Tears of the Jaguar

by Hartley, A. J.

  The motorbike reached the turnoff to the village; he kept going toward the site. The moon was down, which was all to the good. Eustachio got off the bike a couple of hundred yards short of the parking lot and pushed it into the underbrush, watching his feet for snakes. He had ridden barefoot all the way with no difficulties, except when he had stopped for gas outside Valladolid and stepped on a shard of glass from a beer bottle. It had bled a little, and though he had wrapped it in leaves from the chakaj tree, it stung when he put weight on it, and it made his gait even more shambling and tortuous than usual.

  With the bike stowed, he unsheathed the machete that was strapped to the pannier, checked the stars to get his bearings, and pushed cautiously into the site. There would be no one around at this time. The police didn’t have the manpower to guard the dig, particularly if there was nothing worth guarding anymore. But he wasn’t listening for people. He wouldn’t hear a snake until it was close enough to strike, but he might hear other animals. There were peccaries in these woods—what his ancestors called kitam—and he didn’t like the idea of stumbling on a big one without his rifle.

  Years ago he had seen a neighbor gored by one as it ran past him. Well, not so much gored as nicked with its tusks. They had cornered the animal in a tangle of k’u’che’ trees, and it had rushed them, spotting an opening between Eustachio and Fresco. Eustachio had been a young man then, with two good legs. He had dived clear of the boar, but Fresco was slower. He had stepped aside, but the boar had turned her head as she charged past and bitten Fresco’s thigh, opening a terrible wound. The blood sprayed far enough to splash Eustachio across his face, though he was ten feet away. Fresco had screamed, more in fear than in pain. With the boar vanished into the jungle, Eustachio had used his shirt to stop the bleeding. He had tried dragging Fresco back to the village, but it took too long, and he’d had to leave him while he ran back for help. By the time they had gotten back to him, Fresco was unconscious and had lost a lot of blood. They built a fire, heated a roasting spit in the center, and cauterized the wound, but even the searing of his flesh did not bring him round. He died an hour later.

  Without a doctor or medical supplies, with the hospital miles away and only one truck in the village, there was nothing he could have done. But Eustachio still remembered the look in Fresco’s eyes after the peccary had gone, when he saw his blood on Eustachio’s face, and it still knotted his guts with a sense of failure. He remembered, and sometimes that was all you could do. The past was past, but he had learned early that it was important to remember.

  He kept the machete held in front of him as he walked. Something large moved off to his left, but it was light and careful, probably a keh deer. Some said jaguar still lived in the jungle scrub, but Eustachio hadn’t heard or seen sign of them for almost a decade. They had been hunted into the true jungle of the highlands, which was probably just as well. The peccaries and deer were almost gone from the woods now, so there was nothing for the hunter to prey upon. It saddened Eustachio. Ek Balam was named for the jaguar, but now those creatures were gone, lost like the people who had lived here.

  One more thing to enshrine in memory, he thought. Did the beasts of the forest feel loss? Did the jaguar weep for its lot, its shrinking world, its steady displacement from the center of things? He couldn’t say.

  He moved easily through the brush despite his limp, emerging beside the sheds where they kept the wheelbarrows and inexpensive hand tools, and from there he was on a well-worn trail that traced its way into the central court. He passed behind Structure 2, where he had supervised the building of the cell phone tower, and around the acropolis. Even in the darkness he could see the great hell-mouth doorway of the Zac Na, and he felt sure his forefathers approved of what he was doing. He bowed in acknowledgement and moved round the back to where the new cenote had opened up, and the new tomb.

  Eustachio took the small, inadequate flashlight from his pocket. In its small patch of light, he could see that the ground around the edge of the cenote had been beaten smooth with foot traffic and the ladder had been replaced by a two-stage ramp, anchored on joists driven into the earthen walls. He considered the work with a critical eye. There was a heavy metal door at the mouth of the tomb, but—and this sounded the first note of unease he had felt since the last time he had been here—it was open.

  Eustachio stood there looking down at the deep shadow of the doorway for a long minute, listening to the night. The birds and bats had discovered the cenote and had already colonized it. By day it would be filled with their calls. Now there was only the shifting and rustling of feathers, strangely amplified by the sinkhole. He shone the flashlight on the door and the yellowish glow sparkled on the hasp where, he thought, a padlock should have been. He moved the light down, but if someone had cut the lock off, it was as likely to have fallen into the water below. He waited one more minute, then pushed the machete through his belt and began picking his slow, ungainly passage down the ramp, glad at least that he did not have to negotiate the ladder again.

  It seemed solid enough. Juan’s work, perhaps. One of the few things his son did well. Eustachio hadn’t wanted to tell him where he had hidden the grave goods, but he had no choice. Protecting the contents of the site had been passed on to Eustachio by his father, and he had given the same information to Juan. That was how it should be, even if it made him uneasy. Juan had let so many of the old ways slip. But someone had to know in case something happened to Eustachio, and such things were best kept to family.

