by David Wood
The path turned him again. Instead of a wall, the beam of his flashlight revealed only deep shadow, and the paw prints were taking him directly toward it, and away from the center. He kept his focus on what lay directly ahead. The paw prints had not led him to a dead end yet, but if Bell was right, a single scratch from one of the obsidian scorpions might prove fatal.
A few more steps and he could just make out the shore—the end of the river of scorpions—a line of undecorated stone tiles. Beyond it, a smaller chamber still cloaked in shadow.
He was sweating now. The air was cool, if slightly humid, and he was barely moving faster than a crawl, but the intense concentration was as exhausting as a marathon run.
Now he could see past the dividing line, though there was not much to see. There was a gap, about six feet across, transecting the chamber, and beyond it, another line of stone blocks, parallel to the first. The gap reminded him of a man-made drainage channel, a more literal river. He wondered if he would find it filled with blood, pus, water, or nothing at all.
A few more steps, and he got his answer. The stone blocks were now only about ten feet away, and beyond them, the dark trough was bristling with sharp spikes.
“Maddock!”
Miranda’s shout came just as he was about to take another step, startling him. He froze, his heart pounding, his foot hovering above the last row of carved scorpions. He forced himself to unclench and took several deep breaths.
“Yeah?”
“We’re starting out.”
Another breath and then he stretched his foot out and took the final step. He felt like collapsing right there, but instead he turned around and shone his light out across the obsidian deathtrap. “Watch your step!”
Miranda located the first paw print and shone her light on it. “You see it?”
Bell was hunched over, hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath after the rappel, but he nodded. “The tracks of Xlotl, the Lightning Dog, showing us the way across the river of scorpions. We’ve done it, Miranda. We’ve found the entrance to Xibalba.”
Miranda was less sanguine about the discovery. “I still think we’re going too fast. Finding it doesn’t mean a thing if we don’t make it back to tell the story.” She looked up the length of the rope to where Angel was just beginning her descent. “Getting back up that rope won’t be a picnic.”
“The path to the Underworld is a symbolic journey,” Bell said. “A spiritual pilgrimage, not a literal journey into hell. We probably won’t be leaving by the same path.”
“If you say so. You sure you’re okay to make it across?”
“I’ll do what I have to do.” He straightened, took another shallow, halting breath, and then took his first step.
She stayed as close as she dared, but as they ventured deeper into the maze-like path, it was all she could do to stay focused on her own footing. The immediacy of the peril presented by the gleaming black scorpions felt like a physical assault. One slip, one misstep, one minor miscalculation and...
“Oh!” Bell gasped.
Miranda snapped her gaze forward. Charles Bell was bent over, one hand clutching an ankle. “Dad?”
“I’m okay,” he said, though the quaver in his voice indicated he was anything but. “It’s just a scratch.”
Miranda felt her own pulse quickening. “Dad. You have to keep going. Get to Maddock. He’ll be able to help. He can...” She had no idea what Maddock would be able to do for her father.
“I know,” Bell said after a moment, sounding a little calmer. “You know what, I think it is just a scratch. I don’t feel anything out of the ordinary. Maybe they didn’t use poison after all. Or maybe it’s lost its potency.”
Miranda hoped he was right. Only time would tell. “Just keep going, Dad. And for God’s sake, be careful.”
Maddock shared Miranda’s horror at Bell’s misstep, as well as her utter helplessness. But the archaeologist completed the rest of the journey with no further difficulty. The wound, a two-inch long slice just above Bell’s ankle, was weeping blood, but the surrounding skin was not inflamed, suggesting the cut was clean. Maddock rinsed the wound and bound it with gauze and an elastic bandage, finishing up just as Angel arrived. Bones was still making his way through the maze, but Maddock could see that the big man was carrying one of their SCUBA rigs on his shoulder.
“Show-off,” Maddock said as Bones got within shouting distance.
