Caroline Chase and the Temple of Xal'Athar Parts 4.5.6 now added

[Eoworfindir]

1

Caroline Chase had prepared extensively for her first expedition.

She had studied the temple schematics for three weeks. She had cross-referenced four separate academic papers on Xal'Athari burial customs. She had colour-coded her notes, which her father said showed good organisational thinking and her mother said showed she had too much time on her hands and shouldn't she be doing something sensible with her life instead of gallivanting off to Guatemala.

She had bought the shorts from SportsDirect.

They had been on sale. Twelve pounds fifty, down from fifteen, in a colour the label described as Adventure Khaki which was, she now realised, simply beige. They had seemed perfectly adequate in the changing room. Practical, even. Her mother had taken one look at them over the breakfast table and told her to put some proper trousers on, that you could see everything, that she hadn't raised her daughter to go traipsing around in her underwear in front of strangers.

Caroline had pointed out that she was going to Guatemala, not Sainsbury's.

Her mother had handed her a cardigan anyway.

The cardigan was currently in her hotel room in Guatemala City. Caroline had left it there deliberately and with some satisfaction.

She was five foot nothing in her boots, slight in the way that deceived people until they watched her handle a seventeen-hand horse, strawberry blonde hair pulled back practically, and she had been planning this moment since she was nineteen and found her father's old university paper on Xal'Athari ceremonial burial sites buried in a box in the attic. She was twenty-two now. Three years of planning, saving, and quietly not mentioning the specifics to her mother.

She exhaled, turned sideways, and squeezed through the narrow stone passage.

The zip caught.

A small sound. A brief metallic complaint from somewhere around her left hip. She registered it distantly, focused as she was on the chamber opening up ahead, the faint glint of something promising beyond the threshold, the carefully suppressed excitement of a person who had waited their whole life for this exact moment.

She tugged.

The zip freed itself with a slightly worrying resistance, and Caroline moved forward into the chamber without looking down, because she was a professional — or intended to become one — and professionals did not stop to examine their shorts at moments of archaeological significance.

Had she looked down, she would have noticed the zipper pull had bent. That the teeth were no longer quite aligned. That the zip, while no longer caught, had not entirely travelled back to its original position, and showed no particular inclination to do so.

She didn't look down.

She looked at the temple instead, magnificent and ancient and almost certainly full of traps, and she smiled.

Right then, she thought. Let's get into trouble.

Somewhere in Abbots Ripton, as if by instinct, her mother told her father she had a bad feeling.



2

The passage in the floor was exactly where the schematic said it would be.

Caroline allowed herself a small moment of satisfaction at this. Three years of research. She'd been right. Her father would have appreciated that. Her mother would have told her to come home.

She lowered herself in.

The passage was narrow — deliberately so, she suspected, some ancient architectural discouragement to tomb raiders who hadn't done their homework — but she was five foot nothing and had spent years folding herself around seventeen-hand horses who didn't want to be caught. Narrow passages held no fear for Caroline Chase.

She got her shoulders through, her arms above her head gripping the edge, and began to lower herself down.

She felt the catch before she understood it.

Something at the lip of the passage. Stone, or metal, some mechanism she hadn't accounted for in the schematic — a small protruding thing, a carved edge, a trigger point worn smooth by three thousand years of waiting. It found the back of her top with the quiet efficiency of something that had been doing this a very long time.

She lowered another inch.

The fabric moved with her. Up, rather than down. She felt it pull away from her waistband, felt cool temple air on the small of her back, felt the slow creep of exposure climbing her spine degree by degree as she descended.

That's odd, she thought, with remarkable composure.

She stopped. Assessed. She was hanging by her hands, shoulders through the gap, the mechanism holding the back of her top in a grip that tightened as she went down and showed no sign of releasing if she went up. The fabric was somewhere around the middle of her back now. She could feel it bunched up, pulled taut, her bra strap exposed to the empty temple above her.

