The Devil's Bag Man

by Adam Mansbach

  “She made a move!” Sherry yelled, swinging the weapon from one girl to the next as if these drones might spook.

  “Listen, girlie, if she’d made a move, you’d know it,” Gum shot back.

  “Sherry. Please. I must speak through them to my sister,” Izel intoned, in the most authoritative voice he could muster.

  In the moment it took Sherry to relent and lower the weapon by halting degrees, Izel reflected on how pathetic it was that after five hundred years, he still had to strain to project authority.

  “Thank you,” he said to her, and then he locked eyes with the closest remaining girl, a long-limbed, T-shirt-clad specimen who’d most likely met her end in the filthy bowels of Ojos Negros, perhaps so recently that her family still held out hope for her return.

  “Chacanza,” he said, and something in her visage changed. The eyes dilated; the brow furrowed in consternation.

  “This is your brother, Izel. I must see you. The gods have turned me into the wretch you see before you, but they have kept me alive. I have but one purpose, sister, and it is the same as yours.”

  He paused without breaking eye contact and summoned all the conviction, all the persuasion, he had in him. “I know how to kill him, Chacanza. I failed you once. I will not do so again.”

  For a moment, the girls stood stock-still. Izel could hear Sherry’s pulse throbbing in her neck; he felt his own heart race and knew that whatever minute trickle of adrenaline his body could still produce was swirling its way into his bloodstream.

  Abruptly, the five girls turned on their heels and began to walk.

  It took no prodding from Izel for Sherry to fall into step behind them.

  THE GIRLS DIDN’T look back. Not once, in the hour it took them to lead the way to Chacanza’s keep.

  That she had no doubt the supplicants would follow, Izel understood. That she didn’t want to take even one more look at the grotesquely transformed brother she hadn’t seen in five hundred years, he found a little more troubling.

  I failed you once. The admission, which had tripped so easily off his tongue, might well have doomed him—doomed them all. He’d had centuries to lament his actions on the day of her death and agonize over whether his sister had guessed at his complicity. He’d once fantasized about begging her forgiveness, but long ago dismissed the notion as selfish. What mattered was destroying Cualli, not salving his own conscience. Anything that complicated that goal had to be put aside.

  And yet, what had he done within seconds?

  You are weak, old man.

  All the long days of your life come down to this.

  Don’t fuck it up.

  “Almost there, boss,” Gum said, lengthening his stride and pulling up alongside Sherry. And indeed, Izel could sense a kind of mounting density, a hum of life.

  But no, not life.

  A hum of undeath.

  At its center, its hub, there was nothingness. A void in his sensory map so profound, it had to be Chacanza.

  Izel looked up and found himself staring at the slope of a tall hill, the only incline of note between here and the horizon. Something fired in his memory: this was a place he had known once, in the days before the fall.

  A holy site.

  One that Cualli, in his manic erasure of the old ways, had forgotten to raze.

  Or one that he had left alone.

  The Mount of Sacred Grace. Holy to Chimalma, the last of the gods. Whose blessing, whose curse, kept Izel’s heart beating in his chest even now.

  If his sister had died with a prayer on her lips, it was Chimalma’s deaf ears upon which it had fallen.

  But the girls did not lead them toward the summit, where worship and burial had once taken place. They marched instead to the base of the hill, where an enormous boulder rested against its sharply inclined side.

  Together they grabbed hold and pushed it aside. Izel was astonished that the five of them could manage such a feat, until the passageway behind the boulder was revealed, and he saw that another half-dozen of Chacanza’s minions stood inside, assisting in the task.

  The smell of earth, damp and fetid, wafted from the mouth of the cavern. Torchlights flickered in the far distance, throwing light that failed to reach the high ceiling or the well-trodden floor. Pinpricks of light filtered in from tiny holes, just large enough to vent the meager smoke of the torches.

  This is her work, Izel marveled. He buried her here, and she turned her grave into this. Hollowed out an entire mountain. Made it a crypt.

  Though not without help.

  Sherry stepped across the threshold, and Izel felt the cool air envelop him.

