The Hauntings of Scott Remington

by Robert B Marcus Jr

  Returning early to the ship, I sat down to read my book on the deck near the pool. I drank a strawberry daiquiri and found myself staring out over the ocean again; I couldn’t concentrate on my book. I was trying to read about civilizations lining the Mediterranean while my mind was fixated on my dreams. And her. The sites embedded into my mind felt real, as if I’d been there, though I wasn’t sure where “there” was. After a while, I went down to the ship’s computer room and searched. The problem was I didn’t know where to begin. And the dreams didn’t seem to be in present time, so clearly I also didn’t know when to look.

  So of course, I found nothing.

  A young boy approaching puberty was hunched over one of the other computers. His eyes darted my way occasionally and finally, observing my obvious frustration, he asked, “What are you looking for?”

  “I’m not sure. I’ve had some weird dreams lately, and I feel like I should remember the places in my dreams.”

  “But you don’t recognize them?”

  “No. And there’s no reason I should. I know I’ve never been there.” In this life, my mind added. I wasn’t sure where that had come from.

  “Tell me about them. I’ve been all over this part of the world.”

  I did, but he shook his head. “Don’t seem familiar,” he muttered.

  Then his face lit up. “But there’s an old dude on the bottom deck of the ship who knows everything. I think he’s the ship’s doctor.”

  “He knows everything?”

  “Nobody knows everything, dude,” he replied. “But this guy knows a lot. I’ve been to his talks about the Indians who lived near here, and he knows a lot about them.”

  “The Mayans?”

  “Maybe. Yeah, that sounds familiar.”

  I had come down here to find out a few things, which I had failed to do, but maybe this was a lead. I thanked him and left.

  “No problem, big guy,” he said as I stood up.

  The doctor’s office wasn’t hard to find. I’d always had the ability to track people and things easily. Besides, there were lots of signs on the first deck pointing to his office.

  The door was shut, so I knocked.

  “Come on in if you’re a passenger. If you’re not, come in anyway—I’m bored.”

  I opened the door and entered a small office with a blue leather sofa against one wall and a desk and comfortable-looking chair against the opposite wall. Clinging to the side of the desk was a tiny bookcase, and facing the door was the entrance to a small exam room. The “old dude” was much younger than I had expected. Dr. Roland Winkles was no more than forty, with red hair, loose and curly, down to the middle of his back. His reddish-brown mustache hung down around his lips, looking like a misplaced nest for small birds.

  Dr. Winkles gazed at me, amusement in his eyes. “Sit down, sit down.”

  I took a seat on the sofa, then he said, “Tell me what’s bothering you, my young friend.”

  “A little abrupt, aren’t we?” I said.

  “I’m a doctor. People always have a very specific reason to come see me, but sometimes it’s hard to discover, because many people won’t admit the truth to themselves. I often must jolt them in the right direction. So, what’s going on with you?”

  “Dreams,” I replied.

  “Dreams, eh? I’m not much of a psychiatrist. Didn’t have much aptitude for that in medical school.”

  “I’m more interested in the sites of the dreams, and maybe the timing.”

  “That makes no sense at all.”

  So I told him my dreams. At the end, he merely nodded. “I have no idea what they mean, but I have some ideas about the sites. He went around the desk to the bookcase and pulled out a book titled something like History of New Orleans, a thick, hard-covered tome.

  He flipped to a page near the middle of the book and showed it to me.

  “This is Canal Street about 1850,” he said. “Look familiar?”

  I stared in amazement. This is where she had chased me, near where I had lived at that time. With my wife and daughter.

  What was I thinking? This was a picture from 1850, about 170 years ago. How could I possibly think I had lived there?

  Dr. Winkles observed his success and said, “One of the other dreams was easier—at least in a way. The when is more identifiable, as is the where, since it is linked to the when.”

  “I have no idea what you mean.”

  “What it seems like you’re describing is the Spanish invasion of Yucatán in the fifteen hundreds.”

  Suddenly I knew he was right. It all made sense—the men in metal helmets and chest armor, riding horses. But where had it been?

  This time Dr. Winkles went to the desktop computer in the center of his desk. His fingers flew over the keys and he motioned me over.

  “The descriptions sound Mayan to me, particularly The Temple of the Seven Dolls near your family’s sisal plantation. So I’m going to pull up some famous sites and show them to you. What about this one?”

  First he showed me Chichén Itzá—I recognized it from all the pictures on the ship—then Uxmal, then Palenque, then Tulum, and on and on. None of them looked familiar. I was about to give up when he pulled up a place I’d never heard of—Mani, a suburb of Mayapán, another place I’d never heard of.

  “That’s it!” I said.

  He looked surprised. “Not many people have heard of it, much less been there, which makes me wonder about your dreams. How real are they—were they? Let me give you a bit of a history lesson.”

  “Though Chichén Itzá was around long before it ruled northern Yucatán from about 800 to 1050 AD, this is the time for which it is best known. After that it fell, though some recent carbon dating has questioned the date of the fall. Why it fell we really don’t know, although many experts think that the entire civilization declined because of two severe droughts. Did the ruling Cocom family fall? Was it conquered? We’re not sure. But fall it did, slowly collapsing into ruin, the great pyramids tumbling into chaos after they were abandoned during the great droughts.

