The 13 Secret Cities (Omnibus) (9 page)

and now the image in the glass grew black, like a pool of tar invading its surface. Our reflections grew sharper and more solid inside of it. With each step we took toward the glass, I noticed changes in our skin, too. As the glass grew black and glossy, our reflection in the mirror transformed. My skin had gone from brown skin and dark lashes to a bright crimson, wet and raw. As we approached our mirror images, blood spilled from our lips, as if we had just severed arteries or our skin had burst. My left eye, the one that was no longer working properly, was missing from my face in that black mirror, and the hole that remained showed the frame of the skull bone and a glimpse of raw brain inside. My lips had fallen off, and I could see all my teeth outlined in blood. I looked mutilated and severed. I was a body violated and putrid.

But José María’s reflection looked worse, as his hair fell away in the image and his full lips receded. His skin had gone dark and black, charred like barbecue. His hands dripped with blood, and his neck split open in the image. His skin had holes in it, and beneath these holes, there was nothing but raw flesh.

I screamed as the reflection grew more solid and we ran toward them.

I was not imagining this moment. José María shrieked next to me. He could see this disgusting reflection, too.

"Jesus Christ!" he shouted.

We were running too fast when we had started down the hall, and under normal circumstances, José María and I would have slowed down our gallop in order to pause, and then exited through the doors with caution. But that had not been the case. The dark reflection in front of us had mesmerized us, entranced us, and we had run toward it with magnetic speed, and now, just three feet away from the glass, we were going to crash right into the doors, possibly shattering the glass and cutting ourselves to ribbons, truly becoming the bloody images we saw in its reflection.

I let out a sound that was part cry, part bellow, but all fear.

José María had not let go of my hand, and his grip got tighter as he also braced himself for impact.

When we struck the glass, the first sensation I felt was that of sound rippling through my whole body, making my bones and organs vibrate and my head ring with tones like bells. The surface of the glass had gone soft, like gelatin, and we struck the double doors without a crash. Instead, we moved through the surface and into the darkness of the reflection inside. A symphony of sound enveloped us, and I thought that this was what it might feel like to be a molecule of air inside a violin. In the microseconds where we crossed through the barrier, sound surged so deeply inside my body that I felt my organs melting away, and the tension that had been in my body fade away into a velvety softness.

We fell forward for what fell like hours, and my stomach fluttered as if I had just leapt from the Hancock tower without a parachute. When we landed, we struck hard, dry earth, and small pebbles scraped my cheek.

I was facedown now, and the only thing that felt solid was my brother's hand intertwined in mine.

I looked up. We were in the dark that I had glimpsed in the other side. I couldn't make out anything, because night had taken over here. This was darkness. This was the kind of dark that had terrorized me as a child. This was the same darkness where the boogeyman lived, where Freddy Krueger slashed his film victims, and where my heart and my brain had always told me not to enter.

The symphonic sound I had heard was coming from a place above me, and in the dark, I got the sense that I was standing on some sort of flat surface, like a desert. Wind whipped around me, and I felt very, very cold. In the dark before me, I finally made out a single object as my night vision kicked in. I still couldn't see José María, or the ground, or anything except for the silhouette of the object in front of us. But I felt his hand, and I squeezed.

The object before us was pyramidal in shape, and possibly the size of a skyscraper. It was a triangle of ink set against a dark blue-black sky, and the symphonic sound was coming from its peak.

From the top, something was peering at my brother and me.

The thing itself emitted no light, and so there was nothing to see. But I knew that it occupied the space at the top of that triangular shape, and it was staring down at us.

When I looked at my brother's hand, all I could see was darkness, but the warmth of his skin was real.

José María
, I tried to say.

But I had no words. Each time I opened my mouth to speak, no sound came out.

I tried screaming, and all I could hear was the blood beating inside my eardrums and a soft roaring sound, the breathing inside my lungs.

My heart beat too, very fast.

Do not let go,
I tried to scream. Though no sound came out, I hoped at least my thoughts would carry across the dark to my brother. His hand tightened, and I propped him up on his feet. I stood shoulder to shoulder with him now. If I let go of his hand, I might lose him forever. There was so much silence here, except for the melancholy music that came from the shape in front of us.

I knew then that the structure in front of us was not a building. It was a mountain. Taller than any mountain I had ever seen. And up there, in the dark, something was making the saddest music I had ever heard in my life. The sound filled me with fear, and as the music grew louder in my ears, I realized that whatever made that sound was staring at us. The sound stirred sorrow in my heart.

I looked at the peak and searched for its eyes. I only saw a wall of onyx.

But it was looking at us.

And as its tones changed, some of them grew long and harsh, like a growl.

Then it grew silent. After a few moments, it began to emit long brassy knells. It was ringing a bell of some sort, and its tones pulsed long into the space around us.

The owner of those sounds was descending down the mountain.

I tried screaming, shouting, whistling, and nothing came out anymore. My vocal cords were gone, or I had done deaf, or worse. But I couldn't be deaf, because the bells and moans were closer now.

The cold air pressed itself against my skin, and I was thankful I could still feel at least that. This darkness was like nothing I had ever seen. It was the world of the blind.

The bells echoed and their infernal sound banged in my eardrums. It felt so loud that it hurt.

I took two deep breaths to think about what to do, but two breaths were all I ever got. The thing that crept down the side of the mountain came down faster, moaning and murmuring, and its sound flooded my ears. Though I was blind, I shut my eyes as it sprinted toward us.

