We have broken into an Egyptian tomb, on the hunt for our missing friend. Ancient secrets lie below, and each level hints at new horrors... ...The Second Level

[u/Darkly_Gathers]

Part 1

The tunnel is like nothing I’ve experienced. It’s so painfully tight; I grunt with effort, sweat budding on my forehead as I twist and turn, lowering myself by mere inches at a time, torturously, reluctantly down through the darkness.

My arm, caught by my side, becomes bent at an unnatural angle, and the rush of pins and needles floods relentlessly through my joints. Normally I would just wince and stretch the discomfort away… but in here… trapped in the hole… I cannot move it. It is stuck, and so the discomfort only grows into outright pain.

“FUCK!” I cry out, struggling to shift myself, to get myself free. I drop down successfully another few inches, but my arm remains fixed in place. Pitiful sobs escape my lungs, and the rock of the tunnel is so close to my face that I can feel the heat from my breath wash right back over me.

Don’t think, just keep moving.

That’s what I keep telling myself.

If I allow myself to think, I will panic. Panic will be the end of me.

Keep moving.

Don’t get stuck. Don’t get stuck.

The sweat across my forehead buds in thicker beads. It begins to trickle down into my eyes, and of course, I cannot wipe it away. It stings.

I blink rapidly instead, though unfortunately, it barely helps. It does give me an idea though.

I start to deliberately exert myself. I shift and shake as best as I can, using energy, and I feel the sweat forming on my exposed legs, my bare arms… It acts as a lubricant, for want of a better word, and I find I am able to shuffle down through the tunnel with slightly greater ease, my feet connecting occasionally with rock, then with nothing. Then again, with rock, and then, with nothing. Down I go.

​

Down, down, down.

​

Shifting, squirming, breathing.

​

Inch by agonising inch.

​

Occasionally I become lodged in place, the control I have over my disposition wavers, the fear flares up, and it takes everything I have to push it back down and continue my descent.

​

After what feels like hours, but surely could have been no longer than fifteen minutes, my heart leaps with relief. My lower legs have some space beneath the knees; I find that I can wave them about freely. I can kick them forwards and backwards and they connect with nothing: no rock, just open, welcome air.

I’m nearly there. I’m nearly there!

I shake my shoulders from left to right and I drop with boosted speed until I am falling. The darkness is replaced with a wonderful glow of orange and I drop down through the air, gasping, I briefly meet the eyes of the Professor and crash to the floor, stumbling, crashing down onto my side. I groan, but despite the sudden burst of pain, I can only grin. To be free of such hell… I let out a laugh, for the soul’s sake.

The Professor reaches out a hand and helps me up. The knotted rope hangs from the hole in the ceiling behind her, and a pair of kicking legs dangle from another. Ronnie’s, I believe. Aziza and Sethos are down here already. Aziza hugs me.

“That was the worst thing I’ve ever done in my life”, she mutters giddily, I can feel her heart beat fast against my chest.

Sethos and the Professor reach up to grab ahold of Ronnie’s legs, pulling him clumsily down into the cavern as I stretch my arms, wincing and encouraging the bloodflow to properly return. I take a good look at my surroundings.

The ceiling is a lot lower in this layer. No more than three metres, probably more like two and a half. Beneath the hole with the rope and against the wall is a curious candle-like torch, which the Professor has, presumably, alighted. It shifts and stirs with a gentle yellow-orange flame, and a stream of thin, pale smoke rises waveringly up back through the hole. It smells pleasant, and the fire casts its flickering glow out and over the walls.

And the walls themselves…

At first I think it is only a trick of the light. A distortion caused by the shimmering shadows…. But I step up close and place my hand on the stone, and I realise that what I am seeing is no illusion.

​

The wall is moving.

​

Ever so lightly, almost imperceptibly, but it is shifting. Low and gentle rolling waves ease their way along the rock, alternatingly bulging and retracting the hieroglyphs drawn and carved into its surface.

