by J; P Voelkel
“But what does it do?” asked Max. “Can you read the glyphs?”
“No, it would take me years to translate them all,” said Hermanjilio, walking around the machine. “But I recognize these statues. They’re the Bakabs, the four sons of Itzamna and Ixchel. It’s their job to hold up the corners of the world. Lola, come here—have you seen this?”
He looked around for Lola, but she was nowhere to be seen.
“Up here!” she called. “Come up! There are steps at the back.”
She was standing on the machine.
The steps took Max and Hermanjilio up to a small platform on the same level.
“Jump across!” called Lola. “Wait till you see what I’ve found!”
She was kneeling over a low stone table in the center of the slab. Its surface was inlaid with a jade mosaic of a headless leaping jaguar, and on the beast’s shoulders was an empty niche. Above this were two rows of square windows. In each window was a carved stone glyph. Like the pictures on a slot machine, these carvings were attached to a roller that must have been linked with cogs in the machinery below.
“I recognize these glyphs,” said Lola. “They’re from the Maya calendars.” She groaned. “When I think of the hours Chan Kan spent drilling me on this stuff.”
“Then I’ll let you do the honors,” said Hermanjilio with a smile. “Let’s see how much you remember.”
Lola cracked her knuckles like a concert pianist preparing to play.
“Here goes,” she said. “I’m fairly sure that the glyphs on the bottom right are from the Calendar Round. They show a day and a month.”
“Correct.” Hermanjilio nodded. “And the rest of the bottom row?”
“I’m guessing it’s the Long Count, which measures time since the world began. You’ve got the kin, or days; the winal, or months; the tun, or years; the katun, which are units of twenty years; and the baktun, which are four hundred years.”
“Bravo!” cheered Hermanjilio. “Chan Kan would be proud of you! How about the top row?”
She shook her head.
“Then I’ll tell you,” said Hermanjilio. “Each chunk of time is ruled by a different god, and these are their name glyphs. There must be hundreds of them.”
Max groaned. “I can’t stand it. It’s too complicated.”
“I agree,” said Lola. “Except for shamans like Chan Kan, even the Maya don’t keep the Maya calendars anymore.”
“So, shall we see what happens when we activate it?” asked Hermanjilio, holding the Green Jaguar over the niche. “I vote yes.”
“I vote no,” said Max.
They both looked at Lola.
“I’m sorry, Hoop,” she said, “but I vote yes. Aren’t you even a little curious?”
“Curiosity killed the cat,” observed Max primly.
The Green Jaguar purred as Hermanjilio went to slot it in. Suddenly he drew back. “Blood!” he said. “We need blood! I mixed up a batch when I got back from Ixchel, but it’s sitting on the shelf in my storeroom.”
Lola clapped her hand to her mouth. “I thought it was salsa! I put it in my backpack with some tortillas!”
“Perfect!” said Hermanjilio. “I told you this was meant to be.”
Lola pulled a small jar out of her backpack and gave it to him.
“Come on, my little beauty,” Hermanjilio coaxed the Green Jaguar as he poured the thick red liquid over the niche. Just like the Red Jaguar at Chahk, the stone leapt into place of its own accord.
Hermanjilio blew out the lanterns, and they were plunged into blackness.
A breeze brushed Max’s face, and the air in that dank chamber became as fresh as a morning at the seaside. There was a series of loud clicks. The machine was coming to life. The clicks were joined by whirrs and squeaks. As the noise of the machine increased, the whole cube began to rock gently from side to side. The stone table was glowing now, and they grabbed on to it to steady themselves as the cube began to buck like a mechanical bull. Max was wondering how long they’d be able to hold on, when the machine seemed to find its groove and fell into a smooth vibration.
“Look,” exclaimed Lola, “the glyphs are changing!”
Hermanjilio was giddy with delight. The carvings were turning over so fast they were just a blur. Gradually they slowed down until each square came to a stop.
“11-Kawak, that’s 11-Thunder!” yelled Lola, clapping like a winner on a game show. She looked at Hermanjilio. “Is that today’s date?”
“Beats me.” He shrugged.
