As Scully lowered the heavy helmet over her reddish-gold hair, Mulder’s expression became serious. “Are you ready for this, Scully?”
“It’s part of the job, Mulder,” she said. “This is our case, and somebody has to go down and look.” She lowered her voice. “Just keep your weapon handy. You’ll be alone up here on the rim, and I’ll be alone down there. Not a strategically advantageous situation.”
Mulder had kept his 9-mm Sig Sauer close at his side ever since discovering the old archaeologist’s “accidental death”—but the Indians far outnumbered them, and they had shown no qualms about getting hurt, if they intended to make another blood sacrifice.
Even if Mulder and Scully encountered no violence, they remained at the mercy of Fernando Aguilar to get them back out of this jungle.
Not a strategically advantageous situation, she thought again.
Scully secured the heavy diving helmet, locking it to the collar attachment rings. Inside, her breath echoed like a breeze through a cave. She swallowed heavily.
Mulder helped her check the air connections on the back of her suit, long rubber-wrapped tubes like garden hoses that dangled from her back. A small generator would pump and circulate air into her helmet, though it looked barely large enough to power a portable hair dryer.
Aguilar and the Indians stood around the equipment, watching her with a curiosity mixed with anxiety. Scully glanced at them uneasily, but saw no one with missing fingers or a bandaged hand.
“I do not see what you expect to accomplish down there, Señorita,” Aguilar said again, his arms crossed over his khaki vest. “We are in a terrible situation here and should leave as soon as possible.”
Aguilar gestured to the Indians, speaking quietly, though Scully doubted any of them could speak English. “My associates are very distressed about the prospect of disturbing the sacred cenote. It is cursed from the victims sacrificed there. They say the ancient gods have taken their revenge on the old man—and if we continue to disturb them, the gods will attack us as well.”
“Just like they attacked the members of the archaeology team?” Mulder suggested.
Aguilar tightened his ocelot-skin hat, letting his dark ponytail dangle behind him. “Perhaps there is a reason why Xitaclan remained deserted for so many centuries, Señor Mulder.”
“I’m going down,” Scully said firmly, her voice sounding hollow through the open faceplate. “We have an obligation to investigate if it helps us find our people. The cenote is the most obvious place we haven’t searched, especially in light of finding Dr. Rubicon.” She checked the weights at her waist, the utility flashlight hanging from her belt. “While I respect their religious beliefs, your ‘associates’ need to respect international law, Mr. Aguilar.”
Scully sealed the faceplate and then gestured for Mulder to switch on the air generator. A whining, puttering sound throbbed into the jungle like noise from miniature construction machinery. She breathed deeply, smelled the stale air, sour from sealants and old rubber. When she felt a faint breeze stir around her face, she knew the air had begun to flow.
She gestured for them to help her descend into the cenote, hoping that the generator and the suit would last long enough for her to look around under the water. The Indians gazed at her solemnly, as if bidding her a final farewell.
Gripping the same ropes Mulder had used to walk/climb down the rugged limestone walls, Scully made her way one laborious step at a time. Her tedious descent took her many minutes, and the suit seemed as heavy as a truck on her back—but when she reached the edge of the deceptively placid pool, she found herself reluctant to plunge in.
She did not dwell on her irrational fears, but let loose of the wall. Scully plunged into the water, sinking like Thompson’s proverbial bag of lead due to the weights around her waist.
The murk swallowed her up like syrup, a primordial ooze that embraced her. Water engulfed her enclosed helmet. The fabric of the suit pressed against her arms and legs, squeezing her intimately as she dropped deeper and deeper. The depths and the opaque water smothered the light, blinding her for a moment.
A fizz of bubbles curled around the seals in her rubber-lined suit. Scully breathed again, double-checking, verifying that no water seemed to be leaking in and that her vital air supply continued pumping through the hoses. Gradually, her confidence grew.
Under the tug of gravity, she continued to sink toward the bottom…if the cenote had a bottom.
