by Otto Schafer
Then she was there, back in the car… back in the snow. Cold found her bones as the tight crevasse fell away, bending her mind to another place and another time. Twisted metal, snow, the sound of tires skidding and shattering glass. She was but a little girl. A flood of guilt raked across her soul. She squeezed her eyelids together until she was pressing them so tight that white spots replaced the dreaded reflections of her past. Slowly, her breathing calmed, and she heard the comforting sound of her father’s voice somewhere in the darkness ahead.
“Shit, I’ve got to lose some weight,” he said to no one as he reached out and snatched his leather fedora from the dry dirt floor. He stood, slapping his hat against his leg a few times to knock the dust off before placing it back on top of his head. “Bre? Honey, is that you?” Removing a chrome flashlight from the pocket of his khakis, he thumbed the switch, illuminating the space around him.
“It’s me, Daddy,” she croaked out, appearing from the small opening, squinting into the flashlight as she stood and began brushing herself off.
“I thought I told you to wait for me. There was no telling where this could have led.”
She wiped a sleeve across her damp forehead. “Which is why I couldn’t just let you go crawling off into the unknown.”
He squinted, turning the flashlight on her, assessing her dubiously. “Baby girl, are you alright?”
“I’m fine, Dad,” she said sharply, holding a hand up to shield her eyes.
“You can’t worry about me all the time—”
“Well, someone needs to. You certainly aren’t worried about yourself.” She pulled a glow stick from her thigh pocket, bending it until it made an audible pop. A soft green glow illuminated her frown.
“Listen, baby girl, I know ever since the accident you worry, but you have to—”
“Look, over there,” she said, pointing.
He didn’t look. Not at first. Instead he held her gaze in the green glow a moment longer, his smile weak and wishing.
She knew what he was doing. Any time he brought up the accident, it ended with her changing the subject. Thankfully, he finally turned away from her to survey their surroundings. She watched as he flicked the flashlight beam to and fro, realizing disappointedly that he was not, in fact, in the man-made chamber of a Mayan temple – as he had hoped – but in a cave.
“Great, just a cave,” Breanne said disappointedly, tossing her glow stick down in front of the small crevasse to mark the entry point’s location. Then she dug back into her thigh pocket and retrieved her own small flashlight.
From her current vantage point, the space seemed small and the floor uneven. Large rocks were scattered across the ground, having given up their grip on the ceiling no telling how long ago. As she panned her flashlight along the far wall, something caught her eye, and suddenly her disappointment waned. She squinted into the shadows, allowing her eyes to adjust to the darkness. Strange shapes several feet in the distance slowly came into focus. “Daddy! Do you see that?”
As they approached, the ghostly shapes took form, and they realized in unison what they were looking at. Her pulse quickened with excitement – they were skulls!
Arcing their lights back and forth, they cautiously made their way over to the skulls, batting down years of cobwebs as they maneuvered through a precarious rock garden. While Breanne navigated the obstacle course easily, Charles struggled.
Cursing at his flexibility, or rather lack thereof, he bent, pulling the cuff of his pants to assist his stubborn leg over a large boulder. “Did I mention I’m getting too old for this shit?” he grumbled.
Breanne scanned to her right. The reach of her flashlight would only allow her to see that the corridor continued on an upward incline to unknown heights. To her left, and much closer to her position, the tunnel seemed to make a sharp bend, disguising its intentions.
Directly in front of them, the ceiling of the cave descended, forcing Breanne and her father into an awkward stoop as they approached what appeared to be several skeletons.
“Watch your head, Dad, the ceiling drops even further here,” she said in a hushed voice, as if concerned she might wake the dead.
He grinned with excitement and pulled out his two-way radio.
“Paul, you copy? Over.”
“I’m… here… Pops… Signal… breaking… Over.”
“We entered a cave beneath an overhang at the back of the north gorge. Over.”
