The Sphinx Scrolls

by Stewart Ferris

  Playing on the universal hatred of paperwork had no effect. They were gone, out of the nearest exit to the grounds and enveloped by the small crowd in front of the scaffold. Ruby followed in time to see Otto arriving hastily, looking tired. He administered an injection to each of the prisoners and attached something beneath their shirts. Matt’s resistance weakened visibly.

  The scaffold creaked as soldiers placed the first noose around the Guatemalan prisoner’s neck. The main supporting beam seemed to bend as they tugged at the rope to tighten the knot. Matt stood at gunpoint behind the prisoner, cursing the insanity of his former cellmate.

  A retinue gathered around President Orlando nearby. He was pontificating and shouting occasional orders to make use of the time spent waiting for the executions to be completed. Wishing she had taken a moment upstairs to make use of the shower, Ruby chose this moment to push through the others and make an approach to Orlando.

  ‘Can I speak to you, Mr President?’

  ‘Oh, why so formal all of a sudden?’ he asked, without looking at her.

  ‘I beg you not to kill Matt. You’re a great and powerful man. You don’t need his death. Please.’ He glanced at her pleading face. ‘If you spare him I promise to work faithfully for you. For as long as you want.’

  Although a soldier was by now pointing a gun into the small of her back, Ruby grabbed Orlando’s arm. Orlando shrugged her hand off and briefly dusted down his jacket.

  ‘Vicuña. Expensive. Please don’t touch again.’

  The condemned Guatemalan man was offered a mask, but shook his head.

  ‘It is important I die a visible and honourable death,’ the prisoner explained with words that were slurred as if he were drunk. Ruby guessed that Otto had injected a sedative to reduce their suffering.

  Orlando made a tugging sign with his hands to initiate the execution, but before the trap door could be released the prisoner began to mumble semi-coherently.

  ‘I will make an important speech before I die,’ he said. ‘I am not afraid of death. My life has been a journey with a purpose, and this glory is my destiny. I have always known that I would lead my people to greatness. They will follow my lead and bring prosperity to this land. When I was a child in the foothills –’

  ‘Oh, God,’ moaned the President, gesturing impatiently.

  The trap door opened and the rickety wooden structure creaked. There was a snapping sound. Ruby tried to turn away, but the prospect of a swinging man proved irresistible to the primitive part of her brain. Or it would have done if there had been a swinging man to see. The snap had actually been a wooden support on the scaffold; the structural failure had softened the fall and the Guatemalan was still alive, already attempting without coercion to climb back onto the platform for a second attempt, although as the sedative took an increasing grip on him, he needed to be carried part of the way.

  A replacement wooden brace was quickly nailed into place, and this time it held.

  Ruby tried to turn away, but her eyes were glued to the body. She was aware that finding death and execution fascinating was fundamental to the human design, but her attitude nevertheless appalled her. Without taking her eyes off the macabre spectacle she confronted Orlando.

  ‘This is all so wrong. This is barbaric. Your country will never move into the modern age with practices like this.’

  ‘What is so great about the modern age?’ asked Orlando. ‘Maybe there is a different age into which I would prefer to lead my country. Tomorrow you will be back working for me at Tikal.’ It seemed a curious non sequitur, but then little was making sense.

  The novelty of execution as entertainment was beginning to wear off. Many people returned to their duties after this second hanging. A group of soldiers cut down the body and carried it into Otto’s medical room in the palace, accompanied by the Doctor himself. Another soldier placed an almost anaesthetised Matt on the scaffold with the rope around his neck, then tied a rope around his hands. He offered Matt a mask. Matt drunkenly refused. His blurred eyes were studying the structure to which he was connected. Every joint, every bodged repair, every beam, every nail. He was at the twilight of consciousness, but he could see how the trap door operated and where its edges were. He desperately estimated that the drop below was just that little bit more than the slack in the rope.

  A few inches more rope and he would survive. But that was impossible.

