Valley Of Dry Bones

Chapter 1

1

New Orleans, USA. Present day.

As the rain thundered down for the seventh night, water seeped through the earth, trickling through the soil, widening the cracks. It curved over tattered remains of the dead and around the carapaces of scuttling things with unseeing eyes.

The chamber had remained hidden for so long, but finally, darkness awakened, a fissure opened.

A grave fell inwards from above, collapsing into the pit. The clouds shifted, and a shaft of moonlight pierced the gloom. Shadows whirled, awoken at last, as rain trickled toward the dry bones.

As dawn light filtered through the broad branches of the southern live oak, Luis Rey stood underneath a black umbrella watching his men as they widened the fissure leading into the tomb, making it safe to descend. The rain pattered down, a drumbeat that matched his racing heart as he leaned over his ebony walking cane, twisted fingers gripping the bone handle. Could this really be the place after all these years of searching?

Sweat trickled down his spine, the heat oppressive even at this early hour. Generations of his ancestors had lived in the Deep South, but something in his blood pined for the cool heights of the Sierra Nevada, the mountains of Andalusia. Yet his family would never leave this place, not without the Hand of Ezekiel. Luis trembled at the thought of what lay beneath. Could he be the one to find it?

In the center of the bustling city and yet removed from it by high walls and superstition, the St Louis Cemetery No. 1 was packed with vaulted tombs built above ground to protect them from flooding. The stone tombs housed the dead from the great families of the past, names etched into history as witness to the changing city. Some carvings had faded with time, the edges of tombs crumbling as the grey stone weathered away. Others were lime-washed white with detail in bronze. Angels with wings spread wide loomed over the graveyard – a hope of protection in the darkness beyond. How little they knew of suffering, Luis thought as he looked out over the cemetery.

But they would find out soon enough.

With the help of a local councilman encouraged by generous donations, Luis had surveyed the cemetery multiple times over the years, using the ever-shifting earth as an excuse for his private quest. It made sense for the chamber to be here. After all, the cemetery had been built after the great fire that destroyed much of New Orleans in 1788 – a fire that his family journals claimed to have been started as a way to destroy the Hand of Ezekiel relic forever. But they had never given up the search.

Luis had used ground-penetrating radar to search underground without disturbing the tombs above, but there had never been anything to investigate further, nothing that might have pointed to a hidden chamber.

But something had changed last night. Something shifted under the earth, and he could only dare to hope it was what he sought.

“Señor,” Julio shouted, pushing back the hood of his yellow rain jacket with a muscled arm as he waved with excitement. In all their years of working together, Luis had never seen his bodyguard’s eyes light up this way. But then he was more than just muscle. Julio was a man of true faith, committed to the cause, whatever it might take.

The team of workers around him moved back, revealing a way down.

Luis shuffled toward the hole, sensing movement in the darkness below. While his mind raced ahead, his limbs moved with agonizing slowness as he took each painful step.

Born with a rare connective tissue disease, Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, it slowly turned his muscles, tendons and ligaments to bone. It was daily agony, but Luis understood that the Lord had blessed his family with the affliction. It kept their focus on searching for the relic over generations, reminding them of the sacred task with daily physical awareness. He thanked God for it, even as his bones ground against each other and he dragged his twisted limbs onward. Perhaps his reward was finally within reach.

Some of the men turned their eyes away from his contorted form, but Julio’s gaze never wavered. He didn’t shrink from suffering. His family had been in service to the Reys for almost as long as the Spanish had been in the New World. Their families were bound together, an ancient blood pact that together they might finally end.

Luis stepped to the edge of the hole. Julio reached for his arm, helping him to bend and look inside. “Could this be it?” he whispered.

Luis nodded. “Perhaps.” He leaned forward, but he could see only collapsed stone and darkness beyond. It smelled of fresh rain and the mulch of pungent earth with a note of sulfur beneath. “I need to get down there.”

“It’s not safe yet. Wait until we rig some ropes.”

Luis looked up at Julio, his jaw set, his dark eyes almost black in the dawn light, a promise of future rage.

Julio took a step back, biting his lip. “Of course. Right now. I can help you down myself.” He turned to the workers. “Stay back. Don’t stress the ground. But be ready with ropes just in case.”

He picked up a head-lamp and put it on, slinging a pack with safety gear onto his back.

Julio stepped down onto the rubble of the tomb, lifting up his arm as support. Luis placed his walking cane carefully down onto the first stone and took his first step.

“Stop in the name of the Lord!”

A tall, thin man stepped from the shadows behind a tomb. He wore a brown monk’s habit, tied simply at the waist with a piece of rope, the hood up obscuring his features. A heavy bronze crucifix hung around his neck.

“You trespass against God in this place.”

The man’s voice was deep and slow, like the languid movement of the waters in the Louisiana bayou. He pushed his hood back, revealing pale skin and grey eyes that echoed the stone of the tombs around them. His flesh hugged tight against his skull, his head shaved close and nicked in places, leaving patches of dried blood. He looked as if he subsisted on air alone.

