Ruins (14 page)

Aguilar said, grinning at them, "Perhaps they got lost in the jungle. Maybe jaguars ate them, eh?"

"You're not being helpful," Scully chided him.

"Cassandra's team would have been more careful than that," Rubicon said, as if frying to convince himself. "Unlike the old days of amateur diggers coming on a lark, professional archaeologists must proceed with cau-tion, prying up every stone, uncovering the fine details."

He blinked his blue eyes, staring at the weathered stone structures. "Some of the worst amateurs thought they were doing good for history. They came to the old temples at the turn of the century, shoveled away the fallen blocks from walls, and dumped all the discarded potsherds and glyph stones down into mounds of rub-ble—things we now call GOK piles, for God Only Knows ... because God only knows what's in them."

They stepped cautiously, tiptoeing and whispering, as if afraid they might offend the ancient ghosts of Xitaclan. The limestone paving bricks formed a once-level surface to the plaza, but now the flagstones had been buckled and hummocked by protruding roots.

Rubicon said, his voice hoarse and husky, "I can imag-ine why Cassandra was so excited here. This is an archaeologist's dream come true—all the stages in Maya history. Everything we see is a new discovery. Every place we visit, every new glyph we find is something never before cata-logued. Any one relic could be the long-awaited Rosetta stone for Maya writing. It could be the secret to why this great people abandoned their cities and vanished centuries ago ... uh, so long as other people don't ransack it for sou-venirs before the scientific teams finish their work."

With her imagination Scully erased the green tufts of the lush overgrowth. Few outsiders had ever seen this place or known of its existence. "Xitaclan must have been a breathtaking spot."

Standing like gateposts, two impressive stelae dis-played rows of incomprehensible Mayan writing, calendrical symbols; a great coiled snake bristling with feathers, wrapped around each obelisk. She recalled the feathered serpent symbol on the jade artifact Mulder had shown her.

"Is that supposed to be Kukulkan?" Scully said, indi-cating the sculpture.

"The feathered serpent?"

Rubicon studied the stelae, slipping his half-glasses on his nose while the chain dangled on his neck. "Yes, and very vividly rendered, too. This one seems larger and more fearsome—as realistic as some of those jaguar stat-ues on exhibit back in my museum. Uh, quite unlike the stylized glyphs and symbolic drawings we normally see on Maya stelae. Most interesting."

"Almost as if the sculpture was drawn from life," Mulder suggested.

Scully gave him a look, and he offered a faint smile in return.

"The afternoon light is already fading," Aguilar said. "Perhaps we should make a quick inspection of the site and then set up our camp, eh? Tomorrow you can begin your real work."

"Yes, that's a good idea," Rubicon admitted. He seemed torn between his dejection at not finding his daughter there waiting for him ... and his other goal of studying this marvelous uncatalogued site.

"It is quite a treat to see a place like this before it is defaced by tourists. The most famous ruins have been corrupted by thousands of visitors who know nothing about history and come there only because a colorful brochure tells them to." He placed his hands on his hips. "Once a new site is opened up, somebody usually man-ages to destroy it before long."

The four of them went through the plaza alongside the ball court, and then skirted the spectacular central pyramid. The underbrush had been cleared away from two sides, and Scully spotted a narrow entrance passage at the ziggurat's bottom level that had been forced open—a doorway leading into the dark catacombs of the ancient monolithic structure.

"Looks like someone went exploring," Scully said.

Mulder went ahead of them, around the path at the base of the pyramid, and then called for them to come. She found him standing at the rim of a circular well at least thirty feet across that plunged down into the lime-stone as if it had been drilled there by a giant rig.

"A cenote," Rubicon said. "A sacred well. It's a very deep limestone sinkhole.

They're, uh, scattered all over the Yucatan Peninsula. Perhaps that explains one reason why Xitaclan was built at this location."

Scully stepped up to a crumbling platform that must have been like a gangplank over the edge of the deep hole. They stood at the edge, and Scully peered over to see a mirror-smooth pool of murky green water. The depths seemed fathomless. Stained limestone outcrop-pings ridged the cenote walls like the turns of a screw. Mulder tossed a pebble into the water, watching the rip-ples spread out like shock waves.

