by Alex Scarrow
Sal parked those thoughts for now and stepped into the narrow entrance. She panned her torch around. The chamber was small and square with very little going on in it except for what appeared to be a hole in the floor on the far side. She walked over to it, squatted down and shone her torch down into the opening.
She could see a series of steep stone steps receding down into darkness.
She cupped her hands round her mouth. ‘There’s some steps going down further here!’
She waited for a reply from either Maddy or Adam, but both of them seemed to be engrossed in what they were studying.
Oh, to hell with them, then.
She took the first few steps down into the hole until only her head and shoulders remained above the flagstone floor. Then she hunched down low and shone her torch into the darkness below her. The cone of light picked out her dust-covered laced boots, the step she was standing on, the next dozen steps down and the stone walls either side of her, hemming her into this claustrophobic stairwell. The steps faded away into the darkness – no telling how many more of them there were and how far down this stairwell was going to take her.
She was hesitant to make her way any further. If the light from her torch had been powerful enough, she might have been able to pick out what was waiting for her at the bottom of these steps.
She reached out to the wall right beside her, looking for something she could work loose and toss down the steps to see how far they went. She got her fingers round a wedge of stone, wiggled it until it came loose. Then did just that.
It click-clacked its way out of sight and down the steps.
Click, clickety-click … click … click … click
But then there was one final clack … which reverberated like a solitary pebble dropped on to the hard granite floor of a vast empty cathedral.
There’s a room down there. A large one.
And, by the sound of the clattering stone, not that many steps below her.
What are you waiting for?
She was nervous. Obviously. The pitch black below was as featureless, as thick and equally as intimidating as the milk-white froth of chaos space. Like a negative image of that place. She wondered if ghostly wraiths would be swimming in ever-diminishing circles down there also.
It’s just an empty space, Sal. A forgotten ruin. Nothing but a few creepy-crawlies down there. What are you waiting for?
She took in a deep breath. ‘Uh-huh, right. Just creepy-crawlies down here.’
She descended another four steep steps, now fully immersed within the space of the claustrophobic stairwell. She shone her torch up at the opening just a yard above her head and wondered one last time whether it might be prudent to climb back up the steps and go and tell Maddy and Adam what she’d discovered.
No. This was her discovery. Maddy would just take over, take the credit for it. She’d just steamroll Sal out of the way and her discovery of this would be an afterthought. Or simply forgotten. All the same … she sensed there was something down there. Something waiting for her.
Oh, listen to you, you drama queen!
Her brain seemed to be very pushy this afternoon. ‘Chuddah! I’m scared! Give me a break!’ she uttered under her breath.
You’re scared. But come on, you’re so very curious too. Admit it.
She was. Very. She sensed some kind of ‘purpose’ to these receding steps, as if their intent was to gently tease a person downwards towards some profound truth. As if the steps themselves were alive, a silent Greek chorus willing her on, almost whispering encouragement to her to find her way to the bottom.
Just to the bottom step, that’s all. To the bottom, then shine your light around and see what’s down there.
She took the next half a dozen steps down, then the next … then one more.
The sound of the gentle tap of her boot heel was all of a sudden accompanied by the soft wash of returning reverberation. She aimed her torch down at the floor.
The light reflected brightly back from a smooth shiny surface.
‘What is that?’ she whispered as quietly as she could. Yet her voice carried. It returned to her a moment later drowned in a chorus of a thousand whispered voices. Her voice amplified and echoed, distorted and duplicated by the acoustics of this large dark place.
She squatted down and ran her fingers across the surface. Cold and as smooth and black as obsidian.
Jahulla … what is this place?
Chapter 40
1994, the Lost City of the Windtalkers
‘If I was to hazard an approximate guess,’ Liam said, shrugging, ‘I don’t know, about a hundred of them? Maybe two hundred? It’s hard to say for sure. Those bones were scattered all over the place.’