  The girls fell away, joining countless others in the dim recesses of the cavern.

  They were on their own.

  “This way,” breathed Gum. “She’s over here.”

  “How do you know that?” Cantwell asked, in the same hushed mausoleum tone.

  “I feel her.”

  The girls they passed on the trek through the yawing cavern ignored them utterly. Izel watched one, naked and statuesque, carry a lit torch to a wall niche where its predecessor had burned out and swap the one for the other.

  This is her staff, he thought. Warriors out there, elect in here. Another girl, equally alluring and unclothed, passed in front of them, and Izel wondered what other duties the staff might perform for their master. Whether her legendary appetite for flesh might extend beyond protein, and into pleasure.

  Gum led them up a long, twisting stairway, carved from the bedrock of the mountain; it hugged the contour of the main chamber for some hundred feet, then broke off and climbed at a steeper angle, toward a pale yellow light seemingly siphoned from the world above.

  Sherry stepped inside, and the timeline of Izel’s life collapsed on itself, five hundred years of misery blowing away like dust in the breeze as he gazed across the long room at his sister.

  For a split second he was young again—as radiant as she was—and the gods had not forsaken the earth. He felt them: ghostly and dilute, mere shadows flitting across a wall, but it was more than he had ever hoped to feel again.

  She rose from her stone chair and strode toward him so swiftly that her long raven hair fanned out behind her like a veil. And then the hard, shimmering emeralds of Chacanza’s eyes filled Izel’s visage, and the hard grip of her hand encircled his fragile torso.

  The heat of Sherry Richards’s body faded away, replaced by the shocking, bone-deep chill of Chacanza’s flesh.

  The world in which she lived, he understood abruptly, was devoid of warmth.

  She brought him close, inspected him. Izel did the same. She looked exactly as she had the day she’d stood atop the temple steps and pledged her body and soul to Cualli.

  The smell of her breath put the lie to that. Her mouth was closed, her lips pressed together in a tight, pinched look of appraisal, but the stench of rotten flesh behind them was almost unbearable.

  As if it filled her, Izel thought. As if it occupied the vacant space where her soul ought to be.

  “Sister,” he said, and her clasp tightened, became a vise.

  “I am no one’s sister. No one’s daughter. No one’s wife.”

  “Chacanza,” he managed, with the last of his air. If she squeezed any harder, the brittle bones of his rib cage would shatter, become dust.

  “I do not answer to that name.” But her grip loosened. For the first time, she looked past him, eyes flickering up and down the lengths of his companions. Whether in curiosity or contempt, Izel could not be sure.

  Or it might have been hunger.

  “Cualli is born anew,” he said, and the searing bright green eyes flashed back to him. “You know this. You have felt it.”

  “I have,” she said, but something else had captured her attention; Izel felt the slip, the drift, and tried to follow its vector, to imagine what could possibly be of more interest to her than this.

  “We can destroy him, but we must act now,” he said. “We can—”

 
; But she was not listening. She returned him to his perch on Sherry’s shoulder and strode over to Gum, until they stood an inch apart.

  She leaned in close and inhaled. Smelled him deep and long.

  He did not flinch.

  “My queen,” he said when she pulled back to regard him from a slightly greater remove, and he gave a small, graceless bow.

  “What are you?”

  “Your loyal servant always, my most merciful queen.”

  Her brow furrowed, and she cocked her head.

  “Queen of what?”

  He raised his eyes, met hers.

  “Of the Dominio Gris.”

  Her arm shot out, hand striking Gum’s neck like a viper. She lifted him effortlessly into the air, and Izel felt his own throat constrict in sympathy.

  “How do you know my dreams?” she demanded.

  Gum’s arms hung limp at his sides; either he understood the futility of fighting back, or he saw another way through this.

  “They aren’t dreams, my queen. The Dominio Gris is real. You created it. You and Tez—”

  She jerked her hand back as if it had touched flame, and Gum fell, crumpled to the ground. She stared down at him, wild-eyed, watched, waited as Gum brought a hand gingerly to his throat. Finally, he looked up at her.

