Chapter 12: Xochicalco
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Author’s Note: Today someone inside my Discord asked me if I have gotten a lot of feedback on Hall of Mirrors, and this is what I responded: “Not too much. It's sort of crickets, to be honest. This series is sometimes hard to market because it requires that the reader use their own intellect to engage with the story and ideas. If I wrote general sci-fi instead of Aztec sci fi, I think I would have more readers. Many people expect sci-fi to be big wars and battles like GoT, Star Wars/etc, but my books are more about the internal struggles of people in an Aztec sci-fi context. But I don’t give up on marketing the book. Eventually more people will discover my series. I just have to stay consistent with promoting it. There’s also the fact that books with main characters who are brown or black have a bit more of a challenge to get read. Most folks are used to sci fi mains being white. ” So yes, it’s not simple or easy, but it can be done. When the Coil series is complete, it will be made up of nine volumes. We are only in the first third of this saga. Thank you for joining me in this journey thus far. 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 12: XOCHICALCO
From the Journal of Felix Calvo, October 27, 2030
Traveling past Fullerton along the lake was not easy. By the time I walked along the running and bike path parallel to Lakeshore Drive, military police had set up checkpoints.
I should have left my goddamn phone at home. What a mistake.
It’s pointless to resist search, because the cops have legal power.
So when they asked me for my smartphone, I rescinded it. Of course, they were looking for something else inside its contents. But as they made me unlock the phone, I shivered with fear.
They wore shields over their faces, like SWAT teams.
“Where you going?” said a stout cop with a shaved head and sunglasses beneath the clear shield..
I looked over behind my shoulder and pointed toward the smoke in Lakeview.
“I’m just trying to get to a doctor’s appointment downtown, and I heard the CTA has suspended the trains,” I lied.
He flipped through my phone’s screens for a moment. I felt naked, humiliated. He took a long pause to glance at my gay dating app and flip through my camera roll. Has asked me to step aside from the running trail, separate from the rest of the police at the checkpoint.
“I suppose you use pronouns,” he said.
I stayed silent. Suddenly, I wanted to just be back home.
“Answer me,” he said.
“He or they,” I said.
He frowned and looked down at my camera roll in disgust.
“Go on,” he said, stepping aside so I could keep walking south.
Before I took my phone back, I looked over my shoulder and pointed behind me, in the direction of Wrigley Field.
“Do you know what’s happened?” I said.
“You have a fucking smartphone, bud. You can look it up.”
“I’m sorry, I was saving my battery.”
“Three men detonated a home-made bomb on Clark Street close to the Cubby Bear.”
“Vigilantes.”
“By the looks of it.”
The cop cracked his knuckles and mumbled under his breath.
“So tired of this shit.”
A long pause stretched between us. I was unsure of whether the man was confiding a truth in me, or if he was directing a new depth of hatred at me.
“You have a certain look. You mixed?” he said.
I nodded.
“Yeah me, too. Half Mexican, half white.”
“Same,” I said.
He took off his sunglasses. He was a handsome man, with a heavy brown beard and a square jaw. His stare bore down on me like a vice.
“We’re coming to a time where all we ever see is our skin color,” he said. “What’s happening over by the ballpark is child’s play. Worse is yet to come. If I were you, I’d get myself a piece.”
I took my smartphone from the cop, and I cast my gaze over to the east, to let the waves of the lake carry my thoughts away.
“What is it you’re tired of?” I asked.
“Of listening to my fucking self,” the cop said. “Tired of this job. Tired of people like you, just making more problems, while rednecks and Nazis from southern Illinois and neighboring states come into town to burn the city the fuck down. What are you fucking stupid?”
I squeezed past the cops and started my walk toward downtown. My whole body was shaking in fear, revulsion, and even shame. I still didn’t know where I was heading, but I knew I had to keep the lake close at my side. Once I was about a hundred yards away from the checkpoint, I heard new explosions coming from Lakeview. And off to my right, polidrones whizzed by, hovering above the cars on Lakeshore Drive, heading toward the North side like a swarm of wasps.
NESTOR BUÑUEL
The water drenched both Nestor and Puttock, but it also revived them immediately.
It was the most delicious water that Nestor had ever tasted, and what made it even better was its coolness. It was neither icy nor warm, but cool and refreshing. And as it landed on his tongue when he walked through the doorway, the liquid opened up his nostrils and his taste buds further, allowing the scents of the temple to rise within the chamber and overwhelm him. This was a tapestry of smell he couldn’t take in all at once.
