

BELOVED OF THE SERPENT GOD

SIMONE VARR

Copyright © 2018 Simone Varr

Electronic Book Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author or her designated representative.

People, places and events described in this book are fictional.

# 1: Rescue

The Aztec god Quetzalcoatl was singing to me in a voice that sounded exactly like an ambulance siren. He appeared in his form of a green snake with feathery wings, and hovered right in front of my eyes. As soon as I got a good fix on him, though, I saw he was diminishing, singing the ambulance siren song as he shrank. He reduced rapidly down to a tiny speck, leaving only the noise.

I realized I was hearing a real ambulance siren, and at the same time I thought: that's so stupid, Quetzalcoatl doesn't even come from round here.

Then I remembered the last thing that happened before I blacked out, and I forced my eyes open.

Someone said "She's awake," and I thought: Am I? Am I? Then the clichéd: Where am I?

I didn't ask it though. I was in an ambulance. It was night. I rolled my eyes around and saw two medics, men, one of them looking at me and the other checking something which turned out to be his phone. I was possibly dying and he was checking his phone. Maybe he was playing Candy Crush. I thought that was funny and I smiled, then immediately gasped in pain and felt tears leak out of my eyes like floodwaters, uncontrolled, unbidden.

Smiling hurt.

The one looking at me said: "Okay, don't worry. You got some injuries there. Just nod to me or shake your head, okay? Your name is Dr Elmira Miguel?"

I nodded, very gently.

"Okay. Good. That's good. I have to ask you this: did you take any drugs?"

I shook my head no. He didn't look happy about that.

He said: "You sure? Did any of the people with you take any drugs?"

I hesitated, then nodded. He nodded back.

"Okay. We nearly there. You got some injuries but you gonna be fine. You gonna be all right."

His calypso accent made that into you gonna be eyrie and I smiled again. Then gasped again. Whatever had happened to my face—.

But I remembered what had happened to my face. To my body. To the others.

I had to ask, through shuttered teeth: "How many?"

"Huh? How many what? Your friends? You and four more."

That wasn't good. I swallowed, which also hurt, and asked: "Big fat guy?"

The medic frowned. The other medic grunted something and made a face.

My guy said: "Don't worry, okay? Everything they'll tell you at the hospital. We nearly there. In fact, we there."

From this I inferred that big fat guy was not someone they had retrieved. That made me sadder than I would have expected. It also made me feel defeated.

I felt the ambulance roll to a stop and then they were clattering me out on the gurney, rolling me a few brief yards through the asphalt parking lot. A warm breeze brushed over me and I watched the high, dark sky flash past and then it was bright light and the trauma ward at New City Hospital. I had been fortunate enough not to have to visit it for years, but I recognized it well enough. Somehow we were back on the mainland, in the city. It didn't make sense, and somehow it made me feel even more afraid.

They kept on wheeling me right through the main waiting area and into a curtained off enclosure.

My guy said: "Hope you get well," and vanished, leaving me lying in there alone.

Beyond the curtains I could hear other gurneys being wheeled, I could hear doctors and nurses talking, and I could hear a baby crying. After a few minutes a nurse came in to look at me. She smiled and left me again. My face felt the worst but my whole body felt sore. I knew I had bruises everywhere. I thought I might have cracked a rib. I desperately wanted to get up, to go see about the others, to speak to someone in charge, but it was futile. Even if I hadn't been strapped to the gurney I doubted I could stand.

Besides, I needed to come to terms with this new transition. How was it possible? What had happened? The whole day seemed like a frightening jumble of impossibilities, not the least of which was my current presence in the relatively safe and presumably sane environment of the hospital.

I closed my eyes and let the chemical smells, the squeak of nurse shoes and the jumble of voices lull me. I could not make logical sense of how I had arrived here. Someone would have to tell me, but if they did, would I even believe them? The world before the ambulance seemed surreal and yet somehow more true than the world of medics and hospitals. Okay, it seemed bizarre and unbelievable, but since I'd worked so hard to accept it, the ordinary world now seemed like the fake one.

Or maybe both of them felt fake and that was worrying me the most: that somehow, despite all the physical evidence, I had in fact simply lost my mind.

I shook my head sharply to get rid of that thought. The shaking gave me an instant headache and brutal jabs of pain in my neck and throat. I tried to think of nothing and found it surprisingly easy. Just think of blackness, just sink back under.

Just as I fell back into sleep I'm sure I heard Chloe's voice, right outside the curtained area. I imagined her standing there, having reverted to her whiny, sullen attitude, a hip cocked and one hand fingering her pendant while the other hand flicked cigarette ash on the hospital floor. Well, I imagined that part, what she looked like, but I know I heard her nasal, Yankee voice saying: "I don't remember anything. I don't. Don't ask me."

And as I sank under I thought, and maybe whispered out loud: "That is such a lie, baby girl."

# 2: Kabahuacan

Chloe was the first one of them I noticed. She wasn't dressed the way tourists normally dress for their day-trips out to the island. I was used to seeing jeans, shorts, bermudas, tank-tops and t-shirts, usually in blues and yellows and greens. But Chloe was wearing head-to-toe black, long sleeves on top, flared pants on the bottom, and boots with a heel. She looked like she belonged in a city sidewalk café. She even had the long cigarette in one hand, and that cocked hip stance. You could tell she was rich and you didn't have to hear her speak to know she was American.

You could also tell without looking too hard that they were up to no good, the three of them. For one thing, Chloe looked furtive and agitated, and for another the guy with her kept looking back over his shoulder towards the visitor center. The third person in their group, the other woman, was laughing and kind of dancing around in front of the guy as if she was mocking him. I couldn't see this one's face but something about her whole bearing instantly set my nerves on edge. Tall, shapely young woman in too-tight and too-short denim hot pants, and a black tank top that looked like it was designed for her chi chis to fall out of. She looked like the sort of woman my Kriol friends would call a sketel: euphemistically, a woman used to sexual intimacy with a wide variety of men. Those peroxide highlights at the tips of her brown hair, the sheer clutter of bangles on both arms, the belt around her hips with what looked like shark teeth and darts hanging off it, all made me want to smack the face I hadn't even seen yet. She shimmied sexily and I heard her laugh. It sounded like a jungle bird crying out.

Besides their behavior, their presence here was also a clue to wrongdoing. They had no business down at this marina, where the administrative boats docked. In fact, the whole precinct on the south side of the visitor center was off limits to the public. When I caught sight of them my first thought was to go over and politely help them find their way back, but then I saw the way the sour-faced one was flicking the cigarette in irritation and the way the guy was looking worried, and I thought it best to pretend I hadn't noticed them. They were up at the end of the dock, far enough away to ignore. I went on passing packages up to Gonzalo, the pilot, on board the boat, minding my own business. The kind of misbehavior a tourist could get up to was hardly likely to be serious anyway, I thought. Innocently.

I wish I could say I felt some sort of premonition or that an omen appeared to warn me of what was coming, but there was nothing like that. It was a breezy, bright morning in the Caribbean. White beach sands and blue sky, palm trees and mangrove as far as you could see along the coast. Flamingoes pottered about in shallow water that was so clear it took on the color of the smooth floor beneath it. I was heading back to the mainland for the first time in a few weeks. Since I now lived on the island more than in Corozal City, I struggle to think of the city as 'home'. I wasn't really looking forward to the trip, but family affairs and other administrative duties could no longer be ignored, so I'd resigned myself to two weeks away, dealing with stuff, whereafter I could set up camp for as long as I wanted at the research base on Kabahaucan. The island was the only place I felt like I wanted to be.

That morning I was traveling back on The Tommygoff, one of the boats owned and operated on our behalf by the Ministry of the Environment. There were slower, regular ferries between the city and the island, but sometimes a ferry ride could take up to six hours, which was boring, and in any case then you'd have to be surrounded by tourists, mainly Germans and Japanese and Americans, either raucously misbehaving or making asinine remarks. One of the perks of being a scientist on Kabahuacan was being able to organize a boat ride when you needed it. The Tommygoff was small and swift, and could get you to the mainland in just shy of four hours. More importantly, it left when you told it to, which at that moment was about ten minutes away.

My case was already stowed in the berth and I could hear my other traveling companion, Dr Pilsudski, heaving his gigantic weight around inside the boat, stowing his own cases. Pilsudski was heading back permanently, first to Corozal then home to Florida where he was based. His six-week research trip to Kabahuacan had come to an end. I expected to have to listen to his mild but over-elaborate speeches about what he hadn't been able to achieve, and while I wasn't really in the mood to listen to anyone droning on, if it had to be someone it might as well be him. He wasn't bad. He'd never tried to grope me, for me one thing, not even in that opportunistic, forgive-me-I'm-drunk way you sometimes have to fend off from colleagues. Pilsudski was okay.

Gonzalo, the pilot, was looking down at me from the deck as I handed up parcels and small boxes containing various items of research and notes being sent back by other scientists. I handed up the last one and was about to board when he lifted his chin at something behind me. "You have a visitor."

I checked behind me, then turned. It was the guy from the group of three. He was about my height, with long hair and stubble that I'm sure he thought made him look like a rock star. To be fair he wasn't bad looking but he was a few years younger than me, and even though he wore denim cut-offs and a t-shirt, you could tell the clothes were expensive.

"Hola," he said in a terrible accent, and then: "Need question, please?"

His Spanish was clearly learned in high school and barely used. Obviously, since he'd heard Gonzalo speak and because I look the way I do, he thought he couldn't speak English to us. Or maybe he was just trying to ingratiate himself.

"I speak English," I said, in my flawless English. I was going to follow that up with "What can I do for you?" But I didn't. I glanced past him back at the two women. The one I would come to know as Chloe had walked away from the other one and was sucking on her cigarette, hard, one arm folded across her stomach. The other one, whom I was already uncharitably thinking of as The Puta, was now looking right at me, just standing there without a care in the world and with a sort of leering grin on her face. That grin made me feel cold.

"Oh, cool," said Mr Cool. "Uh, I need to ask a big favor."

Yes, American, and if I wasn't mistaken, a proper Yankee from way up north, somewhere in New England. The phrase 'trust fund baby' flashed into my head, the way these intuitions sometimes do. Probably it was a function of his carefully groomed careless look, the expensive watch, the minimalist tattoo of letters I couldn't read encircling his forearm, and the fact that he'd just outright walked up to someone in the middle of the Caribbean and asked them to do him a big favor without even thinking twice about it. Totally a rich kid.

It didn't take a genius to figure out what the favor was.

"You want to hitch a ride?" I hated myself for putting so much Latina in my accent, but I felt it was a necessary countermeasure to the overwhelming stank of Yank. In fact, I felt it was almost punitive. The way I asked the question did not sound like an invitation. It sounded like a challenge.

Mr Cool let a little shy grin happen on his face, as if it was an accident and not a calculated look-how-sexy-I-am ploy.

Well, yeah," he said. "It's obvious we need it, huh?"

"There's a ferry at three," I said, letting go of the boat rail and squaring to face him head on. "Also, how did you get here? You come with a tour boat?"

"Yeah, we did, we came out from San Pedro Caye, last night in fact. Cruise boat. Day-trip to the science center, you know."

He laughed, as if a day-trip to a science center was really too dumb a thing to believe. I just looked at him, then back at the two women. The dark one was sitting down now, cross-legged on the wood of the jetty with her head in her hands. Slutface was doing a little sexy dance by herself. Mr Cool glanced back at them and looked briefly nervous, then cleared his throat and said: "Yeah, look, my sister is sick and I'd really appreciate it a lot if you could, you know, help us get back to civilization."

"There's a medical facility at the visitors' center. What's the matter with her? Did she get bitten by something?"

For some reason that question made him visibly blanch, but he caught it and controlled it. He laughed again, this time without any sincerity.

"No, no, nothing like that. Look, to be honest she's a little hung over and just not up to hanging out in the sun all day, you know. And we'd really just like to get off the island."

That last part came out with such a rapidity and force that I looked straight into his eyes then and again felt very cold. There was no smile in his eyes, only a sort of incomprehensible distress.

"I'm not sure I'm allowed to carry tourists on a government boat," I said, which was completely true.

"Yeah, but this is, like, a medical emergency. Can't you sort of bend the rules or something?"

His sister was lighting another cigarette. She really didn't look too sick to me. What she looked like was a combination of nervous and angry. She kept fiddling with the chain around her neck and trying to ignore the sexpot, who was now doing an indecent groin-rubbing dance and laughing out loud. Where the sister looked worried and insular, the other one looked like she was performing for a camera no one else could see.

"Is she high?" I asked, pointing. "Are you guys on drugs?"

Mother of God, I sounded like a school teacher. I didn't care if they were on drugs. I didn't care about them in any way at all. I just didn't want to have to ride for four hours with people I didn't know on a boat.

"Everything okay here?" asked Pilsudski from up and behind me. He'd finished slamming his suitcases around below deck and was now leaning over the railing, looking like a friendly ogre. Six and a half feet tall and very wide, balding, beefy. If you saw him at a distance you might think he was one of those white supremacist prison types, but up close he was a just a very large, pale human. He'd spent six weeks on Kabahuacan and he lived in Florida, but somehow the only color other than white you could see on him was a sort of salmon blush around his throat and on his arms, where he'd burned a little.

Gonzalo reappeared at the rail too, and said, in English: "They looking for a lift back." Pilsudski nodded.

"I don't know if we can do that," I said.

Sensing a shift in the drama, and recognizing what he thought was a fellow American, Mr Cool addressed himself to Pilsudski. "Hi, my sister over there isn't feeling too good and we just want to get back to the city as fast as possible." When nobody said anything further, he said: "I mean, we can pay if —."

Pilsudski laughed. "You don't need to pay. Gonzalo, we got room for them, right?"

As he said this he glanced up the jetty to the two women. To his credit his expression did not change when he saw Miss Sex Appeal grinding her hips like she was in the throes of orgasm. He just nodded and looked back at Gonzalo, who shrugged. They both looked at me. They were both going to make me into the bitch.

I sighed. "How much luggage you got?" I asked.

Mr Cool's cute little smile turned into a big easy grin. "A bag each. Nothing to speak of."

I nodded. "Okay then."

I turned abruptly and headed up into the boat as if there was nothing more to be said about it. I didn't look back at them but went down into the cabin. I could hear them tramping up onto the boat, the sexy one laughing her scratchy laugh, the other woman muttering something I couldn't hear. I spent as much time as I needed to make it look like I'd been doing something and then went back up.

Gonzalo and his assistant, a chubby young Maya girl called Akna, were going over a check list on the bridge. Pilsudski had seated himself among the newcomers. The nervous sister was standing up, leaning back against a rail, finishing her latest cigarette, and the other two were sitting with Pilsudski, their canvas rucksacks in a pile at their feet. Sex Machine had stopped laughing and writhing around. She was just sitting now, leaning back lazily with her arms outstretched along the rails on either side of her. Her breasts really did look like they were going to escape her flimsy top at any moment.

Mr Cool, whose name turned out to be Steven, was talking to Pilsudski about the boat. "Tommygoff," he was saying. "That's some kind of snake, right?"

Pilsudski nodded and was about to embark on what I recognized as one of his long-winded, monotonous lectures, but before he could say anything Miss Tits-for-Brains said: "Is a pit viper. You know. A raddlesnake."

She had a smile that can only be described as sincerely depraved on her face. Her voice sounded like it had been pushed through a cheese grater. The accent was unmistakably Mexican. When she finished speaking she ran the tip of her tongue slowly over her upper lip and then looked away and laughed.

Pilsudski beamed at her knowledge but since she wasn't looking at him he faced Steven again and began his boring disquisition about the snakes of the Caribbean. It wasn't his area of specialty — believe or not, his area of specialty was rodents, in particular one species of rodent found only on Kabahuacan — but I felt sure he could quietly harangue an audience for thirty minutes or more about snakes if the need arose. He sounded like he was going to try, anyway.

I tuned out and looked at the two women. It was hard to figure out the dynamic of this group. But since I minored in anthropology, I guess I can guess, right? I figured Steven and his sister, name still unknown to me at that stage, were traveling for fun. I doubted they knew Chica over here socially, so I guessed they'd probably met on their travels. Maybe she'd jumped Steven's bones in a bar, but whatever the case she'd attached herself to them. What I couldn't figure out was why they'd come out to Kabahuacan in the first place. All three of them were under thirty and all three of them, including the currently somber sister, looked like they knew how to party. Kabahuacan tourism was mainly for educational parties, families, middle-aged or old people. You didn't get many hip and happening boozers and drug-takers visiting a culturally protected island sanctuary used primarily as an environmental research facility.

There was something else going on, too. Now that we were on the boat, the sister looked completely fine. She was smoking too much, lighting yet another cigarette right now, but she didn't look wan or ill in the slightest. She was quite pretty in a strictly Anglo, direct-Mayflower-descendant way: perfect skin, dark eyes and lips that had no lipstick on but looked as if they did. Shorter than me and her brother by a good three inches, but healthy, physically, if apparently psychologically distressed. Also inappropriately dressed for a day out on an island or a boat. Up close the clothes were high-end boutique wares. The necklace she kept fondling probably cost a year of my salary or more.

"You doing all right now?" I asked her, trying not to sound skeptical or accusing.

She seemed embarrassed and wouldn't meet my eye. Steven, thankful for a chance to stop listening to Pilsudski, stood up and introduced the women to me. "Chloe, my sister. And this is Silvia."

Silvia looked right at me, smiling, her eyes narrow. "And you?" she said in Spanish.

"Elmira."

She just kept on looking at me and there was a long break in the conversation. Eventually Pilsudski said: "So, where have you been traveling?"

I sat down as the boat engine started up. Gonzalo called out something I couldn't hear but took to mean we were on our way, and a moment later The Tommygoff lurched and started to pull away from the marina. I listened to the men making polite conversation, Steven explaining how they'd been on a trip with friends through Mexico, how they'd got separated in the manner of carefree young people, how they'd met up with Silvia — in a bar; bingo — and decided to travel together. While he talked Chloe said nothing, and Silvia also stayed quiet, just watching everyone the same way I was. Except she was smiling and occasionally snickering to herself.

I examined her as closely as I could without being rude. Up close she looked even sluttier than at a distance. You could almost smell sex coming off her. I had the idea that if you licked her skin she'd taste like sweet butter. I wanted to peg her as the kind of woman owned by a drug lord or a corrupt politician, or if not that then a prostitute of some sort. Okay, maybe not a prostitute, but someone whose livelihood involved attaching herself to tourists with money, rich men who wanted a fun time without consequences. I wanted to peg her that way, but it was hard. Because there was something else there and I couldn't name it. For starters there was a scar on her left thigh that had me staring at it so long she caught me doing it. The scar spiraled all the way around her thigh from the left knee up, making two big coils and disappearing into her tiny hot-pants. Its weird shape told me it wasn't a surgical scar. It looked like nothing so much as a scar left by some kind of barbed-wire restraint.

She saw me looking and said, in Spanish: "You got some questions?"

I started and looked up into her face. She looked predatory. Not angry. Not confrontational. Just poised to bite. Still smiling, though.

Not wanting to admit what I'd been looking at, I said: "The belt. Did you make it?"

Her belt was a simple leather thong, but hanging off it were a couple of dozen ornaments. Now that I looked at it I realized it really was interesting. Shark's teeth, stingray spines, and what looked surprisingly like pieces of obsidian. I stared at these and thought: yes, those are obsidian blades. Some sort of archeological artifacts.

"Where did you get those?" I asked.

She waited a while before answering. "Someone gave them to me. You like them?"

"They look like historical items," I said. "Like they should be in a museum."

"They are historical items. But they are right where they belong."

We looked at each other, both thinking of different things to say and the different ways what we said would make the mood shift. She spoke before I could choose something.

"They used them to cut open their tongues. To use the blood to bring the gods. You know about that?"

I couldn't help laughing. "I specialize in pre-Colombian religion of Central America," I said.

This made her laugh too, slightly mockingly. "Do you really?" she said. She didn't wait for my answer. Instead she turned bodily away from me and switched to English, saying to Chloe: "You sure you feeling bedder now, huh? You so happy now?"

Her tone was unmistakably antagonistic and Chloe averted her eyes. The two men also stopped talking, and waited uncomfortably to see what would happen.

In turning towards Chloe, Silvia exposed the back of her right shoulder to me, and I looked closely at the tattoo there. It reinforced my confusion. I'd seen symbols similar to it before, many times, but not exactly like this one. It was a representation of the Vision Serpent, a winged snake that shows up in various Central and South American mythologies, with different names. Often the snake's mouth is wide open and a human head is emerging from the mouth, showing that the gods or ancestors are using the serpent as a channel to communicate, a means of transport from the other world to this one. But Silvia's tattoo was different. It didn't show a head coming out of the mouth. It showed two legs coming out backwards, as if a full human had got turned around inside the snake and was now being vomited out again in reverse.

The tattoo stopped me from thinking clearly and I felt a cold chill on my skin. At the same time, Silvia said to Chloe: "You think we safe now, huh? You think we going to go home again and be warm? We not, liddle baby girl. We not. We not going home again."

# 3: The Tommygoff

On a normal trip back from Kabahuacan, my activities would include reading, snoozing downstairs, and maybe chatting idly to the pilot or whoever else was traveling with me. If I was feeling particularly ambitious and if the company didn't inhibit me, I might spend an hour sunbathing. At some point we'd break out sandwiches and someone might drink a beer if anyone had remembered to put any in the refrigerator. In this case Pilsudski had made a point of doing so. Since I don't drink alcohol I'd survive on sparkling water.

What would definitely not happen was an all-out party. But that was what it looked like was going to happen now. Gonzalo had started up some music on his portable CD player, as was his norm, and Silvia and Steven stood up to jive. The music was probably not what they were used to listening to, mainly Punta Rock and Brukdown, mixed in with a bunch of 90s Latina hits from people like Elvis Crespo, but it seemed appropriate to the perfect day in paradise, the spraying water and the bright blue sky. Silvia and Steven clicked right into it, swaying and grooving. Within a few minutes Steven introduced a bottle of tequila out of his rucksack.

I thought: this is going to go skew.

My instinct was to go downstairs and read a book or even just lie there alone, maybe snooze if I could. I hadn't wanted anything to do with these people in the first place and I didn't see any reason to keep hanging around them now. My gut-feel that they were trouble was being vindicated and I didn't see why I should deal with the resulting mess. Pilsudski could.

For his part, he seemed amused and entertained, especially watching Silvia gyrate lasciviously. She barely stayed inside her clothes. I felt like I should leave him to it. Maybe he could cap off his largely unrewarding research sabbatical with a blow job on a boat. More power to him.

But I stayed topside because of the deckhand, Akna. Now that we were well out at sea she had drifted away from Gonzalo's side on the bridge and was clearly fascinated by the party animals. She seemed less interested in Silvia, probably because she'd seen plenty of that sort of Latina woman, and more fascinated by the other two. Specifically by Steven. Her face wore a dumbstruck puppy-love look, and she stood shyly near me looking at him, watching him dance and drink as if she'd never seen anything so pleasing.

Mother of Christ.

For some reason there's a disapproving nun who lives in me and this nun could plot out a straight line from Akna standing next to me watching Steven get drunk, and a future Akna with an unwanted baby, abandoned to her miserable life of urban poverty in Corozal City. In between those two points there was Akna plied with alcohol and raped on the open seas. Probably while Silvia lewdly encouraged Steven to do it.

I argued with the internal nun and got her to dial it back a bit: okay, so there's no future pregnancy and there's no rape. But maybe there's still Akna, naive and awestruck, getting plastered on tequila, and maybe there's still drunk Akna screwing Steven, and who knows maybe there's still disgusting Silvia getting involved in that orgy too. Is that bad enough? asked the nun. Does it have to be rape and catastrophe?

I didn't know Akna well at all. In fact, I'd only met her that morning. She was Gonzalo's new assistant, explained as replacing a previous deck-hand whom I only vaguely remembered. Akna was a typical, friendly-looking Mayan girl, probably nineteen or twenty years old, slightly chubby. We'd conversed in Spanish and she seemed pretty fluent in it, but I suspected her English was probably close to non-existent. She didn't seem to follow much of what anyone else was saying while they were dancing and drinking. She stood near me, probably using me as an anchor, and watched them with the expression of someone exposed to exotic wildlife for the first time.

The nun inside told me it was my duty to defend her if necessary, and I accepted that. As it turned out, Steven's penis wouldn't even register as something to worry about in the greater scheme of horror, but I didn't know that yet.

I smiled at Akna and chatted to her casually, asking her questions about where she was from, why she was working on a boat, what she thought about the job and so on. She answered superficially, but I couldn't tell if this was standard adolescent indifference or because I was distracting her from ogling the Americans. My intention had been to try to subtly remind her of who and where she was, to ground her, but since it didn't seem to be working I gave up. I resigned myself to keeping an eye out for serious delinquency. Let things happen and step in when it got unacceptable. Steven motioned for her to come and dance with them, and she did, awkwardly. I figured there was no harm in that as long as he didn't start feeling her up. He didn't look like it was on his mind; yet, anyway. He just danced and drank from the tequila bottle every now and then.

We were completely alone on the ocean, as far the eye could see. This far out from the mainland other boats are scarce, so that didn't surprise me. Once we got closer to the coral reefs we'd see the luxury yachts and snorkeling day-trippers, and probably a crowd of jet-skis, but that was at least another hour away, maybe more. I leaned back against the side of the bridge and felt the breeze smoothing the sunshine over my face like massage cream.

The three dancers seemed to be enjoying themselves, and while Silvia looked outrageously debauched, nothing alarming was going on. Chloe sat more or less opposite me with her back to the bow railing. She'd rolled up the sleeves of her long tee, and was now wearing shades so I couldn't read her eyes. I'd noticed her taking pills earlier and they seemed to have relaxed her. She wasn't looking at the dancers, or the sea, or the sky, but seemed to just be watching the cigarettes burn when she wasn't sucking on them. For his part, Pilsudski was sitting at three o'clock from her, smiling benignly and watching Silvia's ass wiggle in its scrap of denim, without any embarrassment.

Gonzalo's CD player started oozing out the epically celebrated Selena song 'Bidi Bidi Bom Bom', a medium-tempo calpyso-Latina hybrid. Its arrival elicited a shriek of almost girlish delight from Silvia, and even made Chloe smile and shoulder-shimmy while remaining seated. The nun in me reminded me that Selena, the singer, was dead, that she got murdered, that some evil bitch shot her, and the thought modulated my own pleasure somewhat. I glanced at Akna and saw her giving the tequila bottle back to Steven and making a sour face, obviously having drunk some. Missed that, Elmira, said the nun. You're not paying attention.

Steven gave the bottle to Silvia, who wrapped her tongue around the neck and sucked it off a bit, looking at Chloe and then at me. When she saw me looking back at her she grinned her inexpressibly sexual grin and tongued the bottle mouth a couple of times as if to taunt me. I looked away and saw that things really were now getting out of hand. Steven had sat back down and pulled a joint out from somewhere. He lit it and blew dirty plumes of greenish smoke out over the deck. Behind me, Gonzalo said something sharp that I didn't catch, and then Steven was holding the joint out to Akna. I started to rise, Silvia grinned, and I felt right in the middle of something about to get ugly.

Before Akna could decide what to do, Gonzalo called out her name, harshly, and then instructed her to come up on the bridge. She turned at once, looking, to her credit, like a naughty child. She hurried past me and round along the gangway, up to the controls. I heard Gonzalo instructing her to take over driving. Clever thinking, Gonzalo.

I turned and smiled at him but he wasn't looking at me. He was glaring at Steven, his arms folded. Obviously he was taking his Akna duties as seriously as I was. More, in fact. Maybe he had it in hand. Maybe I really could just go below and lie down.

With Steven seated now, the only person left dancing was Silvia. She held on to the tequila bottle, shuffled over to Steven to get the joint, and then boogied back into the middle of the deck, tequila in one hand and joint in the other, alternatively sampling them. Steven leaned back and watched her, and it occurred to me that we were now all four of us positioned almost perfectly equidistant from one another, arrayed around the deck as if it was a ceremonial platform, with Silvia like some kind of sex priestess at the center. She writhed before us as if performing an invocation.

