It was a pile of corpses—a high, ugly mountain of bodies.
Human bodies.
There must have been at least a hundred of them, and they were all in various states of dismemberment. Blood slicked the walls all around them in such copious quantities that it seemed as if someone had painted them with it.
Some of the bodies were naked, others were partially clothed—some had had their heads ripped off, others their arms, others still had had their entire torsos gnawed in two.
Bloodied bones littered the area, some of which still had chunks of uneaten flesh clinging to them.
To his horror, Race recognised a few of the bodies.
Captain Scott—-Chucky Wilson—Tex Reichart—the German general, Kolb. He even saw Buzz Cochrane's body lying upside-down on the pile. The entire lower half of his torso had been chewed off.
More curiously, however, Race saw a large number of olive-skinned corpses on the pile.
Natives.
And then suddenly he saw a small hole in the wall beyond the grisly pile of bodies.
It was roughly circular in shape, about two-and half-feet in diameter, the width of a broadshouldered man.
Race immediately recalled seeing a similarly shaped stone up on the surface earlier—on the balcony-like path behind the temple—a peculiar round stone amid all the square-shaped ones, a stone that appeared to have been slotted into a cylindrical hole of some sort. Oh, no, Race thought, realising.
It wasn't a hole…
It was a chute.
A chute that started up on the surface and ended here, in the enormous stone cathedral.
And in an instant, the question as to how the rapas had survived for four hundred years inside the temple had an answer.
In his mind's eye, Race recalled Miguel Marquez's words: 'If you hadn't survived your encounter with the caiman, your friends would have been sacrificed to the rapas.'
Sacrificed to the rapas.
Race stared at the circular hole in the wall, his eyes widening in horror.
It was a sacrificial well.
A well into which the natives from the upper village threw offerings to the rapas.
Human offerings.
Human sacrifices.
They would throw their own people down here.
But it probably didn't stop at that, Race thought as he gazed at the inordinate number of olive-skinned bodies that lay on the pile of corpses.
The natives probably threw their dead—and the dead of their enemies—down here as well, as another way of appeasing the rapas.
And in times of real shortage, Race imagined, the rapas probably ate each other.
Just then, he saw five more rapas lying on the stone floor beyond the pile of corpses, next to a small, square-shaped hole in the floor.
The five rapas were staring right at him, entranced by the steady hum of the wet idol.
Standing in front of them were about ten much smaller cats—-cubs, rapa cubs each about the size and shape of a tiger cub. They also stared at Race. It seemed as if they had all stopped in mid-play as soon as they had heard the idol's mesmerising drone.
Jesus, Race thought, there was a whole community down here.
A community of rapas.
Come on, Will, get on with it.
Right.
It was then that Race extracted something else from the leather satchel that he had slung over his shoulder.
The fake idol.
Race left the fake idol on the floor at the base of the large square-shaped hole that had opened onto the cathedral, so that anyone entering the temple would find it immediately.
He didn't know for sure, but he imagined that that was exactly what Renco had done four hundred years previously.
All right, he thought, time to get out of here.
Race saw the smaller hole in the floor over by the five female rapas and their cubs and figured that his best option—apart from climbing up the sacrificial chute and hoping someone opened it for him—was to just keep going downwards.
