good. We threaded through honeycombed bowels in almost four-dimensional convolutions of knotted tubes, impossible to visualize, over thousands of maimed stalactites lying in sections like logs in a jam. At some point I felt some kind of thrum filtering through the stone and my perspective kind of flipped, I realized the place wasn’t lifeless at all, we were almost lifeless by comparison.
The path sloped off again down an organ-pipe cliff and my bearers formed a chain and handed me down to a sediment bed near the current water table. A high wall of milky crystal bulged ahead of us like it was breathing, taking decades between breaths, and we edged behind it through a one-drip-at-a-time waterfall and out a narrow vertical fissure into a big space. My shadow grew in front of me and then shrunk again as the bearers came through. I turned and looked around, but the torchlight only lit an oval of the high fluted wall we’d come through and a half-circle in the silver sand around us, and everything else was black. I stood and waited. There was something unsettling about the sound of the cantors and pipers coming through. The echoes were coming back too late.
Evidently the room was a lot more huge than I’d thought it could be. We waited until finally everyone formed up. I signaled. The dirge slid into its ending stave and faded away. Finally the echoes faded too. I signaled again and the bearers stuck their torches headfirst in the sand and they sputtered out. Shedding more artificial light than you had to in the halls of the night was just begging for trouble. At first the darkness was total, like what I’d had in my blind eye, just before it became nothing at all. But we waited, and eventually we could at least see our silhouettes against the green chemoluminescence sweating from the walls.
Mask came up beside me and steered me down a long, long gentle slope, my foot feeling its way over the ridges and my snake-leg stumping along, and we twisted through narrownesses and vastnesses of spiraling alabaster walls. From the tone of our foot-scrunches the spaces seemed to be growing larger and larger, as though we were following the air tube of a chambered nautilus. Build me more stately mansions, O my soul.
Finally we edged into a dark cleft in the glow and out through into a deep vaulted sound-dissipating cavern like a black stadium, bigger than I would have thought any cave could be. The ridges vanished under rough sand but Mask kept steering me forward and down, toward a faint nebula of clear light-spicules, not quite moving but still different from stone somehow, and then the sparkles resolved themselves into reflections on liquid. Mask guided my hand to a treelike shadow and when I touched the smooth scalloped stone the procession stopped.
The phosphorescence was fainter here but eventually my eye was able to pick out ancient offerings, laceworks of arm and leg bones spread out over the gray rubble, branched into vertebral columns with multiple necks and mouths for fingers, the human bones forced into merging with alligator-boas with monkey heads and frogs sprouting from their ears, spires radiating and bursting into rosettes of blowfish and cone shells.
(71)
M ask handed me a greenstone hipball. I bounced it off my hip and it struck the pillar. The sparks lit everything with outer-space relief, for less time than an electronic camera flash but still long enough to see a piece of almost everything, the edge of the big white phallic stalagmite boss, like a natural stele, Hun Xoc’s wet, startled face, strings and nodes of desiccated offerings draping over bulbous rocks like the single endless skeleton of a legged snake that trailed off into drifts of tortoises and barracudas. The bones got older and crustier, until I realized they weren’t all just offerings, that we were on a bed of petrified sea creatures, and that the gravel under my feet was bits of sea-lilies and anemones and crinoid stems and shark teeth cast in lost-stone thousands of millennia ago. I could see down the long slope in front of us, to where the fossils smoothed into fine lunar sand, and then the waveless shore and the black still lake, and then out and beyond that, just nothing, no cave walls that I could see, no horizon, just what looked like veils of dark matter, graphite dust shrouding an old helium star. The sound lagged behind the light and when it welled up it wasn’t sharp like glass on stone, it was a low D-note that drifted up through our feet and into our heads and then broke into the hollow voices of fused quartz clusters, brool tuun tob, broo toon lob, reverbing away like vibraphone tubes the size of blue whales.
