Music swelled inside the snake’s body, and though my eyes were blinded by the snakes that enveloped my body, I felt my body flow forward and through the snake, into the brightest flash of sapphire I ever saw in my life.
Edgar’s body had been lanky, marked by moles at his shoulders, and during the times we had sex, my hands had explored his back, his face and even his eyelids. That’s what I remembered most about the times we made love: his skin. Those sensations on my skin and in my nose and eyes had made me orgasm several times when I touched him. And now, as I fell into a thousand shards of the color blue, my skin came alive, just like it did during those early mornings with Edgar. Thousands of electrodes had been turned on over every inch of my body.
The snake called my name, and the two syllables—the way she caressed the sound—made my stomach tingle.
“Clara,” she said. “Crawl with me.”
I felt hollow, as if I was just a shell made of skin. But this feeling—the way it made me feel free, as if gentle air currents inhabited my insides instead of organs made of carbon and water—was a taste of something sacred. The brushes of the air against my neck, my toes, my legs—they felt as if they were coming from a windmill inside my heart.
I let out a deep breath, and as I inhaled, I felt the essence of the snake move through my lungs, stomach and organs, on a journey with purpose.
She’s moving through my cells, I thought. The thought made no sense from a biological standpoint, but my heart felt it. The snake was in me, swelling inside my head, and pressing into me with her blue beauty. She was now seeing through me, as if she had infiltrated me from the space behind my eyes.
In my ears, a wash of sound, velvety and sharp.
But warmer, so much warmer, so much more like blood in my veins.
My body swelled, crested, and then it ran in rivers of liquid. I felt the same rush of an orgasm that I might have given myself with my own hands. Stars flooded my vision and my skin bloomed with heat. I panted inside the sea of snakes.
The blue intensified, and it became thicker, darker. Its music spread itself apart, like a siren going off in the night, and the snake and I became one being, connected by oceans and galaxies of blue color.
It was in this blueness that I understood where I was.
You’re inside the snake’s eyes. You’re literally inside her eyes. Outside, in the circular valley of Mictlán, those eyes are nothing but useless black orbs, but if you ever saw Blue Hummingbird in the sun, those eyes would be as blue as the heart of the Pacific Ocean.
“Thank you, Clara,” the snake said. “We have communed. And now I can show tell you the story of the Ocullín, if you will let me.”
I sang “yes,” and the music of that word flitted off, like a bird, into the blue.
I saw a new vision through Blue Hummingbird’s eyes, and she was nothing but a baby. She peered up from the lower levels of the spiral canyon, and up above, a war took place. Thousands of owls and hummingbirds surrounded an animal that had cut through the circular opening of the canyon. The being disobeyed the natural spiral flow of the walls of the canyon, and instead, it cut across its thousands of miles, like a knife puncturing an onion. The animal was segmented, and covered in thick fur. It ate through the swarm of owls with its five mouths, gathering force as it moved through space.
“That was the first time I ever saw the Ocullín,” the snake said. “He Who Murders Worlds.”
The Ocullín embodied every thrust of a rapist, every hand that slit a throat, every cell of cancer that ate a body from the inside out. The Ocullín felt as putrid as the vision I had seen of Richard Speck walking throughout that house. The Ocullín was the explosion of bone and muscle when guns had shot us down in Pritzker Pavilion.
The Ocullín consumed the hummingbirds and cracked their bones. Their attacks with their talons on his bulbous body did nothing to stop him.
The Ocullín made no song in his path through the empty space of the canyon. In a place where even the cliffs and the stones gave off music, its silence made the young snake take cover in a hollow cave near the fields of poppies.
The snake witnessed this battle of the Ocullín against the citizens of Mictlán. It lasted many wheels, and she lay helpless, just an infant, in her nest hear the bottom of the Coil. I saw it in a simple flash of images, but I understood that it was a war that had gone on for centuries or maybe millennia.
