Dark Gold Read online

  DARK GOLD

  Night-Sea Trilogy – Book I

  David Angsten

  NowHereBeBooks

  Los Angeles

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  DARK GOLD. Copyright © 2006 by David Angsten. All rights reserved.

  Original Hardcover Edition published July 2006, Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press

  Paperback Edition published August 2007, Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press

  Kindle Digital Edition (Revised & Updated) published February 2018, NowHereBeBooks/KDP

  Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2006041714

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the author.

  website: davidangsten.com

  blog: davidangsten.blogspot.com

  Twitter: @DavidAngsten

  Facebook: facebook.com/david.angsten.9

  email: [email protected]

  ALSO BY DAVID ANGSTEN

  NIGHT OF THE FURIES

  THE ASSASSIN LOTUS

  Praise for David Angsten’s

  DARK GOLD

  “A page-turner that will take readers back to the days when a good book meant you stayed up all night under the covers with a flashlight.”

  ~ Publisher’s Weekly

  “[A] pastiche of Crichton, Lovecraft, Jules Verne, and Robinson Crusoe.”

  ~Entertainment Weekly

  “Like Benchley’s Jaws, David Angsten’s debut will once again chase swimmers out of the water. Fraught with shivering suspense and a hauntingly eerie atmosphere, Dark Gold grips with feverish intensity. As literate as it is frightening.”

  ~James Rollins, New York Times bestselling author of The Seventh Plague

  “Thrills and chills . . . sunken gold, black magic, sea monsters, a beautiful Brazilian in a bikini—what more could you want from a summer thriller?”

  ~Kirkus Reviews (starred)

  “A first-class roller-coaster ride of a novel.”

  ~Nick Redfern, author of Close Encounters of the Fatal Kind

  “I sat down with Angsten’s thriller this afternoon, and I was still reading at two A.M. Dark Gold builds to a frantic and explosive climax.”

  ~Royce Buckingham, author of Demonkeeper

  To my father—

  simply the best man I ever knew.

  Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.

  ~Herman Melville

  Contents

  Part One

  VAGABOND

  THE PROMISE

  SAND FLIES

  SKULLHEAD

  CYCLOPS

  GODS

  PUNTA PERDIDA

  THE COIN

  OBI-MAN

  GHOST TOWN

  SPEAK NO EVIL

  THE GREAT MYSTERIES

  Part Two

  DESCENT

  SAUSAGES

  TWIST OF FATE

  LIFE AFTER DEATH

  LIKE A VIRGIN

  LIKE A RABBIT

  ARGONAUTS

  RORSCHACH

  THE WORST THAT COULD POSSIBLY HAPPEN

  LOST TO THE SEA

  THE TRAGEDY OF THE ARGONAUT

  Part Three

  UNDERWORLD

  GRACCHUS

  CORPUS DELICTI

  THE LUST OF THE EYE

  THE FALLEN ANGEL

  CONSUMMATION

  Part Four

  DEVILS

  THE DEVIL YOU KNOW

  THE DEVIL YOU DON'T

  ZOMBIE

  BLACK WIND

  THE SHANGO GOD

  ABADDON

  DANCE WITH THE DEVIL

  THE GUARDIAN

  PARADISE

  PARADISE LOST

  HELL

  THE OTHER SIDE

  THE NIGHT-SEA TRILOGY

  Part One

  VAGABOND

  THE PROMISE

  THE LAST we heard from my brother Dan was a postcard he sent from Puerto Vallarta. He'd been traveling for three years without coming home, and a card in the mail was the most we'd ever get from him. Every now and then he'd drop a line or two, enough to let us know where he was—and that he wasn't dead. My mother always had that worry in the back of her mind. She thought he'd get killed out there, looking for whatever it was he was looking for.