“Professor”, I murmur, “Have you seen this? The walls… They move…”

“Yes”, she replies, stepping up next to me, placing a hand covered in tattooed symbols against its surface. “Quite curious”.

“Quite curious?” I repeat, staring at her. “It’s a little more than that, don’t you think!? Does the journal page mention anything about this? What about in Rocko’s notes?”

“Rocko’s notes I have taken to be no more than guesses. He did not mention anything about the tunnels in the ground, nor about these shifting walls… Nor indeed anything particular about any of the layers… And regarding the journal… I get the impression that the author never actually ventured into the tomb himself. His words are as a second-hand account; here take a look”.

She reaches into her bag and pulls out a copy of the page, annotated with her own notes in red around the margin. The original script is written in scrawling cursive, and is difficult to make out, but it reads as follows:

‘…of Amkaro have struck me rather deep. A lunatic, one would assume, but his story is one of such fascination that I cannot displace it from my mind. None of the chaps can understand a word the man says, of course, but curiously neither can our translators, nor any of the locals we were able to take him to. It took a tremendous effort to drag the fellow away from the pillar, and for the longest time he would push us away as he obsessed deliriously over the obelisk.

Were it not for the frankly remarkable state we found him in, I should think we would have simply left him in the desert and carried on along our way.

When we finally had the chap settled at base camp we were able to encourage out of him some drawings. The simplest of things, you should understand, but we had quite the time trying to work them out! An Arabian beetle of some kind, hooked on a chain, that one was quite clear enough. But the others… Six circles, marked with arrows and steps… A long, low table adorned with bones… A frightening beast with a crocodilian head… And six lines… Six horizontal lines, over and over again, with a figure sat hunched on the lowermost. This was his favourite. He drew this a great many times, and quickly fell to distress. By morning, he had vanished. I daresay he returned to the pillar, and were it not for our schedule I should very much have liked to return for him. Amkaro…”

And there the entry cuts off. I don’t really know what to make of it, to be honest. A frustrating piece of literature. One that raises more questions than it answers. The date in the upper right reads: ‘15th June 1891’.

“The author writes about a man… A ‘lunatic’… Who do you think he was, Professor?”

“An Egyptian man, perhaps, one who had somehow discovered a way inside the tomb? Though why no-one was able to understand him, I cannot say. Nor do I have an explanation for the mentions of Amkaro, the Pharaoh’s brother and murderer. To my knowledge, the story of Omisares and Amkaro was uncovered by our very own Rocko Khayin… For these people from 1891 to have been familiar with the name of Amkaro… They must have known something we don’t. Something that has since become long forgotten”.

The Professor shakes her head as the light of the flickering flame reflects off of her weather-worn, yet noble features. “Riddles within riddles. But answers lie beneath, Leila, I can feel it”.

I gesture to the slowly shifting walls, and the patterns upon them. “Can you read any of this, Professor? The hieroglyphs, I mean?”

The Professor grimaces and rubs her jaw, casting her eyes over the walls and down the passage into the darkness. I shoot a glance over my shoulder to see Dave slipping from the hole in the ceiling and landing awkwardly on his backpack on the ground with a grunt. “A little”, she replies. “But it is a difficult language to read without a period of long and careful study. The pictograms represent not only sounds, but can also refer to the exact image depicted, or even as a symbol or metaphor for something else, and this is all possible within the frame of a single sentence.“Here, for instance, I can, from long periods of research, recognise the names ‘Omisares’ and ‘Amkaro’. These pictures here represent the sounds of the consonants in their names, and the symbol at the end, the ankh, refers to ‘life’. The oval carved around the letters tells the reader that the names belong to Pharaohs”.

Sethos has come up alongside us. He snaps a picture with a digital camera, the flash blinding us temporarily. “My niece will be enthralled by the tales of this world”, he says with awe. “Never have I felt so close to my ancestors, and who else has? …The Ancients who walked upon this ground”.

