Leave Something for the Archaeologists
Abydos
2003-02-08 4:07 pm
Welcome to Necropolis:Who knew that fate would find me here, riding the rails with the walking dead - soulless shambling corpses that I pretend not to see? Life has become endless Halloween - pretend to be one of them, or they eat you alive.
I stare at the pages in front of me (or is it out the window?)- lost cities, dead cultures, human remains. Just stay in Necropolis and the dead will tell you their tale - it's all they can do, when not staring all unfocused at the subway cars, talk endlessly with their grating, metal-flie tongues.
When I first came here, to Concrete Cuicatlan, the dead were in bundles, trapped under volcanic glass, their artifacts around them - and so silent were their flexed bodies that I thought I could be happy. But then their pyramids came crashing down, and the dead rose up to speak - "I love Necropolis! I love Necropolis!" And I ran from the horror of their singed and blackened hearts nailed up to every lamp post. My heart, left unaffected, now shrivels and splinters as the time gets ever closer to the Sacrifice - my still-beating heart ripped from me by long, curved obsidian knives in dead-white-pale, quetzal-feathered hands. They'll throw my body down the hieroglyphic stair, the outstretched arms of the screeching peasant zombies each clawing for a piece of my flesh.
But that's the price Tlaloc demands. Your penance for wanting to live in the City of the Gods.
