CHAPTER 19
The rope went taut, halting Maddock’s fall mere inches above the sea of scorpions, but he had to throw his arms out wide in order to keep from spinning and face-planting into their midst. One glistening black stinger filled his vision, so close that he had to go cross-eyed to bring it into focus.
“Bones,” he said, his voice barely louder than a whisper. “Pull me up. Very. Slowly.”
Nothing happened. Bones and the others were too far away to hear him.
Yet, in the moment or two it took him to figure this out, he realized something else as well. The scorpions weren’t moving.
“Not real,” he breathed, letting out a sigh of relief.
That wasn’t entirely accurate though. The arachnid bodies covering the floor beneath him weren’t actual scorpions, but they weren’t the product of his imagination, either. They were amazingly life-like reproductions, each one the size of his hand, and carved out of a glossy black substance that reflected the light and revealed edges sharper than the blade of a razor.
Obsidian.
When he had settled his weight on the stone square at the center, it had triggered some kind of pressure-sensitive mechanism, which had in turn caused the carved scorpions to spring up out of the recessed area in the floor, creating the illusion of a living swarm. The little statues were everywhere, covering the floor so densely that there did not appear to be any space large enough to step, let alone ease himself down gently.
But he couldn’t stay like this for much longer.
Moving slowly so as not to become unbalanced, he twisted his body sideways and caught the rope. From this vantage, he could make out the square of bare stone — his original intended landing area — just below his outstretched legs. The block had sunk into the floor, but only to a depth of about six inches. Just enough to throw him off balance at that crucial instant. Gripping the rope, he lifted his upper torso, tilting his legs back until his feet finally made contact.
He braced himself in anticipation of some other elaborate booby-trap, but nothing else happened. The stone floor remained solid beneath him as he brought himself to an upright position. He pulled the rope free of the carabiner he had been using as a rappelling device and shouted up to the others, “I’m down!”
The chamber was filled with echoes.
“You okay?” came the slightly muffled reply — Bones, shouting into the serpent’s mouth.
“Yeah. Triggered some kind of booby-trap. About a million carved scorpions just popped out of the floor.”
There was a pause, and then a fainter voice — Charles Bell — floated down to him. “Did you say ‘scorpions’?”
“Yes. Why? Is that important?”
“In the Popol Vuh, the road to Xibalba crosses three rivers. The first is filled with scorpions.”
“Great,” Maddock replied. “What’s in the other two?”
“Blood and pus.”
Maddock gave an involuntary shudder. “I’m sorry I asked.”
“Be very careful where you step,” Bell went on. “They may only be carvings, but I would hazard a guess that their stingers are tipped in poison.”
Maddock nodded, probing the forest of poised stingers with his light. Now that he wasn’t dangling scant inches above them, he could see gaps in their ranks, large enough to step in if he moved with painstaking caution, but he hesitated.
There were several options for the first step, but he had no idea which direction to go. And he had already tripped one booby-trap; there were almost certainly more.
Then he noticed a mark carved into the stone. It looked like a paw print — a large triangular pad with four evenly spaced oblong toes, all pointing forward. He was no expert, but it looked a lot like a dog paw.
“The lightning dog guides the souls to the Underworld,” he muttered. “All right. Let’s do this.”
He extended a leg out over the frozen swarm and eased his foot down with all the care of someone trying to cross a minefield. The sole of his hiking boot made contact, and then he transferred his weight onto it.
The floor remained solid beneath him, and as he advanced, he saw another paw print a couple feet further ahead. Beyond it was another, set slightly to the left of the others.
“There’s a path through them,” he shouted. “Marked with paw prints. I’m going to follow it.”
“I’m coming down,” Bell replied.
Maddock could hear low voices, Miranda and Bones trying to talk the elderly archaeologist out of his stated decision. He knew they wouldn’t succeed, and even though he agreed with them, he also understood where Bell was coming from.
The argument was eventually resolved, and as Maddock took his fifth step, following a path that seemed to be spiraling out from the center, he glimpsed someone starting down the rope. Not Charles Bell, but Miranda, no doubt going ahead of her father to set a belay for him from below.
Maddock could now see the far edge of the chamber, a stone wall about thirty yards past his present position — fifty or so yards from the center. He kept going, picking his way forward one paw print at a time, curling around the center as Miranda finished her descent.
The path turned him again. Instead of a wall, the beam of his flashlight revealed only deep shadow, and the paw prints were taking him directly toward it, and away from the center. He kept his focus on what lay directly ahead. The paw prints had not led him to a dead end yet, but if Bell was right, a single scratch from one of the obsidian scorpions might prove fatal.
A few more steps and he could just make out the shore — the end of the river of scorpions — a line of undecorated stone tiles. Beyond it, a smaller chamber still cloaked in shadow.
He was sweating now. The air was cool, if slightly humid, and he was barely moving faster than a crawl, but the intense concentration was as exhausting as a marathon run.
Now he could see past the dividing line, though there was not much to see. There was a gap, about six feet across, transecting the chamber, and beyond it, another line of stone blocks, parallel to the first. The gap reminded him of a man-made drainage channel, a more literal river. He wondered if he would find it filled with blood, pus, water, or nothing at all.
A few more steps, and he got his answer. The stone blocks were now only about ten feet away, and beyond them, the dark trough was bristling with sharp spikes.
“Maddock!”
Miranda’s shout came just as he was about to take another step, startling him. He froze, his heart pounding, his foot hovering above the last row of carved scorpions. He forced himself to unclench and took several deep breaths.
“Yeah?”
“We’re starting out.”
Another breath and then he stretched his foot out and took the final step. He felt like collapsing right there, but instead he turned around and shone his light out across the obsidian deathtrap. “Watch your step!”
Miranda located the first paw print and shone her light on it. “You see it?”
Bell was hunched over, hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath after the rappel, but he nodded. “The tracks of Xlotl, the Lightning Dog, showing us the way across the river of scorpions. We’ve done it, Miranda. We’ve found the entrance to Xibalba.”
Miranda was less sanguine about the discovery. “I still think we’re going too fast. Finding it doesn’t mean a thing if we don’t make it back to tell the story.” She looked up the length of the rope to where Angel was just beginning her descent. “Getting back up that rope won’t be a picnic.”
“The path to the Underworld is a symbolic journey,” Bell said. “A spiritual pilgrimage, not a literal journey into hell. We probably won’t be leaving by the same path.”