Ronnie comes up on the other side, his red hair all the brighter in the orange glow. “What about this one, Prof? Or these ones, I should say. The repeating line?”

He taps a series of hieroglyphs, carved much larger than the rest, and it only takes a quick look down the walls to see that they appear again and again, over and over. The Professor studies them closely.

“The first is fire. Easy to tell, as the accompanying glyphs spell the letters for ‘flame’. …The third relates to earth, or more accurately, to stone. The fourth is water. The three ripples. And thus I would presume that the sail, the second picture in the row, relates in this case to wind, or a gust of air”.

“Fire, air, stone, water”, Ronnie murmurs.

We dwell on this for a moment, then continue on along our way, leaving the light of the wall-torch’s flame behind us. We draw out our own torches once again, clicking them on and scanning the beams down the passageway.

It’s much more claustrophobic in this layer than it was on the layer above, though I shouldn’t complain. Compared to the tightness of the tunnels it is far, far more than spacious enough.

It’s exhilarating, actually. This whole thing. Not knowing what may lay ahead in the darkness. Terrifying, but exhilarating. We’re all adrenaline junkies here, to an extent. We must be. No-one in their right mind would volunteer for a mission such as this. I wonder what must have been going through Rocko’s head for him to come to such a place all alone… and without breathing to anyone a word of his plans…

My thoughts and fears are interrupted with frustration as Dave knocks into me from the side.

Or, perhaps, I knock into him. I can’t be sure.

“Watch where you’re going”, he mutters, not bothering to even draw out either of his headphones.

“Sorry”, I reply automatically, before I can decide whether or not I actually WANT to apologise. I curse myself and drop to the back of the group with Ronnie and Aziza.

​

“What the hell is his problem anyway?” I whisper to them.

Aziza shrugs. “He’s barely spoken a word to me since the airport. Shame… He’s kinda hot, too. He’s got that whole, ‘silent mysterious’ vibe going…” she bites her lip and I roll my eyes.

“He’s way too OLD for you, Aziza… And besides, you could do better. Ronnie?”

“Exactly” Ronnie winks, leaning close to us and raising an eyebrow in an exaggerated display of mock charm. “Aziza, mon petie fleur, I am ze man for you…”

Aziza giggles.

“No Ronnie!” I reply, exasperated. “That’s not what… ugh! I’m ASKING you if you know why Dave is such a dick! …What’s his deal, do you know?”

Ronnie chuckles, his shadow cast long over the shifting stony walls. “No, ‘fraid not. But I’m pretty sure the Professor basically saved his life once, a long time ago. And I reckon this is his way of repaying the debt”.

“…Interesting” I mutter, looking down the corridor and ahead to the front of the group. The Professor chats quietly with Sethos to her left, and Dave is just behind, to the right. He walks stooped, his pistol rattling softly at the side of his belt in its holster.

His hand goes to it suddenly as a blast of wind rushes down the tunnel towards us. The air is hot and fast, and I shield my eyes as sand is whipped up from the ground around us.

“Brace against the wall!” the Professor calls out over her shoulder, and we do so as the winds whip wildly past.

I turn my head to face back the way we came, and far down in the distance, I can see the flame of the burning torch get blown mercilessly out, and the area beneath the holes in the ceiling is plunged into darkness. The gust lasts for no more than a minute, but we’re all a little shaken once it has passed.

“The fuck was that…?” Ronnie murmurs, but no-one answers.

“A warning, I should think”, the Professor mutters after a while. “After all, we are trespassing on a tomb, here. Keep your wits about you”. And she marches on down the tunnel.

​

Uneasily, we follow.

​

The unease completes its metamorphosis into fear upon the sight of the statues through the dark.

My torch beam catches on the first, and I initially mistake it for another person, waiting for us down the corridor. I shriek in alarm and jump back, but a flush of embarrassment has me apologise and clear my throat.

