Follow the Sun Underground
by David Brookes
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
conclusion
Ix dropped the handle of the luggage trolley and checked that the wooden box hadn’t gotten dislodged by all the branches during the last few miles of jungle. It was fine: the sturdy nails holding the lid on were still in place, and the humidity hadn’t warped it at all.
Ix left the box where it was and approached the fifth temple. It was almost pristine, as though the rainforest didn’t want it. But the jungle was dark now, and things were different in the dark. The Mayas had believed that the Sun God, when he went below the horizon, turned into the Night Sun. This was the jaguar god of the underworld, ruler of the World of Spirits that took over the living world after dusk, fading into existence like the quiet manifestation of coastal mist.
It was almost dark. The sun had gone below the trees, but it was not yet dusk. The sky was clearly visible above the ancient ziggurat, and it hadn’t yet burned bright with the colour of sunset. He still had time.
Ix reached back into his satchel for the Casa Nova. Putting the satchel on a mossy stone brick, he took off his shirt and used cloth scissors to cut it into a dozen small pieces. The final bit, a little too large, he cut in two to make thirteen; the number wasn’t important. He doused the cloth pieces with the tequila and climbed to place them at regular intervals around the uppermost peak of the temple. Then he went back for the wooden box.
It was too heavy to heave up the steps of the ancient temple. Instead, he broke it open near the bottom. A foul smell rushed out at him from the unsealed container, along with a hellish number of black flies. They buzzed across the skin of his face and through his hair, making him shudder and spit. Once they were gone, he was able to check the contents of the box.
The experience was a little like lifting a small human: raise his arms, put the body over your shoulders, then support the lower limbs with your hands. A fireman’s lift, it was called in England. But this wasn’t a small child. It was the body of the jaguar he’d bought illegally from Edinburgh Zoo for enough money to fund a charity organisation for a year. Ix had killed it with his own hands, after Nicola the disgruntled ex-zookeeper had sedated it. He’d used a stone dagger that Kate had bought on the South American black market and never mentioned to him again.
The jaguar corpse stank to high heaven. Good, he thought. Maybe they’ll pay attention. It slumped like a sack of wet towels when he threw it down at the top of the temple. Ix looked at it forlornly for a moment, wracked with guilt. But there was nothing to be done now, and the life of an animal was an insignificant thing to that of a human being. Ix went down to ignite the liquor-saturated rags, then returned to the peak at the centre of the ring of burning rags.
Dusk came down like artillery fire, colouring the sky. The Sun God had reached the horizon, and the Night Sun was beginning its path around the other side of the world. The underworld, a place of spirits, manifested itself around Ix. The tequila bottle was in his hand, drained down to the moth larva.
In his mother’s Spanish, he sang a song to the stars. The jaguar body remained spread like a butcher-shop rabbit on the stone, half desiccated from the time spent in the cargo planes from the UK, and still covered with flies. The thirteen fires burned intensely through the alcohol on the rags.
He pictured Julieta. His researchers had told him that a spirit could be summoned by the accumulation of memory in the mind: a mental watermark. Remember her, and she will return to you, the researchers had said. Ix believed every word, even though Kate looked up sceptically from her notes.
‘Do you have to do this?’ she had asked nervously.
‘It’s not really for you to ask me that, is it?’ Ix replied.
‘Only... she’s gone. Doing this won’t help you in any way.’
But Ix had already booked the flight to Mexico City, and the dead cat was being boxed up in a warehouse downtown.
He staggered around the top of the ziggurat, singing monotonously. He felt his muscles quiver under his skin, as though with strange fire. Through the fog of liquor, he felt the sensation run up and down his arms, shoot down his thighs.
‘Oh, come back,’ he said, between muttered verses in his old language. Tears were streaming down his face, he realised. He couldn’t feel them on his cheeks, but they were blurring his vision, and his eyes stung hotly as though bathed in acid. ‘Oh, please... For a moment.’
His toes crunched against a heavy stone he hadn’t seen, and he tottered, fell on one knee. The vibrations ran through and through him, and he cried out from deep within a sensation of bubbling power.
As the World of Spirits came around him, Ix felt a burst of cold air and saw a white light in the sky, and then little else.
* * *
They found him fast asleep next to a stinking animal carcass. The tour guide had come back after not hearing from Ix that morning, and a small rescue party had been mounted for the missing celebrity.
They woke him up in a roar of pain. The pain was like a crowd of people pressing in around him on all sides. He could barely see his guide or the young boy with him, who were both looking down at Ix with looks of sincere concern. The pain was mostly in his spine and neck, he realised. He was lying with his ass in the dirt and his back crooked on the first stone step of the ziggurat.
He didn’t say a word on the trip back to his apartment; but he did hum a quiet song to himself, and smiled occasionally at his reflection in the car window.
When he returned to the building, he wondered why he had bought the whole top floor. Had he really intended to live on the peninsula, as his grandfather had? That wouldn’t solve anything. But the man had known a thing or two, and it was because of him that Ix was there, on the peninsula, utterly exhausted but strangely warm from head to toe.