What struck Nestor the most was the subtle brown and green scent of that he had noticed ever since they had arrived in this realm of darkness. It wasn’t unpleasant per se, but it was earthy, like that of a gourmet mushroom, or wet grass.
But now that his sense of smell was amplified, he also caught streams of others smells that permeated the air for brief moments. Some he recognized immediately, like the smell of corn, beef liver and even chrysanthemum. And then there were other smells that lured him wth their newness. He had no word to describe them, because they didn’t match anything he had ever smelled on Earth.
And even stranger yet, the smells created shapes that almost resembled holograms or laser lights. It was unlike anything he had ever experienced. For a moment, he even thought that his vision was back. But Nestor shut his eyes and realized that his nose was the one detecting these incredible shapes moving through the air. His brain could see a whole new reality made of scent.
And as Nestor’s bare feet made contact with the long tiles of the temple, the floor itself gave off a smell that he could only describe as the smells of silver and copper.
With each new step, Nestor marveled at the feats of architecture inside this temple. The walls of these chambers came together in perfect right angles, and the vast ceilings created massive vertical walls that overwhelmed Nestor. But these walls were not minimalist: vines, branches, thorns and trunks crisscrossed the upper walls, forming vast folds and swaths of flowers and plants like living drapes. They formed complex patterns that were extremely symmetrical and asymmetrical simultaneously. The vegetation crawled and slithered on the walls, like octopus tentacles, releasing tiny bits of music and beards of scent into the air from the open flowers.
There was no need for luxurious decoration for this royal palace, because the walls themselves thrived with majestic movement and olfactory beauty.
Though Nestor’s eyes had adjusted to the darkness, his tongue could taste the colors on the petals of these flowers. He wanted to believe that he wasn’t experiencing this collision of his senses, but it was inevitable. Through his sense of smell, he could understand that these smells’ colors were lavender, royal blue, indigo and magenta, and they vibrated and pulsed, very much the way LED lights back at home could take on these colors almost through a will of their own.
Nestor came to a sudden realization: these walls, these tiles and these bricks—every hard surface in this massive building—were made of flowers. Now that he was better attuned to this building, he could feel the flowers beneath this feet, the way their velvety petals grazed his shoes, but he also marveled at how so many flowers could form a substance as hard as stone or concrete. Each time he took a step, he felt feedback from every plant in the walls and the floors, yet the flooring beneath him remained solid and supportive.
He put his hand on one of the walls, and he felt tiny vibrations and sounds from thousands of calla lilies. He pulled his hand back, afraid.
The flowers in this temple were not just greeting Nestor and Puttock. The flowers were inspecting them, evaluating them. They were tasting them.
Nestor had found a new source of strength to carry Puttock on his back, and he approached a new doorway. He stepped though and found himself in a gigantic chamber.
At the center of the chamber, a tree floated in the air, as its exposed roots kissed the floor. The tree was unlike any he had ever seen. Its trunk had flat, squared edges that reminded him of slabs, like stelae, and the two biggest branches extended out in two opposite directions, like a Christian cross. The roots pulsed and crawled with tiny insects that resembled ants, but which gave off tiny popping sounds like bubble wrap. Each microscopic pop also released tiny spores in the air, and they smelled unmistakably like bubble gum. But despite their sweet smell, they drifted in the air toward the tree, as if there were a magnetic force right inside the trunk.
The tree itself had no smell, which sent a chill down Nestor’s spine.
“This thing almost feels like a crucifix in a cathedral,” Nestor said.
From beneath the floor, the voice of the building rose, and it bellowed with anger. “You dare insult us,” it sang in a thousand voices. “If you came here to disrespect us, you can leave.”
Nestor collapsed on the floor, letting go of Puttock and landing on his knees. He hadn’t felt this scared in a long time.
The millions of flowers embedded into the roof and walls of this chamber hissed, spat and bristled at Nestor. They made sounds that tore at his very soul.
He tried catching his breath as he crawled on the floor, but couldn’t. Kneeling on this smooth floor only made him more afraid. There they were, right under the palms of his hands: Flowers, trillions of flowers, that had entwined and collaborated to create a substance harder than concrete. His nose detected marigolds, roses, lilies, but many other flowers that he could never even dream of. Some of them smelled like butter, and others smelled like gasoline. All of them gave off signals that they were alive and sentient, like a Tower of Babel that should have never existed.
