by Lisa Morton
“Here, Miss—” and then broke off, his eyes going wide, as he saw the torn fabric and blood on Diana’s left shoulder. “You are hurt—!”
Diana’s hand was already clamped over part of her shoulder, and her face was white, but she tried to sound casual, “Really, it’s not bad. A few grains of the buckshot caught me, that’s all. Let’s get him tied up.”
Manuel had been carrying a length of rope, in case they’d needed to do any serious climbing, and now they used it to bind the unconscious prospector to a nearby large tree. Yi-kin wrapped him up so tightly that Diana wondered if they’d ever be able to free him.
Just then, she didn’t really care.
Before returning to camp, Diana pulled away the shoulder of her shirt to discover five small wounds. Fortunately none was large or deep, but they would need quick attention. Holding her wadded vest up to staunch the bleeding, they finished making their way back to the camp. Yi-kin turned out to be surprisingly squeamish, and had to look away as Diana swabbed wounds with whisky, then heated a knife blade over a fire and used the tip to pry out the tiny balls of buckshot. When Yi-kin heard her cry out a second time, he overcame his reluctance, knelt beside her and finished prying out the last three pieces.
When it was done, she washed the injuries with water and whisky, then used the remains of that shirt to bind her shoulder. She was almost too exhausted and weakened to stand, and the sun was sinking.
“I think maybe tonight we must stay in house,” Yi-kin nodded, helping her to her feet.
“As much as I dislike the idea, I agree,” she said, leaning on him as they walked towards Crazy Mac’s foul little shack.
“I will set up lanterns. I think lizard people might be out tonight,” he said, already glancing about nervously even though the sky was still blue overhead.
“Looking for me,” she added.
“What about Manuel and Crazy Mac?” queried Yi-kin, as he led her into the shack’s single room.
Diana sank down into a corner near the stove; she refused to go anywhere near the old man’s bedding. “Manuel’s dead,” she answered, “and as for Crazy Mac…well, perhaps he can work out something new with his masters.”
Then she passed out.
She regained consciousness briefly in the night, and it took her a moment to realize what had brought her back around, then she identified it:
It was the sound of someone screaming not far away, great, incoherent shrieks of pure terror and agony.
“What’s that?” she muttered.
Yi-kin, who was seated in the middle of the shack, tense, Crazy Mac’s shotgun laid across his lap as he faced the closed doorway, answered, “That is Crazy Mac.”
Then Diana was out again.
She awoke in the morning, and at first was unsure where she was. She felt Mina’s reassuring weight on her feet, and then she was flooded by pain. When the pain subsided, she raised herself up and looked around.
Yi-kin was asleep in the middle of the floor, Crazy Mac’s shotgun still clenched in one hand. Although they were ringed by their lanterns placed around the cabin’s interior, light was seeping in through the cabin’s cracks, and so Diana knew they’d made it through the night.
She sat up, wincing, and looked down; the wounds hurt, but she was pleased to see the bleeding had ceased. She changed the dressing and then staggered out over the sleeping Yi-kin into the cool, welcome morning. Kneeling by the edge of the stream, she let handfuls of cold water pour over her, and then changed into the extra shirt she’d brought with her. After a few bites of some of their salt beef, she actually began to feel better.
Yi-kin appeared in the doorway, looking panicked until he spotted her. “You scare me, Miss Diana!”
She smiled to reassure him. “I’m really quite all right, Yi-kin. Much better today.”
“Oh, good. But do not leave again!”
They were pleased to find their horses were still where they’d left them; they loaded them up with their supplies (including, especially, the lanterns), but before they left, Diana went back into the shack. She pried the lid off the crate marked DANGER EXPLOSIVES and saw three sticks of dynamite left within, all with long fuses attached. She wrapped each of them carefully in pieces of a threadbare blanket, put two in one of the horses’ packs, and one in her bag.
Yi-kin watched. “Explosive?”
“I prefer to think of it as precaution.”
Ready at last, they led the horses the short distance upstream to the cave opening.
And then found Crazy Mac, still tied to the tree.
Of course pieces of him were also in the branches, on the ground, on the cliff face, on the brush and in the stream.
Yi-kin went green, and for a moment Diana feared he might faint, then he gulped and looked away. “What about Manuel?” he asked.
Curiously enough, the creatures had left Manuel alone. She thought perhaps they just weren’t carrion eaters.
When Yi-kin learned of her plan—to enter the cave beyond the opening immediately—he initially objected. She wasn’t well enough; there were only two of them; they’d surely be killed.
“And if we don’t, they’ll keep coming after us, and some night we might be careless—”
“We will not!” he answered, taking a step towards her. “We will always keep light. We will fight them—”
“Then let’s fight them now. And this way perhaps we can answer some questions as well.”
“But you are hurt.”
“I’m quite fine, Yi-kin, really. We’ll take plenty of light with us, and we’ll be fine.”
Or at least she hoped so.
Yi-kin knew better than to argue further with her. He lit one of the lanterns, and prostrated himself before the hole. Flinching as if expecting to share old Mac’s fate any moment, he slowly pushed the lantern into the cave and squinted to look inside.
