The 13 Secret Cities (Omnibus) (27 page)

“And those giants move through the gates,” José María said. His phrase rhymed with the snake’s words, and I realized they were singing together.

He’s in love.

“Like the gate we walked through in Lake Michigan,” I said.

“Yes,” replied my brother and the snake together, in a chorus of gauzy music.

They were singing a song together, even as her flesh of snakes imprisoned us.

“Many wheels ago, this canyon unfurled itself from the navel of the darkness. The Coil wound unto itself, while at the same time it expanded outward, up to the highest levels, close to the ground. That is how things began. And the Lords of Mictlán took residence inside its center,” the snake sang.

“Mictlán was just a home.” José María added. “A home made of flowers and rivers that run like veins.”

“Just one home in the cosmos,” the snake said. “A home for us.”

“A home for us,” José María said, as if he had known this song all his life.

“Two Great Beings, older than old, became lovers. The female swelled with pregnancy. And she bore four children, as the wheels rotated, touched and collapsed. Four children, four colors,” José María continued.

“Those beings are so old that we cannot see them anymore. They are even older than the Lords,” Blue Hummingbird said. “But they are there always, beyond this spiral canyon.”

I felt my brother stir inside this sea of reptiles. He was turning around to face me.

“And those four were powerful gods—” José María whispered to me. He was close, maybe just two or three feet in front of me.

“Four children, all of them Tezcatlipocas,” Blue Hummingbird said.

“And three of those children left Mictlán. They didn’t visit often.”

“But the Lords continued to devour,” the snake said.

The music continued, but the lyrics faded off to an echo.

“Clara,” the snake said. “Can you hear me?”

“Of course,” I said.

“You are here for reparations, yes?”

“To reclaim my tonal,” I said.

“And you know how your tonal got lost, don’t you? You felt the presence of the Ocullín, did you not? You felt his cold body, his roving eyes and his need for violence?”

“What are you talking about?” I said.
 

“I will take you there, I will show you what the Ocullín did. I will show you why the gates are opening and why the Ocullín followed you. I will show you what he can do if you don’t stop him.”

“Show me, yes, show me.” I said.

“I will help you find your tonal,” the snake said as she looped her body over cliffs in the distance.

“Thank you” was all I could think to say.

“But first, our trade,” Blue Hummingbird said. “You can keep your metal object from your world, Clara. Those objects are dull and useless. They contain no real knowledge. What I want is
you
.”

Music swelled inside the snake’s body, and though my eyes were blinded by the snakes that enveloped my body, I felt my body flow forward and
through
the snake, into the brightest flash of sapphire I ever saw in my life.

Edgar’s body had been lanky, marked by moles at his shoulders, and during the times we had sex, my hands had explored his back, his face and even his eyelids. That’s what I remembered most about the times we made love: his skin. Those sensations on my skin and in my nose and eyes had made me orgasm several times when I touched him. And now, as I fell into a thousand shards of the color blue, my skin came alive, just like it did during those early mornings with Edgar. Thousands of electrodes had been turned on over every inch of my body.

The snake called my name, and the two syllables—the way she caressed the sound—made my stomach tingle.

“Clara,” she said. “
Crawl with me.
”

I felt hollow, as if I was just a shell made of skin. But this feeling—the way it made me feel free, as if gentle air currents inhabited my insides instead of organs made of carbon and water—was a taste of something sacred. The brushes of the air against my neck, my toes, my legs—they felt as if they were coming from a windmill inside my heart.

I let out a deep breath, and as I inhaled, I felt the essence of the snake move through my lungs, stomach and organs, on a journey with purpose.

She’s moving through my cells,
I thought. The thought made no sense from a biological standpoint, but my heart felt it. The snake was in me, swelling inside my head, and pressing into me with her blue beauty. She was now seeing through me, as if she had infiltrated me from the space behind my eyes.

In my ears, a wash of sound, velvety and sharp.

But warmer, so much warmer, so much more like blood in my veins.

My body swelled, crested, and then it ran in rivers of liquid. I felt the same rush of an orgasm that I might have given myself with my own hands. Stars flooded my vision and my skin bloomed with heat. I panted inside the sea of snakes.

The blue intensified, and it became thicker, darker. Its music spread itself apart, like a siren going off in the night, and the snake and I became one being, connected by oceans and galaxies of blue color.

It was in this blueness that I understood where I was.

You’re inside the snake’s eyes. You’re literally inside her eyes. Outside, in the circular valley of Mictlán, those eyes are nothing but useless black orbs, but if you ever saw Blue Hummingbird in the sun, those eyes would be as blue as the heart of the Pacific Ocean.

“Thank you, Clara,” the snake said. “We have communed. And now I can show tell you the story of the Ocullín, if you will let me.”

I sang “yes,” and the music of that word flitted off, like a bird, into the blue.

I saw a new vision through Blue Hummingbird’s eyes, and she was nothing but a baby. She peered up from the lower levels of the spiral canyon, and up above, a war took place. Thousands of owls and hummingbirds surrounded an animal that had cut through the circular opening of the canyon. The being disobeyed the natural spiral flow of the walls of the canyon, and instead, it cut across its thousands of miles, like a knife puncturing an onion. The animal was segmented, and covered in thick fur. It ate through the swarm of owls with its five mouths, gathering force as it moved through space.