In order to get closer to the tree in the center, he had to cross a section of the floor that was dotted with tiny holes. Nestor knelt for a moment so he could run his hands over the tile of flowers beneath.
Each flower had a dark opening at its center, a silent crevasse where normally the stigma and the pistil would be on an earthly flower. No, these dark centers were as unknowable as the night sky, and Nestor could feel his fingers dig into their tiny openings. It was as if these flowers had simply been hollowed out in the center. Nestor had never thought he had any type of trypophobia, but this might be the first time he did. He not only felt afraid of these flowers without a center, but he also felt revolted by the thought of millions of these little holes, lining the walls and the floors of these changers like pores that only offered darkness. He fought back a lump of nausea in his throat and spat sideways in order to prevent vomiting.
“Remove your shoes. You will feel better,” the building said.
Puttock lay on his side, unconscious and helpless. Nestor’s fear had become so gigantic that he was too scared to even clench his fists. Did that voice in the darkness really ask him to remove his shoes? It did. But did he have any choice in the matter of what was happening here? The landscape outside was just as terrifying, and what’s worse, the owl creature was out there, with its deadly beak and its revolting gills on its chest.
Nestor kicked off his black dress shoes, and not knowing why, he also stripped off his socks. Once his feet were bare, he got on all fours, and his extremities came into contact with the floor. Nestor fought the urge to vomit, and instead he pushed himself forward, a newborn learning how to navigate their reality.
As Nestor crawled, music, wonderful soft music that reminded him of the guitar riffs from old Aimee Mann songs, drifted up through his skin, into his bones, and up to his throat.
The building was generating this music, sending him a message. His palms and soles of his feets tingled, and the places where his skin touched the floor became wet, as if he were swearing or as if the floor had just turned into wet moss. Soon, an inch of the liquid had risen, and the coolness of the liquid felt very good on Nestor’s palms and soles, which were now submerged in it. The smell of the liquid was unmistakable: it was water, clean, clear water, which amplified the millions of scents in the building. The chamber was flooding itself.
“Chalchiuhuitl-Yolotl was going to eat you,” the building said. “ You know that, right?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Nestor said.
“Chalchuihuitl-Yolotl means Jade Heart. He is the owl with human hands that nests at the top of my crown. He is the son of the late goddess Chalchiutlicue.”
“He spoke to me outside,” Nestor said. “But he never said he was going to eat us. He told me he wouldn’t do such a thing.”
“That creature was, and always will be, a liar,” the building said. “Jade Heart meant to eat you and your companion. But you were lucky you reached the top of the pyramid. He doesn’t dare eat you at the highest levels of this pyramid. Up here, he has no governance. Jade Heart and I have had disputes that last many wheels, and he knows better than to overstay his welcome.”
“What do you want from me?” Nestor said.
“Nothing at all,” the building said. “Take these seeds and place them under the gums of your companion.”
A gnarled vine crawled toward Nestor, and it opened up its branches like a hand, and it presented Nestor with a massive mound of fragrant seeds the size of sesames. The seeds had a mild, nutty smell. He grabbed a handful and slid them intro Puttock’s mouth. Puttock was missing a few teeth, but the seeds stuck easily onto the gum like glue.
“I know these,” Nestor said.
“Amaranth,” the building said. Nestor shivered. “I know you have tasted it before.”
“Who are you?” Nestor said. “And what may I call you?”
“This is my name,” the building said, and it emitted a cloud of sweet and soft scents, followed by a long sweeping sound no unlike a flute. Nestor could feel words forming inside all this wonderful scent information, and the voice of the pyramid, the way it sang when it spoke, also made Nestor think of a very specific word.
“Your name is Xochicalco?” Nestor said.
“Yes, I am, and we are, the Place, the House, the Pyramid of Flowers.”
“Xochicalco, nice to meet you. I am Nestor Buñuel.”
“I know. I have always known.”
From the Journal of Felix Calvo, October 27, 2030
The sun bore down on me, and I knew it was dangerous to be exposed for too long, but I walked as fast as I could.
On my way, I passed up several clusters of people in business clothes. They were walking north. I had seen peopled doing this this before in history class, when I was a kid.
9-11. I had seen business folks walk home from Manhattan to Brooklyn and Queens on the day the twin towers had been pierced and struck.
But I kept to myself, even as I saw them talking amongst each other, their faces sullen and buried inside their smartphones. I knew I didn’t have much time, and even though the sun was bright and burning above, I would need to get home before sunset.
