Chapter 14: I Think We're Alone Now

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Author’s Note: So by now, you have probably realized that this novel is going deep into the place where The Coil book series originated: Mictlàn. This mythical realm, the underworld of the Mexica, was one of the most important places in their religion and culture. As an author I have taken a few creative liberties, but I have stayed very true to the legends and factual accounts that we have on record about what this realm of the dead was supposed to be like. It really was supposed to have nine rivers, mountains that crashed into each other, and many trials for the souls that journeyed there for four yeas each. By going so deep into the realm of the dead, it is my hope that the reader can generate meaning about what it means to be alive. I hope you're enjoying the book. 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 14: I THINK WE’RE ALONE NOW

From the Journal of Felix Calvo, October 27, 2030

We are just four days away from Halloween, and five days away from Día de Los Muertos, and the irony is not lost on me as I walk into a curtain of hazy air emanating from downtown Chicago. The lakefront is quiet, charged with an electric energy that makes my insides squirm. I don’t like it. 

I finally reach Chicago Avenue and Lakeshore Drive. I am facing south, and to my right, the haze has started to take on the quality of smoke.

Everyone is used to the Chicago haze by now. It comes from the large forest fires that come from the western United States every year. But the haze also comes from the fires taking place today in the city. Lakeview burns, and I can see another fire just beyond my sightline, where the Field Museum is located. Police sirens, polidrones and army jets tear through the landscape, and the honest truth is, I don’t care. I am used to it. It’s how we live today.

I think a lot about how closely we live to death. How it never leaves us, like our own shadow.

Will Halloween be canceled this year? Will I make it back home to finish my ofrenda at home?

These questions don’t seem to have easy answers at the moment, and that’s because I keep seeing Tecolotl during my journey. He stays ahead three hundred feet in front of me, guiding me. But each time he appears, he interrupts my train of thought. I wish he would speak to me, but he only sends out intense pulses of music, like some a synth arpeggio at a rave. Whenever I hear it, I see him: A wisp of greenish smoke that becomes an owl, four yellow eyes gleaming.

I live in the Chicago that once was, and the Chicago that soon will be. It’s happening simultaneously.

I know that history has changed today. When I think about the U.S. military flying inside the airspace of the city, and the fires and explosions, I know that there is no going back to the way the world used to be.

I take a seat on the concrete walkway that overlooks Lake Michigan, letting my legs dangle over the water. The lake is gray, covered in a fine layer of soot, and I look up at the sky. Is it raining? No, it’s ash. I have no idea where it’s coming from, but it also has dusted my forearm in murky gray streaks.

This section of the bike and running path is unusually quiet now. I’m virtually alone. I can feel the presence of many people that sat here before.

The first ones I see are hazy, almost shapeless, but they are people. They belong to a tribe of indigenous people that has settled about a half mile from the lakeshore, and two shamans from that tribe sit here once on this spot, burning smoke, consuming tobacco, and offering tributes of animals and plants to the forces that live deep beneath the waters of Lake Michigan. There are no buildings, or modern objects to speak of. In fact, all I can feel, smell and hear are the marshy land, the lake and the sky.

Then the image shifts, and time jumps forward, and I see another indigenous person, this time a woman shaman, dressed in clothes of the early 19th century, performing a similar ritual right on this spot, but she is yanked suddenly away by the hair. Two white men pull her up into a standing position, and one of them plunges a hunting knife into the side of her neck. Her ritual is terminated as her blood and her life spill into the water.

The image shifts yet a third time. Now, I recognize the landscape. It is no longer just the lake and marshy land behind me. Modernity is here. I can see Navy Pier off to the right, and I can also hear the noise of vehicles on Lakeshore Drive. It is the era of glass, steel and digital.