Looking at the faces of the others it seemed they could sense it too, or were at least equally as mesmerized in the moment. Pilsudski's tongue was visibly poking out between the slack lips in his enormous face. Even Chloe had lifted her head and was clearly staring at Silvia as she twirled and snaked to the mellow rhythm. She stuck out first this hip, then the other one, then sucked in her tummy and poked out her chest. It felt like every movement was physically pulling at my skin, as if I was being hypnotized.

That was the first moment in which I wondered if someone had somehow given me a drug. It was a startling thought, but I shook it away as mere paranoia. It was impossible. I hadn't eaten or drunk a thing since they'd arrived. The only exposure, maybe, was to whatever was in that joint, but I was pretty sure it was ordinary weed, and in any case the smoke was caught up by the wind of our forward passage and flung out over the ocean too swiftly to inhale. You could barely catch a whiff of it.

Still, I felt, somehow, not normal.

And I felt sure that it was Silvia doing it to me.

What broke the enchantment was the boat lurching sharply to the left, then correcting. We all slid out of our seats and sprawled, except Silvia, who just took a big step sideways to stabilize herself. She stood there firmly, as if she possessed inhuman physical prowess, indeed supernatural prowess that defied momentum and gravity. I let out a yell as I slid, genuinely shocked and surprised. Behind me I heard Akna cry out too.

When we'd corrected, Silvia laughed. She sucked on the joint, and then pointed antically at Steven, who was picking himself up like a clumsy clown.

From the conversation behind me I inferred Akna had become engrossed in Silvia's dance as much as we all had, and had lost concentration. I picked myself up and deliberately broke the earlier seating arrangement by moving as if to head under to the cabin.

Silvia called out to me: "Hey, where you going?"

"I thought I'd lie down," I said in Spanish. "I don't think you need me."

"Oh, we need you," she said.

Her use of English in reply to me seemed deliberate and significant, either because she wanted to make sure the others could understand our conversation, or for some other obscure reason that hung just out of the grasp of my comprehension. I was starting to feel put upon.

"We need you," she went on. "We need you to tell us about the religions of pre-Colombian Central America."

I stared at her, then shook my head. "I doubt that's an appropriate topic for this kind of party," I said, still in Spanish.

I'd stopped walking. Now I turned to her. I felt it was important to let her see I was neither running away nor afraid of her. That probably seems weird. Why would I run from or be afraid of some tattooed, drugged-up party girl? But it was what I thought. You need to show her that you're not afraid. It seemed important.

"Come back here," she said. "Let's chat." The word chat came out like some kind of slur, something spiky and malignant.

I stood without saying anything, mainly because I wasn't sure what to do. She sucked on the joint, hard and long, one more time, and then flicked it into the wind. Then she methodically screwed the cap back onto the tequila bottle and put the bottle back in Steven's bag. She sat down.

"See?" she said. "We all behaving good now, sister. You can come back."

That pinched. It irritated me that she'd perceived something in me that I hadn't made explicit. It irritated me that she was smarter than she looked, and more complicated, and that I couldn't properly pin her down or box her in my mind.

The irritation must have showed on my face because she raised an eyebrow and snorted, staring right at me. If she'd said anything else at the point I think I might have walked over and slapped her, which would have been even more embarrassing, but Pilsudki intervened.

Gormlessly oblivious to the tension, he said: "Dr Miguel really is an expert, you know. She has been working on Kabahuacan for nearly five years now, overseeing one of the ongoing digs there. They've made some incredible discoveries. Just incredible."

Silvia looked at him without changing her expression, then back at me. "Discoveries, huh? Like what? You finding liddle fat statues down there? Blades like this?" She pointed at the sharp obsidian shards hanging from her belt.

I decided it was best to stay civil. I made my way back to the deck and chose a seat close to Pilsudski. I said: "Yes, among other things. You may not know this but there are artifacts on Kabahuacan that even predate the Maya."

Silvia grinned and widened her eyes at me. Surprisingly, Chloe spoke. She said: "Oh I'm sure Silvia knows all about that."

Silvia ignored her, but Steven frowned and made a face that seemed to say: "Shut up."

I wondered for the first time what exactly they'd been doing on the island. What exactly had made them want to leave so suddenly? Odd that I hadn't really thought about that before. I suppose I'd just taken them at face value: bored and frivolous tourists fed up with staid cultural pursuits, just itching to go back to the bright lights and never-ending carnival of their overfed, luxurious lives. But now I thought: what if something else was going on? What if they wanted to get off the island because of something Silvia did there?

"So, are you a student of pre-Mayan civilization?" I asked Silvia, trying to keep my voice neutral.

"You could say that," she said.

"You could say that," said Chloe, apparently emboldened either by the pills she'd taken or by the fact that someone was confronting Silvia. "Or you could say other things. Not so nice things."

Steven looked mortified but he said nothing. Silvia just laughed lazily and licked her lips. "You want to tell them something, liddle girl? You want to make an announcement? Come on, stand up. Make an announcement."

"Okay, ladies, ladies, ladies," said Steven, trying to sound cool but sounding slightly nervous. "Let's not, let's not, you know. Let's not."

"Let's not what?" said Chloe. "Let's not fight? Does it make you upset when we fight, Steven?"

He just looked at her. Silvia said: "I'm waiding. You gonna make an announcement?"

The more antagonistic she became to Chloe the more stereotypically Mexican her accent became. She was veering close to Speedy Gonzales at this point.

Pilsudski, either genuinely obtuse or artful, said: "I'm confused. I feel like I missed something."

You probably did miss something, I thought. You were too busy checking out Silvia's chest and booty, so you probably did miss something.

His remark broke the tension, though. Chloe waved her hand as if dismissing the whole thing and dug around in her rucksack for the inevitable next cigarette, which she lit. She pointedly turned her face away.

"So," said Silvia, turning back to me. "You find anything down there from the underworld?"

I hesitated, trying to parse the question. The way she phrased it seemed calculated. From the underworld?

In fact, her question was remarkably on point. One of the things unearthed about a year before, which we'd been studying and felt able to now conclusively describe and contextualize, was a ritual bladed ball. The artifact was about the size of a baseball, carved out of jade. The 'blades' were also merely carvings, ornamental, so it was not a functional ball but a symbolic object meant to be used ceremonially. It was probably not pre-Mayan. Most of us thought it was probably only a few hundred years old, but it was still a significant find. The bladed ball was a mythic object recorded in different pre-Colombian mythologies, but of especial significance to the Maya. It was, in mythology, used in the ball court in Xibalba: the Mayan underworld.

I said: "Yes, some items. Are you thinking of anything in particular?"

The thought occurred to me that maybe Silvia was, incredible as it seemed, some sort of artifact thief. It was a stretch of the imagination but it did make a kind of shaky sense, especially helping to explain her possession of several obsidian blades of historic significance. It might also explain why the three of them were so jumpy. Had Silvia tried to pilfer something from the visitor's center? Worse, had she succeeded? I glanced at the rucksack I knew was hers, involuntarily. Did it contain a stolen item?

Silvia, watching me closely, laughed. "I'm thinking of nothing in particular," she said. "I'm thinking of worshipping the sun god."

Without further notice she took off her tank top. She folded it into a neat square, which she placed between her feet, and then leaned back against the boat rail, topless and smiling at me.

Chloe said: "Jesus Christ."

Steven giggled like he was twelve. Pilsudski remained expressionless, but his eyes were fixed on Silvia's naked breasts.

I thought about the timing of this extreme distraction. Had she sensed my suspicion? Was she trying to break my concentration?

Silvia said: "By the way, you like my tattoo?"

She indicated her shoulder with her thumb, but didn't turn to show me the tattoo again. Obviously she was aware that I'd examined it earlier, and this annoyed me again. She was more alert than she looked, by far.

"You recognize it, doctor expert?"

She relaxed even more, extending her arms either side of her on the boat rail. She seemed completely at ease without her shirt on.

"Acat gave it to me," she said. "A special gift."

Pilsudski, fumbling over his dry mouth and still staring at her breasts, said: "A — cat?"

"Acat," I said. "Believe it or not, he's the god of tattooing."

"Very good," said Silvia languidly. "You get one gold star. So, you recognize that symbol?"

"To be honest I haven't seen one exactly like that before," I said. "Usually the person coming out of the serpent is coming out head first."

Silvia was looking straight at me, as if no one else was with us.

"So, doctor expert, what you think that means?"

I thought about it. Hard. Had I seen anything like that, even once? Heard about it? I didn't want to, but I said: "I honestly don't know."

"You honestly don't know, huh? Okay." She stopped smiling and switched to Spanish, leaning forward a little. She said: "Well, I do know. And maybe if you stick with me you'll know soon too."

The way she was looking at me made me feel physically unsettled. It was as if I could feel her eyes touching my face, like fingers. I flinched and jerked my gaze away, which made her laugh softly. She looked over at Pilsudski, licked her lips and shimmied her shoulders so that her breasts jiggled at him. Both Steven and Chloe were just looking at the deck of the boat now, their faces solemn.

I thought: this is completely crazy. How did we get embroiled in this ludicrous drama? And why am I taking it seriously?

Still, despite my rationalization, it felt like I was — like we all were — in some kind of unspecified danger.

"I have to go lie down," I said.

Again I wondered if it was possible that someone — Silvia, obviously — had slipped me some kind of drug at some point. I felt distinctly unwell. Not sick so much as shifted. I felt as if I was half an inch outside myself, disoriented and slightly dizzy.

Chloe looked up as I stood, and said: "I really don't think that's going to help," which made Silvia laugh. Not the loud bird-laugh of earlier, but a dry, husky sort of laugh like seeds shaking in a bowl.

I looked from one to the other, Silvia to Chloe, then at Steven, then Pilsudski. The whole scene had a sudden air of isolation. The sky was still blue, the spray still warm and wet, the breeze still smooth. But something sick had come to cut us off from sanity.

"I really need to lie down," I said, and without waiting for another word I walked back past the bridge towards the ladder that would take me down to the cabin. Akna was still steering the boat, trying not to look at Silvia. She looked chastened, as if she had realized at last that the party people were unsavory. Gonzalo was staring at Silvia, but not with any kind of lust. His face bore an expression of simple hostility that reassured me, somehow. As I passed him he shook his head and said, softly enough so only I could hear: "That bitch is bad news."

I nodded assent and slid down the ladder to the cabin level. Inside the cabin I sat down on one of the bunks and assessed myself physically. I did not feel nauseated, nor did I have any pain. But I still felt slightly confused and as if my thinking was muddled.

I tried to relax and let the gentle, rhythmic pitching of the boat lull me. But I kept hearing Silvia saying "Acat gave it to me". That sentence circled round the inside of my skull repeatedly. She'd said it in a matter-of-fact voice, as if it was nothing worth getting excited about, but it was a very weird thing to say. Wasn't it?

I felt as if somehow I couldn't really judge reality accurately any more, the way you sometimes can't when you're over-tired or too excited. I felt as if I needed to just lie down and sleep. Maybe I'd wake up at the port and they'd already have disembarked. That seemed like a cheery prospect. But it also seemed fake, as if it could never happen.

I put the toe of one shoe on the heel of the other to kick the shoe off, and at that precise instant an excruciating bright flash exploded in the air around me. It made no sound but seemed somehow to sizzle.

I thought: I'm having a stroke.

But I seemed to be fine, not losing consciousness or falling to the floor. A moment later the impossible sound of thunder rolled down the well of the galley into the cabin.

I slipped my heel back down into the shoe. The light seemed to have thickened and gone gray. I stepped out of the cabin door into a sudden and inexplicable cold. Above me the sky was, indeed, unaccountably dark, with murderous black clouds smashed up in it. I just stared at it as the wind kicked up and the boat suddenly swung left, then right, then left again, violently, pitching me off my feet and back head over heels into the cabin. I hit my head on the way, and could only concentrate on that pain, to the exclusion of all else, for several seconds. Then lightning flashed again and then more thunder slammed into the air around me, much louder and longer and closer by, this time. I scrambled to my feet and ran out, back up the ladder as the boat yawed, seemingly out of control.

My head came up to deck level but I couldn't see anyone. There seemed to be no one at the controls. Panic froze me at the top of the ladder, staring. I thought I heard a voice, possibly Silvia's voice, shouting something, the same thing over and over again, but I couldn't discern if it was English or Spanish or maybe some other language. The ocean was chopping up all around us, noisily. The wind howled, and then more thunder drowned out every other sound.

I pulled myself up onto the deck and instantly lost my footing again, grabbing onto the heaving rail to prevent myself from going overboard. I clung on as we swung into a wall of wind, trying to see if I could see anyone else.

The only person that I saw was Silvia, standing in the bow with her legs planted in a wide, strong stance, her back to me, her arms opened to the heavens and her head back. She was shouting something, for sure. And she was standing completely unaided, as if the wildly swinging boat, the wind, the thunder, was barely noticeable to her.

I stared in incomprehension, and then a loud crashing noise seemed to consume everything in the world. I thought: we've hit something. And then I thought: or something has hit us.

The boat pitched up as if it was tipping over. My eyes were shut so I couldn't see what happened to Silvia, but surely even she could not stand fast in the face of this upheaval. I clung on to the rail in desperation, and then everything around me seemed to soften and thicken, and I thought: here I go, I'm going to faint.

And I fainted.

# 4: Night shift

In the hospital I woke and knew that several hours had passed. I came up out of sleep slowly and although I could not remember any details of my dreams, I knew I had been dreaming furiously. All that I remembered was a phrase that at first I could not make sense of: Pilsudski's voice saying something again and again. As I surfaced into the world of ordinary things and ordinary problems, the phrase resolved into the words "Pharomachrus mocinno". Yes, Pilsudski repeating that, I'd dreamed it. But I also felt sure he'd actually said it to me, in that same somewhat supercilious tone of voice, in real life.

Whatever real life was.

The phrase was the name of a bird, the latin name. Pharomachrus mocinno is the resplendent quetzal, a red-breasted, blue-tailed forest bird. Why had Pilsudski named it to me? I couldn't now remember, neither in the context of the dream nor in the context of something that might really have happened.

My head hurt. I opened my eyes and was not surprised to find myself lying in a hospital bed in the dark. The ward was lit feebly by lights from machines near the beds of other patients, and away to my left there was a lighter patch, caused by an ajar door allowing in the fluorescent whiteness of the corridor beyond.

I moved my head to get a better sense of my whereabouts, and also to see how bad it felt. It felt bad. It felt like my vision was dragging behind the motion of my head, a balloon in the wind. It made my stomach lurch. I reset my head to its starting position, closed my eyes, breathed in, breathed out. I was in a hospital ward, eight or so beds in total, most occupied, from what I could tell from my brief reconnaissance. Possibly some of them contained my traveling companions. My fellow victims, maybe was a better way to think about them.

But not Pilsudski. I remembered that: the faces on the paramedics from earlier, telling me without telling me that Pilsudski really wasn't coming back.

I kept my eyes closed a while longer to see if I would drift off again or wake up fully, and it turned out to be the latter. I opened my eyes and moved my head again, experimentally. This time I didn't feel so queasy. Good. What I did feel was in pain, and swollen. My whole face felt hot and wet like some kind of sticky pudding. More than one headache throbbed arhythmically and sharply in different parts of my skull. My throat was dry. Continuing the mental scan downward I found aches in my chest, a sore hip, very sore lower back (possibly from lying down, that), and various small stings and scratches on my arms and legs.

Despite all this suffering, I didn't feel overwhelmed. It felt like damage I could handle. The hospital obviously thought so too because besides a drip in my arm I wasn't connected to any equipment. I couldn't tell what the drip was feeding me, but my thoughts felt clear enough so I figured it wasn't a heavyweight sedative. Maybe just a mild pain killer. Very mild, I thought. Too mild. I could still feel a lot of pain.

Somewhat predictably my most urgent problem was needing to pee. I knew without looking that there would be a bed pan nearby, either at the foot of the bed or under it, and I knew just as well that I had no intention of peeing in a pan. But peeing was required and that meant first standing, then walking. Well, first sitting up. Let's try that.

I inhaled deeply and made myself sit up, putting my hands out either side in case of vertigo. But there was no drama. It hurt, especially in the hip and head, where the various evil drumbeats doubled in number and intensity. But I didn't get dizzy, I didn't throw up, and I didn't pass out. Positive.

It took a while longer to get onto my feet, mainly because I got a leg tangled in the blanket and wrenching it out hurt the hip so much I gasped out loud and felt tears boil out of my burning eyes. I caught my breath for a minute and then tried again with greater care. Soon I was standing upright like a risen ghoul. Whoever had handled me had taken off my clothing and inserted me into one of those blowsy, frail gowns they have in hospitals, the ones that seem to be designed for the sole purpose of exposing your buttocks. Fortunately I was still wearing underwear.

The thought of falling out of my clothes made me think of Silvia, and that made me think of where we'd all been. I clutched both hands onto the fairly unstable drip stand to provide some certainty. It shifted on its wheels and I nearly went comedically sprawling like a cartoon through the blue-lit dark.

Don't think about Silvia. Don't think about anything. Think about peeing.

There was probably a pair of complimentary slippers somewhere but I didn't bother trying to find them. I just shuffled barefoot down the length of the ward to the white outline of the slightly open door. I didn't look left or right and couldn't tell who was in the other beds or if any of them were watching me. If they were they didn't say anything.

I'd find the others later, I thought. Find them and try to piece everything together.

It hurt to walk, especially in the hip, and my headache felt increasingly like the sharp point of an axe or — ha ha — an obsidian blade, being punched into my skull at random points. I formed the very clear thought that as soon as I'd sorted out my bladder I would find a nurse or doctor and demand — demand! — opiates.

Once out in the bright corridor, everything felt paradoxically more normal. The light hurt my eyes but the whole world felt material and familiar again. Just a corridor in a hospital. There's the toilet sign. Go.

I made my slow way to the toilet, pulling my drip along with me like some kind of apologetic totem. Once seated and peeing I felt amazing relief that made me think: it's going to be fine. You're going to be fine. Here you are peeing. That's normal. That's fine.

Hung on the toilet door, a colorful bird looked at me from inside a framed print. I felt sure the bird was a resplendent quetzal, red chest and blue-green tail feathers and all. Looking at me as if smirking. As if saying: now, really, liddle baby girl, you think you in the real world? You not in the real world any more.

I swore at the bird, wiped, flushed, and made my slow way back out into the real world. It better be the real world. Fluorescent light, the smell of antiseptic, and that round-the-corner squeak of nurses' shoes.

Instead of entering the door that led back into my ward, I plodded past it and followed the corridor round to a nursing station. A clock on the wall told me it was just after three in the morning, but it hurt my head to do arithmetic and I couldn't calculate how to feel about that. Did it make sense? Was time back to normal again?

I leaned on the counter at the nursing station and maybe two minutes passed. Then a nurse came hurrying over from wherever she'd been. She bore the common mixture of concern and anger that characterizes nurses' faces: concern about my health and anger at me for not staying in bed.

"I want to talk to a doctor," I said. "Or, wait, really, anybody. First I want some oxy or something."

"You go lie back down and I'll bring you something. You go lie back down."

"I want to talk to a doctor."

"Doctor be round to see you, I promise you. First you go lie back down now."

I looked at her. She was a round-faced, short and dusky woman, fussy-looking and sure of herself. I felt weak and not up for an argument, but on the other hand I'd just survived either a total psychotic break or a supernatural battle with the incomprehensible forces of darkness, so I wasn't going to get pushed around by a chamaca in a uniform. I was preparing myself to resist when I saw another woman approaching, this one wearing jeans and hip-hop sneakers under her white coat. Not a nurse, then.

"Doctor," I said as loudly as I could, but there was no need to try to catch her attention: she was coming right for me.

"Doctor," she said back, with a little smile. "Doctor Miguel?"

"Yes. Not the same kind of doctor. You're the kind I'm looking for."

"Okay. But I think I heard someone telling you to get back into bed."

The nurse nodded, but stepped away, back round the counter of the station. She picked up some papers and started writing on them, not looking at us.

"She did," I said. "And I will. But I need to know what's happened."

The doctor's smile changed slightly into a bemused one. "So does everyone else. We were hoping you could tell us."

We looked at each other. I didn't know what to tell her so I told her nothing. After a long silence she said: "You don't remember anything?"

"I remember everything," I said. "But what I remember is hard to explain."

"Okay. Right now I only need to know one thing. Your friend Señor Flores: did he get bitten by something?"

I frowned at her. Who the —? Flores? Oh, wait. "You mean Gonzalo?"

"Yes, Gonzalo Flores. He's a — boat pilot?"

"He's the pilot." I confirmed. "Is he okay? He's not in there?" I pointed back towards the ward I'd woken in.

She shook her head. "No, no. Miss Tep is in there but she's not seriously ill, as far as we can tell. She's injured, obviously. In the face, mainly. Mainly in the mouth. She's had a severe shock and she wasn't able to speak or even write anything down, when she was awake. But we don't think she's at any great risk. Unless you know different?"

I assumed she was talking about Akna, but to be sure I said: "Mayan girl?"

"That's right. Akna, is it? Akna Tep?"

"She's not badly hurt? She isn't — stabbed?"

"She has been stabbed and cut, yes. Her mouth is especially badly damaged. But as far as we can tell she has no life-threatening injuries, unless she got concussed? Do you know if she hit her head?"

"I don't know. It's possible. Listen, I know I look like I'm on top of the world and everything, but I really need to sit down." The doctor, the nurse, the corridor, all were starting to drift and swim before me.

"I told you to lie down," said the nurse, pleased with herself. But she came out from behind the counter with a plastic chair and I slumped into it.

I breathed deeply a few times and the world corrected back into the ordinary number of dimensions.

"Believe it or not," I said, "I think I'm hungry."

I was suddenly ravenously in need of food. I'm not a huge fan of red meat, but a vision of a rib-eye steak swam up in my mind and I almost gagged with desire.

"I'm pretty sure you can't chew," the nurse said. "But maybe I get you a drink?"

I nodded and she squeaked off in her nurse shoes. The doctor squatted in front of me to look into my face.

"We're going to need to get a complete account of what happened, at some point. But right now, as I say, I need to know about Señor Flores. Did something bite him? A snake maybe?"

I looked at her. Had something? I didn't remember that. I remembered a snake all right, more than one. But did one bite him?

"I can't remember that," I said. "Does he have a bite mark?"

"We can't find anything," she said, shaking her head. "But he's in a deep comatose state and we don't know why."

"Blood loss?" I asked, confused. "Didn't he lose a lot of blood?"

She shook her head. "If you mean the cut on his throat, no. That missed the arteries. I'm sure he bled and it must have looked bad but that shouldn't have done this to him."

We looked at each other. I felt groggy and didn't know what to say. She said: "So if something did bite him, you didn't see it."

I shook my head. "I don't think anything bit him. A snake attacked him, but I don't think it bit him."

She frowned. "So there was a snake?"

Didn't I just say more than one? No, wait, I didn't say that out loud. I was getting tired and confused. The nurse came back with sweet, milky tea in a paper cup and I drank a gulp. It was simultaneously heavenly and excruciatingly sore. I started crying quietly, from the pain in my mouth.

"I have to lie down," I said. "I need oxy or morphine." I sounded like an injured child, even to my own ears.

To her credit, the nurse didn't take the opportunity to applaud herself again. She and the doctor helped me to my feet and walked me back towards the ward. I had so many questions but I couldn't articulate any. My face just hurt a lot. Too much.

I wondered about the Americans, Chloe and Steven. The doctor had said nothing about them. Nor about Silvia, but if what I remembered was accurate then Silvia, like Pilsudski, was gone, gone, gone.

At the door of the ward the doctor asked me again: "So there was a snake? Do you remember what it looked like? What kind of snake?"

I remembered perfectly. But all I said was: "Big. Big snake. Really very big snake."

# 5: Stranded

But before the snake there was the beach. Waking up on the beach and thinking: Elmira, if you're so highly educated and so damn smart, how come you don't know enough not to fall asleep without sunscreen on the beach?

I came up out of slumber, lying on my stomach with my cheek in the sand and a quantity of inelegant drool pooled under my open mouth. Very deep sleep, lots of confusion, not sure what I'd been dreaming or where I was. Assuming, in the initial moments, that I was on a break, that I'd gone sunbathing and stupidly fallen into a doze. Expecting my back and neck to be burned and sore, expecting to feel badly dehydrated.

Then remembering something else: The Tommygoff, a crazy storm, a topless woman summoning demonic forces. Was that the dream?

I pushed myself up onto my knees and rubbed my eyes. I wasn't sunbathing. I was wearing what I'd been wearing in 'the dream': my jeans and t-shirt and my sneakers. I also wasn't sunburned, so I couldn't have been lying down for long. I did have pain, though. My hands felt swollen and I had light bruising on both arms. From clinging to the boat rail in the storm.

That was no dream.

I dropped back flat on my ass and took stock of where I was. A beach, the sea at my back, I could hear. Running both ways down the beach, as far as I could see, was very thick tropical forest. I didn't recognize the location.

Shipwrecked, I thought. It almost made me want to laugh, it seemed so bizarre.

Two other people lay nearby, one each to my left and right. One was Akna. She lay curled up like a child, her feet towards me and one hand underneath her head. As soon as I saw her I leaned over to see if she was hurt, how badly, or if she was even alive. But she looked totally fine. Her face was flushed the way some faces get in deep sleep, and she was snoring. Her eyelids fluttered and when I leaned over her she let out a muttered utterance that I couldn't understand, probably in Mayan. Then she shifted as if trying to get more comfortable, and went on sleeping.

The other person sleeping beside me was Silvia. She lay opposite Akna, her feet nearest me and her head further away. She lay on her stomach with her head turned sharply to one side, her arms at her side. Still topless, her naked back exposed. She was also fast asleep, breathing deeply and rhythmically. She also appeared to be uninjured.

Shipwrecked? I thought. I looked up at the sky. Not a cloud in it, just endless blue in every direction.

I closed my eyes and tried to make some sort of sense of the situation. I again wondered if I'd been drugged and again concluded that it wasn't possible. I don't have a wide experience of drugs, but I have enough to know that there isn't any drug that could leave you this clear-headed and this physically unimpaired while also dropping you into some hallucination so complete it could not be distinguished from reality. I had to accept that what seemed to be real was, in fact, real. That here I was, sitting on a beach with two sleeping women. One of whom had probably made this happen, by means unknown to me. By means I could not even speculate about.

I opened my eyes and turned to the ocean. About thirty yards away stood The Tommygoff, its prow up on the beach and its stern in the water. It was shifting very subtly with the motion of the surf, but it looked secure. There was no obvious hole in it anyway, at least not on the side exposed to me. More importantly, two men stood in front of it, also looking pretty healthy, apparently arguing with one another. These were Pilsudski and Gonzalo, the big white bald guy looming over the compact dark guy, both gesticulating. I couldn't hear their words but scraps of their agitated voices splintered off towards me.

I wondered where the Americans were. A brief flash of panic rose up in me as I imagined them drowned, flung off the boat in the storm, their bodies gone forever. Had I really let them hitch a ride only for them to end up dying on me?

I looked at the two women nearby, both still fast asleep, and then got to my feet. Besides the pain in my hands and arms I felt physically fine. I brushed beach sand off the front of my body, off my knees and thighs, and then trudged down towards the arguing men. As I walked, I looked along the line of surf and saw someone sitting in the water. Just sitting, lumpenly, looking out to sea. It was Chloe. She had her knees up to her chest and her arms around them. Alive at least. And then as I got closer to the boat I saw Steven. He looked like he had just woken up as well, standing on the deck near the rail, wiping his eyes and yawning.

All accounted for, then. I felt relief, just a tiny smattering of it. It was like a thin cloth laid down as a shroud over a mess of panic. At least, whatever other craziness was happening, I didn't have to feel as if I had anyone's blood on my hands.