I knew it was a bad idea to use my phone, because I would leave a geographical trail from geolocation, but I couldn’t resist.
At the top of my news app, a pinned post blinked at me:
The City of Chicago has been placed under martial law until further notice. Residents are advised to stay indoors. Only emergency or essential travel is permitted, and residents must produce valid digital identification and clearance, if they are to conduct essential activities outside.
And not a single text from Nestor. What was the damn holdup at the interview?
I went to my YouTube app mindlessly. Sometimes when I was restless, YouTube numbed me out. I needed numbing out.
The app’s main panel showed me a small feed of recommended videos based on my watching habits. In these feeds, there was the usual banal material, like skincare tutorials, queer memes, and reviews of movies and TV shows that I would binge eventually. But today, a different video popped up. It showed a woman in her backyard, clasping her face in her own hands. The title above the thumbnail read, “A cryptid invaded my backyard!”.
I played the video.
The woman in the video was no older than 30 years old, and she spoke directly into the camera from her living room. She wore no makeup, and there were bags under her eyes.
“Just in case you’re going through the same journey as me—I just wanted to tell you you’re not alone,” she said. “Look, I get it. You’re probably thinking, here comes another cringe crocodile-hunting video by a Floridian. But this is very different. If you came here to make fun of me, please don’t watch my video.
“My name is Jeanine Mattheson. I have battled insomnia and anxiety for a full decade now. I tried everything — melatonin, Ambien and weed, and I still can’t sleep more than two hours a night. This also means I haven’t remembered a dream in more than ten years. If you search on 4chan and Reddit, you’ll find other people like me, who are too ashamed to talk about this problem. They call the condition ‘slicing’, because you only get a tiny slice of sleep a night—if you’re lucky. But you need to know that this condition is destroying me. It’s robbing me of my life, and lately, it’s gotten so bad, that I wonder what it would be like not to be alive. Because if I wasn’t, I would be free from this torture.”
The woman clasped her left shoulder with her right hand, let her eyes drift past the lends of the camera, then continued.
“People who are slicing, regular people like me—we see him. We see him in the early morning, when the sun’s just about to come up. We have seen him in our backyards, and for those who live in more remote and swampy areas, we have seen him in the mangrove. He’s the most horrible thing, worse than Mothman, Slender Man or any creepy pasta you’ll find on YouTube.”
Jeanine walked out into her backyard, which opened up into a wide patch of wetland. Only the back of her shoulders were visible, which suggested that she had handed off the camera to a camera person who was off screen.
“He shows up at dawn and dusk, right at the edge of the water,” she said. “His head is the size of a Toyota Prius. And he doesn’t move. He just stares at me with milky eyes that have no pupils. Right there.”
She panned the camera into the edge of the water, where a single butterfly flittered past the video frame. She drew a boxy shape in the air where she wanted the viewer to imaging the giant head.
“He has blue and green scales, and a tongue as long as the length of my house. And I know it’s not my imagination, man. It just... can’t be.”
She turned the camera back onto her face, which had collapsed. Her eyes looked rheumy and wet, and the skin flat and papery. She was wearing a Wal-Mart uniform.
“I’m not the only one who sees him. Many other people do. I call him the Thief of Dreams. And that’s why I’m making this video. If you have also seen the giant head with scales, and those awful white eyes, please leave a comment and subscribe. I no longer know what to do. I have tried talking to it, I have asked it what it wants, but every time I do, it emits a rattling sound, and then it dips back into the water. This aint’ no crocodile. And it’s not an anaconda or some shit. This thing is as big as a mack truck. Any time I have called the police or the Fish or Wildlife commission, they thought I was playing a prank.
“So please, please, if you’re ever out there, and you have seen this creature, please let me know you exist. I want people to know that this is something that can’t be good. I used to make fun of people who believed in the Loch Ness monster. And look at me now. No thing, no animal should look like that, no animal should be that size, and when I see it, it makes me want to strip my skin off from head to toe, like a glove, and what’s fucked up is that this thing, the Thief, he wants me to do it, he wants me to put a blade to my skin and remove it. He says if I skin myself, he will save me. He even showed me how I can make the first incision, then begin to lift the skin like a sheet of Saran Wrap–“
The woman pulled a paring knife and placed it at her temple.
I closed the app and pocketed my phone. I was sweating through my t-shirt and the urge to vomit started to overwhelm me. I was now approaching a wide curve near Division street, which would take me closer yet to where I thought I needed to be.