Right, she thought. Manageable. This is manageable. Think.

She tried going up slightly. The top pulled tighter. She tried going down. It rode higher. She was suspended in perfect equilibrium between two options, both of which ended badly, hanging in a hole in the floor of an ancient Guatemalan temple in a top that was rapidly becoming theoretical.

The stone was very cool against her exposed back.

And that was the problem.

That specific sensation — unexpected air on her back, the sudden consciousness of exposure she hadn't chosen — sent something firing through her nervous system that bypassed rational thought entirely and arrived fully formed from four years ago.

The Henderson children.

She was twenty-two years old and hanging in an archaeological wonder of the ancient world and her brain had decided that right now, at this specific moment, was the time to revisit a Tuesday evening in Abbots Ripton when she had been babysitting two children aged seven and five who had apparently decided between them, with the casual cruelty unique to small children, that Caroline's clothes were a group project.

She remembered the feeling exactly. The sudden cool air. The confused half-second before understanding arrived. The small triumphant face of a five year old girl holding something that was no longer where it was supposed to be.

She had been eighteen then and thought that was the most embarrassing thing that would ever happen to her.

She was twenty-two now and hanging in a hole and the universe was lining up to prove her wrong.

Don't panic, she told herself.

She panicked.

It was a small panic, technically. A single sharp twist, an instinctive grab behind her with one hand to pull the top back down, the kind of automatic response the body makes before the brain can intervene with a better idea. For one brief moment she had the fabric in her fingers.

Then her other hand slipped on the edge.

She dropped.

The mechanism held the top.

Caroline Chase did not.

She landed in the lower passage in a controlled enough fashion — the equestrian in her knew how to fall, at least — and sat for a moment in the flickering dark, taking inventory.

Boots. Shorts — the zip situation unresolved but currently stable. Bra. A very strong feeling that her mother had been right about everything, not that she would ever be told.

She looked up.

Her top hung from the mechanism above like a flag of surrender, swaying gently in the warm subterranean air, entirely out of reach.

Mum, she thought, with the specific exhaustion of someone hearing a told-you-so across three thousand miles, if you ever mention the cardigan again I will not be held responsible.

She stood up, squared her shoulders with as much dignity as the situation allowed, and consulted her map.

The burial chamber was forty feet ahead.

She walked forward.

3

The passage was two feet high.

Caroline crouched in front of it with her torch and consulted her map with the expression of someone hoping they'd misread something. She hadn't misread anything. The passage was two feet high, approximately fifteen feet long, and the only route to the burial chamber.

She thought briefly of Bramble, her seventeen-hand chestnut who had once refused a six inch puddle for twenty minutes. She understood him better now.

Right, she thought. Fine.

She got down on her hands and knees.

The stone floor made immediate and personal contact with her and the first thing she thought was that she really wished she'd worn different underwear. Not that she'd packed for an audience. She hadn't. She'd packed for herself, which had seemed like a perfectly reasonable position in her flat in Huntingdon on a Wednesday evening, pulling things from her drawer by torchlight so as not to wake her mother, grabbing something small and pretty and entirely her own business.

It was very much her own business.

Her mother would have described it as next to nothing and what was she thinking and had she learned nothing.

The stone floor suggested her mother had a point.

She started crawling.

She was three feet in when the belt went.

There was a carved protrusion on the passage floor — decorative, probably, some ancient artisan's flourish that had survived three thousand years of geological patience specifically to hook the buckle of a twelve pound fifty pair of adventure shorts at the worst possible moment. She felt it catch, felt the resistance, instinctively pushed forward rather than back because forward was the only direction that made sense in a fifteen foot passage with something grinding in the temple behind her, and the buckle did exactly what buckles do when pulled sideways against their design intention.

It came undone.

The belt fell open beneath her and the shorts, which had been waiting for exactly this development, immediately began their assessment of the situation. Cheap fabric, compromised zip, no structural support — the waistband began its southward migration with the calm inevitability of something that had made a decision and seen no reason to revisit it.

