Chapter 10: Necroscopia

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Author’s Note: I celebrated my birthday this week, and one of my favorite gifts I received was your readership. I am so excited to report that my writer’s block from 2019-2021 is now over. Hall of Mirrors is one of the best books I’ve written, and there’s no greater gift than people reading my fictional universes. 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 10: Necroscopia

NESTOR BUÑUEL

Nestor tumbled downward into a space as dark as a mineshaft. He tried screaming, but no sounds came out of his mouth. Instead, his sense of smell exploded. As he fell into the voice, he smelled wet dirt, as well as the sharp smell of peppermint leaf, followed by notes of chlorine and sulfur. Sharp black objects grazed his face, and his ears popped.

For a brief moment, time froze. His head exploded in pain, and his heart screamed in his chest.

“Save me,” said a tiny voice in the dark shaft up above. “Save me,” it repeated, but this time the voice turned tinny, like an audio recording that had been transmitted through an old-time radio.

Then he continued to free fall. Nestor couldn’t see anything in the murk, but he felt his heart grow hot with pain. Not now, he thought. Don’t let me have a heart attack.

But this pain was different. It wasn’t the pain of having a coronary. It was the pain of loss, the pain of closing his mother’s eyes with his fingertips at her bedside. The pain of having to relive murder victims’ misery when their loved ones took the stand in court. This was the pain of a broken heart that won’t heal. It was the hurt of human loss.

It burned, seared, and tore at his chest.

And then he realized he had felt this sensation before.

The creature Tecolotl had once touched Nestor in that very spot right on his chest, and with that smoky caress, Nestor had felt the world cascade and undo itself, revealing all the pain he held inside.

It was back now, all that hurt. It came flooding back, and he wanted to thrash and scream, just like he did when he was a toddler. He wanted all of this chaos to stop, he wanted to not be afraid. He opened up his mouth to scream but no sound came out, as if there were no atmosphere to hold his wailing.

Then his ears popped once more, and he found himself on all fours, his hands and knees finally connecting with solid ground.

He had landed safely, without ever having felt the landing itself.

But he still couldn’t see a thing.

From up above, the voice squeaked. “Please, someone get me out of here!” 

Nestor tried to crane his neck to look up, but every movement he made hurt as if every bone had broken and every inch of his skin was seared. He felt very dizzy too, as if the world’s worst hangover had amalgamated into his nervous system forever.

“I don’t feel so well,” Nestor tried to say out loud. He felt a massive force rise through his esophagus, and suddenly, he was throwing up between his hands. The act was violent and yet also very cleansing. When he was done, he backed away from the puddle of his vomit, which smelled ten times stronger than usual. 

“Someone detonated a bomb,” Nestor lamented. “They blew up the fucking prison.”

It was the only scenario that made sense. The code red, the unrest by the prisoner population because of the unbearable heat over three infernal days. Someone must have set off a bomb, and now Nestor had fallen into the lower levels of the building amidst the rubble.

But where was the smoke, fire or the rubble itself? Why wasn’t he trapped beneath tons of concrete and steel?

All Nestor could feel, see and hear was darkness.

The voice from up above was back. “Help me” it said. Nestor crawled on all fours with precision and intention, to make sure he didn’t injure himself, but he followed the voice in the direction from which it came. After crawling forward about four feet, he encountered a ramp. He smelled dirt, pine, and something else—a fresh smell like that of a mountain spring. Perhaps it was a collapsed prison wall. He used his palms to feel the surface, and by his estimation, it had roughly a 30-degree slope. 

“Up here,.” The voice said. It was coming from the top of the ramp.

The voice had turned sour, more desperate. But it was much closer now, just a few feet away.

Nestor clambered about six feet and fumbled around with his hands. He felt sharp rocks and sticks, and a finer layer of loose gravel that stuck to his arms like dust. And then he felt a hard mass, and warmth coming from it.

“Hey,” Nestor said, “Can you hear me?” His words came out wooden and muted, as if he were underwater, or as if he had gone deaf. Perhaps the blast had busted his eardrums, but that made no sense, because the tiny voice was sharp and clear. It was Nestor who could not hear himself well.

A hand reached out from the darkness and grabbed Nestor’s right arm.

“I’m stuck,” the voice said. “I’m in a hole.”

Nestor felt around the person’s body, and he recognized a leg, and arm, and even a foot.

“Does this hurt?” Nestor said, as he scooped up the body from under the arms to drag it out of the hole. The person screamed in pain.

All round them, not a single ray of light cut through the murk. This was the deepest kind of darkness.

