by Greig Beck
Hector flung himself down on the floor and looked into the pit. Ramón stood back slightly, reluctant to get too close to the black hole. The inside edges of the opening were abraded, as if they had been scratched by some great beast, and he could see that the bottom of the trapdoor was also covered in the same deep gouges. He reached out his hand and spread his fingers, placing them in some of the ancient grooves — they fit almost perfectly. He frowned for a moment, then shrugged and went back to straining his eyes down into the darkness.
Hector snatched up the flashlight and extended his arm down into the pit. Ramón took a few steps closer but couldn’t bring himself to lie down and look over its edge. There was a smell, a feeling … something strange, he thought.
Hector slid the weak yellow beam across as much of the vault as he could see from his limited angle of vision.
‘There’s something down there,’ he said. ‘I think it’s gold. I knew it, amigo — we’ve found the treasure room.’ He scrambled to his feet and stepped onto the stone staircase. ‘Well? Are you coming?’
Ramón shook his head and rubbed the cross around his neck again. ‘I’ll keep a lookout. Come back and tell me what you find.’
‘Okay, but remember: La suerte favorece a los valientes.’ Hector laughed at his own wit and started down into the thick darkness.
* * *
The small stone-lined room seemed to absorb the torchlight and give nothing back in return. Hector moved quickly, as much by feeling as by his limited sight, to the golden object he had glimpsed from above. He pulled it free from several inches of what looked like flakes of mud and dried fruit skins. As he broke the crust, a pungent odour rose up, like a ripe fungus.
The golden object was a crucifix. Hector held it up and squinted at it in the weak light — the arms had been bent and screwed up like wadded paper, and the body of Christ nailed to its centre was crushed flat. He was glad Ramón had remained upstairs — he would have taken the deformed crucifix as a bad sign. He tested its weight in his hand and shook his head. It was too light to be made of a precious metal, and there were no significant stones anywhere on its surface.
‘Jesuit rubbish!’
He flung it to the ground and continued his search, waving the flashlight from side to side and squinting into the darkness. The room looked to be empty, except for a skeletal body propped up in a corner, covered in some sort of black webbing. In the weak light, it looked moist and greasy — almost as if it was still putrefying. Hector approached the remains and his brow furrowed. The head looked wrong; the jaws and teeth were misshapen. He brought his light closer and thought he could just make out something in its skull, something that quivered when the weak beam touched it. A mouse? he wondered as he leaned in to peer between the jaws.
Something swivelled and repositioned itself, shivering in reaction to the movement or light. Hector reached for his blade, intending to poke it at the small moving creature. When he looked back, the thing had shifted again — he could see it clearly now, and it wasn’t a mouse, or anything he recognised.
He grunted in distaste and used the blade to pry open the jaws.
In an explosion of movement, the thing launched itself at Hector’s face.
* * *
Hector’s scream blasted up out of the dark, causing the small hairs on Ramón’s neck to stand upright.
‘Madra Dios! Hector? Hector, answer me!’
Ramón sucked in a deep breath and lifted the small crucifix to his mouth, placing it between his lips to hold it there. He must have fallen, or got stuck in something. He must be hurt. That must be it … that must be all.
He edged closer to the pit and called to his cousin again. There was no sound but his own rapid breathing. He peered down the staircase and saw a weak yellow beam across the floor — not moving and low down. Hector must have dropped the flashlight.
Mierda; there was no choice — he would have to go down.
Ramón crossed himself twice and put one foot onto the first step, hesitated, then silently inched down the remaining steps. At the bottom, the ground was soft and spongy. He called again, but in a whisper, as if fearful of being overheard. It was hard to judge the size of the room in the blackness, but his voice bounced back in a cramped echo, suggesting it was fairly small. Still no response. He couldn’t understand it. There was nowhere for his cousin to go, unless he had found another way out. He must be in here somewhere.