As her eyes adjusted, the water around her became murky and greenish, like wan sunlight filtered through thick smoked-glass panes. She moved her hands and legs experimentally, floundering in the water. Disoriented, she felt only that she continued to go deeper. Deeper.
The pressure around her became heavier, and her ears sensed the strain, the water like a vise squeezing her helmet. She thought again of Dr. Rubicon’s story of how Thompson had sustained permanent ear damage from a faulty suit during his descent into the Chichén Itzá cenote.
She forced those thoughts away and tried to look around, turning her head in the confining helmet. She continued to drop, meter after meter. She couldn’t imagine how deep this well was. Surely, she had already gone below the thirty-foot depth of the Chichén Itzá well.
The circle of light above had dwindled to only a faint, faint reflection of the bright Mexican sky. Her breathing echoed around her ears like distant surf, and she could barely feel the exchange of air through the hoses.
She heaved another breath and could smell the stink of the old tubes, the residual chemicals like the whiff of a long-dead cadaver. The suit seemed terribly hot and stuffy, the helmet claustrophobic.
Her vision swam for a moment, and she became dizzy trying to inhale another breath, then she calmed herself. Her problem had been only imaginary; she had begun to hyperventilate.
Scully noticed a faint lambent glow deep below her, much farther than she wanted to descend—a blue-white light that seemed to seep from the bottom of the sacrificial well, a glowing mist that oozed from the porous limestone itself.
As her eyes adjusted, Scully saw there could be no mistake—the haze of illumination pulsed and throbbed as if sending some sort of signal, a flashed SOS beacon, but at much slower intervals.
The faint light below seemed cold and unearthly. Her skin crawled even as she chastised herself for being foolishly spooked. It was the type of irrational nervousness brought about by telling horror stories around a campfire. Mulder would have loved it.
Her partner might have suggested the light was from a cluster of ghosts, remnants of Maya sacrificial victims. Scully’s scientific mind postulated a colony of phosphorescent algae or anaerobic microorganisms living off the limestone far below, shedding faint, heatless light into their surroundings. Vengeful ghosts or extraterrestrials—she knew that couldn’t be true.
She realized her descent had slowed, her belt-weights reaching equilibrium with the natural buoyancy of her body and the suit, counteracting her ability to sink. She hung in the water like a suspended anchor, feeling the pressure of the depths around her, but imagining herself to be weightless.
Scully fumbled at her wide belt, reaching for the utility flashlight. She unclipped it, fastened the chain around her wrist for safety, and gripped its handle for comfort.
Swallowing away her uneasiness, Scully switched on the dazzling beam, which stabbed through the murk like a snowplow through a blizzard. Kicking her booted feet, she turned in the thick sluggish water, looking around.
And came face to face with a corpse.
A bloated body hung in the water not three feet from her, arms spread, eye sockets open, flesh tattered and leprous after being gnawed by small fishes. The mouth hung wide, and tiny minnows darted out from between his jaws.
Scully gasped. A huge outburst of bubbles squeezed from seams in her suit as she jerked. In reflex, her hand released its grip on the heavy utility light, and the beam plunged downward, pointing deep below.
She scrambled desperately for the light
, suddenly realizing her mistake. The flashlight dangled and stopped, bobbing up and down—then she remembered she had tethered it to her wrist.
Her heart pounded. Scully grabbed the flashlight and pointed the beam back up, studying the corpse that had terrified her.
It was a man, his dark hair drifting about in clumps. Rocks hung from cords tied to his waist. He had been killed and thrown into the cenote. Recently.
She felt the hot air booming in her helmet now, though an incredible cold seeped through the canvas fabric of her suit from the water around her.
Scully swung her flashlight like a lighthouse beam, sweeping through the undisturbed depths of the cenote. She did not linger on the corpse in front of her, but searched through the depths.
The flashlight beam played across other stick-like silhouettes floating like smashed, waterlogged insects, sunk beneath the water.
