The Land of the Night Sun: Book One of The Jade Necklace

by Ian Gibson

  The water in the pool is calmer now that she’s stepped out of it, and when the last ripple has smoothed out, a faint image appears in it. At first, she wonders if it’s a reflection, but it can’t be reflecting what’s above her. The image in the water suddenly flashes with light. It looked a lot to her like lightning. It lasted only for an instant, but in the light, she could glimpse hints of the ceiling of a cavern, a large round hole with treetops rimming it, dark rain clouds covering the sky, and rain coming down towards her. She gathers it’s the sinkhole she had fallen into, seen from the bottom of the hole, but she doesn’t understand why it’s appearing in the water.

  She’s beginning to suspect it’s not a dream anymore, and she has actually woken up now, even though it’s not any less weird than it was before.

  She holds the shining jade pendant in her hand. “The key home?” she wonders out loud—that’s what the voice had told her. If the necklace is the key, then maybe this pool of water is the door. “If this is my way home, then I’m just going home.” She stands up again and puts one foot in the water. But then she remembers her grandmother, and how she saw her fall through the cenote before she did.

  “Grandma?” she says, a little more loudly, though she tries to be quiet because she can still only see darkness surrounding her and the pool, and doesn’t know whom she might be whispering to, if anyone at all. There’s still only silence, aside from the plops of water, which echo faintly. She peers into the darkness and can now see shapes lit softly in the green light of her glowing necklace—they’re spikes of rocks poking out from the ground that look like stalagmites. Maybe she’s inside a cave, which would make sense if she had fallen into the earth.

  Her throat is very dry and she’s thirsty, so she kneels back down beside the pool, cups her hands in the cold water to drink from it, and then splashes her face. The image of the sinkhole and clouds disappears in the ripples. As it fades, she sees through to the bottom of the pool again, but she also sees her own reflection. She stares at it and is quite surprised to see that the red hibiscus flower is still in her hair.

  “Some lucky flower you turned out to be,” she whispers at her reflection.

  Her reflection then does quite a remarkable thing—it winks and smiles at her, which startles her.

  She lets out a yelp and falls backward. The loud yelp echoes throughout the cave. Hundreds of tiny red eyes suddenly open within the blackness and stare at her from across the pool. She hears shrieks and the flutter of wings. They sound like bats, but she doesn’t know of bats that have eyes that glow red and have such terrifying shrieks. Dark shapes descend over the soft glow of the pools of water. She jumps to her feet and runs away, although she doesn’t even know where to run to.

  She runs and runs, and the bats flying after her start clawing at her hair. She’s lost in the cave, without a clue of how to get out. She hears a deep, low-pitched sound in the distance, and it somewhat reminds her of the call of a howler monkey, from what she remembers them sounding like. She turns and runs towards where she thinks the sound is coming from, as it might mean there’s a way out of this cave. The bats grab her hair again with their little claws, and this time they tug at it as if they’re trying to carry her away, but she fights them back and starts screaming for help. She sees a red light in the distance, and hears more howls of the howler monkeys, so she runs towards the light in hopes that it’s the way out of this dreadful place. As she gets closer, she glimpses the shapes of trees outside.

  “Help! Help!” she screams. Her voice echoes throughout the caves, but she hears no reply save for the crazed shrieks of the bats behind her.

  The ravenous bats try to claw at her arms, so she swings her flashlight around like a weapon, trying to frighten them, but they don’t give up. She can barely see where she’s going as the bats have surrounded her like a swarm of angry hornets, but she knows she’s almost outside now as she sees the blackness of the cave give way to light, and everything around her is suddenly awash in red. She glances up and is so taken aback by the otherworldly sky—it’s a deep red—that she trips on a rock, drops her flashlight, and tumbles into a cold river of bluish-green water. It’s so cold it gives her quite a shock, and she grates her teeth as she feels a shiver down to her bones, but at least she doesn’t feel the claws of the bats anymore. Once she gets to her feet, the bats are swiftly upon her again, so she splashes water at them, shouting, “Get away from me!” She wades down the river as quickly as she can away from the cave, but the river bottom is very rocky, and she catches her foot on one and tumbles forward, splashing back into the freezing water.

