The End of the World Club

by J; P Voelkel

  “But let’s not rule out the obvious,” said Lola. “All this yellow must refer to K’awiil, home of the Yellow Pyramid. The Spanish razed the pyramid to the ground, but the stone could still be hidden on site somewhere—maybe buried under some yellow flowers with some yellow rotting ancestor bones.”

  “Out of interest, young lord,” asked Lord 6-Dog, “where do the yellow rotting bones of thine ancestors lie?”

  “Can we drop the yellow and the rotting and just say bones?” requested Max.

  “Thou hast a problem contemplating the inevitable decay of thy skeletal remains?”

  “Mortals are squeamish,” Lady Coco reminded her son.

  “I would advise thee to toughen up, young lord,” said Lord 6-Dog. “Thou art dealing with the Lords of Death. They stink and rot and trail their diseased entrails behind them.”

  “Back to the riddle!” Lola commanded hastily. “Lord 6-Dog asked about your ancestors, Hoop.”

  Max considered the question. “They’re from all over the place. My father’s family is from Ireland, my mother’s is from Italy.… Wait! This could be it! My father’s parents, Patrick and Isabella, are buried in San Xavier!”

  “That’s right! Raul told me your family history.” Lola sounded excited. “He said they’re buried in a family crypt in Puerto Muerto, not far from your uncle’s house.”

  “Puerto Muerto is on the east coast,” observed Lord 6-Dog, thinking aloud, “and east is the sunrise—”

  “And Puerto Muerto is yellow because muerto means ‘death,’ and the color of death is yellow!” interrupted Lola. “We’ve solved the riddle! The Yellow Jaguar is in the crypt in Puerto Muerto, where the sun rises over the rotting yellow bones of Max’s grandparents!”

  Max rolled his eyes.

  “But the color of east is red, not yellow,” cautioned Lord 6-Dog.

  “And what about the flowers?” added Max.

  He could almost hear Lola rolling her eyes. “Details, details,” she said. “The point is, Hoop, that the Yellow Jaguar is in San Xavier—so you need to get over here as fast as you can!”

  “I’m not sure …,” said Max.

  “I, too, have my doubts,” agreed Lord 6-Dog. “Today is 1-Crocodile, a day to solve problems with creative thinking. It is my hunch that the answer requires a little more cunning.”

  “Must you drag the ritual calendar into everything?” snapped Lady Coco.

  “Mortals ignore it at their peril,” opined Lord 6-Dog rather pompously. “Every day has its meaning.”

  “What about the day of 6-Death?” said Max. “It doesn’t actually mean death, does it?”

  “What else should it mean?” replied Lord 6-Dog. “It is a good day to visit Xibalba.”

  “It’s also a day of transformation, of new beginnings,” added Lady Coco quickly.

  Max thought about this. “Would that, by any chance, be the transformation from me living to me dead? As in, my new beginning as a dead person?”

  There was another awkward silence.

  “Cheer up,” said Lady Coco. “Sometimes a day is what you make it.”

  “You can’t live your life by some old calendar,” agreed Lola.

  “Either way,” said Max, “if I don’t find the Yellow Jaguar in the next six days, I’m dead, right?”

  “So stop wasting time!” Lola urged him. “Jump on the next plane to San Xavier, and I’ll meet you at the airport. It’ll be like old times, Hoop!”

  Max sighed.

  What should he do? The gamer in him agreed with Lord 6-Dog—they needed to think more creatively. But Lola also had a good point. Where else would they look for the Yellow Jaguar, if not at the last known site of the Yellow Pyramid?

  “You win,” he said. “I’ll e-mail you my flight details.”

  “Great! And say hi to your parents from me, Hoop!”

  He could hear Lola’s excited babble as he put down the phone, and Lord 6-Dog trying to reason with her.

  But something didn’t feel right.

  He went into the kitchen, where his mother was scraping a blackened piece of toast.

  “Lola says hi,” he said.

  “Forget it, Massimo. You’re not going back to San Xavier.”

  “But, Mom …”

  “No.”

  “Admit it, Mom. You know the Death Lords are gunning for me, and you think we can pretend it’s not happening as long as we stay away from San Xavier. That’s why you don’t want me to go back there, isn’t it?”

