TOM KNOX Bible of the Dead This book is dedicated to the Tibetan villagers of Balagezong, Yunnan, southwest China. A darkness will settle on the people of Cambodia. There will be houses but no people in them, roads but no travellers; the land will be ruled by barbarians with no religion; blood will run so deep as to touch the belly of the elephant. Only the deaf and the mute will survive. Ancient Cambodian Prophecy Contents Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33 Chapter 34 Chapter 35 Chapter 36 Chapter 37 Chapter 38 Chapter 39 Chapter 40 Chapter 41 Chapter 42 Chapter 43 Chapter 44 Chapter 45 Chapter 46 Chapter 47 Chapter 48 Chapter 49 Chapter 50
Acknowledgments
About the Author By Tom Knox Copyright About the Publisher Bible of the Dead is a work of fiction. However, it draws on many genuine archaeological, historical and cultural sources. In particular: The Plain of Jars is an ancient site in remote central Laos, Southeast Asia. It comprises hundreds of large stone vessels, maybe two thousand years old, randomly scattered across the meadows and fields of a limestone plateau. No one knows who made the jars, or why, or how. Burned remains of humans have been found nearby. In the late nineteenth century prehistorians working in Lozère, in southern France, discovered a series of skeletons in the cave systems of the region. These human remains exhibited curious and troubling wounds. In 1923 Joseph Stalin asked a team of French scientists to examine a peculiar kind of crossbreeding, with an eye to creating a more perfect soldier. The laboratory constructed for these experiments still functions today, in Abkhazia, by the Black Sea. Chapter 1 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 Lozère. 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 Lozère, they’d 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 couldn’t 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 Bête 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 unvelcro’d 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 
