I flip it open and flick the striker until I get a low, blue flame. It doesn’t look any different from a normal one. Quetzalcoatl said in Mictlan it would burn the whole place to the ground. I really, really hope it doesn’t spread quite so far on this side of the veil.
I touch the lighter to the ground where it catches on dead leaves, engulfs them in blue fire. The flames spread with unnatural speed, crawling across the moist earth, up into the trees.
The screams of the children rise in pitch and volume and I wonder if I’ve made things worse. Panicked shrieks as the flames tear them from their prisons. Plastic melts, porcelain cracks. The dolls explode from the heat. Twisted wires holding them in place crumble to dust. Thick gouts of black smoke belch toward the sky and the shacks and fence are consumed.
The screams die as each ghost pulls itself free from its prison, only to be replaced with a terrified mewling. Shredded souls trapped so long with their murderer they don’t know what to do. They swarm me, buzzing around me like bees.
I don’t know where they need to go, either. Like all ghosts, they’ll fade away, bleed off to whatever promised land awaits them. But it could take time. Until then they’re going to be miserable and afraid. I don’t know how to help them. I could do an exorcism, but that takes time and materials. I don’t have enough of either. Setting them free is the best I can do.
The flames hit the water, lapping at the shore, and set it to boiling before dying out. It’s persistent, I’ll give it that. In the wrong hands the lighter could really fuck things up.
I watch the island burn until the flames threaten to turn back on me. I wait as long as I dare, smoke making my eyes sting, making it hard to breathe. I cover my mouth and wait. The final doll cracks open and the tormented child’s soul inside it bursts free.
This island of trapped children is just the portal to Mictlan. Jesus. Is it this bad inside? Am I walking into Hell here? Have I bitten off more than I can chew?
Suppose it doesn’t matter. I’m committed. I step through the portal, letting Mictlan swallow me up, shaken and afraid. Is this whole thing just a stunningly bad idea?
Guess I’ll find out.
The oppressive heat from the flames gives way to the dry, cracking heat of a desert at high noon. Instead of the stink of smoke and burning plastic the air is filled with the fetid stench of blood and rot.
Like when I went to Mictlan by way of Los Angeles the landscape is almost identical in structure if not form. The canal behind me is a thick river of blood. The ground is made of shattered skulls, the trees are bone. Flaps of desiccated skin and sinew hang from the branches in a sick mockery of leaves. Nearby I can see the buildings of the barrio we drove through to get here, each building constructed from bones.
In the distance where Mexico City proper should be are tall, bone pyramids that rise toward the sky. I can see a shimmer of red along their sides, light reflected up from something I can’t see. The buildings surrounding it are low and compact, crazy sprawl of the city nothing like the one on the living side. Beyond that I see a landscape of bleached bone, mountains of black glass.
Tabitha sits on a bleached pile of skulls waiting for me, the bone trees swaying their flesh leaves in the breeze. “Took you a while,” she says. She stands, frowning at me. Comes close and runs a finger across my forehead, coming away with it covered in soot. Behind me the portal to Isla de las Muñecas shudders, the light changing from a deep red to a pale blue.
It shatters like glass, exploding shards of light over us with a sound like a bomb going off. We both instinctively duck, but when the light hits us it fades into nothing.
“What the hell did you do?” The way she says it doesn’t sound like an accusation.
I wipe soot from my face with the back of my hand, spit ash out of my mouth. “Set something right. So where are we?”
From the look on her face she wants to ask more but doesn’t. She’s not stupid. She knows what I did. Even if she doesn’t know how I did it.
“Past some of the rougher spots,” she says. “We have the obsidian mountains to get through, but the worst of those are behind us. No knives flaying the skin from our bones.”
“That’s a plus.”
“It’s not an easy hike to get to Mictlantecuhtli’s tomb. All the buildings this far out are obstacles more than anything. Window dressing and not much else. I know a bit of a shortcut nearby. It sucks, but it beats slogging through all this crap.”
