by Ian Gibson
Itzel doesn’t recognise the jewellery she’s wearing, but she doesn’t care. She’s just over the moon to finally see her grandmother again after everything she’s been through to look for her. She squeezes her tightly. “Yes, and then I fell in too, right after you did. And then I was chased by bats, and was saved by a howler monkey, but the howler screamed and made the cave fall in. I had to go up a mountain to meet Kukulkan, and he sent me all the way across this lake to find the Rain god so I’d be able to put out the forest fire, and when I do that one of the gods will clear the rocks for us. And then we can go home. Together.”
The old woman is silent for a moment, as if needing time to absorb all of what Itzel has said, especially as she was speaking so quickly and excitedly. “Home?”
Itzel pulls out the jade stone from her dress collar. “This way.”
“Oooh, such a pretty necklace,” her grandmother says, entranced by it. “Where did you find that?”
Itzel is very confused by this. “It was yours, grandma. Don’t you remember it? You gave it to me, right before you…”
Her grandmother tilts her head. “I… what?”
Quashy has found them, having smelled his way to the stew, and slithers next to Itzel. He’s covered in mud but doesn’t seem to mind, as he’s entranced by the smell of food. He sniffs the air and wags his ringed tail in delight.
“Don’t you remember any of this?” Itzel asks her.
Her grandmother shakes her head, and there’s something almost empty about her eyes, like she’s not all there. “Doesn’t ring a bell, my love.”
Itzel looks at Quashy bemusedly.
“Looks like she’s been alone on the Lake of Tears too long already,” he whispers to Itzel. “A lot of her memories must have slipped from her mind and sunk into the lake.”
Itzel nods. She remembers Seven Deer telling her about how people’s memories can seep into the lake, but she didn’t know it could happen so quickly if someone is alone. She takes her grandmother’s hand. “We’ll get you out of here.”
“Let’s not rush anywhere just yet, my love,” her grandmother says. “I imagine you must be hungry!”
Quashy answers very excitedly. “Yes!”
Itzel looks up and tries to find the rain cloud. She spots it through a gap in the treetops. “I think we should go. I have something important to do.”
“No!” her grandmother says, raising her voice, but then smiles warmly. “Please, stay and eat first, It… zel. I’ve just made a very tasty stew for us.” She beckons Itzel to sit on a tree stump, and walks back to the pot, and ladles some of the hot stew into two small bowls.
Itzel looks at Quashy, as she feels something isn’t quite right, but the coati seems completely content with their situation and is eagerly awaiting his bowl of stew. Her grandmother places a bowl on the ground so he can drink from it.
He licks from it, then cries out in pain. “Hot, hot, hot, hot!”
“That’s what happens when you boil it, Quashy,” Itzel tells him.
He blows on the stew, but he’s too impatient, so he brings the end of his tail to it and spins it around rapidly like a little fan to cool it off. After a short while of that, he starts lapping up the stew happily.
Her grandmother hands the other bowl to Itzel. She smells the stew and does feel a lot hungrier now than she was before, seeing as she had a very light breakfast. Her grandmother is acting a bit strangely—like she feels distant and disconnected—but she really can’t blame her for it, if she’s somehow been stuck alone on a small island in the Underworld, surrounded by a lake that has the power to drain away one’s memories. But when Itzel puts her snake-stick to lean against a tree and opens her hands to take the bowl, the old woman is startled by the sight of them.
“Your hands, my love!” her grandmother says.
Itzel looks at her opened hands—they’re sore, and her fingers and palms are blistered from all the rowing. She winces, as looking at them reminds her of how much they hurt. She had been distracted by the excitement of seeing her grandmother to take notice.
“I’ve got just the thing for those, my love,” her grandmother says, dumping the contents of Itzel’s bowl back into the pot. “Just a moment.” She shuffles away into the woods, with a peculiar, awkward gait in which she bobs her head back and forth slightly, causing her dangling earrings to tinkle with each movement, until she disappears behind the outcrop of rock.
