Justice League of America - Batman: The Stone King by Alan Grant (best english novels to read .txt) 📗

observations. Suddenly, his left foot slid on some gravel, and before Peter could recover his balance, he was wedged between two protruding boulders.

Cursing to himself at the pain that stabbed through his ankle, praying nothing was broken, Peter tried to ease his foot free. One of the football-sized boulders was slightly loose, and he trained the flashlight on it as he rocked it from side to side. Without warning, the stone dislodged, freeing his trapped foot and revealing a small hole in the rocky platform below it.

Peter wrinkled his brow, for a moment failing to appreciate just what he might have found here. Then, with mounting excitement, he angled the flashlight so it pointed down into the cavity, illuminating what appeared to be a buried chamber.

Struggling to contain the feelings that surged through him, working quietly with the flashlight, Peter started to clear away the rocks and boulders that obviously formed the chamber roof. All his dark, brooding thoughts of just a few minutes ago had dissipated, to be replaced by a strange sense of wonder. The Gotham pyramid was an unprecedented find, and now he was going to enter its subterranean chamber, hidden for hundreds, possibly thousands, of years.

It wasn't the lure of treasure that drove him on as he carefully removed the small, square-cut slabs that the builders had used to roof the structure. It wasn't the thought of the ancient artifacts, buried for nearly five thousand years, that might lie inside, or the fame and fortune they might bring him. It was the purest feeling known to any archaeologist–the rolling back of the unknown, the discovery of another piece of the mysterious jigsaw that had been the culture of our predecessors.

The roofing slabs fit perfectly into one another, and Peter couldn't help marveling at the craftsmanship and the knowledge these ancients must have possessed. Who knew–maybe this chamber was the stellar observatory that he suspected the site contained. Surely this would make Mills and the others sit up and take notice!

Peter worked for a full ten minutes before he'd achieved his goal–the clearing of a circular space, almost like a chimney, that gave him enough room to lower his lean frame inside. Requiring both hands for the task, he switched the flashlight off and jammed it in his pocket before he began his descent into the darkness.

Holding onto one of the slabs, its sharp edges threatening to slice his fingers, he lowered himself feetfirst through the hole he'd dug out. A momentary shiver of fear ran through him as his legs dangled in midair. What if the chamber had no floor? What if it dropped away for another fifty feet, right to the very base of the pyramid?

But then his outstretched, scrabbling feet found solid ground, and with a sigh of relief Peter lowered himself down onto the chamber's dusty floor.

The air inside the room was thick and oppressive, and the dust his excavations had kicked up made him cough heavily. Peter stood for a few seconds in the darkness, anticipation building inside him. For the first time in uncounted centuries, human eyes were about to view a long-concealed mystery.

Peter took a deep breath and flicked on his flashlight.

Meanwhile, on the pyramid's flat top, the others had packed up most of their gear and were ready to make the descent to the valley floor. The moon had risen now, its pale silver glow lighting up the sky and blotting out the stars.

"What about Peter?" Jenny asked.

"If the guy wants to act like a spoiled brat," Lorann Mutti replied, "we should just leave him to his tantrums. Let him find his own way back to Gotham."

David Rymel nodded his agreement, and Len Dors's mustache quivered as he growled, "Serve him right, too."

"It's not as straightforward as that," Jenny said quietly. "Peter has . . . good reason to be upset." Her voice tailed off; she had no desire to go into this, not now, not ever really. She threw the professor a sidelong glance and was glad when he came to her rescue.

"Peter's been under a lot of stress," Robert Mills said, "with his postgraduate thesis due, and all the work we've been putting in here." He went on, making sure Lorann heard his words. "But we can't just abandon him. We're a team. We have to look out for one another."

Mills snapped on his flash and walked over to the top of the rope ladder. "You guys finish up here. I'll go on ahead and coax Peter out of . . . whatever's bugging him."

Without waiting for their reply, Mills swung his body out over the edge and started to descend.

Peter Glaston played his flashlight over the chamber interior and marveled.

The stone walls and corbeled ceiling had been constructed without mortar, the stones cut and shaped to fit so precisely that Peter could hardly see where they adjoined. Two larger stones set into the chamber wall had been incised with spiral shapes, and Peter frowned. Almost all of the spirals that he'd seen in Stone Age art were drawn clockwise; the two here were their mirror images, spiraling tightly into their centers but in a counterclockwise direction.

The left-hand path . . . Unbidden, the phrase popped into Peter's consciousness. The left-hand path–the territory of witches and sorcerers. The path of black magic.

The chamber was completely empty, except for a large rectangular block of granite that stood against the west-facing wall. By the light of his flashlight, Peter could see a shallow runnel that ran the full length of the stone. He couldn't be sure, of course, but on other artifacts he'd seen, a carved runnel was to allow blood to drain off. The stone was an altar . . . and someone had used it to make blood sacrifices.

Peter's gaze was drawn to a spot on the floor just in front of the altar stone. It was hard to tell in the flickering shadows, but it seemed that the hard-packed earth floor had at some point been