I nod toward Mexico City and the bone pyramids. “And that?”
If I’m oriented right, on the living side that area would be either Tenochtitlan or Tlatelolco, two Aztec cities that sat where Mexico City is today. But these pyramids here are larger than I recall from the books I’ve read about them. Instead of clean lines and geometric steps, these are misshapen, lopsided, twisted in weird ways.
“A joke,” she says. “Mictlantecuhtli built those to ‘honor’ Huitzilopochtli. Tenochtitlan was his home and he demanded sacrifices at his temples. Sun god, warrior god. Mictlantecuhtli thought he was an asshole, so he made a mockery of his temples and the city.”
The landscape isn’t exactly based on the area today, and it isn’t exactly from five hundred years ago. Out here on Isla de las Muñecas it’s largely the same as it is in the living world. But further afield, with the pyramids in the distance, it’s clearly Tenochtitlan. Which means that red reflected light is probably Lake Texcoco where the city sat on an island before the Spanish started draining the water.
A canal full of blood is one thing, but a whole lake? Ugh.
“Nothing for Tlaloc?” Huitzilopochtli and Tlaloc, sun god and rain god, ruled in this area, sometimes sharing space, certainly sharing sacrifices. I think back to the map of Mexico City. I passed their twin temples out by the Mexico City Cathedral. That gives me a reference point. I feel a little better knowing roughly where we are.
Tabitha shrugs. “Mictlantecuhtli didn’t much care about him.”
“Isn’t Quetzalcoatl supposed to be here to usher the dead into Mictlan? I don’t see him.” And of course I don’t expect to. He wants this place to burn. If he were here, he’d do it himself. But I’m curious about why.
“At the main entrance down in Mitla, not here. And he hasn’t done it in about five hundred years. There was a disagreement. He sided with the Spanish.”
“Why? Domestic disputes between gods seem to be a thing around here.”
Interesting. Mictlantecuhtli told me about how a Spanish priest led an army of Conquistadores into Mictlan in the hopes that they could use it as a springboard to take the other lands of the Aztec gods. He said he lured them into a trap, cut them off from their weapon, but never said what that weapon was.
Was it Quetzalcoatl? It might explain how the Spanish did so well against the Aztec gods, if not the Aztecs themselves. But why side with the Spanish? Did he see the way the tide was turning?
I remember reading about a battle at Cholula, where the Aztecs had a small force and were hoping to use Quetzalcoatl’s power against the Spanish. They got their asses handed to them.
Did Quetzalcoatl forsake them? Or was he powerless to help? That’s the funny thing about gods. So much of their power is smoke and mirrors. Real world influence is sketchy at best. They’re much better with belief and magic than they are with cold, hard fact.
Trying to figure out the motives of gods gives me a headache so I shut down that line of thinking. I’ll figure it out. Or I won’t. He’s not really my problem. I have an agreement to keep with him. That’s all.
“Shit happens. Isn’t that true for everybody?” She stands up from her pile of skulls, stretches until her back pops. “Come on. It’s a long way off.”
“You said you know a shortcut?”
“Yeah. It’ll get us up into another mountain range near Teocoyocualloa.”
My head spins as she pronounces it. So many Nahuatl words give me a headache. “That’s the part of Mictlan where wild animals try to eat your heart?”
&n
bsp; “Yeah. Don’t let them do that. Hope you’ve been keeping up with your cardio. Come on.” She leads me to the banks of the blood river. The thick, coppery stink of it is overwhelming.
“We are not swimming through that.”
Tabitha makes a face like she’s just bitten into a cockroach. “Ew. No.” She puts her hand out over the shore, palm down. Then jerks it up while making a fist.
The air fills with the scent of roses and smoke and I feel … something. It’s not magic like I normally know it, and it’s not the same energy that I feel when I call up Mictlantecuhtli’s power. I’ve never felt this with Santa Muerte, but it’s obviously her power Tabitha’s tapping into. The scent gives it away.
