Chapter 17: Miquiztli
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Author’s Note: We have a change in the publishing schedule coming up. Starting in October, I'll be publishing new chapters of Hall of Mirrors every two weeks instead of weekly. Right now my schedule is quite demanding, and I'm a big believer in preventing burnout before it arrives. Sending you a new chapter on a two-week cadence will help me out a lot, and hopefully, it will help some of you catch up on chapters you haven't yet read. Nestor and Felix each have unique journeys inside this book, and I hope you're enjoying them. Let's forge deeper into Mictlán, shall we? Don't forget that you can chat with me about Hall of Mirrors inside my Discord server.
-Cesar Torres
Chicago
Hall of Mirrors by Cesar Torres
Copyright @ 2022 Cesar Torres. All Rights Reserved.
Hall of Mirrors by Cesar Torres
CHAPTER 17: MIQUIZTLI
NESTOR BUÑUEL
They crawled, haunted by the growls and roars of Citlalín, who pounded the entrance of the cave but couldn’t shatter the hard rock.
“You’re making a big mistake, detective. We need to go back to the jaguar.”
“Shut the fuck up and keep moving, asshole.”
“Citlalín is our salvation.”
“Did you not see what it turned into?”
“Trust is not in your cop’s vocabulary, is it?”
“Fuck off.”
“Watch your head, the path narrows here. There’s a fork in the tunnel up ahead, detective.”
“Can you see?”
“Nothing. But I sense it with my nose and my ears, my skin. There’s’ a forking path about forty feet ahead.”
“Your senses must be sharper. The clarity I had outside is not as good in here.”
“The right path goes further into the lower levels of this cave, but I hear and smell a creature down there. You’re gonna think it’s a bit crazy, but there is grass down below that wants to eat us. It’s sentient, and it knows we’re here.”
“And the left?” Nestor said.
“It goes up at a 30 degree angle. It’s covered in mites and other small animals. But it has an opening that leads back out into the open air. I can taste the fresh air on the roof of my mouth.”
“Then we go left.”
“Won’t be easy. It’s much, much narrower than the right path.”
Nestor had no choice but to forge ahead. He wanted to get back. He wanted to see Felix. He wanted Puttock back in his cell in prison. He wanted to be with the living.
But instead, he faced a darkness so deep, so imposing, that it was as if the darkness could taste him.
The opening on the left sent shivers up Nestor’s spine.
A human could barely fit through it.
As they started their crawl through the tunnel, Needles and pins poked Nestor, and his skin broke into gooseflesh.
Mites.
The critters were already covering his hands, his wrists, and even his face. He hoped they didn’t bite or sting, and though he was a bit claustrophobic, he took deep breaths to calm down. He went back to his days of being a uniformed cop on the streets—thinking methodically through every operation, mitigating emotion, and staying focused on a task. Balancing tactics against strategy.
But it wasn’t easy. The mites took tiny bites of his skin, and they gave off a smell of vinegar and chlorine as they defecated on his forearms and forehead. The mites hardly gave off any music. Instead, they emanated a soft, but somewhat soothing hum.
Moving through this cave’s tunnel took much longer than Nestor had expected. The passage narrowed in places so much that it scraped the top of their heads. More than once, Nestor had to take a break to calm down his heartbeat, and collect himself in order to not freeze and panic. He had always been fascinated by stories of people falling down wells or crevasses, and now he was experiencing it first hand. There were many other moments during the crawl when he wanted to turn around and go back the way they came. But it was much too late. He considered what might happen if he and Puttock got stuck down here. They had to take a handful of breaks to rest, and time elongated. It slipped. And eventually, Nestor came to feel like it had taken hours, or days just to crawl forward twenty inches or so. And all around them, an eerie silence pervailed.
The smell of rot suffocated the throat and nostrils. This scent also carried notes of grief and pain.