Maddy finished stirring the broth bubbling in the cooking pot, ladled some into a bowl and handed it to him. ‘Scattered? Like maybe somebody else has been here before us looking for valuables, do you think?’
He sat down on a stone step beside the fire. They had decided to locate their camp on the edge of the central circular plaza. Bob and Becks had brought back a canvas awning, some blankets and several crates of tinned food from the rebels’ camp. The tins of food were mostly rust-specked, dented and without any helpful labels. It had been like playing a game of Lucky Dip, opening them up and finding out what was inside. Some of the tins had contained pineapple chunks, some unappetizing little silver-coloured fish encrusted with salt. Several had contained a gloop of some kind of refried bean in a thick sweet brown sauce. Maddy had chosen those to empty into their cooking pot, along with some other cans that contained a revolting texture-less pink meat that was quite possibly pork, but could easily have been a minced mix of half a dozen farmyard animals and beasts of burden.
‘It’s possible some treasure-hunters have been through here and rummaged through them bones,’ Liam said, then: ‘Oh! Hold on. No one’s been here before us.’ He remembered the boulder and the tunnel’s entrance clogged by hundreds of years’ worth of ancient vegetation. ‘Maybe some wild animals found where they buried their people round here, dug them up, dragged them to that building and picked at them there?’
Rashim took a bowl of the broth from Maddy. ‘Skeletons all grouped together? All in that same building?’ He looked across the plaza and up at the temple structure they had been exploring earlier that afternoon. ‘To me it looked as if they must have died at the same time. Together, all of them up there.’
‘Here you are, Sal.’ Maddy handed her a bowl of the broth.
Sal looked at it without any real appetite.
‘You not hungry?’
‘Not really.’
‘You all right?’
‘I’m fine. Just not that hungry.’
‘She is feeling sick, maybe?’ said Billy. ‘Jungle belly. You drink water from the river?’
She shook her head. ‘Just don’t feel hungry tonight.’ She looked up at them and smiled quickly. ‘I’m fine, honestly.’
‘Well, try to eat some of it, Sal,’ said Maddy.
Sal took the bowl of broth and sat back down. She stirred it unenthusiastically with her spoon as she watched the others talking. Not really listening to them.
Her thoughts were on what was down there – what she’d discovered.
‘Died all together, you reckon, Rashim?’ Adam frowned. ‘That sounds kind of ritualistic, doesn’t it? Like some kind of Jonestown thing.’
‘Jonestown?’ Liam looked up from his food. ‘What’s that?’
‘It was an American Christian cult that moved out to some jungle in South America to get away from the modern world. The leader was called Reverend Jim Jones. Apparently he just one day got it into his numbskull that the End Was Nigh and told his loyal followers they all needed to go and poison themselves. He made a broth … much like this one –’
‘Charming,’ said Maddy.
‘– laced it with cyanide and they all had to eat some. They were discovered some days later, nine hundred men, women, children … all lying dead tog
ether.’ He settled his back against a block of stone. ‘True story that … happened in the seventies, I think.’
‘A mass suicide?’ Rashim looked at Liam for a moment, then shook his head. ‘It had the look of a mass slaughter to me.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The bones were all over the place, were they not, Liam? Not ordered or placed or ritualistic, but chaotic.’
Liam nodded slowly. ‘It did look a bit like …’ He censored himself with a spoonful of Spam and bean gloop.
‘Like what, Liam?’ asked Maddy.
‘Well … I suppose it looked a bit like some giant wild animal went berserk right inside that temple. Maybe a bear or something.’ He looked at Billy. ‘You get big bears in Nicaragua?’
‘We do not have bears here. We have jaguars. But they are rare.’
‘Something tore those poor people limb from limb,’ said Rashim, ‘that is, if those bones do in fact indicate where they fell and are not the result of the scavenging of wild animals or some other interference.’
The fire crackled in the midst of them, the cooking pot bubbled and spluttered, a welcome sound to fill the heavy silence.
