His foot struck a vagrant stone and he fell, barely getting his hands up in time to stop his face from striking the edge of the table. He glanced up at the opening he’d come through, now a glowing dinner plate in the middle of the black. Again that feeling of foolishness washed over him. He had to be careful.
He paced along the edge of the room, attempting to decipher some of the more interesting symbols. What he saw was both beautiful and terrifying, a tale of harmony and discord, birth and demise, life and death. A common theme Ken hadn’t seen before was interspersed between each set of pictograms—a single flame beside a primitively painted skull with no jaw. He tried to wrap his mind around the images. He’d seen pictograms such as these over the years, but they always seemed to flow smoothly, always told a story. The invading skull and flame didn’t make sense.
That lack of logic shot a spike of enthusiasm up his spine. If there had been a Black Death here, or a period of religious cleansing like the Crusades, the messages printed on these walls might be the only record. This is the place, his mind blabbered in excitement. The answer, the missing piece of the puzzle!
With renewed vigor, Ken worked at a much faster pace. He turned where one wall met another and carried on much as before, eyeing his discovery with the nervous glee of a child at Christmas. His pace quickened again and he passed to the third wall, then the fourth. That was where he stopped.
An arched portal appeared in the middle of that fourth wall, standing only five feet high. Ken bent and flashed his light inside to get a look at what lay beyond.
It was a passageway. The barrier at the end of the tunnel looked to be made of a strange, milky substance, like a sponge. The walls leading down contained nothing as elegant as hieroglyphs—only smooth rock with nary a crack. It took a moment for Ken to realize that nowhere in the temple interior did he see so much as a seam. This place hadn’t been built with the customary adobe bricks. To the contrary, it seemed to have been borne from the earth itself.
A soft clacking reached his ears and he aimed the flashlight at the floor of the tunnel, revealing a scurrying sea of insects. The bugs didn’t enter the main chamber, though there was nothing to stop them. They simply clawed and scurried all over each other, as if to leave the safety of the passageway would bring an immediate end to their short lives. Ken let out a sigh. He could stand the proposition of squatting through the burrow with those things under his feet, but he hadn’t brought a change of pants or socks, which meant he’d most likely be stuck with their gummy innards all over him until he arrived back at the hotel. “Small sacrifice,” he whispered, then crouched beneath the stone arch. Insects crunched beneath his soles and he had to fight off the itch to purge his morning meal of poached eggs and blood sausage when they began crawling over his boots and up his leg. He held his breath and went on regardless.
The insect-and-dust-filled corridor ended after only twenty-two steps. The milky substance turned out to be thick tangles of spider webs. Ken brushed them aside, exposing the wall, and stared into the eyes of a monster.
It was a painting of a decaying man, hunched over and grinning with a lipless sneer. The care that must have gone into creating this morbid work of art was astounding. He could clearly see the flesh hanging from its bones. Ken shivered and brushed away a centipede that had made its way to the nape of his neck before hunkering in to take a closer look. No detail had been spared. There were even fibers of exposed muscle that seemed to glisten in the flashlight’s beam. This is amazing, he thought. It’s so intricate. It belongs in the National Gallery, not the…
A final detail caught his eye, stopping him cold.
The monstrosity on the wall held a strap, made to look like leather, in its bony right hand. The strap itself was attached to what at first resembled a pair of sunglasses, until Ken realized what they actually were—the orbital bones from a human skull.
“Well, hello,” he whispered.
The brilliant piece of art was a portrait of Yum Cimil, one of the great Mayan gods. He’d seen representations of this particular deity many times over the years, but none as expertly crafted as this. All others were a child’s experimentation with finger paints by comparison. It brought into question the Nicaraguan science team’s assumption that this was a temple. Mayan temples were, as a rule, a place where all gods were revered, not just one.
Ken squatted and brushed dust off the area below where the painting ended. What came forth from the sandy grit was a seam three feet off the ground. He marked the crease with his finger and followed it to the floor. Bugs scattered. It was a door, a very small door that was sealed shut. He pushed against the block of granite and it gave only slightly. A soft, virtually unnoticeable vibration jangled in his head. Something isn’t right here, his subconscious warned. Must tread lightly.
