IT LIVES IN THE BASEMENT (7 page)

At the mention of the word ‘Tescara’, the two Mexicans on the floor moaned, eyes as round as pesos, scooting even farther away from the bathroom, trying to become part of the wall.

Carter kept silent, wondering about that oar in the water.

A confused Waltham asked, “A what?  I never heard of a tescara before.”

But it was obvious to Carter the two men on the floor had.  They were terrified of the word.

Taking another drink of his coffee, which emptied his cup, Alvarez refilled it.  He started pulling papers, drawings, pictures and other items in plastic bags from his oversized briefcase.  He said, “First, let me fill-in some background.  The village these men come from is not far from where I grew up.  Did you know I was born in Mexico?  Oh, it does not matter.

“About halfway between where they were born and where I was born, lies an ancient city called Palenque, Mexico.  In this ruined city, is a temple called the Temple of the Inscriptions.  The temple is actually a pyramid, and deep inside is a figure in stone, of ancient man or a God; no one really knows.  Some archeologists have hypothesized the builders of the temple were the same people who built the magnificent city of Tiahuanaco, Bolivia, oh, maybe five thousand or six thousand years ago.  And there are other structures, all over the world, that appear to be built by the same architects, but no one dares admit it.  That is crazy, they say.  How could one civilization, within their lifetime, have built all these structures in different parts of the world?

“But gentlemen, where I grew up, and where these men are from, are legends, stories of these old Gods still told and believed today.  One God in particular, named Viracocha Pachayachachi, which means “Creator of all
Things”, is claimed to have risen from the sea, and he taught the People his ways and secrets.  This sounds crazy, I know, but I believe the legends.  If you have ever seen the ancient temples, and the huge stones they were built from, you would have to wonder how those stones had been moved for sometimes miles, with the simple tools that were available to our ancestors at that time.  Even today, with our technology, we would not be able to build those temples.  Yet our ancient ancestors did.

“Now, back to Palenque, Mexico and the temple.  I have seen these types of temples a dozen times.  Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, and other places, are covered with these old temples, erected to the various Gods as they were known by the People who lived there.  The old legends say the Gods had left the people for one reason or another and some legends even state when the Gods will return.  None of this is important to this case, merely as background information.

“But some legends are the same, told repeatedly.  These legends are so old the names of the Gods have lost their context over the years due to being handed down orally generation to generation.  The name Tescara, for example, is only part of a name; the rest of the name lost over the centuries.  The clear definition of Tescara is no longer known.  But the name is always used in the same context, to describe the same thing.  What I am saying, and will say, is going to sound crazy to you, but what I found in that toilet proves I am not crazy, and neither is what I am telling you.”

Neither Detective had ventured over to look at the gooey, brown glob that Alvarez had fished out of the toilet.  Neither of them wanted to.
  As Alvarez took a sip of his coffee, Carter asked him, “Uh, Pete, what are you saying?”  Carter didn’t care for the glazed look in the little man’s eyes, but he was going to listen anyway.  He knew he didn’t have a clue about what had happened to the doomed man in the bathroom.  Maybe Alvarez did.

After his long
, half-cup sip, Alvarez began again.  “John, I am sure I will not explain this correctly, as I have been chasing these legends for so many years, I get myself confused.  So please bear with me.

“Some legendary Gods that came to our world did experiments on our primitive ancestors and other life-forms indigenous at that time.  Today we call it genetic manipulation, or engineering.  But back then, our ancestors had no word for it.  So they would group words to help them explain an action or event.  The word, Tescara, alone means nothing.  But when you understand
how our ancestors grouped words, descriptive names, you have something else entirely.

“One of the ancient Gods was called Conquite.  Roughly the name means One of Starlight, or The Starlight. 
The legends claim he arrived here in a giant, fiery vessel, with several other godlike people.  This man, or God, according to legends, experimented with vast amounts of the life-forms he found here.  To what purpose, no one knows.  The legends also state Conquite took men, women, children and every kind of life-form he found into his fiery vessel, where they were taken apart piece by piece, and remade into new types of life-forms.

