The Inca Prophecy

20 Mummy Dive

The divers slid through the seemingly endless dark. Around them, the interior of the ship’s engine room was unrecognizable as such. After so many years, it in no way resembled a man-made structure anymore. Pipes had become conduits of minor currents, cramped havens for shy octopuses to ambush their prey from, while steel dials, generators, and large ducts had become shapeless thrones of gloom. In some places the divers found themselves doing a double take on the algae structures, often resembling men. It was an unusual presumption for the party of four seasoned divers, but they all felt the macabre semblance eerie.

Purdue halted and pointed to a hatch under them, easy to open. He reached down and pulled the hatch upward. Its rubber skirting and wedge bar had long been eaten away by time and tide. Their faces contorted in horror as the rushing water, sucked through by the opening hatch vacuum, caused the most awful howl. Reminiscent of a bear’s growl, it filled with a torrent of bubbles that glimmered in the beams of their torches.

Purdue himself bolted backwards at the vocal sound released by the captive water under the hatch. A numbing fear momentarily gripped him, sending numerous Lovecraftian images through his head before he realized that it was merely the sound of the water through the mouth of the hatch.

Relieved, they finally followed the billionaire explorer through the large steel aperture. Below, they found what would make any treasure hunter fume in frustration. But these were not just treasure hunters. These were not men fueled by greed or monetary gain. Half-ransacked trunks, once carrying substantial riches in gems, silver jewelry, and gold, lined the one side of steel wall. They were distorted by the sea’s offspring claiming them, but what was left inside was still evident.

Even though the trunks had practically been emptied by previous visitors, they were heavy enough to constitute a pulley system to be recovered. Purdue and one of Vincent’s men took to measuring the dimensions of the large wood and iron boxes appearing to hail from the eighteenth century by design and material. Vincent took his time to scrutinize the contents of the first trunk. After a while he moved on to the second one, unsatisfied. They contained gold and gems like the others, but that was not what Vincent was seeking.

After all eight of the boxes had been measured, Purdue and Vincent recorded the dimensions at 2.2 meters in length, 2.8 meters in width, and their height at 1.3 meters. Vincent was getting impatient by the time he reached the seventh trunk and still had not found what he was looking for. His heart sank in despair when he completed his investigation of the eighth and found only the doubloons and jewels. He knew he had to be grateful for the immense bounty he they’d found, but there was little satisfaction in caviar when all you want is a beer.

Purdue motioned that he was going on to look for the bone locker his scanner had picked up when he was still lazing on his deceased yacht. Vincent nodded, and gestured for his two men to surface and rig up the pulleys. He was adamant to accompany Purdue to see what morose prizes the rich rewarded themselves with.

Through the intricate iron works of the bridge the two men went. They had no need for much paddling as a strong current carried them along until Purdue’s scanner lit up in bright red once more. It read as expected, combining symbols P and CO with the highest composition of the Ca symbol and the atomic number 20, making up the definitive chemical combination he was looking for.

Bone.

Purdue grabbed onto a thick post to his right and Vincent’s fleeting body was anchored by his grasp. Holding on to the skipper until he had secured his own place, Purdue waited for the scanner to read again before choosing the way down as indicated. By the looks of the cascading hollow, it was once a stairwell down to the sleeping quarters. Bunks were stacked one above the other in pairs, now the playground of nocturnal and shy specimens.

Ahead of them there were more of the crates they’d found the gold in above on the upper level, but these had been empty before the ocean’s children had taken them over and revamped them into shelter. Suddenly, Vincent urgently grabbed onto Purdue’s arm. Quickly, as if by reflex, the wealthy inventor had his laser device readily in his grasp, but what he mistook for an attack was just an observation to be shared.

Vincent pointed to the long sheets of rusted floor under them, lighting the area. Purdue looked down to find a whole trail of golden doubloons and assorted jewelry lying about, scattered like the entrails of a gutted treasure vault. Astonished at the sight, Purdue descended to the floor to clarify the nature of the sporadic glitters the coins gave off in the light of the flashlights. As he dusted the sediment that had settled on the floor, the particles ascended in a delayed slow motion allowing his fingers to reveal the strewn treasures.

They followed the trail of the glimmering valuables, picking up some of the coins as they went. Both men noticed that the doubloons were all marked with a peculiar symbol, much like the one Purdue had collected on his initial dive. In no way did they resemble typical Spanish coins, but Purdue thought to investigate their origin later. Vincent and Purdue reached another hatch entrance, but it did not lead to another section on the current level; it led to the floor below, deeper into the living quarters of the men.

Aside from the wreck’s outward appearance being that of German World War II battleship, there were no telltale signs or insignias irrefutably proving it to be a Nazi vessel. Thus far, Purdue and his accomplice could find no trace of identification on the ship, which was highly unusual, especially in a military environment. The hatch refused to move, and after some time the men realized that it was not rust causing the lock to jam, but water pressure.