“Cave? Did… cave? I should… Over.”
“Cave at the back of the north gorge under a rock overhang. Over.” He shouted louder this time.
“You know, Dad, it doesn’t make him hear better just because you shout louder,” Breanne said with a snort.
Her father shot her a disbelieving look.
“Copy… North… Twenty minutes… Wait for… Before you go… Over.”
“Roger that. Over.”
Bre looked up at her father and shook her head. “He isn’t going to be happy we didn’t wait.”
He shrugged and smiled down at the bones. “Magnificent!”
Bre squatted down next to the bones, nodding. She studied one of skulls that sat canted and upside down. Over time, a portion of the cranium had settled into the floor. It reminded her of an apple being slowly dipped in a vat of caramel. Next to the sunken skull sat a fully intact jawbone, not yet consumed by the hungry floor. “They’re beautiful.”
Breanne payed close attention to her father now. She knew this moment well. The moment when he transformed from Daddy into the formidable Dr. Moore. She loved to watch him work.
Catching the attention of Dr. Moore first was the mandible, displaying perfect teeth that begged for a closer look.
Settling into the moment, Breanne grinned as Dr. Moore fell into the practiced analysis that could only come from decades of experience. “You have to let the bones speak to you, Bre. Let them slowly reveal their secrets like a heavy fog gently burning away under the morning sun.”
He placed the small LED flashlight in his mouth to free both his hands. One he used to balance his awkwardly positioned body, the other to remove a small, round hand brush from the front-button pocket of his green safari shirt. Gently he began brushing away the loose sediment from the jawbone.
“There, you see this, Bre? What does it tell you?” he asked, removing the light from his mouth and training it on the jawbone.
She drew in a breath, pausing to gnaw at her lower lip. “These are the bones of young adults, possibly children. The second pair of molars is present, but the third have not grown in yet. I would guess this victim to be under the age of seventeen but older than thirteen.”
“Good. Very good,” he said, maneuvering his body around the bones as if engaged in a family game of Twister – right hand, red; left foot, blue.
“Careful, Dad,” Bre said, trying not to laugh at her father’s unnatural position. “It won’t be much of a find if you collapse on top of it.”
“I’m… good.” He made a noise that was half grunt, half chuckle. From this awkward position, Dr. Moore began to examine a particularly well-preserved humerus lying under a crushed pelvic bone. “Dental work is great for identification, but don’t discount what you can glean from the other bones. For instance, due to growth plates on either end, the humerus is a great bone for age identification.” Dr. Moore swept the bone lightly with his brush. “Yes, see here, it is unfused.”
Breanne nodded quizzically, giving her father her full attention.
“Now, what this quick and dirty investigation boils down to is this – these are indeed the remains of children, and at least one, probably all, were under the age of fifteen at the time of death,” he said matter-of-factly while shifting awkwardly to his other knee.
“Now, tell me” – he grunted, then shifted again. “Oh, wait that’s even worse. We had better move soon—”
“Because yoga poses don’t seem to be your thing, Daddy?” she mused.
“Right. But you said ‘victim.’ How did you
arrive at this hypothesis, young lady?” He shuffled back to find temporary comfort on his haunches and let out a relieved sigh.
“The damage to some of these skulls appears to be from bludgeoning.”
“Good, but what else? There is more to see here, Bre. What else do the bones tell you?”
Her brows knitted in concentration as she began examining the bones with careful consideration.
Breanne felt her father’s appraising eyes as she panned her flashlight beam over the entire area again, chewing her lower lip as she paid more attention to the positions of the bones than to the bones themselves. With a slow nod, she turned back to her father, a look of sudden revelation blossoming in her eyes. “They were not just victims, Dad, they were sacrifices. See here” – she pointed her beam at a group of bones – “based on the position of the pelvis over the humerus, and the two humeri crossing each other, it is possible – no, not just possible, almost certain – this victim’s wrists were bound behind the back.” She paused again, then whispered, “Dad, all these kids were tied up and beaten to death.”
