Ruins (21 page)

"That's a tragedy," Mulder said, then muttered, "and also quite convenient."

Scully shot him a look, and he knew that the two of them would have to play their cards carefully. If he stretched his imagination to the limits of credibility, he could believe in the accidental destruction of the trans-mitter, or he could believe in the accidental death of Rubicon, or in the accidental disappearance of Cassandra and the other archaeologists.

But he couldn't take it all together.

Scully said with forced brightness, "We'll just have to make the best of it, then, won't we, Mulder?"

He knew that she, too, felt trapped in the wilder-ness, with no contact from the outside . . . and the only people around them a potentially murderous crew who had no qualms about eliminating any inconve-niences they might encounter.

Xitaclan ruins Tuesday, 2:45 p.m.

Scully felt the weight of the rubberized canvas diving suit on her shoulders, a heavy alien skin that muffled her movements and insu-lated her body. Here out on dry land, stum-bling across the weathered promenade toward the sacrificial well, the suit felt incredibly unwieldy and clumsy. The weights at her waist clanked together. She hoped that once she descended into the water, the suit would become an advantage instead of a hindrance.

Mulder stood back and looked at her, his hands on his hips, eyebrows raised.

"That's quite a fashion state-ment, Scully."

She tugged at the thick fabric folds, adjusting the div-ing suit as she stood on the edge of the cenote. She felt an eerie sense of displacement. The suit had been purchased for Cassandra Rubicon to use during her own searches for ancient artifacts and the answers to Maya mysteries.

Now Scully was the only one who could fit into the suit—and her personal search was for something much more sinister, something much more recent.

After finding the body of Vladimir Rubicon, her dread had grown. She had little doubt that the five members of the UC-San Diego research team floated below the surface of the sacrificial well, waterlogged, decaying. If she did indeed find the archaeologist's daughter, beaten like her father, her only consolation was that Dr. Rubicon himself would not be around to witness the grim conclusion to their investigation.

Mulder held the heavy insulated helmet in his hands. "And now to complete the ensemble," he said, "your lovely hat."

Even fresh out of the crate, it seemed an old suit, bar-gain basement. Scully hoped the equipment had been checked out and proven functional. Like many research expeditions, the UC-San Diego team had operated on a tight budget, forced to cut corners wherever they could. According to paperwork tacked inside the crate, trans-lated by Fernando Aguilar, the suit had been donated by the Mexican government as part of its joint financing of the Xitaclan expedition.

As Scully lowered the heavy helmet over her reddish-gold hair, Mulder's expression became serious. "Are you ready for this, Scully?"

"It's part of the job, Mulder," she said. "This is our case, and somebody has to go down and look." She low-ered her voice. "Just keep your weapon handy.

You'll be alone up here on the rim, and I'll be alone down there. Not a strategically advantageous situation."

Mulder had kept his 9-mm Sig Sauer close at his side ever since discovering the old archaeologist's "acciden-tal death"—but the Indians far outnumbered them, and they had shown no qualms about getting hurt, if they intended to make another blood sacrifice.

Even if Mulder and Scully encountered no violence, they remained at the mercy of Fernando Aguilar to get them back out of this jungle.

Not a strategically advantageous situation, she thought again.

Scully secured the heavy diving helmet, locking it to the collar attachment rings. Inside, her breath echoed like a breeze through a cave. She swallowed heavily.

Mulder helped her check the air connections on the back of her suit, long rubber-wrapped tubes like garden hoses that dangled from her back. A small generator would pump and circulate air into her helmet, though it looked barely large enough to power a portable hair dryer.

Aguilar and the Indians stood around the equipment, watching her with a curiosity mixed with anxiety. Scully glanced at them uneasily, but saw no one with missing fingers or a bandaged hand.

"I do not see what you expect to accomplish down there, Senorita," Aguilar said again, his arms crossed over his khaki vest. "We are in a terrible situation here and should leave as soon as possible."

Aguilar gestured to the Indians, speaking quietly, though Scully doubted any of them could speak English. "My associates are very distressed about the prospect of disturbing the sacred cenote. It is cursed from the victims sacrificed there. They say the ancient gods have taken their revenge on the old man—and if we continue to dis-turb them, the gods will attack us as well."