“Hey, I don’t mind humping in the gear, but if it comes to swimming through rivers of blood and pus, this stuff’s all yours.” The big Indian was grinning, but the beads of perspiration bore testimony to the difficulty of the effort. As he took the final step, he shrugged the bag with the diving gear off his shoulder and tossed it to Maddock.
At that very instant, a low rumbling rose up through the stone floor, and with a faint snick, the obsidian scorpions retreated back into the floor of the chamber behind them.
Bones looked over his shoulder. “Huh. If I’d known that was going to happen, I’d have waited a few more minutes.”
“I think the floor’s weight sensitive,” Maddock said.
“Still trying to convince me that I’m fat,” Bones said, shaking his head sadly. “You’re just revealing your own insecurities.”
Maddock ignored him. “Once you stepped off and there wasn’t any pressure on it, the mechanism reset. I don’t know if it’s safe to walk on now or not.”
“It doesn’t matter now,” Bell said. “Our path lies forward.”
Maddock shone his light down across the trough, illuminating the nest of sharp wooden stakes protruding out from the walls on either side. Some of the spikes held onto skeletal human remains. Others were crusted with a dark flaky-looking substance,
“Looks like a BYOB river of blood,” Bones observed. He paused for a second, then added, “You know, ‘bring your—’”
“Your own blood,” Maddock finished. “Yeah, got it. Dr. Bell, do you agree?”
Bell was nodding his head. “I would concur. Fail to make the crossing, and your blood is added to the river. Just like that poor soul.” He pointed to a nearby skull, impaled on a stake through the eye socket.
“How do we get across?” Angel said. “Jump?”
“It’s not that far,” Bones said, “But that platform is only about a meter wide. You’d have to be a cat to stick that landing.”
“There’s got to be another way,” Miranda said. “There’s no way my dad can make that jump.”
Maddock leaned forward a little, playing the light down into the depths of the chasm. It was deep, at least fifteen or twenty feet down, but something was reflecting the light back from the bottom, glittering like a pinpoint of starlight. “There’s something down there,” he said. “It looks like gold.”
“Maya bling,” Bones surmised. “Maybe skelly there was wearing a gold chain around his neck.”
Maddock turned to Bell. “Didn’t the Maya adorn their sacrificial victims in gold?”
Bell’s eyes widened in comprehension. “Of course. The skeletons aren’t from people who failed to make the jump. They’re sacrificial offerings, brought along by pilgrims making the journey to Xibalba. Blood for the river.” He turned to Bones. “Just like you said. BYOB.”
“Wait, so you mean we have to make a human sacrifice before we can go across?” Bones shook his head. “Not it.”
Maddock brought his light back to the protruding spikes. “I wonder...” He straightened. “Maybe it’s not about the blood. We just need something that weighs enough.”
“Enough to what?”
Maddock turned to him, then picked up the bag Bones had humped through the scorpion maze. With two full SCUBA bottles, and sundry other pieces of equipment, it weighed a good sixty pounds. “It’s a bit light, but hopefully it’s enough.”
He took out a coil of rope and tied one end around the carrying straps. As soon as he was finished, he measured off several arm-lengths of rope, passing the remainder to Bones. “Hang onto it,” h
e said, and then heaved the heavy parcel out over the edge.
The bag crashed into the nearest spike which, brittle with age, snapped off with a sound like breaking bones and an explosion of dust. The bag continued to fall, the rope snaking into the chasm, but at almost the same instant that the spike broke off, there was another sound, a deep rumbling that vibrated in the stone underfoot. And then the floor upon which they were standing began to move, sliding forward, partially covering the trough. The stone platform on the far side of the chasm was also moving, sliding out from the opposite direction to completely bridge the gap.
The shift was abrupt, almost unbalancing them. Maddock and Angel reacted by instinctively widening their stances to stay on their feet, as did Bones and Miranda, with the latter gripping her father’s arm, helping him stay on his feet. Bones then went into motion, furiously pulling up the bag with their gear lest it become permanently lost, but his haste was mostly unnecessary. When the leading edges of the two platforms were just six inches apart, they stopped moving. Maddock could now see faint paw prints etched in the stone on the far side.
