Curses! Read Online Free Page A

unremarked for a year. Someone had noticed that the mortar on one of the walls was different, more crumbly, and when Howard had probed between the blocks of masonry with the point of a trowel, they had come loose.
    At the foot of the pyramid Gideon nodded to the two straw-hatted Mayan laborers enjoying their break—cigars and lukewarm tea—on the bottom steps. In return he received two decorous, unsmiling nods. He jogged up the steaming, worn steps, Harvey bumping along beside him and Leo gasping behind, then entered the small building on the pyramid's flat top: the Temple of the Owls, so-called on account of the frieze that ran along its lintel. (They didn't look like owls to Gideon, but no one had much liked his “Temple of the Turkeys” suggestion.)
    Inside, the structure was bare, with the look of a burned-out tenement. Ceilings, walls, and floor were coated with a limestone stucco made dismal and blotchy by centuries of intrusive plant growth, since removed, and a millennium of damp heat, still very much present. Only near the roofline were there a few faded streaks of green, blue, and red to suggest what it might have looked like in A.D. 900. The one unusual note was the square opening cut in the floor, and that, of course, led into the stairwell.
    On the landing twelve steps below, most of the west wall had already been taken down, with the removed blocks neatly stacked and numbered with felt-tipped markers. The crew and another Mayan laborer were gazing mutely at the opening. Two portable lamps on the landing threw their garish yellow light into the small, astonishing room before them.
    It is one of the great thrills of anthropology to look at something that was sealed up a thousand years ago, by the people of a great and vanished culture, and has lain unseen ever since. But this was something more, something out of a fairy tale...the Crystal Cave, was it? The room was a jeweled, sparkling white, made all the more dazzling by its contrast with the grimy stairwell—a fiercely glittering ice grotto in the heart of the Yucatan rain forest. But the ice was crystallized calcium carbonate, of course: stalactites on the ceiling, stalagmites on the floor, and a glistening, petrified sheen of it on the walls.
    In the center was a waist-high stone chest three feet square, made of four massive slabs standing on their sides, and capped by a great, overhanging stone lid eight inches thick. The lid too was coated with crystal deposits, but through the milky veneer Gideon could see an intricately carved surface of extraordinary beauty. There were Long Count dates around the rim, and in the center a lovingly worked figure of the halach-uinic, the True Man, emerging from or disappearing into the jaws of an Underworld serpent. The red paint had faded to a pale rose. Other than that, the chest might have been finished that morning. The lid was magnificent, in itself a find of the first order. Gideon hardly dared think about what might be under it.
    Howard Bennett hadn't seen him come in. Shirtless and built something like a sumo wrestler—sleekly corpulent, with thick, soapy flesh sheathing a heavily muscled frame—he was staring avidly at the lid. On his gleaming neck and shoulders, the skin twitched like a horse's. Gideon heard him laugh deep in his throat, softly and privately. The sound set off an odd shiver of apprehension at the back of Gideon's scalp.
    Howard looked up to see the newcomers. “What do you think now?” he said, half exultantly, half challengingly. Gideon had not made a secret of his doubts about there being anything to find.
    "It's fantastic,” he said sincerely. “I was dead wrong. Congratulations."
    Under its sheen of sweat, Howard's beefy, dissipated face was deeply flushed. He wiped perspiration from his upper lip with the tip of an old paisley bandanna tied around his throat and laughed.
    Howard Bennett laughed easily and often. His loose, jovial personality was an asset for his one-of-a-kind