The 13 Secret Cities (Omnibus)

by Torres, Cesar

  And then the creature roared from behind the beams of light. The bells rang again.

  The beast had stalked us well, because when it pounced, we had nowhere to go.

  Now I was able to understand more about the imminent violence that approached. Though the beast moved with the speed of a jungle cat, I could now understand how the cones had sprung from its head. The creature was the one making the cones with its dreadful musical tone.

  The animal lunged.

  The beams arced toward the sky, and they traveled over several yards, sweeping a over heaven that bore no stars.

  As the beams crossed the air, I saw the beast in detail.

  The body was long and ragged but human. Its sinewy arms and legs bare; the skin hairless and smooth. Its coal-black skin shone with the sickly texture of diseased skin. Its toenails were long and curved—talons. It was a body that looked ill and strong at the same time, as if someone had taken a corpse and given it incredible strength.

  And the beams floated in front of its shoulders.

  They are not headlights, and they’re not flashlights. Those beams are coming from its head.

  I saw the creature’s face and its long jaw, its folded-back ears, the hard skull that tapered.

  It was not a human head.

  The shoulders supported an unnaturally large dog’s head. It was hairless and just as smooth as the human portion. The snarl in its jagged teeth was something I had only ever seen in animals like wolves or jackals.

  The black light from those eyes lit up every detail of that monster as it shortened the distance between it and us, and its stringy biceps, its watery skin, the bits of gristle in its sharp teeth—I saw them all like my eyes were a telescope and a microscope.

  And then it crashed into both of us.

  The creature was even larger than I had expected, easily double the size of an average human, and the jaws of the beast looked wide enough for José María or me to crawl through.

  The beast plunged into us, and our senses exploded. We heard the bells go off inside our very cells, and the stink of wet dog and rotted meat bloomed in my nose.

  The black cones emanating from the eyes grew wider, thicker and clearer, and though I was living in a world made of night, I had to shield my eyes from the blast of sensation that allowed me to see into this world of coal.

  The beast grabbed both of us by the neck, and it did not let go. It thrust its maw in our faces and it tore at our clothes. As it did so, ragged sounds emanated from its tissues. Then it lunged. Its flesh made music as it dragged José María along the rocks. The beast’s claws pinched my shoulder blades.

  Maybe this is what that woman in Millennium Park felt when she got shot and trampled.

  Clara, you didn’t look out for her. That woman’s death was your fault. You could have tried to save her. You should have found out her name.

  God, I am sorry, she had said.

  You should be sorry, too, Clara.

  My body was tossed and turned, and the notes of the beast’s body drifted in the air. Then it dropped us on the rock. The beast roared and stood on its skinny legs. Its strength was incredible.

  The dog head licked its chops, and the beast screamed at us. It was a scream filled with music—tinny drums and terrifying screeches.

  It had knocked the wind out of me, and I sat up on the ground, trying to get in some air.

  The creature darted away a few feet, and it turned around.

  Its eyes locked on mine.

  It crawled on all four human limbs toward me. My shoulder hurt, and a thin stream of blood poured from my head. I put my fingers to it, and I drew them away. The blood remained as black as my skin.

  Behind the beast, I spotted the wall where we had fallen. To the right, I saw a shallow forest running up a small hill, and farther back, the giant mountain I had seen when we arrived.

  The beast ran at me and grabbed me again by the shoulder, and it opened its jaw wide. It let out a roar, and it stuffed me all the way up to my waist inside its throat. Thick saliva coated the inside, and rotted meat got in my hair and in my mouth. I could hear its gut growling below. I scrambled to push myself back out, and I felt electric shocks throughout my body.

  Then it bit down on me as hard as it could.

  The teeth came down on my lower back and then on my belly, but they couldn’t even pierce my skin. The jaws came down again and again. It chewed. And each time, it failed. It was as if my body was made of stone.

  The stink of death was all over the beast’s sandpaper tongue, and I was running out of air. It bit down again, working me over like an old bone, and then it spit me out.

  It roared above me and screamed. This time, its shriek sent music into the sky. I saw a flock of dark shapes fly off in the distance.

  This place has no stars.

  That realization made me shudder.

  Behind me, José María was curled into a ball, crying his eyes out, though no moans came forth. Bugs crawled over his shoulders and his legs, and they raised hooked stingers over his bare flesh, right over the long lines of his homemade Arkangel tattoos.

  Scorpions.

  Hundreds of them.

  And then the beast pulled me around by the shoulders to face it.

  Its eyes squinted, and it examined me, sniffing me at the same time as it inspected.

  The beast stared at me with cold suspicion and rage.

  From its thin loincloth, it produced a small knife, a blade that looked so tiny in comparison to his body that I wanted to laugh.

  It plunged it into my arm, in the very center of my bicep. I shrieked. It squeezed my body, and blood gushed to my skin in its black inky sheen.

  My blood flowed in thick spurts down my arm.

  The beast held out its dog tongue. It cocked his hand and plunged the knife into the tip. He didn’t seem to feel any pain in its self-mutilation. It dug into the muscle until black blood sprang. Then it rolled out the tongue toward me.

