Moon Mask (3 page)

“Well that’s a little on the spooky side,” King commented.

“Why?” Nadia asked sharply. She continued to study the bone-encrusted walls with her usual detachment. “As Sid said, the ancient peoples of the Americas were particularly fascinated with sacrifice and death. You’ve been to the Cenote Sagrado.”

King remembered his explorations around Central America very well, following his father on what some scholars termed a ‘lunatic’s quest to find the origins of civilisation’.

Believing that the sacrificial wells at Chichen Itza might hold clues to what he called the ‘Progenitor Race’ which seeded civilisation across the globe, Reginald King had camped near the sinkholes for three months. Ben had spent the summer before starting at Oxford with his father and still now remembered the surrealism of the site. So still, placid and beautiful now, the waters had once turned red as the remains of those offered to ancient gods were dumped in them.

“Yeah,” he admitted to Nadia, “but I’ve never seen the victims used in the foundations before.”

“Are you sure they’re actual skulls?” Sid asked.

Nadia was irritated by her friend’s questioning. Having met at Oxford, Sid was probably closer to the Russian woman than anyone, yet even she appreciated the reason most of the expedition members referred to her behind her back as ‘The Ice Queen.’

While brilliant, she had few people skills and didn’t like her conclusions to be questioned. As an osteoarchaeologist, specialising in the study of human bones, she didn’t expect to be queried by a ‘run of the mill bog-standard archaeologist’ like Alysya “Sid” Siddiqa.

In many ways the two women were like chalk and cheese. Sid’s grandparents had moved to London from the slums of Bombay in the nineteen fifties and with their entrepreneurial spirit selling clothing at Camden Market they had built a successful business. Eventually, Sid’s parents had taken that business global and become very wealthy. Wealthy enough to finance their most promising daughter’s education through Oxford University.

She was attractive in a very pretty way, her mocha-coloured skin offsetting dark eyes and a round face framed by black-as-night hair. Despite coming from a very privileged family, albeit self-made, there was nothing pretentious or superior about her. She had an ever-ready smile and a gentle, caring nature.

Nadia, on the other hand, had lived a hard life, growing up in the Dagestan town of Izberbash on the coast of the Caspian Sea. She had seen her fair share of war and horror as a young child in the troubled state which was fighting for independence from Russia, but had escaped the difficulties when her genius level IQ had been spotted at an early age.

By sixteen, she had won a scholarship at Moscow State University and became the youngest ever graduate in Quantum Physics. She went on to study practical science and medicine and became known as one of the world’s most intelligent people.

With three degrees to her name by the age of twenty five, she returned to her home town to work with her father, Iosef, himself a respected quantum physicist. But following his brutal murder by the militant organisation Shariat Jamaat, Nadia had fled to Great Britain, seeking asylum, both from the militants, and from the state that had declared Iosef Yashin a traitor. Traumatised by her experiences, Nadia had sought a new direction in life and earned her fourth degree, this time in archaeology, from Oxford.

Her experiences had made her hard and cold. She rarely socialised with people and a smile was a very rare thing to grace her beautiful yet stern face. She was the epitome of sexiness, turning many young men’s eyes. Her body was toned and firm, but not as firm as her icy manner. Much as most of Oxford’s young men may have wanted to, no one got close to the Ice Queen.

Deigning to respond to Sid’s query, Nadia instead said, “We must report this to Doctor McKinney.”

“What?” King demanded, shocked. “We’ve not even checked this passageway out yet.” He started off down the tunnel.

“Nadia’s right, Ben,” Sid called after him. “We’ve got to report in.”

“But who knows what else might be down here?” he argued.

“Precisely,” Sid pressed. “No one knows what’s down here. More to the point, no one knows that
we’re
here. If something happens to us they won’t know to look for us in a hidden passageway- it’s
hidden
, you see, that’s kinda the point.”

“The procedure is to report any unmapped passages before proceeding down them,” Nadia added.

“What, and let McKinney and all her brown-nosers find whatever’s down here and take all the credit? No way! This is our discovery. The three of us. You go back and make your report if you want but I’m taking a better look around.”

