by M. G. Harris
Someone opens the front door; Batman Suit steps through. We wait for a few more seconds, then creep up to the door.
“We should go in around the back,” Tyler says. “If the hosts have to greet us, there might be questions.”
Maybe it’s the kind of party where people spill out into the backyard. So we slip around there.
It isn’t that kind of party. Behind the house it’s dark.
We try all the doors and downstairs windows. There’s one open window, and we let ourselves in. The window leads to a utility room, piled high with laundry. Both the washing machine and the dryer are on, so any sound we make is masked. We open the door to the kitchen, wait until there’s no one in sight, then sneak in.
The very next second, the kitchen door opens. A woman walks in, dressed as a flapper girl from the Roaring Twenties.
“Lovely, Batman and Robin! You’re … ooh, wait, don’t tell me. You’re Poppy’s friends, aren’t you? You boys lost? Or looking for food?”
“Looking for food!” Tyler says, giving her a wide grin.
She directs us through the large hall and toward the main living room, where the party seems to be in full swing. The room’s packed with people wearing elaborate costumes—priest outfits, girls in bunny costumes with fancy face masks, a couple of Supermen, an Elvis, two James Bonds, a Darth Vader, and a whole crew of pirates.
We wait until Flapper Girl is out of eyeshot, then turn around and head for the staircase. It isn’t easy—the hall is crammed with people drinking mulled wine and talking loudly. From wall speakers, Christmas music blares—that song by Mariah Carey. I spot Batman Suit in the far corner, still by the door, with his back to us. He’s with a woman dressed as a Bond girl. At least I assume she’s a Bond girl, with such a skimpy outfit and handguns strapped to her thigh.
Tyler and I try to sidle casually up the stairs. Once upstairs, we pad down the corridor, away from the festivities.
“Where are we going?” Tyler asks.
“No idea,” I reply, trying a door. It’s open. A bedroom. “Not there.”
“Look for a library,” he whispers.
“Thanks, Einstein, ’cause I was thinking the bathroom …”
“Oh, shut up.”
The third door we try leads to a room that’s a cross between a study and a library. I switch on the light. Three of the walls are lined floor to ceiling by shelves covered with books and some computer equipment. Against the fourth wall is a huge oak desk, with drawer handles carved into open lions’ mouths. Toward the center of the room, a red leather sofa sits in front of a low coffee table, which is stacked high with magazines. I pick one up—Architectural Digest.
“What are we looking for?”
“Anything to do with Mayan archaeology,” I say, replacing the magazine. “Look for copies of Thompson’s books.”
“How’s that going to help?”
“I don’t know! I just want to see if they’ve kept anything of his. If they have, then maybe he has notes, or a diary. It’s what my dad would have been looking for, if he really did come here.”
We continue searching. I’ve just discovered a rich seam of books about the Maya when we hear a sound from the corridor. Footsteps and voices, definitely approaching this room. With barely a second to glance at each other, we turn out the light, throw ourselves into the only hiding place—under the desk. The front and sides of the desk go all the way to the floor, so unless someone actually tries to sit at the desk, we’ll be okay.
The door opens, the light turns back on, and we hear two voices—a man and a woman. My blood runs cold when I hear the man.
I recognize the voice.
“What a nice room,” he begins. “My father’s study is just like this.”
It’s the guy who chased me in the blue Nissan—Simon Madison, or whatever his real name is. The man who killed my sister.
The woman sounds quite elderly and speaks in a clipped accent that I don’t quite recognize. It’s somewhere between Australian and South African.
“Professor Martineau? Oh yes, I’m not surprised. Do you know, we’ve kept this room almost exactly as my uncle had it. ’Course, we couldn’t bring all our books from Rhodesia.”
“Do you miss Africa?” Madison asks her. There’s a tone to his voice that I don’t recognize at all. This is him being charming. No trace of the bullying, threatening voice he used with me. He sounds pretty believable, in fact. But I know what he really is—a violent thug.
“Wonderful place. Do you know it at all?”
“I’m afraid not,” Madison says politely.
“Now, my uncle taught your father—have I remembered that right?”
“My father accompanied him on one excavation, I think,” says Madison.
“Do you mind—could I ask you to take off the mask? It’s just … you look kind of intimidating!”
Madison laughs. “Sure.”
There’s a rubbery squishing sound.
“There ya go,” the niece says. “Much better!”
That rubber mask … Madison is Batman Suit!
“Now do you know, it’s funny you should ask about these papers, because only a few months ago some other people came by, asking exactly the same. Well, I wasn’t around. My husband—he hasn’t a clue where we keep them. We had to turn those people away empty-handed.”
Madison might suspect that one of those “visitors” was my dad. If he does, he makes a good job of covering it up with a casual, “Oh, really? I wonder who that could have been.”
“One of your father’s colleagues, I imagine.”
“From the Peabody Museum?”
“I don’t think so. But they did say they were Mayanists.” She pauses and then exclaims with satisfaction, “Now! Here it is. I’m sorry it isn’t much.”
I can’t see what the niece is doing, but they are both standing over by the shelves.
“Can I look?”
