The driver slammed the door shut and with a release of the air brakes, he eased the bus out of the parking lot.
As they rolled away, Lori felt tormented with guilt as she searched the desert for the thicket of pepper trees concealing the observatory cave. More officers in brazen AFI vests were searching the area with their dogs. Surely Dr. Peet had climbed out of the cave by now, but by the number of officers congregating around the thicket, she feared the worst. They were sure to find him if they hadn’t already, a fact seemingly dismissed by her partner in the adjoining seat.
Derek slapped the cloth seat in front of him, watching the great pyramids fall away. “Hot damn, Lori!” he said, his face aglow with adrenaline. “We got away with it!”
Lori felt less exuberant as she thought about Dr. Peet, alone and defenseless against the pursuit.
“Yeah, Derek,” she said, her skin still crawling from the feel of his groping hands. She gave her shirt a final adjustment. “You sure got away with it.”
Womb Of Renewal
The cave was filling with smoke as Peet held the dry end of the root against the smoldering coals. He’d gone lightheaded trying to breathe life back into the fire. He’d packed a small crevice between the wood and the embers with anything that would do for kindling—blades of grass and small leaves that had fallen into the cave, lint from his pockets, and Lori’s empty matchbook which he’d found abandoned on the altar. The material finally ignited into a small flame that lapped timidly at the matchbook. As it grew stronger the fire sliced through the message written inside the flap. Peet caught the last word just before the blaze devoured it.
Tollan.
Tula
.
The smoke in the serpent’s mouth was supposed to lead them on to
Tula
. How nonessential that seemed to him now. John and Eva had been arrested and Derek had taken revenge on some manufactured injustice. But it was the final development that hurt most of all. Lori had lost faith in him.
Peet tried not to think about it as he carefully, oh so carefully, molded the flame into a suitable torch at the end of the root. His concerns had been swiftly whittled down to survival, and now with light to see by, he searched the observatory for anything that might aid an escape. He fumbled through a pile of pottery, terra cotta figurines and various shards of broken artifacts. He found nothing materially beneficial. What he did find was a draft of cool air seeping through a small crevice at the base of the wall. There, the stucco crumbled easily into his hands. There was nothing in the cave solid enough to ram into the wall, but when Peet kicked at it, his boot easily broke through.
To his surprise, a long corridor continued into the dense darkness beyond. He couldn’t say where it led, but it was a better alternative than staring at an escape hole he couldn’t reach. He’d have to take his chances.
He slithered through the crevice in the wall and cautiously followed the tunnel, his torch just lighting the walls on either side, unable to penetrate the never-ending darkness ahead. After a short distance, he took note of an additional strain on his legs, as though he were walking up a gradual incline. That didn’t concern him as much as the thought of getting hopelessly lost in a maze of underground tunnels that might or might not contain lethal levels of radon. Not to mention there was no telling how long his makeshift torch would last.
He wasn’t sure how far he’d gone when the rust-colored walls gave way to brightly colored frescoes. Like any other petroglyph he’d ever come across, the stoic figures of
Teotihuacan
iconography gave him pause. The arrangement of the hieroglyphic pictographs appeared to tell a story, a story that had been hidden from the world for nearly two thousand years.
Find the story behind the find
.
Peet grinned at the sound of his own words playing in his head. Of course he realized there was no time to analyze the frescoes, but the archaeologist within him wished John was there to interpret. The thoughts of some ancient person had been cast upon that wall, taunting him, imploring him to connect with minds long lost in history. It was the same temptation he felt with those petroglyphs in
Chaco
. It was the same desire to understand that he’d felt when he first laid eyes upon The Trader.
Pulling himself away from the wall, he stumbled through offerings that littered the floor until the tunnel walls pulled back altogether and he found himself standing within another hollow chamber. He couldn’t judge just how large the chamber was for the torchlight couldn’t reach the walls. He was lost in a deep expanse of darkness, save for one pinpoint of light directly overhead.
Peet studied the light. It was white, almost star-like, but irregular in shape like a shaft of light seeping through a crack in the earth some sixty meters above him. But that didn’t make sense. The tunnel had taken him upwards, not deeper underground. The only way he could possibly be so far below that source of light was…
Then it dawned on him. Peet wasn’t underground. He’d made it back to the earth’s surface where something had been constructed over the mouth of the cave. Something around sixty-five meters tall.
The Pyramid of the Sun!
“Amazing,” he whispered in complete awe.
As he walked around he began to realize the pyramid wasn’t entirely hollow. Instead, he seemed to be standing within a comparatively small pocket, and that shaft of light he thought was meters above turned out to be a sliver of a crack within reach of his hand. Funny how darkness could distort one’s judgment, but there was no doubt about it, he was inside the pyramid.
What he wouldn’t give for a couple of spotlights, maybe a few tools and his aluminum clipboard box. His mind swam with theories to try and explain what he was seeing. Perhaps the pocket was once viewed as the domain of the god who’d sacrificed himself into the fire, becoming the sun of the fifth age. Maybe the space was reserved for ancient ceremonies commemorating the sacrifice. Or, it could have been used for something entirely different, by a secret society that may have survived into Toltec times, or even Shaman Gaspar’s time.