This new group is a young family made up of a father, mother, a daughter and a son. The people in the first few visions had been indigenous, and if I can place their era correctly, I speculate that they could have been Ojibwa, Odawa, Powtawatomi. But this family seated before the lake is not originally from this region. The mother is a true leader, taking in the experience as a listener and observer. The father performs shamanistic  gestures with his hands to interface with the lake, and his daughter drifts off in boredom, absolutely absent from the experience. The boy pays attention, however. He is absorbed with the ritual his father is teaching the family, even though the boy has that restlessness of a typical teenager. I recognize that his family has mestizo heritage, and knowledge arrives to me in this vision: I know this family is Mexican, just like my own Mexican heritage on my father’s side. I have no idea who they are, but they feel more relatable, only because their experience seems to be taking place in the twenty-first century, like my own.

Suddenly, all three visions overlap, like transparencies or dancing holograms, but one constant remains: the choppy waters of Lake Michigan, which nourish life, but also take it. As these time periods and scenes coagulate into one, colossal shadows move through the dense waters with a life of their own. The lake turns gray, green, then blue, until it settler on charcoal black. It is speaking in colors.

People have communicated with this lake many times, and often they have succeeded, but they have also failed.

Through my hazy daydream, I hear a musical howl over my shoulder, and the vision of the indigenous people and the Mexican family vanish. 

Tecolotl is grooming himself, gently nuzzling the eyeballs in the underside of his wings with his sharp beak. He stops for a moment to look at me in with his four blazing eyes.

“Do you understand how to perceive reality yet, Felix?” he says. His voice thunders like dark techno and hard rain.

“Not really. What’s happening here?”

“Multiple peoples and cultures have settled in this area. You saw three samplings of them with your heart, just now. What they each understood is that this lake, just like marshes, the mountains, the trees, and even the rocks of this land, is alive. Do you understand?”

“Maybe. You’re saying the lake is conscious?”

“That’s exactly what makes the lake so dangerous,” Tecolotl says, nodding, his smoke body turning from green to sapphire blue for a moment. “But there’s a lesson here about another wider danger.”

“What’s that?”

“There’s danger in constructing a reality in which humans don’t take the rivers, lake and mountains into account as living entities with their own consciousness.”

 I suddenly feel something snap inside my heart, and I cry, not knowing why. My tears run in rivulets down my hands, and a few strike the concrete on which I sit. They are tears of release, but even as I dictate this journal entry into my smartphone, I am not sure I understand why I cried so hard when Tecolotl said those words.

I look up at Tecolotl, but he has already moved on. He is perched by the Ferris wheel at Navy Pier, and he lets out a hard, metallic screech. This journey isn’t done. He wants me to get up on my feet and keep walking.

And I do.

NESTOR BUÑUEL

Nestor fell flat on his back. The impact knocked the wind out of him, and he felt a wet snap in his lower back. It felt as if he had landed on the side of a hill.

The ground was very warm, almost hot, and heat dissipated from it in large waves. Nestor formed a visual image of those waves through his sense of smell and the hypersensitivity of his skin.

“Fuck!” Nestor said, and his voice bounced off the steep walls of the canyon in which they had fallen. They had fallen at least 1200 feet or more. By all accounts, they should be dead. And then he remembered that he probably already was dead. This was the Coil.

 He turned over, and his arms and back pulsed with pain. But as he lay on his side, he was able to understand the lay of the land better.

This was a very large hill. And it smelled.

The scent reminded Nestor of human sweat, rank and pungent like mushrooms, but it had something else too, something tinged with ammonia, like cat piss. Familiar yet revolting.

Puttock dusted himself off as he came up to standing. “Did you learn the bird’s name?” he said. “You must share it with me.”

“Get off it, Puttock. Let’s get moving,” They had to get out of this canyon.

Although Nestor ached all over, none of his bones seemed to be broken.

As he started to walk, he noticed how the ground felt. This wasn’t dirt, marsh or even sand beneath his feet. This was a firmness that felt familiar, but was all wrong.

“Do you feel that?” Puttock said. “Feels like the ground is swelling, up and down.” Indeed, the ground was twitching in some places.