A flash of light broke through the sky, and two shards of white light lit the spiral canyon for a moment. The forests and cities and the creatures of Mictlán were bathed in the light for a moment, and I gasped, even through the snake’s vision.
And then the Ocullín clashed with the two light beams. They turned and twirled, and the Ocullín emitted a howl full of rage and pain.
The beams grew thicker, brighter, and a sharp screech came from their very core. Spiraling sparks blew out from the beams by the millions, and even the smoke owls flinched, flapping in fear back toward the mountain as the white spirals ripped the darkness open.
The largest of the white beams took on a slender, fluid shape, and its tip swelled in size, forming a head, a mouth and dozens of sharp teeth. It was a head that looked just like that of a snake, at least until horns and feathers grew from the back of its skull like a radiant headdress in brilliant reds and oranges. The beast dove into the canyon, down toward the black heart at its center, and for a moment, it looked like it had disappeared, spirals and all.
Then a roar detonated from the heart of the canyon, and the snake of light rose like a spear through the thousands of miles between the black heart and the Ocullín above. The snake pierced the worm’s skin, and the Ocullín gross body began to absorb and eat the spiraling sparks. They wrestled, turning and biting. This battle continued for several years, until the snake opened its jaw wide enough to swallow the Ocullín. The music of the white snake turned moody and blue as it wrapped its jaws over the worm, and eventually, he swallowed most of it. The white snake’s body bristled in colored feathers that stood up like spikes all over its back.
Just as the feathered snake closed in on the last segment of the Ocullín, this remainder of the worm ripped itself away from the white jaws that sliced its body. The runaway segment was nothing more than a set of mouths reeking of pus and rot, and it flew up, away from the canyon, while the feathered snake lay in the upper walls of the canyon, fat and bloated as it tried to digest the murderer. What was left of the Ocullín flew up and out of the canyon, and up toward the tip of the mountain, where the gate to Mictlán stood inside its snowflakes.
Then the feathered snake slithered into a cave at the foot of the mountain next to the Coil. Years passed while it lay in silence.
A familiar figure emerged from the flocks of hummingbirds that raged through the air. The Xolotl, draped in his tiny loincloth, clutching his knife, burst from the hordes of birds, seeking the last of the Ocullín.
They used to be inseparable, the snake reminded Clara. Xolotl and Quetzalcoatl, twin brothers. But that was the last time they fought together.
The Ocullín’s last segment sat on top of the mountain, murdering the beings that lived there.
The Xolotl reached the tip of the mountain, and there he slashed the Ocullín’s mouth, and the thick fur that was left on its flesh. But the Ocullín bit back as the snowflakes bristled with music around them. The Ocullín bit the Xolotl in the arm, wounding it, and with a single fluid movement, stepped out of Mictlán and into another world through the reflections in the snow. The smoke owls tried to stop the Ocullín, but it was too late. The Ocullín was gone.
“That is my story,” Blue Hummingbird said.
Then I felt essence of Blue Hummingbird swirl inside me in an ocean of blue color and alien music, and my body melted into hers. I lost track of where my body ended and hers began, and my vision rolled back into a vast, open plane of sapphire.
The snake ejected me from her body onto a field of flowers in Mictlán. The flowers recoiled from my body as I hit the flo
werbed. I felt relaxed but exhausted, and I turned to face up toward the animal. José María was also sliding out from the weave of her body, and he landed sideways, gently, on a cluster of flat rocks off to my right.
José María crawled on his elbows toward me, his eyes wide as saucers, sweat streaking the thick hair on his forehead.
“I think I’m in love,” he said.
Blue Hummingbird was leaving us.
“We have cut through several of the levels of the Coil,” she hissed, “but this is as far as I can take you. There are places in Mictlán that even I can’t go.”
The snake rolled off of the wide plain where she dropped us off. Her coils flipped over the jagged edge, one after another, and soon, she was gone without saying another word to us. Though she had spoken a kind of syntax that I could understand as sentences, what I knew about her from being inside her flesh made me think that she was very far from human.
