Hungry Ghosts

by Stephen Blackmoore

  She looks defiant. I’ve hit a nerve. This is important to her. “Yes,” she says.

  “And she didn’t kill me because … ?”

  “She didn’t have to kill you. Just marry you. And despite what some people might think, they’re not the same thing. For me to be closer to her, linked more directly as her avatar, I had to connect with her more fully.”

  “Which meant you dying,” I say. “So you signed up for this. Did you know what was going to happen?”

  “Of course I did. She talked to me about it. Explained the whole thing. She needed an avatar. She asked me to be it. I chose this, Eric. Just like you did.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “Nobody put a shotgun to your head and made you do it.”

  She’s got me there, though I’d argue I was manipulated and didn’t know what I was signing up for. I don’t, though. What’s the point?

  She did it for a cause. People who care. My parents were like that. Always wanting to do the right thing. Been running into that a lot, lately. I can never quite figure out why. It’s like some puzzle box I can’t get open. I mean, I understand why people care about things, about making the world better. I’m just not sure why I don’t.

  “I just don’t get it is all,” I say.

  “Figure it out. Or don’t. I don’t owe you an explanation, Eric. I have a thing to do. A thing I believe in. And I’m sorry you got roped into this the way you did. I really think if you’d known beforehand that it was all of Mictlan at stake, you’d have signed on all on your own.”

  “Yeah? Well, I didn’t. And I’m not gonna be a part of it.”

  She laughs. “It’s too late for that, lover,” she says. “Too late by a long shot.”

  I drum my fingers on the steering wheel in annoyance, silence stretching between us. Finally I say, “So are you going to show me a way into Mictlan or what?”

  “Go to Mitla, south of here. It’s—”

  “The entrance to Mictlan,” I say. “Yeah, I know. It’s the fucking front door. I need something a little more discreet.”

  Mitla is a site in Oaxaca that dates back to the Zapotecs almost three thousand years ago until it fell to the Aztecs in the late 1400s. Not quite a city, not quite a palace, not quite a temple. When Cortés showed up it was the seat of their religious power where their highest priests lived and worked. He compared it to the Vatican, compared their high priest to the Pope.

  And it holds the entrance to Mictlan.

  Most people can’t see it, of course. Otherwise tourists and old archaeologists would be falling into the goddamn thing all the time. Instead of pyramids like in Chichén Itzá, it’s all low, flat buildings. Closer to the ground. Fitting for a hole to the underworld.

  I don’t know if souls bound for Mictlan pass through there or if they go in some other way, but it’s the main entrance. I go through that gate it’s a good bet Santa Muerte’s going to know pretty goddamn quick.

  “You could always kill yourself.”

  “Ha.”

  “Why should I help you?” she says. “I don’t agree with what Muerte did to you, and I’m sorry it happened. Lucy shouldn’t have been killed. But you’re siding with Mictlantecuhtli. We both know that. I won’t help you kill Santa Muerte for revenge.”

  “No, you’ll just use me as a convenient fall guy for her plan to fix Mictlan.”

  “Yes,” she says. “I will. It’s important. And I won’t let you jeopardize that by murdering her.”

  “Just because I don’t want her looking over my shoulder doesn’t mean I’m going to kill her.” She arches an eyebrow at me. “Okay, fine. Yes, I’m going to kill her. But I’m going to kill Mictlantecuhtli, too. She wants that, right? So if you get me in there, I promise I’ll go after him first.” Not a difficult thing to promise. I’m already planning on doing that.

  She runs her hands over the red, leather seat of the Caddy, the cracked dashboard. “You haven’t taken very good care of this thing.”

  “It was sitting in the land of the dead for a year. Don’t change the subject.”

  “Yeah, sitting over there would do it.” She traces her fingers across the windshield. “Wards on the glass kept the worst of it out, then?”

  “More or less.”

  “Must have been a pain in the ass getting it back.”

  “It was. Took forever to find it. Somebody put a shipping container over it on the living side. I had to push the goddamn thing twenty feet before I could bring it over. At least I finally got all my stuff back.”

  “You’re determined.”

