It was like being at the bottom of a grave. Far above a ragged violet hole opened into the night. Its perimeter glowed faintly where moonlight touched the edges of things, wooden pilings and stones banked up to form a rough retaining wall. But in the pit itself there was no light at all, nothing except the feeble gleam of Magda’s flashlight. She stepped forward, stumbled against a tin pail that gave an echoing clank when she struck it. She raised her flashlight and leaned back against the earthen wall, careful not to disturb the rough system of beams and joists that kept the whole ancient structure from caving in on her.
In daylight Eleven-A was dank and dim and uninspiring. At night it was downright creepy. Magda nearly choked on the pit’s earthy scent: not just dirt, but the heavy moldering smell of thousands of years of decay, shrubs and leaves and rotting timbers, the decomposing bodies of all the dogs and cattle whose remains they had already unearthed, and god knows how many other animals that had been sacrificed or merely tossed into the shaft, before the pit itself was abandoned. Magda tightened her grip on the flashlight. She coughed and covered her mouth and nose with her sleeve.
She’d never noticed it before, but an awful putrefying smell seemed to cling to the bottom of the shaft. There should be nothing, of course, only the ripe but relatively innocuous scent of decaying vegetable matter. But this was awful, as though something, squirrel or rat or vole, had fallen into the pit and died there. Magda grimaced, peering more closely at the floor. The flashlight revealed nothing, just the normal accumulation of stones and twigs, the gritty reddish sand that formed this stratum of the excavation.
She paced the bottom of the shaft. Five steps north, five steps south, six steps east and west. In a battered red plastic bucket someone had heaped a grouping of larger stones with uniformly pointed edges. Evidence perhaps of some kind of tool-making, or—more likely—nothing but pedolites, naturally occurring rocks that appeared to have man-made characteristics. She squatted beside the pail, picking out a few stones and examining them in the flashlight’s watery glare. One of them had the sharp edges associated with knapped stone, but it was feldspar—not good for toolmaking, merely a type of rock prone to breaking in this particular pattern. In disgust Magda tossed it across the shaft, wincing as dirt rained down where it struck the wall.
“Well, shit. I’m just wasting my time.”
The earthen walls swallowed her voice, made it sound thin and childish. The putrid odor was so strong she breathed through her mouth. All at once she felt exhausted. She stood and leaned back against the wall again, sighing. Her high had worn off. The odd things she had glimpsed, or thought she had glimpsed, suddenly seemed embarrassingly commonplace. The kind of things a careless site manager might run into, if she was the sort of person who got stoned in the middle of the night and went wandering around in a godforsaken place like this. Bugs and moonshine and bad smells, that was all.
She twisted her head and stared up into the shaft. Far overhead the sky had paled from violet to pinkish grey. The moonlight that had touched things with faerie gold was gone. In an hour it would be sunup. By this time tomorrow the site would be abandoned, for the second time this century, and probably forever.
At the thought anger welled up in Magda: at George and Nicky and Janine, for refusing to believe Eleven-A might hold anything of historic value; at June Harrington, for encouraging her to believe that it did. The flashlight’s beam wavered fitfully—after this moonlight outing the damn thing would need new batteries again. She thought of Balthazar Warnick’s persistent urging that she give up this crazy plan and join Harold Mosreich in Mexico. At this very moment she could have been perched atop the main pyramid at Chichén Itzá, waiting for moonrise.
Damn June Harrington!
Magda kicked furiously at the sandy ground in front of her. Her boot hit a rock. In a sudden rage she kicked again, hard enough to send the stone flying. With surprising force it struck one of the support beams in the wall opposite her. There was a soft hollow klunk. Then, with mesmerizing slowness, the beam started to buckle forward, and with it the entire earthen wall. Eleven-A was foundering.
Magda stared in horror as the timber split, its rusty splints groaning as they separated. From the surrounding wall soil and stones tumbled, not in an avalanche but with creeping slowness, like lava overtaking a mountainside. Earth like dark foam boiled across the floor, small stones and flecks of gravel flying everywhere. Magda cried out and tried to protect her face. Beams collapsed upon themselves in slow motion, soil covering them. Bit by bit the sandy floor disappeared. There was a soft mumbling sound, like voices heard from another room. When Magda craned her neck to stare upward she could see where other support timbers had begun to bulge outward. Her breath came in sharp gasps; she felt as though earth already filled her lungs, pressed upon her chest with numbing force. Too late she tried to scramble onto the ladder, felt the wall shivering behind it like boggy ground. When she opened her mouth to shout for help, dirt splattered her tongue like rain. Tears of rage and horror filled her eyes as she crouched and stared at the encroaching wall.
She could have extended her arms and touched it, a solid mound of darkness blotting out the little light that remained. The reek of decay was overpowering. Her mouth was filled with sand, dirt covered her boot as she tried desperately to pull her foot from the moving path.
Make it stop, make it stop, oh please…
And then, as abruptly as it had begun, the earthen flow ceased. Not a foot from where she crouched a dark and softly rounded hummock rose to meet the other side of the shaft. The mumbling undercurrent of sound grew still. Magda waited, not daring to move or breathe. Then, very slowly, she stood, with one hand retrieved the half-buried flashlight. She switched it on and trained its feeble beam on the opposite wall.
It was like looking into an empty well. Where timbers and support beams had been, there was now a hole big enough to drive the Jeep through. A dank breeze crept from its mouth. The choking scent of decay faded. Magda didn’t have time to wonder what the breeze might portend, or where the rotting odor had come from in the first place. Before she could turn and flee back up the ladder, a final solid chunk of earth dropped, like a great slice of cake sliding from a knife. When it struck the ground, Magda froze and stared openmouthed at the wall.
Suspended in the motionless waterfall of soil and rock was a skeleton. Perfectly formed, it lay curled upon its side, ribs, humerus, femur enmeshed in delicate bands of sepia and white. Even seeing it in the wake of that nearly silent avalanche, Magda knew its posture was not accidental. It was the same carefully arranged stance that she had seen in photographs of coundess burials, from the famous Neanderthal remains of Shanidar to dozens of Celtic graves throughout Britain and western Europe. The exact same pose: body carefully set upon its side, legs drawn up, arms tightly folded as though they held something.
And in this case, the arms did hold something: a skull. The long curving spine ended above the shoulders in a twist of vertebrae like heavy ivory beads. The skull was gone. Decapitated—the edge of the first vertebra sliced cleanly away. She shone her flashlight back upon the rib cage and there it was, a pale globe clutched within a cage of fingerbones and slender femurs. Its eye sockets gave back a hollow glow where the beam touched them.