I swung again, much harder, and I nearly jumped or rather hopped, it was like I’d dropped a shipping container of lead ore into a water drum the size of a grain elevator, but I got it together and finished the phrase with two more cracks lower down. Like Mask had said, the melody came out, that interrogatory theme without a reply. So far. It was like the stone organ was naturally tuned to a five-note scale. I was shivering a little at the end, no matter what I told myself I couldn’t help feeling I was stirring up larger sounds somewhere else, it was all just that impending Doric strapping-on-the-armor feeling. We waited but the sound didn’t end, multivalent echoes came back upside down and self-amplifying cobalt-purple waves reverberated through the Toad’s sinuses and it was just really bumming me out, actually, and then I realized Mask was chanting again:
“We are the white snake wriggling in the swampfire,
We are the red snake throbbing in the fart place…”
It was like a whisper gallery down here, all he had to do was speak normally and it came back like Paul Robeson singing Odin.
“He dives into our fathermother’s womb,
Accept him into your own hall, your court,
Your root, your time, your garden, your own skin-”
I walked forward with my hand on Hun Xoc’s shoulder. My meat toe felt glacial water and recoiled. I could sense it was flowing west. They laid my mat and I sat down, my bags of offerings at my sides. Behind me the Adders had gotten the doped-up jaguar and the fourteen-year-old blood out of their swaddles and were trying to revive them. I just sat and looked out over the water. My mental color-wheel had shifted again, past the normal spectrum into other wavelengths where I could see an extra band of heat past infrared and two of ultra-ultra- ultraviolets, which is the definition of something indescribable, I guess, since each different color is something more irreducibly different from any other than any other two things are different from each other. I could see new veins in the rocks and clouds of fear rising off the attendants. I could see infection smoldering in Hun Xoc’s pruned arms and EEG fields rippling around his brain. I could see the pressure of the air on the stone like electric potentials, with the zero lines running between them like cell membranes. The water in the lake glowed bee-purple with radioactive alum. I forgot who I was for a while and then remembered-not that the knowledge of who I was turned out to be very comforting-and wondered if they’d overdone it, maybe there was a plot to assassinate me and they’d given me too much on purpose. No, no no, I thought. Forget it. Paranoia’s normal. You always go through this stage when the shit starts really kicking in. I couldn’t get my head totally around the notion, though. Still, nowhere else to go but stay. You can do it. Wait it out. Oh, when the shit Starts kicking in Oh-when-the-shit
Starts
Kiiiiiii-cking in…
On one level I was aware that behind me they were purifying the two offerings, killing them, and laying them out, but it all seemed like it was happening in some other time, on video, maybe. I felt a sear of pain in my groin. Alligator Root had gotten a bone spike and bladder and was injecting me with a solution of Lady Koh’s blood so that I’d be able to find her. Mask of Jaguar Night and Alligator Root touched me silently on the chest. Hun Xoc’s hands opened my offering-box of fifty-two of my best mountain cigars and lit one for me. Pineapple light flooded the shore and vanished. Hun Xoc touched me on the breast with his forehead and the entire team hurried off, crimson footsteps skritching away on the tactile trail, leaving the dead boy and the cat behind me. I blew a puff of smoke out over the lake.
Of course, I couldn’t see anything but the little dying sun at the end of my cigar, but I felt I could feel everything, the thousands of tons of pressure through the stone above me, the temperature of the water (six degrees Celsius), the magma oozing through the veins of the old volcano behind us, the layers of lithospheres and asthenospheres and mantles of silicates and molten iron and nickel down 3,180 miles to the crystal toad-stone at the earth’s core.
I waited and waited and shifted my half-leg and waited some more. 2 Jeweled Skull’s skin tightened over me, merging with mine. I could still hear the ringing of the stone bells, maybe just in my mind but I thought also in my ears. I finished the cigar and fanned the last wisp out across the water. I took a jade ball out of my offering bag and put it in my mouth. It was like I was hatching this egg, and then the earth’s mouth was incubating us, and the other layers were brooding over the earth. Eventually even the warmth from the bodies behind me and from the coals in my fire bag died away and I was sitting utterly alone in the scaleless phosphor-blue void. I felt tectonic plates
