#coco 2017

The whole group set out together, with the alebrijes following behind – Alex’s cat, Chepina’s parrot, and Dante the dog, but also the hummingbird whirring along beside them, and the armadillo, rolling behind. The City of the Dead was a three-dimensional maze, full of staircases and bridges and houses that leaned far out over the streets, but Miguel seemed to know exactly where he was going. Elio happily took both parents’ skeletal hands to walk between them, like he’d used to do when he was small.

Chepina also held Tommy’s hand at first, but he let go after a couple of blocks, still not quite feeling like he was a part of this family. He fell behind a little so that he could watch Elio, who had a definite spring in his step at being reunited with his Mom and Dad. Why couldn’t Tommy feel the same?

“Is that Miguel Rivera?” a voice called out. “It is! Just the man I wanted to see!”

Miguel turned as another skeleton hurried to greet him – a man in a black and silver charro and sombrero with a bright red tie. “Chente! Always an honour!” he said.

“Remember I said I’d look for the chords to that lost song?” Chente pulled a sheaf of folded papers out of his jacket. “I found them!”

“What? No, I can’t possibly take those!” Miguel protested. “I couldn’t take the credit!”

Tommy took another step back, as everybody gathered around the man called Chente to talk about his music. He felt like he ought to know who this person was, but he didn’t... had he failed in trying to get in touch with his culture? If so, then it seemed like he wasn’t any good at being a human kid at all...

Something stirred the hair on the back of his neck. Tommy turned his head, and found the hummingbird alebrije, zipping back and forth in a panic.

“What’s wrong?” he asked it.

“Hola, amigo,” said a voice out of a side street.

Tommy jumped and turned in the other direction to see who had spoken. On his right were two houses with a narrow space in between them, just wide enough for the trunk of a ceiba tree that spread its umbrella-like crown over both properties. Sitting on an upside-down flowerpot among the buttress roots was a girl. She was not a skeleton, and appeared a little older than Tommy and Elio, dressed in black with a lot of gold jewellery, and with long, curly dark hair.

She smiled at him. “You want a soul?” she asked.

“Yes, I do,” said Tommy. “Do you know how I can get one?”

“There’s a few different ways,” the girl replied. “If you weren’t made with one, you can ask somebody to give you half of theirs – although having only half a soul will make both of you very easy for demons to possess. Or you can try to earn one.”

Tommy’s first thought was that he could ask Elio or Aunt Olga, but when she warned of the consequences he quickly dismissed that idea. He didn’t want to leave the family who’d taken him in vulnerable to supernatural forces – forces that evidently did exist, seeing as he was in the Land of the Dead surrounding by skeletons and alebrijes. “How do I earn one?” he asked.

“You can save somebody’s life. That’ll get you half of theirs,” the girl said.

Still no good. “What if I want a whole one?”

“Oh, then you’ll have to face the Trials of Xibalba.”

“Who are you talking to?” asked Elio.

Miguel was now trying out Chente’s chords on his guitar, and a few people had gathered to listen. Elio was not a particular fan of this kind of music, so his attention had wandered – he’d noticed Tommy was missing, and had found him here talking to this stranger.

“She says she knows how I can earn a soul,” said Tommy. “What’s your name?” he asked the girl.

She came up and offered him a hand. “My name is Xtabay. My Papá is one of the Lords of Xibalba. I can take you to him.”

Tommy reached for her hand, but snatched his fingers back as the hummingbird darted in front of him. “Hey!” he protested, as the tiny alebrije whistled at him. “What’s your problem?”

Elio looked at Xtabay suspiciously. The hummingbird and armadillo had led the boys to their parents. If the alebrijes didn’t want them shaking hands with this girl, then it was probably a bad idea. “Come on,” he said, taking Tommy’s hand. “Let’s get back to Mom and Dad.”

“What about my soul?” Tommy protested. With his other hand he grabbed for Xtabay’s fingers, intending to bring her along with them. As soon as he touched them, her hand closed around his wrist like a vise.

“This way!” she said – and suddenly they were standing on a bare, rocky mountainside.

