Kingdom Keepers VII (3 page)

O
UTSIDE THE TUNNELS
, Tia Dalma takes her rest in the shade of a tree beneath the blue moonlight. It is sweltering, the air thick as mud. Jungle birds caw and complain. Creeping critters crush and disturb the oversize foliage, their intrusion very much felt though they go unseen.

Tia Dalma raises her hand like a priestess. The buzzing jungle goes instantly quiet. As still as a pond on a windless morning.

A rhythmic thumping intrudes, like a hammer striking metal. It amplifies the pain in her head, encouraging anger to rise from her belly like lava. A mechanical, entirely human sound, it has no place in the thick of the Mexican jungle. She wills it away, but to no effect. The unwanted clanging is as steady as a heartbeat.

The remains of the walls and temples are revealed in the moonlight as rubble, oversize cubes of weathered limestone tossed about as if a child has wrecked his castle of wooden blocks. They form a festive weed-and-vine-covered courtyard, with a sacrificial table at its center. Two pyramids have been lopped off at the top, like bridal cakes decapitated. A third remains intact, the stones stacked in diminishing tiers like massive stairs rising to the heavens. The rock is crusted with colorful lichen, reminding Tia Dalma of spilled blood, with white splashes of bird droppings and vivid green weeds, air plants, and orchids forgoing dirt and living off the wet of the air itself. The pyramid has stood scabbed in silence for thousands of years, has no doubt witnessed atrocities, marriages, deaths and births, cyclones, deluge, and drought. But this constant, dull pounding from the distance arrives as an abomination.

Already agitated by her general lack of progress in the catacombs, Tia Dalma can take it no longer. A woman who gets what she wants and suffers no fools, she plots her course, electing to climb the stepped central stripe that symmetrically divides the pyramid. No stranger to religious ceremony, she is mindful of this elaborately carved aisle’s possible significance, imagining—even sensing—a procession of high priests ascending it in colorful robes as thousands of jungle-dwelling peasants gather to witness the spectacle. She can see herself among them—a high priestess, in gold and jewels, clad in a breastplate of hammered silver and a necklace of mummified animal heads, carrying a black ironwood staff topped with the hollow-eyed stare of a human skull. She carries herself accordingly as she climbs: square-shouldered, straight-backed. Her mystic powers transcend the present; instead of the intrusive pounding, she hears thousands of voices chanting a guttural language she cannot understand. It drives her and the priests ever higher. No commoner is allowed the privilege of seeing the world from the top of the temple’s peak, of looking into the future, of viewing the past, of talking directly to the gods.

Wooden drums take up the beat of the chant as the priests climb higher. The high priest arrives at the summit, stops, and turns dramatically to look down on his flock. His face is painted like a monster’s. Bare-chested men in the crushing crowd begin leaping and cheering; women faint. Children cry.

Tia Dalma finds herself standing upon the flat-topped pyramid, her right arm extended as if holding a staff, looking down at the tangle of jungle that has consumed everything in its path but the most inhospitable rock.

From behind her comes the rhythmic punch of metal on metal, the sound like the ticking of a giant clock. She spins to address the intruder, but is faced with the treetops of jungle as far as she can see. If there are roads, they do not reveal themselves; nor do structures or villages. Tiny specks—flying birds—interrupt the sky, some in groups, some solo. Only through focused concentration is Tia Dalma able to detect a smudge of gray at treetop level—a faint stain of discoloration in the verdant green, like a watermark on a kitchen window.

The longer she stares, the more evident the tiny cloud becomes. There must be lights beneath it. This place is the source of the mechanical heartbeat. This surgical hole in the jungle’s perfection. Humans. Environmental cancer.

She thinks to stop this sound, to inflict her powers of witchcraft upon anyone vulgar enough to imagine they can disturb a holy shrine such as the one upon which she stands. The hubris! How reprehensible are those who disturb and disrupt without awareness of those around them.

But the longer she stands atop the temple, her foul mood festering like an open sore, the more she feels a slight vibration rising through her bare feet, into her ankle bones, and up her shins. She kneels and places her open palms on the warm rock. Yes, the ground is shaking.

She zeroes in on the underbrush below and to the right, the earthen roof of the catacombs through which she has just wandered. The tunnels are part of the limestone cave systems that can be found in abundance throughout Central America. Here, the priests dictated a human fashioning, carving and connecting, blocking and redirecting, turning what nature offered into a labyrinthine puzzle that only they could navigate. If a commoner entered, he or she never came back. The priests’ abilities anointed them as superior and god-chosen. Untouchable.

But if Tia Dalma’s knees feel the tremor, so too do the limestone walls and ceilings of the catacombs.

Only now, as her unflinching eyes tear up, does she realize she has gone about this all wrong. Worse, she has condemned the people—the humans—responsible for the vexing sound. Instead of condemnation, she should have tried understanding. Instead of repulsion, she should have embraced, even praised their technology!

She sees so clearly where she has gone wrong. If the Beast remains alive in the suffocating chambers beneath her, there may yet be a way to free him.

T
HE WORKER’S SUN-BAKED SKIN
is the color of tobacco, his unfocused eyes bloodshot. He stands, facing the jungle lit primarily by moonlight. Behind him, several electric lights reveal a tangled mass of machinery that connects to an assemblage of aluminum and steel rising like a church steeple. From here tolls the impertinent pounding of metal on metal that drew Tia Dalma. If the temple from which she has just walked represents a sacred place where humanity can connect to the gods, this place is quite the opposite.

