PACHACUTI'S CURSE - Part I

Ever since Timothy Jeffries was a little boy, he had taken pride in the fact that he was related to the Incas. His mother told him with great satisfaction that the second cousin of the Inca king Pachacuti had left Peru in the 16th century 15 generations ago with a conquistador in order to live in Europe due to a war between the torn Inca empire and its’ rival tribe, the Chimor.

The Inca boy grew up as a European and eventually had two children with an Italian noble woman. One of these children married the Duke of Kent and the rest was, as they say, history.

         The relation to the Incas was given a prominent place in the Jeffries’ archive. A picture of Pachacuti hung upon the wall right next to the photo of Queen Elisabeth II. A map of Peru hung over the Steinway next to the map of Oxford.

         Pachacuti was as familiar to Timothy as any odd neighbour would be to his friends. He visited Peru many times and had seen the statue of the great Inca king upon the great open place in Lima more often than Trafalgar Square. He had trekked with his parents down the pathways around Chachapoyas and researched the Karajia sarcophagi.

         He decided to make teaching history a profession.

         So, Timothy became an Oxford graduate at age 30, receiving a doctorate in history with a thesis on ancient South American cultures.

         Everyone in Timothy’s family, except daughter Emma who was an actress in London, spent their life in and around Oxford. Timothy Jeffries and his family were as British as it was possible to be and, although the relation was remote, it was finally something to be proud of in 21st century Oxford to be the great-grandson of a famous Inca king.

The Jeffries family lived in a large house that was one to one with everything that Oxford stood for. They breathed university. Timothy’s mother Deirdre Lewiston–Jeffries was a professor of English at Lady Margret Hall and his father had taught Geography at Exeter. Both of them were frequent guest at family soirees. Timothy’s wife Amanda Jeffries–Carruthers was a music teacher at the most prominent academy in town. Their son studied at a boy’s school that was regarded as a direct link to the university.

         The home was filled with Sunday nights of Lord Byron recitation. Trips to the Albert Hall proms were arranged every year. When Lady Di and Charles married the family were gathered around the telly and cried. When the princess died almost two decades later the family cried as well. There were discussions about the current effects of British politics on university life. Edward Elgar was regarded as vital a composer as Gustav Holst. George Friedrich Handel was mentioned only in connection with two works: The Messiah and The Water Music, because both had connection to English history. This family was highly intellectual, but it was vitality based on knowledge on a theoretical basis.

It was into this perfect world of aristocratic cultivation that a very old and quite criminally minded ghost emerged. History would now catch up with Timothy. The black wings of change would flap its’ menace once more and challenge a reality the professor thought evidently unconquerable.

         That Ides of March, Brutus returned. Alas. Hail Caesar!

Charon arrived with a message. Mercury appeared as a forgotten queen.

         It was the 15th of March 2008. Timothy had been teaching potential scholars about the war of the roses. Shakespeare had been mentioned as had the BBC. He had prepared next day’s lectures and then telephoned with his daughter Emma, who was rehearsing the play “Much Ado About Nothing” at the London Drama School. She had given herself the stage name Smythe as an actress and this bothered Timothy. She was a Jeffries, by Jove.

         Amanda and Timothy sat down with their teenage son Simon and watched a rerun of John Cleese in Fawlty Towers after dinner. It was business as usual. At ten thirty they all went to sleep, but Simon snuck into the PC room and googled some sites about glamour models.

         The nightmare had been thus vivid that Timothy’s inner vision seemed saturated in hell. A skull had rolled around on a small wheel toward him, its’ long and black hair crowned with a gilded ruby crown. What he remembered most were the eyes. They had been glowing with such a menace that Timothy found it hard to calm down in his awakened state. The skull had opened its’ jaws and screamed that its’ name was Pachacuti and that she was a queen of the Chachapoyas. She told him that he soon would be dead if he didn’t watch his step.

         In the dream, Timothy fell down somewhere on the lawn of a dinner party in his brother Roland’s estate. The skull chased him crawling over to a golf course and he had seen the head on the squeaking wheel approach him with steady and solemn menace.

It was two in the morning when Timothy woke up drenched in sweat. His heart was beating so fast that his wife, who sat up startled in bed next to him, thought she saw it beating through his pyjama shirt.

