Charlie Hernández & the Castle of Bones

by Ryan Calejo

  Then the water in the Seeing Bowl began to churn, and a new scene appeared: I saw the same hand being buried in a half-familiar field. I blinked, and now the scene changed again—I saw a row of coffins. Four of them. They’d been chained and nailed shut, hidden deep in the belly of some ship. The bowl water had begun to swirl even faster, and the next moment, there was an earsplitting CRACK! as the ship carrying the four coffins was torn apart by a wild and angry sea.

  I saw a hooded figure wearing a large emerald necklace with some sort of crest on it—a shield, twin lions, and a huge black eagle—levitating the coffins and escaping with them through an expanding crack in the hull just as the sea swallowed the ship.

  For several seconds, the glittery, silvery lights disappeared and the water inside the bowl turned a deep, oily black. It reminded me of tar—or motor oil. When it clarified again, I saw the hooded figure kneeling in the middle of a vast and rocky chamber—a cave, it looked like. The coffins had been laid out in a circle on the sandy ground, and as I watched, wisps of pale green light flowed from the figure’s heavily ringed fingers into each one of the coffins. Then, with nothing more than a lazy sweep of its hand, the figure sent the coffins flying off in different directions; I watched, from almost a bird’s-eye view now, as the coffins scattered all across South America, crashing down in thick jungle, inside caves—one in the middle of the ocean.

  Suddenly, the scene swirled away and the silvery lights formed a new one: A blazing downtown skyline, its jumble of high-rises and office buildings smoking with countless fires that burned on almost every floor.

  “That’s downtown Miami,” I breathed, recognizing the Panorama Tower and the Southeast Financial Center. The next several images formed in the bowl almost too quickly to process: I saw La Liga’s headquarters, the Provencia in North Miami Beach, completely razed; I saw lines of terrified-looking kids, their faces pale and soot stained, their hands bound with ropes, being marched through the streets like prison chain gangs; I saw entire neighborhoods leveled; I saw two bodies lying unconscious in a front yard—my parents! Someone screamed—it was probably me—and I staggered back from the bowl, breathing so hard my lungs hurt.

  “How…? What the heck did I just see?” I whispered, shaking, feeling sweat break out over my face, my arms.

  “You saw the world as it was and as it will be…,” answered the dark-haired chonchón. “But you did not see all. Merely the shadow of a hand…”

  “Soon this world will be plunged into utter darkness from which it might never recover,” said the other. “All living things shall groan under the yoke of slavery. That is, of course, if your mission ends in failure.”

  My mission? “You mean if we can’t save Joanna?”

  Neither sorcerer head answered for so long, I thought they weren’t going to.

  “You know your path,” the familiar one said finally. “It has led you this far, has it not?” The chonchón paused for a moment, its bulging bloodshot eyes staring straight up at mine. “The time of your testing has already begun. Like a sacrifice is blind to its end, so you shall be: an offering, tried by the elements—wind, water, earth, and fire. But in the end, it will not be you who will tip the balance of this war, rather he whose end was told of old, yes, even from the beginning.”

  The time of my testing? Tried by the elements? What was this thing talking about? “I… I don’t understand.”

  “This we cannot interpret for you, even though we greatly wish to. The bowl speaks of its own will. The waters give only what is yours to know—and what has been given to you is this: Return to Brazil. Lay your trap on the highest hill. There the thief lingers, reveling in his take.”

  “What thief?” I said.

  “You know which one,” cooed the chonchón. “He will be the one to lead you. And lead you he will, as a lamb to the slaughter.”

  In another room came a shrill, high-pitched scream. My blood froze.

  Violet!

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  A shot of adrenaline spiked through me as I ran out of the main chamber and into a small room cut into the cave’s walls. Violet was standing in the middle—totally unharmed, I saw with a huge rush of relief—staring at something on the ground. I didn’t get a chance to see what it was before she screamed, “It’s Joanna’s crown!”

  And now that I did get a chance to check it out, I saw she was right!

