by M. G. Harris
Well, this morning, I got a postcard. I didn’t look closely at first, assumed it was to Mom and me. It’s a photo of Labna, the site of a Mayan ruin, one I remember visiting when I was about eight years old. It looks exactly the way I remember it. A typical rip-off postcard—an old photo.
The card is addressed to me, only me. The writing is typed, old-fashioned typewriter style. There’s no “Dear Josh” or anything. Just two words in capital letters:
HOLDS.BLOOD.
That’s it.
It was mailed about ten days ago, in the Mexican state of Veracruz.
Totally random. I have no idea what it means, if anything. Maybe it’s meant to be a threat?
I put the postcard on my desk and turn on my computer. Maybe I’ll find someone I know logged into my instant messenger program.
Maybe even Ollie. I keep thinking about Ollie, about that moment at the concert when she held my hand. How much did I let on that I’ve got a thing for her? After Rodrigo appeared on the scene, we didn’t manage to pick up whatever it was we had going on in the chapel. Like me, Ollie became totally focused on what Rodrigo said about meeting my father in Saffron Walden.
Ollie’s not online, but Tyler is. And that gives me an idea.
Want to go on an “adventure”? I type.
He replies: LOL. Oh yeah. I’m dying to be interrogated again.
Just to Saffron Walden. It’s near Cambridge. We could be back by tonight.
What’s in Saffron Walden?
I type: Meet me at McDonald’s in town half an hour from now and I’ll tell you. Bring cash for the bus!
I check my watch. If I hurry I can make it in time for an Egg McMuffin.
Tyler arrives too late for breakfast, orders a cheeseburger and orange juice, sits down. This time of the day, the restaurant is fairly empty. We sit upstairs, looking out over Cornmarket across at the people in Starbucks, who stare right back. Early winter can be soggy and gray in Oxford, but today is one of the better crisp blue days. Not too cold either. Street entertainers are setting up for lunchtime busking. Briefly, we watch a juggler hurl a bunch of tennis rackets around his head.
“I’m not saying I’m comin’ with you,” begins Tyler.
“Whatever. Just listen.”
I tell him about Rodrigo, Dad, and Saffron Walden. His eyes grow big; he’s definitely interested.
“Man, that is crazy. He was in England on June sixteenth? That means your dad was never in that plane.”
“I wish. But by now I’ve thought it through. Rodrigo spotted Dad with those other guys on the morning of June sixteenth in Saffron Walden. With the time difference, he could still—barely—have made it to Mexico that night in time to be murdered and put in the Cessna, which was rigged to crash. I checked on the Web; there’s an RAF air base, Lakenheath, about twenty-five miles north of Cambridge. I bet the NRO guys flew Dad in and out of that air base, had him back in Mexico that night. They wouldn’t even have had to use their stolen Muwan technology—with the time difference between England and Mexico, an ordinary military plane could do it.
“Which still leaves the question—what was so important in Saffron Walden?
“My guess? They were looking for the Ix Codex.”
Tyler furrows his brow in scorn. “What?! I thought you’d given up on that. Seemed like you gave up the whole idea after your ‘abduction.’”
When he says “abduction” it’s pretty clear that he doesn’t believe me.
“Listen, Ty, it’s not about the codex anymore. Those people killed my dad. Think about that for a minute.”
Tyler looks uncomfortable. “I know, man,” he mumbles. “But what can you do?”
I give a deep sigh. “Maybe I’m kidding myself, you know? Maybe there’s no way I can ever find out who really killed my dad. Or why. But if there’s any chance, any clue … Ty—how could I ever forgive myself? Five years from now, ten years from now … Knowing that I just gave up?”
“Yeah, man.” Tyler nods slowly. “Yeah. You got a point.”
“I need to know what he was doing the last day he was alive. Now that I know he was here, I can’t just forget it. Could you? I have to know why, what he was doing, to know if there’s any connection …”
He seems to consider it. “Would you feel this way if he’d died in an actual accident? A real plane crash? Or if he’d fallen off a mountain? He used to climb, didn’t he, your dad?”
