The 13 Secret Cities (Omnibus) (21 page)

The first few bars of “Plainsong” by Arkangel pirouetted inside our ears.

The music swelled in our brains, and the withering guitars and the thunder of the synthesizers pulled us into its depths. We moved on from song one to song two and on and on, until we couldn’t keep track.

The songs put us in a trance. José María’s Parliament Lights and the weed he packed into them wafted in our noses, and suddenly, we were moving in a mental space that was quiet, punctuated by drums, and soft, so soft.

We didn’t drum anymore. We sat on the blanket, shivering, listening.

We fell into this place for what seemed like hours, and we climbed down into the very structures of Arkangel’s music, as if it were a solid ladder leading us up a tree and into the woods.

When the playlist ended, I opened my eyes. José María was there, still as a statue, with his eyes closed, as if in meditation. I stared in front of me at the Lake beneath.

Below our patch of concrete, a large crevasse had opened on the surface of Lake Michigan. A set of iridescent stairs led downward, and the light that shone from its walls was so brilliant
,
it glowed.

The hole in the water defied the laws of gravity. It was just wide enough for a person to walk through, and even as small splashes of water surged up to its edge, I saw the droplets of water strike the interior of the opening. Even the floor shimmered in an emerald color.

I stood up, and I took a step down. Then another. And another. Soon, the water level of the lake was up to my waist, but I was dry as ever. The water held its shape around the hole. A perfect tunnel with stairs.

I touched one the walls with my fingers and gasped when it moved as if it were alive.

It was made of living things.

One by one, millions of green butterflies overlapped, silently vibrating. They made perfect patterns, forming a surface made of what seemed like scales.

Like dragon scales.

No!

Like snake scales, wanderer.

And as I took a step into the tunnel, the walls shimmered in long waves. I put my feet on the green floor and stared off into its depths. It continued forward seemingly forever but pointing toward the center of Lake Michigan.

“This is the object that the wizard built,” José María said from behind me. I could still see him behind me, standing on the concrete at the top of the butterfly stairs.

“Stay here,” I said. “You know what you need to do.”

“Sure thing, boss,” rang my brother’s voice.

When all of this is over, I can’t wait to go back to the plans we have for the Parade of Lights with the OFA. This will all be over, and I can go back to school and the things I love. That will be my reward for doing this.

Each step I took made a soft sound, like a cat’s purr, and soon, the sunlight from above had disappeared, and my skin was bathed in emerald light.
 

I felt in my winter coat for La Negra’s knife. I had no idea why this entrance to Mictlán would be safer than the passage we found in the Aragon, but it sure was more beautiful.
 

Then I heard the wings flutter behind me by the thousands, and I snapped my neck around.

The gate is closing.

I felt the anxiety of suffocation come over me, and I tried to calm down.
 

You’ll drown in here,
bonita
. Drowned forever, and under thousands of pounds of pressure from the water.

You’ll never leave. But you sure will be mine.

The bits of sunlight that filtered through the gate above dimmed.

José María was outside, and now I was down here. There was no going back.

I turned back toward the place where the entrance had opened up.

It was sealed up tight now, and the gray light of late autumn was done.

I tried taking a step into the tunnel, but I couldn’t move my feet. I was too scared.

The walls shimmered in green, and their light felt alien, cold.

I needed to do something to calm my nerves that could help me keep going. I covered my good eye with one hand. The open dead eye returned nothing to me but darkness. That dark wasn’t as scary anymore. I knew what darkness could really be.

I can’t do this.

I took several breaths to calm myself down.

And then I felt a hand on my shoulder, and I shrieked as loud as I could.

“Relax,
reina
!” I heard my brother’s voice and in a blur, I saw his long face , his whiskered chin. He had snuck down next to me, slinking behind me.

You have a blind spot, Miss Cyclops. He took advantage of your blind spot.

“José María!”

“Now
,
you didn’t think I was going to let you go get autographs from the gods of death and I would stay behind just to text and play on Instagram, did you?”

The gods of death. The masters of the thing called Ocullín.

The Lady is Mictecacíhuatl. The Lord is Mictlantecuhtli.

They are the Lords of death.

Suddenly
,
I realized I had learned the names of the things called “Lords
.
” And knowing their names felt like power.
 

I wanted to rattle my brother by the neck, though.

“You were supposed to stay up there, fool!” I said. “How will we reopen the door?”

“Shut up and let’s get moving,” he said. “Who knows how solid this tunnel actually is? I mean, look at it. It’s
old
.”

He was right. Many of the butterflies’ wings looked nicked, as if they had been here so long that their tiny scales had fallen off.

From inside the green corridor, we heard a roar, like that of an animal. The walls gave off a slight emerald strobe effect. My brother’s face looked goblin green and his hair reddish under the shimmer of the tunnel.

“Come on,” I said, leading the way. “Before these butterflies collapse on us.”

We stepped on metallic insect bodies, and they provided support for our feet. The butterflies stayed glued to the surface of the tunnel even as our feet murdered them by the dozens. Green scales caked the edges of my boot. Each step we took caused the wings of the butterflies to whisper, like an animal taking its last breath.

The corridor stretched on for what seemed like forever. As I walked, I saw at least two distinct sets of footprints on the ground. People had been here before.

PART THREE

BLUE TEZCATLIPOCA

BLUE HUMMINGBIRD,

SORCERER OF MY HEART

“At the age of nineteen, I demonstrated for my mother my camera obscura, and she screamed in terror. It is the work of the devil, she said. She didn’t want to look through it ever again.. That’s one of my strongest memories of her during my youth in Philadelphia.” – Photographer Harvey De Castille, in an 1899 letter to George Eastman, Eastman Kodak Company private archive, New Jersey.