Rather than the backlit starfield of the City of the Dead, the sky here was full of low, ominous grey clouds, as if it were just about to storm. There were a few stunted trees and isolated tufts of grass, but the landscape around them was almost entirely stone, soot-black and moulded into undulating waves, like an oncoming flood that had been magically petrified. The air was warm and smelled of sulphur – a smell that increased as a spurt of blue flame suddenly hissed up next to them. Tommy quickly pulled Elio away from it.

Xtabay was still holding his wrist, smiling.

“Where are we?” Tommy asked her.

“The gates of Xibalba,” she replied cheerfully. “Come on, Papá is expecting you!”

There was no road. To reach Xibalba they had to climb over the rock formations, which were often steep, sometimes sharp, and always worryingly warm. At first they couldn’t see anything that looked like a gate, but eventually they made it over the crest of a hill, from which they could see two towers on either side of a huge entryway, all made of white stone that stood out sharply from the dark basalt. The hummingbird alebrije was still with them and it was not happy. It fluttered in circles around Tommy’s head, chirping and whistling in obvious distress.

They couldn’t go back, though – they didn’t even know how they’d gotten here. So they continued to let Xtabay lead them down onto the flat area in front of the gates. This was paved with triangular slabs that went crunch and sometimes broke underfoot.

The first time this happened, Elio looked down to see what had made the noise – and stopped cold. The broken edge of the slab was visible, and while the outside was a grungy shade of white, the interior was brownish and spongy. Elio had seen that before, but only on dinner plates. He grabbed Tommy’s shirt in a panic and pointed down.

Tommy looked for himself, and sucked in a breath. “They’re shoulder blades,” he whispered.

Both boys slowly raised their heads, hearts pounding, to look up at the gates in front of them. Sure enough – the actual gate was made of long bones woven together with ribs, and the towers on either side were of human skulls and pelvises.

“What are you staring at?” a voice demanded.

The boys yelped again, grabbing each other. One of the skulls were glaring at them. All of the skulls were glaring at them!

“N-n-nothing,” Tommy stammered.

“Then keep moving!” the skull told him, annoyed. “Vamos!”

“Yes, Señor!” said Tommy, and the twins hurried to follow Xtabay.

She knocked on the gates, and another skull, embedded in the lock, opened its eyes – or rather, its empty sockets lit up dull red like hot coals.

“It’s Xtabay! You’re back!” it said.

Xtabay beamed. “Look what I found!” she said. She took Elio and Tommy by the wrists and dragged them forward for the skull to inspect, and the boys suddenly found that she was a lot taller and stronger than they were. Although still dressed in the same clothing, with her hair in braids, she now looked like an adult. Elio looked at his brother and found Tommy looking back with wide, terrified eyes. What had they gotten into?

“Twins!” the skull exclaimed.

“Papá’s favourite!” Xtabay said proudly. “Aren’t they cute?”

“The Lords and Ladies will be so pleased,” the skull agreed.

Something made a deep metallic scraping noise, and the gates began to open. The whole mountainside seemed to rumble as they moved centimetre bu centimetre, leading small stones to tumble down the slope and the bones of the tower to rattle in their places. The gate opened just barely far enough for them to enter, as if any further would have been just too much work, and then groaned to a stop.

The boys leaned to peek inside. They could just barely see an entrance carved directly into the black basalt, with crystal stalactites dangling from the arch like a row of glittering teeth.

“Welcome to Xibalba!” said the skull with a gleeful cackle. “Make yourselves at home!”

Xtabay stepped inside, quite unconcerned, but the boys backed away, clinging to each other. It was obvious now that they’d made a horrible mistake. What were they going to do?

“Are you coming?” Xtabay asked. “If you don’t, the gates will close, and it’ll just be you and the skulls.”

The skulls in the towers giggled.

“I guess we gotta,” said Elio. The alternative was too awful to contemplate. He squeezed Tommy’s hand tight, and they followed her into the dark.