She couldn't stop. The passage was too narrow to reach back, too low to adjust, too long to hold her breath and wait it out. She just had to keep moving and be grateful there was nobody here to see it.

Nobody here, she reminded herself. Empty tomb. Perfectly alone.

She was aware, with increasing and specific clarity, of cool air arriving in places that cool air had no business being. The torch beam bounced ahead of her, illuminating ancient stone, carved walls, the distant promise of the chamber beyond. Behind her, illuminated by nothing, her situation was deteriorating by the inch.

Her mother's voice arrived with the reliability of a bad signal that somehow always got through.

Caroline Elizabeth Chase you are not leaving this house dressed like that.

I'm not dressed like anything, Mum, she thought back. That's rather the problem.

The bra strap shifted. She froze, exhaled, felt it hold by what she estimated was one thread and a prayer, and kept moving.

She was almost through. She could see the chamber opening up ahead, the flicker of something beyond the passage mouth, the ceiling rising away into darkness. Ten more feet. Eight. The archaeology was right there, three thousand years of it, waiting for Caroline Chase who had planned this for three years and crawled through worse — she hadn't, actually, but it seemed like the right thought to be having.

She twisted to angle herself through the final narrow section.

The button met the stone floor.

It was a small sound. A brief mechanical protest, a single thread giving up the argument it had been losing since the zip incident two passages back, now hastened by the absence of the belt that should have been sharing the load. She felt the waistband loosen with the slow resigned quality of something that had been holding on out of politeness rather than structural integrity.

She stopped breathing.

The button held. Technically. It was still there, still attached, but attached in the way of something that had made its position clear and was waiting for the next excuse.

Caroline completed the last three feet with the careful deliberate movement of a bomb disposal operative and emerged into the burial chamber on her hands and knees.

She stood up.

The shorts made an immediate and decisive bid for freedom.

She caught them one handed. Stood in the dark of the burial chamber, one hand holding her own trousers up, belt hanging open and useless, bra strap off her shoulder by a thread, torch in her other hand, and looked up for the first time.

The guardians looked back.

There were four of them. Stone, or she assumed stone, arranged at the cardinal points of the chamber, seven feet tall, wrapped in ancient ceremonial linen, carved faces frozen in expressions of absolute authority. They had been standing here for three thousand years waiting for exactly this kind of intrusion.

She became very aware of her current state of dress.

They're statues, she told herself. Stone. Inanimate. They cannot see you.

They looked like they could see her.

She stood a little straighter, which was difficult while holding her shorts up, and swept the torch across the chamber. There, on the central plinth, exactly where the schematic said it would be — the reliquary. Small, bronze, covered in the same geometric patterns she'd been staring at for three years on photocopied academic papers in her bedroom in Huntingdon.

She forgot about the guardians. She forgot about the shorts. She forgot about the bra strap and the underwear and her mother and the cardigan in the hotel room in Guatemala City.

She walked forward.

Behind her, in the shadows at the edge of the torchlight, the nearest guardian's head turned.

Just slightly.

Just enough.

[MaireadM]

Excellent story. The pacing is exquisite.

[mikewozere]

I liked the premise and storytelling, but not sure about the supernatural bit at the end. Looking forward to reading more though

[Eoworfindir]

I liked the premise and storytelling, but not sure about the supernatural bit at the end. Looking forward to reading more though

There's always a bit of supernatural in these types of adventure tales, thanks there is a 4,5,6 coming, its just a short tale.

[Eoworfindir]

Excellent story. The pacing is exquisite.

Thank you

[Somebody]

Absolutely incredible. The way it keeps cutting to what she's thinking about, her mom, her past...

[Eoworfindir]

Absolutely incredible. The way it keeps cutting to what she's thinking about, her mom, her past...

Thank you

[Eoworfindir]

4

The reliquary was smaller than she'd imagined.