I drew up alongside Pilsudski. From a few yards away I'd heard him talking, saying: "Well, where do you think we could be? What is this place?"

Gonzalo was just shrugging and saying: "I don't know. I don't know. I don't know."

He looked pretty shaken, Gonzalo, somewhat pale in the face and wide-eyed. He also had some kind of mark on his cheek. As I draw close to Pilsudski I saw he had a similar mark, and I recognized it as the impression created on their faces by having the rough surface of a tarpaulin pressed into them while they slept. So they'd also been asleep, but obviously on the boat and not the beach.

Something about that pricked an unformed thought way back underneath my consciousness, but I couldn't identify any meaning in it, so I let it slip away for now.

I said: "Which one of you woke up first?"

From up above at the boat railing, Steven called down: "Listen, where the hell are we? What happened?"

Everyone turned to look up at him. He looked annoyed. "Well?" he demanded.

"Come down here and let's talk about this," I said.

He stretched and yawned again, then hurdled the boat rail and landed in a crouch on the soft sand. He stood up grinning. "Are we in that TV show now? Are we shipwrecked?"

"Ship doesn't look wrecked to me. Gonzalo?"

"Ship is fine," he said. "I mean, no, I don't know if the ship is fine, but the ship is not gonna sink. There's no holes in it."

"Have you tried to start it up?"

He made a face. "I just woke up, okay? I haven't tried anything."

I came back to my first question: "Who woke up first?"

He pointed at Pilsudski, who nodded. "It was me," he said. "On the boat, anyway. I think obviously Chloe woke up first on the beach."

He pointed to where she was still sitting in the surf. She hadn't moved. I had the uncharitable thought that she was probably yearning for a cigarette.

Steven glanced over to her, seemingly barely interested, and then said: "So, go on. You woke up. Where were you?"

"On the boat. We all were. We three. The women were on the beach."

"Well how did that happen?" asked Steven, slightly belligerently. "How come we were split up into boys and girls?"

Pilsudski pouted and shook his head. Gonzalo shrugged.

"Look," said Pilsudski. "I woke up and then, like, a minute later Gonzalo woke up."

"Chloe?"

"I told you I don't know. I didn't notice her till later. Gonzalo and I —. We sort of shouted at each other for a bit. Then Gonzalo came down off the boat to check it for damage and I followed him. That's when I noticed Chloe. She was walking towards the water, and then she just sat down. I started talking to Gonzalo again and then you woke up, and then you woke up." This last to me and Steven. "And here we are."

Somehow this was enormously unsatisfying. I closed my eyes and rubbed my face.

"First thing we gotta do is see if the boat works," said Gonzalo. "So I'm gonna do that, okay?"

"I'm coming with you," said Steven. He seemed the most agitated. For some reason he seemed to suspect all of us of wrongdoing. He and Gonzalo shifted round to the other side of the boat to board it and I heard them clattering up, talking in short utterances that didn't sound immensely polite.

Pilsudski sat down in the sand and looked up at me. "Do you have a theory?" he asked.

I shook my head. "I have nada. Well —."

"Say it. Silvia, right?"

"Yes. I was in the cabin when the storm came. What do you remember?"

He frowned. "Storm?"

"Big thunder and lightning storm."

He pouted again and shook his head. "I must have already blacked out," he said. "I don't remember a storm." He looked at me with skepticism. "You sure this happened?"

"I know it sounds impossible, but it happened."

"Okay, well I know nothing about that. I remember you went down into the cabin and then I looked at Silvia and then —." He fell silent, frowning, apparently examining thoughts inside his head.

"And then?"

"I really don't remember. She stood up, raised her arms. That's it. That's what I remember. She raised her arms and then I felt like I was fainting." He tongued a bad taste out of his mouth. "I felt really sick, you know, like puking. And I felt myself begin to faint. And then this. Waking up." He looked at me thoughtfully. "So you remember a storm?"

I told him what had happened. I left out the bit about Silvia defying the laws of physics, just saying that I'd also seen her holding her arms aloft. He looked past me up the beach to where she and Akna were still sleeping.

"So you thought we crashed?" he asked. "Because the boat looks fine. There's no damage."

I was going to say again that I was sure we'd hit something, but Steven leaned over the railing above us.

"Boat is not fine," he said. "No holes, but nothing works. None of the instruments, anyway."

Gonzalo came round the side of the boat, nodding. "Instruments are dead."

I thought about this. "So even if we get her out on the water and moving, we can't navigate."

"Correct. No GPS, nothing."

"We can navigate by the sun," said Pilsudski. "Right? I mean, we can know what direction we're going."

Gonzalo made a face. "We got no information. Not even a fuel gauge. If we don't know where we are, we don't know how far we have to go, and we don't know how far we can go. Also, no radio. No way to send a mayday. We pretty much stranded right here, even if the boat works. Mechanically. Me, I rather stay here a while and try to figure something out than get out on open water if I got no idea where I am."

"Well, where could we be?" asked Steven, still looking down from above. "I mean, seriously, how far away from where we were could we be?"

Everybody shook their heads.

"Any of you got a phone or anything?" I asked.

I didn't bother keeping a cell phone, myself. I told everyone this was because there was no cell reception on the island, but really I just didn't see the point. If someone wanted to contact me they could phone the admin office. The others all had phones, however. Steven's was smashed and unresponsive. The other two phones, although apparently undamaged, would not turn on.

"Batteries flat?" asked Pilsudski. "I had nearly a full battery. So if the battery ran out we must be, I don't know —. More than a day later?"

This rendered everyone silent for a while. I walked a little way away from the others to try to think. Judging by the sun it was early afternoon. The — event, let's call it — had happened around mid-day. So there was a logic in assuming only an hour or so had passed. But how to account for the phones? Could their dysfunctional state be related to the dysfunctional state of the ship's instruments, and have nothing to do with the batteries? The phrase 'electromagnetic pulse' popped into my head but I didn't really know why I'd thought of it or if it was even plausible or relevant. Maybe I had heard about it in a TV show. Still, there were a couple of competing ideas here: either all electronics were dead for the same reason, in which case it was possible only a short time had passed, or the phones were dead because their batteries had run out, in which case quite a lot of time had passed.

I had no way of deciding which of those ideas was more likely.

What I did have was an analogue wrist-watch. It still seemed to be functioning fine, the little second hand ticking around the face. I walked back to the others.

"It's half past one," I said. "I don't know what day it is, but it's half past one."

Obviously struggling with the same concerns I had, they all just looked at me as if this information solved nothing. They were right.

I had my back to where Silvia and Akna were lying. Gonzalo, looking past me, indicated with his eyebrows for me to look, and there was Silvia, brushing sand off her front just the way I had done. Except, of course, most of her front was unclothed. She looked almost sweet, blinking and yawning, kneeling in the sand like some kind of glamour model. She rubbed her face with both hands and looked over to where we were gathered in the shadow of The Tommygoff's bow.

A sly grin ruined the sweet illusion. She waved at us slightly sarcastically, then spent a few seconds looking at Akna before getting up and pointedly walking further away from us, up the beach towards the tree line.

"She doesn't look too surprised," Gonzalo said to me, in Spanish. "Wakes up wherever we are, on a beach somewhere, just smiles and waves."

Pilsudski, whose Spanish was non-existent as far as I knew, said in English: "She's not reacting the way any of us did."

"Well, why would she?" asked Steven. "She probably did this to us."

I agreed with him, but I didn't want to have that conversation now. Mainly because I had no way of even beginning to explain how she might have done this to us. My current best theory was 'witchcraft', which wasn't any sort of explanation I wanted to voice.

I said: "Just before I lost consciousness there was a thunderstorm. Do either of you remember that?"

Gonzalo and Steven both frowned and shook their heads. Steven said: "I don't remember jack, to be honest. I remember you walking away and then I woke up on the boat. Literally. I don't even remember fainting or anything."

Gonzalo said: "I don't remember no storm. You came by, you went down the ladder, I blacked out. Like, everything just went black. That's it."

Pilsudski told them his version and again we all just looked at each other.

"Seems you were awake longest then," Pilsudski eventually said to me.

I nodded. "Me and her."

Silvia had walked quite a distance from us now, maybe two hundred yards, keeping close to the trees. Strolling along like a holidaymaker. Or, no, like she was looking for something.

Well, until she decided to take further action there was no point worrying about what she was up to. The four of us got back onto the boat, mainly, I think, because it felt somehow less distressing, more familiar to us, then conferring on the beach. I reconnoitered the cabin and, back up on the deck, told the others how much food and water we had (not a lot) and that the refrigerator was also dead, so the meat sandwiches in there would go off sooner or later. I'd sniffed at them and they smelled okay, another indicator that not too much time had passed. For the rest, there were no meaningful clues on the boat, nothing to help us figure out what might have happened. Everything moveable that had been topside had presumably been lost overboard. This included, specifically, Steven's, Chloe's and Silvia's bags.

Steven disembarked again and sploshed through the surf to where Chloe was sitting. She looked up at him and then went back to staring out to sea. He stood over her for a few seconds and then plopped to sit next to her. I couldn't hear anything they were saying, but I could see her responding to him and she looked calm, so that was good.

Pilsudski, Gonzalo and I formed an impromptu task force up on the deck.

"So," said Pilsudski. "Are we taking bets about where we might be?"

I couldn't see Silvia anywhere any more. I watched the tree line for a while and she emerged from it, looking over to us. Then she carried on walking away. Pilsudski repeated his question.

I said: "My gut —. I don't know."

"Your gut what?"

"I don't know how much sense this makes," I said. Pilsudski and Gonzalo, like a comedy duo, made astonished faces. "Okay, okay. I think this is Kabahuacan."

Pilsudski looked like he hadn't thought of that before, but now that he did, it seemed plausible. Even relieving.

Gonzalo said: "Yes, could be. But something is wrong."

"Wait, what could be wrong?" asked Pilsudski. "If this is Kabahuacan then all we have to do is walk in pretty much any direction and we're going to meet up with someone we know, right?"

In theory he was right but somehow I couldn't feel comforted. The place looked like it could be Kabahuacan. But —.

"If this is Kabauhacan," Gonzalo said to me in Spanish, "then this is where the marina is supposed to be. I don't see a marina. In fact, when I look out there I don't see anything that looks like a human being had anything to do with it. This looks like an island nobody lives on. And the problem with that is, there's no such island anywhere nearby."

"Place looks uninhabited," I said for Pilsudski's benefit. "Pristine, in fact. Untouched. There's no part of Kabahuacan that's this unsullied. Believe me. I've lived on it a long time. Sure, it's a preserve. But every part of that island you can see a building or a manufactured landscape."

Pilsudski waited to see if either of us would say anything else, and when neither did, he said: "So, you do or you don't think this is Kabahuacan?"

"Both," I said. "Look, I told you it doesn't make sense."

"You're right, doctor," Pilsudski said. "That doesn't make sense." He was smiling, trying for wit, but it came across as tense. I shrugged.

Down in the surf I saw Chloe and Steven rise and start sploshing their way towards the boat. A minute or so later they clambered up onto the deck, dripping water. Chloe tried to squeeze-dry the front of her shirt, but then realized how completely soaked she was and gave up.

"Hello friends and neighbors," she said, without a smile. "Have we learned anything?"

We recapped for her, which took hardly any time because there was hardly anything to recap. We really didn't know anything. I asked her for her version of what had happened and it was the same as Steven's: sitting on the deck, sleep, wake. When I mentioned the storm she shook her head, then frowned as if trying hard to remember.

She said, somewhat mysteriously: "There was no storm — on the boat."

I didn't know what to make of that, so I asked: "Who was awake when you woke?"

She thought about this. "None of you. None of us, I mean. On the beach. I woke up and saw — her lying there and I just wanted to get away from her."

"Did you try to wake us?"

"No. Look, I didn't know what the hell had happened. I still don't. But when I woke up I was just confused and when I saw her lying there I just wanted to get away. I was coming to the boat but I saw these two," she pointed at Gonzalo and Pilsudski. "I didn't want to talk to anyone."

"What did you think had happened?"

"I don't know. An accident?" As she told us this she kept glancing over the bow to where Akna was. "Is she okay?" she asked.

"Seems fine," I said.

She nodded. "And where's — the other one?"

"Gone for a walk."

Chloe looked like she wanted a cigarette. She sat down and actually felt around in her wet pants, but her smokes, like her other belongings, were long gone. To console herself she started biting her thumbnail. Steven sat down next to her looking concerned, but only mildly.

I said to both of them: "If either of you knows something that you're not telling the rest of us, now would be a good time to spit it out."

Chloe looked down at her feet. Steven said: "What do you think we know?"

"Something happened to make you want to leave Kabahuacan earlier than planned. You can start with that."

Chloe snorted but didn't look up. Steven said: "If you want to know the truth of it, I have absolutely no idea how to explain that."

Still without looking up, Chloe said: "Silvia turned into a bird. Or a snake. Or Silvia turned into a half-bird half-snake. Or Silvia didn't turn into anything but she somehow — I don't know. Summoned a weird bird and a weird snake. Bunch of snakes. Man, I don't know what I saw."

Now she did look up. She looked at me, then Gonzalo, then Pilsudski.

"That woman is not a human being," she said, lowering her head again.

No one spoke. The boat shifted gently as the surf buffeted it. After a while, Pilsudski laughed.

"Okay, look, a simpler explanation is all of you are on drugs. Right? That's the actual correct answer, isn't it? You dropped acid or something and you freaked out and got paranoid."

Chloe glared at him. "I don't take drugs," she said.

"I saw you taking pills on the boat," I said.

Now she glared at me. "Those aren't drugs, that's herbal. It's a sedative. For my nerves. It's valerian, for Christ's sake. Valerian isn't going to make you trip balls and see visions. I don't take drugs."

Steven said: "To play open cards, I do take drugs. But besides the joint on the boat, I haven't for a while. I don't know what I saw, but whatever it was, it wasn't drugs that made me see it."

"So what did you see?" asked Pilsudski, sounding belligerent.

"I can't explain it."

"Silvia turned into a snake?" Pilsudski was sneering, leaning forward.

Steven swallowed and looked at me as if he expected me to reassure him. I just looked back. He said: "I don't know."

"Well I know," said Pilsudski. "I know you did not see Silvia turn into a snake. Or into a bird. Or into a half-snake half-bird. I know you did not see that because that is not physically possible. And if you did see it, you're on drugs or you're psychotic. Are either of you psychotic?"

"Man, calm down," said Steven.

"No. Listen, we're in an extreme emergency situation," said Pilsudski. "Our boat's instruments are toast. We don't know where we are. All of us appear to have suffered some kind of fugue event. Do you know what a fugue is?"

"A loss of awareness of ordinary reality," said Chloe.

Everyone looked at her. She sensed the eyes and looked up.

"Yeah, I know you all think I'm a dimwit, but I have a degree in psychology. So, whatever."

Almost involuntarily she felt in her pants pockets for cigarettes again, and then started chewing her lip. We all paused and thought about Chloe with a degree in psychology. Mental adjustments were made.

Pilsudski said: "Okay. All right. I'm sorry. You are correct. All of us have suffered some kind of temporary lapse of consciousness. Unexplained. And now here we all are. So my point is, we need to be thinking clearly and rationally about how we're going to solve the problem we have. It isn't helpful to be making bizarre claims about people transforming into jungle creatures."

"Dude," said Steven, which made Pilsudski flinch. I don't think anyone had called him dude for twenty years or more. "Dude, I am telling you that that chick is capable of crazy, unbelievable things. And I mean those words not as empty adjectives, either. I mean crazy. And I mean unbelievable. But I saw what I saw with these eyes."

"So what does that mean, even?" asked Pilsudski. "What does it mean that she turned into a bird or a snake or a bird slash snake?"

"It means what it sounds like," said Chloe. She seemed to choke on the end of her utterance and I realized she was close to tears, suddenly. She looked afraid. "That woman has been doing weird shit since we met her."

Gonzalo, who had been listening silently, leaning with his back against the bow rail, suddenly stepped forward.

"I believe them," he said. Pilsudski just shook his head. Gonzalo ignored him. "I believe them," he said. "These things can happen. They are rare, but there are things that can happen that nobody can explain. My father was a priest and he told me that he saw these things. Witches, demons, people turning into animals. This woman, Silvia, she is maybe not a woman. She is a bruja."

Chloe's head snapped up to stare at him. "That's what she told us," she said. "She used that word, remember?"

Steven nodded. "Yeah, it means witch."

"She told us she was a witch, Steven."

Pilsudski flung his hands up in exasperation. He inhaled, closed his eyes as if to collect his thoughts, then said: "Okay. I'm going to be polite about this. It is possible that this woman says she is a witch. Fine. She told you she was a witch. Okay. I'm not going to argue about that. And you say you've seen her do inexplicable things. Okay to that, too. I've seen street magicians. I can be hoodwinked the same as anyone. All of that, I accept. But do you not think that maybe a simpler explanation is that this woman is a con artist and she goes around scamming rich tourists to get them to finance her party life?"

There was a long silence while everyone thought about this. After a while, I said: "How does her being a hustler explain all of us falling unconscious and waking up on this — whatever this is?"

"That I don't know," he conceded. "But if we start from the premise that nothing supernatural is going on, that some sort of scam is being perpetrated, then we can hypothesize, right? Could she have hypnotized us? Drugged us? Is she in league with someone else, maybe? Has she gone looking for her criminal buddies right now, as we speak? Are we being kidnapped for purposes of extortion? These kinds of questions are arising in my mind."

I was glad to have Pilsudski articulate these ideas so clearly. It helped me reset my own fraying nerves.

"I thought about the drug thing too," I said. "A couple of times. But I couldn't figure out how she could have done it. Even just to me. I really don't see how she could have done it to everyone."

"These people use sleight of hand," he said. "They can make a pack of cards emerge from your butt, okay? Could she have slipped us a drug? Probably."

"If you think I'm gonna be touching your butt, you loco, padron," Silvia said, abruptly appearing up the side of the boat and hauling herself onto the deck. "Maybe you want me to touch your butt, baby, but is not gonna happen."

Her arrival found us all unprepared. We'd been so engrossed in our conversation that no one had noticed her returning. The effect was startling, as if she had just materialized out of thin air. She stood there grinning at us, one hand on a cocked hip and the other hand clutching what appeared to be a handful of long red tail feathers. Where the hell had she got hold of those?

I wondered how long she had been standing next to the boat waiting for her chance to make a grand entrance. How much of the conversation had she heard? Just the last utterance, or the whole of Pilsudski's theory that she was a con artist? More importantly, what answers did she have about what was going on?

I was about to ask her the same questions I'd asked everyone else, but Chloe was the first to speak. As soon as she saw Silvia she seemed to gag and let out a low moan. She looked like someone suffering from extreme, unadulterated terror. She stood up and moved away, along the deck, until the rail stopped her.

She said: "Just keep her away from me. Just don't let her near me."

"Hey liddle girl," said Silvia. "Whatsa matter? Relax, baby. Nothing bad is gonna happen to you."

While she spoke she turned her attention to the feathers she was holding. She began to attach them by their shafts, one by one, onto the belt among the other items hanging off there. She seemed completely at ease, as if we weren't standing on a disabled boat in an unknown location after an inexplicable 'fugue event', to borrow Pilsudski's term. And also as calm as if she was wearing a top, which of course she still wasn't. I assumed her tank top had washed overboard.

"How do you know what's going to happen to anybody?" I asked, thinking it was a particularly astute question. Silvia looked at me with an amused frown. Before she could say anything, though, Steven leaped up. The movement made me look at him. He was bolting across the deck to Chloe, who had slumped down onto her haunches and looked like she was in some distress. She gasped repeatedly as if she couldn't breathe properly and all the color had gone out of her skin. She was white as pearl, or coral, her eyes wide, her lips stretched into a fearful leer. She seemed to be trembling, too, not in a delicate, lady-like way but in an ice-cold about-to-die-of-hypothermia way: lurching jerks around the shoulders and head.

My first thought was: is this some sort of hex? I looked back at Silvia, but she wasn't even looking at Chloe. She appeared to be struggling to coordinate the last of the red feathers, one of the sharpened teeth already hanging there, and a small piece of wire, in order to get all of them to cohabit the belt peacefully. She could have been alone in her bedroom.

Steven and Gonzalo helped Chloe to her feet and walked her away between them, down the length of the deck and around to the well with the ladder in it. They obviously intended to try to get her down the ladder into the cabin, but she didn't make it that far. She just slumped down hard in the gangway and lay there twitching. Gonzalo ran to the ladder and disappeared down it. I knew there was a first-aid kit in the cabin, which I assumed he was aiming to retrieve, but I didn't think it would help much. I walked over to Steven, crouching over his sister.

He said: "It's okay, I got this. She'll be fine. You'll be fine, Chloe. Just inhale. Just inhale."

"This has happened before?"

"Yeah, she'll be fine. She's a little anxious. Come on Chloe, sit up now." He wrestled her up into a sitting position and then sat behind her and wrapped her up in a tight hug. "Come on. Breathe now."

Chloe was still gasping and shuddering, but some color was coming back. She covered her face with her hands. Gonzalo came back up the ladder and stood there, unsure, holding the medical kit.

"Let's get her down into the bed," Steven said. "You want to go lie down? Come on."

Between Gonzalo and Steven they helped her to her feet and she stumbled off with them. Steven slid down first and then Chloe started slowly picking her steps down the rungs. She looked like she'd make it.

I went back to the deck to find Silvia and Pilsudski seated apart from one another, not speaking. Silvia sat with her arms spread out along the rail so that her chest was front and center, but Pilsudski wasn't even looking at her. A variety of questions competed for space in my mind and I didn't know which one to ask first. Silvia grinned at me.

I said: "I'm sure I have a shirt you can wear, in my suitcase."

She looked down at her breasts, then back at me, in mock-confusion. "What? You don't like my tetas?"

# 6: Exploring

In the cabin below, Gonzalo still stood holding the unopened first-aid kit, looking confused about what he should be doing. Chloe and Steven talked in low voices, sitting on a bunk. I opened my suitcase and pulled out the first t-shirt I saw.

"Chloe, take some dry clothes out of here," I told her. "Anything you want, okay?"

She nodded but didn't look at me. I semi-push-pulled Gonzalo back out of the cabin with me, and Steven followed. I pulled the cabin door closed and we had a brief meeting in the well.

"What did the witch say?" asked Gonzalo, straight-faced.

"I didn't ask her anything yet. But I'm going to. I think you take the other boys and go see about Akna."

We ascended the ladder. On the deck, Silvia had risen and was leaning over a rail watching the sleeping Akna down on the sand. Silvia looked like a topless model on a break at a shoot. Pilsudski hadn't moved. He looked up at our arrival and I motioned him over. Silvia didn't pay us any attention. I told Pilsudski to go with the other men, and watched the three of them make their way across the beach to where Akna was lying.

"Put this on." I handed the t-shirt to Silvia.

She turned to me and took the shirt. She held it bunched up in one hand, smiling, looking right into my eyes. Then she swayed a little as if she was dancing, pushing first one breast and then the other toward me, her smile getting wider. She flapped the t-shirt to unbunch it and I realized it was my Jolly Roger shirt, a black tee with a white skull-and-crossbones on the front. Possibly not the best choice, given our situation. Silvia cackled and pulled it on. We were about the same size in frame but her bust was bigger than mine and so the shirt looked tight. Somehow she looked more brazenly sexual with the shirt on than she'd looked topless.

Oh well.

"If you know anything about what made us go to sleep," I said, "I'd appreciate it if you would tell us. Like, if there is a medical situation we need to be aware of."

She sat down, and after a beat, so did I.

"Is Akna going to be all right?" I asked.

"She will be fine," she said.

I spoke in Spanish and so did she. Obviously since no one else was around to hear she seemed to have decided that English could be dispensed with. When she spoke Spanish she sounded more educated and less trashy. She almost sounded sophisticated.

"What's making her sleep?"

"Sleepiness, probably. Have the others nominated you to be the prosecutor?"

I let that slide. "What did you find when you went for a walk?" I asked. "Or did you already know what you would find?"

She didn't say anything, but seemed to think about my questions, not just ignore them. I said: "Do you know where we are, Silvia?"

She grinned. "That's the first time you have spoken my name," she said.

I wasn't sure if it was or wasn't, and it surprised me that it was something she would notice, anyway. I repeated my question and she said: "Not exactly."

"What does that mean?"

She chuckled. "It means I'm not an expert in pre-Colombian geography."

She looked right into my eyes again and leaned in to me as if she was going to kiss me. But she just lightly inhaled, as if sniffing my scent, and then looked away.

I didn't know what to make of either her behavior or her comment. What was she implying? Or was she just riffing, ineptly, on our earlier interaction? Somehow I didn't think that was inept, so what did her comment mean?

"Look," I said, trying to sound calm. But even I could hear the tightness in my tone. "Let's stop messing around. Do you know how we got here?"

She shrugged. "Not really, no."

"But you knew this was going to happen?"

"I knew something was going to happen. Something always happens when I'm around." She smiled.

"You can see everyone else is upset by this, but you aren't. Why not?"

"Why should I be upset?"

"You're not worried?"

"Why should I worry? Is somebody going to hurt me? Are you all going to gang up on me or something?"

I inhaled deeply to calm myself. Talking to her was infuriating. I was reminded of the Athenians forcing Socrates to drink hemlock because he annoyed them so much. Silvia was in the same mould. She was a lot smarter than you would give her credit for if you just looked at her. I had the disquieting sense that she was probably a lot smarter than me.

"You don't think this situation is strange?"

She nodded. "It's pretty strange," she said. "But I am not bothered by strange situations. In fact, I am very comfortable with them. You should relax."

I decided to try another tack. "When you came up to the boat just now, we were all talking before you got here. Did you hear what we said? What Adam said?"

"Who is Adam? The fat one?"

"Yes, Dr Pilsudski. Did you hear what he said?"

"I heard he said he wanted me to pull something out of his asshole." She scrunched up her nose. "Disgusting. His name is really Adam?"

"Yes. Why does that matter?"

She shrugged again. "I don't know. It seems kind of funny. Kind of appropriate."

"Appropriate how?" I really wasn't following this tangent. What did Adam's name have to do with anything?

She waved it away. "I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong. Look, I heard you all talking about me like I did something to you. The fat one was saying he thinks I'm a criminal. Maybe I have accomplices."

"Did you hear what Gonzalo said?"

She snorted, and it turned into an extended cackle.

"I don't need to hear what he said to know what he thinks. It's plain on his face. He thinks I'm some sort of witch."

I waited for her to say more and she seemed to be waiting for me to speak, so we just looked at each other. I had the weird and unexpected idea, again, that she was going to lean in and kiss me, but she didn't.

She said: "What do you think is going on? Doctor Expert?"

"I think you did something to make this happen. But I don't know what."

I wondered if I should tell her that I was the only one who'd seen the storm, and that I'd seen her standing in the midst of it, somehow staying upright despite the boat pitching and yawing. Standing up with her arms aloft and maybe even chanting something. I couldn't decide if I should speak about it or not. Maybe she already knew?

She said: "What do you think I could have done to make this happen, Elmira?"

My name emerging from her lips made my skin tingle. I didn't know what to say. I felt similar to how I'd felt watching her dance earlier. A kind of lethargic heaviness in my head, a thickness in my eyes, as if I was falling into a waking dream. She said something else, very quietly, looking right at me, but I couldn't make out the whole sentence, only the word 'reborn'.

Movement in the corner of my vision broke the trance. I jerked my head to look and there was Chloe, coming back up from the cabin. She'd changed into a pair of my bermudas and a plain blue t-shirt. She stood on the far side of the bridge, looking over to where Silvia and I were sitting, as if unsure about approaching us.

I blinked a couple of times and shook my head to clear it.

"The others are down on the beach," I called out. She nodded and climbed off the boat.

Silvia said: "She's too nervous."

"Too nervous for what?"

"Too nervous for life."

I stood up and looked over the rail. Chloe made her way over to the three men, who appeared to be consulting earnestly over Akna's sleeping form. I watched them for a while, trying not to look at Silvia. I could sense her sitting there, as if she had her own kind of gravity.