  “It’s real,” he said again. “I’m there right now, and so are you.” He jerked his head at the cavern below. “And all of them. The only difference is, I know it. It’s not a dream. That’s your soul trying to communicate with your body, or something.”

  Gum planted an arm against the floor, pushed off, regained his feet.

  “I know you there,” he said. “You made it all. The ocean in the sky. The blue mountains. All of it. That was his gift to you when—” Gum broke off and winced, Adam’s apple lolloping in his throat. “When things were better,” he finished softly.

  They stared at each other for a long moment, and then Gum said, “It could work, what he’s talking about. There’s a guy there, Galvan—”

  Her eyes pulsed, so hot they seemed to light up the room.

  “You’ve seen him,” Gum surmised. “Maybe you’ve . . . had dreams about him?”

  The queen only nodded.

  “That’s whose body Cualli took. But he’s—Well, he’s a fighter. He kept Cualli at bay for longer than I woulda thought possible. And to hear him tell it, he ain’t done with this world yet.”

  “That’s my father,” Sherry declared, stepping forward, bringing Izel with her. Neither of them paid her the slightest mind.

  Izel took the opportunity to rejoin the conversation. “He’s at the temple,” he told his sister. “Where it all started. He’s gathering his strength. Building his army. We need to march on him now, before it’s too late. Let your girls do what they were meant—”

  She whirled toward him.

  “The temple,” Chacanza repeated, snatching Izel from his perch again.

  “Where you betrayed me, brother.”

  It is justice, Izel thought to himself.

  He closed his eyes and said a silent prayer to the gods beyond the vale—the gods he knew could hear him still, hard as they might try not to listen.

  He was completely at peace by the time Chacanza dashed his brains against the cold stone wall of the cavern.

  CHAPTER 35

  Galvan craned his neck to gaze at their destination and realized that contrary to his initial impression, Tezcatlipoca’s palace didn’t sit atop the looming mountain; the mountain simply became the palace. It was all one.

  Of course it was. There was no carpentry here. No labor. No grafting of one form onto another. The god had thought it into being, and if tomorrow he wanted to dwell underwater, or reside in a floating mansion among the clouds, then this mountaintop keep might disappear entirely or sit abandoned.

  Word made flesh.

  Except, not flesh.

  According to Gum, that was the one power Tezcatlipoca had been unable to conjure in this purgatory turned playground.

  Every last soul had been imported.

  “What the fuck,” huffed Galvan, short of breath, thighs aching, and unaccustomed to both these human shortcomings. “Why doesn’t he just teleport me up there or some shit?”

  Gum shrugged. “Dunno. He could.”

  “What else can you tell me?” Galvan asked. “I’m flying blind here. I mean, is he . . . am I gonna be talking to a man, or a six-headed eagle, or, I dunno, a giant glass of orange juice, or what?”

  Gum pulled up short, and Galvan almost ran into him.

  “There’s only one thing I can tell you.” He glanced up at the citadel and lowered his voice. “He’s a sick fuckin’ insane lunatic.”

  “Okey dokey, then,” said Galvan. “Thanks. That’s helpful.” And he trudged on.

  Voicing it seemed to open the floodgates, turn Gum from reticent to chatty. “I mean, imagine you’re all-powerful. You can make anything, do anything. But you’re trapped. There’s nobody to bump against, nobody who even comes close to being on your level; it’s just you and your big fuckin’ divine brain and all these luscious chicks keep on pouring in—these virgins who stay virgins no matter how many times you fuck ’em. What’s there to do, after the first hundred, two hundred years except figure out more cruel and depraved shit to do with your time, right?”

  “Could take up needlepoint,” said Galvan, and he put one foot in front of the other again. He had a feeling he’d be dead of exhaustion before he ever reached the top and found out for himself.

