Chapter 8: The Tomb Below the Temple
H1: The Thing at the Door
Through the gloom, the figure at the temple entrance resolved into something utterly nightmarish. It wasn’t a person. It was an empty husk of human skin, swaying gently in the unseen currents of the air. Where its facial features should have been, there were only dark, hollow voids. And it was staring right at us.
It seemed to weigh nothing at all, drifting forward until it stood at the very threshold of the temple. Then it stopped.
We were flattened behind the headless statue, my breath catching in my throat, my pulse a frantic drum against my ribs. The temple was a tiny, enclosed space. If it came inside, there was nowhere to hide, nowhere to run.
“Is that… is it really just… skin?” Junjun’s voice was a choked sob, her hand clamped over her mouth to stifle the sound.
But the thing didn’t enter. It hovered at the doorway, hesitant, as if it were afraid of something inside the temple. The coughing had stopped. It just stood there, a silent, horrifying sentinel.
“Stay quiet,” I whispered, my voice hoarse. “I don’t think it can come in.”
I motioned for Junjun to get behind me. She might have been a seasoned academic and an expert climber, but in the face of this kind of primal horror, the scholar was gone, replaced by pure, instinctual fear. She scrambled behind us without a word, her eyes squeezed shut.
We waited in the suffocating silence. The sky outside the entrance was turning a deep, bruised purple. After what felt like an eternity, Hu Yang risked a peek.
“It’s gone,” he breathed.
We switched on our flashlights. The doorway was empty. Hu Yang crept forward, his movements fluid and silent as a cat’s, and peered outside. He waved me forward.
We swept the basin with our beams. Nothing. The terrifying skin-thing had vanished as if it had never been. Then my light fell upon the cliff face we’d descended.
A cold dread washed over me.
“Hu Yang,” I said, my voice barely a whisper. “The ropes… they’re gone.”
He rushed to my side. It was worse than I thought. Not only were our ropes missing, but the massive boulder we had tied them to had also vanished. A solid piece of rock that must have weighed three or four tons was simply… gone.
“Wait,” Hu Yang said, his head snapping around. “Where’s Junjun?”
I spun around. I’d assumed she was right behind me. A shared, ice-cold panic seized us. We sprinted back into the temple, our flashlight beams slicing wildly through the darkness.
The temple was empty.
She had been right behind us. And now she was gone. Vanished without a sound.
“Over here!” Hu Yang’s shout echoed from the back of the temple. He was standing by the headless statue, his light aimed at a dark hole in the wall behind it.
A cave. It was about a meter wide, a perfect, dark circle leading down into the earth. A strange, coppery, and faintly sweet smell—the scent of old blood and decay—wafted out from its depths.
“What do we do?” I asked, my mind racing.
Hu Yang’s jaw was set like granite. “We go down. We are not leaving her behind.”
“I’ll get the bags.”
“No, I’ll go. You stay here and keep watch for that… thing.”
He was out the door before I could argue. I stood guard, my flashlight beam cutting a nervous path across the basin floor. I saw his light bobbing as he scrambled up the cliff face with an agility that shouldn’t have been human. A moment later, our packs came tumbling down.
I dragged them inside just as Hu Yang returned. I watched, stunned, as he unzipped one of the large duffels and began pulling out his gear: several homemade explosives, cylinders of tightly packed powder with protruding fuses. Then, a modified handgun, which he tucked into his waistband.
“Where in the hell did you get all this?” I asked, grabbing two of the explosives for myself and tucking them into my belt. I took the chisel from my own pack, its cold weight a strange comfort in my hand.
He didn’t answer, his focus entirely on his preparations. I knew this silence. It was the calm before the storm, the quiet focus that preceded his fury. His eyes flickered from the chisel in my hand to the identical one held by the stone statue. “Where’d you get that?”
“My grandfather’s,” I said. “I went home for it before we left.”
He just nodded, the subject closed. He handed me a three-pronged grappling hook attached to a thin, incredibly strong-looking cord. Then, without another word, he leaped into the hole.
I heard the scrape of metal against rock as he arrested his fall, his hooks finding purchase in the sides of the shaft. He looked up, his face a pale oval in the darkness, and jerked his head for me to follow.
H2: Down into Darkness
The shaft was a tight squeeze, the rock cold and slick with moisture. I braced my feet against the walls, using the grappling hooks to control my descent, moving slowly downward in the oppressive dark.
