When we reached the parking lot, several more Army thugs were waiting, grown-ups now, khaki shirts and dense mustaches, the regulation G-2 sunglasses even though it was still dark, with 9mm automatics in holsters at their belt. I took one look at them and I think I blacked out. Steve and I were about to "disappear," and possibly Sarah too. Probably in another hour or two. My tattered mind finally just slipped away.
Soon afterward, I sensed myself being transported in a large vehicle, and after that I was being carried, up, up, as though I were floating into the coming dawn. When I regained consciousness, I realized I was standing in a rainstorm near a small stone building. A dozen Army men were huddled inside, shielding their cigarettes from the blowing rain while they guarded a row of olive-green bassinets. Around me, censers were spewing copal smoke into the soggy air.
I became aware of the cooling sensation of the fresh rain across my face, and wondered if it might clear some of the toad venom (surely that was what it was) from my brain. Maybe it was working. Instead of seeing vivid colors everywhere, I was abruptly experiencing a hyper acute clarity of every sensation. The stones beneath my bare feet were becoming so articulated, I felt as though I could number every granule, every crystal, every atom. The paintings and carvings on the lintel above the door to the stone room-I recognized it as where I'd spent the first night-sparkled, leapt out at me.
"Stand there on the edge of the platform," Alex Goddard commanded, urging me forward. It was only then I realized we'd come up the back steps of the pyramid, where the G-2 men had parked their black Land Rovers, unnoticed and ready.
Looking down at the crowd of people gathered in the square, I realized they couldn't really see much of what was going on atop the pyramid. To them it was just a cloud of copal smoke and foggy rain. Although the sun was starting to brighten the east, the only real light still came from the torches stationed around the plaza.
Then like a ghost materializing out of the mist, Marcelina moved up the steep front steps, leading a line of Maya mothers from the clinic-I counted twelve-each carrying her newborn, the "special" baby she would give back to Kukulkan, perhaps the way Abraham of the Old Testament offered up his son Isaac in sacrifice to Jehovah. It was a sight I shall never forget, the sadness but also the unmistakable reverence in their eyes. I wanted to yell at them to run, to take Sarah's votive babies and disappear into the forest, but I didn't have the words.
Next the women arrayed themselves in a line across the front of the pyramid, facing not the crowd below, but toward Alex Goddard and me. Then, holding out a jade-handled obsidian knife, he walked down the line, allowing each woman to touch her forehead against its flint blade. I assumed each one believed it was the instrument that would take her child's life, ceremonially sending it back to the Maya Otherworld whence it came. Had he drugged them too, I fleetingly wondered, hypnotized them or given them some potion to prevent them from comprehending what was really going on?
I kept remembering… a hundred other insane episodes of immortal yearning leading to a mass "transport" to some other "plane." This, I thought, must be what it was like in the jungles of Jonestown that death-filled morning. And Alex Goddard was their "Jim Jones," the spiritual leader of the moral travesty he'd imposed upon the lost village of Baalum.
I was going to stop it, somehow. By God, I was. I stared at the women and felt so sad at the sight of the hand-woven blankets they held their babies in, primary greens and reds and blues lovingly woven into shimmering patterns that mirrored the symbols across the sides of the stone room. Their faces, especially their eyes, were transcendent in a kind of chiaroscuro of darkest blacks and purest whites, as though all their humanity had been caught by their blankets and shawls, surely created for this ultimate moment. And the mother of Tz'ac Tzotz was there, carrying him, the baby I'd so wanted to hold one last time.
Next Alex Goddard emerged from the stone room bearing a basket filled with sheets of white bark-paper. He approached Tz'ac Tzotz's mother, then took a wide section of the paper and secured it around her face with a silk cord, covering her vision. Down the line, one after another, he carefully blindfolded the women, while they stood passively, some crying-from joy or sorrow, I could not tell. Finally, at the last, he also covered Marcelina's face.
So she's not supposed to know what's really happening. Nobody's supposed to know except him, and me. And, of course, Ramos and the G-2 secret police and whoever else is in on this crime. But, secretly, she does know. The God of the House of Darkness.
When he finished, he put down the basket, then turned to me. "Stand at the front edge of the platform and lift your hands in benediction. They all want to see you, the new bride."
