by J; P Voelkel
“What do you—?” began Max, but before he could finish the question, he heard a familiar frenzied snarling.
“If I turn around now,” he said, “will I see a pack of angry hellhounds thundering toward me, eyes crazed with bloodlust, fangs bared, foaming at the mouth and dripping acid saliva in anticipation of eating me?”
“Yes.”
“So how do we launch this thing?”
Chapter Twenty-three
THE SEA OF STARS
For a while, the village of San Andrés was visible in the distance, lit up by the blue flashing lights of a fleet of police cars. But then the boat was pitched and tossed from wave to wave until Max lost all sense of direction, and he thought they would die for sure. He couldn’t see land, he couldn’t even distinguish sky from sea; all was wild, howling, sloshing grayness.
They were propelled along in the current, their little rowboat slicing through the water like Neptune’s chariot towed by dolphins. They were either being transported to their date in Xibalba or swept to certain death.
Or maybe both.
The wind howled; the waves roared; there was no chance of conversation.
Max and Lola sat facing each other, holding on to the sides of the boat. It was like a demented teacups ride. Even Lola looked terrified, which Max found more scary than anything.
They covered more miles that night in their ramshackle rowboat than any mariner would ever believe. And always they headed west, into the end of the world, into the setting sun.
After what felt like hours, the waves began to calm, but the slower their little boat moved, the more ocean it let in. Soon, a modest aquarium’s worth of sea creatures—crabs, rays, starfish, crayfish, and even a small octopus—swilled around their feet.
They were dangerously low in the water.
Brine oozed in at every joint.
A mist rose off the waves in the cold evening air.
It was impossible to see anything now.
They were lost in a fog in a sinking boat.
Soon it would be dark.
“Look for the lighthouse at Finisterre,” called Lola. “When we see the light we’re nearly home.”
Max tried not to think about how this voyage was most likely to end.
A whirring noise penetrated his consciousness. He looked up.
“It sounds like a helicopter,” he said. “We’re saved!”
“I have come for my bride,” rasped a familiar voice over a megaphone.
“It’s Landa!” yelled Lola. “I mean Tzelek!”
“Surrender or die!” commanded the voice.
Through a gap in the mist, Max saw that Tzelek-in-Landa’s body was climbing down a rope ladder. He was surprisingly agile, despite his twisted foot. Two red eyes blazed out of the fog. He was nearly level with them now.
“Hoop, stay close!” Lola shouted. “If he can pick you off, he’ll kill you! It’s me and the necklet he wants … and he has to keep me alive for that!”
Too late. Max felt an icy grasp on his neck.
Tzelek’s sharp fingernails were once again digging into his skin.
“He’s got me!” Max wheezed to Lola.
“Take that!” screamed Lola, hitting Tzelek with her oar.
The boat rocked wildly, and the oar disintegrated into rotten shards.
With one hand still around Max’s throat, Tzelek grabbed Lola by the hair and forced her down. “So what happened to looking pretty and making tortillas and bearing my children? I’ll deal with you in a moment, wifey,” he said, in a voice that sent chills down Max’s spine.
Pinning Lola to the floor of the boat with his viciously pointed leather boot, Tzelek picked Max up by the neck, ready to throw him over the side.
At the exact moment Max felt himself losing the battle, felt his feet lifting from the floor, and already felt the cold salt water sucking him down, he was blinded by a bright light.
When we see the light we’re nearly home.
He remembered that people who came close to dying talked in magazines about walking to the light.
He realized that this was the end.
He looked toward Lola for one last farewell.
She winked at him.
Then, as if in slow motion, she reached into the bottom of the boat, picked up the octopus, and threw it straight at him.
Wait, not at him—at Tzelek.
HA!
At Tzelek.
The octopus hung from Tzelek’s nose by its beak, its tentacles thrashing wildly in his mustache as they attempted to find suction on his bony cheeks.