  He was taking a risk coming back here at night, even if the place was no longer guarded. His hand went to the note in his pocket. He’d found it tucked into the pocket of his work shirt, which had been hanging in the wheelbarrow shed most of the previous day until he’d grabbed it just before leaving. He hadn’t noticed it when he was going home, probably because he was irritated after being told by the student that Bowerdale wanted enough construction materials to cover the entire cenote. But that morning, before he’d set off on the motorbike for Coba, he’d discovered it.

  Now he pulled out the note and read it again by the beam of the flashlight: “The contents of the new tomb need not go to a museum. Meet me there tomorrow night to discuss how your heritage might be honored.”

  It was written in careful Spanish, but whether it was a man’s or woman’s hand, Eustachio could not tell. He planned to give nothing away tonight, but he figured it would be useful to discover what others knew or suspected. As to talk of somehow honoring his heritage, he took that with a grain of salt, though maybe—just maybe—there was a way to honor the past while serving the needs of the village today.

  The first stage of the descent into the cenote took Eustachio away from the tomb, and he found himself uneasy with the thing at his back. He moved quickly along and down, too quickly in fact. He stumbled slightly and had to take a breath. He held on to the rail—a chakaj log with the bark polished off—and turned awkwardly as the ramp doglegged back toward the tomb.

  The second stage of the ramp was longer and his flashlight beam barely reached the doorway, but as Eustachio looked ahead, he was sure it looked different from down here. From above the door had looked wide open. Now it seemed half closed. He paused as it occurred to him for the first time that whoever had written the note might have bad intentions. He felt his unease turning into something else, something he hadn’t felt in a very long time: fear.

  He moved the flashlight around, but it caught only the roots that draped the sides of the cenote like vines, reaching for the water below. He stared at the not-quite-open door and wondered if he had the courage to go any further.

  But he needed to find out more. What did it mean, to see how your heritage can be honored?

  He took a step, releasing the handrail and then grasping it hard again. Then another. Slowly, he descended into the sinkhole, his eyes and the thin light fixed on the doorway ahead. Reluctantly he released the handrail and drew out the machete. Two more steps and he was off the ramp. He led with t
he flashlight, the machete raised so he could feel the cool flat blade against his right ear. He shoved at the door with his elbow to open it completely, no longer sure if it had looked any different from above, and raised the flashlight to eye level so he could peer down its poor beam into the stone hollow beneath the acropolis.

  He saw nothing. Nobody. Just the tomb structure with its hell mouth, echoing the threshold of Xibalba, the Mayan underworld, the contents gone, save for the stone box that had served as a coffin. No grave goods. No bones. He turned the light into the corners of the tomb but the darkness swallowed it up. He was standing still, looking for a figure in the darkness, when he heard the breathing behind him. He felt suddenly cold, as if plunged into the cenote water itself, and for a moment he did not move, but listened in spite of himself, as the breath rose and fell, strange and unearthly, somehow muffled and amplified at the same time by the chamber. Suddenly, he felt an overwhelming dread of the thing in the shadows behind him, the thing with the strange breathing that was so clearly waiting for him to turn, enjoying the terror that had gripped him. So he did not turn, not even when it spoke his name in a voice he was sure he’d heard before. Not even when he felt its terrible hands on his shoulders. Only then, when it twisted him round, when he saw the dreadful mask and the stray wisp of hair he was sure he recognized, did he begin to scream.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Deborah angled the car carefully, swerving between potholes and peering into the night until she reached the junction and took a left on the good road—the tourist road—to the site. She had been in bed, had actually slept for about an hour and a half, but then she had woken and it had quickly become clear she wouldn’t drop off again. This wasn’t unusual. She slept little—rarely more than five hours a night, often less—and once she got that restless feeling and her brain started working, sleep was out of the question.

  She had woken thinking about that gold ring with the heraldic symbols on it, the one wrapped with the child’s finger. She may even have been dreaming about it. The ring symbolized everything wrong with the site, everything that had made the dig feel somehow off-kilter long before the theft. She was missing something, and until she found it, nothing was going to make any sense.

  She needed to call Steve Powel and see what resources he could dedicate to tracking the symbols on the ring, which she was pretty sure they could get from the photographs and video. He wouldn’t thank her for calling him at this hour, but she had to do it now or it would drive her crazy. She hadn’t been able to get a cell phone signal at the Oasis Retreat, so that meant going to the site and scaling the tower in the dark.

  She parked in the lot by the entrance and checked her flashlight. She had brought the good one, the big Maglite that made her feel like Scully on the X-Files. The darkness out here was almost absolute. There was no moon, and the only light came from the stars themselves. The jungle was alive with sound, insects and frogs, she thought, and the occasional high, rising call she took to be a bird, though she had no idea what type. It was a rich, primal sound that made her feel like the only human for a thousand miles. She slipped on her backpack and started to walk.

  She didn’t mind the darkness, but she kept the flashlight down in case there were snakes. She had no great fear of snakes, but she had done a little research into what she called “the local nasties”—spiders, scorpions, and snakes—and seen some none-too-pleasant pictures of the extensive necrosis some bites produced. Of course, if there were jaguars in the woods, as some of the locals still claimed, she might have an altogether different problem that cautious footwork wouldn’t solve. Still, she thought, to see a jaguar in the wild would be something. Preferably not something that wound up killing her, of course, but getting a glimpse would be a treat. No, not a treat. Not these days. An honor.

