BLACK CITY (Ulysses Vidal Adventure Series Book 2)

by Fernando Gamboa

  “May God hear you, my dear,” the professor said. “May God hear you…”

  Iak was keeping away from the light of the fire. From the shadows we heard his dismal voice. “Your god not come here…”

  “What?”

  “This, Morcego land.”

  “There we go with the Morcegos again,” I complained wearily. “How long are you going to keep on about them? We’ve already been in this city for two days and we haven’t seen any trace of them. Don’t you realize we’re alone? If that tribe ever existed, it’s pretty obvious they’re not here any longer.”

  “Morcegos not tribe,” he said. He came closer to the fire until his face seemed to float in the light. “You not understand. Morcegos not men no more. If you not see Morcegos, Morcegos see you.”

  “Oh, that sure is a powerful argument. So, not seeing them is proof they exist, is it? You know what, you could make a good living as a preacher.”

  “Don’t be a jerk,” Cassie scolded. “Ridiculing someone else’s beliefs is disrespectful.”

  “I’m not ridiculing him. I’m just tired of hearing about the bogyman.”

  “Well, I’m not.” She turned to Iak. “You say Morcegos aren’t men anymore? What are they then?”

  The Menkragnoti took a while to answer. At the last moment, when it seemed he had decided to stay silent after all, he stepped over to us and sat down by the fire.

  “Nobody know,” he said, his voice barely more than a whisper. “Nobody believe old legends but shaman explain to children and children of children.”

  “What are those legends?” the professor asked. He was interested in anything that sounded old and dusty.

  “Shaman say ancient men use Morcegos to protect from other tribes. But one day they go and leave Morcegos alone… They wait still for return of ancient men.”

  “Are you saying the Morcegos were abandoned by the ancient men?” the professor asked. “That’s interesting… Perhaps they were allied tribes, and those Morcegos were like mercenaries, hired by the ancient men? A collaboration with those ancient men, so that the warrior tribe provided knowledge and culture in exchange of security?”

  Iak shrugged his shoulders. “Not know.”

  “Hmm…” The professor scratched his unkempt beard thoughtfully. “That type of collaboration is unusual.”

  I waved the thought aside. “Well, don’t forget it’s just a legend.”

  “You’re a non-believer,” Cassie accused me as if the word were an insult.

  “You mean skeptical. Who would have said you two are the scientists. You are letting a fantasy get the better of you.”

  Cassandra shook her head, with the trace of an ironic smile.

  “You can say that while we’re talking around a fire on top of a pyramid, a few hundred miles away from a monolith just like the one in 2001 A Space Odissey, in the middle of the ruins of a lost city in the Amazon?”

  This time the professor looked at me as his lips formed the word touché.

  “What I mean is…” I argued, trying to recover from this thrust, “that you’re letting yourselves get carried away by a story that was obviously invented just to keep strangers out of here.”

  “Is that true?” Cassie turned to the Menkragnoti. “Could it all be just a legend? Created to keep the white man away from these lands?”

  “Morcegos real,” Iak said. “They here before white man arrive. Devils of night and owners of Black City. Animals know,” he said, encompassing the whole forest with his arms. “That’s why no hunting in this place.”

  “Well, even if that’s so, and even if these Morcegos exist, which I very much doubt, that still leaves the possibility of dealing with them. You can reach agreement even with the most hostile natives, as Percy Fawcett wrote in his diary.”

  Iak shook his head again. “You not understand nothing too,” he said sadly. “If Morcegos come, you cannot talk with them.”

  “Órale, wey,” Cassie said. “There’s always a way to negotiate. With anybody.”

  Then, slowly and deliberately, Iak walked around to Cassandra. Before we understood what he was doing, or had time to react, he took the machete out and touched it to Cassie’s chest.

  “If they find, they kill, chop in pieces and eat you. And if you very lucky,” he warned darkly, “they do one thing… and then the other.”

  Cassandra might be a young woman, but she had already faced life-threatening situations with unusual courage. She remained silent as she digested the words of the Menkragnoti. Meanwhile he sheathed the machete again.

  “Come on, Iak…! I said apprehensively under my breath. “Lay off the ghost stories, you’re scaring—”

  “Quiet!” the professor interrupted, springing to his feet. “Did you hear that?”

  Cassie and I looked at each other with our hearts in our mouths.

  “I heard a noise down there,” he said pointing at the canopy of the forest below us.

  “Jesus, Doc!” I said getting to my feet beside him. “This is no time for jokes!”

  “It’s not a joke,” he said very seriously. “I swear I heard something moving among the trees.”

  “Perhaps a monkey?” Cassie ventured.

  “Have you seen a monkey in the past three days?”

  She didn’t answer.

  The professor leaned out over the edge of the terrace, put his hands to his mouth to amplify his voice, and called into the darkness,

  “Valeria!”

  Silence.

  “Who’s there? Valeria!” he insisted, even more loudly.

  No reply.

  For the third time, Professor Castillo called his daughter’s name.

  But it was not Valeria who answered.

  This time we all heard the undergrowth moving, somewhere near the monolith.

