The Serpent's Coil

by Christy Raedeke

  After I quietly cover the mound with leaves, I ask Clath to take a picture of me and Justine. It’s evil, but I figure it’s the only way. I call Clath over and ask her to take a photo of us on the top of the staircase. She stands just beyond the hill of biting ants, so I ask if she’ll move a little closer. Then I ask her to take another, and another, and another step.

  It must take a minute to feel the nips, but once she does she starts jumping around like she’s walking on hot coals. Justine and I rush over to help her, but the ants are everywhere. She has to take off her socks and shoes and walk into the river to get them all off.

  She scratches her legs the whole walk back to the hotel. We ask if she’d like to go to the restaurant with us, but she says no, she’s got to go back to her room and take some Benadryl to stop the itching. Perfect, I think. Nothing makes you sleep as soundly as a dose of Benadryl.

  At the hotel gift shop, Justine and I buy a detailed map of Palenque, a couple of flashlights so we have backups, two candles, and a lighter in case our backups need backups. There is no way I’m going to be stranded in that place in the dark.

  We wait until eleven (when it seems that the staff is no longer walking around the grounds) to make our move. This time Mr. Papers refuses to be left behind, and he attaches himself to my shoulder.

  It’s only about a quarter of a mile to the ruins, but the thickness of the trees block out any light from the sky. The eerie sound of howler monkeys—which is much more like jaguars roaring than monkeys—has my heart jumping like beads of water in a hot pan. Mr. Papers has his arms and legs around my neck so tightly it feels like I’m wearing a knotted scarf.

  We decide to jog to make this all go faster—there’s something about the pace of walking that makes you feel less in control, like you are at the mercy of whatever might be out there.

  When we see the sign for the entrance to the ruins, we peel off the road and into the jungle. There’s really no way to completely enclose the ruins of Palenque; they just sort of end in the thicket of forest. There are guards in areas where people can drive up, but since we’re walking through the woods and crossing the stream to get in, we can remain unseen as long as we keep our flashlights low and pointed down. The dirt is well packed and the brush is not that thick—thankfully, decades of archaeologists traipsing around have made the jungle surrounding Palenque pretty easy to get through.

  We cross the shallow stream that we had scoped out earlier in the day, which puts us behind the Cross group of temples. From there, the ruins are set in a large, open grassy area with no high trees to block the bit of light coming from the night sky. We turn off our flashlights and walk quickly to the base of the massive El Palacio, The Palace, with its high tower that intrigued us this morning. Before we follow the map and go underground, we can’t resist standing where great Mayan kings stood centuries before gazing up into the sky.

  Once we’re around the back side of El Palacio, we find the small door that leads to the pitch-black tunnels that twist their way up and around the inside of it. In the tunnel, I turn the flashlight back on. The temperature drops in the stone passageway and all noise is blocked out. The only thing we hear is our own breathing.

  Pausing at a massive slab—the very slab where Pacal would have lain down and meditated in the cool air when it got too hot outside—I put my hand to the flat stone and feel it sucking the warmth from my own body, as it did his.

  A tiny staircase leads us to the flat top of the building, the highest place you can go without walking up the stairs of the tower set atop this structure. Turning off my flashlight, I emerge from the dark to a dome of stars. Not one cloud blocks the sky.

  “Unbelievable,” Justine whispers, moving her head in all directions to see the sky.

  “I wish there was a way to see it all at once,” I say.

  I grab her hand and we walk to an area where there is a recessed rectangle. The guide told us that back in the day this was filled with water, like a rooftop pool, so astronomers and kings could watch the movement of the sky in its reflection. We take the steps down into the pool, now empty with its bottom covered in short grass instead of water.

  Lying on our backs on the grass and looking up, we try to take it all in. Mr. Papers finally relaxes his grip on my neck and lies beside us on the grass, gazing up. As these billions of stars burn light years away, the sky looks like it’s throbbing.

