She certainly wasn’t remotely as talkative as she’d been before. Maybe she’d been nervous and chattering nonstop was her reaction to anxiety. But tonight, I was welcoming her company and beginning to think of scenarios for the rest of the evening that were best banished from my mind.
It had been even longer since I’d done that with a woman.
I pulled her a little closer, and she came willingly. Her breasts pushed against my chest, and my thoughts meandered even further, but were interrupted by a welcome question.
“My mother is probably in my room,” she said. “Can we go to yours?”
“No problem,” I replied. “If your mind is straying in the same direction mine is, I’d rather your mother not be there.”
She laughed.
I took her hand and led her to my room.
After a fast and furious encounter, I clung to her, feeling better than I had in years. Maybe I would never love her, but I did like her. We pursued a little pillow talk for a while, and I found out that she and her mother lived in St. Augustine, Florida, and were going home after the trip. In the background of her voice as we talked, I noticed a faint accent that I couldn’t place. Spanish? That was what I finally decided, though I didn’t ask.
She was nice and seemed friendly enough. I would worry about the future later.
That was the last thing I remembered before the thick darkness returned and the gates of hell reopened.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I was back at the top of the temple at Tulum, lying on the red floor in the chamber there. The image of the feathered king was on the wall in front of me.
This was familiar, particularly when I gazed out over the nearby ocean, though the feathered king looked newer than before, but when she appeared, most memories fled. I didn’t know where I was, or what I was doing; all I knew was that I was afraid.
Of her.
She was here to kill me, and my family. I knew that. But for some reason I couldn’t run. It was as if all the gods were forbidding me to flee. I could just sit here on the stone bench at the top and let her kill me.
And she did.
I was now further in the past; somehow I knew this.
Now a small group of thatched huts lined a dirt path. In the distance another small temple, different but again familiar, with an observatory not far away to the left. A number of other buildings filled the plaza between the temple and our huts. Closest to the temple were the fine houses of the priests and rulers, then came the dwellings of the other important people in the city. At the outskirts of the city were the huts of those who mattered less in the hierarchy of our culture, those such as me. But I was a mason, so I was afforded a dwelling closer to the great temple than many, and my house was nothing to be ashamed of, though the family of the woman who originally had been chosen to be my wife by the atanzahab didn’t agree. Being members of the Xiu family and thus enemies of the divine king Kukulkan, they lived in a large house close to the temple. The ruler of the Xiu family had led the revolt against the Cocom family of Chichén Itzá and thus were the dominant family in Mayapán.
In the middle of the group of huts where I lived was a stone fireplace, and the wife I had chosen against all advice was cooking some stew with the rabbit I’d brought home earlier today, teaching my young daughter the ways of the women in our culture.
My daughter raced over to me, her eyes bright and shining, carrying a bowl of the stew. Her birth had been eight tuns ago, so she was growing up, soon to be a woman herself. We would soon have to choose an atanzahab, a matchmaker who would find her a mate. I knew it would be a fight between what we wanted and what my wife’s mother wanted. Her mother didn’t think much of me. I was only a mason, one who wrote messages on the stones or paper at the request of the priests and the rulers.
Sitting on the ground close to the stone fireplace, I carved the date on one of the stones.
11.1.1.10.
The date the world began.
As I finished my dating on the round stone, she came in, not my wife, but the one-I-was-supposed-to-marry and her mother. She carried a black knife in her hand, waving it in the air.
“What are you carving on that stone?”
“I am just carving the date,” I replied.
“You should be carving our name,” said the mother. She was thin and had a beaked nose, reminding me of a crow. Her lips were drawn and tight, making her look older than her age of two katuns.
“Our family is the important one in this city,” the mother continued. “We came to Mayapán and conquered it. The Xiu will conquer other cities in time. We will rule the world.”
“The Cocoms are powerful too,” I said. The Cocoms were my wife’s family. The divine emperor, Kukulkan, for whom at least two great temples had been named, had been a member of the Cocoms. The mother, a Xiu, was their enemy. And thus mine as well.
“And your family of the jaguars is even less worthy,” she went on. “You should not be allowed to live in our city. Losing your family will mean nothing to us.”
“The Jaguar God helped found the great city with Kukultan’s greatest temple,” I said.
But she ignored me, as always and led her daughter away.
I felt a pain in my heart as though I had been stabbed, but it continued to beat.
Then it slowed, and the darkness returned.
I was lying in a bed made of saplings just a few inches off the floor, covered with a straw mat. The floor of the small room with stone block walls was dirt. A thatched roof covered the room. Another straw mat hung in the open doorway, though I could see around and under the mat to the open courtyard beyond. In the distance was a large temple jutting toward the night heavens, lit with fires up the many steps, one for each day of the year.
I was alone for only a moment.
