The Lucifer Gospel Read Online Free PDF Page A

turned back that way. She knew Hilts had been heading toward the wider area of old military surplus. If she hurried she would probably be able to catch up. She pelted through the opening and then pulled up short. A man stood before her, dressed in a white jelabia and a dark, pin-striped suit jacket. His feet were bare and his head was wrapped in a loose, filthy turban.
    He looked as though he was in his forties, slope-shouldered and big-chested. His eyes were yellow green and sunk deep under heavy brows, his nose large, flattened and twisted from several obvious breaks, his upper lip and chin covered by a graying beard. Like everything else in the City of the Dead, he was covered in a thin film of dust.
    In one large hand he held a huge leaf-shaped sword, the blade pitted with rust, the edge hard and shining from a recent sharpening. He raised the machete-like blade and opened his mouth wide, making a gargling, growling sound, revealing that he had no tongue within his black, stained mouth.
    For a frozen instant Finn stood stock-still, simply staring. She felt a panic-stricken laugh burst from her lips and for a second all she could think about was the scene in the Indiana Jones film where Harrison Ford faced a giant Egyptian swordsman of his own. It was ridiculous, but it was horribly real. She wasn’t Indiana Jones and she had no big horse pistol to shoot down the grotesque creature swinging the blade in her direction. The man grunted a second time and then surged forward. Finn spun on her heels and ran.
    Racing back out of the narrow alley, she swung instinctively to the left, running beside the crumbling brick wall, then turned the corner to the right and ran on, hearing the pounding feet of her terrifying pursuer close behind. She scanned the way ahead. She was in a small open space surrounded by the walls of large stone mausoleums, doors and windows heavily grated against any intrusion.
    In the square were a dozen stone slabs marking simpler burial plots. A cooking fire burned on one of them, a pot hanging by a metal hook above the embers. Finn ran forward into the middle of the empty courtyard, jumped up on the slab, and spun toward the fire.
    Half turning, she grabbed the steaming pot by the handle and swung it backward, kicking through the hot coals and spreading them all over the slab. The iron pot of
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splashed across the big man’s face, momentarily blinding him in a mess of boiling-hot slushy rice and lentils.
    He yelled and pawed at his face with his free hand and jumped onto the stone slab as Finn slipped, then fell, rolling into the dirt. The man raised the machete and stepped forward, the skin of his bare feet treading on a spray of white coals. He howled and jerked back, falling sideways into the remains of the fire. Finn regained her feet and kept on running, not daring to look back to see what damage she had done.
    She threw herself into a narrow crack between two of the mausoleums and came out into a small alley. Directly in front of her she saw an open doorway, a cool dark haven from the man behind her. She ran into the modest death house. Laid out on the bare earth floor, only half covered by dust and dirt, were three skeletons in a neat row, feet all pointing in one direction, probably the east, although Finn no longer had any idea which way was which.
    It looked as though someone had been to the simple grave site recently. There were spade marks in the dirt, as though someone had been excavating. There was no archaeology going on here though; if the skeletons had been disinterred it was because the living wanted to move into the rough shelter of the simple one-room building.
    There was a second opening on the other side of the room, and stepping over the skeletons in the dirt, Finn exited into a broad enclosure of two or three dozen graves out in the open with rows of smaller chambers on either side and the high wall of what Finn took to be a mosque at the far end. There were picks and