Don't look in the water

semi-fictional account of a trip to an ancient dam.

The lights were strung along the old weathered phone poles making  them swing in the cool night breeze almost touching the dirt covered ground below, in the streets partygoers and funhavers alike swung and danced, to the sound of banda, they pulsed rhythmically driven by the potent mixture of liquor and marjuana in their system and the fiery spanish blood that filled their veins. It could be any night in little mexico, Lucas had seen them do this for almost any occasion, filling the streets with the sound of reverie and the smell of burning meat and the chatter of young children surprised at watching their parents let loose, he had been to many fiestas at this point, but it wasn’t any night. Lucas was engaged, to a true daughter of mexico, he himself not being of spanish or mexican origin, and with light eyes and light reddish blond hair wasn’t expected to partake in the partying to the same extent as everyone else,but it wasn’t that he was american, or that he had a good job, nor was it the fact that they could now call him a gringo directly to his face, and he in turn could look them dead in the eye and say “pinche Mexicanos'' all done in good fun and with a wistful heart of course. He sat to the right of his soon to be bride, jaira, she was radiant in the dim orange light from overhead. He noticed that as she drank more and spoke with her friends her rate of speaking became faster and faster until his spanish became too broken to continue the conversation with them. So in silence he sat, until a man with snakeskin boots and a comically wide brimmed sombrero walked up to their little white plastic table, swaying back and forth with a drink in his hand, he was saying something but all Lucas heard was “pruebalo, pruebalo Guero'' as a small cup of greenish liquor was thrust into his chest, “vamanos guero, pruebalo” the man was probably some distant cousin or well wishing relative so he consumed the noxious green liquor without a second thought. The man with the snake skin boots proceeded to grab the cup out of his hand, and pulled a bottle from his back pocket that said “mezcal”, he popped the top off and refilled the little cup, he took a large swig of it and stumbled away into the party somewhere. 

“Who was that?” Lucas asked, breaking jaira from her deep conversation. 

“Who was who?” She asked.

“Him! Who was he? The guy with the cup!” Lucas said, irritability creeping into his voice from all of the loud music and chit chat, and alcohol, and marijuana. He pointed in the direction the drunken Caballero had come from, but there was no one there. “Don’t be sharing drinks with ghosts” Jaira said, sharing a laugh with the table, but Lucas stayed silent, half feeling like he had just shared a drink with a ghost for real, and half not caring as the liquor reached his brain.  He chalked it up to the mystique of being drunk and high in another country for the first time in his life. And suddenly a wave of panic overtook him, he felt like he needed to be home, away from the strange and around the familiar. It sunk into his psyche very quickly, a feeling of being out of place, like a sheep just realizing it was surrounded by wolves, all of the laughs became sharp and jagged and were pointed at him, echoing through his mind and reverberating through his limbs, making him feel a certain type of helplessness that he hadn’t felt since he was a young boy. It scared him, and he stood up quickly, knocking his chair to the ground. “Are you okay?” Jaira asked him. “I think I just need to lie down,” Lucas mumbled. “Come on,” Jaira said. She put herself under his shoulder to bolster him as she helped him walk back into the house, The fiesta was being held in a small town in mexico called La frontera, all of the houses were large and had gated in front yards, and the streets were paved with packed red dirt, The big house as they called it which was his soon to be mother in Laws faced one of the main roads so that any time she had a large party the whole town of three hundred and eighty five would show up, usually including the cops. “Lets just rest for awhile” Jaira said gently in his ear, the world around turned dark and forbidden, the dim lights made the faces around him contort and change, and everything turned sideways, in his stupor he looked around the tree tops and felt the glare of some large waiting animal, something that was ancient and hungry, looking to fill itself with new blood, gorging itself in a way it hadn’t in a millenia, he felt it watching all around him, and the silence of a hum wailing in his ear like the screech of a siren, at this point he was more being held up by his fiance then by himself. He lurched forward onto his hands and knees and puked in the dirt before she could stop him “get it out” He overheard her saying through the pulsing he could feel in his head and the pounding in his ears. Things were slowly untwisting and becoming normal again, the people around him no longer looked so much like jagged shadows, or jaded parishioners of hell, and instead looked like the half drunk young people they were, He got back to his feet and three or four minutes later lurched back to the table to say goodnight. 

