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Chapter 1
When the Clifden Museum of Ancient History broke ground for a new addition on a rainy March morning in 1999, no one was prepared to watch Governor Matthew Garner fall through the earth.
I had the television on in the employee lounge, just a lowly unpaid intern stuck at the Clifden Natural History Museum while all my comrades were on site to witness the ceremony. I had only been at the Nat for about four months and was still two years from my degree, but I’d settled in nicely. There was a small diamond on my finger and a tiny person growing inside me, so life was looking up.
I watched the ceremony on a miniscule TV older than I was while I gave in to the first of a slew of pregnancy cravings: dipping cheesy puffs in honey mustard dressing. I had no idea it would be the last time I’d ever touch either again without remembering that day.
The Ancient hadn’t done any renovations or remodeling since it was built in 1908, so the addition was a big deal for the city. It was a huge shindig: the Mayor showed up in his Rolls Royce, as did several state senators with their slimy smiles and graying temples. Even the actor guy from my hometown who got famous for that stupid barbecue show made an appearance. They popped champagne and gave speeches, talking about the “spirit of innovation” and “grand history of the world” before Governor Garner picked up his shovel.
As he pushed it into the earth, a perfect circle of darkness opened like an ink spill beneath him, and then he was gone.
He didn’t even have time to scream.
The governor toppling shovel-first and ass-over-heels into the hole was captured by three news channels—one of them by helicopter. That was the angle I watched with a cheesy puff caught between two fingers, dripping sauce on the old table.
They found the governor later. Much later. It took weeks to shift through the dirt and rubble. Neighboring cities sent public safety personnel to assist in his recovery, but the whole town of Clifden knew that was all it was—a recovery effort. There was no chance Governor Garner survived a forty foot tumble into the bowels of the earth.
The question repeated over and over was why. Why had the sinkhole suddenly given way, rending a scar-like gash beside the museum? A team of geologists studied the catastrophe, offering theories that ranged from weak fault lines to combustible gases beneath the surface. No matter what answers they proposed, none of them was the right one. Just… possibilities.
In honor of the governor, rest his soul, they called it Garner’s Sinkhole.
*
A couple of months into the excavation, the goldmine that lay under the earth was revealed.
A city. A civilization that, little by little, would prove to rival anything we had yet discovered about Native American cultures. A culture of brutal barbarians, so devout in their increasingly complicated system of beliefs that sacrifice was a daily, and painful, ordeal.
The system of underground caves went on and on. The few pictures released to the public showed rock dwellings and large temples decorated in lavish depictions of everyday life. There was a plethora of wheeled carts and brightly colored pottery, as well as beautifully made furniture and tools that bore the wear and tear of use.
And bodies. Tombs containing bodies, laid out in state with a lifetime’s worth of treasure. The cool temperatures in the caverns had preserved everything about the dead, down to the hair on their heads.