  He had trekked through South America, nearly every country on the continent, mailing local postcards from cities we'd never heard of: Guayaquil, Nazca, Porto Alegre, Belém. We'd check the stamp and postmark, then find it on a map. A year after he left he crossed the Strait of Magellan to Tierra del Fuego and sent a postcard depicting the town of Ushuaia, the southernmost city in the world. He spent one Christmas in the Amazon jungle with a tribe of Kayapo Indians. We only found out about it with a card from Barranquilla that arrived in early spring. For a time he worked with an “exporter” in Caracas, bombing around town on a Moto Guzzi and dining like a king at the Restaurant Lasserre. When the military clamped down on the Venezuelan drug trade, he moved into the mountains of Colombia to grow cocaine with a peasant rebel named Carlos Marx. My mother was uneasy, kept waiting for “the call.” It never came, though she found out later he'd been jailed in Bogotá; they sent her a belated notice through the U.S. consulate.

  After that he kicked around Central America, then worked his way up slowly through Mexico, starting with the Mayan pyramids in the Yucatan, up along the western spine of the Sierra Madres, and over to the resort towns strung along the coast. It was easy to pick up a temporary job: translator, tour guide, tennis pro, scuba instructor. He was just what the hotel managers wanted, a bright, friendly, athletic American, fluent in Spanish, and willing to work for Mexican wages—but Dan would get bored, wouldn't last long. He'd screw the help, sell some dope, collect his “tips,” and skip out of town.

  Postcards were sent home to my mother in Hinsdale, or occasionally to me at Grinnell. My brother had a talent for finding odd little photo-cards illustrating his eclectic array of stone-brained enthusiasms: bizarre insects and animals, ancient nature gods, local aphrodisiacs, and the favorite obsession—legendary lost treasures. Dan was a sucker for the dream of buried fortune. He imagined himself a latter day Lumholtz, leading mule caravans through the Sonoran Desert, sipping corn beer with the Tarahumara, hacking up the jungle in search of lost tribes and ancient artifacts. For a while he fancied Mayan relics and actually did join an archaeological dig, but shoveling shit out of pack-horse stalls and grinding coffee for grad students failed to fulfill his Victorian vision of the Grand Expedition. He eventually got himself arrested for trying to unload thousand-year-old Casas Grandes pots to a German collector in Mexico City. He had forged the certificates of provenance; the pots turned out to be terra-cotta knockoffs from Tijuana, aged in an acid bath. He mentioned this in a postcard he sent from Guadalajara. It pictured a dazzling glass-bead jaguar, a god of the Huichol Indians—the ones that do the peyote. No doubt Dan had spent a lot of time with them.

  The card from Puerto Vallarta was addressed to my mother. She kept it in a drawer in my father's roll-top desk, the storage place for everything of importance to her life: mortgage papers, old photographs, stock and bond certificates, long-forgotten love letters, a brass monkey paperweight that had belonged to my grandfather, and all the postcards ever sent by her errant eldest son. Her bony fingers tiptoed through the dog-eared stack of cards, picked out the one from Puerto Vallarta, and offered it up like an article of evidence. I glanced at the picture, a re
produced daguerreotype of a two-masted clipper ship, then flipped it over and checked out the printed logo: CAPTAIN SALTY’S PRETZEL STICKS. How this little promo card from a snack company in Terre Haute, Indiana, ended up in Mexico, I had no idea. Dan had scribbled a typical line, one that prompted more questions than answers: “I've found the mother lode—we're going to be rich!” He signed it as he always did, D.J., for Daniel James. Dan Duran, the vagabond man.

  “It doesn't mean anything,” I told her. I could see she wasn't sleeping well and feared it was her dreams, the “messages” she said were delivered in her sleep. These were invariably dark and disturbing, full of things you didn't want to hear at five in the morning as you were heading off to work. My mother was a sweetheart, sensitive and kind, but her psychic intuitions I often found unnerving. She could see shadowy things in me I didn't know were there. “You're always running off, John. What are you running from?”

  This morning I felt her very presence was invasive. She was wearing the same frilly-necked robe she had worn for as long as I could remember. It gave off the scent of a stale perfume that reminded me of something I couldn't quite recall—or didn't want to. Why was she always floating in a cloud of that perfume, an aging widow alone in her house?

