After several minutes, he reached the spike pit, now merely a rectangular hole in the middle of the floor. He could see large, metal stakes protruding, point upward, in orderly rows from the ground. He shone his torch into the pit and could just barely make out several smaller shadows on the bottom. Those had to be the remains of poisonous snakes which had been placed there millennia ago to deal with any potential survivors of the spikes.

  No time to dawdle, Simon reminded himself, they could notice your disappearance any second.

  On either side of the pit, a narrow ledge ran across to the other side, snug against the wall, and Simon moved along its edge carefully, skirting the gaping hole. He came to a halt on the opposite side, where there was a rough stone wall impeding his path, as he had known there would be. Carefully, he traced his fingertips over the nook on his right, just as his grandfather's notes told him to, and found the hidden lever after several tries. His fingers hooked around the mechanism, Simon pulled gingerly, half afraid that it would no longer work after all those years of disuse.

  A thrill of excitement rushed through him as a low, grinding sound emerged from the wall, which sled aside to the left. Simon waited until the fissure was big enough to slip through, then sealed the door shut again from the other side. There was no need to leave his friends from the expedition a clue as to where he had gone. No doubt, they would first look outside and disregard Morgan's suggestions that, if Simon had gone anywhere, it would have been further in. Fuelled by slight anger that he had allowed his cousin to guess what he was about to do in the first place and fear that his grand goal might be taken from him if his disappearance was discovered, Simon sped his steps.

  Inside the dark corridor, everything looked the same in the wide beam of his torch: Cold limestone walls on either side, trickles of sand where the edge of them met the ceiling, and a dusty old silence, interrupted only by the hollow echo of his footsteps. At some point during his journey, he was very nearly certain that this corridor in fact was endless; every part of it looked like the next, allowing his mind to stray, to wander and form the first doubts. What if he did not manage to find the chamber after all, despite his careful plans and calculations? What if he wandered around this maze forever, or until he died of hunger and thirst? And what if his torch ran low on battery before he was back outside? He wouldn't be able to see a thing without light in here, and his neglect to think of bringing a spare set of batteries suddenly seemed like a great lapse in his elaborate plan. What if the light went out suddenly, like right now, and he had no more way of telling which direction was right and left, up and down? He could still go back to his team if he turned around now, without them ever knowing he had vanished in the first place... As his brain raced, he meant to see the torchlight flickering already.

  Simon set his jaw angrily: He hadn't come this far just to become scared of his own shadow and a bit of swirling dust. Returning empty-handed was not an option either, for he didn't think he could stand the smug look on Morgan's face if the boy ever found out. He laughed out loud at his foolishness instead, but stopped rather abruptly when his voice was thrown back and bounced around the wide corridor with the eerie, bone-chilling quality of a witch's cackle. After the echo had finally faded, he decided to keep his mouth shut from now on. Touching the hourglass pendant on his chest quickly for reassurance, he moved on more quietly than before, for the echo had left a strange, prickling feeling in the back of his neck. Almost too late, his ears registered the soft click behind him, where a stone on which he had trod sunk into the ground as his weight was removed. Next moment, there was movement in the corner of his eyes, and Simon hurled himself face-down onto the cold floor, just in time as something large and heavy fell from the ceiling with a violent whoosh.

  Breathing heavily, heart thudding loudly in his ears, Simon picked himself and his torch (which he had dropped with a yelp of surprise) up again and directed the thankfully still-working beam of it first overhead and then behind him. A square, black hole had opened in the ceiling above him, and out of it had fallen a great, barbed, lethal-looking metal log on a rusty, rattling chain. As he watched, the chain was hauled back in, retracting with the horrible grinding noise of metal rubbing against metal as the deadly log was pulled back up into the hole by the mechanism.

  Simon suppressed a shudder, which had nothing to do with the continuous, chilly draught. The endless, plain corridor, the mundane familiarity of his surroundings after he had walked for several minutes, had dulled his senses the way a long tunnel on a motorway might have. He needed to refocus, find something to occupy his mind with. He could afford injury here in the depths of the pyramid just as little as he could afford losing his torch. If he got hurt, no one would find him until it was too late, that much he made sure of when he had closed the concealed door earlier.

