The Mayan Codex

by Mario Reading

Then she turned back to him, her eyes challenging him for a reaction. ‘You guessed right about me, Captain. Some time ago I decided that I wanted nothing more to do with my mother’s machinations. The other night it all came to a head. I’d spent weeks building up enough courage to tell her the truth about my feelings. Stupidly, I decided to do it in front of my entire family. At a moment when they were all expecting me to formally renew my allegiance to the cause the de Bales have been single-mindedly dedicating themselves to for nearly eight hundred years. It wasn’t what you might call good timing.’

  ‘And what is your mother machinating? What is this cause that unites different generations of the same family over centuries of time?’

  Lamia hesitated. ‘The man. Sabir. He’s your friend, is he not?’

  Calque shook his head. ‘I swore I’d be honest with you, Lamia. I’d be lying if I said Adam Sabir was my friend. We connected, briefly, at a low point in both our lives. He took pity on me, after the death of my assistant, and shared some information with me that he is probably now regretting he let slip – probably because he was doped up with morphine at the time. That’s the full extent of our relationship. That’s as far as it goes.’

  ‘Then why are you still interested in him?’

  ‘Because I think he holds the key to something your mother, and through her, the Corpus, wants.’

  ‘And you believe in this Corpus?’

  ‘I think your mother does. And I believe her to be a very rich, very powerful, and very evil, woman. I also believe that it was she who was directly responsible for my assistant’s death. And if she was, I intend to make her pay for it. I owe that much to his family.’ He hesitated, then allowed his gaze to drop. ‘And to myself.’

  Lamia followed him with her eyes. She hesitated for a moment, still watching him. Then she took in a quick breath, which was almost a gasp. ‘You’re right, Captain. You’ve been right all along. My mother was directly responsible for your assistant’s death. She admitted as much to us the other night.’

  Calque lurched forwards, his face alive. ‘I knew it. So I haven’t been wasting my time?’

  Lamia shook her head. ‘Far from it, Captain. But the information won’t help you. And it certainly won’t save Sabir.’

  ‘What do you mean “save Sabir”? What are you talking about?’

  Lamia held Calque’s eyes with her own. ‘My twin brothers left yesterday for the United States. Under my mother’s direct orders.’ She glanced down at her watch. ‘By now, Adam Sabir will be dead.’

  PART TWO

  PROLOGUE

  1

  At first you thought it was simply another earthquake. There had been three in the past few days, and you had become used to them by now.

  It always went the same way. First, your stomach unexpectedly turned over. For a second or two, you were frozen to the spot, wondering what had happened. Then, if you were unlucky enough to be caught inside your hut, you might have the presence of mind to look upwards. If the oil lamps were swinging, you knew it was an earthquake, and you hurried outside, the ground swelling and bloating underneath you, until you could find somewhere safe to sit that wasn’t directly under a tree, a telegraph pole, or any masonry. Then you watched your hut to see if it would fall down.

  When the earthquake was over, you would walk back towards your hut, the aftershocks making you feel ever so slightly nauseous. Then you would remember to thank God that the earthquake was only a small one, and that the epicentre was a few hundred miles away on the other side of the country, and you would force yourself back to work.

  But this was no earthquake. When you concentrated, you realized that the shaking and trembling of the floor of your hut was also accompanied by a deep rumbling sound. You ran outside and you looked across the hills. One hundred and ten kilometres away from where you lived, the great volcano, 5675 metres high, pierced the sky. You had looked at it every day of your life. All through the year, snow coated its pinnacle, despite the near-tropical climate in which you lived. You had heard that it was still active, but everyone knew that it had not erupted for more than a century and a half. The two great volcanoes four and a half hours further west from you regularly smoked, polluting the atmosphere, or so you had heard, with the smell of sulphur, shit, and rotten eggs. But your volcano had always seemed dormant by comparison. Resting. Unhurried.

