tree?’
‘Forget the tree,’ he said, ‘I require help with a ritual. Tell me, mas’sa, have you ever heard the story of Tezcaplipoca?’
‘You mean Tezcatilpoca,’ I corrected, as if I knew everything about the ancient ones.
‘That is Aztec pronunciation,’ he said. ‘To the Nahuas, he was Tezcaplipoca, god of the night, god of evil, a creature of black magic.’ As he spoke, T’quan opened a container of what appeared to be scarlet dye and proceeded to paint a stripe across the bridge of his beaked nose. ‘Tezcaplipoca was the mirror that smoked. It was his presence that drove Kukulcan from Chichen Itza. He was our greatest and most feared god.’
T’quan told me his Nahua ancestors had lived in this same jungle a thousand years ago. While Kukulcan built temples, T’quan’s clan followed Tezcaplipoca-god of conflict and turmoil, god of power.
The old man removed his tee shirt, revealing a bony, dark-skinned canvas of chest, covered in tattoos. Draping a black cape around his shoulders, he led me back outside to the sinkhole, the very cenote T’quan’s ancestors had used to worship Tezcaplipoca.
I looked out over the edge. The drop was more than thirty feet, and the well’s stagnant olive waters were dark and foreboding. And that, Jacob, is when I finally realized what T’quan meant to do-he meant to sacrifice me to Tezcaplipoca, just as his ancestors had done a thousand years before.
I turned to run, but the wiry old man was too quick. He grabbed me by the arm and pushed me to the ground, pressing his heavy boot to my chest. From a sheath on his belt he removed a ceremonial obsidian dagger. As I screamed, struggling in vain along the edge of the sinkhole, he rolled his eyes to the heavens and began chanting.
What did you do?
At first I panicked, but as the adrenaline flowed, a strange sensation gripped my soul, and a tiny voice in my mind guided my consciousness into a harbor of utter calm. I stopped struggling and allowed my mind to slip inside.
The nexus?
Yes. I remember looking at the trees, which seemed to be getting brighter, the leaves no longer moving with the breeze. Shadowed objects became clear in my vision, while the old man’s words seemed to mute into distant echoes. I could hear my heart pumping blood-a slow, drawn-out slurp. I could feel my muscles growing stronger, as if adrenaline was coursing through every vessel in my body. The weight of the old man’s boot seemed to lessen upon my chest and I knew that if I tried, I could fling it aside… which is what I did.
In one motion, I was back on my feet, pushing through invisible waves of resistance, as if the air itself had become gelid. T’quan barely seemed to react. I followed his eyes as they slowly drifted down to me, his pierced brows raising in disbelief. Quickly, I dashed behind him, then, with all my might, I kicked the old Mayan in the small of his bony back.
It must have been a mighty blow through that thickened air, for he flew forward in slow motion, rising as if gravity had abandoned him. And then he fell, his limbs flapping uselessly as his body dropped silently into the waters below.
Serves him right. What happened then?
A burning sensation ravaged my gut. I fell to my knees and shook my head violently-and the sounds of the woods returned. For several moments, I lay on the ground, my muscles drenched in lactic acid, twitching in recovery until splashing sounds drew me to the edge of the hole.
The old man was struggling to stay afloat, his gaunt figure hopelessly entangled in his soaked cloth cape.
I stood and watched my would-be killer… watched as he sank beneath the surface. When the air bubbles ceased, I climbed in his taxi and drove out of the jungle, back to Piste.
I had never driven a car before. I could barely reach the pedals, yet it seemed perfectly natural. An hour later, I returned to the old man’s home with my parents and the police, who dredged T’quan’s corpse from the sinkhole’s muddy bottom-along with the remains of no less than a dozen other children the old man had murdered over the years.
That was my first encounter with evil and the powers that we possess, Jacob, but it wouldn’t be my last.
I need to know more about evil. Where does it come from? How did it start?
That, my son, is a question your grandfather, Julius, pondered until his dying day. Is evil something genetically programmed into our species, or is it a learned behavior? Is it spiritual in nature, perhaps the Yin to the soul’s Yang. Or is it a disease that infects the mind? T’quan had a look in his eyes when he came after me, one that I’ll never forget. It was as if the old man’s soul had vacated the body and separated itself from the collective warmth of our species. Julius called the man a godless reptile, and for a long time I agreed with him, until the night I witnessed my own father straddling my mother’s body, suffocating her with a pillow.
Julius murdered Grandma?
He claimed it was euthanasia, but in the eyes of a twelve-year-old, it was murder. Looking back on it now, I realize just how much Julius loved my mother, how hard it was to do what he did. She was in so much pain from the cancer, she begged him for mercy, and he gave it to her. At the same time, I also realize how evil is created, because from that moment on, I hated Julius for what he had done, and I allowed my anger to fester, until it finally exploded backstage as I held my dead father in my arms and went after Pierre Borgia.
When you were in solitary for so long – how were you able to keep from… you know, from going insane?
For a while, I thought I had gone insane. Then, during my eighth month, I drifted into a semilucid state, for all intents and purposes, an out-of-body experience.
I don’t understand?
Nor did I at the time. It was my Hunahpu DNA. The gene was somehow programming my mind to take a visual reconnaissance into humanity’s past. My first journey deposited my consciousness on a Mediterranean shoreline, somewhere in the Middle East. From out of the sea strode a large humanoid male, his appearance bordering on the bizarre. His skin was as dark as cocoa, in sharp contrast to his long silky hair and beard, which were snow-white. His eyes were a deep azure-blue, set within an almost inhumanly elongated skull.
I would learn his name was Osiris.
But this was all just a dream?
No, son, it was quite real. I was remote-viewing an actual event that had taken place ten thousand years in the past. In my transcendental state, my consciousness had tapped into a matrix of energy, similar to what you and I are experiencing. Because the events had taken place in the past, I was able to witness the events as if I were there, as if I were one of Osiris’s nomad followers. Osiris turned my people into a functioning society. He directed us to dam the Nile delta, forming an artificial lake. He taught us how to cut immense ten-ton stones from basalt quarries. I marveled as he used his scepter-like device to lift the blocks onto barges, transmitting strange sonic harmonics that seemed to reverse the effects of gravity. More than two million stones were moved in this manner, transported through the pre-flooded valley until they were placed into position, using the surface of the lake as a perfect plane of reference.
Osiris was engineering three of the largest structural foundations in the world-the bases of the Great Pyramids of Giza, and somehow I had become one of his laborers!
Viewing those experiences is ultimately what preserved my mind. For while my body was confined to that dark, decrepit cell, my consciousness was free to roam.
As the years drifted by, my mind accompanied more of the wise men on their journeys. In England, I was part of a sect that followed the teachings of an extraterrestrial who told us his name was Merlin. This ‘wizard’ used his own stafflike device to help us transport the great sarsens that were used to erect Stonehenge. In South America, another wise man-Virococha-used a similar device to carve immense patterns into the Nazca plateau-the very zoomorphs whose meaning had eluded my father and me for decades.
What I didn’t know at the time was that these wise men with their elongated skulls, majestic blue eyes, and white hair and beards were actually members of the Guardian. Attuned to their signal line through my own Hunahpu genetics, I was being prepared.
Prepared for what?
Four Ahau, three Kankin – the winter solstice of 2012-humanity’s day of doom, prophesied in the Mayan
