The Obsidian Mirror, page 7
“Get me a BLT and a side of fries and a cola to go,” it said.
Startled, she peered into the back to find Fred curled up on the floor of the car.
“Please,” Fred added, staring up at her with gleaming orange eyes.
“What are you doing there? How did you get in my car?”
“I’m not doing anything,” said Fred, sucking placidly on a digit. “I just climbed in while you and Chaco were away."
"How? The car was locked."
Chaco said, "Fred's a mannegishi. It's what they do."
“So, are you gonna get me a BLT?” Fred asked again, peering hopefully into Sierra's face. “And a cola and...”
“Yes, all right," interrupted Sierra.
“And fries?”
“Yes!” Sierra snarled, and slammed the door.
She steamed into the restaurant, Chaco close behind.
“Fred may come in handy,” Chaco observed after they were seated.
Sierra was unconvinced.
“I don’t see how. I’m going to go bankrupt, feeding the two of you,” she said ungraciously, scanning the predictable menu.
The server came over to their table. Ignoring Sierra, she blinked in disbelief at the sight of Chaco. He lowered his thick black lashes slightly and gave her a lazy grin. The server smiled back and leaned forward slightly, affording him a glimpse down the front of her well-packed blouse.
“What can I get for you today, sir?” she asked sweetly.
“I will have a chef’s salad. Please also get me a BLT, cola, and fries to go,” Sierra said pointedly.
The server—her name tag, pinned to the ample swell of her left breast, read, “Bettina”—noted something in her order book without looking at Sierra and smiled brightly at Chaco.
“Two Beluga Burgers and a double order of fries,” Chaco said. “And a milkshake. Chocolate, please.”
“I love to see a man with an appetite,” Bettina said and swayed away, but not without another peek at Chaco.
He smiled to himself.
Sierra was annoyed. And she was annoyed at herself for being annoyed. It was nothing to her if Chaco wanted to flirt with Bettina. And vice versa. Nothing. She chewed her way through a tasteless chef’s salad, then flagged Bettina down to remind her about the BLT, fries, and cola to go. Bettina shot a meaningful glance at Sierra’s thighs, made a note in her pad, and strode away, leaving Sierra fuming again.
Chaco wolfed down his burgers, fries, and milkshake with a chaser of mud pie and coffee. Finally Fred’s order arrived, and Sierra paid the bill. When they got back to the car, she handed down the food to Fred in the back and said, “Don’t you dare spill that soft drink all over my carpet, Fred. You hear me?”
The mannegishi nodded and began slurping at the plastic straw, sounding like a clogged kitchen drain.
Sierra made sure Chaco was in his seatbelt, every minute feeling more like someone’s mom, which annoyed her still further. As she pulled onto the freeway, she had a sudden realization.
“Fred?” she said, unable to see him in the back. “Fred, what happened at our camp? Who tore it up while we were gone?”
“I dunno,” came the answer from the back seat, somewhat muffled by BLT.
Chaco leaned over the back of his seat.
“What do you mean, you don’t know?” he asked crossly. “You were at camp when we left. You were obviously there when we got back. How could you not know?”
There was a moment of silence.
Then, sheepishly, “I wasn’t there when it happened. I kind of went over to someone else’s camp to see if they had any chocolate. They did, and they were gone, so I stayed a while. When I got back, Whatsisname was at our camp, so I disappeared, and then you came. I’m sorry, but I didn’t see anything.”
Chaco twisted back around, sighing with frustration.
“I just don’t like it,” he said. “Something isn’t right.”
“I’ll say something isn’t right!” Sierra snapped. “I just lost a couple thousand dollar’s worth of camping gear. Personally, I think it was that Mahaha thing.”
“Naw,” Chaco said. “I would’ve smelled it. Mahaha was never anywhere near us.”
“Then maybe it was just kids.”
“Mmmmph,” Chaco grunted, and that’s all he said for the rest of the drive back to Sierra’s home. Fred took up the conversational slack by singing in a chirpy voice all the camp songs he had ever heard hanging around the state park, including “One Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall.”