“Never mind that,” said Max. “I think this room is getting bigger.”
Lola looked around. “It could be a trick of the light.”
“It’s no trick,” said Hermanjilio. “The walls and floor are receding.”
“I don’t like the look of this,” said Max.
“Me neither,” agreed Lola.
“What a couple of wimps!” said Hermanjilio. “You’re so lucky to share this incredible experience. This might be the greatest moment of your lives.”
Or the last moment, thought Max.
The walls and floor fell away. Far below, tiny sparks of colored light rose in spirals and clustered into luminous spheres, spinning out across the blackness to hang in twinkling constellations. Max, Lola, and Hermanjilio looked up in awe as translucent shapes began to form around the star clusters.
It was beautiful, hypnotic, poetic, amazing, indescribable. …
“It looks like a crocodile with two heads,” observed Max.
“He’s right!” cried Lola. “It’s the two-headed cosmic monster!”
“It’s incredible,” said Hermanjilio. “We’re standing in the Maya cosmos.”
Max was bewildered. “Will someone tell me what’s going on?” he wailed.
“Think of this chamber as an ancient Maya planetarium,” Lola explained. “Those lights are the stars and planets.”
“But what’s with the crocodile?”
“The Cosmic Crocodile represents the Maya heavens; its blood is the rain that falls on Middleworld.”
“Why is it always blood with you guys?”
Hermanjilio was trying to point something out, but his voice was muffled by what sounded like a truck hurtling past on the freeway. It got nearer and nearer until a great ball of fire suddenly shot up behind them and made a huge arc over their heads.
Whoooooomph!
There was light and heat and a booming, terrifying noise.
Max shielded his eyes from the glare and peered through his fingers.
It was a jaguar.
A fire jaguar.
A massive, flaming, roaring fire jaguar in midleap.
“What’s happening?” shouted Lola. She sounded as scared as Max felt.
Hermanjilio didn’t look scared at all. He was shining with happiness. “It’s the Sun Jaguar!” he exclaimed. “This is more than the night sky; it’s showing the passage of time itself!”
“The date’s changed! It’s on 12-Ahaw—12-Lord! Hermanjilio, did you touch something?” shouted Lola as the fiery beast disappeared behind the edge of the cube.
“I pressed the day glyph,” confessed Hermanjilio, “and it moved one day forward. The jaguar was the sun moving across the heavens. At night it crosses into the underworld.”
It was dark again. Max leaned over the edge of the cube. There was something down there. Water. He could see the twinkling stars reflected in its glassy surface far below. “Is this some kind of time machine?” he said.
“I doubt it,” said Hermanjilio. “I think it just shows the movements of the stars and the planets. It was probably designed to help the king predict eclipses, plan the best days for rituals, that sort of thing.”
“So does the machine represent planet Earth?” asked Max.
“There was no such thing,” said Hermanjilio. “The ancient Maya believed in twenty-three interconnected worlds, piled up like a stack of tortillas. Our world, which they called Middleworld, was in between the thirteen layers of the heavens
and the nine layers of the underworld, Xibalba. So, to answer your question, I’d guess this machine represents Middleworld.”
Max looked down at the black waters below them. “Is that Xibalba? Are my parents down there?”
“Forget it, Max,” replied Hermanjilio, reading his mind. “None of this exists. It’s just a working model, an illusion.”
“But what is Xibalba? Is it a spirit world, a parallel universe, another dimension …?”
“It’s all of those and none of them,” mused Hermanjilio dreamily.
That was it. The final straw. Max had had enough of meaningless Maya double-talk. He began to hatch his plan. …
Whoooooomph!
The flaming jaguar leapt through the sky.
“I moved it forward,” said Lola. “It’s 13-Imix! 13-Crocodile!”
Whoooooomph!
“1-Ik! 1-Wind!”
Whoooooomph!
“2-Ak’bal! 2-Darkness!”
Whoooooomph!
“3-K’an! 3-Maize!”
Whoooooomph!
“4-Chikchan! 4-Snakebite!”
Whoooooomph!
