Under the Gaze of Ix Chel
by Dustin Smith
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Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
part 2
March 6th
That was the day when three shades began to stalk me. The portly man, missing the back of his head, the frothing pale woman and the latest addition, a blue-lipped teen on the cusp of manhood. His long black hair floated as if gravity had forgotten he existed. I spun out of my hammock, landed on the grass on all fours and sprinted to the marquee.
They didn’t chase me; they didn’t take a step. The translucent trio stood under the shade of the laurel figs.
I shook my head. “What?!” I demanded.
“Huh?” Austin lifted an earphone from his ear. He stood from his desk and looked up at me. “Missed that.”
“Nothing, I was just saying hello.”
His eyes gave me the full once-over. “You know what?” He tapped me on the arm. “You look like a giant version of the locals.”
I turned away from the trio, steeling myself, catching my breath. “My dad was from Mexico. Grandma swore we had Mayan ancestors.”
“I can see that. How are your translation skills? Any joy in deciphering more of the tablet?”
He didn’t mention Annie, who had done the translating before she’d overdosed in the forest. Nobody had mentioned her since Austin at the bar. Funny how some people just disappear. “Some symbols are known from Yucatec, but the bulk of the glyphs are new.”
“Nothing to add to ‘sacrifice we serve’?”
“Not yet. Most of the logograms and syllabograms on the pot are not in the database.” Austin’s eyes glazed over and he returned to his chair, but I persevered. “Also, It doesn’t help that every word can be represented in five or eight visual ways. Imagine learning a language, and the word food has eight different spellings?”
“Fancy a tea?” Austin asked. I nodded; my thoughts lingered on the three shadows under the trees. “Great; me, too. I take mine white with two sugars.”
I didn’t argue, and Austin didn’t say thank you when I left the brew on his desk, but he did offer me a half-smile as he again gave me the once over. His intense gaze gave me the strange urge to climb under a rock or a root of a tree.
“You know what, these ancient civilisations had it right. Life is a lot easier when you can get other people to do the unimportant work.” Austin gave me an impish wink, then put his headphones back on and returned to editing his research paper.
That was Austin. I told the police he had a Jack the Lad charm. Was that laying it on too thick?
March 13th
The only light in the hut came from my laptop. The glyphs were silent. Mayan is a logosyllabic language. Have letters ever been sung for you? They did for me on the 13th, spinning, expanding and vibrating. Light burst from the centre of the pink, cyan and imperial purple signs. On a black background, they danced and sang like an electric choir.
It was beautiful and enthralling, but it meant nothing to me; they sang in a tongue I could not comprehend.
March 16th
“You know he has servants?” Georgia had caught me staring at the piles of clothes and rubbish around Austin’s bed. Pieces of crumpled paper and food wrappers hung around the bed’s wooden feet like a mob of unwelcome teenagers.
Georgia had slept in the boys’ dorm since the Annie incident. “Servants?” I muttered, my gaze fixed on the sock that had matured from white to junkyard grey.
“Yeah, you know, butlers and a driver. He says he can’t imagine living without his serfs. Annie used to tidy up for him. I’d tell her not to bother. He’s got to learn to do it for himself.” Then she said in a higher pitch after straightening her slouched back. “I must, for my own sake.’ She was a funny one, that Annie.”
“Maybe we should treat it as a biohazard and burn it?” I asked, not really joking. The question came out slow, almost dreamlike.
She chuckled, paused, then said, “Did you hear someone drowned at the bar we were at the other night?”
“No, but drinking and swimming never combine well.”
“Are you going to join us in the trench today” — she pointed at my laptop — “or stare at that screen all day?”
“The screen; they’re talking to me now.”
Georgia frowned. “You should come join us.” She put her hand on my arm. “You’re getting paler. That’s hard to do in the summer.”
March 18th
Sleep was hiding from me at night. It snuck up on me during the day while the rest of the team inspected a new trench. Eyelids heavy, my head dropped to my chest.
I heard it slithering before I saw it. I didn’t move but, somehow, my desk chair spun to face the dorm door. There, a red- and blue-scaled snake tasted the air with a pink tongue. Its trunk filled the doorway.
Emerald-green eyes with slitted pupils met my gaze. Its torso rippled and, as if its skin were a curtain hugging a body, I could see hands and knees working up along the snake’s spine.
My chair was gone, and I was standing. The room had shrunk to half its size and seemed in perpetual gloom. The snake was only ten feet away now, even though neither of us had moved. I wasn’t scared. My heart didn’t pound. It was as if I were numb, floating in freezing water, water so cold my senses had abandoned me.
The snake’s jaw clicked as it dislocated; it opened so that its nose touched the ceiling. Then I saw the little man crawling inside the snake’s back as if it were a tunnel in a kid’s playground. When he reached the roof of its mouth, he detached and landed on his feet with a cat’s grace.
Even with a brown feather headdress that was a foot tall, the man with mahogany skin didn’t reach my eye level. His eyes blinked at me, including the eyes that formed his necklace. The necklace’s eyes rolled back, and he fixed me with an intense glare before shaking a rattle as large as a man’s head.
