...still seems like a good way to start off

[Enkil]

Alright, part 2. It'll need considerable reworking, I mostly wrote it when I was dead tired, as I am now. It might need 2 posts.

It won't quite be a horror story until the end.

Anyways, it's not a mythos story anywho.

====== Section 2 ======

What the flashlight had revealed was only half of a single panel of an impossibly vast door of solid ivory. He knew it was solid ivory of course. Victor had long been in the business of brokering rare and exotic materials, on the shady side of the business of course, and he could tell if a piece of material was fitted together or not. This door wasn’t, unless the Egyptians had forged a secret technique to make it appear so that remained secret through the eons; but that was unlikely with all the digging and prodding archeologists have been doing in these deserts this past century. No doubt about it, it was a solid piece of ivory, no joints and no grooves on it. Just sculptures. How they had found such an incredibly massive piece of ivory, he didn’t want to guess.

Victor reflected that the door must be thick by at least two feet, to have such sculptures upon it. Three dimensional heads leered out of the panels, staring at him with pearl eyes inlayed with various precious gems as pupils. Many had the facial features of Africans and Arabs, and as such amber was predominate among the stones used for this purpose, mimicking the eyes of their Egyptians sculptors and the people in the geographical region. Yet emeralds and sapphires were also present among, suggesting that Egyptians had come in contact with people outside of Africa and the Middle East, who were mostly brown-eyed people, and with these different eyes came facial features from western Europe and the people of the Mediterranean.

With scholars, the suggestion that the Egyptians had been a sea faring people and traveled around the Mediterranean trading with other cultures was often laughed at. What would the scholars say now if they had these… wretched faces staring straight at them? What would they do then? Detonate the stairwell so the door and what lay behind it would forever be concealed and the scholars wouldn’t have to rewrite their precious history books? Most likely.

Victor stood in awe of the ivory door, he became absorbed in the eyes of the sculptures, drawn into them as easily as a star might be drawn into a black hole out in space. The thought of the scholars figurative reactions outraged him. Why would they seal such an important discovery was beyond him, yet he knew the answer.

Then suddenly he felt his hand holding the flashlight drawn to the right, to the center of the doors. As the light moved over the faces their eyes followed him. Vincent would have loved it here, Victor thought, but he hated doing the dirty work. Even while he stood before the door, sweating more than a fat man in a sauna, Victor was relaxing in a hotel in Thebes, probably having grapes fed to him by a beautiful cabana girl while another fanned him with a palm leaf. What an unappreciative bastard, but at least the pay was good, the best he’d had ever earned in any country actually. He was happy with the job, despite the constant threat of never returning from whatever job Vincent sent him off on. But he always returned to the unappreciative Vincent more or less unharmed, and Vincent just nodded when he walked into his room, and always said the same thing.

“Put it in the trunk at the end of the bed. Your money is in their, take it. I’ll call you again soon.”

Victor was used to the routine with Vincent, but he remembered something that had happened two nights ago in Thebes, before he set off across the desert. He had been sitting in a chair opposite of Vincent, they were discussing the job.

“So just was is it that I’m after?” he had asked.
“A book, Victor, a magnificent book.”
“A book?”
“Yes, a book. The pay is five hundred thousand dollars, American.”
Victor was stunned at such a high commission for a simple book, suspicious even.
“What’s the catch?”
“If you don’t find it you wont make it out of the desert alive.”
“That’s a big catch… I don’t know about this.”
“I’ll double the price.”
“Well when you put it that way…” Victor said.
“So you’ll retrieve it?”
“For a cool million I’d kill my mother if she was still alive. God rest her soul.”

Vincent was silent, an uncomfortable silence slowly oppressed the room.

“Sometimes I wonder why I employ you, Victor.”

“But then you look at the collection of curious I’ve brought for you. Besides, you’re not one to talk. I know you’ve killed many people to get what you want.”

“Touche.” Vincent replied, grinning. “Well then, how about a toast to the future?” Vincent stood up and walked over to the cabinet, taking a decanter of amber liquor, which turned out to be Crown Royale. They toasted to the future, and after downing their glasses began to go over the particulars.

“How will I know where to go?” he had asked.

“It’s the only cave in the desert, if you keeps due west you’ll run straight into it, it sticks out like a sore thumb.”

“If it sticks out like a sore thumb do you really think you’re book will still be there?”

