Xibalba

CHAPTER 19

The rope went taut, halting Maddock’s fall mere inches above the sea of scorpions, but he had to throw his arms out wide in order to keep from spinning and face-planting into their midst. One glistening black stinger filled his vision, so close that he had to go cross-eyed to bring it into focus.

“Bones,” he said, his voice barely louder than a whisper. “Pull me up. Very. Slowly.”

Nothing happened. Bones and the others were too far away to hear him.

Yet, in the moment or two it took him to figure this out, he realized something else as well. The scorpions weren’t moving.

“Not real,” he breathed, letting out a sigh of relief.

That wasn’t entirely accurate though. The arachnid bodies covering the floor beneath him weren’t actual scorpions, but they weren’t the product of his imagination, either. They were amazingly life-like reproductions, each one the size of his hand, and carved out of a glossy black substance that reflected the light and revealed edges sharper than the blade of a razor.

Obsidian.

When he had settled his weight on the stone square at the center, it had triggered some kind of pressure-sensitive mechanism, which had in turn caused the carved scorpions to spring up out of the recessed area in the floor, creating the illusion of a living swarm. The little statues were everywhere, covering the floor so densely that there did not appear to be any space large enough to step, let alone ease himself down gently.

But he couldn’t stay like this for much longer.

Moving slowly so as not to become unbalanced, he twisted his body sideways and caught the rope. From this vantage, he could make out the square of bare stone — his original intended landing area — just below his outstretched legs. The block had sunk into the floor, but only to a depth of about six inches. Just enough to throw him off balance at that crucial instant. Gripping the rope, he lifted his upper torso, tilting his legs back until his feet finally made contact.

He braced himself in anticipation of some other elaborate booby-trap, but nothing else happened. The stone floor remained solid beneath him as he brought himself to an upright position. He pulled the rope free of the carabiner he had been using as a rappelling device and shouted up to the others, “I’m down!”

The chamber was filled with echoes.

“You okay?” came the slightly muffled reply — Bones, shouting into the serpent’s mouth.

“Yeah. Triggered some kind of booby-trap. About a million carved scorpions just popped out of the floor.”

There was a pause, and then a fainter voice — Charles Bell — floated down to him. “Did you say ‘scorpions’?”

“Yes. Why? Is that important?”

“In the Popol Vuh, the road to Xibalba crosses three rivers. The first is filled with scorpions.”

“Great,” Maddock replied. “What’s in the other two?”

“Blood and pus.”

Maddock gave an involuntary shudder. “I’m sorry I asked.”

“Be very careful where you step,” Bell went on. “They may only be carvings, but I would hazard a guess that their stingers are tipped in poison.”

Maddock nodded, probing the forest of poised stingers with his light. Now that he wasn’t dangling scant inches above them, he could see gaps in their ranks, large enough to step in if he moved with painstaking caution, but he hesitated.

There were several options for the first step, but he had no idea which direction to go. And he had already tripped one booby-trap; there were almost certainly more.

Then he noticed a mark carved into the stone. It looked like a paw print — a large triangular pad with four evenly spaced oblong toes, all pointing forward. He was no expert, but it looked a lot like a dog paw.

“The lightning dog guides the souls to the Underworld,” he muttered. “All right. Let’s do this.”

He extended a leg out over the frozen swarm and eased his foot down with all the care of someone trying to cross a minefield. The sole of his hiking boot made contact, and then he transferred his weight onto it.

The floor remained solid beneath him, and as he advanced, he saw another paw print a couple feet further ahead. Beyond it was another, set slightly to the left of the others.

“There’s a path through them,” he shouted. “Marked with paw prints. I’m going to follow it.”

“I’m coming down,” Bell replied.

Maddock could hear low voices, Miranda and Bones trying to talk the elderly archaeologist out of his stated decision. He knew they wouldn’t succeed, and even though he agreed with them, he also understood where Bell was coming from.

