Gunslingers Don't Sing or Dance by Mike Marino (any book recommendations txt) 📕

Diego smiled and pointed to a stone carving bas relief above my head. “Parrots, compadre. Two parrots mating.” Great! Two parrots fucking having a go at each other, what the hell kind of perverse clue was this?

 

“That my dear friend is the key. Pull on the male parrots, uh, head.” Which I did. Nothing. Nada happened. No amazing hosanna on high to accompany a great stone wall to recede and allow us to gain entry.  At least at 365 steps above sea level. Not until a few minutes later.

 

Just then a cacophony erupted from our group on the ground. “It’s opening!” Isadora screamed. “It’s opening!” Amazing what two fornicating parrots can reveal. We practically flew down the steps with real parrots soaring overhead as if in celebration at our solving the puzzle. Maybe now they were free of their duty and could go off to some  rainforest and do their mating in some form of avian whorehouse where parrots strut and parrots fuck.

 

The opening at the the top to the labyrinths that lay within was inviting us into its womb. Jules was so excited I thought his head would detach itself from his shoulders and end up in Parrot Paradise looking  to mate with a feminine Andean Condor! “I’ll get the lanterns,” he chuckled. “Gadzooks, this is fantastic!”

 

Diego looked puzzled. “Gadzooks? What does it mean, Senor Dooley?” I had only one response. “It means ‘I’m crazy’ and me thinks Mr. Verne is a few planets short of a solar system, if you know what I mean.”

 

Balam and his men handed up backpacks loaded with food. Rice, beans, sugar and flat breads for the journey, “I won’t be going with you, but be careful and read the signs. English pirates once came here over a hundred years ago in search of the treasure, but couldn’t solve the riddle of Step 365. The treasure was not to be theirs, so they left, heading back to the many islands in the Caribbean where we heard they were eaten by a tribe of Caribes...cannibals on one of them.”

 

Isadora hefted her pack as did the rest of us and with lanterns and food and dreams of riches we were ready for anything, real sons of bitches. Balam had one more  message f warning before Isadora, Jules, Diego, Jean-Paul, myself and 5 of Diego’s armed men were about to be swallowed whole in the belly of the Serpents womb tomb. “Read the signs and beware of the Chamber of Skulls and the Grateful Dead!” he cautioned. More hobgoblins to deal with. Superstition….magic….curses...skulls….grateful deads...and to top it off, oversexed parrots and sauteed pirates!!!

 

Isadora said softly to me as entered the void before us,  “Here’s my road to papa’s dream and your road to treasure Baxter. Paved with pyramids, pirates and parrots.”

Chapter 24 - Labyrinth of Skulls

 

 

Lanterns, food and water were made secure as we began our journey into the unknown. We had plenty of ammo and were well armed as well, but I doubt if a bullet would bring down the occasional pissed off cursed spirit hell bent on revenge for our trepidation causing intrusion that awakened their blood lust.

 

Jean Paul was mumbling some sort of all purpose Haitian anti-curse to ward off any tempermental Toltec terror that might fall upon us, while Jules Verne was astonishingly effervescent at the prospect that maybe he found another chapter or perhaps a whole book based on going deep into the bowels of the Earth. He was a literary sponge soaking up life and adventure to be placed on paper and placed between two leather bound covers acting as a womb until read by the reader giving birth to imagination and mechanical wonders before undreamed of.

 

Isadora was just as deliciously jaunty as a mountain goat in heat, taking the lead through the entrance chamber whose walls were adorned with “stories” told by way of pictures of snakes, weird flying discs and women with bare native  breasts and well aimed  fire shooting from their eyes. As a sideshow act as part of Brother Elias’ Traveling Medicine Show these ancient women today I imagine would sell a lot of snake oil poison to the sheep ready to be shorn of their dollars in every small territorial town between Denver and Laramie.

 

I was transfixed as the light from the lanterns danced in a liquid waltz off the stone walls of the dark chamber. Shimmering and bouncing off  intricate life sized carved figures of serpents and Mayan warriors. The stone figures were jet black, an ebony hue I had never come across before. These stones were perhaps mined elsewhere and transported here. But they were large and heavy...how were they brought to this location? One more mystery to be solved. Perhaps one more book for Jules.

 

Diego was the first to spot the entryway to what turned out to be a lower chamber that took us deeper into the structure and hopefully closer to the treasure that had us all in high spirits. “Ready Amigos, here we go.” Indeed, away we went further in and further down.

