Jack stared blankly at Renso. He felt as if he’d been in a bar brawl and he had not won. Every muscle ached, his head hurt and he smelled of sex. A heavy gold blanket was draped across his waist. He kicked it away and stared, stunned, at a beautiful dark-skinned young woman curled next to him.
Jack shook her. She was unconscious, a cut on her forehead bleeding onto Jack’s tunic.
Confused, Jack looked up at Renso. ‘Where am I?’
‘You’re on some kind of altar,’ said Renso, helping Jack sit up. ‘Like a grotto that’s been carved into the inside of the mountain. There are three of them all round the perimeter down here. I think that’s what we were seeing from the Hornet jutting out from the inside the mountain’s basin.’
‘The what?’
‘My plane, which, by the way, is nothing but melted rubber and tinder now. You owe me so badly, amigo.’
Jack wobbled to his knees. He felt Renso shaking him. Panic and bewilderment crashed Jack’s psyche. Renso wasn’t touching him.
The ground was shaking.
He was shaking.
‘Easy does it, my friend.’ With two good hands, Renso grabbed Jack’s arm. ‘It’s a long way down.’
‘When am I?’
‘What?’ asked Renso, not understanding Jack’s question.
‘Time?’ stuttered Jack. ‘When is this?’
‘Well after midnight of the day we went flying, if that’s what you mean. I’ve been searching for you for hours.’ Renso handed Jack a canteen. Jack gulped and gulped until water was dripping down his chin.
‘My chute caught in the trees so I was out for a while too. But, Jesus, how on earth did you get down here?’
Renso peered inside the grotto. The walls were covered in rows of colourful glyphs and drawings. Renso waved his flashlight over one of them. It was a detailed drawing of a man riding across the stars on the back of what Renso thought looked like a mountain lion, a puma to be precise. Renso tilted the light up to a series of interlocking pointed circles carved across the grotto’s arch.
‘What is this place?’
‘Renso? Is that you?’ Jack grinned, as he finally grasped who was with him. ‘Renso, I’m so glad to see you. I thought you went down with your plane.’ Jack lifted his hand, caressing his friend’s rough beard.
‘I’m happy to see you too, Jack, and I did go down with my plane, only not all the way to the ground, thank God.’ Jack handed him back the canteen. ‘But we need to move, Jack. We’ve not got much time.’
‘Time for what?’ Jack stood up, instantly feeling dazed, confused and nauseated again. What the hell was he wearing? He held up the sleeves of an embroidered tunic, the wool itching his skin. His legs were covered in scratches, long sharp claw-like scratches, blood was dripping from a cut on his arm, and all the way from his ankles to his groin his skin was covered in thin red lines, like rope burns.
Renso helped Jack to his feet, guiding him along a ledge towards the shortest section of the rock that he had climbed down.
Jack looked up. They were about ten metres inside the mountain.
Without warning, a thunderous rumbling shook the entire basin. Jack pitched forward. Renso grabbed him and pinned him against the wall until the tremor settled.
‘This volcano is about to blow again, Jack. I don’t know how you got down here or what you were doing with that… that animal over there, that’s none of my business,’ Renso pointed back to the grotto at what was curled beneath the blanket with Jack.
‘We’ve got to get out of here. Now!’
Suddenly a geyser of black steam exploded up through the mountain, firing chunks of flaming rock out through the top, pelting Jack and Renso as they shuffled towards their way up. Renso half-carried, half-dragged Jack to where he’d left his rope. The air was thick with tar and sulphur.
‘Renso, we should dance and then we should have a drink and then… who knows.’ Jack chuckled, grabbing and shaking his friend’s hand.
‘My friend, I don’t know much about what happened during these last few hours, but one thing I do know. You, Jack Harkness, are stoned.’
‘I thought you died, Renso,’ exclaimed Jack. ‘I’m so glad you didn’t.’
