Hungry Ghosts

by Stephen Blackmoore

  And it’s spreading.

  The green stone swallows up my flesh, spreading like a wildfire. Within seconds my left hand is engulfed in stone.

  “Oh, Jesus, Eric,” Tabitha says. She looks me in the eyes and her own go wide in shock, horror plain on her face. She steps back.

  “What? I’m not gone yet. Shit. It’s not just my hand, is it?”

  “No, it’s not.”

  The vision in my left eye is suddenly tinged a light green. I tap at my face with one of my newly jade fingers and hear the cold tapping of stone on stone.

  “Is it still spreading?”

  “You can’t feel it?” she says.

  “Not really. I mean it doesn’t hurt. Feels a little numb, but not everywhere.”

  “It looks like it’s stopped. It’s covering the entire left side of your face, though.”

  I wave my hand in front of my eyes and see it go green as it passes into my left field of view. “Kinda figured that part out, yeah. I’m still moving, so there’s that at least.”

  Dammit. I hope I don’t tap Mictlantecuhtli’s power for anything else. This spreads anymore and I’m done. I draw the obsidian blade. Nothing like running out of time to keep you focused.

  I’m so close and suddenly I’m not sure what to do. I think back to my conversation with Darius. From my meeting with him I know there’s something I’m forgetting. I almost have it, but that’s the magic. If I try to remember it I can feel it just out of reach.

  I step into the tomb, a long, wide chamber that’s more a vault than anything you’d call a tomb. There are no decorations, just rough stone hollowed out hundreds of years ago. The soft light from the glowing crystals outside barely penetrates the gloom.

  The floor is still littered with the bones of Conquistadores who’d died when they went up against Mictlantecuhtli. Discarded pieces of armor, broken weapons. Now that I know what really happened here I can see the pattern of chaos. It’s clear some of the men died fighting, swords still clutched in their hands. But the way so many of the skeletons are facing, and how close they are to the door tells me that most of them died running.

  “You coming?” I say.

  “I’ll hang back,” she says. “I’m not sure Mictlantecuhtli would be thrilled to see me.”

  She’s probably right.

  I shuffle through the piles of bones littering the floor. Tabitha stands in the doorway behind me. I stop when I reach an unusual pile. Long, blackened leg bones. Cracked and burnt skulls like twisted hyenas. Elongated snouts, long, curved fangs.

  “Found the demons,” I say.

  Before they ended up down here they’d been twisted into a thing called an ebony cage, a structure made of their still-living bones which continually released an elixir of liquid magic. It’s like the magic in the local pools, only in a drinkable form. Distilled and concentrated. Useful when you need some extra muscle in your spells but don’t have the ability to pull very much.

  “You’re not screaming. That mean we’re safe?” Tabitha calls from the entrance.

  Alex had the cage under his bar in Koreatown and was using the sorts of late night dramas bars are known for to feed emotional power into it and tapped the juice coming out to sell for a tidy profit.

  After he died Vivian stuck the cage into storage where it broke, releasing dozens of these things. If they’d gotten out into the general population they’d have killed a lot of people and possessed their corpses, and L.A. would have been in the shit.

  They almost killed me but I was able to open a passage into the tomb and toss them in. I figured Mictlantecuhtli would be pissed off at having his living room invaded by a bunch of unwanted guests.

  Didn’t realize how pissed off.

  “From them, yeah,” I say. But from Mictlantecuhtli? When I was here last he’d been an unmovable statue, inert and lifeless. That was mere hours before I sent the demons here. And just after I did is when I really started my transformation to jade.

  Did that little bit wake him up enough that he could destroy all these demons? He is a god, after all, so I suppose it fits. But if that’s the case how has my continued transformation affected him? I was hoping to find him as a statue at the end of the tomb, not powerful enough to destroy demons. Suddenly I’m not sure how well this whole walk-up-and-stab-him plan is going to go.

  The farther into the tomb I get, the less light from the outside reaches it. Soon the gloom gets too strong. I can’t see the end of the chamber. I start to cast a light spell and think better of it. I can still feel Mictlantecuhtli’s power thrumming through my body. It’s like that tense twitchiness you get in your muscles when you’ve just taken some meth but it hasn’t cranked up to full blown grind your teeth levels. If I cast a spell, even a small one, will it tip me over the edge?

