by Edward Lee
There was no safety in daylight—not here. She could scream all she liked, but the people on the sailboat would never hear her. No one would. In a split-second swipe, her rapist’s hands were around her throat, and she was hauled into the water. The strangulation was slow, deliberate, the hands holding her down, then bringing her back up for just enough time to snatch a single breath before plunging her face right back down. Had she been more sentient at the time—and more sane—she would easily have sensed the glee, the sheer sadistic delight, on the part of her attacker. He was going to kill her slowly—
For the fun of it.
Submerged, her face bloated, her hair opened around her head like a tragic flowing aura. Her hands tried to break the grip on her throat but it was useless; her feet kicked out into cool water, striking nothing. Each time she was dragged up, she could feel the raging erection sliding against her belly and thighs.
By now Kari Ann just wanted to die.
Her hands fell off his thick wrists.
Just die…
Was she giving up?
Easier to die…
Her limbs fell limp in the water now. He was holding her down, watching her face beneath the rippling water. Kari Ann stared back, her tongue a fat cork in her mouth, sticking out between her lips. Though her brain was no longer capable of normal thought processing, something did register now, the starkest cognizance that shook her dying psyche like an eruption.
In all of the awful things that had happened, and with all that he’d done to her—last night and now—this was the first and only moment that Kari Ann had had a chance to really see his face.
And suddenly, that image—that face—buckled her. The basest instinct seized her like a breeze against the last lit cinder in a campfire, and her sheer horror was rekindled.
An instant later, her attacker was howling, his hands releasing Kari Ann’s throat. The howl blared like a low horn, exploding around them—a howl of agony.
Kari Ann, without conscious thought, had reached down, grabbed one of his testicles, and began to twist. Her nails ripped into the scrotum. She planted both feet against his hips and pulled.
And tore the testicle off.
More bellows of agony exploded. Wheezing, Kari Ann thrashed to the shore and ran off back into the woods. The bellows followed her, loud as cannon shots, but her attacker did not.
It was well into the afternoon now, the sun high, the daylight raging, and in that daylight Kari Ann had finally seen her attacker’s face, and now she ran, ran, ran, back into the tropical forest, praying to escape yet again because now she knew something beyond all doubt:
This mad-man rapist was no man at all.
Not a man, a thing.
— | — | —
Part Two
— | — | —
FEDERAL LAND GRID S27-0078
CENTRAL FLORIDA
JUNE 1995
Yes, the demon was reaching for Professor Fredrick now as he stood with both feet firmly planted on the bottom of the ancient cavern.
Fredrick’s mouth fell open but all that came out was a parched rasp. His old heart seemed to stop mid-beat in his chest.
Then he noticed that the demon was eating Gummy Bears.
“Dales! My God!” Fredrick gasped. “You scared the—”
“Shit out of you?” Dales nodded, smiling. “You should’ve turned your torch on when you were coming down, then I would’ve seen it, would’ve called out so you knew I was down here.”
Fredrick was still reeling in the afterfright. He was so mad he wanted to shout out loud into his assistant’s face but then…
A larger part of him was relieved that it hadn’t really been a demon waiting for him down here.
“You nodded off topside,” Dales went on, chewing. “After chow I checked the air-probe and it was holding at green. I didn’t want to interrupt your beauty sleep so I came down first to make sure the props were secure.” Dales winked in the torchlight. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone that I was actually the first person to set foot down here in 10,000 years. You can have the credit.”
“You know, Dales, I know I’m an old man, but I’ll bet I could still kick your young, smart sarcastic ass.”
Dales smiled. “In your dreams, Uncle Joe, and speaking of ass-kicking, you were right. There was some serious ass-kicking going on down here.”
“You saw them?”
“Yup, and they’re not ossifications or fossils. They’re bodies.” Dales held his flashlight up under his chin. “Dismembered bodies.”
“And beheaded, right?”