I took a couple of steps, then looked back to see him adding more copal to the main censer, sending a fresh cloud of smoke billowing out into the rain. As the incense poured around us, the Army thugs who'd been loitering at the back of the stone room began coming forward, each carrying one of the bassinets. They set them down on the stones, ready to start taking the children. My outraged mind flashed on Ghirlandajo's "Massacre of the Innocents." Here, though, Sarah's children weren't being stabbed to death; they were being-kidnapped and stolen.
Revulsion pierced through me as though I'd been hit by a jagged shaft of lightning, but instead of being knocked down, I was energized. Or maybe the final effects of the toad venom were giving me a spurt of adrenaline. Letting his criminal charade continue one second longer became unbearable. What would happen to me, I didn't know, but I couldn't let it go on.
"No," I yelled, startling myself by the sound of my own voice. "In God's name, stop."
The rain was growing more intense, and I was soaked and bleary-eyed, but before I could think I found myself stalking over to Tz'ac Tzotz's mother, shouting at her. The next thing I knew I was ripping the paper from her frightened eyes. I hugged her as best I could, then yelled back at Marcelina.
"Tell them all to take off their blindfolds. This is obscene."
Then I went on autopilot, shutting out everything around me-the rain, the perilous sides of the pyramid, the pistol-carrying G-2 thugs, even Alex Goddard. The way I remember it now, it all took place in slow motion, like some underwater dream sequence, but surely it was just the opposite.
Anyway, I do know I snapped. I started shouting again, and with the G-2 hoods momentarily frozen, I started flinging the still-empty bassinets down the steep side of the pyramid, where they just bounced away into the rain. As I watched them disappearing, one after another, I felt marvelously emboldened. I would throw one and watch it go flying, and then I would throw another. Yes, damn it, yes!
I wanted to show anybody with two eyes that it was all a sham. Once they realized what was really happening, surely they would rise up and drive Alex Goddard from their home.
For a moment it seemed to be working. A stunned silence was slowly spreading over the square, while everybody around me was paralyzed, like waxworks. Maybe it's the same way you're temporarily caught off guard when a stranger on the street goes berserk.
By the time I'd flung away the last bassinet, the women had all removed their blindfolds and were staring at me, dumbfounded. Finally, Tz'ac Tzotz's mother whispered something to Marcelina, and she turned to me.
"She wants to know why you're angry. You're the bride. They only want to please you."
Angry? I was terrified, but also fighting mad.
"Marcelina, this is all a ghastly lie." I'd finished throwing and I was moving to the next stage. Get control. Could he risk killing me in front of all these people? "Tell them to take their babies and hide in the forest."
That was when I heard a cry that pierced through the rain and across the square beyond, and I turned back to see Alex Goddard shoving toward me. He's coming to murder me, since I've exposed him. But I wouldn't let it happen without a fight. I clenched my fists, waiting, feeling my adrenaline surge.
Instead, though, he just brushed past me, headed toward the edge of the platform. At first I didn't know why, but he was intent on something off in the mist, his open hands thrust up at the rainy skies.
That was when I heard the Guatemalan Army hoods yelling curses.
"Vete ala chingada!"
They also were staring off to the south, in the same direction.
Hadn't they noticed I'd just dismantled their sick pageant? I wanted a reaction that would drive home the truth to Marcelina, to the mothers, to everyone.
"Damn it, look at me," I yelled, first at him and then at the G-2 thugs. "Mira!" But their focus still was on something beyond the square.
Finally I turned, following their gaze, and for a second I too forgot all about everything else. An intense red glow was illuminating the morning sky from the direction of the clinic, a vibrant electric rose weaving its hues in the mist. Then I saw spewing spikes of flame, orange and yellow, dancing over the top of the clinic. There was a finality about it that momentarily took my breath away.
Then it hit me. Steve's in there. It was a horror that, in my initial shock, I couldn't actually process, the thought just hovering in the recesses of my brain defying me to accept it.
Then Alex Goddard turned back, shouting at the Army men in rapid Spanish-I recognized the word for fire-that galvanized them to action. They snapped out of their mental paralysis and headed down the pyramid, toward two Land Rovers parked at the back.
Next he turned around and fixed his gaze on me. At last he knew / knew he was capable of unspeakable evil, and I knew he knew I would do everything in my power to stop him.