He spoke, but I could not comprehend the words or the glyphs that tumbled out of his mouth and then floated around his head like smoke rings. He hissed and stamped, pointed at my chest and frowned. “Ochja. Chamiy!”
He continued to speak, and I made out one word from the chaos of light and sound. “Austin.” There was no glyph for Austin.
His rattle boomed like thunder and, instantly, he had my wrist in his right hand. With his left, he tugged an earring that looked like a sea urchin spike that had lanced his earlobe. A bead of blood pooled on his finger before he flicked it to the ground. Then, a finger-length pin appeared in his hand. He spoke in a soft, comforting tone before he buried it in my thumb.
It didn’t hurt; I was still cold and numb.
He grinned, nodded and placed a circular mirror in my palm. He lowered back onto all fours and crawled back into his transport. The snake’s mouth closed, but I saw him crawling towards the tail through the snake’s skin. I bounded after him. The snake was hundreds of metres long. Its trunk wound through the dorm’s kitchen, onto the grass and finally into a hole under a tree at the jungle’s edge.
In a few minutes, the snake had slid backwards into the pit, which sealed around his head as it descended. The sky faded from a boiling blood red to nightshade, and the sound of the jungle returned. Before there had only been silence.
You see? Who on earth could I tell this to except you?
March 20th
“Where did you get that mirror from?” Peter asked. His head was between his legs. He straightened, exhaled and went into downward dog.
I sat under the tree where the snake had vanished, inspecting the gift. It had a hairy maize floret tied to it with red string. I couldn’t resist stroking it with my finger. Peter had his mat rolled out on the grass outside the dorms. “A market near the capital.”
“It looks antique.”
I nodded. The thing had a heft to it. It overflowed my palm. It wasn’t anything like a modern mirror.
Peter brought his left knee forward and stretched towards the sky. “Judging from the colouration, it’s polished iron ore. How much did you pay?”
“A few hundred Quetzal. I got it from a bric-à-brac seller.”
He moved into warrior pose. “That’s a bargain.”
Other than my face, there were three tiny silhouettes, as if they were far away in the distance. I’d seen those shapes before. Most days, I’d make my excuses but, this time, I decided to trawl Peter’s knowledge. He was itching to offer it. Usually, he did his yoga inside. “I think it’s based on an ancient Mayan design.”
Peter took a deep breath. “Post-classic would be likeliest. Do you know what they used them for?”
I didn’t ask. I knew he would continue.
“Warriors would tie them to their backs so no enemy could sneak up on them. If one tried, a daemon would erupt from the mirror and slay the attacker.”
I smiled. Peter would have loved knowing how I’d received the mirror. He would have lapped up the story with a furrowed brow before calling the University support services. “So they contain daemons?”
Peter sat on the floor and placed the soles of his feet together. Sweat was pouring from his receding hairline. “No, they’re doorways to the layers of the Mayan afterlife.”
“You’re going full lobster,” I said. It was almost a purr.
Peter stood and rolled up his mat. “I don’t know what I was thinking, doing my set out here,” he said before darting inside.
The three shadows were back in the mirror. Looming over my shoulder. “Hello,” I whispered. The wind responded for them by rustling through the leaves.
March 21st
The glyphs were silent, so I spent most of the day sulking in bed.
* * *
My mother’s ghost had been soothing. She’d been crying for days after the death of her nanna. She was little, and death was an unwelcome guest, something that hadn’t visited her before. The first visit leaves the biggest scar. Then she’d felt something electric in the air as she lay in bed, hiding under the covers. There was a soft pinch on her toe, then a bony hand caressed her hair through the sheets. It was Nanna! She’d come one last time to do her bedtime routine. Mum never cried about her nanna again.
Grandma on Mum’s side swore her grandfather Ralf had saved her life. She’d been in the backseat of a rusting Triumph. Her three best friends sat in the other seats. Duncan had the pedal to the floor as they tore down the manic mile. It was the one straight mile of country road between Penhurst and Duxlow. The aim of the game was simple: reach eighty miles per hour. Which wasn’t easy in her youth, in the cars her friends could afford.
She couldn’t remember whether they’d won the game. She awoke hanging upside down in a field, mud sliding in through the broken windows.
“You’ll be alright,” said a familiar voice. She turned to see Grandpa Ralf smiling at her in his favourite green mac and black wellie boots. He tousled her hair like always and set off across the field. She hadn’t seen his face since his brief stay at the hospital five years earlier. Since then, he’d rested in an urn on her mother’s fireplace.
Duncan and Mary in the front had been killed instantly. Earl, sitting next to her, had seven breaks in his legs. Grandma, other than a light gash on her forehead, was unscathed.
My sister’s story is barely worth a mention. She claims to have seen our ancient ancestor, Lochlain McLoughlin, riding to the king’s raised banner, but that was at five a.m., after six bottles of wine.
* * *
Am I unravelling like a cheap jumper? Three ghosts and a man living in a snake are not in the same realm as reassuring relatives. They’re not even on the same planet!
Copyright © 2026 by Dustin Smith