  And then, as I was straining my eyes in order to penetrate the darkness, a swift shadow crossed in front of the bonfire we had left burning.

  It was the briefest instant, a barely perceptible blink in the orange light of the still burning coals. But I had no doubt that something had moved down there.

  Something big.

  I listened expectantly, waiting for some sound that would tell me what it was I had glimpsed for less than a second.

  But all I could hear was my heart, beating like a galloping horse, furiously pumping blood.

  Next I heard Iak’s voice behind, filled with dread.

  “Now they know,” he whispered, his voice no more than a thread. “They know we here.”

  49

  That night I could barely sleep.

  I suggested we take turns to keep watch, and every two hours one of us would stay awake, alert to any noise and keeping the fire from dying out.

  I did not know what I had seen, assuming I had really seen something.

  I tried to convince myself that it had only been the casual play of light and shadow, misinterpreted because of the spooky stories Iak had kept telling. At most, it could only have been a wandering monkey or tapir, drawn by the warmth of the bonfire, passing in front of the flames.

  Although I did not take Menkragnoti legends seriously, I could not help but think that most stories, no matter how ridiculous, usually have some element of truth in them.

  After all, there were no monkeys or tapirs in that jungle.

  So, more uneasy than I was prepared to admit, I spent a good part of the night walking back and forth on top of the pyramid. I kept one eye on the way that led up to it and the other on the spot where the monolith stood. For no reason I could explain, the black silhouette of the immense dark slab seemed to me more sinister every time I glanced at it.

  It was during my watch that the sun appeared over the tops of the trees. With a sigh of relief I sat down on the cold stone, legs crossed. I threw the last twigs into the fire and tried to regain the warmth I had lost during the night.

  I looked at my traveling companions in their hammocks, apparently sleeping peacefully. The indigenous man with the impure ancestor
who was fighting to save his people, holding his bow firmly and leaning on his bundle as if it were a pillow. The retired historian who had set out on a foolish adventure in search of a daughter who did not seem to want much to do with him, whom he had spoken with just once, and of whom he had a single photo. And finally, spread out like a rag doll, sleeping soundly as she used to do in my own bed, the woman I knew should have been the love of my life. It was a pity there seemed to be too many things in common between us now to keep us apart—and even more that prevented us from being together.

  I rubbed my eyes. “Goddammit!” I muttered. “Single life used to be so easy.”

  Just at that moment a pair of parrots crossed swiftly over our heads, gliding gracefully with their enormous red and blue wings spread wide. They were the first warm-blooded creatures I had seen ever since we had come into the city. They made a racket with their shrieks and cooing as if they had been given the task of waking up the whole rainforest.

  I felt strangely happy at being in that place at that moment, so that I forgot all about the scare of the night before. I filled my lungs with the crisp morning air as the mysterious silhouettes of the other pyramids took shape above the vegetation, like black reefs in a rough ocean of green water.

  Soon after I began to hear the first grunts of complaint and a loud yawn. Still sitting with my face to the sun and my eyes closed, I sensed my friends waking up, stretching, and getting ready for the day. It was a moment of pastoral quiet, the three of us ignorant of what destiny had in store for us that day that would turn out to feel neverending.

  “Good morning,” the professor greeted me as he sat down beside me. “Wow, what a view…”

  “Yeah, not bad at all.”

  “You can see the whole city from here.” He stood up. “I’d say we’re pretty close to the center.”

  “I guess so,” I answered without much enthusiasm. I was more interested in getting warm than in knowing our exact geographic location.

  The professor moved a few steps away, and I heard him walking up and down. I prayed that he would let me enjoy the dawn in peace.

  But of course, that was too much to ask for.

  A minute later he was shaking my shoulder, urging me to my feet.

  “Get up, Ulysses, you have to see this.”

  “If you bring me a coffee,” I said without turning around, “I’ll follow you wherever you want.”

  “Don’t be a jerk, like Cassie says. Get up and follow me.”

  “Really, Doc, as a Messiah you’d be a real pain in the ass,” I said with a grunt. I stood up unwillingly. “Well, what’s so important that you want me to see?”

  “Just look,” he said, pointing ahead.

  I blinked a couple of times and squinted hard. All I could see was an area of forest exactly the same as the one I had been contemplating minutes before.

  “Yeah, awesome… The Amazon rainforest. I’d never have imagined it.”

  “For heaven’s sake!” he snorted. “Look at the edge of the terrace.”

  I did, and the only thing I could see was that it bent at one corner.

  “Can you see the corner?” he asked.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Wonderful, now check this out.”

  He began to turn with one arm stretched out, numbering each corner out loud, just as if we were in a class in Sesame Street. I followed the tip of his fingers, wondering if my father’s old friend was suffering an onset of dementia.

  “Three…” he said, getting more excited as he kept turning. “Four…” Then once he was back at the starting point he stopped. “And five!”

  I stared at the professor without the slightest idea about what he was trying to prove.

  “Do you want me to make a rhyme with five? Or am I supposed to guess the answer to a riddle?”