The men had obviously decided to bring Akna back to the boat, which made sense. Gonzalo lifted her shoulders, Pilsudki her feet, and Adam and Chloe provided support around the torso and thighs. They moved slowly back through the churned up sand, along the track we'd all been forming between the boat and where we'd slept.

"You're sure Akna is going to be all right?" I asked.

"I'm not sure of anything," said Silvia. "But I don't know of any reason why she shouldn't be all right."

I went over to help them bring Akna up. She seemed to be half awake now, obviously because she was being manhandled, but I had the impression that she would slip right back into dreamland as soon as her head hit a pillow. We managed to get her up onto the boat and then reverse the handling procedure to get her down the ladder into the cabin.

When she was lying curled up comfortably on a bunk we all reassembled on the deck. Silvia had remained seated throughout, so the fact we were all standing looking at her clearly demarcated the lines of affiliation: us vs her.

Pilsudski took the lead, and I wondered if he had been nominated by the others as a spokesman. "Has she told you anything?" he asked me.

"I'm right over here, Adam," Silvia said, grinning.

He didn't look at her, but his name made him frown. "Well?"

"She didn't tell me anything useful. Do you guys have a plan?"

Pilsudski turned to look at Silvia. "Why the split between the men and the women?" he demanded. "Why were all the women down on the beach? How did that happen?"

"Maybe we wanted to get away from your smelly asshole," she said mildly.

"I told you," I said, "she hasn't said anything helpful."

Gonzalo pointed at her. "She knows more than she's saying."

Silvia laughed. "Doesn't everybody?"

Pilsudski motioned with his hands for silence and attention.

"Okay, this is stupid. If she's not going to help us then we need to have a plan. And we made one: we need to scout out our position. Our thinking is we split up into three groups. Someone to stay on the boat, someone to go that way up the beach, and someone to go the other way. Whoever stays on the boat, Gonzalo says there's a flare gun. So they can use that either to call the reconnaissance parties back, or to signal to a boat if they see a boat. You also have a telescope, huh?"

Gonzalo nodded.

"Okay," Pilsudski went on. "So then how are we going to coordinate the timing? Elmira, you're the only one with a working watch."

"I can tell by the sun," I said. "The other group can have my watch."

I undid the strap and held the watch out. Steven took it from me. Clearly they'd already decided who was in which group.

Pilsudski said: "So, you walk for one hour, then you turn around. That should get everybody back here well before dark. Obviously if you find anything before an hour is up, come straight back. I'm going to stay on the boat."

He looked straight at Silvia when he said this, and also heightened and spread himself so that his full physique was emphasized. He was a very big man. He seemed to be saying to Silvia: you do what you want but I'm going to be here defending Akna, so try your luck and see what happens.

"So I go south, you go north?" I said to Steven. He looked confused. I pointed north. "That's north. Do I go alone?"

"I'll go with you," said Gonzalo.

"Me too," said Chloe.

"Wait, wait," I said. "Steven, you go alone? Is that sensible? Chloe, why don't you go with Steven?"

"I want to go with you," she said. She held my gaze. I got the impression she wanted to talk to me, so I nodded. "Gonzalo?"

He seemed uncomfortable, not wanting to say what was on his mind. Silvia stood up and said: "Gonzalo doesn't think two liddle chicas alone can look after themselves. He wants to protect you from the jungle monsters. I'll go with Steven."

North was the direction she'd been walking earlier, on her own. I wondered if she had some kind of devious plan, but realized she would do whatever she wanted anyway, unless we tied her up. I wouldn't put it past Pilsudski to think of that, but so far no one had suggested it.

Steven said: "I'm fine to go alone but if you want to come with me, that's also fine. I don't care."

I didn't feel comfortable about this arrangement, but short of suggesting that Chloe and I stay with Akna, there didn't seem a way out. Between Pilsudski and I there was a clear winner when it came to orienteering, and for all his skills in other areas, it wasn't him.

Gonzalo retrieved a couple of items from a closet under the controls of the boat. Two holstered knives. He gave a knife to Steven and attached the other knife to his belt. Silvia had already jumped down off the boat and walked a little way towards the north. She stopped now and turned, folding her arms and tapping her foot in an exaggerated manner, like a cartoon character waiting for something.

Without looking back, Steven jumped down and trotted over to her. They turned and started walking.

*

Pilsudski stayed up on the deck of The Tommygoff, watching us go. He had Gonzalo's telescope held up to his face and alternated his view between our party and the other two. The sight of the mountainous, bald man, so reminiscent of a fairy-tale troll or ogre, peering through a telescope, struck me as slightly ridiculous. But none of us were behaving with perfect sanity at this point, so I let it go.

Our group of three set off roughly south along the beach. The sand was warm and the ocean mild, surf rolling in gently from a flat, blue ocean extending as far as I could see, where it met the similarly blue and almost completely cloudless sky. A soft breeze danced around us. On the other side, a wall of forest protruded four or five times higher than my head, cutting off any view of what may have lain further inland.

As we walked I tried to decide categorically whether this location was familiar to me or not, but I couldn't be sure. It really felt like the beach near the administrative offices on Kabahauacan, and it really felt like an island. But key features were missing, not least man-made marinas, boardwalks, and buildings. For all I knew this was some other island, or not even an island. Maybe we had drifted — or been deliberately taken — to the mainland. But I couldn't reconcile the geography in my mind. If we were on the mainland, walking south, then the ocean would more likely be on our left, not on our right. We had to be on an island. Or much, much further away from anywhere that made sense.

"Let's get closer to the trees," Gonzalo suggested after a few minutes.

We veered up across the hot sand and into the shade of the foremost overgrowth. Not being a botanist I couldn't identify the species, but to my eye the trees all looked familiar: the typical coastal flora of the Yucatan and the nearby Caribbean islands. A variety of vines grew thickly on and between the trees, flowering in reds and pinks and purples, and spreading a sweet scent into the wind. As we drew closer you could hear the ordinary scuttling and shuffling about of small, hidden creatures, probably lizards and little mammals, as well as the usual bewildering variety of insects clicking and buzzing. By far the dominant noise, though, was birdcall. This created a constant curtain of sound filtering between the leaves and branches, so many different chitterings and whistlings and whoopings that it made me stop walking and cock my head. Chloe looked at me fearfully but I smiled to reassure her.

Gonzalo said, in Spanish: "Interesting, so much noise. The whole place is too wild. I'll be surprised if we run into people. What do you think?"

In English, I said: "It doesn't feel like somewhere people live."

"You guys really don't know where we are, huh?" said Chloe.

"You thought we were pretending?"

"No. I don't know. Listen, I want to thank you for the clothes. This is really helpful. And —. Look, I know you think this is probably partially my fault, and Steven's fault, but I want to tell you that I did not know anything like this was going to happen."

As she spoke her voice tightened and then frayed and tears came to her eyes. I glanced meaningfully at Gonzalo and he got the message. He walked on ahead of us until he would be out of earshot of a quiet conversation, but still in our line of sight. We proceeded that way, with Chloe and I walking and talking about thirty yards behind Gonzalo, a kind of slow convoy in the noisy shade of the tropical forest.

When we were alone, Chloe said: "I'm sorry I keep freaking out. I have anxiety disorder." She laughed without humor. "That's the main reason we were on this trip in the first place. My folks thought if I went traveling with Steven and his buddies, if I just cut loose for a few weeks, it might help."

"What happened to Steven's buddies?"

"Silvia happened. We met her about a week ago. I thought she was a — prostitute or something. I mean, you can see what she looks like. But she turned out to be different."

I nodded. This was pretty consistent with my own opinions. A superficial view of Silvia would dismiss her as a frivolous party girl, possibly a sex worker. If you spoke to her for a while, though, you realized it was much more complicated.

"So what is she?" I asked.

"She's what Gonzalo said. She's a straight-up witch. I'm not even joking."

When she said witch, her voice caught and I thought she would start crying again, but she pushed it away.

"Within twenty-four hours of meeting us, she'd alienated everyone in our group, really deliberately but without you being able to actually accuse her of anything. She made it look like she was trying to attach herself to Steven. She went batshit when anyone tried to get him away from her. A day after we met her everyone basically had a big — I don't know. Intervention. At the swimming pool at this hotel. They told Steven to get rid of her or they were going to go their own way."

In my mind I could see this happening, Steven's friends rounding on him while Silvia lay silently but smiling on a recliner. Probably topless. Watching them argue.

"So he chose Silvia?"

"No, he wanted to get rid of her too. I chose Silvia." That surprised me. Chloe nodded. "I know. Okay? I know. It feels like it was years ago. It was, like, five days or something. Unbelievable."

"What do you mean you chose her? Why?"

"She wasn't interested in Steven. She still isn't. She isn't interested in men."

I stopped walking. Ahead of us Gonzalo looked back, noticed, and started returning to us, but I motioned with my hand for him to stay where he was. Chloe's statement felt like a different lens had been shifted over my mind's eye and various things, even things I couldn't explicitly name, made sense suddenly.

Chloe said: "I know the obvious interpretation is sexual but it isn't that, really. Or it isn't only that. It is that."

"What are you saying? Did Silvia —? Did you and Silvia —?"

Chloe flushed. "No. Okay, this is hard. I'm not gay. I don't think. I've never —. Well, you know, never seriously. I've been with guys, pretty much only." She looked away, obviously embarrassed. "Silvia did something to me. I don't know what."

"Something physical?"

She shook her head. "Something witchcraft. She — enchanted me. That sounds stupid because we use that word wrong. I mean what it used to mean. She put a spell on me."

We started walking again and ahead of us, so did Gonzalo. I didn't know what to say, what to ask. I waited for Chloe to carry on, and after a while she did.

"Anyway, I kind of convinced Steven that Silvia was making me feel better and I wanted to stay with her. I even told him he could leave us together. I mean, I actually told him that." She shook her head in disbelief. "I told him that he could go off with his buddies and leave me alone in Mexico with a woman I met the day before. Seriously. Do you see what I mean?"

Having met Silvia, it didn't seem far-fetched, even though it sounded incomprehensible. I was fully convinced that prolonged exposure to her could warp your thinking. I wasn't ready to commit to the witchcraft idea, fully, but I agreed Silvia could be strangely, almost irresistibly persuasive.

Up ahead of us Gonzalo had stopped and seemed to be waiting. We caught up with him. He pointed out what looked like a natural thinning in the tree line, showing a way deeper into the forest.

"You want to try go in a little way to see?"

We could see quite a long way down the beach and it was obvious that not much was going to reveal itself to us if stuck to this route. We'd been afoot for maybe twenty minutes already, so getting off the beach was probably a good idea, if we really hoped to learn anything meaningful. On the other hand, if the forest was as uninhabited as it looked, as free of human presence, then who knew how dangerous it might be? I heard Silvia's mocking voice saying 'jungle monsters'.

"We'll have to stay close," I said. "You okay with that, Chloe?"

She thought about it for a few seconds and appeared to decide that it didn't really matter what Gonzalo heard. She nodded. We moved off the sand and onto the tangle of roots, fallen fruit and vines that comprised the floor-matter of the forest. Green shade surrounded us, sporadically penetrated by spears of sunlight. Gonzalo stayed in front, only a yard or two, and pushed fronds and vine-stems out of our way as we followed the apparently natural pathway.

"Why do you think Silvia — targeted you?" I asked Chloe.

"I know why exactly. And that's why I wanted to talk to you. You're not going to like it. She's collecting us."

I didn't like the sound of that but I also didn't want to over-react. Keeping my voice level, I asked: "Meaning what?"

"I think she's on some kind of mission. An actual ritual mission."

"You've lost me."

"When we met up she was determined to get to Kabahuacan. She started out asking us if we'd thought about going there, and then that changed into her telling us that she was going there, and then that changed into her kind of insisting that we go with her. That I go with her. I don't think she cares where Steven goes."

"But why you?"

"The morning after we met, we were all down at the hotel pool. You know, mostly hung over. She was showing off her tattoo to everyone, those things on her belt, her bangles. Nobody cared. They were all sleepy. Nobody wanted to hear about Mexican culture. No one except me."

"Because you were polite about her bangles she decided to kidnap you?"

Chloe made a noise of displeasure. "It was more than that. I wasn't just interested. I was — fascinated. I always have been. And so have you, haven't you?"

I felt my skin go cold. "What do you mean?"

"You're an expert in pre-Colombian religion. I'm quoting. You're right in Silvia's sweet spot. You haven't felt it come over you when you're talking to her?"

I couldn't deny it but I didn't want to affirm it, either, so I said nothing.

Chloe said: "As soon as I saw that tattoo I was sucked into it. It felt strangely perfect, strangely right. As if a whole new road just appeared out of nowhere and somehow I knew it was the right and perfect road for me to follow. That's why I told Steven he could go on without me. I meant it, and I wasn't afraid. I felt like I had to stay with Silvia. I felt —."

I waited for her to carry on talking and when she didn't I looked at her closely. She seemed to be struggling with a deep emotion.

"Go on," I said.

"I felt like my whole life suddenly made sense," she said.

Tears welled up in her eyes and then flooded out. She sobbed.

"I felt like I understood why I was anxious all the time. I was out of place. I was in the wrong skin. I was separated from everything that was real and true. And everything that was real and true was what Silvia was able to show me. I can't explain it. But I felt like I was having some kind of religious conversion, like St Paul on the road to Damascus. I'm not joking. I was remembering things I used to like when I was five, drawings I used to do in school, books I used to find in the library and devour. Like, my whole life was setting me up to meet this beautiful, weird woman in Mexico. And now I'd met her and she was going to show me how to escape the bullshit and be free."

Chloe's face screwed up like a little child in pain and she sobbed so hard I thought she might stop breathing. She dropped down onto her haunches, weeping.

"And the worst part of it is," she whined, "I still feel that way. Even knowing how much trouble we're in."

I hunkered down next to her and put a hand on her shoulder, the extent of my willingness to provide comfort. But she leaned into me and hugged me, burying her face in my neck and sobbing. I looked up at Gonzalo. He stared at us with a bewildered expression and then moved off a little way, so that he was partially hidden by the abundant foliage.

Chloe hiccupped and sniffed herself back to a state of relative calm. She wiped her eyes and cheeks roughly and sat down flat.

"I'm really messed up," she said.

I stood and looked around. Not being able to see the sun I couldn't judge how long we'd been away from the boat, but I figured it wasn't much more than half an hour. We could still press on deeper into the forest, if we could get Chloe back on her feet.

Nearby, a bird called really loudly, startling all of us, and then it flew into my line of sight and perched on a vine. It was a large, tropical bird, its body maybe as long as my arm from wrist to elbow, with a plume of red and blue tail feathers extending that long again down below it. Its chest was red and its head yellow. It didn't seem concerned about us, but it did seem interested in us, which was disconcerting. I looked at Gonzalo and saw how tensely he was standing, poised.

Getting up from the ground, Chloe said: "That's the same bird." She sounded tired, defeated almost.

"The same bird as what?"

"The same bird I saw back on the island. When Silvia — did whatever she did. That made us want to leave."

The attitude of the bird looking down at us struck me as somehow unnatural. Working on the Kabahuacan digs I had seen plenty of tropical wildlife in my time, but nothing like this creature. I felt as if the bird was paying close attention to us. Normally birds involve themselves in their own skittish activities, chirruping or calling out, pecking at potential food sources, preening or just bobbing around performing their own unfathomable duties. But this bird simply sat calmly on the vine, as if he too — I felt it was a he — was interested in what Chloe had to tell us.

Gonzalo drew nearer to both of us. "Tell us what happened," he said. "The whole story."

I wanted to suggest we do this while we walked, but Chloe no longer seemed up for the reconnaissance adventure. She sat down on the thick, moist stem of a ground-creeping vine, her fingers working the expensive silver pendant she still wore. Her voice came out like dry seeds rattling in a wooden bowl, scratchy and occasionally shrouded in whispers. Sometimes she closed her eyes and seemed to be recounting a vision or a dream.

She said: "It started up the night before. We were on the tour boat out from Puerto Bravo. Night ride in the Caribbean. The plan was to anchor off the island, off Kabahuacan, and then do the cultural tour the next day. I guess that's standard. So we did, we anchored. We could see the island, we were maybe twenty-five minutes off shore. Silvia said we should steal a boat and go."

"She was serious?" I asked.

"You never know with her. Do you? But I thought she was serious. She was excited. You could feel it. Beyond the normal romance of being out at sea at night. The normal hype of a boat party. She wasn't in the party, she wanted to sit on the deck alone and just watch the island. But not sit quietly. She was talkative, telling me — so many things. Stories. About gods and warriors and magicians. Things she claimed were factual history, but what do I know. I think she really wanted to take a boat and go, she had that look on her face that when she said it you believed it was possible. Not only possible, that it was — essential. That you had to do it. Right now, get up, steal a boat."

She paused for a while, trying to compose herself. I could see she was trembling. Her whole hand shook.

Gonzalo said: "She bewitches you."

"Yes," said Chloe, simply, acknowledging a clear fact. "She bewitches you. Anyway, Steven put a stop to all of that. He was really starting to get tired of Silvia. He'd told me that after Kabahuacan he was going back home and I could come with him or not, but he was going."

"Do you think he would have gone without you?" I asked.

"I really don't know. Maybe. He was fed up with both of us. I think he thought I was sleeping with Silvia — well, wait, I was sleeping with Silvia. Sleeping. We didn't —. Anyway, he thought we were doing that and I think he was irritated about the whole situation. So he basically threatened me. Choose her or choose him. I don't know if he would really have left me. I doubt it. But I don't know. And Silvia was just as fed up with him. Maybe not fed up. Indifferent. She really couldn't care less what Steven does. She'd be happier if he'd gone his own way in Mexico."

Gonzalo sat down too, now, and I followed. We were going to have story time here in the jungle. The bird ruffled its chest feathers and then settled down on its green perch above Gonzalo's head.

"So Steven said if she stole a boat he'd report her to the ship's captain, make a scene. And he would have. Of course, to protect me, he thought. Silvia just laughed at him. But I was in two minds. I can't even believe I've said that. Obviously I wasn't going to steal a boat, but — you know. Maybe I would have."

She thought about this, nodding to herself.

"Anyway," she went on. "We didn't. We went to sleep. I went to sleep. The whole night I kept waking up and hearing Silvia talking to herself. I couldn't hear what she was saying. She was sitting up in the bunk, just talking and talking. Maybe I dreamed it. But I thought I heard her at least two or three times, during the night. I remember thinking: she's going to be so fragged in the morning if she doesn't sleep. But she wasn't fragged at all. The crew woke us up to get breakfast and prepare for the day trip and she was wide awake, happy, excited. She looked like a million bucks, you know, the way she does. Like a fashion model. Like she'd had twelve hours of beauty sleep."

Gonzalo said, apropos of something in his own mind: "The witches can appear eternally youthful. Maybe she is really very old."

Chloe looked at him thoughtfully. "Maybe. That makes sense. So we had breakfast and we joined this tour. You must know all about it, boats of tourists come to the island all the time." I nodded. "The boat docked at the other marina, the big one on the other side of the island. We had a short hike through the forest and then this sort of lecture at the visitors' center. Showing us all these things. Little statues and bangles and arrow heads and bone tools and stuff. The stuff you guys dig up."

I pictured Silvia in our visitors' center, her vivacious delinquency skipping about amongst the glass cabinets and display tables. I imagined her poking fun at everything and loudly disrupting the guide's lecture, but Chloe said: "Silvia started acting really oddly. Very quiet. She was just looking at everything, and then I thought she looked really angry. More than angry. Furious. She looked like she was absolutely seething. But she didn't say anything. She just kept to herself. After the lecture they take everyone out for another hike up to somewhere. And we're supposed to get lunch outdoors or something. But of course I don't know because we didn't go with everyone else. While everyone was filing out, Silvia just walked the other way, back out the door we'd come in through."

Familiar with these facilities I could picture the scene. Silvia would have emerged from the visitors' center on its north-eastern side, in a little landscaped area of stone pond, palm trees and ferns. From there her only route was along a slate footpath back towards the east. After about two minutes she'd come to a split in the path: east back the way she'd come, to the main marina and the tour boat, or north across a wooden rope bridge. That way would be barred, of course, by a sign saying 'No Unauthorized Persons'. The sign in English, Spanish, German and Japanese. But somehow I knew without hearing it that Silvia had ignored that sign and crossed the bridge.

"Steven and I watched her go and he wanted to abandon her, catch up with the group. Of course I wouldn't. I was starting to feel really nervous but I didn't want to just let Silvia go anywhere without me. We argued for a bit and then I left him there and went after her. I couldn't see where she was but I —. I suppose something guided me. I went back along the path a way and there was this bridge across a shallow stream. It had a sign on it but the chain that the sign was on had been unhooked and dropped onto the floor, so it was just hanging there. I knew she'd gone that way and I followed."

"You go across the bridge and then you're going up to the original dig site," I said.

"Well, I didn't know where it was going, but it was this rock footpath, up a little hill. I wanted to call out to her but I was afraid. I was really frightened. I know that sounds — stupid, but I was so nervous. I almost couldn't put one foot in front of the other, and at the same I knew I had no choice but to do it. To keep walking. I must have walked maybe ten minutes, fifteen minutes, and I didn't see her and I didn't see anyone else."

"That part of the island is pretty unused," I said.

"I felt like I was traveling on a road into a different world. Like I was climbing this hill and every step the world around me was changing into something like a dream. Eventually I heard water and then I came out from the thick forest into a clearing."

"The dig site."

"The cave entrance, yes. With the waterfall and the pool."

I frowned. "No," I said. "That's —."

We looked at each other. She said: "There was a cave entrance, big. Higher than my head, wide enough to drive a car into. And a waterfall coming down off it, into this pool. It's —."

"No," I said again. "Look, that cave entrance is collapsed. And that water system is defunct. Not yesterday, either. Like, centuries ago."

Gonzalo said: "Madre de Dios."

Chloe said: "Look, I'm telling you what happened." She sounded sad and somewhat tearful again. "I came out of the trees and the water was pouring off this waterfall into this pool next to the cave entrance. Silvia was in the water. She was standing in it and it wasn't too deep, it was up to the top of her legs. She was completely naked in the water, and when I arrived she turned around and grinned at me. Then —. Jesus."

She inhaled deeply and tried to speak but kept faltering. She tried a couple of times and then started crying again.

Gonzalo said: "Then she turned into a snake."

Chloe shook her head. "Not then. No, then something —. I can't even explain it. It doesn't make sense. It was like there was a storm, but a tiny little storm. Like just where we were, everything got cold and gray and the wind came up. The whole forest was waving and shaking, dust and leaves whirling everywhere, just suddenly. And the water, too. It was churning up all around, like it was boiling or something. I thought it was an earthquake or —. I don't know what I thought. There was a sort of whirlpool in the water and Silvia was standing in the whirlpool. It was spinning around her."

Chloe's description of this inexplicable weather event made me feel cold all over. This was very similar to what I'd seen before we all blacked out on the boat. It also made sense of why, when I'd told Chloe about that, she'd said there was no storm 'on the boat'.

Chloe continued: "Silvia was looking at me, grinning, with this wind flying everywhere and this loud whistling, this loud sort of whistling and humming. She raised her arms up and birds and snakes came out of everywhere. I can't —. They just materialized. These birds, like this bird," she pointed at the bird, still calmly attending to our conference, "and snakes. I can't describe it. Dozens of snakes. In the water, out of the water. In the — air. Around Silvia. Snakes like birds. Or birds that were snakes."

It sounded like some sort of psychotic hallucination, or maybe a drug-induced vision. My rational mind explained it away, but even as I sat there listening to her I felt my tongue going thick and a pressure in my eyes and ears as if I myself, just hearing about it, was embarking on a psychic quest. I felt as if I was experiencing some sort of deadening sleepiness, out of nowhere, imagining the scene that Chloe described: the naked Silvia in the churning water, commanding an army of supernatural birds and snakes.

"I don't know why, but I started walking towards her. I mean, I was terrified. I thought I was literally going to pee in my pants, but I couldn't stop myself. I was taking one step after another, walking towards her, and she was grinning at me and I thought, then, that's when she turned into a snake. Herself. She suddenly seemed not to be Silvia any more. Or to be Silvia, but to also be a snake. I can't explain."

Gonzalo again invoked the name of the holy mother, but I paid no attention to him. I was staring at Chloe, feeling myself sink into a sort of mesmerized attention, thick and deep and slow.

Chloe said: "Before I could walk into the water, though, Steven came. I felt him grab me and I knew it was him but I pulled my arm away and kept on walking. Then he shouted, loud, right next to my face. He grabbed me by the waist of my trousers and pulled me. I fell over. We both fell over, and I fell onto him and sort of rolled away from him. I felt like the world was literally splitting into two different worlds, and that I was being split into two different bodies. It was so painful. It felt like my bones were tearing apart. My ribs. My hips. I lay there and it was so sore and I was crying. I don't know how long. Maybe twenty seconds, maybe thirty seconds. Agony. Christ."

Gonzalo agreed. "Christ," he said.

"I felt really sick, too," said Chloe. "Like, vomit sick. I didn't vomit but I thought I was going to. For a while I couldn't pay attention to what was going on around me. I felt really weak and my stomach hurt and I thought I was going to puke. I think maybe I fainted, or came close to it. When I came back to myself I could hear Steven and Silvia arguing. More like Steven shouting things at her and Silvia telling him to shut up and calm down. She was getting dressed again, pulling her top back on. Steven looked like he was going to deck her, and she wasn't smiling or mocking him. She looked tense. Not about Steven, but about something else. She kept telling him to be quiet, shushing him like she was talking to a child, like he was just an irritation, distracting her from something more important. I watched them for a bit and then Steven noticed me sitting up and came over to see if I was okay."

Chloe went quiet for a long while. We listened to the insects and the various birds of the forest going about their business. The strange, big bird above Gonzalo's head continued to silently witness our discussion. Chloe looked very pale. Her lip trembled but she didn't cry again.

She said: "The waterfall was gone." This in a small voice that I barely heard. "When I sat up afterwards, the waterfall was gone. The whole place was different. There was no waterfall, no pool, no cave, nothing. It was as if we'd been moved to a different place altogether. I couldn't understand it. I didn't want to believe it. I freaked out, running around trying to get my bearings and Steven was trying to pull me away with him. He just wanted to get out of there. But Silvia was pulling on my other arm and they were basically fighting over me. Meanwhile I couldn't even make sense of where we were physically standing. I couldn't decide who to go with."

"Even after all of that you thought you would stay with the witch?" Gonzalo sounded both angry and confused.

"I know, it's — crazy. But yes. Even after all of that I thought I might not want to go with Steven."

"But you did," I said. "In fact, all of you came to our boat." I could hear that my voice sounded lazy, sing-song. The strange, soporific effect of Chloe's story seemed to have dulled my sense of ordinary reality. I felt slightly light-headed, even dizzy.

Chloe nodded. "Silvia —. She had some kind of minor seizure. She let go of me and stood there, looking past both of us. I tried to see what she was looking at, but there was nothing. Just trees. She sort of swayed on her feet as if she was drunk. Her whole face went blank and her — I think her tongue even come out. Then she, like, woke up again. And she was back to the old Silvia, she was laughing and poking fun at us. She said okay, let's go. We can go. Where do you want to go?"

The rest of her story was brief. They made their way back to the visitors' center and then down to the administrative marina. No mysteries there.

Gonzalo said: "Well I think this makes it obvious that she's done this to us. We are here, now, because of witchcraft. This is clear."

I wanted to agree with him, but my rational mind wouldn't let me. I felt suddenly unwell, my stomach turning. The conclusion to be drawn from Chloe's story was pretty obvious but I couldn't allow myself to accept it. It would require me to accept too many other things that I wasn't ready for.

