I was not imagining this moment. José María shrieked next to me. He could see this disgusting reflection, too.
"Jesus Christ!" he shouted.
We were running too fast when we had started down the hall, and under normal circumstances, José María and I would have slowed down our gallop in order to pause, and then exited through the doors with caution. But that had not been the case. The dark reflection in front of us had mesmerized us, entranced us, and we had run toward it with magnetic speed, and now, just three feet away from the glass, we were going to crash right into the doors, possibly shattering the glass and cutting ourselves to ribbons, truly becoming the bloody images we saw in its reflection.
I let out a sound that was part cry, part bellow, but all fear.
José María had not let go of my hand, and his grip got tighter as he also braced himself for impact.
When we struck the glass, the first sensation I felt was that of sound rippling through my whole body, making my bones and organs vibrate and my head ring with tones like bells. The surface of the glass had gone soft, like gelatin, and we struck the double doors without a crash. Instead, we moved through the surface and into the darkness of the reflection inside. A symphony of sound enveloped us, and I thought that this was what it might feel like to be a molecule of air inside a violin. In the microseconds where we crossed through the barrier, sound surged so deeply inside my body that I felt my organs melting away, and the tension that had been in my body fade away into a velvety softness.
We fell forward for what fell like hours, and my stomach fluttered as if I had just leapt from the Hancock tower without a parachute. When we landed, we struck hard, dry earth, and small pebbles scraped my cheek.
I was facedown now, and the only thing that felt solid was my brother's hand intertwined in mine.
I looked up. We were in the dark that I had glimpsed in the other side. I couldn't make out anything, because night had taken over here. This was darkness. This was the kind of dark that had terrorized me as a child. This was the same darkness where the boogeyman lived, where Freddy Krueger slashed his film victims, and where my heart and my brain had always told me not to enter.
The symphonic sound I had heard was coming from a place above me, and in the dark, I got the sense that I was standing on some sort of flat surface, like a desert. Wind whipped around me, and I felt very, very cold. In the dark before me, I finally made out a single object as my night vision kicked in. I still couldn't see José María, or the ground, or anything except for the silhouette of the object in front of us. But I felt his hand, and I squeezed.
The object before us was pyramidal in shape, and possibly the size of a skyscraper. It was a triangle of ink set against a dark blue-black sky, and the symphonic sound was coming from its peak.
From the top, something was peering at my brother and me.
The thing itself emitted no light, and so there was nothing to see. But I knew that it occupied the space at the top of that triangular shape, and it was staring down at us.
When I looked at my brother's hand, all I could see was darkness, but the warmth of his skin was real.
José María, I tried to say.
But I had no words. Each time I opened my mouth to speak, no sound came out.
I tried screaming, and all I could hear was the blood beating inside my eardrums and a soft roaring sound, the breathing inside my lungs.
My heart beat too, very fast.
Do not let go, I tried to scream. Though no sound came out, I hoped at least my thoughts would carry across the dark to my brother. His hand tightened, and I propped him up on his feet. I stood shoulder to shoulder with him now. If I let go of his hand, I might lose him forever. There was so much silence here, except for the melancholy music that came from the shape in front of us.
I knew then that the structure in front of us was not a building. It was a mountain. Taller than any mountain I had ever seen. And up there, in the dark, something was making the saddest music I had ever heard in my life. The sound filled me with fear, and as the music grew louder in my ears, I realized that whatever made that sound was staring at us. The sound stirred sorrow in my heart.
I looked at the peak and searched for its eyes. I only saw a wall of onyx.
But it was looking at us.
And as its tones changed, some of them grew long and harsh, like a growl.
Then it grew silent. After a few moments, it began to emit long brassy knells. It was ringing a bell of some sort, and its tones pulsed long into the space around us.
The owner of those sounds was descending down the mountain.
I tried screaming, shouting, whistling, and nothing came out anymore. My vocal cords were gone, or I had done deaf, or worse. But I couldn't be deaf, because the bells and moans were closer now.
The cold air pressed itself against my skin, and I was thankful I could still feel at least that. This darkness was like nothing I had ever seen. It was the world of the blind.
The bells echoed and their infernal sound banged in my eardrums. It felt so loud that it hurt.
I took two deep breaths to think about what to do, but two breaths were all I ever got. The thing that crept down the side of the mountain came down faster, moaning and murmuring, and its sound flooded my ears. Though I was blind, I shut my eyes as it sprinted toward us.
The bells rang through my whole body, making it shake.
I felt something let go inside of me, like a string popping on a guitar, and my eyes flew open.
I wasn't ready to die.
PART TWO
WHITE TEZCATLIPOCA
9 UNDERGROUND RIVERS
“This is why cities are breeding grounds for the occult: In their streets, sewers, subways and wonders of architecture, man can wear a mask. Inside the city he can trick himself into thinking he can fool nature.” –Frederick Law Olmsted, Marginalia, National Park Service Archives, Brookline, Massachusetts.
