Deity

by Theresa Danley

  “I see something inside,” Lori said.

  She leaned in for a closer look, positioning her wrist light in a way that it would shine into the hole while still allowing her to peer inside.

  “What do you see?” Chac asked.

  “I can’t quite tell. I think it’s a cross.”

  Lori stepped back, allowing Chac in for a peek. He had the same difficulty focusing his light inside the hole without blocking his own view. He fidgeted with his light until he could just see around the equipment. He got a glimpse, but that was all he needed.

  It was indeed a cross, but not quite like any cross he’d ever seen. This one had three nobs or pegs—a single peg extending from each end of its three points.

  Chac’s heart stopped cold.

  His mind was suddenly reeling. However, panic didn’t strike until he turned to find Lori erecting the second lamp.

  “Maybe this will help,” she was saying, stretching the lamp’s cord to the plug on the generator’s extension cord.

  Chac threw himself at her.

  “Don’t—”

  Too late.

  A shocking white light split the darkness as Chac suddenly felt himself hurdling through mid air.

  The Light

  Lori thought she was dead. She saw nothing. She heard nothing. To top it off she felt completely weightless. A truck had hit her and now she was floating through an immensely quiet, densely dark void of death.

  She was deaf and blind, but not entirely senseless. Her body felt deathly cool, convincingly dead.

  Then the darkness parted.

  As if through a tunnel, she suddenly saw a small, distant light - a light bobbing toward her. Just when she was certain she was floating to the end of that tunnel of death, just when the light had grown to devour her, a sudden wave of cold washed over her face. It was a wet cold that shocked her back to her senses and she suddenly realized that she was still very much alive and floating in the pool within the dark cavern.

  A pair of arms wrapped around her, pulling her upright in the knee-deep water, and together, Lori and the halo of light waded back to dry ground.

  “Dr. Peet?” she said, or at least she thought she did. She couldn’t hear her own voice through the fierce ringing in her ears.

  She felt a tug on her arm. Above the glare of a wrist light she could just make out the chiseled shadows of Chac’s face. His lips were moving. His expression was urgent. The ringing in Lori’s ears was growing, but beneath the pitch she could just make out his words.

  “...caving in!”

  As if on cue, a wave of air brushed against them in the wake of something large falling through the darkness. Lori felt its impact tremble the ground beneath her feet. That’s when Chac’s message slammed home.

  The cavern was caving in!

  She couldn’t see it. She could barely hear it - stone crushing stone and slicing the invisible water behind them. Lori’s feet shuddered with the impact of every boulder that crashed to the ground. Chac caught glimpses of the assault with his swaying wrist light, but the thick darkness veiled the totality of the danger. At any moment they could be crushed beneath the collapsing stone ceiling, and they’d never see it coming!

  Dr. Peet joined them from somewhere out of the darkness. His light was broken, shifting Lori’s awareness to the light now missing from her own wrist. Chac’s light glinted off the base of a flood lamp lying on the ground, the business end of it crushed beneath a massive piece of limestone. Chac’s light was their only source of guidance which she readily followed over broken shards of rock and gravel to the limestone wall where they huddled and waited for the ceiling to stop shedding its weight.

  Lori tasted the salty grit coating her lips. Her wetsuit was mud, her hair heavy from the shower of earth. Then, once again, there was stillness.

  “Is everyone all right?”

  “Lori?”

  Lori nodded as Chac gave her a quick once over. That’s when she noticed the burn on Chac’s arm. The entire forearm of his wetsuit was missing or melted into the angry, seeping flesh of his right arm.

  “What just happened?” she asked in the relative calm that followed.

  “A bomb,” Chac said.

  “I get the feeling someone didn’t want visitors here,” Dr. Peet added.

  “We need to assess our damages,” Chac said. He reached into the thigh pocket of his wet suit and retrieved two flashlights and handed them out.

  Lori accepted hers with a relieved sigh. “Thank goodness you brought spares,” she said.

