fiction - brigits_flame - passage

[hwango]

Dr. Carson smiled contentedly as he carefully brushed away the accumulated dust of ages. It was the sort of activity that struck others as unbearably tedious, but Dr. Carson found it soothing. It demonstrated the value of patience and care. This was what archaeology was meant to be. Quiet. Calm. Peaceful.

"Ted, I think I've found a secret passage!" Oswald shouted, shattering the moment.

More than anything, Dr. Carson wanted to pretend that he hadn't heard that. Then he wanted to pretend that he didn't hear the unmistakable sound of stone scraping against stone, and the creak of ancient clockwork that somehow always seemed to be in perfect repair. Damn those smart-ass lost civilizations and their superlative craftsmanship.

"There's a tunnel!"

Dr. Carson slowly put down his brush, stood, and turned to look. Indeed, Oswald was standing in front of a square of abyssal darkness where there used to be a rather nice piece of statuary.

"Come on Ted, let's see what's down there!"

"No."

"But there might be all sorts of ancient artifacts!"

Dr. Carson gestured at the walls and floors around them. "Oswald, we are surrounded by ancient artifacts. I have, in fact, been carefully removing the dust from an urn which appears to depict –"

Oswald waved his hand dismissively. "Yes, yes, it's a lovely urn. But a secret tunnel! Think what they might have hidden down there!"

"You mean like tripwires and pressure plates that trigger swinging blades and avalanches of falling rocks?"

"Pfaw," Oswald said, and Dr. Carson noted that with that single syllable it wasn't so much that Oswald was disagreeing with him, but merely suggesting that such things were beneath his concern.

"Seriously, Oswald, I expect that anything down there is something that they really didn't want anyone poking at. That tends to mean booby traps, and that means we should wait for a full team to come in with better light and carefully examine…"

Oswald was ostentatiously stifling an artificial yawn and staring at his wrist.

"Oswald, I'm not going."

"Of course you are, Ted. You know for a fact that I'm going, and you're too good a friend to let me go by myself. I don't even know why you're bothering to argue with me."

"I hate you so much."

"Excellent! Grab that lamp, would you?"

Hating himself even more than he claimed to hate Oswald, Dr. Carson did as he was asked.

"If we die down here, I'm going to kill you," Dr. Carson said.

"That seems reasonable," Oswald said.

The truth was, Dr. Carson really was curious about the tunnel. He just tended to be more cautious than his colleague. Of course, almost everyone was more cautious than Oswald, a man who had, in total seriousness, been heard to say "it will be fine - only one of the support beams is on fire."

Naturally, Oswald was the first of the pair to step into the opening. He had a lamp of his own in one hand, and in the other he carried an elephant gun, because a lack of caution does not necessarily indicate a lack of preparedness. Sometimes booby traps weren't the only things waiting for them in long-buried places.

The tunnel was narrow enough that Oswald and Dr. Carson would have had trouble exchanging places, and the ceiling so low that both of them had to stoop a bit as they walked. The walls were made of featureless, light gray stone. It was difficult to say whether it was more boring than it was uncomfortable, or if the reverse was true. Dr. Carson tried to take solace in the fact that at least "boring" meant that they weren't on fire or being buried under tons of falling rock. Yet.

"I'll give this another twenty feet, and then I'm going back to my urn," said Dr. Carson.

"Nonsense – you're the one always advocating patience."

"Since when do you pay any attention to what I say?"

"I'm sure it will get more interesting," Oswald said, and while he was speaking Dr. Carson almost didn't hear the click of the pressure plate.

"Oswald, stop!" he shouted, even as he realized it was almost certainly too late. Indeed, an instant later he heard that the sound of grinding stone was back. He twisted around to look behind them, and saw that the entrance was slowly disappearing.

"Run!" each of them shouted to the other, and then took each other's advice.

Dr. Carson grazed his head on the roof unexpectedly about the same time that he saw a chunk of stone fall from the ceiling up ahead.

"The ceiling is collapsing too?!" he shouted in disbelief. "Surely that's overkill!"

"I hear rushing water!" Oswald said from a few feet behind him.

"Oh, come on!" Dr. Carson said. "This is ridiculous!"

Dr. Carson threw himself the last few feet out of the tunnel, and saw Oswald stumble out next to him seconds later. Both men looked back in time to see a huge metal gear come crashing through the ceiling and get caught in the closing doorway. A small trickle of water slopped out onto the floor.

"You know, I don’t think that was supposed to happen," said Oswald.

"I think you're right. Imagine that; for once, the unspeakably old mechanism that has had no regular maintenance actually broke. Kind of makes you question everything, doesn't it? It would be like finding a snake pit full of nothing but dead snakes."

"It's certainly a new experience," Oswald said. Dr. Carson picked himself up off the floor and took a few unsteady steps away. "Where are you going?

"Back to my urn. It, at least, isn't broken. Apparently these people made better pottery than they did clockwork."

"Plus it probably won't try to kill you," Oswald said.

"Indeed," said Dr. Carson as he resumed clearing away dust.

It would be another hour before he finally picked it up and discovered that there was a tripwire affixed to the bottom.

Comments

[cedarwolfsinger.livejournal.com]

These are the guys we've seen before, right? Have I ever told you how much I love these guys? Great story, these are always great send-ups of Action-adventure films...

[hwango.livejournal.com]

Ooh, that's cool that they were memorable! Yes, I made these two up for Digging week and then wrote about them again in Seed week. I thought "secret passage" and "passage of time" would be fun interpretations for the prompt, and both of those fit perfectly with my unfortunate archaeologists, and so here they are again. = )