Patrick pulled the lid off the file box and set it aside. Then he reached in and pulled out Samantha Aguilar’s paper.
“I’m guessing that this”—he held one corner of the paper and shook it like a flag in a high wind—“doesn’t tell us too much about all that, though.” He turned and gestured towards the dry erase board with the constellations of names and phrases.
“No, it doesn’t,” Izzie agreed. “From what I gleaned by skimming through it on the drive here, it looks like she doesn’t spend much time dwelling on references to anything other than Mesoamerican supernatural beliefs. And in fairness to her, most of the time that old man Aguilar mentions things like the Guildhall and such, it’s without much in the way of explanation, at least based on what I’ve seen so far. You’d have to already suspect there was a connection there in order to see any significance. Otherwise they just read like non sequiturs.”
She stepped over to the box and looked inside.
“If you do already suspect that there’s a connection, though …” She reached in and took out a couple of the hardbound journals, one in either hand. “Well, I think these things might turn out to be very interesting reading.”
“So where do you think we should go from here?” Patrick asked, leaning against the table.
Izzie tossed one of the journals through the air to him, and Patrick slapped it between his hands, catching it.
“I think we should get to reading,” she said, holding aloft the other journal, a sly smile on her lips.
Izzie had barely had a chance to dig into the first of the journals when they were interrupted by a knock at the door. It was a uniformed officer, nodding her head in Patrick’s direction as he draped his quilted jacket over the back of a chair.
“Captain wants us all in the briefing room,” she said, gesturing for Patrick to follow her. “Said specifically to fetch you.”
Patrick closed the journal that he’d been leafing through, and stood up from the table. As he followed the officer out the door, he looked back over his shoulder at Izzie. “You going to be okay in here?”
Izzie pointed her index finger at the open journal laid out on the table in front of her. “I’ve got enough to keep me occupied,” she answered. As Patrick turned to leave, she added, “Could you shut the door on your way out, though?” She was feeling a little self-conscious about delving so deeply into such outré material when a stranger might wander in at any moment.
Patrick nodded, and pulled the door shut behind him as he walked through.
“Now, where were we?” Izzie said out loud to herself, turning her attention back to the journal.
Roberto Aguilar’s notes were undated, and so it was impossible to get a precise idea about when they had been written, but it seemed clear that he had composed them over the period of many years. Some contained cultural references that suggested they might have been written as early as the 1950s, while flipping through some of the other journals Izzie had found unambiguous references to contemporary technologies that meant that they had to have been written as recently as the current decade.
Many of the mentions of Mayan and other Mesoamerican beliefs were opaque to Izzie, and she would have had trouble making any sense of them under normal circumstances. But the academic paper that the old man’s granddaughter-in-law had written on the subject turned out to be an excellent skeleton key to the whole thing. Extensively footnoted and with a good many marginal glosses and handwritten notations, the paper served as a kind of gazetteer to the more unfamiliar parts of the terrain that the old man’s writings traveled across.
As for the writings themselves … had Izzie not possessed any grounding in the subjects that the old man discussed at all, had not known anything about the historical context of many of his references, she might easily have taken it for the ramblings of a schizophrenic, at worst, or some inexpert and misguided attempt at a fictionalized autobiography, at best. She was reminded of “outsider artists” like Henry Darger or Opal Whiteley, who spent years crafting immense imaginary worlds for their own amusement, sometimes featuring themselves in prominent roles.
When she was getting her master’s degree in psychology, Izzie had encountered a term that described this type of imaginative world building: paracosm. She’d read a case study of a government worker who was convinced that when his coworkers thought he was simply staring off into space or momentarily daydreaming, that he was in fact being transported across the stars to another world, with its own geography and languages and cultures, where he lived an entirely separate life of space opera heroics and derring-do.
Roberto Aguilar’s memoirs carried much that same sort of tone, featuring himself in a starring role in a grand story of the struggles between the light and the darkness playing out in the city streets of Recondito. But a grand story that it would be reasonable to believe was carried out entirely in his own imagination. Clearly, based on the occasional passing reference to this aspect of his memoirs in the academic paper, that was the conclusion that Samantha Aguilar had reached. She took the tack of believing that the old man had been in possession of verifiable information about the religious practices and cosmologies of the ancient Maya, but that he had subsequently woven that knowledge into a fiction of his own devising.
But Izzie suspected that she knew better.
She already harbored suspicions that there were connections between such moments in the city’s history as the founding of the Recondito Mining Guild, the subsequent destruction of their Guildhall decades later, and the mass murder-suicide at the Eschaton Center for Emanant Truth some two and a half decades later. But when she found each of those historical points and locations mentioned in Roberto Aguilar’s memoirs, almost always in connection with the Mesoamerican beliefs that he had practiced in secret for most of his adult life, a more complete picture began to emerge.
