The Third Antichrist (7 page)

Abi spent the better part of the night recovering his energy on what his three junior siblings now insisted on calling the ‘body raft’, and which he, playing Devil’s Advocate as usual, termed the
ratis corporum
. The reeking raft of corpses would only suffer two persons on it at any one time, so the other three took turn and turn about, alternately hanging off the sides and then catnapping on board throughout the course of the night.

First thing in the morning, just as the sun began its steady creep across the face of the cenote, the raft sank. The rot began with the outlying bodies, but soon communicated itself to the central portion of the raft. Abi barely had time to grab the jack, the two tyre irons, the tow rope and the fire extinguisher, before the raft slid out from underneath him, just as if it had been spirited away, like King Arthur’s sword, by the Lady of the Lake.

Abi trod water for a few moments, his heart pounding with delayed shock. The others struggled towards him through the water, their faces pale in the early morning light. Abi thrust the fire extinguisher into Rudra’s hands, while Nawal took over carrying the jack, and Dakini the two tyre irons.

In a movement which belied his obvious exhaustion, Abi wrapped the tow rope around his midriff and attached it over one shoulder with a quick-release knot. ‘Right. I’m going to get on and do this while I’ve still got some energy left. We’re already half starving. In a few hours’ time we’ll be gnawing at the dead. If we can still find any, that is. The whole darned shooting match seems to have sunk.’ Abi’s fake cheer sounded flat even to him.

‘The sun’s coming up. At least we can see the cliff face now.’

‘That’s a comfort.’

Rudra cocked his head to one side. ‘Are you sure you’re up to this, Abi? You still look washed out from all those dives. Your skin looks kind of grey.’

‘I haven’t checked in the mirror recently, Rudi, but thanks for the testimonial. You always did know how to make a girl feel good about herself.’ Abi floated on his back for a moment, gathering his thoughts. The effort at producing the banter was beginning to take its toll. He fought down an urge to throw up his hands and slide beneath the surface of the sinkhole – signing off at this early stage would be a mug’s game. ‘The straight answer to your question is no. I’m not sure I’m up to it. But as the only one amongst us who has ever done any climbing, logic dictates that I take first shot at the summit. But maybe you have an alternative idea? Along the lines of an alien spaceship, perhaps, arriving from a galaxy far, far away, to spirit us off?’

‘Stranger things have happened, Abi.’

‘I don’t know when.’

Abi twisted in the water and struck out for the base of the cliff. The others, after a brief hesitation, followed him. They looked like a family of ducklings shadowing their mother. The four of them stopped and trod water, their eyes fixed on the fifty-foot rock face above them.

‘It doesn’t look so far.’

‘Neither did Mars and those alien spaceships of yours, Rudi. If I happen to drop one of the tyre irons, for fuck’s sake try and catch it. With your teeth, if necessary.’

Nawal pitched some water at Abi with the flat of her palm. ‘Leave Rudi alone. We’re all mourning our brothers and sisters. Not just you.’

Abi felt like shouting that he wasn’t mourning anybody – that he didn’t give a damn about any of them apart from Vau. But at the last moment he turned onto his back and frog-swam towards the base of the cliff.

The next time he spoke, his voice was detached and formal. ‘If the worst comes to the worst, we can always hammer the irons into the cliff foot and attach the tow rope to them. That would give us something to hang onto. It might even buy us a couple of days.’

‘A couple of days of what?’

‘
Nascentes morimur
,
finisque ab origine pendet
.’

Rudra shook his head. ‘Jesus, Abi. I wish you wouldn’t spring all that Latin stuff on people all the time. What does it mean?’

‘It means “from the moment of our birth we begin to die, and the end of our life is closely linked to the beginning of it”.’

‘Great. That’s just what we all wanted to hear.’

‘It is great. I saw an old English gravestone once. Its occupant had paraphrased Manilius perfectly: “When we to be to be begunne, we did beginne to be undonne.”’

‘I don’t get you, Abi. Are you trying to drive us all to collective suicide?’

‘No,
frater meus
. I’m simply trying to put things into perspective. Classical literature helps with that. They’ve been through it all before, you see.’

‘What? Floating in a cenote with a bunch of dead bodies?’ Nawal was holding the jack out of the water as if she feared it might rust and start to break up in her hands before she could get around to using it.

‘When you get a bit older, Nawal – which I agree, at the moment, looks a little unlikely – you’ll realize that there’s nothing new under the sun.’ Abi’s eyes travelled along the tangled fissure in the rock face he was intending to use on his way up. ‘Pass me the extinguisher.’

Rudra handed it over.

Abi took out the restraining pin and squeezed the trigger. A thin stream of foam jetted across the surface of the cenote.

‘Christ, Abi. What are you doing that for? Isn’t the water polluted enough already?’

‘Weight, Rudi. I’ve earmarked the extinguisher jacket as a hammer, not as a receptacle to put out fires with. The last thing I need is to lug six litres of useless liquid up the cliff face with me. If we hadn’t had the raft, I would have emptied it last night.’

‘Oh.’

‘Right. Now you can take it back. Give me the jack, Nawal.’

Abi launched himself out of the water and rammed the pyramid jack into the crack at the base of the cleft. Then he reached up and screwed it open with the tyre iron. The tyre iron was equipped with two protuberances at the distaff end, specifically designed to slip into the winding mechanism of the jack. When the jack was comfortably embedded in the cleft, Abi launched himself out of the water again, this time with Rudra’s help, and clambered onto the protruding end, until he was standing with both feet tight to the face of the cliff, maybe a yard and a half above the surface of the cenote.