         Timothy’s wife put her hand on her husband’s back and gave it a gentle rub. She kissed his neck and played with his the hairs on the back of his hair.          “A skull on a wheel,” Timothy said, half laughing to himself and disbelieving what he was saying. “I was at a dinner party over at Roland’s and we were chatting about golf, for God’s sake, when this blackened female skull with long hair and a golden crown came rolling up to me clicking its’ teeth at me. It said that it was Pachacuti. It had long hair and a golden crown.”

         Amanda sniggered.

“Pachacuti was a man, dear. A woman? That proves it was just a dream.”

         Timothy nodded. “It told me that it would kill me.”

         Amanda sighed. “Oh, dear!”

         Timothy and Amanda sat there for a few minutes and watched the branches of the trees sway in the breeze, the light of the full moon throwing shadows on their floor and looking like arms reaching for their feet.

         “I’m sure that it isn’t anything to be worried about,” she said. “Have you been under stress lately?”

         Timothy shook his head. “Just the same old providing and obtaining, correcting papers and preparing lectures.” Tim shrugged. “I mean, you know the work. There is always some stress, but I am so loved at the university that I would be ridiculous to grumble. It surprises me to have dream like this.”

         Amanda sighed again and felt that she had to segue this conversation into something peaceful before it turned into something more sinister.

         “Go back to sleep,” Amanda said and lay down on her beige pillow with matching hearts. “Come into your wifey’s arms.”

         Timothy lay down next to his spouse and willingly held her tight and tried to disappear into slumber anew and although the feeling of terror subsided, it would not go away.

         After laying awake until about four in the morning, he managed to sleep and Timothy dreamt again. This time he was buried alive by the skull.

He awoke next morning in cold sweat, but this time he said nothing to his wife. Putting on his suit and tie, he had Amanda serve him food while he leafed through The Times. As Timothy ate his eggs and bacon, Simon came in yawning and grabbed a piece of toast with jam. A jot of Britten’s Pavane from the opera Gloriana was played on the stereo and the BBC accompanied the fat ham with some words about a Glyndebourne production of the piece.

         Timothy recounted in nauseating detail how the skull had chased him across the lawn. There was a long silence, only interrupted by Amanda caressing Timothy’s face.

         “Dad,” Simon finally said, “is the skull invited for breakfast?”

         “No, not really,” Timothy said. “Let’s adjourn this, shall we?”

         His wife cleaned up, Timothy drove Simon to school. Thinking about the dream, he drove in his Volvo over to Turl Street and attended a conference. Amanda took the Aston Martin to the music academy to teach her first student at ten o’clock. Perfect alumni existence continued, while the queen lurked around the corner.

         Timothy kept seeing the skull everywhere, even in the restrooms. He even shrieked when he thought he saw the skull approaching him on a school yard, until he realized it was a soccer ball.

         Why did a female tell him she was Pachacuti? He thought he knew everything about South American history. Here he was, the great-great-grandnephew of the king himself, dreaming of a woman claiming to be Pachacuti.

         He telephoned with his brother Roland, who was taking a break between his lectures at Exeter. Roland laughed at the dream, saying that his brother had only had a silly hallucination. Timothy tried to believe his brother, but kept on persisting that there had been something real about it. Especially the part where the skull had threatened to kill him. Roland insisted that there was no curse. Pachacuti had put no curse on an Oxford professor of history for writing a bad thesis. Roland even yelled at Timothy for being so persistent.

Timothy kept on jabbering, so Roland said he had held a lecture about hallucinations and their psychological aspects. Most certainly, Timothy was experiencing his own female side reacting to his Pachacuti complex. He had become history professor because of Pachacuti and now, settled down, he was realizing that Pachacuti had been a person as well and was coming to terms with this. Roland didn’t believe for a second that it was a signal from the underworld about some queen actually being called Pachacuti.

         Timothy had another theory. The meaning of that name Pachacuti was “the Earth-shaker”. Now, there could’ve been another Pachacuti during the 9th century Chachapoyas cult. The language of Quechua had 46 dialects and one version of it was bound not to have changed that much up until 1438. The name Pachacuti had most certainly meant the same thing back then in Chachapoyas. Too little was known about the cults during those days. The Kualpa palace, yes. That was famous. All the mummies and all the treasures. However, the hidden history was vast. What really was strange was the wheel. No ancient culture of the so-called new world had invented the wheel. Trekking the high Andes was more convenient on the back of mules. Even in the 1530’s the inca empire ruled without wheels. So, why a skull on a wheel? Hey, Timothy told himself, this was just a dream. But something was telling him, nay, urging him, to dig deeper.