Several times as she paged through the journals Izzie wished that she had something on which she could jot down some notes. She had thumbed a few quick lines on her phone’s notepad app, but was old-fashioned enough that she preferred to write in longhand whenever possible. She considered trying to squeeze a few quick notes in the corner of the dry erase board, which was already crowded with writing that she was loathe to erase. So when Patrick returned, she breathed a sigh of relief.
“Hey,” she said, looking up from the journal she was reading, “do you have a spare notebook or legal pad I could borrow? I want to jot some of this down while it’s still fresh in my memory.”
“Mmm?” Patrick was distracted, a serious look on his face as he pulled his quilted jacket off the back of the chair. “Probably. But it’ll have to wait. We’re heading out.”
“Where to?” Izzie said, closing the journal.
“That block near the docks,” Patrick answered with a labored sigh. “I’ve been assigned to the search team that’s going to be going door-to-door in the office building, see if we can turn up anything interesting.” He shrugged into his jacket. “Want to come along?”
Izzie stifled a laugh. “Well, as much fun as that sounds, I think I’m getting somewhere with old man Aguilar’s journals, so I think I’ll stick with this.”
Patrick nodded. “Want to stay here while you do?” He paused, scratching his chin. “There’s no way of telling how long I’ll be.”
Izzie climbed to her feet. “No, I think I’ll head back to the Resident Agency offices. So long as you don’t mind me taking some of these with me?” She gestured to the hardbound journals.
“Be my guest,” he answered, heading towards the door. “Just don’t tell my captain that you’re taking evidence off the premises, okay? Come on, I’ll lock up.”
She picked up several of the journals and the copy of Samantha Aguilar’s academic paper, tucked them under her arm, and followed him to the door.
“Sorry I can’t give you a ride this time …” Patrick said, trailing off.
“No problem. If I don’t take a cab at least once when I’m in town, I’ll feel
like a complete parasite.”
Izzie waited in the hallway while Patrick locked the door and then pocketed the key.
“Have fun?” she said, a sympathetic expression on her face.
Patrick rolled his eyes. “Yeah, right.”
He turned and walked back in the direction of the detectives’ squad room.
“And to top it off,” he muttered as he went, “I forgot to get lunch …”
Izzie grinned, and then headed to the elevator. “I guess there’s a first time for everything.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
As the cab carried her north through Ross Village towards City Center, Izzie considered just going back to her hotel to do her reading, instead. But she couldn’t recall whether there had been complimentary stationery in her room when she checked in, and besides she never much cared for the way that cheap ballpoint pens flowed across the page, and the lighting in the room wasn’t the best …
And she realized that she was simply making more justifications to spend time in the Resident Agency offices than she needed, when at the back of her mind lurked a tiny thrill of excitement about spending more time with Daphne. What was it about the human mind, she wondered, that could get so distracted by something as inconsequential as spending time with an attractive person when grappling with such big and difficult to process matters as the ones that currently occupied her attention? Especially since Izzie had already decided that nothing would be happening there.
But was something happening there, despite her better judgment?
Izzie pushed such thoughts further to the back of her mind. She had more important things to deal with at the moment.
But maybe when all of this was done … ?
“Damn it, girl,” she muttered out loud to herself, wrenching that train of thought to a stop, “get your head together.”
“What’s that?” the cab driver asked, glancing in the rear-view mirror.
“Oh, nothing,” Izzie said, shrinking into herself, cheeks burning.
But still …
Her stomach rumbling, Izzie grabbed a meatball sub and a can of diet soda from a food truck parked out front before heading into the R.A. offices. It was already the middle of the afternoon, and she realized that she hadn’t even had a chance to finish the scone that Daphne had bought for her at the coffee shop that morning. It was hardly any wonder that she was starving.
The offices were mostly deserted when she arrived. The computer technician who had been there the day before was updating the operating system on one of the workstations, and a filing clerk was sorting through a big pile of paperwork. Agent Gutierrez’s door was closed, and Daphne was nowhere to be seen.
Izzie dropped the journals and her lunch at the desk that had been assigned to her, and then went over to ask the filing clerk where the office supplies were kept. She returned from the storage closet a few moments later with a legal pad and a couple of roller ball pens. She shucked off her suede jacket, draped it over the back of the chair, and then went so far as to unclip the holster from her belt and lay it on the corner of the desk along with her phone. She was settling in for the long haul.
The meatball sub was passable, at best, and the diet soda was scarcely any colder than room temperature, but together they served to quiet the rumbling in her stomach, and let her focus on the task at hand.
Izzie had been skimming through the journals at random back at the 10th Precinct station house, but now she decided that a more organized method was in order. It would be difficult enough to decipher and collate all of the scattered and sometimes cryptic references made by the elder Aguilar without making the work that much more difficult with a random and haphazard approach.
