by David Gilman
Death was what lay hidden there.
“Leave him,” Cazamind told Riga as he fumbled a Band-Aid onto his torn nail.
“Let him go?” Riga answered, his voice crystal clear on the satellite phone.
“Yes. He can’t survive in there. He can’t do us any more harm.”
“He hasn’t done too badly so far,” Riga said.
“I don’t want you going in there,” Cazamind said. It was an order. He could not risk any outsider getting inside, especially not one like Riga, who had the skills to get out. No outsiders—that was the golden rule. You go in, you stay in.
There was a moment’s pause. Riga was obviously considering what to say next, which surprised Cazamind. His brain focused, the finger forgotten. Why was Riga hesitating? Why wasn’t it a quick Yes, sir? End of story. Paid. Money in the bank. Mission terminated.
“All right,” Riga said. “Understood.”
Cazamind ended the call. The man’s inflection was wrong. Another fear tugged at his nervous system. He had not believed Riga’s compliance. His assassin was going to ignore his orders—he was convinced of it. Riga was going in alone to satisfy some irrational professional desire to complete the kill against an elusive enemy.
Cazamind was being driven to ever more desperate measures to ensure that one of the world’s biggest cover-ups stayed covered up. He had to ensure that it all ended now. He needed to be in absolute control. He would have to make very definite assurances that all was as it should be. He could be in Central America in under twelve hours. His finger hurt when he pressed the button on his phone console.
“Eliminate Riga,” he said coldly.
Dense clouds of bats, their bodies no longer than Max’s thumb, with twenty-five-centimeter wings, unfurled from the darkness and smothered Flint and the two boys. It was a frenzied attack. Unlike legend, the bats did not suck a victim’s blood; their razor-sharp incisors slashed skin while an anticoagulant in their saliva kept the blood flowing as their tongues lapped it up.
Max pushed his back against the rock, swinging the flaming torch back and forth, trying to beat them off to allow the others to move lower down the rock-hewn steps. But everyone was trying to cover their face with their arms to stop the painful attacks from the pug-faced creatures.
Torchlight shadows leapt, creating their own monsters in the mayhem, and then, screaming, Xavier fell. Max watched as he tumbled into the swirling mass. He immediately tossed the burning torch after him, desperate to see the boy. As the torch fell, Max’s gaze followed it down. Xavier’s legs bicycled in the air, his arms flailed and he still screamed. There was no choice. Max leapt into the darkness, following the diminishing light. Not knowing if Flint had seen him jump, he yelled the plant thief’s name as he plummeted downward.
A couple of seconds later, he heard Xavier’s body splash into water, followed rapidly by the hissing torch as it was extinguished by the river. His mind told him he had a couple of seconds before he, too, hit.
And then he was underwater, all the air pounded from his lungs. He kicked hard and quickly broke through the surface. Within moments he could see light glimmering in the distance. “Xavier!” His voice echoed across the smooth surface of the river, reverberating around the cold rock face. No sooner had he called the boy’s name than he heard a mighty splash a few meters behind him. Orsino Flint had jumped into the void to follow him. Max cried out again, “Xavier!” And this time he heard the boy’s cry for help.
Max was surprised to find he still gripped the sturdy spear shaft, and within moments used it for support in the silted riverbed as it grew shallower. Then he saw Xavier’s bedraggled figure clinging to a boulder in the slow-moving water. He had been lucky. The deep pool had broken his fall, and the gentle current had washed him quickly into shallow water. But his foot had become wedged beneath a rock, and even though the water was shallow, he was forced to raise himself on his elbows to keep his face from slipping below the current.
The light was brighter now; they were near the river’s exit into daylight. Max heard splashing behind him. It was Flint, his straw hat soaked but still firmly in place.
Max could see that, despite being dunked in the river, blood still flowed from Xavier’s face and neck, and he knew that he, too, was still bleeding. But his main concern was for Xavier. He could see that his leg was not broken, but the awkward position of his ankle meant that if he tried to drag the boy free, he could damage it. Ramming the spear shaft under the rock, he levered his weight down.
“Pull yourself free!”
It wasn’t enough. “Grab his shoulders, Flint. Ready?”
Max grunted with effort, found a rock to push his legs against and levered downward. In a slush of water and silt, Xavier was yanked free a moment before the spear shaft snapped. Max fell back into the water, but he was unhurt.
Released from the underwater trap, Xavier hugged Max like a long-lost brother. He gabbled something furiously in Spanish. Max eased him away from the embrace. Flint wiped his face with his hands and looked at the smears of blood.
“He said …” Flint sighed. “You don’t want to know what he said. It’s embarrassing.” Then he pointed at Xavier and said something to him that made the boy look guilty. “I told him you jumped after him. To save him, again. And I told him he wasn’t worth it. Now let’s get out of here and get rid of all this blood.”
“Check his leg first. I’m going to look outside,” Max told him.