The bones at our feet shudder, leap into the air like they’re on strings. They clack together, strands of sinew wrapping themselves around connections, joints snapping into place like some nightmare museum exhibit. A few moments later the bones stop dancing.
“It’s a boat,” I say.
“You’re very perceptive. I can see why La Señora chose you.”
It’s less a boat and more a barge, like the trajineras that take tourists down the canals, only not as large or as colorful. A pole made up of linked together femurs wrapped in tendons leans up against its side.
“Help me get it into the canal,” she says. We push and it slides easily off the shore. Tabitha hops in and I follow, picking up the pole and pushing us off.
“Which way?” I say.
“Back the way we came.” The barge glides through the river of blood.
Tabitha sits on the gunwale staring silently out at the shore, frowning at the landscape. I can’t tell what she’s thinking. I try not to care, but I’m having trouble with that. I leave her alone and don’t say anything.
Occasionally I see something break the surface behind us, a fin or a piece of flotsam. I can’t tell. I don’t want to know what could possibly live in this.
“Think you can push the barge a little faster?” Tabitha says, eyeing a patch of bubbles in our wake.
“This boat isn’t the most stable thing to stand in. I’d really rather not fall in and have to swim through a river of blood, thanks.”
“No, you really don’t.” Tabitha puts her hand out and a few long bones disengage from the side of the boat and click into another barge pole. She dips the pole into the river and shoves.
“Should I be worried?”
“You ever hear of the Ahuizotl?”
“Sounds vaguely familiar,” I say.
“It’s a sort of cat-dog with hands instead of paws and a prehensile tail that ends with another hand. About the size of a jaguar. It’s pretty unpleasant.”
“And that’s it behind us?”
“If we’re lucky.”
I don’t want to know what it might be if we’re not lucky. I put my back into pushing the boat faster, my eyes on the bubbles frothing behind us. Between the two of us we gain some distance and soon the bubbles disappear. Whatever’s been following has lost interest. I spend the rest of the time watching out for anything that might come leaping out of the blood at us.
We come ashore at a dock that juts out into the canal. Bleached white bone like everything else here except for the red stain from the blood lapping at its pilings. Further back is the Mictlan version of the streets we drove through to get here.
When we get out onto the dock Tabitha gestures at the boat with her hand and it rapidly deconstructs itself and sinks beneath the blood.
We walk through the bone streets, past buildings that would make H.R. Giger cream his jeans. Our feet crunch through shards of skulls like gravel. The heat is more oppressive here than out on the boat. Sweat spreads black soot from the island fire streaking down my face, soaking my shirt. Great. I get this far and I’m going to die of dehydration. I pull off my coat, roll up my sleeves. I catch Tabitha looking at my arms when I do it, no doubt wondering how much more of me has been invaded by jade.
“Shouldn’t there be, I dunno, more Dead here?” I say. “Seems kind of empty.” We haven’t seen anyone since we came through the portal. Even when I drove through the part of Mictlan that extended up to L.A. there were souls around. Not many, but enough that I noticed them. Here there are just empty buildings, silent streets.
“Trust me, that’s a good thing. There are some things we don’t want to run into out here. I told you Mictlan is broken. Just because Santa Muerte rules doesn’t mean she has complete control over it.”
“What, like the locals do? They’re dead.” I try to keep the tone light, but after the Ahuizotl in the river I know this is serious. Besides the challenges I’ve read about, I don’t know what else is here. And if Mictlan is in as bad a shape as she says it is, there’s no telling what kind of nastiness is running around.
I don’t know how much of my magic I can tap into. I can feel a trickle of power in the area, but it’s faint and tastes sour, like spoiled milk. I’m not sure what will happen if I tap it and I don’t trust Tabitha to tell me the truth.
Plus there’s the problem that if I only have my own power to use that won’t last long if I have to do anything big. It’ll come back, but slowly. And if I pull too much and end up inadvertently grabbing Mictlantecuhtli’s power things will go south in a hurry.