  Before I could struggle out of its grip, It pressed the cold tongue onto my wound.

  José María, help me!

  My mind blew up into a thousand little bits.

  My ears rang and my eyes burned, as if a blast had fried my retinas and blown out my eardrums.

  A thousand dots made of shadow danced in my mind while I stared into the black dog face in front of me.

  And then the creature spoke to me in blood.

  “Bitch,” it roared.

  It sat me on the ground, as if I was its doll, and it got down on its haunches. The eyes remained dark, evil, hungry. From its throat, sound emerged, and it was both music and language all in one.

  From the wound in my arm, I heard the creature speak. Its voice whispered, like a lone flute in an orchestra pit. Its blood coursed in me, and mine in his, and now, when it moved its canine jaw, I heard its words.

  “Why,” it said.

  It was not a question, but instead a statement. Its voice was high and thin but distinctly male. Air rushed around its musical pitch.

  Tears welled in my eyes, and I wriggled, trying to move away from the being and toward José María, to wipe off the bugs from his skin. The creature held me down, and he spat a word toward the blanket of scorpions. They scrambled away from my brother, who was covering his face with his hands.

  “Now speak to me, woman,” the creature said. “Why is the word where we start. Why. You must ask why.”

  I had never heard the language that this creature spoke, but the blood he shared with me tingled inside my veins, and the blood translated the notes of the dog head. I was able to understand through the music I felt and heard.

  He had called me woman. In this dark, where no color distinguished anything, my concept of “woman” felt thin and artificial, but if he was calling me woman, that meant he knew what humans were.

  “Why—” I said. My voice became a new sound under the spell of the blood, and what emerged from my throat was raspy and undulating, like notes from an electric guitar.
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  “SPEAK,” he shouted, and his voice melded with the bell sounds he made from inside his body.

  “Why is there no light here? Where are we?” I said.

  The beast spat thick phlegm in my face.

  “Stupid woman. You’ve wandered here. You’re nothing but a wanderer.” He turned his shoulders away and spat again and again. The gobs of spit didn’t bring the creature relief. He was furious, frustrated.

  “Don’t kill us, please,” I said.

  Those were the words that came from thousands of people inside Pritzker Pavilion. Don’t kill us. Now they are mine again.

  This smell of rot all around me—it’s that final smell of—

  “Kill you?” the monster cackled. His laughter sounded exactly like a harp. He grabbed me by the collar and tried taking one more bite of my head. His teeth met resistance again, and he roared in frustration.

  The creature scooped me up and reached out with his long arm to pull José María from the nest of scorpions.

  He carried us over the wall in a single leap. Despite having nothing but rotting skin, he dashed with grace through the rocky landscape.

  We headed back toward the mountain. Now that the twin cones from the creature lit up the terrain, I could see we were in a vast plain where no plants grew and where everything lay flat under the dark. And indeed, the things that had felt like human flesh and bones beneath us were mutilated bodies. I saw them clearly now. Bodies thrown there like trash in a landfill.

  I saw the small hill to the right and the mountain towering over us as we approached its foot.

  Though we were moving too fast to free ourselves from the claws of the beast, I wasn’t going to waste my ability to speak.

  “José María,” I shouted. “Can you hear me?”

  He shouted at me, but we were bouncing off rocks and the terrain below, and I couldn’t read his lips. Nothing emerged from his mouth. Only I had the ability to speak, it seemed.

  Because of the blood.

  Tears streamed down my brother’s face like rivers of black ink, and even though he was shaded in the darkest black I had ever seen, he remained familiar—annoying, irritating—but also my brother. I didn’t want him to get hurt. I reached out with my left hand to try to get a hold of his hoodie, but I was too far away.

  “Stay with me!” I shouted to my brother.

  As we gained height in our climb, I could suddenly begin to understand the vastness of this place.

  The arid land spread out for thousands of miles. My eyes scanned every detail of the black panorama. The ground was coated in a fine, shiny gravel, and my eyes caught many glints through the vast plains that stretched before me. These were insect or scorpion colonies, I wasn’t sure. The rest was emptiness, enclosed by a sky without a single star and without a moon. The desolation of this place suggested to me that it might spread out into an infinity.

  Not just infinity.

  An infinity. One of many.

  That idea felt suddenly more terrifying than if we had been buried alive and left to rot.

  Here, the darkness eats everything.

  We were now climbing up a slight incline, and the foot of the mountain spread around us. When the rocks became flat, he forced us to walk, keeping his long claws wrapped around our shoulders. When the rocks became too sharp and uneven to clear, he grabbed us by the collar and leapt.

  We flew into the air, bouncing from one rock to the next. My ribcage rattled and I screamed. We were not just going up the mountain; we were going around it. My sandpaper music-voice sent out futile screams.

  We reached a flat boulder, and the creature landed on it with a creak of its bones. He tossed us at its edge, and José María landed on top of me. My brother let out another silent shout.

  The creature got down on all fours, and now he was more doglike than ever before. His black eyes showed no iris, no pupil, and his cone of black light let me see the steep slope of the mountain behind his shoulders. He flexed, and the bell sounds rang deep from inside his belly. He pounced on José María, pinning him on his back, and the dog head turned toward me.

