Hollowland (33 page)

His elbows struck ground that was at least a foot below that on the outside, followed by his knees.
 
He yelped as pain rattled through his bones.
 
A disgusting, noxious scent – much like vinegar – assaulted his nostrils for a moment, and then disappeared.
 
He fumbled for the flashlight, which shone an arbitrary beam on the pile of discarded rock he’d created.
 
His heart raced and he felt out of breath.
 
The chilling sensation of being watched tiptoed over his shoulder blades.
 
He flashed the light at the hole he created, now above him, just to be sure.
 
There was no one there, no people, no phantoms; even the insects stayed away, much like they had in the main chamber.
 
He breathed out a sigh of relief and cursed his childish paranoia.

The room felt cold and cramped, though it was bigger than the passage which led to it.
 
The ceiling hung low enough that he had to tilt his head to stand, but at least he was through with the squatting.
 
The place was thin, only four meters at most, but at least three times as long.
 
With his back to the door and gazing straight ahead, his flashlight only created the tiniest of circles; he decided he’d get to that part of the chamber later.
 
He sniffed the air – the odor of vinegar must have been his imagination, he assumed – and realized the chamber smelled much like the basement of his mother’s house in
Banbury
.
 
Like an ill-maintained, moldy fruit cellar.
 
He shrugged it off to the humidity and began examining his surroundings.

The first thing he noticed – other than the thousand or so cobwebs – was the shrine.
 
It stood against the wall a few feet to the right of the entryway.
 
He drew close and inspected it; made of some sort of limestone composite whose surface shone with natural, glass-like crystals, a meter wide at its rectangular base, coming up in a pyramid shape, with a bronze effigy of
Kinich-Ahau
, the sun god, his face green with oxidation, watching over the room from its perch on the shrine’s apex.
 
Maybe the temple theory is back in play
, he thought.

A shelf of white bone protruded from the area below the effigy.
 
Below that was an ancient book.
 
Looking at the side, it seemed as if the pages would disintegrate should anyone deem to touch them.
 
The cover had been warped by time but was otherwise preserved, and after blowing the dust off he saw the tapestry on its surface had remained intact, as well.
 
A gold-leafed outline of a blazing sun emerged.
 
Ken’s jaw dropped.

The
Popol-Uuh
.
 
The Mayan holy book.
 
It had to be.
 
Oh, what a find!
 
Over the years, very few bits of parchment thought to be from that very text had made their way across the desk of his Regent Park office.
 
Most were fakes – all but one had turned out to be, in fact – and the only genuine article he’d ever witnessed was a single half-leaf whose pictograms were essentially unreadable.
 
He’d given up hope after that.
 
But now…now, it could all be different.
 
There it was – there it
could be
, he corrected – almost in the palm of his hand, bathed in his flashlight’s beam.

Ken didn’t want to turn away from the book, but in the end he did just that.
 
There were other things to see and he had to get a move on.
 
Daylight wouldn’t last forever, and he didn’t want to risk driving through the jungle at night –
especially
with that defective kid behind the wheel.

The walls of the chamber were smooth, just as they’d been in the main hall and passageway.
 
The whole place seemed constructed from a mold, if that were possible.
 
Deep grooves marked the surface every so often, as if someone or something had tried to claw its way out.
 
This gave him a sudden jolt of panic.
 
The idea that something should be
in there with him
caused the dial on his fight or flight instinct to start wavering toward the latter.

He swallowed hard, closed his eyes, and counted to ten.
 
This simple trick always worked in the past, and this time proved no different.
 
His heart rate slowed to a steady
thump-thump-thump
.
 
His breathing decelerated.
 
His mind cleared, as though a soft voice whispered gentle comforts into it.

That voice told him,
it’s time to come forward
.

His feet shuffled onward over the dirt floor.
 
He progressed toward the milky-black end of the chamber.
 
Gradually, his flashlight picked up the vague outline of a shadowy object, and he realized why his light hadn’t been able to fully penetrate the air; a sheet of what seemed to be silk had been suspended from the ceiling, stretching the width of the chamber, fifteen feet from the small doorway.
 
This struck him as odd – the voice of Cautious Ken urged him to be guarded and follow his logical instincts – but he gently pushed aside the curtain, used a fastener from his belt to hold it aside, and shone his light in nonetheless.

Wedged in the corner sat what appeared to be a primitively assembled church pew.
 
The mummified remains of a small girl knelt upon it; hands clasped on a stone pillar as if she’d fallen asleep there and never woken up.
 
Ken couldn’t believe his eyes.

He moved alongside the mummy, getting as close as he could without touching it.
 
Judging by the diminutive stature of the corpse and the wisps of black hair – amazingly still in place after all these centuries – that draped over its shoulders to the middle of its back, he guessed the poor soul couldn’t have been older than ten-to-twelve years old at the time of her entombment.
 
A split black veil hung from a headpiece of dried tree bark and dangled at the nape of her neck, framing her face.

And what a face it was.
 
The neck had been craned back as if in an eternal scream.
 
The hollow eye sockets gazed at the ceiling.
 
The skin appeared cracked and brown, but amazingly conserved, and the mouth, which still had its teeth, hung open in a ghastly, undead expression of pain, as if offering one final holler of damnation to the heavens.

That’s when it hit him: the poor girl had been buried alive down here.

“Amazing,” Ken whispered with a touch of sadness.
 
How it must have felt for her, to be trapped in this sinister place, all alone, left to wither away into the nothingness of time.
 