I wanted to ask more questions but I saw Chloe staring at something, her eyes wide, and andwhen I looked I saw she was staring at the bird above Gonzalo's head. It was a strange moment. I looked first at Gonzalo, who was speaking, and then at the bird. Gonzalo was saying something, at length, but for some reason I couldn't hear his words. Rather, I could hear sounds but they didn't sound like a language that I understood. No, it was even weirder: I knew he was speaking English but for some reason I could no longer understand English. One part of my mind felt like I should panic over this, but that part was buried under a thick layer of warm tranquility.

The bird on the vine above Gonzalo's head was even less comprehensible than my sudden lapse of linguistic knowledge. The bird seemed to be transforming. Its tail feathers lengthened, slowly and easily, like a curtain descending. At the same time the bird's body elongated upward. The whole bird became longer and longer, until it was longer than Gonzalo, its tail extending all the way down behind him to the ground. It extended its wings and that seemed really disconcerting to me. Because, while it had its same old wings, it was very visibly no longer a bird. It was a snake. The bird had turned into a snake except it still had wings.

Both Chloe and I sat motionless. My mind was completely blank. My body felt heavy, my hands and feet like rocks. The snake reared up. I knew what was going to happen before it happened, but I didn't move or make a sound. The snake stretched back and up, like elastic, and then slammed forward off the vine onto Gonzalo, wrapping itself around his head and shoulders. The motion was so forceful that it knocked the air out of him and made him stagger forwards, towards Chloe. He shrieked and tried to grab at the thing attacking him. His eyes went wild and wide when he realized what was on him, and then a sort of confused terror came over him as it became clear that the snake attacking him had wings.

Still, I did not move. I wish I could say I wanted to move, but that isn't true. Something made me not want to move.

I watched the snake wrap itself tighter and tighter around Gonzalo's head and neck, trying to crush him or suffocate him. I watched him frantically beating at it, watched him fling himself to the ground and then stagger up again, watched him charge against a tree to try to dislodge the monstrous attacker. I could hear him gasping and gagging and shouting out the name of Christ and the holy mother and various saints. But I did not want to move. It felt like watching something merely amusing and interesting, a ballet, an artistic performance. I knew that Gonzalo would be killed, and I did not care.

Somehow Chloe was able to break through the enchantment. She shouted, loud and shrill, and got to her feet, moving towards Gonzalo. Her motion did something in me, too, and I felt suddenly fully alert. I stood up and ran over to him. Both of us began pulling at the impossible snake-bird. Gonzalo continued to bark out in terror, still clawing at the creature. The three of us, twisting and pulling in various uncoordinated directions, managed to get his head free and then his shoulders. He fell to his knees and rolled away hurriedly, hacking and coughing.

Chloe and I stood looking at each other, holding between us a gently writhing winged snake that seemed completely calm and inoffensive. I let go of it, and to compensate it beat its wings and ascended. Chloe let it go too. We watched it float away into the obscurity of a million leaves while Gonzalo moaned and cursed on the ground behind us.

# 7: Yazmin

There is something about seeing a flying snake that will really upset your stomach. Or the traditionalist view is that if you have an upset stomach you will dream about flying snakes. Whichever is true, my stomach felt knotted and thorny. The pain and sheer biliousness of it woke me up into bright sunlight barely modulated by too-thin curtains, and to Pilsudski standing next to my bed looking down at me. I had no illusions about where I was. I remembered the ambulance, the hospital, the conversation at three am. And I remembered that Pilsudski had not come back with us. At least I thought he hadn't. Had I misunderstood? Or was this a ghostly visitation? It wouldn't shock me if it was, frankly.

I felt groggy and sick. Pilsudski seemed to be talking about Akna. He was saying, it sounded like, that Akna was still sleeping and that it worried him. He'd said that at the boat, too, after we ran back to it from our aborted reconnaissance mission. I remembered the dialogue perfectly and I was confused now about why he was repeating it, saying the exact same words to me here in the hospital.

My eyes felt scratchy and wadded thick with crusty sleep. I squeezed them shut tight and rubbed my fingers over them, momentarily forgetting how bruised I was. Pain flashed like tiny lightning bolts around my skull.

"Ow," I said.

"Yes, that looks pretty bad," said Pilsudski.

Except, opening my eyes again, I saw it wasn't Pilsudski. The man was roughly the same enormous size and shape as the departed zoologist, but maybe twenty years older and a different color. Also his voice had the calypso inflections of my home town. I squinted at him. He wore a raggedy black moustache on his top lip and a badly fitting, sloppy brown suit. His skin was the color of pre-Cortes people but his features were Hispanic and his accent was reggae. Just another Corozalean, then.

It was obvious that he was a policeman.

I shifted upwards in the bed so that I wasn't lying flat but half-reclining instead, looking up at him. The sunlight told me I'd been asleep well past breakfast. Instinctively I checked my left wrist for the time and then remembered that I'd given my watch to Steven and for whatever reason he never gave it back. Well, not whatever reason; the reason that we had other things to think about. Unearthly and deadly things.

I better remember to get that watch back when I see him, I thought, somewhat fatuously.

The policeman said: "It's nearly ten o'clock." Obviously he'd noticed my intention when I checked my wrist. "My name is Inspector Yazmin."

That made me smile. I wondered how much ribbing this gigantic man had had to take in life because he was named after a pretty pink flower. I said: "Okay, pleased to meet you. But, uh, why are you creepily standing over me while I sleep?"

He nodded as if I had made a fair point. "I wanted to get a look at your injuries." I waited for him to say more, and he shrugged. "Honestly, this whole situation is putting me under a lot of pressure and I been waiting here for more than two hours and everyone who can tell me anything is sleeping."

"What whole situation?"

"Your situation. Doctor Miguel, I have to tell you, this — whatever it is, whatever happened — this is now turning into an international incident."

I wanted to say: man, it's a supernatural incident, I don't really care about international. But I said: "All right." Waiting for more.

"Can you tell me who or what gave you those injuries?" he asked. I thought he was looking around for a chair. Thankfully there wasn't one nearby, so he had to keep standing.

I realized while he was talking that the pain in my stomach was simple hunger. I couldn't remember the last time I'd eaten anything, or consumed anything at all besides half a cup of weak tea at the nursing station. I was writhing in suffering from pure lack of food.

"I'll make a deal with you, Inspector," I said. "I'll have this little chat with you, but only after I get some breakfast. Okay? I haven't eaten since —. I don't know when, but a long time."

After a few moments of indecision, Yazmin tramped out of the ward, agreeing to wait until I'd abluted, eaten and received some kind of pain medication. My face was throbbing like boiling caramel and the rest of me didn't feel too great either.

I pressed the button to summon an attendant, and while I waited I took stock of the rest of the ward. Eight beds including mine, six occupied. I didn't recognize most of the other patients and couldn't see one of them, screened behind curtains. But I recognized Akna, in a bed diagonally opposite mine. She looked pretty much the same way she'd looked for much of my recent memory: lying on her side, fast asleep. Except now her face was encumbered by a swath of dressings, covering her mouth, both cheeks, and most of her neck. Consistent with the injuries I'd seen her suffer. She was also on a drip, like me. While I was looking at her she opened her eyes and looked right at me, but her vacant gaze told me she did not recognize what she was seeing. She half-snored, half-snorted, shifted her weight, and fell asleep again.

The nurse who showed up in response to my button-press was not the same short, round woman of the previous evening. This one was thin, hard-faced and older. But the doctor who accompanied her was the very same as my wee-hour interlocutor. She looked wan and her eyes were going red. I recognized fatigue and at the same realized I didn't even know her name.

"Isabel," she said, when I asked. "Doctor Triminio. But Isabel."

While the nurse took my blood pressure I asked: "So you let the police wander in here to examine me while I'm sleeping?"

The doctor was unphased. "I don't think you realize yet how serious this all is. I have to say I don't really have a lot of choice when it comes to the police."

"Neither do I, apparently. I need to go get interviewed by the Incredible Hulk."

She smiled. "He's all right. Could be worse."

"Do you think I could get my clothes? Or my suitcase? Did they find my suitcase?"

She nodded. "They did, I think. But it's at the police station. And I'm sorry to tell you this but even the clothes you were wearing are at the police station. Everything is evidence."

"Evidence of what?"

"Nobody knows. They keep waiting for one of you to wake up and tell us that."

I glanced over at Akna again, still sleeping. "She hasn't woken?"

"Oh, she's woken. But she's in no state to speak. Her mouth is wrecked. And she's in severe shock. We tried getting her to write her answers down but without any success. And Señor Flores is out of commission too. It's just you, Dr Miguel."

"Just me? What about the Americans?"

She made a face. "I think it's better if you speak to Yazmin. I don't know what I'm supposed to say. Allowed to say. But on another subject: you seem to be doing well."

"I'm really hungry."

"Not surprising."

"You think you can take this drip out of my arm? And let me eat some ordinary food?"

"I'll have them bring you something."

"No, I'll go get something. Yazmin can buy me a breakfast."

I knew there was a canteen in the hospital and right now I wasn't too concerned about appearing in public looking like the risen dead. I just wanted coffee and something made out of pastry.

Doctor Triminio tried to convince me to stay in bed but I argued my way out of it and into a clean hospital gown and slippers. I asked her to tell Yazmin to meet me at the canteen, and negotiated some more pain killers from the nurse. Then I hobbled down the corridor back to the toilet of the night before. I knew I would have to get some clothing delivered, that I would have to make contact with the outside world, but that could wait. I needed information more than anything right now, and I hoped Yazmin could give it to me.

When I opened the toilet cubicle I thought the floor was covered in a pool of sticky blood. I stared at it, closed my eyes, reopened them and saw plain, clean tiles. I needed to sit down. I needed drugs.

I did my business under the mocking gaze of the bird in the picture frame, with whom I avoided making eye contact. I chomped the bitter white tablets the nurse had given me, and then back out of the cubicle at the wash basin I swilled them down with water and rinsed my mouth out. I tasted like a teenager after two nights of binge-partying.

In the bathroom mirror I assessed my face. It looked like a plate of rotting ceviche, all bruised shrimp and soggy tomato. Some part of me felt like I somehow deserved it, though. I kept remembering the snake attack on Gonzalo, in the forest. The way I'd sat there watching it, appraising it, even, as if it was entertainment.

Jesus.

I took an elevator one floor down to ground and shuffled out into the wide open canteen area, like a recently reanimated zombie. The canteen spread out behind the main reception area of the day-clinic, a seafood-colored expanse filled with Formica-topped tables bolted to the floor and a thick shrubbery of beige plastic chairs. It was sparsely populated at this time of day, and several of the other patrons were clearly patients themselves: casts, crutches, neck-braces, wheelchairs, and even a drip-stand or two. I felt less self-conscious than I'd expected in my open-back gown and hard-bottom slippers.

Yazmin was sitting at a table with two uniformed police, a man and a woman. When he saw me shuffling towards him he signaled them to leave and they did, nodding at me as we passed each other. I realized that I probably stank. I hoped the foreground of food smell and the background of hospital smell would cloak me.

Yazmin was so massive he couldn't sit comfortably in the narrow confines of the plastic chairs. He perched forward on the lip of one precariously, like a cartoon ogre. I sat opposite him and my stomach lurched at the sight of his paper cup of milky coffee.

"I'm really starving," I said. "But you guys have my suitcase so you'll have to buy."

"Believe it or not," he said. "They make fantastic Johnny cakes."

The mere mention of these cheered me up. He went over to the counter and ordered my food, then came back with a warm cup of coffee for me while I waited. I sipped the coffee, determined to acclimatize my sore mouth to consumption. Those Johnny cakes were going to get mercilessly chomped, injuries notwithstanding.

"So, where do we begin?" Yasmin asked.

"How about we begin with what day it is."

He raised his eyebrows. "It's the day after yesterday," he said, as if this was not a ludicrous remark. When I just stared at him, he said: "It's the next day. You left Kabahuacan yesterday morning and were picked up last night around nine. Did you think something else?"

I nodded, then shook my head. "I didn't think something else. I just didn't know. Everything is very confused."

We were interrupted by the arrival of a plastic plate with my breakfast on it. I was so ravenous I can't tell you who brought it. The plate filled my entire vision, and its scent consumed the rest of my awareness.

"Excuse me," I said. "I may faint."

Yazmin waved a generous paw. "Eat."

He was right, they made fantastic Johnny cakes: spicy beans and cheese on hot, thickly buttered coconut bread. I shoveled half the contents of the plate down my gullet before I realized that chewing and swallowing really hurt.

"Ow," I said for the second time that day. "That smarts so bad. But worth it."

I gulped more coffee, which also hurt. But I felt surprisingly refreshed and alive, despite the undeniable pain.

"Okay," said Yazmin indulgently. "Let's get to it, huh? What happened to you and the other people on that boat?"

I had been wondering what I was going to say to that since we'd met earlier. There were different ways to tell the story. There were different stories to tell. My main goal, honestly, was to try to get information, not give it. I still wasn't sure how I felt about the things I remembered.

I said: "My memories are pretty confused. It's possible I was drugged."

He shook his head, pouting. "No," he said. "Your blood work is clean. You weren't drugged. Not you, not Flores, not the girl. The Americans I don't know. But you three, clean. No drugs."

He was watching me, and I reminded myself that despite his amiable demeanor and the fact that he'd bought me breakfast, he was a police inspector. Probably homicide. People were missing, possibly dead. He wasn't my friend.

I started in on the other Johnny cake, slowly. "So there's just the three of us here?" I asked. "There should be more."

"That's one of the things we're trying to figure out: how many people were on that boat. What's the answer?"

I chewed slowly, thinking, and he lost the friendly smile briefly. He exhaled in frustration.

"Is the answer seven? You, Flores, Akna Tep, a Dr Pilsomething, from Florida, the American Miltons, brother and sister, and one other. A Mexican woman?"

"Pilsudski," I said. "Not Pilsomething."

"Okay. My apologies. Those were the seven people on the boat, which was originally authorized to carry just you and the other doctor and Flores and the assistant crew member. So the other three were hitch hikers."

I nodded and finished chewing. The Johnny cake tasted less delicious now but I wanted the nutrients.

"How many came back?" I asked, knowing the answer.

"Five," he said. "No Pil —. No Pilsudski and not the Mexican woman. And it might as well just be three because the Miltons from America are out of my hands."

"I don't understand."

"The American consulate has them. They made one phone call as soon as they got to the hospital last night. An hour later it was wall-to-wall lawyers and junior diplomats in here. Neither of them was badly injured and by midnight they were gone. I have no idea where they are. Right now, with Flores in a coma and Tep unable or refusing to talk, you are my only — lead."

I wondered what word he'd intended before he chose 'lead'. He seemed tired and frustrated, and I could sense a mountain of political pressure being brought to bear on him, tainted by the shame of a small country having to subordinate its investigation to the dictates of the United States.

"Who are they?" I asked. "The Miltons?"

"You don't know?"

"I gave them a ride on a boat. A misdemeanor that turned into a disaster. But I don't know anything about them. I met them — it seems weird that it was yesterday."

"Well, I don't know either. Very, very rich Americans, is the best answer I have. I have managed to find out that they hail from somewhere called Vermont." He took a notebook out of his coat pocket and examined a page. "Montpellier, Vermont. It's in the north. Near Canada."

"I know where Vermont is."

"You do? Well, I suppose you would. You're educated. So that's what I know. Rich, from Vermont. And gone."

We looked at each other. I finished eating the Johnny cake and emptied the cooled coffee. He watched me, patient but visibly restraining his irritation. When I couldn't pretend to be doing anything else any more, he said: "Now, tell me: Señorita Abelar."

"Who?"

"The Mexican. Silvia Abelar. That's the name from the manifest on the tour boat they jilted. Silvia Abelar traveling, and it seems berthing, with Chloe Milton."

"I didn't know her surname. Theirs either. I told you, we just met. They needed a ride from Kabahuacan."

"Why? They had a ride. A tour boat. Which they ditched, causing quite some consternation and uproar."

That made me laugh despite myself. The idea that the tour boat operators thought their problem was serious, in comparison to what had really happened, was hilarious.

Yazmin was unamused. "My priority right now is to find two missing people," he said bluntly. "Do you know where they are?"

I shook my head. "No I don't."

"Doctor Miguel, I'm trying to be nice to you because you've been badly injured and traumatized. But sooner or later you're going to have to tell someone everything that you know. Let's make it sooner."

"Can you tell me how we were found? I only remember waking up in the ambulance. Where had we landed?"

"What do you mean landed? You were found on the boat. The Tommygoff. Drifting in the ocean. Everyone unconscious." He leaned forward and took out his pen to write in the notebook. "What land? You landed somewhere? There's nowhere between Kabahuacan and the coral islands."

I stared at him through all of this speech. "That's insane," I said eventually.

"You're telling me that after you set out from Kabahuacan you made land somewhere."

I felt suddenly sick again, not from hunger this time. My face hurt a lot more than had it a minute before. Of course I knew where we had landed but I didn't know what to say to Yazmin.

I said: "I told you, I'm very confused. And I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to go back to bed."

He shook his head. "No, look, Doctor Miguel, please."

"I'm very sick," I said. "Believe me. I need to lie down. Right now."

"You can help us find out where these two people are," he said. "Only you can."

I shook my head, rising shakily. "Not even I can," I said quietly.

I made my slow way back to the elevator, feeling his eyes on me. He was right. Sooner or later I was going to have to tell somebody everything that I remembered. But not right now. I needed to sort out my own version of events. For one thing, it seemed impossible that we'd been found unconscious on The Tommygoff in the middle of the ocean. That didn't follow from my memories at all.

Upstairs at the nurse's station I begged a phone call and got hold of my mother. I told her I'd been in a boating accident and where I was. I told her to bring me some clean clothes and, while the nurse wasn't paying attention, I told her to expect to take me home with her.

I said: "I look bad but I'm fine."

I wanted to phone someone on Kabahuacan but I didn't think I could finagle a second call, and anyway I felt really tired, suddenly. I thanked the nurse, told her to expect my mother in about forty minutes, and then went back to the ward. On my way to my bed I stopped to look at Akna. I couldn't tell if she was really sleeping or pretending to sleep. I said her name softly but she didn't open her eyes.

Back at my bed I sat on top of the covers, looking out the window at a snail slowly tracking up a drainpipe in the blazing sun. Eventually the nausea came back and I had to lie down. I made sure I lay in such a way that I could keep an eye on Akna, in case she woke, but she didn't. What had the doctor said? She was in such severe shock she couldn't communicate? I wondered what was going on inside her mind, what sort of nightmare she was enduring in there. Was it the ongoing nightmare brought on by Silvia's apparently supernatural transformation of reality? Or was it a nightmare of guilt? Between the island and the hospital, had she realized that besides the injuries she gave herself, she'd also tried to kill Gonzalo?

# 8: Akna

Chloe and I helped Gonzalo out of the forest and back onto the beach. Weak between us, he felt smaller and more brittle than I would have expected, bony and loosely assembled. But somehow the transition from shade to sunlight felt significant. Back out on the beach with thick sand under our feet, Gonzalo seemed more capable and stable. He coughed a few times and rolled his head on his shoulders, the way you would before or after a workout.

It took a while for any of us to say anything meaningful. Eventually, Gonzalo said: "Well, how are we going to explain that?"

I couldn't think of an answer and Chloe also just looked at him.

He said: "We all saw the same thing, right? A snake with wings."

I nodded. He obviously hadn't seen the somewhat crazier part where the snake with wings came into existence out of a bird.

I said: "I don't want to say it out loud, but yes. A snake with wings."

"Just like she said." He pointed at Chloe. "So now we know for sure. The bruja is responsible."

I didn't feel like pointing out to him that Silvia was nowhere near us, as far as we knew. If she was directly responsible, then —. What then? I couldn't think clearly about it. I remembered Silvia's remarks about jungle monsters and how Gonzalo would protect the 'liddle chicas'. That wasn't the way it worked out, though, was it? Had she known? Had she somehow done this? It was hard to contemplate. Already I felt like we were just three people on a remote beach, with blue ocean and light surf rolling in. A breeze, the sky. It was easier to believe in gentle nothingness than in what all three of us had witnessed only minutes earlier.

"Let's go back to the boat," I said. "It's nearly time to turn around anyway."

Chloe seemed to have turned inward, as if she was preoccupied. Or depressed. She looked skinnier than before, somehow, scrawny even. The amount of talking she'd been doing seemed to have exhausted her. Not to mention rescuing Gonzalo from an assault by a mythical creature. For my part, I felt empty. I couldn't explain what had happened by any means that didn't involve sorcery, and I didn't want to accept sorcery as an explanation. My mind wanted to shut down and not examine anything.

We walked back north along the coast, this time sticking close to the surf, even getting our feet wet, as if we'd silently agreed that going near the tree line was dangerous. We barely spoke, all of us caught up in private thoughts. When the boat came in sight we picked up our pace, not quite breaking into a run but striding swiftly. I could see Adam up on the deck still using the telescope. When he saw us he waved, big motions with a straight arm, but none of us waved back.

I climbed onto the boat first. Adam pointed and I saw Steven sitting there, lazily flipping the knife Gonzalo had given him. Silvia was not in evidence.

When the others joined us, I asked: "So?"

Steven said: "You go first. Did you find anything?"

"We found a supernatural flying snake," I said. "What did you find?"

Pilsudski snorted, amused. Steven looked at Chloe and a silent message passed between them. He didn't smile.

"Seriously?" he asked.

Gonzalo said: "Seriously. It attacked me."

"Wait," said Pilsudski. "You're not joking? A snake attacked you?"

"A flying snake," Chloe said, somewhat defiantly.

Pilsudski held up those big hands again, palms facing us. "You better explain."

"Well, Adam," I said, sitting down. "I don't know where to start. First Chloe told me what made them want to leave the island. And you're not going to like that part. And then after she told us that, I saw a bird turn into a snake." Gonzalo grunted in surprise, learning this fact for the first time. I went on: "A snake with wings. And then I saw that snake with wings attack Gonzalo. So, you know, right now I don't know what else to say."

Pilsudski was smiling and frowning at the same time. He looked at me hard, then at Gonzalo and Chloe, then finally at Steven.

"Okay, guys, I feel like I'm being pranked."

"Man, I told you," Steven said. To me, he said: "I already tried to tell your friend here what happened on the island, but he thinks I'm yanking his chain."

"Okay, back up," I said. "Why are you even here? Where's Silvia?"

"That's another story," said Pilsudski. "I think I'm going to need a beer. Even a warm beer. I've been holding off until you all got back."

He walked away shaking his head, and descended the ladder down into the cabin. While he was gone I again asked Steven where Silvia was. He said: "About fifteen minutes' walk into the woods, right over there." He pointed a little way up the beach. "But you're not going to believe where we are."

"I think I know."

"Yeah? Okay. Silvia is waiting for us at the cave entrance, on the same island we left this morning. We're on the same island. Or a different version of it."

Chloe sat down heavily, and so did Gonzalo.

"How is she doing this?" he asked.

"If I knew that," said Steven, "I'd put a stop to it. You got attacked by a snake?"

"Wait for me," said Pilsudski, coming back up the ladder. He carried a six-pack of beers out of the cabin refrigerator. He passed the pack around and everyone took one except me. "I remembered," he said, handing me a bottle of sparkling water. It was warm but I was thirsty. I swigged almost the whole bottle back and then softly belched.

Pilsudski said: "Elmira, you're a scientist. Are you telling me you legitimately saw what you say?"

I nodded. "I have no explanation for it but I saw it."

I described the bird flying into the little clearing where we'd been sitting, and taking up its position on the vine.

"Pharomachrus mocinno," said Pilsudski, with a somewhat haughty, scholarly intonation. We all looked at him. "Quetzal bird, sounds like."

I shrugged. Then I told him the rest, exactly as it had happened. Steven nodded throughout, and when I was done he said:

"Man, I told you. I told him what that bitch did on the island, with the storm and the snakes. He doesn't believe me."

"Well, for one thing," said Pilsudski, "there is no such cave or waterfall across that rope bridge and up that hill. You forget that I spent six weeks living on Kabahuacan. I'm familiar with its geography."

Steven made a frustrated face. He said: "I don't know what you think you know. But if you come with me you're going to see what I'm talking about. Cave, waterfall, rock pool, the whole shebang."

Pilsudski smiled. "I don't doubt, yet, what's in the forest on this island. I doubt what you claim is on Kabahuacan."

"This is Kabahuacan," said Gonzalo. He didn't make eye-contact with Pilsudski. He looked frayed and sweaty.

"How can it be?" asked Pilsudski. He drained his can of beer and took another one. "There are no people here. There's no infrastructure. This cannot be the same island." No one said anything. Eventually he said, to me: "Could this be some kind of hypnosis? Mass hysteria? A drug effect?"

"I really don't know." I was going to say more but glancing past him I saw a head pop up at the top of the ladder. Then the rest of Akna emerged. "When did she wake up?"

Pilsudski looked. "Must be right now," he said. "She was fast asleep when I went in to get the beer. In fact, I thought it was starting to get really worrying."

Akna rounded the bridge of the boat and came towards us, barefoot as we'd left her, having removed her sandy shoes to put her in the bed. She was shuffling along, sliding her feet more than taking full steps, and she seemed to be staggering a little, occasionally bumping her hip into the boat railing.

"Is she awake?" asked Chloe. "She looks like she's —."

"Sleepwalking," I said.

Akna's eyes were only partially open, and her hands hung slackly at her sides. She seemed unaware of her surroundings, yet capable of navigating without serious mishap. As she came near to us I heard her muttering, a kind of guttural, rough noise produced through barely moving lips.

We all stared at her, unsure of the right way to deal with this. I half rose to take hold of her, thinking to prevent her from just carrying on walking and pitching over the end of the boat. But she stopped in the middle of the deck, as if thinking about something, and sat down in a single straight motion, hard, like a demolished building falling. She crossed her legs. Head tilted slightly back, hands folded in her lap, she carried on mumbling.

Leaning in to listen, I heard that she repeated the same few phrases continually. I recognized the language as her mother tongue, but since I can't speak Mayan I had no idea what she was saying.

Gonzalo also leaned in. "Sounds like something about — an eagle. And a jaguar. And a — snake." He sat back again. "More snakes. Fantastic."

Chloe looked at me. "I guess we leave her?"

I'd heard the warnings about waking sleepwalkers, but I'd also heard that it wasn't true, so I shrugged. No one else seemed to want to take responsibility for doing anything. We watched her. She started to sway in little circles, still muttering, and then after a few more seconds she fell silent. He eyelids, which had been fluttering half open, now closed completely. Then she opened her eyes fully, stood, and walked over to the edge of the deck, facing the direction Silvia and Steven had gone exploring.

"Akna?" Gonzalo called her. He said something in Mayan and walked to her. He looked closely at her face, waved a hand in front of it, spoke some more. He came back and sat down again.

"She's not awake," he said.

As if in response, Akna walked away from us back towards the bridge, one hand resting on the railing. She got to the far end of the bridge and then stopped and stood, like a machine that had been powered off.

"Well, this just gets weirder, doesn't it?" said Steven. He meant it as a joke but it didn't feel funny. When no one said anything else, Steven said to Gonzalo: "You mind if I take a look at you? Make sure you're okay? Snake attack is no laughing matter."

Gonzalo seemed suspicious.

Chloe said: "He's a trained EMT. Let him look at you." She saw the expression on my face, and said: "It's a long story. But amazing as it might seem, we're not totally useless rich kids."

Steven stood and started examining Gonzalo, checking under his shirt for bites. There was visible bruising around Gonzalo's shoulders and chest where the snake had compressed him. While he worked, Steven explained that he'd trained as an EMT while supposedly pursuing a business degree in college.

"I wanted to do something good," he said, and Chloe said: "You wanted to bang the woman giving the training. Don't give yourself airs."

Steven laughed and she smiled. It was an unexpectedly relaxed moment in the midst of our calamity. I felt bad about how cruelly I'd judged them the first time I saw them, what seemed like days ago, on the marina.

"No bites," Steven said. "Snake really squeezed you though."

Pilsudski finished his second beer and crushed the can.

"Seems like we have a decision to make," he said, addressing himself to the group. "Are we going to go after Silvia or do we ignore her and carry on trying to figure out how to get back to safety? I mean, am I the only one who thinks we have to try to punch our way out of this? Figuratively. Punch with our minds."