  Simon stopped to consult his hand-drawn map by the shine of his torch. If there were seven traps into the heart of the pyramid and the spike trap was the first of the long chain of trials, the lethal log had to be the second, which meant that there were still...

  Five to go, Simon thought as he proceeded down the corridor, much more alert to his surroundings now.

  At last, the monotonous corridor ended, and Simon found himself standing in the middle of the first cross-section of what was, on his grandfather's map, a great labyrinth. With the arrival at the junction came a faint, whispering noise that seemed to come from within the depths of the pyramid. At the sound, Simon jumped and nearly dropped his torch for the second time. He couldn't lay a finger on it, but the hissing whisper, a sound which closely resembled that of a leaking pipe, sent a very cold shiver down his back indeed. His nerves on edge, Simon turned in a slow circle, lighting out the junction and all four paths that led away from it.

  “Hello?” he asked into the semi-darkness, feeling rather stupid. He hadn't really expected an answer and was, therefore, not surprise when none came. Indeed, he thought that it might have given him a heart attack had a voice answered from the shadows...

  “Must have been a draught...” Simon muttered to himself, then closed his mouth firmly again.

  He moved back into the center the junction and froze; each of the corridors from which he could choose looked exactly the same. Worse, there was no telling which direction he had come from either, nor were there any means to determine which of the paths he was supposed to proceed in.

  All in all, having not thought to bring a compass either, Simon found that he was quite lost. More than that, even. He was, in fact, and for all the purpose of the word, completely and utterly stuck.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  Keeping a wary eye on his torch in case it went out, the other on his environment, Simon considered his two only options: He could try to somehow puzzle out the way back as quickly as possible and henceforth live with the shame of his defeat; or he could proceed onward randomly (which would possibly get him even deeper into the maze), and hope he would somehow find the way out later.

  He was certain that he wasn't going to let this defeat him. He had come too far already. To aide his decision, Simon took his bag from his shoulder and shook it, eliciting a confident, sloshing noise from his water bottle. If thought about properly, it wasn't really that difficult a choice, considering he would rather starve to death here than admit to failure and, as long as he had water, there was still a chance he would see daylight again at some point.

  His mind set, Simon turned into a random corridor, which ended at a full stop after several minutes of walking and forced him to backtrack the way he had come to find the cross-section again. This, however, as it soon became evident, was impossible, for the junction seemed to have vanished.

  He should really have brought a compass, thought Simon frustratedly, the first signs of panic (a tingling in his extremities, sweaty palms) making themselves felt.

  But there had been too much else on his mind that morning, when he had packed his bag with the intention of keeping it light and retentive enough to be filled with proof of the slumbering treasure later. Besides, even now he wasn't sure it would have worked inside the pyramid anyway. Unwilling to admit defeat, Simon wandered on, keeping one hand on the right wall at all times, and without any sense of where he was going or where he had come from.

  Crack.

  Something had crunched nastily beneath his boots, but he dared not to shine his torch onto it in case it once had been human.

  He walked for what seemed like hours before the way parted again, the narrow corridors of the maze giving way to a new sight. An intricate doorway covered in faded hieroglyphs, from which the colour had long since gone and only traces of gold were still visible, rose up before him.

  Delightedly, Simon realized that he must have unwittingly found the very room he had been headed to in the first place, for what were the odds the decorations (which so differed from the rest of the dreary labyrinth) had been placed there randomly? His spirits in a new high, Simon peered into the dark space behind, whose outline he could only guess at beyond the frame of the door.

  The space appeared to be a small chamber, only just wider than the first corridor. Simon consulted his map and realized that, if this was the correct exit from the maze, getting lost had enabled him to skip two traps on the way.

  Three more to go, he thought in a moment of euphoria.