NESTOR BUÑUEL
The effect of the amaranth was almost immediate. Puttock, who had been lethargic and limp since they crashed into this place, twitched, once, twice, then turned over on his side, as if he were finding a comfortable way to sleep. But clearly he had injuries, because he groaned as he lay on his side. His breathing slowed down to a calmer rhythm, and stranger yet, his body began to smell like his body again.
Puttock coughed, and a thin, clear fluid dribbled from his mouth. As he expelled this liquid, more smells and sounds burst from the convicted killer, sending Nestor reeling backward as if he had just popped open a hot oven door.
Every organ and every cell inside Puttock’s voice gave off intense smell, and within seconds, the scent of sweet saliva, the salty tang of mucus and tears, and even the harsh metallic smell of liver lobes bloomed forth from Puttock’s body as if they were announcing his arrival. The gum disease in his mouth was the most putrid, but even the smell of his armpits smelled rancid, and as these waves of smell swept into Nestor, he caught new smells, emerging from within the body like a glow.
The man’s body bloomed with olfactory information.
Nestor could even smell the inside of Puttock’s lungs, which actually smelled of healthy tissue. No tumors, no scars, just healthy lung cells danced on the tip of Nestor’s nose. The stomach smelled too, like dark taffy, cocoa beans and apple. The cock and balls smelled like spoiled milk, and Nestor gagged. Then came the strongest glow from the body—the heart, which smelled like gunpowder, rubbing alcohol, and rancid lard.
“He’s healed already,” Xochicalco said. “All you’re smelling now is the aftermath of the process. Now that he’s repaired, he will need to sleep.”
Nestor looked down at his feet and realized that the water that had covered his feet had now receded. He took a seat cross legged on the floor and put his head down. He felt okay, but there was a strange feeling inside this pyramid, as if his body felt far away, almost like seeing it in third person. He put his hand up to his face and marveled at the surface of his palms. Though he had no vision, he could smell and hear tiny organisms crawling on his skin. They were bacteria, protozoa, and even viruses, and they all made tiny bits of music that sounded like gains of sand rubbing together.
“We need to get back home,” Nestor said. “Can you help us?”
Xochicalco let out a long hiss of air.
“We would like that very much. You don’t belong here.”
“I get it. But isn’t this where souls go when they die?”
The pyramid’s walls and ceilings released a long, forlorn song that brought tears to Nestor’s eyes.
“All living things move through the Coil when they die,” Xochicalco said. “You are correct about that.”
The pyramid’s walls liquefied and reformed, becoming like long rope fibers that broke the laws of time and space. For a moment, those walls formed an image, the way that a television would show an image, and in it, Nestor learned.
The image revealed a deeper structure inside of Xochicalco, like a schematic that had constelated inside Nestor’s brain. This is what it showed him: The pyramid was built in many layers, like a set of Russian dolls, starting out small at the base, but widening with each new layer. Pyramid stacked on top of pyramid. And through all this marvelous architecture, life surged: trillions of flowers compressed into hard slabs of building materials.
This was a place that was so intricate and alive, that all Nestor could think is that it was a living labyrinth. Corridors led to pocket chambers, which led into circular paths, stairways, balconies and cubby holes that made the space impossible to comprehend. Yet the vision he was being shown had a destination: it sliced upward to the very top of one of these chambers, a long platform brimmed with water. There was a roaring river moving through the platform, like an aqueduct, and this water sparkled with light. It was unlike any light that Nestor had ever experienced, because it didn’t give off any brightness. Rather, it was light that shined unto itself, like tiny little bubbles of glittering plasma. The little bubbles were so small that they were even submicroscopic, yet each one thrived with a presence that Nestor understood.
“Those are the sentient beings that travel through Mictlán after they die in your world,” Xochicalco said. “Their journey takes 4 years of your calendar time, and they must travel down all the nine levels of The Coil to meet the lady Mictecacíhuatl and the lord Mictlantecuhtli.”
“It’s–I have no–no words,” Nestor said.
“You don’t need words,” Xochicalco said. “You never did.”
Nestor and the pyramid exchanged an understanding in silence, and as they each felt each other’s presence, the image of the aqueduct and waterfall that Xochicalco had conjured before them popped away in a flash like a hologram shutting off. They were now back inside the vast chamber with the tree in the middle.
“These images I just shared with you are proof that you shouldn’t be here,” Xochicalco said. “You don’t look like one of those liquid stars I just showed you down below.”
