The 13 Secret Cities (Omnibus) (31 page)

“The Black Tezcatlipoca is the most dangerous of the four brothers. We do not invoke his name often. And for those that sing his name, the act can often summon the Ocullín. So be warned.”

“Xolotl, why would the Black Tezcatlipoca keep such a monster?” I said. “The Ocullín—it’s the worst thing I have ever seen, ever felt.”

The Xolotl shook his head at me. The expression on his face was that of pity and disdain. He thought my question was a stupid one. He didn’t humor it.

“I have to return to the snow caps at the top the mountain,” the Xolotl said, “where the rivers begin. Maybe the flowers of your world can teach you about the Ocullín someday.”

I felt a presence above us, in the open air of the canyon, and I remembered how the Ocullín had eaten through the walls, through the snow owls, and how it had promised me the worst kind of murder. The murder of my family.
 

“Well, then, how far do we need to go in the Snow Fields?” I asked.
 

“You must walk the snow after you hear the song of your tonal. And be sure not to fall in the last of the nine rivers. That river feeds the lake on which the city rests. It runs deep, but it is fragile and think like a stream.”

“How will I know I have found the Lords?” I said.
 

The Xolotl howled and ran his claw through my hair, as he widened his jaw dangerously close to my face.

“I recommend not perishing in the Snow Fields, Wanderer,” he said.

“Uhm, OK,” José María said. He tapped me on my shoulder. “This is freakin’ nuts, Clara.”
 

“I heard you, Bangin’ Master of the Universe,” the Xolotl said.

“And then what happens?” I said. My voice and its music took on the texture of steel and platinum. I wanted answers.

“Then you can ask the Lords for your tonal. And just be sure that they don’t devour you. The Lords will see you as dead souls, no matter what you say to persuade them otherwise.”

“And then you’ll take us back to our world?” I said.

The Xolotl grunted. “Yes. You’ll have to meet me back here, at the southern road to Mictlán. I’ll be waiting.”

The Xolotl turned on his heel and walked away from us.
 

I suppose we should have been insulted, but I don’t think he had the concept of rudeness down here. As he walked back toward the lake shore, he broke into a run, and he roared. Two smoke owls dove toward him and grabbed him by the shoulders with their talons, and soon, they were gone, up into the higher levels of the canyon.

“He’s a real charmer,” José María said.

“Yes.” I said.

“I’m hungry,” José María said.

I dug in my pack for the last of the energy bars we had packed, and we ate in silence as we walked toward the palace. As we did, the stillness of the lake began to fill me with dread. Unlike the other realms of Mictlán, there was a music-less silence that floated over this water, and even though the city of Mictlán gave off its song in the distance, the water around us seemed to eat the sounds, stealing it from our ears.

“I’m thirsty,” I said. I knelt over the water and approached the lake’s surface.
 

The beauty of this city atop the water brought tears to my eyes. A few miles away, I could see the cylindrical shape of the city, rotating, taller than any skyscraper on Earth.

But my thirst was tearing at my throat, and my tongue was puffy and dry. If I could just have a sip of water, I could continue this journey. And the stillness of that lake water felt so inviting.

“We should wait,” José María said. “That water doesn’t look quite right. It looks stagnant.”

“Are you always going to be so annoying? I said. “Even when we’re little old people?”

“When we’re little old people, I will set your wig on fire and steal your dentures.” José María said. “You know that’s the river water in this lake.”

Something about the stillness of the water of this lake, and its lack of ripples, made my thoughts hazy, and as I stared at the liquid, I felt intoxicated, drowsy, unable to resist the mirror-like planes of this lake. I felt a little scared, but more than anything, I felt as if I were under a thick mental fog. I had been warned about the water, but I felt an attraction – an addiction to it. I had to touch it.

I put my hands into the water, and as soon as they plunged into the icy liquid, I knew I had made a mistake.

A face stared at me in the murky liquid. Her eye was half shut, and her hair was disheveled. I saw her in shades of black inside the water. Her cheeks bulged, and around their edges, I spotted tiny pits where fish had eaten little bits of flesh.

“You came to save me,” the face said. She was the woman I had lain next to in Pritzker Pavilion, while paramedics rushed to save us.

While the police shuffled bodies off into piles.
 

I let the water slip from my hands and back into lake. The first few ripples started to move off into the distance, and suddenly I wished that the water had stayed smooth and undisturbed. The ripples would let any fish, any plant, any creature inside these waters know my location. But the dead woman was now with me.

“You came to save me, too,” said a new voice, and a new face emerged, replacing that of the young woman from Pritzker. This new face spoke in Spanish, and I recognized the nose, the shape of the lips, the deep brow. I had seen it hundreds of times in a photograph, next to my father.

“Tío Jorge,” I said. This was a person I had never met but which my father mourned for every day. Those times when the tequila ran deep in my father’s blood, and he collapsed in a chair in our back porch to sob, they were because of this face. I spotted a thin hairline crack in his skin where the bullet had entered his face at the riot in Tlatelolco in 1968.

“Clara,” he said. “I have always wanted to meet you.”

Tío Jorge’s voice resembled my father’s. His eyes had a milky quality. They stared up at me, through me.

“José María, get over here,” I said. Soon, my brother kneeled next to me over the water. “Look.”