  The chamber seemed empty at first glance, but when Simon lit his torch inside, he immediately recoiled with horror. On a raised platform in the middle of the chamber stood an altar, on top of it the impaled remains of something dark, skeletal, and human-shaped. Perhaps this had one been a place of sacrifice to the gods, an antechamber built as the last room before the sarcophagus.

  Simon did not take his eyes off the revolting sight as he forced himself to step into the chamber, for there was no way around it. If he wanted his reward, he would have to put aside his irrational fear, see his plan through, and cross this damned antechamber. Really, the bony body wasn't even the first of its kind the archaeologist had seen anyway...

  Simon shone his torch into every corner of the chamber, then took a few tentative steps toward its center. A moment later, he jumped backward violently as something crunched nastily under the soles of his shoes. Looking around, he became aware that the altar was buried to its socket in a mass of bones. And not just any bones, Simon discovered with a feeling of nausea rising like bile in his throat. Human bones, some of them ground to fine powder, others still intact and sticking out in a dirty, greyish sort of white. Every inch of the floor was covered in them, and Simon fought a powerful urge to retch.

  But he had to continue... He had to see this through. Biting his tongue in an effort not to scream with terror, Simon made a beeline through the chamber, hopping and jumping as fast as he could, as if he were playing some sort of perverse version of The Floor Is Lava.

  Crunch! Crunch! Crunch! The noise followed his progress through the chamber. He tried to ignore it, thinking something very bad must have happened here, but, on the bright side, whatever had killed those people must have been out of order for several millennia. In any case, he was glad that he had, so far, been spared the same horror of this particular trap. All the way to the other side, however, he could not help fight a different kind of fear, the brain-jamming, paralysing kind. Who was to say those bony white arms, fingers and jaws would not suddenly come alive and snap and grab for his ankles? Simon's flesh crawled at the thought, his heart throbbing loudly in his ears, every last of his sandy blond hair standing on end.

  He could almost hear the light, hollow fingers scurrying and clattering across the stone ground, feel the brittle grip of skeletal hands on his skin. He was almost in tears with fear when he reached the center, where he caught a glimpse of a nasty fracture on the impaled bone figure's (which, upon reflection, might have been a warning sign) protruding spine. He touched the hourglass pendant again in an effort to soothe his mind. As long as he was cautious nothing bad would happen to him.

  He took another step forward. A harsh splintering noise from behind, not unlike glass breaking, ruptured the silence of the awful chamber and sent him flying to the other end in terror, where he stood motionless and panting. Somewhere behind him, something was moving. He could hear it scuttle across the hard floor, but he didn't dare to look... but he had to look, he needed to know… He wheeled around before he had made up his mind, the beam of light from his torch, clutched tightly in his sweaty palms, illuminating a strip of floor close to the entrance; something was moving there, sideways, like some foul sort of crab...

  Daring not to think, he squinted closely into the corner, while his brain screamed at him to run. A cluster of bony remains closest to the doorway had come loose from the others, and one dismembered arm was scurrying over the ground there, its bony fingers reading the cool stone underneath.

  Simon's already winded brain reeled with fright, but before he could as much as stare in horror, the crab-like motion of the skeletal digits came to a halt. What was this? Had whatever was moving the bones faded with time? Had the mechanism failed after all those years of being buried under the weight of the lives if had claimed? Just as he was about to take a deep breath, the movement started up again, but now he could finally see what had elicited it.

  The doorway at the entrance was sealing itself, a stretch of wall pushing toward the other side, and the skeletal arm had been caught in the motion. Now that it was free, the wall slid shut with the same, low grinding noise as the others, meeting the opposite side of the wall, into which it blended seamlessly, with horrifying finality, leaving no sign but the knowledge of it that it had ever been there in first place.

  Simon took a deep, steadying breath. He couldn't remember there being any indication of another hidden lever at this point on his grandfather's map (a quick look at the papyrus confirmed this), which meant there was only one way now, which was ahead. Only once he had reached the heart of the pyramid's secret chamber would he be able to get back outside through its top.