Mutt leaned closer and read the word under this skull. It was Spanish. “Vuelta.” He glanced at Indy and translated. “ ‘Return.’ Return where?”
“Or return what.”
Indy glanced at the giant skull with blazing eyes.
“You think Ox meant the skull?” Mutt asked.
Indy waved to encompass the four walls. “Seemed to be on his mind, kid.”
“But where was he supposed to return it?”
Indy tugged out Oxley’s letter. He read it fully, stopping again at the phrase Orellana’s cradle. He glanced to the hundreds of translations for the word return.
“Cradle,” he mused. “It also has more than one meaning. In Mayan it means ‘resting place.’ ”
Indy felt his heart skip a beat.
Of course.
He searched the room again, frantic with his certainty. “C’mon, Ox, you had to have left another clue.”
“What’s wrong?” Mutt asked.
Indy’s mind spun.
Orellana’s cradle . . . Orellana’s resting place.
“Ox was talking about the conquistador’s grave,” Indy said.
He stared down at his toes. And where did someone find a grave?
In the ground.
With his attention focused on the skulls, Indy hadn’t seen it. Dirt and dust half hid most of it. He dropped to his knees and swept his hand across the stone floor. He felt the lines more than saw them. It was one last drawing by Oxley, scratched into the stone floor itself.
Indy leaped to his feet and dashed out the door.
“Where you going?” Mutt called after him.
Indy returned a moment later with a broom he had borrowed from the janitor. He tossed it at the kid. “Sweep!”
“What?”
Indy pantomimed how to use a broom and waved to encompass the entire cell. “All of it.”
As Mutt set to work, Indy crossed to the far wall and used the bed to climb up to one of the windows. He hauled himself up onto the ledge of the windowsill and crouched there. He turned back toward the room, as if staring through the eyes of the blazing skull.
As the sun baked his back, Indy waited, concentrating, thinking back to his years in college with Oxley. Even back then, the man put the p in pomposity. He could hold an overflowing discourse on any bit of obscurity, whether the audience was interested or not. He would never leave the dormitory without every button secured, every hair in place. He was equal parts aggravation and obstinacy.
But the man was also brilliant, with a dazzling ingenuity.
Even back then.
Some part of that Oxley had to still exist.
Even here.
Below, Mutt continued to work. With each sweep of the broom, a vast etching was revealed across the stone floor, Oxley’s masterpiece. It was the professor’s own version of the Nazca lines, visible only from above by the gods.
Or Indy
It was an elaborate rendering—but not of a skull this time. Indy stared down as Mutt swept. Lines of jagged peaks appeared, along with painstakingly rendered burial temples and funeral monuments.
And a slew of grave stones.
It was a cemetery.
“Where Orellana is buried,” Indy realized aloud.
Mutt glanced to Indy, then down to the floor. “I thought you said that the conquistadores all vanished. That their bodies were never found.”
Indy stared down at the etched lines.
. . . a dazzling ingenuity.
“Looks like Oxley found them after all.”
TWENTY
LIGHTNING SPLIT THE NIGHT SKY, illuminating the landscape ahead, etching the view in silver. Thunderclouds rolled low over the desert highlands and rumbled as if warning off any intruders. The heat remained trapped in the sand, but a cooling breeze swept over the broken landscape.
Mutt perched his Harley at the top of the rise as another burst of chain lightning shattered through the jagged peaks. It had taken the entire day and most of the night to climb up into the mountains above Nazca.
The lightning revealed another valley ahead.
“There!” Jones said, seated behind him on the motorcycle. The professor pointed across the valley to a ridgeline on the far side.
Mutt had seen it, too. Perched atop the next cliff was a jumble of stone crosses, crumbling statues, and squared-off mausoleums. A handful of windswept thorn-pines stood silhouetted against the sky, tortured into twisted shapes by centuries of storms.
“Chaucbilla Cemetery,” the professor said. “Just like Oxley’s drawing.”