In her hand, Tia Dalma holds a doll crudely fashioned from leaves and twigs, bound together with tendrils of green vine. It follows a human form: legs, arms, the stub of a neck upon which is lanced a
chicozapote
fruit to symbolize the head. Reminiscent of a child’s plaything, it is anything but. It serves no little girl’s purpose. It is not a soldier in a boy’s imaginary army. This doll serves a far more devious purpose. Her purpose.

Following her silent summons, the worker is drawn to the jungle’s edge.

Tia Dalma adjusts the doll’s left arm—and grins perversely as the worker’s left arm moves accordingly. Right arm. Echo. Swivel of the head left to right—perfection!

“The process must be compromised,” she says, speaking the man’s native Spanish so fluently, and with such a fine accent, that she might be this man’s mother. In his mind, the voice sounds like a fusion of his mother’s bidding and commandments from God. There is no denying it, no refuting its authority. To disobey would be tantamount to committing a sin.

“You will do what must be done, or suffer the consequences,” Tia Dalma whispers. With that, she stabs a twig into the doll’s belly. The man buckles over, groaning in agony. “Yes,” she says. “You must obey the Black Mamba.”

Tia Dalma works the doll. It is routine for her; she could do it in her sleep. Only the pesky Kingdom Keepers—five teenagers empowered by hologram technology who serve the good of Disney—are not fully susceptible to her black magic. The effects of her powers on the young people sent to defeat her are wholly unpredictable. Otherwise, she might have prevailed already, she and the other dark masters, the ones who have come together to overtake the parks—the entire Disney kingdom—for the good of bad, the dark of night, the sake of corruption and control. And don’t forget the three Ds: Danger, Desire, and Death.

The worker responds to Tia Dalma’s manipulations like a child’s remote-controlled robot, pivoting and walking stiff-legged in time with the relentless, rhythmic clanging toward the machinery, the dials and tanks, pumps and pipes that sit like an open sore amid a swill of mud. The muck oozes around the man’s bare feet as he reaches the metal tangle. He is not without consciousness: to a point, he can think for himself. Tia Dalma has taken control of him physically and impaired him mentally; they work as smoothly as dancing partners, like a well-oiled machine.

The man marches directly to a control panel of digital readouts so bright that Tia Dalma can make out their neon greens, ambers, and reds from where she lurks in the shadows of the jungle. He acts without haste as she raises the doll’s right arm, giving his brain a cue to work the controls.

Immediately, the wheezing of pressurized pipes rises like a chorus. Steam valves cough; the generator revs to keep up with the demand for electricity. Three of the green displays turn amber; two of the amber, red. A wiry man with slicked-back hair and a tattoo of a snake that winds from his wrist to his neck approaches her worker. The supervisor wears a DayGlo orange hard hat, distinguishing himself from the yellow hard hats of his team. He barks angrily at the worker.

Three more amber displays become red. The supervisor rants, gesticulating at the panel, and moves in to correct the changes his worker has made.

Tia Dalma lifts the doll’s arms, pushes the hands together, and lowers them fast, like a sledgehammer driving down a tent spike. The supervisor collapses to his knees. Her worker smashes the man’s back a second time; now he’s down on all fours, shouting. Four other workers emerge from a small trailer.

All the green is gone from the panel, replaced by amber, red…and flashing red. The sounds intensify. Tia Dalma doesn’t understand the process—she is no mechanical engineer—but by the look of it, steam and chemicals are being injected into the ground, flushing or pressurizing the cavity far below and causing it to disgorge its valuable natural gas. Some form of extraction that goes well beyond her limited knowledge. Whatever the case, the worker’s efforts are charging the well with added pressure; she needs no gauge or display to tell her that. The earth beneath her feet is trembling now, more strongly than she felt from the top of the temple.

The four men rush toward her worker, hollering. The ground shakes so violently that one of the men loses his balance and falls, comically. It feels to Tia Dalma like the earth itself is sliding. Shifting.

She works the doll’s feet and arms in a flurry of inhuman gestures that knock the other three men aside. They go down like bowling pins, and then jump to their feet as the supervisor recovers and stands.

Her priorities set, Tia Dalma turns her worker, holding him upright as the three men attack him from behind. She hears the cracking of her worker’s bones, but keeps the doll steady; it will not yield. The worker swings at the supervisor. The wiry man soars through the air, crashing hard into a rusted pickup truck.

The sight stops the other three men. In an instant, they understand that they are dealing with something cursed, something from another realm. They back up as Tia Dalma turns her worker and marches him forward. Two of the three men hesitate. The other runs, screaming.

Her worker’s legs are broken in several places, the bones showing through the skin—and yet he walks on, undeterred.

The vibration in the earth gives way to shaking, and the shaking to quaking. Tia Dalma steadies herself, reaching out for a palm tree. Behind her, other trees begin to fall, their roots torn from the loosening soil.

From a bird’s-eye view, a ring of destruction emanates outward from the drilling rig, with ever-expanding concentric circles formed by rippling shock waves. The jungle growth inside this ring falls silently, as though a wind has toppled everything taller than a few inches. Birds, snakes, and other creatures scatter. On and on the ring spreads, like ripples in a pond in the wake of a stone’s splash.

As the leading edge of the ring reaches the temple compound, dust rises. The earth collapses, folding inward, swallowing the surface whole.

Against the backdrop of a low rumble, so terrifying that the very birds take flight, can be heard the cackle of a witch doctor’s cruel laugh.

There, in the midst of the mud and grime, as the drill tower teeters and collapses, Tia Dalma has her dull-eyed, broken-boned worker dancing an Irish jig in celebration.