"Just like they attacked the members of the archaeol-ogy team?" Mulder suggested.

Aguilar tightened his ocelot-skin hat, letting his dark ponytail dangle behind him. "Perhaps there is a reason why Xitaclan remained deserted for so many centuries, Senor Mulder."

"I'm going down," Scully said firmly, her voice sounding hollow through the open faceplate. "We have an obligation to investigate if it helps us find our people. The cenote is the most obvious place we haven't searched, especially in light of finding Dr. Rubicon." She checked the weights at her waist, the utility flashlight hanging from her belt. "While I respect their religious beliefs, your 'associates' need to respect international law, Mr. Aguilar."

Scully sealed the faceplate and then gestured for Mulder to switch on the air generator. A whining, putter-ing sound throbbed into the jungle like noise from miniture construction machinery. She breathed deeply, smelled the stale air, sour from sealants and old rubber. When she felt a faint breeze stir around her face, she knew the air had begun to flow.

She gestured for them to help her descend into the cenote, hoping that the generator and the suit would last long enough for her to look around under the water. The Indians gazed at her solemnly, as if bidding her a final farewell.

Gripping the same ropes Mulder had used to walk/climb down the rugged limestone walls, Scully made her way one laborious step at a time. Her tedious descent took her many minutes, and the suit seemed as heavy as a truck on her back—but when she reached the edge of the deceptively placid pool, she found herself reluctant to plunge in.

She did not dwell on her irrational fears, but let loose of the wall. Scully plunged into the water, sinking like Thompson's proverbial bag of lead due to the weights around her waist.

The murk swallowed her up like syrup, a primordial ooze that embraced her.

Water engulfed her enclosed hel-met. The fabric of the suit pressed against her arms and legs, squeezing her intimately as she dropped deeper and deeper.

The depths and the opaque water smothered the light, blinding her for a moment.

A fizz of bubbles curled around the seals in her rub-ber-lined suit. Scully breathed again, double-checking, verifying that no water seemed to be leaking in and that her vital air supply continued pumping through the hoses.

Gradually, her confidence grew.

Under the tug of gravity, she continued to sink toward the bottom ... if the cenote had a bottom.

As her eyes adjusted, the water around her became murky and greenish, like wan sunlight filtered through thick smoked-glass panes. She moved her hands and legs experimentally, floundering in the water. Disoriented, she felt only that she continued to go deeper. Deeper.

The pressure around her became heavier, and her ears sensed the strain, the water like a vise squeezing her helmet. She thought again of Dr. Rubicon's story of how Thompson had sustained permanent ear damage from a faulty suit during his descent into the Chichen Itza cenote.

She forced those thoughts away and tried to look around, turning her head in the confining helmet. She continued to drop, meter after meter. She couldn't imag-ine how deep this well was. Surely, she had already gone below the thirty-foot depth of the Chichen Itza well.

The circle of light above had dwindled to only a faint, faint reflection of the bright Mexican sky. Her breathing echoed around her ears like distant surf, and she could barely feel the exchange of air through the hoses.

She heaved another breath and could smell the stink of the old tubes, the residual chemicals like the whiff of a long-dead cadaver. The suit seemed terribly hot and stuffy, the helmet claustrophobic.

Her vision swam for a moment, and she became dizzy trying to inhale another breath, then she calmed herself. Her problem had been only imaginary; she had begun to hyperventilate.

Scully noticed a faint lambent glow deep below her, much farther than she, wanted to descend—a blue-white light that seemed to seep from the bottom of the sacrifi-cial well, a glowing mist that oozed from the porous limestone itself.

As her eyes adjusted, Scully saw there could be no mistake—the haze of illumination pulsed and throbbed as if sending some sort of signal, a flashed SOS beacon, but at much slower intervals.

The faint light below seemed cold and unearthly. Her skin crawled even as she chastised herself for being fool-ishly spooked. It was the type of irrational nervousness brought about by telling horror stories around a camp-fire. Mulder would have loved it.