  “Diving lights are too unpredictable not to have flashlights,” Chac said. “Spread out and gather everything you can find. Use your light as sparingly as possible.”

  They separated, searching the cave floor now foreign with fallen rock and boulders that cast eerie shadows before them. In a matter of minutes they found two sets of oxygen tanks - one tank missing its valve and still bleeding gas. Lori found her set of fins and a diving submersible which she had to leave trapped beneath the boulder that had crushed it. Dr. Peet found the first flood lamp, its stand crushed but its incandescent bulb and power cord still intact. Meanwhile, Chac discovered a five gallon gas can floating in the water not far from the generator which had been knocked dead by the fallen rock.

  “We’re not swimming out the way we came in,” Dr. Peet said grimly, scanning their meager collection.

  “There has to be another way out of here,” Lori said hopefully.

  “If there is we better find it soon,” Chac said. He turned and aimed his wrist light across the cavern’s pool. “The water is rising.”

  * * * *

  Father Ruiz sat alone on the shaded veranda. He closed his eyes against the earthly paradise laid out before him for the spiritual bliss he anticipated in his mind. He absorbed the scriptures that lay open upon his lap, saturating his thoughts with them, refreshing his soul as the pleasant breeze rejuvenated his flesh. He had to admit, when it came to time spent in God’s word, the lush resort gardens were just as peaceful and inviting as the seventeenth century paintings lining the cathedral’s sacristy after visitor hours.

  As he meditated there, he began to feel that familiar purifying sensation that cleared his mind and cleansed his soul. There was an airless quality about it, the perception of harmony within the spirit. He preferred to think of it as a foretaste of the heavenly peace he’d someday experience. Until then, he was satisfied with the anticipation he habitually renewed with daily prayers and scripture, and he’d just settled into the routine when his concentration was snapped from its tranquility.

  He waited, disappointed to have been stolen from his reflection so soon. For a moment he fought for the sensation to return, but the interruption returned with the discourteous insistence of a cell phone.

  For a brief moment he wished KC was around to take the call, but the woman was elusive. He didn’t know anything about her and she didn’t stick around long enough to offer herself to him. If he wasn’t mistaken, she seemed intimidated by his presence, or annoyed. In either case, as soon as the others left for their dive, KC escaped back to the airfield, claiming there was something mechanical on her plane that demanded her attention.

  The cell phone summoned again. Reluctantly, he rose from the wicker chair and slipped into the room through the sliding glass doors, searching for the adamant intruder. Another ring and he found it, tucked within a pocket of Peet’s vest. Gently, he slipped it out and flipped it open.

  “Sí?”

  There was a pause. A familiar voice tentatively followed. “Padre?”

  It was that Espanoza guy, from the museum.

  “Sí. Esta Ruiz.”

  “Dónde Señor Peet?”

  Without going into much detail, Father Ruiz told the curator that Peet was indisposed, but was expected to return later that afternoon.

  “Bueno,” the curator said. “I’m sending him a picture. Please make sure he gets it.”

  “I will.”

  “And, well…you b
etter write this down,” Espanoza said. “You’re not going to believe what I have to tell you.”

  The Way

  The oily, dark water that had appeared so cool and calm when Peet first arrived in the cavern had indeed risen, most likely displaced by the limestone shed from the ceiling. However, even after the rocks had stopped falling, the water was still rising, evident by the quiet churning of the pool’s surface now encroaching upon the useless generator.

  “The explosion must have collapsed the outlet channel we entered through,” Chac said.

  Lori gasped, an audible expression of the same panic threatening to storm Peet’s nerves. He needed to stay calm. There had to be another way out.

  He turned to Chac, the bearer of their only source of light. “You said the channel connected five cenotes. Is it possible to swim to the next one?”

  Chac shook his head. “We have one good tank and only one set of fins. One of us might make it, but then how do we get the equipment back to the next person?”