The person was wedged tight into the hole, but all Nestor needed was some leverage. He dug his heels into the dirt and pulled. If he broke a bone or injured the person, he would have to take a chance, but he couldn’t see shit in this darkness. As he pulled out the human being from the hole, Nestor remembered what he had been doing before he turned inside out and landed in this place.

I had Puttock by the hair, he remembered. I was about to smash his face through the glass.

More memories came flooding back now.

Nestor remembered how his mother had survived the earthquake of 1985 in Mexico City. She had been trapped in a school classroom for 20 hours, crushed beneath a desk, in the darkness. And now history was repeating itself.

He used all the power in his legs for leverage, and he heaved. Slowly and steadily, Nestor managed to pull the person out. The person put their arms around Nestor, and he heard a soft whisper coming from them.

“Thank you,” The person said in their helium voice.

“Can you stand up?” Nestor said, but he found that he had to shout this. His voice hardly seemed to carry, and the person didn’t seem to hear him because they remained limp. He guided the injured person to their feet. It was impossible to tell if there were any broken bones or other injuries, but it felt good to stand up. Finally, the person clung to him firmly from behind by grabbing Nestor around the waist.

 I have no idea where to go, Nestor thought. The last time he had walked in the dark like this had been when he had gone camping ten years before. That night, he had dropped his flashlight while taking a bathroom break, and though he was only a 100 yards or so away from camp, he had found the process of moving through the dark terrifying. But what choice was there now? He needed to find a way out, and to see if there had been other survivors from the blast.

He took very slow steps, and together, he and the survivor trudged into the dark.

The ground was very firm, and soon, a strong chilly winds whipped up around them. The temperature dropped fast, and within less than a minute, Nestor found himself shivering. How was that possible, if the heat wave had peaked today at 104 degrees Fahrenheit?

He felt very afraid to take another step. What if there was another hole ahead, or worse, a drop-off into another cavity in the rubble? He tested gingerly with the tip of his foot each time he wanted to take a step forward, and slowly, he coveted about 7-8 feet of distance. And on the ninth step, his right foot bumped up against a wall.

“Fucking finally, something solid,” he said out loud, and he heard the sounds as soft thumps, as if he were underwater.

He put his right palm on the wall. It was a dense surface, but its texture was soft as velvet. Yet felt a part of it wrap around his palm and his fingers, and he pulled it back in fear.

“Da hell?” He said.

He held up his hand in front of his face. Though he couldn’t see anything, something was still crawling all over his skin, slithering and enveloping the fingers, moving toward the wrist. He tried to shake it loose, but it held on. He remembered the millipedes that had infested the prison. He must have found a small nest, because they took over his hand.

But he needed to get out. He pressed both hands back on the wall in search of a doorknob, or an opening, anything.

And that’s when the wall bellowed.

From the Journal of Felix Calvo, October 27, 2030

Everyday I wake up in this twisted new world, I wonder to myself if it’s real.

It’s not a novel question. People have asked themselves this very question for a long time.

I also ask myself why it hurts so much to live in this existence.

It hurts in all possible ways. Deep inside the heart, like an iron that’s been brought to white-hot temperature and plunged into the flesh.

I have learned how to manage this pain. I have learned how to not let it consume me. But I know how to respect it, too.

I can’t walk to my destination through the city streets. The cops or the polidrones will eventually find me.

I can’t take a Lyft either. That’s trackable.

I look down at the phone in my hand, and it unfurls like a flower. At a glance, I can see what else is happening. Besides the explosion in Lakeview, there are multiple fires in Andersonville and Edgewater. One is in fact, just two blocks away from the apartment.

That means I can’t go back home. Not for a while.

I emerge from the bird sanctuary onto the clearing by the clocktower, and I can see columns of smoke, directly up ahead and also off to my right, where I live. At least four helicopters whistle through air, and the traffic on Lakeshore Drive is dotted with the blue and red strobe lights of cop cars, speeding in both directions.

The lake is where I must go. I turn off my phone completely, hoping to minimize my digital footprint, but I know too much about the technology. Even if it’s turned off, we are all traceable, as long as the device is on us.

I begin to walk, and I make a horrible realization, just as the sun pokes its golden mask above, searing all with its heat.

I have left the book 9 Lords of Night at home. Why the hell was I so stupid as to leave it behind? Desperation and fear crawl up my back. The book would give me comfort right now. The book could provide me some clues as to how to start my journey. 

This goddamn journey I don’t even want.

