Moon Mask

by James Richardson

  In a panicked scrabble they dashed away from the falling grenade. It hit the ground in between them and exploded on impact, ripping up huge chunks of ancient roadway and the earth beneath and blowing it out in a mushroom of flame.

  Two of Ming’s men were too slow and were almost instantly incinerated. Another fared little better and had most of his flesh roasted like a joint of meat.

  Xan had the sense to follow the American and Ming, several footsteps behind, and as the blast wave rippled out, it plucked all three off the ground and hurled them into the icy water.

  His head throbbing from the pounding Ming had given him and the concussion of the blast, Raine broke the surface and gasped for air, turning to face the two Chinese soldiers who had landed in the water alongside him.

  Ming had lost his weapon, but Lieutenant Xan had not.

  He moved quickly, bringing the water-proof weapon up to aim at Raine’s chest, point blank.

  All Raine could do as he treaded the deep water was raise his hands in submission.

  That was when, without a single sound and in the blink of an eye, the soldier was dragged beneath the surface of the water in an explosion of startled bubbles.

  Dread dawned on the American and the Chinaman at the exact same moment.

  Beneath the water, they felt the current surge and, peering nervously down beneath their feet, they saw the mammoth coils of the leviathan undulating as it digested its human prey.

  Ignoring each other, both men threw themselves forward and swam for the water’s edge.

  But they were both too slow.

  Raine felt a sudden, intense and agonising weight wrap itself around his body, crushing his chest, mere moments before he was dragged into the dark domain of the monster.

  17:

  Leviathan

  Xibalba,

  Sarisariñama Tepui,

  Venezuela,

  Nathan Raine thrashed manically, losing sight of Colonel Ming. The giant snake, an anaconda he guessed, clutched him in its coils, its giant girth squeezing. He felt muscles, incredibly strong, clenching beneath silky skin and he gasped for breath but was rewarded only by choking. He panicked and futilely smacked the snake with the palms of his hands-

  He saw Ming, in a similar predicament, struggling, eyes bulging, gasping for air and drinking in the stale water. The coiled lengths of the snake slithered and twisted and brought the two men close together.

  Raine saw his chance. As momentum and serpentine muscle brought him near to Ming, he reached out and plucked the Chinaman’s dagger from his combat webbing. With only seconds of consciousness left in him, he jabbed the blade deep into the snake’s flesh. He felt the beast contort in pain a second before a giant head whipped around, gnashing at him. But by that point the snake’s hold on him had loosened and he slid through its coils, out underneath and kicked to Ming’s side.

  He repeated the process, stabbing the monster again and then ducking for cover, dragging Ming with him.

  They broke the surface in a splutter of gasping breaths but already the anaconda, unwilling to lose a meal tastier than crocodile flesh, twisted and glided through the water towards them. Its terrifying head broke the surface, slicing through the fire-lit water like a shark. It closed on them, immense jaws opening-

  Raine pushed to the side just before the anaconda’s jaws came crashing down on nothingness. Ming had duplicated his actions on the other side of the four foot girth, reaching out and holding on to the side of the snake’s head, careful to avoid its jaws. It was far safer to cling to the side of its head than be in front of it, Raine decided.

  How the serpent had grown so staggeringly huge was beyond him. Everyone had heard tales of the giant anacondas spotted by the early European explorers but most had been ridiculed. There was no ridiculing this monster, however. Perhaps, secure in a world away from human interference, sustained by crocodiles, themselves massive, it had simply grown to such astonishing proportions. Perhaps it was simply a different sub-species of anaconda, one glanced at by a handful but never documented by science. There were enough folk tales from Amazonian tribes attesting to as much.

  The other possibility which, bizarrely shot through his head at such an inopportune moment, was that perhaps it had been affected by the tachyon radiation emitted by the Moon Mask.

  He hoped to live long enough to find out.

  The snake dived again, thrashing from side to side to shake him and Ming loose. Again submerged, Raine held on for his life as they tore through the water. Wounded and angry now, the snake bucked and heaved its considerable weight. It smashed itself into the side of the waterway, almost knocking Raine free. In retaliation he jabbed the dagger into the side of its head.

  The massive creature reared up out of the water and Raine saw his chance. He was yards away from the bridge and so he pushed off the snake and dived for it, feeling jaws closing just behind him.

  Ming jumped also and landed, bent over the side of the stone blocks of the bridge, legs dangling above the water, arms scrambling for purchase. He fared much better than Raine, however, who crashed shoulder first into the bridge and was unable to find purchase. He dropped towards the water, arms cart-wheeling. His hands automatically closed around Ming’s trouser leg and he held firm. The Chinaman grunted and kicked.

  “Let go!”

  Raine glanced at the behemoth snake. It had over shot its mark, darted beneath the bridge, but now twisted its agile body around on itself, contorting its muscles to sway its length, propelling it forward: directly for Raine.

  “Pull me up!” he gasped.

  “Let me go!”

  “Pull me up, you asshole!”

  Ming’s grip on the top of the bridge was slipping.

  Death ploughed through the water towards them.

  “I helped you, now you help me!”

