Deity (14 page)

Chac
shrugged with an “it’s a mystery to me” look on his face.

“So,
if it isn’t Jesus or Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, who do you believe this fresco
represents?” Lori asked.

Chac
shrugged. “Similar to Matt’s interpretation, I wonder if this isn’t a deity
after all—a previously unknown and forgotten deity among the Maya. So I call
this the Calendar Deity - the god who brought knowledge of calendars to the
people.”

“I’m
sure that stirs a lot of debate,” Lori said.

“It
will, once we introduce the discovery to the rest of the world.”

Dr
Peet stepped back thoughtfully. Lori could see his mind working on a new
problem, and like the professor he was, he expressed his thoughts aloud.

“Putting
all that aside,” he said, “Matt is an archaeologist. He wouldn’t vandalize an
ancient mural over a difference in interpretive opinion.”

“That’s
why I don’t think Matt did this,” Chac said, turning back to the hole above the
figure. “If he intended to cut a part of this fresco out, he would have simply
cut a circle or square. He wouldn’t go through the trouble of cutting teeth out
of the circle. That kind of precision would have taken considerable time.”

Lori
nodded in agreement. “Not only that, but this piece wasn’t freshly carved out
of the rock. Look.” She unstrapped her wrist light and shined the beam directly
into the hole. “
There’s algae
growing just inside the
lip of the hole here.”

Chac
nodded as though following her train of thought. “This hole wasn’t intended to
carve something out of the fresco. It was created to insert something into it.”

* * * *

Something
wasn’t quite right. Chac had known it the moment he turned on the generator.

Only
one lamp had come on.

He
and Matt had taken great pains to get two lamps into the cavern. The generator
had been the most problematic. Nevertheless, they’d prevailed and made great
progress in their work on the murals. Now, however, there was only one lamp
standing, the second strangely unplugged and lying near their feet.

Chac
was trying to find a link between the lamp and the hole in the limestone when
Peet interrupted his thoughts. The anthropologist had busied himself inspecting
the algae clinging around the lip of the hole.

“Whoever
took the Kin piece must have realized this wasn’t the outline of Jesus’ halo,
but a small portion of the gear’s teeth just visible above the figure’s head.”

“I
see something inside,” Lori said.

She
leaned in for a closer look, positioning her wrist light in a way that it would
shine into the hole while still allowing her to peer inside.

“What
do you see?” Chac asked.

“I
can’t quite tell. I think it’s a cross.”

Lori
stepped back, allowing Chac in for a peek. He had the same difficulty focusing
his light inside the hole without blocking his own view. He fidgeted with his
light until he could just see around the equipment. He got a glimpse, but that
was all he needed.

It
was indeed a cross, but not quite like any cross he’d ever seen. This one had
three nobs or pegs—a single peg extending from each end of its three points.

Chac’s
heart stopped cold.

His
mind was suddenly reeling. However, panic didn’t strike until he turned to find
Lori erecting the second lamp.

“Maybe
this will help,” she was saying, stretching the lamp’s cord to the plug on the
generator’s extension cord.

Chac
threw himself at her.

“Don’t—”

Too late.

A
shocking white light split the darkness as Chac suddenly felt himself hurdling
through mid air.

The Light

Lori
thought she was dead. She saw nothing. She heard nothing. To top it off she
felt completely weightless. A truck had hit her and now she was floating
through an immensely quiet, densely dark void of death.

She
was deaf and blind, but not entirely senseless. Her body felt deathly cool,
convincingly dead.

Then
the darkness parted.

As
if through a tunnel, she suddenly saw a small, distant light - a light bobbing
toward her. Just when she was certain she was floating to the end of that
tunnel of death, just when the light had grown to devour her, a sudden wave of
cold washed over her face. It was a wet cold that shocked her back to her
senses and she suddenly realized that she was still very much alive and floating
in the pool within the dark cavern.

A
pair of arms wrapped around her, pulling her upright in the knee-deep water,
and together, Lori and the halo of light waded back to dry ground.

“Dr.
Peet?” she said, or at least she thought she did. She couldn’t hear her own
voice through the fierce ringing in her ears.

She
felt a tug on her arm. Above the glare of a wrist light she could just make out
the chiseled shadows of Chac’s face. His lips were moving. His expression was
urgent. The ringing in Lori’s ears was growing, but beneath the pitch she could
just make out his words.

“...caving in!”

As
if on cue, a wave of air brushed against them in the wake of something large falling
through the darkness. Lori felt its impact tremble the ground beneath her feet.
That’s when Chac’s message slammed home.

The
cavern was caving in!

She
couldn’t see it. She could barely hear it - stone crushing stone and slicing
the invisible water behind them. Lori’s feet shuddered with the impact of every
boulder that crashed to the ground. Chac caught glimpses of the assault with
his swaying wrist light, but the thick darkness veiled the totality of the danger.
At any moment they could be crushed beneath the collapsing stone ceiling, and
they’d never see it coming!

Dr. Peet joined them from somewhere out of the darkness. His
light was broken, shifting Lori’s awareness to the light now missing from her
own wrist. Chac’s light glinted off the base of a flood lamp lying on the
ground, the business end of it crushed beneath a massive piece of limestone. Chac’s
light was their only source of guidance which she readily followed over broken
shards of rock and gravel to the limestone wall where they huddled and waited
for the ceiling to stop shedding its weight.