The door mat was pushed aside, and a short young woman entered. Her skin was brown and she had a long nose and a forehead that slanted steeply toward the top of her head. Her eyes challenged mine, and I found her attractive, yet threatening in some way I didn’t understand.
When she spoke, I found her words strange, yet I understood every one.
Then she stabbed me, and darkness intervened again.
Somehow I loved her, and I thought she loved me. Until she hunted me down and killed me. Again and again. Sometimes I had another wife—one who loved me. The times blurred. Sometimes she was my wife.
We were in a circle, dancing to strange music. Two more dancers were in the middle of the circle, one tossing a handful of reeds at the other.
We were making love. Was she now my wife again in some distant bygone age? The wife I loved or the wife determined to kill me? The years crushed together and blurred my mind and dreams. I knew that there was a woman who wanted to kill me over and over again, as well as a woman I loved who had born me a daughter, again and again.
Who were these women? At times their identities became entwined, and I just had to die and move on.
I was on a temple, and she pushed me off.
I was in a field of corn, and she stabbed me.
We were back in a straw bed together. Her smile vanished as we finished our lovemaking, replaced by an expression of anger and determination. Then a knife again, and again, and again. More agony. More darkness.
Sometimes I knew her for years before she killed me. Sometimes we had just met. But it always ended the same way: in darkness, further and further down the dark abyss of time, leaving behind the other one I loved with the daughter I also loved.
Now the darkness was around me again, but I was alone. In a comfortable bed, not one made of straw, and on the ship. I rubbed my forehead as I tried to forg
et my dreams.
The bedside phone rang. I reluctantly answered it.
A woman’s voice whispered into my ear. “Your death is foretold.”
I rolled over in the bed and reached for Carolyn.
She was gone.
CHAPTER NINE
It was two in the morning. Disturbed by the dreams and the phone call, I groggily climbed out of bed and went to look for Carolyn.
Parts of the ship were quiet, but others were crowded and noisy. The late-night crowd was still hanging out in the lounges and on deck. Except at the top of the ship.
Exiting the elevator on deck thirteen, the top deck, I walked to the balcony overlooking the aft of the ship.
In the gleam of the full moon the water stretched without pause in all directions to the horizon. Behind us our wake was slowly spreading out into a wide V.
I leaned against the rail, gazing over what seemed like infinite water. I was alone.
Where had Carolyn gone? I had walked through the top lounge without seeing her. Strange. She’d wanted what had happened more than I had, so why had she left? Did she have anything to do with the dreams?
And what about the dreams? I felt as though I no longer slept at all. My eyes were sore, as was my mind. It felt as if I had dashed through a millennium of time, chased through the years by a madwoman—who then called me when I woke up.
Why was I being hunted in life after life by this woman? What had I done to this crazed one? And how did she know that I was the one she was after in this life?
Or maybe it was a mistake. Maybe she was after someone else? The problem with that theory was that the dreams were definitely mine, and she was chasing me in all the dreams.
Was it someone I’d just met?
Carolyn or Eve? Or Eve’s mother? Carolyn’s mother?
Eme? I couldn’t believe that. Not Eme. We had developed a bond. I could feel it.
I sensed someone beside me. She had arrived silently.
Eve. I had no doubt. I waited for her to speak first. She said nothing for a long time, staring out over the water with me.
“Did you have a good evening with Carolyn?” she asked.
Uncertainty conquered me, but I knew I had to answer. “We danced for a while,” I said.
“Is that all?”
“What do you mean?”
She didn’t reply, but clearly she knew more. How much? I glanced over at her. She turned and her eyes met mine. There was no anger, merely a sadness, as if she had expected more from me. But why would she care? I decided to change the subject.
“Why does your mother hate me?”
She paused, then looked away. “She is just trying to protect me.”
“From what?”
“You.”
“Me! Why?”
A strange expression crossed her face. “It’s too complicated to explain right now. Maybe someday.”
“You told me in Tulum that we could never talk again.”
Again, she didn’t answer. Finally, she glanced down at her watch, then without a word whirled abruptly and left.
I continued to gaze out over the water, but the silence was intimidating, stretching forever, in both distance and time.
I remained until the first rays of sunrise began to crawl over the horizon, thinking of all those who had chased me in my dreams, wondering how much of it was real. Were the dreams somehow linked to memories? In my previous job I had hunted a lot of men and killed many of them. But at no time had I ever suffered from dreams like these, where someone hunted me. In my life, I was the hunter, not the prey.
Weariness overcame my resolve to study the morning sky, and I finally left and returned to my room.
To find it completely ransacked from one end to the other.