“Now, obviously, many of Conquite’s, uh, experiments did not work.  And there are many references to a pit Conquite threw his failed experiments into.  Before the fiery vessel showed up, that pit was a natural well the People used for drinking and cooking.  After the Gods came, a trench was dug from the vessel to the drinking well, where the waste from the fiery vessel ran down the trench into the well, eventually turning it into a slimy pit.
 

“
After a span of time, the People found they could no longer drink of the water without terrible things occurring, but only to the men, never to the women.  The men affected would die horribly, within a few months.  The same way this man in these pictures died right in this house, six thousand years later.

“For more than forty years, after I saw one in my village as a small boy, I have been hunting the Tescara.  As boys, our job was to watch over the sheep at night.  On this night, it was my brother Antonio’s and my turn, plus half a dozen other boys.  Our village had a large flock of sheep: our main source of income and meat.  The Moon was full, and the sheep were stirring around, not sleeping.  Something was bothering them
. 

“
My brother saw it first.  He pointed to it.  What I saw looked like a small brown dog or fox, moving across the field very quickly, much too fast for any dog or fox.  The sheep bolted and ran from it.  It stood on two legs and chased down a big ewe, on just two legs.  It threw the ewe to the ground, killed her, then picked her up and ran away with the body.

“Please realize I was the youngest, being only ten.  Some of the boys were almost men, of seventeen and eighteen years, and we ran after it with our clubs.  This hairy, brown thing we chased was maybe three fee
t tall when standing on its hind legs, and could not have weighed as much as I did, but it outran us easily while carrying a two-hundred-pound ewe in its arms. 

“
When we returned to the village, we feared the wrath of the elders for the loss of one of our prize breeding ewes.  But when we told them what we had seen, they fell to their knees and began crossing themselves.  The elders kept chanting Tescara every time they crossed themselves.  One of the oldest women in the village, who could barely speak any longer, kept saying a different name.  That was the only time I heard the full name spoken out loud.  She kept chanting, Conquite-Scarapam-Quotzil.  She was found dead in the morning.  She had killed herself.  No one else in the village seemed to know what she knew.

“Many years later, in
a Bolivia temple, I found some stone tablets, broken and thought useless as some ritual stone no one understood.  But I saw it then, carved in six-thousand year-old chisel strokes, two-legged, two-armed, covered in long hair, head very similar to a cat or a monkey, maybe both, and about three feet high.  It stood next to the God Conquite, and he had a hand on its head.  The name carved there gives me terror even today: Conquite-Scarapam-Quotzil. 

“
Remembering what I had told you before about descriptive words being linked, what this name roughly translates into is – One of the God Conquite’s Failures.  Conquite had dumped all his failures into that slimy pit.  This one failure somehow adapted enough to survive.  The name today is Tescara, and is pronounced as Te-scara.  The name is a broken short form of ConquiTE-SCARApam-Quotzil.  And it is the very definition of what, now that I have the proof it lives, I wish to God it did not.”  Another long drink, then Alvarez refilled his cup, more brandy than coffee.

Waltham and Carter were quiet, holding their judgment, but Rickerman asked in disbelief, “Are you trying to say some God from an old legend has come back and is killing people?”

Shaking his head, Alvarez answered, “No, Officer.   I am not.  But I do know what is, and we have a serious problem.”

Carter, after hearing the story, did look over at the red, brown, gray glob Alvarez retrieved from the toilet.  He was pretty sure Alvarez’s one oar was out of the water.  Hell, neither of his oars were anywhere near the water.  He probably didn’t even
have his damn boat in the water.  Carter knew he didn’t want to be stranded in this house with this lunatic cop.

Clearing his throat
, he asked, “Okay, Alvarez, Uh, Pete.  Then exactly what are you saying?  I’m afraid you lost me somewhere.  None of this seems to clear up any of my problems.”

