“Don’t turn around!” I heard him yell.
His words were only background; they did not mean anything to me. On turning around, I saw that three grotesquely deformed men had climbed up on the rock right behind me; they were crawling toward me, with their mouths open in a nightmarish grimace and their arms outstretched to grab me.
I intended to scream at the top of my lungs, but what came out was an agonizing croak, as if something were obstructing my windpipe. I automatically rolled out of their reach and onto the ground.
As I stood up, don Juan jumped to my side, at the very same moment that a horde of men, led by those don Juan had pointed out, descended on me like vultures. They were actually squeaking like bats or rats. I yelled in terror. This time I was able to let out a piercing cry.
Don Juan, as nimbly as an athlete in top form, pulled me out of their clutches onto the rock. He told me in a stern voice not to turn around to look, no matter how scared I was. He said that the allies cannot push at all, but that they certainly could scare me and make me fall to the ground. On the ground, however, the allies could hold anybody down. If I were to fall on the ground by the place where the seers were bur-ied, I would be at their mercy. They would rip me apart while their allies held me. He added that he had not told me all that before because he had hoped I would be forced to see and understand it by myself. His decision had nearly cost me my life.
The sensation that the grotesque men were just be-hind me was nearly unbearable. Don Juan forcefully ordered me to keep calm and focus my attention on four men at the head of a crowd of perhaps ten or twelve. The instant I focused my eyes on them, as if on cue, they all advanced to the edge of the flat rock. They stopped there and began hissing like serpents. They walked back and forth. Their movement seemed to be synchronized. It was so consistent and orderly that it seemed to be mechanical. It was as if they were following a repetitive pattern, aimed at mesmerizing me.
“Don’t gaze at them, dear,” Genaro said to me as if he were talking to a child.
The laughter that followed was as hysterical as my fear. I laughed so hard that the sound reverberated on the surrounding hills.
The men stopped at once and seemed to be per-plexed. I could distinguish the shapes of their heads bobbing up and down as if they were talking, deliberating among themselves. Then one of them jumped onto the rock.
“Watch out! That one is a seer!” Genaro exclaimed.
“What are we going to do?” I shouted.
“We could start singing again,” don Juan replied matter-of-factly.
My fear reached its apex then. I began to jump up and down and to roar like an animal. The man jumped down to the ground.
“Don’t pay any more attention to those clowns,” don Juan said. “Let’s talk as usual.”
He said that we had gone there for my enlightenment, and that I was failing miserably. I had to reorganize myself. The first thing to do was to realize that my assemblage point had moved and was now making obscure emanations glow. To carry the feelings from my usual state of awareness into the world I had assembled was indeed a travesty, for fear is only prevalent among the emanations of daily life.
I told him that if my assemblage point had shifted as he was saying it had, I had news for him. My fear was infinitely greater and more devastating than anything I had ever experienced in my daily life.
“You’re wrong,” he said. “Your first attention is confused and doesn’t want to give up control, that’s all. I have the feeling that you could walk right up to those creatures and face them and they wouldn’t do a thing to you.”
I insisted that I was definitely in no condition to test such a preposterous thing as that.
He laughed at me. He said that sooner or later I had to cure myself of my madness, and that to take the initiative and face up to those four seers was infinitely less preposterous than the idea that I was seeing them at all. He said that to him madness was to be confronted by men who had been buried for two thousand years and were still alive, and not to think that that was the epitome of preposterousness.
I heard everything he said with clarity, but I was not really paying attention to him. I was terrified of the men around the rock. They seemed to be preparing to jump us, to jump me really. They were fixed on me. My right arm began to shake as if I were stricken by some muscular disorder. Then I became aware that the light in the sky had changed. I had not noticed before that it was already dawn. The strange thing was that an uncontrollable urge made me stand up and run to the group of men.
I had at that moment two completely different feelings about the same event. The minor one was of sheer terror. The other, the major one, was of total indifference. I could not have cared less.
When I reached the group I realized that don Juan was right; they were not really men. Only four of them had any resemblance to men, but they were not men either; they were strange creatures with huge yellow eyes. The others were just shapes that were propelled by the four that resembled men.
I felt extraordinarily sad for those creatures with yellow eyes. I tried to touch them, but I could not find them. Some sort of wind scooped them away.
I looked for don Juan and Genaro. They were not there. It was pitch-black again. I called out their names over and over again. I thrashed around in darkness for a few minutes. Don Juan came to my side and startled me. I did not see Genaro.
“Let’s go home,” he said. “We have a long walk.”
Don Juan commented on how well I had performed at the site of the buried seers, especially during the last part of our encounter with them. He said that a shift of the assemblage point is marked by a change in light. In the daytime, light becomes very dark; at night, darkness becomes twilight. He added that I had performed two shifts by myself, aided only by animal fright. The only thing he found objectionable was my indulging in fear, especially after I had realized that warriors have nothing to fear.
“How do you know I had realized that?” I asked.
“Because you were free. When fear disappears all the ties that bind us dissolve,” he said. “An ally was gripping your foot because it was attracted by your animal terror.”
I told him how sorry I was for not being able to uphold my realizations.
“Don’t concern yourself with that.” He laughed. “You know that such realizations are a dime a dozen; they don’t amount to anything in the life of warriors, because they are canceled out as the assemblage point shifts.
“What Genaro and I wanted to do was to make you shift very deeply. This time Genaro was there simply to entice the old seers. He did it once already, and you went so far into the left side that it will take quite a while for you to remember it. Your fright tonight was just as intense as it was that first time when the seers and their allies followed you to this very room, but your sturdy first attention wouldn’t let you be aware of them.”
“Explain to me what happened at the site of the seers,” I asked.
“The allies came out to see you,” he replied. “Since they have very low energy, they always need the help of men. The four seers have collected twelve allies.
“The countryside in Mexico and also certain cities are dangerous. What happened to you can happen to any man or woman. If they bump into that tomb, they may even see the seers and their allies, if they are pliable enough to let their fear make their assemblage points shift; but one thing is for sure: they can die of fright.”
“But do you honestly believe that those Toltec seers are still alive?” I asked.
He laughed and shook his head in disbelief.
“It’s time for you to shift that assemblage point of yours just a bit,” he said. “I can’t talk to you when you are in your idiot’s stage.”
He smacked me with the palm of his hand on three spots: right on the crest of my right hipbone, on the center of my back below my shoulder blades, and on the upper part of my right pectoral muscle.