The night went on like this for several more hours, Lucas rallied back into the party several times, and tried to shake what he had seen in the tree’s only mentioning it in passing conversation. 

He was being chased by a shadow, something ancient and hungry, moving faster and faster as it drew down on him, he sprinted through the foliage bare feet aching as he pushed through the fear exhaustion and pain, he gripped his onyx spear and looked over his shoulder, the creature chasing him seemed to languidly pour itself from one black shadow to another, only flashes of ivory white and a foreboding feeling of an ancient and inhumane rage bore down on him. He could feel it closing in, the heat of the jungle closing in around him as he felt the inevitability of his own death gripping at his throat like a hangmans noose, he turned to face his fate, planting his spear in the mud and crouching down behind it, to try and catch the predator unaware, crouched and sweating he reached for his knife hanging from his belt. He heard a growl of inhuman hunger and hatred over head, and then all he saw was darkness.  

He awoke covered in sweat to the sound of marching outside of his window at 4:45 in the morning, in a half drunken haze he looked outside and saw nothing, he climbed back into bed and forgot about it until breakfast. They had spent the night in their own room in the first floor of the house, he woke up to the smell of eggs, and bacon, and sausage, and beans, and tortillas, as well as carafes overflowing with strong black coffee and freshly squeezed orange juice being passed around the table, the table was a large handmade wooden affair that looked centuries old which easily seated all of the extended family. People laughed and sipped coffee and nursed hangovers, passing around mugs filled to the brim with that thick black life giving juice. He sipped at his cup of coffee, and was amused that the mug was made of real earthenware that had been hand fired and glazed at some point in the distant past. He sat quietly, but still strangely uncomfortable until one bite into his eggs he remembered the marching he had heard last night. 

“I heard marching outside of my window last night, it woke me up at two or three in the morning…” Lucas said casually.

“No mames” Carlos, his soon to be father in law said, rolling his eyes. 

“Ay dios mio” Irma, his soon to be mother in law, said at almost the same time as she crossed herself. 

“What? Did I say something wrong?” Lucas said, confused.

“Remember when I said don’t drink with ghosts” Jaira whispered in his ear.

Everything got quiet and nobody at the table laughed or said anything for a moment, they just silently ate their breakfast.

“Fronteras used to be the border, with america, lots of french, and american soldiers, and indians and mexicans have died here, lots of them were just buried on the hill, never getting to rest” Carlos said matter of fact, with an almost sad tone to his voice. “Yeah a lot of strange things in these hills, this is where Geronimo died” Carlos said. Irma crossed herself again, not wanting to carry any residual effects with her from bringing up the dead. “Have you ever found anything? Like a relic of war or anything from that time period” Lucas asked, now too curious to let the whole thing go. 

“Yeah I found a bent handmade .22 rifle, some bullets, a bullet belt…” 

He paused to make sure the conversation wasn’t too offensive to sensitive ears in the room and continued. 

“Yeah I found an apache ax, some arrowheads,  a belt buckle…” he continued on, uninterrupted for several minutes. “Most of it en la presa…” Carlos finished. 

“Where?” Lucas asked. Jaira got a blank look on her face, as though she wanted to intervene, but was also glad that her soon to be husband and parents were interacting and didn’t want to interrupt. 

