Set beside this satchel is a stack of pristine white pages, each one marked with handwritten script, crisp and focused. I have no doubt that this is the most careful text you’ve ever penned…

NOTES & OBSERVATIONS COLLECTED DURING MY EXPERIENCES WITH THE AZTEC DEATH WHISTLE

Tlatelolco, the Ruins of the Aztec City State:

The Aztecs developed their notorious Death Whistle before the Mithraic Mysteries, before humanity looked for the meaning of life in arcane scrolls, before the resurrection of a Saviour.

The process of the whistle’s creation would commence with the careful selection of sleek, firm bones, ones that had once sat nestled in living meat but had since been flensed by the cruel hands of time. Only the choicest parts would be culled from the fly-swarmed mound that festered at the bottom of the death pit in Tlatelolco.

These bones would be placed upon large slabs of stone. There, they would be hammered into nuggets. The nuggets would then be plunked into mortars and pummeled into a fine dust.

River water would be collected and carried to the place of seclusion. Earth taken from those places that had been blessed by the gods would also be ferried there. The warlocks, called ‘nahualli’ in their native tongue of Nahuatl, would then blend these elements to form a slimy clay. Into this mixture the bone dust would be swirled and folded. Finally, this morbid clay would be scooped up and shaped by the skilled fingers of the nahualli. Skulls would be formed, with gaping jaws and eye sockets like the pocks on the face of the moon, or like the conch shell of the lunar god Tēcciztēcatl.

It was through the shriek-wide mouths of the skulls that the precious noise of the whistle would escape.

Once purified and made firm by midnight fires, the whistles were then decorated with suitably gruesome adornments; snakes or squiggly lines of pyre smoke, hexes, all brushed on with a paint made from poisonous berries and from dung.

On ceremonious occasions, the dates for rites whose character is too extreme to hew with the timid mindset of contemporary man, these whistles would be blown.

The sound they would emit was the very voice of the damned in Mictlān, the Aztec Underworld.

Or such is the tale the elders tell. The whistles become a ligament between this realm and theirs, a terrestrial tool the damned can use to lend voice to their otherwise unheard cries. The whistle’s scream is the song of torment and torture, unimaginable and unending.

How can one even begin to describe the sound? A piercing sine? The sound of fingernails scraping across old tin? It is a hideous, most unmusical noise, yet its power is all-encompassing and immediate. Once one hears it, one is owned by it to one degree or another.