I suddenly remember how at least once a week I fight with Nestor about energy consumption. He has a million tricks and hacks to save money on electricity, water and gas. But each time he tells me to take shorter showers, to read my iPad by candlelight instead of watching TV, to turn the air conditioner down, I snap. Our bickering goes on for almost an hour sometimes. He slams the doors. And once he even threw a coffee cup at the wall, when he had been drinking. And to be honest, I don’t know why I fight him so much. He gets under my skin with the way he just has an answer for everything. The way he tends to be right.

Those memories of those fights now trigger melancholy for me, as I walk along the lakeshore, my feet on the edge of the concrete and the water of lake Michigan frothing under the sun.

Right now, I would rather be fighting with Nestor, safe at home, than walking toward nowhere, beneath fire and smoke, far away from home and the book 9LN.

There are no texts at all from Nestor right now. And I wonder how the final day of interviews might turn out for him.

I have now reached the lakefront along Fullerton, and I can see the Chicago skyline. There’s smoke rising from downtown Chicago, as well.

NESTOR BUÑUEL

The wall roared.

Its sonic signature reminded him of a bear stalking middle of the night, or  thunder in the sky. Thousands of polyphonic notes swelled inside that sound, and its texture was both pleasant and sandpapery. The person on Nestor’s back remained quiet, limp, but alive.

“Who goes there?” The wall said. The words were clear and crisp, and he understood them in English inside his mind. But that’s not how they really sounded. To Nestor’s ears, the wall chirped and trilled, like birdsong. Perhaps they had found a room that hadn’t collapsed, and they could hear each other through the wall.

“We need help,” Nestor said. “Can you let us in?”

“Let you in where?” The wall said.

“Please. I have an injured person here.”

“There’s no inside or outside here. There’s only us.”

“Us,” Nestor said. He said it as a statement, and not a question.

“Yes, that’s a fact. There’s just us. But let me ask you—why do you choose not to acknowledge us?”

“I am not sure what you mean.”

“You’re behaving as if we are invisible to you.”

“But I can’t see anything. Everything is dark.”

“You can see without light. You did this before, inside your mother’s womb. You just have to remember how.”

The music stopped and the wall released a deep perfume that reeked of marigolds and roses. Nestor coughed and covered his mouth. As his lungs took in the sickly sweet air, the smell caused a bloom of heat to rise in his chest. And right there, in a spot right above his heart, he felt a hot glowing ember. Its heat felt warm and pleasant, like a favorite blanket. Memories seeped back into his consciousness, like a slow tide at dawn. These memories were mostly made of images, and he remembered a snowy night in the back of the estate of the filmmaker Samuel Kahan when he and Felix had investigated the murders of the Night Drinker, and how that night, Nestor had also felt a warm spot in the middle of his pecs, right above his heart, where the creature Tecolotl had touched him with his wing. The way that sensation had felt in his heart was the the same as what he felt now.

“Very good,’ the wall said. “You are remembering now. Soon, you will see us.”

Nestor’s vision remained black and impenetrable, but as he relaxed his shoulders and took in deeper breaths, his hearing opened up, welcoming every nuance of sound like parting curtains to let the breeze in. As he began to relax, his hearing amplified, and his sense of smell also became sharper than it had ever been before in his life. His sour sweat, the traces of coffee on his t-shirt where he had spilled a drop, the wax in his ears, and the oil in his hair and beard. They all smelled richer and more alive than any other smell he had ever experienced. He heard sounds that created full panoramic landscapes inside his brain, and there was such precision to every sound, to every wave, that he could suddenly get a better sense of his bearings. What he heard first was his own breathing, light and panting, still imbued with adrenaline and fear.

But then he started to hear the landscape around him. Though it felt impossible, he could hear the sound trees made deep inside the earth, as well as the music that wind currents made in caves. He heard volcanoes singing and icebergs that cackled with laughter. He heard many creatures via their heartbeats, which came from as far away as 30 million miles away.

He heard trillions of heartbeats.

Suddenly, he was hearing the world for the first time.

And it heard him back.

And thanks to this ability to hear sound this way, he was able to generate a mental picture of where he was.

There was a  lush wooded area behind him, complete with a canopy of trees. Sound bounced off its tree trunks and the leaves on the branches, and he could get a sense of their density and scale just by paying attention to the way sounds wrapped around each element in those woods. He tried to get a sense of just how deep the forest went, and he shivered. It seemed to go on endlessly. It’s as if everything in that hall of the world was ruled by ferns, trees, shrubs, mushrooms, flowers and nettles, because he could hear all of them by the billions, threaded into a tapestry of plant life. The ground beneath him was smooth, like a polished stone, and yet it wasn’t slippery at all. His hearing informed him that tiny, ant-like insects crawled on it.

