I ran faster to catch up with her.
“Cassie!” I shouted, “I need the magazines!”
“La chingada!” she exclaimed, from much farther than I had expected. “You’re right! I’ll pass them to the professor so he can pass them on to you!”
“Be quick! I think they’re nearly on me!”
For reply, Cassie’s flashlight shone on me as she yelled: “Everybody duck!”
As I did, 9mm bullets whistled over my head from her pistol, and a terrible howl of pain came out of the darkness of the passage.
“I got him!” Cassandra exclaimed triumphantly. “I think I killed that pinche bastard!”
But she had not even finished the sentence when a chorus of subhuman screams reached us from all directions in that labyrinthine sewer. We knew that one was not the only demon in that hell.
“They’re everywhere!” the professor cried. “Oh my God! They’re everywhere!”
At that moment I felt strong hands grab me by the hair as sharp nails sank into my scalp.
63
Instinctively I turned around, closed my eyes, and hit desperately upward with my fist. I was horrified at the prospect of ending up the same way as Luizao.
Inexplicably, my punch was answered by an exclamation. “La concha tu madre!” said someone with an unmistakable Argentinian accent.
An open hand appeared in front of my face, and the same voice urged me to hold fast.
I hesitated for an instant, convinced it was one of Souza’s men. In the end I decided it was much better to be facing one of those than the monsters below, so I grabbed the hand, which rapidly became several hands. Then I realized that I was coming out of that claustrophobic passage through an opening in its ceiling and I was breathing the warm, humid air of the rainforest once again.
Cassie and the professor followed close behind me through the opening, helped by three strangers: two women and a man carrying torches. All three of them were looking around, visibly anxious.
“Thank you,” the professor said, breathing heavily as they were lifting him. “My most heartfelt thanks.”
Straight away someone turned a flashlight on his face and a woman’s voice said disbelievingly as she came up to him, “Professor Castillo?”
For a few minutes none of us said a word. Even the noise of the Morcegos seemed muffled in that brief moment of recognition.
“Valeria…? Is that… really you?” the professor asked with contained emotion.
They approached each other, shyly, looking closely at their familiar features.
“This is impossible,” she muttered. “How did you…? Where have you—?”
But before she could finish the question her father had his arms around her and was hugging her close.
“Thank God!” he murmured tearfully. “You can’t imagine. You just can’t imagine what…” Unable to control himself, he wept with joy and relief as he embraced his daughter.
In spite of the emotional encounter taking place in the erratic light of the torches, I could not help but notice that the growls of the Morcegos had started again. They were getting closer and closer.
“I don’t want to be a party-pooper,” I said as I looked down into the well I had just come out of, “but I think it’d be a good idea to leave the introductions for later and get out of here fast!”
“I agree,” Cassie said. “I don’t think they were very happy that I killed one of them.”
“You killed one of them?” the other woman asked with obvious skepticism. She sounded Brazilian.
In reply, Cassie shone her light on the still smoking black Glock in her hand. “I’d say I put a couple of holes in him,” she said proudly.
At that instant an angry howl burst out from under our feet, ending the conversation.
“Let’s go!” Valeria cried. She quickly disengaged herself from her father’s embrace. “They’re coming out!”
Taking for granted that we would follow, the professor’s daughter ran into the thick vegetation without looking back.
We ran blindly, splashing noisily with each step, following Valeria’s wake which showed us the way, paying no heed to the foliage that reared up in front of us again and again.
I had no idea where we were going, but it hardly seemed the moment to stop and ask. From my position at the end of the line, Cassie’s petite figure in front of me silhouetted by the light of her flashlight, I simply followed the lead in the hope that Valeria herself knew where we were headed.
It was at least ten minutes before the pace of those at the front began to slacken. Then gradually, the six of us regrouped and went on more slowly and warily.
None of us said a word during our escape, which finally came to an end when we came out of the thicket and saw a low stone mound in front of us, ten feet or so high and about the same across. It continued in the form of a straight wall, which the professor’s daughter followed without stopping.
What I had at first taken for another pile of rubble now revealed itself as something like a wide, low wall.
But I realized that this second impression was also wrong when I saw a second wall running parallel to the first. Both of them ended on either side of an imposing pentagonal portico, with a stone stairway of the same shape leading up to it.
Then the professor’s daughter, flanked by her two companions, stopped in front of the façade of this surprising building. With a pleased smile, she pointed her torch to what was above her head and said, “Welcome home.”
For a few seconds, the professor, Cassie, and I were reduced to a confused silence, not knowing what we were supposed to be looking at.
Thirty feet above us, faintly illuminated by the light of the torches, something that was almost rectangular projected from the main façade. It was slightly curved and leaning back, like some strange cornice that was too long and too high to be much use.
Admittedly, the whole ensemble, brightened from below by the burning torches, looked dramatic enough, but after what I had already seen in that city it did not seem particularly special.
Suddenly, like one of those jugglers you sometimes see at night at some seaside resorts in summer, Valeria threw her torch into the sky with all her might, and it went higher than the projection above our heads.