“I think I would,” I reply. “If there was anything strange or mysterious about it, yeah. Like mountaineering. Sometimes they don’t find bodies for years. Relatives, friends, they never forget, never stop wondering. That’s how it is with me. It’s like there’s a hole somewhere inside your chest. No matter what you do, you can’t fill it. People grow old, wondering. Then they find the bodies, the people they lost. Frozen, still young. Yeah, if he’d died like that I’d want to know what happened. I’d want to see the place where he fell.”
They gave me an urn with my dad’s ashes, but it’s not the same. I need to know the exact sequence of events that led to the end. Mom calls it “closure.” We both need it. And now there’s a chance to know what he was doing on his last day alive.
Tyler nods a few times. He’s still weighing things. “Why not Ollie too?”
I don’t want Ollie involved—I want to protect her. “Not Ollie,” I say. “She’s always busy these days … with schoolwork.”
He shrugs. “What’s the plan?”
“We go to a house near Saffron Walden that used to belong to a famous Mayan archaeologist. We ask questions.”
“What questions?”
I shrug. “We ask them what my dad was doing there, what he wanted, who the guys in ties claimed to be … that sort of thing.”
“That’s it?”
I nod.
“And if they tell us to get lost?”
“Well, then … I guess we might have to get into some light breaking and entering.”
Tyler laughs. He thinks I’m kidding.
It takes longer than I’d hoped to reach Saffron Walden. There’s no bus to Cambridge for another hour. We talk a little, then stare out of the window. Tyler gets a text and then spends the rest of the time chuckling to himself and texting. He won’t show me the texts. “Private,” he smirks. “From a girl.”
I try to ignore him and daydream about Ollie.
The bus takes forever but gets us most of the way, and we have to catch another to Saffron Walden, then another to the little village of Ashdon, where Thompson used to live.
It’s after four, past sunset this time of year, the village center decorated with blue lights strung over the trees and stores, which are about to close. I walk into the pharmacy, figuring that the pharmacist must know everyone.
“Excuse me, we’re looking for a house called ‘Yale.’ Used to belong to an archaeologist named Sir J. Eric Thompson.”
The pharmacist nods and smiles, her curly brown hair bobbing. “You’re looking for the costume party, right? They have one every year, don’t they? First week of December. It’s like the start of the Christmas season here.”
I pause for just a little too long, but Tyler comes to the rescue. “That’s right. We’re supposed to deliver some … ah … costumes.”
“Our parents forgot to pick them up,” I say. “From a shop nearby …”
The pharmacist chuckles. “No costume shops here! There might be one in Saffron.”
I groan. If there’s a party going on, it’s going to be hard to get time alone with the current owner of the house. On the other hand …
“Where’s the house?” I ask.
She gives me directions—the house is no more than ten minutes’ walk from the village center. Shorter if we cross a field, but in this weather she wouldn’t recommend that. “You’ll get all muddy!”
Outside, Tyler and I discuss our strategy.
“It’s obvious, isn’t it?” he says. “We get some costumes and sneak in as guests.”
I like the plan. We c
atch the bus back to Saffron Walden, hoping to hunt down some costumes. What worries me is that we don’t know who lives there now, whether they have any connection with Thompson at all. The fact that the pharmacist recognized the name doesn’t mean much—he was a famous archaeologist, after all. It could be his heirs living there … or anyone, really.
I’m kicking myself that we didn’t ask more questions. I need to get better at this, and fast.
5
The village bus service makes it to Saffron Walden just as the stores are closing. We run around like loons asking for the “costume shop.” Just our luck—it’s as far away as possible, right at the other end of town. We arrive out of breath and sweating, in time to see the manager closing up. He can hardly make out what we’re saying, we’re panting so hard.
“Please … need costumes … tonight.”
“Good Lord, boys, take a breather, why don’t you? Now then, this would be for the party at the Thompson place?”