He headed off again, this time with the tell-tale gait of a man whose mind was made up. Sid rolled her eyes and glanced at Nadia. “Why can’t he ever be that passionate about me?” Then she headed off after him. A heartbeat later, Nadia fell into step too, without saying a word.

Despite the Russian’s desire to follow procedure, King could tell that somewhere under her cold exterior she was as excited as he was. And it was true. Doctor Juliet McKinney, the strong-minded, blusterous, hot-tempered Scottish bitch in charge of the expedition would swoop in and steel the glory of the moment. She was a fame seeker, spending every possible moment in front of the documentary crew’s cameras. She would relish this find. So far, after almost six months camped on Sarisariñama’s jungle-clad summit, all the archaeological team had found was meter after meter of empty tunnels. Thus, they had dubbed it,
The Labyrinth.

The construction of the tunnels themselves was fascinating to any scholar and had already sparked fierce debate in the circles of academia.

Firstly, the presence of sophisticated tunnels boring into the rock of a table-mountain had reopened the age old question about whether or not a more sophisticated and established society than isolated Indian communities could exist in the inhospitable rainforest. For decades the general consensus had been that the jungle was too imposing an environment for civilisations like those found in the distant Andes to evolve.

But it was the design of the walls inside the tunnels that had stirred up the real hornets’ nest in halls of learning across the globe.

Constructed out of hundreds of oddly shaped blocks of varying sizes, carved to fit snugly against one another, the walls bore an uncanny resemblance to the Inca structures scattered around the Sacred Valley of Peru.

That the Incas could have established an outpost so far into the immense rainforest, so far from the safety of the Andes, had sparked a renewed interest in the legends of El Dorado and the Lost City of Z. The general public’s interest in the dig had been enormous and, with the power of modern technology, the expedition had been a true multi-media event. Blogs were posted on the dig’s official website, live videos were streamed whenever satellite coverage permitted, and hundreds of thousands of people followed the events on Twitter and Facebook.

Despite being in one of the most remote places on earth, the expedition was an open book for the whole world to see.

The biological division of the expedition had been hugely successful, the team of UNESCO scientists identifying a number of brand new endemic species of flora and fauna. But the real public interest lay in the archaeological mission and that, sadly, had been far from the roller-coaster, Indiana Jones-like adventure which many had expected.

Seeking fame, all McKinney had been able to report on in six months was the numerous, almost identical tunnels and a few shards of broken pottery which had yet to yield the secrets of Sarisariñama.

The discovery of a hidden passage lined with human skulls would send McKinney into fame-fuelled overdrive and King had no doubt that she would shut him, the
‘radical son of a radical archaeologist’
, as she had already referred to him, out.

Before she did that, however, he wanted to find out anything he
could about his exciting discovery.

They continued down the tunnel slowly, stopping occasionally to examine the walls and jot down notes.

“Poor Karen,” King said. “Can you believe she missed out on this find?”

He did feel genuine regret that Karen Weingarten, the German archaeologist who had been assigned the exploration of this section of the tunnel system, had missed out. By all rights, it should have been her team’s find, but she had been taken ill, contracting some sort of tropical disease. UNESCO had organised her emergency medical evac. The expedition’s supply chopper, a private contractor based in Caracas, had brought a medical team to the summit. Once they had confirmed that no other expedition members were showing signs of the illness, they had transferred Karen back to Caracas and, from there, flown her to a specialist hospital in the States.

McKinney had reshuffled the eight teams of three archaeologists who had each been assigned a section of the tunnel system. King, Sid and Nadia had been reassigned to Karen’s sector.

“I know,” Sid replied. “She would-”

Her words were drowned out by the sudden, sharp cracking of stone and, before her eyes, King vanished!

With
a sharp lurch and a blur of motion, the ground beneath him dropped away! King fell into a black hole, the crash of tumbling rocks and a billow of dust pluming around him.

He splashed down into icy, knee high water, his legs buckling under the impact. His head went under and for a moment he panicked, sucking a lungful of fetid, stale water in before breaching the surface and coughing it back out.