Lori
tasted the salty grit coating her lips. Her wetsuit was mud, her hair heavy
from the shower of earth. Then, once again, there was stillness.

“Is
everyone all right?”

“Lori?”

Lori
nodded as Chac gave her a quick once over. That’s when she noticed the burn on
Chac’s arm. The entire forearm of his wetsuit was missing or melted into the
angry, seeping flesh of his right arm.

“What
just happened?” she asked in the relative calm that followed.

“A
bomb,” Chac said.

“I
get the feeling someone didn’t want visitors here,” Dr. Peet added.

“We
need to assess our damages,” Chac said. He reached into the thigh pocket of his
wet suit and retrieved two flashlights and handed them out.

Lori
accepted hers with a relieved sigh. “Thank goodness you brought spares,” she
said.

“Diving
lights are too unpredictable not to have flashlights,” Chac said. “Spread out
and gather everything you can find. Use your light as sparingly as possible.”

They
separated, searching the cave floor now foreign with fallen rock and boulders
that cast eerie shadows before them. In a matter of minutes they found two sets
of oxygen tanks - one tank missing its valve and still bleeding gas. Lori found
her set of fins and a diving submersible which she had to leave trapped beneath
the boulder that had crushed it. Dr. Peet found the first flood lamp, its stand
crushed but its incandescent bulb and power cord still intact. Meanwhile, Chac
discovered a five gallon gas can
floating
in the water
not far from the generator which had been knocked dead by the fallen rock.

“We’re
not swimming out the way we came in,” Dr. Peet said grimly, scanning their
meager collection.

“There
has to be another way out of here,” Lori said hopefully.

“If
there is we better find it soon,” Chac said. He turned and aimed his wrist
light across the cavern’s pool. “The water is rising.”

* * * *

Father
Ruiz sat alone on the shaded veranda. He closed his eyes against the earthly
paradise laid out before him for the spiritual bliss he anticipated in his
mind. He absorbed the scriptures that lay open upon his lap, saturating his
thoughts with them, refreshing his soul as the pleasant breeze rejuvenated his
flesh. He had to admit, when it came to time spent in God’s word, the lush resort
gardens were just as peaceful and inviting as the seventeenth century paintings
lining the cathedral’s sacristy after visitor hours.

As
he meditated there, he began to feel that familiar purifying sensation that
cleared his mind and cleansed his soul. There was an airless quality about it,
the perception of harmony within the spirit. He preferred to think of it as a
foretaste of the heavenly peace he’d someday experience. Until then, he was
satisfied with the anticipation he habitually renewed with daily prayers and
scripture, and he’d just settled into the routine when his concentration was
snapped from its tranquility.

He
waited, disappointed to have been stolen from his reflection so soon. For a
moment he fought for the sensation to return, but the interruption returned
with the discourteous insistence of a cell phone.

For
a brief moment he wished KC was around to take the call, but the woman was
elusive. He didn’t know anything about her and she didn’t stick around long
enough to offer herself to him. If he wasn’t mistaken, she seemed intimidated
by his presence, or annoyed. In either case, as soon as the others left for
their dive, KC escaped back to the airfield, claiming there was something
mechanical on her plane that demanded her attention.

The
cell phone summoned again. Reluctantly, he rose from the wicker chair and
slipped into the room through the sliding glass doors, searching for the
adamant intruder. Another ring and he found it, tucked within a pocket of
Peet’s vest. Gently, he slipped it out and flipped it open.

“Sí?”

There
was a pause. A familiar voice tentatively followed.
“Padre?”

It
was that Espanoza guy, from the museum.

“
Sí.
Esta Ruiz.
”

“
Dónde Señor Peet?
”

Without
going into much detail, Father Ruiz told the curator that Peet was indisposed,
but was expected to return later that afternoon.

“Bueno,”
the curator said. “I’m sending him a picture. Please make sure he gets it.”

“I
will.”

“And,
well…you better write this down,” Espanoza said. “You’re not going to believe what
I have to tell you.”

The Way

The
oily, dark water that had appeared so cool and calm when Peet first arrived in
the cavern had indeed risen, most likely displaced by the limestone shed from
the ceiling. However, even after the rocks had stopped falling, the water was
still rising, evident by the quiet churning of the pool’s surface now
encroaching upon the useless generator.

“The
explosion must have collapsed the outlet channel we entered through,” Chac
said.

Lori
gasped, an audible expression of the same panic threatening to storm Peet’s
nerves. He needed to stay calm. There had to be another way out.

He
turned to Chac, the bearer of their only source of light. “You said the channel
connected five cenotes. Is it possible to swim to the next one?”

Chac
shook his head. “We have one good tank and only one set of fins. One of us
might make it, but then how do we get the equipment back to the next person?”

The
water was slinking toward their feet. Peet noticed Lori lift to her tip-toes
and then, as if realizing the futility in the effort, dropped back down again.

“Wait
a minute,” she said. “There has to be another entrance. People came here to
draw those murals but I doubt the early nineteenth century Maya had the scuba
gear to get here the way we did. There must be a terrestrial entrance somewhere.”

“There
was,” Chac said. “The cavern slopes upward at the far end where there used to
be a mouth to this cave. It was intentionally sealed, most likely by the same
people who painted the Calendar Deity. Matt and I haven’t been able to locate
the seal from the outside, and I doubt we would have had the resources to clear
all that rock if we did.”