“Even without daylight, I felt like she could see us with her eight eyes,” I said.
“The things she showed me,” José María said. He sat cross-legged at the edge of the flower bed. Roses. Black as night, their petals dewy and graced with a velvety touch. José María began to eat their petals, and instinctively, I did too. Their taste was opulence, sugar and something akin to blood. The experience inside the snake’s blue eye had left me so hungry.
“She showed me the Ocullín,” I said. “From a long time ago, when he tried to eat his way through Mictlán.”
“That’s not the story she showed me. She showed me things that I don’t have words for.” José María said. “But she spoke to us individually. Again.”
“Again?” I said.
“Yes, she was back there, in Chicago. She was talking to us through the tunnel of butterflies. She was manifesting through the tunnel.”
“Holy shit,” I said. He was right. That’s why I had thought it so strange that the tunnel could have thought she was a snake.
“Don’t you see, Clara?” José María said. “The creatures—the gods—inside Mictlán, we catch glimpses of them in our world sometimes, just tiny little glimpses. They can inhabit buildings, and maybe living things, too. They manifest there, and well, we got lucky when the snake spoke to us through the wizard’s tunnel.”
“And you’re sure Blue Hummingbird didn’t make that tunnel?” I said.
“One hundred percent,” my brother said. “She showed me. The wizard named Black Wings was Guillermo. He tried so hard for so many years to get into Mictlán, and he never could. All that time, he begged Blue Hummingbird, begging her to let him into the Coil. Until he tricked her into building that tunnel. And then he disappeared. He left that tunnel down at the bottom of the lake, like a haunted house.”
“If we heard the snake speak to us through the tunnel—” I said.
“Then maybe you really did see the Ocullín through the bookcase in Minerva’s attic, too,” José María said.
I ate more flowers, hoping my belly would get full. Food was a comfort right now, the only thing that could quell my fear from having been seen by something as horrible as the Ocullín back in Chicago.
I walked to the edge of the ground we stood on to get a glimpse of the canyon around us. In this lower part of the spiral canyon, flowers invaded every wall and even the roads. Even the wasp nests were covered in flowers of every shape and kind. They dripped down like lazy diamonds and thick trumpets.
The intoxicating shapes and scents of so many flowers was something I had never expected to see in this place without light. Part of me wanted to keep those flowers with me forever.
A forest of marigolds pulsed with music and their scent just about a quarter mile from us. We walked through their trumpet-like howls, and I brushed their tops the way I might pet a dog. Afterward, we reached a clearing. I unpacked the shawl from my pack, and I placed several dozen roses in it to save for eating later.
“Let’s see if we can find a place to rest up there,” I said. “Where we won’t be so exposed.”
The taste of the flowers haunted my mouth. Mictlán had nothing that resembled weather. There was only wind and breezes. As we cut through the forest, their subtle music took on a brighter note. With each step of our approach, the flowers sang, and they released more perfume. Their song startled me.
I know this song.
I had heard Abuela Blanca sing this to us when I was a toddler, and its sweet melody filled my chest with warmth.
“That’s just like the song we’re supposed to learn for the journey to Mictlán,” I said to José María. He nodded, listening to every note.
The carpets of marigolds formed several peaks and folds, and I could see there were openings in some of its surfaces, as if someone had constructed a new architecture out of living flowers. We walked through a canopy of trees and arrived in a plaza. In its midst, an impossibly tall structure, constructed of marigolds, roses, orchids and corpse flowers, stabbed the open air of the canyon.
It was a castle, a temple of flowers.
It rose about a mile into the air, with twin stairways that led up to small conical rooms at the top. The flowers hissed and bellowed in their song, and though the building looked like it could eat us alive, I knew I should not be afraid. Even in this place without any colors, I could feel the vibrant, soft textures of all those petals, and the firm, smooth surfaces of the stalks and the stamens.
