Tears of the Jaguar (25 page)

The taxi driver sat in his black Hackney cab in front of the Skipton railway station where he’d returned after taking the gawky American woman out to Malkin Tower Farm. A large woman had emerged from the station and was now standing by the curb, a phone pressed to her ear, so motionless that he didn’t know if she was about to get into the cab or not. He didn’t like the look of her.

Not that he could see her, exactly. The woman’s face was obscured by the hood of her blue plastic rain slicker. She’d dumped her modest luggage—it looked more like shopping bags—at her feet while she talked on the phone. Except that she didn’t talk. What he heard through his rolled-down window gave him the creeps. She made noises low in her throat that said she was attentive and in agreement, but that sounded like the purring of a large cat.

He half hoped she’d just walk away. She probably didn’t know where she wanted to go and then would complain about the fare when she got him lost. She probably smelled too. The only bag she hadn’t set down looked like a tightly woven basket, and this she had clasped to her chest as if someone might try to rip it from her grasp. He’d wait another few seconds, and if she didn’t at least acknowledge his presence, he’d pull away and leave her to whatever poor bugger was next in the rank. It was close to his knocking-off time anyway and he fancied a pint before going home.

“You getting in or what, Missus?” he said.

For a second there was no change, and then she lifted her head slightly and he could see her eyes. Although she was otherwise motionless, they sparkled with a strange energy. Finally, the woman’s gaze seemed to focus, like she was noticing him for the first time.

“One second,” she said.

It should have been polite, almost apologetic, but it wasn’t, and it unnerved him. He also thought she sounded like she might be American.

Two Yanks in one day. Weird.

He met all sorts in this line of work. He’d had his share of drunks spilling out of Rooder’s and Strata, and sometimes they were more than drunk, though Skipton wasn’t Bradford or Leeds, thank God. But this woman was something else entirely. He couldn’t put his finger on it but...

“Malkin Tower Farm,” she said, leaning in close so that he flinched slightly.

In other circumstances he might have laughed at the coincidence, but the strangeness of the woman stopped him. They
were surely connected, these two American women who had to be taken somewhere he’d never been before, but something in her manner stopped him from remarking on it.

He watched her settle into the spacious back of the hackney in the rearview mirror, pulling her clutter in after her. She had pocketed the phone and now sat like a perching bird.

“You’ll want to take the A59 west,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said. “I know.”

He took his foot off the brake and the car rolled forward with its customary chugging rattle, which vanished as he picked up speed.

From that moment on she said nothing and never so much as looked to the side, always staring straight ahead through the windshield like she was driving herself. Only after Gisburn when they were heading south on the A682 did her attention turn to the basket in her lap. He watched her, fascinated, as she lifted the lid of the basket in her lap and peered inside.

As she did so, she purred again, as she had when she had been on the phone, and he said, “What’s in the basket?” before really deciding to do so.

Her gaze swung up to the mirror so quickly that he shrank from it, staring hurriedly ahead, but she didn’t speak, and after a moment, he risked another look back. She was still staring at him, but there was the shadow of a smile on her face, which broadened when she realized that she had left the lid slightly off the basket. She adjusted it, closing it properly, but not before he—with a thrill of horror—had seen a long reptilian leg reach out from inside. In the same instant, whatever was in the basket emitted a long, tremulous call that raised the hairs on the back of his neck.

James was sick of Alice’s attitude to him, her presumption. But today it had worked in his favor. She thought he’d gone away all disappointed, but in fact he had gotten his stuff together and taken a tourist bus to Coba, where there was a large Mayan city right in the jungle. James had heard there were spider monkeys and that the ruins felt like something out of Indiana Jones.

Should be pretty cool
.

But he wasn’t going to see the tourist stuff, and that was cooler still, as was the fact that in his backpack, along with the cryptic notes he had scribbled in his journal, was a folding trowel and a hand pick. They made the bag heavy, but he slung it up between his shoulders and walked toward the site entrance, wondering vaguely what he would tell Alice later. He imagined how she would respond: surprise, certainly. Excitement too. And she’d be impressed, and maybe that would be enough. Maybe they would have sex, and maybe after that he’d be able to
walk away from her and get on with his life. By then he would have some real money to play with, thanks to Bowerdale.

James knew nothing about Coba and, for once, didn’t much care. He bought his ticket, the cost of which included a map. He rented a bike then set off into the ruins, which were spread out and overgrown. He passed the Grupo Coba with its Temple of the Church, whose weather-beaten stepped pyramid was almost conical, like an immense termite mound rising up out of the jungle. He’d read that Coba was used for those shots of the rebel base rising above the rainforest in
Star Wars
. If that was true, it was also, he thought, pretty cool.

He rode east, turning right at a sign that marked an overgrown path toward one of the city’s ancient ball courts.

He couldn’t take the bike all the way and had to leave it propped against a tree. The vegetation was dense, and after five minutes, he was sure he had lost the path and was wandering aimlessly in the jungle. There were bugs everywhere, and even though he sprayed himself with mosquito repellant, he was getting covered in bites. He hadn’t seen a single person since coming this way, and though that had initially excited him, he now began to feel simply lost and frustrated. And then, without warning, he was there.

