Jeremiah watched the torch light flicker in the next chamber and wondered how long it would take Radcliffe to complete the next part of the puzzle. There was little to look at in his current chamber. Debris from what looked like many old camp fires and broken pottery shards cluttered the corners of the room leaving the central part of the chamber free from refuse.
Jeremiah’s thoughts once more turned to his father. He had never really known the man, just stories that Radcliffe had told him. There was no clear picture of the man in his head, just a vague father shape that had once been part of his life as long as his memory could reach back, then nothing.
The light from the next room was wavering back and forth wildly. While Jeremiah could hear noise that sounded like Radcliffe’s booming tones, he could not make out what he was saying, specifically. Suddenly, a commotion came from the other chamber. Someone cried out briefly and then nothing for a long while. Soon the torch light no longer flickered from that direction. Jeremiah chewed his lip fretfully. Surely, this was not an impossible situation that he had found himself in.
Jeremiah made a start toward the inner room, but as soon as he stepped off the pedestal the doors started closing. He stepped back onto the plinth. This was going to take some careful figuring. How was he to go see if Radcliffe needed help and then put thought into action if the very act of moving made action impossible?
“Drat! There’s no way to get off of here without closing the doors. Well, I might as well try to see if I can figure this out.”
He stepped off of the pedestal and the doors came down.
“Okay. That’s going to be troublesome. Maybe I can gauge how much weight actually needs to be on the trigger. Then I can put some of this rubbish on there and decide my next move.”
Jeremiah knew that Radcliffe had always felt a little strange about Jeremiah talking to himself, but it helped to sound out his ideas before putting them into action. He examined the switch. There was nothing to use to access the button that he could see.
He put his entire weight on the pedestal and then took one of his feet off still keeping most of his weight on the switch. Slowly, he set the foot down beyond the boundaries of the pedestals and slowly shifted his weight to his other foot. As he got about half of it over there he heard the gears grinding again.
“Ah, So we didn’t need my full weight at all!”
Jeremiah almost jumped for joy then, but then remembered himself and his situation and decided on a smaller personal celebration. With this much of the plan satisfied, he started looking through eyes that felt considerably better about the situation.
“All it takes sometimes is a little calm and a little thought.”
He shifted his weight back off of the pedestal and gripped his torch. The garbage in the corner did not look as useful as he might have suspected at first. It was mostly pottery shards and ashes from old fires. This next part might not be as easy as he thought.
He sifted through one of the corners and made a neat pile of the larger shards to the side. Before very long there was a stack of sorted shards next to him. His hands were now coated in soot. He took his collection to the pedestal and laid it there. The doors came up a quarter of the way and Jeremiah allowed himself to feel hopeful, but didn’t feel the need to stop just yet. That fraction would allow himself to pass quite easily, but Radcliffe was a tower of a man with a barrel chest and that would never grant him access to freedom. He looked around for another likely corner to work with and noticed that the other three corners seemed to hold the smallest pieces. Still he steeled himself and started to work on one.
No luck greeted him with the first one. The shards may as well have been grains of sand for how useful they would be to him. The second corner proved just as futile. Hope started to drain from him quickly. Jeremiah whistled against the dark and noticed something glinting in the farthest corner. Trying not to get his hopes back just to dash them again on the rocks of failure, he walked over to the last corner. Buried in the debris and soot was an anvil shaped pot covered in brass. Immediately he set his torch in a recess in the wall and started to work freeing the pot from the surrounding garbage.
With barely believing eyes Jeremiah thanked the gods for his luck. He picked up the pot and put it on the pedestal. The doors barely moved. Something was missing. Jeremiah picked up his torch and began searching the walls and corners again for any sign that there was something that would help him. There were air vents that led into the chamber, but they were far too high to reach on his own. The carvings on the walls were only decoration and not very good at that. This left him with the seemingly useless anvil. What could he do with it that he had not thought of yet?
He thought that maybe if he had a great quantity of water or sand to work with, this might be easier. But all Jeremiah had was trash and the burnt remains of trash.
“Put the trash in the pot, that’s it!”
Jeremiah reexamined the pot and saw that it was mostly empty. He took it to what he now thought of as one of the useless corners. Slowly, he began sifting through the garbage with his hands. Only keeping the shards of pottery that were fairly heavy. When he got a good handful he would put it in the pot and go back to work.
Within a few minutes he had a fairly heavy pot, almost too heavy for him to lift by himself. He dragged the pot over to the switch and grunted it up into place. With some satisfaction, he listened to the gears grind once more and watched as the doors opened to a little more than three quarters open. That would have to do. Working quickly he placed the larger shards on top of the anvil pot and dusted off his hands. Then he picked up his torch and set off into the next chamber hoping that he wasn’t too late to help Radcliffe out of whatever mischief that he had gotten himself into. He quickened his pace a little and stepped forward into the unknown.
When Jeremiah reached the next chamber, he saw to what purpose that Radcliffe had used the large urn. There was a similar switch in this room that seemed to control the door to a further inner chamber. The switch seemed part of a larger more elaborate system than the one that had taken up the last few minutes of his life. There were ornate brass decorations on a large stone and crystal gods carved into the altar. Jeremiah recognized Zeus mostly because of the beard, but the lightning he was carrying made identification simpler. The other gods were not so iconic to him so he largely ignored them. He left his torch in one of the recesses he found and looked toward the further inner chamber.
Jeremiah crept toward the door and tried to hear what was going on, but only heard muffled voices there. Then he decided that there was nothing for it but to try to creep in there and get the lay of the land. He knelt down and started to crawl into the door.
As soon as he had most of his body in the chamber, he noticed that the room was a larger version of the chamber just outside. The statues of the gods much larger and much more ornate and detailed. They seemed to be looking down at him balefully with those eyes made of quartz. Jeremiah shimmied between what looked like a granite pew and a work bench. On the work bench there were assorted vials and test tubes dusty with neglect and disuse.
He listened again and discovered that he could make out Radcliffe’s voice quite clearly now. He seemed to be thinking out loud to himself. A habit that he had tried to break Jeremiah of on several occasions, but still could not help but doing himself. Jeremiah tried to get a little closer to the source of the sound and carefully slinked around the pew until he could get a good view of the action in the chamber.
Radcliffe was alone in front of the shrine, apparently looking for some sort of switch or release. Jeremiah thought of approaching Radcliffe, but something held him there. Perhaps it was shame of seeing the older man in a private moment. Maybe he wanted to know what was so important that they had risked both their hides to obtain it. Jeremiah was loath to put a name to it, but there he was watching Radcliffe try to decipher the Greek writing on the floor.
Radcliffe seemed to have a eureka moment. Jeremiah couldn’t see exactly what he had done, but one of the goddess statues opened to reveal a small alcove that she had been concealing all this time. Radcliffe was bouncing with excitement, behavior that Jeremiah never would have attributed to him, but there he was giddy as a schoolboy.
Just as Radcliffe was beginning to regain his composure and walk to attain his new prize, Jeremiah heard footsteps behind him. Cornelius Ayres walked in.
“Radcliffe! I see that you have made it easier for me to attain my prize. Stop right there, if you please.”
The gun Ayres held rang out a punctuation that stopped Radcliffe in his tracks and Jeremiah slunk down further into his hiding place.
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