Tom Knox - The Babylon rite

One by one they crouched and waited to pass through the portal of Tomb 1, Huaca D. Jess felt, for a fraction of a moment, like a Second World War POW in a movie, waiting to use the secret tunnel to escape from the Nazis. The difference was, they were going further into the imprisoning evil.

The first thing she noticed was the size of the tomb: it was huge, big enough to stand in, and it stretched deep into hidden darkness. Mud steps led down. So that was how it worked. The Moche must have dug down, to make this vast tomb, then built the adobe pyramid over the pit.

Her feet crunched on something. What? She shone her headtorch down on the floor.

A thousand glittering corpses sparkled back at her: the desiccated carapaces of beetles, iridescent, still showing their sinisterly gorgeous colours: purples and lurid greens and deep dark blues.

‘Skin beetles! Omorgus suberosus. Flesh-eating Coleoptera. The Moche worshipped them — they worshipped skin beetles and blowflies. We see them on ceramics. Familiars of the unknown god, perhaps? Hmm.’ Dan Kossoy was standing close to Jess as he said this. Very close. The beams of their headtorches crossed like battling swords as they both stared at the floor. She felt his hand reach for her hand and grasp it discreetly, giving a brief, secret, affectionate, reassuring squeeze. Then he pointed. ‘And here, these are fly puparia. Thousands of them. But… my goodness. Look. Here — totally staked out.’

Jessica gazed. The dead beetles formed a kind of stencil or silhouette: and they surrounded a skeleton of a smallish human figure.

Protected by the sealed door, the corpse had rotted slowly, free of any covering. The body must have been totally naked for there were no clothes, no adornments, no headdresses or weapons or grave goods: it was stark naked. And it was, as Dan said, staked out.

Hoops of metal fastened the wrists and ankles to the floor. Worst of all: the skull was screaming, locked in a rasping howl of pain, yellowy teeth grimacing. This person, this adolescent or young woman or man, had died in agony.

‘Dan!’ It was Jay, calling. ‘Dan, come and see!’

They ran over. Another skeleton was staked to the floor along the side of the tomb, near the adobe wall.

‘Another girl, it looks like.’ Jay said. ‘No feet. Chopped off. Must be a human sacrifice, right? And here. Birds? Avian skulls. Vultures — must be vultures.’

Jessica knelt by the skeleton. It was adorned with a necklace of some sort; she shone her flashlight. The necklace was maybe copper, and decorated with small, symbolic commas embossed into the metal. She had seen these before, many times, in Moche art. They were called ulluchus. No one truly knew what they were: stylized drops of blood, maybe; perhaps blood of the primary deity.

But who was the god who demanded these strange rites? What kind of ancient faith demanded this horror?

‘Dan!’ Another shout across the tomb. This time it was Larry.

The finds were coming fast. The tomb was littered with many skeletons, filled with precious grave goods: it was a rich and wonderful prize. Wooden weapons mouldered in the gloom. Broken vessels, in the shape of naked prisoners, squatted in the dust, next to little copper bottles for coca taking, and endless broken potsherds with the strange comma-shaped blood drops, more ulluchus, and then — quite wonderfully — a spray of tiny pink coral cylinders, still pretty after fifteen hundred years, where a glorious headdress had rotted away. This was a high-status tomb, a tomb of nobles surrounded by sacrificial companions.

One especially high-status skeleton, possibly a princess, with a great owl headdress, featured another severed ankle, like the skeletons outside. Why? It was inexplicable. This couldn’t be a sacrificial hobbling to prevent a concubine or a slave from fleeing in the afterlife: this was a noble. Why would she have this bizarre amputation? And how did it fit with the puzzling aspects of the other severed limbs?

The puzzle was too hard. Jess felt the throb of a headache as she walked carefully between the skulls and the ribcages.

In the gloom of the Tomb 1 she could hear the others enthusing over this grand discovery. The worry of the last hour was gone; Larry and Jay and Dan were chattering excitedly.

‘Brilliant, just brilliant, this is excellent…’

‘We need to grid this, today — and we need Kubiena boxes.’

‘I’ll go back and grab the cameras.’

Part of her was pleased for them: Jess could understand the excitement. But she just couldn’t share the elation. Because she couldn’t shake the primary image from her mind: that terrible first skeleton staked out in the mud floor, surrounded by the purple and green shells of a million skin beetles.

The anguished, frozen, terrified howl of the skull told her one thing: the victim had surely been tied to the floor, then fed alive to the insects.

Morningside, Edinburgh

‘You’re sure he didn’t tell you any of this?’

‘Absolutely. Nothing. Nada.’ Nina gestured, angrily, chopping the air. ‘A break-in! And he was upset! So that explains why he felt menaced. Or watched.’

Adam gazed down the silent hallway. The McLintocks’ apartment was so very hushed. Several doors gave off the hallway, which was decorated by black-and-white prints of old Edinburgh. Auld Reekie. The medieval city with its Luckenbooths and witch-burnings, the Stinking Style and the royal gibbet.

From somewhere he got the peculiar sense of a clock, somewhere, having stopped. It was a silence comprised of tension, and absence. But maybe it was simply the tension: they were, after all, in someone else’s flat, which they had entered with illicit use of a stolen key.

‘So, what now, Nina? I don’t quite see why we’re here. If the notebooks are gone then we might as well quit. Get out. No?’ He searched for her reaction. He was happy to continue but he didn’t want to take pointless risks.

Her gaze was narrowed by contempt, or something close to it. ‘Ach. Hell with that. We search! There may still be something? Clues!’

She was already unzipping her large blue quilted anorak; as she dropped the hood, her hair loosened, and shimmered. He gazed, unwittingly recording the details: he couldn’t help it, all those years of journalistic training made him do it — this was the stuff that made an article come alive. Details. Description. Details. With her very twenty-first-century anorak now discarded, standing petite and slender in black jumper and grey jeans, she looked like a young and comely widow; yet she also looked as if she was dressed for a break-in. Dark clothes and raven-dark hair. Quite hard to see.

‘Let’s try the sitting room. And his study. Study first.’

He followed her gesture.

‘Here. Dad’s study. They had one each.’

The door opened; they entered the study. The light switch was dimmer style: Nina carefully calibrated the dial — finessing it so they had just enough light to search. Not strange blazing light at the windows, not at two a.m.

The study was definitely the man’s private space in a shared apartment. The decor was austere. Scottish rugby paraphernalia — team photos and faded rosettes — adorned the walls. A medieval globe in a corner. A large photo of Nina stood proudly on the big wooden desk. A slightly smaller photo — Adam guessed it was the older sister, Hannah — was positioned beside it.

Sitting next to the photos was a strange ceramic object, a piece of pottery; it looked old and exotic. Adam had once been to Mexico City, and this item definitely looked Aztec, or at least Mesoamerican.

He picked it up, and turned it in his hand. Deciphering the painted image on the jar. It showed a man with no hands and feet praying at an altar. The image was so disquieting he almost dropped the pot.