He was definitely not in the prison.

He tilted his head up toward the voice coming from the wall, and the flood of information that he got from both the sounds and the smell around him almost knocked him flat on his ass. There wasn’t just a wall blocking his passage. What lay before him was one of the most massive buildings he had ever encountered. It was easily 900 feet tall, and it rose from a wide rectangular base, all the way up to a narrower top. The building featured staircases on each side, and at its very top, a small chamber crowned the building like a beacon.

He had seen this shape before. He had known it. He’d be damned if it wasn’t a—-

“PLEASE, I’m in so much pain,” said the person straddling Nestor’s back. They weighted a lot more than he had expected. So much in fact, that Nestor wondered if the person was made of something other than flesh, because they felt more like lead. “PLEASE...”

Now that Nestor’s hearing was better attuned, he finally recognized the voice. It had changed from a tinny squeal into a soft baritone that he knew all too well.

It was the voice of Steven Puttock, and each time he spoke, Nestor could smell the stink of a gingivitis and the ghost of black coffee with too much milk and sugar rose into a revolting bouquet coming from the man’s throat.

“Come on man, I need a doctor,” Puttock said. The killer clung to Nestor’s neck like a child, and Nestor fought every impulse to throw him right off his back.

Nestor felt something snap inside his gut, and suddenly, he was unable to move. He couldn’t take a step forward. He couldn’t open his mouth to scream at Puttock, and he couldn’t throw the convicted killer of his back. A tenebrous dread paralyzed him.

Nestor remembered the promises he had made to himself during the years when the virus killed his parents. His mother’s scarred lungs had immobilized her in her own home. Each time Nestor had refilled her breathing machine with oxygen, fluffed her pillows, and made her breakfast, he had resolved to not shy away from his fear. When she had passed away in the ICU at the hospital, with his hands holding her tiny hands, he had been so paralyzed by fear that he had been unable to let go. It had taken two nurses and a burly ER doctor to pry him off her dead wrist. And that paralysis had extended two years forward in time. Nestor had not even moved slow. He had no inertia to speak of. He had just lived paralyzed by the fear from her death, and the fear of the impending of his father’s death, which had also seemed as inevitable as hers. Nestor had lost all control, but he had hid it well by not being able to take any kind of action.

It had taken three years after his mother’s death to understand this. He was cleaning out an old dresser when he found a photograph of hers, the kind he loved the most, when she had worn her hair in a long ponytail and large glasses, trim and athletic, a true female vision of the 1980’s with bangles on her wrists, shoulder pads and heavy eyeshadow. The photograph had appeared seemingly out of nowhere, because he was sure he had collected all photos into photo albums that he kept locked away inside the apartment. But this photo had appeared in his dresser; it was a stray, and on that Saturday in 2024, that photo print had revealed to him his own fallacy, and his shortcomings.

He had stayed paralyzed for three years, just as paralyzed as when he felt the pulse vanish from his wrist. As he gripped that photo in his bedroom, he fell to his knees and bawled, dropping on all fours like a convulsing dog, choking on his own tears and coughing out every bit of rage and grief that he had been unable to digest since the day his mother died. Without knowing how, or why, he had spoken out loud to address his dead mother. “I’ll always move forward, Mama. No more of this bullshit. I promise you. I promise you.”

I promise you. He had said it out loud, ten times, then twenty, forty, until he was repeating the mantra, filling the room with his pain, and the grimace on his face so sharp that he felt it might stay that way on his face forever.

And now blind as a mole, sweating and shivering at the same time, that promise galvanized as he started to understand the situation he was in.

“I promise you,” Nestor whispered to himself, barely audible, yet extremely loud, because his hearing was so amplified. “I won’t be paralyzed.”

He walked forward into absolute darkness and toward the massive building. That unknown place had no light, no sun, no clouds, no sky, not even a sliver of the moon to light the way. Yet he took certain steps, and with each one he realized that he was in fact whole and uninjured. He may not be able to see, but he still had his stubborn curiosity, his will, and his self control.

Though his eyes offered him nothing but blindness, his ears, and nose, and to a new extent, even his skin, showed him that if he just walked twenty more steps forward, he would reach the base of the wide platform that formed the base of the massive building. If there was a person willing to talk to him from within the structure, Nestor would get the help he needed, and he would get medical attention for the killer on his back.

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