He trudged through the shallows toward the gaping entrance where the river spilled out. A sheet of rock like a huge split tongue jutted out from the cave’s mouth. The gently flowing water spilled over in a gossamer waterfall. Max stood on the rock’s edge, with water swirling past his ankles, high enough above the tree canopy to look across the vast expanse of encircled rain forest. Wisps of cloud and mist were being tugged from the treetops by the breeze, and the amphitheater’s mountaintop was ringed in a circle of fire from the rays of the sinking sun. Piercing a cleft of rock, a laser beam of sunlight etched across the craggy peaks, broadened into a spotlight and washed the waterfall beneath Max’s feet into a crimson veil.
Max felt as though he had stepped into an unknown paradise: trees and flowering plants swayed in a gentle breeze, the silence broken only by the whisper of the waterfall. The mist was lifting, and in the far distance, as if revealed by a giant hand, the volcano’s smoke drifted lazily away.
He was in the forbidden land.
The warrior’s eyes watched him from the jungle below. It was his duty to guard the Cave of the Stone Serpent—a portal to the underworld, the place of death. But now he gazed with increasing fear.
In the legend of time, the Spearthrower clans had been defeated in great jungle battles because they could not throw their lances in the dense undergrowth. A new clan had emerged carrying shorter, flint-headed stabbing spears. They were brutally effective in close-quarter battle.
He saw a figure step out of the Serpent’s jaws and stand on its tongue. He carried the weapons of a jungle warrior: a blowpipe, a knife and a stabbing spear. Blood streamed from his head and face, washing into the river, causing the waterfall to turn red. Blood was sacred to Mayan life and war. Seized by a primal fear rooted in thousands of years of memory and legend, the warrior ran into the jungle. He must report what he had seen.
The Serpent had created a projection of its own being in another form, its wayob, and sent it into the world of man—it was a manifestation of death.
They clambered down and moved across the shallow sandbanks into the edge of the jungle. Flint made them wash the blood away while he went foraging in the undergrowth. He soon returned and gave Max and Xavier a handful of leaves. “Chew these into a pulp, then put them onto the cuts,” he instructed them, shoving some into his mouth. Within a few minutes of dressing the wounds, the steady flow of blood from the bat cuts stopped.
The shadows were deepening, and a moment of silence fell across the forest before the night sounds started.
�
�We need to get out of the open and deeper into the jungle in case anybody sees us,” Max said.
“There’s no sign or smell of anyone. It’s been a tough day; we need food.” Flint took the straw hat off and ran his fingers through his long hair, pulling it back behind his ears. He was looking over the terrain.
“Where would you choose?” he asked Max.
Max looked around. There were slabs of rock that reminded him of a tor back on Dartmoor. Prehistoric man had once made his campfires on those rocks and used them for lookouts and shelter. He pointed with the broken spear. “I’ll climb up there and see what I can find,” he said.
“What do I do?” Xavier said.
“You come with me and I’ll show you how to catch a snake. Then you can skin it,” Flint told him.
Xavier’s face said it all. “I go with Max,” he said with a grimace.
As Flint turned away and quickly disappeared into the jungle, Max clambered up onto the rocks. Xavier had no desire to be left standing alone, so he exerted himself in trying to match Max’s mountain-goat agility.
When Max finally reached the top, he found he could see deep into the forest, and looking back to the river and the cave mouth, it was obvious they were on the bend of the river. The rocks sheltered a now overgrown clearing, in which stood an abandoned hut. Xavier was bent double from the exertion.
“Down there,” Max said. “It’s perfect. Out of sight but with a clear view of these rocks and the river beyond.”
“I’ve stayed in better slums,” Xavier said. “But after hanging out with you, that place is like a hotel.”
Xavier began to move forward, but Max reached out his hand and stopped him. He pointed with the spear. “Look at that,” he said quietly.
Xavier turned to face Max’s line of sight. The sun had already disappeared below the mountain peaks, needles edging against the dark sky, but far away in the jungle, a curtain of mist was drawn across the valley. And it was bloodred. They stood for a few moments trying to understand what they were looking at.
Flint, huffing and puffing with his smoker’s cough, climbed up behind them, a dead snake in his hands and fruit tucked into his shirt. Max recognized the diamond-shaped head of the snake, one of the deadliest pit vipers in the tropics. Without a doubt, Orsino Flint was an expert survivalist—no one tackles a three-meter fer-de-lance without knowing what they are doing. He turned back to look at the veil of blood. Flint’s eyes squinted. The breeze was picking up. He sniffed the air. “Aha. You smell that,” he said.
Max nodded. He, too, had caught the slightly disgusting smell of sulfur on the wind.
“That’s an open stream of lava. The rising mist is from the damp jungle. This whole area was once an active volcano. Now it’s just that one mountain bleeding into the land. The mist is the lava’s reflection,” Flint said.
“Dangerous ground. I don’t want to go anywhere near it,” Max said. “At first light, we’ll find a track and see where it leads us. The pyramids and buildings in my mother’s pictures are out there somewhere. We find them and I might find out what happened to her.”
“And then?” Xavier asked.
Max shook his head. He wanted to go home, but the thought of facing his father again twisted something inside of him. He felt no compassion or understanding for what his father had done. Max knew his dad had failed to beat his own fear about something out here. He was determined to find the truth about how his mother died, but there were moments he wished he had not embarked on such a torturous journey. From the very start, it had caused pain and hurt, and the truth of his father’s actions tore at him.