  “You’d fuckin’ lose it, man. Everybody needs boundaries, know what I mean? Or, like, goals. Shit, even me. I was a low-life fuckin’ dope fiend half my life, but I had that next high to chase, and that kept me connected to something. Tez—he goes by Tez, that’s another thing you oughta know—it’s like he’s high all the time. His body or whatever, it can handle that. No such thing as an OD for him, boss, lemme tell you. Shit, he can fuck for a month straight if he wants to. Or have a fuckin’ daylong orgasm. There’s a girl here who—”

  “I get it,” Galvan interrupted. “I get it.” He glared up at the peak one more time. “You know what? Fuck this shit.” He cupped his hands around his mouth like a bullhorn.

  “Hey! Yo! Tez! You wanna see me, I could use a little help down here!”

  He glanced at Gum, found him pale with trepidation.

  Galvan shrugged. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?”

  No sooner had he said it than the ground beneath them disappeared, and Galvan found himself tumbling upward at tremendous speed, head over heels, ears popping, the mountainside a blur beside him, and then gone, pink sky in its place, an open vista—

  And then he was falling, the polarity reverse. Gum’s flailing form followed the same trajectory a few feet away, both of them overshooting the mountaintop and slamming toward it now—

  Galvan came down hard, side first, his hip and rib cage connecting with a springy green mosslike ground cover.

  He rolled onto his back and looked up. He was in a kind of open-air parlor of vast proportions, vegetation creeping and climbing over regal stone furniture, all of it jarringly—comfortingly?—earthlike compared to the rest of what he’d seen: no wild colors, no outlandish formations. Even the trees bore familiar fruit.

  He stood and turned to take it all in. There was something familiar about this place.

  Perhaps, he thought dizzily, he’d seen it in a dream. Glimpsed it during one of his encounters with the woman in yellow, the prize Tezcatlipoca had wrested from Cucuy and built this empire around. Perhaps this place was her attempt to re-create some semblance, some shadow, of the life she’d had.

  Where was she, then?

  He narrowed his eyes, as if she might be hiding in plain sight—then startled as a shrill, piercing cry cut through the heavy air, and spun to locate its source.

  It took him a moment to realize that it came from above. Galvan looked up and understood for the first time the limits of his own imagination.
/>   Hovering in midair, some thirty feet above, was a huge, muscled human form that could only be Tezcatlipoca. He spun like a centrifuge, or a tornado, and in his clutches was a woman—no, there were two women, both shrieking, both splayed flat, one in front of him and one in back, one faceup and one facedown, the three of them forming a six-pointed star. His glistening torso pumped in either direction as he fucked them with two enormous organs, faster and faster, spinning all the while.

  And then suddenly, the spinning stopped, and both girls flew away from him. Tezcatlipoca roared, and both his cocks grew longer and gave chase. They were the length of spears when, at precisely the same moment, they reached the girls and entered them. The girls screamed, as the god forced himself deeper inside.

  He’ll break them, Galvan thought in disbelief and horror. He’ll split them apart.

  And indeed, a moment later, with a guttural moan that shook the treetops, Tezcatlipoca climaxed and his organs tore through their torsos from inside, emerged covered in viscera just below their rib cages. He spun again and sloughed their bodies to the ground. They came down hard, one to the left of Galvan and the other to the right, lifeless, bloodied and broken.

  He stared down at them, unable to fathom what he’d just seen, and missed Tezcatlipoca’s landing.

  His transformation.

  The being Galvan saw when he looked up was tall and slight, almost elfin in the delicacy of his features, with arms that seemed too long for his body and a flat, hairless chest. The monstrous cocks were gone; he appeared asexual now, almost prepubescent. The only points of continuity were a golden glow that emanated from within his chest, and the utter blackness of his eyes.

  He stepped toward Galvan without so much as a glance at the bodies lying between them and wiped a trace of perspiration from his thin upper lip.

  “Never fear, Jess Galvan,” he said, in a voice that seemed to come from everywhere, a voice that was neither high nor low, resonant nor flinty, but all those things at once. “It is a deathless realm.”

  He gestured to the girls, and Galvan glanced down and saw that their wounds had healed. Their eyes were closed and they were breathing deeply, regularly, as if sound asleep.