“Very tall inside. We will not have to crawl,” he pronounced, withdrawing.
“Good.”
They spent a few moments assembling what they’d need and finalizing their plans, while desperately trying to avoid stepping into pieces of the dead prospector. Yi-kin would carry rope, chalk (to mark their way), a pack filled with extra oil, some branches they’d fashioned into crude torches, and two lanterns. Diana would carry one lantern (her left arm was too weak to lift a second lamp) and her bag, and walk behind Yi-kin. They briefly debated whether to carry Mina or not, then she decided for them by scurrying into the cave opening.
Finally they were ready, and he crawled in first. “Is good,” she heard him say on the other side. She removed her hat and left it with the horses, then knelt at the mouth and scooted through.
The other side of the entrance was a tunnel at least eight feet tall and equally wide.
Yi-kin looked at her, adjusted his lanterns so they were held out well before him, and then asked, “Ready?”
She told him she was.
And they began the descent into the world of the lizard people.
The first thing Diana noticed, as their route sloped gently downward, was that the sides of the tunnel were remarkably even.
“This isn’t a natural cave,” she noted.
Yi-kin didn’t reply; he was too busy scanning the darkness ahead of them.
At one point the descent became far steeper, and Diana checked her watch—their descent from the cave mouth had taken them about thirty minutes. Here, a series of wide steps had been hewn into the stone, and they found it amazingly easy to continue downward. At the bottom of the limestone staircase the cave broadened, and they heard the sounds of water. The sides of the cave opened onto an underground river, stretching off into the darkness. Strange luminescent fish darted about in the black waters, and Mina reached a paw down, trying to swat at them until Diana pushed her away. She wanted Mina nowhere near those nightmarish depths, which uncomfortably brought to mind the River Styx, the final river crossed by the damned in ancient Greek mythology.
Diana guessed they must be at
least three hundred feet below the surface now, and the air had taken on a weird quality around them, being colder but more humid than on the surface. There was also a faint odor that it took Diana a few seconds to place, then a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature passed through her:
It was the smell that had been left in her San Francisco hotel room after the attack by the lizard thing.
At one point the river curved, and Diana nearly ran into Yi-kin as he stopped just beyond. They were facing a huge open archway, perhaps fifteen feet tall and twenty feet wide, carved into the very stone of the cave itself. The arch was sculpted with bas-relief images of lizard-headed beings, engaged in a variety of practices—Diana picked out what looked like trade or merchant activities, a king or priest with hand extended in blessing…and armies.
The arch was also trimmed in gold.
There was no mistaking its glitter in their lanterns; great strips of it outlined the edges, and the interior of the archway was covered in it.
Diana guessed she was probably looking at enough gold to set up her own small country.
“This is the entrance to their city,” Diana said.
Yi-kin examined the area, then asked, “Why no guard?”
Diana had been wondering that herself. She had expected to encounter her opponents before now. “I suppose we’ll find out.”
She nudged Yi-kin ahead; he gulped and stepped forward reluctantly, but seemed to gain strength when Mina ran on ahead of him.
Beyond the arch the cave ran a short distance before opening to an intersection of nearly a dozen new tunnels. Golden plaques, displaying messages in an indecipherable pictographic language, were mounted above each opening. In the center of this area was a fountain decorated with great carved stone lizard heads. The fountain was dry and cracked, and looked as if it hadn’t worked in decades.
Yi-kin peered around in perplexity. “Which way? What do we look for?”
She saw Mina take off down the second opening from the left, and she pointed after the feline. “We need to know why they’re here, which means we may be looking for an unknown gateway. So we follow her.”
He nodded, but hesitated just long enough to chalk an X beside the exit tunnel before heading after the cat.
Diana was about to follow him into the side tunnel when something odd caught her attention. As she stepped into the new cave, she momentarily covered the light from her lantern, and saw the intersection they’d just left was bathed in a faint, phosphorescent glow. She ran her hand over the stone wall, then held it up in the darkness, and saw that her glove now radiated a green light.
The walls were covered with a luminescent moss of some kind. It must provide just enough light for the sensitive lizard people to see by, but not enough to offend their delicate senses, apparently.
She turned to follow Mina and Yi-kin down the side tunnel, and saw that this new cave was the most astonishing they’d seen yet. The walls were ornately sculpted with writhing lizard forms and geometric designs. Some had been painted, mainly in hues of red and green. Somehow the carvings reminded Diana of religious tableaux.
Her suspicion was confirmed when lanterns illuminated a gruesome scene of lizard people plainly sacrificing a struggling human being. The scene was complete with crimson accents.
“Miss Diana….” Yi-kin muttered, fearfully eyeing the horrible mural.
“I think this is leading to some sort of temple, Yi-kin.”
He reluctantly moved forward, skirting the depiction of sacrifice with as much distance as possible.
They continued on, only glancing at the murals surrounding them. They passed branching avenues, but many of them seemed blocked or unusable. They saw cracked archways and piles of shards that might once have been ceramics, and Diana realized that this civilization, which may have been grand at one point, had crumbled into ruin.