“All experiences are non-local. Most people choose to call these experiences narrative and language. I prefer to call them quantum physics.” –Sculptor Vlad Stoppard-Goswani, commencement speech at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, 2007, YouTube.
“They couldn’t pronounce her name, but her work was not in vain. Up they rose, in demon form, and her feet crushed their horns. Tow, non-seen. Tow, non-seen.” –El Samarïa, “Meet Ze Monsta”, Brief Interviews with Singular Women: Remixes and Rarities, 2011, A-O-T Records.
To live in blindness was to live in fear.
I tried wriggling my fingers and toes, to prove to myself I was still somewhere, anywhere.
There they were. My digits made tiny circles, and each ellipse brought me a smidgen of comfort.
Everything was dark.
My eyes and my vocal cords had stopped working.
I focused my attention on my face, and I forced my eyes to blink as many times as I could. I felt their tiny muscles move, but whether they were open or closed, it didn’t matter. I was as blind as a mole.
Somewhere up ahead, some massive and feral thing galloped down toward my brother and me,
(You are still grasping his hand, don’t let go of his hand)
and whatever it was would be tearing us up soon.
I felt a tug at my wrist, and I knew José María was still there with me. Three tiny squeezes ran up my forearm. He was trying to communicate.
It was time to stop lying on the ground like prey. I remembered the woman whose life escaped on the grass of Millennium, and I knew I didn’t want to succumb in such a submissive state.
Running blind would be dangerous. We would be likely to trip or stumble if we ran. I took my right hand and felt in the dark for my brother’s reedy shape. I found a forehead, and I felt the tangle of his coarse hair. I patted his nose, and I moved on to his left shoulder. I lifted him up by the armpits, the same way I did when we were kids and we transformed the dinner table into a train, and he needed to ride up front as conductor.
Crawl with me. C
rawl for your life.
I yanked the collar of José María’s shirt, and we crawled forward, using the sound of the bells behind us to give us direction. The only shape I had been able to make out in the dark was a mountain the size of a skyscraper, and I knew I wanted to get away from it as fast as I could.
The grit beneath us dug into my bare knees and tried to puncture my palms. There were smells down in this darkness, smells that made me want to vomit.
Under our hands, the ground became coarser, like gravel. We scrambled forward. The sound of bells, brassy and full, pummeled my ears, and I felt a presence behind us. It didn’t sound like a locomotive, car, motorcycle. It was something animal-like.
It’s that thing. The thing at the top of the mountain.
Our crawl was frantic and tedious, and as we moved forward, we felt new textures beneath us. Some were hard and wooden, other soft and dense. Were those eyes beneath—was that human hair? Did I touch a dead hand?
We pushed on.
Then we bumped into something hard and flat. I felt over the surface with my right hand. Luckily, it didn’t feel like human hair or skin. My hands explored it.
It was only about three feet tall. I knew we could clear it. I dragged my brother up its surface. Our legs scrambled, and we never let go of each other’s hands, despite the clumsy climb.
Once we lay on top, the rock felt smooth, like a brick. Maybe we were on top of a short stone wall.
To continue, we had to move past its edge. I moved my hand through the dark to see if there was solid ground beneath it. Nothing. I had no way to tell if the drop was inches or miles deep.
But the sound of the bells behind us was getting closer.
I wrapped both arms around my brother and we jumped off the edge.
I rotated my body in midair so we could land on my side or my back.
We fell, and the dark made it impossible to know how long we fell.
My shoulder hit the ground, and spikes stabbed my legs through my stockings.
We lay wedged inside a bed of hard objects.
Nothing felt broken, though I had gotten the wind knocked out of me.
My brother scrambled close to me. I felt his hoodie and his arms under my hands.
This time, José María grabbed my bicep, and he brought me close to the wall next to us. He tapped my ears furiously, but without hurting me. He tapped right near the ear canal. What was he trying to say?
He wants you to listen, to listen close. He wants you to listen for both of us.
We moved our hands up the wall, and I tried standing up. The wall ended at about chest level for me, and I peered into the dark, listening, while José María tapped my ear.
He tapped me in sync with the bells.
I had never heard a single sound fill miles and miles of space like this. Each time the bell rang, it swelled into the space, packing it with vibrations. It was a violating sound, revolting. But it had a rhythm. Roughly six seconds would pass, and then another repetition would shake my ribcage and make my gut want to empty itself.
I tried finding that tall mountain again in the dark. Anything that would help me orient myself. Instead, there was nothing. All I saw was darkness.
In between the knells, my brother tapped my head, syncopating his taps to their rhythm. He was trying to tell me something.
There’s a sound under the bells, a sound. Something like a rush of air—and José María wants you to hear it.
Then I heard it.
The beast making the sound was breathing. I could hear each breath it took. That was the syncopated beat beneath the bells.
Now that I could hear the breaths, it was easier to assess how close the beast was. By my estimate, it was about fifty feet. I hoped I was wrong about this.
In front of us, the beating of a thousand wings exploded and I screamed as loud as I could. No sound emerged from my mouth.