They had copied what was scratched in the floor of the sanatorium and shown it to a few locals. Someone finally recognized it and warned them against going there. Maldecido was how he described the place. Cursed. It had taken a few pesos to convince the halfblind man to sketch out a map of the mountains and the cemetery’s location.
Even with the map, Mutt had almost given up, convinced the man had been lying.
But here it was.
Mutt understood why they’d been warned off. The cliff where the cemetery perched had eroded away beneath it. Now the old graveyard sat atop a crumbling promontory that jutted out over the open desert. Even some of the tree roots hung exposed along the underside of the promontory in mossy drapes and tangled vines, looking like a hoary beard.
Another flash of lightning revealed what lay on the desert flats hundreds of feet below: the famous Nazca lines.
With each burst of lightning, the mile-wide drawings raced with silver fire. Mutt spotted a crooked-legged spider and a tall man with a bowl-like head. They seemed to be staring straight at him. He shivered. Then they vanished again into the darkness.
“Let’s go,” Dr. Jones urged, impatient, his eyes on the cemetery.
Mutt remained for another breath. He hoped the professor didn’t notice his trembling. He had never liked cemeteries . . . even in bright daylight. But his mom’s life depended on finding Ox’s crystal skull.
So he edged the cycle over the lip of the ridge. A switchbacked trail led across a ridgeline and toward the precariously perched cemetery. It took another half hour to reach the wrought-iron gateway that led into the cemetery proper. By that time the winds had begun to kick up, causing a hand-painted sign to teeter. It read:
Mataremos a Los Huaqueros
Mutt parked under the sign as the professor hopped off and crossed to a dark, ramshackle caretaker’s house, plainly long abandoned. The adobe bricks were cracked and covered in lichen. The roof timbers sagged. It looked like another strong wind would blow the whole place down.
Jones kicked in the door and disappeared inside. Mutt heard some rustling, then the professor returned with a lantern in hand. He fired it to a feeble brightness, preserving what little kerosene remained.
“Shovels,” the professor said and lifted the lamp.
They found two leaning just inside the gate.
Mutt pointed toward the swinging sign overhead and translated it aloud. “Grave robbers will be shot.”
Indy headed into the cemetery. “Good thing were not grave robbers.”
The path passed between two of the scrabbled, twisted pines. The gusting winds stirred the branches, knocking them together, sounding like the rattle of bones. Mutt looked up.
He really, really hated cemeteries.
As he stared, something stirred up in the branches, a shift of shadows. He tried to see what it was, but it vanished. He stood for a moment longer, then hurried forward, running square into the professor’s back.
“Watch it, kid!”
Jones had stopped at the edge of the graveyard. He was staring out at the spread of tombstones and crypts.
“Grave robbing,” he mumbled sourly. “Looks like were late to the party.”
Mutt stepped to the side and searched ahead. Statues, crosses, tiny mausoleums spread all the way to the cliff’s edge. The place had seen better times. Half the graves had been strip-mined, pillaged, emptied, and left open. Any valuables had long sin
ce been stolen. Only the occupants of the graves had been left behind. Skeletons were strewn everywhere, sprawled, propped, toppled, trampled.
The graveyard had become a boneyard.
The professor lifted his lantern higher. The growing winds kicked up dirt and sand into swirling eddies, like the ghosts of the dead.
Now, that wasn’t a good thought.
“Wh-what are we looking for?” Mutt forced out.
“I don’t know yet. Something that isn’t obvious. Maybe an antechamber to one of these open barrows.”
The professor pointed and headed out, thought better of it, and turned in a new direction.
Mutt shook his head and followed.
At this rate, they would be here all night.
Off to the left, shadows suddenly jumped and shifted. Mutt flinched and whirled, striking Dr. Jones in the arm. The professor almost dropped the lantern.
“What’s wrong, kid?” he asked angrily.
“Thought I saw something.”