  She stays underwater this time to avoid the bats and flips herself around to see their black wings flitting as they circle over the river, and their red eyes glowing as they wait for her to come back up. She doesn’t know what to do, and she can’t hold her breath for much longer—it doesn’t help matters that the water is freezing cold.

  She’s about to try to swim away, but then she glimpses a short, dark figure run to the riverbank. It screams at the bats—so loudly that its scream is almost deafening to her even while she’s underwater. The bats quickly retreat into the shadows of the cave, and the figure reaches its hand out to her through the water. She grabs it, and the hand helps to pull her out of the river. She wades back to shore and stoops down to spit out water, having accidentally swallowed some of it amidst the panic, and she’s shivering violently, not just from the cold, but also from the horror of what she sees upon raising her head.

  There’s a vast forest before her, except it would more accurately be described as a tree graveyard than a forest, as its trees are nothing more than leafless, wooden skeletons with their trunks and branches charred black, and the ground beneath them is grey and ashen, such that the only colour she sees before her is the stark red of the sky. What a nightmarish place she’s found herself in!

  She turns and is very startled to discover that the small person who helped her is in fact a howler monkey—its fur a sheeny black, and its pink lips protruding from an oval-shaped head that makes it almost look like it’s wearing a primly trimmed beard. As if she didn’t think it odd enough to have been helped by a howler monkey, it’s also holding its hand, which has been tightly wrapped around with a leaf like a bandage, and she’s never been aware of monkeys using leaves as makeshift bandages before, much less helping people out of rivers.

  It looks at her with an apparent mixture of concern and curiosity, before shouting, “GOOD NIGHT-DAY!”

  She almost falls over backward into the water from the sheer force of its voice, and she lets out a high-pitched yelp that echoes within the nearby cave.

  The monkey turns to the cave to hear the echoes, then turns back to her. "You call that a howl?” it yells, seemingly at the highest volume it can muster.

  Its scream whips Itzel’s hair back and bounces off her chest straight back to the howler monkey, leading them both to cover their ears and wince as their eardrums are on the verge of bursting. She’s reminded of when the announcement speakers at her school sometimes make a very loud, high-pitched noise that hurts her ears, except this time it feels like she had her ear placed right against the speaker when it does this.

  It takes her a while for her ears to stop ringing so much, and she asks, “You can talk?”

  “What?” howls the howler.

  Itzel feels her heart pounding in her chest just from how loud the monkey is. She shouts as loud as she can, “Don’t shout at me!”

  The monkey shout back at her, except with far more intensity, “WHAT?”

  But this time the scream is so loud it causes a chorus of echoes that carry deep into the cave, and its walls start to tremble. The cave asks them back:

  “What? What? What? What? What?”

  But instead of the echoes fading, as one would expect echoes to do, they’re getting louder and louder, and the bats inside it are shrieking in pain as if they’re all trapped in a giant, rocky mouth asking “What?” over and over again. The e
ntire cave entrance then collapses in on itself, churning up clouds of dust, and Itzel and the monkey bolt towards the forest to flee from the rockslide.

  When she’s safely away, Itzel gasps in horror to discover that the entrance to the cave is completely sealed shut. She had a feeling that pool of water deep within the cave might have been her only way home, but it doesn’t look like there’s any way of getting back there now. At first, she had bloodthirsty bats to contend with, but now there’s a wall of rocks far too heavy for her to lift. As the dust settles, she walks back to the cave and kicks the rocks in frustration. She turns back to the howler, who looks very ashamed at all the damage it’s unwittingly done.

  “I guess that’s why they call it the Cave of Echoes!” it yells.

  The wall of tumbled rock quakes and reverberates its voice back at them:

  “Echoes! Echoes! Echoes! Echoes! Echoes!”

