An adventure for New Orleans PCs, working for Belasco’s Rare Books.
Blood on the floor of a New Orleans flophouse. The dead man’s name is Mike Hedge, host of the Jungle Drums radio show, author of such books as Danger, My Ally and Battles With Giant Fish. Stabbed to death in the bathtub with a Mayan sacrificial knife.
Room ransacked. Two crystal skulls left behind - both cheap quartz German fakes.
Hedge had breakfast with Belasco yesterday and told him - I just got back from Bacalar, a lagoon town in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo. I believe this skull to be a genuine relic of Atlantis. This time you can trust me. I’m onto something big.
Belasco bought the skull - bargaining Hedge down from $500 to $10. He keeps it on the counter, in between the dirty postcards and the stuffed owl. He assumed (correctly) it was worthless but now he wants to know what’s going on.
The lost city of Dzibanche, in the Yucatan rainforest, not far from Bacalar. First capital of the Snake Kingdom. Burial place of Sky Witness, conqueror of Tikal and founder of the Kaan dynasty of Mayan kings.
Crystal skulls - not Hedge’s fakes, but real ones - are data storage units from Atlantis. Hold them up in blue-green light, ring chimes to them, and they’ll project images of prehistoric civilisations into your head. Some of them hold the digitised minds of ancient priests - wise old men in copper robes, ready to teach you forgotten science.
They want blood, of course. Blood for Kukulkan, the Mayan snake god, revealing himself to his disciples as a bearded prophet or a writhing mass of coils in sweet smoke.
Sky Witness found a set of thirteen skulls in the Bay Islands of Honduras, home to a colony of refugees, after the crystal kingdoms of Atlantis were sky-punched from orbit by Lemurian doomsday weapons and submerged. He used them to make himself a king - contacting Venus, breeding mutant jaguar warriors, mastering psychic warfare and invading his enemies’ dreams.
He was murdered and succeeded by his son, First Axeman, who balked at all the necessary torture and stopped using the skulls. He’s buried in a tomb under the Temple of the Cormorants. A complex maze, full of traps, connected to a sacred cenote and the labyrinth of flooded caverns that underpin most of the Yucatan.
The skulls are buried with him. It’s exactly like Indiana Jones.
The Carnegie Institute has nominated Sylvanus G. Morley, well-known archaeologist and spy, to lead an excavation at Dzibanche. He had to pause work at Chichen Itza to go and check it out. He’s camped outside the temple, in a spacious linen tent, travelling into Bacalar once a week for supplies.
He believes philanthropists should rule the world. He wants the skulls to reconstruct ancient alien flying machines, invent nuclear weapons and project American power to every corner of the globe. He’s worried about the rise of Germany, and deeply believes the US government is a force for good.
His team includes -
Earl Morris, archaeologist. Cowboy hat. Whip. Gun. Not afraid of anything but snakes. Total contempt for financial concerns. Picks fights. Mistreats women. Flogs thieves to death.
Anne Morris. Earl’s wife. Chipper. Optimistic. Loves paints and colour. Slowly dying. Plagued by racking cough. Thinks she sees ghosts everywhere. Butterflies perch on her hands.
Cyrus Lundell, aviator and botanist. Perpetually chews gum. Brooklyn accent. Works for the Tropical Plant Research Foundation, conducting experiments on the sapodilla tree.
J. O. Kilmartin, engineer. Works for the U. S. Geological Survey. Has private theories about earthquakes - thinks they’re caused by giant worms. Mumbles. Often unintelligible.
Tarcisio Moon. Korean gardener and chef. Can make anything delicious. Pretends to be slower than he is. Spy for the Mexican Communist Party, reporting to handlers in Progreso.
Shiochi Ichikawa. Artist. Works for the Metropolitan Museum. Job is to replicate Mayan murals. Former Japanese Communist - fled the party and the country. Suspicious of Moon.
Abe “Barracuda” Flores. Morley’s bodyguard. A Garifuna turtle hunter, wanted for manslaughter in Belize. Deadly with his machete. Half his face is a chewed mass of scars.
