Chapter 8
Professor McCarter lay flat on his back staring at a ceiling made of thatch and sticks. He was a guest in Oco’s Chiapas Indian village, thirty miles from the base of Mount Pulimundo.
With Oco’s help he had made it back to the village but it had taken several days and his condition had grown worse each day. The bullet wound in his leg had become infected and neither the prayers of the local shaman nor his potions had helped.
Fearing such treatment might hasten his demise, McCarter had asked Oco to get him a proper doctor or at least a treatment of antibiotics. The young man had run off for the next town, but the village was so remote that it would take him two or three days to make the roundtrip. McCarter wondered if he would last that long. And when his hosts moved him to the shaman’s hut, he hoped it was not for last rites of some kind.
A wood fire crackled somewhere to the left of him, but he couldn’t turn toward it. Since the shooting and his collision with the tree, his body had grown stiff, as if a metal rod had been run up through his spine. Any attempts to twist or bend caused ripping pains and he found it best to lay still.
He stretched his left hand down to his thigh, where a swollen wound marked the entry point of the bullet that had hit him. But he was fortunate: The jacketed bullet had gone right through.
He’d doused the wound with antiseptic and bandaged it on the shore of the island, but the infection had taken hold anyway. Beneath the bandage, the swelling had grown and become heated. McCarter drew his hand back and remained still, blinking the sweat from his eyes.
How had it come to this? The thought ran through his head as if he didn’t know the answer, as if it were all the result of some unforeseen event. But he knew exactly how it had come to this. It was a situation of his own making.
A year and a half ago, long before he’d been reunited with Danielle and the NRI, before he had even begun to consider such a course, he’d crawled out of bed on one of many sleepless nights and gone to his study. His notes from the Brazilian expedition were sitting untouched on a shelf. He’d pulled them down and begun leafing through them.
There were so many unanswered questions related to what they’d found down there. Given the chance he would have stayed in the Amazon, but in the wake of so much violence, death, and destruction, there hadn’t been the opportunity.
Initially they had been looking for a site the Mayan people called Tulan Zuyua, a place associated with their creation myth, similar to the Garden of Eden. Whether that was what they’d found he couldn’t say. Nor had he much thought to ask in the final days of that madness. Survival had become all that mattered.
But sitting in a robe, sipping tea in his study, McCarter began to wonder. He was able to study his notes and consider them with more insight. And that had led him to something unexpected.
There were glyphs in the Brazilian temple that spoke of sacrifice. Nothing unusual about that—it was everywhere in the Mayan culture—but this particular set of glyphs described it differently, not as an act or a ritual but as if the sacrifice were a thing. Sacrifice of the Heart was one description.
And then he remembered the item they had finally recovered down there, the stone that seemed to generate power. The natives had called it the Heart of Zipacna, named for a mythical Mayan beast.
If the stone they’d found in Brazil was Sacrifice of the Heart, then what was he to make of other glyphs referencing the Sacrifice of the Mind, of the Soul, and of the Body? Were there three others like it?
Intrigued, McCarter had begun going over the rest of his notes, thinking and working through the night. Knowing what he did about the origin of the Brazil stone, McCarter found himself ascribing great purpose to it and any of its brethren that might exist. This was how it had begun.
Reviewing other notes and even photographs that had been taken, McCarter came to believe that these four stones had been separated by long journeys, one remaining in Brazil, two traveling over land, and the last out over the sea.
The record ended there. It seemed something had befallen the rulers of this Brazilian temple, an uprising or some type of disaster, but the subjects and the artisans and the builders had vanished. McCarter suspected that most had traveled west and then north into Central America. And he tried to pick up the trail there.
Searching the record for anything similar, McCarter settled on the stories of the earliest Mayan people carrying their gods with them in special stones. A carving at an ancient temple south of Tikal told of two stones traveling by land and one sent over the sea. The remnants of a mural there showed a stylized view of the world, nothing that could be called a map or globe, but because he believed that was exactly what he was looking at, his deduction yielded a stunning possibility. Two stones had been taken farther north to the Yucatan and one had been placed on a continent across the sea, in what could only be northern China or southern Siberia.
The fact that this dispersion had taken place here, hundreds of years later than the description in the Brazilian temple, told him it had been planned. There was a purpose to it, a reason. It was more than a simple inheritance or a division of spoils. The act had to have a meaning to it, a greater intention in the grand scheme of things.
