“What is Raul saying?” Riley asked Jubal, once the excitement died down and everyone returned to their hammocks. She nodded at the porter tied to the tree and watched Gary’s expression. “I can see that both of you recognize the language.” She looked Jubal right in the eyes. “Don’t deny it. I see the looks you two give one another. There’s no doubt that you know what he’s saying.”
Jubal and Gary turned almost simultaneously to glance over their shoulders at Ben Charger. It was obvious they didn’t want to talk in front of anyone else.
“Let me give you a hand clearing away these bats,” Gary said.
Riley deliberately began to make a sweep of the dead and dying bats surrounding her mother. It was ugly, sickening work. Both Jubal and Gary pitched in, which was a good thing because she would have followed them back to their hammocks for an explanation.
Ben worked with them for a few minutes, kicking the roasted bodies away from Annabel’s hammock, but when Gary began digging in the vegetation to dispose of them all in a mass grave, the engineer called it quits.
“I don’t think you’ll need me any more tonight. Things seem to be settling down.”
Only then did Riley realize the terrible buzzing in her head had faded away. Although she couldn’t hear it anymore, she could tell by the red eyes and the frowns on the faces of the others that it hadn’t stopped altogether. “Thank you so much for your help. I wouldn’t have gotten them all without you. You acted fast.”
Ben shrugged. “They went right for her. I wasn’t going to stand by and let her get hurt. I’m a light sleeper. If anything happens again, give a shout and I’ll come running.”
Riley forced a brief smile. “Thank you again.”
Ben rubbed his temples, scowling as he turned away from her. Riley helped push the remains of the bats into the hole Gary had dug, waiting until Ben was out of earshot before she turned to Jubal.
“All right,” she said, “he’s gone. Now tell me what Raul was chanting. And what language was he speaking? It’s certainly not native to this country or any tribe here in the Amazon.”
Jubal slipped his gun into some kind of harness beneath his loose jacket. Riley found it interesting that he hadn’t put it away until Ben had left.
“The language is an ancient one,” Jubal said. “It originated in the Carpathian Mountains, but there are very few who still speak or even understand it today.”
She frowned at him. “The Carpathian Mountains? How in the world could a poorly educated porter from a remote village in the Amazon come to know and speak an ancient European language that even I’ve never heard of ? Never mind. We can talk about that later. For now, I want to know what he was saying.”
Jubal looked over her head at Gary.
“
Don’t
do that. Look at me, not him. I know you understand what he said,” Riley insisted. “That man was trying to kill my mother. And the whole time he kept saying ‘
Hän kalma, emni hän ku köd alte. Tappatak ηamaη. Tappatak ηamaη
.’” She repeated the phrase with perfect pitch, intonation, sounding exactly like Raul. “I want to know what it means.”
Jubal shook his head. “I don’t know the answer to that. I really don’t, Riley. I’m not as good at the language as Gary is, and I don’t want to make a mistake. I think I got the gist of what he was trying to say, but if I mistranslate and alarm you …”
“The man came after my mother with a machete. I don’t think it’s going to be more alarming than that,” Riley snapped and was immediately ashamed of herself. She needed this man’s help. Gary, Ben and Jubal had no doubt not only saved her mother’s life, but probably her own as well. “I’m sorry. You helped defend my mother, and I appreciate that. But I’m afraid for her and I need to know what I’m dealing with.”
Gary moved around Annabel’s hammock to stand in front of Riley. “I’m sorry this is happening to both of you. You must be very frightened. It sounded to me, and this is a loose translation, that he was chanting ‘Death to the cursed woman. Kill her. Kill her.’ That’s as near as I could make out.” He looked at Jubal. “Did you get the same thing?”
Riley knew he’d switched his attention to Jubal in order to give her time to recover. She’d suspected the translation would be something threatening—but still, she felt as if someone had punched her in the gut and driven every bit of air from her lungs. She forced herself to breathe as she looked up at the night sky through the canopy, a film of hazy leaves. Who would target Annabel? She was an amazing, kind woman. Everyone she met loved her. The attack didn’t make sense at all.