“If you want to glimpse at the god Huitzilopochtli, all you have to do is play a sport, play a match of chess, or go to war. To call Huitzilopochtli’s name is to invoke battles. He has that power. But I think I misunderstood your question, child. What do his mommy and daddy call him, you say? Oh, that’s simple. His parents call him Blue Tezcatlipoca.” – Q&A by children’s author Paolo Verdi at the Global Children’s Book Summit, Mexico City, September 2013.

“Even the gods abandon the places where they once thrived.” – Arkangel, “My Name is Dita”,
The Violet Album,
2008, Reckless Records.

The tunnel of green butterflies curved, which meant that we couldn’t see how far it stretched into Lake Michigan. As soon as we advanced a few more hundred feet, we still had more ground to cover. I felt guilty stepping over so many insects with my winter boots, but the butterflies never took off in flight.

Above us, thousands of pounds of water bore down on us, ready to crush our bodies, but the wall was as firm to the touch as wood. My fingers came away with green stains from wing scales.

The cylindrical shape shimmered and pulsed each time its musical tones echoed in the hall. The steamy air was making me sweat, and I shrugged off my wool coat. I re-slung my backpack over my shoulders and wiped my forehead with the back of my hand.

“This is insane,” José María said. “How was this thing built?”

“Mom said a wizard built it,” I said. I felt vulnerable saying this out loud. Could the walls hear me? Was it wrong to talk this way inside this tunnel?

“What kind of wizard?” my brother said.

“I don’t know what kind of wizards there are.”

We had been walking for twenty minutes now. Roughly a mile by my estimate.

“So, a tunnel into Mictlán…” José María said. “Why would that wizard leave it behind for anyone to find?”

“Maybe it was so much work to put up that it would be even more work to collapse again,” I said.

“Like building a house.”

We stopped for a moment for my brother to tie his shoelaces and take off his parka. He took my coat from my arms and laid it flat on the ground. Then he placed his parka on top. He folded once, twice, and then he tied the bundle using the sleeves. He stuffed the bundle into his backpack.

“How do you know how to do that?” I said.

“Dad showed us when we went to the Redwoods, remember?” I did remember. My father took us by the hand to forage for berries and photograph mushrooms. Mom had stayed up in the tent, making dinner. My dad had draped our coats over a tree log and folded it several times. He spoke the directions out loud to me, but José María had been the one to learn.

“Wish I had paid attention.” I said.

“Don’t worry; I’ll show you.”

My brother repeated the process, and he guided my hands over the sleeves to make sure I had learned it. Within minutes, he taught me how to pack my coat like a tiny brick, just like him. We dusted the green streaks of butterfly scales off the pack and continued again in silence, and I checked the time every twenty minutes or so.

Three miles.

An animal’s bellow traveled inside the walls of the tunnel, and I remembered the savage dog face of the creature Xolotl.

In this deeper stretch of the tunnel, the butterfly wings took on a purplish hue, and streaks of violet swirled in the semicircular corridor. We didn’t carry flashlights with us, yet the walls emitted their own glow, as if each scale gave off a tiny bit of sunshine.

The path before us curved more sharply now, and I pictured the shape of a hook curled inside the lake like an animal tail.

I looked at my watch. Six miles.

We came upon a sharper bend, and as we walked through it, light stung my eyes. The ground felt a little softer here, and my feet sank deeper into the floor. I grabbed José María’s hand as we stepped into the room.

Light filled my eyes, and I raised a hand to my brow to keep the glare out.

“Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaamn,” José María said.

We had entered a dome. It rose for about 300 feet, and the iridescence blasted our eyes in green and violet.

“This is like Arkangel’s tunnel!” my brother said. He might be Chicago’s resident expert on all things Arkangel, but he often forgot that
I
didn’t know the Norwegian band as well as he did.

“How so?” I said.

“The song says that a tunnel connects Mictlán to the City of Dust. And the City of Dust connects to the City of Stone Spirits. The gods build tunnels shaped like webs. The tunnels that men build are different. They are shaped like domes.”

“Mom said the wizard Guillermo Villa wanted to enter Mictlán,” I said. “He left this structure behind after he disappeared.”

I did not fully understand how Arkangel’s music could provide clues about the city of Mictlán, but José María had made connections that thus far had proved to be true.
 

Azul vs. Fibonacci,
the second album in Arkangel’s trilogy of albums about the 13 Secret Cities, said that the web tunnels of the gods pre-dated the existence of time.

The brother-and-sister duo of Arkangel always performed live while wearing monster masks, and they ended every concert by crowd-surfing down onto the dance floor. It was there that they wailed into their mics, dancing in ecstasy, writhing like lunatics. Their music thundered through a mix of the most cutting-edge electronic instruments, and guitars that shimmered like polished glass. The siblings’ names were Sergio and Karyn Andersson.

No one had ever seen what the brother-and-sister duo looked like in real life.

“I have to admit, Arkangel has always scared me a little,” I said.

“Good,” José María said, smiling.

I slapped his arm and ran my hand over the walls of the dome. The butterflies shifted under my palm, and the animal sound we heard before came through again.

“You’re upsetting the green pets,
reina
,” my brother said.

“No, I don’t think so,” I said. I pressed again, and the howl subsided. “I think the dome is making sound, together—all the bugs together as a unit.”
 

I couldn’t imagine how many butterflies it took to make a tunnel and dome like this one, but indeed, if I pressed on the walls, the dome grunted like a sleeping beast.