  She pointed to the date on the postmark. “That's nearly four months now, and not a single word.”

  “It’s happened before,” I told her, though it wasn't really true. The longest we had ever gone without a postcard was the three months he was locked up in the Bogotá jail.

  “Something’s wrong, John. I can feel it.”

  My mother always had feelings about things. Unfortunately the feelings were usually right. “Don’t worry,” I said. “He’s probably up in the mountains with the Indians again. They don't sell postcards.”

  She took back the card, stared at the ship. “He’s not in the mountains.”

  I didn’t think so either, but I didn't want to admit that anything was wrong, not even to myself. I was always favoring the brighter side of things. “We'll find out soon enough,” I said. “What do you bet we get a card within a week?”

  My mother didn't answer. She wouldn’t bet on anything, especially on Dan. “When are you leaving?” she asked. One vagabond son seemed torture enough.

  “End of the month. When we finish Mr. Madigan’s.”

  My friends and I had at least ten days' work left, painting the humongous house of my ex-girlfriend's just-divorced uncle. We’d been painting houses in the western suburbs of Chicago every summer during the last three years of college. Now we had graduated and were at it again, rising every morning at the crack of dawn with dried paint under our fingernails and dull headaches from polyurethane fumes. Faced with an eighty-foot-long, three-story wall of cracked and curling paint, we'd guzzle the Starbucks, suck on a joint, crank up the Goo Goo Dolls, grab our razor scrapers, and go to work. If we had learned anything at school during the course of the year, it was undone by the stupor of those mind-numbing days. I could feel my feeble brain cells slowly burning off.

  The monotony of mindless work fed a growing wanderlust. We envied my brother's nomadic freedom and his talent for avoiding manual labor. We began to talk about traveling ourselves, saving up our hard-earned cash and taking off for a month or two. Hawaii, maybe. Or Tahiti. Or Thailand. Or Tibet. None of us was ready to get on with our lives. Duff was putting off law school. Roc had broken up with his girlfriend at Brown and was fully occupied licking his wounds. I was debating graduate school and didn't want to commit, not yet. What was the hurry? What was the point? The world was hardly clamoring for another grad in English lit.

  In the dog days of August, dripping with paint-flecked sweat on the second-floor scaffolding of that blazing south wall, an idea swept over us like a blast of arctic air. Why not go all the way? A big trip, the biggest—all the way around the world. Southeast Asia, India, Istanbul, Prague. Start with a month in Hawaii and end with a week in Spain. Four months total, maybe six. What the hell, maybe a year—who could say how long we'd last? We’d trek the globe until we ran out of money or ran out of luck. This could be our great adventure, a swan song to swift-passing youth, a final stab at freedom, a last hurrah before the curtain fell and the church bells rang and the baby and the bills and the mortgage came due.

  We began at once to plan and prepare. We bought hiking boots and backpacks, studied maps and guidebooks, scoured airfares on the Web. I sold my trashed-out VW van and bought a new ultra-light goose-down mummy bag. Roc bought some high-powered waterproof binoculars, a mountaineering rucksack fit for climbing Everest, and upgraded to the iPhone with the killer camera lenses. With his mind as usual on food and fornication, Duff limited his purchases to a Zebco collapsible fishing rod and a carton of lambskin rubbers. By the time we had finished off the Madigan job, we were ready to pick up the old man’s check, buy our tickets to Honolulu, and kiss the suburbs good-bye.

  But another two weeks had passed without a word from Dan. My mother awaited the mail in vain. Troubling nightmares ruined her sleep and left her pale and anxious. I found her at dawn on my last day of work, fallen asleep at the roll-top desk. The look in her eyes when I woke her up stuck in my head like a voodoo curse.

  I had seen that look three years before, on a snowy night in December. My mother had been frightened out of her sleep by a terrible premonition. A few hours later we learned that my father had been killed in an auto crash. An SUV with a drunk at the wheel had slid through an icy intersection and slammed into his passenger door. My dad was riding shotgun and never saw it coming. He was busy talking to the guy at the wheel. The guy at the wheel was my brother Dan.