Ken didn’t listen. Exhilaration overrode his common sense.
Snatching the pickaxe from his tool belt, Ken went to work. He hacked away at the stone barricade, the pick head spraying chunks of rock toward him each time he pulled back. A small hole appeared, and then grew larger, then larger still. The obstruction came down with surprising ease, crumbling like dried clay. Sweat poured down his chest, drenching his shirt, pooled in his crotch, and irritated the mosquito bites dotting his flesh, but he paid no mind to the discomfort. All he could think about was what lay behind that wall.
One final stroke created a gap large enough to squeeze through. He tossed in the flashlight, stuck his head into the hole, wedged his shoulders through—the sweat covering him helped in this regard—and finally let himself drop to the other side like a newborn calf.
His elbows struck ground that was at least a foot lower than it should have been, followed by his knees. He yelped as pain rattled through his bones. A disgusting, vinegary scent assaulted his nostrils for a moment and then disappeared. He fumbled for the flashlight, which shone an arbitrary beam on the pile of discarded rock he’d created. His heart raced and he felt out of breath. The chilling sensation of being watched tiptoed over his shoulder blades. He flashed the light at the hole he created—now above him—just to be sure. There was no one there, no people, no phantoms. Even the insects stayed away, much like they had in the main chamber. He breathed out a sigh of relief and cursed his childish paranoia.
The room felt cold and cramped. The ceiling hung low enough that he had to tilt his head to stand, but at least he didn’t have to squat. The space was narrow, only four meters at most, but at least three times as long. With his back to the wall and gazing straight ahead, his flashlight only created the tiniest of circles. He decided he’d get to that part of the chamber later. He sniffed the air—the odor of vinegar must have been his imagination, he assumed—and realized the chamber smelled much like the basement of his mother’s house in Banbury; like an ill maintained, moldy fruit cellar. He shrugged it off to the humidity and examined his surroundings.
The first thing he noticed—other than the thousand or so cobwebs—was the shrine. It stood against the wall a few feet to the right of the entryway. He drew close. It was made from some sort of limestone composite whose surface shone with natural, glass-like crystals. It was a meter wide at its rectangular base, coming up in a flattened pyramid shape. A bronze effigy of Kinich-Ahau, the sun god, his face green with oxidation, watched over the room from its perch on the shrine’s apex. Maybe the temple theory is back in play, he thought.
A shelf of white bone protruded from the area below the effigy. On top of that was an ancient book. Looking at the side, it seemed as if the pages would disintegrate should anyone try to touch them. The cover had been warped by time but was otherwise preserved, and after blowing the dust off he saw that the tapestry on its surface had remained intact. A gold-leafed outline of a blazing sun emerged and Ken’s jaw dropped.
The Popol-Uuh. The Mayan holy book. It had to be. Over the years a few bits of parchment thought to be from that very text had made their way across the desk of his Regent Park office. Most were fakes—all but one had tu
rned out to be, in fact—and the only genuine article he’d ever witnessed was a single half-leaf whose pictograms were essentially unreadable. He’d given up hope after that. But now…now, it could all be different. There it was—there it could be, he corrected—almost in the palm of his hand, bathed in his flashlight’s beam.
Ken didn’t want to turn away from the book, but in the end he did just that. There were other things to see, and he had to get a move on. Daylight wouldn’t last forever, and he didn’t want to risk driving through the jungle at night, especially with that defective kid behind the wheel.
The walls of the chamber were smooth, just as they’d been in the main hall and passageway. The whole place seemed constructed from a mold, if that were possible. Deep grooves marked the surface every so often, as if someone or something had tried to claw its way out. This gave him a sudden jolt of panic. The idea that something could be in there with him caused the dial on his fight or flight instinct to start wavering toward the latter.
He swallowed hard, closed his eyes, and counted to ten. This simple trick always worked in the past, and this time proved to be no different. His heart rate slowed to a steady thump-thump-thump. His breathing decelerated and his mind cleared, as though a soft voice was whispering gentle comforts into his ear.