“Most of the dead who came in after everything went to shit are Aztecs killed in the war with the Spanish,” she says. “Lately, it’s been devotees of Santa Muerte. But with Mictlantecuhtli out of the picture they can’t reach the end of their journey. So they wander, waiting for things to get better.”
“They don’t sound so bad.”
“Dead warriors?” she says. “The Narcotraficantes, or even the police who follow La Señora? Some of them are here, too. We do not want to run into them.”
“And you said I wouldn’t need the shotgun.”
“Shotgun’s gonna do sweet fuck-all, Eric. They’re already dead. You’re not.”
We come out past the buildings, through the narrow, winding streets and onto a wide road heading toward the pyramids in the distance. Bone trees grow thick on either side.
I feel a weird rumbling through my feet. Does Mictlan have earthquakes? No. It doesn’t feel like that. Too steady, too low. I can see a thin cloud of dust further down the road. “Anything else we need to worry about?”
“Too many to list. This is why Santa Muerte needs you. Look at this place. Before the Fall this was filled with souls on their journey to their final rest in Chicunamictlan. It was a rough existence for them, being judged by your gods is never easy, but it was more like the world outside than this. There were plants, water. Servitors of the dead to help the souls on their journey. Now look at it. Discarded scraps of flesh and bone. The rivers are blood for fuck sake.” She bends down and picks up a fragment of a skull and tosses it into the distance.
Does she really care? It’s not like Tabitha is old enough to have seen it. How much of this conversation is Tabitha and how much is the piece of Santa Muerte grafted to her soul? Is there any difference?
“And having a king in place would solve this?”
“This place needs two rulers,” she says. “Mictecacihuatl and Mictlantecuhtli had their own duties in taking care of this place. They can’t do each other’s job.”
That dust storm is really starting to kick up. Tabitha hasn’t noticed it, yet, and I’m not sure if it’s something to worry about. I nod toward it. “Should we try to find cover or something?” Not that there’s any I can see besides the trees. And though there are a lot of them, their threadbare trunks won’t offer much protection. Maybe we can dig a hole in the road and cover ourselves with bones.
Tabitha squints at the cloud. “Shit.”
The dust is spreading in a wide column on the horizon. Instead of the whistle of wind there’s a rumble that sounds like car engines. It takes me a second to realize that that’s because it is the sound of car engines.
“What the hell is that?”
Tabitha starts running toward them. �
�The narcos I was talking about. Probably some of the Aztecs they’ve roped into joining up with them.”
I break into a run and follow her. Oddly, we’re running toward the column of dust.
Of all the things I was expecting about Mictlan, this is so not one of them.
“They’re in cars? Where the fuck did they get cars?”
“How the hell should I know? I told you things have gone to shit around here.”
She cuts sharply to the left through a break in the trees, kicking up pieces of skull that clattered behind her. Not far off I can see a low hill. At first I think it’s just another bone pile, a wrinkle in the landscape, but there’s a hole in it that becomes apparent the closer I get to it.
“Jesus, Tabitha, what is this? Mad Max?”
“In some places, pretty much. Hurry up, we’re almost there.”
Wherever we’re going we better get there fast because the people chasing us are almost on us. I look over my shoulder and see five vehicles that can only be called cars from the fact that they’ve got wheels and move fast. They burst through the trees, scattering the trunks like tenpins.
The cars look handmade. Sheets of stitched together skin lashed over bone struts. Wheels made out of, shit, I don’t know what the hell they’re made out of, but it’s sure as hell not rubber. Black smoke belches out the back. The cars are bone and sinew like everything else in this nightmare land. And for all that they’re terrifying, there’s an absurdity to them I just can’t wrap my mind around. These things are more Flintstones than they are V8 Interceptor.
“You know, if they’re looking for us,” I yell over the noise of the engines, “the only hole that’s visible for miles might be one of the first places they look.” The engines are getting louder. What the hell do they use for fuel?
“It’s an entrance,” she yells. “To the shortcut. They won’t be able to go in there.”
Hungry Ghosts Page 9
