Tears of the Jaguar

by Hartley, A. J.

  Slowly she stepped back into the dark air, lowering herself with both hands gripping the stiff root, feeling with her feet for the outcrop she had seen in the momentary flash of the lamp. For a moment she was hanging there, just suspended over nothing, then she let her hands slip another foot or so down, and the root tore a little. She dropped another half yard and felt the scattering of earth and stone fragments against her face, but it gave no more, and with a long reach of her right leg, she found the stone outcrop. She let herself down another few inches and took her weight off the root with relief, though she held onto it for balance. Then—wondering how on earth she would get back up—she sank to her haunches and turned slowly.

  She was on the same level as the tunnel now, directly across from it, and she could see clean through to the tomb. The passage narrowed her view, but she could see enough, though for a moment, she could make no sense of it. There was the light, still turned away from her, but bright as lightning in the darkness, and there was the movement of a person in a strange, shapeless robe. The figure turned, and she gasped as the face revolved into view, because it wasn’t a real face at all, but a horror of wild, staring eyes and a gaping mouth full of daggerlike teeth: a mask, oversized and garish like that worn by some ancient Mayan priest. And then the figure moved and the light illumined the chamber proper, and Deborah felt a new rising sense of dread. The tomb was there as they had left it, but the color was all wrong. She could see right through to the back wall of the tomb and it was a red far brighter than the colored stucco she remembered. It was a deep, glistening crimson like new paint.

  But it wasn’t paint. Even from here, without being able to touch or smell it, she knew it wasn’t paint.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  She had to get out, get back to the tower and call the police. This went far beyond old bones, theft, and a blow to her career.

  How do you paint a room with blood? Why would you?

  She pushed the thoughts away and concentrated on climbing back up. To do so meant turning her back on the tomb, and though a part of her was glad to do so, the act itself filled her with terror. She was blind again in the darkness with whatever was going on in that tomb behind her.

  She focused on the climb. There was a notch in the rock that would take one foot, but there was little to hold on to above it but roots. She reached, grabbed, and tugged tentatively. When the roots held, she launched herself up, hauling as she tried to find purchase with her other foot. For a second she hung, reaching with one leg for something that might not be there, then she found something hard in the cenote wall—a jutting root perhaps—and set her weight on it.

  She heard movement, surprisingly, not from the passageway behind her but from above. It wasn’t the masked figure in the tomb. Someone else was there standing out near the rim of the cenote. Was it possible she was surrounded? She scrabbled for the vines, trying to move upward quickly.

  Too quickly.

  Her newly positioned foot lost its hold and she dropped two feet, twisting on the vine-like roots and snapping hard when there was no more slack. The impact seemed to tear the plant above her. There was another scattering of dirt and debris from above, and then the roots were fastened to nothing at all, and she was falling.

  She turned in the air but it was too dark to see if she would hit rock or water, and she knew nothing till the cold splash, which sent roosting birds soaring out overhead. The shock of the fall had barely allowed her to close her mouth in time, but she hit nothing but water, and surfaced feeling lucky.

  A flashlight from above the edge of the cenote found her almost immediately, but she could see nothing beyond the glare of the lamp and the deep-blue water where the black catfish swam. She almost cried out for help. But when the first gunshot rang out, she dove.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The volleyball coach back at Brookline High School had begged Deborah to try out, but, suspecting that height alone wouldn’t compensate for her physical awkwardness or aversion to team activities, Deborah—then fourteen—had declined. For the perceived sleight she had been packed off to the Tappan Street pool and told to complete her PE requirements there, plowing up and down the lanes two mornings a week. She had been a good swimmer, long and powerful, maybe even competition material, but though she had enjoyed the silent focus of the thing, the isolation of it, she had never seen the value in devoting all her time to shaving half a second off her hundred-meter freestyle. When old Joe Winters, the swim coach, had told her that she could be great if she’d put in the work, she had said, genuinely confused, “Define great.”

  “All-state,” he said. “Maybe more. Who knows, with work, you might get an Olympic tryout.”

  Deborah, who already spent her free time immersed in books, just shook her head. All that work just to be a little faster than other people in the pool, working every hour like her sister did on the ice? Never. She didn’t get it.

  She remembered all that in the moment that the second bullet hit the water. She tucked her stomach, pivoted at the waist and slid down through the black water headfirst, pulling with her arms till she felt her feet follow her under. The bright, chlorinated lanes of Tappan Street couldn’t be further from this deep darkness, the water scented with leaves and decay, teeming with fish and who knew what else. She kicked and pulled her way farther down, knowing she hadn’t taken enough air to stay under much longer.

  She turned and opened her eyes, looking up to the surface, where she saw first nothing, then the swift pass of a flashlight. Someone was looking for her, ready to shoot as she broke the surface. For a second she felt only horror at the strange escalation from theft through the blood-stained tomb to this. She was being hunted, and all—presumably—because there was a case of mistaken identity.

  Who did the shooter think she was? Who was that shooter and who was currently standing in the blood-spattered tomb robed from head to foot like a Mayan priest?