  “Jesus, Ulysses! Don’t you realize? Five corners mean five sides. The pyramid has five sides! It’s a pentagonal pyramid! I can’t see how we didn’t realize yesterday when we got here!”

  “Ah, I see.” I said, rubbing my chin. “And that means…?”

  “How on earth should I know?” he exclaimed gleefully. “But it’s absolutely unheard-of. And besides, if you look at the horizon,”—he pointed into the distance—“you can see that the ruined wall around the city has five sides too. Don’t you think it’s extraordinary?”

  “Well, Doc, I guess these people liked pentagons. After everything we’ve seen here, this sounds like too much ado about nothing.”

  “What’s too much ado about nothing?” Cassandra asked behind me.

  Professor Castillo explained his discovery to her, and she was enthusiastic. She began to count the corners over and over as if she could not trust her own eyes.

  “But, how come we didn’t realize it last night?” she kept asking. “This is something unique! Or rather unbelievable!”

  I was about to ask what was so extraordinary about that when I thought I heard a familiar hum coming from the north. I looked in that direction and shushed them with a gesture.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Shhh…”

  The sound was getting steadily more distinct; finally the professor and Cassie could hear it too. The hum turned into a whirr, and a few seconds later a black dot appeared in the sky. It grew larger and larger until it became the unmistakable silhouette of a plane: a low-flying plane coming straight toward us.

  We ran to revive the fire, throwing leaves and green branches onto it to make smoke.

  The pilot, seeing us, turned the plane as he passed over us, while we shouted and waved our arms like desperate castaways.

  It was a DC-3, a big, twin-propeller plane built in the U.S. toward the end of Second World War for transporting cargo and troops. By now, well into the twenty-first century, it would presumably have been relegated to museums or scrap yards. But that was the least important thing. What mattered was that somehow we had been discovered, and that at this precise moment the pilot would be on the radio giving our location so that a rescue team could come and help us.

  The plane, which had no markings, was finished in aluminum paint. It circled above our position, and while the professor and Cassie hugged each other happily, I noticed that it was climbing in a perfect spiral and moving away from us. I was about to mention this to my friends when I realized why.

  The side door of the DC-3 opened and several dark bundles dropped out: seven of them in all. They immediately unfolded great rectangular sails, each a different color making it clear what they really were.

  Parachutists.

  A baffled silence took the place of the happy dancing of a moment before. This unexpected twist of events elicited so many questions that none of us knew what to say.

  “They’re coming to rescue us!” the professor said at last, enthusiastically.

  But as I watched those seven parachutes descending from the sky I was confused. My common sense—which I should have paid more attention to—kept nagging me, pointing out that coincidence did not usually go to such extremes.

  50

  The parachutists, presumably looking for the best place to land, away from the treacherous branches, came down into the only possible clearing: at the foot of the monolith. They touched down, one by one, then gathered and folded their parachutes and put them away in black plastic bags, which they piled around an exuberant Brazilian walnut tree.

  From our privileged lookout, we watched all this. We were still baffled, all of us thinking the same thing: How on earth had they found us?

  All the same, our excitement got the better of any doubts we might have. Waving our arms, we began to jump up and down to catch the attention of our rescuers. When they saw us, they gestured to us to come down and join them.

  “It’s a pinche miracle!” Cassie exclaimed as we started off down the high steps, taking great care not to slip as we went.

  “It certainly is,” the professor said excitedly as he followed her down. “It’s almost as if someone had told the
m exactly where to find us!”

  Before I started down I turned around and saw that the Menkragnoti was standing at the top of the stairway, looking undecided. He eyed the newcomers with distrust.

  “What’s the matter, Iak?” I asked. “Aren’t you coming down?”

  He lowered his gaze with a stern face.

  “Who these people?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “But somehow they’ve found us, and it looks like they’ve come to rescue us.”

  “Iak not need rescue.”

  “I’m sure you don’t, Iak. But we need help to find the professor’s daughter and then get back home.”

  “Iak want return too,” he said as he sat down on the edge and put his bow aside. “But your house not my house.”

  I stayed there for a moment looking at him, searching for an answer to give him. But I suspected that no matter what I said, I wouldn’t be able to convince him. I supposed it hardly mattered if he waited up there until he was sure there was nothing to worry about and came down to join us. Deep down, I could understand his distrust toward these strangers who had literally fallen from the sky. Without thinking any more about it I began the steep descent down that pyramid covered with soil and vegetation that was still damp from the morning dew.

  “It’s amazing that they have found us like this,” I said again when I had caught up with the others and told them about Iak’s decision to stay on the fringe of things.

  “We were saying just that,” the professor said. He was carefully watching where he put his feet. “I don’t know how they could have located us. It’s a stroke of pure luck.”

  “It must have been more than luck,” Cassandra said a few feet below. “One way or another, someone must have given them our coordinates.”

  The professor stopped in his tracks. “Do you think my daughter might have…?”

  “It would explain a lot,” Cassie said. She turned around and smiled. “Maybe she got her satellite phone back again after all, then made an SOS call giving her location. In which case it must be very close to ours.”