Can You Dig It?
By John H. Dromey
a grade A grave-site
she leaves the treasure in place
she’s a tomb rater
The Acámbaro Figures, Reconsidered
By Nicholas De Marino
At that price,
they just leapt
out of the ground.
The Trouble With Tombs
By Jason Hardy
Halfway in
His torch went out.
A bad omen
Without a doubt.
Then, of course,
He lost his way.
It simply wasn’t
His best day.
He nearly triggered
A hidden trap
That wasn’t on
His stolen map.
Eventually,
He didn’t fit.
How much worse
Could things get?
A voice grumbled,
“Not one cent!”
Even a fool
Took a hint.
Backing out
Took so much time
He rethought
His life of crime.
The tomb raider
Sold his sword
Which just covered
Room and board.
No more tombs
Until HE died
Just to be on
The safe side.
The Black Crypt
By DJ Tyrer
Their destination was easy to discover for, amongst all the vaults beneath the dead city of Thranaxis, only one was sealed with a great circular slab of black marble. This was the tomb of an empress whose name was long lost to history and legend, but whose husband had waged a decade-long war to secure the source of the stone that had bestowed upon her crypt its distinctive identity.
Maskalin Vaz watched as the two burly brothers, Alkriz and Ankriz, set their shoulders to the slab and began to heave against it. Slowly, the black-marble seal began to move aside.
“Enough,” he told them, once an opening just wide enough to squeeze through had been created. He lifted the lantern he held to light the interior, revealing a flight of stairs carved from the living rock descending into a maw of darkness.
“In you go,” he commanded. When one had hirelings, the privilege of risk was always theirs.
Alkriz slipped through the gap and Maskalin Vaz handed him the lantern to light their way. Ankriz followed, then he joined them.
Down the steps they went, the light revealing nought but the uniformity of an ancient passage carved with precision through the rock, until they reached a chamber far below even the level of the vaults of Thranaxis.
In the centre of the chamber was a sarcophagus made of the same black marble that had been used to seal the tomb and about it were a number of statues, ornate drinking vessels, and antique lampstands of shimmering gold. On the floor between them and the sarcophagus was a mosaic of coloured glass that depicted the blue-skinned horror that had been the ancient city’s guardian of the dead.
“Give me the lantern,” Maskalin Vaz said, then he ordered the brothers to remove the lid of the tomb, certain that the long-dead queen must have been buried with her regalia.
The two hulking siblings nodded and stepped forward, only to freeze upon the mosaic. A coruscation of multi-hued light ran over their bodies from their feet up to their heads and, then, down again, stripping away clothing and flesh to reveal their skeletons naked to his eyes.
Maskalin Vaz stared in horror as the pair’s bones tumbled to the floor in a jumbled pile. He had, of course, brought them as much for such a contingency as for their labour, but it was still a shock to see such a death occur straight before his eyes.
Worse, the presence of a magical trap that had ignored the amulets of protection he had given them left a question as to how he was to reach any of the treasure that lay so temptingly before him…
Before he could apply his mind to the question, there was a sound like that of dice being shaken in a cup and the pile of bones trembled without obvious cause.
As he watched, the bones assembled themselves up out of the pile and into something like an ossiferous spider, with a compact, eight-legged body with a skull upon its back, from the fore of which rose a long neck composed of a second spinal column, ending in the other skull.
The teeth of both skulls chattered as it took its first hesitant steps towards him.
Although survival through discretion appealed to Maskalin Vaz, the treasure the crypt contained also appealed greatly to him and he wasn’t ready to flee without attempting to obtain it, so he drew his sword and faced the skeletal fiend.
The long neck lashed out towards him and the skull of one of his late companions snapped at him. He danced away and slashed at it, but missed.
It came again, and this time, although he barely evaded it, his blade caught the supple neck and shattered bone, sending the skull rolling away into the darkness.
The remainder of the abomination charged at him, but the awkwardly-placed remaining skull could but snap ineffectually at him as he smashed it apart with his blade, until broken bones lay across the floor before him.
The question of how to reach the sarcophagus without suffering a similar defleshing as had befallen the brothers was taken from him by the echoing sound of stone scraping against stone as its inhabitant, the long-dead queen, disturbed by his trespass, awoke from the sleep of ages and pushed its lid aside.
Once, she may have been beautiful, and the jewellery she wore yet inflamed a desire in his breast, but her visage was a horrific one of blackened, desiccated flesh, stretched across bone, thanks to the work of ancient embalmers, and he had no desire to receive either her embrace or the bite of the fangs set in her jaw.
Pausing only to hook a small treasure or two with the blade of his sword, and without stepping onto the mosaic, Maskalin Vaz turned and ran for the steps, hoping he could reach the black marble seal before she could reach him, and that he had the strength to push it back into place to ensure his survival.
Ends
https://djtyrer.blogspot.co.uk/
Unearth
By Harris Coverley
looter’s axe crumbled
autonomous tentacle
at last free to feast
A Grave Mistake
By John H. Dromey
bandits without masks
open a sar-cough-agus
inhale deadly fumes
Guardians of the Dead
By Matthew Wilson
Though he’d prepared himself for the shock of the statues, Richard Balkewell still cried out when he dared into the tomb first and swung the puny torchlight around the choking dust.
“Quiet, you idiot,” Simon Belfast hissed. As expedition leader, he’d managed to delay the announcement of this great discovery by twenty-four hours, but soon, the rest of the group would break through these holy walls and take an inventory of all that gleamed here.