So she selected the journal that, to all indications, seemed to be the oldest of those that she had brought with her, and she began to read.
Less than five minutes later, she realized that she had already filled the first page of the legal pad with copious notes. This was going to take a while.
Some daykeepers had the genius. Others had to use the key.
The first humans were truly articulate and perceptive. They could not only speak the language of the gods, but could also see everything under the sky and on the earth. They had only to look from the spot where they stood, and their sight would carry all the way to the limits of space and the limits of time. But then the gods, who had not intended to make and model beings with the potential of becoming their equals, limited human sight to what was obvious and nearby.
Even so, some humans were still born with the genius, able to perceive with their minds things that remained hidden to the eye. Such made natural-born daykeepers, capable of seeing shades and daimons from the unreal, even those who cloak themselves in the flesh of the living and the dead.
In the Dark House of the temples of Xibalba, daykeepers honed their senses in the lightless black for thirteen score days. Running through all the names and numbers of the days, praying, burning incense, letting their own blood, sleeping apart from women, and abstaining not only from meat but from corn products, eating nothing but the fruits of various trees. In this way they turned their attention inwards, sharpening their ability to perceive what was hidden, to See and to Send.
But those who were born without the genius of Sight could still play their part, by taking the ilbal. The crystals would take their toll on a body over time, but they were the keys that unlocked that which would otherwise remain hidden. With ilbal, one could see the fires through which we walk, and the shadows that lurk unseen all around us.
Izzie looked up from the journals, a little dizzy. Her hand cramped from writing so much, so furiously. She looked at what she had written.
“Ilbal?” she muttered under her breath. Where had she seen that before?
She reached for the copy of Samantha Aguilar’s academic paper that lay on the far side of the desk. She flipped through, searching for the reference that she’d seen earlier until …
It was defined in a footnote to the main body of Samantha’s text.
Ilbal: a Quiche word from the Popol Vuh. Its literal meaning is a “seeing instrument” or a “place to see,” though today ilbal (or ilobal) is a common term for crystals, mirrors, eyeglasses, telescopes, etc.
What exactly was old man Aguilar describing here? From the context it seemed that this was written when he was a young man, and read as though he were transcribing something that he was being told by someone else, almost like a student taking lecture notes in a college class. With references to ancient Mayan myths and training in the secret temples of Xibalba, the only reasonable conclusion was that Aguilar had been writing down things that had been spoken aloud to him by Don Mateo, the old man from the Yucatan Peninsula. And according to Samantha’s academic paper, everything from “Dark House” to “Xibalba” itself, from “ilbal” to “daykeeper,” were references that were corroborated by the Popol Vuh, the classic Mayan text.
But Izzie couldn’t help but remember things that had been said when she was a little girl about her grandmother, that Mawmaw was a “two-headed woman,” able to see into the spirit world. That was not a million miles from the “genius” and “sight” that Aguilar had written about. And the ilbal? A key that helped one perceive things that could not be seen with the eye, including the “fires through which we walk”? That sounded like the ayahuasca that the Candomblé priestess who was friends with her grandmother had always talked about.
But it wasn’t just a key, was it? It was a crystal.
Izzie sat up straight, lowering the pen.
“Wait a second …” she said out loud.
The vials of crystalline powder that had been found in Fuller’s apartment. The ones that the lab had identified as being similar to DMT.
And what was it that Fuller had said, right at the end?
“I didn’t understand it myself, until the old daykeeper gave me the key”
Izzie turned back to the journal that she had been reading. Roberto Aguilar had trained with a �
��daykeeper” from Mexico, and had carried on in that tradition after his teacher had long since died. He’d become a daykeeper himself, convinced that he was protecting humanity from dark menaces hidden from the view of the rest of the world. And years later, he had come into contact with a distressed young man who was convinced that his colleagues had been fundamentally altered by something they had experienced deep underground, and the old daykeeper had given him a key that helped him understand what was happening.
The drug in the vials was that key. That crystalline powder, a DMT-like psychedelic, was the “seeing instrument” that revealed things that were hidden.
“I’ll be damned,” she muttered to herself.
Fuller had told her what was happening, but she didn’t understand at the time. He had noticed a change in the behavior of his colleagues on the Undersight team, and Roberto Aguilar had given him a drug that let him see what was responsible for that change. He could perceive for the first time that they were being “Ridden” by something … by something …
“By what, though?” Izzie muttered.
“Is everything okay?”
She looked up, surprised to see that Daphne was sitting at her desk a short distance away. Izzie had been so engrossed in what she was reading that she hadn’t even noticed her coming in. She glanced over and saw that Agent Gutierrez’s office door was open, and that he was sitting behind his desk inside. Daphne must have been meeting with him in there when Izzie came in. But how long had it been since she came back out?
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