Wolf (29 page)

Lifting the light, she peered around, but she could see nothing but darkness beyond the range of the light. Giving up, she lowered the light and scanned the floor.

Reassured when she saw nothing scurrying away, she moved cautiously across the stone floor, testing each two foot square with the toe of her boot before she placed her weight on it. It seemed doubtful there would be another trap within the chamber, but she wasn’t taking any chances. She was deep beneath the surface of the ground, but she could still feel air wafting through the shaft, chasing the mustiness from the stale air that had been trapped inside the temple, or whatever it was, for countless centuries. A pitiful amount of light filtered down through that shaft at the moment, only a less deep gloom from the light of the stars, but it was better than nothing … better than falling down another hole and breaking something.

When she paused the third time and lifted the light to look around, she froze in awe. Just at the edge of the ring of light, she saw color, shape, the dim impression of an intricate mosaic. Forgetting the possible hazard of the floor, she held the light up and moved closer.

The entire wall was covered in tiny, colored stones. As she moved closer, she lost the perspective to view the design, but she was far more interested in inspecting the stones at the moment. She saw, when she reached the wall and lifted a hand to inspect the surface with her palm and fingertips, that the stones were amazingly crafted, almost as regular as machine cut, or maybe formed tiles. The surface was as smooth as glass.

They couldn’t be pottery tiles, she decided. The color was too vivid. Time would have dulled almost anything they could have thought of to use to color them, even if they’d fired the tiles. It had to be naturally colored stones, but it was still amazing that they’d processed them into neat, almost perfectly symmetrical squares, and flat, as if they’d been cut by machinery.

The feat of producing the tiles alone seemed impossibly beyond the culture that would have made them. She moved back again after a moment, slowly, until the image began to take form. She could see then that the frieze was like the one on the stone she’d found. Naked couples, entwined in various sexual acts lined the wall as the light revealed image after image. It wasn’t stick-like figures, either. The stones limited the possibility of rounded, more natural looking figures, but these didn’t look primitive, boxy, angular, or disproportionate.

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Some of the positions seemed wildly improbable, but otherwise the picture seemed a determined rendering of nature in action rather than a simple effort to suggest the general idea.

She came at last to a corner. Frowning, she tried to remember how many steps she’d taken, but discovered she’d been too preoccupied by the depiction to spare a thought to counting. Her stride was approximately a yard heel to toe, she decided, maybe closer to two feet. She decided to count by twos. She’d taken ten steps when she came abruptly to a darkened alcove.

That wasn’t what halted her in her tracks, however.

The figure seated on a great stone throne sent a painful shaft knifing through her chest, as if she’d just discovered a living being in the room with her.

Carved from some dark stone that was a close enough approximation of brown skin tones to give her heart palpitations, the figure looked to be every bit of ten foot high, seated. She couldn’t see a lot more than the muscular legs and the impressive erection sprouting from his lap, however. The upper portion of the figure remained in darkness.

The mammoth erection was a blatant clue of her whereabouts, even if she’d been inclined to dismiss the depictions on the frieze.

She’d landed in the temple of some ancient fertility god.

A noise behind her jerked her attention from the colossal cock.

Whirling, she peered into the darkness. Something thudded against the stone floor.

“Gaby?”

Irritation went through her when she recognized Mark’s voice. It dawned on her abruptly that he was the asshole that had gotten her into this predicament to start with.

He’d been shoving on the stone. It had to be some sort of trigger for the trap door she’d fallen through.

And now he was getting all chummy?

“Feel free to call me Dr. LaPlante!” she snapped, holding the light out and stalking toward the dim square of light she could see far into the distance as her sight adjusted. The room must be forty feet square, maybe more. No wonder she hadn’t been able to see anything from where she’d landed!

Her rush proved imprudent. She slammed into an object sprouting from the floor and nearly chest high, almost losing her grip on the lantern. Uttering an inelegant grunt as her impact forced the air from her lungs, she fell back a step. “Hold on!” she called louder.

It wasn’t a wall. By her reckoning the thing was roughly six feet wide and six to eight feet long, approximately three feet high, and flat on top.

An altar?

A shiver chased its way down her spine. Visions of live, human sacrifices danced in her head.

Deciding to ignore the thing for the moment, she moved around it, focused on the square that indicated the opening of the shaft. She nearly fell over the bundle at the bottom.

“I dropped a sleeping bag down. There’s another light, a canteen, and food wrapped inside. Did it make it all the way down?”

She’d kicked something hard inside. It was a good thing she was wearing boots!

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“Yes.”

“Anything else you want or need?”

Aside from getting out? “I can’t think of anything,” she said after a moment’s thought. She wasn’t really hungry, despite the fact that she hadn’t eaten since the noon meal and it was already past the time, she was pretty sure, when they usually ate supper.

She was thirsty, though. She’d been sweating like a pig while she’d struggled to get out, and panting with fear besides. Her throat and mouth felt like they’d been stuffed with cotton that had soaked up every drop of moisture.

She would’ve liked more light, just in case, but they didn’t have a lot of artificial light and they had to conserve it. It was too hard to get batteries for the handheld lights or fuel for the generator that ran everything else so deep in the jungle.

“I’ll be fine,” she said finally, hoping she would be and that they wouldn’t find her dead body the next morning. Or find her blubbering like an idiot.

“I could stay here for a little while and keep you company if you’d like.”

