by M. G. Harris
Ixchel shook her head. “I don’t think so. I was about to pass out from lack of oxygen. And I was still stuck down there. Lost. Just horrible.”
I don’t understand why, but I’m almost overcome with grief. Ixchel looks shocked.
“Hey, what’s wrong? You look like you saw a ghost.”
It’s ridiculous, but I want to grab Ixchel and hold her close, just to check she’s still here.
But it’s not really Ixchel I want to hold. It’s Albita.
Ixchel muses, “You know, I think it was Chan and Albita.”
“In the dream . . . I was called Chan.”
“Lucky you! I was Albita. Not so fun, when you think about how she ended up.”
I’m staggered. “Chan and Albita were real?”
“They were part of the search party that went looking for this boy – a Bakab heir called Kan’ek – years ago.”
“I know the story,” I say. “It ends with them finding Kan’ek, and he smells of gardenias.”
“Well, that’s the nice side of the story. What’s not so nice is that Albita didn’t return. She must have given up waiting for Chan to come back and tried to swim for it by herself.”
“She drowned. . .?”
Ixchel looks grim. “Pretty nasty, yes? Poor Albita; her spirit must still be down here, poor thing.”
I say nothing, staring into the water.
“Not the nicest experience to share with me; thanks, Albita,” says Ixchel to no one in particular. “You couldn’t have chosen something better?”
“That Chan guy,” I say. “He really liked her, right?”
“They were crazy in love. I felt that, you know – I actually felt what she felt. He risked his life to save her, but she died anyway. No wonder he never recovered.”
I don’t really want to know, but I can’t help myself. “What happened to him?”
“Some say Chan left his soul down here, with Albita. He got out OK, but couldn’t forgive himself for her death.”
“Why not?” I say, my voice rising. “It was her decision to swim. He told her to stay! He told her to wait for him! Why didn’t she just do what we agreed?”
I realize suddenly that I’m pounding the ground, splashing both of us with water. A feeling of almost overwhelming desperation grips me.
Ixchel seems deep in thought. “How amazing. . . You and me, visited by Chan and Albita.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” I say, but it’s a half-hearted objection.
I know what I felt.
Ixchel doesn’t seem remotely thrown by the experience. She actually seems pleased. I’m still reeling from feelings of grief that aren’t even really mine.
Or maybe they are. Because I keep thinking back to Camila, and how I couldn’t save her.
“You know, Josh . . . what this could mean. . .” Ixchel grips my arm urgently. “You know the way out of here! Chan found another way, through the underground river. Can you remember how?”
Ixchel is right. I can see it all clearly in my memory. The cave with the lake. The tunnel. The narrow gap, the left fork in the underground river, the journey to the cenote.
I turn to Ixchel. “We have to go back to the cave with the helictites. There’s a tricky climb – you’ll have to climb up over me. And – it’s not an easy swim. Long. Dark. Scary.”
“But you know the way?” Ixchel says, hopeful.
I nod. “Yeah. Think I do.”
We make our way back to the helictite cave. Beyond that, we find the second tunnel. We don’t even need to discuss it – we both recognize the route.
“This is going to work,” Ixchel says, almost to herself.
I’m silent, thinking about the underground swim. Without light, I can’t see how I would find that narrow opening in the rock. But I won’t do what Chan, my dream-self, did: I won’t leave Ixchel behind.
And then the solution comes to me. My pace quickens.
“You’re right, you know,” I tell Ixchel. “It really is.”
We reach the wall with the ledge. Just as in the dream, I use Ixchel’s shoulders to give me the lift, then hang from my fingers as she climbs up my legs and over my back. It’s not so easy for me as it is in the dream – the first couple of times I can’t take her weight and we both fall to the ground. The mistake we’re making is that I lose it the second that Ixchel grabs my ankles and puts all of her weight on me. The third time, I don’t just hold on by my hands, but brace my shoulders and arms into the ledge too. Ixchel takes a running jump to reach my ankles. Once she’s grabbed hold, I groan loudly, straining with the sensation of stretching in my knee joints. I breathe in staccato, shallow gasps, holding my shoulders firmly in position as Ixchel climbs along my back.
Just like Chan and Albita, we turn and sit on the ledge for a few minutes, to recover. I recognize suddenly that this is real. I’m visiting a place I only know from a dream – and it’s real.
Ixchel and I steal a glance at each other. I can’t help wondering – is she thinking what I’m thinking? Is she remembering the dream? It’s confusing. In that moment, dream and reality collide.
And Ixchel doesn’t kiss my cheek.
The torch light is down to a feeble point, no better than a match.
“Why didn’t I pack batteries?” mutters Ixchel.