 

I kept waiting for the obligatory booby trap to spring itself on us causing death to one or more of our number and of course to keep the gods amused. Keep the gods laughing as dance hall comedians do to a drunken audience and you might have a chance at surviving any ordeal that involved retribution by angry giant serpents or little green men from space.

 

Just as soon as that thought escaped me, it happened. One of Diego’s men had wandered off down another passageway on an exploratory mission...it was the passageway of the Wall of Skulls!

 

Just as flames were depicted shooting from the eyes of the carved figures in the entrance, projectiles shot out of the skulls on the wall as this unfortunate retch passed by. By the time we responded to his screams he was already dead looking for all the world like an old spinsters pin cushion,  his curdling blood flowing from every penetration creating a poisoned puddle.

 

“We were warned about the Wall of Skulls” Jean Paul said firmly, adding, “Mwen pa renmen!” I didn’t like it either. Isadora shed some light on the quandry. “Papa told me about the Skulls when I was a child. I grew up hearing about this treasure every day. We must step carefully...one at a time. The skulls are known as the Grateful Dead. They were captured warriors from other warring tribes who were as you can see had their heads removed and placed in here as trophies after the treasure was secured in the chamber ahead of it. Poisoned arrows placed inside the eye sockets and released when anyone passing by placed pressure on the Key Stones which trigger the release..and of course the death of one whose folly brought him here...look they are marked with the sign of Kulkakan. Avoid those or...we’ll never make it. There are thousands of skulls imbedded and if we panic and run we’ll trigger them all and believe me we won’t survive.”

 

Gawd I love this woman more and more. She can not only raise the dead from a New Orleans cemetery with a chant or two in mysterious Creole, but can get us through the Gate of the Grateful Dead but can also make love with a hurricane swirling around her...she was a tempest in a tempest as well as a sexual temptress. If nothing else I had found  my treasure in her.

 

“Gents, I’ll go first,” she practically commanded. “Follow one at a time stepping only where I step and where the fellow before you steps. Baxter you follow me first, then Jean-Paul, Diego and Jules...the rest of the men can follow or wait here for us. The dream of my father should be in the chamber ahead. Now they are dreams.”

 

Jules was delighted beyond measure. “This is like taking a journey to the center of the Earth!!!”

Chapter 25- Underground World of Psychedelic Mushrooms

 

 

The passageway shrunk in size so barely a body could fit through, let alone some of the more rotund of Diego’s men who sported the girth of one of the Col.’s hot air balloons. Soon we had all managed to squeeze through and came out in yet another chamber festooned with pictorials of airships and ancient language of which even Diego was unfamiliar with. Inside ran a clear river, not wide, but deep, hidden all these eons underground creating a world of it’s own with it’s power of water.

 

More amazing was the flora of the chamber itself. It was a miniature forest of ferns, colorful plants bigger than the tallest man among us and red mushrooms so large you could use the stalks for building timber. The red mushrooms riding atop the stems were surely 5 feet in circumference.

 

The ferns were a rich green, yet there was no sunlight to feed them that which they needed from the sky. Even more amazing to us was the fact that the chamber forest was awash in a brilliant light!

 

“My father was fascinated with this chamber,” Isadora explained in the Creole rasp of hers that made my six guns cock themselves. “The light is from the walls and the river.”

 

It was so. The walls of the cavernous chamber were filled with shiny stones. Clear and prismatic if looked at from different angles. “Diamonds,” Diego whispered to me. Correct this academic bandit was. Diamonds! Thousands of them imbedded in the walls as a bullet in a gut of the loser in a showdown at high noon on Mainstreet in Dodge City.

 

The river was swarming with hordes of fish that gave off a small bit of light which in turn was magnified by the waters of the river in a shimmering pattern and reflecting off the diamond encrusted walls!

 

“It’s stunning!” Screamed Jules Verne. “It reminds of paintings by Renoir and Degas! Especially Claude Monets ‘Impression: Sunrise’. Many people in France couldn’t understand this new look on canvas, but I told Claude not to give up his style, or the others too. Call it Impressionism as art.  Label it and they will fawn and fall all over your flora and fauna!”

 

Even more surprising to us was the intrusion of a familiar voice, Balam! “You are almost there. I had no doubt with Isadora leading the way. Please, before we enter the last chamber that holds your dreams, might I suggest we each partake of a piece of mushroom. I think it