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.
I grabbed José María by the arm and covered him from the path of the creature. I slashed in the air, hoping to fight of the spikes from the shapeless body and the sense of desolation and despair that seeped from its dark.
“Your parents are next,” the Ocul
lín roared, and it plunged a spike deep in my thigh. It was then that I screamed with all the power I could muster, and the song that erupted from my scream turned the canyon of Mictlán into a bed of fire.
My scream sparked balls of black fire above the still waters of the lake, and in the distance, I felt spiders and owls fly off in fright. Each time I swept the knife in the air, it left long trails of sound like whispers. The Ocullín flinched at the blade, and he was genuinely afraid.
At least, he seemed afraid. Beneath the dark folds of his body, I spotted many mouths of all shapes and sizes. All of them were smiling.
“You don’t need a tonal, Wanderer. Don’t bother trying.”
Get to the water, the reflection in the water.
I remembered something my mother had said. “No more travel through mirrors,” she had said. And she was right. No more travel through mirrors.
I grabbed my brother by the collar and I dragged him with me as we dove into the still surface of the water on the lake of Mictlán.
I had come to this place to find my tonal, and I would get it any way that I could.
As we approached the mirror-like surface of the lake, I noticed small columns of smoke drifting from it. My face, that terrible misshapen, plastic surgery monster face, stared at me as I tumbled toward it with my brother, his eyes peeled back in fear.
When we struck the surface, the knife in my right fist went red-hot, and I felt the Ocullín scream as it chased after us.
I swung the knife to the left, to the right, and in any direction, hoping it would tear through our attacker.
We exploded into the smoking mirror.
José María and I traveled through the glassy material of the water, and as we pushed through its jagged prisms, the Ocullín followed us.
I had been here before, and as the swaths of white light engulfed me, I knew we were returning in the very same way in which we came.
The Ocullín tore through the air, making the sounds of a bottle rocket, darting to keep up with us.
We fought without bodies, and we used the sound that came from inside us to cast off the ferocious anger and savagery of the monster behind us. As we spun through the vast crystal landscape, I spotted a nautilus shell in the distance. Farther back, beyond it, a vast field of black stripes. I had seen three cities in this transitory place, but now I wanted to see none.
Farther in the distance, I saw more pinpoints, like stars. In my heart, I knew they were cities, too.
This was the tunnel that connected the cities.
The Ocullín roared behind us. He was all at once a jet engine, the sound of metal shears and the angriest screech of a predator.
Inside the glass, the Ocullín slashed at me with claw and bristle, and he sliced my arms, my legs. The gashes I felt were worse than any I had ever experienced when I had a body. I came close to the Ocullín, and it wasn’t until I willed myself to escape his dark body that I felt myself gather my brother José María to shoot us up and out of the white glass.
We burst through the center of the dome, and we stumbled on the floor of butterflies. Hundreds of them took off in flight. A wet sound sloshed around us.
“José María,” I screamed. He had landed on the far end of the dome, and he scrambled to where I stood. “The dome—run!”
As we ran for the door, the wet sound became a roar. The butterflies lost their solidity, and water poured through the top of the dome. The structure was leaking, and soon it would collapse. Icy drops hit my face, and I knew that people didn’t survive the cold waters of Lake Michigan in late fall.
We ran into the tunnel. My pack cut into my shoulders, and my legs burned with soreness. We had a long way to cover in the tunnel.
“We’re not going to make it,” José María said. “It’s too long to go.”
He was crying as we stomped on the butterflies. Cracks were appearing in the walls, and butterflies danced in the air, in a stupor.
Then we heard the crash behind us.
“The lake,” I said.
I looked over my shoulder to look behind us.
Water and foam, crusted in white and blue, barreled through the tunnel. It would reach us within seconds, and then it would be all over.
And inside that form, I spotted a black mass made of black needles and hungry mouths. Thousands of legs and no heart.
My heart pounded, and my ankles ached as we ran
“Thanks for the ticket back,” the Ocullín screamed at me. “I owe you, Wanderer.”
“Call her, José María,” I said. “Call her!”
“Call who?”
“Blue Hummingbird.”
José María laughed out loud, with pure joy and a youthful candor. He winked at me. He opened up his mouth and sang a word, made of long syllables and sensuous utterances.
And she appeared then.
