The endless beating of the tired calloused feet continued, pounding out an appeasement to their half-dreamed Ometéotlitztl, and accompanying the sound were those faint notes of a pipe, reverberating off the stone walls, calling out with arms held wide. Their singing was like no song Noah had ever heard. The language was impenetrable—grunts and clicks as if Nature herself were in revolt, throwing off her suffocating yoke. Still more figures spilled forth from the ruins, multiplying in the burning height of day, each one solidifying into a grey, mud-covered mockery of humanity. But none were shaped like children. None were his Eli.
The discordant music elicited an orgiastic fury from the Tletliztlii, their cracked flesh drumming the world into submission. Every note, every image served to further dwindle Noah’s rationality until he doubted the truth of what he witnessed. All his anchors were gone, abandoning him when he needed them most, leaving him to stare at events his sun-stroked mind could not fathom. Nothing on the heath could be trusted. Nothing on the heath could be real. There were familiar screams, but in the chaos of impossible events they retreated into moorless oblivion. A scattering of ashes, motes of dark dust, filled the air. Lifeless, shapeless piñatas vibrated, painted-on faces distorted by the blaze. Fire raged white and pure inside his skull, and yet Noah felt the cold fear of being trapped in an elaborate Goldbergian web of events. He sweated profusely as before his eyes the twisted figures danced harder, faster, and from within their multiplying childless numbers the terrified screaming resurfaced, demanding his flailing attention. It was a voice he knew frighteningly well.
Rachel was as naked as the mob that dragged her struggling from the ruins, her body covered in streaks of coloured paint radiating from her swollen pregnancy, and they held her high above their heads. Noah opened his mouth wide, but nothing emerged, all sound lost somewhere inside his dried throat. He was trapped in an ever-worsening nightmare, far beyond his breaking point, and yet could do nothing but watch the woman he loved, the mother of his unborn child, as she was carried across the baked earth and placed onto that cloven altar the petrified tree loomed over. Noah stared impotently as Muñoz appeared, covered in the same cracked grey mud, and bound Rachel’s hands over and over with thick loops of rope. The chanting of the others grew louder as Muñoz wrapped the rope between Rachel’s arms and pulled so tight her hands slammed together. He then threw the other over the worn branch of the petrified tree where other muddy hands waited to receive it, clamouring for a grip. Noah tried to will himself to stand, to scream for help, to do anything to disrupt the nightmare that was unfolding, but his paralysis held firm, the drone of the plaster creatures overpowering him. With a sudden jerk of the rope by the dancing Tletliztlii, Rachel was hoisted violently from the ground to hang from the branch of the tree, her mouth contorted in a drawn-out scream that Noah could not hear. Rachel’s legs kicked and thrashed, her round belly thrust forward by the angle, and Noah wanted to call out to her, but his bruised and broken body would not comply. Even his tears dried before they emerged. He was held fast to the spot, rooted by ineffectuality and torment.
The village danced in chaotic ecstasy to the tribal rhythms and Rachel’s feeble kicking, while around them the rows of plaster piñatas continued to vibrate from the pounding of so many villagers shaking the rocky terrain. Noah felt it slipping up into his body as he lay powerlessly immobile. Each of those dead-eyed creatures stared at the proceedings, and in his sun-baked delirium Noah wished they would act, do what he could not and stop the horror. But though the piñatas shook, they took no action, not even when, from the depths of the crowd, a lone muddy figure appeared. She moved differently from the others, her limbs flailing as though in the throes of deep spasm, as though the stifling heat was consuming her from within. From beneath the tangles of mud-caked auburn hair her face flashed, revealing a darkly painted countenance blacker than was possible. And yet, within that empty void two bright eyes burned; he did not have to see them to know their owner. His battered body bucked with the strange sensation running its length, crawling into his pelvis, shrinking him in terror. “No,” he rasped as Sonia’s darting hand grabbed hold of Rachel’s face and smeared the coloured paint into chaos, her fingers leaving wet black streaks in their wake. Then Sonia stretched her head back and screamed a word into the black night, a word that echoed across the heath, a word that seemed to fracture the very air. It was a word so large Noah’s mind could not comprehend it. Tears finally erupted from his eyes as though to cleanse them of the unholy blasphemies they had witnessed, but did nothing more than streak his dusty face. Sonia raised her arms toward the orb burning above and for an instant it went dark, became its antithesis, a solid ball of pure emptiness, of burning space and countless overlapping aeons. The sun burned bright, burned black, and the sound itself was like thunder rolling across the heavens. Then a glint from Sonia’s upheld hands filled the sky, bursting through walls and shores like an exploding sun, and from that flash her arms emerged, swinging down in a purposed arc, one hand over the other, so swiftly Noah did not know where they had gone until Rachel’s swollen belly burst open, blood and flesh spraying, the grue of his unborn child tumbling forth soundlessly to die on the heat of the ancient pedestal.
Noah found his voice then, but it was too late. And had been before he and Rachel and their unborn child arrived in Astilla de la Cruz. Before Eli had been taken, before Sonia saw any articles. The series stretched back further, each piece, each cog, tumbling in time, lined up one before the other. So far back, there was no beginning, simply causality stretching back into something else, something so distant that were Noah to scream forever the sound of the last dregs of his sanity would never reach it. Instead, they would spew into the æther until his body was burned clean through. But even the sound of his shattered sanity was eclipsed by what followed.
The rock of the blasted heath raised a foot beneath Rachel’s lifeless swinging legs, a jump that shifted the earth beneath so many. The villagers stopped, the drumming ceased, and all were mesmerised by the stained altar. Even Noah, to whom words and noise had recently returned, stared dumbly at the wet mass covering the stone, at what remained of his unborn child and at the petrified tree growing impossibly from rock. The sense in the air dragged down on the world, blanketed everything in oppressive dread, and the group of villagers and their offering of piñatas could do nothing but watch as the distant thunder grew louder. And louder. And louder still. Then, with no warning, a deafening crack. As loud as the world at its end. Everything shook, the Tletliztlii stumbling over themselves in confusion, some dropping to their hands and knees as everything became unstable. The altar fell to thousands of pieces, Noah’s unborn child consumed instantly by the fissure that grew down the middle of the heath, wrenching the earth apart with a horrible sound. The petrified tree tottered, its weight too much for the crumbling, receding earth, and it too fell forward into the widening chasm, the remnants of Rachel’s empty body tumbling alongside. The Tletliztlii stumbled over one another as stable ground collapsed, some swallowed into its depths without a sound.