At that very moment, McCarter had felt the urge—no, it had been a need—to look for these stones. He had gone to those who could help him: Arnold Moore and the NRI.
It all seemed so foolish now. Not the theory but his pursuit of the proof. Who did he think he was? Some spy, some agent of change for the world? It had ended so badly, he wished it had never begun. And yet even in such despair, some part of him knew that if he managed to get healthy he would continue on.
At the sound of someone entering the room McCarter tried to look up.
“Oco?” he asked.
A different voice answered. “Oco has not returned from Xihua.”
McCarter saw a younger man who spoke English and who had acted as an interpreter between McCarter and his primary caregiver. Right behind him stood the shaman himself, in full regalia.
“When will Oco return?” McCarter asked.
“Tomorrow, maybe,” the interpreter said. “But we cannot wait. The poison of the blood is spreading.”
McCarter looked around, desperate to see what preparations might be under way. “What are you going to do?”
“The shaman say, he now understands why you are sick,” the interpreter said.
“I’m sick because someone shot me,” McCarter managed to say. “I have an infection.”
Apparently the shaman disagreed.
“He say, you are looking for something,” the interpreter said. “But you not admit to yourself what it is you want to find. He say, you fear it will be taken from you. And your spirit fights against that truth.”
Great, McCarter thought. Now he was getting his horoscope and medical treatment all from the same person. Not his idea of comprehensive medical.
He laid his head back, the strain on his neck too much to bear. He found the shaman’s statements utterly confusing, but he lacked the energy to ask anything more. At another time he would have enjoyed speaking with them, exchanging words and concepts and trying to gain an insight into their unique view of the world. But at the moment, he couldn’t have cared less.
The shaman spoke some words over him. “The poison blood has brought bad spirits to you,” the interpreter said. “They control you in your sleep, bringing the dark dreams. The healer is going to force the spirits to leave and then the medicine will be able to work properly.”
At that, McCarter heard the fire being stirred, felt another wave of heat, and heard the shaman begin to chant. The interpreter was grinding some type of medicine in a cup, mixing it with goat’s milk. Seconds later McCarter was drinking it.
The taste was bitter enough to make him close his eyes. When he opened them a moment later, he felt dizzy once again and quickly the room began to blur.
Around him, the chanting continued as the shaman fanned the flames of the fire. The room began to spin and McCarter felt his head growing heavy. It felt as if the sounds had become distorted. He heard voices: the shaman chanting, the interpreter as well. And then, he thought, another voice.
“Oco?” he said hopefully.
The voice reached him again. A woman’s voice, though he couldn’t make out the words. They were just whispers. Hidden.
The shaman passed through his field of vision, casting ash into the air. The fine dust floated down, catching the light of the fire. In it McCarter saw a face.
He tried to focus but the shaman waved a hand through it and the dust scattered on the current.
“What have you given me?” he asked weakly.
The young man answered. “The potion is to calm the dark ones, to make them unaware.”
McCarter could not follow anymore or even pay attention. He felt less pain, that was for sure, but he was more certain than ever that he was on the way to the great beyond.
He thought of his wife, who had died from cancer several years earlier. There were people in this life that made it seem worth all the trouble, made it feel like things would always get better no matter how bad they were. McCarter’s wife had been one of those people.
As college students in the mid-1960s, they had endured racial slurs and threats together. And of the two of them, it had been she who’d insisted that minds would change. When their first child had been deathly sick with pneumonia, she’d promised him that their son would be fine, and he grew up to be a strong young man. And even when she’d lain dying herself and McCarter had stood at her bedside, she had been the one to comfort him.
“If this is my time,” he whispered, “then let me find you.”
The shaman moved past, chanting and whirling like a dervish, shaking some feathery wand. It was all a blur.
McCarter ignored him now. “Let me see you again,” he said aloud to his wife. “If it’s time, bring me to you.”
The shaman was over him now, gazing through the smoke and the haze into McCarter’s eyes. There was something in his hand.
McCarter looked past him. “Bring me to you,” he said again, and then he heard the woman’s voice. It was his wife. She whispered back to him.
“No,” she said. “Bring me … to you.”
And then the shaman raised a cast-iron rod from the glowing embers of the fire and plunged it downward. The molten tip burrowed into McCarter’s open wound; his head tilted back and he screamed.