So Simon intended to cash in on them first.
“Hurry, man. Pass my bag.”
Of course he’d promised his investors too much and now the creditors were barking at his door. Tools and labourers were expensive and the permit just to even disturb the sand here had emptied his savings.
But his heart had soared when they had discovered the army of stone men guarding the crypt. Life sized and stern faced – protectors of their dead master and servants of his afterlife.
“These things give me the creeps,” Richard visibly shivered.
Simon hated his cowardice, such meek men could never climb Everest, they would never reach the moon and they would never have discovered the sleeping pharaoh’s tomb alone. But great men such as Simon always needed little people to lift a pickaxe.
His sharp mind had seen a possibility when the good news broke – that all their efforts were worth it – but great men had not made it so far by sharing. Tomorrow, those vultures would pick this place clean after all he had got this expedition rolling, licking the boots of rich men he despised.
No, he deserved his riches tonight for only dead men and cold stone statues knew what was really here.
“They’re the first defence against grave robbers,” Simon said, lowering his voice as insect wings beat against the old stone figures. “Built to unnerve weak men but we are not children, Richard. Now earn your sack of gold.”
Richard found gas in his legs when his torchlight fell on something glittering.
“Jewels,” Richard giggled. “Wonderful jewels.”
Little men were always needed for work – Simon relied on his mind, not his hands – filling heavy sacks with fortunes was beneath him. He left the manual labour to unimportant people – those who would not be missed.
“I think these guys would be mad if they could see what we were up to,” Richard said and Simon agreed, but he didn’t waste any more words, Richard had used up his use and Simon thrust a dagger between his sweat soaked shoulder blades.
“Oh, hush,” Simon sighed. Little people were always moaning about something. Of course his colleagues with more than half a brain would work out someone had broken into the tomb last night. Marble was disturbed, tracks were left in the sand.
But now they had the criminal dead to rights – poor Richard.
No, I never trusted that little thief. He must have run into something sharp in the dark.
“Thanks for filling the bags,” Simon said and huffed the lighter one over his shoulder.
Yuck – more manual labour – but no matter, tomorrow he would be as bemused anyone that Richard could have been so cunning – he’d always said the fellow was a dummy – but now he could fund his own expedition in the Caribbean – some place to retire without kowtowing to any more rich snobs –
Simon stopped thinking when something crunched in the dark – a familiar noise twitched his ears – the movement of stone.
“Hello?”
Was no one trustworthy? Maybe one of his colleagues was sneaking down here before the great unveiling to help themselves to some bonuses. Bloody copycats.
“Steven? Mark?” Simon called out… “Richard?”
The air polluted with more dust particles as the grinding of stone grew louder and Simon heard his teeth grind.
Had that stone guard been facing that way before?
In life, the pharaoh had been in charge of an army and in death, his slaves had created a vast collection of marble men to continue fighting his enemies in the afterlife and draw his mighty carriage across the stars of heaven. But more importantly, they deterred disrespectful thieves from this holy ground.
Simon knew his history – pharaohs were not kind men but everything down here, even Richard was dead and impossible to hurt him. He had to calm his breathing and not let his imagination get the better of him.
Simon cried out once as something slammed into his back, he fell prone and almost lost his torch.
“No,” he yelled when the stone man stood over him, fist raised. “No,” Simon said again and retrieved his bag of gold. No one would take this from him now, not Richard’s vengeful spirit or his vivid imagination drowsy with months and stress and heat stroke in the daily 40 degree heat.
He was almost at the stone entrance that Richard and Simon had just ruined. He ran harder and in what light the bouncing torch in his hands allowed, he saw stone men move, raising the swords they were sworn to use against intruders.
“Leave me alone,” Simon sobbed. “I’ve worked for this.”
Something hit his hand and the torch fell. Simon heard a foot crash down and glass smashed.
The dark was total and the hands that surrounded him were cold, he could not move them as they squeezed harder.
“You’re not real,” he had to shout over the grinding of stone. The rubbing of ancient marble undisturbed since the time of mammoths. “You’re just stones,” Simon seethed and realised he couldn’t suck in anymore air for words.
Again, something cold and hard rumbled through the air, then when the head guard’s marble sword came down on Simon’s head, the leader of the expedition forgot all about his stresses.
***
Steven Stokes didn’t like to disobey orders – such rebellion had gotten his dad twenty years hard labour – but Mark Filey had been most persuasive – why did they have to play second fiddle? They had sweated and sacrificed as much as anyone out on these harsh desert sands.
Where was their reward? To come second place? To receive two lines of praise in the local paper?
No.
That bloody slave-driver Simon could make all the commands he liked, but Steven didn’t have to follow them – tonight, he’d found his backbone and deciding it strong enough to hold a bag of gold, he waited till Mark gave the all clear before he too stepped over the broken seal.
“Damn!”
“Relax,” Mark giggled. “It’s only a stone guy – the ancient stonecutters made them to put off grave robbers.”
Steven angled his torch beam and sniffed copper in the air. “Why’s his hand red?”
“I know you’re not an artist but surely you know some people paint their work, now shut up and help me. These guards aren’t gonna cause us any trouble.”
Steven sighed but complied. If he was brave for just a few more minutes, he knew he would be a very rich man, but he wished he wasn’t so nervous – he wished that his imagination wasn’t playing up at this important time.
He told himself it was crazy, but he really thought he could hear the grinding of moving stones.
Ends
View From Atlantis 