‘So far so good. Hand me the other tyre iron and the extinguisher.’

‘Jesus, Abi. This is impossible. You’re never going to make it.’

‘Hand me the climbing kit, Rudi, or I’ll abandon you here to drown.’

Rudra handed him the extinguisher and the tyre iron.

Abi reached above himself and positioned the tyre iron in the cleft. Then he took the hand extinguisher by the trigger mechanism, and hammered the tyre iron home. ‘If I can make it as far as that cleft up there, I might be able to belay across to that little outcrop. If I can traverse as far as that, I can rest up a bit and get my bearings. That’s the plan, anyway.’

‘How are you going to free the tyre iron? After you’ve released the jack, I mean?’

‘I’m going to tie the tow rope to it, Rudi. Then, when I’m safely on the outcrop, I can yank it a few times and it should come free. The art is not to ram it in too far.’

Rudra looked at the girls, who were treading water beside him. He was tempted to comment further, but he could tell by the way they were staring hopefully up at Abi that any observations he might make would fall very flat indeed. ‘Good luck, Abi.’

‘That’s the understatement of the year.’

13

It took Abi more than an hour, and six near falls, to inch his way the forty feet up to the final ledge. The ledge was situated just ten feet below the upper lip of the cenote, but those ten feet might as well have measured ten miles as far as Abi was concerned, for the rock face was as smooth as Plexiglas.

Abi squatted on the ledge, with his back against the cliff face, and stared down at his brothers and sisters. His clothes, which had begun to dry off during the ascent, were wringing wet with sweat.

The sun had reached its zenith over the cenote. Abi could feel it beating against the top of his head. The unholy mixture of semi-starvation, thirst, and unrelenting heat were threatening to give him hallucinations. Twice, early on in the climb, he had fumbled and lost one of the tyre irons, but each time Rudra had either caught it on the wing, or snatched it from the water before it had time to sink. Then he had thrown it back up to Abi again, with the girls acting like the backstops of a volleyball team in case he muffed the throw.

About forty minutes into the climb, Abi had jammed both feet and his one free arm inside the cleft, fearing that he might be about to lose consciousness. He had managed to snatch a five-minute breather, after tying the tow rope to the pyramid jack and making a belay of it via a Munter hitch. The thought that he might unexpectedly black out had filled Abi with existential dread. He knew for a certainty that once he fell back into the cenote, that would be it – he’d never make it up the cliff face again.

Abi twisted on the spot and squinted at the area above his head. There was no sign of a handhold. There was no whisper of a striation. There wasn’t even the faint beginnings of a crack that he could take advantage of and extend. Just the limestone equivalent of an opaque, marginally convex, sheet of glass.

‘Any suggestions anyone?’

Rudra cleared his throat. ‘Can’t you find anywhere to hammer one of the tyre irons in? To use it like a chisel?’

‘No.’

‘Can you jump, then? Upwards, I mean.’

‘No. I’d make it about halfway, then I’d fall back into the cenote and drown. Or as good as. The face is angled.’

There was a brief moment of silence. ‘What are you going to do, then?’

‘I don’t know. It didn’t look this smooth when I checked it out from down below. I can’t believe that rock can change its character like that. This has to have been manmade.’

Nawal drifted into sight below him. ‘Can you weight the end of the tow rope and swing it up and over?’

‘Maybe. But what’s it got to latch onto? There’s no wall or anything. We were up there only yesterday. Although it seems about three years ago. You’ve all seen what it looks like on the top. Just an area of flat terrain with a few loose rocks.’

‘You can’t be sure of that. We weren’t looking at it in that way when we were up there.’

Abi sighed. ‘You’ve got a point.’

‘So what have we got to lose?’

Nawal swam closer in towards the cliff. Her face was earnest. She looked as if she was about to address a science class. ‘If you were to put the extinguisher through the gap in the car jack, Abi, and then screw it down tight, you’d have a pretty effective counterweight. Then you could ram the tyre irons through the jack to give it a sort of porcupine effect. Like one of those wartime mines they blew ships up with. That way it might snag on something.’

‘What if it snags on something, and when I start climbing up, it un-snags?’

No one answered.

‘Okay then. I’m going to do what Nawal suggests. I can’t squat up here for much longer or I’ll cramp up and take the big dive.’

Abi unhitched the jack from the tow rope. He screwed the jack open to its fullest extent, and then eased the extinguisher through the middle of the pyramid. When he was satisfied with the fit, he screwed the jack down onto the extinguisher so that metal bit into metal.

‘Now tie the tow rope onto the jack again before you lever in the tyre irons. Just in case. Wouldn’t do to drop it.’

‘Thanks, Nawal. Did anyone ever tell you what a fearful pedant you are?’

‘Next, you jam the tyre irons through from either end. If you jam them crosswise through the jack mechanism, they should lock into place.’

‘Okay. Hold your horses. I’m doing it.’

‘Has it worked?’

‘Yes. It’s worked. But I doubt it’ll stand a hard knock. If this thing lands wrong, it will simply loosen up and collapse on us.’

‘That’s a risk we have to take.’

‘
We
have to take?
We?
It’s me who’s taking the fucking risk, not you.’

‘So you don’t think we’re risking anything, do you? You think we’re all floating down here thinking, well, that’s great – Abi’s holding all our lives in his hands. But it’s okay. We’re easy with that. In the meantime, while he’s busy trying to save us, let’s all go for a doggy paddle to pass the time.’