“How much farther?” I called down after about thirty feet, my voice sounding small and swallowed by the abyss. “You hear me?”
A muffled grunt was the only reply. I risked a glance down. The moving shape below me didn’t look right. It was too thin, too fluid. It looked… like the skin-thing.
A jolt of pure terror shot through me. “Hu Yang?” I yelled, my voice cracking.
“Yeah?” his voice came back, calm and clear from below.
The relief was so intense my knees almost gave out. I was about to say it was nothing when I heard it from above.
Cough. Cough.
I looked up. A black shape blotted out the faint light from the temple, and I heard the dry, rasping sound of skin slithering against stone.
“Hu Yang, move!” I screamed. “It’s in the shaft! It’s right above me!”
I felt more than saw him accelerate his descent. I started scrambling, not caring about the sharp rocks tearing at my clothes and skin. The slithering sound was getting closer, a wet, intimate noise that made the hairs on my neck stand on end. I could practically feel its cold, empty breath on my neck.
“Dammit, Hu Yang, are you down yet? It’s right on top of me!”
Just as I yelled, I heard a solid thump from below. He was at the bottom. Without a second thought, I let go.
I fell, tumbling through the darkness, and hit the ground hard. The impact was brutal, a starburst of pain that radiated from my tailbone up my spine. I lay there for a moment, groaning, every bone in my body screaming in protest.
When the world stopped spinning, I realized I was in absolute, total darkness. The kind of black that feels like a physical weight pressing on your eyes. I fumbled for the flashlight in my breast pocket. It was gone. Must have fallen out during the fall.
“Hu Yang?” I called out, my voice a nervous whisper.
The silence that answered was terrifying. The slithering from the shaft above had stopped. It was as if I was the only living thing in the universe.
I felt my way along the stone wall, calling his name again, my voice trembling. Suddenly, a hand clamped over my mouth from behind, dragging me into a narrow crevice. I struggled for a second before I saw his face in the gloom. It was Hu Yang.
He held a finger to his lips, then pointed. Far down the cavern, a tiny, flickering light was visible. “Someone’s over there,” he mouthed, his voice barely audible. “Be careful.”
“Junjun?” I whispered.
He shook his head, indicating he didn’t know. We moved forward, silent as ghosts, the only light the faint, distant flame. Was this a natural cave? Or had we stumbled into something else?
We rounded a bend in the passage, and Hu Yang stopped dead. Hanging in the light ahead was a shape. As we crept closer, my stomach turned to ice. It looked like a body, hanging from the ceiling.
Then we saw it properly. It wasn’t a body. It was a chain. An iron chain as thick as my body, descending from the impenetrable darkness above. The light was coming from a single torch, jammed into a crack in the wall.
Hu Yang knelt, pointing his finger at the bottom of the chain where it lay coiled on the cavern floor. “Look at this,” he whispered.
I ran my hand over the final link. The metal was twisted, warped, the break jagged and violent. It hadn’t been cut. It had been snapped. By sheer, unimaginable force. What in God’s name had been chained down here that was strong enough to do that?
Suddenly, Hu Yang grabbed my arm, his fingers digging into my bicep. He pointed at the floor.
A new shadow had appeared beside our own. It was growing larger, stretching toward us.
Hu Yang spun around, his gun already in his hand.
“Aah!” a woman’s voice cried out.
Standing there, holding the torch, her face a mask of shock, was Yang Junjun.
“I was just trying to scare you!” she said, lowering the torch. “You guys overreact to everything.” She gave Hu Yang a playful glare. “Took you long enough. I found it. This place… it’s a tomb.”
“You fell?” I asked, the relief making me weak. “How are you not hurt?”
“I fell with style,” she corrected, tapping the side of her head. “All that climbing experience paid off. But never mind that. Look around you. This isn’t a cave. It’s a burial chamber. Or at least, the entrance to one.”
“Zhou Chu’s tomb?” Hu Yang asked.
Junjun shrugged. “Possibly. I haven’t found any definitive proof. This passage seems to be just an antechamber. I’ve looked everywhere, and besides this chain, there’s nothing.”
I looked from the broken chain to the impossible darkness above. An idea, insane and terrifying, began to form in my mind.
“Let’s climb it,” I said. “Let’s see where it leads.”