The bells rang through my whole body, making it shake.

I felt something let go inside of me, like a string popping on a guitar, and my eyes flew open.

I wasn't ready to die.

PART TWO

WHITE TEZCATLIPOCA

9 UNDERGROUND RIVERS

“This is why cities are breeding grounds for the occult: In their streets, sewers, subways and wonders of architecture, man can wear a mask. Inside the city he can trick himself into thinking he can fool nature.” –Frederick Law Olmsted, Marginalia, National Park Service Archives, Brookline, Massachusetts.

“
All
experiences are non-local. Most people choose to call these experiences narrative and language. I prefer to call them quantum physics.” –Sculptor Vlad Stoppard-Goswani, commencement speech at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, 2007, YouTube.

“They couldn’t pronounce her name, but her work was not in vain. Up they rose, in demon form, and her feet crushed their horns. Tow, non-seen. Tow, non-seen.” –El Samarïa, “Meet Ze Monsta”,
Brief
Interviews with Singular Women: Remixes and Rarities
, 2011, A-O-T Records.

To live in blindness was to live in fear.

I tried wriggling my fingers and toes, to prove to myself I was still somewhere,
anywhere
.

There they were. My digits made tiny circles, and each ellipse brought me a smidgen of comfort.

Everything was dark.

My eyes and my vocal cords had stopped working.

I focused my attention on my face, and I forced my eyes to blink as many times as I could. I felt their tiny muscles move, but whether they were open or closed, it didn’t matter. I was as blind as a mole.

Somewhere up ahead, some massive and feral thing galloped down toward my brother and me
,

(
You are still grasping his hand, don’t let go of his hand)

and whatever it was would be tearing us up soon.

I felt a tug at my wrist, and I knew José María was still there with me. Three tiny squeezes ran up my forearm. He was trying to communicate.
 

It was time to stop lying on the ground like prey. I remembered the woman whose life escaped on the grass of Millennium, and I knew I didn’t want to succumb in such a submissive state.

Running blind would be dangerous. We would be likely to trip or stumble if we ran. I took my right hand and felt in the dark for my brother’s reedy shape. I found a forehead, and I felt the tangle of his coarse hair. I patted his nose, and I moved on to his left shoulder. I lifted him up by the armpits, the same way I did when we were kids and we transformed the dinner table into a train, and he needed to ride up front as conductor.

Crawl with me. Crawl for your life.

I yanked the collar of José María’s shirt, and we crawled forward, using the sound of the bells behind us to give us direction. The only shape I had been able to make out in the dark was a mountain the size of a skyscraper, and I knew I wanted to get away from it as fast as I could.
 

The grit beneath us dug into my bare knees and tried to puncture my palms. There were smells down in this darkness, smells that made me want to vomit.

Under our hands, the ground became coarser, like gravel. We scrambled forward. The sound of bells, brassy and full, pummeled my ears, and I felt a presence behind us. It didn’t sound like a locomotive, car, motorcycle. It was something animal-like.

It’s that thing. The thing at the top of the mountain.

Our crawl was frantic and tedious, and as we moved forward, we felt new textures beneath us. Some were hard and wooden, other soft and dense. Were those eyes beneath—was that human hair? Did I touch a dead hand?
 

We pushed on.
 

Then we bumped into something hard and flat. I felt over the surface with my right hand. Luckily, it didn’t feel like human hair or skin. My hands explored it.

It was only about three feet tall. I knew we could clear it. I dragged my brother up its surface. Our legs scrambled, and we never let go of each other’s hands, despite the clumsy climb.

Once we lay on top, the rock felt smooth, like a brick. Maybe we were on top of a short stone wall.
 

To continue, we had to move past its edge. I moved my hand through the dark to see if there was solid ground beneath it. Nothing. I had no way to tell if the drop was inches or miles deep.

But the sound of the bells behind us was getting closer.

I wrapped both arms around my brother and we jumped off the edge.
 

I rotated my body in midair so we could land on my side or my back.
 

We fell, and the dark made it impossible to know how long we fell.

My shoulder hit the ground, and spikes stabbed my legs through my stockings.
 

We lay wedged inside a bed of hard objects.
 

Nothing felt broken, though I had gotten the wind knocked out of me.

My brother scrambled close to me. I felt his hoodie and his arms under my hands.

This time
,
José María grabbed my bicep, and he brought me close to the wall next to us. He tapped my ears furiously, but without hurting me. He tapped right near the ear canal. What was he trying to say?

He wants you to listen, to listen close. He wants you to listen for both of us.

We moved our hands up the wall, and I tried standing up. The wall ended at about chest level for me, and I peered into the dark, listening, while José María tapped my ear.

He tapped me in sync with the bells.

I had never heard a single sound fill miles and miles of space like this. Each time the bell rang, it swelled into the space
,
packing it with vibrations. It was a violating sound, revolting. But it had a rhythm. Roughly six seconds would pass, and then another repetition would shake my ribcage and make my gut want to empty itself.
 

I tried finding that tall mountain again in the dark. Anything that would help me orient myself. Instead, there was nothing. All I saw was darkness.

In between the knells, my brother tapped my head, syncopating his taps to their rhythm. He was trying to tell me something.

There’s a sound under the bells, a sound. Something like a rush of air—and José María wants you to hear it.

Then I heard it.

The beast making the sound was breathing. I could hear each breath it took. That was the syncopated beat beneath the bells.