The architecture of the temple looked very familiar, but I couldn’t place it.
I tried speaking to the flowers of the building, but they only responded in song. I couldn’t understand what they were singing.
“If we get to the top, we can get a handle on how far down we’ve made it,” José María said. “Maybe we can see how much farther we have to go down the canyon, too.”
“Perhaps,” I said.
We climbed slowly, because the steps were steep and the scent of the flowers made us sleepy, but we took swigs of the water in our water bottles. José María helped me up the risers when I became afraid of the heights, and we did our best to not disturb the smoke owls that swooped above our heads. They did not attack us. Rather, I felt that the smoke owls were keeping us safe.
For now.
“Are you really going to go to that protest on Michigan Avenue when we get back?” José María said.
“If we get out, yes. This time, we’re going to make a big difference,” I said.
Nothing delighted me more than my brother’s innocence. This trip down here was just a game to him. Nothing but a romp. He was already planning on our return. I wanted to be as hopeful as him, but I knew I could not. If I found my tonal in the bottom of the Coil, I had no idea how we would ever get back.
We may be dead already for all we know, making the trip that everyone makes when their time is up.
“Do you hear that?” José María said as he put his arm on my elbow. We had almost reached the top of the temple.
I listened. Floating like a whisper, beneath the bell tones of the rocks and the ringing screech of the owls, I heard something. I also felt something.
It was viscous liquid. Heavy and with intention. Rushing, crashing, sparkling in waves. It was water.
“Sounds like a river,” my brother said.
“It’s coming from inside the temple,” I said.
We took a few more steps up the temple, and I swooned with nausea. We were so high up in the air, I was reminded of the times my father took us to the Willis Tower to the observation deck. I felt afraid but alive.
And alive was good.
José María let out a few hard noises, like a human beat box, and the sounds he emitted permitted us to see down below us. There, just over the edge of the temple, I could see thick, rubbery grasses flanking a wide river. The force of the water crashed and swelled. Inside the current of the river, tiny objects like sparkles emitted their sound signature through the liquid. Without light, I shouldn’t have been able to see anything sparkle in the river, but I could see billions of the tiny metal p
articles flow through the water.
“We must be moving in the right direction,” José María said.
“Which of the rivers do you think this is?”
There were nine rivers in Mictlán, all of them interconnected like a braid. They flowed in a spiral downward along the walls of the canyon. There was something about the sheen of the water, the twinkle inside the river that felt familiar, and good, something that felt like the safety of home.
“Clara, get your ass up here,” José María said. My brother was standing at the top of the temple with his hands on his hips. The flowers provided him a firm surface to stand on, despite the petals’ delicate appearance. “You’re never going to believe what’s up here.”
I clambered up the last riser and walked onto the flat landing. It spread before me in an area of about 300 feet by 300 feet. At its center, two shrines stood like twins. They had triangular openings but no doors. Though I could sense many of the details around me, I couldn’t feel anything that was inside those conical towers.
“No, fool, not inside the rooms; turn around!” José María said, and he yanked me by the shoulders so I could see the landscape below the temples.
I could see very far with ears instead of eyes, and there, maybe two thousand miles in the distance, I could feel all of it. I gasped.
A lake spread out below me for miles, almost as big as an ocean. Its waters were as still as a stone. I could see the way in which the river we had just seen fed into the lake, and the opening on the other side, where the river continued on, as it dove under a mountain and continued its underground journey.
Situated on top of the lake, in a perfect cross shape, stood a small city made of thorns, flowers and the bones of animals. Four roads connected the shore to the center, and at the center, a flat circular stone rotated, emitting multiple symphonies of music. The structures of the bridges and the island throbbed with life. The thorns swelled, and poison rose to their tips. The bones bent their shape as the flowers bloomed and swelled in the darkness.
The 13 Secret Cities (Omnibus) Page 20