The tunnel opened onto a ledge that wound around the inner wall of a large chamber, a hundred feet above the floor. Below, they could just make out half-ruined walls and rooms, with a few decaying mounds of wood scattered about.
“I think this was a market of some sort,” Diana whispered.
“Their world die.”
Diana nodded. “That’s why we haven’t seen any of them yet—I suspect there are very few left.”
Their path left the open chamber and became a tunnel again, they rounded one last curve, and stepped out of the cave into what was apparently a temple. The large cavern was supported with redwood-sized stone columns, which extended beyond the light of their lanterns. They stepped to the far wall (for a moment Diana was reminded of the temple of Kali outside Calcutta), and saw a huge stone table resting there.
It was unquestionably covered in ancient, dried blood. Human blood.
Yi-kin stared at the altar stone, horrified; but Diana moved around it, her attention captured by something she saw glittering just beyond:
The back wall of the temple was lined with great golden tablets, each about seven feet tall and four feet across, covered with more of the pictographs and friezes, highlighted with fading, chipping paint to bring out the illustrations. There were a total of twelve, and she swiftly realized that they told a single complete story. She guessed they read from right to left, and showed the history of the Lizard People.
On the one farthest to the right she saw scenes of the reptilian figures cavorting with a variety of other oddities: There were wolf-headed creatures, winged humanoids, dancing skeletons, huge spiders—
—and a tall horned man who too plainly represented the demon she’d once fought in the woods near Derby.
The story told by the tablets seemed to begin with the Lizard People in the Netherworld.
In the second tablet, they appeared to be stepping through a large hole and disappearing, and she knew she was witnessing the Lizard People using a gateway to leave their realm.
She moved to her left, and saw that the third tablet showed the reptiles stepping out of black circle and appearing among tall trees.
“They come through gateway,” Yi-kin murmured.
“Yes. Look at those trees…I understand the one to the north of us is in a thick forest, so it’s probably that one.”
“But how do they come here?”She didn’t answer, but proceeded to her left again, and was examining the fourth tablet: The Lizard People were sacrificing humans, and offering prayers. Red paint trailed down parts of the frieze, and her stomach churned as she thought of the altar behind her. She felt Mina brush her leg and picked her up, cradling her protectively.
The following three tablets showed an exodus: The Lizard People had traveled by land, beneath a glowing moon, and then they’d completed their journey south in boats they’d fashioned.
The eighth tablet showed them landing their boats, and digging out their tunnels. In the ninth tablet the Lizard People sacrificed to their gods, in this very temple.
The final three tablets were empty.
“They didn’t finish,” Diana muttered. She thought back to the parts of the city they’d passed through, and realized now that what she’d taken for ruins might have been structures that had never been completed. “Something happened to them not long after they arrived here…but what?”
When Yi-kin didn’t respond, she called out, “Yi-kin?”
“Here,” he called from the darkness, but something about his voice chilled her instantly.
She walked off to where she thought she’d heard him, and rounded one of the huge pillars to find a twenty-foot tall pyramid obscenely crafted of human bones. They were all very old, decaying, although a few were mummified and still bore shreds of papery skin or wispy hair. There were arms, legs, torsos, and heads, all piled neatly to create a four-sided pyramid.
“There is opening back here.”
She followed Yi-kin behind the abominable pyramid to a carved entryway. Although not as large or elaborate as the main archway leading into the city, this nonetheless led to something special. Diana set Mina down, thrust a
lantern in, and saw a narrow hallway that stretched off well beyond her light. It was lined on both sides with stone shelves that held corpses. Those nearest were little more than skeletons, but a quick inspection revealed they weren’t human.
“It’s a catacomb,” Diana breathed out.
“Many thousands dead,” Yi-kin said as he peered in beside her. “Why?”
She shrugged. “Plague? Perhaps they caught something from the very humans in that pyramid. That would be a rich irony.”
“What is ‘irony’?”
Diana was reaching affectionately to Yi-kin’s shoulder when Mina yowled. She stood a few feet away, back arched and tail puffed out.
They heard the hissing then.
In the temple entranceway, she could make out the shapes of lizard men. The creatures were hesitating, just out of range of the light they so feared.
Diana and Yi-kin exchanged a look of dread, then she moved carefully towards the entrance. She held the lantern up, Yi-kin came just behind her. As she reached the edge of the archway that led into the tunnel beyond, she girded herself, then stepped into the opening, holding the lantern out before her.
There were six or seven of the creatures waiting. They fell back from the light, snarling and hissing, covering their eyes, stumbling into one another.
Yi-kin was beside her, staring wide-eyed in horror, while Mina hissed at her feet.
“What we do now, Miss Diana?!” he cried out.
Diana thought furiously for a second. The catacomb was the only other way out of this temple that they’d found, and it obviously led farther into the city, so they’d have to go back out the way they’d come in. They might be able to force the lizard people back for a while with the lanterns, but when they reached the point where the many tunnels intersected, they’d be vulnerable to attack from every direction. Diana could only hope she was right and that there were very few of them left.