‘We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that whatever did happen up there, happened quite a few hundred years ago,’ said Adam. ‘Somebody else may have discovered this place and picked over it.’
Liam nodded. ‘Aye. That’s for true.’ He grinned. ‘Still, makes you think, though, doesn’t it?’
Maddy settled back against a stone block. ‘Think what?’
‘Well … you know, what did happen?’
‘Something bad for those people,’ said Billy sombrely.
‘It appears that this city did not slowly become abandoned,’ said Rashim. ‘I would say something catastrophic happened. Those bodies in the temple died together, all at once. That is my guess.’
Maddy reached across and grabbed the handle to the ladle and tapped it against the metal cooking pot. It made a dull clang. ‘Well enough of that. Anyone for any more?’
Heads shook round the fire.
‘I’m not that horrible a cook, am I?’ She laughed loudly – an attempt to lighten the mood. It sounded forced and humourless and carried out into the dark, echoed around the hard stone basin and came back to them sounding more like the wail of some jungle creature.
Chapter 41
1994, the Lost City of the Windtalkers
Liam awoke suddenly. A soothing dream of warm Caribbean waves, creaking ship timbers and the snap and rustle of a restless sail was instantly blown away. Maddy had him by the shoulders and was shaking them to wake him up.
‘Liam! Wake up!’
He rubbed sleep out of his blinking eyes. ‘What’s … Jay-zus, Maddy! What’s the matter?’
‘Sal’s gone!’
‘What?’
‘Sal’s missing!’
He sat up and looked around their camp. Beneath the awning, the grey embers of their cooking fire were surrounded by beds made of dirty grey blankets; all empty except his. They were all already up, as was the sun. He could hear Adam, Rashim and Billy, the support units, calling out for Sal from different places around the dead city, their voices ricocheting back off the ruins.
‘Did she talk to you about going anywhere?’
‘No.’
‘Did you see her get up in the night to go to the toilet?’
‘No.’
‘Did you hear anything last night?’
He shook his head and got to his feet. ‘I slept like the dead last night. I didn’t –’
‘She’s gone, Liam!’ Maddy looked around frantically. ‘She’s not anywhere!’
‘Well she’s got to be somewhere nearby.’ He shaded his eyes from the sun as he scanned the labyrinthine basin.
‘If she’s somewhere here, Liam, she’d frikkin’ well hear us! She’d answer!’ Maddy shaded her eyes and looked around too. The only smudges of colour among the rust-coloured sandstone and the green of vegetation were the others, walking through the ruins and calling out Sal’s name.
‘Perhaps she got up in the night,’ said Liam, ‘stumbled or fell somewhere? Maybe she’s hurt or unconscious?’
Maddy thought about that. ‘She wasn’t well last night, Liam. She said she wasn’t feeling too well. Remember?’
‘Aye. So she’d not be far then, you know? If she got up and was heading for somewhere private to relieve herself …?’
‘We’ve searched everywhere nearby!’
‘So then maybe she’s somewhere …’ He carried on scanning the ruins. ‘… somewhere she can’t hear us?’
‘Can’t hear us?’ She shook her head, exasperated. ‘It’s a big echo box. No way she’s not hearing them out there calling for –’ She looked down at the plaza floor. ‘Maybe she’s down there? Maybe below the ground?’
Liam followed her gaze. ‘That’s quite a lot of effort to go to for a toilet.’
‘No, I’m not thinking that, Liam. Look, there was something that happened yesterday afternoon. She was funny, odd … I can’t put my finger on it.’
‘What?’
‘Me and Adam were trying to read some carvings down below and she wandered off. She was missing for a bit and when she came back I kind of told her off for not staying with us. But she was really quiet. Like she was trying to make sense of something. I actually thought at the time she was just sulking.’
‘You think – what? She’s hiding? Sulking still?’ Liam shook his head. ‘She wouldn’t play around with us like that.’