  “At some time after that, the Xiu family moved in from Uxmal, conquering primarily the surrounding farmlands and cenotes—those are the sinkholes found around the Yucatán—and founded a new city about forty-five miles northwest of Chichén Itzá, Mayapán. The facts aren’t clear. It may be that the Xiu family actually had already founded Mayapán and then conquered the territory including Chichén Itzá, but either way, Mayapán took over the rule of the end of the Mayan Empire, coordinating the remnants of civilization in that area and lasting until about seventy years after the Spanish arrival in 1517 or so. And sometime there was a great war where Chichén Itzá was burned, along with many other Mayan cities and farmland.

  “Again, the info differs from source to source; there is a codex or two, the equivalent of a Mayan book, that claims Mayapán fell before the Spanish invasion. But a lot of Mayan hieroglyphics haven’t been decoded yet. Maybe one of them will produce a more accurate answer. In any event, there is a village, a suburb of Mayapán called Mani, in which a Spanish bishop, Frey Diego de Landa, ordered all the books and statues of the Mayans burned and destroyed. I think that is what your dream is about.”

  “When?”

  “July 12, 1562 was the date.”

  “Did he burn Mayans too?”

  “Apparently he did, which goes along with your dream. You also said that in your dream, your daughter answered when a soldier asked you a question. Later writings indicate that he was trying to destroy not only Mayan scrolls and history, but also their entire culture, and he felt that it wouldn’t hurt to kill anyone who spoke fluent Mayan. When the Spanis
h conquered Yucatán there were probably at least sixty indigenous languages, but the one that concerned them was the Mayan spoken by the elites. Your daughter probably replied in that Mayan, putting both of you into that category.”

  It all fell together in my mind. My dream was of me and other prisoners being rounded up by Spanish soldiers and led up to the lawn in front of the Spanish church in Mani, Yucatán, where the evil deed took place.

  How did I know all this? Confusion conquered my mind. I’d never been to Yucatán; why would I dream of the mass destruction that the Spanish had brought there? Or dream of my daughter and me being burned to death? I could still feel the pain of the flames as they consumed my body and hear my daughter’s screams, which hurt far worse than my own pain. I had failed her.

  So, my first dream was from 1850 or so, and the last from 1562. Then there was the short dream that I’d had the same night as the last one. The one involving a row of haciendas along a dark street.

  Was that from a time period between the two dreams? What in the world did it mean? And who was the woman who had killed my daughter and me in the hacienda?

  Suddenly I knew that wasn’t the only time she’d killed us. But who was she?

  I thanked Dr. Winkles and skipped dinner, substituting for it with a huge ice cream sundae at the bar on the seventh floor, then went to my room after finishing it off.

  I slept through the night peacefully, without any more dreams.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The next day we anchored off George Town, Grand Cayman Island, and took a tender in to shore. This was quite a different culture from Jamaica, more formal, less crowded. No taxi vendors or relatives of taxi vendors.

  I walked by the Canadian Bank of Commerce and wondered what the teller would do if I marched in and demanded all my holdings in small bills. Doubt if there would be much surprise; it was probably common in the Caymans. That’s why people with something to hide deposited so much money here.

  I had registered for a tour and so I sent a postcard to Anthony Simone from the city of Hell, Grand Cayman. I didn’t know anyone else who would care. He would get a kick out of the postmark, even if he was mad at me.

  I took the tender back to the Sea Lady and read again on the deck. I hadn’t seen Eve and Eme since dinner two nights before. Hopefully they would be at dinner tonight.

  They were.

  The conversation at the meal centered primarily on what everyone had done that day. One tour or another, everyone bragged about what a good time he or she had experienced. I wondered how much was true.

  Carolyn met my gaze a couple of times, with a bright glow in the depths of her eyes. I had the feeling that she had come on the cruise looking for a man. I hoped for her success, but few of the passengers were eligible bachelors below the age of forty, so I didn’t expect her to have much luck. Too bad, because she was certainly attractive and friendly enough, although a little talkative for my taste.

  Most of the other side of the table conspicuously ignored me. Interestingly enough, the empty seat at the table had been filled with another thug, this one small and wiry, with darting eyes and the nose of a ferret. I wondered how the old lady had accomplished replacing a passenger who had disappeared. I had already surmised that she was powerful, and this confirmed my conclusion.

  Whenever I looked across the table, they were turned toward each other, muttering in tones too low for me to hear. Everyone but Eve and Eme. Eme stared at me constantly, as if she wanted to ask me something. Eve, on the other hand, glanced at me intermittently. I often caught Eve staring at me, her emerald eyes thoughtful but without any emotion that I could detect. No hostility, no anger, certainly no warm welcome . . . nothing, apparently, but distant speculation. I tried to meet her gaze but found it difficult. She made me uncomfortable, as if she knew my every thought. And underlying it all was the feeling that I knew her somehow. I was usually extremely good at reading people, deciding whether they were threats or not, but I couldn’t begin to read Eve.

