Making Gods

  MAKING GODS

  I stared at the photo and the two black, hollow eyes seemed to burrow into the space beyond. Susan moved suddenly and I jumped, shifting my eyes from the image and back to her. The archaeology department's current expedition near Cobá had uncovered some brand new Mayan artefacts from a sinkhole, including some exquisite carvings. Mike, our intrepid Aussie explorer, had immediately emailed photos to linguistics, and Susan was in her element.

  "See this section here is identical to the passage...", she rummaged around her desk as files dropped to the floor and scurried under bookshelves, "...here! The Copan carving found sixteen years ago.”

  She showed me the two images side-by-side as she brushed her coppery hair behind her ear. The older find had weathered and the pictograms were softer, like ink spreading across a wet page. The new carving had been buried for centuries and was superbly preserved.

  "This first one is the famous Votan or 'Old Black God' invocation found by Dressler and Harman in late 1990. The stone was incomplete, but what was there was translated. The missing piece was never found."

  She stared at the old picture, dejected. She was always so open with her feelings. I could always tell she was never happy with him.

  Her face suddenly brightened. "But now this new carving contains almost the full invocation and fills in the missing gaps. We will finally have a complete Mayan invocation! Can you imagine it?" She smiled at me and all my worries melted away. She slid round behind her desk with a willowy elegance and started work almost immediately. When she was passionate about something, there was nothing else in the world to care about.

  I was so glad to see her like this again. For the last year or so she just hadn't been her lively self. She was purely functional. A free spirit caged. No-one had said anything of course, but we were all glad when she left him. I was glad when she left him.

  "I've... ah... got to go now Sue."

  "OK. '...completeness to have knowledge of...', '...to be aware of the end', '...judgement...'".

  I hesitated to interrupt, but it was too good an opportunity. I had been waiting some time to ask after all.

  "Ah... look. There's a nice new, er, Greek place opened up on Portland Street. I don't know if... I mean obviously you're busy now, but maybe the weekend sometime, if you'd like... um, eat..."

  "I'd love to."

  Her reply caught me slightly off guard, as I had been staring anywhere but her face to make it easier to speak. When I looked at her she was posed with one hand in the air holding some papers and just smiling at me.

  "OK, well I'll, er, call you later to sort a time… you know, around your work here, and..."

  "OK. Take care David."

  Some days later I found her at her desk, books surrounding her like worshippers at an altar. She had been struggling with part of the translation. It could have several meanings depending on the interpretation and she had been busy comparing it with other known work. Sumerian was my personal speciality, but I volunteered to lend a hand to help out, and I relished the chance to talk with her.

  "See... this passage refers to the priest, the one who calls to the God to imbue them with its power. But it says something to the effect of, 'the one who cannot see shall guide/lead/whatever', which doesn't make sense. The priests are the ones who can see 'above all'. That's their purpose."

  I was definitely intrigued.

  "Well what else does the text say about sight or looking?"

  "Part of the originally translated passage forms a warning for those casting the invocation. It says, 'To the unseeing, Votan grants his power. To the seeing, Votan takes their life.'"

  I picked up the emailed photo and looked at the image of the God. It was a giant, square figure with circles for eyes, none of the elaborate decorative effects usually found on Mayan carvings, apart from the tiniest of human figures standing in the palm of its hand.

  "Well, in the Christian Bible, God says 'You cannot see My face, for no man can see Me and live!'. Basically, us little fleshy animals can't survive looking in the eyes of a God, it's too much for us to take in. Maybe a similar belief..."

  "Oh my God." Sue sat down. "No pun intended by the way."

  "None taken.", I smiled.

  She took her glasses off and started to fold them slowly. This was her “deduction” habit. I loved watching her do this.

  "There have been skulls found in some sites – full ritual burials of priests – with scrape marks inside the orbits. They'd had their eyes gouged out."

  We looked at each other with grim mutual comprehension.

  "Well, on that rather gruesome note, um... Greek? Saturday?"

  Sue had been deep in thought, but now looked up, her eyes bright. "Yes, is about 11am OK? The time difference you see – Mike is sending me some more images so I'll be up late...", she tilted her head to the other side "...early." She giggled.

  "Sure."

  I left her poring over old texts as I wondered what I had to wear that didn't make me look like a slightly overweight linguist in my mid-forties.

  Just before nine am on Saturday I got a phone call from her, asking me to come over to her apartment. She was very excited, and all she would say was, "I've finished it!"

