The Mayan Resurrection mp-2

by Steve Alten

I don’t know. I’m not even sure I exist. I have no physical form, but somehow I can think, and I can feel emotions. It’s as if I exist in a vacuum of energy, only I can’t escape.

  Something’s out there, isn’t it? Something’s frightening you. It’s as if I can taste your fear. Father, what is it?

  It’s the Abomination… I can feel its presence. It’s like ice, hovering in the periphery. It circles me like the shadow of death, always waiting for me to drop my defenses.

  But what is it?

  A presence of pure evil. It wants to feast on my soul.

  Tell me what to do! How can I help?

  You have helped, son, more than you’ll ever know. I’ve been so lost, drowning in loneliness and despair. Your thought energy… it’s like a lighthouse beacon to my soul. You’ve strengthened me, you’ve given me hope. I know now that I haven’t been abandoned, that I’m not alone. You’ve given me a newfound sense of being.

  Father, there’s so much I need to ask you. The Mayan Creation Myth

  … is it true? Am I really the son of One Hunahpu? Is it really possible for me and my brother to travel to Xibalba? Can you be… resurrected?

  There’s no easy answer to that. There’s so much I need to tell you, and I want to, I have to, but it’s dangerous. The effort to communicate weakens me, and the Abomination hovers… waiting for me to lower my guard. Still, I must try, there’s so much at stake. Jacob, how old are you now?

  Seven.

  My God…

  Father?

  Wherever I am, it’s impervious to time. You say you’re seven?

  Yes.

  My own journey… it also began when I was seven. In fact, it was at seven that I first encountered evil.

  Teach me, please! Tell me how it began for you.

  I‘ll try. The memories… they’re very powerful, so vivid. I can still recall inhaling the scent of the rain forest, registering its heaviness in my lungs. I can hear its nocturnal symphony playing in my ears. And the Peruvian desert… as I recall the desolation of that awful Nazca plateau, I can almost feel the blood pooling in my extremities as the afternoon heat baked my skin in its searing embrace.

  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.
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  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 calendar. I realized that wallowing in my emotions was doing me no good. I had to focus. I had to stay strong. My life served a greater purpose. If a holocaust was truly coming, then I knew I had to stop it.

  My cell became a war room. A regimen was established, combining rigorous exercise, meditation, and remote-viewing sessions. Pieces of an ancient puzzle began falling into place. There was a means to our salvation-I just had to find it.

  But first, I had to escape.

  Sometime during my last year in isolation, the state of Massachusetts determined that the antiquated facility I called Hell would close down. Pierre Borgia, by then U.S. secretary of state, immediately arranged for Dr. Foletta, my personal keeper, to transfer himself and me to an asylum in Miami.

  It was the summer of 2012.

  The rules at the Miami facility were different, each inmate assigned a team. No longer able to exert his autocratic rule, Dr. Foletta needed someone on the staff he could manipulate into signing off on my yearly evaluation. His pawn would arrive a week later in the guise of a graduate student.

  My mother?

  Yes. She was so beautiful, so enticing… consuming all my thoughts, disfocusing me from the mission at hand. I tried to quell my love for her, but as the doomsday drew nearer, our souls touched. Then, in her most difficult hour, your mother sacrificed everything she held dear and helped me escape.

  Together we discovered the Balam, a starship buried long ago beneath the Kukulcan Pyramid. Within this vessel we found the remains of Kukulcan, the last survivor of a more advanced humanoid race called the Guardian. The Guardian had come to our planet long ago, fleeing the rise of evil that had enslaved their people, transforming their world into a hellish existence. The Guardian had avoided enslavement by taking refuge on one of their planet’s moons. But the evil ones were not satisfied with their conquest. Inhabiting their planet was an alien serpentine creature that could bridge the gap between dimensions of time and space. Trapping the creature aboard a transport ship, they sent it into space and through a wormhole. Members of the Guardian brotherhood chased after the transport in the Balam. Their vessel’s presence in the wormhole altered the wormhole’s trajectory… depositing both ships in our solar system, 65 million years into Earth’s past. This historic journey not only resulted in a cataclysm that wiped out the dinosaurs, it created a causal time loop in third-dimensional space.

  Most of the transport was destroyed upon impact, but the life-support pod containing the creature remained intact.

  Knowing a deep-space radio transmission could awaken the creature, the Guardian programm
ed the Balam to remain in orbit above Earth. The ship would deflect any incoming signals while the Guardian remained immersed in sleep pods. Sometime around 11,000 B.C., the Balam landed in the dense jungles of the Yucatan Peninsula, not far from where their enemy lay buried beneath the Gulf of Mexico.

  It was about this time that the great flood caused by the last ice age thawed, and Homo sapiens became the dominant species on the planet.

  The Guardian had a two-phased plan for humanity. Awakening in intervals, each member was assigned the task of erecting an electromagnetic relay station at key points around the globe. When completed, this astrogeodetic array would link with the Balam, creating an electromagnetic grid around the entire planet. The grid would prevent the creature from using its weapons to alter our planet’s atmosphere for its carbon-dioxide-breathing masters. Each Guardian had the challenge of camouflaging his relay station so that the array’s relay stations would remain undisturbed over thousands of years. Their solution was to bury the antennae beneath monolithic structures so magnificent in size and structure that they would forever remain undisturbed by modern man.

  Great civilizations came into being, and with them rose the Pyramids of Giza and Stonehenge, the Pyramid of the Sun, and the Temples of Angkor Wat.

  One of the last of the brotherhood to be revived was Kukulcan. Under his tutelage, the Mayans rose to power and the Kukulcan Pyramid was built-directly above the burial site of the Balam. All that was needed was someone to activate the device in the year 2012.

  This was the second phase of the Guardian’s plan. Each member of the brotherhood would not only instruct his people, but spread his genetic seed using our women. By mixing the Guardian’s superior DNA with Homo sapiens DNA, our species genetically leapfrogged up the evolutionary ladder.

  The Guardian’s DNA is the so-called missing link?

  Yes. But the Guardian were capable of much more than simply siring a new subspecies, they could also manipulate their DNA so that genetic anomalies like them would reach maturation around the time of the predicted day of reckoning. They called these superior beings the Hunahpu.