I heard her sigh, then she said, “Take care of Eme. She will be your daughter.”
I hugged her just as a heavy object rendezvoused with my head.
Consciousness fled.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
I was falling.
Before I could understand what was going on, I hit the water, on my back. Another two splashes after mine told me that Eme and Eve had been thrown into the water with me.
I was in the cenote.
The water was dark, but I could still see a glow that was the surface, probably a reflection from one of the lights above the cenote.
I was up for a breath of air in no time. Where were Eme and Eve?
Not far away, it turned out.
Eme was treading water fine, so I told her to continue. I swam over, grabbed Eve, and pulled her head above water. Amazingly, she coughed briefly, then started breathing.
But now what?
I surveyed the surrounding wall of the cenote. I couldn’t be far from where I had fallen in my dream because we had been thrown from the same place on the side! I saw no hole in the wall, but the vines were thicker than I remembered.
Had my dream been real? Was it a memory rather than a dream?
I swam to my left, over to where I remembered the hole to be, dragging Eve with me, and started pulling the vines away from the side of the cenote.
There!
The hole was in the same place, but full of debris and covered with lots of vines. That was why no one had found it in the intervening years. Of course, I’m sure that even with the explorations of the cenote that had taken place over the years, not many people had looked at the walls of the cenote.
Motioning for Eme to help me, the two of us slowly managed to hold on to the rocks and vines at the side of cenote while we cleared the debris from the plugged hole. It didn’t take long to achieve an opening big enough for Eme to crawl into.
“Keep getting the debris out,” I told her. “I’ll help as best I can, but I have to hold on to your mother”
“Why?” she asked. I knew she was asking about why clear the hole, not about why hold on to her mother.
I also wondered what we would find but knew there was no other way out. I’d climbed the wall of the cenote carrying Eme before, but I knew that in my present condition with the knife wounds, there was no way I could get Eve to the top. Eme would probably make it, but not Eve and me. We would have to find a way inside the cenote.
It took Eme and me about thirty minutes to clear out enough debris for me to shove Eve into the hole, with Eme helping to pull her mother in. Shortly afterward, there was enough room for me to crawl in after her.
Where was Carolyn?
I knew it was too much to hope for that she was dead, even though I had felt no pulse, but looking back at the cenote and the little of the top I could see, I saw no trace of her. Of course, the light was still faint, with only the shine from the lamps above the cenote.
While we rested, Eme continued to clean the passageway, throwing some debris back into the water and shoving some forward.
Both of us still had our smartphones; with the flashlight apps on, we could see a little. I was amazed that our phones had survived their plunge into the water, but that’s why I had purchased one that was touted as waterproof. I guess Eve had purchased Eme a similar phone.
Maybe the claims were true.
“There’s another chamber here!” Eme yelled. “And something else!”
I knew what the something else was.
My heart froze.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
I left Eve lying in the tunnel, breathing softly, amazed and thrilled that she was still alive, and crawled as fast as I could toward Eme’s voice.
Just as I had expected, the tunnel opened into the adjacent cenote. Since it was dark outside, no light came through the hole in the ceiling. If I hadn’t known the cenote was there, I wouldn’t have noticed it with the faint light from our phones.
But what was visible in the light of Eme’s smartphone was what I knew would be there.
The bones of a short, thick man, and beside him, the bones of an infant.
My bones . . . and my daughter’s, lying here undisturbed for centuries, picked clean by the carnivores of time.
My heart froze again, and I grabbed Eme and hugged her, still a bit disoriented. How many people have to stare at their own bones?
She sensed something was strange about the situation but said nothing.
There was a black obsidian knife lodged in the middle of the mid vertebral column in the man’s back. As I stared at it, my back began to hurt. Memories from my dream? I reached down and pulled it out of the skeleton, noticing the stains on the knife that were no doubt dried blood from Eme and me. The pain in my back was gone.
I crawled forward until I could stand up in the chamber of the enclosed cenote. Eme stood up beside me.
But what about Carolyn’s bones? She must’ve survived our encounter.