  “If I pull you up, I’ll kill you anyway!” Ming admitted without pause. He kicked again, violently. Raine slipped, dropped, regained his hold, feet touching the water.

  “How you Americans say? Eat my shorts?” He laughed at himself.

  The snake’s head rose, its jaws opening, aimed directly at Raine . . . and the lower half of Ming’s body.

  “I won’t,” Raine replied, “but he might.”

  With that, he pulled the pin from his last remaining grenade, thrust it into the large pocket on Ming’s thigh and then pushed off from the Chinaman’s body, diving into the water, streamlining his body to drop as far down as possible.

  The snake’s jaws closed around Ming’s legs and lower body and with a petrified shriek of primordial terror, the colonel was torn from the bridge and pounded into the water.

  The grenade detonated.

  The explosion blasted apart both Ming and the snake’s head in a grotesque balloon of blood and snake brains which plumed in the water and jettisoned through the air, splashing against the bridge and the nearby temples.

  The snake’s body twitched momentarily before finally floating motionless on the surface.

  Raine broke the surface to witness his handiwork. Frenzied splashes nearby told him that the crocodiles had witnessed the death of their own tormentor and they dove towards the bloodied carcass. Raine dragged himself out of the water and darted away from the danger it posed before glancing back around at the melee of death as the crocs tore the leviathan apart.

  The Chinese were gone. The giant snake was gone and the man eating crocodiles were occupied. But he had heard Ming’s radio message.

  The United States Special Forces had arrived and Nathan Raine would not let them take him.

  Whatever the cost.

  18:

  The Ashes of Eden

  Xibalba,

  Sarisariñama Tepui,

  Venezuela,

  “You’ve got to take a look at this.” King exclaimed enthusiastically as Raine staggered into the temple on the summit of the pyramid.

  “Glad to see you’re okay too,” he deadpan
ned. “We’ve got to go.”

  King didn’t even notice Raine’s bedraggled state; his soaked clothes, bruised and bloodied face and exhausted expression. He himself had been revitalised. He rushed to the temple’s far wall.

  “Here, look at this. I think this place was some sort of hall of records. Like a . . . a library or something.”

  “That’s great Benny, but we really need to keep moving.”

  “I thought you said on the radio all the soldiers were dead?”

  After surviving his wrestle with the anaconda, Raine had used one of the dead men’s radios to see if King was still alive. The archaeologist had answered his own victim’s radio and given Raine his position.

  There was a pause before Raine answered now, and if King hadn’t been so caught up in his discovery, he might have picked up on it. “There’ll be more on the way,” Raine lied.

  “Then we still have time. I can’t leave yet.” He thumbed on his torch and shone it at the wall. The bright artificial light cut through the fire-lit gloom and illuminated thousands of carvings of all shapes and sizes. Some were easily recognisable, pictograms of birds and animals, vaguely human-looking shapes, even tools and buildings. Others looked to the untrained eye like nothing more than random squiggles, a series of lines, dots, waves and spirals. King saw the incomprehension on Raine’s face.

  “It’s a form of writing,” he explained, his voice filled with enthusiasm. One would never have guessed what dangers he had just lived through. “It incorporates Mayan hieroglyphics into it, but it’s far more in depth than that.” He turned and cast his torch beam over the twelve-foot high stone columns which filled the summit temple like a petrified forest. “It’s on all of these columns as well,” he explained. “But most of it has been erased, chiselled out.” He answered a question which Raine didn’t even ask. “I’m not sure why. I mean, we see this type of erasure on temples around the world when new monarchs come to the throne and want to eradicate the memory of previous rulers. Egypt is full of such examples.”

  “Yeah, that’s great Benny,” Raine said half-heartedly, peering out across the city. There was no denying the spectacular sight before him: an entire ancient metropolis sprawling inside an enormous cave, but he kept his mind focussed, peering across to the waterfall down which they had come. He pulled a pair of NVG binoculars which he had taken from a charred Chinese corpse on his way to meet King, and focussed them on the falls. Sure enough, as he had feared, eight black-clad soldiers were abseiling down the slippery rocks on either side of the rushing water.

  United States Special Forces.

  “We’ve really got to go.” He glanced at the carvings. “Does that tell us how to get out of here?”

  Sensing the urgency in his voice, King fell back down to reality. “Not exactly,” he replied, peering across the city to where Raine was looking. “Are you sure they’re Chinese?” he asked nervously. “It could be the Americans-”

  He cut himself off, dread dropping like a cold hammer through his belly. The Americans. The very people Raine was trying to flee from before the Chinese showed up.

  The two men faced each other, an icy tension settling on them. After saving his life half a dozen times in the last hour, King thought, would Raine really hurt him now?

  If he decided to, he realised, after seeing him in action, the swift ease with which he had taken out the Chinese, he knew he wouldn’t stand a chance. His best bet was to play along with him, wait for an opportunity to escape to arise.

  “What do you mean, ‘not exactly’?” Raine asked, referring to his previous statement.

