Think, Jake!
OK, I thought, so far the Aztecs had simply described what to look for: a jaguar. So why would that change now?
I moved towards a row of stalactites that hung on one side of the cave kissing the tips of stalagmites jutting from the ground. Together they looked like teeth … or fangs. Behind them, a crack in the rock led deeper into the cave system – a low, narrow passage.
“I’ve found a tunnel,” I said.
“Can you get through?” Dad replied.
I crouched down and used night vision to peer into the tunnel.
Then I swore. A lot.
“Jake!” Mum hissed.
“What do you see?” Pan asked. I could hear the delight in her voice; she knew I’d discovered something bad.
I looked back across the cave to the spluttering flare, and was tempted to say that I saw nothing, that the cave was empty. I almost wished that were true; then I wouldn’t have to face what I’d seen in that tunnel.
“What is it, Jake?” Dad asked. “What’s in the tunnel?”
“Spider webs,” I replied.
“OK,” Mum said. “A few spider webs won’t—”
“Not a few. The tunnel is full of webs.”
Seriously, I’d never seen so many. I wouldn’t be able to wriggle around them. There wasn’t even a them to wriggle around, just one huge web filling the space. I ordered my goggles to shine their torch into the tunnel, but the light barely penetrated the spider silk by a few metres before it was snuffed out by the sheer thickness of the mesh.
I heard Pan laughing. Mum and Dad began a conversation about the native spiders of the Mosquito Coast. I zoned out, staring into the tunnel. Could I really go in there?
“Jake, listen,” Mum said. “Those webs were most likely made by tarantulas.”
“That is supposed to make me feel better?”
“Tarantulas are not deadly,” Dad explained.
“They bite, though,” Pan added.
“Shut up, Pan! So the best case scenario is that I’m crawling into a tarantula tunnel?”
“Yes.”
“Great. Thanks for that.”
“Get a wriggle on, then,” Pan said.
I breathed in deeply, trying to settle my nerves.
I can do this. I can do this.
No, I can’t. I definitely can’t do this.
I had to do this. I was Sami’s only chance. I remembered how he had risked his own safety to help us in Egypt, turned himself into a fugitive, even, and then again to help us track down the Snake Lady. I had to do this for him.
I closed my eyes and slid a hand into the webs. They were even thicker than I’d thought, resisting my fingers, so I had to push harder. My hand didn’t break through; the tunnel was just all web. I kept pushing until my whole arm was inside the mesh.
“Are you shaking?” Pan asked. “It might make the giant spiders come out.”
“Shut up, Pan…”
“Bet that’s the last time you just jump through a secret door, eh?”
“Shut up!”
I got down low and slid into the tunnel. The crack in the rock was shaped like an upside-down V, so there was space to slide through if I wriggled on my elbows with my arms tucked at my sides. That meant I couldn’t use my hands to tear a passage through the webs. So I had to do it with my face.
Mum and Dad must have given me a free pass on swearing, because they didn’t tell me off as my curses grew louder and I burrowed face-first through the webs. My goggles were quickly covered with web, dimming the torchlight. The mask of spider silk grew thicker on my face. Each time I swore I got a mouthful of the sticky stuff.
“Just relax,” Mum said.
“That’s easy for you to say! You’ve never been in a tarantula tunnel.”
“Jake, we were treasure hunters for twenty years before you were born. We’ve been in dozens.”
Dad chipped in. “Not an actual tunnel, Jane.”
“No,” Mum agreed, “but tarantula pits and tarantula traps.”
“Oh, yes,” Dad said, “and do you remember the Tarantula Queen of Cochabamba?”
“Fine!” I interrupted. “So what do I do?”
“Wet yourself,” Pan replied. “Urine scares off tarantulas.”
“Really?”
“No, Jake, your sister is teasing you.”
“Mum! He would have done it!”
I was actually quite close to wetting myself, but from fear. At least I could now see an end, where the tunnel opened to another chamber.