         Maybe Exeter had some old books that entailed some stories that could help Timothy find out if he was right. Roland said that he could come over anytime and they would go over and check.

         The idea was put on hold and so it didn’t take long for Timothy’s nightmares to return. This time, he saw the skull on the wheel break into his house and chew on his leg. It left Timothy waking up screaming.

         At first, Timothy endured the nightmares. The skull would scream at him, haunting him to tears, panting in his ear. He was chased by the skull down the university hallways and it robbed him of the peace he so badly needed. At one point, the skull broke into a lecture hall and attacked the students.

         Finally, Timothy’s wife Amanda insisted on psychotherapy in order to find out why these dreams were haunting him. Simon was getting tired of hearing about his dad’s encounters with the monster. He welcomed a change. Even Emma was worried. The weekend she wasn’t performing she drove over to Oxford and saw her father brooding in a corner. Her dad looked sick and pale.

         On Timothy’s behalf Amanda called Roland. He promptly answered that he knew a very good therapist a two hour drive away who was a dream specialist. He was expensive, but was deemed one of the finest in the country.

         The entire family decided to make it a family vacation. Three days on a farm ten minutes away from the therapist would be a fine thing. That would be the ticket away from the nightmares.

         The therapist performed hypnosis on Timothy that showed that he was worried about really being haunted by Pachacuti. All in all, the therapist said it was a misconception to talk him out of this. For a while the nightmares stopped, but once back in Oxford they grew worse. Timothy laughed all the way home.

         As far as a family vacation was concerned, the trip was a success. Buying hours from the most expensive therapist in England was a flop. All he could say was that Timothy probably really was having some sort of premonition.

         That did it. He knew that Exeter had an extensive library of historical documents. Roland offered to help him search the library.

Many hours were spent among old historical books that wrote about the rise and fall of the Inca Empire.

         By this time, Timothy’s nightmares had grown much worse. They were more intense and more gruesome. They had no success in finding any other queen who had called herself Pachacuti.

         The research was taking a lot out of Timothy. He spent the days in his own university and the evenings in Exeter. All this meant that he rarely was seen home. He was obsessed about finding the female Pachacuti.

         The result was a very worried Amanda that found a tired and rather sweaty husband crawling into bed at eleven o’clock each night.

         The nightmare that occurred during one of these nights took this worrying tale to a different level entirely.

         He now saw a public execution. It was the woman, whose skull had chased him down the lawn and she was being killed on a public platform. The woman was beautiful and young, but there was something fanatic about her in that beauty. She was standing on a cliff held by three very strong, tall men that looked too pale to be South American Indians. On the other hand, the Inca tribes had spoken of the Chachapoyas as pale skinned and pale haired and so Timothy felt that this actually fit the historical description very well about the physical aspect of the tribe.

         This woman had hair as black as coal and that probably made her exotic among these people. There was something about her eyes. They were glowing, but this wasn’t the glow of happiness. This was the glow of hatred.

She hated everyone, including herself.

         Timothy knew nothing about this woman, only that he didn’t want to know her. She was shouting at the crowd to be quiet, speaking in a language that must have been an obscure dialect of Quechua. Timothy had heard Quechua spoken in the mountains of Peru and even in Chachapoyas itself, but this dialect was different than anything he had heard. The strange thing was that he knew what the woman was saying. He understood her.

         There were around thousand people standing around the cliff and they all were shouting “Pachacuti, Smira!” in rabid chants, which meant “Pachacuti, die!”

         He didn’t know who was scarier, the queen or the crowd. Obviously, this was a revolt and the people were executing their oppressor. She was screaming at them and they were screaming back.

         She told them that once she died she would come back to haunt them, that the head they were chopping off would end up rolling around the world on a wheel and killing every one that had stopped her. She would track down every one of the culprits and kill them.

         There was a fourth, huge man among the people and he came with a huge bronze axe. He pushed away the other men and kicked the queen to the ground below the cliff. In one swift swoop the axe landed on her throat and cut off the queen’s head. The crowd cheered as the head flew across the hedges and landed in a tree.

         When the killer ran to fetch the head, it was gone.

         The crowd ended up frenetically looking for the head that was nowhere to be found.

         Timothy saw the familiar skull rolling away from the village, its’ one wheel giving off that familiar squeak.

         Timothy was never the same again.

