Xibalba- a Dane Maddock Adventure

by David Wood

  Carina shook her head. “What was it you said before? We’re going to skip a few steps.”

  The mouth of the Naj Tunich cave was a vast open area, mostly flat, except where archaeologists had dug exploratory trenches. Bell explained that, in the heyday of the Maya Empire, thousands of worshippers would have gathered on the floor of the cave while the priests performed rituals on a terrace above them. The excavations supported this hypothesis; the floor was actually composed of artifacts, pottery and other litter, cemented into place by subsequent centuries of mineralized water dripping down from above.

  “Some of the local Maya still worship here,” Bell said, pointing to the remnants of a stone fire circle.

  “They still worship the old gods?” Maddock said. “I thought the native religions were mostly extinct.”

  “The arrival of the Christian conquistadors forced practitioners of the old faith underground,” Bell said with a wry smile. “If you’ll pardon the obvious pun. But those traditions are deeply rooted in their culture.”

  At the back of the cathedral-like mouth of the cave, the explorers had to climb a steep retaining wall, built by the Maya to preserve the passage into the deeper reaches of the cave. Maddock and Bones took the lead in order to help Bell up the incline. As Angel scrambled up to join them, Bones used a pry bar to pop the lock on the gate erected by the Guatemalan government.

  As they stood there, poised to begin the descent into the confines of the cave, Maddock could feel a breeze on his face, rising out of the cave, as if it were breathing. “This place really is alive,” he mused.

  “It was to the Maya,” Bell said, wheezing a little as he struggled to catch his breath after the climb.

  If the entrance to the cave was the breathing maw of a living beast, then what lay beyond was the throat—a cramped, hundred-yard long passage, sloping down into the depths. Although there were adequate handholds and steps cut into the limestone, the rock was slick with moisture. Fortunately, previous expeditions had left behind a fixed safety line which Bell clung to as he made his way down.

  The initial descent ended at a chilly pool where mineralized water flowing down the far wall had created lobes of glass-like flowstone that glittered in the beams of their lights. The effect was spectacular, but there was little time to stop and appreciate it. The vertical shaft, which Bell believed would lead them to the realm of Xibalba, lay at the end of a long arterial passage, more than two miles beyond.

  As they splashed through the pool, Bones shouted over his shoulder, “Hey, Miranda, be sure to keep your phone dry.”

  Angel moved closer to Maddock, embracing him in a seemingly spontaneous display of affection, but as she brought her face close to his, she whispered, “Bones is really giving her a hard time about the phone. I can tell when he’s busting chops. This is something else. What’s up?”

  Maddock shook his head. “Maybe nothing.”

  “Dane. Come on. No secrets between us.”

  He glanced over at Miranda who was helping Bell across the pool. “She’s always on that phone. That’s a bad habit for an intelligence officer. Unless it’s something else. ScanoGen got to Copán ahead of us. I gave Miranda the wrong coordinates to the City of Shadow, and nobody bothered us.”

  “That doesn’t prove anything.”

  “No, it doesn’t. That’s why I’m going to keep right on being careful around her.”

  Angel drew back a little, one eyebrow raised accusingly. “I don’t buy it. This is her father’s expedition. Why would she risk it...risk his life? Are you sure this isn’t just because she likes girls?”

  “I’m sure.” He was certain of that much, but he wasn’t as certain about his suspicions. All he really had was a lot of assumptions. The near-encounter at Copán might have been a mere coincidence, just like the Chinook fly-by was probably nothing.

  In any event, it didn’t matter now. They were well outside the mobile coverage area, and even if Miranda had possessed a satellite phone—which she did not—the signal wouldn’t get through the tons of rock surrounding them.

  They continued through passages adorned with Mayan glyphs and paintings that depicted human sacrifices and bloodletting rituals, as well as graphic sexual images. Bones could not resist commenting on one painting that depicted a naked Maya couple embracing in preparation for intercourse. The male figure sported an enormous phallus which was thrusting toward the belly of the female figure. The detail of the stylized image left little to the imagination.