  Dan was in his final year at the University of Chicago, an honors student in anthropology, minoring in Spanish. My father had picked him up from campus to bring him home for Christmas. Miraculously, Dan emerged from the mangled Ford without so much as a scratch. A week after the funeral he went back to school. I thought he was doing all right, but halfway through the semester he quit and moved back in with my mom. He let his hair grow, stopped shaving, and ended up wandering the house in his pajamas.

  The arrangement didn't last long. Seeing the look in my mother's eyes made me understand why. My mother had powerful feelings, and if you were her son, the feelings eventually migrated to you. Her love for my father had gone that way, into us and through us, wrapping itself around us like a flowering vine. When he died, the vine died, leaving around our broken hearts a brittle bark of grief. It hung in the air like the wilted scent of her perfume, reminding you that when someone was lost he was lost forever, that nothing you could say or do could ever bring him back, no matter how hard you tried or how far you went looking.

  Of course, that didn't stop you—the feelings were too strong. They grew and festered and overwhelmed. They haunted you and sent you to the corners of the earth.

  That’s what had happened to my brother Dan. Now I could see it was happening to me.

  I made my mother a promise that we’d find her other son.

  SAND FLIES

  IT MUST BE the heat that gets them going. They started the moment I felt sunlight on my cheek. By the time the shadows had crawled off the beach, I was ready for murder.

  “Motherfu—” I started to shout, and quickly stopped myself. I’d been trying to curb my swearing habit. I yanked the sleeping bag over my head and grumbled to myself.

  A shriek shattered the air beside me. Duff tore loose from his nylon cocoon to rant and rave and wreak revenge. I peered out the hole at the top of my bag as he staggered past, flailing his arms like a lunatic. He was wearing only his underwear, revealing an ugly scar on his belly that looked like an old war wound. Some hack surgeon had pulled out his appendix when Duff was a little kid. From the look of the scar, the guy must have opened the flesh with his bare hands. Watching Duff go spastic now, I began to wonder if the surgeon had stuck something else back in—a leaky battery maybe, or a time bomb with a ticking clock.

  A pair of troll-like feet appeared.
They belonged to the Roc, a gap-toothed giant, standing bare-chested against the sky. He raised his new iPhone in his fat little fingers to memorialize my suffering with a video. Duff joined him, taking hold of a driftwood microphone the size of a baseball bat. “The body of an American refugee, identified as the illiterate house painter John ‘Jack-off’ Duran, was found on a beach in Puerto Vallarta this morning. After a shameless night of drinking and debauchery, it appears he was eaten alive by a ravenous swarm of Mexican sand flies, known to have a taste for alcohol in the blood.”

  “Illiterate. That’s a low blow, Duff.”

  “The dead speak!”

  “Go away,” I said, retreating like a turtle. My head was splitting, and the light hurt my eyes. “And turn off those fucking waves.” The surf had been blasting the shore all night. It sounded like the bombing of Baghdad.

  Duff took the iPhone from Roc and aimed it at him as they headed for the water. “The bloated body of a second American was found washed up on shore late this afternoon. Authorities stated that Brown Bears’linebacker Roc “the Boulder” Redick had apparently gained too much weight after getting dumped by his lesbian girlfriend—”

  Roc grabbed the driftwood out of Duff’s hand. “And Alfred U. flunky Bobby McDuff got the living shit beat out of him—”

  I stuck my head out to watch the loping giant with the caveman club chase the diapered CNN reporter halfway down the beach. I was committing this precious moment to memory when the two of them came to a sand-spewing halt.

  Crossing our otherwise empty beach was a long-limbed, deeply tanned, exotic-looking young woman. She wore a Popsicle pink tank top and a curving white thong. Her black hair was wrapped up in a baby blue bandanna, and half a dozen silver bracelets rattled on her wrist.