         He refused to speak of the dreams that he had had and he refused to speak to anyone. Amanda spent hours and hours trying to squeeze some information out of him as to what that last dream had been about.

         The leading council of Jesus College knew under what strain Timothy had been. They assured Amanda that they would keep him in the staff and let him get over his problems before they took any drastic measures. They would hire a substitute and wait until Timothy Jeffries got well. He would receive his checks as he always had. They believed in his recovery. They believed Timothy would get well.

         Amanda was afraid that Timothy was lost.

         He started drinking quite heavily, literally emptying a bottle a day. There was no way of stopping him.

         Instead of working, Timothy now spent the entire day in Exeter researching the archives and then going out and getting drunk. He would take the car and drive as far as London in order buy some expensive Kensington escort girl and take her to a motel.

         When he came back home at midnight, he stunk of cheap wine and cheap perfume. He reeked of sweat and tobacco and booze and dust from old beds. This was not the eloquent connoisseur that she had married twenty-two years ago. This was a crazy, obsessed drunk.

         One morning when Timothy was too lazy to get up, Amanda demanded he tell her what was happening or she would file for a divorce. Timothy told her to go screw herself and disappeared into the pouring rain.

         Amanda and the children spent the whole day searching for Timothy. They had the police and the entire neighbourhood on their feet trying to find him.

         At ten o’clock in the evening, after having wandered in the wilderness for hours, Timothy barged into the Jeffries’ house in Oxford bloody and wet. He fell down on the hallway floor, cuts and bruises all over his body. What was even worse was that he had traces of something with one wheel having rolled over his body over and over again.

         Amanda called the ambulance.

         Upon arrival at the hospital, Timothy was diagnosed as being in a coma and this was a state in which he would stay indefinitely. Amanda didn’t know for sure, but it seemed to her that her husband would stay in this state until she found a solution to the problem.

         Maybe there was something to this Pachacuti curse after all?

         Wait a minute. Had she really said that? Was this a curse? Now, this thing had obviously attacked her husband.

         The very next day, distraught to the bone, Amanda jumped into the Aston Martin and drove over to Roland’s estate. In tears, she asked him to help her search the archives for any trace of a Chachapoyas cult with a queen that had been beheaded in 9th century Peru.

         Roland was frightened to hear her speak so openly about a thing that Timothy only could speak of in riddles. Roland did help her get access to the archives, but there was not much he could do other than help her search and act as moral support. After a week of assistance, Roland told her that he had been neglecting his work and needed to go back to his lectures. He would visit Timothy and pray for his recovery, but as far as the Pachacuti thing went Amanda was on her own.

         For days and weeks, Amanda read about Inca cults and searched every possible nook and cranny for any trace of an earlier queen named Pachacuti. She felt she was getting nowhere. In fact, her children Emma and Simon feared for their mother’s life and decided to stop her. They made a mutual effort and went to the back room to find her and take her away before she, too, was going to fall into a coma. Amanda almost gave up and chucked the whole thing, leaving the library and telling herself that it was useless. She returned the same day a few hours later. Something was telling her that she was going to find the clue that day.

         The mother of Emma and Simon was sitting next a large mahogany table and reading a book, written in the 1980’s labelled Chachapoyas: The Hidden Truth. It had been written by a man named Luis Julio Riano. Her expression was one of a vacancy. She seemed as if she dwelled in a time long before their own.

         She had found the truth. Timothy’s dream had been a premonition.

         Both children tried to convince her that this had gone far enough, that their father was in a coma and...

         Amanda urged them to listen. Their father had been attacked by something with one wheel. Amanda had a feeling that he would only wake up if they really found the truth about this queen. They, as a family, were related to the original Inca king by 15 generations and maybe the earlier queen was an ancestor to the more famous Pachacuti. Maybe, just maybe, there was really a truth hidden here somewhere.

         The children sat down and began listening. As the big wooden clock to the left of the Washington Irving section began playing the Big Ben melody, Amanda began telling them the story of the evil queen. The book in question was rather sensationalist, to say the least, but in regards of the situation, this book told them exactly what they needed to hear.

         This occurred over a thousand years ago. A young girl named Nima had grown up around the Huabayacu River sometime in the 9th century. Her tribe was a peace loving tribe that rarely did anything else than sculpt animal figurines and harvest wheat and occasionally make bronze artefacts to sell at the local market.

