Alexander Death (The Paranormals, Book 3) (24 page)

Jenny looked down the steep slope of the pyramid—it was a long fall to the shadowy ground below. For a moment, she could imagine thousands of Mayans standing below, looking up in awe as priests performed the ceremonies.

Then she looked out to a breathtaking view of the sunset over the Sierra Madre mountains. She could see a waterfall here and there off the mountains, disappearing into rivers that slinked away below the dense green canopy. A flock of brightly colored birds passed nearby.

“
How old is this place?” Jenny asked.

“
About twelve hundred years, give or take,” Alexander said. “It's not one of the famous, touristy places. Most of the old ruins aren't well known. The government just picks a few, runs a lawnmower over them, and charges admission. But nobody ever comes here. We've got the place to ourselves. Let's check out our room.”

Alexander led her through one of the portals, into a room lined from floor to ceiling with hieroglyphs. A thick layer of leaves and debris had accumulated on the stone-tile floor. Alexander swept an area clear with his foot, then shrugged off his hiking pack and set it down. Jenny was grateful to set hers down, too. She stretched her arms and back, all of which now felt incredibly light.

“
Got any more coke?” Jenny asked him.

“
Why? We're done hiking.”

Jenny shrugged. “Just an idea.”

“
We're not doing any more of that tonight.” Alexander laid out a bright, geometric-patterned Mayan blanket that covered a large portion of the cover. Then he took out a woven pouch the size of a grocery bag.

“
Dinner?” Jenny asked.

He opened the bag to show her. It looked like a couple of pounds of raw mushrooms. They smelled pungent, like earth and decay.

“
Tell me that's not what we're eating,” she said.

“
It's the only thing we're eating.”

“
Ugh. They look sick.”

“
We're not eating them for the flavor, Jenny.” Alexander tossed a mushroom in his mouth and chewed on it, and he was obviously trying to hide a grimace at the taste. “These are sacred mushrooms.”

“
Oh...I've never done those.” She looked into the bag again and wrinkled her nose. “Those can make you crazy, can't they?”

“
If you use them like a party drug. Used correctly, they can open hidden doors in your mind.” He held out a mushroom to her, but Jenny didn't take it.

“
What kind of doors? Hallucinations and stuff?”

“
In your case, the doors to who you really are,” Alexander said. He popped the mushroom she'd refused into his own mouth and chewed it quickly. “After tonight, you'll remember everything, Jenny.”

“
You mean my past lives?”

“
All of them, if we do it right. You'll remember the different ways you can use your power, too. And then you'll be fully awake. You'll remember yourself, you'll remember me, and we'll both be fully ourselves again.”

“
All that from a mushroom, huh?” Jenny asked. She was starting to feel afraid, but she didn't want to show it. Her real self, as Alexander called it, the primordial part of her that had reincarnated so many times, had often acted as a monster. She'd glimpsed that much already. “I'm not sure I want to see my past.”

“
The truth is the truth whether you learn it or not,” Alexander said. “So you might as well learn it. That's my philosophy.”

He offered her another mushroom.

Jenny could only think of the difficult life she'd had so far. Her father's struggle to make her a good person, his depressing disillusionment when he realized he'd failed. Ashleigh's manipulations—which might even include Jenny and Seth's entire relationship, according to Alexander.

She did know one thing—she was sick of being in the dark about what she was, and she didn't want to go through life depending on Alexander to tell her. She needed to know for herself.

Jenny took the mushroom into her mouth and bit into it. It tasted the way cow patties smelled.

“
Delicious, huh?” Alexander asked.

She raised her middle finger at him while she chewed the mushroom. Then she accepted another. And another.

They walked out of the temple and sat on the highest step, watching the sun fade away while they ate their way through the mushrooms, washing them down with water. Jenny grew nervous, then anxious, then bored. The corona of the sun slid out of sight, and an ocean of stars became visible.

“I don't think these are doing anything,” Jenny said.

Alexander grinned. “Tell me about your earliest memory.”

“Like Egypt? Or Africa?”

“This lifetime.”

“Oh.” Jenny thought. “I was outside in the yard, like two or three years old. I don't remember what I was doing. But I saw this snake—a huge rattler—crawling around below this log. And for some reason, I thought it would make a fun little toy.”

“You liked the rattle.”

“Maybe. I thought it was kind of cute. But when I picked him up...” Jenny looked at Alexander. He could probably guess what came next, but he just waited attentively, his eyes watching hers. “Well, he died. The Jenny pox made him bleed everywhere. My dad got really pissed at me for playing with rattlesnakes.”

As she told the story, she thought she could hear a sound like rattling, but at first it seemed like an echo of her childhood memory. Then the rattling grew louder and multiplied, as if the forest were filled with diamondback rattlers.

“Do you hear that?” Jenny asked.

“The sound of the jungle?”

“Not exactly...” Jenny heard the rattle behind her, loud and strong, and she whirled around to look at the temple.

A feathered serpent was carved above the doorway on the far left, its squarish jaw open and pointed tongue protruding, its scales rectangular with a dot carved inside each one. When they'd arrived, the serpent figure had been folded in on itself in stack of coils.