That was always the way, her father had told her once, reading from some explorer's memoir over Sunday breakfast. The thing you've been looking for is never quite the size it is in your head. It's the finding that's large, not the object.

Caroline picked it up with both hands — which meant letting go of her shorts, which dropped two inches before she caught them with her wrist, which she chose not to think about — and turned it over slowly in the torchlight. The geometric patterns caught the light. The bronze was cold and dense and impossibly old and she was holding it and she was right and she was here and she had done this.

Dad, she thought, you would have loved this.
The grinding sound started on her left.
She looked up.
The nearest guardian was no longer where it had been. It was closer. Considerably closer. It was also moving, which statues were not supposed to do, with the slow grinding inevitability of something that had been waiting three thousand years for someone to touch that specific object and had all the patience in the world now that the moment had finally arrived.

The others were moving too.
Caroline Chase stood in the burial chamber of Xal'Athar, reliquary in one hand, shorts held up by her wrist, bra strap off her shoulder, belt hanging open and useless, and performed a rapid tactical assessment.
Run, she concluded.
She ran.



The guardians were slow but the chamber wasn't large and there were four of them and they knew the geography considerably better than she did. She went for the low passage, dropped to her knees, shoved the reliquary into her waistband against her hip and crawled with everything she had.
Behind her the grinding intensified. They weren't following her into the passage. Too large. But they didn't sound concerned about that, which meant they knew another way and she needed to be faster than that way.
She came out the other side at speed, stood up, caught her shorts, and ran.

Through the offering chamber — ducking under the pendulum blade she'd carefully noted on the way in, feeling it part the air above her head with a sound like disapproval.
Through the inscription gallery — her torch bouncing across three thousand year old text she would have given anything to stop and read, absolutely not stopping, not even slowing.
Into the approach corridor and there they were.

Two of them. Somehow ahead of her. Standing in the corridor with the patience of things that did not need to breathe or hurry or worry about their shorts.
She stopped. Looked left. A side passage, unplanned, not on the schematic. Dark. Unknown.
Looked right. Stone wall. Looked at the guardians. The guardians looked at her. She went left.

The side passage opened into a natural cavern, a crack in the temple's foundations where the jungle had begun its patient reclamation, roots coming through the ceiling, the smell of outside air, and there — a gap in the far wall, maybe fifteen feet across, the jungle visible beyond it, actual daylight, actual escape.

The vine was right there. As if placed. As if the temple, having taken everything else from her, was feeling generous. She grabbed it, looked at the gap, took three steps back to build the swing.
And stopped.

The shorts were halfway down her hips. The open belt, the compromised button, the broken zip — three separate failures that had been managing their own individual collapses had now combined into one unified structural catastrophe. The waistband sat at an angle that her mother would have described as disgraceful and Caroline would have described as a problem she needed to solve right now before swinging across a fifteen foot drop over a jungle ravine.

She could just jump. Risk it. The shorts might stay up. Probably would. Probably.
Her mother's voice arrived with its usual impeccable timing.
You are not swinging across anything in that state, Caroline Elizabeth Chase. You sort yourself out first. What if someone sees you.
There's a guardian behind me, Mum.
I don't care what's behind you. Pull yourself together.

She pulled herself together. One hand on the vine, one hand pulling up the waistband, threading the belt back through, fastening the buckle with fingers that were not entirely steady, giving it a firm tug. There. Sorted. Proper. Her mother would have approved.

Four seconds. Maybe five.
She heard the passage behind her.
She grabbed the vine with both hands and ran for the edge.
She was halfway across when the guardian came through.
The largest one. The one that had been closest to the reliquary, the one that had moved first, the one that had apparently decided this was personal. It crossed the cavern in four strides, hit the edge, and jumped.