“Naturally, I wouldn’t waste your time if I didn’t. The locals, if you can call them that, shun the place, it’s like Irem of the Pillars, forbidden. I doubt anyone has been down the stairs in that cave two-millennium.”

No one had been down those steps in two-millennium, as Vincent had guessed. If they had, they’d have been mesmerized by the sculptures, which appeared to be pushing themselves out from the door and trying to step onto the ground, beckoning Victor to open the door and walk through. His flashlight, moving right, illuminated the center of the two doors. There were no visible handles to open them with, except for two arms out stretched on either side of the door, hands extended in a death grasp. Victor wasn’t about to touch them. A great unease came over his mind when looking at them, so he stood sideways between the two foul arms and pushed his shoulder against the doors with all his might, but they would not budge. He tried again, straining harder this time until he felt his arm bruising, but still not resulting. He tried kicking and then pulling at the crack in between the ivory slabs, only to meet with failure.

It puzzled him, he couldn’t very well leave, he’d die. But he couldn’t stay in this oven, he’d roast like a Thanksgiving turkey. He sat down on the steps opposite the door and a few more swigs of water, thinking what to do.

“’suppose the only thing left is to push the hands.” He said to himself, getting up, and placing the flashlight on step equal in height to the hands. He walked over to the door and looked at the arms for a minute. They were exquisitely carved, even more so than the sculptures in the door. So realistic were they that for a second Victor thought they were the real arms of a person on the other wide..

It took him several minutes to work up the nerve to place his hands in their outstretched ivory counterparts, but when he did he could have sworn he felt the ivory fingers faintly clutch onto his, and it scared the living Hell out of him.

“That didn’t happen. That didn’t happen. That didn’t happen.” He chanted over and over compulsively to himself; then, taking a deep breath he pushed.

His vision went blank as he fell face forward onto the hand stone on the other side of the doors. Groaning he rolled over and looked back at the light of his flashlight. The twin doors were wide open, they had slid open so easily when he pushed against the arms that one second he had been standing and the next face down on the floor.

Sitting up facing the flashlight he realized he had a burning sensation in his nose, quite a bad one at that. Touching his fingers to it only made the burning worse, and when he removed them they were covered in blood.

“Holy Mary, mother of God. I broke my FUCKING NOSE.” Victor hollered. He had never much been one for pain. His yell echoing in the black abyss behind him, he sighed deeply and stood up to retrieve the flashlight. When it was in his hands he pointed it through the door and walked through.

More glorious than the ivory doors, than the pyramids of Giza, than all the skyscrapers in Manhattan, was what lay before his eyes, and at that it was only a fraction of what truly slumbered in the dark beyond the thin electric light.

[Eternities End]

Cool, the one thing I dont like is that two of the guys names start with a V, Vincent and Victor...Idk seemed kinda confusing to me, especially how they have completly diffrent personalities

[Enkil]

The rest should be up tonight, or tomorrow morning at latest. I finished the story but the second half is on paper, so I have to type it up.

Thanks for the comments

[Enkil]

And now I reveal the last of it.

===== Section 3 =====

The electric light shone over the floor of the room beyond the doors as the moon shone over the desert above his head, casting a gentle glow over a vast underground desert. For a moment Victor was confused, had he somehow reached the surface again? No, that would have been impossible, and yet here he stood before an ocean of sand hundreds of feet below the very desert that was emulated before his eyes. And then, walking up onto a dune not far from the ivory doors, Victor saw that there was not the eternity of sand lying before him that he had supposed, but only a room as long as the Sistine Chapel and twice it’s width. The sands were not as numerous throughout the room either, just a thin layer covered the floor in most places with a small dune here and there – with, what at a distance, looked like broken tables sticking out of them occasionally. As Victor was asking himself how all that sand got so far down beneath the bedrock something lightly trickled through his hair. Running his hand through he hair he could feel it was sand. Looking up he did not notice any cracks running through the vaulted ceiling, which towered forty feet above his head. But this only struck Victor as strange for a second – thee second before his attention was arrested by massive statues of demons and monsters which rested upon the stone ceiling as angels and cherubs rest on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

The vaulted ceiling was a terrifying dissonance of waltzing sandstone creatures, frozen in time by their sculptors in a horrific poses. There were orgies a plenty, and great cannibalistic feasts, in which the stone sculptures crouched over their fallen and were eating with the bloody vigor that starved hyenas do. Other were carved as if they were crawling down the walls onto the great sandstone bookcases which lined the walls from end to end. Victor was reminded of Spiderman by their poses.