  “I’ll bet that guy was a god,” he remarked.

  “You’ll like this one, Mr. Bonebrake,” Bell said, pointing to another painting of a squatting man.

  “A guy taking a crap?” Bones said, raising a dubious eyebrow.

  “Not exactly. This is a depiction of a bloodletting ritual. The Maya believed that there was great power in blood, so when a king wanted the fertility gods to bless him with a child, he would drive a bone needle or a stingray spine through his penis as an offering.”

  If Bones was shocked by this, he didn’t let on. Instead, he just grinned. “Hey Maddock, sounds like Kyle Olsen?” Even though he had pitched the question to Maddock, he turned so that he was facing Miranda. “This guy in our platoon had a Prince Albert piercing. When he got drunk, he’d whip it out and put a carabiner through it, then hang heavy stuff from it.”

  “That’s hot,” Miranda replied, deadpan but with a wicked gleam in her eye. “You should get one.”

  “As much as I love a trip down memory lane,” Maddock said, “we should probably keep moving.”

  “Dane,” Angel called out. “Everyone. Look at this.”

  She was pointing to another glyph further down the wall and apparently all by itself. The image was more weathered than the explicit sex scene, but was nonetheless instantly recognizable.

  It was the same canine figure depicted on the golden guidestone they had found in the cenote in Mexico, except this dog was facing to the side, in profile, with one paw extended as if to point the way, pointing deeper into the cave.

  “I guess we’re in the right place,” Maddock said.

  They continued down the winding passage, finding more of the guide glyphs wherever the passage branched off in more than one direction. At a few points, the passage narrowed to the point where they were forced to move single file. Bones had to unsling his pack just to scrape through.

  A short almost vertical descent dropped them down into a cavern with adjoining passages to the left and right. Directly ahead was a ledge that overlooked a seemingly bottomless abyss. The shaft was not very wide, in fact, it was barely larger than the diameter of a chimney, but was so deep that their lights could not reach the bottom. On the back wall of the shaft was another guide glyph, this one pointing straight down.

  “I suspected the guide glyphs were leading us here,” Bell said. “We’re in the section called the Cave of the Underworld. The Naj Tunnel leads out of here and back to a cavern called ‘the Quiet Way.’ But this...” He gestured to the vertical shaft. “This was the sacrificial well. A cenote of sorts. A passage into the Underworld.”

  “A regular highway to Hell,” Bones muttered.

  “I suppose if you were at the bottom of it, you’d call it a stairway to Heaven. The Maya thought of caves as both. They believed that at night, the sun descended into a cave in the west, traveled underground and then emerged from another in the east at dawn. As you can imagine, it’s not a place where mortals are exactly welcome. To the best of my knowledge, only one expedition has reached the bottom, and they were only able to spend a few minutes down there.”

  “Why?” Angel asked.

  “I believe one of their team members was injured, forcing them to hasten their exit. There was also a problem with the air. High carbon dioxide levels, possibly from some decaying organic matter.”

  Maddock had anticipated this problem when Bell had first mentioned the five hundred foot deep shaft earlier in the day. In addition to all their other gear, he had brought along
a low-tech CO2 detector—a cheap disposable cigarette lighter he’d picked up in Belize City. He took it out and spun the wheel with his thumb, producing a bright yellow flame. “Old caver trick,” he said. “As long as it’s burning yellow, there’s enough oxygen in the air. If the flame burns blue, we might have to turn back.”

  Angel leaned out over the shaft and made a face. “You know, we probably shouldn’t have left poor Kasey all by herself at the airport. Is it too late to change my mind about this?”

  Maddock just blew her a kiss.

  They had brought along two SCUBA rigs and a single bottle of compressed air, just in case it proved necessary to swim through flooded passages. In a pinch, they could buddy breathe, just as they had done in the City of Shadow, but the supply wouldn’t last long enough for a prolonged excursion. If they ran into befouled air, they would probably have to cut their investigations short. Maddock doubted it would be a problem as long as the was air moving up from the depths.

