Jack Scarlet

by Dan McGirt

  “Ingenious mechanism.” Jack shifted his footing. “Perfectly balanced...after two thousand years.”

  They turned the wheel a full revolution, then reversed direction until the fish and frog symbols aligned.

  “That does it,” said Jack.

  Galahad stood upright and let out a long breath. “Does what?” he asked. “Nothing is happening.”

  “Wait for it.”

  There was a muffled thump as a hidden counterweight dropped into place. The dais vibrated beneath them. With a grinding scrape, the frog tile slowly sank into the floor.

  “Fabulous,” said Galahad. “Yet another dark hole.”

  17: Underworld

  The deeper passages proved to be narrower, the ceilings lower, and the air more foul. Counting paces under his breath, Jack led Galahad through a maze of abrupt turns, steeply slanted ramps, and peculiar, twisting stairwells.

  “You’re sure there are no scorpions?” asked Galahad, pointing to yet another relief carving of scorpions devouring a human sacrifice.

  “Reasonably certain,” said Jack. “The San Marcos scorpion is listed as extinct.”

  “You think whoever made the list came down here to check?”

  Jack laughed. “I doubt even the Maya came down here often. Only select members of their priesthood on rare ceremonial occasions.”

  Galahad stopped short. “So who are these guys?”

  “This is the Hall of Bones,” said Jack.

  “No kidding.”

  Stone walls gave way to a hideous gallery of leering human skulls, full skeletons, stacked ribs, and other bones arranged in appalling geometric patterns. Even the floor, which descended in a series of wide steps, was paved with polished tibias and femurs.

  “The Hall of Bones is a symbolic entrance to Xibalbá, the world of the dead,” said Jack.

  “You think?”

  Galahad aimed his light down the narrow corridor. Projecting bones cast macabre shadows that writhed and twisted like tendrils of smoke. His eye caught a flicker amid the skulls.

  “Something moved.”

  “Only shadows.”

  “Yeah, well...after you, kemo sabe.”

  Jack shuffled forward sideways into the bone-lined passage. He felt he was being slowly swallowed by some fossilized behemoth serpent, and reflected that this psychological effect was most likely intended by the builders. Skeletal hands seemed to clutch at him. The black void of empty eye sockets stared sightlessly through him as he pressed past mounted skulls, being careful not to brush against the ancient bones, browned with age. A hundred sliding paces brought Jack to the hall’s end, where he reached a doorway framed by the cyclopean jawbones of a long dead whale. Jack beckoned to Galahad.

  “Your turn.”

  “Be still my heart.”

  Galahad unslung his carbine for easier handling and advanced into the Hall of Bones. He moved more cautiously than Jack, shining the flashlight along each section of the bone-crusted wall before advancing.

  “Your mural better be worth all this trouble, man.”

  “It will be,” promised Jack.

  “It better have naked ladies.”

  “I can’t promise that. But it does pre-date the murals at San Bartolo in Guatemala, which are otherwise considered the oldest Preclassic Era examples of Maya mural work.”

  “That’s something, I suppose. I’d prefer naked ladies.”

  “Time is wasting, Gal. We are on a schedule here.”

  “I do not trust these grinning – Aieee!”

  Galahad recoiled as he came nose to nose-socket with a skull and something moved inside. He jerked back against the opposite wall. Several ribs of an old skeleton cracked on impact as Gal slammed into them.

  A scorpion appeared in the eye socket of the skull. It was black and glistening, its pincers raised.

  “Chodaya!” Gal jumped sideways.

  The scorpion climbed onto the face of the skull. It was six inches long, with a segmented tail curled over its body. The scorpion snapped its pincers in challenge, before dropping to the rough, bone-paved floor. It scuttled toward Galahad.

  “Huhisdi!”

  Galahad slammed the butt of his carbine down fast and hard, smashing the scorpion’s body with a crunch and splat. The dying creature’s legs and tail twitched spasmodically. Galahad hit it again and again until nothing was left but a smear of organic paste on the bony floor.

  “What was it?” asked Jack.