“La presa de Cuquiarachi, It's a little town with a man made dam, it’s older than fronteras” 

Some of their conversation broke off into just general mumbling and Lucas decided he and Jaira were going to visit “la presa”. After breakfast Jaira and Lucas sat on their bed packing their things, they were going to visit Bahia Del Kino, and then take a flight from San Carlos to the yucatan. “In Mexico people don’t usually bring up the dead at breakfast,” Jaira said. “It's not considered polite,” she finished. They had only been together six months, and before he had met Jaira, Lucas was too afraid to venture outside of America, believing the indoctrination that he was fed from a young age that anywhere outside of America was a completely unlivable s**t hole where your life expectancy would be half to a third of what it was in the 1st world freest nation on earth . But after six months and three visits into his Fiance’s childhood hometown of Aqua Prieta, and a few other places, after he had gone to the mexican doctor, learned a little bit of their culture and a little bit of their language and felt that he was ready to take in more of this beautiful albeit strange to him country, they decided to see some places where she had wanted to see. 

And visit the sprawling yucatan peninsula and marvel at the eclectic artifacts and structures of a lost civilization. “Before we go I want to see La presa” Lucas said, casually. A weary look came over Jaira’s face. “That was where I saw a body floating when I was a little girl, it's not a nice place” Jaira responded. “I still want to see it,” Lucas replied, “My uncles going out there this afternoon to check on his cattle, they were grazing there and they wandered off and now he can’t find them, maybe you can help?” she said. “Yeah, that's fine” Lucas replied with a twinge of doubt in his voice, he really didn’t know how much help he would be as he had spent his entire life in one large city or another, and knew little to nothing about cattle. But she packed a day bag and they picked up her Tio humberto, he was an aged man with a sun weathered face, and hands that looked like ancient stitched leather gloves, he had a thick white mustache, and wore all denim, he had a pair of well worn cowboy boots that were still not as cracked as his hands and face. He looked at Lucas with trepidation and doubt, he was a hard man to impress and money meant nothing to him. They drove down the road and Humberto regaled them with tales of when he was young, he had laid all of the original telephone line up and down sonora with little more than rolls of wiring and good mule, he had worked for days unrolling and setting a hundred feet of line at a time, Lucas also came to find out that he was much older then he looked, at ninety years old he looked as though he could keep working for thirty more years, but when you looked in his watery blue eyes you could see the exhaustion starting to creep in.  