Surely the frescoes in the mouth of the cave would reveal more—but unfortunately Peet couldn’t linger with the idea. For, as much as he longed to stay and explore, to learn the story behind his find, he needed to find a way out.
That’s when he recalled something John had said.
“The Pyramid of the Sun was aligned with the cave,” he repeated to himself. “And the cave opening faced the heliacal setting of the Pleiades…it faced the west.”
The western wall of the pyramid, when he found it, was a conglomeration of stone and earth and adobe. With his bearings fixed, he followed a narrow tunnel that ended abruptly where the conglomeration of stone and adobe gave way to bare earth and a concrete slab—the seal at the base of the pyramid’s main stairway—the way outside!
A wave of exhilaration forced a relieved smile as he clawed the dirt away from around the seal. Soon he’d emerge from this underworld and work his way back to the embassy. Only then did he expect to locate John and Eva. With any luck, he’d find Derek and Lori too, but that thought suddenly gave him pause.
What would he say if he did find them? He’d just as soon strangle Derek, but Snead’s voice within him interrupted that impulse.
“You have an anger management issue
.
”
Anger could be excused in this case, he decided as he continued to claw at the earth. He knew what he’d like to say to Derek, but what about Lori? What would he say to her?
The fraternizing issue had become so convoluted that Peet doubted he’d ever sort it out well enough to regain Lori’s trust. But why did that matter to him? Why did he care so much about what she thought? Lori was only a student—a student he’d never instruct again once the Board of Trustees learned about this fiasco with the effigy. Peet doubted he’d ever teach again, but even if he did, Lori would graduate next year and dissolve out of his life like so many students before her. What made her so different from all the others?
Peet knew the answer, though he’d never before allowed himself to admit it. Lori reminded him of Cathy. The hair, the smile, the personality…her youth. She was Cathy all over again. Was there any wonder he felt so comfortable with her? Surely that explained why working with her came so naturally.
Perhaps in a sense, Derek was right. Peet did treat Lori differently, but had he really overstepped his bounds and never even realized it? The more he thought about, the more he was convinced that he had an emotional attachment to his student. He was infatuated with her.
No. He was in love.
Peet cursed under his breath. He couldn’t be in love with a student. Not again. Those feelings had to be a mere residue of the grip Cathy still held on his heart. Nothing more.
He dug faster, trying to jolt Lori out of his mind. The perpetual darkness of tunnels and caves had to be playing games with his mind, causing him to admit to a guilty conscious. Falling in love with students, running from police, desecrating a valuable archaeological observatory—it was like he’d become an entirely different man.
As he hefted the slab aside the bright light of late morning flooded the opening. Peet peered out at the wandering stream of tourists. That’s when he noticed a little boy standing in stunned silence nearby, staring at the face, his face, peering out of the mouth between creation and the underworld.
It was impossible to get out without being noticed. Peet just hoped he wouldn’t be noticed by the wrong people. With a groan he pulled himself through the dirt until he was free, emerging as a man he’d never known before. A man on the run. A man exploding from the confines of a previous life.
The little boy was still watching.
“Are you a arcwee-ologist?”
Peet stood and brushed himself off as a small crowd gathered to curiously peek down into the hole beneath the pyramid. They were of no concern to him as he tousled the little boy’s hair and hurried for the parking lot behind the pyramid, alert for any sign of police officers still hanging around.
He spotted a vacant AFI van parked in the lot. More importantly, Derek’s rental car was still in its place not far away. He rushed toward the rental only to find the doors locked. Habitually he slapped his empty pockets, knowing full well Derek still had the keys.
“Damn!” he cursed under his breath.
As if on cue the back door of the AFI van flew open.
Double damn! Of course the police are watching the car!
Before he knew what he was doing, Peet sprang for the van door and slammed it into the face of the first officer scurrying to get out. As the officer fell back, another behind him lifted a rifle. Peet grabbed the barrel and jerked the muzzle skyward as his fist flew toward the black balaclava face mask. He missed.
Still struggling for the gun, Peet yanked the officer’s mask over his eyes and jerked the weapon from his grasp. With one swift motion he rammed the butt of the rifle into the officer’s face and as he fell back unconscious, Peet leaped into the van and closed the door behind him.
He squatted in the silence there, panting for air, and listening for any sounds of pursuing officers outside. There was nothing. He glanced over the unconscious men sprawled across the floor. He was both shocked and impressed with himself. If this wasn’t the most heroic action figure of a thing he’d ever done…
He shook his head at the ridiculous thought. He was no Rambo but he had to admit the energy that got him into the van had been a needed release. Now, if he could just get out of
Teotihuacan
.
He looked at the men again. The first was bleeding through his mask from a broken nose, no doubt. The second was clean and, except for short legs, was about his size. He quickly stripped the officer of his navy shirt and bulletproof vest and slipped them on. He felt criminal and anxious that the officers would regain consciousness. He wasn’t going to fit into the man’s trousers, but he wouldn’t need them anyway. From the window of a moving vehicle, nobody would notice the incomplete uniform.