This is a sound that rouses and wrests. Settled dust is stirred by its piping. Hidden shapes are lured out. Latent wishes spring up like fresh weeds in the mind of the hearer. Mictēcacihuātl Herself is said to smile when the Death Whistle blows, and the priests’ blades are drawn and raised.

Until this past century, when a team of archaeologists with which I was involved accidentally disinterred one from its resting place amidst the ruins, the Death Whistles were believed to be mythical. We’d gone to the site in search of villagers’ relics, which, based upon years of research, were believed to be in the area. We were shocked and excited by our happening upon one of the Death Whistles. News of our find spread like wildfire.

Human nature being what it is, the lone discovered specimen was quickly molded and replicated. These cheap copies were exported to line the shelves of trinket shops around the planet for no other purpose than vulgar, unvarnished greed. No stock was placed in the whistle’s sacred nature or its powers. It became, like all things to modern men, a toy.

Only the original artefact was shown any degree of respect. It was preserved under glass in the British Museum of Antiquities, where tourists gawked and snapped photos and made light. There it remained…

Indeed, there it remained, Professor. Until last week…when you stole it.

You smuggled it all the way here, to your private bungalow on the shore. You didn’t think that anyone or anything would hear when you stood on your deck and blew into the whistle’s ancient slit and unleashed the ungodly scream.

The sound ripped across the snow-piled shore of the beach, now abandoned for the winter. It stabbed through your lavish bungalow as well…the bungalow that had been vacant, but now held me.

I want to thank you for leaving behind all these notes about the Death Whistle. They’ve been a great aid in explaining just what I am, the power that now lives inside me. Since you dug up that whistle, I felt I’d been living in one prolonged nightmare, but now I have entered another.

All dreams are quests. I undertook mine, and as my prize I found my portal out of Mictlān. You did that for me. You gave me a signal to follow, you gave me back my voice. Along with a new body I could use to once more roam the mortal world.

I hope these words I’m now adding to your notes are legible to you, and that they help as you move down there in Mictlān. Your notes have certainly helped me. I hope this confession makes you understand, though judging by your face when you saw me crawling through your living room wall (me being all pungent smoke and clattering, carbonized bones) it did not look as though you were able to understand anything that was happening.