At the front of the pyramid was a double door with hieroglyphs carved into the wood. It had cracks from old age yet was secured with a modern padlock.
Gabriel grabbed the heavy piece of metal with a frown but Abaddon could already see the tension in his shoulders as the sense of rage and disappointment rose in the boy’s pure heart.
It would have been easy to pull on the padlock, make a few annoyed hisses, and call it a day. But if the price of avoiding the truths hidden beyond those doors was the peace of Gabriel’s mind, then he couldn’t have lived on with the lie.
“I need light,” Abaddon said, blinking away the haze in his vision.
Gabriel turned on the flashlight taken from Martinez’s car. The sudden illumination struck Abaddon like lightning, but the vision descending on him didn't show Father John’s hooded figure, or any of the other cultists.
A blond guy in his twenties turns to Abaddon with a scowl. “Come on! We don’t have time for this!”
Abaddon frowns as he looks at his tattooed hands fiddling with a padlock. The scent of old frying oil fills the air, cars honk somewhere in the background, but when a siren joins their cacophony, the guy pushes him away.
“Too late! Let’s go.”
He shuddered with the padlock squeezed between his palms but instantly knew what to do and kneeled, staring at the four number wheels at the bottom of the lock. The combinations would have been near-impossible to exhaust, but he didn’t intend to just try his luck and glanced Gabriel’s way.
“Quiet.”
“I didn’t say anything,” Gabriel mumbled, which meant it was the voice from the vision still resonating in Abaddon’s mind. Had it been sent by God to aid Abaddon in opening the lock?
He placed it against his ear, turning the first number wheel at an agonizing pace. A part of him believed he was being irrational, and that such things only worked out in movies. He didn’t have specialist equipment, not even a stethoscope to hear the movement of the cog with more clarity, but there it was—the softest, most fleeting click that made him smile.
“Three more to go.”
Gabriel didn’t say a word, but his soft fingers on Abaddon’s nape were silent encouragement. Time became a blur as Abaddon worked, letting the hard stone under his feet ground him in reality, because the two worlds—the present and the one from the vision—seemed to mesh and fall apart again as if he were playing with 3D glasses.
He had just gotten the third wheel right and was about to progress to the fourth when his gaze settled on the numbers he already had, and a flash of heat overcame his entire body, taking away his air and blurring his vision. The 0 and 5 at the start stood for the month of May. And the 2 was the start of—
He turned the final cog to the sixth position, and the lock opened.
May twenty sixth—the date of Father John’s enlightenment, which all of his followers would have known.
“You opened it,” Gabriel whispered with reverence and planted a sweet kiss on the top of Abaddon’s head.
A massive Pandora’s box had been unlocked, and Abaddon had no doubt the boy wouldn’t back out now even if a swarm of hornets buzzed inside the stone structure. They needed to face what was in there, so he opened the door, guided by the glow of the flashlight.
His headache was gone.
The light revealed frescos emulating Ancient Egyptian art, but they remained at the far recesses of Abaddon’s consciousness, which was overtaken by the enthroned figure sitting at the back of the interior.
His knees weakened, but when Gabriel stepped into the pyramid, so did Abaddon, following his shepherd. The boy looked around the slopes of the ceiling with his face frozen into a focused expression. Their steps made a strange hollow sound, and while the statue on the throne was the only other presence here, it felt as if they’d invaded a tomb.
“I remember there being a figure on the throne during my torture, but it was… different.”
The sculpture facing them from its seat was too large to be mistaken for a person and made of a stone so black it seemed to consume the light rather than reflect it. It sat with both massive hands resting on its thighs, all calm as if its original head hadn’t been butchered to replace the elongated muzzle of God Set with the mask of a human face.
Abaddon’s stomach was in knots as he stepped closer to meet the empty visage that had chaos for eyes. The artwork from many years ago had been further desecrated with red paint forming Abaddon’s symbol on the basalt chest, and four wings of real black feathers emerged from behind the figure’s back. Real impala horns spiraled high above the figure’s head.