Screeches tore at our ears, and more sounds burst in patches around us. They reminded me of blue jays from the woods or even monkeys in the jungle. The wings grew louder, then they were gone, moving into the distance in the dark in their flutter.
My legs shook, and the darkness smelled of rot and decay, and something else. Something like flowers.
A hard, metallic musical note broke through the space. Two hard cones of something that seemed like light shot from the dark. The cones spread far and wide, and they remained suspended in the air, pointing up toward the sky, while the metallic tone stretched itself further and further in my ears.
The beams lowered toward the ground. They descended with grace and precision, until they were pointing at us like headlights in a deserted highway. The musical tone they emitted blasted my ears.
Then they stopped. The strange light from the beams allowed me to make out some details.
That is not light.
Light doesn’t look like that.
But what is it, then?
The beams allowed me to understand the positions of objects around me, giving me a rudimentary sort of vision. In fact, the beams allowed me to feel the textures and surfaces of the things around me, and in feeling those, I could create a sense that felt like normal vision.
I caught a glimpse of the solid ground. Flat and dry.
Beneath my hands I felt and understood the debris on the ground. The dusty bits clung to José María’s hoodie like lint, or like tiny, dusty chicken bones.
Not like chicken bones.
Like bones. They are human bones.
Baby bones.
I squeezed my brother’s shoulder. The beams allowed me to see details of his shape and body, though José María remained bathed in black darkness. It felt strange to see all parts of his skin, even his eyeballs, in pure black.
Then another change in the musical tone in front of us. I jerked my head forward.
The tone broke, and then the beams disappeared. The darkness swallowed everything again.
One noise remained: the breathing of the beast.
It took air in, exhaled, and the breaths inched closer toward us. José María tapped out their rhythm.
The breathing stayed steady, and a smell of cheese, mushroom and what I could only think was pus, wafted toward us. No more bells. Just the precise breaths of an animal I would never see.
We were being stalked. I had to hide us.
I yanked José María’s collar one more time, and we slid along the low wall, with our bellies pressed tight against the cold surface. How I wished that we could have even just a sliver of moonlight instead of this vacuum where I couldn’t even see my hands in front of me.
As we inched left on the wall, I heard footsteps come toward us, and then the sound of rocks and grit shifting. It was so very close. Holding on to my brother for dear life, I turned us around so we had our backs against the wall to protect us, or possibly hide us from the beast.
We slid downward into a squatting position, and I dug my nails into José María’s flesh. The wall scraped the back of my arms, but I didn’t care. Words were useless, and my urge to scream resulted in nothing but silence.
A roar detonated in front of us, and I realized that hiding behind this wall had been futile. It had somehow leaped, flown or gone around the wall.
It’s here.
A long tone burst forth into the air, and the bells rang. The cones of understanding swept over us, and as they spread wider, they amplified my cognition of the topography around me. I could feel every object, its position, its texture and exact shape as if a 3-D map had turned on in my brain. The beams floated about ten yards in front of us, and they allowed me to see through and into the darkness. Their haunting tone droned far and wide.
What is this place?
When I understood what I was seeing, I cupped my hand over my mouth.
Up until that moment, I had spent nineteen years—my whole life—able to see the colors of the world. Red and indigo, emerald and brown, purple and blue, they came to life when the sun or artificial light radiated onto objects that c
ould reflect them. In daylight, back in Chicago, I could see the blue of the lake, the gray of the skyline and the green of the trees. My favorite had always been green.
But nothing about that sunlight and those colors had prepared me for what I could feel and understand now through this dark.
We crouched in a vast place, like a desert. Rocks of all shapes and sizes lined the ground. I felt them in absolute detail. Some were razor-sharp, and now that I could see their jagged edges, I was surprised I hadn’t cut myself open when we jumped over the wall.
The ground was littered with little bones. And big bones, too. They resembled human bones, but I couldn’t be sure about all of them.
Off to the sides, I spotted crumbling chunks of stone, and a quick glance behind me showed me the wall where José María and I crouched. Its walls also reminded me of coal. The wall’s edges were decorated in shimmering runes that I couldn’t read.
I let go of José María’s hand, and I looked down at myself.
This is not normal.
I turned my palms up and down, over and over. No matter which way I moved them, the skin looked black as night. What’s more, I could feel and understand in incredible detail. The narrow ridges on my palms became like maps carved in onyx. Whatever the cones allowed me to see was magnified, allowing my to feel every single thing as if I had an electron microscope.
I turned the hands over, and the skin, with its imperfections and tiny triangular patterns, was as black as the downy hairs on the back of my hand. If this was what the light was doing to my skin—
I jerked my head to the left to look at my brother.
The fifteen-year-old who went by the name of José María Montes stared out at me through eyes whose irises and pupils were as black as crow feathers. His skin, his clothes and everything on his being looked as if it had been bathed in the thinnest layer of tar. He parted his lips in surprise as he stared at my own black face and skin, and I could see the inside of his mouth, with its tongue and teeth—all of it was black now. He moved his lips, but no sound came through. We could see each other finally, but we still couldn’t speak.
The 13 Secret Cities (Omnibus) Page 7