What kind of rock was this tunnel made of? It was hard, but not as hard as stone. And crunchy too, with many small ridges and nubs that poked at his skin and made him feel queasy.
“About thirty yards to go,” Puttock said. “Do you feel them?”
“Don’t remind me. They’re biting me everywhere.”
“Funny, I feel them too. But no, I’m not talking about the bugs. Do you feel them?”
“Them?”
“Yes, them. The dead. We’re surrounded by them, detective. These walls, and this tunnel are exactly like dreams I had many years ago.”
“You dreamt about this place?”
“I dreamt of a forking path, and I dreamt of this tunnel, filled with dead things. And in my dream, I had a male companion, but when I dreamt it, I hadn’t met you yet. We’re talking twenty years ago. I still had my full head of hair back then. But the dream tunnel was identical to where we are now: it was a lyrical palace of trophies.”
“Puttock, stop talking in circles.”
“Detective, this beautiful feat of engineering before us is a tunnel made of human corpses.”
Nestor stopped in his tracks. He took a sniff—a really strong sniff. And he detected a smell that he had been hoping wasn’t there. It smelled of meat left roting on a counter for weeks. It smelled of deep fungal growth, and of the deepest parts of the earth. It was the perfume of decay.
He felt around the ground with his hands, and the enhanced abilities of his skin gave him terrifying, new information. His palms were squishing flaps of skin, crushed eyeballs, hardened tumors, and bones that were so corrupted and diseased they were spongy, full of tiny holes.
As he crawled on all fours over bone, sinew and vanishing flesh, Nestor’s consciousness brimmed with images, sounds and sensations of mass graves, people trapped under buildings in earthquakes, villages consumed by smoke and fire, and death at a catastrophic level. Back in New York, he had witnessed this type of scene first hand on September 11, 2001. He had volunteered at the site of the twin towers, and his own eyes had witnessed death at a scale he could barely comprehend. He had seen bodies trapped under rubble, in tiny tunnels, just like this one, hands outstretched, hoping for air and light, and receiving none. Instead, they had become part of a mass grave.
Goddammit he couldn’t stay in here. This was sickening.
Nestor’s hands clawed the surface beneath him to make sure he didn’t slide back down the incline of the tunnel, but he wanted to let go suddenly, and he wanted out. His throat closed up, and he felt a tightness in his head and throat. His heartbeat sped up, and he felt that panic of claustrophobia arrive.
Now he could hear, smell and touch them. The dead. This long tunnel was made of skulls, femurs, hip bones, finger bones, and the worst part was that they were indeed human. He could feel the density of adult jawbones, and sadly, the softer, smoother bones of babies and infants. And their remains gave off soft trails of their histories: families, babies, people who had once laughed, cried and kissed, emanated tiny echoes of what their lives had once been, like a field of ghosts.
Puttock had just about reached the exit, which was only about 30 inches in diameter. He laughed and bellowed as he emerged onto solid ground, and he whooped and hollered as he extended his hand out to Nestor, who was still inside the tunnel.
From down below, Nestor heard a long howl, unlike any howl he had ever heard on Earth. He felt nausea rise in his throat, and he trembled.
Nestor snapped out of his paralysis, and crawled as fast as he could. He flailed and scurried, and somehow, he closed the distance between him and Puttock.
And yet, as Nestor crawled through the last stretch toward the exit, the cave of human remains around him constricted, like a throat closing up. By the time he was just two feet away from the opening, he could only fit his head and his right forearm arm through the hole. His eyes watered, and panic flooded his body. This was his worst nightmare come to life, much worse than being left in the police morgue overnight with no way out.
He could see Puttock standing there, holding on to his hand, and his hot breath forming tiny plumes of steam, but there was no kindness, no trust there. In fact, the murderer was smiling.
“Do you hear it, detective?” he said.
“Help me out,” Nestor said. He tried jamming his muscular shoulder through the hole, but he was pinned inside the tunnel.