  With help from Miranda, who had almost as much rope training as a SEAL, Maddock and Bones rigged up a fixed line—the first of several pitches that would be required to reach the bottom. There was a reason the passage had confounded earlier expeditions. They would be descending about forty-five stories—half the height of the Eiffel Tower—and getting down would be the easy part. They had brought along over a thousand feet of rope, which when combined with the rest of the climbing equipment and the SCUBA gear, represented a lot of weight. Fortunately, they wouldn’t have to pack it any further.

  He just hoped Bell’s remark about mortals not being welcome in the Underworld would not prove too prophetic. Descending the shaft might well prove to be the easiest part of the day.

  CHAPTER 25

  If Angel had chosen to rejoin Kasey Kim, she would not have had to go very far. Kasey was still by herself, but she was not at the airport. She was, in fact, racing up the mountain road toward Naj Tunich.

  Just thirty minutes after Maddock and the others had set out for the remote archaeological site, a twin-engine Beechcraft Baron had touched down at the airstrip. Kasey had watched with only mild curiosity as the plane taxied down the gravel runway, but decided it might be worthwhile to call Tam with the plane’s tail numbers, just in case. While she was waiting for the ID, an SUV drove out to meet the plane’s lone occupant, an attractive dark-haired woman that kind of looked like Penelope Cruz. What piqued Kasey’s interest however was the woman’s attire; she wore tigerstripe pattern camouflage fatigues. So did the men who got out of the SUV to meet her.

  To the best of Kasey’s knowledge, no army or law enforcement group in Central America was using tigerstripe camo, but it was readily available on the civilian market, and sometimes used by agencies and organizations with the freedom to pick their own gear—the CIA for example.

  The plane belonged to a shell company with an address in Wilmington, Delaware, which Tam informed her was believed to be a front for the Yucatan-Gulf Cartel, and the woman who looked like Penelope Cruz was none other than the Cartel’s current leader, Isabella Beltran. She was definitely not one of the good guys, but as far as Tam knew, she had no connection to ScanoGen.

  Nevertheless, Kasey’s curiosity was growing. All were dressed up for action and in a hurry, and that was enough to make her want to know more. She took the parabolic microphone from her surveillance kit and decided to listen in on their conversation. The portable eavesdropping device had a range of up to three hundred feet, but she only managed to catch a few words before they all got in the SUV and took off.

  One word had stood out from the rest.

  Cueva.

  Cave.

  The descent was tedious, but not as difficult as Maddock had anticipated. He let Miranda play mother hen to her father, and focused on making sure the pitches were securely anchored to the limestone. This far from the surface, they couldn’t afford any mistakes.

  The last hundred feet or so were the hardest, with the shaft narrowing to an uncomfortably tight squeeze between walls slick with mud, but at the bottom, the cavern opened into a bulb-shaped chamber. The floor was covered with an ankle-deep layer of thick mud. If, as Bell had suggested, the Maya had thrown sacrifices into the shaft, then there were probably hundreds of shattered skeletons compressed into the sediment beneath him, not to mention a fortune in gold jewelry. Maddock however was more interested in the opening at the back of the cavern, and the barely discernible guide glyph etched into the damp stone.

  After everyone was down, and Bones had made the obligatory joke about naked mud wrestling, they headed into the passage, which meandered up at a gentle incline for about a hundred feet before emptying into a round chamber, and an apparent dead end.

  There were no visible exits, but a quick look around suggested there was a lot more to the room than was evident at first glance. The chamber was almost perfectly circular, and the circumference was adorned with several high relief carvings of very familiar looking figures seated on thrones.

  “The Lords of Xibalba,” Bell said, confirming what Maddock had already deduced.

  “There were ten Lords in the City of Shadow.” Maddock swept the room, performing a quick head count. “I count twenty here.”

  “This is the Council of the Death Lords. It was a test for travelers wanting to enter the Houses of Xibalba. The Lords sat alongside mannequins designed to confuse the arriving supplicants. The only way to gain entry to the Houses was to greet the Lords by name. They also tried to trick the travelers into sitting on a bench that was actually a hot cooking stone.”