"Chloe thinks Silvia brought us here deliberately," I said. "By means unknown, she made this happen. Pretty sure Gonzalo thinks that too. Steven too. And so do I."

"Hey," said Pilsudski, "I agree. The difference is, I don't think there's voodoo involved. I think she's up to some kind of admittedly inventive but not supernatural scam. And I think we're just playing into her hands by following her plan. She wants all of us up at that cave, or whatever, and I think we should therefore not go there."

"Well, at least one of us now has to," said Steven. He startled me by jumping up and leaping over the boat rail. Confused, I stood and saw him running hard across the beach.

"Where is he —?"

"Akna," said Gonzalo. He too, stood and hopped over the side of the boat.

I looked further away and there she was, also running hard. She must have quietly slipped off the boat possibly while Steven was examining Gonzalo. She was already well up the beach and disappearing between the trees. Heading for Silvia.

"I don't know how to explain any of this," I said to Pilsudski. "But I don't think ignoring it is a real option."

I walked to the rail and lifted myself over. I dropped to the beach and set off in a light jog after the others. I heard Chloe calling after me and I slowed to let her catch up. As she did I looked back and saw Pilsudski climbing down slowly. Even at this distance I could see him shaking his head.

*

I could hear Gonzalo and Steven, still moving fast up ahead of us despite the impediment of the forest. Their passage batted vines and branches aside, crunched leaves and twigs underfoot, dislodged stones. They were going much faster than we were and gradually they moved out of earshot, the sounds softening and dissipating.

Chloe and I moved more cautiously, so slowly in fact that Pilsudki soon caught up with us.

"We're going to lose them," he said, moving slightly ahead. His huge form easily bulldozed a path through the tangled growth.

"So what?" I said. "If this is Kabahuacan, we know where we're going."

He let out an exasperated snort. "If this is Kabahuacan I will personally —. I don't know what I'll do."

"Well, let's test the hypothesis. If it is Kabahuacan then we should be able to easily navigate to the cave site based on our existing knowledge. Right?"

He stopped and looked at me, eyes narrowing, a little smile forming on his rotund face. He nodded. "Okay, I'll play. I'll say this: if we get lost based on our existing knowledge, then we'll have proven this is not Kabahuacan. But if we find our way there, that could just be a happy accident. Agreed?"

I shrugged. Formally speaking, he was right. But both of us knew, I think, that if our knowledge of the island correctly navigated us to Silvia, that was sufficient empirical evidence. The pitfalls of inductive logic could go fly a kite.

"So, where are we on Kabahuacan?" he asked as we resumed our slow progress.

"A couple of hundred yards north of the visitors' center," I said. "If we turned right and walked straight we would come to that half-moon elevation that it's built on. But we don't need to do that. If we keep heading this way, which is more or less north-east, we're going to cross a river. Or, more likely, we're going to cross a natural gulley that will eventually become a river."

"Why not the river itself?"

"What Chloe and Steven described, the cave entrance and the rock pool and so on, does not exist on Kabahuacan today. That cave system collapsed as a consequence of a seismic event about five hundred to six hundred years ago."

I made a face at myself for saying 'seismic event'. I didn't want to sound like the same sort of smug pedant as Adam.

"The earthquake," I went on, "also diverted the watercourse that had previously formed the waterfall that fed the rock pool. It created a new channel further east that ran into a natural gulley and formed the river we know today. Without the waterfall the rock pool dried up and in any case the earthquake smashed its bedrock into jagged boulders, upon which later people painted the art which signified to the first archeologists that the area had been inhabited. Hence, that area became the first dig site on the island."

Pilsudski was sustaining his skeptical, slightly smarmy face, and seemed about to say something, but I noticed that Chloe had stopped walking so I turned to look at her. She was standing with her mouth open, as if everything I'd been saying had only recently turned some gears in her brain.

"Are you saying —? I mean, what are you saying?" she asked, sounding like a small child.

Pilsudski laughed, without humor. "The eminent doctor is saying that she thinks we have traveled backwards in time."

Chloe went pale. "Is that what you're saying?"

I nodded. "It's an idea. It addresses the evidence. Not just the geographical evidence, either. It's also consistent with our technology not working. Our digital technology, our phones, the boat's instruments."

Pilsudski squeezed his eyes shut as if he had a headache.

"Wait, wait, wait, are you saying that those things don't work because they haven't been invented yet? That doesn't make any —. Look, that's ridiculous. Electronics work according to physical laws, and those don't change over time. Just because someone hasn't invented battery-powered gadgets in the fifteenth century doesn't mean that a time traveler's battery-powered gadgets would fail to function in the fifteenth century."

I smiled. "I guess we don't actually know that. But circumstantially, I'd say that if we have traveled back in time, and all our gadgets simultaneously no longer work, then we might hypothesize that traveling back in time is what broke them."

We carried on walking. No one seemed inclined to say anything. Chloe seemed stunned, deep in thought, and Pilsudski looked like he was trying out different smart-aleck remarks in his mind.

Like the forest where Gonzalo had been attacked, this growth was thick and high, blocking out most of the sky but for sporadic patches. Sunlight filtered through as a pervasive greenish-yellow glow. Suddenly the ground sloped down underfoot.

"Gulley," I said.

The depression was about the right size to eventually become the river over which 20th-century scientists would build a rope bridge. That bridge, if my guess was correct, would lie maybe half a mile away. If we cross the gulley and then tracked along it we'd come to a pronounced hill, and about half way up that hill we'd find the others.

We crossed through the gulley and up the other side, then carried on walking along its edge. I was so busy thinking about how astonishing it was to have such an absurd idea as time travel occupying my mind that I didn't notice Pilsudski stopping. I walked into his back, somehow soft and solid at the same time.

"What is it?" I asked.

"Path." He pointed. "Man-made."

He was right. We'd reached the bottom of the hill. I couldn't see its total shape because of the trees, but it looked like the right angle of ascent. As if someone had been expecting us, a course up the incline had been marked out by the placement of conch shells, some on the ground, some attached to trees, forming a clear directional avenue up the hill.

Chloe said: "So there are people here."

"Looks that way," said Pilsudski.

He turned his head this way and that as if to listen, but all we could hear were the insect and bird noises, and the constant shushing of the breeze through the leaves. With no other obvious option, we followed the path indicated by the shells. I'd climbed the hill on Kabahuacan maybe a hundred, even two hundred times. Every one of my senses told me unequivocally that this was the same hill. The wildlife was more abundant, the vegetation thicker and more verdant, but the shape of the earth, the angle of the ascent, the sheer sense of physical place, was the same. No matter that I couldn't explain it. I had to accept the evidence.

"Hear that?" Chloe said after a few minutes of trudging. "Is that water?"

I heard it too and then Pilsudski said: "Sounds like a waterfall."

We pushed on and within a short while found ourselves emerging into a clearing, roughly halfway up the hillside. Sunlight poured into the space, sparkling off the rapid, gurgling water of the fall, and skipping off the little waves and dimples in the surface of the rock pool.

I was going to say: "Well, we found it."

But Silvia's voice got there before me. "Here we all are," she called out, like a party hostess. "How nice."

*

I suppose I had been subconsciously expecting to find Silvia actively involved in some kind of ceremonial magic ritual, probably naked, but in fact she was fully clothed in her denim hot pants and my Jolly Roger shirt, sitting comfortably in the mouth of the cave. Consistent with Chloe's description, this cave entrance was taller even than Pilsudski, and wide enough to park a car in. Silvia sat cross-legged in it, leaning back on her straightened arms, smiling at everyone.

Gonzalo and Steven had, of course, arrived before us. Gonzalo had taken custody of Akna and was standing off to one side, near the shimmering pool, bodily shielding her from Silvia. For her part, Akna seemed completely uninterested again in what was going on around her. Her eyes were open but it didn't look like she was fully present, mentally. In her now-dirty cheap t-shirt and scruffy shorts, she looked like a street-delinquent, such as you unfortunately find in every major city: poor, dirty and high.

Steven was up on the rocky ridge above the cave mouth, looking at the fast-flowing spring that pushed the waterfall off the edge into the pool. He glanced down at us and waved.

I took a moment to steady myself. I was surprised at how shocked I felt to find that the scene Chloe had described actually existed. I thought I'd accepted it on some level, but it turned out to be only in my imagination. Physically entering the location was more upsetting than I had expected, probably because it more or less confirmed my intellectual surmise that we'd somehow traveled back in time on Kabahuacan. I stared at everything like a tourist at a World Wonder. As the reality of the situation caught up with me, I felt myself get dizzy and I put out a hand. Chloe took my arm but it wasn't enough support. My knees buckled and I sank into a kneel, feeling the whole clearing and its sparkling water features spin and dip around me.

It took a few seconds for me to stabilize. I sat flat on the ground, feeling slightly foolish.

Towering over me, Pilsudki looked completely untroubled. He walked over to a rock on the edge of the pool and sat on it. To Silvia he said: "Maybe you can tell us why you brought us here."

I wasn't sure if he meant 'here, this island' or 'here, this clearing'. Silvia just looked at him.

He went on: "You were supposed to see if you could find any help for us. Instead you found a cave. Amazing. How is this supposed to help us?"

Silvia flicked a hand dismissively. "If you wanna leave, go," she said. "I like it here."

I found my voice: "So, Adam, what do you think now? About where we are?"

He made a face of distaste. "I concede nothing," he said.

Silvia laughed. "He don't wanna see what's in front of his face. He gonna have seventeen reasons why it isn't what it looks like."

"Well, what does it look like?" I asked her. I wanted to hear her say it. But she just grinned.

"You know what it is," she said. "So does he. He just don't wanna admit it."

Pilsudski looked irritated, even close to being angry. It wasn't clear if he was angry at Silvia in general or if he was somehow angry at the world for not making sense. For trying to make him believe something he had already decided was impossible. He addressed himself to Gonzalo, standing nearby.

"Let's take Akna and go back to the boat," he said. He called up to Steven, who was now sitting with his legs hanging off the rock ledge. "I think we go back to the boat, what do you say?"

The other two men looked uncertain, reluctant to make a decision. It was clear to me that Silvia, for whatever reason and by whatever means, had successfully taken full control of the flow of events. It was obviously also clear to Pilsudski, and he hated it.

"Look," he said, studiously not looking at her, but addressing himself to the rest of us. "We can go back to the beach and build a fire. A few fires. You got firelighters and that sort of thing, on the boat, right? We can collect enough firewood while it's still light to make three or four big bonfires along the beach. Signal fires. Maybe we even try to take the boat out. I don't know, have we even tried to see if the motor will start? I know the instruments don't work, but if we start the motor maybe we can get out into the ocean a way and see if there's any other traffic out there. What do you think?"

Part of me wanted someone to agree with him, even if only to make him seem less isolated. But nobody said anything. Eventually Silvia said: "Okay, man, you wanna go do all that, go. Take all the boys with you. Have fun."

I said: "Adam, I think we're past all that. Obviously Silvia brought us here, although she hasn't yet admitted it." I looked at her but she smiled angelically without a word. "And obviously this thing is going to play out according to some script that only she knows about. I think we could build signal fires and shoot flares into the sky until we've burned up everything on this island and it won't make a single bit of difference."

"I think the expert in pre-Colombian religion is right," Silvia said.

Pilsudski said: "Because we've traveled back in time? Is that really your whole explanation, Dr Miguel?"

Silvia snorted laughter. "We traveled back in time?" she asked, sounding genuinely incredulous. "Wow. I did not know that. Hey, Chloe, baby girl, you know that? We traveled back in time, man."

"See?" said Pilsudski. "Even she thinks that's stupid."

I flushed. I couldn't decide if Silvia was mocking me to deflect from the truth or because she genuinely thought my explanation was dumb. If she knew the whole truth and it had nothing to do with time travel, then I probably did sound like a lunatic to her.

I stood up, more as a way of reasserting some dignity than anything else. I said: "Is this island Kabahuacan?"

She shrugged. "I don't know what it's called."

"Let me ask it another way. Is this the same place where you went after you left the visitors' center on Kabahuacan?"

Her eyes widened and she looked at Chloe, making a face like a naughty schoolgirl caught out in a relatively harmless prank. "You told them that, huh? Oh, that must have been so funny."

"You know what isn't funny? Getting attacked by a flying snake," I said. I flushed again, feeling stupid for saying it.

Silvia frowned. "You got attacked? That's not right."

"Not me. Gonzalo." I pointed at him. He straightened up and pushed his chest out a little, defensively.

Silvia grinned. "Oh, that makes sense." In Spanish she said: "You all right, baby boy? Did the big snake frighten you?"

I could see he wanted to rebuke her, but he didn't. He strained against whatever insult was boiling in his mouth. Tight-lipped, he stared at her and moved slightly so that he concealed even more of Akna from Silvia's view.

"Here's my theory," Pilsudski said, stepping forward like an orator. "It doesn't involve time travel or UFOs or ancient aliens. It involves this woman drugging us, or hypnotizing us in some way that I can't explain, and bringing us to this island. Which is not Kabahuacan. It is some other location, similar but not the same. I don't know exactly why she's brought us here, but my guess is its to make us the victims of some kind of criminal shenanigan. Or if not that, then to make us the victims of some kind of psychotic cult murder. Or something. And furthermore," he actually said 'furthermore', "I think that inside that cave one or more accomplices are waiting to kibosh us, tie us up, torture us and or kill us." He also actually said 'and or'. "So, for my money, going into that cave with this woman is one of the dumbest things any of us will ever do. So I'm not going to do it."

Silvia gently applauded, touching her fingertips to her palm like a theatregoer. Then she said: "I agree you should not come into the cave. Who said anything about you coming into the cave? You go back to the beach and make a big fire. Be manly."

Pilsudski called up to Steven again: "You coming? Am I really the only sane person here?"

Steven stood up and started walking back down the ridge. "Man," he said, "what I think is —."

But we would never find out what Steven thought at that moment. His voice was drowned out by the impossible, incomprehensible sound of thunder. He stopped walking and looked up, as did all of us. Even Silvia stood, coming a yard or so out from the cave mouth, her face lifted skyward.

Behind me I heard Chloe say, in a scared whine: "No. No. No."

The sky was thickening, visibly and swiftly. Clouds rushed into it like time-lapse photography, blotting out the sunlight, devouring every patch of blue. Within seconds the clearing where we stood had fallen into a cold shadow. The color of the light went from yellow-green to charcoal-blue. I felt the hairs on my arms straining with electricity. Then thunder came again, accompanied by a flash of lightning that seemed to tear across the entirety of the visible sky, from side to side.

Silvia started to laugh. Everyone else just stood motionless, staring and struck dumb. The wind rose and began flinging leaves and sticks around our feet and legs. It grew in strength until I had to put a hand on Chloe again to keep from being knocked off balance by it. Her fingers gripped my forearm reciprocally. More thunder, and then rising behind the thunder, as if brought out of her by it, Akna began to chant.

Silvia looked at her. Akna pushed past Gonzalo, who tried to grab her and missed. She walked purposefully, her hands held up like the points of spears beside her face. She chanted whatever she'd been muttering earlier, on the boat, only now she sang it out, loud, clear, continuous. She marched over to Silvia and knelt before her. Silvia put a hand on the top of Akna's head.

"Leave her!" Gonzalo bellowed, but more thunder trampled on his voice. Akna reached up to Silvia's belt of many blades and baubles, took firm hold of one of the longer pieces of sharp obsidian, and plucked it off as if it was a fruit. She rose slowly, holding the ancient stone blade, and then before anyone even realized what she might do she stuck out her tongue and forced the stone knife through it.

My stomach rolled over and I felt myself get dizzy again. Chloe shrieked, and so did Gonzalo. Silvia seemed completely calm, not smiling any more, but not upset, either. Curious. I thought: that's how I must have looked when the snake was attacking Gonzalo. Serene and interested.

Akna withdrew the knife from her tongue in a spew of blood, and then plunged the knife forcefully through her cheek. She did this once more before Gonzalo and Steven both snapped out of their shock and leaped towards her from different directions. Gonzalo got there first and tried to grab at the hand holding the knife, but she deftly stepped out of his reach and stabbed herself again, this time at the point where her neck met her clavicle. She did not make any sound to accompany the mutilation, and she still did not seem to be fully awake. She got in another stab, through her bottom lip, before colliding with Steven, who wrapped his arms around her, pinning her. Now she did make a sound, an inarticulate, weird wail that soared up and cut through the next peal of thunder that crashed over us.

Gonzalo joined in the wrestling and while Steven held her arms, he again tried to get the blade away from her. She shrieked even more loudly, spitting blood, and trying to say some actual words that came out as inarticulate blubbering because her tongue was ruined.

Through all of this Silvia barely moved, except to shift her position so that she could get a better view. Pilsudski stood immobile, as did Chloe and I.

Akna gave one more bloody-mouthed yell and then she stamped hard on Steven's instep, causing him to cry out in pain. He lost focus for half a second and Akna heaved away from him, flailing an elbow that connected with his jaw and knocked him off his feet. She spun away from Gonzalo, raising the knife to stab herself again. Gonzalo tried to grab her arm. Furious, she rounded on him, eyes blazing. She slashed the blade at him, causing him to stagger backwards, away from her. He put his hands up to his throat and turned to me, not looking at me but facing me. Looking at nothing. Blood seeped out between his fingers and I realized with horror that Akna had cut his thoat open.

I let go of Chloe and moved towards him. He sank down into a heap as I caught him. Then he sank, prone, holding onto his throat and babbling softly, blood pressing out in sticky, dark rivulets over the backs of his hands.

"Help!" I shouted.

I looked around frantically, taking in much more detail than normal, in a state of panicked hyper-awareness. Chloe was moving towards me with a fierce, fearful expression, like someone facing up to their deepest phobia, trying to be courageous. Pilsudski had started moving too, also coming towards me, looking baffled, amazed even. He had never looked more like a lumpen fairytale monster than at that moment. Silvia hadn't moved. She looked as if she was in a waking dream, as if she was intoxicated and sedated, staring benignly at some pleasant, hallucinatory confection. Steven had risen and was trying, from a crouch, to grab hold of Akna again. Lightning flashed and reflected off the hilt of the knife on his belt, and I thought how remarkable it was that both he and Gonzalo were carrying knives, that both of them had weaponed up precisely because they thought there might be danger, and yet when danger came their knives remained forgotten in their sheaths.

Following that lightning flash, more thunder pealed, so loud and hard it felt like a physical force smacking into me. Time sped up. Steven almost got to Akna but she raised a foot and kicked out at him, planting the foot squarely in his chest and sending him reeling away. He slipped and lost his footing again. Akna raised the blade another time. She plunged it straight into her chest, forcing it in with both hands, and I thought: she's killed herself.

But instead she pulled the bloody knife out as if a little bit of a chest-stabbing only served to invigorate her. She flung the blade to one side, let out another horrendous keening wail, and set off running straight into the cave mouth.

I looked down at Gonzalo. He was still muttering, but his eyes had closed. He started to shake, as if he was freezing. A pool of blood formed on the ground, under his neck and shoulders.

Steven scrambled over to me, shouting something about applying pressure, and I remembered his EMT training. Well, that's good, I thought. That's one good thing.

I looked up and saw Silvia watching us. She seemed to have been waiting for me to look at her. When our eyes met, she nodded and motioned one hand towards the cave. She held my gaze for several seconds, then turned calmly and followed Akna into the darkness.

# 9: Descent

Steven took control of the scene. He shifted me gently but firmly to one side and knelt over Gonzalo.

"Look out for Chloe," he said to in a low voice. "She may flip out."

Louder, as if to reassure all of us, he explained the situation: "She didn't hit an artery. If she had, his blood would be shooting out in jets with every heartbeat. I know this looks bloody but it's probably just veins."

Gonzalo shuddered violently beneath him. He had bleached to that translucent blue-white that people go when they're fainting, and I thought he would probably lose consciousness at some point. I stood up and moved over to Chloe, who looked pale herself, her eyes wide and sunken. I put my arm on hers and she moved closer to me. She also trembled, but it felt like cold and not psychological distress. The wind had died off with Silvia's exit, but the sky still loomed low and dark above us.

"Basically," Steven said. "I think he's going to make it. His biggest problem is going to be sepsis. Who knows what bugs have been living on that knife? He could get a bad infection, so we need to clean these wounds, bandage him up. We have a kit on the boat, so if we can get him down there or get that kit up here, that's our first move."

"We also need to get to Akna," I said. "I mean, I know she did this, but she's obviously not in her right mind. She may harm herself even more."

"Or Silvia may harm her," Pilsudski said. Now that the action has subsided, he seemed to have reverted to his former state of mind: slightly irritated and obstinate. I waved a hand to cut the discussion short.

"We need to make a decision. Can he be moved?"

Gonzalo looked like he had now gone under. The trembling had subsided. I could hear him breathing raggedly, but his eyes were closed and he looked unconscious.

Steven shook his head. "I'd prefer getting the kit up here from the boat first," he said. "Unless all four of us try to carry him down, and even then I don't think we can manage it easily without causing more injury."

"Adam, can you get the kit?" I asked.

He made his affronted face. "Yes, I can get the kit. That's trivial. What are you going to do though?"

"I want to see what's going on with Akna."

He sighed. "It isn't safe. What if I'm right? What if Silvia has other people in there? How big is that cave system?"

"I really don't know. It depends how much of it is still accessible. At its greatest extent, pretty big."

"How big?"

"Halfway to the other coast, in various tunnels and chambers."

I wanted to point out that he was now relying on my knowledge of a defunct cave system on an island he claimed not to believe we were on, but I thought I'd let it slide. People don't always think consistently when stressed. Or maybe he'd changed his mind. Maybe the supernatural weather event and the teenage self-stabbing had finally convinced him that I was right.

"Lot of place for people with weapons to hide," said Pilsudski, infuriatingly.

"Jesus, Adam, do you really think this is some criminal abduction? Have you got eyes? I'm fully in favor of rational doubt, but what has to happen to make you realize we're not the victims of an ordinary scam?"

He flinched and I realized I was baring my teeth at him, really angry. I inhaled deeply.

"Okay," I said. "I'm sorry. I'm on edge."

Steven said: "We're all on edge. Can we focus on the dying stabbed guy?"

"You said he wasn't dying," Chloe moaned.

"Yeah, yeah. Can we focus on the medical emergency? I need somebody to go back to the boat and get the first-aid kit. I can do it, if someone else wants to sit here applying pressure."

"I'll do it," said Pilsudski. "But you guys wait here for me. I'll be twenty minutes. At most. Do not go into those caves."

He turned and ran out of the clearing. You could hear him barreling at high speed down the hill, clattering through vines and branches. As he went, thunder rolled out overhead, further away and less brutal than before, but enough to remind us of our incomprehensible situation.

Chloe said: "You're going to go into the caves, aren't you?"

I nodded. "I think Silvia got us into this and she's the only one who can get us out of it. If we can be gotten out of it."

Steven said: "Of course we can be gotten out of this. Eventually. If push comes to shove we can survive on this island, right? And there must be other people here. You saw that path of conch shells."

Somehow the path of conch shells did not fill me with any great confidence. I wanted to go after Akna, urgently, but I also didn't want to abandon Steven to whatever other peril might arise. If I could get Chloe to stay with him —.

"I'm going with you," Chloe said.

"Right," said Steven sarcastically. "I'll just save this guy's life and then bake a cake or something, shall I?"

But Chloe was already walking towards the cave mouth. Steven called out her name but she ignored him. I wondered if she, too, was responding to some unseen force compelling her, as it had compelled Akna.

I havered, feeling bad for Steven. He indicated the cave with his eyes. "Go," he said. "Look after my sister."

*

The interior of the cave was the size of the average bedroom. At first it wasn't obvious to me how to proceed. The place looked sealed off, from what I could see in the low light. It smelled stale and muggy. Then Chloe called out: "Here."

I walked further into the indistinct interior and saw her sitting about halfway up the far wall, in a hole that was apparently the entrance to a tunnel. "This way," she said.

A practical problem occurred to me: "It's going to be dark," I said. "Maybe we should go to the boat and get a flashlight."

She shook her head. "It's light in here. Come look."

She shifted backwards into the tunnel and I hauled myself up onto the lip of the hole. The tunnel extended a few dark yards into the rock, but beyond it I could see a soft blue and white light.

"Is that electricity?"

Chloe crawled backwards and I crawled forwards to the light. The tunnel opened out into another cave chamber about the same size as the one behind us. The light was not produced by electricity, or at least not by a man-made lighting system. I could identify that fact easily enough, but it wasn't easy to explain how it was being produced. The light came from the cave walls. Veins of blue and white light seemed to be embedded in the rock somehow. It wasn't bright but it was bright enough to see by, about as much light as you'd get from a TV screen in a darkened room.

"What is that?" both of us asked at the same time.

I approached one of the walls and peered at the light source. On closer inspection it didn't seem to be embedded in the rock, but laid over it. It looked like some sort of vegetation, actually. Bioluminescent plants? Did that exist?

"Don't touch it," Chloe gasped as I touched it. It felt like moss, thin, mat-like strips of furry plant matter, slightly cold and not quite moist. But shining, blueish-white.

"This is incredible," I said.

Chloe had moved away from me. She said: "It goes all the way in."

She was standing on the opposite side of the chamber. Another tunnel opened up on that side and I could see rivulets of light extending down along that tunnel's walls.

We pressed on into the mountain. The passages were high enough, mostly, for us to walk upright, with only occasional places where we had to crouch down or kneel. After the second tunnel opened into another small chamber, the succeeding tunnels began to angle noticeably downward. Not so steeply as to cause a problem for us, but definitely descending. I took Steven's instructions seriously and made sure I stayed ahead of Chloe. If anything dangerous came at us, I wanted to be between it and her.

As we went I tried to listen for any sounds up ahead of us, but I heard nothing except our own movements.

Chloe said: "You notice that all the men stayed outside the cave?"

I hadn't really thought about that, but she was obviously right. By whatever means, Silvia's unstated desire to separate the women and the men had finally come into effect. I tried to suppress my fear. I tried not to think about it but instead to distract myself with trying to be amazed by the caves and the lighting on the walls. But interesting as all this was, my overriding emotion was fright. And it was getting more intense the deeper in we went.

The tunnel cramped down to a crawl again and then we came out into the largest chamber we'd so far encountered. The floor area was maybe twice the size of the entrance cave, but the height extended up eighty or a hundred yards above our heads, all the way to the earth surface. I knew that because right at the top of the dome a hole let in what was obviously daylight, even if somewhat subdued and overcast daylight. It wasn't enough light to illuminate the floor where we stood but it revealed the architecture of the rocks above our heads and gave us a sense of how deep into the mountain we had penetrated.

The air around us felt wet. A visible, thin mist hung in it. The floor of this chamber was strewn with various kinds of leaves and needles, pine maybe, and cypress. I thought at first that this was detritus that had fallen down through the hole, but on closer inspection it seemed to have been packed on the floor like a kind of carpet. In amongst the needles and leaves I saw a great abundance of long, colorful feathers. I got the impression that if I could hover at a greater height, or look down from the hole above, I might see a pattern in the floor. I had never encountered anything like this before, either in my own field work or in literature. I felt confused and somehow diminished, as if my supposed academic expertise was being shown up as an illusion.

"This is pretty weird," Chloe said eventually.

Just as she spoke a bird cried out. Its call echoed and whirled around us and I couldn't tell if it was in the chamber with us, up above in the world of forest, or somewhere else in the cave system. I felt disoriented and even more afraid.

I could tell that Chloe was suddenly frightened too. "What do you really think?" she asked me. When I said nothing, she asked: "How do you think this ends?"

I swallowed and tried to make myself sound calm. "However it ends," I said, "it ends further down. Let's go."

Beyond this chamber the descent became much more pronounced. Twice we came to ledges taller than ourselves that we had to climb down. Chloe seemed to be getting physically tired, but she didn't say anything and we went on doggedly. I tried to calculate how much time had passed but I felt unsure. It could have been as little as ten minutes of descent or as much as thirty. Time felt as if it had slipped its chains, and I felt as if I was in a lucid dream.