Great—a Thompson still lives there.
“Well, as you can see, we’ve just closed.”
We’re bent over, trying to catch our breath. With my head somewhere around my knees, I say again, “Oh, come on. Please. We’ll get into big trouble with our parents.”
The shop manager is a man in his late forties, with a big mop of messy, sandy-colored hair that gives him a sympathetic look. He hesitates. “Okay. But this is just a normal shop, you know. There’s no magic portal to Diagon Alley, if that’s what you’re looking for.”
He’s still chortling away at his joke as he unlocks the front door.
The place isn’t a real costume shop but a charity store with a few costumes in the secondhand clothes section. In the window, a child-sized mannequin is dressed up like a fantasy hero, with a sword, shield, amulets, and everything.
We check through the collection. There are maybe three costumes that would fit me. Two of those are for girls—flowing white dresses.
“That one’s multipurpose,” the manager says helpfully. “The Snow Queen, White Witch of Narnia, Arwen from Lord of the Rings. Or a ghost, if you wear a hood as well.”
Tyler turns over a pair of costumes that I realize are perfect the minute I see them.
“Hey, look, Josh. Batman and Robin.”
“I call Batman!”
The shop manager weighs in. “I shouldn’t lend you the Batman. Only the Robin. I already rented out another Batman suit. Bad form to turn up in the same costume as another guest.”
Tyler picks up the Batman costume, holds it against himself. “Wouldn’t fit me anyway. It’s about two inches too small.”
“That Robin suit is adult-sized,” says the manager.
“I’m Robin!” shouts Tyler, before I can say anything. Not that I would, because I can tell right away it wouldn’t fit me. Tyler’s either fully grown already, or he’s going to be a giant. Me, I’m still growing. I check out the Batman suit. It looks perfect.
“Oh, come on, let me borrow the Batman,” I plead. “Then we’ll be a match. Anyway, it’s the only one that fits.”
“Apart from the White Witch,” Tyler says with a snigger.
The manager relents, again. I guess he just wants us out of there.
“Do you know the Thompsons?” I ask as we hand over cash.
“I’m not that old,” he replies with a smirk. “Died back in the seventies, didn’t he, Sir Eric? Some niece of his living there now. No idea what her name is.”
But she’s a relative. She might still have Thompson’s Mayan stuff. That makes sense—why else would the NRO drag my father there?
“Has she lived there since Thompson died?”
“No,” he says, pausing. There’s a tiny shift in his attitude toward us. Maybe I’m imagining it, but it’s as though the cando, easygoing nature has suddenly vanished. And it’s replaced with an air of conspiracy.
“Who lived there after he died?”
“His widow. Then the house was empty for a while.”
“It didn’t sell?”
“It wasn’t on the market. Not with that history.”
“What history?”
The manager looks me calmly in the eye. “The history that any half-decent research would uncover. The stories from the time Thompson lived there.”
We stare blankly. “Like what?”
“Probably a lot of nonsense. As I say, I was too young to remember much. There were people who thought that it wasn’t only Egyptian archaeologists who came back with curses on them.”
Tyler says, “What, Mayas had pyramid curses too?”
“So it was believed, around here. Mostly just whispers. All because of that young assistant of Thompson’s, the one who disappeared. There were folks who wondered if it was covered up at a high level because it got a D-Notice, as it was called back then—one of them things the government slaps on a case to make it a national secret. You need someone high up to get a D-Notice. It didn’t make the national papers. And that young fella, they never found him.”
I gather up the costumes in a major hurry. I’ve got a hunch that Tyler’s next question is going to give the game away.
“We’d better get going,” I announce. “Going to be late.”
Minutes later, standing in the bus shelter, Tyler says breathlessly, “Wow … what do you think of that story? Could Thompson’s Mayan curse be linked to the Ix Codex? Didn’t those guys who e-mailed you say it was dangerous or cursed?”
He’s right, of course. And my mind can’t help going back to that story in the Lebanon newspaper about Madison. How many of these “cursed” artifacts are out there in the world?