"All my records." His voice sounded as though it was coming from another world, and it held a sadness that touched even me. "You have no idea what's been lost."
He was distraught, but also obsessed. With his wild mane of hair, he did, finally, look like Shiva the Destroyer. He stalked over and seized the obsidian knife, then turned toward me.
I looked for something to defend myself with. The bassinets, which I might have used as a shield were gone. I only had my bare hands.
I had to get away from him, get down the pyramid and find Sarah and Steve. But as I started toward the front steps, the women were all clustered there, blocking my way.
Then, for no reason I could understand the mother of Tz'ac Tzotz stepped out of the group and handed me her baby, saying something in Kekchi Maya and reaching to touch my cheek.
I was so startled I took the bundle that was Sarah's child. But then I thought, No! Alex Goddard will just kill him too.
"She said he must not harm you," Marcelina whispered moving beside me. "You are the special one. She wants you to give her child back to Kukulkan."
She still believes, I realized. They all do.
Holding Tz'ac Tzotz, my eyes fixed on Alex Goddard, I'd entirely failed to notice a new presence on the pyramid a ghostlike waif in a white shift who now stood silently in the doorway of the stone room. Sarah!
Marcelina had said she'd wanted to come for the ceremony. She was being helped to stand by the two Maya women who'd fed me the atole. Somehow, she'd gotten them to bring her.
"Morgy, are you there?" Sarah asked gazing up at the rainy skies, the downpour soaking her blond hair, her eyes unblinking. At that moment, I felt we'd joined become one person-me the dogged rational half who'd just gone over the line, her the spiritual part that needed to float, to fly free. "I wanted to be with-"
"Sar, get back," I yelled and started to go to her, but there wasn't time. Now Alex Goddard was moving toward me holding the knife, as though tracking a prey, oblivious to Sarah, to everything. He'd concentrated all his hatred on me and me alone, and I hated him back as much. Death hovered between us, waiting to see whom to take.
But then the woman who had borne Tz'ac Tzotz said something in Kekchi Maya, pointing back at me and her child, and lunged at him. They collided together in the rain and next she slid down, first seizing his leg, then losing her grip and slipping onto the stones, her long black hair askew in the hovering smoke.
She's trying to save me, I realized. Why-?
Then I saw Sarah pull away from the women supporting her and slowly move across the platform.
"Morgy…"
She was walking in the direction of Alex Goddard, but then she stumbled over the fallen woman's leg and her hand went down as she sprawled across her. She must have touched something, because she recoiled backward, and only then did I notice the flare of a torch glinting off the obsidian knife now protruding from the woman's chest.
Sarah rose up, her eyes full of anger, and awkwardly flung her arms, searching. I could feel the passion that had been pent up all those months she lay in the coma, feeding her madness. She managed to catch hold of Alex Goddard's arm, and they began an awkward minuet, neither realizing how close they were to the stone platform's edge. I stood mesmerized a moment, then dashed toward them, but only in time to watch them vanish into the rain and haze. It was as though there had been some sleight of hand. One second they were there and the next they weren't. At first I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me, but then I realized it was real. They were gone.
"Sarah!"
I reached the side in time to see them land on the first tier of stones below. She'd fallen near the edge, but she was solid and safe. Alex Goddard, however, hit with one foot on and one foot off, and the result was he slid away, then vanished into the dark rain.
It's her final act of self-destruction. She's joined me in my rage, but we've both been spared. That's the miracle of Baalum.
"Sar, don't move." I finally found my voice. I was still holding Tz'ac Tzotz, who'd begun to shriek, his blue eyes flooded with fear.
Now several village men from the square were running, shouting, up the slippery steps. Their faces looked like they'd been painted at one time, but now the rain had washed most of it away.
While I yelled down to Sarah, again begging her not to move, Marcelina was asking them something, and their answers were tumbling out.
Finally I turned to look at her, the screaming Tz'ac Tzotz still in my arms.
"No one knows where he is," she was saying as she looked down over the side. "He's gone into the forest."
"Good." I pulled Tz'ac Tzotz to me and kissed him, trying to tell him to calm down. It wasn't working.
"Marcelina, here, please hold him. I've got to get down to Sarah."