“I think I’m almost there,” I gasped.
Then I felt it.
A pat on my back.
Something landing.
“There’s one on me,” I hissed.
“Jake, do not panic.” Mum tried to sound calm. “One tarantula isn’t—”
Another pat.
“There’s two,” I whispered.
Another pat. Another. Another. I don’t know how many I felt land on me – maybe a hundred – as I lay in their webs. Tiny legs tapped across my back. I couldn’t see them, but I knew they were tarantulas; no other spiders could be that big. And they were spreading out.
“Stay still, Jake. They will crawl away.”
Dozens of them tiptoed onto my head. They crawled down onto my face, over my smart-goggles…
I couldn’t stay still any longer. I shot up, bashing my back against the tunnel roof to get the creatures off. I crawled faster, flicking away tarantulas as I slid from the tunnel. As soon as I was out I jumped up, brushing and slapping my limbs, convinced I was still covered in the creatures.
“Everything OK?” Dad asked.
“You big baby,” Pan said.
“Where are you now, Jake?” Mum demanded.
Still struggling to calm my breathing, I wiped webs from my goggles and took in my new surroundings in the trembling torchlight.
“A smaller cave,” I said. “There’s another tunnel on the other side. It could be a way out.”
I crouched to see into the passage, which was larger than the one I’d just crawled through. “More webs, but they’re broken up.”
Dad began to speak. “What do you mean—”
“There’s something else here,” I said, interrupting.
A stone slab, about the size of a school desk, stood against the wall. Actually, I realized as I moved closer, it was the wall. The rock had been carved back all around it to form an altar.
“Jake,” Mum said. “Just tell us what you see.”
But what did I see? I edged closer to the altar, directing the torchlight at a strange shape carved above it on the cave wall. It was some sort of symbol. It may have been an Aztec glyph once, but five hundred years of rainwater dribbling through the cave had worn it into a blur. From what I could make out, the symbol had been large and elaborate before it was eroded, and must have taken time to carve. Was this the second marker to the tomb of Quetzalcoatl?
“Do you see the marker, Jake?”
“I… Maybe,” I replied. “There’s a carving on the wall.”
“Take a photo, we can study it.”
I blinked three times and my smart-goggles flashed. I prayed Mum and Dad could make more sense of the photo.
“Jake.” Dad’s voice sounded urgent. “The other tunnel… Did you say the webs were broken?”
“Eh? Oh, yeah.”
“But you didn’t go in there?”
“Me? No, I…”
A cold hand grabbed my guts and squeezed as I realized what Dad meant. If I hadn’t been in that tunnel, then what had?
“Get out of there, Jake,” Mum barked.
I wanted to, but suddenly my legs felt like they were made of lead.
“I just heard something,” I whispered.
The sound was coming from the other tunnel. Soft footsteps.
“Was that a growl?” Pan asked.
She’d heard it through my goggles. She wasn’t laughing anymore. “Jake? Did something just growl?”
“Jake!” Mum roared. “Move!”
This time I didn’t think twice about the webs or the tarantulas. I scrambled back into the tunnel and wriggled frantically on my elbows. Another growl echoed around the cave behind me. Whatever creature was back there, it knew its home had been invaded.
“It’s coming after me!” I cried.
“It could be harmless…”
“Nothing harmless growls, Pan!”
“Move faster, Jake!”
I was moving as fast as I could. There was web on my lenses, web on my face, web filling my mouth. One of my elbows slipped and my chin hit the tunnel floor. I glanced over my shoulder, my torch beam revealing dozens of tarantulas scuttling towards the light. They were fleeing, but not from me.
“I see it,” I gasped.
“See what?”
I wasn’t sure. My goggles were clouded with spider webs. Something big, in silhouette, crouched to look into the tunnel. Amber eyes gleamed in the torchlight, and another snarl echoed through the passage.