“There,” he said, pointing to the mark. “Step there. Move it.”
With Angel’s hand in his, he hopped over the narrow gap onto the far platform. Miranda and Bell quickly followed, and Bones, still trailing the rope attached to their substitute “human” sacrifice, brought up the rear. As soon as he was across, the two platforms began moving again, sliding back to their original configuration before grinding to a halt. The only difference was that now the five explorers were stranded in the middle of the chamber.
There was another channel on the other side of the platform, but instead of a deep chasm like the one they had just crossed over, this was a comparatively shallow trough—only about six feet deep—accessible by a steep flight of stone steps that descended down to the bottom of the trough, but at either end of the trough, another flight of steps rose to a third platform on the far side. There were no spikes and no sign of skeletal remains, but the bottom of the channel, however, was far from empty.
Maddock shone his light down revealing what looked like a long bramble of dried thorn bushes, covered in a fine powdery black substance, like velvet on a buck’s antlers.
Bones, who was looking over his shoulder as he reeled in the rope tied to the gear bag, said, “Maybe ‘pus’ meant something else to the Maya?”
“You think so?” Miranda said. “Ever heard of a little thing called a staph infection? Or candida or aspergillus? That black dust is on everything. I’ll bet you fifty bucks it’s some kind of fungus. Even if we could get through that without a scratch, we’d probably breathe in the spores. Dad is especially vulnerable because of his COPD.”
“Could a fungus even survive down here?” Angel asked. “I mean, it’s been hundreds of years, right?”
“There’s evidence that some fungal spores can remain dormant for at least a quarter century. And even if they’re dead, they may have produced toxic or carcinogenic chemical compounds. Not many people realize it, but fungal diseases kill more people every year than malaria, and they’re extremely hard to treat.” She realized they were all staring at her and shrugged. “I had to take a course in infectious disease. Work related.”
“So what are we looking for here?” Bones asked. “Do we need to make another sacrificial offering? Trip some switch and make a bridge across this sucker?”
Maddock shook his head. “I don’t think so. I think this was meant to be another test of faith for the pilgrims. To get to Xibalba, you had to be willing to walk through that stuff, risk getting infected by...whatever that is.” He glanced at Bell for confirmation, and got a nod.
“That’s not an option for us,” Miranda said. “There has to be another way.”
“Maybe we could get a gigantic can of athlete’s foot spray?” Bones suggested.
“We’ll burn it out,” Maddock said. “Remember how those spikes broke off? Even though the air is damp down here, the wood is old and brittle. Those thorn bushes down there will probably go up like matchsticks.”
Bell grinned. “A solution worthy of the Hero Twins.”
“Whose?” Bones said. “His or mine?”
“Because hot smoke is so much easier to breathe than fungal spores,” Miranda said, her tone thick with sarcasm.
“We won’t be breathing smoke. We’ve got a SCUBA rig with a couple hours’ worth of air. With the main line and the octopus, we can buddy breathe until the air clears, which probably won’t take that long.”
Miranda offered no further protest, but her disapproving frown remained fixed in place as Maddock began talking them through buddy breathing procedures and other precautions to safeguard them from the heat and smoke. While Bones and Angel worked to fashion a fire shelter from a reflective space blanket, Maddock created a tinder pile from pocket lint and bits of shredded paper, and when everyone was set, he used a fire-piston to set it alight. He could have just used one of the waterproof matches included in the survival kit in the gear bag, but he’d been looking for a chance to try out the fire-starting device, which used compressed air to ignite the tinder. As soon as he coaxed a small flame to life, he tossed the tinder out into the thorn-filled channel and then ducked under the shelter with the others while the fire did its work.
CHAPTER 20
Aside from a layer of gray ash and the lingering smell of smoke, nothing remained of the obstacle described in Maya lore as the River of Pus. Nevertheless, Maddock instructed the others to breathe through damp cloths and kept Bell on the SCUBA regulator as they ventured down the steps into the trough. The fire had burned quickly, consuming the dry fuel in a flash, without raising the temperature of the stone beneath, and what little heat it had created was already dissipating.