The view was beautiful, but terrifying the ground around was cracked and cragged with deep cuts in the salt bleached earth where ocean water had some time in the distant past left its ancient remnants of salt, surrounded by a weirwood full of leafless trees, the water was a dark green that didn’t look normal for a small man made dam, it was a color that looked as though it came from another place, somewhere deep in the ocean. It smelled thick and ancient with the pungent odor of dead fish and vegetation that filled the air and made your head swim if you weren’t accustomed to it, the infrequent aroma of livestock and their many myriad of smells occasionally stung your nose as though it lingered unmoving in the air, as though the livestock that had grazed through that area were still somewhere lingering on that once green pasture where they chewed cud and milkweeds decades before. The acrid smell of their feces and offal hanging heavy in the air. Lucas stuck his head out of the window and took all of this in as they drove up the steep and jagged dirt road that led to the presa, it was strange the way the perspective of the dam worked. From far away in the town of Cuquiarachi you could see the water as though it were close up, but to reach it you had to drive through a winding twisting dirt road that seemed as though it would collapse on the side of the hill and take you and tons of dirt with it, many times it ended in a dead turn, where if you weren’t paying attention you would easily drive off of the side of the little mountain because there was a sharp turn with no sign or notification of any sort, and the turns were often camouflaged with stones and foliage that made it look as though it was a dead end. Lucas' stomach rolled from all of the liquor the night before sending waves of nausea through him threatening to heave all of the contents of his stomach out.  Lowering the window did nothing to avail him of his nausea, it was past midday and the air was hot and heavy, and rife with the many assorted smells that permeated the air. The heat brought it to a pungent and almost maddening crescendo, it was a cornucopia of bad smells that the olfactory senses of someone who was born and raised in first world cities just wasn’t prepared for. Lucas grimaced and rolled the window up, keeping quiet as he felt somewhat out of place sitting next to his fiance's ninety year old uncle who didn’t speak a word of english, or at least didn’t want to speak what english he did know, making the ride towards the presa even longer and stranger (I didn’t… I mean Lucas didn’t feel strange because her uncle didn’t speak english but because he sat there in relative silence staring at Him the whole time) As they reached the top the ground leveled out and turned into the cragged and cracked earth that looked almost like magma from an ancient volcano that had hardened and then been whitewashed. When they drove down to the most level ground near the bank of the ancient dam, Lucas saw a family in the distance in the back of  a red station wagon fishing, and it set his mind at ease for the moment, to see other people. The ground was of a type and consistency that Lucas had never seen or felt in his life, it appeared as though it was solid and hard when looking at it and driving on it but as soon as he stepped out of the truck his foot was sucked into the earth as though he had stepped into snow. It was mud, thick and ancient and knotted in strange and uncouth thick veins lashed to the earth as though they were thrown up from the deep of the dam by some great behemoth and fell across the earth in intersecting lines. “Oh god” he said out loud as he pulled his foot from the mud, almost losing his shoe, breaking the promise he had made to himself before they came on this trip to keep his complaints to himself until the end, until they were back in america. Then he could complain all he wanted. Her uncle looked over at him and squinted with a  judgemental eye, showing his distaste at this foreigner, but still saying nothing. Lucas was working on pulling his foot from the mound of mud when Jaira’s uncle walked by, stepping over the mounds and into the shallow spots of mud, underneath there was solid ground, it was just that Lucas had stepped without looking, a very dangerous idea. He pulled his leg out and followed her uncles suit,  he had lived in this area for his entire life, and it shaped and molded him, he was a one of the last few true cowboys; or caballeros, who raised horses and cows and built his house out of concrete and was raising a stepson named jesus who had come to him through circumstance, but he was compelled by a code of honor to raise the boy, even though his mother and humberto were not married, he still felt obligated to take care of the boy as there was no one else to do it. He was an old school type of man. Without saying anything Lucas walked, stepping around the unnatural mounds of mud. The presa was a large pool of water, no longer large enough to be considered a lake at this point as it was drying out for some months and there had been no rain or overflow from the rivers in that time, they weren’t simply there to have a look around and enjoy the sights. They were also there to find Humberto’s missing cattle; they had simply disappeared when they were grazing. He wasn’t just there to show them the Presa; he was there to set up field cameras and needed Lucas to show him how. At this point Lucas had become used to being the family electronics guy, he had set up his fiance's parents' internet and after that it was all over. Everyone knew that he knew how to set up electronics. The