That wasn’t helping either.
He closed his eyes and ground his teeth together, tried to concentrate. To cut through the blaring cacophony, subdue the terror.
Master himself.
You’ve come this far.
You ain’t leaving this room alive.
So get it up and save the world, motherfucker.
But it was as if he’d already begun the process of abandoning his body. Only the thinnest filament of sensation connected him and his mind to his sex.
He groped with a hand, but neither part felt like it was his own. A cold sweat broke out across his brow, beneath his arms. He felt nauseated, feverish, as if his body was already breaking down, crumbling, returning to the earth.
And then, all of a sudden, Galvan felt her hands on him. Her mouth. His body came back into focus. He opened his eyes, looked down, and saw the sculpted porcelain curve of her back as she bent over him, and every vision he’d ever had of Chacanza came flooding into his mind, as if the dam holding them back had broken.
Cucuy was loose inside him, frenzied and desperate but also confused.
Conflicted.
Excited.
Those haunting dreams of the woman in yellow had not been Galvan’s alone; for five hundred years, the Terrible One had dreamed of his bride. They had called out to each other, beckoned across the vast reaches of space and time.
They were one being. They completed each other. And though he railed against it, recoiled from it, unfurled a litany of threats and pleas and lies, a part of Cucuy wanted this.
Wanted her, even if having her destroyed him.
If he hadn’t, Galvan’s body could not have cooperated.
As it was doing now.
Lust filled him, and he reached down and took Chacanza’s face in his hands. She took her mouth off his cock, stared up at him, spoke in a throaty whisper.
“Take me, Cualli. Let us bring each other peace.”
She took his hand, led Galvan to the bed. He eased inside her and heard himself moan, guttural and low, starbursts of color filling his field of vision. Cucuy’s presence was a subsonic rumble inside him now, like a cat’s purr, bespeaking some incomprehensible mixture of pleasure and violence, a precise fault line separating abandon and defeat.
She began to move beneath him, hips undulating, one hand pressed to his chest and the other wrapped around the hilt of the knife.
“Don’t do it yet,” he grunted. “Wait a little while.”
Chacanza’s legs were like a vise grip, locked around his back. She nodded.
“Yes. I will enjoy you first, my love.”
Galvan closed his eyes. He didn’t want to know when it was coming. Endorphins he’d never known existed saturated his body; he was experiencing heights of sensation he’d never dreamed possible, as far beyond normal human experience as the strength, the speed with which Cualli’s presence had endowed him.
I should have done more of this.
He felt his release building, mounting inside him, and Galvan’s eyes popped open.
Chacanza stared back, emerald eyes blazing like some otherworldly fire, and Galvan knew it was time.
His scream was pain and ecstasy at once, as Galvan came and the knife tore through his chest. Chacanza’s hand plunged inside him, wrapped itself around the beating muscle, ripped it from its mooring of tissue and vein.
She shoved it in her mouth, and they died staring into each other’s eyes.
Again.
EPILOGUE
No blackness this time.
No flurry of bats, no half-formed waiting room, no colorless ocean in the sky.
Those histrionics, he guessed, were reserved for the new arrivals.
Not the motherfuckers with the frequent customer punch cards.
Galvan awakened as if from a nap, naked and unscarred, heart beating quietly inside his chest. He was in a garden, strange and familiar at once. The place had changed in the time he’d been gone, but there was no mistaking it.
When the soul and body are severed from each other in a manner that is unnatural . . .
Galvan rose and looked around. There was a pall over the realm, somehow; the once-vibrant colors seemed muted, drained, as if Tezcatlipoca’s kingdom were in mourning.
Which, it dawned on him now, was precisely the case.
The Dominio Gris had lost a queen. He felt it suddenly, acutely. Chacanza had been unmade. Her soul and body reunited and passed blissfully out of existence. She was at rest.
That was the price Tezcatlipoca had paid to know that he was safe, that he could not be summoned back from this land of invention and depravity. He’d given up his queen, just as he’d forced Cucuy to do.
Cucuy.
Galvan felt his heartbeat accelerate as he considered the priest’s fate.
Let us bring each other peace, Cualli.
Chacanza had believed it. Mercy had guided her hand. What she had done, she had done for them both. To rejoin what had been torn asunder, rid the universe of the twinned abominations Tezcatlipoca had brought into being.
But perhaps Tezcatlipoca had other ideas. Perhaps his gambit had been about more than securing the borders of his land, eliminating any challenge to his timeless reign.
