This Green Hell

belt. He spent the next few minutes chopping away the roots that hung over the doorway. This, combined with the angle of the setting sun, allowed weak illumination into the building.

This time, Hector followed Ramon inside.

The floor was littered with broken clay tiles, probably from the roof, which had been replaced by a ceiling of massive tree trunk. Its heavy, grey body looked like a living thing, Ramon thought, with coiled, grey-brown muscles just waiting to unwind and drop down upon them.

‘Look here.’ Ramon pointed at a huge slab of granite propped at the wall just inside the doorway. In the dark, a bearded face carved into the stone could just be made out, it’s features almost lost to the gloom.

Hector sighed with approval. ‘One of the Jesuits maybe — God bless you padre.’ He patted the image and then moved ahead into the dark space behind a heavy screen of root fibres, calling to Ramon, ‘Come quickly, amigo, I’ve found something.’

He stood before a waist-high blackened dome that had been toppled from a once finely carved slab of stone split by the recent earth tremor’s crack, and strangely, its two halves slid many feet apart. When he tapped the dark shape with the iron head of his axe, it responded with a deep metallic bong that vibrated the air around them.

‘The golden flower maybe … or perhaps a golden bell?’ he said.

He flipped his axe blade around and chopped at the bell, first at one place then another. It was no use: the metal was hard; too hard to be valuable. Ramon grimaced; he knew that even the lowest grade of gold would have yielded to his cousin’s blade.

Hector kicked the bell, eliciting a duller peal. ‘Mierda! Must be fucking brass.’

Ramon turned his machete blade sideways to scrape the side of the metal, removing a six-inch crust of oxidation and ancient soot. It seemed the bell had been in a fire at some point. Underneath, the brass shone through, reflecting the weakening light from outside back at him.

‘At one time it would have looked golden,’ he said. ‘But not worth anything now, unless you have friends at the museum.’

‘Bastardo!’ Hector kicked out at the bell.

The loud curse in the small tomb-silent room made Ramon jump, and he took a step back as his cousin muttered more profanities, looking like he wanted to hit something else. He lunged at the large bell, grabbing it and tugging savagely, causing it to roll a few feet. Hector moved around behind the solid dome and put his shoulder to it, and grunted. The bell rolled some more, grinding small stones to powder beneath its rim, before picking up speed as the large man gave it one last push.

Ramon expected it to stop there, but instead it kept rolling, out through the opening and into the clearing, where it settled heavily in the dry soil. The movement shook loose centuries of oxidisation to reveal the bell’s golden hue in places.

Hector stared at the path the bell had taken, breathing in loudly through his nose and exhaling through gritted teeth. His noisy breathing suddenly broke off and he clicked his fingers, looking at Ramon with his eyes wide. ‘Not the bell; it’s not the bell — remember the words outside? It was below the bell we needed to look.’ He brought the beam of his flashlight back to the floor, and traced the path of the rolling dome.

The circle of light waved back and forth, and then came to a sudden stop. ‘Oh, gracias Jesus.’ Hector took a few steps and then went to his knees, keeping his light on the object in the ground. ‘A door.’

Ramon stood back and watched as his cousin laid his flashlight on the ground and used one large hand to brush away loose debris. He grimaced at the thought of climbing down somewhere that could be even darker than where they were.

‘Remember there was also a warning outside,’ Ramon said. ‘I think we should come back with some more men … and also maybe in daylight.’

Hector curled his lip in a sneer. ‘What are you afraid of, estupido? Look, there might be nothing under here but more tree roots, or the graves of the Jesuits. Or it could be something more — something that could make you, me, our families, richer than a Hollywood movie star. Forget about the stupid words outside — every ancient treasure room in history had some sort of warning or curse written somewhere. It’s a good sign — there must be something down there they wanted to keep people away from.’

Hector reached out to take a swipe at Ramon’s thigh. ‘There are no real curses or evil eyes mio amigo, no horn-headed beasts, or devil-demons. Unless you count the ones you’ve seen after too much sangria.’ Hector smiled disarmingly. ‘Now come on and help me, my friend.’

Ramon shook his head as if clearing away his moment of indecision, and took another step forward. ‘All right, I’ll help you. But you are wrong Senor Ignorante. There are bad things in this world; things my mother has told me about. I just wish she was here with us now.’

On his knees, Hector clapped his hands once and waved Ramon over. He motioned to the other side of the door, and finished brushing away debris.

Ramon looked at the square trapdoor with a large metal ring at one end. In the beam of light from the flashlight, he could see the crack running across the stone blocks in the flooring, halting at the door, and then continuing on after the wooden frame once again. He frowned for a second in puzzlement, as the door didn’t carry the patina of age that the surrounding stonework did, and his eyes moved to the large slab that was broken and shoved aside.

Hector grabbed the light and held it up. ‘You pull.’ He pointed the beam of light and waited.

Ramon reached down with one hand and took hold of the ring. He immediately dropped it, and held his hand up to his face, to check his fingers. They were wet with something slick and slightly greasy. He sniffed, and only detected a hint of something salty and metallic. Rust and grease maybe, he thought and wiped his hand, getting ready to try again, when Hector barged him out of the way.

‘Too heavy for you little cousin? Let me.’ Hector spat on his hands and grinned in the dark. ‘There must be a hidden room underneath us. This is it, amigo mio: prepare to be rich.’

He hunched over the trapdoor and pulled on the ring with two hands. Nothing happened. He grunted, invoked the names of several saints, and strained. Still nothing. He changed position, counted three deep breaths and yanked quickly. The trapdoor groaned against the floor’s stone edges and then rose an inch. Hector stood up, pressed his hands into the small of his back, cursed softly, then bent back to his task. With the next tug, the door squealed open, and he let the heavy wooden square drop back flat against the ground. A set of steps led down into the blackness below.

Hector flung himself down on the floor and looked into the pit. Ramon stood back slightly, reluctant to get too close to the black hole. The inside edges of the opening were abraded, as if they had been scratched by some great beast, and he could see that the bottom of the trapdoor was also covered in the same deep gouges. He reached out his hand and spread his fingers, placing them in some of the ancient grooves — they fit almost perfectly. He frowned for a moment, then shrugged and went back to straining his eyes down into the darkness.

Hector snatched up the flashlight and extended his arm down into the pit. Ramon took a few steps closer but couldn’t bring himself to lie down and look over its edge. There was a smell, a feeling … something strange, he thought.

Hector slid the weak yellow beam across as much of the vault as he could see from his limited angle of vision.

‘There’s something down there,’ he said. ‘I think it’s gold. I knew it, amigo — we’ve found the treasure room.’ He scrambled to his feet and stepped onto the stone staircase. ‘Well? Are you coming?’

Ramon shook his head and rubbed the cross around his neck again. ‘I’ll keep a lookout. Come back and tell me what you find.’

‘Okay, but remember: La suerte favorece a los valientes.’ Hector laughed at his own wit and started down into the thick darkness.

* * *

The small stone-lined room seemed to absorb the torchlight and give nothing back in return. Hector moved quickly, as much by feeling as by his limited sight, to the golden object he had glimpsed from above. He pulled it free from several inches of what looked like flakes of mud and dried fruit skins. As he broke the crust, a pungent