“5-Kimi! 5-Death!” called Lola, like a demented bingo caller.
She surveyed the conjunctions of the planets with the pride of one who can make the sun rise and fall at her command.
“What’s that?” she said, pointing to a bright star that was rising in the daytime sky. Instead of twinkling cheerily, it seemed to bristle like a hedgehog.
“Take cover!” yelled Hermanjilio as the star let loose with a barrage of flaming arrows. Max dropped to the floor and covered his head with his hands. Sizzling arrows fell on the slab all around him.
“It’s Venus,” explained Hermanjilio, “the morning star! To the Maya, it heralded the outbreak of wars and military action. They used to schedule their battles by its cycles.”
“Why’s it firing at us?” asked Lola.
“Move the day forward and maybe it will stop,” suggested Hermanjilio.
Lola pressed the glyph. The Jaguar Sun dove into the sea. Venus shone even more brightly. More flaming arrows hailed down. Max and Hermanjilio took cover with Lola behind the stone control panel.
As they huddled there, a disgusting odor filled the air.
Lola looked accusingly at Max.
“It wasn’t me,” he said. They both looked accusingly at Hermanjilio.
The smell—an eye-wateringly pungent cocktail of gas, bad breath, and cigar smoke—got worse and worse until it was too strong to be of human origin.
Whoooooomph! Whoooooomph! Whoooooomph!
“Slow down!” Hermanjilio instructed Lola.
“I didn’t touch it. The dates are going crazy. …”
While the days flashed by and Hermanjilio and Lola huddled over the machine, Max plucked up the courage to put his plan into action.
Dodging arrows, he crawled to the back corner of the platform and quickly slipped over the edge. His searching feet found the shoulders of a Bakab statue, and his hands grabbed its head. He worked his way clumsily down the torso and legs, being careful to avoid the wheels and gears that were spinning at high speed just inches away.
When he landed on the black slab base, he crouched down and looked into the water. It was as flat as a mirror. All he saw was his own reflection, with the erupting universe behind him. He leaned over to touch the surface. It didn’t feel like water. It felt like extra-tough Jell-O, a great rubbery mass of seething evil.
This was wrong.
His parents were not here.
He shouldn’t have done this.
He had just grasped a Bakab to start climbing back up, when a flaming arrow shot straight into his hand.
He let go.
He was falling.
He was plummeting like a stone into the blackness of Xibalba.
He landed flat on his face.
He managed to turn over so that he could breathe, but he couldn’t break free of the gelatinous surface. He was dissolving into it. The evil black Jell-O was sucking out his soul.
He lay there helplessly as the cosmic fireworks went into overdrive all around him. Days and nights flashed by. Fireballs crashed and comets blazed, their fiery tails scorching everything in their paths. Stars collided in showers of burning sparks. A few feet above him, he could make out the machine. It was juddering wildly. Its wheels were roaring and screaming in pain. Gears were spinning out of it, end to end, into infinity. A terrible meltdown was in progress, and it was all his fault. He’d disobeyed the rules. He’d tried to breach the fabric of the universe. And now his life was draining out of him.
Through the smoke and explosions, he saw Hermanjilio’s face above him. “Fight it, Max!” he was shouting. He was hanging off the machine, leaning out as far as he could, every muscle straining to reach out.
Slowly, painfully, fighting the Jell-O, Max turned over and inched toward Hermanjilio’s outstretched hand.
He was close, so close, when five bony fingers closed around his ankle. He was thrashing and kicking, but he couldn’t break free. Something was pulling him down, trying to climb over him, to use him as a bridge between worlds. He felt heavy and drowsy and cold inside, as if mercury had been injected into his veins. His legs were going numb. He was so cold. So cold …
He felt Hermanjilio’s big warm hand close over his frozen fingers.
Now Max was the rope in a tug-of-war.
“Out! Out! Take the stone out!” someone was shouting, but the voice was distorted and the words made no sense.
If only Hermanjilio would release him and let him sink peacefully down to Xibalba. Maybe he’d see his parents. Maybe he wouldn’t. It didn’t really matter. Nothing mattered anymore.
