Like jaws clicking together, like teeth clacking. Like the sound a fleshless mouth might make, if it tried to speak.
The heat of the day could not stop her from shivering.
She was still thirsty, so she scooped up more water, and then more. She worried she would give herself stomach cramps, but the water helped with the pain, a little. It made her feel less desperate, something she very much needed. She reached down again to lift up some more water and then she screamed.
Because her fingers had found something she hadn’t expected. A bone, long and thin. She scuttled away from the edge of her perch, convinced that the creature with the glowing eyes had come back for her, that it was lying in wait just below the water’s surface.
The water didn’t move, though. After a time, she convinced herself she’d been mistaken. She even forced herself to move back over to the water. To reach in with one darting hand and see what it was she’d touched.
She grabbed it and pulled it up out of the blue water. And saw she’d been right—it was a bone. A thigh bone, she thought.
But it was connected to nothing. It wasn’t from the creature she’d seen. It had to have been from one of the previous sacrifices in the cenote. One, she could only assume, who hadn’t struggled. Who had died properly.
She dropped the bone back in the water, feeling like she had profaned a sacred thing. Then she lay back on the wet ledge and wept a little.
The creature did not return during the day.
No. It waited until night fell.
It was summer and the nights were not cold, not truly, but lying in a little water like that sucked the heat out of her body and she was shivering, passing fluidly back and forth in and out of consciousness, feeling feverish, feeling so hungry, feeling fear and pain and not much else. Feeling like she barely knew where she was, who she was. Feeling like she was floating in the sky. Feeling like she was buried in the ground.
When the fingers came over the ledge and pressed down, pushing the creature up out of the water, for a moment she thought she was dreaming. She stared at the bony fingers in sheer curiosity, with detached interest. What she had thought would be just bare bones, skeletal fingers, were something more. There was skin over them, stretched as taut as the hide on the top of a drum. She could see narrow tendons moving under that skin, make out individual pores in it.
Slowly, because this was a dream and in dreams one was never really in control of oneself, she followed with her eyes the shapes of the bones, back to the wrist, the forearm like a pair of twigs rolled in a leaf. Up to where the shoulder blade pressed out against the skin of the creature’s back. Its round head was the fattest thing about it, the most fleshy part. The head, the skull, was bent over her, bobbing up and down. She wished she could see more of its face, which would make it less terrifying, somehow. She pushed herself up a little—something was trying to hold her down, but she struggled up a bit, lifted herself, and saw that its face was buried in the swollen flesh of her broken leg.
She reached down, still certain this was a dream, her head still reeling with fever. She reached down and pushed at the side of the thing’s skull.
She was too weak to scream. Too tired. Even when she felt her own skin tear. Felt its teeth rip free of where they’d fastened on her swollen leg.
Blood and yellow pus oozed from the creature’s mouth. Her own body’s fluids. Its blue eyes burned brighter than ever.
It slapped her hand away and lowered its face back onto her leg. She did not feel so feverish now—terror had anchored her in her body, dragged her senses back from her febrile dreams. She cursed it with words so small they barely made it out of her mouth. Called out for help, shouted out prayers. Tried to push at the creature, force it away from her, but she was still so weak.
She could feel her heart pounding in her chest and knew it was stealing her blood, sucking it right out of her veins. If she didn’t stop the thing, it would drink all of her, suck her life out of her, and she would die there, lying in the water. The thought was more horrible to her than anything.
That gave her some strength. She grabbed the thing with both hands and shoved it off of her, thrust it out into the dark, rippling water. Its teeth clicked together madly—it was chattering out a complaint, a protest.
“No,” she managed to say, pushing the word out on a huge breath. “No!”
Its skull head crested the water, just like the first time she’d seen it. It climbed up onto the ledge with her and she saw the skin pulled so tight over its sunken chest, wrapping its rib cage and its angular pelvis. She saw its chest throbbing. Pulsing, its heart beating with her stolen blood.
It took a step closer.
“No,” she said, a whimper. She hauled herself back, away from it, pushed her back up hard against the wall of the cenote.
It took another step. It moved so slowly. As if it were nearly as weak as she was. But it wanted her blood—she could feel its need like a haze of heat around the thing. See it in the blue eyes, the way they burned.
It opened its mouth and croaked out words she could not quite understand.
Until—until suddenly she could. She could make out one word it had used.
Please.
It was begging for her blood.
And that just made everything worse. She thrust her hand out, down into the water. Groped around until she found the thigh bone she’d touched before. It was sacrilege to touch such a thing, but she needed a weapon.
When the skeletal creature came close enough, she smashed it across the face with the bone, as if it were a war club.
The creature was weak. Even with the little force she could manage, she knocked it backward into the water.
It kept trying to rise and come for her, throughout the night.
Each time, she was ready.
But she could not keep this up.