By the time Sierra parked in front of her house in the falling dark, she had a tension headache from gritting her teeth. This was not helped by discovering that Fred had gone to sleep, spilling the remnants of his sticky brown drink on the car’s carpet. She poked him sharply to wake him up, causing him to disappear.
“C’mon, Fred, we’re home. You stay disappeared, OK? And I want you to come back out here and clean up this mess.”
She didn’t wait to see if Chaco and Fred were following. As she had carried her backpack with her on the hike to the cave, it was the only piece of camping gear that hadn’t been spoiled by the vandal or vandals, so she hefted it over one shoulder and left the ruins of the rest of her gear in the trunk. She unlocked the front door. Chaco stood motionless in the middle of the sidewalk, nose twitching and staring around in an unnerving manner, but she ignored him. The inside of her house was dark, and she groped with her hand for the light switch near the door and flipped it on. Nothing happened.
“Darn it!” she said to herself. “Another power outage.”
She stepped into her front hallway and set her backpack down to retrieve her flashlight. As she bent to rummage in the depths of the pack, her front door slammed violently shut and locked, cutting off the dim evening light from outside. She became aware of a sharp, cold odor—the odor of impending snow— at the same instant that a heavy, bony body hit her hard, and sent her sprawling on the floor.
Then, inches from her face, she saw the thing. Red, glowing eyes, slit like a goat’s. Ice-blue skin with a few coarse white hairs straggling from cheeks and chin. Yellow tusks in a lipless, grinning maw. Slotted nostrils in a flattened face. And long, long, bony fingers ending in gleaming, scythe-like claws.
In the few coherent thoughts she could summon, she was pretty sure she was looking at Mahaha.
Chapter 7
Sierra screamed, lashing out with her booted feet. The ice demon laughed a high laugh, “Mahaha!” as her boots slammed into its bony chest, and it raked her shins with taloned fingers, sending lightening-bolts of pain along her nerve ends. Moving faster than Sierra could believe possible, the hideous thing leaped at her again, trying to pin her under its body.
All the while, the thing kept laughing like a stage villain, “Mahaha! Mahaha!”
Sierra rolled to one side as fast as she could, still gripping her backpack, but not quite fast enough. The creature jabbed its clawed hands at her, and Sierra gasped with pain as an icy pang slid toward her heart. It felt as though a frozen knife were sliding into a space between two ribs, turning her warm flesh to ice in its path.
Sierra found herself near a corner formed by the wall and the rise of the stairs. She heaved to a sitting position, gasping with pain, and wedged herself into the corner, protecting her back. She began frantically grubbing inside the pack’s main compartment with one hand, fending off the monster with her feet. She was dimly aware that someone was pounding on the front door and yelling, but the door had locked again when it slammed shut. The pain in her side grew more intense every moment, and she could barely breathe from the agony.
Sierra’s back was now protected and she could brace herself against the wall for more powerful kicks, but she was literally cornered, with no way to retreat. After taking the first surprise blow from her feet, Mahaha evaded her kicks easily, but could not get past the barrier of her furiously jabbing feet. It finally caught both her ankles with its bony fingers and yanked, hard. As she felt herself slip down, she brought her right hand up out of her pack, gripping what she had sought so desperately and shoved her hand toward the demon’s fanged face. Then she slid helplessly down, head banging sharply on the hardwood floor, and abruptly lost all interest in what was happening.
Sierra found herself in a long stone hall, standing at one end. The blocks of stone composing the structure were the size of small cars, massive and cleanly squared. The air was hot and humid, with the musty closeness of a confined space. The long chamber was lit with torches, burning in sconces fixed to the stone walls. Stone bas-relief friezes, brightly painted in rusty red, blue, yellow, black and brown, decorated the length of the hall on both sides. She slowly turned all the way around, looking for a door, but there was no entryway or exit. At the end farthest from her, she could see a huge black oblong, flanked by stone sculptures and shining darkly in the torchlight.