The monk strode toward the hole, his right fist clenched around the crucifix.

The workers drew back, eyes looking away, unwilling to challenge a holy man. Some of them crossed themselves as he passed.

Luis stood his ground, Julio holding strong beside him, as the monk pushed to the edge of the hole.

“What right do you have to desecrate this holy ground?”

Luis tilted his head to look up at the monk. “The right of my ancestors who have sought this place for generations.”

The monk’s eyes widened. “Then you are–”

His words were cut off as Julio grabbed the monk and forced him to his knees. He tried to shout but the noise was muted by the stone and the rain and the rag they stuffed in his mouth.

Luis looked down at the monk kneeling before him. “Push his head forward.”

The man struggled, but Julio pushed him down and pulled down the robe revealing a stylized tattoo of wind swirling around a cross of bone on the base of his neck.

Luis spat in the monk’s face, barely hearing the audible gasp from the men around him. “You are Brotherhood of the Breath, one of the traitor Père Antoine’s bastard breed. But it ends here. Your very presence confirms this is the true resting place and your sacrifice will begin a new cycle.” Luis stepped away. “Bind him and lower him down.” He looked out at the wakening city. “Then guard the perimeter. No one must come down here until we are finished.”

Julio’s men wound guide-ropes around the monk and lowered him into the darkness. When the rope went slack, they threw the end in after him. Luis began the slow journey down, relishing each step on the stones of history as Julio helped him climb into the chamber.

When they reached the bottom, Luis paused for a moment, listening to the darkness. Was there a faint rattling, like bones against a casket?

The moans of the bound monk echoed around the chamber, the sound revealing a bigger place than expected. Luis shook his head. There was no way he could have missed this with the radar. It was as if it had appeared overnight, some opening into another world that slipped through the shadows of time.

Julio unpacked his bag, bringing out stronger lights. He flicked on a powerful flashlight and shone it around the chamber, his hand shaking a little as it revealed what lay ahead.

The floor was layered with bones, some full skeletons with rusted swords in their hands, some arranged in intricate designs, others piled high like a mass grave. Julio crossed himself as he raised the light higher. Pelvis bones and femurs lined the walls while a ceiling of skulls gazed down with empty eyes.

“We need to go deeper. The Hand of Ezekiel must be here.” Luis took the flashlight from Julio and started forward, shrugging back at the bound monk. “Bring him.”

Luis walked on, his thin ray of light lancing through the darkness, illuminating the long dead, their dull-white bones reflecting the glow back at him. Julio walked behind, carrying the bound monk, and together they formed a slow procession toward their final goal.

An altar made from criss-crossed leg bones fused with skulls and on top, a casket made from tiny bones fitted and fused together, inlaid with exquisite gold filigree.

Luis exhaled slowly and walked to it, putting his hand on what his family had sought for generations. Was there a vibration from inside, or did he imagine it? His heart pounded in expectation at what lay within.

The monk twisted and moaned more loudly as Julio dropped him on the floor near the altar.

Luis leaned closer.

He opened the lid and gasped. “No, this can’t be right.”

Inside, there was only a faded crimson silk cushion with five compartments, empty of the relics he so desperately sought.

Luis spun around and ripped the gag from the monk’s mouth. “Where is it?”

The monk laughed with triumph. “You will never find the Hand of Ezekiel.”

Luis grabbed the box from the altar and smashed it into the sneering face.

Blood spurted from the monk’s mouth as he fell sideways to the ground, coughing, moaning. A spasm of pain shot up Luis’s arm, a righteous punishment for his failure.

He leaned over the bleeding man, the box held high as a weapon. “Tell me where it is, and you will join me in glory.”

The monk spat blood in Luis’s face. “Never. I curse you and your crippled family as the Brotherhood has cursed all those who came before you.”

Luis hammered the box down, battering the grinning face until all that was left was a bloody maw. His pants of exertion echoed around the bone chamber as the dead bore witness to the sacrifice.

After a last bubbling breath, the monk exhaled a final sigh.

Luis stood over the corpse, breathing heavily, the box in his hand covered in blood. His limbs ached, and he could feel the crack of his injuries hardening already. But it was worth it.

Julio put his hand out, pointed at the box. “What’s that?”

Luis looked down. Blood had soaked into the joins of the tiny bones forming what looked like a map. He bent and dipped it into more of the monk’s blood, using the life force to outline the path ahead.

Luis smiled. Of course, the Hand of Ezekiel would not be held in one place. But the Lord rewarded the faithful, and he had passed the first test.

He looked down at the dead body. “Get rid of that. Mark it and leave it somewhere public as a warning to those who might come after us. The Brotherhood of the Breath is broken but not finished yet.”

Luis turned and walked back through the chamber. A shaft of sunlight broke through the clouds lighting the way ahead as he climbed out of the tomb into a new day, the bloody box of bone clutched tightly to his chest.