“Of course. Need some more light? I can turn on the desk lamp.”
Hearing her step toward the desk makes me freeze. I stare at Tyler, helpless.
“It’s fine,” Madison says. “I can see here.”
I release my breath slowly.
From the squeaking leather, I can hear that they’ve sat on the sofa.
“Now see,” she says. “It’s just a few pages. I found them in his diary from 1965.”
“Could I see the diary entry?”
“Yes … there should be a copy of it here.”
“Would it be possible for me to borrow these documents, to make photocopies?”
Her voice becomes smooth, almost patronizing. “Do you mind if I say no? The photocopying process can be pretty damaging to the manuscript. But I have a really nice digital camera somewhere. Terrific resolution. Just wait here.”
We remain scrunched up under the desk, not daring to move a muscle. Tyler, I can tell, is doing a circular breathing capoeira technique to keep calm. His eyes are closed.
The niece returns a few minutes later; we hear her take a few photos and then she comes over to the desk. We tuck our legs in even tighter, so that our whole bodies are in shadow. Luckily she doesn’t sit down, just plugs the camera into a laptop, punches the keyboard. We hear the printer on the shelf nearby whir into action.
“I did them at the highest resolution, so it’ll take a while to print, I’m afraid. Let’s go and find you some food while you wait.”
We breathe a sigh of relief as they leave the room. I swing my legs out and wince at a sharp stab of muscle cramp.
“Come on, now’s our chance!” Tyler says.
Over by the sofa, they’ve left a document folder. “This is what they were looking at!” Tyler whispers. He grabs it and makes for the door.
“Wait!”
Tyler stops.
“I know that guy,” I say. “I recognize the voice. It’s Blue Nissan—the one who chased me, the one who tried to drown me.”
“What? You’re kidding!”
“No. It’s hi
m all right. And he said his father’s name was Martineau. That’s one of the names he uses. And also ‘Simon Madison.’”
Tyler blows air softly through pursed lips. “Dude! We’d better get out of here fast.”
“Yeah, except …”
I look at the printer and the camera.
“We have to take the printouts. We have to get rid of what’s on that camera. Otherwise, whatever this stuff is, Madison will have it too.”
I pick up the camera, fiddle around for a few seconds until I work out how to erase its memory chip. We wait impatiently at the printer and grab each page as glossy paper feeds out. It’s agonizingly slow. I grab every page and stash each one in the document folder with the originals.
There are footsteps on the creaky stairs.
“The window!” Tyler whispers.
I open the window, throw the folder clear of the house. We launch ourselves through the window, one by one. Tyler goes first, clinging to the timbers and ivy.
“Watch out!” I say, landing practically on top of him.
“Ow!” he hisses. I slide over him, grab the next timber and then a fistful of creeping ivy. It’s not the most stylish stunt ever, but we make it to the ground in seconds. Meanwhile back in the room, we can hear the door opening, and exclamations of surprise from the niece. By the time they’ve spotted the open window, I’ve picked up the document folder from the gravel path and we’re scooting around the back of the house. As I dip behind the corner, I turn and poke my head out just in time to see Madison leaning out of the window, his eyes hunting us out.
His face is silhouetted by the light in the room behind, but I can plainly see the shadow of a Batman mask pushed behind his head.
And for a split second we stare at each other, Batman to Batman.
I turn to Tyler. “The fields. Let’s move!”
Between puffs for breath, Tyler asks, “Think he saw us?”
“Yep. No doubt.”
The only question is, did he recognize me? A sinking feeling tells me that even if he didn’t, he’s smart enough to put two and two together.
We easily clear the low hedge at the back of the yard, and land in a soft, swampy field beyond. It’s so dark we can’t see more than about thirty yards ahead. Beyond that, the light from the Thompson house peters out.
We run flat out for five minutes, putting at least three fields between us and the house. Finally we collapse in a heap, totally spent. But the document folder is safely clutched in my fist.
When I look back, I see and hear nothing. The darkness may have saved us—that’s if Madison chased us at all. But a sneaking suspicion tells me that he didn’t—for one really good reason.
Why bother—when he already knows where I live?
7
After we run over those fields, the costumes are muddy, so we peel them off, bag them, and leave them in front of the shop, with a ten-pound note for the dry-cleaning. After the cost of the return bus tickets, that’s our last cash too. So we ride the bus home, wishing we’d had time to eat at the party.
We don’t care. We have Thompson’s document folder and Madison doesn’t. It contains three sheets of paper on which someone has copied a bunch of Mayan hieroglyphs and two more pages as well, where I can see some writing in English. In the dim lights of the bus, we pore over the pages.
The first page I kind of recognize. The second two are packed more densely with glyphs. The fourth page is handwritten in English—a copy of a diary entry. The final page in the folder contains both English writing and Mayan glyphs. It looks as though someone has tried to translate a bunch of them.
Here’s what the diary entry says:
May 12, 1965
Met this morning by appointment with a certain Señor Aureliano Garcia of the Yucatan, Mexico. Not a gentleman with whom I have any previous acquaintance; nonetheless, he supplied impeccable references from the National Institute of Anthropology in Mexico.
