What had once been seated now stood. The thing was colossal, tangled, yet it moved with a grace that defied its size and its anatomy. Every time it lowered one of its lumps onto the next carpeted step there came a thunderous knocking, metallic and deep and echoing endlessly. The creature began to contort itself, to flaunt its non-humanness by halting for a second or two so that Joyce could absorb each repulsive asana.

Joyce shut her eyes.

Weeping, she sputtered, “Now I lay me down to sleep…”

Notes on the Aztec Death Whistle

Notes on the Aztec Death Whistle

It was the dream home for which you’d always been yearning, and at last, after many years of patient drudgery in the halls of academe, you found yourself able to purchase it. But your freedom came at a dear cost. You’d only truly managed to garner wealth after winning such a high degree of fame and fortune thanks to your unsanctioned archaeological dig in Tlateloco, Mexico.

Yet even before you connived your way into the historian’s limelight, you had already done quite well for yourself, hadn’t you? For years you’d drawn a handsome salary as a tenured professor of Cultural Anthropology at McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada.

But this was not enough for you…not nearly enough. You just had to be noticed, be revered, be perceived as the one who had done that which couldn’t be done: you ‘discovered’ the notorious Aztec Death Whistle.

Of course, the newspapers that ran your story around the globe didn’t know about the ruthless tactics you’d employed in order to make that discovery, did they? Even the most diligent journalists who covered the story were unable to dig up the ugly facts about it that you buried: your engaging a gang of mercenaries to raid the little village near Tlateloco, the way you’d watched them torture an elder to death just so you could obtain the location of the secret ceremonial pit where long ago the Aztecs buried their human sacrifices.

No, what you showed the world instead was a charade, the mirage of the humble scholar whose painstaking research had led him to that pit of the dead. It all appeared so innocent.

Why, even your research notes exuded studiousness. See? I have set them here upon your marble-top desk. Beside these pages is the worn satchel of pig leather you used to cart your notes around Mexico. It is hand-stitched and is branded with a strange mask in profile; the Nahuatl words “Huehue Ichtacatlatolli” (meaning “Ancient Secrets”) embossed in careful one-inch characters just above the satchel’s clasps. Wreathing this tantalizing message is a mosaic of images—gods in profile, potted fires, skulls whose expression is almost gleeful. Many of the images have been woven into the leather with a variety of colourful threads, making this object as much a tapestry of mythology as a case.