I’ve worked this one out. From my jeans pocket, I bring out my dad’s iPod. Ixchel watches, at first bemused and then impressed as I switch it on, choose a playlist and change the “Backlight” setting so that the backlight on the LCD screen stays on.
“What d’you reckon?” I say. “Now it’s a torch.”
I take the Ziploc bag with the Adaptor from my other pocket. I make Ixchel use her gas mask while I open the Ziploc bag for just a second and place the iPod and my UK mobile phone inside the clear plastic.
“And now,” I say, smiling, “it’s a waterproof torch.”
Ixchel gazes at me. Behind her eyes, something is different. “Well. That’s actually pretty good.”
I want to reply with a flip comment, but my mouth is suddenly dry. I can’t say a word. Instead, I turn away, feeling my cheeks flush. I place Ixchel’s Ek Naab phone in the Ziploc bag too, after which nothing else fits.
The cave with the underground lake is close by. We arrive within the minute, guided by the steady beam of milky light from my dad’s iPod. The plastic bag crackles in my hand as we approach the water. We jump in, gasp at the shocking cold, and swim fast to the other end of the lake.
We reach the end, where the channel through the rocks begins.
“This is it,” I tell Ixchel. “It’s a long swim. But don’t be afraid . . . I know the spirits wouldn’t deceive us.”
I’m risking my life for a belief in spirits. . .?
The dream of the leaf storm that led me to the lost Ix Codex was one thing . . . but at least that was some kind of a connection with a living Mexican shaman – a brujo. It’s a whole other level to imagine that I’ve been communicating with someone long dead.
“Take deep breaths,” I say. “Stretch your lungs.”
We breathe deeply. If I think about it even for a second, my mind screams with fear. Fear of the dark, of being trapped, or drowning. So I don’t let myself. Just going by instinct – that seems to work best for me.
And then we’re in. With the iPod light to guide us, I spot the letter-box gap almost immediately. I have a very clear memory of the way in the dream I’d posted myself through it, like a letter. I swim through without hesitating, and then slow my pace until Ixchel catches up. Then I head for the left-hand tunnel, swimming as fast as I can. I sense Ixchel is close behind.
I keep having flashbacks to the dream. The moment where the light went out is a terrifying memory. I don’t let myself think what I’d do if that happened right now.
But it doesn’t. My chest hammers with the ache of holding my breath. The iPod lights up the narrow channel to the cenote. Up ahead I see the most incredible blue colours in the water. The water is frothing, di
sturbed. When we emerge into the cenote, I understand why.
It’s crowded. Filled with swimmers jumping, diving, playing around.
As I surface, one swimmer, a blond guy in his twenties, looks at me with a puzzled smile.
“Hey, man,” he says with a laugh. “You didn’t even bother to get out of your clothes?”
Ixchel breaks the surface behind me.
“That’s so cool,” says another, who looks almost identical – tanned and blond. “They just got off the bus and hurled themselves in. Awesome!”
Outside, an old Mexican woman in a multicoloured shawl and her son sell tortas and cold drinks from a cooler. My eyes go straight to the tortas de jamon – ham, tomato and avocado in rolls of chewy white bread. I buy four, and four cans of lemon soda. The old woman looks from the sopping wet fifty-peso note with which I pay her, then back to me. She blinks at my soaking clothes, saying nothing.
“I’m not a gringo, you know,” I tell her in Spanish.
“Whatever you say,” she replies in a thin, high voice, shrugging. “But you look just as daft.”
Ixchel and I sit on stony ground behind the bus, in the hottest part of the sun, and we gobble the tortas, biting off huge chunks. We’re famished – it seems like more than a day since we ate.
“I should borrow your backpack,” I say. “Can’t carry the Adaptor around like this.”
I take her dripping backpack and open it up. Ixchel snatches it back.
“Who said you could open my bag?”
We stare at each other.
“I just need to borrow it!”
“OK,” she says. “But at least ask first!”
I take it back from her reluctant hand, a bit astonished at her outburst.
“You really don’t know much about girls, do you?” she muses. “You don’t open a girl’s bag without asking. Ever!”
“It’s cos I don’t think of you as a girl,” I say, through a mouthful of bread and ham. “You’re more like a mate. ‘Mate’ just means a friend,” I tell her hurriedly, furious that I can’t do anything to stop a blush. “Like saying wey.”
“You better not call me wey,” she warns. “I hate it! I can’t believe people in Mexico call each other ‘ox’.”
“OK, wey,” I say, grinning. It’s a word that always makes me laugh. “Promise not to call you wey, wey.”
“Stop it,” she says. “I’m serious.”
“You are very serious,” I say. “Too serious.”
Ixchel’s eyes widen. “Listen to who’s talking!”
“I’m not so serious.”
“Yes, you are.”
“It’s just the situations we’ve been in,” I explain.