“Roger that, Prof. For a minute I thought those Mr. Magoo glasses of yours were making you see things, but then my own eagle-sharp sense of vision quickly verified your outlandish claim.” Dales popped both brows at Fredrick. “Somebody pulled their motherfuckin’ heads off.”
“You speak with the eloquence of kings,” Fredrick said. “In fact, I think I’ll let you ghost-write my upcoming bestselling autobiography. Now get out of my way so I can take a look at my discovery.”
The levity didn’t last long after that. Even Dales, a natural-born jokester, looked utterly solemn when they turned their beams into the widest portion of the cenote.
The blood—some of it in elongated pools, some of it in gushes—had dried to a coffee-brown, but the rare mix of trapped methane and nitrogen made it appear to be still wet. It wasn’t, of course, but the effect was chilling.
“Man,” Dales muttered. “That’s a lot of blood.”
The shale floor appeared spotless, even polished in spite of its one hundred centuries of disuse. The limbs of the four Ponoye priests—warlocks by any other name—had been flung this way and that, while the heads had been twisted off and then placed right-side up against the cenote’s wall. Again, the effect was chilling: the shriveled heads were looking at them.
“Creepin’ me out,” Dales observed. “If one of them starts talking…can we leave?”
Armlets and wristlets on the arms remained shining in their pure gold platework—no tarnish, no oxidation whatsoever, as though the fineries had been polished hours rather than ten millennia ago. Unseemly pagoda-sleeved tunics still adorned the torsos, fashioned from hide and intricately patterned with hand-inked markings that still looked crisp and sharp. The inevitable process of karyolysis, retarded by the cenote’s protective environment, caused the insides of these ritual garments to fuse with the skin, producing fascinating ripples, while beaded necklaces and feathered fringes around the collarettes remained virtually unaffected. Fredrick had never seen anything like it. The headdresses too, strewn aside in whatever fray had taken place down here, remained absolutely intact, and odder still in their miter-like shape, nothing at all like typical feathered headdresses that were generally thought of as Native-American ceremonial vestment. So much of this, he knew, would begin to disintegrate now that it was being exposed to normal air (he’d have to get a photographic crew down here as soon as possible) but he also knew that very likely the organic remnants—the limbs, torsos, and heads—would experience no such disintegration if handled properly, the natural mummification essentially curing the skin.
Then he thought: The skin. God.
“Careful,” Dales warned. “If you crack it, it might be toxic.”
Fredrick didn’t hear his assistant. He was kneeling before one of the arms, examining it under his torch light. The fingernails, not surprisingly, had continued to grow post-extremis, and the hand hadn’t clawed up as he would’ve expected. Time and the air down here had preserved it so well that he could even see the whorls and bifurcations of the fingerprints still intact. Even more uniquely, where the arm had been disconnected from the shoulder, Fredrick could see the clean white ball of the humerus bone, and desiccated arteries hanging in frozen stasis. But he actually marveled at the appearance of the skin in the flashlight beam, which looked transparent as fine Depression glass and gave off a shiny hue of yellowed beige.
Incredible.
�
��These bodies are better preserved than Tatshenshini Park Iceman,” he said aloud. “Better than the Peat Bog Children and the Nevada Spirit Cave mummy.”
Dales’ voice bounced back from the dark, an ominous echo. “Yeah, Prof. And this body too.”
Fredrick glanced up, alarmed. He could see Dale’s light play in the distance. “You’ve found another body?”
“Yeah. You gotta see this…”
Fredrick’s old knees crackled when he jumped up and shuffled forward. The cenote was much longer than he’d imagined, much more spacious. Dales looked thirty yards away in the echoic dark.
“It’s horrible…and beautiful at the same time,” Dales said more to himself.
Fredrick’s shuffling footsteps slowed as his light began to reveal his assistant’s discovery.
It was a woman—
Good God…
—a woman so uniquely and perfectly mummified that Fredrick grew light-headed at the sight.