  Her air was almost gone and her body was instinctively starting to surface. She tried to get her bearings so she could swim for the cenote wall. Perhaps she could find a crevice where she could breathe unseen. She pushed away from where she had entered the pool, making for the rock wall, and when she felt the long, trailing roots in her fingers, she tried to slide in among them. With excruciating slowness, she allowed herself to drift up, feeling the air on her face as she broke the surface. As quietly as she could, she released the breath and drew in another, looking up through the root strands to the passageway.

  The gunman was there still, though she couldn’t even see enough to be sure it was a man. She saw only the merest shadow and the brightness of the flashlight held out away from his—or her—body. It was moving over the surface of the water, slowly, meticulously, and she knew that the other hand had a weapon trained wherever the light went. The light in the tomb had gone out and there was no sign of movement there at all. She waited, breathing hard. How long did she have? Eventually, surely, she would be noticed.

  The light was inching toward her. She took another breath, then, trying to brace her hands against the rock, she pushed herself under the water as carefully as possible. She held the position, her face only a couple of feet below the surface, and looked up, waiting for the light to move over her. It crept up from the left and immediately seemed to stall.

  I’m not deep enough, she thought. He can see...something.

  Suddenly, uncannily, it was like she could see herself from his position, floating mermaid-like amongst the weeds, the paleness of her face under the water. The light held another second and she knew the shot would come. She surged sideways, kicking off against the rock as the gun roared, loud even though she was deep underwater, and she felt the tremor in the water where the bullet passed her. She swum hard, desperate to keep moving, toward the center of the pool, snatched the longest breath she dared, then dived once more.

  He fired again.

  Deborah thrust herself down as far as she could, pulling hard with her arms, frog-kicking her legs
. She had no idea how deep the pool was, and there was no strategy to her actions now, just a desperate desire to go so deep he couldn’t possibly get her. What she would do when she ran out of air, she couldn’t think.

  And then, quite suddenly, the water went cold and she felt it pushing against her body: a current. It was moving back to the wall she had come from and she arced into it, letting it move her. She swam two strokes before she realized that she had gathered speed. More alarmingly, she was sure the cenote wasn’t big enough to have let her go so far in one direction. She should have hit rock.

  It came to her like a hand around her throat. Cenotes weren’t simply pools. They were cave-ins above underground rivers. She had gone too deep and was no longer in the cenote at all. She was in a channel that might wind miles before it opened to the air again. Deborah spread her arms, trying to find something against which to brace herself, to stop her momentum, but there was nothing. She tried to turn and swim back against the current—better face a gunman than drown in this airless rock passage—but it was too swift. It swept her on, and her head banged hard against stone so that she gasped, losing what little air she still had, and swallowing the tangy water. She opened her eyes wide. Frantic now, panicking. There was no way out and she knew the closest cenote was a kilometer or more away.

  She was almost out of air. Her stomach contracted and she felt the nausea rise up in her throat. She swallowed it back, but it wouldn’t be long now. She reached up, vainly hoping to find a recess above her, a pocket where air might be trapped, perhaps a cavern, but the water went all the way to the smooth rock above her. The river suddenly tightened into a narrow tube, and she was picking up speed, bumping her elbows and knees against the limestone as she hurtled through. She felt the disorientation of the twists and bends, but knew also that she was blacking out. The nausea surged back, and this time—fight it though she did—she opened her mouth and felt the cold water flooding in. It was almost a relief, that coolness, that stifling, black end. She could feel her eyelids fluttering and the muscles of her neck beginning to spasm. Then nothing.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Aguilar hung up the phone and cursed. There was no sign of Miller, and people were starting to freak out. One of the local Maya had speculated that she had been the one who had ransacked the tomb and had now made a run for it. The story was being circulated as something with real weight till the kid who brought the food and water for the laborers, Eustachio’s granddaughter, Adelita, got wind of it. Aguilar had never seen anything quite like that skinny twelve-year-old reading the riot act to village men two and three times her age. It was, he remarked to Krista Rayburn, something to behold, the men skulking like whipped dogs, some drifting away, others suddenly finding the sun-scorched grass just about the most fascinating thing they’d ever seen.

  But the girl’s anger also showed concern. Miller had become a kind of mentor for the kid in the last week or so, showing her around the dig, talking to her like a grown-up. The child, for her part, had obviously taken to her and Aguilar had caught the quiet, watchful look on Eustachio’s face when he saw them together, chatting. The old Mayan had been happy and sad at the same time, and you could guess why: Adelita saw in Deborah Miller something of what she might be if she ever escaped the village with its dirt roads, its wandering turkeys, and—more importantly—its punishing regimen of manual labor. The kid was smart, and underneath the bashfulness that was expected of girls her age in a place like this, she was a live wire, as the scolded men who had disparaged Miller had discovered. Aguilar felt a stab of disdain for the old Mayan. If Eustachio wasn’t so damned in love with the backward life he called his culture, he’d put the kid on the first bus out.