Ramón picked up the flashlight and edged along the wall towards the back corner. There was a mound there; maybe Hector was behind it. His foot touched something hard. He bent to see what it was: some kind of book. He pulled it free of the crusted floor and rubbed away some of the black sticky substance that coated its thick leather cover. There was a gold-leaf crucifix on the front, but no title. A Bible perhaps? He tucked it under his arm and waved the flashlight around again. The gouges he had seen above were more pronounced down here: deep furrows in the wall and ceiling stones, as if some great beast had been clawing at its enclosure.
Like it was trapped here.
He blinked away the frightening thought and brought the beam back to the strange lump.
‘Hector? Is that you? Are you hurt?’
His hushed tones seemed unnaturally loud in the small space. His steps got shorter, his feet seeming to deny him the forward motion his brain requested. He stretched out his arm instead, holding out the light. Even with its beam directed on the mound, he still couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing. The mass seemed to move and glisten in the flickering flame — something covered in moss, perhaps, he thought.
He took another step and saw his cousin’s mud-streaked pants just showing from under the sticky-looking lump. The whole pile looked unclean and he was loath to reach out and touch whatever it was, so he stepped to the side and crouched, extending the flashlight as far as he could. There was definite movement — the thing shifted. He could see now. His cousin was curled up on the ground, a grotesque black figure crouched over him, pressing its face into his, as if kissing him deeply. But this was no gentle caress; instead Ramón could see rows of needle-sharp teeth hooked into Hector’s cheeks, while long skeletal fingers restrained him. As Ramón watched in horror, he saw his cousin blink once, very slowly, as if the effort of the tiny movement was almost beyond him.
The glistening skeletal head seemed to burrow further into Hector’s face. Ramón could see rivulets of red running over the thing’s bony mass, as though its veins and tendons were filling with the life fluids it was sucking from his cousin’s rapidly thinning body.
There came a scream so loud it hurt Ramón’s ears. Only when his throat rasped with strain did he realise the sound was emanating from his own mouth. He stopped himself, not wanting to draw the creature’s attention, and instead moved his cold lips in prayer. But it was too late. The monster stopped its revolting sucking and detached its head from Hector.
Ramón saw something slither back between the thing’s jaws as the long face swung towards him. Hot wetness splashed his groin as his bladder released in revulsion and fear. He fell backwards and scrambled on his back along the floor to the steps, his hands still clutching the book. The flashlight remained where he had dropped it, casting a yellow halo over the monstrosity in the corner.
The creature rose up, pieces of wet blackness falling from its frame as it flexed strings and bulges of flesh that were becoming muscles and skin. We need you, it said, its voice dry and dispassionate, and sounding not in the room but within his mind.
Ramón hit the steps with his lower back, ignoring the pain. The thing moved out of the light and was now invisible in the darkness. Ramón edged up the steps, trying to pray, but only small squeaks came from his dry throat. He held the book up in front of him, brandishing its gold-leaf crucifix like a shield.
His head breached the rim of the pit. He scrabbled his way out, then turned and ran.
It took him hours to find his way back to the mining camp. Once there, he did not speak of what he had se
en. Who would believe him? He had no proof — he had dropped the book during his flight. Besides, it had probably been a hallucination; a result of the powder his cousin had given him. There was no ruined church, no foul beast lurking below it in its lair. He had simply got lost in the jungle and wandered until he had come upon the camp again. And Hector? He would turn up. He always did like to go out exploring on his own.
SIX
Aimee sat quietly in the shade of the stretched canvas sheet that was doing little to block out the pervasive humidity. Her eyes followed the activity of the men as each worked smoothly, but noisily: changing pipe segments, calibrating penetration force or drill speed, or simply yelling out data to Alfraedo on the other side of the platform.
Her stomach roiled from the impatience she felt over the time it was taking to break through into the deep cavern, and also from the images of the ruined bodies just past the jungle’s edge. She thought she could still smell a hint of the ripped and torn flesh as it sat slowly baking in the sun and heat, and a tiny shot of bile hit the back of her throat; wishing she could have another sip of Francisco’s whisky, she swallowed hard.