Perhaps his own capacity for cruelty bored him. Perhaps the beings who populated this realm, with their limitless capacity to endure it, did too.
Just then, a voice broke the silence.
“Maybe you’re wondering where everybody is.”
Galvan turned to see Gum picking his way across a vast, empty expanse of light pink sand.
And indeed, just as he said, the place was utterly devoid of life.
“Yes,” he heard himself say, in a voice sludgy with disuse.
“Come with me.” Gum beckoned, and Galvan followed.
In the distance, beyond a sweeping hill, a sound like thunder boomed. They walked toward it.
“So,” Gum said, “how was that shit, anyway?”
Galvan scowled at him.
“You know. The queen.”
And Gum made the finger-in-the-hole gesture, like some third-grade punk. Without thinking, Galvan swung a fist and knocked him on his ass.
“Whoa, whoa. Take it easy.” Gum raised his palms in surrender, and Galvan shook his head, extended a hand, hauled him back up.
“She died a hero,” he said. “Heroine. Whatever. That’s all you need to know.”
Gum shut the fuck up, and they walked on.
“Well, shit’s been crazy here, boss. When she died, Tezcatlipoca shut everything down. I’m talking no light, no water, no fucking atmosphere. It was like being a bug stuck in amber. Total sensory deprivation, except for that.” Gum gestured at the hill, the sound. “His screams. Seemed like it lasted forever.”
Galvan furrowed his brow. “How long’s it been since—” he started to ask, but it didn’t matter. Time didn’t work the same here anyway.
He’d have to get used to that.
“And it’s only gonna get crazier,” Gum concluded, as they reached the top of the hill. “See what I mean?”
Galvan looked, and his jaw dropped.
Sitting low above the valley was the ocean in the sky. It churned with pregnant fury, a swirl of pastel hues.
Below, the girls swarmed the field—all twenty-some-odd thousand of them. They stared up at the sky, rapt and expectant, as the ocean shaped itself into a funnel, a tornado.
Tezcatlipoca floated above them, his form massive, his golden glow filling the air. And as the funnel deepened, his booming cries of anguish changed.
Grew deeper.
Became a maniacal laugh more terrifying than any wail of sorrow.
The tornado disgorged what was contained within in, and the god’s laughter reached a crescendo.
A young man, clad in robes of pure white, spun through the air in what seemed like slow motion and then crashed to the ground.
Silence, sudden and absolute.
Tezcatlipoca alighted a few paces aw
ay, strode to the supine newcomer as the girls crowded around, jostling for position.
The man lifted his head an instant before the god grabbed his mane of jet-black hair and jerked him to his feet.
It was Cualli.
Cualli, tall and fresh and beautiful.
Cualli as he must have looked when the world was young and uncorrupted.
Cualli, gazing at the women he had doomed.
The god he had served.
The god he had betrayed.
The very beings at whose eternal mercy he now found himself.
Though mercy was a word that had no place here.
For some reason he could not explain, Galvan felt a sudden, uncontrollable urge to help him, an inexplicable sense that even in this land beyond all reckoning, their fates were still intertwined.
“Welcome,” Tezcatlipoca said. “You have no idea how badly I have wanted to see you again, Cualli.”
And the god’s laughter boomed across his kingdom.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ADAM MANSBACH is the author of the instant New York Times bestsellers Go the F**k to Sleep and You Have to F**king Eat, as well as the novels The Dead Run, Rage is Back, Angry Black White Boy, and The End of the Jews, the winner of the California Book Award. He was the 2009–2011 New Voices Professor of Fiction at Rutgers University, a 2012 Sundance Screenwriting Lab Fellow, a 2013 Berkeley Repertory Theater Writing Fellow, and a 2015 Artist in Residence at Stanford University’s Institute for Diversity in the Arts. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, Esquire, and The Believer, and on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. He lives in Berkeley, California.
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ALSO BY ADAM MANSBACH
You Have to F**king Eat
The Dead Run
Rage Is Back
Go the F**k to Sleep
The End of the Jews
Angry Black White Boy
Shackling Water
genius b-boy cynics getting weeded in the garden of delights
CREDITS
Cover designed by Richard Aquan
Cover photograph © by Helene Havard / Arcangel Images
COPYRIGHT
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE DEVIL’S BAG MAN. Copyright © 2015 by Adam Mansbach. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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FIRST EDITION
EPUB Edition JULY 2015 ISBN 9780062199706
ISBN 978-0-06-219968-3 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-06-243372-5 (international edition)
1516171819OV/RRD10987654321
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