  “What do you think?” snarled Galahad. He sidled out of the Hall of Bones and scraped the carbine’s stock against a corner of the stone doorway to remove the gunk that had been his attacker. Galahad gave Jack an accusing glare.

  “They’re supposed to be extinct,” said Jack.

  “That one didn’t get the memo,” said Galahad.

  “Well, it’s extinct now.”

  “If there is one, there are others.”

  “Safe bet,” Jack agreed. “Move on, shall we?”

  “Yes, let’s.”

  Beyond the bone-framed threshold the tunnel reverted to walls of undressed stone cantilevered to form the Maya arch. The passage sloped downward at a steep grade until reaching a wide, four-sided, high-vaulted chamber. A canvas tarpaulin was spread across its floor. Upon it were a stack of polypropylene equipment cases, a ruggedized laptop on a small work table, and a Corelast mobile power station. A bank of pole-mounted LED lamps provided illumination. The lights faced a low, wide doorway leading to an adjoining chamber – the mural room.

  “SEG,” said Jack.

  “Bet they took the scorpion-free route.”

  It was logical that in the decades since Archimedes Helstrom was here, the San Marcans would uncover – or dig – another way into the mural chamber. Opposite the tunnel mouth in which Jack and Galahad lurked was a similar passage, lit with a string of construction lights anchored to the ceiling. Jack surmised the alternate route originated from the temple group above, or maybe from the Pyramid of the Bat at the east end of the complex. He had perhaps been too hasty to follow Helstrom’s almost century-old directions, rather than scouting for a faster ingress. Galahad would not let him forget this.

  Still, here they were. SEG’s interest in Sina’an Muul was evidently the same as Jack’s – the startling images on the walls of the next room. That alone was good intel.

  “So where are they?” said Galahad. “Coffee break?”

  “Or setting an ambush,” said Jack.

  “Equally likely.”

  The only points of concealment were behind the equipment cases or around the corners of the mural room proper. Jack and Gal cleared the equipment room first, while keeping a wary eye on the mural entrance and the other tunnel. Empty.

  The best way to flush out ambushers in the mural room would be to toss in a grenade. But a frag would destroy the murals and Jack didn’t have a flashbang or any of his own array of dazzlers, chems, or specials.

  They’d have to do it the hard way.

  Jack went left. Galahad went right.

  No targets.

  “We have the place to ourselves,” said Jack. “Almost.” In the center of the room was a tripod-mounted OmniCam. The metal orb was the size of a soccer ball and bristled with tiny crystal lenses that provided three hundred sixty-degree panoramic digital coverage of the room. A rubber-sheathed fiber optic cable snaked from the OmniCam out to the laptop setup in the next room.

  “Great. We can relax and appreciate the artwork,” said Galahad. His dark eyes took in the many figures on the painted walls. “Bloody-minded people, weren’t they?”

  “Yes.”

  The polychrome murals were breathtaking in their artistry. The images were painted with beautiful and bright colors – vibrant reds, somber black, a surprising palette of distinct yellows, blues, and greens. Jack recognized immediately that the work was done by a great master. The fine-line exquisite details were perfectly rendered. No drip lines. Full control of the paint flow. For the paint to bond so lastingly to the plas
ter walls, the artist had to work quickly, placing each stroke with confidence while the plaster was still wet.

  Yet it wasn’t merely the workmanship that astonished. The frames of the north wall portrayed scenes of unrelenting cruelty and violence – battles between rival tribes, replete with stylized blood gushing from wounds, severed limbs and heads, and impaled prisoners. Other sequences showed lines of prisoners being blinded, disfigured, drowned, burnt, or marched into the scorpion pits.

  Presiding over the slaughter and sacrifice was a mythological figure Jack read as Great Scorpion. It was exactly that – a gigantic scorpion that by turns sliced men in two with its pincers, impaled them with its stinger, or devoured them. Accompanying Great Scorpion was Camazotz, the Death Bat, who also had a penchant for decapitation.

  “Professor Helstrom theorized that San Marcos was colonized by a religiously deviant branch of Maya who worshipped these demon figures, Great Scorpion and Camazotz, and who were driven out by the tribes of the Yucatán region.” said Jack.