Our correspondence over the past few weeks concerned an object which came into my possession many years ago. The artifact in question was part of a consignment purchased at auction from the contents of a house in Vienna in 1951. There was an unfortunate incident involving its opening, and I have been reluctant to have any further dealings with the item.
Accordingly, I arranged for its safe storage. I tried to forget about the matter.
Now, almost fifteen years later, I find myself dredging up memories of an abominable nature. Señor Aureliano Garcia, most astonishingly, appeared to know about my possession of the artifact. Indeed, he wrote requesting that I agree to his purchase of same.
Naturally, I agreed. Anything to spare my heirs from having to deal with it.
It was therefore with considerable anxiety that I watched Señor Garcia remove the artifact from its place of storage. Unwilling to risk myself further, I hesitated even to watch. I was, however, assured that a gas mask would provide adequate protection. How I wish I had known this years ago when we first opened the artifact! Señor Garcia himself appeared oblivious to the perilous character of the relic.
He asked if I had read any part of the object. Wishing to be swiftly rid of Señor Garcia, I’m afraid I dissembled, replying in the negative.
In point of fact I did, years ago, attempt a transcription. Not touching the artifact presented a challenge. I turned a few pages with tweezers. What I read convinced me of the uselessness of proceeding further. I declined to share my findings with the world of fellow Mayan scholars. The artifact, I believe, has more in common with either an elaborate hoax, or perhaps more sinisterly, a supernatural nature of the most wicked kind. As such, it would hold no interest for me. I am an archaeologist, not a practitioner of the occult.
Señor Garcia, however, could scarcely contain his delight. He claimed that before long the item would be displayed in Mexico City’s spectacular new National Museum of Anthropology.
I await his findings with bated breath.
The language is a bit old-fashioned. We have to read it through a couple of times to get the gist. Tyler and I agree that basically, what it says is this:
Thompson got hold of a Mayan relic, which did something horrible to someone who touched it. When Aureliano Garcia (my grandfather) came asking for it in 1965, Thompson was only too happy to hand it over. Just like the brujo in Catemaco, he believed that the object was cursed.
I pretend to Tyler that I’m not sure what this “artifact” is, but even he guesses that it’s the Ix Codex.
“So these must be copies of the first three pages!” he says with delight.
“I guess so.”
“If that Madison guy is bothering with them, that means he probably hasn’t got the actual codex.”
“Yep. Definitely.”
“And now you’ve got these pages!”
“Uh-huh.”
“Dude, why aren’t you excited?”
“Because,” I reply, “I’m wondering why he didn’t chase us.”
“It was dark! We were out of there like lightning!”
I shake my head. “I know this guy. He wouldn’t give up so easily. He’s coming after me again.”
Tyler gives me a long, curious look. “You know a lot more about this than you’re letting on.”
“Yeah. It’s true.”
“But you’re not gonna tell me?”
“I will. One day, I promise. Right now it’s too dangerous. You okay with that?”
He grins ruefully. “Guess I have to be.”
“There’s a lot more to my father’s death.”
“Oh yeah?” he says, laughing. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
“Madison and me … we’ve got unfinished business.”
By the time we say good night and head for our houses, it’s past midnight. The next day, I decide I’m going to stay home. In fact, my plan is to stay in my bedroom with the pages until I can figure out what to do. I’ve pretty much decided that destroying the documents is the way to go. But first I scan the pages, set up a
brand-new file storage account on a new Web site that claims to be super secure, behind a password I’ve never used before.
And then I erase all traces of my activity from the computer’s browser history. So even if Madison breaks in again, he won’t be able to follow what I’ve done.
This is all very absorbing, so when Ollie turns up on my doorstep around lunchtime, she takes me by surprise.
“Hey,” she says, her voice all soft. “I was looking for you yesterday. Where were you?”
“Tyler and I went on a trip.”
“Fun?”
“To be honest, scary.”
We go upstairs and I turn off the TV.
“Scary? How?”
I hesitate. But she’s only going to hear the same from Tyler.
“We found something. Another clue to the Ix Codex.”
She’s blown away. “Wow! Amazing! What is it?”
I shake my head. “You know what, Ollie, it was great having you and Ty to help me last time, but this time … I don’t know. I already got you both into trouble. So I’m going to finish this—destroy everything I have about that codex, forget about it, and get on with my life.”
“You really think it’s that dangerous?”
“I know it is.”
“And you’re worried about me?” she says with a hint of a smile.
“What do you think? Of course!”
“That’s really sweet.”
She stares into my eyes then and I really don’t know what to say.
“‘Sweet’ … come on, now,” I say with a nervous grin. “No guy wants to be ‘sweet.’”
She steps a little closer. “Okay. You’re not ‘sweet.’”
“Good.”
She takes another step. I can smell her perfume; it’s like flowers after rain.
“I stopped thinking of you as ‘sweet’ back in Mexico.”
My mouth goes dry. “Uh-huh …”
She takes both my hands in hers. “Yeah. And look … you’re taller than me now.”
“A bit. It’s only ’cause, well, you’re really …”
“Petite?”
“Yeah.”
What are we doing? She can’t be thinking what I’m thinking …