Seize the Night: New Tales of Vampiric Terror (64 page)

She could, she supposed, spend the rest of the time she had left begging Chaac for forgiveness. Apologizing to him for how she had ruined his sacrifice. She knew the prayers—she had been raised to be a priestess, which was why she had been chosen for this job when the rains failed to come and the maize didn’t grow. Maybe if she begged him enough, if she made the prayers sound sincere, he would understand that she had not ruined the sacrifice by choice. That she was blameless.

For a while she tried. She mumbled her way through the words she’d memorized, repeating the same lines over and over.

But the pain in her leg was just too much. It clouded her mind, made it impossible to concentrate. The words got tangled in her mouth, like the quipu strings the tax collectors used. She felt herself growing weak, tired. She slept again.

Her dreams were not good.

W
hen she woke, darkness had fallen. At first she did not understand why she had awoken. Then she realized she was not alone in the cenote.

She did not cry out this time, though even as she opened her eyes she was gripped by terrible fear. Some base instinct kept her quiet as she watched the water of the cenote ripple in spreading circles.

It was just a fish, she thought. At worst, an eel with snaggled teeth, twisting its way through the blue water. She forced herself to calm down.

It moved again and she heard it this time, the little splash as it cut through the water. If it had been a fish it would have darted about, she thought. If it were an eel, it would have twisted. But as she heard another splash, saw a pale shape crest the blue water a third time, she was gripped by the certainty this was no creature of the watery realm. That it was not swimming but walking through the water.

A delusion, surely. An imagining brought on by the pain that surrounded her every thought, crushed out all logic.

Above, the night sky was bound by the round rim of the cenote, like a colossal eye full of stars looking down at her.

She chided herself for being such a little girl. For letting fear and emotion get in the way of proper thinking. She had been trained to be better than this. As a priestess she would have had to watch the world, observe it dispassionately. Search the clouds and the streams in the forest for signs and tokens of what the gods wanted. She would have
worked out careful formulae for how to appease them for the betterment of the city. Such work required a clear head and a strong heart for making hard decisions. If she had been a simple child, jumping at every story of the lords of Xibalba and their demons, she would never have been chosen to die for Chaac’s pleasure. The priests would not have trusted her to die without struggling.

Of course, that hadn’t worked out so well.

For a long time the water of the cenote was still. The ripples she’d seen reached the walls and reflected back but in time they died out and the stars appeared on the dark face of the water once more, unbroken.

She rolled her eyes and sighed deeply, putting a little cynicism into the gesture. It sounded affected to her ears but it helped a little. She settled herself down on her ledge, getting as comfortable as her broken leg would allow, and closed her eyes. She would sleep until the morning. Perhaps then someone would come and look down and see her, and get a good rope, and bring her out of this place. She knew how unlikely that was, but imagining the possibility soothed her. Took her mind off the fact that she was starting to get very hungry, and—

She heard another little splash. And more. A croaking, clicking sound, like something trying to talk.

Instantly her eyes opened and she pulled herself up to a sitting posture. Pulled her legs away from the end of the ledge, though every movement was agony.

She stared out into the darkened cenote, searching the water for the source of the noise. At first she could see nothing but then—there? Perhaps . . . a round shape, a little paler than the water around it. About the size of a little basket turned upside down. It did not move but it lay at the center of the ripples. She watched it with fascination, with horror. Feelings that only increased as the thing started to grow.

No, not grow. It was simply rising from the water, showing more of itself. It became rounder and fuller, pale in the starlight. A dome, a hemisphere that dripped with the dark water. She could make out only a few details of its surface, two dark pits on its front. And then, suddenly, she understood.

She was watching a skull emerge from the water. Those pits were eye sockets. And deep in those dark hollows burned two tiny fires, just sparks of light. Blue light.

She screamed for the second time, then.

But whatever the thing wanted, this skull-thing, it came no closer.

She shouted at it. Splashed water at it to try to make it go away. Prayed to Chaac for help she knew she did not deserve.