Aimee grimaced when the acidic taste refused to leave her mouth, and began searching for the small doctor just as the background noise of the drill thumped, making her start, before taking on a smoother sound for a second or two, then stopping as its rotational brakes were applied.
A shout went up from the rig foreman — they had broken through into the gas chamber.
Aimee got to her feet, her stomach still threatened more discomfort, but she was thankful for some action at last. She strode a few feet closer, but had been cautioned to keep her distance from the heavy machinery while it was being operated, and settled for hovering just behind the workers and their furious exertions.
The drill head had to be carefully extracted and the toothed bit drawn back up inside the drill shaft. It was a tense procedure: the pipe remained sealed, but with trillions of cubic feet of gas under thousands of pounds of pressure, any mistake could be disastrous — causing either an explosion that would crush hundreds of feet of expensive pipe, or destabilisation and fissuring around the penetration site resulting in gas leakage over a huge area.
Aimee paced back and forth while the last few hundred feet of pipe were withdrawn from the well. Finally, the end hissed free in a white cloud of raw gas and micro-fragments scraped from the walls of the shaft. She held her breath — primitive gas contained sulfur, methane and a number of other revolting-smelling compounds that always made her imagine dinosaurs farting.
Ignoring the warning that she should stay well clear of the drill zone, she pushed forward. She had to get the encrusted drill tip before surface bacteria contaminated it. What she sought came from an environment so different from their own that it might as well have been from another planet — so fragile that it could be destroyed on contact with the air. Assuming there was even anything there in the first place …
* * *
Ramón used a twenty-pound wrench to unscrew the drill bit, then let it drop gently onto a padded sheet so the soil and rock caught in its teeth wouldn’t shake free.
He stood and rolled his shoulders — his whole body was sore and he had a headache. He hadn’t slept properly since his trip into the jungle, and he was tired — deathly so. Nightmares continued to boil away his sleep at night, and his cousin, Hector hadn’t returned. Still Ramón refused to take seriously the dark images that filled his dreams; to accept them as real memories, rather than some sort of drug-induced hallucination — to do that, would surely lead to madness.
The tall American woman stood behind him, watching his every move. She was attractive enough, but not his type; like most foreign women, she was too tall and much too aggressive.
The encrusted drill head glistened darkly in the sunlight, like the feathers of a water bird fouled by an oil slick. Ramón lifted it in his thick rigging gloves and held it out to the woman. She looked pleased, but refused to take it in her hands. Instead, she asked him to return it to the sheet and make a kind of carrying sack by lifting the fabric’s edges, so it could be moved to her tent office.
After Ramón had placed the sheet and its contents on the small folding table, the woman said something to Doctor Herrera, who then turned to Ramón.
‘Please get some new gloves, Ramón,’ he said. ‘There could be contaminants on that pair now.’
Ramón nodded and walked away, pulling off first one glove, then using his bare hand to remove the other. Black, oily sludge now stained his fingers.
* * *
Aimee scraped a tiny speck of the glistening debris onto a glass slide before placing the drill tip in a clear isolation box. With experienced hands, she added a few drops of demineralised water to the sample and placed it under the lens of a high-power microscope, then she unwound a small length of cable and inserted one end into a free port on her computer; the other end fitted neatly into the back of the microscope. Aimee clicked an icon that informed her the scope was successfully connected, and immediately her screen expanded to show a seething grey ocean of microbial life. She grinned and punched the air — success! It was exactly what she had been hoping for: living bacteria from a primordial gas chamber deep beneath the earth.