  “Not at all,” she protested, but she didn’t look up. “It is just that the summer is flying by and we need to spend quality time together in Boston, just the three of us, as a family. Tell him, Frank.…”

  They both looked at Max’s father. He was sitting at the breakfast table, reading the paper as usual. His face was covered in Band-Aids, his nose dripped stalactites of dried blood, and his arm sported an oozing bandage. He looked feverishly hot, but underneath his ever-present multipocketed safari jacket, he was wearing a heavy turtleneck sweater.

  “Listen to your mother,” he said without looking up.

  She set down a cup of thick black Italian sludge. “Drink your coffee, Frank. You must not be late for the doctor.”

  “Extraordinary, isn’t it?” mused his father. “I was fine when I went to bed last night.…”

  “But don’t you remember, Dad?” said Max. “The owl guy, Lord Kuy, made your face break out, then the hellhound sank his teeth into your arm—”

  “I think we’ll leave the diagnosis to the doctor, shall we?” said his father, scratching his neck.

  “What’s that lump?” asked Max suspiciously.

  “It’s nothing,” replied his father, pulling his turtleneck up higher.

  Max looked more closely. “I can see it under your sweater. You’ve got a lump on your neck, and it’s moving.”

  Max’s mother ran over and pulled down the turtleneck. “A botfly maggot!” she squealed. “You were trying to hide it from me!”

  “Now, now, Carla, it’s just a harmless little parasite growing under my skin. People get them all the time in Central America. It’s nothing to fuss about.”

  “Stay right there,” she said. “I will find the tweezers.”

  “No need for that,” said Max’s father, hastily standing up and getting ready to leave. “It’ll pop out on its own in a few weeks’ time. See you later!”

  As the screen door slammed behind him, Max’s mother threw up her arms. “What is happening to us?” she cried.

  “I’m trying to tell you, Mom. Lord Kuy came here last night; he’s the new messenger for the Death Lords—”

  “Stop!” said Carla, bursting into tears. “No more! I have had enough of your crazy nightmares!”

  “It wasn’t a nightmare, and I can prove it.” Grabbing his mother by the hand, Max pulled her into the living room. “I’ll show you where the TV melted and the hellhound’s drool burned the rug.…”

  He flung open the living room door and pointed triumphantly.

  “Look!”

  Carla looked carefully at the corner where the TV had been. Then she looked at the hearth rug. Finally, she looked at Max.

  “I think perhaps you should see the doctor, too.”

  A brand-new TV was sitting innocently in the corner. The rug showed no signs of acid burns.

  “Aha!” Max spotted a brownish stain on the sofa. “Look here, Mom! It’s Dad’s blood, from where the hellhound bit him.”

  Carla scratched at the stain. “Ketchup,” she said flatly, “from the hot dogs you ate in front of the TV last night.”

  Something caught her eye and she glanced over the back of the sofa.

  “Oh, hello,” she said. “I didn’t see you there.”

  It was Zia.

  She looked hot and bedraggled, like she’d been working hard.

  Behind the sofa, Max glimpsed a battalion of cleaning supplies. He scrutinized Zia more carefully and saw something that could have been the instructions for a
new TV peeking out of her apron pocket. She followed his eyes and tucked it out of sight.

  “Zia!” Max wailed. “Did you repair the rug? Did you replace the TV?”

  “Massimo!” his mother chided him. “Leave Zia alone.”

  Zia flicked back her braid, gathered her cleaning supplies into a bucket, and picked up a bulging black garbage bag, ready to make her exit.

  “Wait!” yelled Max, grabbing at the bag. “Let’s look in the trash! I bet we’ll find bits of molten TV and owl pellets and—”

  “I am so sorry about this, Zia,” said Max’s mother as she unpicked his fingers one by one from the garbage bag.

  “You have gone too far this time,” said his mother, sitting down heavily on the sofa. “Poor Zia, as if she did not have enough on her plate.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Max. “What does Zia have on her plate?”

  “It is not easy for her, bambino.”

  “But she’s the only one who’s happy around here. She’s up to something, Mom. I don’t trust her.”