As they passed through the gates, some of the flat bones of the pavement outside shifted, and a small burrowing creature came up and shook soil off its shell – the armadillo. It scratched at an itchy ear with one foreleg, but was interrupted by the hummingbird, zipping down to chirp impatiently at it. The armadillo grunted an indignant reply. Then both of them hurried through the gate after Elio and Tommy, just moments before it shut behind them with a very final-sounding thud.

-

Back in the Realm of the Living, Aunt Olga had arrived late to pick up the boys. She was prepared with apologies – Aunt Juana and Aunt Maria had taken her to a local market, and she’d lost track of time but had bought them each a gift. When she arrived, however, they were not waiting where they’d promised. She checked in several places, but everybody she spoke to told her they’d last been seeing waiting by the wardrobe trailer.

“Perhaps they went with Socorro Rivera,” Señora Herrera suggested. “I know she took them to her house earlier.”

“Gracias,” said Olga. “Can you give me directions?”

When she knocked on the door of the Rivera house, it was answered by a tall woman with long black hair, threaded with early silver. “Can I help you?” she asked.

“Sorry to bother you, Señora,” said Olga. “My name is Olga Solís. I’m Elio and Tommy’s aunt – are they here?”

“Lo siento, no,” the woman replied. “I haven’t seen them since before lunch.”

“They went with Miguel,” announced another voice, as a little girl peeked around the corner. “They were going to the Land of the Dead, to get Tomàs a soul.”

Olga didn’t know what that might be meant to imply, but her imagination offered several possibilities, each more ominous than the last. “What do you mean?”

“Exactly what I said,” the girl told her.

“Corazon, you know when Miguel says things like that, they’re just stories,” her mother chided – but something was off about her tone. Señora Rivera wasn’t talking to her daughter. She wanted Olga to hear that.

“No, no, tell me about it.” Olga bent down to speak to the girl face to face. “You’re Socorro, right? You were at the movie set.”

“Yes, Señora,” said Socorro.

“Where did Miguel take my boys?” Olga’s mouth was dry as she spoke. Miguel Rivera had seemed like a nice young man, but fame could go to anyone’s head... and the problem with truly terrible people was that you could never spot them beforehand.

“To the Land of the Dead,” Socorro repeated. “He can go there whenever he wants, through the magical cenote. I want to go, but he won’t let me.”

Olga swallowed. “Can you show me?” If the girl knew where her brother’s hideout was, maybe they could get there before it was too late. Olga would call the police later.

“Sure,” said Socorro. “You just follow el Camino de Leche. We ere there just last week when he first came home.”

“What?” asked Señora Rivera. “He took you to a cenote? What if you fell in?”

“We were fine!” Socorro protested. “I didn’t go near the edge, and I wore my helmet and everything!”

“Your hel...” her mother stopped mid-word, horrified. “He took you on his motorcycle?”

“Oh,” said Socorro, with a sheepish face. “Oops.”

“Señora Rivera,” said Olga, anxious to intervene before things could get too off-topic. “I need to find my nephews. May I borrow your daughter to show me the way? You can come along, of course.”

“I... yes. Yes, you may.” Señora Rivera grabbed a wrap to put around her shoulders. “Take your jacket, Socorro – and don’t think we won’t talk about this later! You, me, and Miguel!”

“Sí, Mamá,” said Socorro meekly.

The three of them climbed into the car Olga had rented in Oaxaca City, and she started the engine. Luisa Rivera sat in the back with her daughter, muttering to herself while tapping a spare chancla against her palm.

“Which way?” asked Olga.

“There!” Socorro pointed out the window.

Olga followed her finger, and despite the lights of the town, she could just barely make out the fuzzy band of the galaxy arching behind the starfield. She frowned, trying to think where it would have been earlier in the evening. “East?”

“No,” Socorro insisted. “Where the Milky Way meets the earth, no matter where that is. It wouldn’t be the Land of the Dead if it was always in the same spot.”

For the first time, Olga began to think this child might not be using the phrase Tierra de los Muertos as a euphemism for murder. “Explain,” she said.

“The first time Miguel went there, it was because of a family curse,” Luisa said. “He read a lot of legends and stories looking for a way to get back. The Zapotec believed there was a gateway through a cenote, and he said he’d found one in a place you can only get to by following the Milky Way.”