  “Stubborn as a bulldog.”

  “I was going to go with jackass, but sure. Even if you kill Mictlantecuhtli you’re still going to try killing Santa Muerte.”

  “But if you come with me maybe you’ll be able to stop me.”

  I knew there was no way to convince her that I was on the up and up. The cuffs allow for a certain amount of compulsion. It’s what they’re designed for after all. She won’t want to get too far away from me.

  So I figure if I give her the thing she wants, Mictlantecuhtli dead, and dangle the opportunity to keep me from doing the same to Santa Muerte in front of her, maybe she’ll bite. She thinks about it, fingers tapping against her legs.

  “And if I don’t, you’re stubborn enough to find another way to do it.” She lets out a sigh and shakes her head. “I’m so going to regret this. Isla de las Muñecas. South of here in the canals of Xochimilco.”

  “Island of the Dolls? Sounds creepy.”

  “Heh. Yeah, that’s a word for it.”

  The sun is setting by the time we get out of the more modern parts of the city center and into Xochimilco. A deep orange glow in the western sky fades into blue.

  Things change fast here. Fifteen minutes ago we passed a modern football stadium. Now we’re in a dense sprawl of narrow, potholed streets, weathered cinderblock buildings.

  As Tabitha directs me through the winding streets, barely more than alleys, the cinderblock sprawl gives way to canals where ramshackle huts and small gardens share space with strawberry trees, squat tepozanes, massive Montezuma cypresses and ocotes. The air smells green and swampy, the only sound the thrumming of the Eldorado’s V-8.

  “So, what, is there a bridge or something to get to this island?” For a short bit we parallel one of the canals, a wide, dark green river of slow moving water. Brightly painted trajineras, tourist gondolas for lazing down the canal, are heading back to their docks. Boats with vendors selling food and drinks aren’t far behind them.

  “Nope,” she says. “Take a left there and park the car. You’ll have to leave the Caddy here.” I do as she says, stopping at a dirt track that heads toward a small dock at the edge of the water. A small dinghy is tied up at the end of it.

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “It’s that or swim. Come on.” She gets out of the car. I grab my messenger bag out of the back seat, get out, pop the trunk to retrieve the Benelli. Tabitha stares at me as I come down to the dock slinging the shotgun over my shoulder.

  “What the hell do you think you’re going to do with that?” she says. “Everybody in there is already dead.”

  “Better to have a shotgun and not need it, than to need a shotgun and not have it.” She shakes her head and unties the boat as I get in and grab the oars.

  “All right, which way?”

  “Just follow the current. You’ll know when you get there.”

  She pushes us off and I row down the canal. No sound but the water lapping against the boat, the buzz of insects. The night comes on quickly and soon we’re traveling in almost complete darkness, the only light coming from the shacks on the shore.

  Is she leading me into a trap? And what would that even be? She’s not going to try to kill me. Run away? She won’t get far with the cuff on her hand. The only thing I can think of is that she’ll somehow contact Santa Muerte before I can stop her and tell her where I am and what I’m doing.

  That’s a risk I�
�m willing to take. I can’t do anything out here. I need to get into Mictlan. Once I get inside eventually Santa Muerte will figure it out, whether I try to stop Tabitha or not. All I can do is delay it a little.

  If Tabitha’s telling the truth, and there’s a gate to Mictlan on this island, then once I get inside the rest is going to be a whole lot of luck. My only exposure to the place has been driving through an extension of it in Los Angeles and standing in Mictlantecuhtli’s tomb. It’s not like they make maps for the place.

  All I have to go on are legends and stories. And not all of them agree with each other. Some stories, the dead are ushered through the gates of Mictlan by Quetzalcoatl. Others say the dead are accompanied by a dog who helps them on their way. It takes four years of hard travel to reach their final judgment.

  I find myself wondering what happens to the Dead now that Quetzalcoatl’s on the outs. Do they show up on their own without him to push them through? Maybe he’s not really needed and he’s pissed off things are working fine without him. Wouldn’t surprise me. He seems pretty bitter about things.

