At Fear's Altar (17 page)

The Mayan Riviera. A late-December dawn, yet summer-like warmth met Mary as she stepped out onto her hotel balcony. In a distant year, and perhaps in some future one, this type of setting would offer tranquillity. But it was not the idealized past, nor the unformed future. It was December 20, 2012, and Mary felt neither peace nor wonderment. In fact, she was scarcely able to remember what contentment felt like. She was a castaway, with her beloved thousands of miles away, inching his way toward death. She was a knight on a hopeless quest.

Several storeys below, early morning swimmers churned up sugar-sand with their naked feet as they raced toward the ocean; children, with bright towels held above their heads like soaring kites. (
Was Damon ever that young? Did he truly run as though he was ready to knock down the world, or am I just wish-fulfilling?
) Parents dawdled just behind them. A man and a woman, their hands interlocked. The woman carried a bag that Mary imagined as being filled with suntan lotion, books, fresh fruit for a breakfast on the shore.

A frigid vice squeezed Mary’s heart when she realized that Whitley would never see the ocean again, would likely never even walk again. She stared out at the distant mountains gauzed with mist. She wondered how she would even begin her task. Could Damon even be out there at all?

Taking the Polaroid from the table, Mary made her way down to the lobby.

She hadn’t noticed the decorations when she’d shambled into the hotel the night before. Exhaustion had censored the images of the luridly green crepe-paper winged serpents that spun on strings from the ceiling, and the silver Quetzalcoatl brooches that the staff had pinned to their vests.
Feliz Año Nuevo! Happy Mayan New Year!
shouted the large banner above the exit. The pamphlet Mary accepted from the hotel’s greeter explained how December 21, 2012 was a largely misunderstood event, that it was not the end of days, but a time of change, a new beginning, a cause for celebration. Quetzalcoatl was about to shed Its skin and carry humankind into a more enlightened new age. Mary balled up the pamphlet and flung it into the first trashcan she saw on her way to the docks.

If the hotel concierge did know anything about the half-image Mary showed him, he certainly faked it well enough, but Mary felt his suggestion to go speak with the seamen who cruised sightseers around the historic reefs was a good place to start.

Most of the dock workers spoke English to some degree, which made Mary’s task a bit less hopeless, though the men all seemed to find her questions amusing. They passed the photograph among them. One of them muttered something in Spanish, something that made his cronies laugh out loud. She was handed back her picture. Heads shook, shoulders were shrugged.

Mary turned to make her way to a nearby bench where she hoped to scrabble together a new plan.

A male voice suddenly called out, asking what it was she was looking for.

He was an older man, in his fifties at least, tall and thin. When Mary held out the Polaroid he took it from her gently, as though it might crumble at his touch.

“Why do you want to see this place?” he asked her. His tone was non-committal, his face stoic.

“You know it?”

“
Si
, I do. But you haven’t answered my question.”

“My son,” Mary began. She offered the man a truncated version of her anguished saga.

“I’m very sorry for you, Mrs. Cowan,” the man said, “but I suggest you go to the authorities. They can probably give you something more concrete than an old photo. Besides, I’m afraid whoever gave you this was leading you astray.”

“How?”

“Your boy couldn’t possibly be on this island. It’s all but deserted. There are no houses there, no stores, no food, no plumbing.”

“But what about this temple?”

The man squinted as he stared out at the ocean, as though he were studying something at a great distance. “He’s not in there, believe me.”

“I’m afraid I can’t just take your word for it. Where can I rent a boat?”

The dock worker’s dark eyes looked directly into Mary’s bloodshot ones. “You’ll never find it,” he warned. “Besides, if there
are
people on that island, they’re not the kind you’d want to meet.”

“That’s a risk I’m willing to take. Thank you for your time.”

“Mrs. Cowan!” the man shouted as he yanked himself out of the small outboard motorboat he’d been loading with fishing gear. “Mrs. Cowan! Come back!”

Mary turned her head but did not return until the man called out, “I will take you there.”

The majority of their journey across the water was mute, but the guide did offer up his name, Alvaro, and informed Mary that he had lived along the Riviera all his life.

Another fact became clear to Mary: Alvaro’s insistence that she would never have found the island was obviously a smokescreen to deter her, for as they bobbed along, the island came into view rather quickly. It sat just east of the docks. Mary clung to the rim like an eager child, watching the island as it swelled and sharpened into focus. The outboard motor wheezed an endless ribbon of pungent blue smoke into the air. Mary hoped it would hold out until they reached shore.