It would win in the end, she knew. She had overpowered it in the night, but eventually she would weaken to the point where she couldn’t fight anymore. When daylight stained the top of the cenote’s walls, she knew she could relax a bit—the sun was too much for the thing, depleted as it was—but she also knew this was going to be the hardest day of her life.
She needed to get out of the cenote, or the thing would kill her. She did not know if she had even one more night’s worth of strength left in her body.
She could not afford to sleep. She let herself rest, but every time she started to drift away, she would strike the most swollen part of her calf with the thigh bone. New, fresh pain would waken her. She conserved her energy as much as she could. But eventually, she needed to move.
All thoughts of sacrifice, of how she had offended Chaac and let down her people, were gone from her mind. That day, she thought of nothing but escape.
There was one chance for her. A liana that hung down farther than the others. It still looked too high for her to reach, but she had to try. The problem, of course, was that it was on the far side of the cenote from her. She did not know if there was a submerged ledge over there, or anything for her to stand on while she jumped to try to grab the lowest end of the vine. If it was just deep water there beneath the liana, she was certainly doomed. The only way to know for sure was to go over and check.
She could not have walked, even if there had been solid ground all the way over to the liana. She was not sure she could even get to her feet now. Her broken leg moved in a sickening way when she lifted it, like a fishing net full of gravel. She would never stand on that leg again, she knew.
She closed her eyes and forced herself to think of the goal ahead. This problem—this escape—could not be solved all at once. If she kept thinking about how hard it was going to be, she would never get away.
She half pushed, half rolled herself into the water.
The thing, the skeletal blood-drinking thing, was down there, sleeping on the bottom. It could reach up at any moment and grab her ankle, pull her down into its embrace—please, it had said please—
No, s
he would not think such things. She struggled to keep herself from slipping down farther into the water, using her arms to thrash and her one good leg to kick, twisting her head around to keep her eyes above the deep blue. She could feel the strength flow out of her as surely as the blood the thing had stolen, feel it drain from her limbs as they grew heavier, as they moved more slowly. She could feel herself slipping down into the water and knew she would never come back up once it closed over her plaited hair.
Kick—thrash—she swung her arms and it was hopeless, she would never get anywhere like this, she was making no progress at all, she had killed herself, and then—and then her fingers touched stone and she grabbed at it, but it was sheer, the smooth wall of the cenote, there was nothing to grab on to, she waved her arm wildly about, her fingers stretched as far as they could go and there—yes, there! She felt a rock just below the water, felt the bottom, another ledge, a ledge like the one she’d abandoned. She grabbed and hauled and heaved herself up onto it.
It was no more than an arm long, and half that wide, but it was a place to rest, to stop and just breathe, to recover some of her strength. She forced herself not to move, to lie as still and limp as she could without falling off this new ledge.
Eventually she opened her eyes and looked, to see what she had accomplished.
She had crossed perhaps five arm lengths of the way around the side of the cenote. The distance she normally could have walked in two seconds.
She wept a bit then, but bit down hard on her tongue and stopped herself. Even weeping was going to kill her. It took away energy she needed.
She made herself think, think about what she had learned. She could swim, barely. She could move a little at a time. And there was more than just the one ledge below the water. Maybe there were plenty of them. Maybe there were ledges all around the circumference of the cenote. Maybe one below the low-hanging vine.
There had to be.
She forced herself to rest again.
Eventually, she made herself swim again. Rolling off the ledge into the blue water was a good incentive, to struggle a little more.
She found more ledges. Not as many as she’d hoped, and none as big as the one that had been her original place of refuge. But they were there.
Sometimes she would look down into the deep blue mirror of the cenote. When the ripples had gone, she could see her own face. See the blue paint on her cheeks, see the dark bands painted across her eyes and mouth.
She could not see the thing, the blood drinker. It slept deep.
She tried not to think about it down there, on its bed of the bones of all the sacrifices who had come here to please Chaac. Girls like herself, who had been willing to give away everything for the rain. It was obscene how the blood drinker profaned this, their resting place. Made it unclean.
How long had it been down there? How long had it been preying on the sacrifices, the ones who came before? It subsisted, she was certain, on the blood of those like her. On the blood of the dead girls who thought they were pleasing the god, who had no idea what thing they truly died to propitiate.
She would not let it have her, too.
She would not.
It took hours to make her way around the cenote. For every few thrashing seconds in the water, she would spend long minutes unable to do anything but lie there and breathe.
But she did not stop. She did not give up.
The liana hung down only three arms from the surface of the water. Its end was furry and loose, tufted like the end of a braid of hair. It was as thick as her wrist and woody in texture. She did not know if it would hold her weight.
It would have to. There was no other way for her to climb up and out of the sheer-walled cenote.
She spent a while fantasizing about what she would do once she reached the top. She could call for help and people would come with a litter, carry her back to the temple. They would want to know why she had struggled, why she had defied Chaac. But surely once she told them about the blood drinker, they would understand. They would forgive her, and welcome her home, and her mother would brush out her hair and scrub the blue paint from her skin. And warriors would come down on ropes and find the blood drinker and smash its bones with war clubs.