Itzel whispers to Quashy, “Something’s weird about her.”
He’s still busily slurping his bowl of stew. “What do you mean?”
“For one, she keeps calling me ‘my love’, and I don’t remember my grandma ever doing that.”
Quashy raises an eyebrow. “That’s really why you’re suspicious?”
Itzel cautiously looks out into the woods. “I don’t know. She just seems a bit… off. She’s even walking strangely.”
“She passed over here recently, didn’t she?” Quashy asks. “To Xibalba, I mean.”
“Yes. At least by my time. I don’t know how long it’s been here, but I saw her fall in the cenote right before I did, so she can’t have been here for all that much longer than I have.”
“She might be in denial then, too,” he says, quite matter-of-factly, before returning to lap up his stew.
“What do you mean ‘in denial’?”
“A lot of dead souls don’t really come to terms with the fact that they’re dead. It takes them a while for it to fully sink in. I guess they just think they’re stuck in a dream they’re having problems waking out of, so they behave a bit dazedly, almost like they’re sleepwalking.”
Itzel tucks her necklace back into her dress, realising she had left it out after showing her grandmother. She’s beginning to doubt her own circumstances too, after hearing what Quashy has just said, as she herself has wondered several times if this was all a dream. “I’m not actually dead, right?”
Quashy raises his snout from his bowl and smirks at her. “Surprise!”
Itzel picks up a stick and throws it at him. “That’s not funny!”
Her snake-stick slithers after the stick to fetch it and brings it back to her.
“I forgot it likes to do that,” she says, looking at the happy snake-stick. She picks up the stick it dropped at her feet and half-heartedly throws it again—she’s not really in the mood to play fetch with it right now, but it’s been so helpful to them, and it always looks so happy when it brings the stick back.
“Okay, bad joke,” Quashy admits. “None of the gods thinks you’re dead, so you’re probably not dead.”
Itzel finds it difficult to believe what any of the gods say simply by having smelled her—except for maybe Lady Chel, who had treated her injuries. She seemed like she would know better than any of the others, and she said she was absolutely still alive. Thinking of Lady Chel reminds her of the strangler vine still hugging the top of her arm.
“But you were very close to being dead,” he continues, “when the Dead Queen’s arrow was aimed at you.”
The snake-stick returns to her, and she throws the stick again for it.
“But if she had shot it, what would have happened to me?” she asks.
Quashy pauses with his mouth full of stew. After a moment to ponder this, he chugs it down. “Huh! That’s a good question. People usually die, then come here—not the other way around. I guess you would have blacked out and woken up on Lady Chel’s table again, with a new heart, since that arrow would have gone for it, and no doubt another one of these wrapped around you too.” He points his snout at the strangler vine still wrapped around the base of his tail. “And you would be a permanent resident of the city, just like the others. Oh, and your necklace would be missing, if the Dead Queen was so interested in having it. If I didn’t take it myself first, of course.”
Itzel glares at him.
He innocently licks his stew. “Another bad joke?”
They’re both startled by a loud cry coming from the woods. It certai
nly doesn’t sound like it came from an old woman, but it isn’t recognisable as coming from any animal they know of either. To Itzel’s ears, it sounded a lot like a hiss from a snake or lizard mixed with the garbled growl of a broody hen, but much louder than either, as well as so high-pitched it made her blood curdle.
Quashy abandons his bowl of stew and cowers behind her legs. “What was that?”
Itzel kneels. “Pssst, snake-stick!” she whispers with a hiss to call it, opening her hand to the ground.
Her snake-stick hurriedly slithers back to her and stiffens into a wooden stick again. She raises it like a weapon and stares into the shadows between the trees. They hear the rustle of leaves and the snap of twigs. Her legs are shaking as she prepares to either strike or flee at any moment.
But all that emerges from behind the outcrop of rock is her grandmother. She’s still smiling warmly and holding something in her hands. “It’s missing the secret ingredient!” she announces proudly, before dumping whatever she’s holding into the stew.