  If he could jump onto the ledge at the side of the trapdoor, he could survive, but it was too far, and his bulk would slip back into the hole. His neck would still break.

  The list of options wasn’t quite as exhaustive as he would have liked.

  Surely just seconds left now. Darkness encroached on his peripheral vision; the circle of light in his eyes reduced to a white dot. The sedative kicked in completely. His feet wobbled and he fell asleep. Soldiers braced his body to keep him upright, inwardly cursing the Doctor’s insistence on sedating the prisoners before the execution was completed. They were forced to wait in this uncomfortable position for some minutes, as Otto had ordered that they wait for his return before the sentence be carried out.

  ‘Please, Mr President, this has gone far enough. What right do you have to terminate the life of another person?’ pleaded Ruby, trying to stop the tenseness in her throat from making her sound like a shrieking dolphin.

  There was a brief pause, during which Ruby counted some of the remaining seconds of Matt’s life, before Orlando replied enigmatically, ‘None at all.’

  The concurrence of opinion shocked her. Maybe she had found a way to connect with his humanity. Some of the tension eased from her neck muscles.

  ‘So please stop this madness. Let him go.’

  ‘Ruby, you must have faith in me. Your friend will discover that there is to be a life after his death.’

  ‘Not that again. Life after death is wishful thinking. It’s a way to comfort relatives. It’s selling a product that never needs to be delivered. It has no place in a science-based world view.’

  Orlando chuckled. He was either insane, thought Ruby, or he knew something of fundamental importance that she didn’t. Given the broad scope of her education, she guessed insanity was the more likely scenario, and that didn’t bode well for her chances of reasoning with him.

  ‘You speak of science, Ruby, but science is not complete. It moves forward. Sometimes it also moves backward. What if we were to rediscover forgotten sciences from the past? What would that say about your world view?’

  Otto returned to the scaffold. Matt’s executioners pulled the rope tight amid more straining of the old timbers above him. Their preparations complete, the soldiers left the scaffold except for the one whose task it was to release the trap door. The number of spectators had dwindled to about ten. Ruby could see, to her dismay, that Matt was showing some signs of waking up. The sedative was already wearing off, plainly insufficient to knock out someone of Matt’s bulk for long. He was going to suffer his hanging fully conscious. His eyes blinked and his body shook in frustration.

  ‘At least give him some dignity,’ begged Ruby. ‘Get rid of the audience, please!’

  The President gave her this small concession.

  ‘Non essentials can leave!’

  Matt watched the minor exodus through eyes that widened with fear as he came to the realisation that he had woken up for the last time. But Ruby seemed to be up to something. Reducing the number of people present could give her a chance to act. He felt a growing sense of confidence in her abilities.

  ‘Please don’t be tempted to make a speech,’ said the President once the area was clear.

  ‘Ruby! Now!’ shouted Matt.

  ‘What?’ she yelled. Lacking the superhuman strength that movie characters seemed to find in these situations, she felt powerless.

  ‘Your plan! You must have had a plan! I thought that was why you got everyone to go away!’

  Her jaw was on her chest. With great difficulty she found her voice.

  ‘Er ... no, no
t particularly.’ Then, almost whispering as the full horror of the situation hit her and her eyes filled with hot tears, ‘Oh God, I’m sorry, Matt.’

  Grinning coldly, Orlando ended their discussion with a peremptory hand signal. Otto administered a second injection, then stood back.

  The trap door opened and Matt fell into it.

  * * *

  The night spent in the Mitsubishi Delica minibus on a dirt track in the middle of nowhere had been relentlessly miserable, made all the more unpleasant by his determination to remain in full New Ratty regalia while lying down, including the stiff leather jacket. And with no sheets, no duvet and not even any Belgian chocolates on the non-existent pillow, Ratty felt that he had stretched his survival skills to their limits.