  The water was slinking toward their feet. Peet noticed Lori lift to her tip-toes and then, as if realizing the futility in the effort, dropped back down again.

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “There has to be another entrance. People came here to draw those murals but I doubt the early nineteenth century Maya had the scuba gear to get here the way we did. There must be a terrestrial entrance somewhere.”

  “There was,” Chac said. “The cavern slopes upward at the far end where there used to be a mouth to this cave. It was intentionally sealed, most likely by the same people who painted the Calendar Deity. Matt and I haven’t been able to locate the seal from the outside, and I doubt we would have had the resources to clear all that rock if we did.”

  “That’s our way out,” Lori said.

  “Wait a minute,” Peet said. “We’re not talking about a door we can just walk through here. There’s no telling how many tons of rock were used to seal this cave. We’ll never be able to remove it.”

  “Maybe we won’t have to,” Chac thought out loud. “As I recall the seal is, for the most part, a slab of limestone. It might be porous enough to blast our way out.”

  “How are we going to do that?” Lori asked doubtfully. “You got a stick of dynamite hidden in those thigh pockets?”

  “Not quite.”

  Chac handed her the gas can. The damaged flood lamp he passed on to Peet. “Whatever you do, don’t drop this,” he instructed. “Take your flashlights. I’ll meet you at that end of the cavern.”

  Before the words had finished Chac’s mouth, Lori was sloshing through the water that had already breached the dry ground. Peet followed, tenderly stepping over shards of rock as their shadows shifted away from their passing beams of light. She hurried forward, weighting the darkness with her silence.

  Or was that just his conscience?

  Now is the time.

  “Lori,” Peet started, struggling to match her pace over the uneven stone. “I feel I should apologize—”

  “Don’t,” she snapped. “An apology now makes this feel like the end.”

  Peet hesitated as they came to a wall.

  “This isn’t the end,” she said determinedly as she ran her flashlight beam over an uneven texture in the wall. “We’re getting out of here.”

  “You don’t understand—”

  “I’m not listening,” Lori warned as she examined the wall.

  Peet sighed and ran his hand over a seam in the rock, where stone overlapped stone. If she wasn’t going to accept his apology now, he’d just have to cooperate and find a way out of the cavern. Only then might she allow an explanation.

  “It looks like two, maybe three boulders were placed here to seal off the cave entrance,” he offered.

  Lori found another seam in the rock. She studied it a moment, following it down to the stone floor where a fissure in the rock created an alcove just large enough to fit an adult’s head. There, she squatted and placed a hand in front of the hole. “Hey! I think there’s a weak spot here!”

  Peet knelt beside her and reached for the wall. Lori snatched her hand back. As he held his hand in front of the hole he discovered something peculiar.

  The wall was breathing!

  “We’re just inches away from getting out of here!” Lori gasped.

  Peet had his doubts. The Yucatan forest, even in its dry season, was dense and airless. It would take a considerable wind to move the air through the vegetation.

  So where exactly was the air coming from?

  “Chac!” Lori called. “Over here!”

  The bright wrist light bounced toward them as Chac approached with the generator’s salvaged battery tucked under his arm.

  “There’s a weak spot here,” Lori announced, pointing out the fissure.

  “Excellent,” Chac said. “We’ll need all the help we can get.” With that, he dropped the battery to the ground and took up the flood lamp.

  “What are you going to do?” Lori asked.

  “With any luck, I’ll blow our way out of here.”

  “I’m not so sure about this,” Peet objected. “You saw what happened with the last bomb. Another blast could completely cave this place in on top of us.”

  “We’ll be lucky if there’s enough fumes in that gas can to light off a decent firework show,” Chac said.

  “And if you’re wrong?” Peet asked.

  Chac unscrewed the incandescent bulb from the lamp. “If I’m wrong, one of two things will happen. First, the explosion could be strong enough to destabilize the seal and give us the opportunity to dig our way out of here.”