“The Maya said the bright part leads to the afterlife, and the black chasms take you to Xibalba!” added Socorro.

A year ago, Olga would have scoffed at the idea and demanded the truth... but since then she’d met multiple aliens and adopted a clone of her brother’s son. That was different, though. Those concepts were at least science fiction. This was fantasy... wasn’t it?

“You don’t believe us,” said Socorro quietly.

Who was Olga Solís to say what was and wasn’t real? She wouldn’t have believed in some of the alien technology, either, if somebody had just told her about it. If seeing was believing...

“Show me,” she said.

Socorro perked up and pointed again. “Follow the stars!” she said.

Olga put the car in gear, and did so.

Elio and Tommy would have been surprised by the route they took. It did indeed leave the main road and head into the woods, but where Miguel and the boys had found themselves on a dirt track barely wide enough for the motorcycle’s sidecar, Olga turned onto a poorly-maintained gravel road where branches brushed the side of the rental car, but there was still space for the vehicle to get through. They rumbled over bumps and splashed through puddles, and drove down a narrow stone gorge where the side mirrors occasionally threw sparks as the metal scraped rock, all with the Milky Way glowing above them.

“Does any of this look familiar?” Olga asked Socorro.

The little girl shrugged. “It’s different every time.”

Finally the road came to an end, and there it was – a yawning circular hole in the ground, as wide as the I-5, with vegetation trailing over the sides like a waterfall. Olga stopped the car and turned the engines off, and the sounds of the jungle became audible. Birds, insects, and a general rustling of things moving in the trees.

“That little liar!” exclaimed Luisa. “Look, there it is!”

Sure enough, around the other side of the cenote was a motorcycle with a side car.

“He told me he left that in the city!” Luisa got out of the car and stood looking at the machine with her hands on her hips. “I’ll tan his lying hide! I don’t care how old he is! He knows I don’t approve of that contraption!”

Olga went as close as she dared to the edge of the cenote and looked down. Six metres below was the surface of the water, reflecting the sky – and her mind immediately went back to suspicions of murder. This hole in the middle of nowhere was a perfect place to hide a body.

What to do now? Olga had done a bit of SCUBA training, but that had been years ago, when she’d been prepping for the astronaut program and expecting to work in a neutral buoyancy tank. Even if it had been more recent, she had no gear.

If the boys were down there, she thought grimly, she was gonna put young Señor Rivera at the bottom with them. And if she got caught, she’d plead guilty and go to prison with her head held high.

“We need to come back with the police,” Olga said. “They’ll probably have to drain this in order to...” she stopped as Luisa gave a cry – because Socorro had just jumped over the edge into the water.

“You don’t need to drain anything!” the child called up to them. “Just swim down to touch the bottom – like this!” She took a deep breath and vanished under the surface.

“Get your bottom back here!” Luisa shouted.

“I’ll get her,” said Olga. She took a deep breath of her own and dived in after Socorro.

It was too dark to make out anything else, but there seemed to be a dim light at the bottom of the cenote. Olga could see Socorro silhouetted against it, but no other human shapes – which was reassuring for the moment. She kept her eyes straight ahead, and reached out to snag the girl’s skirt, but her hand seemed to go straight through it, and then suddenly Socorro was gone.

A moment later, Olga came suddenly to the surface of the water instead. How had that happened? Had she blacked out and bobbed back up? She scraped her wet hair out of her eyes and looked around, and spotted Socorro, halfway up a rope ladder back to the top. The girl looked back and waved to Olga.

“Come on, we’re almost there!” she said cheerfully.

Olga followed her up. The girl vanished over the lip of the cenote – and then there was a scream. She climbed the rest of the way in a hurry and dragged herself up over the edge, where she found Socorro confronting some horrible half-dog, half-crocodile beast that was about to pounce on her.

There was no time to stop and think. Olga ran up and kicked the thing in the jaw, which made it whimper and stagger backwards. She looked around – the ground was bare and stony, with a few little cacti here and there, but nothing that would make a useful weapon. Olga took her jacket off and wrapped it around her left arm.