Surprise flickered through her. Guilty conscience, she wondered? “The mosquitoes will carry you off—or suck you dry. But thanks anyway. I think I’ll explore this room a little more now that I have more light.”

“You need to be careful with batteries,” he cautioned.

“If I have to sit in the dark, I’d like to know what, if anything, is in here with me
before
the lights go out,” she pointed out.

“You sure you don’t want company for a while?”

Gaby sighed. “Not unless you want to join me down here,” she muttered under her breath. She decided not to voice the comment loud enough for him to hear it, though.

He might take it as a different sort of invitation. “It’s hard to talk like this, but thanks anyway.”

She didn’t wait to see if she could hear him leave. Kneeling, she untied the bundle to examine the contents. As she’d hoped, he’d tossed in the small bag of personal items she’d brought with her that included a small jar of petroleum jelly, which she used for everything from chapped lips to scrapes and minor cuts.

This was not the sort of place where one wanted to ignore even minor injuries.

They were too prone to infection.

Settling on top of the bag once she’d emptied it, she examined herself carefully and discovered her pants had torn at the knee on the trip down, which explained the stinging knee. When she’d cleaned the scraped areas—chin, knee, elbow, and palms--

with a moist wipe, she carefully applied a thin later of petroleum jelly and then topped it with self-stick bandages to keep from smearing jelly everywhere. It soothed the minor discomfort at once, which brought her mind to another discomfort.

She was going to have to squat. She didn’t want to and it had nothing to do with discomfort of desecrating a holy place, pagan or not. But she’d bust a bladder if she tried to hold it till she was rescued.

Grabbing the lantern and her tissues, she moved down the wall to the corner, examined the floor and the walls and finally shucked her pants and backed into it. She began to get the prickling sensation of being watched the moment she took her pants off.

She cast several glances toward the statute at the other end of the room, certain that must be what was giving her the feeling of being watched. She couldn’t see it of course. The lantern light didn’t reach even nearly that far.

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It made her wonder how and why she’d gotten the sensation of being watched before. She hadn’t known the thing was there at that time. And it wasn’t as if it was a live person.

When she’d finished and put her panties back on, she decided against the pants.

No one was coming down tonight, and it was too damned hot to wear them when she didn’t feel she needed the protection. Folding them instead, she returned to her sleeping bag.

She hadn’t seen a sign of crawlies, but she didn’t like the idea of sitting flat on the floor, or sleeping on it, and laying awake all night so that she’d know if anything crawled on her. The flashlight Mark had sent down to her, she discovered with her first touch of pleasure, was a floodlight. Setting it up, she switched it on and got her first good look at her surroundings, because this light was powerful enough to chase the shadows all the way into the corners and even the shadows weren’t dark and deep—except around the alcove where the horny god sat.

After staring at the altar—she knew that must be what it was—that was blocking a good bit of the light, she took the lantern and went to examine it more closely. It was a solid slab, she discovered when she’d waved the lantern over the top.

She didn’t see any signs of dark stains that told of a gruesome usage for the thing.

Setting the lantern down on top, she went back to gather the rest of her things. When she’d carefully examined each article to make certain nothing had crawled into it, she set them all on top of the altar, then walked around the thing in search of a foot hold to climb up.

If it was an altar, she reasoned, it would have a way up.

There were several steep stairs carved into the stone on one side, she discovered.

Climbing up, she opened her ‘cosmetic’ pouch and pulled out the can of aerosol lubricant she’d brought on the advice of one of her co-workers at the museum. It wasn’t a lovely smell, but by the time she’d sprayed a narrow barrier all the way around the edges of the altar she felt secure in the knowledge that there wasn’t a crawling thing alive that could climb slick stone further slickened with oil.

She could sleep.

If she could just ignore the god staring down at her.

She tried. Climbing up again, she arranged her sleeping bag and drank a little water. The packaged food they usually ate wasn’t great, but it wasn’t bad either. She kept glancing toward the temple god while she ate, still feeling that peculiar sensation of being watched.

The floodlight threw the upper portion of his body into bold relief.

He was wearing a mask, but instead of blank orbs where the eye holes were in the mask, she could see winking green gems set into carved eyes.

Why, she wondered, would any people from this region give their god green eyes? It defied reason when the aborigines were dark skinned and had dark eyes.

The mask seemed off, for that matter. Instead of the bizarre faces primitives generally created, the mask was perfectly blank, and the face behind it looked human.

The whole lower half of his face was exposed and the nose, mouth, jaw and chin looked like a normal human face.

Actually, a better than average
handsome
human face, she decided.

That was strange enough since primitives usually feared their gods and made
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them ‘terrible’ to behold. But the mask seemed to be decorated with peacock feathers.

She doubted peacocks had been around that long. They weren’t even native to the continent.

Maybe it was just the plumes of a similar bird, though? She wasn’t a wild life specialist. There were probably hundreds of animals that existed now, or had in the past, that she didn’t have any clue about. For that matter, it might not be ‘natural’ feathers.

The mask—and she knew the stone mask was very likely a depiction of a mask actually used at some point—might have had eyes painted on it to represent their god’s omnipotence.

Shaking her head, she finished her meal, drank a little more water and finally settled in the sleeping bag, staring up at the darkened ceiling above her.

Everything about the temple seemed strange. Nothing inside it seemed to follow any of the ‘rules’. Of course they didn’t know that the temple was pyramid in shape since they hadn’t uncovered the whole thing, but the art wasn’t primitive. It looked more modern than Aztec. The god wasn’t clunky and primitive looking.