The Exquisite and Immaculate Grace of Carmen Espinoza

by Rebecca Taylor

  “Fear,” Ray advised. “will bring them faster. Fear is a very strong energy…they love it.” He pulled me past the hand tree. “It’s an emotion I would try my best to control if I were you.”

  “How can they feed on me? Why?” I asked. “I thought you said I would be protected? I have this day of protection.”

  “I said you have some measure of protection. If you didn’t you would’t last one second past the gates. But you will still feel them, like a slow drain. The imbalance is too great between a live human and a faint, it is only natural that there would be some energy transference. And they will be sssso very hungry for you. Imagine, if you will, a dog that has not eaten in months, it is weak, frail, emaciated from starvation,” he stopped walking and fanned his hand in front of his vision, “then, out of nowhere, like a gift from the Gods, you appear. A fat juicy rabbit.” He started walking again. “Now imagine it’s not one starving dog but a million, you of course are still just one little rabbit.”

  Ahead of us, I could see something shining through the darkness. It must be the gate. A nervous uncertainty settled into my core and I wondered about how I had gotten here, about the rush and momentum towards something I didn’t really understand. I glanced behind me and saw that the desert was entirely gone now, only forest and the shadows loomed behind us.

  With every step, the gate became more clear. An enormous barricade made of intricate scroll work shaped from a metal unlike anything I had ever seen. When we were only a few steps away I could tell that it didn’t reflect the moonlight from above, it glowed from within. The two large gates stood guard against us, but they were not connected to anything else.

  “Why not just go around them?” I asked.

  “You can try if you like,” he smirked. “But you would not end up there,” he pointed to the forest on the other side of the gates. “You would find yourself transported to some other remote location in the forest, wandering, lost…and without your guide of course.”

  He led me the last few feet, right up to the towering gates, right in front of a golden gargoyle head. Its eyes bugged out beneath a low hanging brow and short horns arched towards me from its misshapen head. The mouth gaped wide and revealed the creatures sharp pointed teeth and protruding tongue that reminded me of apes at the zoo making loud angry noises through their bars. I stood a moment longer studying the monster’s eyes, they were so carefully crafted I expected them to shift and meet mine.

  “How do you open it? Do you have a key?”

  “Yes,” Ray said. “You.”

  I pulled my eyes from the gargoyle and looked at him, “I’m sorry?”

  “You are the key,” he took my hand, the one he had been holding ever since we left the desert and began moving it towards the gargoyle’s mouth.

  Instinctively, I snatched my hand from his grasp and immediately regretted it. Like before, the forest grew and swelled all around me only this time, because Ray was completely separated from me, the speed and intensity of the change brought me to my knees. All over and around me the forest pushed in and the faints, no longer just shadows in the distance, began moving quickly towards me. Long, pale creatures with emaciated limbs and yawning mouths, their eyes were black holes swimming in desperation and locked on me.

  I fell backwards and began pushing and scrambling, trying to escape until I backed into the enormous trunk of a tree blocking my path. “Ray!” I screamed. The closest creatures were only seconds away from me now. “Ray!”

  Inches from me, the nearest of the faints reached out its spindly hand towards my face. I turned my head and strained my neck as far away from it as possible, “Ray!” my scream pierced the air and I felt the creature’s finger brush my cheek.

  Then, just as my panic pushed my brain past reason and I flailed my arms at the emaciated demon, I felt it disappear from my side.

  I dared a look from the corner of my eyes and saw the faint receding quickly, as if dragged from behind, back into the forest which was also shrinking. The creature struggled, a fractured scream echoed from its core and the spiny fingers left a trail of resistance dug deep into the rich forest earth until the faint was nothing more than the shadows I had seen before, lurking in the forest’s depths.

  In my hand I felt Ray’s.

  “How about you not do that again?” he said.

  Still breathless, with my heart pounding in my head and chest, I looked up into his strange eyes and nodded my head.

  Ray bent down, reached under my arm and lifted me from the ground with one hand, as if I were nothing more than a forgotten play thing. With no effort, he set me right on my feet and pulled me back to the gate’s entrance.

  “Okay,” he said, a hint of annoyance made his eyes wide. “Let’s try this again,” and he moved my hand towards the gargoyle’s gaping mouth.

  “Wait,” I said placing my free hand on top of our clasped ones instead of yanking away like last time.

  Ray took a deep breath. “Yes?”

  “What is going to happen when you put my hand in there?”

  His mouth set into a hard line while he considered my question. After a moment, he replied, “It will taste you.”

  “Taste?”

  “Yes. For a living mortal, to unlock the gates to The Between, the gate must taste you. Only then will it know where your hands have been, what your hands have done, and it will also know what your hands intend to do…even when you do not.”

  I stared at the monstrous golden mouth in front of me. “Does it hurt?”

  Again, Ray did not answer me right away. He seemed to always take these moments to measure his words. “It will be…uncomfortable, perhaps. But not physically painful…usually.”

  “Usually?”