Then I understood.
For a fraction of a second, as it was lit by a whirling torch, we saw the eroded features of a formidable animal head. The eyes of the head were empty, its open jaws frozen in a silent roar which shone in the black night like an apparition from another world.
What I had taken to be a projection was the enormous lower jaw.
We were all speechless.
Not a sound came out of our gaping mouths.
Then the lighted torch fell from above. It went out with a hiss as it hit the muddy ground, but I was still staring at the same spot. I was hypnotized, with the image of that colossal sculpture still shining in my brain. It was like the moment when you close your eyes after briefly looking at the sun and its image stays flaming in your retina.
“What… what is… that?” the professor asked lowering his gaze to his daughter, visibly disturbed..
“We believe it’s a temple.”
“A temple?” repeated Cassie, equally stunned. “With the head of an animal?”
“Not only the head,” the Argentinian explained. “What you see here at the sides”—I had mistaken them for walls—“are the outstretched front legs. The temple’s in the form of a reclining animal.”
Cassandra’s mind was full of questions. “But… what animal? And how do you know it’s a temple?”
He was about to reply again, but Valeria cut him off brusquely. “I showed it to you so you could all see it,” she said curtly. She turned around and started up the stairs with the air of an aristocrat entering her palace. “Now, I suggest we leave the silly questions and carry on with the conversation inside the building. It’s not a good idea to stay out here for a long time.”
Cassie, always tempera
mental, had a retort ready at the tip of her tongue but we heard the sound of disturbed vegetation behind us. All in all, it was a sensible suggestion.
We went up the steps two by two, urged on by the imminent arrival of the Morcegos, then crossed that imposing pentagonal threshold, which was crowned with a five-pointed star, without stopping to admire the view.
As soon as we were inside, Valeria turned to us with a stern look. It was almost as though she were annoyed by our presence.
“We’re safe here,” she said, and crossed her arms over her chest. “The Morcegos don’t dare come in here.”
“Are you sure?” Cassie asked, more than skeptically.
Valeria Renner looked at her with cold blue eyes, assessing her. She was thinner than in the photo with her father, certainly looking scruffier and with lines under her eyes, but still undeniably attractive.
“We’ve been here for two weeks, we’ve smelt them and heard them lurking about,” she said. “We’re not sure why they’re reluctant to come in here, although we have an idea it might be because of its animal shape.” She pointed up at the fierce head at the entrance. “Believe me,” she added, “you can rest assured about that. If they’d wanted to come in they’d have done it already.” Then she turned to her father, looked at him up and down and said, “And now, Professor Castillo… will you please explain what the hell you’re doing here?”
The professor told the long story of how we had come to be there, sitting in front of a fire in the center of a great hall which certainly looked like a temple.
As he talked, my curiosity was aroused. I walked to the bottom of the hall. At one end of this, facing a stone altar like the ones in Christian churches, mounted on an elevated pedestal, was an exquisite throne carved out of a single dazzling piece of white quartz.
That place raised an infinity of questions in my mind, but I was too tired to ask any, so I decided to go back to the others. On the way I noticed the thick columns at the sides, the walls chiseled with intricate symbols, and the reliefs which I guessed were of mythological beings, masterfully crafted.
Before the others had sat down around the fire, we had formally introduced ourselves. So I now knew that the young Argentinian I had punched was Claudio Schwartz. He was an attractive blond, blue-eyed archeologist from Buenos Aires who looked like a beau from a TV series and was specialized in pre-Columbian Amazonian cultures. The woman was Angelica Barbosa, a Brazilian from Sao Paulo who looked younger than the fifty-six she claimed, thanks to her lively black eyes and the athletic body I guessed was hidden under her clothes. Valeria had hired her as the expedition doctor, among other reasons for her experience in herpetology, infections, and tropical parasites.
I was still standing with my gaze lost in the corners, listening to the end of the professor’s story, when Valeria finally asked with ill-concealed sarcasm: “So, you say you’ve come to rescue me?”
“I realize that it doesn’t look like it,” the professor said apologetically, “but… yes, that was our idea.”
“Well, forgive me, but as a rescue team,” she said examining us one by one, “you leave something to be desired.”
“It’s just that we didn’t have time to do the washing,” Cassandra said irritably.
“It’s the intention that counts, isn’t it?” the professor said.
“Well, I’m sorry to say not in this case. Instead of being a solution, you’re one more problem,” Valeria said curtly.
“A problem?” Cassandra retorted with a frown. She was really angry now. “Really? We risked our lives just to get here to try to save your pinche ass, so the least you could do is show a little gratitude.”
“That might have been your intention,” Valeria said icily. “But in the end it was us who saved your “pinche ass.” So, from my point of view, it should be you thanking us.”
Cassie, furious, started to her feet. “Do you really mean we—”
“Look,” the professor interrupted, “could we all just calm down? We’re all in the same boat now, and the only thing we ought to be worrying about is how to get out of here as soon as possible, before we end up in the hands of those…”—he seemed reluctant to name them—“Morcegos. Or before the mercenaries find us.”