  “What a trip, to be seeing the same thing Pacal saw centuries ago,” I say, more to myself than Justine.

  “It’s not so hard to believe, you know.”

  “What?” I ask.

  “That we are all connected. That all of this is just one gigantic organism.”

  “I know. How can we not be affected by where we are in relation to these massive fiery things?”

  “I think if more people looked up at the stars, we’d all be better off.”

  We stay there for a while, both mesmerized by how the pulses of light we see above us seem to be synchronized with the sound of the jungle, which is humming with night sounds.

  “Are you afraid of what we’ll find in the hidden room?” Justine asks.

  “A little,” I admit. “I guess I’m afraid of what we won’t find—I’m not sure what will happen if I can’t get those books.”

  “Well, I guess we’d better go find out,” she says.

  Silently, we walk back down the way we came up and then over a small bridge from El Palacio to a group of three temples that face each other—the Temple of the Sun, the Temple of the Foliated Cross, and the Temple of the Cross. I was drawn to the smaller one today, the Temple of the Foliated Cross, because it’s tiny and wonky and a little overgrown with weeds. But it’s the more spectacular one across from it that we climb.

  At the top, in the back corner of one of the tiny chambers, there’s a small chink in the rock. This is the door marked on the map. I cannot bring myself to stick my finger in it, so I use the end of one of the long candles I bought in the gift shop. When Justine sees the wax crumble, she pushes me away. “I’ll do it,” she says, sticking two fingers into the dark hole. After feeling around for longer than I ever would, she manages to move something. One of the thick stone panels that I thought was a wall rotates just enough to reveal a very skinny, very dark staircase.

  “Mr. Papers?” I say, handing him a flashlight. “Would you?”

  He looks at me and rolls his eyes. Instead of taking the cheap tourist flashlight I was offering, he reaches for my big metal flashlight and shines it down the opening. No snakes, no critters—so far so good.

  Since Justine bravely stuck her fingers in the hole, and Papers is going first, I suck it up and follow. I have to turn sideways to even fit, and once I get a few feet down, I can no longer see my feet; the staircase is too narrow and steep. I just feel for each step. Justine has her hand on my shoulder and is feeling her way behind me. After about twenty stairs, we reach the ground. We are under the Templo del Sol, the Temple of the Sun.

  The space widens just a bit, enough for us to walk side by side. Having memorized the map, I know we have to follow this tunnel almost the whole distance of the base of the pyramid in order to reach the room.

  Neither of us is talking; we’re both breathing heavily and walking as quickly as we can. The farther we go, the more panicked I’m feeling about getting stuck down here. Just as I fear I might start hyperventilating, the tunnel turns. Right after the turn is a stone door. Mr. Papers gives it a push and it rotates open, this time to reveal a smaller door covered in silver and decorated with glyphs.

  I pull on the handle, shocked to find the room behind it already glowing with light.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Bolon is sitting on a small stool in the corner of this room, every inch of it lined in gold.

  “In lak’ech,” he says, standing up to greet us.

  Justine grabs my hand, digging her fingernails in with fear.

  “Hi, Bolon,” I say, giving him a huge hug. This is exactly who we need to see
right now.

  Justine swallows a couple of times as if her mouth has gone completely dry with the shock, and then comes over to meet him.

  “Wow, I’m not sure I actually believed you existed,” she says as he hugs her.

  “Maybe I don’t,” he replies with a smile. “Who is to say?”

  “Well, I’m really glad to meet you, even if you do talk in riddles.”

  Justine and I look around, dumbfounded by the gold everywhere we look.

  “Is this real gold?” I ask.

  “It is, yes.”

  “It’s so beautiful,” Justine says. “May we touch it?”

  “Yes, of course. Just don’t press too hard on the glyphs. This gold is quite soft.”

  Every inch of the walls is covered in Mayan hieroglyphs and drawings. I gently touch a wall, surprised to find it’s not cold. The beauty is overwhelming, yet I can’t fully appreciate it because of the weight of the secret I’m keeping.