The sound of water brought me back up to some semblance of full alertness. "Do you hear it?"

Chloe muttered assent and gently pushed me to keep moving. The tunnel floor leveled out somewhat, but at the same time the quantity of luminescent moss began to diminish. As the sound of water grew louder the air grew thicker and darker. I began to worry about hitting my head because I couldn't see clearly any more.

"Definitely water," I said.

The sound was very loud now, flowing ahead of us in the gloom. The gurgling noise echoed and trilled.

We came to another crawl space. It looked very dark, and at first I wasn't sure we would be able to make it through. I knelt and looked along it. The far side of it was bright. The same blue-white light shone there, much brighter than we'd seen before. I felt as if we were close to some kind of culmination. I should have felt pleased or relieved, but instead my stomach crunched up tight and I had to steady myself against the rock wall.

Cutting through the sound of water I heard another sound, and judging by her face, so did Chloe. It sounded like a human voice. A woman's voice, chanting just as it had chanted in the clearing above us. Akna.

I crawled along the tunnel and emerged into another chamber, similar to the ones we'd passed through earlier. The major difference in this chamber was the quantity of the luminous vegetation. It covered all the rocky surfaces like a thick carpet. Rising into this space felt like rising into some sort of underwater kingdom. I almost expected to see fish swimming in the air around me.

"Wow," Chloe said, coming up behind me. Despite the obvious tiredness in her voice, she sounded as genuinely amazed as I was.

Another tunnel, high enough to walk through, opened up ahead of us. The sound of Akna chanting was clearly audible now, even above the sound of rushing water. You could hear that she wasn't able to pronounce the words because of how much she'd mangled her tongue. She was just wailing their general shapes and intonations. The amount of echo on the noise made me think the chamber beyond this tunnel was much larger than any we'd previously encountered. I had the sense that we had arrived.

As I started to move towards the tunnel, Chloe put her hand on my shoulder and pointed.

Above the tunnel entrance, on the rock face, the luminous moss appeared to be arranged into a shape. It wasn't a particularly realistic picture, but it was quite clearly a depiction of a two-headed snake. With wings.

# 10: Survival

My mother lives alone in a modest, bright-blue, two-bedroom house near the university. Also near the main police precinct, which made me slightly nervous. I felt like a fugitive from justice, sneaking out of the hospital with a scarf around my face and into the back seat of a waiting taxi. The scarf was more to protect my injuries from prying eyes — my mother's idea of dignity — than to conceal my identity, but I felt deceitful anyway.

The day outside was bright and beautiful, calm with a high blue sky and the subtlest of breezes. Ordinary life. Impossible. Almost frighteningly impossible.

My mother kept clucking and fussing around me. The hospital had been reluctant to discharge me, and so had she, but I'd insisted. I looked worse than I felt, although I felt pretty bad.

Because of my hasty departure, though, I'd received no medication. I managed to get my mother to go shopping for painkillers, which served another purpose too: it left me alone long enough to call the admin office on the island. I got one of the long-serving secretaries, Jane, who went into paroxysms of hysteria when she realized who I was, and then I got her to give the phone to Jeavon Edgar, a close colleague. Not surprisingly, Jeavon also freaked out for a while before settling into information-giving mode. Unfortunately, he had no information of any value.

"The only thing we heard out here is Adam never made it. Is that true?"

"I think it is. They're looking, though. I mean, he's missing at this stage."

"I heard there's going to be a full investigation, police, department of environment, even the foreign ministry. What did you get into, Mira?"

"If I knew, I'd tell somebody," I said.

I suddenly didn't feel like seeking information any more. I realized that the gap between what I'd experienced and what everyone else knew was too great. The only people who could communicate sanely with me about such insanity were those who had also survived it. And all of them were out of reach, one way or another.

I spent three days at my mother's house, mainly to make her feel better, itching to get away and get back to my own apartment. The days were spent walking to the beach and back, slowly, like a convalescent, then staring at the sea. When not doing that I read newspapers and watched television. My injuries felt more like sprains and bruises than anything very serious, although my face stayed purple and black and didn't seem to be improving in the slightest.

When I slept, I dreamed about it. Not once about Silvia, or the snake-thing, but other parts of it. I dreamed a lot about being on The Tommygoff, silently sitting on the deck. Alone, as if everyone else had fallen overboard and I was drifting into nowhere, without a prospect of rescue.

I also started to remember things, although at first they felt more like headaches than memories. Images punched into my forehead at unexpected moments. I often had flashes of myself crawling through the blue glow of those incomprehensible illuminated tunnels. Crawling backwards, though, crawling back up and pulling Akna. Sometimes I saw Chloe in these memories, both of us exhausted, resting in the eerie half-dark, with Akna unconscious between us. Chloe silently weeping, not saying a word.

In these memories of Chloe she was wearing my Jolly Roger shirt, not the clothes she'd borrowed earlier. At first I thought this was down to confusion on my part, some kind of pathological symbolic sleight of mind. But I remembered, eventually, that that was factual. She put on what Silvia had been wearing because her own clothes were destroyed.

That reminded me of what we'd had to fight off down there. Both outside ourselves and within us. I hated remembering and my head hurt. I visited the hospital, ostensibly for a check-up but really to get better drugs. They gave me strong painkillers and also a sedative, which helped me sleep without remembering my dreams.

The hospital staff would not tell me anything about Akna or Gonzalo.

The day I left my mother's house, Inspector Yazmin intercepted me. I was walking to the waiting taxi, only to see him lean into its window. When he straightened up, the taxi rolled slowly away.

"Doctor Miguel," he said in his friendly not-friendly way.

"I expected you sooner," I said. "How am I going to get to my apartment, Inspector?"

Yazmin's car was an old Toyota SUV, well out of warranty, noisy and lived-in. He drove me, sedately, the five miles to my apartment.

"You remembered anything else yet?"

I didn't know I was going to, but I said: "I remember being inside a cave. Me, Chloe, Akna and Silvia."

"Where were the others?"

"Dr Pilsudski came later. Steven was treating Gonzalo. His throat had been cut."

"By who?"

I didn't want to name Akna so I said nothing. I looked straight ahead out the windscreen at normal people strolling along through their normal lives.

Yazmin sighed. "A cave, you say. See, this is what I don't understand. Last time you said you'd landed somewhere, but there is nowhere for you to have landed."

I shrugged. "You asked what I remembered."

"Okay. So what happened in the cave?"

I almost told him, then I closed my eyes and shook my head. "Bad things. I don't remember exactly."

"Do you remember vaguely?" He sounded annoyed again.

"We were attacked. Wild animals. A snake. We had to fight them off and — I mean, it's confused in my mind."

He drove in silence for a short while. "So, why were you at this place? What happened after you left Kabahuacan?"

"Silvia, Chloe and Steven started to have a party. You know, tequila and so on. I went below deck to get some sleep. Then —."

"Then what?"

"I think there was a storm. Or a collision. Or a storm that led to a collision. When I woke up we were stranded on a beach."

Again he drove silently. As we approached the part of town where I lived, he said: "Have you seen someone besides a medical doctor?"

"Like who?"

"Like a therapist? Or a counsellor?"

I shook my head. The thought had crossed my mind but it seemed an exhausting prospect.

He said: "Reason I ask is, it seems some of the things you remember are just — well, I don't know how to say this to you, but it seems impossible."

He stopped the car in front of my apartment building.

"For example," he said, "we thought of weather. You know, it sometimes happens, surprising weather events out on the open ocean. But according to the meteorology people, nothing like that at any point on that day anywhere between here and Kabahuacan. No storm. And I already said, nowhere for you to land either. So no cave. So no animal attack. So, Doctor Miguel, what really happened?"

I leaned my head back against the seat, suddenly very tired. "Are you going to charge me with something?"

"Not right now," he said.

"Are you going to charge anybody with anything?"

"Not right now."

I got out of the car and he called my name. He held out his hand. In it was my wallet and my apartment key.

"I brought these along for you," he said. "Thought you might need them." I hadn't even considered the idea that I didn't have a key to my apartment. "Unfortunately, your other belongings are still in evidence."

I took the wallet and the key and watched him drive away, his juddering, big car grunting its way through lazy traffic.

I was home, but my mind was not.

*

Stories of this nature are rare, and in a slow-news part of the world like Corozal you would expect ours to dominate the public conversation for a while. I stayed out of sight, and soon enough a woman went missing, a spate of apparently unexplained shootings broke out across the city, a bus full of beauty queens crashed in the mountains, and to cap it off an undeniable storm arrived, a category three that veered close to a category four and had the good coastal people of Central America and the Caribbean tying down their belongings and investing heavily in plastic utensils, batteries and canned food. The storm didn't hit us too hard but its approach and then the aftermath — some flooding, a few wind-pulverized roofs — washed the headlines clean of everything else.

I bet Yazmin was pleased, because from what I could tell, the police were no closer to solving our case, nor to finding the missing people or their remains. The international aspect of the incident subsided, I assumed because the surviving Americans were staying as much out of sight as I was. The University of Florida contacted me formally, and one of Pilsudski's colleagues, another Polish-American, contacted me informally, but I told them to talk to the Corozal police. Pilsudski's colleague, distraught, swore at me, and I guess that was deserved. But I couldn't explain anything in a way other people would understand.

There was no pressure on me to go back to work, so I didn't. I stayed in my apartment. I started writing this account. I watched YouTube videos. Once a day I walked to the beach, watched the ocean, walked home again. My face healed, more or less. I still sometimes think I can see bruises and scars on it, but it's mostly my imagination.

I received an email from the department of the environment asking me to participate in a disciplinary proceeding against Gonzalo. They wanted to punish him for allowing the hitch hikers on the boat. I emailed them back to say I had over-ridden Gonzalo's objections and that the entire blame for the presence of the unauthorized travelers lay with me. Pressing 'send' on that email was the first time I felt like Elmira Miguel in weeks.

On YouTube, conspiracy theorists, who somehow have a radar for every slightly bizarre thing that happens anywhere on Earth, picked up on our adventure and made a few videos about it. A Russian YouTuber claimed it made sense in the context of the earth being flat, which seemed even stupider than what had actually happened. I couldn't follow his train of thought, and frankly he just seemed like a psychotic person with a video camera. A loud, ranting nut mentioned us as being victims of a left-wing mind-control experiment and then made a tenuous link to Hillary Clinton. The rest of his video was about how America was being threatened by satanic communists.

I scrolled idly through the comments on these videos, and buried in the mess of racism, bad grammar and insult, I saw someone had written:

"None of you know what really happened. None of you ever will."

The username wasn't anything meaningful, a jumble of letters and numbers. I tried to check out the Google profile for that user and it was empty. Steven? Chloe? or just some smart-aleck on the Internet claiming knowledge they didn't have?

My dreams evolved and changed. While my sedatives lasted I don't remember what I dreamed but afterwards I dreamed, nightly, about the island. Often I dreamed about Kabahuacan as it is today, my work there digging through its earth, and about the creatures that live on it. Green tree frogs, snails, snakes, iguanas, geckos, Pilsudski's unique rodent. These creatures crowded my thoughts and woke me, often in the middle of the night, with a musty, oily taste on my tongue and an upset stomach.

I rarely dreamed about the other island, the island of the nightmare. When I did I dreamed mainly of the beach, of waking on the beach. One night I dreamed I woke up first and that I walked down to the boat, calm in the blazing sun, and methodically killed Steven, then Gonzalo, then Pilsudski, stabbing each of them while they slept, in the back of the head with one of Silvia's obsidian blades.

After waking from that dream I sat in the dawn light of my tiny kitchenette and wished I had more sedatives. I drank coffee until the sun came up, mug after mug, and tried to push away the jostling memories.

New memories arrived that day, disjointed and sharp like splinters of bone or rock. I remembered falling down the hillside in the early evening twilight, falling and not caring, too tired and confused to feel alarmed. I remembered Steven and Chloe carrying the naked Akna, and them laying her flat on her back on the beach sand in the starlight, while I just sat there staring at them. I remembered them talking quietly and then setting off again, tired and plodding, going back for Gonzalo.

I remembered, later, waking up and feeling that we were on the water. I was lying on a bunk in the cabin of The Tommygoff. Chloe sat on the floor, chewing her fingernails. In the other bunk, Akna lay on her side, sleeping, dressed in clothes Chloe must have taken from my suitcase. Chloe saw me wake but didn't say anything, and the gentle rocking of the boat lulled me back to sleep.

I tried to get in touch with Chloe. I knew where she came from. Web searching quickly revealed her family story. She and Steven were, as Yazmin had put it, 'rich Americans'. Their family owned what can only be described as a waste management empire that spanned much of the north-east of the United States. According to Forbes their father's net worth was more than half a billion dollars. Neither Chloe nor Steven had much of a social media presence: no Instagram, no Twitter that I could see. I found a Facebook profile for someone that could have been Chloe but it didn't share anything publicly and the profile picture was of a cute black-and-white Boston terrier pup, so I couldn't even be sure.

Stumped, I reverted to old-school methods. I started phoning Miltons in Montpellier, Vermont. I didn't really expect the Miltons I was looking for to be listed, but on my second call I got through to a woman who sounded almost exactly like Chloe. So much so that I felt my heart skip.

"Chloe? It's Elmira."

The woman said: "Chloe doesn't live here. Who did you say this is?"

"I'm sorry, this is Doctor Elmira Miguel. I met Chloe a few weeks ago while she was abroad."

There was a long silence on the line. Then the woman said: "I don't want to be rude, Doctor Miguel. But please don't call us again."

The line went dead, and I never tried again.

Except for the email from his employers I hadn't given too much thought to Gonzalo. For some reason I felt as if trying to communicate with him would be painful. I realized I felt like it would make me ashamed, as if I was guilty, responsible for what had happened to him. I found out from Jeavon Edgar that he had woken from his coma and was generally considered to be healthy, although the injury had damaged his vocal chords so that he could not speak above a whisper. He hadn't been back to work, and the expectation was that he wouldn't come back either. Apparently there were discussions about severance.

"If they're firing him I'm going to be mad," I said.

Jeavon said: "I don't think it's that. I heard you took the fall for the unauthorized use of the boat. I think he doesn't want to come back." After a pause he said: "Are you coming back?"

I didn't know. I didn't think so but I didn't know. I hung up and stopped looking for Gonzalo. I wondered what he had said to the police, what he may have whispered to Yazmin in his damaged voice. I guessed it wasn't anything that helped much, because the case seemed to have been quietly shunted aside, to fester, unsolved.

I didn't find out what became of Akna until a few weeks later, when Inspector Yazmin came to my apartment. He knocked on my door one night, wanting me to sign a statement.

"Amazingly," he said, his bulk filling up most of my small sitting room, "I never got you to write anything down."

I gave him the same statement I'd already given him piecemeal, this time once through in sequence: we picked up hitchers, there was a party, I lost consciousness, we ended up stranded, I don't know what happened, someone rescued us. He looked forlorn as he wrote down my value-free sentences and I felt sorry for him. I could have told him so much more but I didn't see the point.

When I asked about Akna, he looked at me for a long time before speaking.

"That girl is very affected," he said. "I managed to get Señor Flores to admit that it was she who cut his throat. But he doesn't want to press any charges, because she was not herself. And he says he also doesn't remember much more of what happened. The girl, well — basically, I'm no psychiatrist, but she seems like she has lost her mind."

"She was no help either, huh?"

He shook his head. "She had plenty to say. In Mayan, by the way, which I don't speak, and I was told she could speak Spanish but she for whatever reason wouldn't. So with a translator she had plenty to say. You want to know what she told me?"

He was looking at me as if he was hoping to catch me out somehow. I kept my face as straight as possible.

"It's not the same as what I told you?"

He smiled. "It's the same in many ways. But she told me much more. Like where you said you were attacked by animals, she had a different version." He waited to see if I would give myself away but I just kept looking at him. Eventually he said: "She said the Mexican woman, Abelar, tried to sacrifice you to a snake god. What do you think about that?"

I felt bile spiking up my throat. I swallowed it back with a sour expression.

"I think it sounds crazy," I said. "So what's happened to Akna?"

He put the written statement into a paper folder and rose to go. "She was in psychiatric care for a while but I understand she's been released and that she's gone home. To her village. Some village in the west."

"I hope she recovers," I said, more to myself than to him.

That night I struggled to fall asleep. I lay on my bed listening to cars hoot and drunkards cry out in the street outside. A bottle broke somewhere and a long string of rising and falling laughter and arguments passed below my apartment window. I felt completely alert, for hours, and then when the window began to whiten with the coming light, I closed my eyes and fell into an abysmal, hollow sleep.

As I sank into it I relived, in a single instant, the entire horror in the world below the world: the creatures, the mud men, the god of snakes, and Silvia.

I relived it vividly and violently, but as I sank down like a rock in water, I could not move or scream or pull myself awake to get away from it.

# 11. The final chamber

The chamber — which I now think of as The Final Chamber — was indeed larger than any we had previously passed through. As I entered it I felt overwhelmed by a flood of sensory detail and I stopped walking after only a step or two out of the tunnel. Chloe nudged me gently and pushed past so that she could see too. She stopped a yard ahead and also stared.

The chamber was roughly oval, longer to each side of us than ahead. It seemed too regular to have occurred completely naturally, but not so precise that it could be entirely man-made. Most likely it was a cavity with pleasing proportions that humans had enhanced for their ceremonial needs.

I say 'humans', but it was, and remains, incomprehensible to me who these humans might have been or how they might have achieved what we witnessed in that cave.

Similar to the chamber we had just left, the interior of this space was lit by an intense, blue-white luminosity. Unlike what we'd seen up that point, however, the light was not emitted by threads of carpet-like vegetation clinging to the walls, but instead appeared to be coming from actual candles, or at least actual flames. Hundreds of small, blue-white flames seemed to be affixed somehow to the rock surface of the cavern. Or if not affixed, then simply burning directly out of stone. The candle-like nature of this light created shifting shadows over the scene, making me feel as if the whole world was gently rocking, as if we were inside a vessel under water.

Adding to this effect, running water sounded throughout the chamber, seemingly coming from all directions, echoing and overlapping. The flow seemed to stem from directly above our heads, but the water was carried throughout the space in a massive structure of wooden runnels circling along the walls and downward. Rather than a simple, straight pipe system, the runnels crossed over and branched off in an elaborate, geometric pattern that even appeared to pass through the outcropping rock in several places. The effect of these runnels was to condense and intensify the noise of the water so that it sounded like a multitude of individual streams racing in parallel to the same point on the far wall, where two outlets spewed downwards-facing torrents of white water onto a raised platform of rock. This platform was about waist high. The two man-made waterfalls, more like powerful water jets, slammed into a trench at the back of the platform that looked about as wide as a human body. While some of the water splashed up and washed over a small section of the platform, most of the water was hurried away in the trench and out of sight, to exit the chamber invisibly. Where on the outside it might emerge I couldn't say. Perhaps it didn't. Perhaps it flowed deeper down into crevices and caves below.

The raised platform formed a rough rectangle, about thirty feet wide and fifteen deep. Above the trench at the back, and at more or less head height between the two thundering water spouts, a hole appeared to have been punched into the rock wall. This hole was not illuminated. It looked dark and deep, and was far too perfectly circular to have occurred without human intervention. It looked big enough for a human to sit in its circumference without bumping their head. To complete the dizzying vision, the platform also propped up eight life-sized statues of men, arrayed in two rows of four, on the left and right edges, facing inward towards the center. These statues appeared to be carved out of wood, and to have been polished. The men did not have detailed faces, but in other respects were recognizably men, unclothed. Their heads were bowed and they held their palms up in a gesture reminiscent of acceptance or supplication.

It is superfluous to say that I had never seen or even conceived of anything like this room before. Despite everything that had already happened to us, the uncanny complexity and startling design of the place utterly flabbergasted me. I could not have spoken a word if my life depended on it. My mouth hung open and I must have looked like someone stumbling out of years of solitary confinement into life.

While all of this information slammed into my skull and squeezed my brain, the sound of chanting continued to fly out and mingle with the sound of the rushing water. This chanting came, as expected, from Akna, who was also up there on the rock platform. She was kneeling with her back to us, her arms raised above her head, facing the water spouts and the hole. Her mutilated chanting consisted not of words, now, but simply of animalistic, twisted outcries. Her voice sheared and splintered, bouncing off the back wall of the chamber, breaking out into many voices in many echoes that danced and argued with the sound of water, and seemed to tug at my attention, to pull at my skin even, like a dense fluid. The chanting was so insistent and compelling that it took me a few seconds to realize that Akna had discarded all of her clothing somewhere, and knelt nude before the water jets and the ominous tunnel into the rock wall.

Silvia stood on the platform, too, but off to one side, watching Akna. After a short while she glanced at us and then did a double-take and broke into her customary salacious grin. She didn't say anything at first, merely turned towards us. Naturally she had also stripped, and now stood naked with her hip cocked in that suggestive way of hers. The flickering light of the blue candles accentuated her shape with shifting patches of shadow. She held something in her hand. After about thirty seconds of us staring at each other, she raised the object and I recognized it as a flute of some kind, possibly made out of stone or bone. She exhaled into the flute and a piercing, sweet high note was added to the other noises, cutting through all of them like a knife through tongue.

The flute could play only a limited scale, perhaps four or five unique notes. But Silvia used it expertly, producing a legato melody of unexpected intervals that somehow distressed and caressed the ear simultaneously. After the first few notes Akna stopped chanting. She did not turn to look at us, but seemed to slump into inactivity, lowering her arms, as if she'd been sent to sleep.

Silvia kept her eyes on us and slowly danced around Akna's kneeling form, playing a melody that sounded improvised but which somehow kept returning to a familiar version of itself. She played for perhaps a minute while Chloe and I stood motionless and silent. Then she lowered the flute and let it fall from her fingers, as if forgotten. It rolled away towards the trench of thundering water. Silvia grinned again.

"Welcome," she said.

I wanted to retort, to say something cutting that would wrest control away from her, but I could think of nothing. The journey down through the cave system, culminating in this glorious, strange dream-space, had torn all my faculties of normal thought to shreds. Chloe seemed as damaged as me. She swayed slightly, watching Silvia, as if she was so drunk she couldn't even see clearly.

Silvia spoke, her voice adopting a melodious quality similar to the melody of the flute.

"When I first started journeying here," she said, "I brought only me, this body with this spirit in it. But as I came I met you, Chloe, and the gods below us told me to bring you with me. They marked you, and wanted you, and I know you felt their want and wanted them as well. Until today I thought the two of us would come alone, but then the gods showed me these other two, this one: Elmira." She pointed at me flamboyantly, unfolding her right arm like a ballerina. "And this one." She turned to Akna and stroked the kneeling girl's hair. "This beautiful gift that is Akna."

Akna raised her head and pressed against Silvia's stroking palm, the way a dog will.

"Come," Silvia motioned to us. "Come closer. Don't be frightened, little girls. The time has come. You know it has. Come. Come."

I didn't see any point just standing where I was, but more than that I felt as if the movement she was making with her fingers, the simple flick to beckon us, had a physical effect on me. I felt fingers, light fingers, gentle fingers, pulling on the front of my shirt.

I took a hesitant step and then Chloe started walking too and the two of us closed the space until we stood at the base of the platform staring up at Silvia, who was smiling. The light played over her skin like a shower of immaterial flower petals, emphasizing the lines of her hips, her breasts. Light flashed against the coiling scar that ran up her left leg from knee to crotch, and seemed to make the scar pulse with electricity.

As we stood staring up at her, Silvia began to dance again, this time silently, writhing in small circles and revolving around the central, kneeling sun that was Akna. Her dance, too, felt like a physical force, each twist and turn pinching and pressing against my face.

She came close by me and I found myself fixated on the tattoo on her shoulder. The snake on the tattoo seemed to be a living thing, and it seemed as if the legs it was ejecting kicked out in a sort of spasm. I felt unmistakably intoxicated. All suspicion that I had been drugged had long since dissipated, but I felt as if I was drugged or drunk nevertheless. My stomach burned as if a living thing was on fire inside it, and I couldn't hold thoughts in sequence. My head felt light and somehow separate from my body, which felt heavy and as if no longer made of skin and bone, but made of something denser, earth maybe or stone. My eyes stuck to the sensuous rippling motions of her muscles and I felt as if at any moment I might float upward.

Out of — somewhere — other creatures came into the chamber. I did not see any entrances besides the one behind us and the hole above the platform, but these creatures did not come from either of those. They seemed, instead, to emerge into the space out of nothing. Or perhaps they were in the space from the beginning, and something in my attention shifted and allowed me to see them. I clung on to the cold stone lip of the platform edge, as a variety of animals suddenly took shape and began to vocalize around me. I could not look directly at any of them, because I could not, no matter how hard I tried, take my eyes off Silvia. She continued to dance, unconcerned that the chamber was now populated by what seemed, in my peripheral vision, to be jaguars, snakes, iguanas, eagles, colorful, bright birds, spiders and giant bugs. These creatures seemed to crawl and slide and climb over one another, both on the platform itself and on the lower floor where we stood, an impossible menagerie of buzzing, sighing, cawing, crying creatures, their presence and their sound intensifying and pressurizing like an incantation. I felt a fever. My skin burned. My eyes skidded. The world felt oily. My vision began to duplicate and blur.

On the platform, Akna rose to her feet. She began to dance with Silvia, very close to her, writhing and squirming in the same fashion. In the edge of my vision I saw Chloe climbing onto the platform as well, and then she entered the center of my sight, in sharp focus. She looked the way Akna had looked earlier, half asleep, completely under the control of some external force.

Akna, now, seemed to have advanced to a different stage of the trance. Her eyes were open and they shone dark and alive in the shuddering blue light. She smiled as Silvia smiled, the grin bruised and bloodied. The two of them danced close, danced apart, seemed to sink into a sea of barely present animals, and then step back out and form full physical shapes again, like creatures made of smoke.

Chloe appeared to be mouthing some words, although no sound came out. She did not join the dance, but the other two danced around her, both of them picking up whatever words she was silently forming. When they picked up the words they added sound, the same chanting as before. Chloe swayed. Silvia and Akna circled her, singing, sinuously evoking — something.

From the platform edges, the two ranks of wooden men began to slowly walk towards the women.

This somehow struck me as even more impossible than anything else I was witnessing. Some cold, small part of Elmira Miguel baulked at such an outrage, that wooden statues could walk. I let go of the platform edge and sank down onto my knees, peering up over the lip like a frightened child. Unable to think clearly, I clung to the idea that no matter what it looked like, this could not be what it seemed.

As they converged on the women I saw that the wooden men had changed substance and now seemed to be made of mud, deep brown mud that looked slick and full of clay. Silvia and Akna, choreographed, step back from Chloe and let the mud men surround her. I tried to call out something, a warning, a repudiation, but my voice would not come. The only sound I made was a sort of gagging cough, lost in the seething noise of water, the chanting, and the half-real zoo of jungle beasts.

The mud men put their hands on Chloe and tore her clothing off. They ripped the shirt and shredded the bermudas as if they were made of paper. They stripped Chloe down to the same stark, blue and white nudity as the others, even lifting her feet and destroying the trainers she'd borrowed from me.

Silvia and Akna raised the volume of their chanting and this made the mud men slink back, heads bowed, to take up their original positions. Chloe staggered slightly, then her eyes opened and she raised her arms and started moving in time with the other two.

The noise in the chamber began to confound me. The sound of water seemed more insistent than before, more urgent. The chanting, with Chloe's shapeless voice added, grew louder and louder above the water. Meanwhile the unreal, half-there animals clacked and cackled and spat and growled.

I felt as if my body was being slowly dismantled, and as if two conflicting forces grew up inside me: one was a dark horror, a sort of emotional nausea more grim and desponding than I'd ever thought possible, and the other was a scintillating, sweet ecstasy, a kind of transporting delight more thrilling than I'd ever known. I thought these forces were at war within me and that between them they would utterly annihilate me. I closed my eyes briefly and felt a sense of anesthesia seeping through my blood and bones.

