And so with the real idol still humming in his hands, he cautiously made his way past the five female rapas and their cubs and over to the small, square-shaped hole in the floor next to them.
He looked down into the hole.
It was about six feet square and it just disappeared straight down into the rocky floor. Like the larger hole before it, it also had foot and handholds carved into its vertical walls.
What the hell, Race thought.
With his torch held firmly in his mouth again and the hum ming idol shoved inside his satchel, Race climbed down into the narrow shaft.
After a minute or so, he lost sight of the hole's opening above him. From then on, except for the small circle of flickering orange light that illuminated the shaft around him, he was surrounded by impenetrable darkness.
A couple of the rapas followed him down, slinking down the walls of the shaft at the edge of the torch's circle of light, hanging upside-down above him, keeping pace with him, glaring at him with their cold yellow eyes.
But they never attacked.
Race kept climbing. Down and down. It felt like he climbed for miles, but in reality it was probably only a cou ple of hundred feet or so.
Then, finally, his feet touched ground again.
Race grabbed his torch and held it aloft and found that he was standing in a small cavern of some sort, bounded on every side by solid stone walls.
Filling the cavern, however, was a body of water.
It was a pool of some sort—a small pool, bounded on three sides by walls of stone. On the fourth side of the pool was the flat section of ground on which Race now stood.
He walked over to the water's edge, bent down to touch it, as if to see if it was real. The two rapas stepped slowly out from the shaft behind him.
Race dipped his hand in the water
And suddenly, he felt something.
Not an object or anything like that, but rather a gentle surge in the water itself.
Race frowned. The water was flowing.
He looked at the entire pool once again and saw that its tiny wavelets actually moved ever-so-slowly from right to left.
And in that instant, he realized where he was.
He was at the very bottom of the rock tower, at the point where it met the shallow lake at the bottom of the crater.
Only—somehow—water was flowing in and out of this cavern.
The idol was still humming in his satchel.
The two rapas watched Race intently.
Then, with a confidence that he had no reason to possess, Race discarded his flaming torch and stepped into the pool of inky black water—satchel, clothes and all—and ducked beneath the surface.
Thirty seconds later, after breaststroking his way through a long underwater tunnel, he surfaced in the shallow lake at the bottom of the crater.
He gulped in air and breathed a thankful sigh of relief.
He was outside again.
After he emerged from the base of the rock tower, Race returned to the upper village. But before he did so, he stopped at the tower top, at the entrance to the temple. The warriors who had pushed the boulder back into the portal were gone now, having already departed for the village, and Race stood before the ominous stone structure alone.
After a few moments, he grabbed a nearby stone and approached the boulder wedged inside the portal. Then, beneath Alberto Santiago's inscription, he scratched a mes sage of his own:
Do not open at any cost.
Death lies within.
William Race, 1999
When he arrived back at the upper village, he found Renee waiting for him at the edge of the moat, standing with Miguel Marquez and the chieftain, Roa.
Race handed the idol to Roa. 'The rapas are back inside the temple,' he said. 'It's time for us to go home.'
'My people thank you for all that you have done for them, Chosen One,' Roa said. 'If only there were more in the world like you.'
Race bowed his head modestly, just as Renee looped her good arm in his.
'How are you feeling, hero?' she said.
'I think I must have suffered another hit to the head,' he said. 'How else am I going to explain all those feats of derring-do? Must have been the adrenalin talking.'