  Now a massive cloud encircled the familiar peak, blotting out the sun. Even from one hundred kilometres away, you began to catch the smell of sulphur on the air. Soon, you sensed, it would be all pervasive, like the smell of a rotting animal in the underbrush.

  You followed the course of the eruption in bewildered wonderment. And as you stood there watching, volcanic ash and tiny balls of mud, about a quarter of an inch in diameter, began to patter around you like hailstones. In the distance, thick clouds of black, white, and blue roiled up from the vent, shot through with eerily silent bolts of lightning, as if someone had inadvertently switched off the sound on the village television set.

  You had never thought that this would happen in your lifetime. As guardian of the codex – just as your father, and your grandfather, and your great-grandfather had been guardians of the codex before you – you had been preparing for this event for 163 years. Ever since the last eruption. Your family’s only task during that period had been to make sure that no one discovered the location of the cave that housed the codex, or tampered with its contents. That task was completed. Now, your second, and greater, task would begin.

  And that task involved a journey to the south. A journey for which you were terminally unprepared.

  2

  The Tanyard, Stockbridge,

  Massachusetts

  For some months, now, Adam Sabir had been unable to complete a full night’s sleep inside his own house.

  As soon as he began to drift off, the nightmares would return, and with them the claustrophobia that had tormented him since early childhood, when some schoolmates, as part of a Halloween prank, had bound and gagged and then locked him inside the trunk of his professor’s car, in imitation, or so he later learned, of a scene from a horror flick that was currently doing the rounds at the local drive-in movie houses.

  The professor had discovered Sabir three hours later, his gag chewed to a pulp, moaning, hallucinating, and half out of his head with fear. Sabir had spent the rest of that semester at home and in bed, alternately chain-reading for comfort, and then throwing up as a result of the tranquillizers his psychiatrist was forced to prescribe him for whenever the street doors of his parent’s house needed to be shut and bolted.

  In true prep school tradition, Sabir had found it impossible to squeal on his tormentors. But years later, as a journalist, he had taken his revenge on them in a manner reminiscent of Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo – he had built them up, in other words, each man in his turn, and had then proceeded to tear them down again in an avalanche of failed vainglory.

  But the fear of enclosed spaces still lurked in his psyche like a recurring nightmare – only a thousand times exacerbated by what he had experienced earlier that summer, in France, in the cellar of an abandoned house in the French Camargue.

  Over the past few months, Sabir’s cycle of disrupted sleep had always followed the exact same pattern. First would come the hyper-realist dreams, in which he was back in the cesspit again, deep in the cellar below the Gypsy safe-house in the French Camargue. In these dreams he was up to his neck in raw sewage, his head bent backwards to protect his mouth, his forehead tight up against the lid of the cesspit, which Achor Bale was sliding shut across his face.

  Then came the dreams of dreams, in which Sabir revisited the hallucinations he had experienced whilst sealed inside the cesspit. Hallucinations in which his arms and legs were torn off, his torso shredded, his intestines, lights, bowels, and bladder dragged out of his body like offal from a butchered horse. Later in the dream a snake would come towards him – a thick uncoiling python of a snake, with the scales of a fish
, and staring eyes, and a hinged skull like that of an anaconda. The snake would swallow Sabir’s head, forcing it down the entire length of its body with convulsive movements of its myosin-fuelled muscles, like a reverse birth.

  Later, Sabir would become the snake, its head his head, its eyes his eyes. It was at this exact point in the dream that he always awoke, his body drenched in sweat, his eyes bulging from his face like those of a startled cat. He would throw on his dressing-gown and hurry out into the garden, where he would stand, gulping in fresh air, and cursing Achor Bale and the perniciousness of posthumous effect.

  The rest of the night would be spent in his father’s old Hatteras hammock, in the garden house, with the veranda doors thrown open to the elements, a single blanket draped over his quasi-foetal shape. He had tried switching to a sleeping bag, but the bag’s innate constriction had seen him thrashing around like an emergent chrysalis, desperate to disentangle its body from the pupal shell before serving as some passing bird’s hors d’oeuvre.