  “Yes, not usually,” he smiled as if this half promise should reassure me. When he began guiding my hand back to the mouth, I didn’t resist and when my fingers were resting on the beast’s golden tongue, Ray started to let go. “Now, as long as you are connected with the gate, it is like being connected to me. The forest and it’s occupants will stay back. But if you break contact…” he trailed off. “Well, you know.” Slowly, he removed his hand from mine and then nodded for me to go ahead. “Put it in.”

  The pads of my fingers barely rested on the rough surface, like golden sandpaper, I could feel the abrasive tongue catching my skin as I slid my hand slowly past the rows of ferocious teeth. The tongue began to curve away, down into the beast’s throat and my fingers involuntarily curled themselves into a fist, each wanting to protect itself from being the first to enter into the dark hole where my eyes could not help them. I wished Ray would pick up my other hand, hold it and stand a little closer to me but he didn’t move and I didn’t ask.

  My forearm grazed one of the monster’s canine teeth. I pushed further, the golden lips were almost to my elbow. Nothing happened. Nothing seemed like it might happen.

  A centimeter more, and I felt it. The backs of my fingers, deep within the throat, were wet. There was something soft, fleshy—I snatched my hand back.

  The mouth shut tight and trapped my hand and arm behind its fat, greedy lips that rolled up and started to suckle near my elbow. I yanked and pulled as hard as I could, and when sharp pains radiated up through my arm and down my spine—I screamed.

  Ray moved behind me, cradled my body against his chest and pushed me closer to the gate, “Stop pulling,” his lips breathed near my ear. “Don’t pull and it won’t hurt.”

  Pressed hard against him, I turned away from the sight of my arm in the creatures mouth. It sucked and chewed and every second brought on wave after wave of nausea, but the sharp pains stopped. Something, like loose and shifting meat, rolled over my hand and between my fingers again and again, “Yes,” Ray said still near my ear. His right hand held my elbow near the gargoyle’s mouth, as if feeding it, while his left had settled onto my stomach. “It won’t be much longer now. It can really taste you.”

  Whatever was rolling across and between my fingers began to slow
down and it seemed like the mouth loosened its grip. The gargoyle’s eyes shifted quick and looked into mine. Transfixed by his stare, my head began to burn. It felt like a bright hot flame inside my forehead and then, the image of Daniel, standing at the top of our stairs at home, smiling down at our mother. Her face was angry, her mouth opened and began to move in a silent rage as she ran towards the stairs. The image faded and the beast released my hand and arm taking all my strength to stand with it. I fell backwards into Ray’s arms.

  My mind blurred with the memory of my mother advancing on Daniel, I blinked and tried to focus with my eyes on the face hovering before me. Ray was holding me cradled in his arms, like a small child, my legs dangled across one of his arms while he held my upper body and head in the other.

  “Put me down,” I said trying to struggle from his grasp.

  Immediately, my feet were on the ground and he had me upright. Only his hands remained on my arms, steadying my still weak frame.

  I blinked a few more times and rubbed my forehead, surprised by the heat radiating off my head. When the world around me had come completely back into focus, I could see that the massive gate had cracked open, splitting the golden gargoyle’s face precisely in half. A strong warm wind was blowing my hair in wild strands around my face—it was tunneling through the slit in the gate.

  “I saw it,” I said.

  Ray looked intently into my eyes, “Saw what?” he whispered.

  “I saw the day she killed him.”

  He stared at me a moment more and then took his hands from my arms. “Then you are ready?” he asked and stepped aside.

  I narrowed my eyes, tried to understand what I was seeing. Stepping closer, the air rushing through the tight space made the hair on my arms and legs stand up. The gate didn’t just open up to the stretch of forest on the other side—the gate opened the forest. Before me, another world, one very different from the dark forest around us, peered through the crack.

  Chapter Seven

  Through the Gate

  “Ladies first,” Ray said sardonically and gave a low bow while flourishing his arm towards the strange world before us. I gave him a sidelong look and stepped closer to the entrance.

  The warm wind hit my face and carried an acrid odor, like sulfur and matches, that burned my sinuses and made my eyes water. The sky before me, swirling, melting shades of yellow and gray crossed over by wispy clouds, was a vast expanse that looked diseased and pressed down on the craggy land below it. We stood high above The Between on a iron colored ridge. The rock beneath my feet was sharp and brittle, like shale that would probably flake into large slabs if I kicked one of the jagged jutting pieces around me. Far off in the distance, a giant black mountain pushed up into the heights of the sick looking sky, its peak capped in light, pointed precisely to the fat orange moon that hung in the night above it.

  Below us, in the land that spread between the ridge we stood on and the mountain in the distance, a series of rolling hills seemed to divide the land. They looked like enormous waves carved into the earth, the valley of one rested against the rise of the next, all pressing towards the ominous mountain. As my eye moved over them I quickly counted three individual hills.

  “Those,” his voice whispered near my ear and sent shivers across my neck and down my back. “Are the boundaries for the offenses.”

  The side of his face was very close, I could feel the heat of him warming my cheek. Unsteady, I closed my eyes to gather myself and took a deep breath of the foul scented air, “What are the offenses?”