Maddock swept his boot across the ash layer at the base of the steps, revealing the first of several paw prints carved in the stone. The prints took a left turn at the base of the stairs and headed down the channel to the stairs leading up the other side. Those stairs brought them to a third stone platform, this one bordered with a row of elaborately carved columns, which unlike the ruins at Copán and Chichén Itzá , were in pristine condition, untouched by wind and weather. A line of paw prints, spaced just a few feet apart, led them between the columns and onto a balcony overlooking another vast subterranean chamber.
Bones shone his light down a wide staircase that descended into the dark unknown. “What’s next? River of Crap? Hey, why can’t there ever be something like a River of Dos Equis?”
Bell shook his head. “Your guess is as good as mine, but if we’re descending again, I suspect it means that we’ve completed the preliminary tests.”
“So this is it?” Miranda said. “We’re entering Xibalba?”
Bell spread his hands in a gesture of ignorance, but his giddy expression told a different tale. But as they made their way down the steps, his enthusiasm ebbed.
“I’m not really sure what I was expecting,” Bones said as he swept his light across the floor of the chamber, “but I’m sure it was more...” He shrugged. “Hellish?”
Instead of the Maya version of Dante’s Inferno, the only thing waiting for them at the bottom of the steps was a large courtyard. There were devils—or more precisely, demonic-looking Maya deities, but they too were carved of stone. Ten elaborately carved stelae, of a style even more dramatic than what Maddock had seen at Copán, each one at least ten feet tall, stood in pairs in a loose ring at the center of the courtyard.
“Watch where you step,” Maddock advised, searching the elaborately carved stone floor tiles for more paw prints, but finding none.
“The stelae,” Bell gasped, shuffling out across the plaza, seemingly heedless of Maddock’s warning. “They’re the Lords of Xibalba. Miranda, come here. You need to record all this.”
He moved around the circle stopping in front of a pair of twisted figures. “The Lords of Xibalba are always described in pairs. This is Xiquiripat—Flying Scab—and Cuchumaquic—Gathered B
lood.”
Bones stared at the archaeologist in disbelief for a moment then shook his head. “And people make fun of American Indian names.”
“Most Maya deities are similar to those of other ancient people,” Bell went on. “Natural forces, storms, heavenly bodies, war and fertility and so forth, but the Lords of Xibalba seem to have been inspired by a different sort of deadly force: Disease.” He pointed to the other stelae couplings. “Ahalpuh—Pus Demon—and Ahalgana—Jaundice Demon—who cause people's bodies to swell up. There’s Chamiabac—Bone Staff—and Chamiaholom—Skull Staff—who turn dead bodies into skeletons. Ahalmez—Sweepings Demon—and Ahaltocob—Stabbing Demon—who hide in the unswept areas of people's houses and stab them to death. And Xic—Wing—and Patan—Packstrap—who cause people to die coughing up blood while out walking on a road.”
“Those are oddly specific descriptions,” Maddock observed.
Bell nodded. “It has been suggested that perhaps these deity-pairs represent the very disease outbreaks that decimated the Maya at the end of the Classical period.”
“But this place predates that cataclysm, right?”
“By at least a couple centuries, I should think.”
“So the Maya knew about these diseases before they were wiped out. They even built this temple.”
Bell inclined his head, confirming Maddock’s train of thought.
Bones, who had been following the exchange, spoke. “You’re on to something, Maddock. Spit it out.”
Maddock took a moment to organize his thoughts. “The ancients built temples and made sacrifices to their gods as a way of trying to control the natural world. What if the Maya were trying to control this disease?”
“You mean like a...” Miranda shook her head as if the very thought was troubling. “A bio-weapon?”
“Exactly. And maybe it got away from them.”
Bell nodded again. “I think that’s exactly what happened.”