Curses! Read Online Free

had killed her before she was twenty. And all Harvey saw was tubercles and protuberances.
    "Okay,” Gideon said gently, “let's see if we can't look at her as a human being now, not just a mass of skeletal criteria. For example—"
    "Gideon! Dr. Oliver! Hey, where are you?"
    He recognized Leo Rose's bellow of a voice and sighed again. Tlaloc was one of those Horizon Foundation excavations that was supervised by professionals but staffed by pay-for-the-privilege amateurs who worked for two weeks or a month and usually turned out to be both the chief pleasure and the chief pain of the dig. Pleasure because of the artless, enthusiastic interest they showed in almost anything at all; pain because this same interest meant the professional staff rarely got ten minutes in a row to work on something without having to answer a well-meant but often inane question.
    "Over here, Leo. We're behind the shed."
    Bearlike and rumpled, the California real-estate developer lumbered into sight around the corner of the thickly overgrown Priest's House. Or what they called the Priest's House. Anthropologists didn't really know what these buildings had been, any more than they knew what any ancient Mayan building had been, or what the Maya had called their great cities and ceremonial centers (if they were actually ceremonial centers), or even what the Maya had called themselves. There was a hell of a lot, when you thought about it, that anthropologists didn't know and probably never would.
    Leo was bouncing with excitement. “We found a fake wall, can you believe it? With a kind of little hidden room behind it, and this fantastic stone chest in it. Come on, we figured you'd want to see this. Oh, hiya, Harvey."
    Gideon didn't have to be asked twice. He was up at once, carefully placing the girl's skull on the bean-bag ring that served as a cushion. Was there anyone on a dig, amateur or professional, who didn't harbor secret hopes of sealed rooms behind false walls? Not since Howard Carter knocked down that wall in 1922 and walked into the untouched tomb of Tutankhamen, there wasn't.
    "Where? In the temple?"
    "Underneath. In the stairwell."
    Clearing the rubble-filled stairwell was the major ongoing task of the Tlaloc excavation. Since the dig had opened more than two years before, the director, Howard Bennett, had worked steadily at it with changing crews, boring down into the flattopped pyramid on which the little Temple of the Owls sat. Gideon, on leave from his teaching post, had come to Yucatan only two weeks before—when they had begun to bring up bones from the cenote—but he had long since learned that Howard's enthusiasm was centered on the buried passageway. Howard had staked his reputation, such as it was, on the unearthing of some great find when they finally got to the bottom. Why else, he wanted to know, would the Maya go to all the trouble of packing a perfectly good stairwell with tons of debris, if not to hide something of tremendous importance?
    Gideon had been doubtful. Sometimes there were treasures at the bottom of such rubble-packed passages; much more Often there was nothing. The Maya had made a practice of enlarging their pyramids by using an old one as the core of a new one erected on top of it. The Pyramid of the Magicians at Uxmal had five such masonry “envelopes,” one inside the other, like the layers of an onion. And when the Maya built this way, they usually blocked up any hollow spaces in the original pyramid; for structural soundness, not to hide anything. But a false wall and a sealed room that was something else again.
    "Did you reach the bottom, then?” Harvey asked as they trotted across the grassy plaza toward the pyramid.
    No, Leo explained, huffing for breath, they hadn't found the base of the stairwell yet, although they had now dug down twenty-four steps. No, the hollow wall had been discovered on the landing that was just twelve steps down from the temple floor, at a level that had been exposed and