Black Rain

And while it was true that the Wall matched Blackjack Martin’s description aesthetically, his calculations of its dimensions left something to be desired. At ninety feet in length and seven feet tall, the Wall was almost exactly one fifth of Martin’s boast. It made McCarter laugh. In Martin’s business, in the early twentieth century, a little exaggeration went a long way.

As he dangled over the gaping pit, suspended in a harness, McCarter wondered what Martin would have written about it. It was almost thirty feet from the ground level to the surface of the muck at the bottom, but McCarter guessed that Blackjack would have claimed a depth of at least fifty feet, or a hundred, or perhaps even called it bottomless.

Twisting on the rope and looking down, he decided it didn’t matter, thirty feet was enough.

“Lower me down,” he said, “before I change my mind.”

The porters released some of the tension on the rope and McCarter began to drop. This was his fifth trip to the bottom. In fact, he’d spent more time down there than anyone, but he had yet to get used to the voyage in or out.

As the pulley creaked and he dropped below ground level, McCarter’s attention was drawn to the stone slab that made up a large portion of the pit’s eastern wall. A great face, five feet across, dominated the slab. It had sad, round eyes from which stone tears ran, highlighted by dripping condensation. Its thin lips were closed tight and a spiked barb passed through each ear, drawing rivers of blood. Stylized torches burned on either side of the face, while beneath it, what appeared to be a massive crocodile head had been carved, complete with something bloody lying in its open jaws.

Danielle and Susan waited beneath it, looking silly in their oversized fishing waders.

McCarter touched down in the cloying muck, his feet stretching for the bottom. Never a fisherman himself, he hadn’t gotten used to the odd feeling of cold mud and water pressing against him through the thin rubber skin of the waders.

He released the harness, sloshed his way over to Danielle and Susan and pulled two printed photographs from his breast pocket, handing one to each.

“It’s a match,” he said to Susan.

The photos contained an image from the database of Mayan glyphs. The image was a representation of a name.

Danielle and Susan examined the photo, comparing the image to the glyph on the stone wall above them.

“I think you’re right,” Susan said.

“I’m not sure what I’m looking at,” Danielle said. “How about a little help?”

McCarter pointed out the matching sections. “This is Seven Macaw,” he said. “The name of an exalted being from Mayan prehistory. From a time even before Tulan Zuyua.”

“Before?” Danielle asked. “I thought Tulan Zuyua was their Garden of Eden.”

“It is,” McCarter said. “In a manner of speaking. But their version of Genesis runs differently than ours.”

She gave him a sideways glance, which he took as a request for more information.

“Let me put it this way,” he said, “in the Judeo-Christian version of Genesis, we begin with God creating the heaven and the earth. The second and third verses tell us that the earth was in darkness and then God created the light. By verse twenty-six, we’re on the sixth day and God creates man. But there was nothing before this, nothing before these six days.

“Now,” he said, “in the Mayan version, history stretches back from the creation of man as well as forward. It goes back to a time before Tulan Zuyua, before mankind even existed, to a race that preceded us, a race the Maya called the wooden people.”

Danielle’s eyes narrowed. “I’ve heard the name. How do they relate to this?”

“In the Mayan view of creation, it took the gods four tries to successfully create the human race. On the first attempt they ended up with things that squawked and stuttered but didn’t speak. Seeing some value in these things the gods kept them around, letting them become the animals of the forest and going back to the drawing board once again. The second time, they used mud as the medium and it was more or less a complete failure. The creation kept dissolving into sludge and muck. So they let it die and tried again. On their third try, they used wood to create with and they brought forth the wooden people: a sort of a prototype for mankind.”

McCarter paused to make sure she was with him. “Now, the wooden people looked something like humans,” he explained. “They were intelligent, ambitious, they could count and talk and reason, but they were odd in many ways. The Mayan manuscript Popul Vuh describes them as having no muscle in their arms or legs, no fat on their bodies. They were said to be able to speak but had stiff, masklike faces and ungainly deformed shapes—like stick people, I suppose.”

Susan chimed in. “Basically they needed a good makeover, some time in the gym and about ten thousand collagen injections.”