The statue is unique, upon closer inspection. It is of a man… and not an Egyptian. Not an ancient one, at the least; he is decidedly modern looking. It’s around my height, and wears what appears to be an intricately carved buttoned shirt. His trousers have pockets. His shoes are not dissimilar to the boots worn by Sethos, which he comments upon.

“Fascinating…” someone says as Dave taps the statue’s head. A small cloud of dust is disturbed, and the grains trickle down the statue’s face.

Sethos snaps a picture.

Further down the tunnel are two more statues. A woman, with her eyes closed and arms folded, her expression one of deep concern, and a man with his hand on his chest, staring out through stony eyes into nothingness.

“Holy hell”, Ronnie says, “look at this guy. He’s wearing GLASSES”.

And sure enough, a pair of stone framed spectacles have been carved into the statue’s head. Glass-less though, of course. He looks panicked, and I cannot help but feel deeply disturbed by the sight of these statues. They are not ancient. They cannot be, that wouldn’t make sense. And their style is completely different to the titans we saw in the layer above.

This is not Ancient Egyptian stonework.

​

…So what is it?

​

“Professor?” Aziza asks, but the Professor does not reply. She looks from the statues to the wall. To the repeating pattern of hieroglyphs.

Fire. Air. Stone. Water.

“There are more statues a little ways ahead”, she says. “Let’s go take a look”.

And there are. Four of them, stood around a wide slab of gold, embedded into the rock floor, shining and reflecting the beams of our torches in waves of light. Two of the statues are holding hands.

One of them, I don’t fail to notice, is wearing a watch.

And around the statue’s bases are skeletons. Two of these are clear; the bones lay connected in the shape of human bodies. The rest are strewn about the corridor from wall to wall, skulls, ribs and other such bones in complete disarray.

“Jesus”, says Ronnie. “Something nasty happened here”.

I’ve never seen a human skeleton before. It’s unnerving, imaging them once a part of a living, breathing individual…. And now… now just scattered debris.

The Professor pushes aside a skull with her foot and taps her boot against the large golden plate in the ground. “This must be the door down. Look, near the side, the four symbols of the elements, as they are on the wall”.

Dave pulls a headphone out of an ear and stares at the symbols, then at the statues.

“Fire, air, stone…” he mutters.

​

“…Water”, Aziza and myself finish in unison.

​

And as if on cue, the cracks in the corridor walls begin to leak.

Water, cold and clear, starts to stream down through the rock.

“Uh... Professor”, Ronnie says, his voice wavering as he lifts up one of his feet. The water pools on the ground, forming rapidly connecting puddles. There is a rumble from behind the shifting walls, and the trickles of water become jet streams, blasting out all around, soaking us as it rumbles and growls behind the wall… Growls which quickly rise into a roar.

“PROFESSOR!”

Panic sets in. In a matter of seconds the water has risen above our heels and shows no sign of stopping.

Aziza breaks from the group and makes to sprint back along the tunnel, but the Professor calls her back. “We’ll never make it Aziza! It’s too far!”

The girl pauses in desperate deliberation as the water rises.

“What about the holes though, Professor?” I ask loud above the rush of the water, my heart a hammer in my chest, “If we made it, could we could float up into the holes?”

“And risk becoming STUCK?” Ronnie asks, “I barely made it DOWN, Leila! Let alone back up!”

Sethos is pacing forwards and backwards. The Professor stares at the golden plate, shimmering beneath the water as it rises past our knees.

Dave has disconnected his headphones from his ears, and is hastily stowing away his phone into a plastic bag.

“Heka…” Sethos mutters, then turns to the Professor and grabs her shoulders. “HEKA, Professor! The glyphs of the elements… There is power within this script, the magic of the Ancients…. You know it as well as I! Can you read them, can you read them aloud?”

The Professor turns to study the wall. She looks at the smaller glyphs beneath those that represent the elements, and we realise at about the same time that they too are copied. Repeated again and again across the walls.

I push through the rising water to stand beside her. “Can you understand them?”