  “Yeah, I don’t think I’d want these guys as neighbors,” said Galahad. “Excited as I am to check this off my bucket list, what do a giant scorpion and a devil bat have to do with an offshore platform?”

  “Next to nothing,” said Jack. “The Scorpion Cult were not the first to inhabit this island, nor the first to build here. According to Helstrom, an earlier people, a sea-faring people, constructed a temple complex centuries before the Maya arrived. He didn’t have a chance to dig deeper and confirm his theory. But he described the east wall in his notes. That’s what I want to see.”

  Most of the east wall was, like the north, a colorful mural painted on plaster in the Maya style. The eastern mural presented an aquatic theme, with the sea being every bit as perilous as the land: painted priests hurled human sacrifices over cliffs to be devoured by fierce aquatic creatures: shark, crocodile, and crab, among others.

  One enormous sea creature loomed above all the rest, seeming to be part croc, part fish, part frog, with a profusion of fang-filled mouths at every joint. It had a large canoe or raft in its jaws, the hull broken, bloody sailors falling into its maw. Jack interpreted it as a representation of Cipactli, a primeval sea monster of Meso-American myth. It was unusual to see Cipactli depicted interacting with – well, eating – human beings, since in most versions of the myth, Cipactli was killed by the four creator gods and its body used to form the earth and sky long before man came on the scene. The mainland Maya did not, so far as Jack knew, believe the sea monster to be part of their contemporary world. The San Marcos Maya evidently had a different opinion.

  “Don’t tell me that’s what sank Sandpiper,” said Galahad.

  “Not as such,” said Jack absently.

  The outstanding feature of the east wall was a set of four large rectangular plaques of black basalt each about the dimensions of a modern movie poster. These were plainly not of Maya origin, or at least represented no Mayan writing or artistic style with which Jack was familiar. He could not dismiss the possibility that the Maya had made the stones, copying some older design they themselves did not originate or fully understand.

  The plaques were much as Professor Helstrom had described them in his 1924 notes. Bands of the same pseudo-Akkadian script found on the Great Wheel framed the perimeter of the plaques. The dominant images on each plate were a series of glyphs cut deep into the stone and inlaid with polished green jade or red coral. The other symbols were chiefly circles – some plain, some concentric, many of them nucleated circles, or circumpuncts – which was a fancy way of saying they had a dot in the middle. Most of the circles were joined by straight lines. Other marks included acute angles, isosceles triangles, and the “dragon’s eye” symbol of a point-downward equilateral triangle with an internal Y connecting the three vertices.

  Helstrom had given these markings an astronomical interpretation, relating them to cup-and-ring petroglyphs found around the world, especially in the British isles, India, and the Middle East. Such glyphs were often found in constellation-like arrangements, suggestive of the sun, moon, stars, and other celestial objects.

  Jack admired the late Professor Helstrom and his work, but in this instance he believed the great man had been mistaken – the glyphs were not star charts, but had a more terrestrial significance. To Jack, the interconnected lines and circles evoked a circuit board. More precisely, they mapped a portion of a planetwide subterranean energy grid.

  In fairness to Helstrom, his time on site had been cut short. He was also unaware of the peculiar submerged formations in the Gulf waters near San Marcos and the electromagnetic and atmospheric anomalies associated with the area. Helstrom thus failed to fully consider how the four basalt plates related to the surrounding images of ocean sacrifices and sea monsters.

  The professor interpreted the plates as the “gift of the sea” referenced in the Mayan glyphs that accompanied the sacrifice scene at the top left. He surmised the plaques were retrieved by the Maya from shallow waters off San Marcos – perhaps uncovered after a hurricane shifted the sands of one of the island’s beaches. Alternatively, Helstrom conjectured, the pieces were brought to San Marcos by boat from the mainland, or even across the Atlantic.

  These guesses may have been correct, but the arrangement of the plates beneath the depiction of Cipactli suggested an additional interpretation to Jack – one of warning. Was Cipactli serving here as a threshold guardian, the protector of a secret power source hidden beneath the waves? And if so, did that secret power still exist in the waters off San Marcos? Perhaps the answer could be found back at the Deepfire platform.

