CHILDREN OF ANZULLA
EXCERPT
CHAPTER ONE
Present Day
South Africa
With a disorienting jolt, the neeb-neeb-neeb of my alarm ripped me from my dreams. Holy shit! I startled awake and jumped to get ready. “The door!” I must find the door or lose all my grandfather’s credibility. “Today’s our last day,” I groaned out loud.
Tobias reprimanded me last night. He told me to stop searching and start packing up today. So, I set my alarm extra early to sneak back inside the caves. It was now two hours after midnight, still dark outside, and the stifling hot January night air had just cooled down before the sun began to bake the caravan into a furnace once more.
The summer chorus of insects that usually soothed me pushed me to move faster. Each irritating, repetitive krrrrr-krrrrr-krrrrr the insects produced outside sounded like a persistent tick-tick-tick as I rushed to beat the clock. It grated on my nerves, so I threw my favorite long-sleeve shirt over my head, popped my earbuds in, and pressed play on my phone. The rhythmic thump-thump-thump of Armin van Buuren’s latest song started and instantly lowered my anxiety while lifting my mood. I switched on the small gas stove to boil some water, then got dressed, brushed my teeth, skipped shaving, and put on my boots. For breakfast, I made myself an extra sweet cup of coffee, grabbed a cold vetkoek, smeared it thick with Marmite, and left to greet my day. We had run out of time, with the thunderstorms bringing six hundred and fifty millimeters of rain that halted my operation last week. So, yes, I wanted to go inside one last time.
No camp lights in sight. No one was up yet. Good. When I reached the entrance to the cave, I gulped the last of my coffee, shoved the whole vetkoek into my mouth, and started to put on my Gonzo Guano seat harness. My denim shorts were still damp in the crotch. Typically, they dry overnight, but I’d only managed two hours of sleep. A little chafing and heat rash in the groin were the least of my concerns today. We’d been digging in this area for two years with no results. Sweet blue fuck all. Sure, there were plenty of skulls and bones from what they claimed was a graveyard, but not what we were searching for.
First of all, I was a speleologist, a cave archaeologist, but my field of interest has taken a detour I didn’t like to brag about. Those who knew what I was looking for believed me, and those who don’t…Well, I knew they would laugh, and that was why I would never trust or share my secrets with them. Let them be content with their three hundred fifty-five-thousand-year-old Homo naledi. The species name, naledi in Sesotho, meant star, hence the Rising Star Cave system.
It was also where the Stardoor was, according to my grandfather’s map. I believed the door opened into another time or reality. It had to be there!
I’d also discovered evidence of a massive global fire that scorched the Earth’s surface around twenty thousand years ago. This fire was likely triggered by an EMP storm, leading to worldwide lightning storms that devastated the grasslands and transformed the crust into rivers of molten rock, shaping the surface into what we see it today. We know there are ancient civilizations that date back much further than Homo naledi. Tobias and I had scanned this belt of fifteen cave systems that form the Cradle of Mankind. Surely the entrance they used should be there as well. If I could find that entrance, I could demonstrate that modern humans and other ancient advanced species, like winged creatures, occupied that area for centuries before Homo naledi left their sick there. I believed that was not a burial place but rather the threshold to the home of advanced races. They brought their sick and dying because they knew someone on the other side could heal them or, better yet, transport them to another world or time. All I needed to do was find that damned door.
I traced my fingers over the geometric shapes discovered in 2023. They matched the cuneiform wall etchings my great-grandfather transcribed in 1922, over a century ago. Those patterns of squares, triangles, crosses, and ladder shapes were also found deeper within this cave system.
Shaking my head, I clucked my tongue and scanned the wall by moving from side to side as I slowly descended into the tight space. The low hum of a male voice and flickering light caught my attention, prompting me to look up. Someone was waving a torch down the shaft. I removed my earbuds and, yes, damn it, Tobias was calling me from above.
“Draxton, do you want to take a break? You’ve been gnashing your teeth and talking to yourself for the past hour, and I’m sick of listening to you.”
“Fuck off!” I shouted, but he didn’t respond. I couldn’t see him, but I could tell from the volume of his voice how far above me he was. “So, you’ve decided to get up early, too?”
“Yes, I knew you would pull a trick like this. It’s our last day. Our approval expires at midnight.”
Our voices echoed up and down the tunnels. I had to wait a moment for it to die down before speaking again. “I know! Now kindly fuck off and go get us that extension.” I adjusted myself so I could slide back and look up. The familiar warm feeling of seeing my best friend made me smile.
He waved his hands and pointed. “I’m not going back into Johannesburg. I’ve been to the geosciences offices every bloody day for the last week. The potholes alone are enough of a deterrent. Accept it, the permit will not get renewed. It’s a waste of time. I’d rather use the time to take as many scans as possible. You might get lucky. Why don’t you go?”
Frustration ignited that short fuse in me. “Damnit, Tobias!” I lifted my arms and then slipped my whole body out of the narrow crack. “Okay, okay! I’m not wasting time arguing. Come down and make yourself useful. I will fucking go!” I said, irritated. “It took those wannabe archeologists months to remove those bones, and now that we have access, our permit is expiring—their precious skeletons and stupid red tape. I know the door is here. I fucking know it!” I murmured to myself, not to Tobias, because he’d heard it all before. Several times a day. I waved my arm up and down, our signal for “stand ready, I’m coming up.”
