Chapter 15: Teyollocualóyan
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Author’s Note: It’s time to resume our journey into Mictlán. Interesting fact: I named one of my two snakes Mictlán. Mictlán, a corn snake, is now two and a half years old. He has the beautiful colors of a marigold, and the patterning of a jaguar’s pelt. If you ever want to see him, check out my TikToks at @nahualtezcatl. My other serpent is a kingsnake, whom I have named Tezcatl. Since the pandemic began, I acquired these two snakes and brought them into my care as a way to stay connected to nature, and to go deeper into my investigation of the culture and religion of my ancestors, the Mexica or Aztecs. To the Mexica, snakes were divine animals that symbolized wisdom, rebirth, and in the case of the god Quetzalcóatl, medicine and the arts. My two snakes are not my pets; they are my teachers. I learn about science, evolution, biology and non-human consciousness from them, and they have in fact inspired new scenes in Hall of Mirrors. Those scenes will arrive later this fall, once Nestor and Puttock continue their journey through The Coil. 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 15: TEYOLLOCUALÓYAN
NESTOR BUÑUEL
Nestor fell hard on his ass, and pain erupted in his legs, back, his neck. Puttock yanked him by the arm as the jaguar soared toward them from the sky,
“Run!” Puttock shoutedm, and they sprinted. Just a few feet behind them, the ground shook as the jaguar slammed onto the rocky surface of the canyon, missing them by several yards.
But Nestor knew they didn’t have much time. This may not be Earth, but the laws of predation remained constant. He ran as fast as he could with Puttock by his side. They needed to cover a lot of distance to escape.
The cat roared once again, invoking the terrible rumble of an erupting volcano.
There was no cover before them, just flat earth, and steep canyon walls. But running in Mictlán was like running in a dream: swift, liquid-like, and frustratingly alien.
As Nestor dove into the darkness before him, his skin, ears and nose detected something that resembled snowflakes, falling from the sky,
He put his hand out.
“This is ash,” Nestor said.
“It’s not,” Puttock said, rubbing a few of the gritty flakes in his palm with his index finger. “This is sand.”
Nestor glanced over his shoulder. The jaguar was loping at a leisurely pace, just two hundred feet behind them. Perhaps the animal was taking his time, stretching out the hunt for his pleasure.
Nestor slowed down a bit, glanced over his shoulder again.
The jaguar was now prowling, low to the ground on all fours, keeping them in his gaze. His eyes burned with a plasma-like glow that could be smelled and felt, but not seen.
Puttock tapped on Nestor’s shoulder, motioning him to stop running. Both men stopped and stared back on the creature, whose voice shook pebbles loose from the canyon walls.
“What is raining from the sky of Mictlán is glass,” the jaguar roared, as if reading their thoughts. “Volcanic glass, black sand, full of the energy and vibrance of the dead.”
Nestor gasped when he heard the creature speak. When he had heard Jade Heart and Xochicalco use their musical sound signatures, he had been astounded by the way that he was able to decipher their melodies and rhythms and interpret them in his head as human speech. Jade Heart’s voice had been reedy, and thin, and Xochicalco’s had been a thundering polyphonic boom, but the voice of this feline just destroyed him.
The jaguar’s voice sounded like mutilation, trauma, and massacre. It was the sound of a machete hacking through bone, sinew and flesh. The sound of young bones cracking in multiple shards under a killer’s weight. The sound of savagery.
Every musical note of the jaguar’s speech induced terror in Nestor, but it also caused a strange arousal in his nipples and his crotch. It was confusing and alarmingly unexpected. Nestor had not felt this uncomfortable with himself in a long time.
The jaguar’s eyes hypnotized. They were unknowable, as black as the darkness of Mictlán. They probed.
Puttock tugged on Nestor’s sleeve. “It’s okay,” he whispered.
“No.”
“Give it up. There’s nowhere to hide in this canyon. We must talk to it.”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Nestor said. Puttock made a good point.
“Are those rivets?” Puttock said.
Indeed, the jaguar had multiple rows of jade pebbles that ran horizontally along his body. The animal’s muscles were a bas relief, carved to perfection yet sheathed in a layer of black, coarse, but silky fur. Even without any light to speak of, the rows of jade resembled snake scales, pearly and very, very reflective. And what music they made.
