Cole jerked his hand back but before he could step away from the wall, there was a grinding screech from behind and he jolted forward, banging his forehead.
"Tanya!" He choked, his mouth filling with dust. He felt the slow, inexorable pressure of the chamber's back wall closing in from behind. He reached both arms up, palms flat against the stone in front of him, and pushed with all his might.
"Dad! Dad!" He could barely hear Tanya's panicked shouts over the rumble of the stone as he was pressed more firmly between the chamber walls. He had to turn his head sideways to fit or it would burst. He was certain to be crushed into powder.
And then... as suddenly as it started, it stopped. He froze - not that he had much choice.
The stone pressed in on him. He had no way of moving his arms or legs out of plane with his torso, either forward or back. There must have been less than a foot of space between the back and front walls that were compacting him. He was Han Solo in the carbon freezing chamber, right down to the contorted expression on his face. Comical - if it wasn't also likely to be fatal.
"Dad! Oh my god dad! I'm here!" Tanya's voice was faint, muffled by six inches of stone.
Cole could hear his daughter scrabbling against the wall behind him. He took a breath to call out to her and sucked in a lungful of 3000-year old dust, triggering a bout of painful coughing. His chest heaved against the wall.
"Dad, oh, thank god! I can hear you! Dad! Can you hear me?"
"Yes," he finally managed to sputter. "Yes, Tanya. Oh Jesus. Tanya, I'm trapped. Are you ok?"
"Yes! I'm ok dad. Can you move? What's happening in there?"
"Not really," said Cole, testing his fingers against the stone and trying to move his feet. There was not even an inch of play for his feet or hands. "Can't reach my water, can't bend my knees, can't turn my head..." He considered his entire anatomy. "Nothing feels crushed or broken. I think I'm ok. I'm just... stuck."
Tanya spoke again, but her voice faded out.
"Louder!" yelled Cole.
"Can you see?!"
"Yes, I see a wall." Cole's headlamp had survived the ordeal. With his head stuck turned over his right shoulder, he could see the side wall illuminated about three feet away.
"What's there? Glyphs? Indents or protrusions? Anything?"
Cole knew what Tanya was hoping for: a release mechanism of some kind. In the three years Cole and Tanya had been exploring the tombs, all the traps they'd triggered (intentionally or not) had a hidden mechanism for returning them to their original state.
"Uh, no, not that I can see so far."
There was no response from Tanya. Then he heard a scratching sound in the wall behind, over his left ear.
"I found a soft spot in the stone!" shouted Tanya. "I'm using my blade!"
The scraping behind his ear got louder, and suddenly he could hear Tanya's voice much more clearly.
"Dad! I got through! A bit of the stone was broken away. Can you hear me better now?"
"Yes!"
"The hole's not big enough for me to fit anything through, but at least this way we can talk without shouting. Maybe you can breathe better."
"What's changed on your side since I sprung the trap?" asked Cole.
"Um, well..." Cole could hear Tanya shifting her weight, and her voice rose and fell as she moved about the room behind him. The chamber they'd discovered was no more than eight feet square. They'd dropped into it from a short vertical shaft above. "I don't see anything yet... other than this wall that swung down out of nowhere and pinned you there."
They were silent for a minute as Tanya continued to roam the chamber.
"Wait a sec," said Tanya. "There's something on the floor."
"What is it? What?"
"Glyphs. Can't decipher right away. Let me look for a minute." Cole could hear his daughter rummaging around in her pack, then flipping the pages of the book.
Cole was silent, anxious. He pictured his daughter frowning over the pages of their hieroglyphic translation notes, tracing the outline of the glyphs on the floor with a trembling finger. He thought about how lucky it was that Tanya been behind him with the gear. That was almost never the case - she was usually in the lead, and he was the pack mule.
But as soon as they had climbed down into this chamber, Tanya asked to carry the pack and offered Cole to lead. Moments later, it happened. And thank God, thought Cole. If it were Tanya stuck in here suffering and not him, he didn't think he could stand it.
"Well?" he called to her.
"Um... yeah. Ok. I have something. It's, er..."
"What? Tanya?"
Silence. But a loaded one.
"It's... a fertility chamber. For the goddess Hathor. It's designed to, um, extract... uh... your virility."
"My...?"
"...virility."
"My life force?"
"No!" Tanya said suddenly. "Not like that! Not your actual life! Your, um... your seed..."
"My seed."
"Yes. The glyphs are pretty clear."
Cole thought about this. The fertility theory made sense, based on where they were in the tomb and what they'd seen so far. And his daughter was the expert on Hathor.
"Dad?"
"Yes, I'm here, sorry. But I don't understand. How could they have conceived this extraction to work? I'm trapped in here. It feels like solid stone everywhere..."
Cole heard Tanya take a deep breath.
"Ok dad, I'm going to lay this out based on what I understand from these glyphs. It looks like... once you're, uh, stimulated enough... once it's clear you are 'prepared for the touch of Hathor,' according to my translation, then, one of the goddess's handmaidens will begin the, um, extraction."
"So. I need to give my seed."