The 13 Secret Cities (Omnibus) (18 page)

“In Náhuatl.”

“No, it wasn’t Náhuatl.”

My mother looked confused now.

“That can’t be right. No one in your father’s family ever got direct experience in Mictlán—it’s forbidden. But nevertheless, we expected Náhuatl to be spoken there.”

Now that I thought about this, I had no way to explain how I actually felt and heard the language of the Xolotl. I knew that our blood pact had allowed me to hear it, but I couldn’t even string one sentence together to explain how I experienced its language of music and inner sound.
 

I was only nineteen years old. I would need more time, and more experience, to one day be able to explain the language of Mictlán to another human being. I would need decades of time to do so, in fact. I failed my mother that day.

“Their language sounds, like—uh—sound,” I said.
 

“All the stories and all the myths I learned from your father’s sisters—explain that the Xolotl should speak Náhuatl, Toltec at least.”

“I didn’t even know what a Xolotl was until I saw it.”

“I was convinced that the Xolotl is what visited you on your thirteenth birthday, but your father is not so sure anymore. I have my doubts
,
too.”

“And just a few moments ago, I thought I saw a shadow, and it talked about seeing my grandmother when she had her stroke.”

“When I married your father, his mother terrified me. Her eyes were the deepest shade of green I had ever seen, and her skin, brown and wrinkled, looked like a mask. But over time, she taught me about these traditions, and I realized she was unlike any woman I had ever met. She was a generous, smart and wise woman.”

“Was she the one that taught you about all this?”

“Yes, but not at first. She didn’t take well to me, not for years.”

“Why didn’t she like you at first?”

“These are things you only learn when you marry.”

Lightning flashed through the windows as the snow storm built up power.

“What am I supposed to do now?” I said. “Just a moment ago, something spoke to me in the TV room—”

“I remember a story your grandmother told me when I was pregnant with you, and it’s helped me remember things that shouldn’t be remembered. But I think I know now what it is you saw in the library.”

“And it’s not the Xolotl?”

“It’s worse. Your grandmother called it a spirit. The Ocullín.”

The word sounded hard, like a knife striking through flesh and into bone.
Oh-coo-yeen.

How can there be something worse than the Xolotl?

“
The Ocullín is the servant of the Lady and Lord of Mictlán,” my mother said. “He is the other side of death, the part that’s difficult to celebrate. He is raw hunger for blood—he’s disease.”

“What does he look like?”

“We don’t know. I only have stories from your grandmother. She never described it. She just said it was a terrible presence.”

“What does he want with me?”

My mother cocked her head for a moment, to make sure she heard the sounds from the floors below. She lit a cigarette, cracked the window open and shut her eyes in ecstasy as she puffed into the frigid air.

“You’ve started smoking again,” I said.

My mother laughed, beaming inside the curls of smoke.

“Your father and I thought it would be easy for you to go find your tonal in Mictlán. It’s not a place we’re supposed to fear, since we will all go there someday. In fact, we should celebrate Mictlán. But we had no idea how closely something like the Ocullín would follow you. It’s worse than being followed by a serial murderer, or an executioner.”

“What does Ocullín mean?”

“Worm. But he’s worse than anything a worm could ever be.”

“I’ll just go back one more time then. Find it.”

My mother shook her head.

“No. No more trips.”

“I can do it. To make this stop.”

“We regret sending you there.”

My mom draped a rosary over my neck.

“From my first communion,” she said. “Maybe it’s time to get all the help you need.”

I wanted to laugh at my mother. Despite all the madness from the past few weeks, this felt ridiculous. Seriously, a rosary? But it was typically my mother, too.

My mother took down a few cardboard boxes from the shelves, and she systematically opened and closed several until she found what she was looking for. She brought the tiny object to show it to me in her cupped hands. I expected to see something delicate and alive, like a hummingbird.

A tiny obsidian knife lay in the folds of her skin. Its handle zigzagged like the tail of a snake, and it glistened with tiny green mosaic patterns. The blade’s obsidian edge absorbed light instead of reflecting it, as if it were made of shadow. The obsidian looked fragile, like glass.

“This knife belonged to your grandmother Blanca. She used it for everything. For cleaning out chilies, for cutting umbilical cords when she was a midwife, for removing splinters and for rituals, too. She also used it for contacting the spirits from her house in Oaxaca.”

“Where did it come from?”

“Where all our things come from. Our ancestors,” my mother said.

“So
,
I take this with me back to the Aragon?” I said.

My mother shook her head. She glanced at the door to make sure we were alone.

“No. No more travel through mirrors.”

“What then?”

“Lake Michigan,” she said. “That’s the place you need to go to. Your father and his sisters can’t come to an agreement on whether the Lake should be avoided or not, and by the time they decide on a course of action, it will be too late. I want you to be able to solve this as quickly as possible. And the quickest way back to Mictlán will be through Lake Michigan.”

“Why the lake?”

“Terrible magic has been performed in that lake for centuries. That’s why death rolls from it like a perfume. The Chicago Eastland disaster, the serial murders at the World Fairs—”

“The Millennium Riot.”

“And it happens again and again. It can’t be stopped.”

“José María would think you’re talking about his Japanese horror movies right now.”

“Do NOT tell him any of this. ”

“But he knows so much about Mictlán and then the way the music—”

“No. He’s done enough. He shouldn’t have gone with you to Mictlán. Just like the journey to find the tonal, it must be done alone.”

“José María’s tonal is the flint knife—shouldn’t he be the one to use this thing?” I said.

“I don’t know where I went wrong when you were growing up. I tried teaching you these rules, these lessons. Your tonal acts as a link to the spirit world, as a protector. And that’s all. The job you have to do with this knife is different.”