  On this particular evening the dream had come to him with more than its usual vigour and destructive force. Sabir was perilously close to hyperventilating by the time he made his way across the lawn and into the garden house.

  Rationally, he knew that it made no earthly sense for him to persist in trying to sleep in the main building. What was the point, when he would simply come rushing out again, three hours later, gasping for air? But some obstinate part of himself refused to give up on the attempt to live an ordinary life.

  He privately feared that once he abandoned all pretence at living inside – once he gave up fighting, in other words – his claustrophobia would enter the obsessive-compulsive stage, dooming him to a downward spiral of psychoanalysis and soporifics.

  For that was the way his mother had gone. A steady, inexorable descent towards drug dependence and enforced hospitalization. It had destroyed his father’s life, and it had come close to destroying his own.

  Recently, Sabir had begun wondering if he wasn’t hellbent on repeating the family pattern?

  3

  ‘I like small town Americans,’ said Abiger de Bale. ‘They’re so fucking trusting.’

  The twins were sitting in their rental car, watching the outside of Adam Sabir’s house. They had been in the United States for a little less than twelve hours, and already they had identified their mark.

  ‘What do you mean, trusting?’

  Abi wound his seat back to the prone position, so that his silhouette would no longer be outlined against the street lights. He glanced over at his brother. ‘I’m pretending to be a tourist, right? I ask them things, right? In the American idiom. Things like “you got any celebrities in this town?” Then they give me a list. Including Norman Rockwell, and Daniel Chester French, and Owen Johnson, and Mum Bett – oh, and that guy who wrote the bestselling book on Nostradamus’s private life. And because the writer is the only one on the list who isn’t dead yet, they tell me about his private life. That he can’t keep a woman. That he lives alone. That his mother went mad. Stuff like that. And all without me, the tourist, needing to ask anything at all. Try the same thing in France, and it’d be like attempting to crack a stone wall with the tip of your nose. How did you do?’

  ‘Pretty much the same.’

  ‘You see? I like these Americans.’

  Vau cast a quizzical look at his brother. ‘You don’t think they’ll remember us?’

  ‘Lighten up, Vau. Nobody ever saw us together. So they’ll just assume we’re one and the same person. And the Amis can’t recognize accents, anyway. They never travel abroad. They’ll think we’re Canadians.’

  ‘I still think we ought to take him away somewhere. Not do him here.’

  ‘Don’t worry about that. I’ve got a better idea. Sabir’s been behaving strangely lately. People around here are starting to think he’s taking after his mother. We’ll play on that.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Wait and see.’

  4

  Adam Sabir’s ‘Berkshire Cottage’ style home was set well back from the Stockbridge Main Street, in grounds totalling a little more than an acre and a half – or roughly the size of a baseball field.

  The ultra-discreet street lights cut a fragile arc across the front lawn, but they fell just short of the main part of the house, which was consequently shrouded in darkness. The back garden, in which Sabir’s summer-house-cum-writing-hut was situated, stretched for a further fifty feet towards a thick stand of trees, which marked the extreme boundary between Sabir’s property and next-door’s smallholding. The rear of his demesne was bounded by a small white picket fence, whilst the front of the house lay directly open onto the street, as if its original nineteenth-century occupants had not wished to mar the vista of its rolling lawns with anything as common as an enclosure.

  At a little after two o’clock in the morning, Abi and Vau emerged from their car, checked up and down the street, and then moved swiftly across the floodlit lawn until they were swallowed up by the darkness surrounding the main house.

  Once at the rear of the house, Abi made his way cautiously up the veranda steps and tested the back door. It was open. He grinned at his brother. ‘Jesus Christ, Vau-Vau. This idiot doesn’t even lock his door at night. Do you think he knew we were coming?’

  ‘I don’t like this, Abi. No one in the United States leaves their house door open at night.’

  ‘Well Mr Sabir does. And I, for one, am most grateful to him for the courtesy.’

  The twins edged their way through the door. They stood in the back hall, staring up at the main stairs.