“If it were here, we would have found it by now. We may have overlooked it and need to start over from the beginning.” Tobias stood with his hands on his hips, waiting for me.
“How can we do that if we’re not allowed to search?” I reattached another cable I had used earlier to descend, then swung back, found my footing, and wiped my brow with the back of my hand. Tobias cranked the wheel to hoist me up. My back was killing me, and Tobias was right. We needed a miracle. I’ve been saying that for two years, and nothing has changed. I’d found one clue on the map with hidden text that pinpointed the Cradle of Mankind, in South Africa.
“I can feel it. We are close. So, so very close.” When I stepped out of the chamber, Tobias pushed me to the side so I could stand next to him. He handed me the remote. I pressed the button to shorten the cable, then unclipped it. Tobias stood there, arms folded, shaking his head at me. I made sure the light from my helmet blinded him because I was spiteful and passive-aggressive like that. Once I’d climbed out of my harness, I tossed it and the tools still attached to it onto our worktable, removed my shirt to wring out the sweat, and walked over to a trough of fresh rainwater where I scooped a cup and drank the refreshing liquid. After drinking three more cups, I tipped one over my head to wash the dust and sweat off my body. The muscles in my back rippled and contracted as I cooled, and I let out a cry of frustration.
“I’m going to pack up,” Tobias said.
“Absolutely not. I’ll go and demand an extension myself. Please work the chimney at level WU1485. Push a camera down that groove we identified in the photos last night. It’s not just a crack. I’m telling you, it’s too perfectly long to be merely a crack. Break it open if you need to. Please, do that for me. If I’m denied today, at least we’ll have those photos to work with until we can get permission to go back inside.”
“Draxton, we’ve worked that chamber many times before, and I assure you it’s only a crack. It’s too narrow for anything except maybe an ant or a spider carrying an ant in there. I’m one hundred percent sure the door isn’t there, not the house-sized one you described,” Tobias said, and I grunted a warning not to patronize me today.
He sighed. “I will indulge you. I’ll go deeper and take more lateral scans. National Geographic withdrew its funding, and the university instructed its researchers to cease excavating the site. They are also packing today. I’ll ask them to leave the cameras so I can do the scans until you return.”
I pointed deeper into the cave. “That’s all I ask. The cables are still in place.” I made air quotes. “They like you. Beg them to forget about them, at least until the day after tomorrow, for us. Tell them there’s a chance we might get an extension and that I’m personally going into the city. Tell them to come pick up their brushes and toothpicks, but to please leave the oxygen and the three-mile fiber optic cable for us.”
I pointed in the direction of the camp. “Those one thousand five hundred fifty bones, which they call a treasure trove, have now suddenly made this a graveyard and a holy place. This is about money. The government and university claim ownership, and entrance is now granted by renewal of permits. Since they found what they found, they don’t even want to leave the scraps for us. No, they want money. That’s the only language these officials understand. I’m not concerned with bones, Tobias.”
“You need to explain to them why we’re here and that we’re seeking much more than bones or fossils. Describe why the bones are here, why this appears to be a graveyard, and why we assert that it is not. Naledi and the sapien primitives knew that this door opened to another plane,” Tobias said.
A feeling of frustration clawed and gnawed at my insides. I sighed. “Alright, I’ll tell them about the tomb discovered in 1922, along with the cuneiform inscriptions my great-grandfather found, which serve as the first tangible evidence of an ancient kingdom thought to have existed thousands of years ago. I’ll bring my great-grandfather’s map to show them. I’m willing to share all my family’s research if we can keep working in this cave system. They will see the texts and schematics revealing evidence of an ancient race, the naledi, utilizing the door to another world.”
“Yes, tell them to look closer at the rock carvings.”
“I will.” I scratched my head. “They could argue that divine beings enter through a door in the sky.” I chewed the inside of my lip.
“No, they won’t. I promise you, one look at your map and they’ll be speechless. Go to Professor Kilroy first. He’s gay.”
“Oh my God, Tobias! You want me to sell myself out!”
“Yup, he’ll either eat it up or toss you out.”
“You mean eat me out.” I laughed, and Tobias chimed in.
Chuckling, he pointed a finger at me. “Yes, that too. But I agree, if you had a suitcase full of gold, it would quickly change their minds.”
I shook my head slyly. “I don’t have a suitcase of gold, but I have my family’s research. If I show the university just a glimpse, they’ll be all over this. The risk is that they might grant us digging rights, or will they boot us out and continue the search themselves.”
“I told you, there’s at least one gay man. I know how much you like a man in a suit. Start with Professor Kilroy. Use everything in your arsenal to sway him, and then the others will be falling over themselves to extend our excavations.”
Waving my finger and smiling, I said, “Tobias, you may have a point. I’ll do that if I think they’re interested.” I adjusted my shorts, which had been riding up my backside while I sat in the harness.
Tobias shook his head at me. “I will take pictures from every angle of that crack in the rock,” he retorted while climbing into his gear. I couldn’t let that opening slip by.
“You could take pictures of my crack, too, but I don’t have time.” Fist high for the victory of the winning last word, I shouted, “I’ll be back in four hours, with the extension. I will. I promise.”
Tobias laughed and said over his shoulder, “I love you!”
“Love you too!” I shouted. I didn’t romantically love Tobias. He was becoming my best friend, even though he was just a business partner and mouthpiece for me.