The jewels made music that pirouetted up above as if to scrape the sky, then came crashing down, only to soar up again into the ether, in brief but deep notes.
“You need to leave Mictlán,” the jaguar said.
“No problem,” Nestor said, slowly pacing away as he held his right hand up in a gesture of peaceful intentions. “We’re on our way out anyway. Didn’t mean to disturb you.”
“Did Chalchihuitll-Yolotl send you to poach my den?”
“Not at all,” Nestor said. “We are trying to reach Iztepetl, the Holy Mountain.”
The jaguar clicked his tongue, hissed, and the hundreds of tiny stones running down its body glistened and twinkled with lightless radiance. They hummed in a frequency so low, that Nestor realized that it was only possible to hear it here in Mictlán. This was frequency his ears had never once heard back on Earth.
“The volcano of Iztepetl is very far from here. It’s found in the third level of Mictlán, up above us,” Nestor said.
“Is that so?” the jaguar said, rising from his haunches. He brought his face close to Nestor’s: close enough to kiss, or to swallow him whole. “You’re an intruder in my den, and you, mortal being, dare to tell me where to find Iztepetl?”
“Didn’t meant insult you,” Nestor said. “It’s just that in this realm, entrances seem like exits, and exits lead to gates that reveal darkness.”
“Prophecy, apocalypse, and inevitable rebirth,” the jaguar said, smiling. “That’s what I taste in those words of poetry you just spoke.”
“All we want is to reach Iztepetl so we can go home.”
“I see what you are now…” The jaguar said. It purred and growled, circling Nestor and Puttock like rabbits. “You are not meat, in the way I understand meat…”
“We are—“
“Yes, yes you are, little ones,” the Jaguar said. “You’re a very old creation. You’re part of the old stories.”
“You think we are a myth,” Puttock said, bowing his head by an inch or so.
“Humans play a big part of the great five great eras,” the jaguar said. “Each of these eras is known as one of the Five Suns. Those are the old stories.”
Nestor was well aware of the Five Suns, thanks to Felix. During each era, the Aztec gods created life and nature, but each of those eras collapsed, often violently. Every time one collapsed, a new era started. And what tied all the eras together was the fact that select gods decided to take on the role of the sun.
“Quetzalcóatl the White and his brother Tezcatlipoca the Black are big players in the stories of the Five Suns,” Nestor said.
The jaguar licked his lips and nodded. He was acknowledging what Nestor had just said.
“The great god Quetzalcóatl and his sibling Tezcatlipoca created men in more than one Sun indeed,” the jaguar said. “But in all the wheels, I have never seen a man in his earthly form up close. Until now.”
“Or so say the myths,” Puttock said.
“You!” the jaguar said as its eyes peeled open, wide as dinner plates. “You are not like the poet here. Instead, you smell like a hunter. Tell me, what’s your definition of ‘myth’?”
“Funny you should ask,” Puttock said, as he got down on both knees. He bent at the waist and bowed so his forehead touch the ground. “A myth is a story told over many generations, containing both a kernel of truth, but also elements of the fantastical.”
The jaguar’s tail undulated, high in the air, pensive, and calculating.
“Oh sacred jaguar, teach me, make me part of your league of servants, and lead me to the Lords of death and the venerable Night Drinker, Xipe Totec,” Puttock said.
Nestor chuckled. “Come on bro, get the fuck out of here with your stupid shit.”
Puttock raised his head and snapped. “Quiet! Show some respect.”
The jaguar cocked his head toward Puttock, narrowed his eyes and opened his jaw. From deep in his throat, flames of fire shot out: pungent and reeking of copper and soot. This fire emerged thick as lava, but deadlier than any molten rock. It missed Puttock by just two or three feet, and landed against a wall of rock behind the two men liked a gob of burning spit. The pile of fire twisted, crumbled, and then turned into a solid mass that looked like a cake made of cinders. The cake then crumbled and turned into thousands of tiny spiders. The arachnids crawled toward Puttock, and they climbed up his ankles and legs in an instant, as he screamed in agony.
“Make it stop!” Puttock screamed, clawing at his prison uniform as he collapsed onto the ground. The spiders found their way onto Nestor’s arms by gliding on long strands of their silk. They bit into his flesh, making it burn.
“My apologies, friend,” Nestor explained. “We are very unfamiliar with the customs here. We mean you no harm or insult.”