“Quit jumping at shadows. There’s nothing here but a bunch of dead—”
One of those shadows jumped from behind a gravestone and knocked Indy flat. Another dropped from a tree limb and pounded Mutt to the dirt. Mutt flailed wildly at whatever had struck him—but nothing was there. Jones yelled and kicked—but he had no opponent, either.
Ghosts.
Mutt scrambled to his feet in a panic. He backed against one of the grave markers. His heel crunched through the arm bones of a skeleton. He shuddered away—bumping into another skeleton propped up against the neighboring gravestone.
The skeleton’s skull turned and looked up at him.
Mutt choked out a scream of horror as it leaped at him, bony arms reaching, clawing. He threw it off of him with a strength born of terror. But it just bounced back to its feet and crouched.
Mutt finally realized it wasn’t a living skeleton—but a wiry, feral man, covered in black mud and dressed in a carapace of bones.
Shock kept him frozen for too long.
The madman leaped at Mutt again. But as he lunged, a shovel swung and clocked him flat in the face. The man fell back as his bony mask shattered, revealing a human face behind the skull.
Still, as he struck the ground, he immediately rolled away with preternatural speed and vanished back into the dark.
Mutt joined the professor, shoulder-to-shoulder. They brandished their shovels like weapons.
“Man, that was not dead!” he yelled at Jones.
“Oxley’s letter,” the professor gasped out. “He mentioned something about the living dead. He wasn’t kidding. He—”
—thwack, thwack—
Two blow darts bloomed along the wooden handle of the professor’s shovel, their tiny feathers quivering. The professor dropped flat.
Mutt moved too slowly.
Two shadows leaped over the professor’s back and struck Mutt in the chest. He stumbled, then fell backward—into an open grave.
He landed on his back in the hard-packed dirt, the wind knocked out of him. As he wheezed for air, one of the skeletal shadows appeared at the lip of the grave, blowgun ready, pointed toward Mutt.
No escape.
Mutt dug into his pocket and whipped out his switchblade, thumbed it open, and hurled it at the warrior. Silver flashed and grazed the man’s forearm, enough to throw off his aim.
The blowgun fell from his fingers—only to be snatched up by a second warrior, who raised it to his lips and pointed it down into the open grave.
Mutt had no other weapon.
He winced, knowing what was coming.
He was wrong.
A hand shot out, grabbed the blowgun, and tugged it away. Leaning close, the professor brought the wrong end of the pipe to his lips and blew hard into it.
The warrior gasped and fell back, dropping the blowgun. One hand clutched at his throat; the other dug into his mouth. The poisoned dart had lodged deep. In another heartbeat, he fell over dead.
On the other side of the grave, the first warrior leaped to his feet, his arm bleeding. He held Mutt’s switchblade in his fingers, his arm already cocked back, ready to return the blade to its owner.
—KUH-RACK—
Mutt jumped.
Overhead, Jones’s bullwhip had snagged the warrior’s wrist. With a jerk, the switchblade tumbled out of the attacker’s grip. It flew high, then plummeted—straight for Mutt.
He scrambled back, doing a split. The blade impaled itself into the dirt between his legs.
Close call . . . too close.
“Sorry, kid,” the professor called down, but he had his own problems.
The warrior had freed his arm and was preparing to lunge at Jones.
The professor raised his other arm and revealed a black pistol. He cocked it loudly and pointed it at the warrior’s bony chest.
The attacker eyed the gun, the man, and the whip—and ran off in the opposite direction. Mutt grabbed his switchblade and stood up. He watched other shadows flowing away in all directions.
Smart shadows.
Lightning shattered overhead, limning the professor, bullwhip in one hand, pistol in the other.
“You’re a teacher?” Mutt asked.
Indy reached down to pull him out of the open grave. “Part-time.”
TWENTY-ONE
INDY HOLSTERED HIS PISTOL and helped haul Mutt out of the grave. Back on his feet, Mutt wiped the blood from the handle of his knife onto his jeans. Indy noted the slightly sick turn to the kid’s lips.
It was tough to grow up.
