Descending Son

by Scott Shepherd

  Sophia took a deep breath and Maria said she didn’t need to continue. But the old woman wasn’t one to not finish what she started. “So, me, being the hysterical bride, burst into tears. The whole thing was ruined, I said. But Luis, my dear, dear Luis, promised to make things right.”

  Luis told her he knew a place where a patch of wild roses grew and it was easy enough to fetch them. Sophia, realizing she had gotten overly emotional from pre-wedding jitters, told him he needn’t bother—the offer was sweet enough and she would make do. But Luis wanted her to be happy and took off before she could utter another word.

  “Luis promised to be back long before the wedding was to start. He left shortly before sundown.”

  The best man and father of the groom went looking once Luis had been gone two hours. Soon after, the entire wedding party took up the search. At nine o’clock, when the ceremony was supposed to commence, all the guests had joined in. By midnight, people began to give up and offered condolences to an inconsolable Sophia, who clung weeping to the white trellis.

  The term “cold feet” wasn’t part of the vernacular in those days. But Sophia never thought Luis had abandoned her. As if she needed proof, the next morning when the sun came up, a handful of freshly picked pink and white roses was found on the outskirts of the jungle. That they were tinged with blood didn’t dissuade Sophia from clutching them to her breast with hope Luis would return after having lost his way.

  He never did.

  At least not the Luis Mendoza she knew and loved.

  A year later, on the birthday she and her betrothed had always shared, Sophia was lying in bed unable to sleep. It was completely understandable. They had never spent that day apart. The wind chimes echoed in the night breeze. Sophia thought she was dreaming while still awake. She heard a voice, distant, buried in the breeze. She couldn’t make out anything at first, but then realized it was calling her name. She knew it must be Luis—but by the time she opened the door, it had faded, and the only sound was the twinkling wind chimes on the trellis.

  She had walked over to the swaying chimes. She had planted the pink and white roses they had found on her wedding night. In twelve months’ time they had withered, rebloomed, and grown halfway up the notches, intertwined like two lovers holding onto each other for dear life. Maybe it was a trick played by the moonlight, but Sophia swore they were flecked with drops of blood.

  When the sun rose hours later, the petals started to fall and the blood had disappeared.

  The same thing happened on every subsequent birthday. She would hear Luis calling, but he would never arrive. Come morning, the ground would be strewn with bloodless petals and the yearlong wait would begin anew.

  “How can I leave? How can I not be here when Luis finally finds his way back to me?”

  If Jess hadn’t experienced the past few days, he would have chalked this up to the ruminations of a mad woman. But he had learned, way too quickly, not to dismiss anything he couldn’t rationally explain.

  “You think the Civatateo took him that night?”

  “I am sure of it,” Sophia replied with quiet certainty. “Just as you are sure it has returned once more.”

  “I think it took my father. And now it may be back here chasing someone else.”

  Jess pulled out the photographs. He handed Sophia one of the blowups he had made of Tracy. “Have you seen her?”

  Sophia looked long and hard at the picture. “Not recently. But I remember her.”

  “You do?” Maria asked, surprised.

  “She was here when they were making the movie. Her father is the film star.”

  Jess flipped past the Tracy pictures and pulled out the wrinkled photograph of Clark James standing in front of the church.

  “That’s right,” said Jess. He pointed at the actor. “Clark James. He retired after that.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t keep track of those things,” she said. He started to take the church photo away, but Sophia clung onto it.

  “But you might want to talk to him,” Sophia said.

  “Clark James?” asked Jess. “I did, but he’s back in Palm Springs. At least he was the other night.”

  “I was talking about him.”

  She pointed at the man Clark James had his arms around, the curly-haired, Hawaiian shirt-wearing screenwriter of The Seventh Day.

  “Perhaps this girl came here to talk to him,” explained Sophia.

  “The guy who wrote the movie?” asked Jess.

  “He’s been here all this time. Living in the strangest house you have ever seen.”

  16

  Sophia had told them where to find the writer’s house. The dirt road wound through gargantuan trees and clumps of vines, and was sparsely traveled. Jess couldn’t spot a single tire tread in either direction. As they plunged deeper into the jungle, Jess thought Maria’s great-aunt had led them on a wild goose chase. But then, the dense foliage cleared and the house was upon them.

  Strange was hardly an exaggeration.

  It sat perched atop a tiny hill like something from an Antoni Gaudí nightmare. It wasn’t so much its twisting and bending shapes that the Catalan architect was known for. What was truly bizarre were the colored tiles that literally covered every square inch of the structure in a peacock-like mosaic. The setting sun glinted off the ceramic glass, casting a rainbow sheen over its surroundings. It was so completely out of place, it might as well have been an alien spacecraft.

  Maria parked the jeep at the base of the hill. There wasn’t a driveway, only crudely fashioned steps that forced a visitor, and presumably the occupant, to get two hundred feet of exercise every time they came or went. They got out of the jeep and Jess led the way up the stairs.

  No sooner had they reached the top step, maybe fifty feet from the front door, when they were blasted by an eruption of light that could illuminate a small stadium. It poured from the ceramic tiles, en masse.