  Aguilar wasn’t good with kids, particularly Mayan kids, but he had given her an encouraging smile and said Miller would turn up any moment. She responded not in the Yucatekan she used with her family but in careful and polite Spanish, which served to remind him that he was—to her and her people—almost as foreign as Miller. In her formal tone he heard how much she saw through his show of concern, maybe even glimpsed something of his contempt for her family and the village in general, and he felt as humbled as the villagers accusing Deborah Miller of plundering the site.

  He excused himself and walked through the ball court and round to the acropolis, keeping his eyes open for Miller and for Krista Rayburn, the former somewhat reluctantly, the latter with a sense of anticipation he hadn’t felt since his wife left him. He trekked round to the new cenote and the gantry access they had built, wondering if the environmental archaeologist smiled that way for everyone or if there was something happening between them. He had to play it carefully. He would be working in close quarters with Krista if this dig ever really got going, and any tension or awkwardness would quickly become excruciating.

  The door to the tomb was open.

  Miller, he thought, his heart sinking a little.

  There was something odd about the light this morning. It seemed to reach into the tomb and show more than he would have thought possible, and where the plastered structure inside had been painted that pinkish red, it seemed darker but more vivid now, the color closer to a rusting crimson.

  He descended the creaking ramp but stopped before he actually got inside, though he wasn’t sure why. Something was wrong. It took him a moment to realize that he was reacting to a smell: sweet, but also somehow metallic, a familiar and dreadful scent...

  Blood.

  And then he was stepping carefully inside, looking for Miller’s body, and when he saw the scarlet-daubed limbs hanging lifeless over the edge of the coffin-throne, it took another moment for him to realize that under the spattering of blood the skin was too brown. Too old.

  Aguilar was clutching his stomach and running back out into the air before the remains of the face registered in his mind.

  Eustachio.

  He clutched the wooden rail the old man had built and vomited into the cenote. And beyond the nausea, beyond the horror of what had been done to the old Mayan, beyond even the sense that being close to any death was somehow a brush with your own, Aguilar felt Adelita’s childlike and accusatory stare.

  You thought him less than a complete person, said the eyes. A machine that would lift and carry for you, or a mule...

  “No,” he whispered to himself, defiant but fearing the child was partly right.

  He ran to the cell phone tower, climbed to the top, and called the police. Then he stayed there, technically still on site, but as far from the tomb, psychologically, as he could get, up there above the trees, looking down on the highest of the Ek Balam structures.

  Ten minutes later, he saw Bowerdale, picking his way across from the parking lot in a cream linen suit. Aguilar watched him, wondering what he was doing there alone. He seemed to loiter as he passed the Twins, then peeled off toward Structure 3, finally doubling back toward the Oval Palace. What was he doing? Why didn’t he go to the tomb? That was surely why he was there. He wanted to look again at what was inside.

  Unless...

  He hadn’t completed the thought when Bowerdale seemed to look up and see him at last. The surveyor raised a hand in salute, which Aguilar returned, then Bowerdale was walking toward Structure 2 and the base of the tower, recovering his customary swagger. Aguilar, glad he had already spoken to the police, began the long climb down the ladders.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Deborah felt the cold slap of water hit her face, and her eyelids fluttered. In the same instant she felt her belly convulse and her neck twist as she voided the cold, tangy water from her stomach out of her mouth. For a second there was no air, and she thought she would black out again, but then she spewed more and her lungs filled with oxygen again. She continued to spit and retch, but she was breathing. Only then could she reconnect with her body, its contorted position, and the fact that her face was in air and mottled light, while her body from the chest down was submerged in dark, cold water.

  She was lodged against a smal
l, hard outcropping of rock, but she felt the subterranean river moving steadily around her waist and legs and it felt that if she pushed back under the ground she might float away into the darkness. She opened her eyes briefly and found herself looking skyward up a stone-rimmed tube about a yard across.

  A well.

  It was one of the old Mayan water sources, drilled down to the underground river but not used for centuries. That she had surfaced unconscious here, her head and shoulders above the water while her body still hung in the slow, pulling current below, was the kind of luck Deborah generally didn’t believe in. She must have been out for hours, lodged in this spot as the horrors of the night before had played out. If the gunman or the figure in the Mayan mask had found her before she came to...well, they hadn’t. More luck.

  She remembered the splash to her face that had woken her and looked up toward the blue sky again, perhaps twenty feet, to where the small brown face of Adelita Lucia del Carmen Lacantun peered down at her, a bottle of spring water poised to dump down the well if the first didn’t get enough show of life.

  Deborah called the girl’s name, then coughed.

  “Stay there,” said Adelita in Spanish. “I’ll bring people.”

  She was gone no more than ten minutes, though it felt longer, and Deborah had time both to recover her breathing properly and to feel the dread of being pulled back into the darkness. She could understand why the ancient Maya had considered cenotes gateways to the underworld. After the bright, arid conditions of the surface, the world beneath felt like another planet, an opposite realm full of strangeness and danger.