  “Is this your gift to me, woman?” the creature sang.

  “Leave him alone,” I said. “Take me first.”

  “You still don’t understand, do you?” the creature said. “You have proven yourself, but no one visits my gate without bearing a gift.”

  “He’s not your gift,” I shouted, and I ran toward the beast. I punched him in the eye as hard as I could. Just like he had been unable to chew through me, my own fist didn’t make the monster flinch.

  You need to distract him; you need to buy time.

  “What is your name?” I said.

  The beast cocked his head, and our eyes stayed locked. Time passed in that trance we held through each other. I saw the fine wrinkles of his dog face, and the edges of his gums drip with slobber.

  Then a single tear ran down his smooth skin.

  The musical note that created the twin cones in the air gave the tear extra dimension and detail, and I could see deep within the tear’s structure, the way the molecules clung to themselves. Even in this world of no light, I could see the tear was transparent as water.

  “No one has asked my name in a very long time,” the creature said, and he lowered his head. His human arms and legs went slack, and the decaying skin wrinkled on his thighs as he took in a few sad breaths.

  He stared at José María for a second, then slashed his cheek with a talon. José María’s scream went unheard in the vacuum of sound around us. Black blood sprang from his cheek. The monster licked the blood with a sweep of his tongue.

  “What is your name, then?” I said.

  The breath of the beast rolled down over my face. The breath was feces and fetid vegetables. It was maggots and sulfur. He heaved, breathing hard, and then spoke his name.

  The word the beast spoke was long and strung together by many syllables. Each one rolled out of his throat as music, like a wet whisper. Its sound was like a flute and a rattle.

  It was a word I had no comprehension for.

  “I cannot pronounce that,” I said.

  The beast stared down at his body, as if evaluating a thought.

  “That is my name. I can’t help you learn it,” it said. “I can’t help you say it, either.”

  “Fine. I’ll call you X.”

  “X—” he said, and the single syllable melded with a bell tone. The music the creature made sounded exactly like a letter X, except wet and hollow at the same time.

  “And now you can let me feast on your gift,” it said.

  “He is not your gift,” I shouted.

  What I saw in that monster’s eyes filled me with dread.

  He’s old. He’s really, really old.

  He was ancient. And he didn’t really care about us. That’s the reason his stare felt so odd.

  “X, you said I was a wanderer,” I said.

  “Yes, and we send wanderers back from where they came. Last time someone wandered through my gate was six hundred wheels ago.”

  “Wheels?”

  “600 wheels, yes,” said the creature.

  “How much is that in years?” I said. His harp laughter danced in the air. With each cackle, his teeth bristled.

  Those teeth. There’s so many teeth in there.

  “You, too, have an obsession with time,” X said. “Interesting. Many wanderers share that defect. You’re a wanderer; you should know how many years there are in a wheel, and how many wheels there are in what you call a year.”

  “I should?”

  The creature smacked his lips.

  “Let me show you something,” X said.

  X scooped us under each of his arms, like kittens, and we walked along the edge of a precipice. As we leapt among the rocks, I smelled the mountain and its metal notes.

  We moved closer to the edge of the precipice.

  I could see that we were high up, but it wasn’t until we came close to the edge that I understood w
hat lay below.

  Dear God.

  I had never seen a place more vast than this, not even when my father took us to the Grand Canyon. The immensity terrified me, and though I didn’t want to, I held on to the bony arm of the creature to make sure I didn’t fall.

  Up above, a screech broke out—identical to the one I heard when we arrived in this place. A bird swooped upward, headed for the mountain.

  On our left, the precipice of the mountain at first looked like outer space. As X approached the very edge of the rocks, his cones grew deeper and their music more melodic, revealing detail. Behind us, the mountain loomed over us. And now I understood that the mountain was minuscule in comparison to the precipice beneath it.

  I looked down.

  A land lay before us, as big as a planet, deep, so deep. It was a place built out of night.

  Inside this deep space, a circular pattern emerged, and it coiled round and round, like a corkscrew. The circular canyon definitely had a topography. It was like a sinkhole with walls that curved in toward the center in a spiral.

  This was nothing like the Grand Canyon. It was bigger than planet Earth and filled with a darkness that smelled of things forgotten and forbidden.

  The coil moved downward, starting from the mountain where we stood. Thanks to the light from X, I could see tiny knobs of shimmering lights along the ridges of the coil, each one connected to the other by rivulets of black liquid like pearly tar. Those little dots twinkled like torches on top of long towers.

  Those are cities. Cities dot the landscape as it curves downward to the bottom.

  The cities formed tiny clusters of towers and houses, and the path between them was made of a wilderness. I could see water rushing through the rivers that wound down through the coil, and forests that looked like they were made of sharp needles. I even saw a set of bridges built out of what looked like snakes.

  And though I could see these cities, and the roads that connected them downward into the canyon, I saw no cars, no planes, no buggies. No citizens.

  My ears were drawn by the very center of the spiral-shaped canyon. It was there that I heard the loudest noise, made of music that seemed to rattle me and cause my teeth to chatter.