I slid from the tunnel, scrambled up and ran for the flare as it spluttered and died. As I charged closer, another light beamed onto the ground beside the flare. It wasn’t my torch. It was daylight! Mum and Dad had opened the pit!
A rope fell through the sunlight.
“Jake! Grab on!”
They began to raise the line before I even reached it, so I had to jump and grab hold. I clung on as they pulled me up. My goggles slipped and the torch beam cut out.
Below, a shape rushed across the darkness and sprang up at me on the rope. I screamed and kicked out at whatever creature was leaping. Claws flashed. Eyes gleamed. The animal dropped back to the cave, which resounded again with its furious growls.
I didn’t see it, but it saw me. Maybe I was being crazy, but I could swear those snarls were a warning. The creature would find me.
It would see me again.
21
I think the rain had stopped by the time we reached Alpha Squad’s camp, but it was hard to tell. So much rainwater dripped from branches and sprayed off leaves that it still seemed to be pouring. I guessed it was late in the afternoon, but it was tricky to know that either. So little daylight found its way through the jungle canopy that it always seemed like dusk.
I felt like shattered glass. My jaw was swollen from the bullet ant sting, my side throbbed from the mudslide, and I was scratched and bruised from crawling in the cave. My feet were raw and blistered from the trek, and I can’t tell you how badly I itched. Every single part of me was bitten. I had a bite on my lip, my eyelid, inside my ear, even. What sort of creature bites you inside your ear?
The moment we reached camp, I clambered into my hammock and pulled the net over the top. I know that sounds bad. If that symbol I’d photographed in the cave was the second marker, then we needed to act fast. Sami’s life depended on it. But I had to rest, just for a bit.
After half an hour, Mum brought me a bowl of warm, grey mush – another of Alpha Squad’s jungle rations. That food was depressing when you were tired and hurt and desperate for some sort of comfort. Dad’s “food training” back home hadn’t included freeze-dried cardboard-tasting gruel. Right then I would have done anything for a milkshake and a cheeseburger. I stared at Alpha Squad’s drone, wondering if we could programme it to fly out of the jungle and bring back some proper food.
Mum rubbed some cream on my jaw where I’d been stung. She looked at me and stroked my hair in a way that she hardly ever does. With her other hand she slid her necklace out from under her shirt and clutched her amulet.
“Are you sure you’re not hurt?” she asked.
I nodded.
“You’re lucky to be alive,” Mum said.
“I’m OK, Mum, thanks.”
“No. You are lucky.”
Hang on. She was telling me off!
Pan leaned from her hammock. “Jake may have found the marker in that cave, Mum.”
“Jake hurled himself into a pit with no idea what was down there,” Mum replied. “He could have fallen into a trap.”
“He didn’t fall. He used his bungee. And there was no trap.”
“You don’t consider a wild jaguar a trap?”
“We don’t know it was a jaguar.”
“Well, it wasn’t a racoon! If Jake had properly observed his surroundings, as we have trained you, he might have noticed the animal’s spores.”
“Spores?” I asked.
“Its poo,” Pan explained. “How was he supposed to see that? And if he hadn’t gone further, then we’d not have found that carving. If that is the marker, then we need it to save Sami.”
“I have known Sami for a lot longer than you, young lady,” Mum snapped. “He would not want to be saved if it meant either of you were harmed.”
“That’s not your choice to make, Mum.”
“It’s exactly my choice. I am your mother!”
“Everyone be quiet!”
Dad hissed at us from across the camp, and we all shut up. He was crouching to examine one of the alarm sensors he’d hidden among the trees. He had his serious face on, jaw clenched and chin dimpled.
“What is it, John?” Mum asked.
“This alarm has been tripped.”
“Maybe it was one of us?” Pan suggested.
“No, we entered the camp from the east. I was careful to deactivate only that alarm.”
Bones clicked in Dad’s knees as he rose and rushed back to the canvas shelter. His eyes roved over the holosphere screen, the table, the drone…
“Someone’s been here,” he said. “Someone has looked through our notes.”
