Thomas Hoover - Life blood

"Sar, please-"

"Here, see it?" She was pointing to a section at the very end. "That's the two-headed Vision Serpent up above me. He's the god Kukulkan… or something. I've made him come to me by giving him my blood. I'm-"

"Sar, what in heaven's name is going on with you?" I grabbed her and in spite of myself, shook her. Jesus! The whole scene left me in shock. She was sinking back deeper into her fantasy world. Was she taking the drug again, I wondered and fantasizing she was some dead Mayan princess? Please, God no.

That was when I saw Marcelina walk over to a shelf along the wall and lift down another clay-pot incense burner, along with a small white brick. What-?

"Oh, yes!" Sarah exclaimed moving quickly over to her. "Let's do it for Morgy."

Marcelina nodded warily and handed her the white brick, then turned to me. "She likes to do incense. It always calms her. This is copal, what the shamans use."

I watched while Sarah shakily began crumbling pieces of the sticky substance into the pot. My God I thought, she's truly, truly lost it. Next she inserted dry tinder and began trying to knock sparks into it with a piece of hard black jade and a flint. But she was too weak, and finally Marcelina had to take the flint and do it for her. Then, as the gray smoke started billowing out, Marcelina began a long chant, shrill and strangely melodic. I felt a chill creep down my back. When she finished she turned her dark eyes on me sadly, waiting.

"What were you saying?" I asked finally, sensing she wanted me to.

"I was singing from the Popol Vuh." Then she translated. Holy earth, giver of life, Help us in our struggle against The God of the House of Darkness.

Wait a minute. What's she saying?

"Who's the God of the House of Darkness?" Could she be talking about Alex Goddard?

"I didn't want to do it," she blurted out, reaching out to me, her eyes even sadder. "But he said you're the new special one. We had to."

What the hell was she talking about? Had to what? Did it have something to do with my "visit" to the women in the hut?

"Please stay here with us," she pleaded as she took my hand. "Don't go."

Stay? Don't even think about it. I had Sarah halfway to freedom. While the Army was still getting its act together, we could lose ourselves someplace in the forest where nobody would find us, and when Steve got here tonight…

"Sar, come on, it's time." I pulled away from Marcelina and slipped my arm around her. "Nothing here is what you think it is."

"Are we leaving?" she asked, her eyes blank.

"Yes, honey, we're leaving. This very minute."

The dense forest was all about us, and I'd just carry her into it if I had to. In the coming storm, nobody was going to find…

That's when I noticed I was beginning to have gastric rumblings. Damn. Never, ever eat "native" food, no matter what the social pressure. That damned "visit"…

When I turned to ask Marcelina if she would help me get Sarah outside, I noticed she'd been joined by the two women, both still in their white shifts, who'd just fed me the sickly sweet atole. And more women were behind them, all staring at me, expectant, as though wondering what I would do.

Maybe it was my imagination, or the dizziness that was abruptly growing around me, but it also seemed they'd painted their faces with streaks of white, designs like the men in the square were putting on.

"She's going to be all right," Marcelina was saying. "But we have to get you back now. You'll need your strength."

I needed it then. My stomach had really begun to gyrate, and my vision had started growing colored. I noticed I was sweating, even though the day was cooling down. Actually, I felt as though I was about to pass out. What had those women fed me?

It was finally dawning on me that Marcelina's fearfulness back in the hut had nothing to do with betraying Alex Goddard. It was because she knew she was betraying me.

Well, damn her, I'm not going to let Alex Goddard win, no matter what.

"Marcelina, please help me. I've got to get Sarah out of here. Now. I don't know what poison drug he's giving her, but he's driving her insane."

"We'll take care of her," she said. But I could barely make out the words. They echoed bouncing around in my head.

"I'm really getting dizzy." I glanced over again at the women standing by the door. "Please tell me what they-?"

"The elixir," she said. "For tomorrow at sunup. That's when you'll see his real power."

I'd begun experiencing white spots before my eyes-and for some reason I had a vision of the Army Jeeps parked up the hill. I didn't know how the two were connected but in my jumbled thoughts they seemed to be.

Just get Sarah and get out into the air. Walk, don't think, and you can do it…

I pulled her next to me and struggled toward the door, the women studying us, unmoving.

"Morgy, I've missed you so much," Sarah was saying, slipping her arms around my neck to help herself walk. "I'm… I'm ready to go home."

"I've missed you too." I think my heart was bursting as I urged her on through the stone portico. At last. Had something clicked that freed her from Alex Goddard? Maybe her mind was finally becoming her own.

When we got outside, the skies were growing ever more foreboding, storm clouds looming. Steve had been right about the coming rain, but now it seemed the perfect cover for us to just get out. I took a deep breath of the misty air and forced myself to start helping Sarah up the cobblestone path.

"Sar, you can walk, I know you can. Be strong. For both of us. I'm…"

I felt myself sinking slowly to the cold stones of the walkway, the hard abrasion against my knees, Sarah tumbling forward as I pulled her down on top of me, Marcelina's arms around me trying to hold me up. It was the last real sensation I would remember.

Sarah was hovering around me, a sylphlike presence, as I watched myself drift up the steps of the pyramid there in the square, my senses waxing and waning like the waves on a distant ocean shore. There seemed to be rain, or fog, or smoke, but it had a luminous, purple cast one moment, a Day-Glo orange the next. In fact, all the colors were swirling and changing, shimmering from hue to hue. A pack of howler monkeys was cavorting up and down the steps on my left, like circus Harlequins in electric red-and-blue suits, doing pratfalls and huffing as they flew through the air and tumbled one over another.

Sarah was floating silently beside me, but where was Steve? Had he come? Were we escaping?

No. I sensed his face drifting across my sight like a cartoon cloud before dissolving into nothingness. He wasn't here. I was having the eeriest dream I'd ever had.

When I reached the stone-paved platform at the pinnacle, I felt Alex Goddard clasp my arm and turn me around to face the plaza below.

"They are waiting," he said, pointing toward the hazy square.

I looked down, and at first I couldn't see anything except rain and smoke, but then slowly a crowd materialized. The scattering of men I'd seen earlier had become an undulating sea of upturned faces painted with stripes and swirling circles of blue and white and red, a torch-lit garden of brilliant blossoms. They all were looking up at us, at Sarah and me.

Next he held out a mirror whose reflecting surface was a polished silver metal.

"Behold yourself, Morgan. As befits a royal one, a special one, your nose has been built up with clay and pierced with lustrous blue feathers and a giant topaz. Your front teeth have been filed to a point and inlaid with jewels, your royal skull has been shaped back and flattened."

I gazed into the mirror and gasped. I was monstrous, a Halloween harpy.

Then he moved over to a waist-high censer stationed there on the edge of the platform and began adding balls of sticky white copal resin, together with bark and grasses, which he ignited by the quick friction of a fire stick spun by a bow.