“Raul has definitely spent his entire life here in the rain forest. He truly doesn’t have that much contact with outsiders, none of the villagers do. How would he ever pick up such a nearly extinct, clearly foreign language?” Riley struggled to keep the challenge out of her voice.
Without a doubt this man had saved her life,
but
Jubal Sanders and Gary Jansen researched plants. They both admitted they’d come to the Andes in search of a plant that was supposed to be extinct everywhere else and that the plant was native to the Carpathian Mountain range in Europe. If this language had originated in that same area, what were the plant and language doing in South America? And what a coincidence that everyone in their traveling party was experiencing the same hallucination all wrapped around this ancient language both men understood?
Jubal shook his head. “I have no explanation.”
He was lying. He looked her straight in the eye. His expression didn’t change, his handsome face carved with worry lines, his jaw and mouth firm, but he was lying.
“Oh, yes, you do,” she retorted. “And you’re going to tell me what it is, right now.”
Gary sighed. “Just tell her, Jubal. Worst case, she’ll just think we’re as crazy as the porter.”
“Honestly, we don’t know for certain what’s going on, but we have our suspicions. We’ve seen things like this happen before in other parts of the world.” Jubal hesitated. “Do you believe in the existence of evil?”
“You mean like Satan, the devil?”
“Sort of, but I’m not talking about God and the angels.”
Riley forced down her first reaction. Strange things happened in the Amazon. And her mother certainly had gifts that couldn’t be explained. There was the trip to the Andes every five years and the ritual performed on the mountain. There were also rumors, the legends and myths handed down of a great evil having destroyed the Cloud People and then the Incas. Of course, no one believed it, but what if it was the truth?
“Yes,” she admitted, “I believe in evil.”
Jubal hesitated again. “ I—we—suspect that something ancient is out here, an evil being that has the power to command the insects and to prey on our minds, to trick us into believing things that aren’t true.”
Riley instantly recalled her mother’s agitated rambling about the evil trapped in the mountain. The two of them were traveling to the mountain to reseal it, to keep the volcano from exploding, and Annabel was worried about being late. Riley knew generations of women had come to this mountain, and the trip had been even more rigorous and dangerous in the past, yet they’d continued to travel to that same spot and perform the same ritual.
So could it possibly be true? Was there really something evil trapped in that mountain? Something the women of her family had been keeping contained for hundreds—possibly even thousands—of years? Riley shivered, pressing a hand to her knotted stomach.
“Why would this evil thing target my mother?”
“Clearly it considers your mother a threat to it in some way,” Gary said.
“
Something is happening. The evil in the mountain is deliberately trying to slow me down. It is close to the surface and is orchestrating accidents and illness
.” Riley shivered, remembering her mother’s fearful warnings. She’d brushed them off as shock-induced ramblings, but now Riley wasn’t so sure. Could it possibly be true?
Jubal shifted closer to her mother’s hammock. Riley nearly leapt at him, but his body language exuded protection. He faced the forest, his body alert. She became aware of the silence then. The constant, never-ending drone of the insects had disappeared, leaving behind an eerie silence.
Instinctively Riley stepped close to her mother. Annabel writhed. Moaned. Sweat beaded on her body. Her hands rose and she began a complicated pattern of movement, a mesmerizing twisting of her fingers and hands, a conductor of a symphony, yet each flowing motion was precise and beautiful. Riley had seen those movements several times. Her own hands automatically followed the pattern, as if the memory was pressed into her bones rather than her mind. She made the effort to keep her arms down, but she couldn’t stop her fingers and wrists from twisting with her mother’s, or the flutter of graceful motion.
Her mother’s body turned toward the east and Riley found herself facing the same direction. She could feel the flow of earth rising from beneath the soles of her feet, moving through her like the sap through the trees. A heart hammered, deep beneath the soil. She could feel her pulse syncing to that steady drumming beat. She felt grounded, roots spreading beneath her to find that beckoning life force deep in the earth.