  She didn't live far from the Greek place, so we wouldn't have far to walk later. I was going to pay anyway of course, but if she had finished translating the full passage then dessert was going to be my treat too. Her place was pretty much as I had imagined. The communal stairs had little cactus plants on each landing and her apartment smelt a joyful mix of flowers and marshmallows. She was almost bouncing up and down with glee as she explained her translation methods, why she'd used certain words and phrases, how the remaining text had helped her decipher three previously untranslated glyphs, and told me how it all confirmed her initial theory of the passage.

  She sat back on the edge of her desk and started to read the invocation out loud. How someone could do this to me I don't know. I was Mr Boring and always had been. I knew this. My ex-wife told me many times. But there I was, listening to Sue and I had never felt so vibrant. Her vitality made me feel alive by proxy and had made me stop handing in my resignation for months. And as she sat there, the morning sunlight making her hair glow orange around her face I nearly cried with happiness as I realised I was in love.

  She finished reading and looked at me, swinging her legs and grinning like a happy child.

  "Susan, I..."

  Then her face stopped glowing. The beams of light crossing the walls from the blinds dissolved and the warmth left the room. A note played. A note so deep my guts liquefied. It reverberated through the walls and the floor. The dust floating in the air vibrated with it and I felt sick like I was falling. I grabbed her by the arm and pulled her towards me as the huge black hand scooped through the front of the apartment buildings, dragging windows, curtains and bookcases with it.

  Another note. My chest compressed and my heart felt like it was going to be squeezed dry. I managed to force out the word, "Run!", and we fled. Down past the cacti and into the front lobby. Through the frosted glass of the front door all we could see was flame and debris falling to the floor. "The alley!", Sue screamed and pulled me out the back.

  Hurtling out of the alley we collided with somebody running and they fell hard onto the pavement. While I tried to stammer an apology they rolled over, looked past our heads into the sky, gasped and exploded into flames. Within a second they were nothing more than a blackened skeleton and flecks of charcoal rising into the air. Sue screamed. Then we both saw the world slowly ending in front of us. A dark red sky hung over the city, casting nightmarish shadows across our view. People were running, falling, crying, looking up at the impossible being towering over the apartments behind us, then bursting into fire. Cars collided as the people inside erupted, sparks billowing out slit-opened windows.

  Only the crashing sound of Sue's apartment block collapsing broke us out of our reverie. Another note. Paving slabs shifted out of alignment
and windows fell from their frames. I dragged her between the crashed cars, the air starting to taste like ash. I feebly shouted, "Don't look at it's eyes!", while feeling my own eyes being sucked back into their sockets, some magnetic force almost unbearably compelling me to look.

  We ran past a fast food place as the families sitting at the window vaporised in swift succession, leaving inky smears on the glass. Sue was crying now, saying it was all her fault, I told her it wasn't. How could she have known? How could anyone have known?

  An explosion. I chanced a glance back at ground level and saw a waterfall of dust and brick as a giant black square foot punched through two storeys of a building. Screams and fire erupted wherever this thing touched. The city behind us was aflame.

  I pulled her towards the park. The underground was just the other side. If we could get down there we would be safe. We might be safe. Hell, I didn't have a clue.

  Sue started to resist me pulling her, but I said, "We can make it." As we passed the pond, Sue stopped.

  "I can't. I can't...", she sobbed.

  I grabbed her by the shoulders. "Look, we get into the underground. It might not be able to get us there."

  "But it's after us isn't it? It's after me. It won't stop until it gets me... I'm its guide. I called it."

  "But if we hide from it, stop it getting to you then it might go... away, somewhere... might give up, I don't know, we've got to try!"

  "I know how to stop it."

  Sue had stopped crying now and I could feel the heat increasing on one side of my face. Crash – another footstep. Boom – another lung-crushing note.

  "No. Sue. Don't. You can't... I..."

  Boom. The note pushed my shoulders down into my chest as I felt my eyes bulge. The trees erupted into flames and charred birds fluttered out of the sky like impossibly dark leaves.

  Sue looked at me forlornly.

  "It's calling me. Can't you hear it? It needs me to guide it, and if I'm not here..."

  Crash. The footstep cracked the pathway under our feet as the pond started to boil.

  "... then neither is it."

  "Please, Sue, I..."

  Then she smiled again and all my worries melted away. She leant over and kissed me. A first kiss. A last kiss.

  "It's OK."

  It was crouching down, its giant hand resting close by us, palm upwards. All I could taste was ash.

  I took her hand, and as she turned to face it, I looked away. There was the faintest sound, like a sudden intake of breath, then dark flakes of her flowed around me. I wasn't sure what to do, so I held onto her hand until the sky turned blue again.