I thought: if you just don't look at it you'll stay alive.

But a sound I cannot describe forced my eyes open against my will. Even amongst all the other noises in the chamber, this sound was dominant and could not be ignored. It sounded like something mechanical attacking something living, both things enormous and moving fast. Perhaps like a high-speed freight train engaged in combat with a prehistoric mega-reptile.

My eyes snapped open as the roaring, shrieking noise tore into the air of the room, and I saw what I suppose I had always known I was going to see: Q'uq'umatz, Kukulkan, Quetzalcoatl, the serpent god of many names, or a version of it anyway. It came out of the hole between the water spouts, two-headed and as thick as the circumference of the hole, its length immeasurable. It filled the space and towered over the platform, some unknowable amount of its body still inside the tunnel in the wall. It shrieked again, with one head, and roared with the other head, and its body pushed a hot wind in all directions, a wind that made the blue candles sputter and darken before they burned back up, brighter than before. The rows of mud men sank prostate before the serpent vision and I stared, aghast, uncomprehending, terrified.

The three woman on the platform seemed unafraid. Languidly they approached the massive trunk of the snake's rearing body, and one by one they pressed themselves against it, then began to stroke the snake and nuzzle it. Its two heads shrieked and roared once more, the sound almost deafening, and then the heads snapped together with a crack like a thousand whips, and somehow merged to form a single, massive snake head with a salivating, cavernous mouth.

From my shielded position below the edge of the platform where I cowered, I felt my stomach lurch. I clung weakly to the rocks, unable to move and barely able to breathe. My tongue and belly felt thick and my ears throbbed from the sound of the snake's bellowing. The snake lowered its double-sized head so that it rested on the platform among the women. Then it opened its mouth to the maximum extent. A hot breath stank out of it like an infernal gale.

I stared, fixated, as Akna stepped up onto the bottom jaw of the snake and began to climb, calmly, into its mouth.

I wanted to cry out, again, but couldn't. I could do nothing. Silvia on one side and Chloe on the other were helping Akna keep her footing as she walked into the steaming horror of the snake's throat, stepping on its tongue and slipping slightly as she went.

I felt something break inside my mind, and I shut my eyes.

From behind me, a new, sudden noise forced its way through the tumult. At first I couldn't recognize it. It seemed far away from me, like a sound on a radio in another room. It might as well have been coming from another world, a signal from a reality that I was no longer sure existed. The sound came again and I thought: that's someone shouting. I turned away from the platform and forced my eyes open.

Across the juddering blue light I saw Adam running towards me. The shouting came out of him. He looked scratched and dirty. Obviously his huge body had struggled to press through some of the narrower passages on the descent through the cave system. He also looked terrified, bleached white under the filth, and totally bewildered. But to his credit, his terror did not stay him. He charged across the chamber shouting "Stop! Stop!"

His arrival introduced a sour note into the smooth, hypnotic ceremony that had been underway on the platform. Silvia and Chloe looked as if they were too surprised to think or move. Akna carried on trying to get into the snake's mouth, still completely unaware, but the snake reacted to Adam with outraged ferocity. It let out a mighty bellow and reared its head up off the platform floor, flinging Akna out of its face and turning its gaze on the approaching assailant. Akna tumbled head over heels in mid-air and slammed down onto the platform, hard, right on her coccyx. She did not scream in pain, but instead sat there, looking confused. The snake snapped its body towards the platform edge and in so doing it collided with Akna again, sending her flailing and skidding off the edge of the rock at high speed. She flew off the lip of the platform and slammed into the chamber wall.

Undeterred by the snake's display of fury, Adam charged past me and leaped up to engage with it. He was clutching one of the knives Gonzalo had handed out earlier. Presumably this weapon helped him feel empowered. The blade glinted in the blue light but looked puny and pointless against the leathery monstrosity of the serpent god. Adam roared something in a language I didn't recognize, presumably the Polish of his youth, and leaped onto the snake's body a yard or so below the head, trying to stab it.

I expected either Chloe or Silvia to interfere with his attack, but neither did. Silvia stepped back, apparently fully possessed of her senses but unsure what to do. Chloe, on the other hand, looked as if she wasn't properly aware of her surroundings. She tripped over her own feet, fell to her knees, then stood again. Her face crumpled in distress. She staggered away from the snake towards one of the rows of mud men, looking forlorn and brutalized, a victim of a date rape or like someone slipped a mickey and forced into an orgy.

I tried to pull myself up onto the platform, urging myself to help Adam somehow, but my limbs were weak and when I stood my knees buckled and I fell.

Adam could not maintain a grip on the incredible girth of the snake-thing. He slid off from a height, turning over an ankle. He cried out in pain. Then he pushed off with the other leg, leading with the knife, trying to stab into the creature's body. He must have succeeded because the snake squealed, a sickening, loud keen of pain.

That made up Silvia's mind for her. A look of rage consumed her features and she charged at Adam like a wrestler, throwing herself onto his back with her arms around him. She leaned backwards with her full weight to try to pry him off. Adam kept his balance somehow and stabbed at the body of the snake again, then again, each time eliciting a similar agonized outburst from the creature.

I managed to get back to my feet and haul myself onto the platform. My arms felt numb, tingling, and my legs did not seem to want to move in concert. I realized that these were the physical effects of immense terror. My brain and body seemed at odds. I wanted to try to get to Adam, maybe to pull Silvia off him, but my body wanted only to crawl away and hide. I forced myself to act in spite of that.

I lurched over to where the two of them were struggling, intending to grab onto Silvia's arm and try either to distract her or remove her from Adam's back. But before I covered half the distance a force like a wall crunched into my head. I felt my whole body spin and then the same force pounded the other side of my face from the opposite direction. I began reeling in a confused delirium of pain. I lost my footing and collapsed onto my back, hitting the back of my head on a small protrusion in the platform.

I can't say for certain what happened, but I assume the snake-thing had head-butted me. As I lay there feeling as if my cheekbones had cracked and my eyes would soon explode, I saw it swaying high above me, moving exactly like a rattler ready to strike. Fortunately, Adam got a hand free from Silvia and drove his blade into its flesh again, causing it to roar and twist around violently, away from me.

I inhaled deeply and tried to stand, to continue my feeble contribution to the fray, but I was obviously concussed and couldn't see straight, let alone walk. All my limbs went in random directions and I flopped down onto my butt, swaying helpless, once more reduced to a spectator, this time by physical debility rather than pure fear.

The struggling pair continued their fight. Silvia bent her head around Adam's neck and bit his face. He yelled and slammed an elbow backwards, knocking her off him, but she stayed on her feet and grabbed at his shoulders. I could see his blood smeared across her lips and cheeks.

He turned to her and plunged his knife right into her chest, sending her pin-wheeling backwards. Like Akna earlier, however, this wound did not deter her. She shouted something aggressive and rough that I couldn't hear above the bellowing of the snake, and then charged at him again.

He raised the knife to receive her, and just as they were about to collide the snake-thing reared up and snapped its body against Adam, bumping him up into the air as if he'd been launched from a catapult. He lost his grip on the knife and the weapon arced through the shimmering blue light, glinting and tumbling. Swift and agile as a circus act, Silvia reached up, plucked it by the handle out of the air, and rounded on Adam where he had landed in a heap.

He stood, but slipped, trying to stagger away from her. Silvia's momentum slammed her into him, knocking him flat on his back. His head hit the rocky surface with a sharp crunch, and you could hear the wind blow out of him. Silvia maneuvered to sit astride his belly, as if engaged in some sort of deranged sex act. She raised the knife with both hands above her head and dug it into his throat, then raised it again, slammed it down, raised it and slammed it. Blood, a jet of it, spurted out of him as if shot out of a water cannon, spraying her from head to crotch in its sticky warmth.

After the third stab, which surely killed him, Silvia got to her feet and flung the knife away. It skidded across the platform, hard, and sank into the water in the trench. She turned to look at me, covered from the mouth down in a sheet of red. She let out an inhuman shriek of lust and fury. I thought she would attack me. My will gave way. I tried to scramble up to escape, but felt my legs go again and I sank down into a kneel, staring at her.

Instead of coming for me, though, she strode back over to the frenzied snake, pressing herself lovingly against its trunk and smearing it with Adam's blood. She seemed to have no further concern for any of us, not me, not Chloe, not Akna. She was caught up in her own ecstasy of snake-lust, as if killing Adam had tipped her over into a frame of mind beyond humanity, into some headspace where she could no longer recognize the world.

Slowly, sensuously, she calmed the giant snake. She chanted softly to it, licked it, rubbed her breasts against it. The snake stopped roaring. It coiled around her partially, as if adoring her, and then it reared up, sighing a steaming, fetid sigh. It lowered its head back down into the platform. As it had done for Akna, it opened its colossal, wet mouth to its fullest extent.

Silvia stroked its head and then stepped up into the lower jaw, onto the tongue. Without a further word, nor even a glance backward at the rest of us, she walked along the creature's tongue into the back of its mouth, and on into its throat. When she arrived at the gullet she lowered herself to hands and knees and crawled inside. Her legs kicked like a swimmer's legs as she forced herself in, and then she was gone.

The snake let out a different sound now, a sort of contented, almost sweet moan. It closed its jaws. I expected it to rear up and roar again, or do something else demonstrative and triumphant, but it simply lay there for a while, breathing. I felt like it was looking at me, but it did not appear to want to threaten me. After a short while it raised its head. Slowly, as if being pulled along a rail, it reversed into the hole it had come out of, and disappeared.

Silence descended. With the departure of Silvia and the snake god, the magical mechanics of the chamber seemed to break down. The water stopped spewing out of the jets, and the water flowing in the wooden runnels also seemed to dry up completely. Only a few tiny drips continued to be heard in different parts of the immense system. All the half-alive, half-imaginary animals vanished, and to my astonishment so did the statues of the mud men. They simply blinked into thin air as if they had never existed, as if the entire scene had been a mere phantasm. Even the blue-white candlelight dimmed, and many, even most, of the flames winked to darkness. Only a few patches of illumination remained, mainly around the platform itself. The rest of the cavern fell into a profound blackness that was as thorough as if my eyes had been removed from my head.

Into this silence I heard Chloe sobbing. I couldn't see her clearly, but could make out her shape, sitting upright in the same position she'd sat in the ocean surf, arms pressing her knees up to her chest.

I ignored her for the moment. I crawled over to where Adam's ruined corpse lay, my palms padding through blood. I couldn't see with accuracy because of the reduced light and because my eyes were already swelling up and closing, but it was obvious he was dead. Silvia's violence had almost severed his head from his neck completely. The stench of his blood and exposed throat made me choke and recoil from him.

As is often the case with shock, I had an inappropriate but insistent thought: that I would never be able to tell him "I told you so."

When the thought subsided, I started to cry. The tears burned and my face throbbed so painfully I thought I might stop breathing.

I collected myself, at length, and made my way off the platform and through the darkness to where I thought Akna was lying. I found her after feeling around for a while. I could sense her breathing, but even though I prodded her quite hard several times, she did not wake.

I sat down in the darkness next to her and closed my eyes to rest. I don't know how much time passed. When I tried to open my eyes again I could still hear Akna breathing but Chloe had stopped crying. Through the thin slits of my puffed over eyelids, I could see her moving around, vaguely, in the low, murky light.

I stood up and got back onto the platform. Chloe had found the clothes Silvia had discarded, and was climbing into them, the denim hot pants and my Jolly Roger t-shirt. We spent a few minutes feeling around to try to find any other discarded clothing to get Akna into, but we failed. Neither of us said much to the other, except practical remarks about our search and about how we planned to try to get Akna back up to the surface. Trying to move my lips hurt and in any case I didn't feel I had anything valuable to say. We agreed, both of us starting to cry again, that we would leave Adam's body where it was.

As we made our way over to Akna and began to coordinate our ascent back to whatever sort of real world lay above us, I realized something that made me stop and stare into the unseeing darkness for a long while: Silvia's tattoo had not shown a man being ejected from the snake god's mouth, in some perversion of convention. It had shown a woman, Silvia. Not coming out of the snake, but climbing in.

# 12: Silvia

I'm not going to go back to Kabahuacan. It's taken me nearly a month, since writing this account, to admit that. But even though I've been pretending to debate the question, with myself, with my mother, with my colleagues from the island, I think I've known since the first time that I woke in the hospital.

I'm not going back to Kabahuacan.

I will formally resign my post. I think they're expecting it, and from what I hear via the rumor mill, they have other candidates lined up already. It's an exciting role for an enthusiastic and ambitious academic. Someone who believes in the mission of unearthing, cataloguing and understanding the artifacts of the civilizations that existed there before the Conquistadores came.

It's not what I believe in doing, any more.

I don't know what I do believe in, any more.

My face has healed as completely as it's ever going to heal. My lip was badly torn on one side and has reformed into a scarred, misshapen wreck that I'm told cosmetic surgery can fix. I don't care to have it fixed. I like to look into the mirror and see evidence. Sometimes, on a sunny day, walking to the beach, lying under the breezy sky, listening to calypso rhythms, laughter, it's almost possible to forget. The mirror makes me remember. This is true. This happened to you.

Inspector Yazmin has been to see me twice more. The first time he came to tell me that they were formally declaring Adam and Silvia 'missing, presumed dead'. Whatever that means. The official version of events is that some unexplained agent, possibly biological, infected us and made us temporarily lose our minds. They seem to think that some sort of airborne ergot drove us to hallucinatory frenzy, drove Akna to violence, drove Adam and Silvia Abelar overboard. In this theory, my memories of landfall are just dreams, nightmares, drug-induced fantasies.

Let them believe whatever they want.

The second time Yazmin came was to tell me about Silvia. He has now officially washed his hands of her, but in the course of finalizing all the paperwork he interacted with police from Mexico, and found out some remarkable details about her story. He thought I might like to know these. He gave me the information and after he left I looked it up on the Internet. Everything that he told me was true, easily verifiable in online news archives.

Firstly, Gonzalo's theory about her possible ancient age was easily debunked. According to the news reports I found, Silvia Abelar was thirty or thirty-one at the time I met her. I calculated this based on the age she'd been sixteen years ago when she was abducted, held hostage, and repeatedly raped by a man named Ricardo Muñoz, in rural Mexico. She was fourteen.

Silvia was not the only victim of this predator. Over the course of his life, Muñoz is alleged to have abducted, chained and raped nearly forty women, mostly young teenagers. He killed almost all of them. In fact, in the press reports that I read, Silvia Abelar was often referred to as 'the girl who would not die'. She is, or was, the only known survivor of Muñoz's crimes.

In the typical ghoulish fashion of the darker parts of the Internet, you can see pictures and short videos of various aspects of these atrocities. You can see photographs of all the girls and women believed to have been his victims, mostly candid personal shots of girls in back yards, giving thumbs up on city streets, backpacking somewhere. Because of her peculiar status, there are many photographs of Silvia.

A photo taken only a month or so before she was abducted shows a fresh-faced, pretty girl with her hair tied back and no make-up on. She looks younger than her age, maybe twelve. It is a posed photo, possibly taken by a school sweetheart, a friend, a mother. Silvia is standing in front of a gray stone wall, holding one hand up to her neck, looking up into the lens, which is poised higher than her head. The expression on her face is unreadable, not because it contains an inscrutable mystery, but because it is so ordinary, so blank, so genial.

A photo of Silvia taken the day after she escaped shows a different person altogether. Only four or five months have elapsed between the two pictures, but the Silvia in the later photo lives up to the name the press gave her; she looks like the girl who would not die. There are differently cropped versions of this picture online, and in the most inclusive you can see that she is sitting in a sort of interview room. She is wearing a hospital shift, white with blurry spots on it that might be flowers. The photographer has snuck into the room without authorization and is snapping as he is being hustled away. Silvia is looking straight at him. Her hair is loose, frazzled, choppy and shorter than before, as if someone has hacked at it inexpertly. The benign, pretty expression has been replaced by something else, something equally unreadable but for different reasons. She is not startled, shocked, or upset by the intrusion of the camera. She looks knowing, and she also look deeply, silently angry.

Muñoz kept most of his victims imprisoned in a remote farm house. He normally had more than one person incarcerated at a time, although by the time Silvia got away she was the only one left. He invented and constructed his own specialized torture equipment, often using industrial tools or farming implements as components. For example, Silvia was kept chained in the house by a trap attached to her left leg and bolted to a concrete floor. The part of the trap in contact with her skin was made of industrial barbed wire. Muñoz connected it to a car battery, and was thus able to send debilitating electrical shocks into Silvia's leg and groin to punish her, or simply to torture her for his own amusement.

According to Silvia's testimony, which you can also read verbatim online, Muñoz raped her 'most days' during her eleven-week ordeal. In order to achieve this feat without discomfort to himself, Muñoz would usually sedate her, remove the trap, bind her arms in manacles chained to a wall, rape her, often anally, and then put her back into the trap. When she regained full awareness, afterwards, he always gave her a carton of sweet, flavored milk, 'as a treat'. Strawberry, mostly.

You can watch, on YouTube, various atrocity-tourism videos about Muñoz and his farm house. You can even take a video tour. You can see the now-empty rooms, the remaining frames of some of his larger devices, the places on the walls where the manacles were bolted in. It's not possible to know precisely which room held Silvia, but they all held someone, until Muñoz decided to do away with them.

His typical method of disposal was strangulation. According to reports, Muñoz did not take particular pleasure in the killing and did not waste much time luxuriating in it. He seemed to view it as a garbage-disposal task, once he had brutalized a victim beyond what he would consider her usefulness.

Silvia attests to personally seeing him murder two girls, one on the day that she arrived, and one the day before she escaped. He strangled both of them with a leather belt while they were manacled to the wall. He made them lie face down, put his foot between their shoulder blades, looped the belt around their necks and throttled them until they stopped kicking, and the urine was forming a pool under their legs. On the second occasion he made Silvia clean up the urine. Then he manacled her to the wall as well. She says she was sure he was going to kill her too, but he only raped her again, this time without sedation, and then tied her back into her trap. Then he took Hermelinda, the dead girl, away to get rid of.

It was late afternoon when he left and by nightfall Silvia had begun to worry. Muñoz never left the house for longer than an hour or two, and every time he did so he informed his victims that he was leaving. She did not know where or how he disposed of corpses, but she felt sure that if he had been going to leave for a long time he would have said something. Silvia waited what she thought was another hour or two, and when he still did not return, she decided to try to free herself.

Getting the barbed wire off was not the hard part. Silvia had previously figured out how to remove most of it, and in the beginning she often did so when Muñoz wasn't around, to alleviate the pain. She says that she stopped doing it because she would then have to suffer the indignity of putting it back on herself, and that was too much to bear. She would rather suffer the barbs continuously than have to put them back on her own leg.

The hard part was the locked metal ankle cuff attached to the chain, bolted into the concrete floor. It was while she was trying to figure out how to get her foot out of this cuff, while she was steeling herself against visions of somehow amputating the foot, that Muñoz returned.

She says she knew at once that something bad had happened to him. He came into the house on all fours, dragging himself very slowly, pausing for seconds at a time before taking another feeble movement forward, then stopping again. Silvia, frightened, had started to put the barbed wire back on, but decided to leave it. She could see that Muñoz was in no condition to notice her transgression, let alone do anything to her.

He vomited violently onto the floor of the room. As he approached her she saw that he was sweating. The sweat, she says, was so voluminous he looked like someone had dumped him bodily into a bath. His clothes were wet through and sweat fell off him in constant drops. He was also shaking furiously, very pale, and when she looked into his eyes she could see them shuddering and skidding around as he struggled to maintain his vision of the world around him.

Silvia had never seen anyone bitten by a snake, so she did not know that that was what had happened, and Muñoz could not speak to tell her. He survived another twelve hours, until just before dawn, retching, struggling to breathe, sweating rivers. He died with his head in her lap and with one hand holding on to her wrist, as if seeking solace or comfort. Throughout that entire time Silvia says that she sat as still as possible, knowing that the keys to her ankle cuff and to Muñoz's truck were within easy reach in the pocket of his jeans.

An investigator asked her why, if he was so obviously incapacitated, she did not simply take the keys and flee.

Silvia said: "I wanted to watch him die."

For the record, the snake that killed Ricardo Muñoz was a Mexican pit viper. What we here in Corozal like to call a Tommygoff.

*

In the days after I discovered this information I felt discomfited. The facts were distressing in their own right, but combined in my mind with the events I had personally lived through, they made me feel unsure of myself and confused about what to think about Silvia. She had obviously suffered an unimaginable trauma. How much did that excuse? More, importantly, how much of what she became, what she was capable of, could be somehow explained by her ordeal in that farm house?

There was no evidence that Ricardo Muñoz had any occult connections or that any kind of religious or cultic thinking played a role in his behavior. To put it bluntly, Muñoz was simply sick. If anything, according to reports and Silvia's own accounts, he was oblivious to any sort of reality beyond the purely material. Possibly this was the source of his pathology: that he relentlessly reduced the entirety of conscious existence to his immediate physical impulses. So I did not think there could be a complete explanation for Silvia, the Silvia that I encountered, in the abduction. Certainly the abduction started something. But it could not account for everything.

Another thing that bothered me was how useless my education was in making sense of our experience. I have spent years studying pre-Colombian culture and religion. I am, as Silvia would say, 'an expert doctor'. Clearly what we encountered — wherever it was, in whatever reality or timeline — was directly connected to the core subject matter I am supposed to be thoroughly familiar with. And yet the reality of it did not line up with what I thought I knew, what the text books said, what I had emphatically claimed in papers I had published.

I felt as if everything I had ever dug out of the ground and catalogued really meant something completely different from what I thought it meant. That the entire body of work that constitutes my academic discipline was little more than daydreaming and pattern-making, as flimsy as dried-up snake moult. We try to make sense of what we find based on what we think the world is like. But the people who made those things thought the world was very different, and perhaps because of that, we can never truly understand the things they left behind.

Now, as I prepare to leave the city, to head north, in search of something that can help me find the true meaning of this story, I think endlessly about the specific details I can't explain. How, practically, did our boat go from the middle of the ocean to that beach? Where was that beach? Or when? Was it really Kabahuacan, sometime long ago? Was it something else? Did it come from inside Silvia? Was it a world that now exists, at right-angles to the world of modern life? Is it possible that the entire event was my imagination? A shared hallucination? Something else?

More questions: why was it that when we woke up, the four women were arrayed neatly on the beach, and the men were on the boat? Who did that? Did someone move us, one by one, and lay us down there? Did we walk there ourselves, in a fugue of some kind?

And later, at the end: why was it that I did not get trapped in the same mental fog as Akna and Chloe?

That last question, for whatever reason, occurs to me daily now. I ponder it, and I worry about it.

Why could I stay back, terrified, a witness on the floor, while Akna and Chloe seemed unable to resist, and were sucked in and swallowed whole by the force of madness?

On good days I like to think this makes me special. Maybe I'm resistant. Maybe I'm smarter. Maybe I survived because I'm better. Sometimes I think this, but I don't really believe it.

Another explanation that I've played with is that maybe the deficiency was Silvia's. Maybe she just bit off more than she could chew, in which case my resistance was an accident. I could have swapped places with Chloe and the fact that I didn't was down to luck. Maybe Silvia was only capable of including two of us besides herself, and I was just the little piggy who escaped. Maybe if Silvia was stronger I would have been sucked in too, and who knows what would have happened then?

That's the explanation that I accept most often. The outcome was random. It wasn't anything to do with me.

But there is still another explanation, one that comes to me in quiet moments when I least expect it, when I'm not really looking out for anything, when I'm trying to fall asleep or just sitting on a bench looking at the beach. This explanation is: the snake god didn't want you. Or wanted you least. Would have taken you if possible, but wasn't going to push too hard to get you. You were expendable. You could be allowed to survive, Elmira, because you didn't matter.

Maybe it says something about me, but when I have this thought I feel cold and sad, because it feels as if it must be true. When I laid eyes on Silvia that morning on the marina, the first thing I thought about her was that she was a frivolous and superficial slut. But she was the one the snake god wanted most, and I was not.

*

I am going to Mexico. I have my ticket and my suitcase. I have given up the lease on my apartment. I will start where Silvia started, in a village in the mountains, near Oaxaca. Not far from the monstrous farm house where her life was changed. I will start there and make my way to answers, or die trying.

I know a little more about what I am looking for. I have approached the problem from a different angle, spending the last few nights trying to determine if there is any tradition of worshipping the Mayan pantheon outside of Mayan communities and outside the conventions of well-understood pre-Colombian religions.

After much fruitless poking about in online journals and the bowels of various university web sites, I found an academic paper by an anthropologist working at the Universidad de la Sierra Juárez, in Ixtlán. The paper, titled 'The persistence of indigenous mythoses in urban mystical practice', is a study of a variety of modern cults throughout urban Central America. As you can imagine, contemporary urban mystical practice is a narrow field, and most of the modern urban mystics are essentially magickal societies, with a general inclination towards satanism. Indeed, the thrust of the paper is the link between the Christian demonization of non-Christian religious practices, and the modern explicitly anti-Christian reaction among small, generally satanistic, mystical orders. Essentially, these orders or groups exist in very confined geographical areas, often only in specific parts of a single city. The largest group mentioned in the study consisted of around thirty verified members, while most had fewer than fifteen. We are talking about extremely marginal spiritual practice.

The information that has excited me so much is in a footnote, referring to an order that the anthropologist heard about but could not verify existed. The group is alleged to operate somewhere in Oaxaca. It is described as a loose community made up exclusively of women. The group is called Las Serpientes Voladoras. The flying snakes.

According to the footnote, the women are devoted to 'a mystical union with the primordial snake yielding a transformation into the divine'.

That quote is attributed to an informant whom the anthropologist met at a bus stop. She does not name the informant, but she describes her thus:

"A young woman with a unique tattoo, which she claimed was a ritualistic symbol of the order. The tattoo, on the right shoulder blade, depicts a Vision Serpent symbol in the style of much Mayan or Aztec art. However, the usual face emerging from the snake's mouth has been replaced, perhaps as a deliberate sacrilege, by the supplicant emerging legs-first from the snake's interior."

The same mistake that I made, when I saw that same tattoo.

The date on the paper is three years ago. Was that informant at the bus stop Silvia? Or someone like Silvia, who would be able to answer the questions that I have?

One last thing, that's added one more dimension to my questioning confusion. Just this morning I received an email from Jeavon Edgar, still toiling away at the digging projects on Kabahuacan. It reads:

"Hey, hope you are well. Thought you might be interested (I still hope I can persuade you to come back :-)) — as you may have heard we finished tunneling into the back end of the original dig site. Lots of cool stuff down there. Going to be years before we even publish. But I thought you'd like this one piece. It looks smack in the middle of your field."

The email contains a link to Jeavon's YouTube channel. The video is marked as private. It lasts for thirty seconds or so, and is shot on Jeavon's phone. In the background you can hear my ex-colleagues chatting and laughing, at the end of another day in Paradise digging up the past. The video shows Jeavon's hand, wearing a latex glove, turning over a figurine about three inches high, that has been carefully brushed free of muck and detritus.

I've seen similar figures before, but never found one on Kabahuacan. Most of those I've seen are made of wood, and date from perhaps three to six centuries ago. This figure looks like it's made of stone, which is itself interesting, perhaps even revolutionary, in the academic sense.

The figure is a stylized woman with a large, square head. She wears a finely carved necklace of sharp beads around her neck. Her arms consist of simple loops, like the handles of a jug, connected into her hips. Around her waist is a bumpy belt, suggesting a string of loose objects. She seems to be nude. Her legs are spread open. The toes of her feet are well-defined, but the legs are simple cones, fat at the top.

All of this is interesting, and some of it is fascinating.

But what has made my skin tingle is the left thigh of the figure. Only on that thigh, and not the other, is a spiral mark, extending from the knee, looping twice around the fat part of the leg, and ending in the crotch. Tiny incisions on the line of the spiral look, to my eye, just like the barbs on barbed wire.