That voice told him: It’s time to come forward.
His feet shuffled onward over the dirt floor as he progressed toward the milky-black end of the chamber. Gradually his flashlight picked up the vague outline of a shadowy object and he realized why his light hadn’t been able to fully penetrate the air. A sheet of what seemed to be silk had been suspended from the ceiling, stretching the width of the chamber, fifteen feet from the small doorway. This struck him as odd—the voice of Cautious Ken urged him to be guarded and follow his logical instincts—but he gently pushed aside the curtain, used a fastener from his belt to hold it aside, and shone his light in nonetheless.
Wedged in the corner sat what appeared to be a primitively assembled pew. The mummified remains of a small girl knelt upon it, hands clasped on a stone pillar as if she’d fallen asleep there and never woken up. Ken couldn’t believe his eyes.
He moved alongside the mummy, getting as close as he could without touching it. Judging by the diminutive stature of the corpse and the wisps of black hair—amazingly still in place after all these centuries—that draped over its shoulders to the middle of its back, he guessed the poor soul couldn’t have been older than ten to twelve years old at the time of her entombment. A split black veil hung from a headpiece of dried tree bark and dangled at the nape of her neck, framing her face.
And what a face it was. The neck had been craned back as if in an eternal scream. The hollow eye sockets gazed at the ceiling. The skin appeared cracked and brown but amazingly conserved, and the mouth, which still had its teeth, hung open in a ghastly, undead expression of pain, offering one final cry of damnation to the heavens.
That’s when it hit him: the poor girl had been buried alive down here.
“Amazing,” Ken whispered with a touch of sadness. How it must have felt for her, to be trapped in this sinister place, all alone, left to wither away into the nothingness of time. He felt her loneliness and fear, and for a brief instant hated those he’d spent his life studying.
Very gently, Ken reached for the mummy-girl’s clasped hands. Confusion spiraled through his brain like an unstoppable whirlpool as he did this, for the logical part of him knew the rules. Never, ever place your dirty hands on something as precious and fragile as this. Yet he couldn’t stop himself. His fingers brushed the mummy’s flesh. The texture reminded him of sandpaper. Then he grew bolder, rubbing the spot as if trying to ease the dead girl’s epoch of isolation with a well deserved, loving caress. Stop it, man, what are you doing? his mind cried, but he couldn’t pull himself away. His consciousness grew dim and his vision faded.
A bright light flashed in his eyes and images poured into his head. Fire surrounded him on all sides, creating an impenetrable wall of heat. He saw people standing around the lip of the shallow pit he found himself in, dark-skinned and dressed in animal hides, wearing headdresses of brightly colored feathers. He felt his throat constrict with laughter and watched those around him tremble at the sound. Flames licked his flesh, searing it, but he felt no pain. He pushed his hands forward, breaking free of his bonds, and lunged for the one standing closest to him, the one who chanted. He cleared the rim of the crater in a single leap, leaving the flames behind. His fingers—looking small, delicate, and slightly charred—wrapped around the man’s throat. He squeezed.
The scene shifted. Now he floated above the ground, bound and gagged, as those who’d been standing around the hollow now carried him. He struggled mightily, but there were too many of them. He twitched, forcing the veil from his eyes, and gazed at the canopy above, repulsed by the vibrant greens, reds, and violets. Then he felt himself being raised even higher into the air, followed by the sensation of falling. Fast. Then came the violent impact as his body struck the ground. Stars in his vision now, stars that would go on long after the dim point of light above him had been sealed over for good.
Laughter again escaped his lips. He tilted his head back in the darkness and let it come, wave after wave, like a frenzied carnival clown. A mantra repeated in his head, over and over and over:
The time wasn’t right, the time wasn’t right, the time wasn’t right…
As if struck by a bolt of lightning he careened backward, whacking his head against the wall. Dizziness ensued. He brought his hands to his head, cradled it, and rocked back and forth, trying to force away both the sensation and the vision through mindless repetition. Eventually his vertigo petered out like the last drops of water from a canteen.
