Temple

by Matthew Reilly

  The massive stone groaned loudly as it was pushed slowly back into place.

  Race watched its movement from within the temple. Gradually, all the moonlight from outside was replaced by the shadow of the massive rock and then, with a final ominous thud, the boulder would move no more.

  It now filled the portal, sealing it shut, at the same time sealing William Race inside the temple with the pack of ferocious rapas.

  Darkness.

  Total darkness, save for the flickering orange glow of his torch.

  The walls of the tunnel around Race glistened with moisture. From somewhere deep within the temple, he heard a steady, echoing drip-drip-drip.

  It was absolutely terrifying, but strangely Race felt no fear. After all he’d been through, he was beyond being afraid.

  The twelve rapas—visions of evil in the strobe-like light of the torch—just stared at the humming idol in Race’s hand, entranced.

  With his torch held high above his head, he made his way down the spiraling tunnel at the base of the stairs. It bent down and to the right in a slow, descending curve. Small alcoves lined its walls.

  Race passed the alcove that he’d seen the last time he had been inside the temple, saw the mangled skeleton with the cracked skull lying in it. The skeleton that he had assumed was Renco but which he now knew to be the wily old conquistador who had stolen Renco’s emerald pendant.

  He came to the bottom of the spiraling passageway and saw a long straight tunnel stretching ahead of him. It was the tunnel in which von Dirksen and his men had met their grisly end.

  The rapas emerged from the ramp behind him—silent, looming, ominous—barely even making a sound as they slunk along on their soft padded paws.

  At the end of the long straight tunnel, Race came across an enormous hole in the floor. It was roughly square in shape and at least fifteen feet wide, taking up the entire tunnel before him.

  Out of it came one of the most repulsive odors he had smelled in a long, long time.

  He winced at the smell as he evaluated the wide hole in the floor in front of him.

  On the far side of it he saw nothing but wall—solid, stone wall—and inside the hole itself he saw nothing but inky blackness.

  Just then, however, he saw a series of hand- and footholds that had been cut into the hole’s right-hand wall. They’d been carved in such a fashion—one on top of the other—that they created a ladder-like mechanism which a person could use to climb down into the hole.

  After dousing the idol once again with his bladder full of water, Race put his flaming torch in his mouth and then, using the hand and footholds cut into the wall, slowly began to climb down into the dark stinking hole.

  The rapas followed him, but they didn’t bother using the footholds. They just used their scythe-like claws to climb down the walls of the hole after him.

  About fifty feet later, Race’s feet touched solid ground again.

  The foul stench was stronger here, to the point of being overwhelming. It smelled like rotting meat.

  Race grabbed the flaming torch from his mouth and turned away from the wall he had just scaled.

  What he saw took his breath away.

  He was standing inside an enormous hall of some kind, a gigantic stone-walled cavern that had been carved out of the belly of the rock tower.

  It was absolutely spectacular.

  An enormous, rock-walled cathedral.

  Its high vaulted ceding soared into the air at least fifty feet above the floor, disappearing into darkness. It was sup-ported by a set of stone columns that had been fashioned out of the rock. A flat stone floor stretched away from Race. It also disappeared into shadow.

  The walls of the cathedral, however, were its most stunning feature.

  They were covered with primitive carvings—pictographs similar to those that adorned the portal up on the surface.

  There were pictures of rapas, pictures of people, pictures of rapas killing people. Tearing their limbs off, ripping their heads off. In some of the carvings, the screaming humans being mauled by the cats clutched piles of loot in their hands, even as they were being killed.

  Wanton greed, even at the moment of death.

  Interspersed among the carvings on the walls were a series of stone alcoves that had all been carved in the shape of rapas’ heads.

  Thick cobwebs covered each alcove, so that it looked as if see-through gray curtains had been lowered over the carved rapas’ jaws.

  Race went over to one of the alcoves, sliced through the cobweb across the rapa’s mouth.

  His eyes widened.

  A small shelflike podium had been carved into the wall inside the rapa’s bared jaws. On it sat a lustrous golden statue that had been fashioned in the shape of a fat man with an enormous erection.

  “Good God . . .” he breathed as he stared at the statue.

  He scanned the hall around him. There must have been forty such alcoves scattered around its walls. And if there was an artifact in each one, then it would be a treasure that was worth . . .

  It was Solon’s treasure.

  Race looked at the ornate alcove in front of him, looked at the carved rapa’s head, snarling viciously at him.

  It was as if the builder of this temple were daring the greedy adventurer to reach inside the cat’s mouth to grab its treasure.

  But Race didn’t want any treasure.

  He wanted to go home.

  He stepped away from the fearsome-looking alcove, out into the center of the enormous stone cathedral, holding his torch aloft.

  And then he saw the source of the foul odor that had assaulted his nose.

  “Oh, Christ” he breathed.

  It lay on the far side of the cathedral, and it was huge.

  It was a pile of corpses—a high, ugly mountain of bodies.

  Human bodies.

  There must have been at least a hundred of them, and they were all in various states of dismemberment. Blood slicked the walls all around them in such copious quantities that it seemed as if someone had painted them with it.