“Why didn’t you stay with your mother?” she asked the girl.

“Miguel didn’t tell me about these!” Socorro replied.

A second, similar monster leaped at them from the side. Olga thrust her left arm into its mouth so its teeth would close on the layers of fabric instead of her flesh. It worked, but even so, the thing had a hell of a bite. She was going to have bruises.

Olga threw an arm around the beast’s neck and forced its head back until she heard a snap. She dropped the animal, but to her astonishment rather than lying there limp it staggered away with its head lolling at an impossible neck. Its neck was clearly broken, and yet it was still standing.

“You! What are you doing here?” a voice demanded.

The pack of monsters parted, and a bigger, humanoid, half-skeletal things strode towards them, jingling with jewellery. The last time Olga had seen anything like that was a stone carving in the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City...

“The living may not walk paths reserved for the dead!” this being declared in a deep, reverberating voice.

Olga thrust Socorro behind her and stood up straight. “I’m here to find my nephews!” she said.

“You will see them again when your time comes,” the figure boomed. The dog monsters crowded around it, spittle dribbling from their fangs. “Until then, you are not welcome here, unless you wish to hasten your own end. Leave now, or let my pets rend your limbs from your...”

It was cut short as a sandal hit it in the side of the head.

Luisa came stomping up, hands in fists at her sides, and scooped up the projectile to shake in the creature’s face. “Where is Miguel?” she demanded. “We know he’s here, and he’s got those other two boys with him!”

The monster scowled. “The way is closed to...”

She slapped him with her chancla again. “Stop making excuses! If he can get in here, so can we!”

One of the dog creatures sniffed at Socorro’s skirt. She pulled off one of her own sneakers – they were pink and glittery, with Elena of Avalor on them – and smacked it across the snout, imitating her mother. “Bad doggy!”

“Come on, ladies,” the monster complained. “The gods already think I’m not doing my job right since some of the chupacabras got out thirty years ago, and...”

“That’s your problem, not ours!” said Luisa. “Coronela Solís tried to be polite and you turned her down, so now you have to deal with me!”

Xolotl scowled, but the chipotlis backed off, and the scene around them brightened from an empty plain into a shining and rather precarious-looking city, somewhere at the aesthetic intersection of Las Calaveras and Dr. Seuss.

“Just try to be quick,” the psychopomp pleaded. “If you stay past sunrise you can never leave, and even I can’t do anything about that!”

“We won’t be a moment longer than necessary,” Luisa promised.

Xolotl faded away.

-

The tunnel from the Gates of Xibalba led into the mountain for a hundred metres or so, lit only by flickering torches that flared to life as they approached and extinguished again after the group passed them by. Then the boys spotted a ruddy glow up ahead, and the tunnel opened out into an immense underground space.

Where the city of the dead had been built up into barely-balanced towers, Xibalba went precipitously down, corkscrewing into a deep pit lined with buildings that stuck out at unnatural angles. It was not lit by the sky, nor by lanterns – although there were plenty of those, most of them shaped like the skulls of ghastly unknown animals – but by canals of hot lava, which bubbled and glorped its way through channels and spillways, and even over waterwheels. In places there were barges floating on the lava, overflowing with strange plants and flowers, like a hellish reflection of Xochimilco in Mexico City. The buildings were angular and decorated with gargoyle-like statues, some of which moved unexpectedly or watched the boys pass with eyes like glowing coals.

The new, taller version of Xtabay was not impressed by any of this, the city itself or its monstrous inhabitants, which looked like skeletons but twisted and misproportioned, rather than the human figures of the Land of the Dead. She led Elio and Tommy down the spiralling road, past the baking hot canals, and around a central spire that rose out of the bottom of the pit an also covered in buildings that teetered like an amateur layer cake in a cartoon. In places, struts from the walls were necessary to hold it up.

“Xtabay!” A gorilla-sized creature skittered down the wall to join them, and the boys backed away again. This creature appeared to be made of bones, but those bones were incongruously arranged into the shape of a spider, like a cheap Hallowe’en decoration. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so big. “What have you brought us? Mortals? Living mortals?”