  “That sounds great,” Lori said.

  “It could also weaken the mouth of the cave and collapse this part of the cavern that we’re standing in.”

  Lori’s face pinched with worry. “So is there a door number three?”

  “There’s the chance the bomb won’t work at all and we all get to sit here and wait to drown.”

  * * * *

  Chac didn’t like their chances any better than Peet or Lori but that wasn’t about to stop him from trying. He’d been through tougher scrapes than this and if there was anything he learned from them it was that there was always a way out if he was willing to risk the odds.

  Over the years, Chac had come to realize that odds were a luxury no matter how stacked against him they were. With them, there was still opportunity—something to work with and manipulate. There was still wiggle room. A chance. Without odds, there was only absolute certainty. Without odds there was no gray area to control the direction of his fate, and Chac liked control.

  It was with utmost care that Chac broke the lamp’s glass light bulb without damaging the incandescent filament inside. He handed it to Lori who took it as though gripping a delicate egg between her fingers.

  With Peet’s help, Chac removed the light shield from the flood lamp and extracted the wire from its broken aluminum stand. Handing the professor his dull diving knife, he instructed him to peel the plastic coating from around the wires while Chac turned his attention to the gas can. He shook it well, hoping to release as much fumes as possible from the remaining liquid. Then, taking the filament back from Lori, he laid the gas can on its side on the ground. He unscrewed the cap, slipped the filament inside and quickly sealed it tight again with some electrical tape he’d found atop the generator.

  “Hopefully, the filament will have enough spark left to set off the fumes,” he said, squeezing the can into the seal’s limestone fissure. “How are the wires coming?”

  “All but finished,” Peet said, giving the wires one last whittle.

  He handed the copper ends over to Chac. Perfect. Chac wound the first wire onto the battery post and not a moment too soon. The diver’s light on his wrist was beginning to fade. “Get back and take cover,” he ordered. “And cross your fingers.”

  Without a word, Lori tucked herself behind Peet as they backed themselves behind a large boulder. Chac lay prone behind another rock directly across
from them. The light was fading fast. With the battery between his hands in front of him, Chac took up the second wire and held his breath.

  Let this work. Please let this work.

  Chac closed his eyes and just as he touched the wire to the battery, the light went out.

  Through The Darkness

  There was a pop, a gentle spark, and a fraction of a second later a flash of light penetrated the darkness with an explosive crack. Peet ducked instinctively but it seemed just as Chac’s makeshift bomb went off, the Mayan was tugging urgently on his arm.

  “GogoGO!”

  Peet scrambled to his feet, spotting the only thing he could see—a patch of filtered daylight ahead. Instinctively, he ran toward the light as more rock and debris began to rain down around him. Encouraged by the sounds of Lori and Chac clambering beside him, Peet pressed forward, ducking beneath the invisible onslaught. He covered his head with his arms to which he was rewarded with a glancing blow off his elbow, setting his funny bone into a numbing frenzy. But it was his feet, protected only by the fabric of his wetsuit, that took the brunt of the pain as he stumbled over loose shards of rock in his blind pursuit of the light.

  The hole, he happily realized, was just large enough for a man to squeeze through. Chac had done it! The seal had been punctured. Their escape was within reach!

  The glow that gave texture to the ground-level stone around the hole was only meters away and closing fast when Peet heard the crack above his head.

  “Dr. Peet!”

  Two hands shoved him from behind. Peet collided with Chac’s solid frame and together they fell in a heap at the base of the stone seal, landing face first into the fresh air venting through the hole. But that taste of pending freedom was immediately overshadowed by the dull thud that trembled the ground behind them. Another boulder had fallen. The unstable cave was collapsing.

  “Lori!”

  Peet struggled to gather himself, but Chac was tugging on him again. “We have to get out now!”

  Peet wrenched himself free and lunged back into the darkness only to smack face first into a wall of limestone…a wall where he’d stood just moments before.