From small, finely-cut bricks of black shale, a dolmen had been erected in the center of the cenote—the sacrificial altar. And atop the dolmen lay the woman—more probably a girl well into puberty—petite, nude, and pristine in her 10,000-year-old death.
She lay serene, the velvety straight black hair still intact and arranged about her shoulders. The desiccation of time tightened the skin but in this cool, high-nitrogen/carbon-dioxide environment, it remained flawlessly smooth, no signs of shrivels, sags, ripples. The small breasts were still more than apparent, dark over-large nipples still crisply defined, still distended from the fearful rush of murder. The eyes were gone, of course (they always were) but the beatific visage left the appearance of an endless gaze rather than gruesome sockets. Everything about her was fine, fragile, even angelic in the ancient beauty. Fredrick nearly felt ashamed when he looked between her slightly parted legs to the young pubis. Fourteen, fifteen years old, probably, he estimated. And a virgin, no doubt. Even her sex seemed delicately beautiful, the gentle cleft in once undefiled, dough-soft flesh. The scant pubic hair looked like a dark mist.
“Call me a pervert, boss, but this gal damn near looks good enough to take to the prom,” Dales jested. “Christ, she’s better looking than that cheerleader I was dating last semester, and the cheerleader wasn’t 10,000 years old.”
Fredrick didn’t hear the foolish remarks; he was too enraptured with the find. Every archaeologist’s greatest dream was right here, lying before him…shimmering in its strange, dead splendor and nearly smiling at his awe.
Most amazing to see, though, was simply the girl’s skin. Poreless, smooth, perfect. The naturally dark pigmentation of her race had been leached away by time and absolute darkness, leaving a sheen like rice paper with an eerie off-white tint that reminded Fredrick of the stains in a spent tea bag. Faint chocolate traceries of veins could be seen through the skin’s remarkable translucence, fine and thin as individual thread fibers. Fredrick reckoned that in all of history, death had never looked so alive.
“The state of preservation is astonishing,” he said.
“It’s not astonishing, Prof, it’s unequaled in the annals of human preservation. This chick makes the Andean ‘Pretty Sue’ mummy look like a dried up dog turd. You’re gonna be famous, all right. A week from now, this floozie’s gonna be permanently on display at the Smithsonian, with a neat little photo of you on the plaque next to it. And all those guys out there who thought you were full of b.s. can start eating crow now. After we get some pictures of this in the journals, nobody will ever again refute your claim that the Ponoyes were sacrificial.”
“And, look! She isn’t even cut,” Fredrick reveled. Now more and more of his translations of the Ponoye entablatures were proving correct. Unlike the Toltecs, the Eleusinians, and other ancient civilizations that practiced human sacrifice, the Ponoyes did not cut out the sacrifant’s heart—the archetypal offering. Instead, the virgin would be offered whole and unblemished to the dark devils that the Ponoye worshiped. It was with the most macabre enthusiasm that Fredrick further remarked: “She was garroted in place. You can still see the ligature mark on her throat.”
“That you can.”
“She must have died in sheer terror…yet she seems so peaceful, so serene.”
“She probably believed in the same stuff the priests believed in, probably thought she’d go to some ecstatic afterlife as a reward for allowing herself to be sacrificed.”
Maybe, Fredrick pondered. The thought seemed dreamlike. Maybe she’s there now…watching us.
“But that’s not the $64,000 question, is it?” Dales went on.
No, it wasn’t. The cold hard facts of reality buffeted back into the old professor’s sentience. What an absolutely arcane mystery. It gnawed at him.
Who killed these four priests?
Dales put it into his own terms. “First the priests punch the chick’s ticket, then someone comes down here and goes totally caveman on all four of them, pulls them apart like a bunch of Ken dolls. Who could’ve done that, Prof? I mean, even if you forget about the motive for a minute, who could’ve done that? By the looks of their bodies, they were manually dismembered. No ax-marks, no cutting tools were used to do this. They were pulled apart. Almost like they were drawn by horses or yanked apart on a medieval rack. Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m not seeing any horses or racks down here.”