  “Bolon, I have to tell you something,” I say. My voice gives away the fact that it’s not good news.

  “What is it, Caity?” Bolon asks with concern.

  “They have Uncle Li,” I blurt out. “Barend Schlacter has him and I don’t know where. But they need the books and I didn’t know what to do, except to come here.”

  For the first time since I heard about Uncle Li, I start crying. Maybe I felt I needed to be strong until I could transfer control to someone else. Bolon puts his arm around my shoulders and I lean into him, into the familiar scent of wood and fire and spice that seems to be at his core.

  “We sensed he was missing,” Bolon says. “But did he not instruct you to stay out of it should something happen to him?”

  I pull back and look at Bolon. “Yes, but—”

  Justine says, “You mean we’re supposed to just … leave him?”

  “No good will come of you two being captured, too. Let The Council handle Li. You need to focus on your mission.”

  “Honestly, this has gotten so complicated, I’m not really sure what my mission is,” I say, wiping my eyes with my T-shirt sleeve. When Mr. Papers sees me do this he hops up on my shoulder and dabs at my tears with his tiny hand.

  “It is simple: Unite the youth and overthrow the Fraternitas,” Bolon says. “Those two things will allow the transformation to happen so that all humans can flourish in peace.”

  “But what about all the other stuff? The torus from the Three Hares embedded in the Flower of Life, the fact that this is what makes gravity, the poem at Breidablik, precession, the calendar … ”

  “All tools and parts,” Bolon answers. “Just as you could not make a car without specific tools and parts, you cannot create the world you want to see without all these.”

  “It’s all sort of coming together for me,” Justine says, “but the DNA part is what’s a mystery. Is our DNA somehow going to be all different?”

  “Not different, just changed,” Bolon says. “Here’s an example: scientists have just done DNA testing on a very, very old species of fish. What they discovered shocked them: these fish did not develop DNA that allowed them to move from water to land. The genes needed to make arms and legs were in them the whole time.”

  “They were carrying around the instructions for arms and legs the whole time?” I ask.

  “Exactly. All the instructions were there, it was just the switches that were turned off. This confirmed what the ancients have all known: there is infinite potential inside of us. All that is needed for transformation is a switch, of sorts.”

  “So there are the genes that make our bodies and other genes that are switches?” Justine asks.

  “Yes, there are genes that are switches, and still other genes that give the switches on and off orders. It is these switches that are so receptive to the high-energy particles coming from the Galactic Center and the sun.”

  “And that’s what will change us?”

  “If we can get a clear signal. And that requires the two things I mentioned first: getting out from under the control of the Fraternitas, and getting the youth united in a real, coherent way.”

  “Coherent in, like, the wave sense, right?”

  “Yes, we must get back in sync with the nesting waves that pattern the universe,” he says. Then he walks over to the center of one of the gold-paneled walls. “This is the same design that is on Pacal’s massive tomb lid in the Templo de las Incripciones, which has confounded archeologists since it was discovered a few decades ago. What do you see here?”

  When I first researched Pacal, I saw this image and read that a lot of people think he’s in some kind of spaceship. “It’s hard to shake the spaceship thing from my mind,” I say.

  “Try,” Bolon replies. “In light of all that you have learned, try to look at it with fresh eyes.”

  I stand before it and fuzz up my eyes so I stop seeing details.

  I try to think like Uncle Li—when he does feng shui analysis, he always says “Form Defines Energy.” He says that by looking at a form, you can predict its energy or movement. I can see why people would think Pacal is in some kind of spaceship; he’s reclined in a container and looking up. But then I notice that the sides of this thing he’s in are drawn to show that they are in motion. Once I see it that way, it looks as if Pacal is being sucked in—or through—this thing.

  I run my fingers up the side of the thing that he’s in, and follow the momentum. He’s falling into a hole, a victim of gravity, but below him it looks like energy is flowing out again.