The argument was eventually resolved, and as Maddock took his fifth step, following a path that seemed to be spiraling out from the center, he glimpsed someone starting down the rope. Not Charles Bell, but Miranda, no doubt going ahead of her father to set a belay for him from below.

Maddock could now see the far edge of the chamber, a stone wall about thirty yards past his present position — fifty or so yards from the center. He kept going, picking his way forward one paw print at a time, curling around the center as Miranda finished her descent.

The path turned him again. Instead of a wall, the beam of his flashlight revealed only deep shadow, and the paw prints were taking him directly toward it, and away from the center. He kept his focus on what lay directly ahead. The paw prints had not led him to a dead end yet, but if Bell was right, a single scratch from one of the obsidian scorpions might prove fatal.

A few more steps and he could just make out the shore — the end of the river of scorpions — a line of undecorated stone tiles. Beyond it, a smaller chamber still cloaked in shadow.

He was sweating now. The air was cool, if slightly humid, and he was barely moving faster than a crawl, but the intense concentration was as exhausting as a marathon run.

Now he could see past the dividing line, though there was not much to see. There was a gap, about six feet across, transecting the chamber, and beyond it, another line of stone blocks, parallel to the first. The gap reminded him of a man-made drainage channel, a more literal river. He wondered if he would find it filled with blood, pus, water, or nothing at all.

A few more steps, and he got his answer. The stone blocks were now only about ten feet away, and beyond them, the dark trough was bristling with sharp spikes.

“Maddock!”

Miranda’s shout came just as he was about to take another step, startling him. He froze, his heart pounding, his foot hovering above the last row of carved scorpions. He forced himself to unclench and took several deep breaths.

“Yeah?”

“We’re starting out.”

Another breath and then he stretched his foot out and took the final step. He felt like collapsing right there, but instead he turned around and shone his light out across the obsidian deathtrap. “Watch your step!”

Miranda located the first paw print and shone her light on it. “You see it?”

Bell was hunched over, hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath after the rappel, but he nodded. “The tracks of Xlotl, the Lightning Dog, showing us the way across the river of scorpions. We’ve done it, Miranda. We’ve found the entrance to Xibalba.”

Miranda was less sanguine about the discovery. “I still think we’re going too fast. Finding it doesn’t mean a thing if we don’t make it back to tell the story.” She looked up the length of the rope to where Angel was just beginning her descent. “Getting back up that rope won’t be a picnic.”

“The path to the Underworld is a symbolic journey,” Bell said. “A spiritual pilgrimage, not a literal journey into hell. We probably won’t be leaving by the same path.”

“If you say so. You sure you’re okay to make it across?”

“I’ll do what I have to do.” He straightened, took another shallow, halting breath, and then took his first step.

She stayed as close as she dared, but as they ventured deeper into the maze-like path, it was all she could do to stay focused on her own footing. The immediacy of the peril presented by the gleaming black scorpions felt like a physical assault. One slip, one misstep, one minor miscalculation and…

“Oh!” Bell gasped.

Miranda snapped her gaze forward. Charles Bell was bent over, one hand clutching an ankle. “Dad?”

“I’m okay,” he said, though the quaver in his voice indicated he was anything but. “It’s just a scratch.”

Miranda felt her own pulse quickening. “Dad. You have to keep going. Get to Maddock. He’ll be able to help. He can… ” She had no idea what Maddock would be able to do for her father.

“I know,” Bell said after a moment, sounding a little calmer. “You know what, I think it is just a scratch. I don’t feel anything out of the ordinary. Maybe they didn’t use poison after all. Or maybe it’s lost its potency.”

Miranda hoped he was right. Only time would tell. “Just keep going, Dad. And for God’s sake, be careful.”

Maddock shared Miranda’s horror at Bell’s misstep, as well as her utter helplessness. But the archaeologist completed the rest of the journey with no further difficulty. The wound, a two-inch long slice just above Bell’s ankle, was weeping blood, but the surrounding skin was not inflamed, suggesting the cut was clean. Maddock rinsed the wound and bound it with gauze and an elastic bandage, finishing up just as Angel arrived. Bones was still making his way through the maze, but Maddock could see that the big man was carrying one of their SCUBA rigs on his shoulder.