  “Massimo! Zia has lived with us since you were a baby. This silly game has got to stop.”

  “It’s not a game and you know it, Mom. It rains on our house and nowhere else in Boston. Every room is crawling with bugs. There’s a jungle in our hallway and a strangler fig in our backyard. You can’t go on pretending that this is all a figment of my imagination. The Death Lords mean business.”

  His mother put her head in her hands.

  An evil-looking spider, as furry as a kitten and about the same size, scuttled across the carpet in pursuit of a small lizard. Max threw a pillow at the spider, and the lizard made a break for freedom.

  When his mother looked up, her face was fearful and tearstained.

  “Why must they torment us like this?” she asked, her voice barely audible.

  Max sat down next to her. “You know why. I owe the Death Lords a favor, and now they’re calling it in. Last night, Lord Kuy gave me seven days to fulfill my side of the bargain. Make that six days now. Six days left to live. This time next week, if I haven’t given them what they want, it will be over for all of us.”

  “Six days?” His mother looked at him with fear in her eyes.

  Then she nodded slowly as if she’d made a decision.

  “What did they ask for?” she whispered.

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Why not?”

  “The Death Lords will punish you, like they punished Dad.”

  Max’s mother took his hands in hers. “It was horrible in Xibalba. I wanted to forget about it, to convince myself it never happened. But enough is enough. I cannot keep running from the truth. I am not going to live my life in fear of the Death Lords. Tell me what they want.”

  “I have to deliver the Yellow Jaguar to Xibalba.”

  “The Yellow Jaguar of K’awiil? The Stone of Truth? But no one knows where it is.”

  “The Death Lords do. They gave me a stupid riddle to help me find it. Lola thinks it’s in San Xavier, but Lord 6-Dog isn’t so sure.”

  “Show me the riddle.”

  “The Death Lords will get you for it, Mom.”

  “Show me.”

  Max pulled out the book. It had faded so much it was barely legible, but since his mother was the world’s foremost authority on Maya glyphs, he trusted her to make an educated guess. She went straight to the back page. “ ‘His yellow dawn place,’ ” she muttered, “ ‘his many yellow flowered place … his yellow ancestor-bone place.’ ” A smile of triumph spread across her face, quickly followed by an angry pink rash. “I know it! I know the answer!”

  “Mom, your face …”

  “Listen to me, bambino! I have always suspected that the Yellow Jaguar was stolen by Diego de Landa, the Spanish monk who burned all the Maya books. We know from his journal that he was obsessed with the Jaguar Stones. He tortured whole villages to get his hands on them.…”

  As she talked, Max watched her closely. The rash spread and darkened and congealed into lumps until she looked like she’d been dunked in a vat of plum jam.

  “Your grandmother, Isabella Pizarro, was descended from the first conquistadors,” she was saying. “They sailed from the east, out of the rising sun. I do not know this yellow city, but I would bet all the ham in Parma that it is in … aaaaaghhhhh!”

  She had brushed her hair out of her eyes and a large hank had come off in her hand. Even as she patted her scalp to assess the damage, more strands fell away, until half her head was bald.

  She stared in horror at the tresses in her lap, then jumped up and ran upstairs. He could hear her screaming as she surveyed her hideous appearance in the bathroom mirror.

  What had she been about to tell him?

  Round one to the Death Lords, he thought bitterly.

  He was on his way to e-mail Lola about this curious development when good smells from the kitchen derailed him.

  Roast chicken.

  Homemade gravy.

  Chocolate cake.

  Since any meal right now could be his last meal, Max decided to investigate.

  Zia was frosting the cake, humming to herself as she worked. Not for the first time, Max wondered why she was so happy these days. The house was falling apart, the Murphys were all acting strangely, and Zia was smiling for the first time ever. Either she’d lost her mind or maybe, as Max strongly suspected, she knew something the rest of them didn’t.…

  He thought back to the days before his trip to San Xavier. He’d surprised Zia in the middle of some creepy ritual, like a fortune-telling ceremony. He remembered that her room was crammed full of jars and potions, like a witch doctor’s lair … like the hut of Chan Kan, the Maya wise man, in Lola’s home village of Utsal. And it had been Zia who’d come up with his plane ticket.