His head still ached, his ears still buzzed, and his intellect couldn’t come to grips with what had happened to him, but still he wedged his palms into the ground and forced himself to his knees. He panted and tried the counting trick again, but this time it couldn’t stop the rapidity of his heart. A sound emerged, something soft and scratchy, like dry hands rubbing against velvet. He picked the flashlight up off the ground beside him and scanned the chamber, from corpse to shrine to door and back again. Nothing moved. He cocked his head.
The sound grew in volume, and at that point Ken understood it for what it was—a whisper tickling at his inner ear. Then a voice emerged, a sickly humming, a female voice, getting louder with each passing moment. Only this wasn’t in his head. This was behind him.
“Shit!” Ken yelped. He spun around, his knees worn and bleeding as they scraped against the rough dirt floor. His flashlight shone on the mummified little girl. The cadaver had developed a liquid sheen in the few seconds since he had last illuminated it, as if someone had snuck in and covered it with grease. He thought briefly that this had been the result of Raul, the driver, playing a practical joke on him, but that couldn’t explain the humming that still invaded his brain. Closer he inched, his bloody knees smarting, only to stop when a rather large beetle scampered over the mummy’s shoulder.
“Shoo,” he said, waving his hand at it. The beetle lifted its pincers, snapped them together, and then took off back from whence it came. What came next was the riot of a thousand tiny clackers. The din sounded like game day at Wembley Stadium. He flashed the light over his shoulder. Perched on the edge of the door cut into the side of the chamber sat the horde of insects from the passageway, too many to count, seemingly on the verge of joining him in a space that now seemed far too congested. They twitched and writhed.
Game day at Wembley, indeed.
A bone-jarring crack snapped his head back around. The mummy-girl no longer gazed at the ceiling. Those empty eye sockets now stared directly at him, and though the mouth still hung open the way it had before, it no longer seemed to be screaming.
The mummy-girl was laughing at him.
Ken backed away. The mummy-girl’s head wobbled, furthering the image of laughter, and then split at the jaw. The pa
rt of the skull from the disintegrated nose on up toppled off and rolled like a papier-mâché ball until it rested against the wall. The lower jaw protruded from the top of the wrinkled, root-like neck. Insects of every species imaginable erupted from where the head had once been, scampering the length of the mummy-girl’s body and falling to the ground in sheets. The body itself, rocked by the sheer violence of the tiny invaders, collapsed. More bugs poured from the newly made orifice when it hit the floor.
“No!” Ken screamed. He backpedaled and then flipped, proceeding to crawl on all fours toward the entrance and the army that waited there, thinking—no, hoping—they would prove as docile as they’d been on his way in. As if sensing his wish, the insects dumped into the chamber in a tidal wave of legs and exoskeletons and scuttled after him. Ken stopped and got up on his knees. They came at him from front and back, left and right. He flailed his limbs as they fell upon him, trying to brush them off. He screamed the whole time.
It was no use. They formed a living coat over his body. He felt them crawl and slither their way into his every crevice, numerous legs treading where none should ever be, tiny mouths gouging soft flesh. Pain engulfed him. He opened his mouth to scream one last time but no sound came out. The wiggling mass flowed into his mouth and worked their way down his windpipe. They were everywhere—in his ears, up his nose, worming into his anus. A ghastly, mucus-filled whistle forced its way out of his throat.
It was the only form of resistance he could muster.
* * *
Raul sat back in the driver’s seat, bored out of his mind. The stuffy English maricon had been in the pit for almost three hours and it was closing in on five o’clock now. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, hoping the guy would finish soon. Sure he needed the money, but sitting in the same place for so long with the sun beating down on him, mosquitoes droning his ears and no company to speak of save chirping tree frogs worked on his nerves. His buzz had long since worn off and the following headache played tricks on his eyes. He cursed out loud, got out of the Jeep, and walked to the edge of the abyss.
The Fall: The Rift Book I Page 2