She felt the individual plants, each of them with their own character and personality. Some poison, some antidotes. She recognized them as sisters and brothers. She felt them take root inside of her, spreading through her veins, into her internal organs, and wrapping around her very bones until her veins sang with the lifeblood of the rain forest.
Awareness of every living tree, shrub and plant nearby rose until it was absolutely acute. Heart and soul reached out to them and they reached back, feeding her courage and resilience, the earth her mother, willing to aid her at any turn. She felt a stain of evil spreading through the ground itself, seeking a target. But something else was there as well—something strong and brave. Predatory. Protective.
Hers.
Abruptly she pulled herself back.
Apparently, Jubal and Gary weren’t far off with their assessment of the situation after all. This was no mass hallucination, but a carefully orchestrated plot to attack her mother, to delay her trip to the mountain and prevent her from carrying out the centuries-old ritual. Riley couldn’t tell why, or what was in the mountain. She could only discern that it was desperate to get out, to survive, and it would use any means available to do so—including killing her mother.
So this was why her mother was so in tune with plants. She felt them, was connected to them, and not in some small way. Riley had never felt that connection before, and it occurred to her that some form of awareness and power was being transferred to her. That possibility only alarmed her all the more. Was her mother inadvertently doing something in her sleep to pass her knowledge on to her daughter, as she’d said each generation of their ancestors did before their deaths?
“What is she doing?” Jubal asked, curiosity in his voice. Curiosity and something else. Recognition, maybe?
Riley actually started, so caught up and absorbed by the myriad plants around her and the feeling of being almost transformed, mesmerized by the existence of such intense life all around her that she’d nearly forgotten there were witnesses to the ritual movements her mother performed up on the mountain. Both Jubal and Gary looked at her with far too much knowledge.
Riley shrugged, reluctant to explain her mother to anyone, although she felt as if the two men had earned an explanation—she just didn’t have an adequate one.
“Have you seen these movements before?” Jubal asked. “The way she’s moving her hands is almost ritualistic.”
“Yes.” Riley had been as honest as possible and felt they had been as well. Both were skirting around each other, reluctant to say something they couldn’t take back.
“I’ve seen similar gestures in the Carpathian Mountains,” Jubal admitted. “When we’ve worked in the remote parts of the mountains. Has your mother been there before? Does she have any ties to Romania or any of the countries the range goes through?”
Riley shook her head adamantly. “We’ve traveled to Europe once, but nowhere near the Carpathian Mountains. We mostly stay in South America. Mom’s come here many times. Most of the women in my family were born here, my mother included. We’re descendents of both the Cloud People as well as the Incas so my family has always had a huge interest in this part of the world. My mother was raised here and only went to the States when she met and married my father. He was from there.”
“Are you adopted?” Jubal asked. “You don’t look anything like your mother.”
Riley pressed her lips together. She’d heard that all of her life. She was tall and curvy with translucent skin and large, very different oval eyes. Her hair was as straight as a board and as black as midnight. Her mother was slender, of medium height, with wonderful olive skin and curly hair.
“I’m not adopted. I look like one of my great-great-grandmothers. She was taller with dark hair, at least if the drawings of her can be believed. Mom showed them to me once when I was all upset because I towered over everyone in middle school.”
She was talking too fast, too much, as she sometimes did when she was upset. They were asking a lot of personal questions. What did it matter if she didn’t look like her mother? Why were they so interested? She just wanted to grab her mother and make a run for it. If not for the fact that the forest itself seemed intent on attacking them, she might have done just that. Her mother had an amazing sense of direction when it came to the mountain. Twice when they’d made the journey and the guides were lost, it had been her mother who had found the way.
But now, with Annabel sick and the attacks on her growing more violent, Riley didn’t dare separate from the group. Jubal and Gary offered a level of protection she couldn’t afford to dismiss.
“Thank you both so much for your help. I have to get some sleep tonight. I don’t know why the forest has gone silent, but I don’t feel any immediate threat. I don’t want my mother to know about this right away. I want to tell her myself and see if she has any ideas why these attacks on her are happening.”