There was no one else present, but she could hear drums and chanting, as though from a great distance. She began to walk slowly down the length of the hall, as there was really no other way to go and nothing else to do. She drew closer to the painted friezes on the left hand side of the hall, trying to make out what they represented.
At first, the bright paint made the friezes appear attractive and cheerful. She associated the style with the art of the Aztecs or the Maya: highly stylized, blocky figures accompanied by strange shapes and ornaments she did not recognize. As she stared at them, she began to discern what the figures were doing. There was a chief—she thought it was a chief because he was larger than the other figures—cutting the tongues from the mouths of bound captives. There was another figure, prone on a stone altar, his heart, in the grip of a priest, pumping blood into the air. Each scene was a depiction of torture, human sacrifice, pain, and gore.
Sierra continued walking, each step bringing her to a new scene, each one more terrible than the last. The parade of cruelty increasingly oppressed her as she walked, but she seemed to have no choice but to go on.
At last, she stood before the shining object at the end of the hall. It was a sheet of black stone, obsidian, nearly twice as tall as she and as wide as her workbench was long. It had been hewn from a single, impossible sheet of volcanic glass; its opaque, gleaming surface reflected her image, distorted by the flaking cuts used to smooth the stone. She stared into the black mirror, fascinated by the way her reflection constantly distorted with even her smallest movement.
“Sierra.” Her name was whispered, echoing in the stone chamber.
She whirled around, but no one was there.
“Sierra,” said the voice again.
It was a deep voice that reverberated inside her chest, like a drum.
“You are in my house. This is my mirror. See yourself.”
Sierra turned back to her dark reflection.
“See what I will do for you,” the voice said in caressing, almost seductive tones.
For a fleeting moment, she remembered the “power” that Quetzalcoatl told her she possessed. But the memory of those bright flames misted away as her reflection took on a life of its own in the black mirror. She was wealthy. She had become a renowned designer of fine jewelry, her work sought by the rich and powerful throughout the globe. She had a sleek, high-powered car. She traveled around the world. She knew many powerful people and men dreamed of her. She was known and welcomed everywhere in the finest restaurants, the most luxurious hotels, the most exclusive society.
“See what you will become, as my beloved,” the voice said. “Everything you have ever dreamed of. Everything. All you need do is come to me.”
Sierra stared dreamily into the depths of the obsidian mirror. How lovely everything would be. No more bosses. Lots of money, enough money to play with. Fame and recognition for her work. She raised her hands and rested her palms on the cool, black surface. All she had to do was go through the mirror, like Alice, and this would be her life. The surface of the stone seemed to shimmer around her hands like black water. No more worries, no more problems. Sierra sighed, yearning toward this vision that the voice had promised.
Then she frowned. Wait a minute, she thought, I don’t think this is my dream. She looked again. She wanted to use her creativity to design jewelry and earn a living doing it. But sleek, fast cars? Fame and fortune? Yearning men? One yearning man would be enough for her. Now that she really thought about it, this wasn’t her vision at all. She didn’t see any hiking or camping in there. She didn’t see true friendships or true love. No, not her dream at all. She pushed away hard from the stone, and whirled, half expecting to see the speaker behind her.
Instead, she saw a massive stone altar where none had been before. Lying on the altar, chest empty and bleeding, eyes lifeless, she saw herself. She screamed in terror, and the scream seemed to build until the vast hall rumbled and shifted, and the ceiling stones dropped as the structure began to collapse around her. Still she screamed, and the obsidian mirror shivered, exploding into fragments and deadly black dust, sending a barrage of razor-edged shards flying at her.
Sierra gradually became aware that time had passed. She felt a cold trickle down her neck. Blood? She opened her eyes, but couldn’t see.
Am I dead? she wondered. She lay quite still, hoping that more information would be revealed about her current status. Then she realized that someone nearby was snuffling loudly.
“Oooooooh!” someone wailed. “I’ll never forgive myself if she dies. Oooooooh!”