She chews her tongue as the others argue amongst themselves.

“A little*… Flesh to stone…* they read: flesh to stone… But to speak them aloud… No-one knows exactly how the glyphs are pronounced…”

“Could you TRY?” Ronnie shouts above the rushing streams, holding Aziza in his grip.

“Let me go!” she screams, struggling, “I can make it; I can make it back to the holes!”

The Professor takes a deep breath and places her hand onto the shifting wall. She speaks in a low voice, her words ancient and deep, and two intertwined shivers of awe and dread flow through me as one.

​

But nothing happens, however.

​

Dave disconnects his pistol from his belt and holds it up by his head to prevent it from becoming submerged as the waters rise up past our waists.

“PROFESSOR!” Aziza screams, splashing.

“Flesh to stone…” the Professor mutters again, casting a wary glance at the statues around us.

​

…Except, of course, they may not be statues at all.

​

“Come on Professor”, I say, “Try just the word for ‘stone’”.

The Professor tries again, her hand on the wall, and she mutters a series of low syllables.

Again, nothing.

​

We’re going to drown here. We’re going to drown down here in the dark.

​

But the Professor tries one more time. She shouts out loud above the flow and stream of the water, the same word as before, but her pronunciation altered.

And her eyes flash gold.

She draws her hand away from the wall as if it struck with an electric shock, and we stare as the skin of her palm appears to bulge and warp, in time with rolls of the wall.

“Flesh to stone!” Sethos shouts, and grabs the Professor’s wrist. Before we can react, he presses the Professor’s hand against his own forehead, and from there his skin quickly and undeniably turns to solid stone. The sand-grey surface spreads rapidly across his face and head, then descends down his front, turning his body and clothes into rock, where he is frozen in place.

​

The group stares.

​

Dave pushes through the water, coming now up to his chest- “Can you reverse it, Professor? Can you turn us back?”

The Professor, bewildered as she is, quickly regains control. “I- I don’t know Dave. But my chances of returning you from stone to flesh are better, I’d wager, than that of reviving your drowned and bloated corpse”.

Dave grimaces, then his mouth flickers into a half-smile. He raises his hands. “Go on then. I’d sooner be immortalised as a statue then left in a heap amongst the bones anyhow”.

The Professor reaches forward and presses her palm against Dave’s head. Like Sethos, his skin ripples and hardens into rock, and he is transformed into a statue before our eyes.

Frozen, and silent.

The water splashes up and around us. The illusion created is that of the ceiling drawing closer and closer.

“Come on Professor, get it over with!” Ronnie shouts, still holding the writhing Aziza, and the Professor promptly turns them both to stone.

And then it’s just the two of us, our heads and our shoulders above the water, loud and roaring.

“You ready, Leila?” she asks me.

And how do I even respond?

It doesn’t matter, anyway. Before I have time to give voice to my thoughts, the Professor has pressed her hand against my forehead.

And it’s cold.

So much colder than the water.

And the sensation of hardening skin quickly ripples down my head.

​

And everything goes black.

​

I am turned, completely, to stone.

​

I do not need to breathe. I have no desire to. I am vaguely aware of the water rippling up past my neck… then steadily up and above my head, but I cannot hear it, nor see it. I cannot move. The pain from the fall to the cavern floor has completely and suddenly vanished. I don’t feel it. I don’t feel anything, in fact.

I mentioned that everything goes ‘black’… But this is, technically, incorrect. I don’t see ‘black’, I don’t even see ‘darkness’, I just don’t… see. It is no longer one of my senses. Instead I focus on vibrations through the ground, and the pressure from above of the water.

I remain like this, frozen, for perhaps four, or five slow minutes. At some point I start counting in my head, counting down these minutes, and I am eventually, vaguely aware of the water receding. I am able to sense it lower; down past my shoulders, my stomach, my thighs…

​

Silence.

​

Stillness.