  “What? Oh. Well, this section-”

  “The part that’s missing you mean?” he checked, looking where the archaeologist was pointing. Only the faint outline of the carvings remained, but it was enough for King to formulate a basic hypothesis.

  “Yeah. I think it tells the origins of the city. But here, this bit that remains, talks about the ‘Face of the Gods’ appearing in a flash of lightning. Shortly thereafter, most of the city’s population died horrible deaths.” He indicated the crude depictions of twisted and distorted humans, mouths open in silent screams, flesh decaying, blood oozing.

  The Curse of the Moon Mask. The flesh-eating ‘Evil Spirit’ of Sarisariñama.

  His mind flashed back to the horrors he had witnessed in the base camp and he instantly thought of Sid. Was she okay? Was she even alive?

  “It was only part of a face that appeared to them and so, most likely to appease its ravenous appetite, they fashioned it into a mask, venerated it, sacrificed hundreds, possibly thousands of people in hopes of it sparing others.” He ran his fingers over a scene of decapitated bodies.

  “Peachy,” Raine quipped. “So, no back door out of here?”

  “That’s just the thing,” King continued. He felt his eyes drift across to the waterfall but he could not see the soldiers there any longer. It was a dangerous gamble he was playing, stalling for time. If Raine realised what he was doing, there was no telling how he might react. Not to mention, Raine could be telling the truth after all and all King was doing was giving more Chinese troops the time they needed to catch up with them.

  “Whatever this place was originally,” he explained, “it ultimately became Xibalba- the Mayan idea of Hell. It was a place of torment, where the damned would suffer at the hands of the Twelve Lords,” he indicated twelve grotesque-looking figures. “Rumours about this city must have escaped from here in some unknown epoch and spread across the early Andean and Mesoamerican cultures. Rumours of an underground city, adorned with the bones of the dead, where people were forced to endure hideous tests and trials . . .” he glanced at more images of slaughtered people, of ball courts and rivers of fire. “Then, over the years, these ‘rumours’ engrained themselves into the developing cultures’ mythologies. Their tales of the Underworld. Hell.”

  “And if this is hell . . . then no one gets out,” Raine realised. He refocused his binoculars on the soldiers. They were moving now through the city, towards the pyramid. “One entrance, one exit, and we can’t go back that way.”

  “Except, it wasn’t always Hell,” King realised, cutting through the other man’s thoughts. His fingertips gently traced the rough contours of the erased carvings, closing his eyes, his mind trying to digest the tactile sensation, to form a picture in his mind.

  He opened his eyes again, ran the torch down the length of the temple wall, then out through the forest of columns. All had once been carved with the history of Xibalba, but only a small section, telling the story from the ‘arrival’ of the piece of the Moon Mask remained intact. Untold years of history had been erased, sponged out by the real-life, though no less hellish leaders who came to power during the dark days following the mask’s arrival.

  “This place, this city,” he decided. “It wasn’t custom built to be Hell. No great architect sat down and decided today, I’m going to design the Underworld.” He gazed out across the city, his eyes absorbing its reality for the first time. The channels of fire were diminishing as the oil burned away, subduing the once hellish furnace to a gentle, miasmic glow, flicking upon the buildings. He allowed his mind to drift back, to picture what this place had once been before the near obliteration of its population by the tachyons emitted by the Moon Mask.

  The city came to life around him, a hustling, bustling metropolis, spreading out from the pyramid in its centre. Priests prayed to the ancient gods, temple virgins sung sweetly, carrying braziers of sickly incense through the pillared halls of elaborately carved temples. Bakers kneed their dough, blacksmiths worked their furnaces, and children played and frolicked in the wide, blue aqueducts, fed by an elaborate network of water pipes the likes of which the ancient world had never seen. Sunlight streamed into the immense cave through sinkholes in the ceiling, directed onto the green and fertile farming terraces, laced with irrigation canals, by giant mirrors hanging high above-

  “Benny!”

  R
aine’s voice snapped him out of his daydream and he spun to face him, pulling his hand out of the pink purse containing the Moon Mask. He felt disorientated and glanced up to the ceiling. Sure enough, a single sheet of metal, once polished smooth, now tarnished and rusting, hung by one corner to a chain. It had once been part of the network of mirrors which he had seen in his daydream.

  The only thing was, he hadn’t seen it in reality until after the spell was broken.

  “Of course there is another way out,” he told Raine. He had seen that too. The water, collected on the summit during the jungle’s rainfalls, was fed through the Labyrinth tunnels, over the waterfall and distributed through the city, from east to west.

  “Give me the binoculars,” he ordered then placed them to his eyes, scanning the west face of the cave. Sure enough, there he saw the confluence of all the aqueducts and irrigation canals flowing back into one body of water and vanishing into a tunnel. The mouth of the tunnel had once been fashioned into the maw of a giant serpent, now crumbled and decayed. “There,” he pointed.

  “Good,” Raine replied from behind him. “Now move.”

  Picking up on the shift in the other man’s tone, King slowly turned to face him, lowering the binoculars and raising his hands.

  “Nate?”

  “Sorry, Benny,” Raine replied, QBZ-95 aimed at the archaeologist’s chest.