And someone else would be cast into the resanctified cenote, and the rain would come. Or maybe they would never do such a thing again. Perhaps the king of the city would outlaw such observances. The cenote would be abandoned, and in time, its water would run clear again.
She never wanted to see anything blue, ever again.
She could tell them. She could convince them. But first—
First she had to climb this liana.
And she was running out of time.
Already a shadow was crawling down the wall of the cenote. The sun was sinking in the west and when it was gone, when darkness fell, the blood drinker would come back. It would come for her, and this time she did not have her thigh-bone club with which to fight it off. She had less than an hour left, she thought. She would have to use that time well.
She had found a ledge that was not too far from where the liana hung down. It was out there above the water, too far to reach, even if she could have jumped. But she was so close. There had to be a way.
Maybe—maybe she could make it swing toward her. She reached down into the water and felt around for a stone. What she came up with almost made her shriek, but she had learned in the last few days how not to scream. It was a human skull she’d picked up. Somehow she did not throw it away from her. The skull in her hand was just a dead thing, just bone bleached by water and sun until it was a bluish-white stone, that was all. Even when a little worm came wriggling out of the eye socket, she did not let herself drop the skull.
She lined up her throw very carefully. She thought of the players in the ball courts and how hard it was to make a goal through the stone hoop. It could take them days to score. She needed to strike the first time. She waited until her arm had stopped shaking, and then she threw.
The skull hit the liana a glancing blow. Enough to send it swinging, to make it veer back and forth, away from her, now closer, away—closer—
It was still too high for her to reach. Not from a sitting position.
The next part of her plan was the hardest. It was the one she’d forbidden herself from thinking about until now. How to stand up.
Her broken leg was useless, but her other one was still whole. It should be possible. Just moving was pain, but familiar to her now. It was not something that could be ignored, yet like a boorish houseguest who had overstayed their welcome, it could be worked around.
She pushed herself back against the cenote wall. Her wet shift stuck to the rock. On her back, she could feel a little warmth that the wall had soaked up during the day, but she could also feel it growing cool now as the shadows lengthened in the cenote. As darkness probed its long fingers toward the blue water.
It had to be done now.
She pushed herself up against the wall, grabbing at the warm stone with both palms, grinding her shoulder into the rock. She could hear herself grunting and sobbing in exertion, though she had no desire to waste energy on making sounds. She forced herself up onto her good foot. Instantly she felt waves of exhaustion ripple through her muscles. It was unbearable. The urge to shift her weight to her other foot—as stupid as such an idea was—could barely be suppressed.
Still the liana swung toward her, now away. And it was slowing in its pendulum swing, getting farther away each time before it swung away from her again. She kept one shoulder against the wall and reached out for it with the other and knew it would not be enough.
She let some tears explode from the corners of her eyes. Gave vent to a cry of frustration. She couldn’t do it. She could not escape, not even after all this effort, all the wrenching, excruciating work. She couldn’t reach.
The far side of the cenote was already in shadow. Darkness was seeping into the water. She was certain she could see the pale dome of the blood d
rinker’s head cresting the surface over there. She knew it was only waiting. It was weak, but not as weak as her.
She could see it moving. Edging closer, sticking to the shadow. Waiting. Only waiting.
“No,” she said.
And then she threw herself away from the wall, pushed hard, and launched herself out over the water, her hands stretching out instantly to grab, to pull at the liana. Her left hand felt the woody length of it, and her fingers clamped shut. Her right hand reached up, found purchase. And then the liana swung away, swung hard, and she struck the far wall.
Her bad, broken leg was pinned against the stone, all of her weight, all of her momentum, crushing it.
She had thought she understood pain, that she had become a scholar of hurt. In that second white light lanced through her, exactly like lightning. Spears were driven through her chest, impaling her, keeping her from breathing. Her sense of hearing increased a dozenfold, so that she could hear the skin tear open as the sharp fragments of bone inside her calf cut their way out.
But somehow she did not let go.
Somehow she clung to the liana, and somehow, somehow, it did not break under her weight, and somehow, somehow, she was still alive.
She opened her eyes. Saw the walls of the cenote swing crazily past in scything rhythm.
She could feel blood trickling down her leg. Feel it dripping from her swollen toes. Wetting the liana. Dripping into the blue, blue water.
And when she looked down she saw—
—them—
There were dozens of them.
The one she’d seen, the one she’d fought, was just one of them. The fleshiest, the least decayed. Some of the others had only one eye burning in their skull heads. Some were missing limbs.
They were all dripping blue water. They were all so very, very hungry. They craned their heads upward, stretched their jaws wide to catch the little tiny drops of blood that fell from her leg.
Dozens—so many—crouched there in the dark. And she saw something for the first time that made her let go of the vine.
Seize the Night Page 50