“I hear All Tomorrow’s Parties.”
“Puttock, now’s not the time for bullshit. Come on.”
“Nico is singing it, right now, as if we had brought the song with us. Or as if she were here. This is simply sublime—“
But Nestor could hear it too, distant and tinny— a recording of All Tomorrow’s Parties by the Velvet Underground indeed was wafting in the air—while he struggled to take a breath. Above him, Puttock had produced a flat stone the size of a teacup saucer. Its edge glinted despite the absence of light in Mictlán. There was no time to do so, because he could see the intention in his companion’s face.
In one swift move, Puttock sliced through Nestor’s hand. Nestor flinched and tried to pull his hand back, but Puttock kept on cutting.
Puttock laughed as he tore through the flesh, and Nestor felt the world constrict, collapse and vanish. He smelled his own blood in the air, and he let out a cry that tore him apart.
“You fucking idiot, what are you doing?” Nestor bellowed.
Puttock slapped Nestor hard across the face, and the sound echoed.
“Shut the fuck up.”
The smell of Nestor’s blood overpowered everything, as if it had detonated a grenade of metallic scent. Here in Mictlán, blood was an opera singer. The wetness of the blood spread down Nestor’s forearm, and he heard the droplets hit the ground with a boom, as if each one were a cannonball that pummeled the ground. The music it made danced, careened and shouted.
And beneath him, the tunnel constricted him further, molding itself around his feet, his legs, his torso and his neck. The soil was what was making the sound, and a terrifying notion came over Nestor.
The cave was tightening around him.
“Something is alive down here. You have to get me out NOW.”
“I said shut up,” Puttock said and struck Nestor in the side of the face with his fist. Nestor’s head rattled with pain and his ears rang.
Suddenly, a sound like thunder rose from the depths, and it twisted, changing shape, becoming a sound like a cough, then a whistle, until finally, it turned into a blood curdling scream. Around Nestor, the crushed bones that constricted him shifted and slithered, and finally, began to loosen their grip.
The sharp bones that formed this narrow tunnel transformed into a fine powder, like sand, and suddenly, Nestor could move his legs and arms through the powder. However, he began to slide back into the the depths, as if he were trapped in quicksand.
From beneath him, he felt and heard two presences. One was indeed a type of wild grass that had a very sharp intellect, and it sang its music from about five miles beneath them. Its song was one of terror-inducing howls, followed by whispers.
But there was yet another consciousness here, and it was very close. So close, in fact, that Nestor could sense it all around him. Its song and music was abstract, filtered, as if underwater, and absolutely unknowable.
And it wanted to consume Nestor.
The whole cave was conscious.
Puttock used both hands to hold on to Nestor and yanked him out of the the hole, digging his heels into the ground to get leverage.
Nestor moaned and growled, but he was able to get his left shoulder through the opening, which was still firm as stone, while the ground beneath him continued to turn into sand and collapse. The feeling was terrifying, like dangling from a skyscraper. Because whatever was living down there in the bones was not kind.
Finally he was able to squeeze his chest through the opening. Meanwhile the wraith-like sounds below him turned into a choir of voices, shouting, haunting him, shattering his eardrums. The sound morphed once again its a high-pitched whistle that soared through the air with sinister speed and stained the air with dissonance. Nestor flailed his feet, and he was able to push forward. He was free now except for his calves and feet, which still struggled to clear the narrow opening.
Puttock tugged and finally, Nestor’s whole body emerged from the prison of bones. The two men stumbled forward, panting, but quickly got to their feet. They were inside a canopy of trees, in a clearing shaped like a crescent.
“You may pass,” the cave shouted from below, in a language that was now understandable, despite sounding like abstract noise. Nestor’s hand bled profusely, and when the drops touched the ground, tiny creatures like thorns and nettles sprouted, lifting into the air like fireworks. They gave off a horrible sound, like vulture screeches, and their smell reminded Nestor of deer meat, and something delicious too, like fresh mango.