  Mictlan has nine levels each with their own challenges and passages; a mountain made of obsidian blades, a terrifying wind, a rain of arrows, wild beasts and more. And at the end of that journey the soul finally comes to rest in a place called Chicunamictlan.

  Honestly, that sounds like a pretty fucked up afterlife. I don’t plan on going through any of it.

  My plan, such as it is, is to get through the gates, get my bearings and find Mictlantecuhtli’s tomb. I’d hoped to take the Caddy, but that’s not happening. So I expect a lot of walking. Worst case I give in and tap into Mictlantecuhtli’s power, open a hole to his tomb and shank him. Yeah, I know. It’s a shitty plan.

  “You sure you want to do this?” Tabitha says, breaking the silence. All I can see of her is her silhouette against the night sky and the glow of lights along the canal.

  “I don’t see how I have much choice.”

  “You always have a choice,” she says. “You chose to come down here. You chose vengeance.”

  “I’m choosing to stay alive.”

  “By destroying two beings thousands of years old.”

  “Maybe they shouldn’t have fucked with me, then.”

  “Do you know why I’m showing you this way into Mictlan?” she says.

  “So you can jump me the second it’s convenient?”

  She laughs. “That, yes. But more so you can see for yourself what Santa Muerte’s trying to save. It’s a broken place. Even when the dead reach their end it’s nothing but suffering. She wants to change that. Wants to make it what it’s supposed to be.”

  “And you? Is that what you want? Or is that what she wants you to want?” She gives me a flat stare, says nothing, so I drop it.

  “How close are the legends to the reality?” I say. “A mountain of obsidian knives? Wild beasts that tear your heart out? Is that worth saving? How is that not suffering?”

  “It’s suffering with a purpose. The trials are meant to cleanse the soul,” she says. “When they’re done there’s supposed to be an end to it. But they don’t get that end now. It might as well be hell.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s not my problem.”

  “I know you well enough by now to say you’re full of shit, Eric.”

  “Dead is dead,” I say. “It happens. People die, souls move on. It’s natural. If that’s where they’re supposed to end up, then that’s where they’re supposed to end up. I don’t have a problem with people dying.”

  “You act like you don’t care, but we both know that’s an act. You might not have a problem with death, but you sure as hell have a problem with suffering, don’t you? If Lucy had just died, would you be here? If she’d been in a car accident, say, or even murdered if it was quick? I don’t think so. I think you’re here, I think Santa Muerte caught you, because she made your sister suffer.”

  I stop rowing, say nothing for a long time. We float in the current, lazily heading down the canal, my hands tight on the oars. I want to beat her, throw her over the side and leave her there.

  “Strike a nerve?”

  “How much further is this place?” I say.

  “Not far. Can’t you feel it?”

  I tune out the background of magic, the whispers of old dead. And then, just on the edge of perception, there it is. Haunts. A lot of them, but weak. And at the edge of my hearing a sound I can’t quite identify.

  “Is that crying?” I look over my shoulder and see a dim glow in the distance. Tiny pinpricks of light swarm the far shore like hovering fireflies. I start rowing toward the sound.

  The closer we get, the louder the sound and the more I can feel the dead. The light becomes brighter, the noise a cacophony. A constant wailing of anguish, torture, agony. What the hell is over here?

  I let the boat bump against a row of tires tied to short wooden pilings to hold the shore together. I stare at the scene in front of me.

  True to its name Isla de las Muñecas is covered in dolls. Perched in the crooks of trees, wrapped to branches with wire, duct taped to a couple of tiny shacks, strung from the timbers of a decaying, log fence. Large and small, weathered and cracked and coated with grime. Kewpie dolls, porcelain dolls, clown dolls, rag dolls, troll dolls, bobbleheads, marionettes, puppets.

  And nailed to each doll is a child’s screaming ghost.

  Like the dolls they’re all different types. Some look to be infants, some toddlers. None looks to be more than five or six years old. Their phantom light casts everything in a pale, blue glow that casts erratic shadows as they writhe in their plastic prisons, struggle against their bonds.

  “Jesus fucking Christ.”