Disorientated, he looked around, his eyes struggling to make out his surroundings. The impenetrable darkness was broken only by the eerie rippling effect of his submerged flashlight shining up through the water. He could hear Sid and Nadia shouting to him, their voices high with panic.

“I’m okay!” he called up. It was bravado that spoke. In truth he hurt like hell, his entire body aching from the jarring impact. He felt bruising spreading across his rib cage and his left ankle shot jabs of pain up his leg. The darkness also closed in around him, claustrophobic and suffocating and he felt a jolt of fear pass through him.

“Hold on,” Nadia shouted. “I have a rope. We will pull you out!”

King stumbled to his feet, the smelly water draining off him and his clothes. His satchel was still wrapped around his shoulders and he scooped down to pick up his flash light. Free of the water, the torch beam cut through the darkness and King felt himself relax a little. He panned it around his surroundings.

The chamber he had fallen into was about thirty feet in diameter and roughly circular, not unlike a giant well. The walls were the same jigsaw puzzle of misshapen rocks, some large, others small, as the rest of the underground complex.

Scanning his torch up, he saw that a section of the ceiling, about five feet wide, had collapsed and through the hole, fifteen feet above, he could see Sid and Nadia’s worried faces.

“I’m alright,” he called up to them, more firmly this time. “I’m in some sort of chamber.”

He knew the implication of his statement would not be lost on the two women. No identifiable rooms or chambers had yet been found in the endless hundreds of feet of passages.

“I wish you would stop literally stumbling onto discoveries like that,” Sid half-joked.

King laughed then brought his torch beam back down. Shining it at the ground, he realised he had potentially been very lucky. Directly beneath the hole, he had landed on a partially submerged plinth of stone rising out of a much deeper pool. While the water landing may have been softer, there was no way of knowing what lay beneath the murky surface.

He turned around and jumped in fright as a hideous visage peered back at him!

It was another skull, this one alone, its lifeless expression somehow seeming to leer at him. It wasn’t just a skull, he realised. It was a complete skeleton. It was curled up on a recess cut into the wall at the back of the plinth, about seven feet off the ground.

He moved towards it-

Something slapped at his head and he spun around, arms up defensively only to discover a rope dangling down from above.

“Ben, grab on,” Sid called. “We’ll pull you up.”

He was about to take hold of the rope when something stopped him. He couldn’t explain what, exactly. Curiosity, he supposed. “Hang on a sec,” he shouted up to Sid and Nadia.

He cautiously sloshed through the water, wading over to the wall beneath the recessed slot. He guessed the shelf-like recess had once held an idol or some other sacred object and wondered for a second whether the human remains were in fact that object.

Ignoring all his archaeological training, he proceeded to use the joins between the blocks of the wall as finger and toe holds and hauled himself up to peer into the recess at the skeleton.

Its back was slumped against the wall, its knees bent, legs folded under it. Focussing his torch on the remains, he was surprised to note fragments of clothing still clinging to the bones, most notably the rotten remains of a hat sitting lopsided on the skull.

“Ben,” Sid called again from above. “Hurry up!”

He ignored her, peering more closely at the man’s clothing, completely out of place in an ancient South American ruin hidden deep in the Amazon.

“What have you found?” Nadia asked, her clinically detached demeanour making her more interested in his discovery than his welfare.

“A skeleton!”

“Wow,” Sid replied mockingly. “It’s not like we haven’t seen any of them
embedded
in the walls!”

“This one’s different,” he swung his satchel around to hang in front of him and plucked out a pair of tweezers and a plastic bag with one hand while using the other to hold him to the wall.

“It’s not just a skull,” he explained. “It is a complete skeleton. And, judging by its clothing, he wasn’t from around here.”

“Where do you think he came from?” Nadia asked, a hint of excitement breaking through her icy demeanour.

“Europe.”

“Conquistador?” Sid asked. The Spanish Conquistadors had penetrated deep into the Amazon in their bloodthirsty quest for gold.