To my surprise, I could still feel José María’s hand wrapped around mine, and the way in which I rushed back into my body turned my stomach. Nausea churned in my gut, and I wanted to vomit, but the scream in my lungs made me forget.
Just like before, we were bathed in the darkness of Mictlán.
We rushed downward, and our clothes flapped around us. My hair was plastered to my face, and I felt the yank of my brother’s arm. He grabbed my other free hand.
“Open your ears,
tonta
!” my brother screamed.
I relaxed and allowed the sounds of Mictlán to show me things around me. My open eyes took in the vast blackness of the place, but through the sound, I could feel and pinpoint the details of my body and its relation to the world around us. José María emitted twin cones of sound, like the Xolotl had done so before, and I also had my own cones. My brother’s charcoal skin, eyes and clothes came into sharp detail, and I realized why his thin T-shirt flapped with fury.
We’re free-falling like skydivers.
I turned my attention below, and I felt a familiar landscape. The mountain we had climbed during our first trip lay to our right, but it was tiny now. We fell toward the spiral-shaped canyon next to it, and I gasped at the sheer size of it. The canyon looked like it could contain a thousand earths.
“Ohhhh!” I heard my brother scream as we plummeted. We were headed toward large objects inside the canyon.
“Are those things alive?” I screamed.
We were about to land on top of two animals the size of mountains. One creature was shaped like a pitchfork, with curling hairs and blades of bone that adorned its body like tattoos.
The pitchfork creature jammed its thin limbs into another creature. They both roared and screamed.
The adversary was just as tall as the pitchfork animal but shaped instead like a triceratops head without eyes—like a beak with a plate and two horns. Each one of these creatures was bound to the earth and legless. It was only their heads and limbs that rose through their volcano-like bodies.
The animals clashed, and they drew blood. They roared again, took a quick breath, and then they clashed again, driving their horns and claws into each other’s flesh. They ripped out whole chunks, and the flesh crumbled like dry clay. We were headed straight for the head of the triceratops creature.
Our bodies accelerated toward the ground, and I knew that the hard, bony surfaces of the triceratops head would crush our bones on impact.
José María whistled to get my attention, and he drew my body in tighter. We interlaced our arms. We braced for impact on top of the gigantic monster.
The two creatures locked their heads together, and as we rushed the last hundred feet to strike, the giants broke their lock on each other. They pulled apart, screeching like violins out of tune, and they recoiled away from each other.
We fell through the space between them. As I did so, I felt the details of these creatures come into sharper detail.
The triceratops monster was covered with tiny orbs. From up high, the creature had looked eyeless, but now that I was close, my sonar ability told me that the rows of tiny orbs were eyes. Those eyes were made up of thousands more eyes, and inside each one, I heard scorpions, crawling around inside the eyeballs like a prize. Each orb had an ancient presence, and I distinctly felt each of those eyes evaluate us as we flew past them.
The pitchfork creature had no mouth, but it sang a long bellow of rage and fury. As we flew past it, I could almost feel the velvety touch of the creature’s tendrils and the prongs that made up its mountain-like body.
I never wanted to see things so alien and so foreign again.
There was a sense of freedom as we free-fell, and I could feel my brother’s excitement in his heartbeat as we sped through the gap between the fighting mountains.
José María’s screams were pure joy, like a thumping R&B jam, while the wet fear in my vocal cords made the music from my body howl and screech without a single bit of melody.
We would strike the land below the monster very soon.
“They have no feet,” my brother said. “Those monsters have no feet!”
My heartbeat thumped, and the ground rushed at us. We struck it facedown, and the smack of earth on my arms, belly and face made my whole body shake. Surely I would break my bones instantly.
But my brother and I held. I hurt from the fall, but I felt a softness in the ground beneath me, and I was grateful to
(Who, God?)
whatever broke our fall. José María
We fell into brambles that looked as sharp as rose thorns but instead were gauzy and feathery like dandelion heads.
I scrambled up to my feet, and José María got up from the ground with the same sense of urgency. Above us, I could hear the rumbling that the giants made, and I wanted to get as far from them as I could. They were going to clash again, and the crumbling rocks and earthquakes they made might kill us. They were so large that running away from them could easily takes us many hours to get away from them, but I didn’t care. We pummeled the ground as fast as we could.
As we ran, the terrain around us came alive. The sounds I emitted from my body let me see all around me as the sonar that existed in Mictlán revealed details around me. Above us, the two monsters continued to clash, oblivious of our escape.
We ran for a good half hour, and though we hadn’t cleared the valley between the mountain monsters, they continued to recede from each other, as if taking a break from their clash.
The road beneath began to change the farther we moved. From this spot in the canyon, I could see across to the other side, where the spiral shape of its walls led downward. We slowed down to a walk a few times, but we never stopped.
We eventually reached the outskirts of the monsters’ bodies. As I peeked behind them, I realized they were cemented to the ground.
“They’re the clashing mountains just like the Aztecs described,” José María said. “Mictlán, level one, COMPLETE.”
“Shut up,” I said. We ran a little more.
As we ran, my shoes skidded on pebbles. Eventually, the stings of the pebbles were fewer and farther between, and the ground below felt clean and smooth.
It felt good to be on more stable ground, and I hoped that the mountain creatures would continue to ignore us.
We were now traveling along a road. It was paved with more precision than a German highway. It stretched on, several hundreds of feet in width, and the way that sound bounced on it told me that its smooth surface glistened as if made of glass. Our feet did not slip on its surface. Instead, the ground gave our winter boots just the right amount of slickness and friction so that running felt effortless. Behind us, the two colossi continued to fight, and chunks of rock were pulverized into dust around them, creating sounds like a war zone. I smelled the blood on their claws, even from our miles in distance.