“Get it off me!” screeched Tzelek, losing his balance as the octopus suffocated him with its rubbery, blubbery body.
Moving as one, Max and Lola went to push his flailing body overboard.
He resisted their efforts with superhuman strength but then, as if an unseen force had kicked him from behind, he suddenly plunged into the water.
Still the bright light advanced on them.
“Guardacostas!” boomed a voice. Through the drifting mist, Max saw the grizzled old sailor from the beach manning the huge searchlight on the coast guard cutter.
“Hombre al agua!” called Lola, waving at him furiously. “Man overboard!”
“What?” said Max incredulously. “Why are you helping Tzelek?”
“I’m helping us,” Lola explained. “They’ll be so busy rescuing him, they won’t notice us sneaking away.”
As the old sailor directed his beam onto Tzelek in the water, and the other crew members yelled instructions and threw in life preservers, Lola bailed out the rowboat with her hands. “We’re sinking fast,” she said. “We haven’t got much time. Break your oar in two and let’s get out of here.”
The fog was dense now, and the ebb tide was strong. Using half an oar each, they rowed quickly out of the coast guard’s glare.
“We’re close, I know we’re close,” said Lola. “The entrance to Xibalba is nearby. If only this fog would lift.”
The fog cleared, as if at Lola’s command.
It was night. Black night. At least the wind had died down. The water lapped placidly around the boat, like a kitten drinking milk.
It didn’t feel like they were moving anymore.
“We’re becalmed,” said Max. “We’re becalmed in the Sea of the Dead.”
“Stop.”
“We’re becalmed in the Sea of the Dead, off the Coast of Death. That can’t be good.”
“Stop,” repeated Lola. “Look up.”
It was his old friend the Cosmic Crocodile, twinkling down at him, light-years away and so close he could almost touch it.
“See where its mouth is,” Lola pointed out, “the dark space of sky between its jaws?”
“Uh-huh.”
“That’s the Dark Rift in the Milky Way. Otherwise known as the Road to Xibalba.”
“Otherwise known as … we’re sinking.”
“Look at the sea, Hoop.”
It was glassy and still, a perfect mirror image of the night sky above them. Max couldn’t see where sky ended and water began. All around were stars and reflections of stars. Stars above them, stars below them, as if they were suspended in the infinite universe.
Except that Max’s feet were wet. Very wet.
And something else was bothering him, too.
“Monkey Girl?”
“Yes?”
“Do you remember what Ah Pukuh said about taking the road and entering the water?”
“Yes.”
“And Lord 6-Dog said it meant I was going to die?”
“Yes.”
“Well, we took the road, the pilgrim road to Finisterre. And any minute now, I think we’re going to enter the water.”
The moonlight played on a fin circling the boat.
“Shark!” yelled Max.
Lola tried to stay calm. “Did you know that the word shark comes from the Mayan word xook?”
“No—and I don’t care! Shark! Shark! SHARK!”
Lola
paddled them into the mouth of the reflected crocodile.
“We made it!” she said. “Good luck, Hoop!”
“Wha—?”
The little boat sank beneath the waves and took Max and Lola with it.
In the cold water, Max saw the shark. It was even bigger than he had thought. He saw its serrated teeth as it headed straight for him.
He braced himself for unimaginable pain.
But instead of biting him, the shark dived underneath him.
Am I breathing?
Am I drowning?
What?
Max felt Lola’s arms around his waist as they rode down, down on the back of a shark to the Maya underworld.
Chapter Twenty-four
THE END OF THE ROAD
It was the intense pain of the lobster bite that brought him around.
Was it a lobster? Or a jellyfish with pincers?
Max stared at the neon-orange creature that was pinching his finger. With its bulbous eyes, thick lips, and amorphous body, it looked like a child’s drawing. He pulled it off and it let go without a fight, dropping with a splash into the water around Max’s feet, where it instantly clamped on to his leg through its coating of wet denim.