“Show-off,” Maddock said as Bones got within shouting distance.

“Hey, I don’t mind humping in the gear, but if it comes to swimming through rivers of blood and pus, this stuff’s all yours.” The big Indian was grinning, but the beads of perspiration bore testimony to the difficulty of the effort. As he took the final step, he shrugged the bag with the diving gear off his shoulder and tossed it to Maddock.

At that very instant, a low rumbling rose up through the stone floor, and with a faint snick, the obsidian scorpions retreated back into the floor of the chamber behind them.

Bones looked over his shoulder. “Huh. If I’d known that was going to happen, I’d have waited a few more minutes.”

“I think the floor’s weight sensitive,” Maddock said.

“Still trying to convince me that I’m fat,” Bones said, shaking his head sadly. “You’re just revealing your own insecurities.”

Maddock ignored him. “Once you stepped off and there wasn’t any pressure on it, the mechanism reset. I don’t know if it’s safe to walk on now or not.”

“It doesn’t matter now,” Bell said. “Our path lies forward.”

Maddock shone his light down across the trough, illuminating the nest of sharp wooden stakes protruding out from the walls on either side. Some of the spikes held onto skeletal human remains. Others were crusted with a dark flaky-looking substance,

“Looks like a BYOB river of blood,” Bones observed. He paused for a second, then added, “You know, ‘bring your—’”

“Your own blood,” Maddock finished. “Yeah, got it. Dr. Bell, do you agree?”

Bell was nodding his head. “I would concur. Fail to make the crossing, and your blood is added to the river. Just like that poor soul.” He pointed to a nearby skull, impaled on a stake through the eye socket.

“How do we get across?” Angel said. “Jump?”

“It’s not that far,” Bones said, “But that platform is only about a meter wide. You’d have to be a cat to stick that landing.”

“There’s got to be another way,” Miranda said. “There’s no way my dad can make that jump.”

Maddock leaned forward a little, playing the light down into the depths of the chasm. It was deep, at least fifteen or twenty feet down, but something was reflecting the light back from the bottom, glittering like a pinpoint of starlight. “There’s something down there,” he said. “It looks like gold.”

“Maya bling,” Bones surmised. “Maybe skelly there was wearing a gold chain around his neck.”

Maddock turned to Bell. “Didn’t the Maya adorn their sacrificial victims in gold?”

Bell’s eyes widened in comprehension. “Of course. The skeletons aren’t from people who failed to make the jump. They’re sacrificial offerings, brought along by pilgrims making the journey to Xibalba. Blood for the river.” He turned to Bones. “Just like you said. BYOB.”

“Wait, so you mean we have to make a human sacrifice before we can go across?” Bones shook his head. “Not it.”

Maddock brought his light back to the protruding spikes. “I wonder… ” He straightened. “Maybe it’s not about the blood. We just need something that weighs enough.”

“Enough to what?”

Maddock turned to him, then picked up the bag Bones had humped through the scorpion maze. With two full SCUBA bottles, and sundry other pieces of equipment, it weighed a good sixty pounds. “It’s a bit light, but hopefully it’s enough.”

He took out a coil of rope and tied one end around the carrying straps. As soon as he was finished, he measured off several arm-lengths of rope, passing the remainder to Bones. “Hang onto it,” he said, and then heaved the heavy parcel out over the edge.

The bag crashed into the nearest spike which, brittle with age, snapped off with a sound like breaking bones and an explosion of dust. The bag continued to fall, the rope snaking into the chasm, but at almost the same instant that the spike broke off, there was another sound, a deep rumbling that vibrated in the stone underfoot. And then the floor upon which they were standing began to move, sliding forward, partially covering the trough. The stone platform on the far side of the chasm was also moving, sliding out from the opposite direction to completely bridge the gap.