  “Hey,” I say. “You mind shining a light in here?”

  I feel a spark of magic as she casts a spell, and a glowing sphere appears near the ceiling casting light through the entire chamber. I can’t believe what I’m seeing. Or more to the point, what I’m not.

  “You have got to be fucking kidding me,” I say.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “Mictlantecuhtli,” I say. “He’s not here.”

  “What? No, that’s not possible.” Tabitha comes into the tomb, stepping hurriedly over bones and weapons. “How could he get out? He’s locked in jade.”

  “I’m gonna go with: Not anymore.”

  I should have guessed something like this would happen. I was banking on the idea that he wouldn’t be able to move around until he was completely free of the jade. And even if he was that he’d still be stuck in here. Wrong on both counts.

  “Is there another entrance?” Tabitha says.

  “He wouldn’t need one.”

  “So now what?” Tabitha says.

  “I’m not sure.” Where would he go? “Where’s Santa Muerte now?”

  “Probably in Chicunamictlan. She travels through Mictlan all the time, but now that the mists are open and souls can get through they’re going to be flooding the place. I can’t imagine she won’t want to be there to greet them as Mictecacihuatl.”

  I look at my left hand, the light reflecting off the polished jade. I’m glad I don’t have a mirror. I run my hand through my hair. It moves, but it feels stiff, brittle.

  I’m running out of time. Whether I use Mictlantecuhtli’s power or not, it’s still spreading. Soon, today, tomorrow, an hour from now, it’s going to be all over.

  “Then that’s where he is. Can we get there through the Crystal Road?”

  “Mostly. But there’s no guarantee she’s there. I could find her, though. She’ll either know where Mictlantecuhtli is, or she’ll be able to find him.”

  “No.” The only way Tabitha could do that is if I take off the cuff and reconnect her to Santa Muerte. I’m not prepared to do that.

  “Eric, you’re not going to last much longer. What happens if we get there and she’s not? What if she is and we can’t find him in time?”

  “I said no.” But what if she’s right? It’s a good possibility. Mictlan’s a big place. They could be anywhere. And I’m sure they know by now that I’m here and looking for them, even if they can’t find me. All things considered I don’t see how I have any other choice.

  “All right, then. Let’s get going.”

  ___

  “End of the line,” Tabitha says. Bright light shines through a cave opening and the road slopes up to meet it. We come out into another copse of madrones, more of the Cihuateteo. I can hear a quiet shift in the wood as branches bend toward us.

  “Is that normal?” I say.

  “Yes. They’re tasting the air,” Tabitha says. “Wondering if we’re a threat.” A moment later the branches shift back.

  “Guess they like us.”

  “More that they like me. I’ve been here before. They never really got along with Mictlantecuhtli.” I follow her through the grove.

  “So what is Chicunamictlan,
exactly?”

  “It’s a city. Looks a lot like Tenochtitlan or Teotihuacan, but bigger. Stone carvings, jaguar sculptures. Homes, markets, ball courts for ōllamaliztli games. Lots of tzompantli. Skull racks never really go out of style. Then there’s the Bone Palace.”

  “That doesn’t sound at all ominous.”

  “It’s just a building, Eric. It’s not even made of bone. It’s where Santa Muerte holds court. She and Mictlantecuhtli used to use it for rituals, but that hasn’t happened in half a millennium. If she’s anywhere in the city she’ll be there.”

  We push our way through the trees. Unlike when we were heading toward the Crystal Road entrance outside the mists, the trees aren’t hampering our way. They bend aside to open a path for us.

  When we get out of the copse onto a boulder-strewn desert landscape, I can see what she means. Chicunamictlan glitters on the desert horizon with a skyline to rival New York. A sprawling metropolis of Mesoamerican architecture that never existed on Earth. Stone buildings the size of skyscrapers, carved from limestone and red, volcanic rock. Everything brightly painted in reds, greens and blues, a stark contrast to the dead, colorless ruins in the land of the living.