"These natural sinkholes were considered to be sacred wells, water from the gods rising from the earth," Rubicon said. "You can be sure this one contains a trea-sure trove of relics and bones."

"Bones?" Scully asked. "From people that fell in?"

"Uh, were thrown in," Rubicon said. "The cenotes were sacrificial wells.

Perhaps they would club the victims to death, or just tie them up and weight them down so the bodies would sink.

"Other times, for special sacrifices, the victim was chosen as much as a year in advance. He led a life of plea-sures and indulgence, food and women and fine clothes—until the day when he was drugged and led to the edge of the cenote, then thrown into the sacred waters."

"I thought the Maya were primarily a peaceful peo-ple," Scully said.

"That's an old belief, a false story promulgated by an archaeologist who admired the Maya beyond all common sense—and so he slanted his findings to downplay the bloodshed evident in the writings and carvings."

"An archaeological spin doctor," Mulder said.

"The Maya culture was quite violent, shedding a great deal of blood, especially in later periods, due to Toltec influences. They considered it beautiful to scarify themselves, to hack off fingers and toes in self-mutilation ceremonies.

"In fact, the most bloodthirsty cult belonged to the god Tlaloc, whose priests would prepare for great festi-vals by approaching mothers to buy their young children. At a great ceremony the children were boiled alive, then eaten with great pomp and splendor. The priests took special delight if the infants cried or wailed while they were tortured to death, uh, because they thought the tears promised a year of plentiful rain."

Scully shuddered as she stood on the edge of the sinkhole, looking down into the murky cenote, thinking of all the secrets the bottom of that deep, dark well might hold.

"I'm sure nobody practices that religion anymore, though," Rubicon said, as if that might comfort her. He brushed his hands on his pants. "There's nothing you need to worry about. I'm sure it has nothing to do with all those missing-person rumors ... or Cassandra."

Scully nodded noncommittally. Yes, here they were, isolated, two days from the nearest major road, at an abandoned site of ancient ruins where the Maya had per-formed countless blood sacrifices. A place where an entire team of American archaeologists recently disappeared.... Of course, she thought. She had nothing to worry about.

Xitaclan ruins Sunday, 6:38 p.m.

Standing near the broken-brick sacrificial platform at the edge of the limestone sink-hole, Mulder stared downward, feeling the depths beckon him.

The air smelled sour and mildewy, hinting of decay. He wondered what secrets lay beneath the murky waters, how deep the well went, how many skeletons it held in its gullet.

A tingle traveled up his spine, a brooding uneasi-ness—but he could not pinpoint its source. The colored rays of the setting sun and the dim amber light cast long shadows. Mulder thought he saw dark shapes swirling like oil in the cenote, and he felt a slight tremble beneath his feet... a vibration as if from deeply buried engines, generators entombed beneath the earth. He thought of H. G. Wells's novel, The Time Machine, the evil Morlocks laboring in subterranean tunnels, working their machines . . . hungry for the flesh of surface dwellers.

The water in the cenote began to stir and froth. Suddenly large bubbles belched to the surface, each as wide as a barrel, spewing gas from the depths.

"What's going on?" Scully said. Mulder backed away from the rough edge as the vibration grew stronger beneath his feet. A wave of stench struck him, sour and sulfurous like a thousand rotten eggs made into a giant omelet. He covered his nose, choking. Scully, who was accustomed to smelling cadavers and decay under even the most horrendous autopsy circumstances, wrinkled her nose and gasped.

"What a stink!" Fernando Aguilar said.

"Maybe it's the legendary corpse of Tezcatlipoca," Vladimir Rubicon suggested, unbothered by the event. "That's a stench bad enough to kill off half the popula-tion."

Scully took a cautious sniff and shook her head. "No, that's sulfur—sulfur dioxide, I think. It's a volcanic gas."

"Maybe we should talk about this a little farther from the edge," Mulder said.

The four of them hurried back around to the front of the large pyramid. "My knees are still shaking," Scully said. "Wait, that's not my knees—it's the ground. It hasn't stopped."

Mulder saw the trees swaying, the ground jumping and bucking. In the back of his skull, in the rumbling sub-sonic range below his ability to hear, he experienced a loud tremor ... growing in power as a deep subsurface event gained strength.