  As she thought this through she traced the old sacbe into the site proper past the four-way triangular “arch” with the oval palace behind it and round the back of the Twins. Though being surrounded by the jungle had not bothered her at all, being here in the familiar confines of the site in the unfamiliar darkness of the night was more unsettling, like she was trespassing on hallowed ground. The high stone walls loomed. She moved the white-bright beam of her flashlight over the stone, and the shadows leapt and flickered with each fractional shift. To her left, nestled at shoulder height, a great green iguana—almost four feet from head to tail—scuttled suddenly back into the darkness. She jumped, then took a long breath and blew it slowly out.

  The footing was as treacherous as ever on the way up to the cell tower. Climbing it took both hands, so she reluctantly stowed the flashlight in her backpack and began feeling her way up the ladder. Almost immediately she caught sight of something in the corner of her eye: a flash like distant lightning to the north. She paused, listening for thunder, but none came. Holding the rungs of the ladder tighter, she turned toward the acropolis and scanned the sky. For a moment there was nothing but the stars and the distant looming blackness of the pyramid, but then the light returned, not in the sky but lower, bouncing off the pale stone of the structure itself: a flashlight. Someone was there.

  She came down the ladder but resisted the urge to turn on her flashlight. She frowned and then turned cautiously and began retracing her steps in the darkness, feeling for the stone lip of the platform edge with the soles of her boots. She descended slowly, turned half into the structure so she could feel the stone with her left hand as she inched her way down to the grass of the central court. All the while, she watched the acropolis pyramid for another flash of light. None came.

  Perhaps he—or she—is doing the same as you, she thought.

  But then another possibility occurred to her. Maybe the light had shown her not where the other person was so much as where his flashlight beam had happened to fall, in which case he could be almost anywhere. She paused and looked around. No movement, no light, nothing out of place. Nothing, indeed, to suggest there was anything here except her, the lizards, and the ancient stones.

  So either he is out of sight, or he has turned off his light.

  She didn’t like the implications of the latter. The only reason someone would do that was to stay hidden, which meant he had seen her.

  So go. Run back to the car and drive straight to Valladolid. Wake the others and call the cops.

  It made sense. But this was her site, Goddamn it, and someone had already ruined it once. Someone had plundered her career when they emptied out that tomb, and she was not about to run from them when they came back. Beneath her anxiety, she felt a spark of anger. She had to know who it was and what they were doing.

  She decided. She would keep her light off, move closer to the acropolis, and take a cautious look around. If she didn’t see the light again or if she felt even a whiff of danger, she would go straight to the car and get out.

  She began to walk toward the acropolis. Her stride was longer now, a little less cautious. She had the flashlight ready, though she hadn’t turned it on. There was no point announcing her presence till she had seen something she could use, something that might turn this whole nightmare situation around. Recover the stolen artifacts, and she might yet make National Geographic and the kind of publicity that would put the Druid Hills museum firmly in the black.

  Deborah picked up the pace, veering left again, moving north around the side of the acropolis. Here the jungle seemed to encroach into the site, and she felt the humidity coming off the vegetation like it was something she could touch. At the corner, she paused, then she was out, moving silently toward the sinkhole.

  She saw nothing, but there was almost immediately a sound: someone was in the tomb below her. She stared hard at the ground, trying to pick out the rim of the cenote and edge along it. If she could get around the other side, she might be able to see down into the passage. She knew that descending into the tomb with no sense of who was down there was absurd.

  I’ll just look, she thought.

  She moved gingerly around the edge of
the cenote until she got to an angle where she could see the bright, shifting light that played at the entrance of the tomb passage.

  Found you.

  She squatted, staring toward the passage, but couldn’t see enough down the tunnel. She had to get lower.

  The only way into the tunnel itself was via the gangplank ramp, but that made too much noise and took her too close. She peered down into the cenote itself. The walls were steep, but perhaps there was a place she could climb down part of the way, just far enough to see straight down the passage. She crawled to the edge and looked down, but it was just too dark. Perhaps if she just flicked the light on for a moment it would go unnoticed and she could see how to navigate a way down.

  She positioned the light as precisely as she could, snapped it on, did one quick sweep of the cenote walls below her, and turned it off. The whole movement had taken less than two seconds. Then she waited, her eyes on the passage mouth. The light from inside still seeped out, flickering as the person inside moved around. There was no sign that they had seen anything.

  Deborah processed what she had seen, then thrust the flashlight into her backpack. She turned her back on the tomb and cautiously dropped her legs over the stone lip of the cenote. She felt for the first ledge with her feet, couldn’t find it, and eased herself down another six inches. When she found it, she put her weight on it cautiously. It held, and she lowered her whole body down into the great stone basin. She was effectively blind now, her face pressed up against the cool rock, brushed by the long fibrous roots that snaked down to the water like rat tails. She took hold of one and tested her weight against it.