She had discovered the missing team of American archaeologists.
24
Xitaclan ruins
Tuesday, 4:16 P.M.
The flagstone plaza was littered with bodies.
Since the Indians had refused to help retrieve the bloated corpses from the cenote, it had taken Scully and Mulder hours to hoist the dead figures up to the top of the sinkhole, one at a time.
While still deep in the stygian well, Scully had used her utility knife to saw through the cords holding the stones that weighted the corpses, and the waterlogged cadavers had slowly drifted up to the surface.
Standing on the rim, watching anxiously for his partner, Mulder had been shocked to see one swollen form drift up to the top of the cenote, then another and another, while Scully remained deep below, breathing through her air hoses. Finally, she too came back to daylight, opening the faceplate of her helmet and drawing huge breaths of the humid air before proceeding with the most unpleasant part of the task.
As they had dragged the dripping, stinking bodies up and out of the water, sprawling them on dry ground, Fernando Victorio Aguilar had stood by, looking extremely agitated and queasy. Mulder had kept his FBI standard-issue handgun in plain sight. Finally, the guide had grudgingly assisted him with the ropes, helping to haul Scully back up the limestone wall.
Panting, her nerves jangled, she had shucked out of the cumbersome suit, standing in her sweat-dampened shorts and blouse, then stared down at the most difficult part of the work. Four bodies, and plenty of questions.
Aguilar had stammered, staring down at the gray-green, shriveled skin on all the cadavers lying on the packed ground next to the brick sacrificial platform. The distorted, half-decomposed features of the research team stared back up at him with empty, accusing eye sockets. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down, and he rubbed his cheeks as if he needed a shave.
“Just help us get them to the plaza,” Scully had said. “They can’t walk by themselves.”
When they had finally taken the soggy, stinking bodies around the tall pyramid and to the open plaza near their camp, Aguilar continued to look furtively around, swallowing repeatedly as if to prevent himself from vomiting. Finally, he cleared his throat and excused himself. “I’m afraid I am going to be sick if I remain here any longer,” he said, stumbling backward. “That foul stench…”
The entire crew of Indians had already fled into the jungle with so much wailing and shrieking Scully doubted they would ever return. She wondered if the Indians had a village nearby, or if they had just found a place to huddle under the overspreading trees…where they could tell each other superstitious stories and cut off their own fingers.
“Go see if you can find our cheerleading squad, Aguilar,” Mulder said to the retreating guide. “We’ll need those helpers to get out of here. Now that we’ve found our missing people, we can go.”
“Yes, Señor,” Aguilar said. “I will be back as soon as I can, and, uh…” He shuffled his feet. “Congratulations on finding your people…though you have my sorrow it had to turn out like this, eh? Just like the old man.” He scuttled off, disappearing into a fern-lined path, his dark ponytail bobbing.
Mulder fidgeted in the late afternoon light, gazing at the silent temples and overgrown ruins, listening to the brooding sounds in the jungle. He kept an eye out for anything suspicious, while Scully devoted her attention to the four wet corpses that lay beside Vladimir Rubicon’s. Next to the bloated new bodies, the old archaeologist seemed like a contented retiree who had died peacefully in his sleep.
“Since we have such a limited pool of possibilities,” Scully said, “it’ll be fairly easy to identify the four bodies,” she said, her voice droning, businesslike because she had no choice.
She had taken the dossiers from her pack inside the tent and looked at the sheets of paper, the photographs: smiling pictures of ambitious young grad students eager to make names for themselves in an obscure field. The team had gone off on an innocent adventure to the Yucatán, expecting that their future would hold guest spots on talk shows or slide presentations in academic venues around the country.
Instead they had found only death.
Scully glanced at the photos, the identifying information. She studied the hair color, the height, the general bone structure. After advanced bloating from prolonged submersion and the onset of decay, their handsome facial features were unrecognizable.
“This dark-haired one is Kelly Rowan,” Scully said. “He was the tallest of the group, the secondary leader, easy to identify.”