“How far down do I have to go?”

“Your father said all the way to the end. To the ninth level. He believes your tonal is down there.”

I saw what was down at the bottom of that spiral
-
shaped canyon. A beating mass of darkness that pumped like a heart.

I don’t want to do this anymore.

“This knife was used for sacred rituals. And you should take it to Mictlán when you go find your tonal. For good.”

“I don’t want to go back.”

I wasn’t going to cry. So I didn’t.

“Put the knife away. And don’t tell any of your aunts that you took it. Don’t tell your father
,
either.”

My father had been the one who wanted me to go to Mictlán, and now things were very different. I didn’t understand why my mother would send me down there like this—so suddenly. But I wanted to find an end soon so I could return to daily life, to the things that actually mattered to me.

And I also trusted my mother when it came to emergencies, and this felt like an emergency.

My mother finished her smoke and put it out in an Altoids tin in her pocket.

“Let me tell you something,” she said. “Even good men like your father stray, Clara. I want you to be prepared for the hardness of life.”

“What does this have to do with Mictlán?”

“Your father met a woman at work years ago. They worked together at the Botanical Gardens, and she didn’t leave his department until the affair was over. That lasted six years. All those years
,
I pretended not to know.”

My headache intensified.
 

“Her name was Elizabeth—she knew about the history of the lake, too. That’s how I knew he was cheating. Because he couldn’t stop gushing about her knowledge about the magic that floated above the water.

“Elizabeth told your father that at the time—and this was around 2007—a terrible thing happened in the water of the lake. Someone performed magic that drew on the bloody history of the city’s past and made it into a solid object. According to her, that object is still there, under the water.”

“If I smoked cigarettes, I’d ask you for one now,” I said.

“Stop talking like that. You’re wishing for what you do not want and what you do not need.”

My mother closed the book, placed it in the bookcase, and walked me back to the top of the stairs. She shut off the lights, and I realized that we were actually stealing things from my aunt Minerva’s house.

Things controlled by La Negra. She will find out she took it.

“Just like every house has a door, Mictlán has doors
,
too,” my mother said.

“Yes, the Xolotl said he guards the gate.”

“Yes, and doors can be opened from our side, too. The person who opened the gate in Lake Michigan was a terrible man.”

“What kind of man?”

“A wizard. A corrupt wizard. He taught at the university in Guanajuato for years, but he disappeared. No one knows where—or what—he might be anymore.”

“What’s his name?”

“He was once called Guillermo Villa. But he’s disappeared now. His only legacy is the gate he made in the lake.”

It occurred to me that the glass of the Aragon’s doors had functioned as a gate, too. Was that bad magic, and if so, was I responsible for it? Was José María?

“Your father will say differently, but I think you will need to go through that gate,” my mother said. “It will be safer than the one you entered with José María. More stable. The citizens of Mictlán won’t be able to kick you out like the Xolotl did, because they’ll never even know you arrived.”

“It’s a side entrance?”

“That’s what I’m hoping. You’ll be able to travel through the nine levels and find your tonal.”

“I don’t see why the tonal matters so much.”

“If you don’t find your tonal, death will trail after you like a stench. Misery and tragedy will be your companions. And death will corrupt you.”

We passed the TV room, where the Ocullín had promised me everyone in this suburban house would die, and I felt a chill race down my spine.

“And why can’t we tell my dad?” I said, as darkness cloaked our shoulders but the light of the hallway lit our chins in the stairway.

“He doesn’t think you’re ready for a journey of this scale. He’s decided it’s best if he regroups with his sisters to decide your fate. I disagree.”

My mother and I split when we reached the first floor. As I crept down the carpeted stairs, the music stopped. Someone fired curse words in Spanish like rounds of a machine gun.

I did my best to make it seem as if I hadn’t just had my world turned upside down one more time, and squeezed past my cousins, who gathered around the fight.

My father spat out words at Minerva’s husband, Horacio. My dad curled his hand around a beer. He towered over Horacio’s wheelchair, but Horacio didn’t care. My dad’s face had gone red, and his eyes shrank into little brown pinpoints. Uncles and cousins tried to ease my father away from Horacio.

“Your medals and that wheelchair don’t give you the right to run this place like it’s all yours,” my father said.

“Look at yourself, you hypocrite,” Horacio said. “Didn’t Clara herself get the shit beat out of her just weeks ago? You have a kid in the OLF
,
for God’s sake. Your mother would be ashamed of you and that
mocosa
.”

Suddenly
,
eyes were on me, then back on the fight before us.

“You weren’t there, and you weren’t either at Tlatelolco,” my father said.

“Where the what?” Horacio said. He had married Minerva in Chicago, but he was fourth generation Mexican-American, with a little Irish thrown in. I suspected he didn’t know what happened in Tlatelolco.

“Learn your history,” my father said. He shook off the men’s hands and straightened the collar on his jean jacket.

“None of you people who didn’t serve know shit,” Horacio said. “Look at these nubs on my hands. They used to be fingers. Five of them. And this wheelchair—the result of Fallujah. Five years serving, to protect you, and you, and you. What you got, desk jockey?”

Horacio was talking about my father and his job in the development office of the Botanic Gardens.

I had never seen my father lunge in a rage, and as he plunged forward, I was reminded of the way José María had pounced last night on the driver on Lawrence Avenue. Same animal energy.
 

My father swiped, and he got close, grabbing a handful of Horacio’s T-shirt. He pulled it hard, and it ripped. The wheelchair started to tip over, but the men on Horacio’s side righted the chair. Both men were drunk beyond belief.