  V stepped toward it, careful not to disturb the scene. “It’s another bread crumb!” she said. “Another clue!” Crouching, she studied the dirt mounds someone had built near the back wall—there were five or six of them. Smooth-sided and sculpted, they reminded me of sandcastles.

  As my gaze moved slowly around the room, I said, “Okay… so what’s the clue?”

  “Where exactly was the crown…?” Violet asked Mario.

  “On top,” he replied, nodding at the baby-faced anchimayen. “Goyito found it. Last night.”

  “Show me.” Violet picked up the crown and handed it to Goyito, and the little guy placed it carefully—and very, very gently—on the tallest of the mounds.

  “Así,” he said, and then shyly retreated to Mario’s side.

  I glanced at Violet. “You getting anything from this?”

  But she stayed quiet, her forehead wrinkled in concentration. “When do you think our friend and those other sombras passed through here?” she asked Mario after a few moments.

  “No sé. Probably around midnight yesterday. We would’ve seen them had it been any earlier.”

  Violet glanced at her watch, then at me. “Almost midnight now,” she said.

  “Okay…” I had no idea how that mattered, like, at all. “What are you thinking?”

  “Not so much thinking… maybe, praying?”

  We waited. A minute passed, then two. The gang of anchimayen stood in a circle around the room. Not one of them said anything. Santi stared silently at Violet, and Violet stared silently back for a moment before glancing down at her watch again.

  I saw her frown. Then she looked up at me and said, “It’s midnight.”

  The disappointment in her voice was clear. But I wasn’t sure what exactly there was to be disappointed about. “Was something… supposed to happen?”

  V let out a heavy sigh. “I don’t know. I thought—maybe. But…” Now she was shaking her head, looking almost hopelessly around the room. “Yeah, I have no idea what Joanna was trying to tell us.…”

  “Maybe she just wanted to let us know that she was still alive?” I said.

  “I mean, yeah. It’s possible. But that’s not going to help us find her.”

  Overhead, a thin stream of moonlight had found a crack in the craggy ceiling and was spearing into the room in a bright column. Noticing it, Violet turned. And suddenly she was staring at the crown again. Staring hard. Like she’d figured something out.

  Before I could ask her if she actually had, though, she bent down, angling the crown so that the moonlight shone directly onto the large emerald on the front of it.

  I wasn’t sure what she was up to, but she obviously was, because that’s when something interesting happened.… The jewel in the center of Joanna’s crown began to glow. It seemed to absorb the moonlight like a rag does water, and suddenly the fist-size emerald began to sparkle. Prisms of dazzling light radiated out, bouncing off the walls and lighting the room in a pale, greenish glow. Steadily the sparkling intensified. The crown itself began to glow. And now a rich golden hue fell over the cluster of mounds. In the glittery yellowish light they looked an awful lot more like golden buildings and towers than simple piles of dirt.

  Mario’s mouth had dropped open. “Madre…”

  “Looks like—a city,” Violet said, and it did… a big, golden city.

  “Oh my God,” I breathed.

  V turned to me. “What?”

  “It’s the City of Gold.…”

  “What?”

  “That’s her clue! It’s El Dorado!”

  CHAPTER FIFTY

&nb
sp; The fabled city of El Dorado was one of the most famous cities in all of legend and myth, if not the most famous. Explorers from as early as the 1500s had risked their lives and reputations in search of its wealth and supposedly boundless treasure. But it also seemed to be impossible to find, because although treasure hunters from all over the world had tried to discover its secret location, none had actually succeeded.

  “But does it even really exist?” I asked Mario. “I mean, have you ever heard anything about it?”

  The anchimayen’s black eyes lit up as he grinned at me. Like, literally lit up. They seemed to burn in their sockets like miniature fireballs, casting deep shadows over the rest of his face. “¿Cómo no? It’s almost impossible to find, but it’s real. Our brujo visited many times. They markets are world famous.”

