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for a few seconds and let out a slow “Wow.”
    Tyler asks, “What does it mean—‘end of days’? Is that like …?”
    â€œâ€¦ the end of the world?” I say. “Yeah. My dad told me about all that years ago. The Mayan calendar ends on the date 13.0.0.0.0—Thirteen Baktun.”
    Tyler stares, expectant. “Um … when’s that, then? In our calendar, I mean.”
    I try to sound calm. “Well … it’s pretty soon, actually.”
    â€œWhen?”
    â€œDecember twenty-second, 2012.”
    Tyler’s mouth opens, as if he’s trying to think of something funny to say. But nothing comes out.
    â€œPeople have been trying to work out what that date—Thirteen Baktun—means for
ever
. No one knows.”
    Tyler stabs a finger at our translation. “This ‘Book of Ix’ seems to know!”
    â€œBook of Ix—that must mean the Ix Codex,” Ollie says thoughtfully.
    â€œI can’t see any mention of Ek Naab here …,” I mutter.
    â€œCan we talk about this end-of-the-world thing a bit more?” Tyler says, his voice rising.
    â€œIt’s not
literal
,” I say. “Not
literally
the end of the world. More like the end of an era. That’s what my dad told me.”
    â€œGood thing you’re so sure about that!” Tyler says. “I’ve never heard of it until now, but it seems pretty worrying to me! I mean—I’ve got plans, you know!”
    I say, “This is about a rare Mayan book—some book that maybe finally explains just what the Mayans meant by ending their calendar in 2012.”
    â€œYeah,” Tyler says, emphatically. “And what if it really is about the end of the world?”
    Could it really be?
The idea is so far from what I’ve been brought up to believe about the Maya that I can hardly take it in.
    I can’t answer Tyler’s question, so I look again at the Calakmul letter.
    The manuscript consists of two sets of two columns. The final sentence is incomplete.
    Not only are we missing part of the letter, we can’t makesense of the final sentence. The final glyph is a verb, the beginning of a sentence:
utom
—“it will occur.”
    Everything to the right of that is ripped away. Without the second half, we can’t even make sense of the first. Without it, we have no hope of picking up the trail of the codex. And without that second half, my dad wouldn’t either. So if he thought he’d found the codex—he must have hidden the second half of the Calakmul letter somewhere else. But where?
    â€œThere’s that word again,” Ollie says. “Bakab. Wasn’t that in your dream? The one you blogged?”
    â€œI dreamed
Bakabix
.”
    â€œThat’s right,” says Tyler. “
Bakab, Ix
. They’re both in this inscription.”
    The possibility that my dream might have some connection to the inscription hits me like a kick to the stomach. It’s all too weird. For a second, I imagine myself back in the leaf storm of my dream. There’s a flash of memory, a curtain of fragrant smoke behind which a stranger chokes to death.
    I suddenly need to be alone, to think. I manage to say, “I really need to get back now.”
    I drag myself back to Jackie’s just as the paper-route kids are hitting the street. The dream is still with me. It isn’t so much what I actually witnessed in the dream but the feeling of utter foreignness. Nothing about it felt familiar.
    The dream of the misty lakeside straw hut with its cold,unmoving death scene—like nothing I’ve ever seen. It feels otherworldly. Disturbing.
    That date turning up in the Calakmul letter—December 22, 2012—and the mention of the “end of days.” Written about in the Book of Ix—the Ix Codex.
    And those words together. Bakab. Ix.
    Summon the Bakab Ix.
    What—or who—is the Bakab Ix?
    Could it really be