  “A torus!” I yell. “This is a cross section of a torus!” Gold seems to absorb sound in a weird way, so my voice sounds strange and loud and powerful. “Look, Justine—don’t you think the walls of this show him being sucked in?”

  “Totally! And the bottom shows the energy shooting back out and up. Just like being sucked into a donut hole and then pushed out the bottom.”

  “Is that right, Bolon? Is that what this carving is about?” I ask.

  Bolon smiles and nods. “This is about above and below, the big and the small. All things at the smallest level follow this energetic torus pattern when we live naturally, unobstructed. And where is the energy centered in this carving?”

  “The exact center is right between his two hands,” Justine says.

  “Which, according to feng shui, means that’s where the source energy is,” I add. “He’s definitely doing something intentional with his hands.”

  “If you had to guess, what would you say?” Bolon asks.

  “It looks like expansion and contraction, the same energy that the torus produces.”

  “Very good. What Pacal is doing with his hands is called making mudras.”

  “Oh, right!” I say. “Some of Uncle Li’s friends taught me mudras when I was little. All I can remember is the meditation one, probably because I saw Uncle Li do it a million times.”

  “Wait, what’s a mudra?” Justine asks.

  “It’s like a symbolic hand pose,” I say. “It’s from India, but Buddhists use them, too.” Digging out a piece of paper and a pencil from my backpack, I place it over the picture and gently take a rubbing, making sure I don’t press too hard.

  “Mudras are powerful things,” Bolon says. “This very ancient practice was recently researched and it was proved that these hand gestures stimulate the same regions of the brain as language.”

  “Wow! I love that science is now testing out ancient practices,” I say, amazed at being able to see the picture come to life on my blank paper as I rub.

  “I seriously don’t get how all of this stuff is now being proven by science,” Justine says. “It’s freaky how much they knew about the body and space without instruments or computers.”

  “When you are in sync with time and space, sometimes those things are unnecessary. They were able to tap into areas of the brain we have yet to unlock. But that is where you two come in, isn’t it?”

  When I’m finished, I place the paper with the rubbing gently in my notebook so it won’t
get smudged. “Wait a sec, can we go back to Pacal’s hand mudras? Are they really ancient Indian mudras?”

  “They are, yes. His left hand is in Sarpasirsha, male snake energy, and his right hand is in Kapitha, divine female energy. Again, he is teaching us how the universe works. The snake is expansion, radiation, waves. The divine feminine is attraction, gravity, pulling in.”

  “And growing out of the center of these things is the great tree,” I say, finally seeing the whole picture. “That’s the symbol of the Milky Way, right?”

  “Yes. Our recycling center. Pacal is shown descending into the mouth of the earth monster only to be shot back out through the Milky Way. As you know, every atom in your body has at one time been part of star stuff, and will be again. We are ordered, or put together, by the great consciousness. And it is time for our consciousness upgrade.”

  “If we can overcome the Fraternitas,” I say.

  “When you overcome the Fraternitas,” Bolon replies. “Once this energy is in balance, once we are able to resonate completely, unfettered by the ‘noise’ the Fraternitas is putting out, then we will grow to our full potential.”

  “I can’t even think about taking down the Fraternitas until I get Uncle Li back. But we need those books. We assumed they were here because of something Uncle Li said about The Sun Shield and Eight Ahau.”

  Bolon stands up and walks to a corner where a gold box sits on top of long, highly decorated legs. “Come here,” he says.

  We walk over to the box and see a beautiful design of a stylized butterfly. I instantly recognize it as the butterfly made by the core days in the Tzolk’in. When he opens the box, I see something astonishing—the same bird I’ve seen on the ceiling in one of those hidden-room dreams I have.

  “I’ve seen this,” I tell Bolon. “This was in the dream I had about finding a room in a house I’d lived in forever. There was this peacock head with a crystal light fixture for an eye.”