The Ruins (24 page)

 Jeff
stopped at the mouth of the trail, set everything down. He crouched
with his back to the Mayans. It filled him with a fluttery sense of
panic—he kept imagining the bows being raised, the arrows
pulled taut—but he thought it might make him appear less
threatening. He tore a blank page out of the rear of the notebook,
uncapped the pen, and began to draw the first of his signs, a skull and
crossbones, stark and simple, appropriately ominous. He went over and
over it with his pen, making the drawing as dark as possible.

 He
tore off another page, wrote "SOS" on it.

 Then
a third page: "HELP."

 And
a fourth: "DANGER."

 He
pried up a softball-size stone, used it to pound the aluminum pole into
the dirt, right at the edge of the clearing, blocking the trail. Then
he duct-taped his signs to the pole, one beneath another. He turned
finally, as if to see the Mayans' reaction. The two along the
tree line had lain down again, their hats over their faces, and the
woman by the fire had her back to him now. She was stirring the embers
with her left hand, setting a small pot onto an iron tripod with her
right: breakfast, Jeff assumed. The other three were still watching
him, but with a much more casual air. They almost seemed to be
smiling—good-humoredly, he thought. Or was there an air of
mockery, too? Jeff turned, banged at the pole a few more times with his
stone. Someone would have to come and sit by it later in the day, after
the bus arrived in
Cobá
,
but for now this ought to suffice. Just as a precaution, in case the
Greeks somehow managed to appear earlier than expected. If
they'd hitchhiked, say. Or rented a car.

 Jeff
retrieved the pen and the notebook and the roll of tape and was just
about to start back up the trail, when he changed his mind. He set
everything down again and—very hesitantly, very
carefully—stepped out into the clearing, lifting his hands,
patting at the air. The Mayans raised their weapons. Jeff pointed to
his right, trying to show them that he just wanted to walk along the
clearing's margin, keeping close to the vines: he
wasn't going to try to flee. The Mayans kept staring at him,
the bows drawn, the pistol aimed at his chest, but they
didn't say anything, made no overt attempt to stop him, so
Jeff took this as permission. He started slowly along the base of the
hill.

 The
Mayans followed him, leaving the trail momentarily unguarded. Then,
after about a dozen yards, the man with the pistol shouted something to
the woman behind them, and she rose from her cooking, kicked at one of
the sleeping men along the tree line. He pushed himself into a sitting
position, rubbing his eyes. He stared after Jeff for a long moment,
then roused one of his companions. They reached for their bows, stood
up, shuffled sleepily toward the watch fire.

 Jeff
continued along the edge of the clearing, the Mayans keeping pace with
him, their weapons raised. His mind was jumping again—the
latrine, the hole to distill their urine, Amy stealing the water. He
wondered if the signs would have any meaning to the Greeks, if
they'd just walk right past them. He checked the
sky—a pale blue now, perfectly clear—and wondered
if it would darken later in the afternoon, if the customary showers
would sweep over them, brief but intense, so inexplicably absent
yesterday. He tried to think how they ought to go about collecting the
rain if it did fall—they could use the remains of the blue
tent, maybe, fashion it into a giant nylon funnel, but leading into
what? There was no point gathering the water if they couldn't
store it; they needed containers, bottles, urns. And this was the
problem that was occupying Jeff when he glimpsed the first waist-high
mound of vines and finally realized why he'd set off along
the clearing, what he was looking for here, what—without
admitting it to himself—he'd known that
he'd eventually find.

 The
mound lay ten feet out into the clearing, a small island of green amid
the dark, barren soil. Jeff stopped while he was still a few yards
short of it, feeling a little frightened, almost turning back. But no,
though he knew what it was—he was sure he knew—he
still had to see for certain. He stepped toward it, dropped into a
crouch, started to tear at the vines, forgetting the danger of their
sap until he felt his palms begin to burn. By then, he already had the
thing half uncovered; he could stop, wiping his hands in the dirt.

 It
was another body.

