The Codex

75

Tom ran through the forest, speed taking precedence over silence, swinging wide of their earlier trail to avoid running into Hauser. His path took him through a maze of ruined temples buried under thick mats of vines. He had no light, and sometimes he had to feel his way down dark passageways or crawl under fallen stones.

He soon arrived at the eastern edge of the plateau. He paused, catching his breath, and then crept to the cliff and looked down, trying to orient himself. It seemed to him that the necropolis should lie somewhere to the south, so he went to the right, following the trail that skirted the cliffs. In another ten minutes he recognized the terrace and walls above the necropolis and found the hidden trail. He scurried down, listening at each switchback in case Hauser was still there, but he had long gone. A moment later he came to the dark opening to his father’s tomb.

Their backpacks still lay in a pile on the ground where they had dropped them. Tom picked up his machete and resheathed it and then kneeled, rifling through the packs, taking out some reed bundles and a pack of matches. He lit one of the bundles and stepped into the tomb.

The air was pestilential. He breathed through his nose and ventured deeper inside. A tingle of horror crawled up his spine as he realized this was where his father spent the last month, locked up in pitch darkness. The flickering light illuminated a raised funeral slab of dark stone, carved with skulls, monsters, and other strange motifs, surrounded by stacked boxes and crates banded with stainless steel and bolted shut. This was no King Tut’s tomb. It looked more like a crowded, filthy warehouse.

Tom stepped closer, overcoming his sense of revulsion. Behind the boxes his father had set up a crude living space. It looked as if he had scraped together some dry straw and dust to form a kind of bed. Along the back wall stood a row of clay pots, which evidently contained food and water; the stench of rot rose from them. Rats came leaping out of the pots and fled before the light. Sick with fascination and pity, Tom peered into one and found a scattering of dried plantains at the bottom; the food was crawling with greasy black cockroaches, which bumped and chittered in a panic from the torchlight. Dead rats and mice floated in the water jugs. Against one wall was a pile of rotting rats — obviously killed by his father in what must have been the daily competition for food. In the back of the tomb Tom could see the gleaming eyes of live rats, waiting for him to leave.

What his father had endured in here, waiting in the pitch-dark for his sons who might not ever come… It was far more horrifying than he could possibly imagine. That Maxwell Broadbent had endured and lived — and even hoped—told Tom something about his father that he had not known before.

He wiped his face. He needed to get the Codex and get out.

The boxes were stenciled and labeled, and it took Tom only a few minutes to find the crate containing the Codex.

He dragged the heavy crate outside into the light and rested, gulping in the fresh mountain air. The box itself weighed eighty pounds, and it contained other books besides the Codex. Tom examined the quarter-inch bolts and wing nuts holding together the steel bands that clamped down the fiberglass-wrapped wood sides of the box. The wing nuts were tight and hard. It would take a wrench to unscrew them.

He found a rock and gave one of the nuts a sharp blow, loosening it. He repeated the process and in a few minutes had removed all the wing nuts. He pulled off the steel bands. A few more massive blows cracked the fiberglass covering, and Tom was able to wrench it free. A half dozen precious books spilled out, all carefully wrapped in acid-free paper — a Gutenberg Bible, illuminated manuscripts, a book of hours. He shoved aside the books and reached in, grasped the buckskin-covered Codex, and pulled it out.

For a moment he stared at it. He remembered so clearly how it had sat in a little glass case in the living room. His father used to unlock the case every month or so and turn a page. The pages had pretty little drawings of plants, flowers, and insects, surrounded by glyphs. He remembered staring at those strange Mayan glyphs, the dots and thick lines and grinning faces, all wrapped and tangled around each other. He hadn’t even realized it was a kind of writing.

Tom emptied one of their abandoned backpacks and shoved the book in. He shouldered the pack and started back up the trail. He decided to head southwest, keeping an eye out for Hauser.

He entered the ruined city.