Xibalba

CHAPTER 29

Crossing the still warm cooking stone reminded Alex of the firewalk he had done, except this time, the potential reward wasn’t just some abstract sense of accomplishment or empowerment. When this was done, he was going to literally change the world.

He felt an almost overpowering urge to keep moving.

“This is Dark House,” Carina said as he stepped down onto the floor of the cavern.

“Well, that’s a clever name,” he retorted. He played his light across the pitted floor of the chamber. “Who would have expected a cave to be dark? Oh, wait. We did. That’s why we brought flashlights.”

“Your lights won’t help you find a way through the darkness,” Isabella said. There was still a hint of contempt in her tone, but Alex thought she mostly just sounded beaten.

“I suppose you’re the only one who can guide us?”

Carina spoke quickly. “We don’t need her. I learned the same stories she did. I know what we have to do. We must trust the darkness.” She stared at Isabella, as if looking for confirmation. The latter raised an eyebrow but said nothing. “Turn off your lights. All of you. In a few minutes, the path will be revealed.”

“That sounds like a really lame idea,” Alex replied. He turned to Isabella. “If she’s right about that, then we probably don’t need you anymore.”

Isabella shrugged. “Do as you will.”

Alex laughed. “All right, then. Lights out, everyone.”

He maintained his confident façade right up until the moment the last light winked out. The darkness was like nothing he had ever experienced before, a void so ominous that he almost dropped to his knees to avoid falling.

This was much, much worse than dancing across hot coals.

“Carina,” he sang out, unable to completely mask the quaver in his voice. “How are we coming on that path?”

“Patience,” came the hissed reply.

“Not my strongest personality trait.” As he said it, he thought he heard a muffled grunt in the darkness. Cold adrenaline dumped into his veins, and for an instant, he could see monstrous shapes emerging from the absolute darkness.

“I’m turning on my light,” he said, frantically trying to find the switch.

“No! We will never find our way through if we give into our fears.”

Alex growled in frustration and kept his hand poised above the switch. “You’d better hurry. We need to keep moving.”

As the seconds ticked by, his other senses became hyper-aware. The sounds of the men around him breathing, sniffing the air, coughing, passing gas. He could definitely smell that, too. The air was a rank mixture of sewage and something like cat piss.

“Enough!” he shouted. “You had your chance, Carina.”

“No, wait. I see something—”

Alex ignored her plea and hit the switch, unleashing a focused but nonetheless blinding shaft of light into the cave depths. He winced, squinting against the painful but welcome brilliance, and brought light around toward their captive.

Except Isabella wasn’t there anymore, and the two men who had been holding her between them lay motionless on the cavern floor, with blood streaming from slashed throats. The other men from the security team immediately went to work trying to assist their fallen comrades, but it was plainly evident that the men were already beyond help.

Alex could barely form words through his rage. “Where is she? Find her.”

“Forget her,” Carina snapped. “You’ll never find her in here. You’ll only get more of your men killed.”

Alex rounded on her. “And I suppose you’ve got a better idea?”

“I do. There’s a map on the ceiling. It’s phosphorescent, so you can’t see it with the lights on, but I saw where it was leading.” She took a few confident steps forward, then shone her own flashlight down onto the floor. “I didn’t notice this earlier, but look. These marks on the floor here… ”

She shifted the light, following a series of smudges on the rough limestone. “That’s mud, left behind by someone crawling on hands and knees. It perfectly follows the map on the ceiling.”

“Who? Isabella?”

“No. There wouldn’t have been enough time for her to kill your men and crawl out. More likely, it was Maddock’s team. They’re helping us and they don’t even know it.” She knelt and dragged a fingertip across one of the smudges. “It’s still wet. We’re close. We can catch them.”

Alex stared at her for a moment, then looked back at the two dead men. His private army was dwindling fast. Part of him couldn’t help but wonder if that had been Carina’s intention all along.

With the last of the rope, Bones anchored Maddock for an exploration of the fog-shrouded bottom of the hill. The vapor was like evaporating dry ice, and as he slid down the frozen slope, Maddock had a feeling the air inside would be just about as cold, too.

Up close, he had a couple feet of visibility, just enough to see what looked like a narrow protrusion — barely wider than his hand — extending horizontally from the slope. To either side of it, there was an abrupt vertical drop into the impenetrable cloud.

“Hold up!” he shouted, barely able to get the words out through chattering teeth.

Bones immediately locked down the rope which kept him more or less at the edge of the freezing cloud.

“Gi… Give me… a foot.”