Mulder knelt down beside her. “This should have been one of his most glorious accomplishments,” he said, looking down at the young man’s destroyed features. “Dr. Rubicon said he was a talented scholar with a great potential for archaeology, a good partner for Cassandra.”
Scully did not dwell on the subject. In times like this, when performing autopsies and identifying corpses, she found it best to lock away the part of her mind that considered these figures…these objects…to be actual people. For now she had to be professional, despite the primitive conditions.
“The second man is John Forbin,” Scully said, moving on to the next corpse. “He was the youngest of the lot—you can see it on him. In his first year of graduate school. An architect with a specialty in large, ancient structures.”
Mulder shook his head. “He must have felt like a kid in a candy store here, all these untouched temples to study.”
Scully pressed on with the identification tasks. “This young woman is obviously Cait Barron, the photographer and artist. She liked to paint watercolors more than she liked to take photographs. Her hair color and body weight are all wrong for her to be Cassandra.”
Mulder nodded. Scully drew a deep breath, forcing herself to shut out the smell. She frequently rubbed camphor ointment under her nostrils to mask the stench during an autopsy, but here in the jungle she had to rough it.
“And that leaves this one to be Christopher Porte, the expert on Maya hieroglyphics,” she said. “What did you call it, an epigrapher?”
Mulder nodded. “Not too many people have that knowledge, and now the field has one less.” He cocked his ear, as if he had heard something, pausing….
A sudden noise made him spin around quickly, his hand on his pistol—but it turned out to be only a group of squabbling birds in the overhanging vines. Looking sheepish, he turned back to Scully.
“So what did happen to Cassandra Rubicon? Are you sure you didn’t find her body down there under the water? It was dark, and cold—”
“I searched, Mulder. All these others were clustered together, weighted and hanging at the same depth. Believe me, I spent a lot more time than I wanted to beneath the surface with this group of corpses.” She nodded to the bodies. “But there just wasn’t anyone else. Unless something happened to place her in a different spot, Cassandra’s body wasn’t down there.”
“So we’ve solved one mystery, and now we’re left with another that could be just as difficult.”
Scully felt hot and sweaty and dirty. The cloying putrescence of the waterlogged corpses clung to e
verything, a sweet nauseating odor that clawed its way through her nose and mouth to lodge permanently in her lungs. She desperately wanted a shower or a hot bath, anything to feel clean again. A swim in the cenote just wouldn’t do it.
But she still hadn’t finished her task. Afterward, she might treat herself to a quick sponge bath.
“Let’s see if we can determine anything about the cause of death from the condition of the bodies,” Scully said. She used her knife to cut away the clothes, exposing the torsos of each of the victims.
“It’s been too long to determine if they’d merely drowned,” she said, “because the air would have out-gassed from their bodies, and their lungs would have filled up with water anyway.”
She moved John Forbin’s head from side to side, seeing the neck move, but not too flexibly. “Unlike Dr. Rubicon,” she said, “the neck hasn’t been broken.”
She rolled Cait Barron over and looked at the grayish-white skin on her back. Two circular puckered holes marked the base of the young woman’s lower back.
“Bullet wounds,” Scully said, raising her eyebrows. “I’ll bet they were all shot before being thrown in.” She shook her head, lost in thought.
“But where was Cassandra during all this?” Mulder asked, pacing on the flagstones. “She’s still missing.”
“Yes, we can keep our hopes up,” Scully said. She examined each of the bodies. All four had been shot…most of them low in the back, in a paralyzing but not fatal blow. The similar placement of the wounds could not be accidental. The victims had been thrown into the sacrificial well while still alive.
“We have some very bad people here, Mulder,” Scully said.
Mulder frowned. “After seeing the severed finger and the blood sacrifice, and watching how superstitious these locals are, it seems that the violent old religion is really still prevalent. The Indians could have been the ones who performed these sacrifices, murdering convenient strangers.
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