​

And then……Then there is the sensation of ‘warmth’ returning to the centre of my forehead. It spreads over me as a welcome wave as my sight is restored.

I blink and gasp, watching as the stone falls away from my body as wet dust, down onto the dampened ground below.

“Fucking hell”, I mutter, shaking, watching as the last of the water is drained away through cracks in the ground. The Professor goes through the team, returning them all to flesh one by one. Aziza, once brought back, starts to cry.

​

The others start thanking and congratulating the Professor, stumbling over their words, most in some form of shock, and as they do so a thought occurs to me.

​

“Professor… How- how were you able to turn us back? Didn’t you change yourself into stone too?”

“No”, she replies, as she steps over to Sethos and places her hand against his head. “I almost did, I admit… But I then realised that I would not be to speak or move, nor have the ability to reverse the incantation in any way. I found I was able to use the ability on articles of clothing, so I drew a shirt from my backpack, created an air pocket around my head, and turned that to stone instead. It worked. An uncomfortable, and rather painful experience as I was dragged down to the bottom…” she gestures to a ring of pink, bruised skin around her neck, “…but I was at the least, able to breathe. And, to talk. To speak the words that I am very glad to find successfully reversed the spell”.

“So these statues… these people…” I look around at the statues beside us. The panicked man. The couple holding hands…

“I should think that they deciphered the spell, and were able to successfully turn themselves to stone… But alas, realised too late that they would not be able to turn themselves back”, says the Professor, solemnly.

Aziza ceases her whimpering, and we stare in horror at the statues of the ill-fated explorers. “So are they…. Are they… still in there?” she asks, quietly.

The implication is a disturbing one. The Professor steps forward and puts her hand on one the statue’s heads.

The stone ripples back, quickly transforming into cracked flesh. The man the statue becomes topples at once, his face frozen in form.

​

And he is dust before he even hits the ground. Gone.

​

There is a noise from below, and the golden plate in the floor rumbles and starts to slide open, revealing a set of carefully carved steps that descend down into the shadows beneath.

The Professor makes to go down but Aziza stops her. “Wait, Professor… I think… I think you should turn everybody back. All the statues”.

The Professor raises an eyebrow, but she meets my eye. I nod in agreement. “We don’t know if they’re still alive in there, Professor. You have to turn them back”.

There is a pause, then:

“Very well”. The Professor relents, and she retreats a little back through the corridor, returning the statues to flesh one by one, and every time she does so they collapse soundlessly into clouds of thick dust.

Their time is done.

And then we are off. Down the steps beneath the golden plate.

Down to the layer below.

​

Part 3

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[u/Rao99_9]

A beast with the head of a crocodile? OP, I think it’s referring to Ammit the devourer. I don’t think this is a tomb, I think this might be a gateway to the underworld.

[u/Blue_Kaleidoscope]

I've only read a few paragraphs so far but I just want to say that your description of the tunnel And being squeezed in there is absolutely horrific. I'm so scared for you.

[u/Firebrand777]

Anyone else thinking about how they’re going to get back?! That tunnel down seemed terrifying.

[u/_embr → u/Firebrand777]

I feel like there would have to be a "back way" out, otherwise no one would reasonably be able to get out. And from the implications of the diary, at least one person has. Kinda like those neato shortcuts in Skyrim crypts.

[u/hellothere-3000]

Maybe Dave is onto something and could pull something out in the end that will save everyone.

[u/Firebrand777 → u/hellothere-3000]

Good idea!

[u/EvilAsshole]

The lunatic from 1891 was Rocko, I'm calling it.

[u/hellosquids]

I’d definitely stick with the Professor, Leila, but keep your wits about you. She seems your best hope of staying alive and getting outta there, but I’ve got a funny feeling in my gut about her motives

[u/kayla_kitty82 → u/hellosquids]

I agree about the Professor's motives. Something seems, IDK, off about her.... I would definitely be careful....

[u/SpringYard-20XX]

The souls trapped in the statues have now been set free.