Itzel finds it odd that she’s seemingly unaware of the bizarre creature’s cry coming from the woods. “Did you hear that too?”
“Hear what?” her grandmother asks while stirring the stew.
“That weird animal cry,” Itzel tells her, baffled that she even has to specify. “It sounded like a lizard, or a bird. Or a big lizard-bird.”
“Oh, don’t mind that, my darling It...zel. I share this small island with a creature, but it’s never done me any harm.”
Itzel is also beginning to find it strange that her grandmother keeps saying her name very slowly, almost like she’s struggling to remember what her name is. “I really think we should go,” she says.
“Not until you eat. You’re skin and bone! And you can’t go off with your hands in such a state!” She ladles some of the stew into the bowl again and hands it to her. “Tell me if you like it.”
Itzel looks at her hands again. Her fingers are throbbing, and she cringes at the thought of having to pick up an oar again. She reluctantly places her snake-stick down, takes the bowl, and sits down on the tree stump again. She blows on the stew and waits for it to cool off. “What kind of creature is it? Have you seen it?” she asks.
“No, never,” her grandmother says. “It just stays away from me and the other woman.”
“What other woman?”
“She’s much younger, and very beautiful, with long black hair. I do most of the cooking for us.”
“Where is she now?”
“She’s here, my love.”
Itzel looks around, as her grandmother doesn’t point to anywhere when she says that. “Where?”
“Here with us,” she says mysteriously.
Itzel glances at Quashy again, but he’s ignoring them and drinking his stew happily. She’s suspecting that her grandmother’s not only losing her memory, but also going a little crazy. She sips her stew—it’s spicy with chilis, and has roasted pumpkin seeds floating in it, as well as little chunks of meat. “Thanks, grandma. It’s very good! What is it?”
Her grandmother smiles gently. “I call it finger soup.”
Itzel raises an eyebrow at that and looks again at the soup just as the tip of a human finger floats to the surface. She spits out the soup in her mouth and drops the bowl with a yelp.
“You don’t like it?” her grandmother asks, pouting sadly.
“It has a finger in it!” Itzel screams.
“Well, yes. That’s why it’s called finger soup!” her grandmother says with a chuckle.
Itzel picks up her snake-stick and jumps to her feet. “We’re leaving now, grandma! I don’t know what’s happened to you, but we need to go.”
Her grandmother frowns. “There’s no need to get upset. It’s only from a very special plant that grows fingers. I added some more in as it should help your hands.” She picks up the bowl Itzel dropped, and shuffles over to the pot to ladle out some more.
Itzel looks at her hands. They look a lot less red, the blisters have shrunk, and the pain has already vanished. She wonders if the plant she’s talking about is similar to the ones growing in Lady Chel’s hut—including the seedling she got from her—that looked like they grow body parts.
“See?” her grandmother says. “I told you, finger soup is good for the fingers!”
But now that her hands are much better, Itzel is even more eager to leave—moreover, she’s lost her appetite. She grabs her grandmother’s arm. “Come on. We’ve got a lot to do, but I’ll explain everything on the way.”
“At least let me take some of this soup with us,” her grandmother says. She pours the soup from the bowl that she was going to hand back to Itzel into a small pot which she can carry with her, then ladles out some more from the large pot over the fire into it also. “Food should never go to waste.”
Itzel would generally agree with that, but for a soup with chopped fingers in it, she’s willing to make an exception—even if they were just grown on a plant.
When her grandmother finishes ladling and covers the pot with a lid, they head into the woods together towards the shore. Itzel glances back to see Quashy slithering behind, and then looks up to see the rain cloud drifting over the trees. She’s trying to hurry, but she has to help her grandmother along, who is walking very slowly and carefully, shuffling her feet through the leaves on the ground and hardly raising them. Itzel guesses she just wants to avoid spilling her precious finger soup, but she doesn’t quite understand why she keeps bobbing her head back and forth a bit like a hen.