Now the serpent's head was sliding forward across the front of the temple, towards the middle door, while layer by layer its body unfolded and stretched out behind it. The serpent opened its jaw wide and ate the hieroglyphic birds carved on the lintel of the middle door. Then it flowed on across the face of the temple, towards the door on the right.

“Do you see that?” Jenny whispered. She looked at Alexander. His face kept shifting and melting in front of her eyes, changing from one face to another to another, all of them somehow familiar to Jenny. The only constant was his dark eyes, watching her while the rest of his face kept changing.

“I see you,” Alexander said. “All of your faces like masks, nested inside each other like a Russian doll.”

“I see you, too,” Jenny said. “All of you.”

The snake rattled again. It swallowed the hieroglyphs above the third door, then turned inward and began flowing away into the temple wall, as if it had found some hole in which to burrow.

Then its head and body curled down into the doorway, but it was no longer a stylized relief carved in stone. Instead, it was a live snake, its head as big as a lion's, its body as thick as a man. It was identical to the snake from her first memory, except that thousands of actual diamonds glittered among the scales on its back.

“Tell me you're seeing that,” Jenny whispered.

The snake extended out of the doorway, its head gradually dropping lower as more of the body flowed out of the doorway, until its head was just above the stone floor.

“What are you seeing?” Alexander asked. His voice seemed to echo around her, along with the thousands and thousands of snake rattles.

“A snake,” Jenny said. “It's huge. And it's coming toward us.”

“Don't be afraid.” Alexander took her hand.

“It's not real, is it?” she whispered. The snake moved silently across the stone tiles, towards her feet.

“It's more than real,” Alexander said.

“That's not what I wanted you to say.” Jenny watched the huge head approach her. The snake rose up in front of her like a charmed cobra, its bottomless black eyes staring into hers. Its rattle sounded as loud as a drum in her head.

“Don't show it any fear,” Alexander's voice said, somewhere. Jenny couldn't see him, only the vast snake raising up above her now.

“Yeah...I don't know if I can do that,” Jenny whispered.

The huge diamondback's head rose a few feet above Jenny, and then the snake froze, its eyes still locked on hers.

“Nice snake,” Jenny whispered. Her whole body was shaking, but she knew better than to make sudden moves around a poisonous snake, even if it was just a hallucination. “Good snake...”

The snake's jaws opened, revealing fangs the size of butcher knives. Then its head darted down at Jenny, and its venomous fang sank deep into her right temple. She could feel it skewering her brain, flooding her head with hot poison.

“Alexander!” Jenny cried out. The snake tore loose, ripping away a sizable chunk of her face. Jenny screamed and toppled forward, toward the steps.

She caught her balance and found her feet sliding forward on stone. She was reminded of moments when she'd been about to go to sleep, when suddenly she would feel her feet slip out from underneath her and then feel herself falling, even though she was lying in bed. Then she would regain her sense of balance.

When Jenny regained her balance, she found herself walking along a crowded cobblestone street that reeked of horse manure, human waste and baking bread. She wore a long, rough skirt and a stiff, scratchy blouse, as well as a pair of gloves to her elbow. Her hair was tied back with a length of ribbon. The crowd jostling around her wore similar archaic, handmade clothing.

All at once, she knew that this was Paris, but not the modern city of wide boulevards and classical architecture. This was more of a medieval warren tucked behind high walls, the streets as narrow and twisted as rabbit-trails in a thick forest. It was the early seventeenth century.

Jenny heard a pained wail behind her. She looked back over her shoulder, and suddenly the crowd was gone. Instead, people huddled in doorways, shivering, their bodies swollen with thick black growths. Corpses littered the streets.

All around her, the dense crowd had turned to scattered individuals staggering their way down the street, afflicted with the horrific disease. She watched a hobbling old man drop his cane, then fall to the street motionless. The city was filled with cries of despair and muffled weeping.

“What do you see?” Alexander's voice said beside her.

“The plague,” Jenny said. “Paris.” She turned to look at Alexander. They were standing just where they'd been, on the top step of the Mayan pyramid. Though Jenny had been part of the street scene, it now appeared to float before her, like a television screen glowing in the vast open darkness in front of the pyramid. She could see herself in that life, pulling the hood of her cloak over her head as she hurried through the plague-ridden city.

She turned to Alexander, whose face was still shifting appearance at least once a second, one face giving way to another. His faces smiled at her.

“Look again,” they said, and the sounds of countless snake rattles grew as loud as a thunderstorm.

Jenny looked. The space in front of the pyramid seemed to unfold, and with each unfolding a burst of images appeared. Ancient Greece, ancient Egypt, medieval Germany, more and more scenes woven together in a vast, animated tapestry drawn from across the millennia. Her past lives, all of them appearing to happen right now, in the present moment, parallel to each other.

Her eyes found a recent life—glimpses of herself on a circus train crossing America, and then in a shadowy tent, the pox all over her skin so that she was unrecognizable under her mask of bleeding sores. A carnival barker:
Yes, sir, yes, ma'am, pay a penny and see the world's most diseased woman...a true horror, friends, a true horror...