  Yet more stones stir and slide down, and Itzel backs up in case the howler’s voice causes another rockslide. She gestures to the monkey with her finger on her lips to be quieter.

  The howler monkey shuts its lips and nods like it understands what she means, then scuttles a distance away and climbs up to the top of one of the black, skeletal trees. “I’m very sorry!” it howls at her from one of the highest branches—its voice a fair bit more bearable from a safe distance. “I’m a howler monkey, not a whisperer monkey! This is the lowest volume we can go, so it’s better that we talk at a distance!”

  Itzel looks up at the sky. She thought it was still night, but the jungle around her is lit up more than moonlight could possibly do. There are large plumes of black smoke in the distance, and the sky is redder than twilight. It looks eerie, and she feels a cold dread in her. “Where am I?” she asks.

  “Welcome to Xibalba!” the howler announces.

  “Xibalba?” She remembers the story her grandmother told her about such a place, and suddenly she feels a cold dread tingle down her spine. “The Underworld? Am… I…” She pauses, her lips quivering. “… dead?”

  “I would most certainly hope so!” says the howler monkey.

  Itzel stares at him wide-eyed. “You hope so?” she screams at it.

  “Well, yes!” replies the howler, seemingly unfazed by Itzel’s distressed screams—maybe it’s just used to talking by screaming. “If not, then there’s been a very grave mistake, and you’d be trespassing! The Underworld is no place for the living!”

  Itzel covers her mouth with her trembling hands. “I’m dead!”

  The howler scratches its head. “Then again, I heard the bats took a special interest in you! They don’t care much about dead people, so it could very well be that you’re not dead, miss!”

  “I hope not!”

  The howler monkey ponders this for a moment, then howls, “How odd! Then what are you doing here?”

  Since the howler monkey has the bizarre ability to talk—although at only the highest volume imaginable—Itzel wonders if it could help her find her grandmother. “Have you seen an old woman pass through here a short while ago?”

  “No, I haven’t seen anyone!” The howler monkey shouts back. “But I don’t usually come anywhere near this cave. We howler monkeys are told to avoid the Cave of Echoes because we’re so loud. Now I can see why! I only came here because the river water is very cold when it comes right out from the cave, and I was dipping my hand in it to treat my burn. Then I heard someone screaming, and the bats shrieking, and wanted to know what was happening. If I hear screaming, I just assume someone’s talking to me!”

  Itzel can understand why, if these howler monkeys communicate only by screams.

  “It’s not really our job to guide the people who come here. In the old days, there were two spirits who paddled a grand canoe down this river to take the dead to the City of the Dead. It was all very fancy!”

  The monkey points to a small dugout canoe by the river that looks so dinky and rickety that it’d sink the moment anyone tried to float it. “Now we rely on little people to do that, and they haven’t really gotten

  their act together. Sorry, we used to have a Death god running things around here, but we haven’t anymore, so the system is very disorganised. But anyway, I’m just talking about what’s done with the dead, and you are not dead, so we’re not sure what to do with you!”

  “I don’t belong here,” she says. “I want to go home.”

  The monkey turns and cups the sides of its mouth with its hands, and howls into the forest. It waits for a moment and receives a howl back.

  "What did they say?" Itzel asks, not knowing how to interpret a howl of a howler monkey herself.

  "Uh-oh!” shouts the howler.

  Itzel is worried now. “Uh-oh?”

  “They say this has happened at a very bad time! The only one who could have moved these rocks is a tapir, but the rainforest is up in flame! That’s how I burnt my hand. We’re trying to put out the fire, but we’re not having much success! It’s better that you get out of the forest and go to the Mountains of the West to speak with the Great Feathered Serpent—he is the lord of the land! You must go to him!” It points to the river. “Follow this green river to where it branches, and head left along a narrower creek towards the foothills, and you’ll eventually find his mountain by it. It’s much taller than any others there. Oh! But be very careful of the wildfire! It’s out of control! I came here to collect water to fight the flames!”