She hadn't thought they could jump.
Its hand found her belt. The belt she had just fastened. The belt that was now, thanks to five seconds of misplaced modesty, exactly where it needed to be for a seven foot reanimated temple guardian to grab it.
For a moment they regarded each other — Caroline gripping the vine with both hands, the guardian hanging from her belt with both of its, the gap yawning beneath them both. She could feel herself slowing. Feel the arc of the swing flattening. Feel three thousand years of righteous temple guardian pulling her down by the belt she'd stopped to fasten because her mother's voice lived in her head rent free and had done since 1995.



If you had just jumped, she thought, with the specific clarity of someone watching their own mistake in slow motion, you'd be on the other side by now. Shorts and all. You stopped. You actually stopped to do your belt up. With a guardian behind you. Because of Mum.
She filed that thought under things to examine later and drew her knife.
Assess. Act.

She transferred the vine to her left hand — her shoulder screaming, her remaining bra strap lodging a formal complaint — and cut the belt. One clean stroke. The leather parted instantly.
She braced for the weight to drop. The guardian fell six inches. Its fingers found her waistband.



No, she thought. Very clearly and with great feeling. Absolutely not.

She felt the button go — not the tentative protest of the crawl, but a final clean departure, all remaining structural integrity abandoned in one decisive moment. The zip, that old enemy, that known quantity, offered no resistance whatsoever. It had been waiting for this since the first passage, since that first small metallic complaint she hadn't stopped to investigate because she was a professional.



The shorts went with a speed that seemed frankly unnecessary.
One moment they were there.
The next they were not.
The guardian, deprived of anything to hold, followed them into the dark below. The sound it made on impact was distant and final.



Caroline completed the swing and landed on the far ledge.
She stood for a moment. Breathing.
If you had just jumped, she thought again, unable to help herself.
She filed it away.

5

The passage was the last one. She could see daylight at the end of it. Actual daylight, grey-green and alive, the smell of jungle and rain and outside world, forty feet away down a corridor lined on both sides from floor to ceiling with carved stone hands.
Caroline stood at the entrance and looked at them for a long moment.
They were beautiful, in an objective architectural sense. Hundreds of them, emerging from the walls at every angle, fingers slightly curved, palms forward, frozen in the universal gesture of stop or possibly give that back. Ceremonial, the academic papers had said. Symbolic of the dead reclaiming what belonged to them.

She was currently wearing what could generously be described as symbolic underwear.
She looked at the hands.
The hands did not look back. They were stone. Inanimate. Three thousand years old and completely incapable of movement or intention or the specific focused malevolence she was absolutely not projecting onto them.
From somewhere behind her in the temple, something ground against stone.
Right, she thought. Fine.
She tucked the reliquary firmly under her left arm, raised her torch with her right hand, and walked in.

The hands were still. Of course they were. Stone, she reminded herself. Carved. Fixed in place by three thousand years of absolute geological certainty. She moved carefully through the first section, turned sideways where the passage narrowed, felt the cold of the walls close in and —
Something caught the bra strap.
She spun round.

Hands. Stone. Still. Exactly where they'd always been, curved fingers and flat palms and not a single one of them anywhere near her.
She stood very still. The distant grinding continued. Getting closer. She turned back and kept walking.

It was gradual. That was the thing. Nothing dramatic, nothing she could point to, nothing she could catch. Just a growing creeping inventory of loss that she became aware of by degrees as she moved through the passage. A resistance here. A slight snag there. The specific sensation of fabric that had been present a moment ago being present somewhat less now.
She tried looking sideways, catching them in her peripheral vision.
Stone. She tried stopping suddenly and spinning.

Stone. All of them. Innocent. Ancient. Completely motionless in the way of things that had been motionless since before her country existed.
She kept moving. The remaining bra strap went in the half second she had to close her eyes to squeeze through a section where the ceiling dropped and the walls pressed in and she couldn't watch all of them at once.

She opened her eyes. Stone. I felt that, she told them. The hands offered no comment.
She was twenty feet from the exit now. Daylight. Real daylight. She focused on it and moved and tried not to think about what was happening in her peripheral vision, the flickering almost-movement she couldn't quite catch, the sense of deliberate patient industry happening just outside her direct line of sight. Ten feet. Something gripped.