‘No, not play with us. But maybe there’s something she’s seen, found, and she’s – I dunno – puzzling it out before she wants to come and tell us about it. She’s been getting like that, Liam, keeping things to herself. Brooding on things. Shutting us out.’
Liam looked across the plaza towards the trench entrance on the far side of it. ‘You want to go take a look down there?’
Maddy nodded. ‘I’m getting really worried about her.’
‘I’ll get Bob to come down with us.’ He looked at her. The thought of stumbling across a jaguar in the dark, perhaps using that chamber as some lair, occurred to both of them.
‘Good idea.’
‘Saaaaal! You down here?’
The main chamber echoed back Liam’s voice, but no answer came riding back with it.
‘Yesterday, she wandered off somewhere, off this main chamber.’ Maddy tried to remember where exactly Sal had been when she’d called across to her that she’d found something. She’d been so distracted with the carving on the floor, caught up in Adam’s excitement, that she’d been rather dismissive of Sal. Casually waving her off with a ‘be careful’ as an afterthought.
‘She was somewhere over there, when she called out.’ Maddy led the way across the floor, weaving between the support columns. ‘She said something about finding another room.’
They panned their torches ahead of them. Shadows cast by the columns danced wildly across the stone floor, like light-shy wraiths caught on the hop and diving for cover.
‘She was skirting the edge of this chamber, looking for – hang on!’ She moved the beam of her torch back the way it had just come. The shadows cast by the columns nearest the curving stone wall parted to reveal a so-easy-to-miss two-foot-wide gap in the stonework.
A narrow rectangular gap. A recess.
‘That’s it! That’s where she was standing!’
They hastened towards it. ‘Sal! You over there?’ cried Maddy.
Liam shone his light into the recess. ‘There’s a small room. Nothing in here that I can see. She’s not in there.’
Maddy cursed. ‘Where the hell is she? If she’s messing with us –’
‘Wait!’ Liam squeezed through the gap and stepped into the room. ‘There’s a hole over here! A hole in the floor.’
She followed him in and crossed the floor to join him. Bob squeezed through after her, grunting with effort as he scraped through the gap.
Liam was aiming his torch down in
to the hole. ‘There’s some steps leading down.’ He cupped his mouth. ‘Sal! Are you down there!’
No answer.
‘I’ll go down and take a look,’ said Liam.
‘Recommendation: I go first,’ said Bob. ‘There may be animals.’ The support unit placed his foot on the first step.
‘Sure. Good idea, Bob. Here.’ Liam handed him his torch.
Bob’s shoulders and coarse bristly head disappeared into the hole as he took the first few steps down. ‘Caution: these steps are steep and slippery.’
Liam stepped in behind him, then Maddy.
‘My God, this is claustrophobic!’ she uttered. ‘This is horrible.’
‘Aye.’
They made their way down the steps until finally Bob announced he’d reached the bottom. His deep voice boomed up to them. ‘I am at the bottom.’
‘What the hell’s down there, Bob? It sounds like you’re in a large room.’
‘That is correct.’
A moment later Liam was standing beside him. ‘The torch, please?’ Bob handed it back to him and Liam panned it around.
The light pierced the darkness and revealed some details. They appeared to be standing in another circular chamber with a diameter similar to the one above, but this time the ceiling was much higher, fifteen to twenty feet above them. There were no column supports holding up the ceiling either.
An enormous, cavernous space.
‘The floor,’ said Maddy. ‘Look at it!’
‘SAL?’ called Liam. ‘YOU DOWN THERE?’
No answer.
Liam shone his torch down. The light reflected smoothly back at him.
‘It’s … it’s like glass or something.’ He ducked down and traced his fingers across the surface. ‘Perfectly smooth too.’
Maddy did the same. ‘My God! Liam, can you feel that? It’s warm!’ She shook her head. ‘This … this can’t have been built by those Indians, surely?’