  Some of the bodies were naked, others were partially clothed—some had had their heads ripped off, others their arms, others still had had their entire torsos gnawed in two. Bloodied bones littered the area, some of which still had chunks of uneaten flesh clinging to them.

  To his horror, Race recognized a few of the bodies.

  Captain Scott—Chucky Wilson—Tex Reichart—the German general, Kolb. He even saw Buzz Cochrane’s body lying upside-down on the pile. The entire lower half of his torso had been chewed off.

  More curiously, however, Race saw a large number of olive-skinned corpses on the pile.

  Natives.

  And then suddenly he saw a small hole in the wall beyond the grisly pile of bodies.

  It was roughly circular in shape, about two-and-a-half feet in diameter, the width of a broad-shouldered man.

  Race immediately recalled seeing a similarly shaped stone up on the surface earlier—on the balconylike path behind the temple—a peculiar round stone amid all the square-shaped ones, a stone that appeared to have been slotted into a cylindrical hole of some sort.

  Oh, no, Race thought, realizing.

  It wasn’t a hole . . .

  It was a chute.

  A chute that started up on the surface and ended here, in the enormous stone cathedral.

  And in an instant, the question as to how the rapas had survived for four hundred years inside the temple had an answer.

  In his mind’s eye, Race recalled Miguel Marquez’s words: “If you hadn’t survived your encounter with the caiman, your friends would have been sacrificed to the rapas.”

  Sacrificed to the rapas.

  Race stared at the circular hole in the wall, his eyes widening in horror.

  It was a sacrificial well.

  A well into which the natives from the upper village threw offerings to the rapas.

  Human offerings.

  Human sacrifices.

&n
bsp; They would throw their own people down here.

  But it probably didn’t stop at that, Race thought as he gazed at the inordinate number of olive-skinned bodies that lay on the pile of corpses.

  The natives probably threw their dead—and the dead of their enemies—down here as well, as another way of appeasing the rapas.

  And in times of real shortage, Race imagined, the rapas probably ate each other.

  Just then, he saw five more rapas lying on the stone floor beyond the pile of corpses, next to a small, square-shaped hole in the floor.

  The five rapas were staring right at him, entranced by the steady hum of the wet idol.

  Standing in front of them were about ten much smaller cats—cubs, rapa cubs—each about the size and shape of a tiger cub. They also stared at Race. It seemed as if they had all stopped in mid-play as soon as they had heard the idol’s mesmerizing drone.

  Jesus, Race thought, there was a whole community down here. A community of rapas.

  Come on, Will, get on with it.

  Right.

  It was then that Race extracted something else from the leather satchel that he had slung over his shoulder.

  The fake idol.

  Race left the fake idol on the floor at the base of the large square-shaped hole that had opened onto the cathedral, so that anyone entering the temple would find it immediately.

  He didn’t know for sure, but he imagined that that was exactly what Renco had done four hundred years previously.

  All right, he thought, time to get out of here.

  Race saw the smaller hole in the floor over by the five female rapas and their cubs and figured that his best option—apart from climbing up the sacrificial chute and hoping someone opened it for him—was to just keep going down-ward.

  And so with the real idol still humming in his hands, he cautiously made his way past the five female rapas and their cubs and over to the small, square-shaped hole in the floor next to them.

  He looked down into the hole.

  It was about six feet square and it just disappeared straight down into the rocky floor. Like the larger hole before it, it also had foot- and handholds carved into its vertical walls.

  What the hell, Race thought.

  With his torch held firmly in his mouth again and the humming idol shoved inside iris satchel, Race climbed down into the narrow shaft.

  After a minute or so, he lost sight of the hole’s opening above him. From then on, except for the small circle of flickering orange light that illuminated the shaft around him, he was surrounded by impenetrable darkness.

  A couple of the rapas followed him down, slinking down the walls of the shaft at the edge of the torch’s circle of light, hanging upside-down above him, keeping pace with him, glaring at him with their cold yellow eyes.

  But they never attacked.

  Race kept climbing. Down and down. It felt like he climbed for miles, but in reality it was probably only a couple of hundred feet or so.

  Then, finally, his feet touched ground again.

  Race grabbed his torch and held it aloft and found that he was standing in a small cavern of some sort, bounded on every side by solid stone walls.

  Filling the cavern, however, was a body of water.

  It was a pool of some sort—a small pool, bounded on three sides by walls of stone. On the fourth side of the pool was the flat section of ground on which Race now stood.

  He walked over to the water’s edge, bent down to touch it, as if to see if it was real. The two rapas stepped slowly out from the shaft behind him.

  Race dipped his hand in the water.

  And suddenly, he felt something.

  Not an object or anything like that, but rather a gentle surge in the water itself.

  Race frowned. The water was flowing.

  He looked at the entire pool once again and saw that its tiny wavelets actually moved ever-so-slowly from right to left.

  And in that instant, he realized where he was.

  He was at the very bottom of the rock tower, at the point where it met the shallow lake at the bottom of the crater. Only—somehow—water was flowing in and out of this cavern.