“You’re the first humans I have ever seen walking in full bodied form in my den, ever. The stories they tell up in the crown of Xochicalco are true, then. You do exist.”
“How wouldn’t we? Isn’t Mictlán the place human souls come to when we die?”
The jaguar changed his lunging stance into a soft posture of relaxation. He curled up on the ground and licked his paws for a moment. He even shut his eyes, as if asleep. But although he was very relaxed and silent, he spoke from under his breath, his lips barely moving.
“Each time souls enter The Coil, they will eventually reach my den along their journey. This is my home. This is the canyon of Teyollocualóyan.”
The jaguar opened his jaws in a wide yawn, and the sharp teeth that he revealed were caked with blood, guts, and even the feces of eaten creatures.
“I eat the heart,” the jaguar said. “In all the wheels that I have lived here in Mictlán, I have never seen a human arrive in full form. You usually resemble tiny stars for me to eat. I use my teeth to crack the outer surface of a human soul like a nut, and I slurp out the heart at its center using my tongue. ”
“I don’t understand,” Nestor said.
“You arrived here in your Earthly body,” the jaguar said. “Let me show you what a human soul looks like.”
The jaguar turned his head and lapped up dark water from a puddle on his right side. Using the tip of his tongue, he picked up a small particle, roughly the size of a pea. It gave off a powerful glow, just like the jaguar’s eyes, radiating black energy. The jaguar placed it right between his upper and lower teeth, and he peeled back his lips so Nestor and Puttock could get a good look. Then the jaguar bit down hard. The particle gave off a human scream, bloodcurdling and desperate. The outer core of the particle fell down to the ground and all was left was a smaller particle the size of an amaranth seed. The creature rolled it around on his tongue and then swallowed it. The horrible human shrieks amplified and stabbed Nestor’s ears. He had heard screams like that before, when he had been a uniformed policeman. It was the sound of a mother’s cries after her son was shot in a drive-by, or the sound of terror after a shooter fires into a crowd.
The jaguar narrowed his eyes again and smiled at Puttock and Nestor.
“I have to say: If this is what you humans look like in corporeal form, you look and smell… delicious.”
The jaguar knew that Nestor and Puttock would never outrun him. That’s why he had decided to lounge on the canyon floor as if it were a pillow. He was hunting them on his own terms.
“Perhaps the lady and the lord of Mictlán sent you to me as a gift,” the jaguar said. “I will be sure to thank them when I chew on your bodies and relish the taste of your livers.”
Puttock was still struggling and whimpering as he tore at his clothes to get the spiders off his body. Nestor had to buy time, and quickly.
“Before you eat us,” Nestor said, “I’d like to ask, what happens after you eat a man’s heart?”
The jaguar stood back up on his four legs, twirling his long tail in the air. He began to circle the two men again.
“Most of them pass through my body. And what I excrete continues to flow down the rivers that link all levels of Mictlán. Human souls keep going through this journey through this seventh level, all the way to the ninth, when they reach the city of Tonalpohualli. From there they move through the endless snow fields, until they finally meet Lord Mictlantecuhtli, may he be blessed, and Lady Mictecacīhuatl, oh the kindly one.”
“So you eat every human soul,” Nestor added.
“Yes, but not every soul exits my body to rejoin the nine rivers of Mictlán. Sometimes I keep a soul or two with me. You see these jewels on my hide?” he said. As the cat walked past them in a circular motion, Nestor could feel the long lines of stones on the flank of the animal, and they radiated even more beauty than before. More gorgeous than diamonds, more reflective than silver, more lyrical than gold. The gems emitted soft music, as if they were a musical instrument unto themselves. Each jewel looked hard as glass, round like tiny planets, and embedded right into the flesh like a rivet. “When I eat a heart of a particularly kind or evil human, a new stone appears on my hide.”
“May I touch them?” Nestor said.
“Buñuel, get these spiders off of me already!” Puttock was busy swatting the arachnids off his arms and legs.
“Sure,” the jaguar said. The cat’s smile widened.
As Nestor took each step, his skin went cold in fear. No horror movie, no spooky legend from his abuelita, no Halloween story, had ever scared him as much as this giant jaguar was scaring him now, but Nestor wanted to live, he wanted to avoid the fate of his death, and he walked toward the muscled body of the jaguar, as if he were gliding forward in a dream.
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