 Jeff
stood up, used his foot to part the remaining vines. It was a woman,
perhaps even the one
Henrich
had met on the beach, the one whose beauty had enticed him here, luring
him to his death. She had dark blond hair, shoulder-length, but beyond
that it was difficult to say, as most of her flesh had already been
eaten away. Her face was a blankly staring skull. Her clothes were
gone, too; she was just a skeleton and hair, some mummified strips of
meat, a tarnished silver bracelet still encircling her bony wrist, a
belt buckle, zipper, and copper button resting in the otherwise-empty
hollow of her pelvis. She couldn't be
Henrich's
love, of course; she was too far gone. Such a degree of dissolution had
to have taken months to accomplish, even in this climate. Or maybe not,
Jeff realized, bending to remove more of the vine, carefully this time,
gently. Maybe it was the plant that had done it, eaten away at the
flesh, fed off its nutrients.

 The
Mayans stood twenty feet away, watching him.

 Jeff
pulled more of the vine free, and the skeleton's left arm
came loose, fell from its socket, dropped with a clatter to the ground.
The vine wasn't growing out of the soil, he noticed; it was
clinging directly to the bones. Jeff considered this for a moment, his
mind jumping to the mystery of the clearing itself: how had the Mayans
managed to keep it free of vegetation? The vine sprouted so quickly; in
a single night it had taken root on his clothing, his shoes. And yet
the earth he was standing upon was utterly barren. He scooped up a
handful of dirt, examined it closely. Dark, rich-looking soil, flecked
with white
crystals.
Salt
,
he thought, touching it with the tip of his tongue to make
sure.
They've
sowed it with salt
.

 It
was at this instant, up on the hill, that Pablo began to scream. Far
away—too far away—Jeff didn't hear a
thing.

 He
stood, dropped the handful of dirt, continued walking. His three
companions followed, keeping themselves between him and the far tree
line. He passed another watch fire, seven Mayans clustered around it,
eating their morning meal. They paused as he approached, lowering their
tin plates into their laps. He could smell the food, see it. It was
some sort of stew—chicken, tomatoes, rice—perhaps
left over from the night before, and Jeff's stomach clenched
hungrily. He had the urge to beg from them, to drop to his knees and
extend his open palms in supplication, but he resisted it, sensing the
futility of such a gesture. He kept moving forward, sucking dryly on
the pebble in his mouth.

 He
could already see the next mound.

 When
he reached it, he crouched, carefully pulled some of the vines away.

 Another
corpse.

 This
one seemed to belong to a man, though it was hard to tell, since it was
even more reduced than the blond woman's. The bones had
collapsed in a loose pile; they no longer bore any obvious relationship
to a skeleton. Jeff guessed at the corpse's gender more from
the size of its skull than anything else—it was large, almost
boxlike. One of the flowering vines had pushed its way into the eye
sockets, entering the right one, emerging from the left. There were
buttons again, and a thin wormlike length of zipper from the
man's pants. A pair of wire-rimmed glasses, a plastic comb, a
ring of keys. Jeff counted three small arrowheads, stripped of their
shafts. And then, lying in the dirt, nearly hidden beneath the tangle
of bones, there was a scramble of credit cards, a passport. It was the
contents of a wallet, of course. Which must've been made of
leather, Jeff guessed, since there was no sign of it now. What remained
was the inorganic, the synthetic—the metal and plastic and
glass—everything else had been eaten. And that was the right
word for it,
too:
eaten
.
Because it was the flowering vine that had done this, Jeff realized,
not a passive force—not rot or dissolution—but an
active one.

 Jeff
crouched over the body, examining the passport. It belonged to a
Dutchman named
Cees
Steenkamp
. Inside, his picture
revealed him to be broad-browed, with thinning blond hair and an
expression that could either be read as aloof or melancholic.
He'd been born on November 11, 1951, in a town named
Lochem
. When Jeff looked up, he
found the three Mayans watching him. It was possible, of course, that
they were the ones who'd killed this man, shooting him with
their arrows. Jeff felt the urge to extend the man's passport
toward them, to show them the photo of
Cees
Steenkamp
, his large,
slightly bovine eyes staring so sadly out at the world: dead now,
murdered. But he knew it wouldn't matter, wouldn't
change anything. He was beginning to grasp what was happening here, the
whys and wherefores, the forces at play. Guilt, empathy, mercy: these
weren't what this was about. The photo would mean nothing to
these men, and Jeff, increasingly, could understand this—even
sympathize, perhaps. Half a dozen yards beyond the Mayans, there was a
cloud of gnats swirling in the air, hovering over the
jungle's edge, as if held back from approaching any nearer by
some invisible force. And this, too, made sense to Jeff.