  Itzel sees a little clay pitcher by the river—the howler monkey must have brought it along to collect water. She wonders how much good that’ll do to contain a forest fire—by her estimation, probably not much.

  The monkey adds, “Also, you might want to go quickly, before the rise of the Day Sun! It gets very, very hot!"

  Itzel tries to soak all this information in, but her head is spinning. “‘Day Sun’?” she whispers to herself. “What’s that up there then? A ‘Night Sun’?” She covers her eyes and looks at the red sun, although she can’t stare into it directly because it’s too bright. For a moment, it looks like its light flickers subtly. She’s never seen the Sun flicker like a lightbulb before. Then again, she’s never seen the Sun shining so red either—at least not while so high in the sky.

  She thanks the monkey, who climbs down the tree to fetch its pitcher. She starts walking down the cold river to discover that most of the jungle has been ravaged by fires, but there are a few trees here and there along the riverbank that have some vestige of green left on them. As she walks through the trees, she hears whispers around her from all manner of unseen creatures:

  “Who’s that?” the inquisitive voices say. “Is she new?”—“What’s a human doing in our forest?”—“Is she lost?”—“Why haven’t they taken her down the river?”—“The aluxes have been slacking off, I see!”—“Such a curious thing around her neck.”—“What could that be, I wonder?”

  She looks at the pendant on her necklace, which still has a glow to it, although much more softly than it had been in the cave. She tucks it inside her dress, as she doesn’t want to bring too much attention to herself in a jungle that’s full of whispering voices. She hears howls in the distance, and they sound like they’re getting closer and closer, and then comes upon many more howler monkeys carrying pitchers filled with water—or at least trying to, since they appear to have a lot of difficulty walking upright while holding them. Most are trying to balance the pitchers on their heads, but they’re teetering and stumbling around, and end up spilling most of the water long before any of it will make its way to the fire. One monkey falls off its feet, dumping all the water and breaking its pitcher on the ashen forest floor, and Itzel rushes over to help it up.

  "Thanks, miss!” the monkey screams at her most gratefully once it’s back to its feet.

  Itzel’s ears start ringing again, and she suspects she’s going to go deaf very soon at this rate. She runs back and keeps her distance, plugging her ears with her fingers. She wishes they’d stop screaming at her!

  “Anot
her pitcher smashed to pieces!” yells another lamentingly. “We won’t have any left at this rate!”

  The howler she helped looks at her concernedly while she’s trembling and keeping her fingers plugged in her ears, though apparently its concern doesn’t prevent it from still shouting at her. “Humans don’t come to our forest much!”

  “Usually we’re trying to keep you furless folk out of our forest,” the other tells her gravely, “but as you can see, we have other things to worry about at the moment!”

  “Where are you off to, miss?” asks the howler that she helped.

  “A howler monkey told me to go to the mountains,” she says, trying her best to keep her voice high enough to be heard, but still low enough as to not encourage them. “Am I going the right way?”

  It points to a hill for her. “Go over that hill! And keep going straight! You’ll probably see others going that way to try to put out the forest fire! They should be able to help you if you get lost again!”

  “Thanks,” she says. “Are you also trying to put out the fire?”

  "Our shrine is in this forest!” another howler shouts at her. “We can't let the wildfire come this far at any cost, or else it’ll destroy it! But we won’t let it! All threats to our forest, no matter how great, shall cower before our mighty howls! We’re called the Voice of Kukulkan for a reason!” Its chest swells with pride and determination, just before it topples over and spills most of the water in its pitcher too.

  Keeping her fingers plugged in her ears just to be safe, she plods up the hill and comes across a clearing at the top with the shrine the monkey must have been talking about. It’s built of stone and sculpted to look like an enormous head of a howler monkey facing upwards with its mouth opened, as if it were howling into the red sky.

  A howler monkey sees her walking up to the shrine and bows its head to her in greeting. "We're constantly watering this part of the rainforest. There's been a drought for a long time! What's a rainforest without rain? It'd be like a howler monkey without a howl! What would you have then?"