Max sat up and detached his attacker once again.
Once again it landed in the water with a splash.
There was a smell of fish and iodine and sulfur.
He surveyed his immediate surroundings.
He was, apparently, sitting on the edge of a rock pool.
A rock pool full of strange phosphorescent sea creatures, some like miniature sharks, others like turtles and shellfish, and strange hybrids like the one that had bitten him.
The rock pool was in some sort of cave.
In front of him, a faint light illuminated the cave walls, and Max could see grotesque Maya faces carved as if by nature into the rock, their noses coaxed out of overhanging boulders, their sloping foreheads following the natural curves of the dripping walls.
“Over here!” called Lola. “This way!”
Max squinted through the gloom.
He could just make out a girl in a long black dress scrambling over some rocks. In the dim light of the cave, the Yellow Jaguar beads around her neck shone like so many little suns.
Still half dazed, Max staggered to his feet and turned to follow her.
“What happened? Where are we? All I can remember is the shark and then diving and stars and blackness.…”
“Don’t ask me—I had my eyes shut the whole time.”
“Is this Xibalba?”
“I think so.”
There was no way back, so they had to go forward.
“Give me your hand,” she said. “This bit is slippery.”
But she didn’t let go when they were back on firm ground.
As they rounded the next bend in the cave, their way was blocked by a giant skull. It was covered in a layer of pale phosphorescent moss that made it glow in the dark like a Halloween party favor, but its expression was anything but fun. Grim and terrible, it faced them like a temple wall; its mouth was the doorway, and a row of sharpened stalagmites served as jagged teeth.
Flaming torches sputtered on the wall to light the way.
“This is the place, all right,” said Lola.
“Do you think we’re supposed to knock?” asked Max.
“I think they’re expecting us, don’t you?”
Max took a deep breath. “Into the mouth of hell it is, then—”
“Wait!” said Lola. She took down a torch and passed it to Max. “Hold this,” she said. Then she picked up a boulder and hurled it with both hands over the bottom teeth and into the mouth.
The second the boulder hit the ground, a large earthenware pot came crashing down from the cave roof, spilling out its contents as it fell. Soon the boulder was completely buried under a hill of rotting entrails, maggots, blood, vomit, and yellow pus.
Lola clamped her hands over her face.
Max retched.
It was quite a welcome mat and it had been intended for their heads.
Max pulled up his shirt to cover his mouth, while Lola threw in another boulder to make sure that the Death Lords had set no more traps. Then, eyes streaming and gorges rising, Max and Lola quickly skirted the stinking pile and darted through the open mouth into a cavern the size of Fenway Park.
It was cold and damp in there, lit by more sputtering torches whose joyless flames were reflected in many pools and puddles on the cavern floor. The walls ran with water, and nameless creatures scurried in the shadows, but Max and Lola were just grateful for the pervading smell of strongly perfumed incense that masked the hideous heap in the doorway.
“We made it,” said Lola.
“But where are we?” asked Max.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Maybe this is the entrance hall.”
“We’re not dead, are we?”
“How do you feel?”
“Let me think. How about terrified, nervous, apprehensive, freaked, scared out of my wits …?”
“I don’t think you’d feel all those things if you were dead.”
“That’s comforting.”
“Shh. Someone’s coming.”
She was right.
There were footsteps.
Getting louder.
“Biix a beel!” called Hermanjilio cheerily, appearing at the far end of the cavern. “Long time no see!”
Behind him was Lucky Jim.
They were both dressed in simple white shifts and they waved and cheered as they half walked, half ran to their rescuers.
Hermanjilio held his arms open to Lola. “I knew you’d come!” he said with a beaming smile.
“Get away from me, you creep!” she yelled, jumping back.
Lucky Jim winked at Max. “No hard feelings?” he said, holding out his hand.
Baffled by Lola’s reaction, Max shook Lucky’s hand.
It came off at the wrist.