The brandy flask empty, Alvarez, with shaking hands, rummaged through his bursting-at-the-seams briefcase.  With a small triumphant smile, he pulled out a full liter bottle of blackberry brandy
, sitting the gleaming bottle on the table.  “Please, help yourselves.  I must think before I speak now, so you do not misunderstand.”

Carter opened the bottle, thankful for time to hash out in his mind what he had just heard.  He poured stiff drinks for his fellow Officers and himself.

Rickerman’s radio blared again, but this time there was no request to go to the car radio or a phone as before.  After Rickerman acknowledged the call, Captain Reames’ voice boomed loudly and with authority, “Give me Carter.”    Rickerman handed Carter his radio, who acknowledged he was listening.

Pepper’s radio
, in the living room, echoed through the silent house as Reams spoke in a very tense voice, “Did you hear me, John?  The ME flew in here like a crazy man.  He says the autopsy confirmed your corpse was eaten, John, from the inside out.  Do you understand?  Something was alive in Carlos Doe and ate out his, uh, well, you know, when it left his body.  The ME says they found brown hairs that weren’t identifiable; seems they were a cross between, human, monkey and feline hair.  He advises looking for a small animal, covered in brown hair.  He wants it shot dead and brought here ASAP.  He even has the traffic chopper on standby to pick it up when you find it.  Start looking, John.  Now.”

Carter stared at the radio like it would explode any second, then acknowledged, “Yes, sir.”

Standing in the kitchen doorway, Pepper asked, “Should we search again, Lieutenant?  I know we had before, but then we were looking for the guy’s uh, privates.  Not a small animal.”

With a shaky voice, Alvarez advised, “I would not people.  Tescara are only small when born.  They grow rapidly, up to three feet or so, and are highly intelligent, extremely strong, fast and dangerous.  They do not like the cold; they go into the ground,
rapidly digging a tunnel.  Because it is frozen outdoors, if you must be foolish enough to look, take shotguns and look for an opening in the concrete or bricks of the basement, where it can get to the dirt.  But I would not go after it.  It will kill you.  You will die, and it will feed on you to grow and become even stronger.”

Pepper’s face went pale, as Carter demanded, “Wait a minute, Alvarez.  This is kinda crazy, isn’t it?  An animal that grows inside people then eats it way out?  And kills and eats more people to grow?  You’ve been watching too many horror movies, man.”  Carter kept seeing a scene from a sci-fi flick about some alie
n animal bursting out of a guy’s chest.

Alvarez said calmly, “If you feel that way, by all means go after it.  You will learn.  As for me, I have all the proof I need
, there on the counter.”

Carter handed Rickerman
back his radio and stood, striding to the dish-laden, filthy counter.  He picked up a food-crusted fork from the slimy kitchen sink and started poking through the gray, smelly glob from the toilet.   “All you have here is some human excrement, maybe some muscle or tissue, and a sausage like casing.  What is this proof of, Alvarez?”

The small, thin
men gestured, “Please, sit.  I will try to explain.”

As Carter sat back down, he couldn’t help thinking about the small room in the basement
, where the floor was dirt and where his old partner Flynn’s one shoe had been found.  Carter was trying his hardest to deny the facts.

Alvarez resumed his explanation.  “The Tescara, a survivor of the ancient God Conquite’s experiments, has long been believed to be a legend.  Made up. But it is not.  Many years ago, before this country had your Indians, a Tescara was killed.  The creature was trapped in deep mud, and the People who lived at that time
, killed it with stones.  Many People saw it, trapped in a circular pool of mud and what we now know as tar.  Today we know this place as the Le Brea Tar Pits in Southern California.  They knew what the creature was and threw many stones, until it sank in the mud.  They did not go out and recover the body, they were satisfied they had seen it sink and die.  Because they had destroyed an ancient terror of their ancestors, they celebrated for many days.  They were so simpleminded to think it was the only one.