Though no sculpture had a twin in shape or form they all had two things in common: each was as large as two men and each had glowing red eyes – probably phosphorescent rubies of a magnificent karat. They made Victor nervous though, those eyes, and to settle his mind on the matter he climbed up a bookcase to the lowest Spiderman creature and pried out it’s left eye. He sighed with relief that the jewel kept glowing, and slipped it into his pocket, after all, Marcel might like it.

It was from behind these creatures that the sand rained down on the ground every now and then in a slow trickle. Victor reckoned that the cracks in the ceiling were located behind them. Yet it was not the rain of sand, the fantastic sculptures or their glowing eyes that captured his attention that moment, it was vast carvings that covered the upper portions of the walls that held this position in his mind. To his left, the wall from which he pried the glowing ruby from the creatures now dead eye, was a map of the spiritual, and then the physical, world. The map of the spiritual world appeared rather conventional, except that it was roughly laid in a likeness to the geography of earth, but the map of the physical world was anything but conventional. On it, clearly marked, were the locations of Atlantis, Lemur and Mu, all in the locations legend had them placed; except for Atlantis which stretched in an archipelago from the Caribbean to Antarctica. So too were modern locations placed on the map, such as the States, the UK and Russia. Though not the least of the maps wonders, seven gates to Hell, or the spiritual world, were marked on the stone, one in present day America, Iraq, France, Antarctica, South-East China, Italy and Australia; further suggesting the Egyptians had defied modern day academics in being a sea faring people. Furthermore, these seven gates to Hell corresponded to gates seven gates to Life on the map of the spiritual world.

On the wall opposite was a set of three panels depicting the fall of Heaven’s angels to Earth, their copulation with humans and their banishment to Hell for this additional transgression against the will of God. It struck Victor as odd that the Egyptians would have a pre-conceived though somewhat skewed notion of the Christian beliefs centuries before Christ walked the sand of Palestine, but as he turned to look above the ivory doors he was its explanation.

Above the ivory doors, in the top right-hand corner, was an Egyptian man dressed in royal garments, sitting inside a temple that must have already been of great antiquity at the time of the pictures etching, meditating. Before him was an open portal inlayed with jet or obsidian, Victor couldn’t tell which, and another man was stepping through it. Victor took this to be some sort of wormhole through time, as some scientists were buzzing around the outside world with such an idea, and because on the rest of the stone was carved the scene of the tempting of Jesus by the devil. But instead of the devil there was the man who had stepped through the portal.

Victor sat down on a squat little dune and took out his canteen. His throat was parched again, his mouth sandy and his mind reeling from what he wad seen on the wall. He took some water in his mouth, swished it around to clear out the sand, then spat it on the sand in front of him. Then he took a mouthful and swallowed it, hoping it would also help him swallow down this new revelation in the tempting of Christ. He was not a religious man, though he had come to believe in the supernatural and in preternatural abilities in humans after working for Marcel for so long, but the power to create wormholes through time using only ones mind was something his own mind violently rejected. People could move objects, bend spoons and read minds, there was no doubt about that, but to time travel with just your mind… well even Stephen Hawkings’ intellect would fall far short of the mark needed to do such a thing. Just thinking about it hurt his head. Of course he had heard conspiracy theories about Camp Hero and other black military projects in which they were doing just that, but the thoughts needed to create the wormholes had to be electrically amplified by hundreds of times to achieve success, as the theories went.

[Enkil]

He took another deep draught of the water, emptying it, and stood to go examine the last carving on the wall opposite. Along the way he decided to trail the big sandstone bookcases on the right. Not that there were only bookcases on the right of course, but he had already been to the left and he fancied a change in direction.

He walked along the bookcases until he came to the end, stopping every few yards to pull out dried parchments, which usually crumbled into dust the moment he touched them. Those that didn’t he couldn’t read, he was never very adept at reading hieroglyphics, despite his education as a poor child living in a one room apartment with his mother, alcoholic father, and two sisters in the slums of Brooklyn. But he had learned street smarts, how to steal and most of all how to be brave in the face of overwhelming danger. It was that education that had gotten him so far with Marcel over the years.