When they emerge from the jungle on the shore of the island, she peers out across the lake into the horizon. Hurakan’s storm must have passed the Isle of the Dead entirely at this point, as she only sees dark storm clouds in the western part of the lake. This worries her even more now—if the storm has cleared, the Dead Queen and her soldiers might already have set off on boats to look for her. They need to get away from the lake quickly!
They come to the muddy beach and walk straight for the canoe, but her grandmother stops right before the mud.
“What’s the matter, grandma?” Itzel asks her.
“I don’t want to muddy my dress,” her grandmother says.
“Then just hike it up!” Itzel says frustratedly.
Her grandmother shakes her head vigorously. Itzel tries to do it for her.
“No!” her grandmother shouts scoldingly and offers the pot she’s holding to her. “Take this for me.”
Itzel grabs the pot and hurries over to the canoe to put it inside.
Quashy slides through the mud and into the lake water, where he rolls around to wash himself off. Using his tail, he pulls himself up into the canoe and gives his slender body a good shake. The rain cloud floats over the canoe also. Itzel starts dragging it into the water and turns towards her grandmother, who’s very slowly and reluctantly treading through the mud, despite sullying the bottom of her white dress.
Quashy taps her on the shoulder with his long tail, then points with it to the mud. “Itzel, look!” he whispers.
Itzel stares at the mud. She doesn’t know what she’s looking for.
“Her footprints!” he whispers.
Itzel peers more carefully. The footprints that her grandmother is leaving in the mud don’t look like they’re coming from a shoe, nor even a human foot, but instead have the impression of three long, thin toes widely spread apart, much like the footprint of a chicken.
“I don’t think that’s your grandmother, Itzel,” he says nervously.
“Then who is it?” she whispers back.
“Hold on,” Quashy says, as his tail falls down the other side of the canoe, stalks secretly through the cover of the reeds, then loops back behind the old woman so she doesn’t see it, and very carefully hooks and pulls up the bottom of her dress.
They both scream at what was hidden underneath the old woman’s long dress. She’s barefooted and her feet are shaped like a chicken’s, but with very long, sharp claws, and even her legs are t
hin like a bird’s, but they’re vivid green and scaly like a lizard.
“What are you?” Itzel shouts at her.
The old woman looks down to her feet and screams also, as if seeing them has disturbed her just as much as the others. But her scream shortly morphs from an old woman’s scream into a cry that a human should never be able to produce—the same cry they had heard earlier, an eerie and disturbing mixture between a lizard and a bird, except far more high-pitched, forcing Itzel to cover her ears. The old woman starts convulsing, like she’s transforming into something. Itzel pushes the canoe off quickly, then wades in the water to hop in and start paddling.
“It must be the Lady of the Lake!” she says, remembering what One Reed and Seven Deer told her, of the demon that kidnaps fishermen who go out on the lake without the company of a woman. “She eats men and children!”
“But not coatis, right?” a very scared Quashy asks.
“Can you help?” Itzel asks as she paddles.
She looks back at the beach to see the old, hunched woman has become a tall monster showing only the semblance of a woman. She still wears the long white dress, but all her skin is now green and scaled like her legs, her arms have lengthened, her hands are clawed, and her hair has grown long and dark but spikes outward like the scales along an iguana’s back. A long purple tongue hangs from her slavering mouth.
“Do your fan thing with your tail in the water!” Itzel shouts at Quashy, desperate for any help she can get.
Quashy puts his tail in the water and spirals it around quickly like a propeller, giving them a much-needed boost away from the shore. “Do you think she can swim?”
The demon leaps off the beach and lands on the still water of the lake, standing on the water surface as if it were no less solid than the ground.
“Never mind—she doesn’t need to!” he yelps.
The demon runs after them on the water, quickly closing the distance between her and the fleeing canoe. The rain cloud drifts over to her, but the lake demon lets out another one of her high-pitched, blood-curdling shrieks, which is so strong it manages to blow the rain cloud away.