  My appetite gone, I excused myself and left. I felt her eyes on me as I walked away, still thoughtful as ever. But what in hell was she thinking about and what did I have to do with it?

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The next day brought Cozumel. With a tour of Tulum.

  Ancient civilizations had always fascinated me, and none were more interesting than the Mayans. As Dr. Winkles had explained, they had ruled this region once, from at least three thousand years ago until the Spanish had conquered them in the 1500s, creating an advanced civilization that stretched from the bottom of Middle America to northern Yucatán. The early cities were further south, but those had faded with time, and by the arrival of the Spanish the major active cities were primarily in Yucatán. The huge city of Chichén Itzá dominated for a while, but had already been conquered by other cities by the time the Spanish invaded, though it was still quite populated. I had never been to Chichén Itzá, with its great cenote full of bones and ghosts, its bloody ball court, and the jeweled jaguar hidden in the depths of the great temple.

  Tulum, here on the turquoise coast, was a Mayan ceremonial center, tiny compared to Chichén Itzá, but I was told that the site was spectacular, and the architecture had inspired Frank Lloyd Wright. It was one of the last Mayan cities, probably ruled from Mayapán once that city had taken over the northern part of the Mayan Empire after the fall of Chichén Itzá. It had peaked from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, and even lasted a while beyond the Spanish invasion. It was very important in Mayan trade, accessing both water and land trade routes. It had become very popular during and right after the great droughts, because it had more water than many other cities.

  For that reason I decided to visit the site. Forty-five minutes on the ferry from Cozumel to the mainland, then herded like cows up a narrow road onto a crowded, hot bus, then an hour-long ride to Tulum. Our tour guide claimed to be pure-blooded Mayan, and he had a cousin with a roadside stand full of overpriced goods. We stopped there, of course.

  I didn’t buy anything for myself, but when a boy about ten years old was negotiating for a chess set, I gave him a little help. I suspect that the price of forty dollars was a good one, but how could I know? At least it was a whole lot cheaper than the $250 he was quoted at first. I hated haggling over price. No matter how much of a concession I received, I still felt cheated in the end. Just put the price on the product and let me buy it or leave it. But different cultures do things in different ways. Still, I was glad to help the boy. All it took was a glower at the small Mexican huckster. I often had that effect on people. When you’re six-four and 220 pounds, most of which is muscle, people don’t usually argue much with you. And he had no idea how good I was with every kind of handheld weapon invented by mankind.

  As long as it took to haggle over the price of things, you would have thought the driver would have allowed a little more time at his cousin’s stand, but he said fifteen minutes and meant it. By thirteen minutes he was counting passengers. By fifteen we were pulling out.

  It’s easy to be unimpressed with how the Mexican government handles its tourist attractions. It’s true that the charges are low, but services are too. The price of entry to Tulum came with the tour package, so I don’t know how much the entry fee was, but for two more U.S. dollars we had the privilege of riding in a dusty open train on wheels behind a tractor from the parking lot to the actual entrance. A cluster of shops lurked around the trolley stop, but the proprietors were not very aggressive here. In any event, there was no way to stop and explore the shops. We were herded onto the trolley and meandered down the rutted road to the entrance to Tulum. The last hundred feet of the road was accompanied by a row of grass huts and more salesmen (and women), none of whom suffered from shyness. They tried to hawk their wares as we wobbled by. One held up a flute shape
d like a large phallus. I have no idea how the merchants thought we were going to buy the product. Jump off the trolley? I imagine that the tourists who chose to save the two dollars and walk to the ruins were hit up relentlessly along the way.

  After we exited the trolley, our guide led us up a narrow-paved pathway, through an ancient crumbling wall and onto the grassy plain of Tulum. The main temple stood proudly on the lip of the cliff overlooking the sea. The remains of twenty to thirty other buildings were scattered around the primary quarter-mile-square site. Most of these were mere piles of rocks, with the hint of purpose hidden in their depths, but a few had been restored to recognizable structures, including several along the shore. I couldn’t see the ocean from the entrance, but I knew it was there.

  Our guide took us under a tree to shield the ninety-five-degree sunlight, and told us about the site. He also told us that, according to Mayan predictions, our current cycle of history should have ended on December 21, 2012. Of course, many of the Mayan hieroglyphics were still not translated, so who knew what that date actually meant? We were still here, so it obviously didn’t mean the end of the world, as many New Age–type people had predicted.

  After his talk was finished, we were taken to the base of the Primary Temple and then allowed to roam, with instructions to meet back at the bus in two hours.

  The land climbed up toward the sea, as though it wanted a better view, and to completely appreciate the beauty a voyeur had to walk up a fifty-foot incline to the left or right of the temple. I made my way to the edge of the cliff.

  It was noon. The sun was directly overhead. In front of me, green water stretched to the horizon, with small waves crashing onto the narrow white shore about fifty feet below me. If I had brought my bathing suit, I could have gone swimming, because there was a narrow, steep, but climbable path down to the sand about a hundred yards to the left of me. Many people were playing in the waves, splashing and throwing themselves around, having fun. I wondered how that felt, having fun. Maybe I could learn.