Bones played out a few inches of rope, just enough for Maddock to plant his feet on the protrusion, which he now saw continued out across the gap, like a bridge.

A very narrow bridge.

Covered in an inch of solid ice.

With painstaking care, he eased himself down until he was straddling the span. The cold knifed up through his body. The ice stuck to the fabric of his clothes, and the exposed skin of his palms as he began shuffling himself forward.

“More!”

The rope slackened, allowing him to scoot out a little further. Now he could see all the way across the gap to the hidden ledge at the end of the bridge. There was another doorway there.

He slid the rest of the way across, frantic for any respite from the bone-chilling cold. The ledge, as expected, was thick with ice, but the doorway was close enough to give him something to hold onto as he got back to his feet. Even better, he could feel warm air — relatively speaking at least — flowing through the opening.

He turned and looked back but couldn’t see anything except white mist.

“Made it across,” he shouted, finally able to catch his breath.

“Cool,” Bones shouted back.

Maddock tried to think of a suitable rejoinder, but his brain was still partly frozen. “Yeah. There’s a really narrow bridge down here, and door on this side of it. But the bridge is slippery and it’s really cold. I think we might be better off to rig a Tyrolean traverse.”

“I’ll take care of things on this end,” Bones replied. “Let me know where you’re ready to start catching.”

It took only a few minutes for the two to anchor the line at both ends, forming a zip-line across the chasm. Once the line was secure, the others began sliding down, one at a time. Bones slid the pack with the SCUBA gear along, and then followed.

When he was finally across, he hugged his arms across his chest. “Man, I’m glad there are no babes around to see my package right now.”

“Don’t use shrinkage as an excuse,” Angel quipped. “I’ve talked to enough of your exes.”

“Let’s focus.” Maddock nodded to the open doorway. “Any idea what we’re going to find in there?”

“We’ve made it past Dark House, Blade House, and Cold House,” Bell said. “If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say we’ve reached the House of Jaguars.”

“Literal actual jaguars?” Bones shook his head. “That makes no sense. How could a population of big cats survive down here, closed off from the outside world? What would they even eat?”

“Hopefully not us,” Maddock said, and stepped through the doorway.

The jaguars that waited for them were not literal flesh and blood animals, but rather larger-than-life carved stelae, dozens of them, arranged in haphazard rows on the floor of a large natural cavern. The layout was somewhat reminiscent of Dark House, only with statues instead of stalactites and pitfalls.

“That’s a jaguar?” Bones remarked, shining his light on the nearest stylized image. “How can you tell?”

“Easy,” Angel said. “It’s got spots.”

“So does a Dalmatian.”

“When you’ve studied the Maya as long as I have, it’s obvious,” Bell replied. “But these aren’t all jaguars.” He shone his light onto one of the other figures. “That’s a monkey. And there’s a rabbit.”

“If you say so. They remind me of the terra cotta warriors in the Emperor’s Tomb in China.”

“Or the chess game in that Harry Potter movie,” Angel added.

“Obviously we don’t have to worry about them eating us,” Maddock said. “But must be some other kind of threat here. A booby trap, maybe.”

“That would seem a logical assumption. I would recommend giving them a wide berth.”

“I’m not sure that’s going to be possible. Any hints in the Popol Vuh?”

“The Hero Twins kept the jaguars at bay by giving them bones to chew on instead. I’m not sure how that helps us.”

“Could be a weight activated trap,” Bones suggested. “Like the River of Blood.”

“We’ll go with that for now,” Maddock said. “Dr. Bell, keep calling out the animals as we get close. Everyone else keep a look out for the trigger mechanisms.”

They moved out single-file, heading toward the stelae that Bell identified as a monkey. As soon as they were past it, Bell excitedly pointed to another stelae. “There. Those two. They’re dogs. And they’re facing each other. That’s the way we should go.” Before anyone could respond, the archaeologist pushed past Maddock and strode out to prove his theory.

“Dad!” Miranda shouted, but Bell was almost to his goal.

Maddock held his breath as Bell reached the narrow gap between the two carvings, but nothing happened. Bell shone his light into the next row. “There are two more dogs here. This is the way. Follow me.”

Maddock exchanged a glance with Bones.

“Guess it was his turn to go first,” Bones said with a shrug.

Bell led them from row to row, finding the paired dogs that, evidently, indicated safe passage through the death trap. As they progressed, Maddock felt the pins and needles of sensation returning to his frost-numbed fingertips and extremities.

“Thawing out is worse than getting frozen in the first place,” he remarked to Angel.

“I know, right? I take back what I said about wanting to get to Hot House.”