There were shelves in the lower parts of the bookcases too, many were difficult, if not impossible to open, but the few that did contained cuneiform tablets. He knew they were cuneiform because he had stolen three such tablets from the vaults of the British Museum for Marcel a year earlier. Like the parchments, he couldn’t understand a lick of the writing.


“This book I’m after must be really something’ for Marcel to pass up all these funny tablets.” He said aloud. His memory jotted back to the end of his conversation with Marcel in Thebes at the mention of the book.

“How will I find this book?” he had asked as he was stepping from the door of Marcels’ apartment into the cool night air.

“Opposite the wall from which you enter into the library should be an entrance to an annex. Legend has it that the book’s in there.”

“How will I know which one to take then?”

“It’s the only one in the annex. It may be in the central sarcophagus of three though.” Marcel replied.

“You know I don’t like disturbing the dead, Vinny.”

“I do know that, and that’s why I’m paying you a million dollars.”

Marcel had been right, as always, there was another entrance opposite the ivory doors, and this one without a door. It was framed by the bookcases on either side of it and the last carving atop of it. This carving pictured the Egyptian in royal dress sitting in a tomb. It was a rather plain picture and held none of the outrageousness of the other carvings for the most part, at least nothing as disturbing. Hovering above the Egyptians lap, a foot in front of him was a book. The book he felt sure was the one he was after. Behind the man were three sarcophagi, as Marcel had described.

Victor now felt sure that the way to Marcels’ prize, and his million, was through this archway and down the long dark corridor. He took out his second to last canteen and washed out his dry mouth for a third time and then stood for a moment drinking. The library had left an awful yet majestic impression on him, but the corridor ahead was strangely inviting.

After hae had put his water back into the rucksack he began walking. The tunnel was long - perhaps six hundred yards - and was honeycombed with cubbyholes filled with scrolls along its entire length. He didn’t bother to stop and investigate these scrolls as he had the parchments in the main library, now that the prize was in sight he just kept walking to the annex – kicking up such a fog of dust from the two millennium of neglect that he would have easily become lost if the corridor had not been straight.

When he came to the annex there were indeed three sarcophagi, and to Victors’ relief the book lay upon the central sarcophagus. He wouldn’t have to disturb the dead, something he considered bad luck from his earliest youth. With little ceremony he took the book and put it into the rucksack, pausing before his did this to say only, “Stealing is wrong, stealing is sin, all sin is forgiven so let’s begin.” Checking his watch he found about five hours had passed since he walked through the ivory doors, but he couldn’t be sure. Even so he was astonished, it felt like he had only spent thirty minutes in the library before making his way to the annex, and on to top of that he had no need to relieve himself, which he usually had to frequently, the curse of on setting old age and a weak bladder. No matter, he thought, he was in a strange place and his body was prone to act strangely.

[Enkil]

It took what seemed to be an eternity to walk back to the ivory doors. The sand covering the library floor had taken on a new essence and he found it to be a pain in the ass walking over it. The sand felt like it was repelling him from his destination, as if it was magnetically polar to the electricity his body generated. He managed to struggle through though, and was shortly close to the doors.

When he approached Victor knew something was wrong. The doors were not in the position he had left them in. They were close ever so slightly, perhaps by six inches. He rushed towards them, nervous that they would close anymore, when they slammed in his face with as much abruptness that they had opened when he first entered. Panic struck through his mind like a bolt of lightening, and he quickly stepped back to search the door for the outstretched arms, which would open the door. Victor hadn’t noticed before, but the doors on this side were as stark and pale as a babies bottom, and he had no advantage in trying to open them. His subconscious began to entertain the reality that he was trapped, but his mind rejected this even worse than it had rejected the notion of creating wormholes with your mind. Panic took full hold of poor Victors mind, he began clawing at the door blindly and wildly, hoping to pull it open, but it didn’t. He ran back to a table sticking out of a sand dune and broke off a leg, which he took back to the door and began to whack away at the center of the doors. If he couldn’t open the door he would break them down! But they didn’t break down, they didn’t even dent never mind budge. He cast the table leg aside into the sand. His mind had begun to entertain that he was trapped, but he wouldn’t have any of it. He stood back and fetched a pistol from his rucksack, a Beretta M92F that he always kept in case he ran into bandits. He jumped back and started to empty into the door, but he slipped on the sand in his haste and many of the bullets went wide of their mark. Standing up he ejected the magazine and let it fall onto the sand and took out his last magazine. Taking as careful aim as he could he emptied it on the door, with no results.