Mum joined him, her hand now clasped around her amulet. “Could it have been an animal?”
“Maybe,” Dad muttered.
Neither of them sounded like they believed that. Someone had been here. Someone was watching us. More than ever I feared there was something going on here that we didn’t understand. I only knew one thing for sure: we had to find the tomb, and fast.
“This is the photo Jake took in the cave. As you can see, it’s heavily calcified. I’ve filtered it through an advanced geo-reconstruction programme to enhance the eroded features.”
We sat in the shelter, using Alpha Squad’s holosphere to examine the photo of the marker. The blurred symbol was projected up beside other images of Aztec glyphs.
“It reconstructed the symbol like this.” Dad swiped my photo away and it was replaced by another showing the symbol much more clearly. It was as if the Aztecs had carved it only yesterday, and it wasn’t just one symbol.
“The marker is two signs?” Pan said. “Do you recognize either?”
Dad shook his head. “The reconstruction programme just guessed. Neither is exactly what the Aztecs carved.”
“Can we cross-reference with known Nahuatl glyphs?” Mum asked.
More files projected from the table screen, cartoonish signs from the ancient Aztec script. I remembered now – Nahuatl was the Aztec language.
Pan, Mum and Dad began to compare each of the files to the marker’s weathered carvings. They discarded some of the signs and enlarged others, talking over one another most of the time.
“This sign could be a conflated logogram,” Pan suggested.
“You’re overcomplicating it,” Mum said. “They’re just phonetic glyphs.”
“I disagree,” Dad replied. “They’re calendrical signs, nothing more.”
I sank back into my hammock, grateful for the chance to rest while their big brains were on the job. I think I fell asleep for a bit. When I looked again the three of them stood together looking exhausted and elated at the same time. Only two Aztec glyphs remained, hovering beside the two symbols of the marker.
Dad touched one and slid it through the air, so it sat on top of a marker sign. It was a good fit – not exact, but close.
“This symbol means fire,” he said.
Mum slid the other sign over its match on the marker.
“And this is wind.”
That set them off, and they began to argue over the meaning of the symbols. I lay back again and thought about the first marker. In the end it had turned out to mean something that was there to see, once we looked in the right place. That marker – jaguar – simply showed us what to look for; so why shouldn’t these, too?
Surely “wind” didn’t mean just mean wind. That could be anywhere. “Fire” wasn’t much help either. Mum had said the Aztecs wanted the markers to last, so the word had to mean a type of fire that would stay alight for a long time. The sun burned for ever, so maybe the marker meant a sunny place where it was windy. That seemed too vague, though, and I knew my parents and sister would say the same.
A windy place, where fire burns for ever…
I shot up. “Are there any volcanoes in this jungle?”
“No,” Mum said.
My head was spinning. That was a lot of big thinking for me, and it hadn’t achieved much. I slumped back down and pulled off my hiking boots. My socks were soaked again, but I didn’t want to take them off and see the blisters. There wasn’t much point in changing them, anyway; the new ones would get soaked in seconds, and the old ones would never dry in this constant damp. I heard thunder in the distance, rumbling louder. It was going to chuck it down again soon.
“Thunder…” I muttered.
Was it possible?
I stared up into the trees as rainwater splashed off branches and showered the camp. Then I slid from the hammock and pulled my boots back on. No one noticed as I grabbed one of the lower branches of a tree at the edge of the camp and started climbing.
I was so excited about what I might have found that I didn’t even notice the height. I must have been twenty feet up before my parents spotted me and shouted for me to come down. I stopped where I could see through the canopy, towards the jagged silhouettes of the Storm Peaks. Dark clouds gathered over the high tops of the mountains, whisked by fierce winds. Thunder roared. Lightning flashed.
A storm.
Wind.
Lightning.
Fire.
“Guys!” I yelled. “Did we pack climbing boots?”
Jake Atlas and the Hunt for the Feathered God Page 12