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.
“Not unless conquistadors wore tricorns,” he replied.
“Tricorns?”
Something just behind the unblinking skull caught the light, glinting, dully. Tentatively, he reached around the dead man’s shoulder and his fingers brushed cold metal. He peered over the skeleton and, as his eyes made out the distinctly metallic object amidst the gloom, a rush of boyish excitement shot through him, prompting him to act totally unprofessionally.
“Oh my god,” he gasped, wrenching the object free with one hand and holding it before him. “It’s him.”
“Ben?” Sid shouted to him.
“It’s him!” he bellowed up excitedly, hearing his voice echo in the chamber. “Sid, it’s him!”
“Who?” Nadia asked.
“Death! It’s Death!”
“Death?” Nadia mumbled uncertainly. “As in… the Grim Reaper?”
“Not again,” Sid moaned. She didn’t share Nadia’s confusion. She knew exactly what King was talking about. How could she not? His obsession with an obscure historical reference to a man known as the ‘Black Death’ was an offshoot of his father’s own insane quest. That quest had led to the brutal murder of King’s mother and sister at the hands of the fanatical General Abuku, known as the ‘Himmler of Africa,’ in front of him when he was a young child. It had led to both he and his father’s ridicule in the academic community as they hunted for the origin of civilisation among ancient myths. Only months ago, it had ultimately led to his father’s disappearance somewhere within the heart of Africa, searching for the mythical city of the Bouda tribe, a remnant of what he called the ‘Progenitor Race’.
The Black Death, King believed, had been a member of the Bouda, perhaps their chief, who had been initiated into the mysteries of the Moon Mask, the tribe’s central icon. According to legend, the mask offered its wearers’ glimpses of the future and, in one tradition, even gave them the ability to travel through it.