  “I’m pretty sure he’s not here,” Tabitha says, sadness and resignation in her voice. Even she’s not immune to this psychic onslaught. She steps out of the boat and onto the shore.

  “What the hell is all this?” I follow her, consider tying the boat, but don’t see anything to secure it with. Suppose it doesn’t matter. I doubt I’ll be coming out this way again. If I ever come out at all.

  “It’s a side door to Mictlan,” she says pitching her voice above the ghostly noise. If anyone else were with us they would wonder why we were shouting. “The man who built this place didn’t know what he was doing. Story goes he found a little girl drowned in the canal. Tried to save her and couldn’t. Later he found a doll floating in the canal and stuck it in a tree. Then he hung more and more dolls. Did it for fifty years. Folks figured he was still trying to save that girl, I guess.”

  We walk past the walls of shrieking ghosts staring at us from the trees, the doll heads swiveling to track us. Some of them twitch against the wires holding them in place. One of them falls to the ground.

  Tabitha kneels to the ground and picks up the doll, and the child’s spirit inside stops screaming. She gently places it back into the crook of the tree, holds it for a moment in place, her hand against its porcelain face. When she steps away its screams rejoin the cacophony of the damned.

  “So what’s the real story?”

  “Pretty much the same thing,” she says. “Only he killed the girl in the canal and then went on to murder the rest. He’d lure them with promises of candy or money. And then he’d bring them here and drown them. He kept pieces of them, a lock of hair, a finger. There are a few eyes around here, I’m sure. He’d put them into the dolls as trophies. I don’t think he knew the dolls would trap their souls. But if he did, he probably would have gotten off on it.”

  “What happened to him?” I hope somebody strung him up and used him as a piñata with a machete.

  “Drowned in the canal. Ironic, when you think about it. Here it is.” We stop at a wide break in the trees overgrown with vines. I can see a light shining through. She parts the vines to reveal a shimmering wall of red light wide enough to walk through hanging between the branches.

  “Well, that doesn’t look ominous at all.”

  She cocks a thumb over her shoulder.
“All that suffering back there? All those ghosts? It made this. It called to it and the door opened. That’s what Mictlan has become. Their suffering tore a hole into it.”

  “Sounds like a great place.” I can’t wait to burn it down.

  “It was. A long time ago. And there are a couple of spots that still are.”

  “You’re okay with all that back there?” I say.

  She looks past me at the strung up dolls, the shrieking ghosts of children. Her face goes flat, she chews her lower lip. Picking her words? Rationalizing what this island is so she can keep this back door open?

  “No,” she says finally. “I just can’t do anything about it.”

  “And how does Santa Muerte feel?”

  She ignores the question, and I think that’s answer enough. She steps closer to the portal. All sly smiles and snark again. “Well, we’re here. Care to carry me over the threshold, lover?”

  “Ladies first,” I say.

  “Sure you trust me? I might run off. Track down Santa Muerte. Throw a wrench in your plans.”

  “You won’t,” I say. “Not until I’ve killed Mictlantecuhtli.”

  “You’re awfully trusting.”

  “No, just banking on the selfishness of human behavior.”

  “Fair point. See you on the other side.”

  She steps through, the red light swallowing her up. I don’t think she’ll take off, and if she does she won’t get very far with that cuff on her wrist. I don’t want her waiting any longer than necessary in case she gets ideas. It’s a risk, but I have to do this.

  The wailing ghosts of murdered children stare at me with hungry eyes, mouths working like gasping fish. Who knows how far gone they are, trapped in this hell? I doubt they remember who they are, where they’re from. All they know is pain and hunger.

  Tabitha might not be able to do anything about it, but I sure as hell can.

  The dolls are the key. They hold the tortured souls in as if they’re wrapped in barbed wire. I could free them. But I’d have to do it one by one and with this many it could take hours, maybe even days.

  I don’t have time to let them loose one by one. But maybe I have another way. I pull Quetzalcoatl’s lighter from my pocket. He said it would burn anything. I wonder how far the flames will spread. Far enough, I hope, to clean this island. Far enough to set them free.