Lizard Men of Los Angeles | Page 8

walked to the middle of the south wall of the tunnel, and ran his fingers carefully over the massive stone blocks. "Ah," he said, and a section of the wall pivoted backward into darkness. He removed the blindfold and switched on Bruno's mining lamp. Sniffing the air of the passage he commented, "Methane. Volatile stuff. Don't light up one of your cigars in here, Mrs. Lockhart."
"Very droll, Cairo. If you don't wish to lead, I'll be happy to oblige."
Cairo handed her the lamp and followed her into the passage. The tunnel was ten feet high and nearly that wide, paved with large, uniform stones. The scars of pickaxes were visible in the rock of the ceiling. Cairo and Mrs. Lockhart had advanced no more than a few paces when the section of wall that had pivoted to admit them rumbled slowly back into place.
Mrs. Lockhart looked at Cairo. "I trust you'll be able to get us out again."
"I hope so too," Cairo smiled. "Lead on."
The passage ran straight and unencumbered for several hundred yards, angling slightly downward. Suddenly Cairo halted. "Mrs. Lockhart. Shut the lamp off, if you would."
She did so, and for a moment they were plunged into what seemed to be absolute, stygian darkness. Then, after a few agonizing seconds, a faint, yellowish-green outline emerged from the general gloom of the floor. Cairo knelt and lifted away a stone trap-door, revealing a drop of ten feet or so, with hand-holds in the rock, and a stone staircase below it that led deep into the bowels of the earth. The green glow rose from the stairs.
Mrs. Lockhart handed the lamp to Cairo and began to descend. "Be careful," she said. "It's a bit slippery."
Cairo passed down the lamp and joined her on the first platform. "Are you prepared to go on?" Cairo asked. "I have no idea where this may lead."
A narrow smile barely registered on Mrs. Lockhart's agelessly beautiful features. "That lack has never stopped me before."
The stairs seemed to have been carved from living rock, untold generations before. The risers were over a foot in height and the uncomfortably narrow treads were well worn. The passage curved gently to the right as it descended. After the initial turning, Cairo and Mrs. Lockhart continued straight downward in a northwesterly direction for hundreds of feet before abruptly emerging into a chamber the size of a banquet hall with a smooth, level floor. The mysterious green glow came from a single sphere, somewhat larger than a man's head, in the center of the ceiling. It provided enough light to easily read the carvings in the walls of the cave. Interspersed with vaguely humanoid figures were rows of hieroglyphs. Cairo took the lamp and studied them.
"Remind you of anything?" Mrs. Lockhart asked.
"The Temple of Ramses the Second at Abu Simbel," Cairo returned, awe in his voice.
Mrs. Lockhart nodded. "And...?"
"And Chichen Itza in the Yucatan."
"Exactly."
"But if there is a single civilization that bridges those two cultures, it must mean--"
"Correct," Mrs. Lockhart said. "These tunnels can only have been built by the survivors of Atlantis."
*
Cairo stood for a moment, as if trying to fathom all the implications of the idea. "Are you saying that the Atlanteans were not human? That they were some sort of...lizard race?" Cairo turned slowly, taking in the carvings, the alien technology of the light sphere. "It could explain so much..."
He froze. "Did you hear something?"
Mrs. Lockhart shook her head once, a curt gesture that barely disturbed her jet-black hair.
Another tunnel led from the far end of the chamber. Cairo glided silently toward the opening and looked into the darkness. "I don't think--"
This time the noise was clearly audible, a sort of wet thump. It was quickly followed by another. Cairo backed into the center of the room and held the lamp high. Mrs. Lockhart moved behind him, crouching slightly, her arms raised in the posture of an oriental science of self-defense.
A panel of hieroglyphs suddenly slid open to reveal a small passageway, followed almost instantly by a second panel and then a third. A fourth opened in the opposite wall, then two more. For a moment silence fell on the underground chamber, an absence more terrifying than the sounds that had preceded it.
And then the openings poured forth lizard men.
There were at least a hundred of them, all about four feet in height, their skins gray-green in the eerie luminescence. Their loins were wrapped in some sort of bindings that left room for the massive tails that dragged the ground behind them. They had almost no necks, and their lipless mouths extended more than an inch beyond where their noses should have been. Their bulbous eyes stared unblinkingly as they shambled forward on massive lower legs that bent nearly double. Had they straightened those legs they would have