  Abi covered his mouth with his hand. ‘You saw him earlier, didn’t you? You’re sure of that?’

  Vau echoed the movement. ‘Clear as a bell. His bedroom is the last room on the right, below the gable window.’

  ‘And no one else here?’

  ‘No. He was alone. And behaving like a lone man. You know. Pottering around. Tinkering with stuff.’

  Abi shrugged. ‘Crazy. Crazy to leave your door open. What is the man thinking of?’

  The brothers made their way to the base of the stairs. Halfway up the staircase they stopped and listened once again, but the house was silent as the grave.

  ‘The bastard doesn’t even snore.’

  ‘Perhaps he’s not asleep?’

  ‘At 2.30 in the morning? So why are his lights off?’

  ‘Okay. Okay.’ Vau stopped outside Sabir’s bedroom door, one hand on the handle.

  Abi stood a little away from him. Without a sound, he unhitched the telescopic fighting baton from his sleeve. Then he nodded.

  Vau threw open the door.

  Abi sprinted towards the bed, landing with his legs splayed, the full weight of his body concentrated on where he expected the sleeping man to be. ‘Christ, Vau. There’s nobody in here.’

  ‘You’re kidding?’

  Abi disentangled himself from the bed covers and cracked on his torch. ‘This bed’s been slept in, though. It’s still fucking warm. Go and check the bathroom. Then we’ll do the rest of the house.’ Already, without knowing why, Abi was getting the sense that the house was deserted.

  ‘He’s not in the bathroom either.’

  ‘Are you sure you didn’t see a car leave while I was sleeping? Are you sure he didn’t see us?’

  ‘Hell, Abi. Of course he didn’t. I would have told you. His car is still in the garage.’

  ‘Maybe he went for a walk? Maybe he creeps across the boundary fence every night and porks the next-door-neighbour’s wife?’

  Vau shook his head. ‘No. I watched him prepare for bed. I even used the binoculars to make sure it was him. The curtains were wide open all the time. The man doesn’t seem to give a damn that anyone who wants to can look in on him.’

  ‘Let’s check downstairs, then. Perhaps he’s got a study? Or maybe a dressing room with a spare bed in it?’

  Vau made a face. ‘Dressing rooms like that are for men who want a break from their wives. Like Mo
nsieur, our father, remember? Sabir hasn’t got a wife. He lives alone.’

  Ten minutes of frenetic searching convinced the brothers that Sabir wasn’t anywhere in the house.

  Abi threw his head back and exhaled through his cheeks. ‘Right. Let’s do something constructive. Let’s find if he’s written anything down. At least that way we won’t leave empty-handed.’

  ‘What are we going to do then?’

  ‘Burn the place down. That’ll bring him running.’

  5

  Sabir had almost succeeded in dozing off when he saw the study lights go on in the main house. For a split second he refused to believe his eyes. Then he eased himself out of the hammock and stood, still rocking with tiredness, on the extreme edge of the lawn and just beyond the arc thrown by the lights.

  His house was being burgled. That much was clear. At first the thought caused him some bemusement. What was he going to do? Who was he going to call? His cell phone was up in his bedroom, and he was standing in his back garden, in pyjamas and bare feet, on a chill and windy October night. I mean, how dumb can you get?

  Weapons? He didn’t have any. What an idiot. He didn’t even have a pair of carpet slippers to hit the burglars with. And he couldn’t see himself bearding potentially armed men with a garden rake.

  He was just beginning to move away from the house and towards Main Street when some instinct stopped him in his tracks. Perhaps it was the memory of another night, five months before, when he had huddled down behind a sand dune in the Camargue and watched a similar house, once again in total darkness save for the opalescent glow from a fragile circle of candles.

  That time, the candlelight had been outlining the hooded figure of his blood sister, Yola Samana, as she teetered precariously on a three-legged stool with a noose around her neck, whilst a dispassionate Achor Bale sat in the invisible shadows and watched her as he might have watched a staked-out lamb during a midnight tiger hunt.