But they never reached the shore. When they were still several hundred yards from the island’s sandy hem, Alvaro killed the engine. He yanked an oar free from the iron hooks that held it in place and began to paddle. The sudden extinction of sound made the gentle lapping of the waves and the distant trills of the gulls sound haunting. The sun was painfully bright and saturated everything with a sharp, glassy heat.

“Can you dock anywhere along here?” Mary asked.

“I can pull up fairly close to the shore, but I’m not going to. There’s nothing there for you to see.”

Then, as if to tempt her, the boat edged around one bank just enough to reveal it: the temple.

It was an ill-matched structure, one that had seemingly been cobbled together with whatever items could be salvaged from and around the island. Mary quickly realized that size alone does not a temple make, for this structure was large—colossal, in fact—but its helter-skelter air bled out its humbling aura. In fact, if the monument stoked any passionate feeling at all, it was frustration. The building was infuriatingly asymmetrical. Its lack of engineering would be apparent to almost anyone with an attentive eye.

The foundation was composed of a great truncated pyramid of shiny black rock that reflected the sunlight even more sharply than the waters that pooled around its angled entrance. Because of its delicious lustre, Mary initially wondered if the base was obsidian. But surely the locals wouldn’t have let such a vast amount of a precious stone just fester in the ocean like this.

Portions of the walls were the rich crimson of ancient magma, spurted from the depths aeons ago; solidified; hewn; carved with alien motifs of what looked to be squids and nebulae and fierce fanged masks. These reddish slabs seemed somehow to fit with the black stones. They were materials appropriate for an ancient sacred place. But, like a familial quilt that is added to by successive generations, the temple’s newer-looking additions looked to have been helmed by masons who failed to grasp the building’s early purpose. Tied to the carved stones were sheets of corrugated metal, lengths of rusted chain-link fencing, and swatches of perforated tarpaulin that snapped in the wind. There were ropes and bungee cords and (this made Mary shudder) a few articles of clothing; denim shorts, T-shirts, jackets, an infant’s sleeper.

The temple stood partially on land with matted jungle growth shawling its hind, and half-submerged in the ocean, where it dammed a shallow eddy, making it a stagnant malaria breeding pool clouded by thousands of thirsty insects.

Something thudded against the side of the boat. But the surprise Mary experienced at the sudden noise was mild compared to when she peeked over the boat’s rim and saw the oversized mullet fish riding the current, belly-up.

What had sprouted from the fish’s quicksilver scales was unmistakable: human fingers. The digits were skinned in the same shimmering scales as the fish they grew out of. The half-hand was gnarled in rigor mortis. It looked like an abstract sculpture bobbing along the waves.

Mary gasped. The boat teetered as she pushed herself to the far end of her bench.

Wordlessly, Alvaro dropped the oar and began yanking on the engine’s starter cord. When Mary rose to try and assist, her gesture seemed to stoke the boatman’s ire. She returned to her seat, but not before she chanced a sighting of a figure standing near the mouth of the temple. Even though her glimpse was but a beat long, Mary saw the masculine anatomy dangling between the figure’s thin legs. He was naked, or mostly so. The man’s face was obscured by some huge and hideous mask. His hands had been stuffed into what looked like sagging tubes. Mary cried out, but by then the boat’s motor was muffling her.

The shape slid back, back into the great mouth of the patchwork sanctuary.

“I saw him!” Mary shrieked. “Please, I just saw Damon!”

Alvaro ignored his passenger, even when she began smacking him on the back and arms, even as she spat caustic insults at him.

Only when the mainland docks came back into view did Alvaro turn to Mary.

“Your son was not there,” he said coldly. “I told you, no one is there. You saw that fish, no? Everything that goes to that island gets tainted by it. It’s always been that way. Long ago people would swim out to that island to starve themselves to death, all to honour some devil they felt would accept them as a sacrifice. We’re almost back, Mrs. Cowan. Once we’ve docked I want you to take my original advice and go to the authorities. You’ve seen the temple now, so you know that nothing good can come of it. Just let the police take over.”

Mary was so hopelessly exhausted by the time she returned to the hotel that night that the lobby appeared to her as a well-lit vacuum. Her only thought was of crawling back up to her room, flopping onto her bed and sleeping for a year. The past few days of manic travel, the heartsickness she felt for Whitley, the fear she felt for Damon; it was all finally taking its toll.

The afternoon she’d spent at the police station had been pointless. They took her story down, gave her cards with phone numbers, drawn a sketch of Damon, but Mary knew that all their rote attempts would yield nothing.

She’d tried phoning home three different times, hoping to speak to Whitley, for just hearing his voice would be a balm to her, but there was no answer. At suppertime she sat in a restaurant and picked at her salad and drank white wine before becoming resigned to the fact that tonight she could do no more.