  But none of that mattered now because, according to his calculations, he was standing on the spot. The intersection of the lines was not a straightforward latitude and longitude equivalent, for the lines ran between ancient Mayan settlements that didn’t restrict their locations to the niceties of horizontal and vertical map divisions. The two lines Ratty had, in fact, drawn between the ruins of Topoxté and El Zotz, and between the ruins of Paxcamán and Uaxactún, appeared more like an ‘x’. So ‘x’ did, indeed, mark the spot.

  Or did it? The spot on which he stood looked exactly the same as every other spot around him: damp ferns that engulfed his ankles; trees randomly spaced but uniformly blocking any view of the sky. The map said he was three hundred metres above sea level, and the land sloped down towards a shallow valley. There was no habitation within sight, not even a hint of a bulge in the ground level that might suggest the presence of a buried Mayan temple – nothing but diffused rays of sunlight and the sweet aroma of nectariferous berries dripping with heavy dew, a fragrance tempered by the increasingly fruity odours emanating from within his new outfit. He made a mental note to buy several copies of each item of clothing when he was able to afford it.

  Had he made a mistake with his map reading? His biro lines between the items on the map were a millimetre wide, and on a scale of 1:25000 that could equate to an inaccuracy of about twenty-five metres in any direction. He stomped around the trees covering the area that he felt might include the margin for error, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. It was more likely that the creators of the stelae were in error. They didn’t have aerial photographs or GPS to help them map with pinpoint accuracy. They couldn’t see any of the locations the stelae described from this position on the ground, even if the tree coverage had been thinner in past times.

  Ratty crouched down and put his hand into the soft soil. Decomposing leaves and insects covered his fingers as they easily penetrated a few inches before hitting firmer ground. He realised how difficult it would be to dig here, alone and without any equipment. He didn’t even have a spade. Even if he could create a hole using a screwdriver from the Mitsubishi, it would be a random pin-prick compared to the size of the area that needed to be excavated. He wasn’t sure what he had expected to find here, but some kind of clearly delineated entrance, obscured by a few easy-to-move bushes, would have been ideal. It wasn’t too much to ask. He wished he had brought Ruby along with him. She would know what to do.

  Sighing at the anti-climax of his visit, he trudged back to the Mitsubishi. He needed to return to England to learn how to locate buried monuments, to acquire the equipment he would need and to get fit enough to be able to conduct this dig alone, in secrecy. But going home would throw him back into a vortex of financial chaos. The banks would tear him to shreds. And that would be nothing compared to whatever vengeful Teutonic tendrils Otto was able to extend to England when he realised that Bilbo’s diary had been tampered with. Ratty wondered what the chances were that the sinkhole would widen and swallow Otto’s villa with the disagreeable Doctor inside it.

  ‘Time has transfigured them into Untruth,’ he told himself, once again. Ruby’s quote was really starting to get on his nerves. He could see only one way of purging the poetry from his head: as soon as he returned to England, before all hell broke loose at the manor, he would pay a long overdue visit to Chichester.

  * * *

  ‘It has not been possible to connect your call,’ said the distant recorded voice of a well-spoken Englishwoman. ‘Please try again later.’ Otto put his mobile phone back in his pocket, noting that Ratty was out of range of Guatemala City’s phone network already. It was of no consequence. The call would have been a mere courtesy, and Ratty’s disappearance should not affect his ability to decode the message of the stelae.

  In any case, the third body of the day had just been delivered to his treatment room, and he had more pressing tasks ahead. The tall American would use up all of his stocks of the unique embalming and preservation fluids he had developed. He made a mental note to create some more barrels of the stuff at the earliest opportunity. With Orlando now self-enrolled as President, assassination attempts could not be ruled out, and Otto had to be ready to tackle any eventuality at short notice. Orlando was counting on him.

  He looked at Matt lying unconscious on the trolley, lips and chin wet with dribble. At least this one hadn’t soiled himself, but it had been tough knocking him out on the scaffold. The sedative was pre-prepared in quantities suited to the body mass of typical local men. In Matt it had barely lasted a couple of minutes. As he removed the support strap from the subject’s chest and replaced it with a heart monitor, Otto pondered whether a third dose of sedative would be necessary before the live embalming process took effect and started slowing the heart rate to an eventual standstill. No, he decided. The double dose already inside Matt ought to be enough, and the even number fitted comfortably with the grain of his sensibilities.