Out of ammunition and hope Victor sank to the sand with his back against the sealed door and began to sob softly, which escalated into a wail. Why had he taken this job? He had known he shouldn’t. Marcel wasn’t a stingy man, but he wasn’t generous either. The pay for this job had been to generous and Victor had known this, but his greed had blinded him. That night he cried himself to sleep.

When he awoke his situation had not changed. Despite renewed attempts to break down the ivory doors he made no headway. He gave up and checked his watch to find that two days had passed.

“Impossible.” He muttered. Then Victor did something he had not done in forty years. He prayed. He prayed in English, in French, in Arabic (he knew a few Arabic prayers from his treasure hunting days in the Middle East) and in old Hebrew. He screamed the Our Father, the Hail Mary and the Nicene Creed until his voice became to horse to whisper. All hope was lost be he kept on praying in his mind. Praying for deliverance.

But no deliverance came, and the phosphorous rubies continued to stare down mutely at him.

[Enkil]

Alternate Extended Ending

Eventually his batteries ran out, his water consumed, his bullets spent, and Victor was on the shore of madness after swimming through an ocean of hopeless panic. He was tired physically, but exhausted mentally. As would any man be in his position. He had soiled himself several times, pissed his pants, and fancied that he was starting to become delirious in encroaching insanity, but he was a hard man who had gone through many things, and insanity would not take hold easily.

Again he looked to the heavens to beg for deliverance but could only see the vaulted ceiling and those maddening ruby eyes. It looked to Victor that the ruby eyes were glowing stronger and sturdier. He chalked it up to a trick of his mind. Perhaps he wasn’t as hard as he had thought, maybe he was going insane. It would be blissful, he wouldn’t have to worry about his situation anymore, he could just become a babbling idiot.

Then the eyes started moving, and Victor knew it wasn’t a trick of the mind – he wasn’t that insane. They continued to move about, taking part in what he assumed was the action they had been still in. He followed the orgies and the feasts by the eyes, the burning red eyes. The sounds came soon after. The sounds of moans and stone tapping against stone and the sound of a devilish gluttony of rock consuming rock.

Suddenly one set of eyes broke off from the feast closest to him and rapidly crossed the ceiling towards his location. Victor whimpered, he would have loved for nothing more than to scream, but his voice was still to worn. Then the eyes dropped and landed five yards in front of him, creating a blast of sand such that a one-ton weight might make after falling a large distance into an embankment of sand.

Victor huddled into the fetal position, sure his demise was at hand and glad for it, he no longer wanted to continue living in what he had come to consider his sepulcher. Yet nothing happened for an hour, the eyes only kept glaring at him. After the hour curiosity took the better of his mind and he sat up and took a book of matches form his pocket. Lighting one he stood up and inched over to the eyes. Instantly he fell backwards and screamed as well as he could scream. The match had gone out and the book was lost nearby in the desert of the room.

“This is not the deliverance I prayed for!” he managed to stammer out abruptly.

“This is no deliverance, sorcerer. This is your fate – to be with us for eternity.” the creature growled in a salty voice.

Another voice from above chimed in, “Oh yes! How we would like to play with you!” Then another voice spoke up, and another, and another, but Victor stopped hearing what they were saying, all he could do was watching as the ruby eyes fell to the ground, and wish he had kept one bullet.

[JJ Burke]

my overview

i think victor's underground adventure is really the story here, and all the dialogues and speaking parts do more distracting than complimenting. when you brought up vincent or marcel, i just wanted it to get back to the exploration. when you had victor mumble something to himself about the situation or its preceding circumstances, i thought it would have been more articulate and informative if you just narrated that stuff.

one plot point confused me.. did victor retrieve the wrong book? were there other books to choose from? i remember the warning about not coming back alive if you don't get the book, and victor picked up a book, yet he was trapped. was it because of stealing the eye jewel? if so, it would seem more appropriate to have the one-eyed monster drop down first. again, the speaking parts don't work for me in that scene. the imagery is what carries it.

hope that seems reasonable, whether you agree or not

[Enkil]

very reasonable. I replaced the name Vincent with Marcel, but perhaps a missed a few.

Victor got the right book, I'll make that more clear.

I was going mostly for imagery, that's why I had had the extended ending as an alternate one, because it didn't quite fit the atmosphere.

Anywho, editing starts today. thanks for the thing to look out for.