  He had to make her talk.

  “Hello, Zia,” he said warily. “I’m sorry about that thing with the trash bag.” The housekeeper shrugged—did that mean she didn’t understand or she didn’t care?—and indicated that he should sit at the table. It was set for one.

  Soon, he was tucking into a big plate of juicy roast chicken.

  “This is so good,” he said.

  Zia looked up from her frosting and smiled at him.

  Taking that as encouragement, he continued: “Zia, I know you don’t speak much English, but I need to ask you something.” She nodded. “When I went to San Xavier, where did you get the ticket from? Who told you to buy it? Who gave you the money?”

  She carried on nodding.

  She obviously wasn’t understanding a word.

  Not knowing what else to do, Max persisted. “The thing is, Zia, I need another ticket. I have to go back to San Xavier.”

  Zia was putting down her frosting knife.

  She was wiping her hands on her apron.

  She was beckoning to him.

  Nervously, he got up and followed her.

  She led him to her room, above the garage. It was dark in there and it smelled of incense. Even when she’d lit a candle, Max could hardly see.

  “There are rules,” she said. “You must follow them.”

  Max was so surprised at her fluent English, he just nodded mutely.

  She continued, “You must be early. Three hours. No liquids.”

  “Did the Death Lords tell you this?” he whispered.

  Zia looked at him like he was the crazy person.

  “Transportation Safety Administration,” she said, pushing a piece of paper at him.

  It was a receipt for an e-ticket. American Airlines.

  “Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you!” he cried, and punched the air excitedly. “San Xavier, here I come!”

  “No,” said Zia. She pointed at something on the paper.

  And there it was, in bold uppercase.

  MAD. The paper said MAD.

  His stomach sank. He’d been right the first time: Zia was insane, and now she had a ticket to prove it.

  Max tried to stay calm.

  “I
get it,” he said. “Funny joke. You’re mad. I’m mad. Ha-ha.”

  He crumpled up the receipt and threw it into the trash can.

  “Not mad,” said Zia, fishing it out again. “Airport code for Madrid.”

  “Madrid? In Spain? But I’m going to San Xavier!” He spoke slowly and loudly, as if she were deaf.

  Zia went over to a table piled high with baskets and boxes, many of them draped in gaily striped woven cloth. With a flourish, like a magician doing a trick, she whipped the cloth off the largest box to reveal a computer. She typed in a few words and waited impatiently as an image downloaded onto the screen.

  Max stared at it.

  For a moment, as planet Earth whirled toward him from deep space, he wondered if her computer was like a high-tech crystal ball.

  Then, as the planet split into blue oceans and green landmasses with borders marked in yellow, Max saw that it was Google Earth. Closing in, the camera zoomed through continents, countries, and counties, until it rested on a battlemented castle on a hilltop. There were other buildings dotted around the hillside below the castle, but none of them were clearly visible. The picture was blurry and the resolution was poor, but one feature of the town was unmistakable: it was shrouded in a haze of yellow.

  He zoomed in. They were yellow flowers, he was sure of it.

  Within the space of five seconds, he had copied the coordinates, done a search, and identified the “yellow city” of the glyphs as Polvoredo in the province of Extremadura, western Spain.

  Another frenzied search told him that Polvoredo was noted for the number of conquistadors who’d been born within its walls and for its abundance of flowers—all of them, thanks to a quirk in the local soil chemistry, a brilliant shade of yellow. The town contained little of touristic interest besides an unremarkable central square, a Romanesque church, and a castle (closed to the public). Population: 341. Motto: La Verdad Sobre Todo (“Truth Above All”).

  “The Yellow Jaguar is the Stone of Truth! This is the place! It’s east of San Xavier and it’s famous for yellow flowers. Grandma Isabella’s family must be buried around there somewhere. This is what Mom was trying to tell me! The Yellow Jaguar’s in Spain!” He was punching the air and dancing round Zia’s room. “Oh, Zia, you’re so clever! The conquistadors stole the Yellow Jaguar and brought it back to Spain with them!”