         The girl was rather exotic looking, her black hair and dark features different than her fellow people’s pale skin. Her temper was wild and her father was very strict as a result of this temper. Instead of soothing her, he began beating her up to succumb her rage. This resulted in even more hatred and the effect was that the father one day became the victim of a daughter’s anger. The father was dumped into the Huabayacu River, but as he surfaced a day later it became obvious that Nima had murdered the man.

         The tribe had never known crime before and the girl was driven out of the village and became a recluse. She moved to the mountains into a cave and stayed there for years and so she became a tall and stately woman.

         Watching the life in the village from a distance, she swore one day to take revenge on her tribe. Nima lived on the animals she learned to hunt with her bare hands and swore to hunt her enemies in the same way.

         One day, there was a terrible earthquake and the only thing that was left intact was the hill where Nima lived. Her cave had been spared. As she walked down into the village, the tribe realized who she was. They also realized that she was the only one that had been spared. Half of the population was gone and all the houses were destroyed. Nima decided to help them rebuild their village, but only if they agreed to make her queen.

         A reign began that would again restore the village to a seldom seen grandeur, three of the most gruesome and horrible years in Chachapoya history.

         Nima gave herself a new name: Queen Pachacuti. Inspired by the earthquake, meaning “the Earth-shaker”, she beheaded anyone with another opinion than her own. Soon enough, the people were so afraid of her that they began believing that she actually was a Goddess that had brought on the earthquake and would beget another one if they did something wrong.

         Hundreds of people were tortured and whipped. Temples were built and the finest food prepared. Queen Pachacuti was in a constant state of intoxication and she would call for male slaves to please her in return for freedom. If they disagreed to succumb to her dominant and very menacing lust, they were whipped and sometimes even killed.

         The catalyst for the revolt was her treatment of a young boy.

         This young boy served as a sculptor and artist. His amazing capabilities made Queen Pachacuti sing with admiration. So, he worked day and night on artefacts to please her. Without payment, of course. He was a very tender boy, known in the village as one of the most gentle of people.

         But the boy was not a stranger to the rumours that were criss-crossing the village. Rumours and secret wit that free tongues were subjecting themselves to. Whenever the Queen was angry, it was said, her thin face looked like a skull. She waved her hands about during this rage that people, even while fearing for the lives, called her “The Flying Skull”.

         The genius boy sculptor had been whipped once too often and took his revenge by creating not a sculpture or a statuette, but a perverted children’s toy of the Queen’s face. Still, the flight thing had to be solved. After hours of try-outs, the boy took the invention of the water-wheel and put the scary skull on top of it. A ludicrous hate-object was born, aiming to ridicule the Queen.

         Needless to say, the boy kept this artefact a secret.

         The boy was working on a sculpture one weekend, when the Queen barged in and somehow got sight of the skull on a wheel. She immediately began interrogating the boy. When the boy did not answer, she began whipping him and ordering him to crawl on the floor and eat the dirt. Desperate, bloody and full of wounds, he escaped the castle chased by royal guards. These threw him down a ravine into the arms of his father, who fled with him into a neighbouring city and was never heard from again.

         The queen’s vile treatment of the young boy started a chain reaction that had the villagers storming the castle with the aim of overthrowing her. Thousands of individuals grabbed whatever they got their hands on and broke down the gates. They ran into the queen’s throne hall, her and dragged her to the highest cliff in town. All the preceding executions had been held here and now the queen herself was about to suffer the same fate.

         Shortly before her execution, Queen Pachacuti swore to return after her death to haunt the village as a skull on a wheel. The invention of the wheel failed to revolutionize the Inca Empire, but the Queen said before she died that she would haunt the world for ever as a skull on a wheel until she found the boy.

         The head that was cut off from her body that day was never found. It was reported to have been seen from time to time rolling on one wheel and killing its’ victims by rolling over them again and again. Timothy Jeffries was obviously the latest in a long line of victims. The headless body of the queen rested in a cave behind the Karajia sarcophagi and anyone who had suffered the fate of meeting the queen would only be awakened if the head would be brought to rest along with the body and sunk into the bowels of the underworld.

         Emma and Simon didn’t want to admit it, but they really had thought all along that searching the internet would’ve been a better solution to research than leafing around mouldy books. Amanda said that she really had searched all she could, but found nothing that specified locations. If there had been a cult somewhere, it would’ve been good to know where this cult had been and if there were any current experts that knew where to look. If the author of this book still were alive, they could maybe find some clues as to what to do next.