“Twins!” said Xtabay cheerfully. “You know how Papá likes twins.”

“His favourite!” agreed the spider, clacking its bony pedipalps. “What brings you two to the pits of Xibalba, then? Here to challenge the Great Lords, I presume? Determined to be heroes of legend?”

“Uh, no,” said Elio. “We just want to get Tommy a soul.”

The spider cocked is head, then cocked it further, until it turned all the way around like a cartoon owl. “Very good,” it decided. “Best of luck to you! Earning a soul is no easy task.”

“Thank you,” said Tommy cautiously.

“Oh, and they’re so polite!” the spider cackled. “Lord Jun Kame will love you two!”

They continued down and down, until they reached a narrow bridge over one of the lava canals. This was the first time they’d had to cross one, and there were no railings on either side of the path, which was slightly narrower than a sidewalk. Xtabay walked across as if this were nothing, but Elio and Tommy stopped to look down at the gurgling surface, where a skin of dark cool material was wrinkling and sliding as the liquid moved beneath. The heat rising off it made the air shimmer.

Tommy swallowed hard, and looked at Elio. “You don’t have to come,” he said. “I’m the one who needs a soul. You can go back.”

“No way,” said Tommy, squeezing his hand. He’d had to watch Tommy get eaten by the alien blob monster in the ice cream warehouse. He wasn’t going to get separated from his brother in a dangerous situation, ever again. “Aunt Olga would want us to stay together.”

But the idea of crossing that bridge with nothing to stop them falling off was almost unbearable. The boys knew they had to keep up with Xtabay, but...

A chirp made them look up. There was the little hummingbird alebrije. It circled them once, then zipped across the canal. A moment later, the armadillo caught up with them. It paused to look up at Elio and Tommy, then trotted off following the hummingbird, right across the bridge.

This was encouraging somehow. The alebrijes were supposed to be protectors, right? If they were willing to cross, maybe it wasn’t that dangerous.

“Hang on to me,” said Elio. He took a deep breath and slapped his face gently, then started across the bridge. Following the armadillo, he tried to stay in the exact centre, watching carefully where he put his feet. Tommy came after him with his hands on Elio’s shoulders. Hopefully, if one slipped the other could catch him.

The bridge seemed a kilometre long, with the blast-furnace heat making sweat roll down his neck and back, but finally Elio stepped onto the road on the other side. He was shaking a little. Tommy came behind him – and then they heard a cracking sound. The two boys turned around, then cried out and scrambled back from the edge as the bridge crumbled before their eyes. Chunks of stone dropped into the lava below with wet, gloopy noises and sizzles of evaporating water.

Their ragged breathing was so loud that it took them a moment to realize Xtabay was laughing at them.

“What’s so funny?” Elio demanded.

“That’s one of Papá’s favourite pranks!” she said. “Oh, you should have seen the looks on your faces! This way! We’re almost there.”

Ahead of them was the central island towering out of the lava. It resembled a very steep pyramid stretching up towards the cavern roof, which was lost in darkness somewhere high overhead, but the terraces were off centre and at odd angles. There were weird dead dead trees growing out of walls and roofs, and channels of lava trickling down and out the mouths – or backsides – of gargoyles. If the Land of the Dead looked like it was designed by Dr. Seuss, this looked like a product of Salvador Dalí’s nightmares.

The Gates in the mountainside had only suggested a giant set of jaws – the entrance to this central palace made it explicit. It was built to look like the mouth of a monstrous shark, with row upon row of triangular teeth hanging from the lintel and protruding from the ground. The reinforce the impression, there was liquid dripping from the upper fangs, and the intricate rug that spilled down the steps was all in shades of red and came to a forked point, like a snake’s tongue. Inside was hung with tapestries, all in red fabric with ragged ends, as if the whole place was dropping blood.

“We can’t go back now,” whispered Elio, although he wasn’t sure if he were talking to Tommy or to himself.

“No, we can’t. Especially not if I want a soul.” Tommy stood up straighter.

Hand-in-hand, they followed Xtabay up the steps and into the gaping maw.