Purdue used his laser device, set to a sonar detection unit feature, to survey the problem. After some calculations, he came to an unlikely conclusion — that the jam was being caused by means of a vacuum: the room beyond was void of water. Laboriously Purdue explained it to Vincent in hilarious, but effective, gesturing. They had to enter from the bottom level to gain access to the dry room from below.

The scanner in Purdue’s belt indicated that they had reached the site successfully, but the painfully neat galley they climbed up into through the floor baffled them. It was too unassuming. But they found their answer soon enough when they opened the pantry doors. Purdue and Vincent could not believe their eyes. Piled upon one another like sardines in a matchbox were a good number of bodies, still dressed in tattered uniforms. Sure enough, the emblems on their clothing bore the Swastika and other SS-insignias.

Inside the dry chamber, the men momentarily removed their mouthpieces to speak.

“Keep your oxygen on. You never know when a freak current will swell up and flood this galley,” Vincent instructed Purdue.

“I know,” Purdue answered, “but then again, if it hasn’t flooded in so many decades…”

“Look at this,” Vincent remarked, kneeling next to the corpses. “More piled behind these. There must be over a hundred bodies here!”

“More like the entire crew and officers,” Purdue speculated. “Good God, here are more! Look inside the ovens and cupboards.” He peered further in, past the sickening dust and putrefaction that salt and humidity had caused to the corpses. “The back of these storage compartments have been removed, Vincent. It looks like they lead to one of the boiler rooms.”

“Can you get through?” Vincent asked, wincing at the ghastly sight all around them.

“Do I have to?” Purdue asked, rather uncharacteristically.

Vincent gave a dry chuckle. “Well, we are here for you now. Isn’t this what you came for?”

“It is,” Purdue sighed. He was naturally very curious, yet he rued having to dislodged some of the mummified skeletons to get through to the boiler room.

“Hurry,” Vincent urged him. “The tides are changing in about ten minutes and we won’t have much time for the first lift to be completed.”

“We have to get as much done in one session as we can, old boy,” Purdue reminded him as he pulled some of the remains aside. “There are easily a few hundred German soldiers down here, and,” he hesitated as he grasped at something, “more of these.”

Vincent shook his head when Purdue showed him more of the golden coins. “These seem to be everywhere the dead guys are. Maybe they were carrying it?”

“God knows. I hope they did not swallow these treasures in some desperate errand to hide or claim it. That is greed taken a bit too far,” Purdue remarked.

“Would serve them right, though,” Vincent scoffed. “Look, David, I don’t want to speak out of place, but these boys don’t look like common skeletons, hey? Am I off or what? By the looks of them, their skins are still on them, hair, the lot. They look like… mummies?”

“Could be,” Purdue muttered as he disappeared into the boiler room adjacent to count more bodies. “Perhaps the heat from the boiler room and the ovens petrified their remains?”

Vincent felt decidedly creeped out by the grisly scene, and with the undertow bringing all kinds of sounds through the broken carcass of the battleship, it made for an experience that could make even the devil uneasy. “Do hurry, David! We have to get topside before the tide changes!”

Purdue was silent behind the wall of bodies. Only the echoes of the dead ship accompanied the skipper of the Cóncord as he took samples of fabric from the uniforms, and, reluctantly, peeling minute samples of skin and hair from the bones of his nearest gruesome donor.

“My God! I don’t believe this!” Purdue shouted from the other room. “Vincent! You have to get one more pulley down here before we pack up for the day, old boy!”

“What? What is it?” Vincent asked eagerly, very grateful to hear his diving partner’s voice again. He chose to follow through the morbid obstacle of corpses to see what Purdue was on about. With great toil he finally managed to get through with the heavy tanks still strapped to his back. His blue eyes grew wild at the vision before him, bringing tears to his eyes.

“Unbelievable. Oh Christ, she is beautiful,” he wailed as Purdue smiled.

“Do you know her?” Purdue asked playfully, assuming the golden statue of an Inca woman in full royal dress was the relic Vincent was looking for.

“I know her,” Vincent said softly as he waddled towards the full-size artwork. He looked at Purdue with an expression of absolute shock and admiration, his thick, gloved hands shaking. “Do you realize what this means, David?”

“Your prophecy can come true?” Purdue guessed, still not certain about the pursuits of the mariner with the oddly blue eyes.

“This is the statue reputed to have been melted down by the greedy Spanish conquistadors under that dog, Pizarro, after the sacking of Cuzco in 1533. Do you know the account of Atahualpa, the Inca emperor the Spanish held ransom?”

Purdue shook his head. “No, I’m afraid I don’t. I’ve heard of Atahualpa, but I fear I lack the smaller details.”

“Murdering, greedy bastards, they were,” Vincent lamented.

A loud clank against the gunwale jolted them both back to reality. They gathered the samples, designated the area with bright orange luminous paint and returned to the surface with far more than they ever thought they would find.