Chapter Twelve
I try to sleep late into the morning. I try to focus on the warm sun that settles over me. It should have been comforting, but it reminds me instead of the hot Aztecan sun. Pushing the image away, I try to reassure myself that I am momentarily safe in my own time, not high atop a temple mesa. It works a little. Although, however comforting that realization is, it can do nothing to hold all that I have learned at bay.
Fear slowly seeps into my mind, leaving little room for anything else. Climbing off my mattress, I make my way to the bathroom. I do my best to push the disturbing thoughts out of my mind as I stand under the hot shower. The heat and water only serve to remind me of the dream girl sitting in a steaming tub of water being scrubbed by attendants in preparation for the sacrifice. I finish my shower quickly.
Dressing with much less care than usual, I consider the things my grandpa told me yesterday. He surprised me with what he revealed, but I think he kept back even more. It is scary to admit that, because if he did keep anything back, it’s because it must be even more horrifying than what he already told me.
He warned me that the mystery goes deeper than I realized, and he’s right. I found out about the other girls, dead and forgotten. Perhaps if I show my grandpa how serious I am about finding the truth, he will tell me the rest of what he knows. Remembering how his body crumpled and sagged at the mention of his beloved sister and daughter, I don’t relish the idea of asking him to relive those memories again.
Bringing that much pain to my grandpa again scares me more than I want to admit, but turning away from the truth is not an option anymore. Despite my despair last night, I wake up still holding onto a tenuous belief that there might be a chance to change my fate, if only I could find the truth. That slim hope takes hold of me and refuses to let go. I am on my way to my grandpa’s house with my new information before either of my parents wake up. This time, I do remember to leave a note.
When my grandpa opens the door, I am not greeted with the same enthusiasm as I was yesterday. Studying my demeanor carefully, he welcomes me into his home. He knows exactly why I came back.
“Come in, Arrabella,” he says. “I thought you might be back today. Come in and tell me what you’ve found.”
I walk through the door and listen to my footsteps gently tap along the old wood floors. Glancing at the wall that enclosed the hallway, I see the rows of hanging pictures. Katie and Maera dominate the faces. At least he hasn’t forgotten, I think. Stepping into the kitchen with my photos and records, I am ready to find out the rest of what my grandpa knows. We sit down at the little round table, and I tell him everything I’ve discovered.
He patiently listens to me with a frown that deepens as the conversation continues. When I finish my explanation, I look at him expectantly, waiting for him to tell what he knows as well. Staring down at the table, the silence grows thicker.
“Well,” I ask, “what do you think?”
“Arra, I told you that you would find out all of this,” he says.
I just stare at him. Surely he doesn’t expect me to accept that as an answer. I open my mouth to argue, but he continues first.
“Are you sure you want to go forward with this? There won’t be any going back if you do. The knowledge will change things too much for that.” His gaze meets my eyes, studying me intently.
“I need to know, Grandpa. I can’t live with this fear and not try to understand it,” I say, hoping I sound brave enough.
He nods. He must have expected that to be my answer. “I do know what is happening, Arra. I had truly hoped that it would never come to this, but it has. No matter what ideas I have, they could never be tested, until now.”
Pausing, he takes a deep breath before moving on. “Well, now you know that Katie’s and Maera’s deaths weren’t just coincidence. You can’t change any of it, unfortunately. I told you to find the other names just so you would realize how old this is, how deep the trouble goes. No one else has ever been able to stop it, but I refuse to accept that no one ever will. Knowing doesn’t help the fear, but maybe it can help in other ways.”
“We can’t know for sure that nothing will stop it. I have to try, Grandpa. If this thing is going to come after me, too, I won’t sit around and just wait for it to claim me. I will not give up that easily,” I say.
“Good, Arra. You will need to be strong for this,” he says, almost to himself.
I rub my arms absently, trying to get rid of the prickling feeling spreading over my skin. I can’t rid myself of the bizarre sensation, though. Looking back at my grandpa, I wonder how long he has been preparing for this. “I want you to tell me what else you know, Grandpa. I can tell you’re keeping something from me. I have to know everything. Please tell me.”
“I know that when you hear this, you’ll think I’ve lost what little sanity I have left, but please just listen,” he says, patting my knee. “I will tell you everything. You deserve to hear the truth. You need to hear it if you want to succeed.” Leaning forward in his chair, he brings his face closer to mine.
“Katie didn’t actually die instantly like I made it sound yesterday. Your father was able to reach her while she was still alive. Her head was bleeding from the fall, but not badly enough that your father thought she was going to die.
“She was coherent at first, but the longer he was with her, the more unreasonable she became. Your father tried to ask her what had happened, but she wasn’t sure herself. She told him that someone was after her, but there was nobody else around. She was hysterical, begging your father not to let them take her. He asked her who was coming, but she couldn’t give him a clear answer.
“The more he tried to talk to her, the more frantic she became. By the end, she was screaming at him to save her. He tried everything he could think of to calm her down, but nothing worked. Your father stood up and starting yelling, hoping somebody would hear him. He was only a few steps away from her.
“He told me later that the most terrifying part of the whole thing was that she had been screaming for help and suddenly just stopped, for no apparent reason. At first he thought she had lost consciousness. But when he checked for her pulse, he realized that she was already dead.
“He couldn’t understand what had happened. No one could, really. The fall wasn’t bad enough to have killed her. Like I said, the coroner couldn’t actually tell us what had happened to her. He told us that she must have died from shock, but the look in his eyes said he didn’t believe it either.”
“Do you know what really happened to her, Grandpa?” I ask quietly. I know there is more to tell, and I find I am willing to push him into unpleasant places to get it. “Do you know who ‘they’ were? Do you know who was chasing Katie? Do you know who will come after me?”