“Why the fuck did you just cut me?” Nestor said. His stomach burned with rage. He lunged forward and tackled Puttock like a linebacker. But Puttock weaseled himself out of Nestor’s grip and backed away from the hole in the ground and the vines of thorns that lifted from the ground and flew into the sky.
“This is how you thank me, fucking bitch?” Puttock said.
“What?”
“You don’t get it, do you? You have zero respect for the rules of Mictlán.”
“Get the fuck back here. I need a minute to recover.”
“No detective. We have to keep moving. We need to walk, or run if we can. The cave creature below only gave us temporary passage. We don’t have much time left before it retaliates.”
“How do you know that?”
“It’s a vibe I learned in prison. That vibe has taught me that nothing is for free. There’s always a price to be paid.”
“What are you even talking about?”
“Your blood, detective. I needed to slice your hand. The blood was the price we had to pay to exit the tunnel. Do you get on the fucking subway in New York without paying the fare?”
Nestor’s face grew hot with embarrassment.
“Holy shit.”
It was altogether possible that Puttock was right. Nestor knelt down, took his t-shirt off and wrapped it around his wrist to stop the bleeding.
“Is this what you wanted?” Nestor said, directing himself at the patch of bone-scented sand beneath his feet.
From below, millions of voices spoke in unison.
“We will take more blood from you, if you have the blood to give,” the cave said.
“Who are you?”
“I am Miquiztli, the Placenta of the Dying Earths.”
“Miquiztli,” Nestor repeated.
“You said Earths. There are more than one?”
“Of course,” Miquiztli said. “There are millions.”
“But can you tell me—“
“And your name is…?” Miquiztli interrupted.
Nestor thought very hard for a moment about what he would say.
“Roberto.”
“Come back down the tunnel then, Roberto. We have such dimensions to show you.”
The ground shifted gently, like sand dunes in a storm, yet there wasn’t even a breeze to speak of. Nestor was so scared he felt his hands start to shake. He started a jog toward the far end of the crescent, where Puttock was beckoning him while putting his hand to his lips, asking Nestor to stay quiet.
“Come back, Roberto…come back. We can help you. You belong down here. We can help you become…”
“Become what?”
“Become like us,” Miquiztli said. Suddenly Nestor felt the grand size of this being beneath the ground. Miquiztli spread for at least ten miles, like a fine web of fibers made of rotting flesh and diseased bone fragments. A grave beyond comprehension.
“Return to us, Roberto.”
Nestor broke into a full sprint and caught up with Puttock, who was now also running through the trees, away from Miquiztli. They ran as a pair, agile and nimble, despite their blindness.
“Roberto, huh?” Puttock said. “You don’t look like a Roberto to me.”
“It was the first name I could think of. Roberto Midian. He was a confidential source I knew back in New York, a long time ago. He helped me with many criminal cases. Worked as a crime reporter for the New York Times for a bit. Also wrote a gigantic novel about the disappeared women in Juarez that no one ever read. Died of cancer at age fifty.”
“Using a fake name was a smart thing to do.”
“Not sure why I did, really. I just did what made sense at the time.”
“You were able to communicate with that cave, detective. That’s a type of necromancy you just preformed, you know that?”
Nestor didn’t like what Puttock was implying. “Just keep moving and let’s get out of these woods.”
The men kept on running, through the tress, past a stream, and over three small hills. The cool air of Mictlán on Nestor’s naked chest soothed him a bit, and he was glad to be able to breathe in the Coil’s smells once again: the scent of marigolds, waterfalls, metals, lava and lush forest. His ears could still hear a faint rumble of Miquiztli behind them, beckoning for their return to its depths. It was impossible to ignore the cave’s unique voice.
But after a while, the millions of voices of Miquiztli faded away like the sun at dusk, and Nestor forged ahead of Puttock, leading the way, hoping to find Iztepetl.
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