The Babylon rite

34

Huaca D, Zana, Peru

The beam of the killer’s flashlights probed deeper into the passage, illuminating the floating dust. Jessica flattened herself, in animal panic, against the mud wall. Her heart galloped in her chest, so loud she reckoned it must be audible, booming down the adobe corridor.

Again the torchbeam flicked this way and that, investigating, while the male voices at the passage entrance debated. Evidently they knew she was in here, or they suspected someone was in the huaca. Jessica listened, intent. Sure enough she heard the word matar: to kill. They were discussing whether to kill whoever was inside.

She had to hide.

Stealthily, she inched up the passage, sidling into the darkness, turning off her own headtorch as she went.

The blackness absorbed her at once: an intense and devouring darkness. And Jessica hated the dark. The fear of what she had to do, where she had to go — crawl into the huaca, towards the tombs, in the terrible darkness — would have been insurmountable if the alternative hadn’t been worse: a callous death in the dust outside.

But the blackness was hateful. It grasped at her: it took the air from her mouth. Putting one palm in front of the other, patting her way along, Jessica negotiated the zigzagging passageway, crawling like a blind mammal in the darkness. Like a human mole.

Here the passage turned, she turned with it, smelling the warm earth all around her, scraping her hard hat on the mud ceiling, knocking her knees against pebbles and rocks. Or maybe these were bones, not rocks. The huaca was riddled with tombs and corpses.

Breathing quickly in the warm, humid, constricted air, Jessica looked back. The darkness extended as far behind her as in front of her. The blackness was so intense it felt viscous, as if she was drowning in a sump of crude oil.

What was that?

Maybe a noise, a whispered voice carried along the passage. She heard voices. They must have made their decision, and now they were coming after her in the dark, following the same confusing and circuitous passageways, hunting her down.

Urgently she continued her eyeless crawl, chafing soil from the ceiling with her hard hat, soil that fell in hissy little whispers on to her body; one especially vigorous mudfall made her stop, and wait, tense, until the drizzle of soil concluded. Then she pushed on, into the black heart of the tombs.

She’d made it to the antechamber of Tomb 1. She could tell because she was kneeling on bones. Under her hands and her knees were the disarticulated skeletons of the servants, with their willing amputations. And now she had to crawl straight through them — straight through the middle of the skeletal remains — so that she could get to the senior tomb.

The bones crumbled under her scrabbling sneakers. She couldn’t see the skulls, she couldn’t see anything, but she could sense their sad, immortal grins. Jessica kicked the last metre and climbed the low mud shelf and as she did she heard the voices, very near.

They really were coming after her. And they were very close behind.

She had to hide, quickly, somewhere in the tomb. Racing on her scratched and bleeding knees Jessica forced herself through the stone portals. At once she tripped on the square-metre strings that gridded the floor; with a loud crack she fell into the piles of corpse beetles, the trashy, gaudy crunch of thoraxes. She had fallen face first into the pile and now they were in her mouth: she was eating the beetles who ate human corpses; it was disgusting.

Spitting the vileness from her mouth, Jessica moved on, slithering through the crackling insect shells, and then at last she half-stood, and ran and threw herself blindly at the wall.

A light.

The torch beam of her pursuers was now visible in the antechamber beyond: a dim and troglodytic light, sinister and subterranean. And coming her way. Fevered with desperation and terror, Jessica groped her way to the corner of the room where the secret entrance to the second antechamber was concealed.

The passage was virtually a hole in the ground, hidden behind a mud wall. Would the killers see it? This was her only chance. Jessica squeezed herself into the tight and grimy final passage. It was so narrow it seemed to her that she was now being swallowed by the mud, swallowed by the Moche pyramid, eaten up by their unknown gods.

A minute later she was in the antechamber. She could sense the higher space around her, even if she could not see it. And she could stand up. She could also sense the little skeletons of the children, sleeping in their kindergarten, their hearts removed.

There was nothing Jess could do now but wait. She squatted in the far darkness of the chamber, her eyes closed to the terror; but the terror was the same with her eyes open or shut. She wiped the mud from her blinded eyes and just stared into the blackness.

Subdued murmurs, echoing down the long huaca passages. The word ulluchu… they were talking about ulluchu, and the way they said it was strange, not quite right, spoken in a different accent. Not Peruvian? The pronunciation chimed in Jessica’s mind. But she didn’t know why, and she didn’t care, because now the voices were dwindling, they weren’t getting any nearer, they seemed to be moving away.

Time passed. With no sign of the killers. Maybe she was going to make it?

But then despair grasped at her, in the darkness. Even if she did survive, what was the point? If she lived longer, that maybe just meant she would die soon, but more slowly. From Huntington’s. And that would be worse. Much, much worse.

Maybe it would be better if she was shot now: simple and painless.

Yet even as she thought this, her soul stirred with rebellion. Clinging to life.

Jessica stared into the blackness, where the Muchika children lay sleeping. Devoid of visual stimuli, her mind conjured up pictures of its own: she was seeing her father again. Thrashing in his bed, angry, then crying, then angry, then very silent again: the longest silence of all. And now Jessica could see herself in the hospice: she was a child, looking at the body on the bed, looking at the body where her father had been, and she was wondering where he had gone.

Jessica remembered her own reactions. Staring at the dead body, outraged, tearful, and wondering where the life had gone. Her mother’s soothing stories of Jesus and angels and heaven had not consoled her. With a seven-year-old’s basic sense of morality, she felt she’d been robbed. Someone or something had stolen her father away, and he would surely be returned.

But he never returned.

There. Now.

A voice. In the tomb.

She returned to alertness with a startle and suppressed a cry of fear.

The voices were getting louder. They were coming down the passageway into the hidden antechamber.

So this was it. They’d found the concealed passage. Death had not relinquished her, after all.

The killers emerged into the chamber; they had dazzling headtorches. They were tall silhouettes flashing beams of light right into her eyes. She held up her hands in supplication, visoring her eyes in the glare. But she could see one thing well enough: the men had raised their guns, and they were pointed her way.