The ball court was much smaller than the one at Chitchen Itza, more like the one at Ek Balam, which had similarly sloped sides. James scanned the site, checked the instructions he had scribbled down, and walked into the jungle, moving diagonally from one corner of the stone terrace. He took twenty long paces, feeling like a kid playing pirates, and came to a patch of secluded ground under a huge tree: ground that looked dark and uneven as if recently disturbed.

He checked to see that he was still alone, then set to work. The ground was indeed soft and he didn’t need to use the pick. The trowel worked just fine, and in less then ten minutes he had removed enough of the dirt to see the edge of a purple canvas bag. He would have preferred to hear the chink of his little spade on the lid of a chest, but this would do very nicely. He uncovered the rest of the bag and hauled it out. He replaced all the dirt, gently tamping it down with his feet when he was done. Only then did he turn his attention to the contents of the bag.

He had seen it all before in the Ek Balam tomb, of course, but couldn’t resist just laying it out and gazing at it for a few minutes. Everything was there: intact and beautiful, even the bones. He picked up the highly polished log inset with bright, decorative stones and turned it over in his hands. It was about eighteen inches long and carved with images of a jaguar with quetzal feathers, traditional symbols of power and grace among the ancient Maya. He turned it end over end, studying the carving closely. It was a full two minutes after he had blown off the dust and dirt that he saw the crack that outlined the body of the springing jaguar: there was a visible seam. Excited, James pried at it with a pocket knife, and within moments, the log split easily into two perfectly crafted halves. Inside was a brown folded parchment bound with faded red ribbon. He freed the ribbon gently, working it sideways till the paper slid out, and read the letter to himself, delighting in the fact that he was the first person to see what it contained.

It wasn’t easy to decipher. The penmanship was spidery and erratic, the letter shapes and sizes wildly inconsistent, like it had been written by a child. It took him a couple of minutes to make it all out, then he read it again, not sure what he had discovered.
He was sweating from the digging and the humidity of the jungle, but he felt a rising thrill as the contents of the letter registered. The treasure they had found in the Ek Balam tomb was only the beginning.

“At the beginning of the seventeenth century,” said the barman, fixing Deborah with a serious look, “Pendle was a wild and sparsely populated place known as Pendle Forest. There was not much to hold the people scattered across the region together, except for Newchurch. It’s an old church about three miles west of here, and the place people had to go for Sunday service or risk being fined by the state.”

The barman’s name was Ralph. He owned the pub, and Deborah could tell from the slightly amused hush of the others in the pub that this was not the first time he had told his tale to a stray visitor.

“Among the people who made the trek to Newchurch each Sunday—or were supposed to—were two poor families anchored by a pair of old women. One was called Anne Whittle, known locally as Old Chattox, perhaps because she was constantly muttering and chattering to herself. The other was Elizabeth
Southerns, known as Old Demdike, a blind, lame woman who owned no more than a single smock. Both lived by begging and from time to time working as “wise women”: curing sick cattle, banishing the evil eye, turning soured beer back the way it should be. Important stuff, if it worked, stuff right at the heart of the community.”

“Spoken like a true barman,” said Neil, the man with round glasses, laughing. He’d been listening attentively, as if ready to correct the story if necessary.

“Beer is food!” said Ralph, slightly defiant. “Anyway, the two old women knew their stuff, but they feuded with each other. Also, people were afraid of them, thought they had dark powers. And not just the old women themselves, but their children and grandchildren too. There were stories of grudges, stories that went back as far as 1595—almost twenty years before the trials—rumors of people like Christopher Nutter and his son Robert, and Old Demdike’s son-in-law John Device, all being bewitched to death by the Chattox woman.

“Legend has it that Old Demdike’s granddaughter, Alizon, inherited the dark powers. First, the young girl cursed a local miller who had underpaid her mother for some field work. Soon after, the miller’s daughter grew sick and died. Two years later, Alizon Device was begging at a market and asked a peddler for some pins. He refused her roughly. ‘Pins?’ says he. ‘Let’s see some money, first. You’ll get no pins from me, baggage.’ ‘No?’ says she, ‘then I hope your own pins prick you to death.’”

The barman leaned forward, still holding Deborah’s eyes.

“And no sooner than she had said it,” he continued, “did the peddler fall down, paralyzed and unable to speak. He was taken
to a tavern, and though he lived, he was lame from that day forth and could only speak with great difficulty.”

“He had a stroke,” said the man in the round glasses.

“Quite possibly,” said Ralph. “But Alizon thought she had done it. She confessed as much, and told how she had been visited by a black dog who told her how to lame the peddler. She said Old Demdike had trained her in witchcraft and brought the black dog to suck at her breasts when she was just a lass.”

“She said this at trial?” asked Deborah.

“Before the trial,” said Ralph. “The peddler’s son appealed to the local magistrate, who forced Alizon’s confession. He got not only the story of her own witchcraft, but other stories of her grandmother Demdike’s workings in the dark arts: how she had bewitched John Nutter’s cow to death, magically turned milk to butter, and cursed the Baldwin child till she died. Alizon didn’t stop with her own family, but went on to implicate Old Chattox, said she’d killed little Anne Nutter for laughing at her and used a clay figure to kill the child of John Moore who had accused her of souring his beer.