Tom Knox - Bible of the Dead

Tom Knox is the pseudonym of the author Sean Thomas. Born in England, he has travelled the world writing for many different newspapers and magazines, including The Times, the Guardian, and the Daily Mail. His first thriller was translated into twenty-two languages; he also writes on art, politics, and ancient history. He lives in London.

For more information visit www.tomknoxbooks.com

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Thanks are due to the many authors I have read, over the years, in the various subjects pertaining to the themes of this novel. In particular I owe a huge debt to Karen Armstrong, Nic Dunlop, Dith Pran, Haing Ngor, David Lewis Williams, Jean Guillaine and Jean Zammit, Steven A. Leblanc, Roland Neveu, Dave Grossman, Jean Clottes, Robert Wright, Jon Swain, Philip Short, Steven Pinker and dozens of others.

My great friends and colleagues Peter Dench and Dan White, brilliant photographers both, have always been ready to tell me over a warm beer in London, or a cold beer in Bangkok just how wrong I am about almost everything. Without them, this book wouldnt exist in any sensible form. I am similarly indebted to my editors Jane Johnson, Joy Chamberlain and Josh Kendall, and also to Coralie Saint-Genis.

Above all, I am grateful to the many people who helped with my more difficult research in China, Cambodia and Laos.

Ill not forget the Hmong family who helped me as much as I helped them, when we were all stuck in the Laotian jungle one long muddy night. And thanks to Paksan for not being embarrassed when I nearly blubbed at the beauty of the snow mountains near Zhongdian. And I owe a debt of gratitude to the Lozre tourist authorities in France, and the guide who showed me around miraculous Gargas cave on that sunny day in late September.

The Genesis Secret

The Marks of Cain

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The cave was dark. And cold. Always cold. Even though the last hot autumn sun of the Cevennes was blazing outside, as soon as Julia made that descent, down the metal ladder, into the Cavern of the Swelling, the cold grasped at her: like she was entering a neglected orphanage, full of clammy and demanding hands.

Why was she always unnerved by the initial descent? Surely she should have become accustomed to it by now? All summer she had been doing this: doing her job, digging and scraping in the dank limestone cave systems beneath the Cham des Bondons. Yet the first moment of the working day never got any easier.

As Julia reached the bottom of the ladder she paused. Thinking of that ceaseless cold. Maybe the cave itself was not to blame, maybe it was the entire region: the frigid Lozre.

This remote departement in the forgotten heart of France was beautiful enough. Yet this beauty was married to a chilling emptiness. The departement had been depopulating for centuries. The highest limestone steppe of all, the Causse Mejean, just west of the Cham, was said to be the single most deserted part of France: a great plateau of rock with just a few shepherds remaining. Everyone else had gone. Everything else had gone. There were no railways in Lozre, theyd closed years ago. The nearest airport was way north, or way south. As for the autoroute, that swept past the entire region with imperial disdain: escaping altogether, at the great Millau viaduct, with a brave and enormous vault.

Like it couldnt wait to get away.

Was there any reason to linger? The only attraction to detain tourists was the legend of a werewolf on the Margeride the Bte de Gevaudan; that, and the Cham des Bondons itself.

And the ancient standing stones, that comprised the Cham des Bondons, were truly extraordinary, dozens of grey monoliths, standing alone and apart, on every cliff and promontory, like frozen warriors frowning down in judgement: at the dark pineforests of the Cevennes.

Yet even the stones were deserted. Untouristed. Neglected. And now only the winds remained, the winds and the wild horses, feeding on the feather-grass.

Julia reached up, switched on the torch of her headband, and crouched, reaching through the crowding gloom to her tool-roll, left there on the cave floor, from yesterday.

She knelt and unvelcrod the plastic and laid it all out, exposing the trowels and eyeglass, the brushes and plumb-lines. The tool-roll was a gift from her devoted yet sighing parents in Ontario. The tiny family she had left behind.

The wind whistled outside, fluting across the cave opening: like a child blowing air over a bottleneck. The sound was plangent and sad. Julia picked up her tool-roll and crawled further, painfully barking her shin against rock despite the protection of her soft neoprene kneepads. A few minutes later she halted under a limestone ceiling barely a metre high. Here was her patch. It looked forlorn.

She was used to working down here in the Cave of the Swelling, with her colleagues Kanya and Alex and Annika. But in recent days the little platoon had dwindled: Kanya had gone home to California, finishing the digging season a week early. Alex was elsewhere, working in a cave along the plateau, with the rest of the team. And Annika, her good friend Annika, she was nursing a cold, in her little cottage in the deserted village of Vayssiere, high on the Cham.

But at least, thought Julia, adjusting the beam of her LED headlamp, at least she was still doing proper archaeology. And she only had one more week to make the most of this disappointing season. One more week to find something, to justify her sabbatical, to justify all the time and money spent here. They had a week left. One last week of the season. And then, then what?

The vision of a winter in London, and many winters after that, teaching yawning eighteen-year-olds, was a drag. Julia cursed her meandering mind, and concentrated on her work. Just do it. Even if she knew she wasnt going to find anything more than a broken bonepin, she also knew she was lucky to be here at all. And the sheer metronomic rhythm of her archaeology was, as always, rather soothing: brush and trowel and sieve, trowel and tweezer and sieve.

The tinkle of her metal tools echoed down the empty cavern.

Julia tried not to think of her loneliness. What if some mad shepherd came down here and raped her? In speleology, no one can hear you scream. She smiled inwardly, at her own fears. Shed gut the guy with her six inch survey peg. Just let him try it.

The hour passed. She bent to her task. Trowel and sift. Trowel and sift and scrape.

She brushed, and troweled. And paused. Feeling her own heart. Beating.

An eye stared back at her.

Julia nearly dropped her brush.

A distinctive white circlet of bone was visible through the black soil, like a crescent moon on a very dark night.