  The idol was still humming in his satchel.

  The two rapas watched Race intently.

  Then, with a confidence that he had no reason to possess, Race discarded his flaming torch and stepped into the pool of inky black water—satchel, clothes and all—and ducked beneath the surface.

  Thirty seconds later, after breaststroking his way through a long underwater tunnel, he surfaced in the shallow lake at the bottom of the crater.

  He gulped in air and breathed a thankful sigh of relief.

  He was outside again.

  After he emerged from the base of the rock tower, Race returned to the upper village. But before he did so, he stopped at the tower top, at the entrance to the temple. The warriors who had pushed the boulder back into the portal were gone now, having already departed for the village, and Race stood before the ominous stone structure alone.

  After a few moments, he grabbed a nearby stone and approached the boulder wedged inside the portal. Then, beneath Alberto Santiago’s inscription, he scratched a message of his own:

  Do not open at any cost.

  Death lies within.

  William Race, 1999

  When he arrived back at the upper village, he found Renée waiting for him at the edge of the moat, standing with Miguel Marquez and the chieftain, Roa.

  Race handed the idol to Roa. “The rapas are back inside the temple,” he said. “It’s time for us to go home.”

  “My people thank you for all that you have done for them, Chosen One,” Roa said. “If only there were more in the world like you.”

  Race bowed his head modestly, just as Renée looped her good arm in his.

  “How are you feeling, hero?” she said.

  “I think I must have suffered another hit to the head,” he said. “How else am I going to explain all those feats of derring-do? Must have been the adrenaline talking.”

  Renée shook her head, looked him squarely in the eye. “No,” she said. “I don’t think it was adrenaline.”

  Then she kissed him—nicely—pressing her lips firmly against his. When at last she pulled away, smiling, she said, “Come on, hero. It’s time to go home.”

  Race and Renée left the upper village to the cheers of the natives.

  As they disappeared down into the crater and headed back to Vilcafor, a muffled scream could be heard from somewhere within the village far behind them.

  It came from the bamboo cage that was tied to the four post-like trees.

  In the cage, lying on the ground, rolling around in agony from the wounds to his stomach and with both of his hands hacked off, lay the wretched—and gagged—figure of Frank Nash.

  The natives hadn’t killed him on the main street of Vilcafor earlier. Rather, they had cut off his thieving hands and brought him up here for more appropriate treatment.

  An hour later, the last Indian procession to go to Solon’s temple began. Bodies were carried aloft on ceremonial litters as the procession made its way across the rope bridge and over to the temple.

  Nash lay writhing in agony on one of the litters, while a series of other corpses—Van Lewen, Marty, Lauren, Romano, and the corpses of the entire Navy-DARPA team—occupied other litters. Dead or alive, any kind of human flesh would appease the cat gods that dwelled inside the temple.

  The whole village gathered around the rear of the temple—chanting in unison—as two strong warriors lifted the cylindrical stone from its slot in the path, revealing the sacrificial chute.

  The dead bodies were cast into the hole first—Van Lewen, then Marty, then Lauren, Copeland and the Navy people.

  Frank Nash was brought over to the sacrificial well last of all. He had seen what had been done with the other bodies and his eyes widened as he realized what was going to happen to him.

  He screamed through his gag as the sacrificial pr
iests bound his feet together. He writhed about maniacally as two Indian warriors brought him over to the chute.

  They put him in feet-first and as he saw the sky for the last time, Frank Nash went bug-eyed with horror.

  The two warriors dropped him into the chute.

  Nash screamed all the way down.

  The cylindrical stone was placed back into its slot and the natives left the tower top for the last time, never to return. Once they arrived back at their village, they began preparations for a long journey, a journey that would take them to a place deep within the rainforest, a place where they would never be found.

  The Goose soared over the Andes, heading for lima, heading for home.

  Doogie sat up front in the cockpit, bandaged but alive. Race, Renée, Gaby and Uli sat in the back.

  After about an hour or so of flying, Gaby Lopez joined Doogie in the cockpit.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey,” Doogie replied when he saw who it was. He swallowed, nervous. He still thought Gaby was seriously pretty and seriously out of his league. She’d done a great job band-aging his wounds, treating them with gentle hands. He’d stared at her the whole time.

  “Thanks for helping me with that caiman back in the moat,” she said.

  “Oh,” he blushed. “It was nothing.”

  “Well, thanks anyway.”

  “No problem.”

  There was an awkward silence.

  “Say, I was wondering,” Gaby said nervously. “If you weren’t—you know—seeing anybody back home, maybe you’d like to come over to my place and I could cook you dinner.”

  Doogie’s heart almost skipped a beat. He smiled a broad, beaming smile.

  “That’d be great,” he said.

  Ten feet behind them, in the passenger section of the plane, Renée lay nestled up against Race’s shoulder, fast asleep.

  For his part, Race was speaking to John-Paul Demonaco on Earl Bittiker’s cellular phone—care of the redial button. He brought Demonaco up to speed on everything that had happened at Vilcafor. From the BKA to the Nazis, to the Navy and the Army, and then finally, the Texans.