I wasn’t surprised. She always won.
But not this time!
A scrabbling behind us grabbed our attention.
Carolyn! Even though she was wounded, her obsession to kill us was so strong she’d followed us into the cenote and found the tunnel. She obviously remembered it as well.
I dropped to my knees and reached backward to grab Eve’s hand and pulled her down the tunnel to my side. She groaned but didn’t wake up as she scraped along the stone floor.
I then waited for Carolyn.
“It doesn’t have to end this way,” I said as she crawled toward me.
“Yes, it does,” she replied. “I have to kill you.”
“Unless I kill you first,” I said.
Carolyn continued to crawl forward.
I had the advantage at the moment, but through my mind flashed memories of our times together and I hesitated to attack her.
“Found your bones?” she asked.
Eme’s eyes opened wide.
“And the little ones are yours, my dear,” Carolyn added.
Eme shrank away from the bones, and I could see her shaking.
“What about yours?” I asked. “Did you survive?”
“No, I had nothing to eat or drink, so finally I crawled over to the edge of the water in desperation and tried to reach down and get a few sips with my hand. But I was so weak I slipped and tumbled into the water and drowned. My bones should be at the bottom.”
She climbed to her feet as Eve woke up. Eve looked at me, then at Carolyn. She obviously was somewhat confused, but clearly sensed the tension between us.
“I need you,” Eve said.
That helped me respond quickly as Carolyn took a gun out of a holster hanging from her waist. I slashed at her with the knife she’d left in my back centuries before. She jumped back, allowing Eve to grab one of her legs. This caught Carolyn by surprise, since she had not anticipated fighting anyone but me.
Now it was teamwork; Eme grabbed Carolyn’s right arm with the gun, causing it to go off, though the shot just impacted the water of the cenote.
I wasn’t going to miss this opportunity. I stabbed Carolyn.
Surprise flashed in her eyes, then anger, but no determination, since she knew her quest had failed.
She was still standing at the edge of the cenote as she died, so I shoved her gently into the water, her body leaving a puddle of blood on the surface as it drifted deep into the clear waters of the cenote, to join her bones from centuries past.
EPILOGUE
NEAR
KIRKLAND,
ORKNEY ISLANDS, SCOTLAND
I now hoped that our worst of times was over, and that Eve, Eme and I were embarking on our best of times.
After Carolyn died, I tended to Eve’s wounds, which were not as bad as I had imagined. The knife wound that I had thought to be over her heart had entered at such an angle that the blade had stabbed through the muscles in her armpit, not her heart, and once I stopped the bleeding, she did okay, though it eventually took some surgery to put things back together.
We waited until morning, then crawled back to the opening of the Sacred Cenote. When the tourists came, we managed to attract enough attention for a rescue, though it took a while for them to find a team with the capabilities of pulling us up from our location at the bottom of the cenote wall.
Though they had never lived north of Florida, Eve and Eme took to their new life quickly, even developing a bit of a Scottish lilt.
Eme, in particular, loved the sheep that we raised and the couple of hairy cows that I had bought.
We heard nothing more from Eve’s mother’s corporation. From what I could figure out, the corporation took a huge hit when mom died. She’d made no plans for her successor, since she didn’t trust Eve to run it and Eme was still too young.
I was worried for a while that Anthony Simone might take over the corporation again, but a few months after our escape I read on the Internet news that a northern drug kingpin, Anthony Simone, had suffered a heart attack and died.
And now they couldn’t find Eme.
Ismalda had set us up in these quiet northlands of Scotland. Drugs were a problem here, as they were in most places today, but the cartels were different, and none of the previous ones came after us.
Today we stood out by the barn, staring at the Stones of Brodgar that we could see in the distance, a ring of stones about five thousand years old. I wondered if we had been living one of our lives in Yucatán at that time. Or had we come along later? Certainly, the first dream I had with both Eve and Eme in it had been years after that, in Mayapán about seven hundred years ago.