The tunnel roared to life. A the butterflies that made up its walls blew bright red. We stumbled. The path behind us sloped backward and we he had to scramble to get a foothold. More cracks appeared in the walls, and water seeped through the blood-red surface of insects. The water in the tunnel rushed toward us, and soon we would be engulfed.
As we ran, I spotted a single blue eye on the right wall. It had no eyelid, and instead a membrane flickered over it.
The tunnel constricted, shimmied and slithered, and I knew then that it was moving upward, in it snake form, allowing the water behind us to move away. We held onto the walls with our fingers, digging into the butterflies so we wouldn’t slide back into the water.
“She’s here, Clara,” José María said. She’s taking us to the top!”
Indeed, I felt it. The tunnel was alive, and strong, a snake hundreds of feet long beneath Lake Michigan.
And then a dagger of light.
We felt thousands of pounds of pressure shift as our ears popped, and then water poured over us as sunlight burst through the walls.
The butterflies were now dead, and they washed over us as we got tossed onto a hard surface and the sun blinded us.
Sun, glorious sun.
I gasped for air and got on my hands and knees. Two people on bikes stared at us as they rode on the bike path, and the jagged metal of the skyline cut out the fading sun. I felt relieved to be on a concrete walkway, cold as ice, but dry. We were back in the place where we began, at the lakeshore. Beneath us I could see the spot where we had entered the tunnel long ago.
Nonetheless, cold water had still dampened our clothes and our shoes. I was shaking uncontrollably, and the sun blinded me.
“Call 911,” I heard the biker say to the other. The water was so cold it burned, and José María coughed, on his side. I looked back at the water, and I saw a single line of green zig zag back into the water, dissolving into the current of the lake. The tunnel of butterflies was gone, and so was Blue Hummingbird.
But the Ocullín is here.
I gathered all my will to live and dragged my brother away from the water. That deadly water. We hobbled all the way to where the bikers stood. Sirens wailed, and I saw an ambulance whiz toward us.
If I told the EMTs the right lies, they would take us to the ER without alerting our parents.
José María and I parted ways that afternoon, and my return to school became a fever dream. I was behind on my coursework, and every one of my senses was on fire. I felt a hunger that tore at my insides. I ate six full trays of pasta, meat, fruit and desserts three times a day, and after eating all that food, it was still not enough.
At night, I sweated through the sheets, and I feared the moonlight coming through the blinds. I considered playing music, but I feared that my playlists would lead me back to my playlists that featured Arkangel. I knew if I listened, I might never sleep again.
I also bit down on the meaty part of my thumb at night in a rage. I choked back tears of my failure, and just as I got close to chewing through the bone, I got up to bandage my digit.
I stayed up until dawn reading for my classes. That became easier than
trying to fool myself into thinking I could sleep.
In those few times I drifted into sleep, I did not dream.
Each night, I vomited bile into the toilet in the shared bathroom at the end of the hall, and every time I looked down into the yellow liquid, I expected to find snakes swimming in it.
Morgan urged me to go to the university clinic. Instead, I swaddled my thoughts around the way I had failed in my journey through the Coil.
José María emailed me and sent me private messages every day. I ignored all of them.
Colors screamed, and smells roared. I didn’t know how to make any of it stop.
At the end of that week, I walked with José María from the top of Michigan Avenue. He had met me at the Belmont stop on the Red Line, and he had offered me a hot coffee on our way down to Michigan Avenue. I had taken one sip and vomited right at the station.
The intensity of the colors of the world was worse. They hurt my good eye, and all sounds had become so amplified that even laughter made me cringe in pain.
But we didn’t talk about why I vomited.
I was having a hard time talking to my brother since our return.
We got off on Chicago Avenue and walked east toward the top of Michigan Avenue. My heavy breathing sounded like songs of despair and sadness. I heard the music of my breath now, and the music of all things.
The music of the real world was not always one of beauty.
We wore several layers as the wind bit into our skin. I handed José María a container of flyers I brought to hand out at the rally while I Instagrammed photos to our OLF group.
“You look like shit,” José María said to me.
Nightmares had filled my dreams every night since I came back from Mictlán, and I had caught a terrible cold that brought wet coughs each time I tried to talk.
“Why are you still going through the motions with this plan?” José María said.
“I’m like a zombie,” I said. “The truth is, I don’t want to go to this OLF thing anymore, but—”
The 13 Secret Cities (Omnibus) Page 23