THE WAY IT WENT DOWN: THAT WHICH PROVIDES (Patreon)

The Tolupan shaman smelled like vomit and hydrogen peroxide and he said he had been waiting for me, though he couldn't know I was coming, I told her not to say anything. They all liked to play these games. Divination garbage.

The drug he had, I had heard, was a bronze dust, ground from a plant which was then heated in a soup. I asked him about it, and his eyebrows raised when I did it in Eastern Jicaque. He smiled, showing me yellowed stumps of teeth stained red inside, like a dye had insinuated them. The drug made you see things, but more importantly, those under its influence seemed to be able to consciously regulate bleeding. Or so the stories said.

"You are the one," he said in Jicaue and laughed, a sound like a crumpled brown paper bag. We went inside. I presented my gifts. A hat from Miami, a metal water bottle with SKI WASHINGTON STATE on it, various small, wrapped candies. Melanie had said he enjoyed sweet things.

Inside his home, we sat and we spoke about the drug, which he called "Eleao," a word I had never heard before. Where was it from, I asked? And he said "ojat," 'the door.' Could he show me the door? Certainly, he said, but it was far. He only went twice a year, and even then, they had to a lot into the jungles with them. "Why?"

"As an offering," he smiled.

To what?

"Apaó eleao," 'that which provides eleao'.

What did he want in exchange for showing me the way? He dug through a pile of dried leaves, an old German sleeping bag, and recovered a two-tone spiral bound manual covered in greasy fingerprints. A user's manual for a Kawasaki motorcycle.  

Back at the hotel, phone calls were made. Ethnobotanists make a lot of calls like this. More than you might imagine. The drugs are all out there. The drugs have all been found. You just have to know who to ask. It pays very, very well, and the asks are all like this: a pneumatic pump, a generator, a motorbike, a laptop. Sometimes, it's cash, but in amounts that I could draw out of an ATM. When the asks were bigger than that, I had to call it in. The people at the company were almost always willing to make things happen.

Three and a half weeks later, in the interior with the shaman, his younger brother and a pack man, we stood at the cave door. Inside, it was warm and wet and low ceilinged and we marched in. It wasn't far inside.

An oblong stone door. Old. Carved heads. Mayan maybe.

We all stepped in and forward and as we approached, all but the brothers began to see something was wrong. The door looked like it opened onto more black, but it didn't. It looked like a polished mirror, but it wasn't. It was perfectly sized tiles of obsidian cut in a bizarre, looping pattern. The pack man laughed and dumped his gear and approached it, filled with wonder, cursing softly in Spanish.

I put my stuff down and put my hand under some water running from the cave ceiling and ran it down my face. When I opened my eyes again, it was already done. There was no scream.

The shaman and his brother hacked the pack man to death with machetes in less than a few seconds. I froze, wondering how I had been so stupid to come to this place with people I hardly knew, unarmed. The cave filled with the stink of shit and blood.  

But when I caught the shaman's eye, he only smiled apologetically, blood on his face as he and his brother hurried to carry the body over in front of the door. That smile said, I apologize this is taking so long.  

I was completely frozen.

A thin smoke began to spider up from the floor from the door. By the time the door was a wall of grey fog, and a thrumming had filled the room, I think I was in shock. A lot of time maybe passed. I don't know.

Then silence for a time, shaken by low, sub-audible humming.

A shadow moved behind the fog, and a moment later a hand—a hand that was three-fingered, red, and scaled—reached out from it and placed a small, glass phial on the ground to the side of the door. The phial was filled with a powder.  

As the fear built in my throat, more hands emerged and began the drag the body into the smoke.

Apaó eleao.