Isauro and Remedios. Mayan boys. Do random jobs around camp. Isauro - slow, stupid, and secretly cruel. Remedios - bright, cheeky, quietly afraid of Isauro. Both spies for whoever pays them.
The dig site is off limits to civilians. That includes you. They’ve hired local workmen - Indians and chicleros - to clear away the rubble so they can gain access to the tunnels underneath the temple. A small camp has sprung up around Dzibanche, palm huts in the jungle where nervous diggers huddle in the dark.
Quintana Roo is controlled by General Francisco May - chief of the Chan Santa Cruz Indians, provisional head of the Cult of the Talking Cross. It’s almost entirely unsettled. Nothing but jungle and islands, mangrove swamps and ruins every ten feet.
Bacalar is a gathering place for all the scum of Mexico. Chicleros hiding from the law, disfigured by the chicle fly - ears and noses eaten away. Machete duels over prostitutes in decaying tin-roofed warehouses. Campfires on the lagoon sandbars. Rum. Wild midnight dances to African drums and guitars.
Nobody would know it’s a former Mayan holy city. Alonso Pacheco drowned three thousand women in the lagoon here in 1544. Some say you can still hear their ghosts, wailing and demanding he piece their bodies back together.
Hedge followed rumours to the city. Couldn’t work out what was going on. Slouched around for a while, bought the fake skulls and used gossip to concoct a backstory he assumed was fake. Sold a few in ports around the Gulf. Word of this got back to Morley, who assumed he knew more than he did and sent Earl Morris to bump him off.
May’s second in command, Colonel Joseph Vega, is stationed in Bacalar. Thin, insidious, a true believer in the Talking Cross. He keeps a wooden Jesus in his pocket, feeds it drops of blood and believes it tells him what to do. His job is to liaise with the Morley expedition, find out what they’re up to and quietly decide if May’s army should take Dzibanche over.
An old wooden church by the waterfront is a base for the Red Shirts of Tomás Canabal, who have burnt all the Bibles and systematically mutilated the cross. They’ve heard about the skulls and want to use them to destroy the Pope. (Canabal has a few Atlantean manuscripts, stolen from Olmec tombs in Tabasco, which prove using pure reason that the Christian faith is an obscene lie.)
Stories in the bars about an old man, living in a hut by the edge of the Black Cenote, who keeps a talking creature in a sack under his bed. Some say it’s just a parrot. Others tell you it’s a demon who demands cigars. Hedge visited this guy, came away empty-handed.
This is Ambrose Bierce. Still alive.
He owns a crystal skull. He and Pancho Villa stole it from the house of Porfirio Diaz, who had it from Eugene Boban, official archaeologist to the court of Maximilian I. It contains Pancho Villa’s soul, also still alive, and very talkative. The skull’s jaw is on a hinge, allowing Villa to smoke.
Bierce went to Mexico during the Revolution to find the lost city of Carcosa, in the Chihuahuan Desert, which he’d found out about from Sioux Indians in the Dakota Territory many years ago. He fell in with Villa, and they had adventures. Now they want the knowledge of the skulls to get Villa back into a mortal body.
And set him up as the new Crystal Emperor of Mexico. Why not?
Another set of rumours.
The Dzibanche camp is haunted by El Tata Duende. A jungle gnome with backward-facing feet. The corpses of three workmen have been found - eyes bulging, tongues blackened, clutching at their swollen throats.
Morley covered it up. He doesn’t want a panic.
The flooded tunnels underneath the Yucatan are inhabited by duendes. Albino dwarves with blowguns, flat noses and ears like leafcutter bats. Underwater pygmies of Xibalba. They serve Camazotz, the bat god, and crawl out of cenotes in the night.
First Axeman tasked them with guarding the tomb. He wants his father to stay dead.
The crystallised skeleton of Sky Witness lies in his jade sarcophagus, deep under the pyramid, surrounded by his slaves and wives. He gets into your dreams. Whispers to you. Earl Morris hears him, late at night, promising a cure for Anne and a place of honour by his throne when he reigns as America’s king.
All he wants is blood. If he gets enough of it, he can live again.