“Very good. The precise age of the bones will have to wait for a CT scan, and accurate dating of the bones can be further established with a carbon-14 analysis, but yes, I think we have seen all we can see with the naked eye.”
“But how? How could they do something so awful?” Breanne’s voice was quiet.
“Oh Bre, this was awful for certain, but in the Mayan culture, young sacrifices, even children, were a common practice, believed to be a plea for rain from Chaack, a god who lived on the fringe of the underworld. Most theories on the Mayans’ disappearance hold that their pleas went unanswered and those who survived the drought were forced to flee, abandoning their massive cities, which were then slowly consumed by the jungle, lost to history.”
“Well, thanks for the textbook answer, Dr. Moore. You realize my question went completely over your head, right?”
Her father blinked.
“It’s different seeing it for real, you know? I asked how could they do it? How could they kill their own kids so violently? Look at this one,” she said, pointing at the pile of bones. “This could have been a young girl. She could have been sixteen like me, maybe even younger.”
“You’re right, that went straight over my head,” he admitted. After a pause, he continued, “They thought this would save everyone, Bre. Thousands were suffering – no, dying – from drought, many of them kids. I think it came down to the sacrifice of a few for the many.”
“Yeah, well, guess it’s good not to be a kid in the days of the ancient Mayan, huh?”
Dr. Moore gave a forced smile and placed a hand on his daughter’s shoulder. “I think we’ve seen enough here – let’s move on.”
Bre nodded her agreement, and they moved cautiously towards the bend. Once clear of the nook they could stand upright, and in fact, the ceiling opened up well beyond their reach.
Her father took a moment to stretch his back, and they moved on.
As they rounded the bend, Breanne froze with a gasp at the sight of a perfectly symmetrical archway of stacked stones. Her pulse quickened as they stepped forward.
Completing the archway was a huge lintel with a carving of a winged beast. She had seen carvings of both the Mayan and Aztec versions of the feathered-serpent deity before, but this carving seemed to fit neither. Adorning both sides of the archway were several giant orange pieces of pottery. The lid of each piece was in the shape of the same winged creature on the lintel, with two tails curving gracefully out from the sides to form handles. Breanne could see the pottery still showed faint, once-artful images, but there was too much sediment to make out anything other than shapes. Amazingly, most of the pots were still whole and in remarkable condition.
“Holy Mother Mary, baby girl, this is it! These have to be Mayan offerings, left here for Chaack. These are offerings for rain!”
They were now close enough to cautiously peer through the archway. The floor of the cave dropped away to stone stairs that appeared, under the glow of their flashlights, to be meticulously cut into the floor on a precision curve descending downward into the unknown.
Dr. Moore furrowed his brow. “Wait a second. This is odd.”
“What is?”
“Bre, I have never heard of a Mayan cave having an archway like this or, for that matter, curved stairs cut into the floors. I mean, I can’t be sure without a little research, but I think this is something truly special.”
“I know what you’re thinking, Daddy, but maybe we should go back and get Paul before we go further.” Breanne’s voice was heavy with concern.
He looked at her for a long moment, his face failing to hide the battle raging in his mind, and before he even spoke, she knew she had lost.
“Wait here, and I will be right back,” he said reassuringly.
“Dad, please wait, or at least let me go with you.”
Her father started to object, but she quickly cut him off for fear of an answer she couldn’t reverse. “I’m not a little girl, Daddy.”
“Alright, baby girl. We quickly, and carefully, go to the bottom of these stairs and take a brief look around, but no matter what we find we come right back up. Most likely this will lead to a cenote, and we won’t be able to explore further without dive equipment anyway.”
Breanne nodded, sighing in relief. In truth, as excited as she was to see what was at the bottom of the stairs, she also didn’t want to be left alone. Not in the dark. Not even for a minute.