  “What the fuck!” Jess yelled.

  Maria gasped and covered her eyes.

  There was a mechanical squawk, followed by a command. “Go away!”

  Jess shielded his eyes while trying to face wherever the speaker was located. The blinding lights had him completely befuddled. “Can you turn off the goddamned lights?!”

  “You must leave. Now!”

  But Jess hadn’t come this far to take no for an answer. He stepped forward, even though he couldn’t see the front door through the swath of rainbow brightness.

  “We just want a few minutes of your time! You’re Tag? The writer of The Seventh Day?”

  Nothing came from the speaker, but there wasn’t another demand for them to retreat, so Jess kept talking.

  “We’ve come from Palm Springs looking for Tracy James.”

  This was met by silence until the disembodied voice finally punctuated through the speaker. “Tracy James? The actor’s daughter?”

  “Yes! Have you seen her?” asked Jess.

  “No. Why would you think she is here?”

  Jess didn’t know how much to say. He waffled. “We’re not sure.”

  But Maria put it right out there. “She may be running from the Civatateo.”

  There was a loud clunk and the lights dimmed by at least half. They heard the clanks of locks being undone, and the front door was thrown open.

  The screenwriter stood before them. He wore another tropical shirt; a thin cylindrical metal tube hung off a chain around his neck. His hair was still curly and he wore the same glasses that were in the five-year-old picture Jess had in his pocket.

  But his hair was as white as snow and he looked twenty years older than he did in the photograph.

  “We should definitely talk,” said the screenwriter.

  His name was Tag Marlowe. (The nickname was never explained.) He had once been a structural engineer who had given up a steady career to become a struggling writer. He had knocked around Hollywood for almost a decade when Clark James finally optioned his sci-fi book, The Seventh Day, and commissioned
him to write the screenplay.

  They were seated in the living space Marlowe had created. Walls had been taken down (or never built) to form one gigantic room—it was a humongous studio apartment with books, computers, mismatched furniture, and one-way tinted glass windows. Marlowe could look out the latter whereas anyone approaching the house saw only the multicolored ceramic tiles. The interior was completely unique, but Jess couldn’t tell if it was being used to launch a satellite or host the world’s rowdiest frat party.

  Marlowe described his work as an apocalyptic Western, The Road Warrior meets The Stand meets Pale Rider meets The Grapes of Wrath. Jess found it ludicrous how Hollywood people described projects as bizarre combo plates—like Schindler’s List meets A Bug’s Life, though he might fork over fifteen bucks to catch that flick. Tag’s story took place seven years after an alien race wiped out Earth and chronicled the last few days of a hero’s Odyssian journey home after the war ended.

  Enter Clark James, who fell in love with Tag’s book, had him adapt it, and decided to finance the film by shooting in the heart of Mexico. They had chosen Santa Alvarado because the actor had seen the pictures of Lena Flores’s hometown and was convinced it was the only place to film his epic. Originally, they were only going to shoot in Santa Alvarado and the surrounding jungle. Things went swimmingly for the first half of filming. Clark James played the lead with an Eastwood Man With No Name panache, and the director was knocking off scenes ahead of schedule.

  “We were going to shoot the climactic scene in a church where we revealed that Clark’s character was actually a preacher,” Tag said.

  Jess showed the well-worn picture to Marlowe, who confirmed it was the very same one he was talking about.

  “But the minute we set up scaffolding to mount cameras, the building practically collapsed.” Tag pointed at the picture. “This was taken right as we were rigging. Half an hour later you would’ve seen dust spilling from the walls.”

  Jess remembered the misguided search party. “That’s when you went looking for another site.”

  Tag nodded. “One of the locals knew of an old set of ruins about an hour to the east. He described them to Clark, who said to check them out, see if they were worth rewriting the script. Another man overheard this and warned us not to go there. Of course, try telling Clark James not to do something.”

  “His ego couldn’t handle it.”

  “Exactly. Of course, he demanded we go right away. Didn’t even want to wait till the next day.”

  Tag glanced out the tinted window—night had fallen but one couldn’t tell from the glare reflecting off the tiled lights. “That proved to be a huge mistake.”

  “Who went?” asked Maria.

  “It was James, the cinematographer, assistant director, and location manager.”

  Jess found it interesting the actor had lied and told him he hadn’t been on the scout.

  “What about you?”

  Tag fingered the dangling metal tube on his neck chain. “James had me stay behind to rewrite the script. Penelope went instead.”

  “Penelope?” Jess repeated, picking up on the apparent reluctance with which the screenwriter mentioned her name.

  “A girl from the village the location guy had hired as his assistant. She did odd errands. Took a lot of pictures.” Marlowe let out an audible sigh. “Then, my heart.”

  He picked a framed photo off a makeshift desk and handed it to them. A striking Mexican girl in her late twenties stared up from behind the glass.

  The engineer-turned-doomed-screenwriter stared forlornly at her picture. Recalling Sophia’s wedding story and his own experiences in the Sands Motel five hundred miles away, Jess played a hunch.

  “Let me guess. She died shortly after that and you sometimes hear her calling your name in the middle of the night.”