  “Mario, could you give us a moment?” Violet said, and when he nodded, she turned to me and whispered, “So that’s where they’re taking her, then—El Dorado. I mean, if it is, in fact, a real place like he says, then that’s gotta be it.”

  “Seems like it.” Honestly I didn’t see any other way to interpret her clue.

  V frowned. “It’s weird, though…”

  “What is?”

  “Well, why are they moving Joanna around so much? Usually when you kidnap someone, you take them to one place and just keep them there, tied up or whatever. That way they’re out of sight and have less chance of escaping.”

  “You sound like you have experience. Should I be worried?”

  “Ha-ha. But seriously. First they took her to a cave—Lapa do Santo; then they brought her here, to this island; and now they’re moving her to some ancient and lost city of gold. So the investigative journalist in me has to ask, Why? What’s the point of all that? And is there some connection between the three locations?”

  Interesting questions… Why did they keep moving her? And what was the connection between the locations? But before I could come up with any theories, Violet turned back to Mario and said, “You wouldn’t happen to know where we could find El Dorado, would ya?”

  “In Colombia. But where exactly? Don’t know.… We never left this island. But our brujo say it’s one of the oldest of all the forgotten cities. He say it was built after the Sun Wars and at the cost of much blood.” His voice dropped to a whisper as he said, “But you two should stay far away from that place.…”

  I shook my head. “What? Why?”

  “The creatures that live there? They hate outsiders, despise humans, and don’t care nothin’ for no one ’cept they own kind. But, I can’t blame them.… They been hunted for their great treasure since the beginning of time. I only ever hear one story ’bout someone who walked into their golden fortress and escape alive.” His eyes dimmed, lowering to the brightness of a dying match. “You should stay away… and especially now.”

  “Why now?” Violet asked.

  “You no heard the rumors spreading through the continents?”

  I stared at him with a sinking feeling. “What rumors are you talking about?”

  The look of concern in his eyes flickered into surprise. “You no heard? We never left Chiloé, and we heard!”

  “You mean the rumors of the dead rising?”

  The surprise in his eyes changed back into dread. “You have heard, then.”

  “Were you guys around when it happened the first time?” V asked.

  “No,” Mario said, “but our brujo tell us about it sometimes. He say it was darkest time the world has ever known… either world.”

  “What did he say? What happened exactly?”

  “Terrible things…” He was nodding now, but there was a kind of guardedness to it. As if he thought he might have said too much already. “So many terrible things… maybe it is better you don’t know.”

  “Actually, I think it could be very helpful to us,” Violet said, sounding quite sincere and not just like someone hoping to hear a scary story.

  Mario took a deep breath like he was wondering what to say—or whether to say anything at all. When he finally spoke, his voice was low and tight. “Our brujo tell us that in the thirteenth year of La Catrina, los muertos began to rise. He say that, at the time, no one knew why. The warlocks confused. Scared. They blame it on las brujas. Las brujas blame it on las calacas. Las calacas blame it back on los brujos. Everyone started to believe that death had lost its appetite—they say it was spitting up souls.… But no one knew that the dead were not rising by they own choice.”

  Confused, I shook my head. “They weren’t?”

  “No, they were rising b—”

  “Because of el MONSTRUO!” Goyito yelled, then hid behind one of the other kids.

  “El monstruo…?” I turned back to Mario. “What monster?”

  Surprise widened his eyes. “You two never hear this before?” And when we both shook our heads, he turned and started out of the room, motioning for us to follow.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  We followed Mario through a labyrinth of narrow, echoing, dimly lit passageways until we came to a small square-shaped space flanked by wooden tables. The walls were black quartz, glassy, almost translucent, and had been drilled with a matrix of deep holes from floor to ceiling. The holes had been perfectly measured, perfectly spaced, and formed a flawless dot grid. Within these holes were long, ancient parchments, chipped with age but intact and sturdy looking.