She took him. Then I walked over to where his mother lay bleeding on the stones. The woman wasn't moving, the obsidian knife still protruding from her chest. She'd saved me, but now death had taken her. There was nothing anyone could do.
I was trembling, but I turned and began easing myself over the side of the stone platform and onto the first tier of the pyramid.
"Sar, don't move." I inched my way across to her. "Just stay still." The rain was pouring again, but the electric bloom of sparks and flames from the direction of the clinic was unabated. It would be completely gutted. Was Steve awake enough to get out? He'd seemed alert when I left him.
"Morgy, is that you?" She was holding out her fingers. "I can't see you. Where are-?"
"I'm here, Sar. Right here." I reached down and took her hand, which was deathly cold. "Come on. Let me help you get up."
Carefully, leaning against the wet stones of the side of the pyramid, I gradually pulled her to her feet and away from the treacherous edge. Then it hit me what she'd said.
"Sar, what do you mean, you can't see me?"
"I'm okay. It's just…" She was gripping my hand now, and then she brushed against the stone side of the pyramid and put out her other hand to cling to it. "Morgy, I took it again. To go to their sacred place. But sometimes you can only see visions and then after a while everything goes blank."
That bastard. Alex Goddard had given her the drug again. Now she was lost in a world of colored lights, a place I'd just traveled through myself. She probably had no idea she'd just pushed him off the pyramid and into the dark.
"Your hand feels so soft," she was saying. "You're like warm honey."
"Sar, try to walk. We're going to turn a corner and then we'll be at the back of the pyramid. Next we'll come to some steps, and then we're going down."
As I inched our way along, scarcely able to keep our footing because of the rain, I wondered again about Steve. Please, God, let him be all right.
When we finally got to the steps, Marcelina was there, standing expectantly, holding Tz'ac Tzotz. He was still crying, intermittent sobs.
"He belongs to you now," she said, holding him out for me. "It's what she wished.
"What-?" I took him before I realized what I was doing.
As I cradled him, gazing down at his tender little face, I realized he truly was Sarah all over again. And I was so glad she couldn't see him. Never, I thought, she must never, ever know.
I finally forced myself to place him back into Marcelina's arms.
"You've got no idea how much I want him, but I can't. Let one of these women give him her milk, have a twin for her own child."
For that wrenching moment I'd held the very baby my heart longed for. But he was the last one on earth I could have. Just go, take Sarah and find Steve and go as far from Baalum as you can, before you lose your compass and do something terribly selfish.
"Marcelina," I said, reaching to hug her, "tell them these 'sacred' children are all from his medico. Look up 'in vitro' in your dictionary. That's all it is."
She hugged me back, though I wasn't sure whether she understood. Then I asked her to take Sarah's hand for a moment while I went back up the steps to the platform. I felt a primal anger as I took one last look at the women Alex Goddard had wronged, now clustered around the body of Tz'ac Tzotz's mother. Then I bade them a silent farewell, turned, and walked, holding my tears, back through the stone room.
The rear of the pyramid was deserted, the steps slippery and dangerous, but it was our way out. I began leading Sarah down, step by treacherous step. Everything had happened so fast I'd barely had time to think about Steve. Those flames, my God. It was finally sinking in, truly hitting me. Had he gotten out in time?
Then the slimy Rio Tigre, now swelling from the rain, came into view. I stared at it a second before I noticed the three young Army recruits leaning against the trunk of a giant Cebia tree next to the trail, their rifles covered in plastic against the rain. When they saw us, they stiffened, shifted their weapons, and glanced up at the top of the pyramid, as though seeking orders. Neither group had any idea why the other was there. Sarah and I were an unforeseen contingency they hadn't been briefed on.
What are they going to do? They have no idea what just happened.
"Morgy," Sarah said, gazing blankly at the sky, "the colors are so beautiful. Can we-?"
"Shhh, we'll talk in a minute."
I smiled and nodded and began walking past the young privates, holding my breath. Then a spectral form emerged out of the rain just behind them.
It took me a moment to recognize who it was. I was hoping it might be Steve, but instead it was a man dressed in white, now covered with mud, and holding a knife, not obsidian this time but long and steel. His eyes were glazed, and I wasn't sure if he even knew exactly where he was. Why had he come down to the river? Had he known I'd come here, too?