“So really you’re, what, a funny guy?”
“Maybe not funny, but fun. Yeah. I think I was pretty fun, once.”
“What happened?”
I put my torta down with a heavy sigh. “Just . . . everything.”
I get back to searching through the backpack. My fingers land on the napkin where Ixchel wrote my mysterious postcard messages. The napkin is soaked through, on the point of turning to mulch, but I notice the biro writing. It’s fuzzy, but I can still read what she wrote. As I look at it upside down, the positions of the full stops suddenly grab my attention.
WHAT.KEY.HOLDS.BLOOD.
DEATH.UNDID.HARMONY.
ZOMBIE.DOWNED.WHEN.FLYING.
KINGDOM’S.LOSS.QUESTIONABLE.JUDGEMENT.
“What if. . .” I whisper.
Ixchel puts her bottle down. “What?”
“What if the full stops actually mean something?”
“You mean, like part of the code?”
I point to the letters at the start of each word.
“What if this message is an acrostic? Where you just use the first or last letters of each word? What key holds blood – W-K-H-B.”
Ixchel shrugs. “It’s meaningless.”
“Yeah, but now,” I tell her breathlessly, “now that does look like a Caesar cipher word.”
“Caesar cipher? Like Julius Caesar?”
I nod. “He used it to encrypt messages to his troops. It’s one of the simplest, earliest codes. You shift each letter along three places to get the cipher letter. So an A becomes a D, a B becomes E.”
Ixchel’s eyes widen, impressed. She looks down at the writing.
I continue, pointing. “W in the cipher message . . . go back three in the alphabet . . . that’s T. Then K . . . that’s an H. H is code for E . . . and B is code for. . .”
I stop, momentarily stumped.
“It would have to be Y,” Ixchel points out. “Going back to the end of the alphabet.”
“That spells . . . THEY.”
We stare at each other.
“What’s the second word?”
We work it out together.
ARE.
We continue, until we’ve deciphered the message so far.
THEY ARE WATCHING.
I jump up, run over to the woman selling tortas and beg her for a napkin. Ixchel digs around inside her backpack and finds her pencil. I scribble the decoded message. And we just stare at it in wonder.
“Josh,” Ixchel says, her voice hushed, “how long have you had this message?”
“Days. . .”
I think suddenly of Tyler. If we want to call him before he goes to bed, we have to hurry. I check my watch – almost six in the evening. That’s eleven o’clock in England. I walk to the other end of the field, far from anyone, and open the plastic bag containing the Adaptor. I have no idea if it’s still giving off the poisonous gas, but better to be safe. I remove the iPod and both phones. I seal up the Adaptor again, stuff it into my back pocket and return to Ixchel. Then I try my UK mobile phone. It turns on OK – finally! But the battery is almost flat, so I use Ixchel’s phone.
We call Benicio, who almost has a fit when he hears my voice. He’s furious. I can’t say I blame him. But he’ll feel differently when he sees the prize we’ve captured – the Adaptor.
We assure Benicio that we’ll be back by morning. Montoyo won’t know that we ever separated; Benicio won’t get into trouble.
I’m feeling my confidence return. This is working out. We’ve had everything thrown at us. But we’re still in the game.
We call Tyler. He sounds tired and grumpy. When we ask if he went to my neighbour Jackie’s and picked up today’s post, he perks up.
“Yeah, there were two more.”
He reads aloud the latest two messages, in date order.
FINESSE.REQUIRES.PROPER.HEED.
Just before I put the phone down, Ixchel whispers, “Ask him what the photos are. . .”
I’m a bit puzzled, but ask anyway. He tells me that they’re photos of Labna and Palenque, two more Mayan ruins.
“You think that’s important?” I ask Ixchel.
“Could be. Another way to give more information, maybe?”
“You mean there’s a clue on the photos?”
“Maybe.”
I’m suddenly angry with myself for not going back to my house for the postcards.
That’s the first place Ollie and Madison would have looked for me, but. . .
Without the actual postcards, it seems that I won’t be able to solve the coded message.
Ixchel and I concentrate on deciphering the next few words.
In cipher-text they spell F-R-P-H. In English: COME.
THEY ARE WATCHING. COME.
It’s definitely a message – with an instruction. But where?
“The clue to where could be in some more messages,” Ixchel comments. “Or it could be right here, in what you already have.”
“That would be the smart way to send a message,” I agree. “Give as much information as possible in each piece.”
“If ‘they are watching’, then the message has to be as subtle as possible. Hidden in plain view. So anyone could see one or two postcards and not get the whole message.”
What do we have? Photos of Mayan ruins
: Tikal, Labna, Calakmul, Altun Ha . . . I can’t remember them all.
And then I realize. I’ve been thick. Blind as a bat.