  “The offenses are the errors in judgment, thought, word, or deed that a soul makes while living their human life. They are transgressions a body makes, against another, against oneself, that create great shifts in their energy. When an energy arrives at The Between, they are first carried by their guides on golden wings high over the offenses, directly to the black mountain.” He nodded his head toward the looming rock mammoth in the distance. “The Great Balancer lives there, high above all of this in her iron tower. When the soul steps before her and gives an account of their life and death, the energy of their physical existence either balances and they move on,” he gestured vaguely by flitting his fingers in the air. “Or it does not balance. When it does not balance, they are transported back to the beginning of The Between,” he pointed to the first half circle below us. “And they must traverse the offenses.”

  “And what happens in the offenses?”

  “A great many things happen there.”

  Ray stood beside me, watching, waiting for my reaction.

  I turned to him, “Where is Daniel?”

  The corners of his mouth turned up slightly, almost imperceptibly, I would have missed it if I had not been staring at him so closely. He inclined his head an inch and directed his gaze to the cliff that dropped off several feet in front of us.

  I narrowed my eyes at him, disbelieving, and inched towards the edge. As I moved further away from the gate, the wind pushed my body harder. Several feet from the edge, I glanced back at Ray and shivered with the chilling sensation of him rushing me from behind and shoving my body into a plummeting and jagged death.

  He stood exactly where he had been but now, one corner of his mouth was raised. He shook his head gently, as if watching an amusing child, as if he could read my thoughts about my mistrust. Could he read my thoughts?

  My feet remained firmly planted as my body leaned out as far as I dared. The cliff, as I had feared, dropped away for several thousands of feet before ending in clumps of black and brown plumes of tree tops that reminded me of molding broccoli. From what I could see of the cliffs sheer face, Daniel was not on it.

  “I don’t see him,” I accused.

  “Oh, he is waaaay ahead of us. We’ll need to hurry if you’re planning on catching up. But please, by all means, continue to stare off into the wonderment of The Between,” he raised his hands sarcastically before him. “After all, I’m not the one on the deadline,” he pointed his finger at the horizon before us.

  “What?” My gaze followed his finger. All I saw was the massive black mountain and the moon.

  “See that bright orange melon floating on high?”

  I focused on the strange moon before us.

  “That’s your clock,” he said. “Once it moves from there,” his finger traced a high and invisible line from the mountain’s peak, into the sky above our head and down to the top of the gate behind us, “all the way over to here,” he finished. “Your time is up, your Day of the Dead will be over. If you are not back here, moving out of this gate by the time the moon sets over these beaming metal bars, you’ll be trapped forever on this side of them.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said gazing into the rotting forest far below us. “If he came to me for my help, why isn’t he waiting for me?” I looked questioningly into Ray’s eyes. Ever since I had first seen Daniel in the Basilica de la Soledad, near the Virgin of Solitude, he had been running away from me. “I would think he’d be running to me.”

  Ray stared at me, again, for a very long time before answering. “He’s one day away from becoming a faint. I doubt very much he realizes who you are, much less that you are here to help him.” He walked the distance between us, passed me, and continued straight up to the edge of the cliff. The toes of his brown leather shoes hung inches over the edge. “By now,” he continued as the winds made his body sway. “Your brother doesn’t even know he was alive, never mind what life actually is. Or that he might one day want to choose to have a life again. He is driven by a singular memory of a want that he can’t even form a concrete thought around.”

  “What,” I breathed waiting for him to fall off the edge at any moment. “What does he want?”

  Ray turned and looked into my eyes. “Your mother,” he said. He turned back to the view before him. “He wants his mother. He’s looking for her. Has been looking for her for thirteen years. Not that he would be able to quantify it like that. He has been looking for his mother for so lon
g now, it is all he knows. Single, continuous moments of searching for her is all he knows now. There is no before he began searching for her and there is no after he is searching for her. There is only that. Always, forever…he is lost.”

  I shook my head, “But why? Why would he want her after what she did to him?”

  Ray seemed to avoid my gaze. “You said it yourself,” his foot extended into the abyss of sky before him. “He does not know what happened to him in his life.” He leaned into the death step he was making and fell down past the edge.

  I gasped and ran to the edge. When I looked down, I expected to see him still falling or cracked and bleeding, but he stood on a ragged footpath cut into the side of the cliff. Amused with himself for making me panic, he grinned up at my worried expression, “He does not believe she hurt him. So I should think that, as a small lost boy, looking for his mother is probably a very natural response.” He began walking the narrow path.

  His smooth soled shoes crunched the small rocks and dirt along the path. Still only watching him move away from me, I scanned the ledge and tried to find a way down to the path.

  “Just jump,” Ray called casually over his shoulder.

  A surge of annoyance tightened my chest. He could read my mind.

  “Not exactly,” he said as he rounded the first bend dropping him lower down the cliff face.

  “How, not exactly?” I yelled after him.

  Just jump?

  It was at least an eight foot drop to the narrow path below me. And if I over shot it I would go tumbling down the jagged face. Ray was getting further and further ahead of me, being left alone here was making a panicky feeling beat fast in my chest.

  As I crouched down to try scooting over the edge, I heard his answer to my question carry on the air but the wind swirled his words so that I couldn’t make out the details. All I could make out was, “I…eel…tion.”