She didn't look. Looking didn't help. She just pulled forward and kept moving and there was a sound she didn't want to think about, a small precise tearing sound, the sound of ancient stone mechanisms that had been doing this for three thousand years doing it again with quiet professional competence.
Five feet. Two.
She came out into the daylight at something between a walk and a run and stood in the grey-green jungle light and didn't look down for a full five seconds.
Then she looked down.
Boots. The reliquary, cold and safe under her arm. Everything else a matter of archaeological record.

6

The stone panel swung shut behind her.
Caroline stood blinking in the sudden brightness, wild-eyed and breathing hard, and became aware of several things simultaneously.
The coach. Large, white, Guatemalan Heritage Tours written along the side in cheerful yellow lettering, parked forty feet away. The tourists, approximately thirty of them, arranged in a loose semicircle around the temple's official entrance, which was apparently around the corner and had a laminated information board and a guide in a polo shirt who was pointing at something architectural and had not yet noticed her.

The gift shop. There was a gift shop.
And the cameras.
The cameras noticed her before the people did — a ripple of instinctive lens-raising moving through the crowd as she emerged from a wall that was not supposed to have an exit in it, holding something ancient, in her boots.

Just her boots. The first flash went off. Then another.
Then several at once, phones and proper cameras and one man with a lens the size of a small telescope who was absolutely getting everything in high definition.
The guide in the polo shirt turned around. The coach driver leaned out of his window.

A small boy in a red t-shirt pointed at her with the uncomplicated directness of someone who had not yet learned that pointing was rude.

And there, at the back of the group, standing slightly apart, bottle of water in one hand, was a woman. Sixty, perhaps. Sunhat. Sensible shoes. She looked at Caroline with the complete and total look — the look that required no translation, that crossed every language barrier, that said I don't know what you've been doing young lady and what were you thinking and what would your mother say all at once without a single word.

She looked exactly like Caroline's mother. She was not Caroline's mother. Somehow that made it worse.
Caroline met her eyes for exactly one second. Looked away.
Looked at the gift shop.
In the window, between a rack of postcards and a display of miniature replica temple models, there was a small rail of clothing. Tourist clothing. Oversized t-shirts in the shade the label would probably call Adventure Khaki.

She thought about the cardigan.
The specific cardigan. Folded on the chair by the window in the hotel room in Guatemala City. Packed by her mother without being asked, left behind by Caroline without a second thought, sitting there right now in the cool of the air conditioning, soft and substantial and floor length if she needed it to be.
Her mother had said you'll thank me.
You were right, she told her, across three thousand miles, in the deepest and most private part of herself that her mother would never be allowed to access. About the cardigan. About the trousers. About the underwear. About all of it. I am thanking you right now and you will never know.

Another flash went off.
She looked down at the reliquary. Cold bronze, geometric patterns, three thousand years old, never been outside that chamber until forty minutes ago. Hers. They hadn't got that. The hands, the guardians, the temple — none of them had got that. She had the thing. She had actually done it.



Caroline Chase squared her shoulders, crossed one arm across herself in the universal pose of someone doing their absolute best under very difficult circumstances, tucked the reliquary against her chest with the other, and walked toward the gift shop with as much dignity as a person could carry when they had nothing to put it in.

First expedition.

Partial success.
She was never telling her mother any of this.
Not a word.
Not ever.
She was absolutely coming back.
But next time she was bringing proper trousers.
And the cardigan.


https://www.deviantart.com/eoworfindir/ ... 1344341075

Link to an image I created for this story

[Somebody]

A classic Pitfall swing! Amazing set pieces here. Though I kind of lost track of where she put the reliquary when it was in her belt and then her shorts got tugged off but she still had it. At the end, I was almost worried that it would turn out this was all kind of fake, since there's a gift shop and everything. Kind of a City Slickers II ending. But no, it was just perfect.