 He
slid the passport into his pocket, continued walking, the three Mayans
mutely accompanying him. They passed other watch fires, everyone
pausing at Jeff's approach, staring at him as he shuffled by.
It took him nearly an hour to make his way around the base of the hill,
and he found another five mounds before he was through. More of the
same: bones, buttons, zippers. Two pairs of glasses. Three
passports—an American's, a Spaniard's, a
Belgian's. Four wedding rings, some earrings, a necklace.
More arrowheads, and a handful of bullets, flattened from striking
bone. And then, of course, there was
Henrich
,
though at first Jeff had difficulty recognizing him. His body was in
the right location, but it had changed dramatically overnight. The
flesh was completely gone, as was most of his clothing, eaten by the
vine.

 Yes,
Jeff understood now, or was beginning to understand. But it
wasn't until he completed the circle, returning to his
starting point at the base of the trail, that the true depths of their
situation began to open before him.

 His
signs had vanished.

 At
first, Jeff assumed the Mayans must've taken them down, but
this didn't fit into the picture he was forming in his mind,
and he stood for a long moment, staring about, searching for some other
possibility. He could see the hole where he'd pounded the
pole into the dirt; he could see the stone he'd used as an
improvised mallet, the notebook, the pen, the roll of tape. But the
signs were nowhere to be found.

 Just
as he was about to give up, he noticed a glint of metal beside the
trail, three feet from its margin, buried under the vines. He stepped
toward it, crouched, began probing with his hands beneath the knee-high
vegetation. It was the aluminum pole, still warm to the touch from its
time in the sun. The vines had wrapped themselves so tightly around it
that Jeff had to strain to tug it free. The signs he'd drawn
had been torn from their duct tape; the plants were already starting to
dissolve the paper, eating away at it. Yet even now, having glimpsed
this, Jeff still couldn't stop himself from clinging to the
old logic, the ways of the world beyond this vine-covered hill: perhaps
the Mayans had thrown stones at the pole, he thought, knocking it off
the trail. Then he noticed something else beneath the thickly coiled
vegetation, a blackened sheet of metal. He kicked the vines clear of
it, reached to drag the thing out into the open. It was a baking pan, a
foot square, three inches deep. Someone had scratched a single word
onto its soot-encrusted bottom, gouging deeply, cutting a groove into
the metal.

 ¡PELIGRO!

 Jeff
stood for a long moment, contemplating this.

 Danger.

 The
day was growing steadily warmer. He'd left his hat behind in
the tent, and he could feel the sun beginning to scorch his neck, his
face. His thirst had climbed to a new level. It was no longer simply a
desire for water; there was pain involved now, a sense of damage being
done to his body. The pebble he'd been sucking was proving
useless to combat this, and he spit it out, only to be startled by a
leap of movement amid the vegetation as the tiny stone dropped into the
vines. Something had seemed to dart, snakelike, at the pebble, too
quickly for Jeff to see it clearly, just the abrupt blur of motion.

 The
birds,
he
thought.

 But
no, of course not, it wasn't the birds—and he knew
this. Because though he'd yet to understand where the noise
had come from last night, he'd already realized that there
weren't any birds on the hillside. No birds, no flies, no
mosquitoes, no gnats. He bent, picked up another pebble, tossed it into
the profusion of vines beside him. Once more, there was that jump of
movement, nearly too fast to glimpse, and Jeff knew what it was
now—knew what had pulled down his sign, too—and
felt almost sickened by the knowledge.

 He
threw another pebble. This time there was no movement, and that made
sense to Jeff, too. It was exactly what he'd expected. If it
had kept happening, it would've simply been a reflex, and
that wasn't what this was about.