He felt her loneliness and fear, and for a brief instant hated those he’d spent his life studying.

Very gently, Ken reached for the mummy-girl’s clasped hands.
 
Confusion spiraled through his brain like an unstoppable whirlpool as he did this, for the logical portion of his brain knew the rules.
 
Never, ever place your dirty hands on something as precious and fragile as this.
 
Yet he couldn’t stop himself.
 
His fingers brushed the mummy’s flesh.
 
The texture reminded him of sandpaper.
 
Then he grew bolder, rubbing the spot as if trying to ease the dead girl’s epoch of isolation with a well-deserved, loving caress.
 
Stop it, man, what are you doing?
his mind screamed, but he couldn’t pull himself away.
 
His consciousness grew dim and his vision faded.

A bright light flashed in his eyes and images poured into his head.
 
Fire surrounded him on all sides, creating an impenetrable wall of heat.
 
He could see people standing around the lip of the shallow pit he found himself in, dark-skinned and dressed in animal hides with headdresses of brightly colored feathers on their heads.
 
He felt his own throat constrict with laughter and watched those around him tremble at the sound.
 
Flames licked his flesh, searing it, but he felt no pain.
 
He pushed his hands forward, breaking free of their bonds, and lunged for the one standing closest to him, the one who chanted.
 
He cleared the rim of the crater in a single leap, leaving the flames behind.
 
His fingers, looking small, delicate, and slightly charred, wrapped around the man’s throat.
 
He squeezed.

The scene shifted.
 
Now he floated above the ground, bound and gagged, as those who’d been standing around the hollow now carried him.
 
He struggled mightily, but there were too many of them.
 
He twitched, forcing the veil from his eyes, and gazed at the canopy above, repulsed by the vibrant greens, reds, and violets which stared down at him.
 
Then he felt himself being raised even higher into the air, then the sensation of falling.
 
Fast.
 
Then the violent impact as his body struck the ground.
 
Stars in his vision now.
 
Stars that would stop long after the dim point of light above him had been sealed over for good.

Laughter again escaped his lips.
 
He tilted his head back in the darkness and let it come, wave after wave, like a frenzied carnival clown.
 
A mantra repeated in his head, over and over and over.

The time wasn’t right, the time wasn’t right, the time wasn’t right…

As if struck by a bolt of lightning, he careened backwards, whacking the back of his head against the wall.
 
Grogginess ensued; grogginess, and dizziness so complete it seemed like he was stuck on a carousel spinning out of control.
 
He brought his hands to his head, cradled it, and rocked back and forth, trying to force away both the sensation and the vision through mindless repetition.
 
Eventually his vertigo petered out like the last drips of water from a canteen.

His head still ached, his ears still buzzed, and his intellect couldn’t come to grips with what had happened to him, but still he wedged his palms into the ground and forced himself to his knees.
 
He panted and tried the counting trick again.
 
This time it couldn’t stop the rapidity of his heart.
 
A sound emerged, something soft and scratchy, like dry hands rubbing against velvet.
 
He picked the flashlight off the ground beside him and scanned the chamber, from corpse to shrine to door and back again.
 
Nothing moved.
 
He cocked his head.
 
It felt like he had water in his ears.

The sound grew in volume, and at that point Ken understood it for what it was; a whisper.
 
It tickled at his inner ear like squirming maggots.
 
Then a voice emerged, a sickly humming,
female
voice, getting louder with each passing moment.
 
Only this wasn’t in his head.
 
This was behind him.

“Shit!” Ken yelped.
 
He spun around, his knees worn and bleeding as they scraped against the rough dirt floor.
 
His flashlight shone on the mummified little girl.
 
The cadaver had developed a liquid sheen in the few seconds since he last illuminated it, as if someone had snuck in and covered it with grease.
 
He thought briefly this had been the result of Raul, the driver, playing a practical joke on him, but that couldn’t explain the humming he that still invaded his hearing.
 
Closer he inched, his bloody knees smarting, only to stop when a rather large beetle scampered over the mummy’s shoulder.

“Shoo,” he said while waving his hand at it.
 
The beetle lifted its pincers and snapped them together, then took off back from whence it came.
 
What came next was the riot of a thousand tiny clackers.
 
It sounded like game day at
Wembley
Stadium.
 
He flashed the light over his shoulder.
 
Perched on the edge of the door cut in the side of the chamber sat a horde of the insects from the passageway, too many to count, seemingly on the verge of joining him in a space that now seemed far too congested.
 
They twitched and writhed.

Game day at
Wembley
, indeed.

A bone-jarring crack snapped his head back around, and his jaw dropped.
 
The mummy-girl no longer gazed at the ceiling.
 
Those empty eye sockets now stared directly at
him
, and though the mouth still hung open the way it had before, it no longer seemed to be screaming.

The mummy-girl was laughing at him.

Ken backed away.
 
The mummy-girl’s head wobbled, furthering the image of laughter, and then split at the jaw.
 
The part of the skull from disintegrated nose on up toppled off and rolled like a papier-mâché ball until it rested against the wall.
  
The lower jaw protruded from the top of a wrinkled, root-like neck.
 
Insects of every species imaginable erupted from where the head had once been like magma from a volcano.
 
They scampered the length of the mummy-girl’s body and fell in sheets.
 
The body itself, rocked by the sheer violence of the tiny invaders, collapsed.
 
More bugs poured from the newly made orifice when it hit the floor.
 
It seemed they would never end.