“That was the first time I ever saw the Ocullín,” the snake said. “He Who Murders Worlds.”

The Ocullín embodied every thrust of a rapist, every hand that slit a throat, every cell of cancer that ate a body from the inside out. The Ocullín felt as putrid as the vision I had seen of Richard Speck walking throughout that house. The Ocullín was the explosion of bone and muscle when guns had shot us down in Pritzker Pavilion.

The Ocullín consumed the hummingbirds and cracked their bones. Their attacks with their talons on his bulbous body did nothing to stop him.

The Ocullín made no song in his path through the empty space of the canyon. In a place where even the cliffs and the stones gave off music, its silence made the young snake take cover in a hollow cave near the fields of poppies.

The snake witnessed this battle of the Ocullín against the citizens of Mictlán. It lasted many wheels, and she lay helpless, just an infant, in her nest hear the bottom of the Coil. I saw it in a simple flash of images, but I understood that it was a war that had gone on for centuries or maybe millennia.

A flash of light broke through the sky, and two shards of white light lit the spiral canyon for a moment. The forests and cities and the creatures of Mictlán were bathed in the light for a moment, and I gasped, even through the snake’s vision.

And then the Ocullín clashed with the two light beams. They turned and twirled, and the Ocullín emitted a howl full of rage and pain.
 

The beams grew thicker, brighter, and a sharp screech came from their very core. Spiraling sparks blew out from the beams by the millions, and even the smoke owls flinched, flapping in fear back toward the mountain as the white spirals ripped the darkness open.

The largest of the white beams took on a slender, fluid shape, and its tip swelled in size, forming a head, a mouth and dozens of sharp teeth. It was a head that looked just like that of a snake, at least until horns and feathers grew from the back of its skull like a radiant headdress in brilliant reds and oranges. The beast dove into the canyon, down toward the black heart at its center, and for a moment, it looked like it had disappeared, spirals and all.

Then a roar detonated from the heart of the canyon, and the snake of light rose like a spear through the thousands of miles between the black heart and the Ocullín above. The snake pierced the worm’s skin, and the Ocullín gross body began to absorb and eat the spiraling sparks. They wrestled, turning and biting. This battle continued for several years, until the snake opened its jaw wide enough to swallow the Ocullín. The music of the white snake turned moody and blue as it wrapped its jaws over the worm, and eventually, he swallowed most of it. The white snake’s body bristled in colored feathers that stood up like spikes all over its back.

Just as the feathered snake closed in on the last segment of the Ocullín, this remainder of the worm ripped itself away from the white jaws that sliced its body. The runaway segment was nothing more than a set of mouths reeking of pus and rot, and it flew up, away from the canyon, while the feathered snake lay in the upper walls of the canyon, fat and bloated as it tried to digest the murderer. What was left of the Ocullín flew up and out of the canyon, and up toward the tip of the mountain, where the gate to Mictlán stood inside its snowflakes.

Then the feathered snake slithered into a cave at the foot of the mountain next to the Coil. Years passed while it lay in silence.

A familiar figure emerged from the flocks of hummingbirds that raged through the air. The Xolotl, draped in his tiny loincloth, clutching his knife, burst from the hordes of birds, seeking the last of the Ocullín.

They used to be inseparable, the snake reminded Clara. Xolotl and Quetzalcoatl, twin brothers. But that was the last time they fought together.

The Ocullín’s last segment sat on top of the mountain, murdering the beings that lived there.

The Xolotl reached the tip of the mountain, and there he slashed the Ocullín’s mouth, and the thick fur that was left on its flesh. But the Ocullín bit back as the snowflakes bristled with music around them. The Ocullín bit the Xolotl in the arm, wounding it, and with a single fluid movement, stepped out of Mictlán and into another world through the reflections in the snow. The smoke owls tried to stop the Ocullín, but it was too late. The Ocullín was gone.

“That is my story,” Blue Hummingbird said.

Then I felt essence of Blue Hummingbird swirl inside me in an ocean of blue color and alien music, and my body melted into hers. I lost track of where my body ended and hers began, and my vision rolled back into a vast, open plane of sapphire.

The snake ejected me from her body onto a field of flowers in Mictlán. The flowers recoiled from my body as I hit the flowerbed. I felt relaxed but exhausted, and I turned to face up toward the animal. José María was also sliding out from the weave of her body, and he landed sideways, gently, on a cluster of flat rocks off to my right.

José María crawled on his elbows toward me, his eyes wide as saucers, sweat streaking the thick hair on his forehead.

“I think I’m in love,” he said.

Blue Hummingbird was leaving us.

“We have cut through several of the levels of the Coil,” she hissed, “but this is as far as I can take you. There are places in Mictlán that even I can’t go.”

The snake rolled off of the wide plain where she dropped us off. Her coils flipped over the jagged edge, one after another, and soon, she was gone without saying another word to us. Though she had spoken a kind of syntax that I could understand as sentences, what I knew about her from being inside her flesh made me think that she was very far from human.

“Even without daylight, I felt like she could see us with her eight eyes,” I said.

“
The things she showed me,” José María said. He sat cross-legged at the edge of the flower bed. Roses. Black as night, their petals dewy and graced with a velvety touch. José María began to eat their petals, and instinctively, I did too. Their taste was opulence, sugar and something akin to blood. The experience inside the snake’s blue eye had left me so hungry.