The Mayan Codex

2

The Tanyard, Stockbridge,

Massachusetts

For some months, now, Adam Sabir had been unable to complete a full night’s sleep inside his own house.

As soon as he began to drift off, the nightmares would return, and with them the claustrophobia that had tormented him since early childhood, when some schoolmates, as part of a Halloween prank, had bound and gagged and then locked him inside the trunk of his professor’s car, in imitation, or so he later learned, of a scene from a horror flick that was currently doing the rounds at the local drive-in movie houses.

The professor had discovered Sabir three hours later, his gag chewed to a pulp, moaning, hallucinating, and half out of his head with fear. Sabir had spent the rest of that semester at home and in bed, alternately chain-reading for comfort, and then throwing up as a result of the tranquillizers his psychiatrist was forced to prescribe him for whenever the street doors of his parent’s house needed to be shut and bolted.

In true prep school tradition, Sabir had found it impossible to squeal on his tormentors. But years later, as a journalist, he had taken his revenge on them in a manner reminiscent of Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo – he had built them up, in other words, each man in his turn, and had then proceeded to tear them down again in an avalanche of failed vainglory.

But the fear of enclosed spaces still lurked in his psyche like a recurring nightmare – only a thousand times exacerbated by what he had experienced earlier that summer, in France, in the cellar of an abandoned house in the French Camargue.

Over the past few months, Sabir’s cycle of disrupted sleep had always followed the exact same pattern. First would come the hyper-realist dreams, in which he was back in the cesspit again, deep in the cellar below the Gypsy safe-house in the French Camargue. In these dreams he was up to his neck in raw sewage, his head bent backwards to protect his mouth, his forehead tight up against the lid of the cesspit, which Achor Bale was sliding shut across his face.

Then came the dreams of dreams, in which Sabir revisited the hallucinations he had experienced whilst sealed inside the cesspit. Hallucinations in which his arms and legs were torn off, his torso shredded, his intestines, lights, bowels, and bladder dragged out of his body like offal from a butchered horse. Later in the dream a snake would come towards him – a thick uncoiling python of a snake, with the scales of a fish, and staring eyes, and a hinged skull like that of an anaconda. The snake would swallow Sabir’s head, forcing it down the entire length of its body with convulsive movements of its myosin-fuelled muscles, like a reverse birth.

Later, Sabir would become the snake, its head his head, its eyes his eyes. It was at this exact point in the dream that he always awoke, his body drenched in sweat, his eyes bulging from his face like those of a startled cat. He would throw on his dressing-gown and hurry out into the garden, where he would stand, gulping in fresh air, and cursing Achor Bale and the perniciousness of posthumous effect.

The rest of the night would be spent in his father’s old Hatteras hammock, in the garden house, with the veranda doors thrown open to the elements, a single blanket draped over his quasi-foetal shape. He had tried switching to a sleeping bag, but the bag’s innate constriction had seen him thrashing around like an emergent chrysalis, desperate to disentangle its body from the pupal shell before serving as some passing bird’s hors d’oeuvre.

On this particular evening the dream had come to him with more than its usual vigour and destructive force. Sabir was perilously close to hyperventilating by the time he made his way across the lawn and into the garden house.

Rationally, he knew that it made no earthly sense for him to persist in trying to sleep in the main building. What was the point, when he would simply come rushing out again, three hours later, gasping for air? But some obstinate part of himself refused to give up on the attempt to live an ordinary life.

He privately feared that once he abandoned all pretence at living inside – once he gave up fighting, in other words – his claustrophobia would enter the obsessive-compulsive stage, dooming him to a downward spiral of psychoanalysis and soporifics.

For that was the way his mother had gone. A steady, inexorable descent towards drug dependence and enforced hospitalization. It had destroyed his father’s life, and it had come close to destroying his own.

Recently, Sabir had begun wondering if he wasn’t hellbent on repeating the family pattern?