  When Mario first unrolled one on the tabletop in front of us, there didn’t seem to be anything written in it. But a moment later, he snapped his fingers, producing a lick of flame at the very tip of his thumb, and as he passed it over the parchment, inky splotches began to appear until strange marks filled the page; there were a few Spanish words scribbled in the margins, but nothing I could make any sense of. Mario read silently from the scroll for several moments, then looked up at us again, his eyes like a pair of small round torches in the dimness of the room. The kid was using his eyeballs like a pair of reading lamps. It was crazy cool! “These scrolls were left to us by La Sociedad de las Calacas. They the recordkeepers of the sombra world. But after the Great Shaking, many of their bibliotecas were destroyed. They gave what was left to the warlocks for safekeeping.” He passed one hand reverently over the parchment. “The scrolls are written in they ancient language.”

  Leaning over the scroll, Violet examined it. “What does this one say?”

  “It speaks of El Dark Brujo… El Hijo de la Tumba.”

  “Who is that?”

  “El monstruo,” said the anchimayen, turning his fiery eyes on us. “A sorcerer who can summon the dead.”

  “Like, a necromancer?” I said.

  “Sí, exactly like a necromancer…”

  His words sent a rush of fear through me, but I tried not to let it show.

  Mario glanced down at the scroll and began to read. “ ‘Soulless, sinister, insidious,’ that is what is spoken of him.… They say the monster was so wicked, so powerful, that when Death herself came for him, he fought her off, wounded her, cleaved off two of her fingers…” He held up his hand. “Her dedos, man.… But did you know that he was once the High Inquisitor of España?”

  At this point Violet and I were totally freaking out—at least I was. But the anchimayen kept going.

  “He lead the inquisitions when they hunted down all those they believed to be brujas y brujos. They give him this task because of his—how you say?—unique gift.…”

  “Because he could raise the dead,” I said, and Mario nodded.

  “Correcto. So after they burn someone at the stake, let’s say, he could bring them back for even more questioning; and if they still refuse to answer, they could do it all over again.…”

  “That’s… terrifying,” Violet breathed.

  The anchimayen’s eyes cast bright oval shapes on our faces as he spoke. “But soon he became hungry for even more power.… He no longer care about helping the crown hunt down brujos y brujas; no, he wanted to learn all they deepest secrets—they darkest spells, they most pow
erful elixirs. He formed his own secret army, un regimiento of undead assassins, sorcerers resurrected by his own hand. He even create his own secret prisons where he would bring the witches and warlocks he capture. But when the king and queen find out, they were no happy. They kill him. Burn him at the stake. But that not the end of him.… It was only the beginning. He crawl back up from the grave with revenge burning in his corazón. His dream? To unite La Península. To bring Spain and Portugal under his rule. He wanna bend the worlds to his will—this one and the other.”

  I frowned. “But why?”

  “Porque la iniquidad absoluta siempre anhelará el poder absoluto.”

  “What’d he say?” Violet asked me.

  “Because absolute wickedness always craves absolute power.”

  Mario glanced down at the scroll and began to read aloud: “ ‘And it was this dark brujo of unspeakable power, which some claim cannot remain dead, who wielded the armies of the dead like a weapon. Under his control, they swept across the earth like locusts, devouring any who dared stand against him.’ ”

  “So this necromancer basically led an army of—zombies…?”

  “Zombies, los muertos vivientes… Call them lo que quieras. But if you ever face one, you find out fast just how hard it is to kill something that’s already dead.” He paused for a moment, like he didn’t want to continue, and I wasn’t sure I wanted him to. “But there were more than muertos in his army. There were ogres. Comelenguas from the Black Mountains. Chupacabra tribes from el norte—thousands of them. They gather sangre—you know, blood—for el brujo, oceans of it… the blood he need for his rituals. Oh, and don’t forget, they masters… the asemas, vampires of old.”

  Just then Goyito, the youngest of the anchimayen, pushed up on his tippy-toes and whispered something in Mario’s ear. Mario turned to him and, in a soft, reassuring voice, said, “No, no, no… no te preocupes por eso… eso no va a pasar, ¿me oíste?”