During her walk Mary saw crowds gathering, people making their way to the beach. Kites of Quetzalcoatl billowed in the darkened sky. In the distance a few fireworks popped. Music was beginning to billow out from open windows. In a few hours, it seemed a new age would be upon the world.

Crossing the hotel foyer, Mary went to the elevator and to her room. When she closed and bolted the door she noticed the red light flashing on the desk. She went to the phone and collected the three voicemails Jo had left her. Her sister sounded increasingly crushed in each successive message.

Mary sat down in the still-unlit room and pressed the buttons of her home number.

“Jo? It’s Mary. What’s going on?”

“Did you find him?”

For a second Mary was almost offended that her sister seemed to be avoiding whatever issue had caused her to be so distraught in her messages. Mary vaguely recalled hearing Jo saying something about a hospice, about a turn for the worse.

“No,” Mary replied, “not yet. What’s happening?” From the other end there came a sniffle or a burst of static, Mary could not discern which.

Jo then fed her sister two steel-bleak words:

A cold silent sheen washed over the world at that moment. Mary’s fingers forfeited the receiver. It was still swinging from the cord like a hanged man when she shuffled away from her desk and out of her room. She did not even notice the lobby doors parting automatically as she passed through them, nor did she hear the elated shouts of the revellers on the beach. She simply walked through them on her way to the night-opaque waters.

The ocean could have been scalding or frigid against her skin, Mary neither felt nor cared. When she began to swim, she did so instinctually, as infants do when they are tossed into a pool by wide-eyed, New Age parents who labour under the folly that nature does not err, that the Earth Mother tends to her own. None of the New Year’s revellers seemed to notice her escape.

She kicked and reached until it seemed as if her arms were being pulled from their sockets. The moon was full and seemed to spotlight her eastward journey.

The island, with its grand, sickly-architected temple and its cumuli of brittle vines, finally came into sight. At night it looked like something Böcklin might have painted had Mexico been his muse instead of Corfu. It was not a sad place, but certainly a sombre one. Images of ascetics fleeing the world for this place passed through Mary’s mind like a fog. She liked to think that Damon had found solace here, some fount of epiphany the likes of which she, in her stubbornly commonsense way, had no hope of ever experiencing.

And all at once her fanciful visions of her only child wandering a garden path with a prophet’s beard and the warm demeanour of one who’d managed to hew his soul with the divine were burned away. Now she saw Damon as a limp abomination, twitching upon the filthy floor of the great black temple; his arms as fine as glass noodles and his belly plump with ascites. His lips a thin sneer, exposing the shrivelled gums, the chalky tongue, the teeth that were all too eager to tear .   .   .

But even if this was the case, even if Damon had been transformed into some kind of mad monk, he was now all she had left. She had to see him. She had promised Whitley. Her husband. Her
late
husband.

Mary swam.

She noticed immediately that something was vastly different once she neared the shore.

The temple was gone. A great damp cavity had been left in its place.

As the fireworks erupted and streaked the night with glowing colours, Mary pulled herself onto the muddy shore.

The countdown to midnight on the shore must have been approaching its finale; she could sense it. December 21, 2012 was now here, if the distant eruption of fireworks from the mainland was any indication. Did the great winged serpent loop those glittering constellations of artificial stars? Were the people on the mainland undergoing a rebirth?

If so, Mary wondered what would happen to her out here.

It all happened simultaneously.

All at once the shape rose from the deep and emerged from the jungle and grew from the earth.

The temple was no longer still. Perhaps at this auspicious moment in Aztec time, it had merged with enough living things to rise, to walk. More than just a congealment of matter, the temple was Becoming. It was metal and it was jungle vinery and it was flesh and it was precious stone. The great gaping entrance was now a mouth from which a thunderous cry bellowed and rumbled. It shook the island to its core. Human beings were part of it too; legs and teeth, faces, millions of eyes, genitals shorn from their trunks but still copulating madly. A few bones or bits of pipe or tree boughs were shat out through crevices here and there, there and here. And the whole Thing just kept bellowing. By now the moon was blotted by the ever-growing Shape that shambled nearer, nearer.

Fish and plankton and other deep ones must have sensed the great Shape’s passing, for they leapt above the surface to splatter against It, to become a part of It.

Unity. Mary saw it at its purest, at its most hideous, at its holiest.

Not knowing what else to do, Mary fell to her knees, pressed her head against the earth.

Mary wondered: Was Damon up there, some splayed artery of the All?

She wondered if she was hiding her head out of terror or sheer reverence for this new-age god.

But as the thunderous thing lowered Itself to awaken her, Mary came to understand that, in the end, distinctions do not matter.