Mayan December Read Online Free PDF

television to background noise. It was fully dark, and the lights of the resort spread bright below them. A couple walked by one story below, hand in hand, and in the other direction, a mother chased three unruly boys ahead of her.
    Oriana spoke first. “She could be telling the truth.”
    “How?” Alice choked out.
    “Does she lie to you?”
    “No.” That wasn’t quite right. “When she tries, the lie might as well be written on her face. She didn’t look like she was lying tonight.”
    Oriana let the quiet hang in the hot air for a few long moments, and then spoke just above a whisper. “I have this friend, Ian. He’s lived here a long time, maybe twenty years. Says he’s getting ready for the world to change.”
    “Twenty years is more than most.” So many people had come down here hoping that being in Mayan country at the end of the baktun—the great divide in the calendar that would end in eight days—would change the world into a kind of paradise. Or destroy it. “What does Ian do?”
    Oriana shrugged. “Sometimes he helps with digs, sometimes he teaches scuba, sometimes he tends bar. He doesn’t seem to need much.” Oriana settled back in her chair, her eyes on Alice’s face. “Ian says he’s been to an older time. He’s seen Chichén Itzá and Tulum bright with color and full of people from the past.” Oriana hesitated. “But he gets there a different way.” She paused again, sipped her wine, and swallowed hard. “He uses the same drugs he says the old Mayans used. Toad venom and psilocybin.”
    At Alice’s indrawn breath she waved a hand. “Not regularly. A few times a year. In ceremony. He studies with a group of Mayan shamans. Been doing it for years.”
    “But Nixie couldn’t have taken any of that.”
    “Of course not,” Oriana said.
    “I don’t understand it.”
    Oriana sipped her wine, looking pensive. “But don’t you think there are things we don’t understand?”
    Alice had spent that last decade of her life trying to understand the Mayans through the star-stories they left, and she still felt far away from really “getting” their culture. Of course she knew about the drugs. A lot of ancient cultures mixed ceremonial drugs with the sacred, it came up all the time. She’d even tried ayahuasca once, on a trip to Ecuador when she was still in college. After it made her violently sick, it gave her visions. Rivers and plants talking to her, plants singing inside her blood, reviewing her life with her, demanding she answer questions she couldn’t even ask. She’d been scared, and it had seemed like a whole lifetime before she could think clearly.
    She had never done it again.
    Finally, she said, “There’s a lot I don’t understand. Including this trip of Nixie’s.”
    “It might help you to talk to Ian,” Oriana said. “I’m not sure I can find him, but if I can, is it okay for me to bring him over?”
    “All right.” She’d be very busy soon, but she needed to find out what had happened to her daughter. It wasn’t as if she could just go ask the local police or anything. Not here. “Can you find him tomorrow?”
    “I’ll try.”
    “Thanks.” Alice took the younger woman’s hand. “And thanks for helping me look. Thanks for not thinking this is all crazy.” Even if it was.
    Oriana smiled. “I love mysteries.”

DECEMBER 15, 2012

CHAPTER 6
    Cauac stood with his wrinkled feet in the sea, looking out at the foamy whitecaps where shallow, bright blue waves broke over the reef. The night’s strange dreams still stuck to him like honey. They danced as clearly in his head as the sea in front of him. But no meaning clarified from the images.
    He needed to be alone with the sea and the creatures in it that called him family. He needed to find his Way, his spirit companion, to salve his soul and regain balance before he sent his students back to Chichén Itzá. Tomorrow, there would be no time.
    Cauac took a deep breath, filling his chest, his belly. He