With a bang that shook the universe, the wheels and gears of the machine came to a screeching, cracking, shuddering halt.
Everything went black.
The grip on Max’s ankle relaxed, and his will to live came flooding back. He could feel the life rushing back into his veins. His legs were tingling as they warmed up.
He squeezed Hermanjilio’s hand in the darkness.
Grunting with effort, Hermanjilio hauled him onto the bottom slab. “That was close,” he said, half holding him up and half hugging him.
All Max could say was, “Sorry.”
A faint light appeared above them. Lola was holding a lantern over the top edge. “Hermanjilio?” she called. She sounded like she was crying.
“I’ve got him,” Hermanjilio called back. “Send down a rope!”
“I thought we’d lost you, Hoop,” said Lola when they got to the top.
“Me, too,” he replied.
They lit the rest of the lanterns and sat there, shell-shocked, just looking at each other. There were no stars, no planets, no Sun Jaguar. They were suspended in blackness, drifting in eternity, with that awful smell still hanging in the air.
Max was waiting for the other two to start shouting at him.
“I’m sorry,” he kept saying, “it was all my fault. The machine went crazy because I fell off—”
“No, it was my fault,” Hermanjilio cut in. “I brought you here.”
“You saved my life,” said Max.
Hermanjilio shook his head modestly. “It was Lola who saved us both. She pulled out the Jaguar Stone.”
“But I didn’t,” said Lola. “It stopped on its own.”
“What?” Hermanjilio scrambled to his feet. “Why would it do that?” He lit a match and checked the glyphs. “It says 4-Ahaw, in the month of 3-Kankin.”
“4-Lord, 3-Winter Sun,” translated Lola. “Do you think it’s significant?”
“I don’t know.” Hermanjilio borrowed a pen and paper from Lola and noted down the dates. “I’ll look them up when we get back.” He tried to sound calm. “By the way, does anyone have any ideas about how we might do that?”
They began to make suggestions, all of them bad.
Each time one of them drew breath to speak, the other two looked up hopefully, only to h
ave their hopes dashed almost immediately. Most ideas were nixed by their creators before they were even formed.
“What if …? No, that won’t work. …”
“Perhaps we could … Nah, forget it.”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Max said, over and over.
But sorry wasn’t going to save them.
He thought about what Eusebio had said in the rainforest. Something about using your special skills to help each other. Problem was, he didn’t have any special skills. He was an idiot in an alien world and he didn’t understand anything about anything.
“Think, Hoop!” said Lola, sounding desperate. “You got us out of Chahk by thinking like a gamer. If this was a game, what would you do?”
“When a video game crashes, you restart.”
“It’s worth a try,” said Hermanjilio.
He pulled the Green Jaguar out of the slot—it came away easily—and poured on the last of the blood mixture.
“Fingers crossed,” he said as he slotted it back in.
Was that a faint breeze?
Slowly, very slowly, the machine shuddered into life. The day glyphs spun back to 11-Kawak, and the Cosmic Crocodile stretched out across the sky.
“Now quit,” Max instructed him.
With difficulty Hermanjilio pulled out the Jaguar Stone. It bit him, but he did not let go. The machine stopped, and this time the walls, ceiling, and floor of the chamber came shooting back. The platform and steps reappeared. Then, most beautiful sight, the stone blocking the tunnel rose smoothly up.
“Let’s go,” said Lola. She sounded exhausted.
As Max followed the other two out of the Star Chamber, he paused and looked back. What had happened in there? Who or what had gripped his foot?
He shuddered and crawled into the tunnel back to the outside world.
He didn’t know that the glassy surface of Xibalba had been a two-way mirror, nor that another face had been looking back at him. He’d didn’t know he’d been eye to eye with someone he would have recognized, someone who needed a mortal body to return to Middleworld, someone who’d grabbed his ankle and would soon have possessed the whole of him with his evil being.
But if Max had caught a glimpse of his opponent, he would have remembered the two great stone heads in Villa Isabella. He would have recalled the story of Lord 6-Dog’s jealous brother who opened a doorway to the underworld and unleashed an army of undead warriors.