We peered at the face. José María could see it, too.

“Our father misses you,” I said. What else could I say?

“I miss him, too. But no worries; he’ll come down here into the water soon. The water is nice and cool, like a kiss of ice.” he said.

The music of the giant stone turning down the road faded off, and suddenly, I only felt silence around me as I stared at my uncle.

“What is it like to be dead?” I asked. The paradox of the question was not lost on me. I presumably might already be dead if I made this far down Mictlán, but I didn’t think that really was the case. I had seen the river of souls, and I wanted to believe the Xolotl that the river carried the spirits of the dead.

My uncle crinkled his eyebrows just like my father did when he worked on organizing shelves at home. The wounds in his face looked soft like putty. They were spotless, as if the blood had been removed from his flesh.

“What it feels like to be dead, children,” he said. “What it feels…is good. Pleasurable. Moist. Dark. Surely you want to feel these joys, no? Why wait when you can taste it now?”

His eyes flickered, and I wished I could verify their color. Were they like my father’s? Or lighter in color, like La Negra’s eyes? Suddenly, they didn’t match my memories of his eyes from the family photographs. They looked
wrong.

“Tell me about your father, Clara,” Tío Jorge said. “Is he still lost in his memories?”

“I suppose you could say that,” I said. “He’s sort of stuck, I suppose. Or lost. Or both.”

“Good,”
Tío
Jorge said. “That means he’s still a little fucking bastard.”

That response didn’t feel right. I elbowed José María, who was fishing something out of his backpack. He never took his eyes off our dead uncle.

“I don’t think you would want our father to be haunted,” José María said. I felt him shiver and shake. He was holding back tears. “Would you?”

“I don’t see why not. Death is nothing but pain, children. Dark, nagging pain. We live in pain down here.”

My uncle’s head turned sideways, first to the left, and then to the right, as if he were on the other end of a teleconference and he was checking to make sure he was alone in the room. I could see tiny maggots crawl along his Adam’s apple.

“Will you help us find Clara’s tonal?” José María said.

“Of course,” our uncle said. “No woman should be without her tonal. She would be a monster without it. Clara, if you’ll help me out of the water, I’ll travel with you to get your tonal. Just take my hand and help your uncle out.”

The limb that emerged from the water was smooth, hairless and strong. His oval nails had grown long (and I remembered that hair and nails continued to grow after death). The arm entered the space right between José María and me. Behind the image of my uncle, I could see the modern high-rises of the apartment buildings in Tlatelolco, where he had been gunned down. The clouds in the image drifted, forming long strands like taffy, and suddenly I felt swept in their long shapes, lazy and undulating. They became a siren song and—

STOP IT,
I
heard myself think.

José María had plunged his arm into the water, hoping to free our uncle from the confines of the lake.

“No!” I screamed, but it was too late.

The being crawled out, changing its shape with flesh that bristled with murderous energy. It roared our names as it aimed to scoop out our eyes.
 

Tío Jorge emerged, but as he did so, I realized why he had made me feel uneasy. He made no music, unlike the other creatures inside Mictlán.

He rose naked, a fully grown man, and one skinny leg climbed onto the road above the water. As he brought his other leg forward, he frowned, and his face collapsed in a series of thick folds. His lips and nose crumpled into each other, and the flesh re-knitted itself before our eyes as its human fleshiness disappeared, and hard lines and creases took over its structure. He stood over us, and we backed up, as thick branch-like structures rose from his shoulders. His naked belly and his flaccid penis gave the transformation an even more horrible twist. Soon, they were gone, too, transformed into a writhing mass of thin legs and bristles covered in fur.

“Thanks for playing my game, children,” said the thing, and the rest of our uncle’s body folded over, like origami, into the hard spikes of the thing that lay beneath. “Now if you’ll direct me back to your homes in the other world, I will murder you and murder them. As I promised you, Wanderer.”

The thing turned toward me with a hundred eyes that lay hidden beneath the spikes of its true shape. Its voice was as ancient as that of Blue Hummingbird or Xolotl, but its sounds were those of blades scraping against metal and the growls inside a carnivore’s throat.

“Take me to your mother and father, girl,” the entity said, “Because I want to take them first.”

José María darted toward the creature, and with a single click, he turned on the flashlight on his phone. The light that poured out melted and fell onto the road. José María scooped it up and tossed it at the face of the creature. The tiny gob of light was limp and pale, like snot, but it was solid.

The thing recoiled, and it folded itself up into something that looked like a shrimp carapace. Its legs bristled, and then it spat out the gob of light, which faded into droplets of liquid, and then evaporated into dust.
 

“Time to die,” the creature said, and it lunged at José María. I was ready with the knife I carried in my coat pocket, and I plunged the blade into the folds and spikes of the thing. It didn’t bleed. Instead, darkness poured out of its wounds. A sick darkness, nothing like the smooth musical darkness of Mictlán. The creature’s thick legs wrapped around my hand, and as it touched my skin, it spoke its name through his touch in a long guttural roar.

Our direct contact was brief, because I yanked the knife back from the seeping dark, but as I learned its name, I saw through its eyes. Millions of eyes, all of them malevolent, hungry and with an intelligence that frightened me more than anything I had ever felt. It was very old and ready to kill us any way it could.