“Keep walking. It won’t take long for Jade Heart to find us.”

“So you know its name,” Puttock said.

“Yeah, now shut up and let’s get off this hill. There’s a few outcroppings we can follow in the canyon wall to get out over that way.”

The musk around them grew deeper, more feral. The smell became so intense that Nestor could taste it in the roof of his mouth. It was disgusting. 

“Do you get the sense that we’re being watched?” Puttock said.

“Not exactly. It’s more we’re being smelled. Do you hear that?” Nestor said.

“Sounds like long sighs, detective.”

“Or a giant nose, sniffing. Sniffing us,” Nestor said.

The ground was covered in long, grass-like fibers. It was coarse, yet a bit slippery, and it ran in one direction, along the grain.

They had covered about fifteen feet on the hill when a rumble paralyzed both men.

The rumble turned into a roar, louder than a jet engine, and with a vocal muscularity that made it rattle one’s bones. Its sound signature was not of any earthly quality. This was a terrifying sound of another dimension altogether.

They reached the foot of the hill, finally.

“Help me down,” Puttock said, extending his hand so Nestor could help him make the leap off a small ledge where the hill ended and the flat earth began.

Just as Nestor put his hand out, the growling they had heard before enveloped them. It was coming from directly beneath the hill.

Puttock let out a squeak of fear and jumped off the hill. He stumbled and fell down on all fours, and he rolled down onto the dirt, away from the mound as it transformed itself.

The hill shifted, bulged, changed shape, and unfurled to reveal its complete shape.

It was alive.

The creature stood about fifteen feet high, but its length was shocking. It was about sixty to seventy feet in length. It stood on four muscular legs with paws and claws at each end. It had a very long tail that moved with intelligence of its own, and its head was also muscular, encased by jaws packed with muscles, and topped by two triangular ears that rotated toward the two men to analyze them. Inside the powerful set of jaws, sharp teeth curved inwardly to tear flesh and trap prey. The creature explored Nestor and Puttock with two big eyes that showed an intelligence beyond that of Earthly animals, including men.

This was no mountain.

“Back up slowly Steven,” Nestor whispered. He heard Puttock grunt in acknowledgment, but Nestor didn’t dare take his focus away from the hill creature.

“This can’t be, man,” Puttock said. “This thing—it’s a motherfucking—“

“I know, I know. And it knows who we are. You can hear it in its heartbeat, by God.”

“Holy fucking shit—“ Puttock said. The creature, which stood about twenty feet away continued to sniff, lowering itself on its haunches, prowling, ready to pounce.

“A fucking jaguar,” Nestor said.

The jaguar before them was the size of a school bus, and it growled like no cat Nestor had ever heard on Earth. It was a growl full of longing, anger, but also music, like the harsh riffs of death metal. It opened its jaw wide and revealed not just one, but two rows of razor sharp teeth. Its eyes were two bright comets of darkness, emitting more of the strange dark energy that creatures in Mictlán radiated like inverted light. 

“Do you see the waves of black energy coming off its body?” Nestor said.

“I feel them. I don’t see them,” Puttock said. “And it’s fucking glorious.”

The jaguar narrowed its eyes, clicked its throat, and in a fraction of a second, it leapt forward.

The beast rose at about 12 feet up in the air, and in mid-leap, its body quivered and dissolved, turning into particles like dust or pixels. The transformation released a string of harmonious musical notes that sounded like the world’s largest harp. The minor key of each note stacked on top of another, and Nestor’s chest shook with euphoria as the music burst forth from the animal.

It had turned itself into a cloud of dust that resembled a galaxy.

The cloud rose forty feet or so, and within a fraction of a second, it transformed yet again into the muscular feline predator of a moment ago. Now that it had left its cloud shape behind, the animal flew down toward the two men, with its teeth bared and ready to tear flesh.

Nestor stumbled backward, sure that this would be his last moment before being mauled. For a moment, the jaguar blotted out the sky of Mictlán.

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