“Mercenaries?” asked Angelica with more surprise than worry in her voice. “What mercenaries?”
“The ones that have been sent here to shut us up,” I explained approaching them and coming into the circle lit by the fire. “Us and you as well, I’m sorry to say. They parachuted from a plane this morning. We were just trying to make smoke signals in the hope you’d see us.”
“Wait a minute… what are you talking about?” Valeria asked, astounded. “Are you saying that now there are some mercenaries that want to kill us too? Are you kidding me? Why?”
Instead of answering directly, I turned to the professor so that he could explain to his daughter.
“Well… it’s a long story…” He thought for a moment. “In a nutshell, it seems that the AZS, the company in charge of building the dam upriver, wants to stop anybody revealing the existence of this city to the rest of the world. They’re prepared to eliminate any witnesses. This includes all those present here, I’m afraid.”
“But how do they know that Angelica, Claudio, and myself are here too? Our expedition was practically clandestine. Not even the Brazilian government or the FUNAI knew we were coming.”
“Well, yes, but… you see, we told them.”
“You told them!? Why would you do that?”
“It wasn’t our fault,” the professor said apologetically, making an effort to placate his daughter. “You see, they introduced themselves as a rescue team, although in the end they turned out to be anything but.”
“I can’t believe this…”
The professor shrugged. “Yes, well, there you are… By the way,” he added to try and shift the course of the conversation, “didn’t you see the plane approaching?”
“I think so,” Angelica said as she turned to Claudio. “In fact, he said he’d heard a motor this morning, but when we went outside we didn’t see anything.”
“In that case, if you didn’t hear the plane arrive… how did you find us?”
Valeria leaned forward and arched her eyebrows. “The question should be, how could we have avoided finding you?” Her cheeks were still red with anger. “In the total silence of this forest, your shots could have been heard miles away. Elano, our guide, the first member of our expedition to disappear, was armed… we thought it might be him and decided to risk going out at night in the hope of finding him.”
“Sorry to disappoint you,” Cassie muttered.
My worries had little to do with Valeria’s sarcastic tone. I scratched my growing beard uneasily. “In that case…” I mused aloud, “if you were able to find us as easily as that—”
Valeria took the point quickly. “Then those mercenaries you say are looking for us will do the same, and try to follow our tracks all the way here.”
“So now,” Claudio said, “not only do we have to hide at night, from the Morcegos, but also during the day, from those mercenaries. Macanudo!”
I sat down beside Cassandra, stretching my back and leaning on my elbows on the cold stone floor. “Well, let’s look on the bright side,” I said cheerfully. “This simplifies things. Now that we’ve found you, there’s only one thing left to do. And that’s get out of this city right away.”
Valeria looked at me in surprise. “I’m afraid that’s easier said than done,” she said somberly.
Something in her voice suggested that she knew something we did not.
“And why is that?” Cassie asked. Her voice still sounded hostile. “What’s to stop us?”
This time it was Angelica who answered. “The Morcegos,” she said sadly. “They won’t let any of us leave here alive.”
64
“Excuse me,” I said, getting up and feigning to unblock my ear. “Could you repeat that?”
It was Valeria
who spoke again, after taking a deep breath. “When we arrived in this city eight days ago,” she said in a whisper, as though this was something she was reluctant to remember, “there were eight of us in the team. We set up camp on the western side of the city, and on the first night Elano, who had been our guide, disappeared. We guessed he must have gone out before dawn for some reason and had an accident. So, after a couple hours we began to search for him, then when it got too late we decided to leave the search for the following day. But that same night Flavio, a biologist from Costa Rica, also disappeared from his tent without a trace. They both seemed to have turned into smoke.”
“Didn’t that make you suspect something strange was happening?”
“Of course it did. Do you think we’re stupid? But you must have realized that there don’t seem to be any dangerous animals in this forest, so we assumed they could have fallen into a well when they went out to relieve themselves during the night, or something like that. It seemed even more likely after we found several holes like the one we got you out of tonight. They seem to go down to what looks like an old sewer system.”
“Yes, we came to the same conclusion,” the professor said.
“Anyway,” Valeria continued somberly, “finally we decided to go into one of those tunnels to look for the two we were missing.”
“Fuck...” I said, imagining what was coming.
Valeria tightened the muscles of her face as she tried to hold back her emotions. “That night,” she whispered with a knot in her throat, “we realized we weren’t alone.” She took a deep breath before she went on. “Helmut, a great Austrian anthropologist who had been my mentor at university, was trapped by those demons. He screamed and held onto my hand as they were pulling his legs to drag him away.” She looked up at the ceiling, swallowed, and straightened her shirt. “I still have his blood on my clothes.”
The professor went over to his daughter and patted her back. “I’m so sorry.”
BLACK CITY (Ulysses Vidal Adventure Series Book 2) Page 27