  There was no movement from the body as he inserted the tubes into the carotid arteries and turned on the flow of cell preservatives. This first stage of the embalming process would take three hours to complete before the body was ready for full mummification. He made a note of the time and left the room, locking it carefully behind him before he made his way to the antiquities room, unaware that as the door clicked shut, the eyes of the body on the trolley flickered open.

  Otto was now alone with the stelae and Bilbo’s diary. Two of his ancestors had striven to achieve impossible things. Otto knew he would, someday, complete their unfinished works for them. Some projects would take him longer than others; his medical training and subsequent research had consumed the majority of his adult years just to equip him with the vast amount of specialist knowledge needed to be able to continue from where his father had been forced to stop. He was pleased that completing the work of his more ancient forbear, Karl, would show results more quickly.

  He mated the stones together, noting dispassionately the accuracy with which they fitted after all this time, and turned them to the alignment suggested by the diary. This was it. He had arrived.

  He unpacked the boxes of books and maps that lay on the floor, then stacked the empty boxes neatly against the wall. The glyphs had to be translated, their meanings had to be equated to actual locations, and the lines between those locations had to be drawn. It was a process not to be rushed, not least because he loved diligent, careful research. He pictured Karl Mengele trying to carry out the same meticulous investigative work from a flimsy tent in the jungle with only one of the stelae in his possession. No malaria pills, no electric lights during the long nights, no real chance of success while that moronic Ballashiels man was obstructing respectable science.

  Slowly Otto identified the glyphs as referring to the ruins of Chukumuk and Los Cimientos. He drew a line between them on the map. Next came the settlements of Utatlán and Iximché. Another line. A shiver of excitement ran through him. A location had revealed itself at the centre of a tall, thin cross. To the north west of Guatemala City, just outside a small town called Chichicastenango, he sensed fate was waiting for him. He checked his watch. Matt’s body was almost ready to be mummified.

  * * *

  Matt felt rotten. He’d expected th
e afterlife to be fun. It wasn’t supposed to suck. His neck hurt like hell where he’d pulled the tubes out, and his head was pounding like he’d been trying to out-drink an entire college fraternity. Falling off the trolley onto an unforgiving tiled floor hadn’t helped, and it had seemed like hours before he had the strength to pick himself up. But the bruising convinced him that he was still alive, on planet Earth, although he was so disoriented he had no idea what country he was in.

  There was a sink. He ran the water and splashed it onto his face before glugging some down his dry throat. His surroundings came into focus and the fog of confusion started to evaporate. He was in a medical treatment room. There were two bodies on trolleys next to him. He recognised one of them as the crazy Guatemalan who had shared his cell. He was a pale blue colour. Not a healthy look. The other guy was covered in sticky brown tar and stank like a fishmonger’s dumpster. Even worse.

  It dawned on Matt: he was meant to be dead, like these two, and some depraved doctor was about to start experimenting on his corpse.

  He needed to get the hell out of there.

  He tried a door. Locked. There was a second door, though. It opened with a waft of chlorine when he tried the handle. Beyond was a room with a swimming pool, a desk and some chairs. Cool office, his muddled mind thought. Reminded him of something. He walked around it, fantasising about having such a room in his own apartment. Great place for writing his next book, he decided, thinking it would be cool to write a thriller about a guy who wakes from a coma to a changed world.

  Memories started to return. Arriving in Guatemala. The dying fan of his previous book in the pit near Tikal. Hiding in a golden sarcophagus. Having the crap beaten out of him by the soldiers who found him in there. Making the situation worse by getting angry with them, especially when they pretended not to have heard of him. Seeing Ruby’s face as she opened the door to his cell. The scaffold and the hanging.

  And there was something else. Something vital he was forgetting.