Maddock looked out at her sideways. “What do you mean?”

“It’s like a sauna in here. And getting worse.”

“So it’s not just me.”

Miranda, walking alongside her father, looked back. “Definitely not just you.”

The passage at the far end of Jaguar House was like the open door of a blast furnace, glowing red with radiant energy, and even Bell seemed reluctant to approach it.

“Hot House,” he announced. “Also called the House of Fire. It is said to be filled with fire. The Twins passed through unhurt, but there’s no explanation given as to how they were able to do so. But the lightning dog hasn’t led us astray yet.”

“It’s got to be close to 200 degrees in there,” Angel said.

“Yeah, but it’s a dry heat,” Bones remarked.

He probably meant it as a joke, but Maddock knew that humidity made a big difference as the temperatures increased. During the course of their search for Atlantean technology a few years earlier, he and Bones had rescued their teammate Matt Barnaby from the Cave of Crystal Giants in Mexico. The cavern was filled with enormous gypsum crystals, and situated above a magma plume. The temperature in that cave was only about 150 degrees Fahrenheit, but because the humidity was nearly 99 %, even with protective equipment, the safe limit of exposure was only about half an hour.

Unfortunately, they didn’t have any protective gear now.

“You know,” Bones went on, looking right at Angel. “It just might be hot enough in there to burn all that nasty hair off of your back.”

He quickly retreated a few steps before she could slug him.

Maddock turned to Miranda. “You want this one?”

Miranda stepped back and made a sweeping gesture. “After you, hero.”

I guess she’s done trying to impress Angel, Maddock thought, and then stepped through into the passage.

The cavern was smaller than the last, or at least it seemed that way because the neon red glow emanating from cracks that crisscrossed the floor lit it from end to end. The limestone walls and floor were a uniform white under the beam of his headlamp, which had the effect of distributing the magma-like glow, and presumably the heat as well. There were no shadowy corners or blind spots, but at the opposite end of the chamber, maybe fifty yards away, he could see the dark outline of another doorway. The floor, which appeared to be covered in fine white dust, was mostly flat, except where it was cracked, but scattered randomly throughout were little statues that gleamed a metallic orange in the dull light. He couldn’t tell which if any were dogs, but he was pretty sure that they were all made of the same fire-resistant material.

Gold.

His original plan was to step into Hot House just far enough to identify the specific dangers they would face and, if he was lucky, spot a guidestone or some other relevant marker, but that plan quickly went out the window.

As he took his third step, he heard a sound like an eggshell being crushed. He drew back, but the crunching sound was now coming from his back foot. He moved again, sideways this time, but no matter where he stepped, the floor crunched like thin ice.

It wasn’t ice of course, but rather a thin layer of limestone, baked brittle by the persistent heat of a partially exposed magma pocket.

A line from an old poem flashed through his head. In skating over thin ice, our safety is in speed.

Instead of retreating, he started forward, almost running.

The crackling sound followed ominously, and each step seemed to release a fresh wave of heat.

He doubted that the original architects of Xibalba had done anything to make this room more dangerous. Nature had done all the work for them, but the floor was now almost certainly more fragile than it had been centuries earlier, during the time of the Maya. Still, it seemed logical that the cracks marked the places where the crust was weakest, so he avoided these. The golden statues might have been placed as guidestones or as bait to lure the greedy to their doom; there was no way to know for sure, so he avoided these as well.

The floor held up. He reached the other side in mere seconds, savoring the relative cool of the dark passage beyond, despite the overwhelming stench in the air. The odor stung his nose and brought tears to his eyes.

“I’m across,” he shouted back into the cave. “The floor is thin. I don’t know how much weight it can hold, and I don’t think we want to test it. There’s no trick really, except haul ass and watch your step.”

Behind him, in the darkness, there was a strange chattering sound, and despite the heat, Maddock felt a chill shoot down his spine.

He turned away from the passage and slowly turned his head to illuminate the cavern he had just entered.

Just past the entrance, a flight of irregularly carved steps descended down into a vast, stadium-sized chamber. The floor of the cavern was covered in a substance that looked like dark mud. To get through, they would have to wade through a sea of the stuff, but that was the least of their problems.

He tilted his head back, shining the light up at an angle. Wherever the light touched, the ceiling rippled like a field of wheat being stirred by a stiff breeze.

Bones’ voice echoed across the glowing chamber behind him. “Looks like I’m going last again.”

The chattering got louder and the rustling grew more feverish, as if the ceiling were alive… which in fact, it was.

He had come to the sixth and last house of Xibalba.