Life Blood---XXVI---Page No 94

Sarah was hovering around me, a sylphlike presence, as I

watched myself drift up the steps of the pyramid there in the

square, my senses waxing and waning like the waves on a distant
ocean shore. There seemed to be rain, or fog, or smoke, but it
had a luminous, purple cast one moment, a Day-Glo orange the
next. In fact, all the colors were swirling and changing,
shimmering from hue to hue. A pack of howler monkeys was
cavorting up and down the steps on my left, like circus Harlequins
in electric red-and-blue suits, doing pratfalls and huffing as they
flew through the air and tumbled one over another.
        Sarah was floating silently beside me, but where was Steve?
Had he come? Were we escaping?

No. I sensed his face drifting across my sight like a cartoon cloud before dissolving into nothingness. He wasn't here. I was having the eeriest dream I'd ever had.

When I reached the stone-paved platform at the pinnacle, I
felt Alex Goddard clasp my arm and turn me around to face the
plaza below.

"They are waiting," he said, pointing toward the hazy square.
        I looked down, and at first I couldn't see anything except rain
 and smoke, but then slowly a crowd materialized. The scattering of men I'd seen earlier had become an undulating sea of upturned faces painted with stripes and swirling circles of blue and white
and red, a torch-lit garden of brilliant blossoms. They all were
looking up at us, at Sarah and me.

Next he held out a mirror whose reflecting surface was a polished silver metal.

"Behold yourself, Morgan. As befits a royal one, a special one, your nose has been built up with clay and pierced with lustrous blue feathers and a giant topaz. Your front teeth have been filed to a point and inlaid with jewels, your royal skull has been shaped back and flattened."

I gazed into the mirror and gasped. I was monstrous, a Halloween harpy.

Then he moved over to a waist-high censer stationed there on
the edge of the platform and began adding balls of sticky white

copal resin, together with bark and grasses, which he ignited by the quick friction of a fire stick spun by a bow.

Finally he turned to me and held out his hands. "Now we will make a miracle, the miracle of Baalum."

Heavy smoke from the censer was pouring out into the rainy
sky as we started a stiff pas de deux, the strains of a clay flute
drifting around us. Was it the "ceremony"? Was I dreaming it?

As the incense billowed, our Maya dreamtime dance became
ever more intense, and then a faint form began to writhe up out of
the haze between us, an undulating serpent the deep color of
jade. As Alex Goddard wrapped his arms around it, it began to
form into two dark heads, then pirouette above us. Finally, as the
two-headed specter opened its mouths and gazed down on the
platform, Sarah stepped toward it and held out her arms.
        "Sar, no!"

I screamed to her to get back, but as I did, the . . . thing

reached down and swallowed her in flames. It was the VisionSerpent come to receive her.

"Sarah . . ."

"Can you get up now?" said a voice, cutting through the haze
that enveloped my consciousness. At first I thought it was more of
the dream, but then someone was touching me and I opened my
eyes to see Marcelina standing beside the bed I was in, dressed
in white and holding a candle. For a moment I thought I was still
atop the rainy pyramid but then I felt the moistness of the sheets
and realized the storm Id been dreaming of was being blown in
through the slats of the windows. I was shivering.

"Marcelina, where's Sarah?" The nightmare had seemed so
real, and now I was hallucinating, having flashes of colors I didn't
want to see. "I just had the most horrible dream. I was on the
pyramid and there was smoke, rain and some kind of ghastly—"
        "It's the elixir. From the toad. It makes you dream dreams of
the Old Ones." She took my hand. "She's resting now. He gave
her something to calm her."

More drugs, I thought angrily.

Then I caught the "he." Alex Goddard must be back. Everything had gone wrong.

"I've got to get her and—"

"Not now," Marcelina went on, helping me up. "Come. I want to show you the true miracle of Baalum. Now is the time you
should know."