A few dozen steps later, they reached the end of the spiraling staircase. Eagerly, they began arcing their flashlights back and forth like lightsabers, taking in the scene.
Breanne’s breath caught in her throat, and for a long moment she forgot to breathe.
“This is no cenote,” her father said as they gazed into a perfectly round chamber.
The chamber was approximately thirty feet across by fifty feet high. In the center of the room stood a giant stone statue that reached almost to the ceiling. The statue looked like that of a Mayan king or god, and as Breanne aimed her flashlight up at the god king’s face, she flinched at its facial expression and the menacing lips turned upward in a snarl. The giant’s head was adorned with a flying-serpent headdress bejeweled with precious stones. The statue’s arms were extended forward, his palms facing outward as if pushing something. No, not pushing, she thought, warning someone to stop? Freezing in place, Breanne swallowed hard.
“Not a very friendly fella, are ya,” her father muttered, continuing to scan his surroundings from the bottom step of the stone staircase.
Pulling her gaze from the statue, she took note of several beautiful ancient torches placed around the chamber. The torches stood tall, taller than her father, and lifeless, having not been licked by flame for centuries. Positioned between each torch stood a rack of human skulls, which had been formed by shoving wooden rods through severed heads and connecting the rods with vertical shafts.
“Bre! Do you know what these are?” he asked in an excited whisper.
“I… I don’t remember the name, but I know I’ve seen photos before.”
“These are known as tzompantli. Traditionally these would have been placed at the entrance to a city or at the top of a pyramid, not hidden in a cave. I can’t believe this, Bre, there are so many! And still whole!”
Breanne shook her head. “Dad, I don’t remember this from my Mayan research.”
“No, not Mayan, Bre. Aztec.”
“Aztecs? Here?”
“Aztecs sacrificed their enemies and severed their heads, creating racks like these as a show of their might. Aztecs were known to do this, but no Mayan skull racks have ever been found. Jesus Christ! Not even Aztec skull racks have ever been found complete, or on this scale, and never in a cave!” Hundreds of skulls lined the walls all around them. “This will be the greatest collection of tzompantli ever discovered. But what I don’t understand is why they are here. This makes absolutely no sense,” he muttered, p
ulling off his fedora to run his hand through his hair. “We may have found something much older than we could have imagined.”
“Is the great Charles Moore stumped?” Breanne asked, taking complete joy in watching her father struggle with an explanation.
“Yes,” he smiled. “By God, yes I am! But the answers are here, Bre, right in front of us. We just need to see them.”
“Maybe the answer is on the walls?” Breanne aimed the beam of light towards scenes of colorful cave drawings depicting what appeared to be some kind of battle scene.
“Notice no other tunnels exit this chamber. This appears to be the only room.”
“Dad, do you think there is any significance to the skulls facing inward towards the center of the room – towards the statue?”
“Perhaps.” He scratched at his chin in thought.
Then Breanne noticed it. On the floor in the center of the room was a circular shadow as dark as night, even when she shined her flashlight right on it. The shadow was directly between the legs of the giant statue. “Do you see that?”
“See what?” her father said, his focus still drawn to the painted scenes.
“Under the statue. There,” she said, pointing. “Don’t you see?” Then, against the warning of a nagging inner voice and a menacing giant, excitement took hold of Breanne as she stepped off the bottom step and onto the chamber floor.
“Bre! Wait!” Her father lunged for her arm but was too late.
Her foot landed on the hard stone and… nothing happened. “What was that about?” she said, walking towards the giant statue.
Gingerly extending his toes to the floor and tapping a few times, he decided it was safe and allowed the full weight of his own right foot to land on the floor. He paused there, listening to stillness.
“Dad, what are you doing?” Breanne asked with a chuckle.
“The last thing I want to do is trip some sort of ancient booby trap. I am too damn old to be dodging any Indiana Jones rolling-boulder bullshit.”