Nothing seemed to faze the creature. But eventually, after watching her for a long time, it sank back into the water and left her alone.

I
t became very hard to keep herself awake.

The fear worked, for a while. The terror she’d felt when she saw the monstrous shape in the water. But fear is like a little fire—if made without enough kindling, if you do not constantly blow on it, it gutters out. The pain in her leg made it difficult to think in chains of logic and she had to remind herself over and over that she was in danger, that the skull thing was still out there.

She knew it had been no hallucination. She had seen those eyes burning clear as daylight, seen the blue sparks the same color as the water of the cenote. But whatever the thing was, it did not return. And she was so hungry . . .

The next time she woke, the sun had come back and was burning her face. She struggled to pull herself away from the heat and light and a new stab of pain made her pass out again for a while.

She felt so weak, so fragile. When she looked down at her leg, she saw it had swollen, the joint of her knee like a mamey fruit ready
to burst. The skin of her calf, where the bone had shattered, was purple and shiny and she didn’t dare touch it.

Thirst tugged at her. She didn’t like to drink the blue water, knowing what it contained, but she could not help herself. She cupped her hand and brought a little of it to her lips. Despite her squeamishness, it tasted wonderful. She drank deep, then lay back and just tried to breathe normally for a while. Even that took effort.

What had she really seen? What had it been?

She had been taught what the gods looked like, of course, had even seen the secret carvings inside the pyramid at the center of the city. She knew there were gods who looked like human skeletons with rolling eyes and grabbing hands. Cizin, the lord of the underworld, was one like that, one of many. But the thing she’d seen out in the water had no human eyes to flash and stare. And what would any god be doing submerged in the water of a cenote? The gods were haughty, tricksome beings who spoke like thunder. They didn’t croak like frogs.

That sound—it haunted her more than anything. She had been sure the creature wanted to talk to her. That it was trying to make itself understood. But the sound had been nothing like human speech. It had been like—

Like jaws clicking together, like teeth clacking. Like the sound a fleshless mouth might make, if it tried to speak.

The heat of the day could not stop her from shivering.

She was still thirsty, so she scooped up more water, and then more. She worried she would give herself stomach cramps, but the water helped with the pain, a little. It made her feel less desperate, something she very much needed. She reached down again to lift up some more water and then she screamed.

Because her fingers had found something she hadn’t expected. A bone, long and thin. She scuttled away from the edge of her perch, convinced that the creature with the glowing eyes had come back for her, that it was lying in wait just below the water’s surface.

The water didn’t move, though. After a time, she convinced herself she’d been mistaken. She even forced herself to move back over to the water. To reach in with one darting hand and see what it was she’d touched.

She grabbed it and pulled it up out of the blue water. And saw she’d been right—it was a bone. A thigh bone, she thought.

But it was connected to nothing. It wasn’t from the creature she’d seen. It had to have been from one of the previous sacrifices in the cenote. One, she could only assume, who hadn’t struggled. Who had died properly.

She dropped the bone back in the water, feeling like she had profaned a sacred thing. Then she lay back on the wet ledge and wept a little.

The creature did not return during the day.

N
o. It waited until night fell.

It was summer and the nights were not cold, not truly, but lying in a little water like that sucked the heat out of her body and she was shivering, passing fluidly back and forth in and out of consciousness, feeling feverish, feeling so hungry, feeling fear and pain and not much else. Feeling like she barely knew where she was, who she was. Feeling like she was floating in the sky. Feeling like she was buried in the ground.

When the fingers came over the ledge and pressed down, pushing the creature up out of the water, for a moment she thought she was dreaming. She stared at the bony fingers in sheer curiosity, with detached interest. What she had thought would be just bare bones, skeletal fingers, were something more. There was skin over them, stretched as taut as the hide on the top of a drum. She could see narrow tendons moving under that skin, make out individual pores in it.