“It is cursed,” I say, shortly. I’m so close to a possible answer—it’s time I told Tyler a bit more. “But the codex isn’t there anymore. Someone got there already, years ago. And my dad would have known that too. What I want to know is, why did he go to the trouble of coming back here? With those NRO men?”
Tyler stares at me. “What are you talking about? How do you know all that?”
“My grandfather found the Ix Codex,” I tell him. “And I think I know how—he must have found the stories about Eric Thompson’s assistant in the local newspapers. Something must have put him on to Thompson—I guess we’ll never know what. But once my grandfather realized that Thompson had some sort of cursed Mayan relic, he must have decided there was a chance it was the Ix Codex.”
That’s the thing about mysterious disappearances—curious people can’t resist them.
Tyler isn’t entirely satisfied with my answer, I can tell. But for some reason, he doesn’t push it further. He just leans against the shelter, like me. Thinking.
Half an hour later we’re back on the bus to Ashdon, clutching plastic bags with our costumes inside, wondering where we’re going to change.
“Too bad they got rid of most of those red phone booths,” remarks Tyler. “We could do a Superman.”
Of course, they didn’t completely get rid of them—not everywhere. I cross my fingers that Ashdon is considered cute and traditional enough to keep its original phone booth.
6
A single main road passes through the village of Ashdon. Our luck holds—they’ve kept their old-fashioned phone booths, and we can change into our Caped Crusader outfits. The house named “Yale” lies along a lane surrounded by fields, lined with trees. There are very few streetlights and the sky is layered with dense gray clouds. We have to walk a long way in the cold, foggy dark. It’s just as well that it’s hard to see us in the murky light, with us dressed as Batman and Robin.
Tyler hasn’t said much since I half-answered his question. Finally, he breaks his silence. “This Mayan codex … if it was here in Saffron Walden all along, why did no one find it before?”
“I guess no one knew to look for it here.”
“But this Thompson guy—he was a Mayan archaeologist, right? So he must have known what he had, yeah?”
I don’t answer, remembering how I dug up the codex at the shrine of those creepy
little statues in the forest—the chaneques. And those two NRO agents … how they watched me dig, the horrible way they died when they touched it … My guess is that Thompson didn’t know what he had. Because once he’d seen what it could do to a person, he never would have let that weird volume be touched again.
Which means that most likely, Thompson would never have seen inside the box, never looked at the actual codex.
“Maybe he kept it a secret,” I suggest.
“Maybe,” replies Tyler. But he doesn’t sound convinced. “So what’s the plan?”
“We go in, we act natural at the party, we try to chat with the owners about Thompson. Then we mention my dad, see if it gets any reaction.”
“And if they ask us who the heck we are … ?”
“Easy,” I tell him. “We tell them to try to guess. No one recognizes their friends in costume.”
“But we’re dressed like Batman and Robin.”
“Yeah, so?”
Tyler shrugs. “Seems like a waste to me. If we won’t be recognized, we could go unnoticed forever. We’d have a chance to snoop around first.”
“Now that is not a bad idea …”
It’s easy to see there’s a party going on at the Thompson house. Balloons are strung around the front yard. Christmas decorations hang in the leafless branches of a small tree. Light blazes from every window in the house, the only light for at least half a mile. It’s a big timber-framed country house, with deep brown logs that crisscross the walls, covered by ivy. The windows look old and rickety. The downstairs windows have tiny leaded panes.
A car passes when we’re only a few yards from the gate. It catches us in the full beam of its headlights for a second, then swings in and parks in the already-crowded, gravel-covered front yard.
We hang back for a minute, waiting. I’m impressed when I see who gets out of the car: it’s Batman!
Batman according to the latest movie incarnation, mind you. Not the cheesy TV version, like our costumes. Compared to me, this guy is huge, menacing. Batman Suit knocks on the door, glancing for a second in our direction. I push back against the hedge. But it’s pretty likely that he’s spotted us already.