Hollowland (32 page)

“No bullshit, let’s just go,” he said.
 
“I’m on a schedule here.”

*
    
*
    
*

The Jeep bucked and lurched as the tires struck the roots and vines that cluttered the thin layer of dirt that passed for a jungle road.
 
Sweat covered Ken’s body and mosquitoes persisted to hover about his head despite the speed at which Raul drove.
 
He itched all over and didn’t care.
 
The inherent beauty of the rainforest moved any discomfort to the back of his mind.
 
It seemed such a difficult proposition for people to live in conditions such as these.
 
The humidity, the insects, the predators; all these natural dangers made one have to be on top of their game to simply survive, let alone blossom into a society.
 
To Ken, this fact brimmed with splendor.
 
It echoed the heights humans could reach –
did
reach – before technology caused universal laziness to wash over the globe.

Two hours after the journey began they entered a clearing.
 
The vision of the site awoke a tinge of sadness within Ken; the soothing embrace of nature in its purest form was ripped away, revealing the ugly beginnings of Humanity’s pursuit of intended uniformity.
 
Rubble from the excavation had been carelessly placed in random piles, creating a rocky maze so thin in some places that stone tore into the Jeep on both sides when they passed.

They drove across the winding stretch of flattened grass that weaved through the debris and stopped at what looked like a giant mouth cut into the landscape.
 
Ken stepped out, pulled his travel case from the back, and removed from it his harness, a coil of thick cable as wide as his torso, and his tool belt.
 
He took a clasp – one of each had been secured on opposite ends of the lead – and fastened it to the Jeep’s tow hitch.
 
That done, he tossed the cord over the edge of the pit.
 
A few seconds later he heard a dull thud.
 
The cable had struck ground.
 
He whistled between his teeth.
 
Judging by how long it took to reach the bottom, it had to be at least seventy feet deep.
 
A cold, nervous sweat dribbled down his neck as he fastened the tool belt around his waist, wiggled into the harness, locked its catch around the line, and put on his gloves.
 
He crawled to the lip and peered over.

“Bugger, that’s deep,” he whispered.
 
Then, his resolve returning, he turned to Raul and said, “You, wait here,” in an authoritative tone.

While bracing his feet on the rim of the crater he pulled the cable taut, took a deep breath, and plunged into the void.

A rush of cold, wet air greeted him.
 
His arms ached as he lowered himself down one hand at a time; his leg muscles stiffened from squeezing his feet against the rope for support.
 
Had James been there he would have used the second support lead, which he should have done anyway, just in case.
 
Now, if he fell, there’d be nothing to break his fall but the ground below.
 
He shivered and tried to force thoughts of his carelessness to the back of his mind, which proved a simple task seeing as his anticipation bubbled over any other invading emotion like foam at the crest of an ocean wave.

Still further he descended.
 
No light penetrated the small opening up above, leaving him in the black.
 
Barbs scraped his bare elbows when he swung too close to the cracked tunnel walls.
 
He considered for a moment how the walls themselves seemed much too round, the plunge much too straight, to be the happenstance creation of wayward dynamite.
 
He thought it possible the channel had been
created
, then pushed that thought, as well, to the storage space in the deep recesses of his brain.
 
There will be no conjecture here
, he thought.
 
There is only observation.
 
Gather the data.
 
The time for assumptions and analysis comes later.

After fifteen minutes of his slow, laborious plunge through the darkness, he felt a sudden breeze.
 
The mugginess surrounding him disappeared – the revealing sign of the end of the channel.
 
He remembered the warning
Fuad
Cerrano
, the director of the Nicaraguan National Institute, left on his cellular –
take it slow once you hit the open, you will have the urge to drop quickly, don’t do that, the plummet is far, yet the floor still seems to come at you in a hurry, the first two men we sent down both broke bones in their legs
– and he heeded that advice, placing one hand beneath the other even slower than before.

Amazingly, it took just as long for his toes to brush the ground as it had to enter the chamber from the tunnel.
 
His feet rolled flat from ball to heel, steadying himself as if he’d spent the last year in zero gravity.
 
He disengaged clamp from cable, took off his gloves, and felt for the line’s end.
 
There it was, right at his fingertips, without having to be uncoiled; which meant the depth of this chasm was very close to the line’s full hundred feet.
 
A whistle escaped his lips, pierced the silence around him, and bounced back two fold.

He grabbed the flashlight from its place in his belt and clicked it on.
 
A blazing cone of yellow light cut a streak through the darkness.
 
Ken looked around in amazement, trying to take in each thing the flashlight’s narrow beam revealed.
 
He stood in the middle of a huge, square room – fifty or so feet from wall to wall by his best estimation.
 
Hieroglyphs covered those walls for as far up as he could see.
 
Six crudely built wooden tables stood against the wall he faced.
 
He marched slowly toward one of them.
 
A thick layer of white dust – Ken thought it most likely the granular remains of bones – covered the top of its flat slab.
 
He pulled a brush and plastic bag from his belt and stepped forward, intent on sweeping in a sample for later testing.
 
His foot struck a vagrant stone and he fell, barely getting his hands up in time to stop his face from striking the splintery edge of the table.
 
He glanced up at the opening he’d come through, now just a speck in the middle of nothingness.
 
Again that feeling of foolishness washed over him.
 