“I know,” Fredrick confessed, science and logic not lost on him. “It doesn’t make much sense. The answer is somewhere—we’re just not seeing it.”
“Members of a warring tribe? The Seminoles, maybe?”
“The Seminoles hadn’t even arrived here 10,000 years ago,” Fredrick said. “They hadn’t even migrated as far as Alabama. And neither had any of the Muskhogean peoples. And those who did live in the area were terrified of the Ponoyes; they ran from them, never fought—there weren’t enough numbers. No, Dales, it’s not logical that another tribe came down here during the sacrifice ritual and murdered the priests.”
Dales had to chuckle. “Well, when you consider what the priests were actually doing down here…maybe no one else came down at all.”
The ludicrous comment was difficult for Fredrick to ignore altogether. He felt anxious, queasy now in this darkness with all these bodies.
When you consider what the priests were actually doing down here…
Yes, the priests performed a human sacrifice in an attempt to incarnate one of the nameless underworld deities that they worshiped.
The silence seemed to hang around him like a pitch-black sheet. “Fine, Dales,” he finally made a response. “I’d be willing to consider the possibility of a successful demonic incarnation.”
“You would?”
“Of course. After you find a genuine demon corpse, that is.”
He expected a typical smart-aleck remark but now he noticed that Dales hadn’t heard his sarcastic statement at all.
“Dales?”
Dales was standing perfectly still, flashlight poised, staring out. It seemed that he too was hanging there, with the silence and the dark.
“Dales?”
The younger man took several fast steps forward, then abruptly stopped.
“Enough of this, son. You’re scaring me. Now what the hell are you looking at?”
Dales turned quickly around, standing stiffly as he re-faced Fredrick. His eyes seemed strained open they were so wide, and his face looked pinched as if tense from some briefly glimpsed dread. He said, very softly:
“About ten yards ahead of us, there’s another hole.”
“What!” Fredrick exclaimed. The prospect didn’t scare him in the least; it electrified him. “An opening to another cenote? That’s amazing! Show me!” and then he lurched forward.
Dales grabbed Fredrick’s arm. “Wait. Listen.”
“Stop acting like a fool! What’s wrong with you?”
Dales’ eyes remained frozen wide open. “The other cenote—the other hole…”
“What about it?”
“Th
ere’s a clawed hand sticking out of it.”
— | — | —
Chapter Four
(I)
By the time Joyce had finished showing Clare the rest of the property, it was four p.m. shiftchange; the heat had now compounded to a soupy haze. Joyce was off and the next guard, Rick, was on. Clare couldn’t resist the tiny smile on her lips when she was introduced, remembering her sneak peek on the security camera. He seemed competent and bright, and he cited some military police experience of his own. He’s qualified, has brains, and as long as he lays off the hanky-panky on the job site, I don’t think he’ll be a problem. She arranged to meet him back at the security office to relieve him, when his own shift ended, at midnight.
As Rick departed in the truck for his first rounds, Dellin exited the clinic entrance, his jacket flung over his shoulder. He locked the front glass doors, then smiled as he approached Clare and Joyce in the parking lot.
“Joyce, did you show your new boss the ropes yet?”
“The whole site, yes sir,” Joyce replied.
“And I’m happy to say,” Clare added, “we didn’t run into a single snake or alligator.”
“Like the old saying goes, they won’t bother you if you don’t bother them.”
“That’s what I was telling her,” Joyce said.
“Believe me, Clare, the only thing you have to fear out here is boredom.” He pointed to the other security vehicle. “I didn’t make it clear that that’s yours now, at least for as long as you work for us.”
“Yes, thanks,” Clare said. “It’s really nice. I’ll take good care of it.” But now she noticed that Dellin had his car keys out; it appeared he was leaving the clinic for the day. “So the clinic’s closed now?”
“Yeah, we usually close down around four and most of the med staff goes home. The janitors stay till eight and the kitchen ladies stay on till six, so don’t forget to grab some dinner.”