‘No thanks to you,’ said Renso, wrapping his rope round Jack’s waist and tying it off in two thick knots. ‘You were a man possessed this morning. Eyes bleeding, weird sounds coming from your mouth and then you attacked me. You leapt over into the cockpit and you tried to snap my wrist, ended up tearing the hell out of my skin.’ Renso held up his wrist, showing Jack three raw patches where his skin had been scratched away. ‘Then you knocked me out.’ Renso tested that the rope around Jack’s waist was secure. ‘Next thing I know, you’re flying through the sky like a bloody big bird and my Hornet is about to meet the mountain.’
Jack grabbed Renso’s shoulders, pulled him forward and tried to kiss him.
Renso slapped him upside the head. ‘Jack, no time. I’m going up to the top and then I’ll pull you out.’
‘I can climb. I’m a seasoned climber. I once raced Hilary to a summit… now where was that? Wasn’t Everest, I know that.’
‘You’re in no condition to climb without my help. Stay here.’ Renso pushed Jack against the wall.
‘Just for a few more minutes. OK? I’ll get you out of here soon.’
‘Okee dokee, my fine fine friend,’ Jack giggled.
Winding the extra rope over his shoulder, Renso began to climb the rock.
In the grotto, Gaia stirred.
Jack watched, mesmerised, as the beautiful young Indian woman shook off the blanket, stretched her naked body and began walking along the ledge towards him. Her movements were graceful, her smile inviting. Jack could taste ginger. He could smell her pleasure. She lifted her arms enticing Jack into an embrace. In the thin beam of moonlight, her eyes shone like cobalt. Jack could feel his loins ache for her. He took another step.
‘Jack, stop! Snap out of it, Jack!’
Jack looked up. Renso was standing at the precipice, paying out the rope. Behind him, Jack heard a low feral growl. Without looking back, he tugged on the rope.
Jack was yanked off the ledge. For a second, he was swinging loosely over the precipice.
‘Jack,’ yelled Renso. ‘A little help would be good.’
Grabbing the rope, Jack used the momentum to climb.
Then he looked back and saw the Indian woman, her arms outstretched, her dark eyes pleading with him to return. Jack hesitated. The rope released a little. Jack slipped back towards the ledge.
In that instant, Gaia whipped her sword from behind her back and swung it at Jack’s neck.
‘You must not leave!’
15
RENSO HAD FOUND enough crevices in the rock face to move with speed and efficiency, which was good, because the air inside the mountain was heavy with ash, and the stink of sulphur made his eyes water.
When he was almost at the top, Renso looked back down. Jesus, no.
Jack had moved. Behind him, the creature was slinking along the ledge, and Jack was walking to meet it, his hand outstretched. It was a mountain lion, a sleek black puma, animals that used to be everywhere in the Andes and were now extinct in this region. The beast had a pulpy cut above its eye where Resnos had thumped it, which was still bleeding into the surrounding rock.
Renso dug his foot into a crevice near the top and hauled himself up and out, rolling quickly away from the opening, unwinding the rope as fast as he could. The moon was full and the plateau was bathed in its soft white light. Scrambling to his feet, Renso ran to an outcropping of rocks, tied off his end of the rope, then sprinted back, wrapping two loops around his own waist.
Bracing himself above the basin, Renso slung the rope down and called to Jack. The puma was poised to leap. Renso knew that it would take Jack with it down into the volcano.
‘Jack, stop! Snap out of it, Jack!’
He felt Jack’s tug on the rope.
He saw the mountain lion pounce.
He hauled on the rope. For a second, Jack was swinging against the precipice, the puma snarling and snapping at his bare feet.
‘Jack,’ yelled Renso. ‘A little help would be good.’
Thank God. Jack was climbing. Renso relaxed.
A sudden tug on the rope, and Renso knew that Jack had fallen back. He heard the roar of the puma.
Renso pulled his pistol, firing into the darkness.
‘Jack! Are you OK?’
Jack was staring down at the creature lying on the ledge, her shoulder bleeding. ‘You shot her. She was so beautiful.’
‘You’re hallucinating, Jack. You’re stoned. What I shot was not a woman. It was a mountain lion. Now move before the damn thing gets up again and wants to eat you.’
Minutes later Renso pulled Jack out of the basin. ‘We need to get back to civilization and fast.’