presa was cut into natural rock, essentially it was a giant bowl that had been carved into the sheer side of the mountain thousands of years ago to stop the rain from forming into a mudslide and wiping out the village below, on the left side of the presa was a large dirt mound that was covered in giant rocks and white stones that weren’t natural to the area, no trees were growing within a thousand yards or so of the mound and no animals wandered on the ground there, Lucas stepped around the base of the mound where it met the water, walking along a path to the top that was set with stones thousands of years ago, it smelled fetid, there was something in the air. There was a rock on the other side of the dam that stuck out of the water like some high altar, and blocked out the midday sun. The stone was black as night, and cast a foreboding shadow over the dam. It stood some forty or fifty feet in the air, he thought about swimming over to get a closer look for some reason, but thought better of it and stepped away from the waters edge, the water stank but shimmered with a deep green that was unnatural, Lucas took off his shoes and dipped his foot into the water. A sound, like an air horn, high pitched and urgent rang In his ears like there was an ambulance in his head, the sun started to wail and he felt the world turn upside down. His vision blurred as he stood frozen with his foot half in the lake and heard a whisper in the breeze and stood frozen in fear. His brain switched back on and he kept walking along the base of the mound, there were dead and dying fish along the base washed up intermittently among the stones, wriggling and writhing and gasping for air. Lucas once again stood frozen in fear looking at the grim spectacle. His fiance walked a different path to the top, a more direct path that led straight up the side of the mound, it was a set of man made stairs that were made of the same white stone that lined the base, Lucas walked along the base as it was the easier path to the top. His mother in law walked ahead of him by about fifty paces, A man appeared out of nowhere, trudging through the muck carrying two fish he had caught slung over his shoulder, his pants were rolled up to his knees and appeared dour and his looked black and cold, “buenas tardes” Lucas said, as the man passed by, in return he gave a quick glance that said stay away and nothing else, he mumbled something under his breath that was incomprehensible “Ai no mames” it might have been, as he hastened his step away from this white stranger, he walked quickly to the bank on the other side of the mound. Lucas put it out of his mind, but noted the unusual unease in the man's stride and reaction, most people simply replied “buenas' ' when greeted. Lucas shrugged it off and kept walking up the stones, the ascent was slow but it was easier then the direct path up the forty five degree angle stairs that looked like a hazard.  By the time he reached the top of the mound he was out of breath, hunched over trying not to puke, he was extremely out of shape from years of retail and middle management life in retail america, he had fallen out of shape so badly that a ten minute walk seemed almost like a torture to him, he stood doubled over, hands on knees trying to catch his breath as it came into his vision, it was a large white stone about the size of a small house, it was flattened in the middle, and the edges had been smoothed down as though it was a large bed for some ancient race of giants, along the base of the stone were strange carvings, one of which caught his eye, it was a circle with an arrow pointingupwards, this and several other similar symbols were carved along the base of the rock. As he caught his breath he walked over to the stone, His fiance and her uncle were talking and he caught the end of some long winded story in spanish. “What did he say?” Lucas asked her, “Hold on” Jaira replied, her uncle spoke for several more minutes and then stopped and pulled out the trail camera he wanted Lucas to set up. “Hold on, I want to know what he said. '' Lucas asked, “he said this stone is ancient, older even then the mayan empire it was here before anyone could write or read, and that it was used for many things, from worship to human sacrifice, and that later on it was also used as the bedrock for our ancestor, my great great great grandfather, when he built his home on this mound, but he didn’t stay long as the rain and earthquakes kept wiping his home out every time” Jaira said.  “And that one,” Jaira said pointing to the jagged black stone sticking out of the water. “Was used by the yaqui Indians for drowning sacrifices in the water, thousands of years ago” she finished.  Lucas turned around to look at the stone, some kind of sound on the wind struck him in the ear, like a dissonant chord from a violin, it sounded like nothing he had ever heard, he fell into a trance, and once again found himself doubled over breathing heavily, “are you okay sweetie?” Jaira asked, Lucas lurched forward dizzy and searching for purchase, he grabbed the stone to steady himself and felt an electric jolt, a bolt of pure energy struck him through his body and he stood upright and stiff like he was possessed, the wind picked up and he found himself looking out at the dead wood that surrounded the area, and the potent sun beating down on them seemed to make everything shimmer in a curious way,  and even through his pulse pounded in his ears he was listening to his fiance’s uncle telling her the story of the mound they were on and the veined and wretched earth below, the whole dam was ancient, but the