CHAPTER TEN
Our next stop was Progresso, on the northern coast of Yucatán, where I had signed up for a tour of Chichén Itzá, the most prominent Mayan site known today. But that was tomorrow. Today was an at-sea day. I’m sure the voyage from George Town to Progresso could’ve easily been made in less than a day, but we needed another day at sea for the proper organization of the cruise itinerary.
It didn’t make complete sense to me, but I’d given up trying to figure out the cruise line’s agenda. I was just here to relax.
And now, apparently, I had to avoid being killed.
I cleaned up my room, locked the door, and crashed for a few hours.
Six, to be exact.
I woke up at two in the afternoon, groggy but functional. Barely.
Hungry, I took the elevator up to the buffet on the top deck, only to find it closed. But the hamburger stand was open. I ordered two, filled up a glass with tea, and sat down at a table next to the windows. I still couldn’t see any land.
The hamburgers were good. I usually didn’t eat them, but this was a vacation, both from my job and from my usual diet.
As I sat munching my food, I felt as though I was no longer alone, again as if someone was watching me. Glancing around, I saw no one I recognized. But I still had a bad feeling. Not only did I sense that someone was watching me, but I also believed that this person was my enemy.
My mind went back to my dreams last night. Was it her? Was she just someone I’d made up in my dreams, or was she real? And if she was real, was she in this time with me?
I had never been afraid of any human being before, but now I felt uneasy. Maybe not afraid, but certainly disconcerted. A little bothered.
After finishing my meal, I rose to leave. A woman was leaving the buffet area, the hem of her black dress twisting a little in the wind coming in from the deck as she opened the door. I couldn’t see her face.
My bad feeling intensified.
I didn’t sleep well that night, still having the continual feeling that I wasn’t alone. Finally, I drifted off early in the morning.
A noise awakened me a couple of hours later. The curtains to the balcony were blowing in the muggy breeze.
The balcony door was open!
Immediately I was wide awake and standing beside the bed, staring at the balcony.
Was someone behind the curtains? I thought I saw a shadow. I watched it move back out onto the balcony. I half expected a woman with a knife to come running through the curtains and attack me.
But how could anyone be out there?
I took the steak knife out of the drawer where I’d hidden it and crept to the balcony.
Nothing. Empty. No woman, no man, not even a bird.
But there was a red rhododendron on the balcony chair.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The pier at the city of Progresso, on the northern coast of Yucatán, is billed as the longest pier in the world, jutting five miles out into the Gulf of Mexico. Buses and taxis are available at the end of the pier, where the cruise ships dock, to convey passengers from the ship to town.
Progresso is also famous for being essentially at the center of the Chicxulub Crater, where a large asteroid struck 66 million years ago and wiped out 75% of life on Earth, including all the non-flying dinosaurs.
At dinner two nights before, Carolyn had talked me into taking the tour to Chichén Itzá, about a two-hour bus ride. She suggested that we rent a car instead, but I was uneasy at the thought of being alone with her, so we signed up for the bus, which was waiting on the pier.
I sat next to Carolyn, wanting to ask her why she’d deserted my bed the night before last, but the bus was crowded and behind our seat sat Eve and Eme. Across the aisle from them were two of their thugs. I had climbed on the bus first an
d sat down in a seat near the back, only to have the others tromp back and surround me.
If they were looking for trouble, I could supply them with some. But not now. I leaned back in my seat and went to sleep.
By the time I awakened, the bus had passed through Mérida, the capital of Yucatán, and we were hurtling down a two-lane road into the countryside. The terrain alternated between hemp farms, dry and dusty and tangled, and forests of short trees, struggling to survive in the arid weather. Limestone rocks abounded in the fields of hemp. It had to be a hell of a lot of work to be a farmer here. Preparing the fields for planting would be quite a chore.
At Chichén Itzá the bus parked near El Castillo, the Temple of Kukulkan, the most famous of all Mayan ruins. As we climbed down into the heat of the late-morning sun, I felt as if I’d been here before, though I knew I hadn’t. Carolyn and I walked over to the tall pyramid. Three of the four sides, with their narrow, steep steps, were completely reconstructed, with the unfinished side more like the way it had been found in 1843, the central steps still being put back together by the archeologists of the Mexican government.
Each side of the pyramid had ninety-one steps to the top. Adding the one shared step of the platform on the top made 365 steps, one for each day of the year. It was built between the ninth and twelfth centuries. Theories about how Chichén Itzá fell abounded. Was it taken over by the newer city of Mayapán in the thirteenth century, or did it fall earlier?
The Spaniards called the pyramid El Castillo, but the Mayan name was Temple of Kukulkan, the Feathered Serpent God, also known as Quetzalcoatl, the god-king that Eve claimed landed at Tulum first. Again, I wondered how she could possibly know this.
Tourists were no longer allowed to climb the stairs to the top. Neither were they allowed to enter or climb most of the ruins here.
The Hauntings of Scott Remington Page 6