Moon Mask Read Online Free Page A

they had transferred Karen back to Caracas and, from there, flown her to a specialist hospital in the States.
    McKinney had reshuffled the eight teams of three archaeologists who had each been assigned a section of the tunnel system. King, Sid and Nadia had been reassigned to Karen’s sector.
    “I know,” Sid replied. “She would-”
    Her words were drowned out by the sudden, sharp cracking of stone and, before her eyes, King vanished!
     
     
    With a sharp lurch and a blur of motion, the ground beneath him dropped away! King fell into a black hole, the crash of tumbling rocks and a billow of dust pluming around him.
    He splashed down into icy, knee high water, his legs buckling under the impact. His head went under and for a moment he panicked, sucking a lungful of fetid, stale water in before breaching the surface and coughing it back out.
    Disorientated, he looked around, his eyes struggling to make out his surroundings. The impenetrable darkness was broken only by the eerie rippling effect of his submerged flashlight shining up through the water. He could hear Sid and Nadia shouting to him, their voices high with panic.
    “I’m okay!” he called up. It was bravado that spoke. In truth he hurt like hell, his entire body aching from the jarring impact. He felt bruising spreading across his rib cage and his left ankle shot jabs of pain up his leg. The darkness also closed in around him, claustrophobic and suffocating and he felt a jolt of fear pass through him.
    “Hold on,” Nadia shouted. “I have a rope. We will pull you out!”
    King stumbled to his feet, the smelly water draining off him and his clothes. His satchel was still wrapped around his shoulders and he scooped down to pick up his flash light. Free of the water, the torch beam cut through the darkness and King felt himself relax a little. He panned it around his surroundings.
    The chamber he had fallen into was about thirty feet in diameter and roughly circular, not unlike a giant well. The walls were the same jigsaw puzzle of misshapen rocks, some large, others small, as the rest of the underground complex.
    Scanning his torch up, he saw that a section of the ceiling, about five feet wide, had collapsed and through the hole, fifteen feet above, he could see Sid and Nadia’s worried faces.
    “I’m alright,” he called up to them, more firmly this time. “I’m in some sort of chamber.”
    He knew the implication of his statement would not be lost on the two women. No identifiable rooms or chambers had yet been found in the endless hundreds of feet of passages.
    “I wish you would stop literally stumbling onto discoveries like that,” Sid half-joked.
    King laughed then brought his torch beam back down. Shining it at the ground, he realised he had potentially been very lucky. Directly beneath the hole, he had landed on a partially submerged plinth of stone rising out of a much deeper pool. While the water landing may have been softer, there was no way of knowing what lay beneath the murky surface.
    He turned around and jumped in fright as a hideous visage peered back at him!
    It was another skull, this one alone, its lifeless expression somehow seeming to leer at him. It wasn’t just a skull, he realised. It was a complete skeleton. It was curled up on a recess cut into the wall at the back of the plinth, about seven feet off the ground.
    He moved towards it-
    Something slapped at his head and he spun around, arms up defensively only to discover a rope dangling down from above.
    “Ben, grab on,” Sid called. “We’ll pull you up.”
    He was about to take hold of the rope when something stopped him. He couldn’t explain what, exactly. Curiosity, he supposed. “Hang on a sec,” he shouted up to Sid and Nadia.
    He cautiously sloshed through the water, wading over to the wall beneath the recessed slot. He guessed the shelf-like recess had once held an idol or some other sacred object and wondered for a second whether the human remains were in