For a moment we just stood staring at each other, while the Army privates began edging up the hill, as though not wanting to witness what surely was coming next.
"Why don't you put an end to all the evil?" I yelled at him finally, trying to project through the rain. "Just stop it right now."
"Baalum was my life's work," he said. Then he looked down at the knife a moment, as though unsure what it was. Finally he turned and flung it in the direction of the river.
"It could have been beautiful," I said back. Thank God the knife was gone. But what would he do next? "But now-"
"No," he said staring directly at me, his eyes seeming to plead. "It is. It will be again. To make a place like Baalum is to coin the riches of God. I want you to stay. To be part of it. Together, we…" But whatever else he said was lost in the cloudburst that abruptly swept over the embankment. In an instant it was a torrent, the last outpouring of the storm, powerful and unrelenting. Nature had unleashed its worst, as though Kukulkan was rendering his final judgment.
"Morgy, I'm falling," Sarah screamed. The ground she and I had been standing on began turning to liquid as though it were a custard melting in the tropical heat. As we began slipping down the embankment toward him, I gripped her arm with my left hand and reached up to seize a low-lying branch of the Cebia with my right.
Then, under the weight of the water, all the soil beneath us gave way, tons of wet riverbank that abruptly buckled outward.
Alex Goddard made no sound as the mass of earth lifted him backward toward the river. His sullied garb of white blended into the gray sludge of mud and rain, then faded to darkness as the embankment dissolved into the swirling Rio Tigre.
"Sar, hold on. Please hold on." I felt my grasp of the tree slipping, but now the mud slide had begun to stabilize.
I managed to cling to the limb for a few seconds more, the bark cutting into my fingers, and then my hold slipped away, sending us both spiraling downward till we were temporarily snagged by the Cebia's newly exposed undergrowth. I still had her hand though just barely, but the torrent of rain and mud was subsiding, and finally we collapsed together into the gnarled network of roots.
After a moment's rest, I managed to crawl out and pull her up.
"Come on, Sar. Try and walk."
Together we stumbled and slid down the last incline before the river's edge, then turned upstream along the bank. After about fifty yards, sure enough, the native cayucos, the hollowed-out mahogany canoes I'd told Steve about, were still there just as I'd seen them that first morning, bobbing and straining at their moorings. In the rain I couldn't tell how usable they were, but I figured going downriver was the only way we'd ever be able to get out. We'd have to flee the way Sarah had that first time.
For a moment I thought they all were empty-dear God, no-but then I realized there was a drenched figure in the last one in the row. When I recognized who it was, I think I completely lost it; all the horror of the last two days swallowed me up. I grabbed Sarah and hugged her for dear life, feeling the tears coursing down my cheeks. I literally couldn't help myself.
"They were tied up here just like you said." Steve wiped the rain from his eyes, then reached to take my hand. His bandaged nose was bleeding again, and he looked like he'd just been half killed. "I told those little Army chicos I was a big amigo of el doctor and they saluted and showed me where these were tied up."
"Thank God you're okay. What happened? Did-?"
"Ramos, the son of a bitch. He came in and… I guess it was time to finish me off. But I wasn't as drugged out as he thought." He was staring at Sarah, clearly relieved but asking no questions. "I brought along his nine-millimeter"-he indicated the silver automatic in his belt-"in case we run into problems."
I wanted to kiss him, but I was still too shaken up. Instead I focused on helping Sarah in without capsizing everything. After I'd settled her, I pulled myself over the side and reached for a paddle.
"If we go with the current," I said, "we'll get to the Usumacinta. Hopefully the flooding will help push us downstream."
"Honestly, I didn't think the fire would get away from me like it did." He shoved off amidst the swirling debris. "Jesus. I heard them taking you away, and I assumed you didn't get to mess up his lab. So I figured there was one way… I just threw around some ether and pitched a match. The place was empty, so…"
I looked around at the roiling waters, snakes and crocodiles lurking, and felt a lifetime of determination. Was Alex Goddard still alive? I no longer cared…
Sunrise was breaking through the last of the rain, laying dancing shadows on the water as we rowed for midstream. Someday, I knew, what was real about Baalum and what I'd dreamed here might well merge together, the way they had for Sarah. But for now, true daylight never looked better.