Aguilar's hand-picked Indian guides stood next to the half-erected tents, talking quickly among themselves. One stocky man fled into the forest, shouting back at the others.

"I wonder what their problem is?" Mulder said. "Haven't they ever experienced angry gods before?"

"That's seismic activity," Rubicon said, his voice sounding out-of-place, analytical. "Uh, how can there be earthquakes, volcanic action? The Yucatan Peninsula is a high, stable, limestone plateau—it is geologically impos-sible to have volcanic activity here."

Seemingly to disprove him, the ground shuddered as if someone had struck it with a giant sledgehammer. Plaza flagstones bucked. A group of spindly mahogany trees beside an old temple tipped, their roots pulling out of the wet powdery ground like a dirt-encrusted mat of tentacles.

One of the ancient, half-fallen facades collapsed the rest of the way with an explosion of crumbling stone blocks. Bricks from the sides of the stair-stepped pyramid popped loose and pattered down, bouncing, gaining speed.

At the edge of the jungle, the stressed ground split apart like a newly broken scab, bleeding foul gases from beneath the earth's surface. Mulder grabbed Scully's arm to help her keep her balance.

"We better get away from these large structures," Scully said. "One of them could collapse and bury us."

Together they helped the old archaeologist stagger out into the middle of the open plaza while the ground swayed and shook beneath them. The trees thrashed about like gnashing teeth.

From his vantage Mulder could see the ziggurat rock-ing from side to side like a Chicago skyscraper in a wind-storm. He grabbed Scully's shoulder. "Better hang on!"

But then, before the quake seemed ready to reach its peak, the tremors subsided, dampening to a faint vibra-tion that might well have just been Mulder's nerves mis-firing with fear.

Rubicon smeared his goatee flat, occupying his shak-ing hands with some nervous gesture. "Uh, I could be wrong about that seismic stability," he said.

Aguilar pointed to the half-fallen tents and the scat-tered supplies. The campsite lay empty, abandoned. "It looks like we have lost our assistants for now," he said, his face ashen. He fumbled in his vest pocket to find cigarette papers and tobacco.

"They'll be back tomorrow, amigos. They are good workers. But we are on our own to prepare this evening's dinner and to recover from our adventure, eh?"

He forced a laugh, which made Mulder feel decidedly uneasy.

Rubicon found an awkward seat on one of the upraised flagstones. He hung his head. "One of the reasons this area interested Cassandra was because of its, uh, very localized and unusual geological instability. Her first love was geology, you know. My little girl collecting rocks, studying how they were made, igneous, metamor-phic, and sedimentary. She had a large collection, knew them all, labeled them all.

"Then Cassandra allowed her interests to shift to dig-ging not just for the rocks themselves but for what lay hidden in them—the marks of human impact and the history trapped between layers of deposited sediment and dust. She seemed very excited about certain seismic readings she had obtained in this area—just as excited as she was about leading the first team out to Xitaclan."

The old archaeologist shook his head. "But it still seems impossible such violent activity would occur here." He gestured toward the tall central pyramid, where a few loose pebbles continued to rain down the exaggerated steps. "You can see that the area is thoroughly stable—if seismic tremors occurred frequently, these ruins would have been leveled centuries ago. The mere fact that Xitaclan remains standing provides incontrovertible evi-dence that this land is phenomenally stable."

"It didn't feel stable a moment ago, Senor," Aguilar said, standing with his feet braced far apart, as if he expected the ground to begin rocking and shaking again at any moment. He finally succeeded in rolling and lighting his cigarette.

Mulder sifted through the scattered information he kept stored in his brain, the enormous amounts of trivia and tidbits gleaned from encyclopedias and reports he had studied over the years. He always tried to remember items that had the slightest unexplained or mysterious flavor to them.

"Most of the major volcanoes in Central America are in the highlands of Mexico, right down the backbone of the country—but volcanoes are unusual things. One called Paricutin suddenly appeared in 1943 .. . right in the middle of a Mexican cornfield that was as flat as a tortilla. A farmer was out plowing his field when the ground began to smoke and shake. For nine years after-ward the volcano continued growing, dumping over a billion tons of lava and ash. It buried two entire towns."