mound they were on was pre mayan, pre inca, the civilization that built it precariously on the mountain and dragged the white stones from some distant quarry were from a time unknown, and archaeologists had never taken any time to study it, it was a place still out of time and untouched by many human hands for and minds who would seek to unlock its secrets, dizzy and feeling confused lucas found himself stumbling down the side of the mound to the bank of the fetid water, he took off his shoes and put his feet in, and again he heard a sound that cracked the quiet of the hot afternoon sky, like thunder it broke his internal silence, and he felt drawn into the water deeper, he hiked up his pants and went in to the water up to his knees, that was when he saw his fiance running down the side of the mound screaming, he couldn’t quite make out what she was saying, but the water no longer smelled wretched, it was cool and it lapped at his tired muscles, calming him, he looked into the deep emerald blue green water filling the dam, it was deep, he couldn’t tell how deep, but you couldn’t see to the bottom, Lucas took off his shirt, he felt compelled, pulled by the water somehow, and as he was about to dive into the water, something changed, he smelled the rot of dead flesh ancient and new, and he felt something brush against his leg, caressing him ever so gently, then he heard them on the wind, “nosotros morimos aqui” a voice said in a whisper that sounded like ancient broken and drowned vocal chords. He saw the corpse of an ancient, white creature, no longer fully human, covered in blotchy rotted skin and with long white hair dressed in some kind of leather jerkin that covered his body like an apron, most of his body had rotted away, but somehow he was still there floating in the dam, calling to others to come join him in the deep water, bubbles started floating up to the surface from the middle of the dam as something ancient started to rise and awaken. The enchantment broke as Jaira came barreling down the mound yelling at him, and that's when he heard her “Nunca miras en el agua!” she was yelling, reverting back to the language she was most comfortable with in her panic. Lucas looked down and realized that he was under some sort of ancient spell, he was disrobing by the bank of the dam, he didn’t realize what he was doing until she yelled and screamed, breaking the trance he was in. He pulled his shirt over the top of his head, and put his soaking wet shoes back on,“F**k the dead!” he yelled as he flung his wet socks into the water in an act of defiance. “Lets get the f**k out of of here!” Lucas yelled as he trudged through the now drying mud that was quickly being swarmed by large black ants that were digging through the mud looking for the bits and pieces of dead fish to eat, Lucas looked back at the dam as he jumped in the truck and felt a shiver of revulsion and disgust flow through him, how many people had died here like that? How many more would be drawn into the dam by this ancient evil, Lucas wanted to go to the nearest hardware store and pick up as much ammonia nitrate as possible and make a bomb and blow the s**t out of the mound and the dam below it, they were both cursed, in separate ways, but maybe they were cursed because of eachother, or in spite of, maybe it was that great white stone, worn and ancient, he didn’t know, but he could no longer see this place as innocent or mesmerizing as he once did “Get in the f*****g car” he screamed at jaira not able to stop himself from his panic, his heart racing, and all he knew was that he had to get out of there. He sat in the driver's seat of the truck waiting for everyone to climb in, knuckles white from gripping the wheel out of some existential dread that was filling his soul like darkness enveloping the light, the sun was starting to set and a noise from the lake like a stripped vhs tape being rewound stung his ears, he looked at the people who were standing on the banks fishing and camping earlier in the day, and they in turn looked back at him, there faces were obscured as though they were standing behind a frosted pane of glass, and their movements were few, and rote, they weren’t there he realized… it wasn’t people, they were a facsimile of a human meant to put whoever was stupid enough to come within walking distance of the dam at ease, to lure them into a watery grave. A new type of fear sank into his stomach, sweat blurred his vision, and as he wiped his forehead with the back of his hand he saw that the red station wagon and the “people'' standing next to it were gone, it had felt like he had always been at the dam, and like he was never going to leave. Everyone climbed into the truck but it seemed to be in slow motion to him “Are we ready!? Cause we need to get the f**k out of here!” his mother in law had never heard him scream and yell and curse like that, and she turned away and looked out the window, much like the strangeness of the dam, and the strange things in her own house, she crossed herself and ignored it. Jaira’s uncle climbed into the back of the cab, chuckling to himself. “What’s so goddamn funny!?!” Lucas couldn’t hold it in anymore, he yelled for the simple fact that he could do nothing else, and the pounding in his heart and the adrenaline made him feel as though everyone else was moving at a snail's pace. “Calm down my love” Jaira said, placing her hand on his shoulder, her uncle continued laughing. “No, f**k that, whats so goddamn funny?” Lucas yelled at her uncle. And finally through his laughter he managed to get out “Miraste en el agua no?” and kept on laughing in the backseat.