Last time he counted, there were thirteen gliding around and around today. “Swell. Does that guy ever deliver any happy-skippy news?”
“He thinks that reincarnation may be on the table as part of the vultures’ purpose for being here.”
“Reincarnation?”
She nodded, vertical lines forming at the bridge of her nose.
“Like someone dying and coming back to life in another form?”
“Or you dying and something from the Underworld coming back in your place. The Maya are sort of vague on some of those details, depending on which region they come from and what era we’re talking about—Pre-Classic versus Classic and Post-Classic.”
“Fuck me.” He stared up at the sky through the trees, catching sight of several of the birds circling on the air currents. “I sure hope he’s wrong.”
Part Five: THE TEMPLE
“Listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make!”
~Bram Stoker,Dracula
Chapter Seventeen
“There’s no place like home.
There’s no place like home.
There’s no place like home.”
“You’re wearing the wrong shoes for that wish, Parker,” Angélica said.
She turned away from Prince Charming to focus on the weathered-gray stone structure that was in the process of being devoured by the jungle. An abundance of ferns, vines, yucca, agave, thorny ceiba trees, several large strangler figs, and layers of moss had all banded together to form a web of greenery that cloaked the ruin. It was no wonder this place had been hard to see from the sky prior to LIDAR technology.
A tightly grouped stand of papaya trees varying in size from saplings to mature trees were vying for the sunlight poking through the canopy. Clusters of green and orange fruit crowded their trunks. The ground at their bases was abuzz with bees and flies and gnats and butterflies, all sharing in the forest’s fruity bounty.
“Visible through the jungle’s grip of tangled vegetation was the tomb’s entrance,” Quint said in an ominous voice. “A dark, gaping mouth, shrouded in shadows and cobwebs.”
“Sounds like the start of a spooky story,” Pedro said. A wet chewing sound followed. When Angélica looked his way, he held out a papaya toward her with a bite out of it. “Want a bite?” He lifted another papaya in his other hand. It too had a bite missing. “They aredeliciosas.”
She shook her head in spite of a growl from her stomach. Sticky fingers did not go well with rice paper and stone rubbings, and while she already knew they’d be returning tomorrow morning bright and early to dig deeper here, she wanted to take a few rubbings on the carvings surrounding the structure’s rectangular opening—something to study later back at camp.
She needed Quint to take some pictures, too, before they headed back.
“I’ll take one of those papayas off your hands,”her dad said, stealing Pedro’s offering as he came up next to her. “What do you think,gatita? Is it all you’d hoped for?”
“I want to see inside before I answer that.” She looked back at Dr. Fernel, who was being harassed by a cloud of mosquitoes. “The object on your LIDAR map that has the temple shape must be that structure.” She pointed at the crumbling building to their right.
Strangler figs, chechén, and chacá trees had taken root in the cracks and crevices of the steps leading up to the rubble-strewn top. A king of the mountain battle must have been taking place over the decades, each trying to be the first species to reach the very top where a mound of ferns acted as a furry hat. While it appeared to be a multi-level temple, both it and the single-story structure in front of them, which was much more than just a small platform as she’d first thought upon viewing it on the LIDAR map days ago, sat at the bottom of a natural bowl in the land.
If this site had been located farther north on the Yucatán Peninsula, she’d have figured the buildings were the victims of one of Mother Nature’s sinkholes in the underlying limestone. But here in the southern part of the peninsula, cenotes were few and far between, withaguadasmaking up the majority of natural water repositories.
Dr. Fernel swatted at the vortex of flying menaces, which seemed to be increasing in numbers exponentially. Several red welts now covered the backs of his hands and neck and cheeks—wherever he had exposed flesh.
Had he forgotten to put on any insect repellent? Maybe he was out of whatever he’d brought along. She’d check with Teodoro later to see if he had extra of his homemade goop.
“This other building,” Dr. Fernel said, indicating the one-story ruin. “It didn’t appear to be an actual structure on the map.”
“What does that mean?” Quint asked.
“It didn’t look like anything worth investigating,” Dr. Fernel explained, using his tablet as a bug swatter. Several wasps now seemed to be drawn to him as well, dive-bombing haphazardly.