Her partner might have suggested the light was from a cluster of ghosts, remnants of Maya sacrificial vic-tims. Scully's scientific mind postulated a colony of phosphorescent algae or anaerobic microorganisms liv-ing off the limestone far below, shedding faint, heat-less light into their surroundings.

Vengeful ghosts or extraterrestrials—she knew that couldn't be true.

She realized her descent had slowed, her belt-weights reaching equilibrium with the natural buoyancy of her body and the suit, counteracting her ability to sink. She hung in the water like a suspended anchor, feeling the pressure of the depths around her, but imagining herself to be weightless.

Scully fumbled at her wide belt, reaching for the util-ity flashlight. She undipped it, fastened the chain around her wrist for safety, and gripped its handle for comfort.

Swallowing away her uneasiness, Scully switched on the dazzling beam, which stabbed through the murk like a snowplow through a blizzard. Kicking her booted feet, she turned in the thick sluggish water, looking around.

And came face to face with a corpse.

A bloated body hung in the water not three feet from her, arms spread, eye sockets open, flesh tattered and lep-rous after being gnawed by small fishes.

The mouth hung wide, and tiny minnows darted out from between his jaws.

Scully gasped. A huge outburst of bubbles squeezed from seams in her suit as she jerked. In reflex, her hand released its grip on the heavy utility light, and the beam plunged downward, pointing deep below.

She scrambled desperately for the light, suddenly realizing her mistake. The flashlight dangled and stopped, bobbing up and down—then she remembered she had tethered it to her wrist.

Her heart pounded. Scully grabbed the flashlight and pointed the beam back up, studying the corpse that had terrified her.

It was a man, his dark hair drifting about in clumps. Rocks hung from cords tied to his waist. He had been killed and thrown into the cenote. Recently.

She felt the hot air booming in her helmet now, though an incredible cold seeped through the canvas fab-ric of her suit from the water around her.

Scully swung her flashlight like a lighthouse beam, sweeping through the undisturbed depths of the cenote. She did not linger on the corpse in front of her, but searched through the depths.

The flashlight beam played across other stick-like sil-houettes floating like smashed, waterlogged insects, sunk beneath the water.

She had discovered the missing team of American archaeologists.

Xitaclan ruins Tuesday, 4:16 p.m.

The flagstone plaza was littered with bodies.

Since the Indians had refused to help retrieve the bloated corpses from the cenote, it had taken Scully and Mulder hours to hoist the dead figures up to the top of the sinkhole, one at a time.

While still deep in the stygian well, Scully had used her utility knife to saw through the cords holding the stones that weighted the corpses, and the waterlogged cadavers had slowly drifted up to the surface.

Standing on the rim, watching anxiously for his part-ner, Mulder had been shocked to see one swollen form drift up to the top of the cenote, then another and another, while Scully remained deep below, breathing through her air hoses. Finally, she too came back to day-light, opening the faceplate of her helmet and drawing huge breaths of the humid air before proceeding with the most unpleasant part of the task.

As they had dragged the dripping, stinking bodies up and out of the water, sprawling them on dry ground, Fernando Victorio Aguilar had stood by, looking extremely agitated and queasy. Mulder had kept his FBI standard-issue handgun in plain sight. Finally, the guide had grudgingly assisted him with the ropes, helping to haul Scully back up the limestone wall.

Panting, her nerves jangled, she had shucked out of the cumbersome suit, standing in her sweat-dampened shorts and blouse, then stared down at the most difficult part of the work. Four bodies, and plenty of questions.

Aguilar had stammered, staring down at the gray-green, shriveled skin on all the cadavers lying on the packed ground next to the brick sacrificial platform. The distorted, half-decomposed features of the research team stared back up at him with empty, accusing eye sockets. His Adam's apple bobbed up and down, and he rubbed his cheeks as if he needed a shave.

"Just help us get them to the plaza," Scully had said. "They can't walk by themselves."

When they had finally taken the soggy, stinking bodies around the tall pyramid and to the open plaza near their camp, Aguilar continued to look furtively around, swallowing repeatedly as if to prevent himself from vomiting. Finally, he cleared his throat and excused himself. "I'm afraid I am going to be sick if I remain here any longer," he said, stumbling backward. "That foul stench..."