Curses!

his reading glasses in a pocket and rummaging for them when he needed them. It was one of the very few concessions to age Gideon had known him to make.

'So,” he said, after the preliminaries of greeting, when Gideon had poured him a glass of beer and they had resettled on the balcony, “how do you like our curse?” His exuberant sunburst of white hair, backlit by the sun, was like a frizzy halo.

'I can hardly wait for all the lousy jokes,” Gideon said. “Every time anybody breaks a pencil or misplaces a trowel it's going to be the Curse of Tlaloc. When does Garrison present her translation?'

'After dinner. Eight o'clock.” He leaned forward, holding the glass in both thin hands. “Listen, guess what. The Institute changed its mind. They're going to let us dig under the temple. I guess I convinced them after all.'

'That's great! Congratulations!'

When the Institute Nacional de Antropologia e Historia had permitted Horizon to reopen Tlaloc, the Temple of the Owls, where the codex had been found (and promptly lost), was expressly excluded. It was to remain locked and off limits, a kind of shrine to iniquity. This, Gideon knew, Abe had been lobbying to have changed, spending several days in Mexico City putting forth a persuasive argument: Somewhere he had gotten hold of an almost unknown volume by the nineteenth-century French artist-explorer Jean Frederic de Waldeck, in which was sketched a ruined, looted Mayan temple-pyramid he had come upon in the Guatemalan highlands. The structure was virtually identical to the Temple of the Owls—two-level stairwell, concealed room in the landing, and all.

Moreover, de Waldeck had found a second concealed chamber at the base of the steps, also regrettably broken into and emptied. Did this mean there might be a second sealed room at Tlaloc, under the first one and now blocked by the debris of the cave-in? If there were, what might it not contain, considering the fantastic find in the one above? No one knew the answers, of course, (and the Count de Waldeck's romantic enthusiasms had been known to get the better of his fidelity to fact), but Gideon was sure that Abe's presentation to the Institute had made their mouths water.

'That's wonderful, Abe,” Julie said. “Maybe Horizon can get back in their good graces yet.'

With his head tilted to one side, Abe seemed to weigh these innocuous words. “Maybe,” he said darkly, “maybe not.” He drained his beer. “If you're not too tired from your trip, how about taking a walk to the site? We can be back by dark if we get started now.'

'I'd love it!” Julie said.

'Good. And you, Gideon, I want you to have a look at something.'

Gideon frowned. “Is something wrong, Abe?'

'That,” Abe said, “is what I want you to tell me.'

* * * *

As Yucatecan ruins went, it wasn't much, not in the same league as Coba, or Chichen Itza, or Uxmal; a square ceremonial plaza about three hundred feet down each side, with six more-or-less standing structures. The largest was the one they were on, the Pyramid of the Owls, but by Mayan standards it was hardly imposing: a squat, truncated pyramid only forty-two feet high, with its broad, crumbling stairway of stone steps set at a comfortable forty-degree grade instead of the usual dizzying, near-vertical uplift.

When they had made their way to the top they turned to look back out over the site. Five and a half years hadn't changed it much. Only the eight-foot chain-link fence surrounding it was new. It had been erected by the government a few months after the site had been shut down.

They were facing west into an early-evening sky just shifting from a pale blue to a rich, red-ribbed mauve. Below them were the rest of the buildings, trailing long shadows and scattered with no apparent design around the edges of the grassy plaza: the thickly overgrown cube of the Priest's House, where the newly discovered skeleton lay; the twin ramps of the modest ball court, where much of the current work centered; the cluster of three small, collapsed buildings, little more than foundations now and unimaginatively dubbed the West Group by Howard Bennett.

The clump of knobby hummocks along the northern border of the plaza just inside the fence had also once been structures of some kind, but the jungle had long ago broken them up and engulfed them. To a casual eye they were no more than irregular humps of dirt and debris covered with soil and sprouting tangles of weeds and bushes. No one would even be able to guess at what they had been until they were cleared and excavated in the years to come.

And that was it, except for the archaeologists’ shed of limestone stucco, its thatched roof flaring to salmon as the slanting rays of sunlight struck it. Immediately beyond the square plaza, on all sides, the rain forest pressed in, a lumpy, scrubby mat, endless and impenetrable.

Or so it seemed. Invisible under the green canopy was the trail they had walked to get here. Decrepit now, collapsed and pulled apart by time and roots, it had once been part of the complex system of raised Mayan “highways” that had linked the great centers. This one cut arrow-straight through the jungle for three-quarters of a mile to Chichen Itza, conveniently passing within fifty yards of the Mayaland's grounds on the way.

But from here the Mayaland might have been on another continent. There was nothing to see beyond this silent, thousand-year-old place of ghosts but jungle, nothing to hear but the thickening drone of insects as the evening came on. It was an astonishing thought that they had been drinking iced beers in a posh hotel only twenty minutes before. Even the air was primeval, full of the sharp, burnt-straw smell of Yucatan. Here they still cleared their cornfields for next year's crop by setting them aflame, just as they had done when Tlaloc bustled with life.

'Come,” Abe said. “I want you to have a look inside the temple.'

The entrances to Mayan temples are generally doorless, but this one had been sealed by the government with a thick plywood barrier, now warped and spongy. A clumsy arrangement of metal bars and a massive padlock held it in place.

Abe grasped the padlock. “Yesterday when they sent me the key, I came up to have a look around. And this,' he said dramatically, “is what I found.” When he lifted the lock it slid apart in his hand.

'It was already open?” Julie said.

Not merely open, but sawn neatly through the hasp.