  Galahad interrupted Jack’s thoughts. “While you contemplate the fish buffet, I will keep watch on that other tunnel so we don’t get any surprise visitors.”

  “Do that,” said Jack. “I won’t be long.”

  Galahad took a last look around and left the mural chamber muttering to himself in Monoga.

  Jack leaned closer to the plaques. He traced his finger along one of the etched images. The jade inlay in the circle was smooth and cool to the touch, the surrounding fine-grained rock polished like a black mirror. Jack’s reflection stared back at him from the basalt’s inky depths, like a shadow self from a dark dimension.

  “Dr. Scarlet, again you intrude where you are not wanted. A bad habit of yours.” The voice, slightly distorted in transmission, came from the camera pod at the center of the room. Jack had earlier noted the small bulge in the support stand that indicated a multi-directional microphone and speaker.

  “I have so many,” said Jack, without turning around. His finger traced a the inlaid red coral to the next concentric jade circle. He stepped back and studied each of the four plates intently, one by one, fixing the images in his mind.

  “Who are you talking to?” called Galahad.

  “You have me at a disadvantage, disembodied voice,” said Jack. He turned toward the camera.

  “I am Director Oswald of the Special Engineering Group.”

  “Oswald is almost certainly not your real name, but it will do,” said Jack. “You’re directing the Deepfire operation, I presume.”

  “Project: Deepfire is my remit, yes.”

  “I like the name,” said Jack. “It’s evocative and descriptive of your goal without being overly precious. SEG always has good project names, I’ll give you that.”

  “You know our objective, do you?” Oswald’s tone was mocking, amused.

  “I do now.” Jack jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the plaques. “Your setup here confirms my earlier suspicion.”

  “Oh?”

  “The Deepfire platform’s coordinates precisely coincide with a major Becker-Hagens node. You have a boron laser drill in place, and nothing on site that looks like oil and gas exploration or recovery. And here we have one of the oldest known charts of the so-called Earth Grid. I’d say your objective is fairly obvious.”

  A slight chuckle emitted from the speaker. “Astute, Dr. Scarlet, as always. And a step behind us �
�� as always.”

  “I don’t care about your science project.” Jack stepped toward the camera pod. “What happened to the Sandpiper?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Don’t insult me by playing dumb,” said Jack. “You’re aware of the search and rescue effort for Sandpiper, even if San Marcos isn’t cooperating. Do you know what happened to the ship? Was SEG involved? Were there any survivors?”

  Oswald did not respond. The silence lengthened. Jack lacked time for a stare-off with a camera.

  “Still there, Oswald?”

  “So many questions, Dr. Scarlet. We are aware of the search for Sandpiper – and that the search was your pretext for attacking Deepfire.”

  “We merely defended ourselves.”

  “At significant cost in damaged LiquiOil equipment and personnel.”

  “Put it on my tab,” said Jack. “Let’s get back to Sandpiper. Do you know what happened to the ship?”

  “The San Marcan authorities are of the opinion it isn’t missing at all.”

  Jack rolled his eyes. “Yes, it’s all an ISA plot. They’re paranoid idiots. What do you know about it, Oswald?”

  “Project: Deepfire had nothing to do with any missing ship.”

  “It had everything to do with it,” Jack snapped. “Your operations at Deepfire disrupted marine life throughout the Gulf. There is a cost to recklessly tampering with such energies. The Maya knew that.” Jack turned to the wall and tapped the Cipactli image. “You woke something better left undisturbed, and the Sandpiper’s crew paid for it.”

  Oswald scoffed. “Pure conjecture.”

  “You know better.” Jack pointed an accusing finger. “You’re endangering innocent people. I’ll shut you down.”

  “Our operations are authorized by the government of San Marcos. If you return to Deepfire you will be dealt with appropriately.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  “Soon the only thing you will see is the inside of a San Marcan prison. Or perhaps a coffin.”

  “Jack, we’ve got company!” called Galahad from the other room. “I mean it – sounds like a full company.”