Jack stared back down at the body, a deep despair washing over him. If he was hallucinating, why did this all feel so real, and why did he feel that he should remain here with her?
After Jack’s slow clumsy climb, Renso hauled him from the maw of the mountain. By this time, the ground was trembling so violently, the smoke and sulphur so strong, that even Renso was having a difficult time remaining on his feet as he pushed and cajoled an unsteady Jack towards the steep canyon pass.
About halfway down, Renso spotted a clearing and a deserted pueblo village. ‘At least whoever lived here got out safely.’
A stone temple, shaped like a round pyramid, had been built in the centre of the clearing. If the mountain was still standing when this eruption stopped, Renso decided, he’d come back. Might be Inca treasures still buried in this place.
Jack stopped outside the cairn. ‘I think I was here.’
‘How’s that possible?’
Jack pressed his body against an irregular block of stone that was obstructing the entrance to the temple. It wouldn’t budge. He began to laugh. ‘Hey, a little help.’
‘No time, Jack. We need to get off this mountain before she erupts.’
Jack kept pushing, the stone moving a few inches then sliding back.
Renso kept going until he realised Jack wasn’t behind him. Renso was starting to get angry. He loved Jack. They’d known each other since the Great War. Jack had saved his life. Twice. And he was certainly the best shag he’d ever had, but right now, stoned or not, he was a real pain in the ass.
Renso got behind Jack and pushed. The block of stone shifted enough for their passage. On shaky legs, Jack stepped through the antechamber and into the main temple.
‘I’ve definitely been here.’ Jack could feel it, but he couldn’t get the memory of it to form.
Following Jack inside, Renso was astonished to see that the chamber was furnished as if a queen had lived here not centuries ago, but today. The fire was still smouldering.
Another deep throaty rumble from inside the mountain shook the chamber, knocking both men off their feet. Jack fell into a stack of pillows in the corner. He didn’t try to get up.
‘I remember an old woman with white hair, and…’ Jack’s voice drifted off as he tried to find words to get back what he couldn’t remember.
The ground rumbled again, this time freeing two large triangular stones loose from the roof, crashing them onto a wooden trunk, cracking its lid open, exposing an array of ceremonial knives. Renso picked one up, admiring the jade inlaid along its hilt. No point in leaving all of this to be raided by poachers before the villagers return, he thought. Plus some evidence might encourage investors to sponsor a return trip. He slipped two of the gem-encrusted knives under his belt.
Jack rubbed the heel of his hands against his bloodshot eyes. ‘Man, I’m fried. I can’t get my brain to focus on anything for more than a second.’
Renso stepped to the fire pit, kicking over some clay pots as he did. He lifted one, and shoved that into his pocket.
The mountain roared. The ground trembled. A fissure shot across the stone walls.
‘Why are we here, Jack? This morning I survived a plane crash. I really would rather not be buried alive in the middle of the night. I need a shot of tequila and sleep. Make that a lot of tequila.’
‘And I,’ said Jack, getting up off the pillows with some difficulty, bowing slightly, holding the edges of his tunic, laughing. ‘I want some trousers.’
After a few minutes of digging in the baskets and wooden trunks around the chamber, Jack found his coat in shreds under a mat next to the fire. He held up one of its sleeves.
‘Looks like someone took a sword to your coat.’
‘Thank God I’ve got more than one,’ said Jack.
A deep rumble knocked both men to the ground, the smell of sulphur getting worse, smoke and ash drifting in through the opening in the roof.
Jack scavenged around his shredded clothes, finding none of them in one piece. His boots, on the other hand, were wearable. He sat down next to the hissing fire and pulled them on.
When he stood, even Renso couldn’t contain his laughter. ‘You look like you’ve escaped from a sanatorium.’
Jack looked down at his boots, at the deep scratches, like claw marks on his legs from the Indian woman and a strange feeling of déjà vu came over him, snagging part of his mind and focusing it. With an urgency that he couldn’t explain to Renso, he knew he had to remember the feeling, remember what had happened today, if it had happened today. The mountain, the woman, the old woman, the sun in his eyes, the cave… Already the memory was peeling off, drifting away like ash.