“Yes, Arra, I know. At least, some of it I know,” he says. He turns to me and says, “It was the same thing that killed Maera. I was sure of that after Katie died.”
“Tell me what happened to her, Grandpa. Please,” I say, my fingernails digging into my palms.
His eyes close tightly and he draws a deep breath. Seeing his pausing as a refusal to answer, I stand up to leave. “I can’t believe this,” I say angrily. “I did what you said. I found the others, and still you won’t talk to me?” He grabs my arm and pulls me back to my chair. He takes a deep breath, rubs his wrinkled forehead, and looks me straight in the eye.
“Wait, Arra. I will tell you everything. I just needed a minute to prepare myself. I hoped that I would never have to do this, but I know that I must. I’m sorry. This isn’t easy for me. Sit down, please,” he says gently. “Katie didn’t die because of the fall, or from shock. At first, I thought that she had, or I wanted to believe she had, to be perfectly honest. I wanted to believe that it had nothing to do with Maera. But when the coroner couldn’t explain her death to us, and your father told me what Katie had said, I knew her death had everything to do with Maera’s.
“There has always been a story passed down in our fa
mily about a woman named Kivera. She was an Aztec woman who lived many generations ago when Aztec society still flourished. She was chosen to be a sacrifice when she was a young woman. She was so terrified that she pleaded with the priest to let her go. Nobody knew exactly what happened, but some kind of deal was struck over the sacrificial altar. Kivera walked away, but obviously that wasn’t the end of it,” he says.
Aztec sacrifice and deals made over an altar? I scoff, pretty sure my grandpa is trying to feed me a bedtime story instead of telling me the truth. I guess I came here expecting some fantastic reason behind the mystery of the dead girls, but still. My lips part to object, to demand he stop treating me like a child, but he waves my words away and continues.
“I know you don’t believe in stories like that, Arra,” he says, “and I didn’t either at first. I had heard the story before Maera died and later wondered if the fabled curse had been what claimed her. Eventually, I forgot about it. When Katie died, I considered the curse again because of the strange circumstances. That’s when I found out everything you’ve found out. I know the curse is real, Arra. I know it sounds crazy, but you believe it too, don’t you?”
I sit quietly, wondering at my grandpa. I don’t know what I had been expecting to hear, but an ancient Aztec curse sounds insane. I’m sure he must be joking, but the devastated looked on his face stops me cold. He looks as though he just signed my death warrant himself, as if sharing his secret finally made it all too real.
His revelation is so far away from anything I had been expecting that I can’t say anything in response. Wanting to laugh and cry at the same time, I bite the inside of my cheek hard to stave off doing either. I sit very still and consider everything I know. There’s no such thing as curses. That is certainly true, right? This is all crazy, isn’t it? But all those girls were taken by something. No coincidence could possibly reach that far. In the end, I can’t deny the possibility that it isn’t just a silly story.
If all I had to go on were the pictures and genealogy, I might be able to convince myself that none of this is true if I try hard enough, but my dreams rush to the front of my mind in a crashing wave. The cleansing and painting, the slow march up the tower, and the oily black blade assault me. The dreams are so powerful that I wake each night dreading falling asleep again. It is all too much for me to pass off as fantasy. My grandpa disturbs my dizzying thoughts by putting his rough hand on my arm. It’s only the slightest pressure, but the physical contact brings me back to the present.
“Arra, why don’t you tell me what else you know? You haven’t told me everything either, have you?” he asks me.
Without looking up at my grandpa’s face, I share my secret as well. “I’ve dreamed of her. At least I think it’s her…Kivera. For nearly a week, I have dreamed about her, about what happened to her. I saw her taken from her home, dressed in ceremonial clothes and paint, and paraded up to an altar. She was terrified. She was crying the whole way.”
The remembered terror of the dreams makes me pause as I try to push away the all too familiar tears. I look up at my grandpa’s patient face and try to continue. “She looked just like me. I thought it was me at first, but now I know it must be her. The fear is so real that they can’t be just dreams,” I say. “It’s her. She’s trying to warn me, to tell me what happened to her and what is going to happen to me.”
My grandpa puts his arm around my shoulders and hugs me to his chest. I thought this dream would be a revelation to him, but the calmness in his eyes says it’s not. “You’ve heard this before?”
“Yes, I have,” he says. “Being Twins, Maera and I were very close. The week leading up to her death, she had started acting very strangely. Normally she was a happy, excitable person, but suddenly she started staying mostly to herself. I tried to ask her what was wrong, but she brushed me off. All she would say was that she had been having bad dreams at night.
“After Katie died, I was packing up her room and I came across her diary.” He smiles warmly. “I probably shouldn’t have opened it, but I just wanted to know what she had been feeling and thinking before she died. I wanted to feel close to her. I was shocked to read about the dreams she was having, how they scared her and kept her awake at nights. They sound like the same dreams you just described. I wish she had told me about the dreams then. Maybe it would have made a difference. Who can know? She didn’t even tell your father.”
I simply stare at him. Had all the girls shared these awful dreams? The connection I feel to them just keeps getting stronger. I hope that doesn’t mean that I will share their fate as well. I can try to deny what my grandpa is telling me, but I know there is no use. My head sags. My hands come up to rub my arms once again. The cold foreboding feeling refuses to give way.
“I’m so sorry, Arra,” he says. “I’m sorry this is happening to you. I’ll help you with anything you need. We’ll find some way to stop this. We won’t give up.” He is crying as he holds me. I think I am too.
I don’t think he believes his words any more than I do, but I try to hope there will be a way to free me. Despair washes over us as we cradle each other. I wish again that I had never seen Katie’s photo. I wish I had never left Manhattan and found any of this. Pulling closer to my grandpa, I know that in two days none of what I have learned will matter anyway.