In among the whirling, flicking and spinning life, flecks of silver shimmered. Aimee recognised the material immediately: iridium. Must be where the K-T layer extended in this region, she thought. She had come across the mineral many times in her work. The rare substance was in abundance in two places that she knew of: the first place was a thin sedimentary layer that dated back over 65 million years and separated the Cretaceous and Mesozoic eras; a global skin that separated humans from the dinosaurs. The theory was that iridium was the pulverised remains of a massive meteor strike — which was where the second common form was found: in meteors, meteorites and astral bodies that made Earth landfall.
Aimee moved on from the mineral to the microscopic animals that crowded the screen. She clicked her mouse to create a square border around them, then enlarged and rotated the captured images. Many she was able to identify as well-known, simple anaerobic life forms, but others … they refused to fit into any recognisable categories. She was sure she’d seen something like them before — long spherical bacteria in chains — but not from miles below the ground.
She suspended another image on the screen and scrolled down to the description box, her cursor blinking at her as she sat thinking for a moment. She remembered Alfred’s words about the bacteria being a potential key, then smiled and typed: Clavicula occultus; Latin for ‘hidden key’. And hopefully that’s what you might be, she thought as she added a standard taxonomic descriptor for spherical bacterium.
She flipped back to the live images and was surprised to see that some of the chains had increased slightly in size. Hmm, hungry little fellows, aren’t you?
She continued to examine the bacterial life forms for a while, their shape nagging at her memory. Finally, she saved the images and shut down her computer. She’d know more after she ran some tests back at the camp.
She smiled again, her earlier black memories and fears swept away by the realisation that she may have hit upon an inexpensive, and limitless, source of fuel for the world. Today is a good day for mankind, she thought.
* * *
Ramón was having the strangest dream of his life. He was in a black pit full of twinkling stars — pinpoints of light that landed on him like angel dust and tickled his skin. His hands were the most thickly covered, and they wouldn’t work. He felt as light as a feather, but just as weak.
He came awake slowly, as though rising through water to break the surface on a gloomy landscape. His nose was running into his mouth and the taste was strange, like dirt and tar. He tried to sit up in the dark tent, moving quietly so his three companions would not waken — all were bigger than Ramón and would not take kindly to being roused unnecessarily after a long day’s work and an early start the following morning. Bu
t he couldn’t move his arms to place them on the ground. The darkness was velvet black and made it impossible to see even outlines. Still, he knew something was terribly wrong: his arms didn’t just feel numb, they felt … gone.
The tingling sensation turned to pinpricks of fire and he knew he was going to have to wake his co-workers. He would risk their harsh words or blows; he just needed to ensure he was okay.
‘José, lo siento,’ he called softly into the dark, beginning to sob as he felt the prickling move to start in his shoulders. He called again, a little louder. ‘José.’
This time he was answered by a grunt in the dark, then a deep and sleepy voice beside him. ‘Qué quieres, Ramón?’
Ramón sobbed out his request for light.
The larger man swore softly under his breath and reached for the mud-caked flashlight they kept near the door of the tent. A small click and the beam lit Ramón up like a ghastly performer on a stage.
Jose’s scream was high and piercing and immediately wrenched the other two men from their sleep. On seeing Ramón, all three pressed themselves to the back of the tent.
Ramón’s body was coated in a black oily mucus that ran from every orifice in his body, even from the very pores of his skin. The most shocking aspect was his upper limbs — or lack of them. At his shoulders were dripping stumps. The wounds weren’t bloody and ragged, as would be expected if the arms had been hacked off by a knife. Instead, the limbs were frayed, as though something had dissolved them into a tattered mess. As the men watched, a piece of grey-black flesh fell away from Ramón’s shoulder and plopped into the pool beside him, melting away like butter in a hot pan.
Ramón’s vision was clouding, but he could see the horror on the men’s faces and knew it must be bad. He tried one last time to sit up, but all he managed was to rock forward a few inches and then flop back down, splashing into the pool of viscous liquid that surrounded him. It splattered the other men and they cried out in disgust, holding damp sheeting or clothing over their lower faces.