  “Nice,” Bones remarked. “And why exactly did the Maya worship these guys?”

  “To get the cure to the Shadow disease,” snapped Miranda. “I guess you haven’t been paying attention.”

  Bones tilted his head to look down at her. “I ask a lot of rhetorical questions. I guess you haven’t been paying attention.”

  Maddock ignored their exchange and brought both his flashlight and his attention back to the recess with the low shelf, directly opposite the passage through which they had entered. “That kind of looks like a bench,” he said.

  He squatted down and shone the light into the space beneath it. The beam revealed a small round pit. A teepee of wood had been erected in the center, atop a bed of gray ash and black charcoal. He picked up one of the pieces of wood, half-expecting it to crumble to dust. It didn’t, but it was as light as balsa in his hand. Still, it was hard to believe that the wood had been there for hundreds of years. Maybe they weren’t the first ones to make it this far after all.

  “It’s a fire pit all right.” He looked up at Bell. “So what now? Does the legend say how to pass the test?”

  “You mean aside from not getting punked?” Bones said.

  Bell shook his head. “In the Popol Vuh, Hun Hunahpú and Vucub Hunahpú, the father and uncle of the Hero Twins, journey into Xibalba and basically fail all the Council’s tests. They even sit on the cooking stone and get burned, but the Lords allow them to enter the Houses of Xibalba anyway because their plan all along was to sacrifice them later. The Court tests were just a joke to them. Later, when the Hero Twins arrive, they trick the Lords into revealing their names, and then when the Lords tell them to sit down on the bench, they simply refuse.”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Miranda said. “There’s probably a secret door here somewhere. To unlock it, we have to figure out which of these statues are the real Lords of Xibalba.”

  Maddock considered this for a moment. “I think you’re right about there being a secret door, but I don’t know if there’s a trick to opening it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Remember those three rivers in the City of Shadow? The only way to get past them was with sacrifice. And the paw prints lead right to the cooking stone.”

  “What are you saying? That we have to sit on the stone?”

  Maddock shrugged and then without waiting for further prompting, lowered his backside onto the shelf.

  Nothing happened.


  “Maybe you have to preheat,” Bones said.

  Knowing Bones, it was meant as a joke, but Maddock knew his friend had hit the nail on the head. “That’s exactly what we have to do.”

  “You’re not serious,” Miranda said.

  But Maddock was serious. If there was one thing he had learned from his previous encounters with the ancient architects of Xibalba, it was that they were sadistic sons of bitches. He took the lighter he’d brought along as a CO2 detector, crouched down to the firepit and struck a light, holding it to the dry wood until yellow flames began rising. The smell of woodsmoke soon filled the air, but there must have been a chimney at the back of the recess, because the chamber remained relatively clear. After a few minutes. Maddock could feel a change in ambient temperature. The room was heating up. The mud on his clothes and skin was rapidly drying out, forming an itchy crust. As he stared at the stone shelf, his enthusiasm for meeting the test head-on began to wane.

  “Stone takes a while to heat up,” Bones observed. “But once it does, it stays hot.” He grinned at Maddock. “Having second thoughts?”

  “Second, third and fourth,” Maddock admitted. He touched a forefinger to the stone shelf. It was warm but not enough to burn him. Not yet.

  Instead of sitting, he stepped up onto the shelf, reasoning that his boot soles would afford an additional layer of protection, provided they didn’t melt down. As soon as he transferred his weight onto his leading foot, the shelf shifted beneath him, dropping an inch or so. A low rumble shuddered through the stone and the back of the recess abruptly slid aside, revealing a dark passage behind the cooking stone.

  “Open Sesame,” Maddock said, trying to sound triumphant, but mostly just feeling relieved.

  “Awesome,” Bones said disingenuously. “We’re all going to hell.”

  “Not if you don’t get moving,” Maddock said. He could feel the heat in his boots now and knew it would only get worse. “It might close if I step off, so go past me, one at a time. Bones, take point.”