There was no point talking about it. He didn’t want his own fears bubbling to the surface. Best no one saw that.
The embers of the fire burned in the stone hearth that Max had made in the hut. They had grilled and eaten the snake, and even the reluctant Xavier had admitted it wasn’t so bad and that it tasted like chicken. But now the breeze began to blow through the hut’s windows. As Max peeled fruit and handed it to Xavier, Flint began closing the wooden shutters.
“It’s already hot in here,” Max said. “We need some air.”
“It is not good to have the night wind move across your body when you sleep,” Flint told him as he fastened the shutters. “Some winds are malevolent; they are night spirits. You understand that? Your ch’ulel, it can be attacked.”
“Ch’ulel?”
“Ch’ulel is your life force, your spirit,” Flint explained. “It is vulnerable when you sleep. We’re intruders here, but our presence will be known. There are different ways of stopping us. Shamans can take on the form of animals and travel on the wind.”
“The wayob?” Max asked.
Flint nodded. “The windows stay closed.”
Xavier pulled fruit strands from his teeth. “Y’see, chico? Peasants. These people live in the forest and they start thinking like monkeys.”
In an instant, Flint had a knife at Xavier’s throat. Xavier choked. Max’s reactions were just as quick as he gripped Flint’s knife hand.
“Flint! Stop it! We’re in enough trouble as it is. Leave him.”
Flint pulled back but gestured with the knife. “Do not insult a man’s beliefs, drug scum. They sit more deeply than the heart.”
“Apologize,” Max told Xavier, who stared at him in disbelief. “Go on,” Max urged him. “If he wanted to kill you, he could have. I couldn’t have stopped him. He was warning you. If I were you, I’d apologize.”
Xavier grimaced as if the fruit had been sour. “OK. So … so you believe in evil spirits. OK. That’s cool, amigo. It was a joke. OK? I was joking.”
Flint muttered and backed himself into a corner, where he lay down with his back to the wall. “You are the ignorant one, boy. Your ch’ulel has already been corrupted. The dark ones took your childhood. You should ask for forgiveness and one day, maybe, you will understand what it means to live like a human being instead of a cockroach.”
Xavier flinched, and this time Max’s hand restrained the boy. “Leave him, Flint. Xavier tried to start a new life for himself and his brother. He’ll come right.”
Flint grunted, rolled a cigarette and let it smolder in his lips as he pulled his hat down over his eyes. He gave a rattling cough, his lungs struggling with the smoke. Both he and Xavier settled down. Max gazed into the fire. He knew about shamans and the creatures they could become. The shaman in Africa who had saved his life had taken him through a terrifying experience. Max understood what it meant to feel your body turned inside out, to experience the sensation of becoming an animal. Some things you can’t explain. The subtle energies that moved through his body were a mystery, but he had stepped into that maelstrom on more than one occasion. If he were able to, he would beckon it at will, but it was beyond his capability. Something triggered it—he didn’t know what—so he accepted Flint’s explanation. The room was stiflingly hot, but he closed his eyes and let the exhaustion take him into the fractured world of dreams.
Outside, the jungle bristled. Max and the others had been seen by more than the cave-guardian warrior.
A hundred pairs of eyes gazed through the darkness toward the hut.
As daylight broke in the City of Lost Souls, it was the women who came to Charlie Morgan. Half a dozen pickup trucks with armed men had torn up the muddy street as they headed toward the jungle. Charlie wiped the sweat from her neck, tugged her clammy T-shirt away from her body, swallowed the last of a cold drink and crunched ice between her teeth as she waited for the dozen women who had gathered in front of her to speak. They were nervous. One nudged another forward, but the women seemed either shy or afraid. Charlie smiled. Time to be nice.
“¡Hola!” she greeted them.
“You are English?” the woman asked. There was no trace of hesitancy. Obviously, Charlie reasoned, they had all been educated.
Charlie nodded. That seemed the right answer, as if it comforted and reassured the women.
“No one, no woman, has ever stood
up to the men.”
“Well, there’s a first time for everything. Slimeballs need a bit of housecleaning once in a while.”
The women hesitated, seeming uncertain, until their spokesperson translated this into what Charlie assumed was Mayan. The women smiled, nodding. Charlie didn’t usually get on that well with other women, but this seemed to be going OK.
“I’m looking for a boy,” she said. “An English boy.”
“Yes. He said someone would come after him.”
“Max Gordon was here?”
“We do not know his name,” the woman replied.
Charlie tugged out Max’s picture. “Is this him?”
The picture was quickly passed around, and the accompanying shake of their heads answered Charlie’s question.
The woman handed the picture back. “The boy had long hair. He was tall. He had heard of a woman who had gone into the rain forest four, maybe five, years ago.”
Charlie nodded. “His name was Danny Maguire, and he was looking for a scientist called Helen Gordon.”
The woman shrugged. That part they did not know about. “And this boy you are looking for?”
“Her son,” Charlie said. She watched their faces register what it must be like for a young boy trying to find his mother. “The boy with long hair—Maguire—did he go into the jungle?”