The shift was abrupt, almost unbalancing them. Maddock and Angel reacted by instinctively widening their stances to stay on their feet, as did Bones and Miranda, with the latter gripping her father’s arm, helping him stay on his feet. Bones then went into motion, furiously pulling up the bag with their gear lest it become permanently lost, but his haste was mostly unnecessary. When the leading edges of the two platforms were just six inches apart, they stopped moving. Maddock could now see faint paw prints etched in the stone on the far side.

“There,” he said, pointing to the mark. “Step there. Move it.”

With Angel’s hand in his, he hopped over the narrow gap onto the far platform. Miranda and Bell quickly followed, and Bones, still trailing the rope attached to their substitute “human” sacrifice, brought up the rear. As soon as he was across, the two platforms began moving again, sliding back to their original configuration before grinding to a halt. The only difference was that now the five explorers were stranded in the middle of the chamber.

There was another channel on the other side of the platform, but instead of a deep chasm like the one they had just crossed over, this was a comparatively shallow trough — only about six feet deep — accessible by a steep flight of stone steps that descended down to the bottom of the trough, but at either end of the trough, another flight of steps rose to a third platform on the far side. There were no spikes and no sign of skeletal remains, but the bottom of the channel, however, was far from empty.

Maddock shone his light down revealing what looked like a long bramble of dried thorn bushes, covered in a fine powdery black substance, like velvet on a buck’s antlers.

Bones, who was looking over his shoulder as he reeled in the rope tied to the gear bag, said, “Maybe ‘pus’ meant something else to the Maya?”

“You think so?” Miranda said. “Ever heard of a little thing called a staph infection? Or candida or aspergillus? That black dust is on everything. I’ll bet you fifty bucks it’s some kind of fungus. Even if we could get through that without a scratch, we’d probably breathe in the spores. Dad is especially vulnerable because of his COPD.”

“Could a fungus even survive down here?” Angel asked. “I mean, it’s been hundreds of years, right?”

“There’s evidence that some fungal spores can remain dormant for at least a quarter century. And even if they’re dead, they may have produced toxic or carcinogenic chemical compounds. Not many people realize it, but fungal diseases kill more people every year than malaria, and they’re extremely hard to treat.” She realized they were all staring at her and shrugged. “I had to take a course in infectious disease. Work related.”

“So what are we looking for here?” Bones asked. “Do we need to make another sacrificial offering? Trip some switch and make a bridge across this sucker?”

Maddock shook his head. “I don’t think so. I think this was meant to be another test of faith for the pilgrims. To get to Xibalba, you had to be willing to walk through that stuff, risk getting infected by… whatever that is.” He glanced at Bell for confirmation, and got a nod.

“That’s not an option for us,” Miranda said. “There has to be another way.”

“Maybe we could get a gigantic can of athlete’s foot spray?” Bones suggested.

“We’ll burn it out,” Maddock said. “Remember how those spikes broke off? Even though the air is damp down here, the wood is old and brittle. Those thorn bushes down there will probably go up like matchsticks.”

Bell grinned. “A solution worthy of the Hero Twins.”

“Whose?” Bones said. “His or mine?”

“Because hot smoke is so much easier to breathe than fungal spores,” Miranda said, her tone thick with sarcasm.

“We won’t be breathing smoke. We’ve got a SCUBA rig with a couple hours’ worth of air. With the main line and the octopus, we can buddy breathe until the air clears, which probably won’t take that long.”

Miranda offered no further protest, but her disapproving frown remained fixed in place as Maddock began talking them through buddy breathing procedures and other precautions to safeguard them from the heat and smoke. While Bones and Angel worked to fashion a fire shelter from a reflective space blanket, Maddock created a tinder pile from pocket lint and bits of shredded paper, and when everyone was set, he used a fire-piston to set it alight. He could have just used one of the waterproof matches included in the survival kit in the gear bag, but he’d been looking for a chance to try out the fire-starting device, which used compressed air to ignite the tinder. As soon as he coaxed a small flame to life, he tossed the tinder out into the thorn-filled channel and then ducked under the shelter with the others while the fire did its work.