Why, that’s Fred, she thought in amazement. I can’t be dead, because Fred can’t die. Can he? Then she realized that she couldn’t see because someone had placed a very wet towel over her eyes and forehead, causing the cold trickle down her neck. She also became aware that she was lying in bed, probably her own bed, which was undoubtedly getting wet from the sopping towel. Groggily, she swept the towel off her face and tried to sit up. Pain stabbed her side as if an icicle had speared her. Her throbbing head persuaded her to lie back down again, but the cold, wet pillows sent her right back up. Fred stopped wailing and began a joyous, if earsplitting, squeal.
“Chaco! She’s alive!”
Chaco leaned over her anxiously from the other side of the bed, where he was sitting in an armchair.
“Are you all right?”
His amber eyes were soft with concern as he peered into her wet face. He was holding a bundle of burning herbs over an abalone shell that had most recently decorated her downstairs bathroom. A thin veil of sweet-smelling smoke arose from it as he set it down carefully on her bureau.
“I’m not sure,” she responded, holding her side.
She felt the oddest sort of pain in her ribs on the right side, not a hot, throbbing pain like an infection, but a deep cold, as though there were ice embedded in her flesh.
“What happened? No—first, could someone get me some ibuprofen? Please? It’s in the kitchen. Cupboard next to the sink.”
Chaco loped downstairs to the kitchen and returned with the bottle of ibuprofen and a glass of water. Sierra moved carefully away from the wet pillows and took the glass in a shaky hand. Chaco sat down beside her on the bed, shook out two tablets and put them in her hand, then took the glass and held it to her lips. She sipped and swallowed the tablets. He put a strong arm around her and hugged her gently. Fred grasped one of her hands in twelve of his fingers and squeezed.
My goodness, she thought. This is sort of nice.
Then she asked again, “What happened?”
“You remember Mahaha?” Chaco asked.
Sierra shuddered. She remembered the thing’s icy claws and her stomach clenched.
“I see you do. Anyway, it was waiting for you inside. It slammed the door shut when it attacked you. The door locked again, and we could hear you screaming and Mahaha laughing and a lot of thrashing around. Then Fred opened the door…”
“How did Fred open the door? You said it was locked.”
Chaco grinned at the mannegishi, who was—unusually, for Fred—staring at Sierra with both his huge eyes. “That’s just another thing that mannegishis are good at. They can get into anything. Especially if there’s food involved, of course.”
“So it was Fred and Chaco to the rescue?”
“Oh, no,” responded Chaco. “The door locked behind you. We didn’t realize at first that anything was wrong—not until we heard the demon laughing.” He shuddered slightly. “By the time we got into the house, you’d already killed Mahaha. You were out like a light, and Mahaha was dead.”
“Um,” said Sierra. “I’m afraid I’m a little vague on that part. How did I kill it? I thought it was killing me.”
Chaco managed to look proud and worried simultaneously.
“You must have remembered that the feathers were in your backpack. You grabbed them and stuffed them down its throat. No creature of Necocyaotl can survive contact with Quetzalcoatl. It died.”
“Oh, no,” moaned Sierra. “How are we going to get rid of that thing? I can’t exactly call the county coroner or put it out with the trash. It’s too big to bury in the back yard…”
“Oh, don’t worry about it,” Chaco said. “It vaporized. It left kind of a nasty stain on your floor, but we got most of it out.”
“Vaporized?” Sierra said, feeling more dazed than before.
“Um, yes. And the feathers, too,” Chaco said ruefully.
“All of the feathers? Every last one?” cried Sierra in horror.
“Yes. But you saved your life. That was quick thinking.”
Sierra cradled her throbbing head gently in her hands. She recalled grabbing the feathers, although she had not been so much thinking rationally as grasping at straws. She couldn’t remember anything after shoving the feathers at the creature.
“We’ll have to go back to the cave, then,” she said. “We’ll have to get more feathers from Quetzalcoatl.”
“I don’t think we can do that,” said Chaco. “He wouldn’t be there anymore.”