“I don’t understand.”
“We have only ever seen two other humans arrive here in their earthly, corporeal form. You and your companion are the third and fourth arrivals with a body. These are anomalies that we don’t approve of.”
“Who is we?”
“I. We. Me. It’s what I am. What we are.”
“I still don’t follow.”
“You have broken the laws of Mictlán by entering this kingdom in the way you did. Whatever magic you practiced to do so must be relinquished and turned over to us. Now.”
“But I didn’t do it. I don’t have any magic. It was him,” Nestor said as he pointed at Puttock.
“Liar.”
“I mean it. He made me see a vision inside the interrogation room, back in the prison we were at, and suddenly, we appeared here.”
“You two are part of a corrosion. You are one of the creatures responsible for The Rift that is spreading throughout all realms. You acquired knowledge that is forbidden to your kind.”
“Please just send us back to Earth.”
“We can’t. I can’t. To send you back would require teaching you how to do it. The flowers of Xochicalco—we, in your language–-we made a vow to keep our libraries and our books hidden and protected from humans throughout time.”
“You have a library here?” Nestor said.
“Of course we do. Don’t you keep a library inside your own body too?”
Nestor glanced at himself. Though he was still clothed in his black t-shirt and jeans, he could smell and feel through them, almost like x-ray vision. What he saw was a very muscular body, low in body fat, strong as an ox. But even as he glanced at his big pecs and washboard stomach, he failed to understand Xochicalco’s riddle.
“No, all I have are organs. Blood. Bones. No library here.”
Xochicalco laughed, and with each cackle, the scents of fish, seaweed and saltwater filled the air.
“Your species is just as ignorant as I remember,” Xochicalco said. “I much prefer when we see your kind travel as pinpoints of light, to be honest. If you don’t understand the books that live inside you, then I can’t help you. But I can tell you who can…”
The pyramid’s laughter continued, but beneath each laugh, another sound warbled and gushed. It was a vast rumble in a low frequency, and one that felt very familiar to Nestor.
It was the sound of a predator getting ready to eat its prey, and Xochicalco was the one making it.
“Right now you are located in the region of Teocoyohuehaloyan, the seventh level of The Coil,” Xochicalco said. “In this level, jaguars eat the hearts of humans who have died in your world. But you won’t find answers here, and if you stay too l long, in fact, the jaguars will smell you and kill you. Instead, you must travel four levels up through the Coil and head toward Iztepetl, the Holy Mountain of Obsidian. Iztepetl can be found on the third level. There, you must retrieve two pieces of fruit from the Tree of Remembrance. That tree belonged to the god Xochipilli, and that means the fruit will enchant you if you’re not careful. You will then need to offer the fruits to the Lord Xolotl as tribute. Only Xolotl can help you, because Xolotl is the only god who can carry human souls back and forth from Mictlán. This is all the knowledge we will offer you at this time. Nothing more.”
“I can’t do all that. I don’t even have a map.”
The pyramid responded by releasing a more pungent plume of its floral scents. Violets, roses, daisies and bougainvillea filled the room, but Xochicalco refused to speak any further.
Nestor suddenly remembered what the owl Chalchihuitl-Yolotl had advised him to do.
“I have a present for you,” Nestor said.
The pyramid throbbed with sweet music suddenly, and the walls moistened, as if a morning dew had misted every single chamber. Xochicalco let out a long sigh filled with melodies.
“Is that so?”
“It’s not much: my wallet, my keys, my smartphone, and this gum. They probably mean nothing to you, but that’s all I got.”
Xochicalco whispered, and Nestor felt soft vines crawl along his arms, caressing the hairs on the back of his hands. He wanted to pull away in fear and disgust, but he kept his cool. The pyramid was evaluating his offer, and he shouldn’t’ interrupt its thinking.
“You crafted none of these objects yourself, Nestor. Why would we accept them as a gift?”
“I didn’t know the gift had to be made by me.”
“It has to come from you,” Xochicalco said. From the ceiling, a long stem sprouted. At its tip, a marigold poked the darkness, with tiny canine teeth at its center. It slid through the air with sensuous ease, and it rested right over Nestor’s right pec.
“We do see a gift that would be appropriate,” the pyramid spoke, its voices suddenly radiating from the center fo the flower.
“Okay,” Nestor said.
The marigold nestled itself between Nestor’s pecs.
“Give us your heart. We would like to eat it.”
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