  Marlowe looked at Jess, flabbergasted. “How could you possibly know that?”

  “I’m getting a handle on how this Civatateo goes about things.”

  By the time night fell, the location scout hadn’t returned.

  No one had any idea what had happened until Clark James stumbled into the village the next morning. The actor was bloodied and more than half delirious.

  James kept saying they were all dead and he collapsed in the arms of Edward Rice, the film crew’s doctor. This time, when a search party went out, Tag Marlowe made damn sure he was on it.

  “I kept asking James about Penelope, if she was one of the dead he kept rambling on about. He never said yes, but he didn’t say no either, so I insisted on going along.”

  The ruins were an hour east, but only as the crow flies. By truck and machete (a couple of times they literally had to get out and hack their way through overgrown vines strung across the road), it took the better part of a day, and getting lost along the way didn’t help matters.

  They finally emerged in an open field where they found half-fallen rock structures that must have been built by Mayan cousins or distant relatives of whoever put up Stonehenge. Whether the ruins had been temples, ancient abodes, or statues was impossible to tell. Besides which, Tag and the search party were totally distracted by two other things.

  First, there was an inordinate amount of cracked glass spread throughout the field—it was as if a hundred mirrors had exploded. Rays of sunlight flew off fractured shards. If caught directly in the face, it was momentarily blinding.

  But what commanded their attention were the three slaughtered bodies in the center of the field. Ripped to pieces, and sounding very similar to someone’s handiwork in Edward Rice’s living room, it took them a while to ascertain these were the A.D., D.P., and location manager.

  “What about Penelope?” asked a horrified Maria.

  “She definitely wasn’t there. So I was filled with hope when I went back to the village later that day.”

  But once they returned, that dream slipped away. The movie was immediately shut down and Clark James was airlifted by helicopter back to the States with Edward Rice at his side. The three bodies were seized by local authorities, written off as victims of a wild animal attack, and burned on a funeral pyre before anyone could protest (which sounded awfully familiar to Jess). The rest of the film crew packed their bags and headed for Puerto Vallarta to party away their per diem before heading back to California looking for the next gig. Tag refused to accompany them; he stuck around and patiently waited for some word about his beloved Penelope.

  As days drifted by, along with almost all hope, Tag overheard stories whispered amongst the locals. The word “Civatateo” cropped up more than once, usually accompanied by someone making the sign of the cross and muttering a prayer. He quickly realized it was some sort of vampire lore but immediately wrote it off as Old World nonsense.

  Until two nights later—when he heard Penelope calling him.

  He had been staying on a small farm near the jungle border. Tag was sleeping in the cottage and shortly after three in the morning was woken up by what he thought was a gust of wind. As he sat up in bed, he realized something was scratching outside the door and his name was being called.

  The voice was a whisper, but he would have recognized Penelope anywhere. Tag quickly hopped out of bed, threw on a robe, and opened the door.

  But nobody was there.

  The moon and stars provided little light and the night shadows cast by the overhanging jungle trees didn’t help. As he stepped outside, Tag couldn’t see much of anything, so he detached the cylindrical tube off his neck chain and squeezed it.

  A bright light blasted out of one end like a laser beam. It wasn’t a constant stream. He had to pump the tube to keep it working.

  Again, there was nothing.

  He turned to head back to the cottage. Penelope’s voice called again, this time from behind him. Tag whirled around, but he was still alone.

  “Tag…”

  It came from the jungle. Tag squeezed the thin flashlight. It picked up something moving between the trees.

  He darted
forward, whispering. “Penny…”

  As he got closer to the trees, he heard approaching footsteps.

  Her voice was louder this time.

  “Tag!”

  Suddenly, he was in the middle of the jungle and it was pitch black. He started to aim the cylindrical flashlight, but a rush of footsteps caused him to drop it on the ground.

  That saved his life.

  He dropped to his knees and frantically searched for the metal tube. He had just wrapped his fingers around it when the night air was split by a ferocious roar. Tag squeezed the metal tube and the light beam splayed.

  First, there were just trees.

  And then—growls.

  He swung the flashlight left and illuminated something that looked like a man. Stunned, Tag could only focus on the sharp teeth jutting from its gaping mouth. It caused him to momentarily lose track of the creature as the light winked out. He felt something swipe at his neck but was able to squeeze the flashlight again and train it on his attacker.

  The thing—and it was more thing than man—recoiled in pain as the light beam blasted a hole in its chest. The creature howled but leapt forward as Tag squeezed once more and the ray of light opened up another hole in the thing’s torso.

  Tag, still on the ground, scampered backwards, but the creature was already moving away, deeper into the jungle, its unholy screeches filling the night.

  And then it was gone.

  “I think my hair started turning white before the break of dawn,” Tag said.

  Jess absently rubbed a hand over his own scalp. A few more confrontations with his father and he could start a select Hair Club with the screenwriter.

  But Maria was concentrating on the cylinder Marlowe wore around his neck. “What exactly is inside that tube?”

  Tag detached it from the chain as he explained. “There’s a lot of downtime in Hollywood waiting for that big break, so I never quite gave up my first career. Being a proponent of using nature to advance science, I started working on alternative light sources.”