He had to be careful.

He paced along the edge of the room, attempting to decipher some of the more interesting symbols.
 
What he saw was both beautiful and terrifying; a tale of harmony and discord, birth and demise, life and death.
 
A common theme Ken hadn’t seen before was interspersed between each set of pictograms – a single flame beside a primitively painted skull with no jaw.
 
He tried to wrap his mind around the images.
 
He’d seen pictograms such as these over the years, but they always seemed to flow smooth, always told a story.
 
The invading skull and flame didn’t make sense.

That lack of logic shot a spike of enthusiasm up his spine.
 
If there had been a Black Death here, or a period of religious cleansing like the Crusades, the messages printed on these walls might be the only record.
 
This
is
the place
, his feelings screamed,
the answer, the missing piece of the puzzle!

With renewed vigor, Ken worked at a much faster pace.
 
He turned where one wall met another and carried on much as before, eyeing his discovery with the nervous glee of a child at Christmas.
 
His pace quickened again and he passed to the third wall, then the fourth.
 
That was where he stopped.

An arched portal appeared in the middle of that fourth wall.
 
It stood only five feet high.
 
Ken bent and flashed his light in to get a look at what lay beyond.

It was a passageway, the same height as the portal which led to it.
 
The barrier at the end of the tunnel looked to be made of a strange, milky substance, like a sponge.
 
The walls leading down contained nothing as elegant as hieroglyphs; only smooth rock with nary a crack.
 
It took a moment for Ken to realize that nowhere in the temple interior did he see so much as a seam.
 
This place hadn’t been built with the customary adobe bricks.
 
To the contrary; it seemed to have been borne from the earth itself.

The sound of clamor reached his ears and he aimed the flashlight at the floor of the tunnel, revealing a scurrying sea of insects.
 
The bugs didn’t enter the main chamber, though there was nothing to stop them; they simply clawed and scurried all over each other, as if to leave the safety of the passageway would bring an immediate end to their short lives.
 
Ken let out a sigh.
 
He could stand the proposition of squatting through the burrow with those things under his feet, but he hadn’t brought a change of pants or socks; which meant he’d most likely be stuck with their gummy innards all over him until they arrived back at the hotel.
 
“Small sacrifice,” he whispered, then crouched beneath the stone arch.
 
Insects crunched beneath his soles and he had to fight off the itch to purge his morning meal of poached eggs and blood sausage when they began crawling over his boots and up his leg.
 
He held his breath and went on regardless.
 
Nothing so little as a few bugs could stop him now.

The insect-and-dust-filled corridor ended after only twenty-two steps.
 
The milky substance turned out to be thick tangles of spider webs.
 
Ken brushed them aside, exposing the wall.
 
His bit his lip hard enough to draw blood and stared into the eyes of a monster.

It was only a painting, though a very meticulous one, of a decaying man, hunched over and grinning with a lipless sneer.
 
The care that went into creating this morbid work of art was astounding.
 
He could clearly see the flesh hanging from its bones like frayed carpet fibers.
 
Ken shivered and brushed away a centipede that had made its way to the nape of his neck before hunkering in to take a closer look.
 
No detail had been spared; there were even fibers of exposed muscle that seemed to glisten in the flashlight’s beam.
 
This is amazing
, he thought.
 
It’s so intricate.
 
It belongs in the National Gallery, not the…

A final detail caught his eye, stopping him cold.

The monstrosity on the wall held a strap, made to look like leather, in its bony right hand.
 
The strap itself attached to what at first resembled a pair of sunglasses until Ken realized what they actually were – the orbital bones from a human skull.

“Well, hello,” he whispered with a smile.

The brilliant piece of art was a portrait of Yum
Cimil
, one of the great Mayan gods.
 
He’d seen representations of this particular deity many times over the years, but none as expertly crafted as this; all others were a child’s experimentation with finger-paints by comparison.
 
It brought into question the Honduran science team’s assumption that this was a temple.
 
Mayan temples were, as a rule, a place where
all
gods were revered, not just one.

Ken squatted and brushed dust off the area below where the painting ended.
 
What came forth from the sandy grit was a seam three feet off the ground.
 
He marked the crease with his finger and followed it to the floor.
 
Bugs scattered.
 
It was a door.
 
A very
small
door that seemed to have been sealed shut.
 
He pushed against the block of granite.
 
It gave slightly, and then wouldn’t move again.
 
A soft, virtually unnoticeable vibration clattered in his head.
 
Something isn’t right here
, his subconscious warned.
 
Must tread lightly.

Ken didn’t listen.
 
Exhilaration overrode his common sense.

Snatching the pickaxe from his tool belt, Ken went to work.
 
He hacked away at the stone barricade, the pick head spraying chunks of rock towards him each time he pulled back.
 
A small hole appeared, and then grew larger, then larger still. The obstruction came down with surprising ease, crumbling like dried clay.
 
Sweat poured down his chest, drenching his shirt and irritating the mosquito bites that dotted his flesh, and pooled in his crotch, but he paid no mind to the discomfort.
 
All he could think about was
what lay behind that wall.

One final stroke created a gap large enough to squeeze through.
 
He tossed in the flashlight, stuck his head into the hole, wedged his shoulders through – the sweat covering him helped in this regard – and finally let himself drop on the other side like a freshly born calf.