I was convinced that was where it had all begun, where I had fallen in love with a woman named Ichika, now Eve, and offended Raxka and her family. Because of that, they had decided to kill me and execute our daughter, Eme. I had foiled their plans by pulling Raxka down with me into the Sacred Cenote. After Raxka had killed both of us, she was unable to get out of the cenote and died there, which resulted in Raxka haunting me in every generation since then, killing me when she could, since she blamed me for her death. I knew now that in this life it had been Raxka, reborn as Carolyn, who’d pushed Eme into the Sacred Cenote at Chichén Itzá.
But now I had both Eve and Eme.
Often at night, in the deep northern darkness, Eve would awaken and I would feel a hand on my face. I would awaken also, and gaze into her eyes. We were together at last.
I’d found what I was seeking without knowing what I sought. Things happen for a reason, I guess.
But in the background, once in a while, I would see a misty figure at the side of the bed, sometimes even lying beside me. Her eyes shone with a fierce and angry light, even angrier now because she had lost.
Often, she had a black knife in her right hand, but it just hung there, as if something was keeping her from using it. As time passed and the love between Eve and me became stronger, the ghostly figure appeared less and less often, and grew fainter. Finally, the misty shadow faded so much that I could no longer see it.
My hauntings were over. Because in this life, finally, I was traveling along the pathway that was best for me, that of a loving husband and father, as I had tried to do in many lives before.
Most evenings, the three of us watched the sunset together, my mind filled with happy thoughts. Time had no meaning for me, since my dreams swept me through the ages. “The three of us have lived together in many previous lives,” I often told Eme. “Your mother and I have always loved each other, and you’ve been our daughter many times.”
“I feel as though I’ve always known you,” Eme said. She came over and snuggled next to me.
“You have, for a long time.”
For the first time in our history, Eve and I would raise Eme while fully understanding our past. Hopefully, our daughter would eventually find someone who was her special one and be loved by that person, even after we were gone.
But somehow I knew that even after Eve and I were gone from this life, we would meet again in another.
And love again.
And again.
It was our destiny.
THE END
EXPLANATION OF MAYAN CALENDAR
Mayan math used a base 20 system, as opposed to Western civilization’s base 10. So although a tun, which was equivalent to a year, was 360 days, the katun (sort of equivalent to our decade) was 20 tuns, and the baktun was 20 times 20 katuns, or 400 tuns (years).
However, the Mayans did adjust for the true solar year, having a vague solar year called the Haab’. With 365 days in its count, it was obviously based on solar observations. It’s called the “vague” year because, unlike the Gregorian calendar, it does not include a leap year to correct for the fact that the solar year is about 365 ¼ days. The Haab’ was in use by at least 100 BC. It was used in conjunction with the more standard calendar described above called the Tzolk’in. The Haab’ consisted of 18 months of 20 days each and a final short month of only 5 days. Together they formed the 365-day, solar-based year. As with the Tzolk’in, each day is represented by a number-glyph combination, but the numbers are now 20, one for each day of a 20-day month.
The Mayan Long Count calendar keeps track of long periods of time. It is presently on its 13th baktun, which takes the calendar back nearly 5,200 years, with a starting date of August 11, 3114 BC.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert B. Marcus Jr. has a bachelor’s degree in physics and a doctorate in medicine from the University of Florida. He has been selling science fiction stories since he was in college, when he made a sale to Analog Science Fiction/Fact. Since then he has published a number of other stories, as well as this novel, and he is a lifetime active member of Science Fiction Writers of America. Most of his fiction is based on accurate scientific principles.
OTHER BOOKS
NOVELS
Shadow on the Stars
The Far Side of Silence
Yesterday’s Tears
Tomorrow’s Destiny (Coming Soon)
House of the Last Man on Earth
The Hauntings of Scott Remington
SHORT STORIES
Beyond the Veil
Shadows of Dark Eternity
COLLECTIONS
Memories of Darkness
CHILDREN’S PICTURE BOOKS
Proton Gator
For more books please visit:
www.rbmarcusjr.com
The Hauntings of Scott Remington Page 19