A few days after his parents died, his grandfather had found him lying alone in his bedroom in the dark. Ix was ten years old and alone. He barely knew his mother’s father. Ikal was the burnt-faced old man who visited sometimes from his trailer home in the Yucatán. He spoke in a language that wasn’t English or Spanish, but something like Spanish, which Ix couldn’t understand. He led tourists around the peninsula for what Ix’s mother called pocket change.
‘It’s like the night in here,’ said Ikal.
Ten-year-old Ix said nothing. He crossed his arms and rolled onto his side. This was his way of saying that he didn’t want to talk. But Ikal, whose clothes that day smelled strongly of cigar smoke even though his hands smelled of soap, either didn’t recognise the signal or ignored it. He sat on the soft mattress so that Ix practically rolled down against his grandfather’s wide, hard back.
‘You do not have to live with me.’ His grandfather was as still as a tree in the darkness. His long hair was still black and a little salted, exactly like Ix’s mother’s had been. ‘Your parents left you great wealth. A little for me, too. I have put it in a bank, and if you ever need it, you can call me. I will give it to you. Or if you choose to live with me in the Yucatán, I can find a good school for you, and I will raise you to be a good person, if I can. I can promise you that I will try.’
Ix had his eyes closed so that he didn’t have to look at the face of his grandfather, which looked too much like his mother’s. Something about the way that lines developed around the eyes and down the cheeks. Ix wanted to open his eyes again because he could hear a strange, scratching noise going tchap, tchap, tchap and he didn’t know what it was.
‘I already said I’m staying here in London with Auntie Laura.’
‘She is a good woman. She’s your father’s sister, but she’s a lot like my daughter. Very strong and determined. She helped me with my business, you know.’
‘I know,’ Ix wanted to say, but the strange tchap, tchap noise had distracted him. He opened his eyes to the dark bedroom. Every time he heard another scratch, the edges of his grandfather’s sleeve lit up orange. He gently pulled his grandfather’s arm away so that he could see the source of the intermittent light. It was Ikal’s callused thumb playing with his cigarette lighter. Ikal saw Ix looking and held down the button so that the flame lingered above the glinting mechanism.
‘Do you want to hold it?’ he asked.
Ix nodded. He wondered how it worked. Ikal showed him how to drag his thumb on the metal spark wheel to produce the warm light.
‘Have you heard of xiuhmolpilli?’
Ix shook his head.
‘It is a Nahuatl word. That’s the language that I speak. I tried to teach your mother when she was younger than you, but she wasn’t a good student. She thought she only needed to speak English to get ahead. Anyway, xiuhmolpilli means ‘the binding of the years’. It comes from the time of the Aztecs, who might have been your ancestors. Every one of their years, the Aztecs used to hold a huge ceremony. They had all sorts of beliefs and rituals. For five days before the end of the year, the people would stop working. They would even stop eating and speaking, like you did for a while after the accident, remember? And they would smash up the possessions in their houses or burn them.’
‘Why?’
‘Because the calendar was about to start a new cycle, and that is a time of colossal change in the universe. If you think change is difficult for us humans, imagine what it is like for a whole universe that is about to get reborn, with all its hidden spirits and gods and magic bubbling just under the surface! So the people tried to bring as much stability as they could, because they were afraid that the world would come to an end. To make sure this didn’t happen, the Aztec priests journeyed to the temple on the peak of the mountain. And all the people in the towns and villages would wait for the sun to go down on the final day of the year. Every fire in the land was extinguished, bringing total darkness to the civilization.
‘When the time was right, a man was sacrificed on the top of the temple, and his chest was broken open. In the place where his heart was, the priests would start a fire. It would burn in his chest, first as a small flame, then as a mighty bonfire. A successful fire meant that a new year had just begun and the universe had settled into a new stable shape, ready for another cycle of the calendar. And from the fire in the dead man’s chest, torches were lit that were carried to all the other temples and households of the realm, bringing light and warmth back to the people.’
Now Ix looked at his hands and saw that they were still young, though covered in the scabbed blood of the jaguar and dirt from the centuries-old ziggurat. Staying on the peninsula wouldn’t get him anywhere. And now, after what he’d seen, he didn’t feel the need to drown himself in tequila in his dusty new apartment with lopsided shutters on the windows. They wouldn’t let in nearly enough light, and now he felt inhibited by the shadowy indoor space.
His phone rang. It was the number of Kate, his P.A.. He’d talk to her again later. He had too much to absorb and needed silence and space to do it. But he was reassured by what she told him about the office’s insurance claim. There would be no investigation into the cause of the fire.
The memories of what he’d seen the night before were already fading. On the drive back, after being fussed over by his relieved guide, he’d thought he must write down the details of the experience before he forgot. But by the time he’d taken out his phone and loaded a notes app, he had no idea what to write. It seemed ludicrous, and pointless to try.
He fully hadn’t expected to survive the night. Or, rather, he hadn’t thought that far ahead, and hadn’t felt the need to.
But the sun had risen, and he was hungry. He thought he would have the man downstairs hire him a car and tell him a good place for breakfast.
Copyright © 2019 by David Brookes
