Moon Mask Read Free Page A

fit on top of the last, this wall was imprecise, sloppy even. The blocks were a haphazard jumble of irregular shapes, loosely piled up and then cemented together with a thick grey mortar. Unlike the smooth, almost marble-like finish to the rest of the passageway, these rocks were jagged and rough, allowing the jungle’s hardy vines to find purchase and spread across it like a spider web, concealing the narrow gap where some of the wall had fallen away.
    It was through that gap that King, while slashing away at the vines with a machete, had fallen, part of the structure giving way beneath him.
    He scrambled up onto his feet, chunks of ancient masonry and decapitated vegetation tumbling to the ground, and picked up his own torch, scanning it across the walls.
    “Wow,” he mumbled under his breath. “This is amazing.”
    “Uh . . . a little help here?” Sid called. King ignored her as he ran his light over the walls, his eyes picking out the intricate detail.
    “Ben!” she snapped.
    King whirled around, shaking off his astonishment, and hurried to assist her. She was part way through the newly excavated opening and had become intertwined in the crusted vegetation.
    “Here,” he said, helping her to untangle herself and jump into the passageway. Another shape appeared behind her, a form even more lithe and athletic than Sid. Ben offered her a hand.
    “I do not need any help,” a clipped Russian accent replied. Sure enough, moments later Nadia Yashina slipped into the hidden passageway unaided. Her sharp eyes surveyed her new surroundings and astonishment flashed across her normally stoic face.
    “What is this place?” Sid asked, awed.
    “I’m not sure,” King replied excitedly, scooping up his satchel and notes from where they had fallen on his less than elegant entry. He hurried up beside Sid to study the wall. “It’s absolutely amazing though.”
    From top to bottom and stretching all the way into the gloom beyond where their flash-lights could penetrate, every single block in the wall had been carved into the near perfect shape of a human skull.
    “They’re all like it,” Sid said enthusiastically, moving from block to block, running her hands over the polished craniums. “I’ve never seen anything like it. I mean, most of the ancient South American cultures had their fascination with sacrifice and death and decorated their temples with images of skulls and skeletons, but I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
    “They’re all so lifelike,” King said. “I wonder what sort of stone they’re-”
    “Bone.”
    King and Sid both looked, mouths agape, at Nadia, but no elaboration was forthcoming.
    “Bone?” Sid repeated. “You mean . . .” her voice trailed off as she realised what her friend was saying. Reverently, she removed her hand from a shiny plate and her face twisted into a slight grimace. “Oh.”
    Each and every one of the skull-shaped blocks was in fact an actual skull.
    “Well that’s a little on the spooky side,” King commented.
    “Why?” Nadia asked sharply. She continued to study the bone-encrusted walls with her usual detachment. “As Sid said, the ancient peoples of the Americas were particularly fascinated with sacrifice and death. You’ve been to the Cenote Sagrado.”
    King remembered his explorations around Central America very well, following his father on what some scholars termed a ‘lunatic’s quest to find the origins of civilisation’.
    Believing that the sacrificial wells at Chichen Itza might hold clues to what he called the ‘Progenitor Race’ which seeded civilisation across the globe, Reginald King had camped near the sinkholes for three months. Ben had spent the summer before starting at Oxford with his father and still now remembered the surrealism of the site. So still, placid and beautiful now, the waters had once turned red as the remains of those offered to ancient gods were dumped in them.
    “Yeah,” he admitted to Nadia, “but I’ve