That was my childhood, Jacob, an existence spent in Mesoamerican jungles and on the harsh plateau of Nazca. My parents, Julius and Maria, your paternal grandparents, they had been archaeology students who had first met at Cambridge. Their love blossomed on their own journey as they set out to resolve the mystery of the Mayan calendar and its two thousand-year-old doomsday prophecy. Me? I was the result of their fateful union, born, like you, as destiny’s victim.
I don’t feel like a victim. Most of the time I feel like Superman.
Careful, son. Even Superman has his kryptonite. Although my Hunahpu genes were not as developed as yours must be, I also felt superior. By the age of seven I had grown into quite the brat, rebelling against everything my parents were attempting to teach me.
You said you encountered evil?
Yes. At the time we were living in a one-room, stucco dwelling in Piste, a tiny village outside of Chichen Itza. I remember the day it happened, a typical morning in the Gabriel clan. Julius had just grounded me for swapping a pair of his best binoculars for a baseball glove and ball, and I was furious, stomping and cussing up a storm. The moment my parents left for the ruins, I packed a small bag, my passport, and a few pesos borrowed from my mother’s purse-and I headed out to begin my life anew.
You ran away?
I had to. I felt boxed in, unable to cope, unable to just be myself. But I had a plan. Merida and its airport were seventy-five miles to the west. Somehow I would stow away on board a plane bound for America. Even though I was only seven, I had already aced my high-school equivalency test and was being recruited by several universities. If I could just get to the States, I knew I could survive.
Guess I’d been walking less than an hour when a taxi pulled off the road. I immediately recognized the driver-T’quan Lwin Canul-a middle-aged local of pure Mayan descent. He had a large nose and dark eyes, and wore his black, oily hair long and braided. Tattoos ran up and down his body, and jewelry pierced his ears and heavy brows. More bizarre was his tongue, the tip of which had been sliced down the middle and forcibly separated over time so that the last two inches were forked, resembling that of a viper.
The ‘serpent’s tongue’ gave T’quan a heavy lisp. He leaned out his open window at me, and hissed, ‘Going somewhere, mas’sa?’
‘Off to see a distant cousin,’ I lied. ‘What would it cost me to get a ride to Merida?’
T’quan gave me a price, then mentioned he needed some assistance cutting down a tree. We struck a deal. If I helped him, he would have me in Merida by nightfall.
And you believed him?
I was naive, and the truth is disguised by what we want to hear. Before I knew it, we were bouncing along a dirt path, cutting through dense jungle. Eventually we came to a small clearing and T’quan’s hut, which sat adjacent to a freshwater sinkhole.
The old man led me inside and offered me a drink. I watched as he dipped his cup into a wooden barrel, the scent of the fermented ceremonial drink known as pulque drifting up at me. ‘No, thank you,’ I said. ‘Where is the 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.