“I . . . I never really used it before,” the kid said, staring down at the blade. “Except as a bottle opener.”
Indy clapped him on the shoulder. “You did all right, kid.”
He crossed to the poisoned warrior, propped him up on a grave, then borrowed a hat and serape from one of the skeletons. He wrapped the dead man in the poncho and planted the hat atop his head.
“That oughta keep him for a couple hundred years.”
Mutt stood with his arms hugged around his chest. He studied the dead body. Indy imagined it was the first corpse the kid had ever seen. He had to give the kid credit. He didn’t shy away.
“Who were those things?” Mutt finally asked.
“The Nazca. Or maybe their descendants.”
Indy contemplated the implication. The Nazca had come to the region more than two thousand years ago. They flourished for a millennium, developing farming methods and complicated irrigation systems. They were great artisans in pottery and weaving. Then they were wiped out. So what was a secret tribe of them still doing out here?
Indy stared across the boneyard.
“Whoever they are,” he said, “they don’t like us poking around here. Which begs the question: What are they protecting?”
Off to the left, something caught Indy’s attention. A stone wall near the back of the cemetery. There was something odd about it. He led Mutt toward it. The surface was riddled with niches, crammed with bones and skulls—most of it covered with spiderwebs.
He fingered the silk.
“Lasiodorides striatus,” he mumbled.
Mutt leaned closer. “What’s that?”
Indy straightened. “Peruvian giant stripe-knee.”
Mutt still looked confused.
Indy moved along the wall. “Giant tarantulas.”
“How giant?” The kid looked over his shoulder.
“Come see this,” the professor said. He ran his fingers down the face of the rock wall. “The stonework’s from two different eras. One ruin built atop another. Civilizations do that all the time, layering one atop the other.”
As Indy followed the wall, he discovered footprints in the sand: one set heading toward the wall, another away.
He searched that section more closely, his nose an inch from the wall. He examined each niche, gently pulling aside the webs.
“Careful of the tarantulas,” Mutt warned.
Indy ignored him. All he discovered were more funer
ary bones. He came to a skull in another niche, in the more ancient section of the stonework. As he reached to clear the sticky webs for a better view, the silk moved away from his fingers—then back out again.
As if the skull were breathing.
“Air circulation,” he muttered.
“What?”
“Sign of a subterranean passageway or cavern.”
He reached and pulled the skull from its niche by its eye sockets. A fat tarantula scurried across his hand. Mutt gasped, but Indy ignored the spider. It scampered back to the wall and dove into another niche.
With the skull out of the way, Indy searched the back of the space. His fingers discovered a loop of rope. Leaning back, he hauled on the rope, and the section of wall creaked open with a grinding of stone.
A narrow crawlway stretched into an inky darkness.
Mutt bent down with Indy, shoulder-to-shoulder, and leaned a hand on the jamb of the secret door.
Indy motioned him back. “I wouldn’t touch—”
Too late.
A dozen black scorpions streamed out along Mutt’s arm.
“GAAH!”
The kid shot backward, shaking his arm. Scorpions rained down and scattered.
“Relax,” Indy said. “They’re only scorpions.”
Mutt suddenly cried out and smacked his forearm. “One . . . one of ’em bit me.” He stared over at Indy, his eyes huge. “Am I going to die?”
“Kid, we all die. That’s life.” His words failed to comfort Mutt in the slightest. He sighed. “Listen, how big was the scorpion?”
“HUGE!”
“Oh, good.”
“Good?”
“With scorpions, the bigger the better.” Indy turned his attention back to the tunnel, then thought of something and swung back around. “But if you get stung by a small one, kid, don’t keep it to yourself. Okay?”
With this sage advice, he retrieved his lantern and crawled off into the tunnel.
Mutt watched Jones vanish down the tunnel. He glanced behind him toward the dark cemetery. A few raindrops pelted from the sky. Lightning flashed and stripped the cemetery of all its shadows. Skeletons and open graves all seemed to be staring back at him, angry at his trespass.