He had to write down what he could remember. It was important. He didn’t know why, but he could feel in his bones that it was.
As the mountain shook, Jack rifled through remains of his coat, feeling some sadness at its destruction.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I need to find something to write on before I lose what happened completely. This mountain is doing weird things to my brain.’
‘Maybe not just the mountain,’ said Renso, lifting a bowl layered with cacao leaves.
‘I know that’s part of it, but I feel different, like I’m watching myself think.’
‘Here,’ said Renso, pulling Jack’s notebook from his breast pocket, handing it to Jack. ‘Use this.’
‘How did you get my notebook?’
‘I found it when I was looking for you – after the Hornet crashed.’
Jack opened to a blank page, scribbled across the pages, not sure what he was writing but feeling an intense need to put his thoughts on the page, to capture all the weirdness that was flitting across his mind. Jack made notes about the two women, about this chamber, the crashing of the Hornet and the strange seduction inside the mountain. He wrote while all around him was crumbling because at that moment, in that place, Jack believed he had lost all sense of what was real and what was not.
16
AN EARTH-SHAKING CRACK shook shards of rock from the stepped roof of the temple, pelting both men. Renso grabbed the notebook from Jack’s hands, shoved it into his shirt pocket and, yanking Jack’s arm, dragged him out of the temple.
Above the terraced fields, the two men watched as the top blew off the mountain in an explosion of noxious gas, smoke and flaming rock.
‘Jesus, did you see that?’ asked Renso, pushing Jack ahead of him out into the clearing.
‘I wonder what happened to all the other women who were here earlier?’ Jack asked, while they were zigzagging across the clearing, their hands covering their heads as the mountain spewed pieces of itself at them.
A tree whipped from the ground near them, its massive roots tearing from the ground in front of Renso, catching his feet and sending him splaying across the dirt. As Jack scrambled to help Renso, they watched in awe as the ground beneath the temple swelled up as if air was being pumped underneath it. A mound of earth lifted the structure higher and higher. The ground roared, then the mound ruptured, swallowing the entire stone structure into the earth.
‘Jesus,’ said Jack,
pulling Renso to his feet as they made for the canyon pass at the other side of the clearing, their only way to reach the bottom of the mountain.
Renso could hear Jack laughing a few steps behind him.
‘What’s so bloody funny?’
‘That.’ Jack pointed to the smoking basin where the temple had been. A fissure as wide as a trench was pushing out from the swallowed temple and reaching along the ground towards them. Breathless, Jack watched the fissure circle the pueblo village shaking it to its foundations, the adobe huts, the nearby olive trees, the fire pits folding into the ground. And then it shot directly towards Jack and Renso.
‘That… that fissure is chasing us,’ said Jack.
‘Jack, you are certifiable,’ said Renso, breathless and sceptical.
Leaping over trees being torn from their moorings, ducking from rock projectiles flying off the temple, the two men charged across the clearing to the jungle. All around them what was left of the village was filling quickly with the smoke and fumes from the volcano that was oozing lava.
‘I think the mountain is trying to stop us,’ shouted Jack, knocking Renso out of the way of a falling tree.
Gagging from the smell and the smoke, the widening maw chasing closer and closer, Renso yelled back at Jack, ‘I think it may succeed.’
Every hut and tree the fissure snaked beneath was sucked into it, chewed up, and then dragged along, crushed and crumbled in its wake. Jack’s lungs were aching, his bare legs tattooed with cuts and burns from the flying ash and hot coals spewing from the mountain. He knew that they had to get to the canyon through the jungle but he was afraid that it was going to be impossible to navigate in the fading moonlight.
With no idea where they were heading, side by side Jack and Renso crashed into the thick jungle, ducking, dodging, weaving through the thick foliage as it slapped and slugged and assaulted them.
Jack paused to get his bearings. Wiping blood from a cut above his eye, the fault line crashed into the jungle behind them, its progress marked in the crushed and collapsing trees as if an invisible monster was stepping on them. Renso stopped and stood at Jack’s side, the fissure charging closer and closer.
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