Max dropped it in horror, and the hand scuttled away like a spider. Lucky waved his stump in mock agony and collapsed, laughing.
“That’s not funny!” said Max angrily, which made them laugh even harder. “Where are the real Hermanjilio and Lucky Jim?”
“That’s for us to know and for you to find out,” said the fake Hermanjilio in a childish, singsong voice.
Lola stood there looking bored and pretending to inspect her fingernails.
“You’re not much fun, are you?” pouted the fake Lucky Jim, before morphing into Santino Garcia, the Spanish law student. “Do you like me better now?” he asked, combing his hair with his fingers. “How do you like my eh-sexy eh-Spanish accent?”
Hermanjilio clapped his hands appreciatively. “My turn! My turn!” he said, giggling girlishly as he morphed into Nasty Smith-Jones. “Hello, Max,” he said flirtatiously, batting his eyelashes, “look into my big blue eyes. I’m so much prettier than Lola. Don’t forget to call me when you get back to Boston.”
Lola yawned. “Is that it?” she asked.
The fake Nasty Smith-Jones finished blowing kisses at Max, and nudged the fake Santino. The two of them burst into laughter as their flesh slowly rotted away to reveal the decomposed corpses of Demon of Jaundice and Scab Stripper.
“Kiss me, Maxie!” begged Scab Stripper, in Nasty’s voice. His dangling, rotting lips were covered in oozing sores.
Max wheeled around in revulsion, trying not to gag, but Lola was unmoved.
“If you guys have finished with the comedy,” she said, “perhaps we could get down to business.”
“Hark at her,” said Demon of Jaundice. “Don’t you tell me what to do, missy. You just remember where you are.…”
There was a rush of wind, and Lord Kuy—the half-owl, half-human messenger of the Death Lords—landed silently among them. His great brown wings settled around him like a feathered cape, but his head rotated this way and that in irritation.
“What’s going on here? Do you two have permission to be ashor
e? If Ah Pukuh hears about this, he will eviscerate you both. Again.”
The two Death Lords looked visibly alarmed.
“I’m not scared of Ah Pukuh,” said Demon of Jaundice, but his jumpy demeanor told the opposite story.
“Me neither,” said Scab Stripper as his eyes darted around in panic.
Lord Kuy fixed them with a stare as sharp as a raptor’s talon.
“Come on, Jaundice,” said Scab Stripper, trying to sound nonchalant. “It’s boring here, anyway.”
“Yeah,” said Jaundice, “it’s boring here.”
Sticking out their tongues and making faces at Max and Lola, the two Death Lords sauntered backward the way they had come, before breaking into a run and disappearing into the depths of the cavern.
“I do apologize,” said Lord Kuy. “Let us start again.”
He cleared his throat and ejected an owl pellet.
“Greetings to you both. Welcome to Xibalba, the world-famous Maya underworld. Lord Ah Pukuh asked me to apologize that he could not be here to welcome you in person—but, as I think you know, he is currently touring Middleworld in preparation for his impending reign of terror. May I offer you some refreshments after your journey? Would you like a guided tour before we get down to business?”
“No, thank you,” said Max. “If it’s all the same to you, we’d like to do the deal and go.”
Lord Kuy’s greedy yellow eyes fastened on Lola and the necklet. “I see you have the prize.”
Max took a deep breath.
This was the moment he’d been waiting for.
This was the moment he’d been rehearsing in his mind ever since he’d arrived in Spain.
He was about to hand over the Yellow Jaguar, the last stone that Ah Pukuh and his Death Lords needed to bring Middleworld to its knees. He was about to save his own life and the lives of four more human beings—and, in the process, condemn all humankind to a new age of pain, misery, and suffering.
He looked at Lola.
Her expression was inscrutable. She reminded him of Princess Inez as a young girl, before the invaders came. But he had no doubt that, underneath that innocent exterior, she was plotting some double deal to outwit the Lords of Death.