We took a short walking break until we could jog again. As we picked up speed again, I felt full of movement, as if a gentle hand propelled us to become faster runners in the dark.
“We can’t run like this,” I said. “We’re not marathoners. We have to figure out where to rest, and find some food.”
My brother nodded. But there was no safe place to rest, not if the giants found us with their million eyes again. Our packs bobbed up and down and their straps cut into our shoulders, but we were not going to get rid of our stuff.
My calves burned from exertion, and my brow was sticky with sweat. But slowing down allowed me to notice the other things on the wall that flanked this road.
Things that seemed alive, even in this world of the dead.
Slowing down let me appreciate the smaller details of the landscape. I could see tiny plants and insects on the canyon walls on our right. When I glanced at them on the wall, they dispersed in tiny clouds, and when I looked away, they returned to their perching spot.
Though our pace was very slow, I noticed that the animals on the wall seemed to move past us very quickly.
This speed was impossible.
“This feels amazing,” José María said, and he took a few hops in his jog, as the trees on our left side began to whiz by and blur.
I looked behind me, and the clashing mountains were now very far away, nothing more than pinpoints in the distance. How had traveled so far, so fast?
Then I felt it. Something throbbed under the ground beneath us. The force below made the smooth road shift in a very tight rhythm, like the surface of a drum vibrating. As we moved farther along the valley, I got the sense of freedom I felt back in Chicago at O’Hare on the moving walkways.
The ground below us didn’t make any music. Instead, it throbbed and pulsed.
We were finally leaving behind the vastness of the giants. I could no longer feel them with my sonar, and all I sensed from that direction were tiny peaks.
“The legends talk about those mountains,” I said to José María.
“Yes, passing through them is supposed to be one of the trials for those who visit Mictlán,” José María said.
“But no mountains should ever have eyes, and no mountain with eyes should look into the dark with such knowledge, with such presence.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s scary, that’s why.”
“And those eyes… Millions of them, Clara.”
“In a place that has no light, no color and no sun, why would these giant mountains have the need for vision? Why have eyes at all?”
“Dunno,” my brother said.
The uncertainty of the possible answers to that question terrified me.
I was glad the mountains were gone from our range of hearing.
The road on which we ran cut a path through a thick jungle. A canopy of their leaves floated above our heads, and meanwhile, the ground pulsed with more intensity. The rubbery leaves of the canopy above us made a latticework of hexagons and octagons. On our right, the wall continued to host a variety of intricate-looking birds and mushrooms, none of which I dared touch.
The road was as wide as the length of a football field, but so far, we hadn’t ventured to its inner edge. I grabbed my brother’s hand, and as we walked forward, we drifted across its width until we reached the edge.
The cones of sound that projected from our heads and shoulders spilled into the darkness, and using their sound, we tried to pinpoint our location.
This wall followed the shape of the canyon of Mictlán, and from the ledge of this smooth road, I stared deep into the spiral canyon.
We were located along the outer edges of the spiral, moving downward into its core. The canyon remained as breathtaking as the first time I had experienced it. It moved for thousands of miles downward, into the dark, and along its path, I spotted more trees and, off in the distance, structures like buildings, punctuating the path down the coil.
“I am thirsty,” I said.
José María slowed his jog down to a walk and handed me the water bottle from his pack. I had no choice but to slow down, too. The trees made no noise, no music. The ground, which continued to move us through at amazing speed like a conveyor belt, also made no noise, other than its occasional throb.
“That’s the best water I have ever had in my life.” I said.
“You don’t get out much, do you?” my brother said.
“I was hoping we would enter in a place far away from the Xolotl,” I said.
“You got your wish. Looks like we came down right in the upper levels of the place. We bypassed the mountain above the canyon.”
“I’ve never seen monsters like those mountain things, José María.”
“They’re not monsters. They’re in the legends. Those were mountains that clash in the first level of Mictlán, Clara. Mountains with hands.”
And eyes. Too many eyes.
Up ahead, down the slope of the road, a voice hummed a melody, forlorn and silken.
“Those mountains have names,” the voice said. Its timbre was deep, its pitch glossy and dark. “You have forgotten to implore the mountain’s names as you passed through them. They will not be pleased with you.”
“Who said that?” I shouted.
Suddenly, I no longer wanted to walk forward. I turned my body to allow the cones of sound to see behind me, and I felt the mountains screech as they continued to fight. No clue as to who was talking to us.
“Clara, you hear that voice, too?” José María said.
I grunted to say yes. José María grunted back in acknowledgment.
Before us lay darkness. I could sense the jungle around the path, but beyond that, not much else. Not an animal, and not another human. To our right lay a flat wall that rose thousands of feet. The insect hives that had risen along our right side on the wall were gone. Only rock was left. And to our left, a chasm with those throbbing pods of blackness at the bottom.
“Come forward; don’t be afraid,” the voice said. Its source had now become distant, as if it had moved from a position in front of us to a new location hundreds of miles away. Even though the voice felt like it had moved off and away from us, I was still scared. It was tracking us.
“We’re headed straight for where that voice is. It’s up ahead,” I said.
“I know. But that’s the waaaay down the path,” José María.
“Sigh,” I said.
“I don’t want to go, either,” my brother said. “But we don’t have much of a choice. You want that tonal, yeah?”
“It’s what we came for.”
We walked for what seemed like a half hour without hearing the voice again. We stopped a few times to stretch our legs, drink water. We ate the Clif Bars in our bag in small bites to ration them for the trip. For a long stretch, we walked in silence. Neither of needed to fill our time with chatter. That was one of the advantages of having a brother. Plus, I needed time to think by myself.
I tried checking my watch, but I couldn’t sense the hands along its dial through the glass, and I gave up. I guessed that we had been walking for three hours, but in my head, I felt like we had been walking for much longer.