Slowly, because this was a dream and in dreams one was never really in control of oneself, she followed with her eyes the shapes of
the bones, back to the wrist, the forearm like a pair of twigs rolled in a leaf. Up to where the shoulder blade pressed out against the skin of the creature’s back. Its round head was the fattest thing about it, the most fleshy part. The head, the skull, was bent over her, bobbing up and down. She wished she could see more of its face, which would make it less terrifying, somehow. She pushed herself up a little—something was trying to hold her down, but she struggled up a bit, lifted herself, and saw that its face was buried in the swollen flesh of her broken leg.

She reached down, still certain this was a dream, her head still reeling with fever. She reached down and pushed at the side of the thing’s skull.

She was too weak to scream. Too tired. Even when she felt her own skin tear. Felt its teeth rip free of where they’d fastened on her swollen leg.

Blood and yellow pus oozed from the creature’s mouth. Her own body’s fluids. Its blue eyes burned brighter than ever.

It slapped her hand away and lowered its face back onto her leg. She did not feel so feverish now—terror had anchored her in her body, dragged her senses back from her febrile dreams. She cursed it with words so small they barely made it out of her mouth. Called out for help, shouted out prayers. Tried to push at the creature, force it away from her, but she was still so weak.

She could feel her heart pounding in her chest and knew it was stealing her blood, sucking it right out of her veins. If she didn’t stop the thing, it would drink all of her, suck her life out of her, and she would die there, lying in the water. The thought was more horrible to her than anything.

That gave her some strength. She grabbed the thing with both hands and shoved it off of her, thrust it out into the dark, rippling water. Its teeth clicked together madly—it was chattering out a complaint, a protest.

“No,” she managed to say, pushing the word out on a huge breath. “No!”

Its skull head crested the water, just like the first time she’d seen it. It climbed up onto the ledge with her and she saw the skin pulled so tight over its sunken chest, wrapping its rib cage and its angular pelvis. She saw its chest throbbing. Pulsing, its heart beating with her stolen blood.

It took a step closer.

“No,” she said, a whimper. She hauled herself back, away from it, pushed her back up hard against the wall of the cenote.

It took another step. It moved so slowly. As if it were nearly as weak as she was. But it wanted her blood—she could feel its need like a haze of heat around the thing. See it in the blue eyes, the way they burned.

It opened its mouth and croaked out words she could not quite understand.

Until—until suddenly she could. She could make out one word it had used.

Please.

It was begging for her blood.

And that just made everything worse. She thrust her hand out, down into the water. Groped around until she found the thigh bone she’d touched before. It was sacrilege to touch such a thing, but she needed a weapon.

When the skeletal creature came close enough, she smashed it across the face with the bone, as if it were a war club.

The creature was weak. Even with the little force she could manage, she knocked it backward into the water.

It kept trying to rise and come for her, throughout the night.

Each time, she was ready.

B
ut she could not keep this up.

It would win in the end, she knew. She had overpowered it in the night, but eventually she would weaken to the point where she couldn’t fight anymore. When daylight stained the top of the cenote’s walls, she knew she could relax a bit—the sun was too much for the thing, depleted as it was—but she also knew this was going to be the hardest day of her life.

She needed to get out of the cenote, or the thing would kill her. She did not know if she had even one more night’s worth of strength left in her body.

She could not afford to sleep. She let herself rest, but every time she started to drift away, she would strike the most swollen part of her calf with the thigh bone. New, fresh pain would waken her. She conserved her energy as much as she could. But eventually, she needed to move.

All thoughts of sacrifice, of how she had offended Chaac and let down her people, were gone from her mind. That day, she thought of nothing but escape.

There was one chance for her. A liana that hung down farther than the others. It still looked too high for her to reach, but she had to try. The problem, of course, was that it was on the far side of the cenote from her. She did not know if there was a submerged ledge over there, or anything for her to stand on while she jumped to try to grab the lowest end of the vine. If it was just deep water there beneath the liana, she was certainly doomed. The only way to know for sure was to go over and check.