  In the center of the city stands an immense pyramid that reaches toward the sky. When I met Santa Muerte in a slice of Mictlan that extended to L.A., she had the same thing sitting where Dodger Stadium should have been, only on a much smaller scale.

  I whistle. “Big place.”

  “And then some. There’s more underneath. Hard to pin down its size. It shares space with Xibalba.”

  “The Mayan land of the dead?” Interesting. I always assumed that all these places were sequestered from each other, but with so much overlap in religions that kind of makes sense. “If the Spanish had gotten through to here—”

  “They could have taken a hell of a lot more than Mexico.”

  What would have happened if they had? If Mictlantecuhtli hadn’t gotten rid of Darius? If Quetzalcoatl hadn’t been kicked out? Belief’s a powerful weapon. Gods have rules, constraints. Humans, not so much. What could a bunch of zealots do in a place like this? Create a new Spanish pantheon? Elevate themselves to godhood? Would the Aztecs have even been remembered?

  The more I learn, the more I think we shouldn’t be fucking with these things. Gods are bad, people are worse. “Does Santa Muerte always stay in the palace?”

  “Not all the time, no. Sometimes she wanders the streets, but eventually she’ll be back. Once she hears you’re in the city she’ll come looking for—”

  Tabitha falls face first into the ground. At first I think she’s tripped, but then she gets yanked back toward a boulder behind us, her hands scrabbling in the dirt. That’s when I see the hand grabbing her ankle and the long, ropy tail it’s attached to.

  I jump after her, but the Ahuizotl is fast. Faster than me by a long shot. Shooting it with the Browning is out of the question. Even if I could get the gun out in time I honestly don’t think I’d hit it. Same with the pocket watch. Its time bending isn’t exactly precise. It’d be just as likely to kill Tabitha.

  The only other thing I can think of is a spell. But ever since I opened the door to Mictlantecuhtli’s tomb his power’s been sitting there inside me itching to get out. And if I let it, I’m fucked.

  The trick is to cast without touching that power. It’s so tightly tied up with my own at this point I don’t know if that’s possible. But if I don’t, who knows what the Ahuizotl will do to Tabitha.

  I throw out a minor levitation spell that I hope is strong enough to help, but not so strong that it will tip me over the edge. I don’t have to use magic to stop the Ahuizotl, I just need to slow it down.

  The tail pulls taut as my spell takes hold, grabbing it and yanking it toward me. I haven’t stopped running and the pause before it breaks free is just enough for me to get close in with the obsidian blade.

  I slash at the tail, opening it along its length, hot blood spraying from the wound. The Ahuizotl lets loose a shriek, dropping Tabitha and jerking back its tail, the hand at its end spasming.

  Tabitha scrambles to her feet as the Ahuizotl leaps to the top of the boulder it had been hiding behind. It lets loose a roar, showing fangs dripping with green pus. It looks a lot more dangerous up close than when I saw it at the entrance to the Crystal Road.

  It occurs to me, as I’m standing there holding Mictlantecuhtli’s blade, that maybe I should have pulled out the Browning, instead. Blowing holes into it from a distance just seems like a better idea than trying to take it on with a glorified steak knife.

  A ball of blue fire flies over my shoulder and slams into the Ahuizotl’s chest, throwing it off the boulder and setting it ablaze. Of course. Just because I can’t cast spells, doesn’t mean Tabitha can’t.

  “Come on,” she says, grabbing my hand and pulling me along with her. We run as fast as we can.

  “You don’t think that killed it?” I say.

  “I know it didn’t. I’ve tried that before. Makes it nice and pissed off, though.”

  “That’s a plus how?”

  “It isn’t.”

  The Ahuizotl roars behind us. I can hear it running. I’m afraid to look back, but I know that if I don’t do something it’s just going to keep coming.

  I pull the Browning and turn around to face it, knife in one hand, gun in the other. I get off two shots that hit center mass and do fuck-all to slow it down. Twenty feet away from me it leaps. I lift Mictlantecuhtli’s blade high as it comes down on top of me. A part of my mind is trying to figure out how big it is. Too big for a jaguar. Too small for a tiger. Though once you get past really fucking big, it’s pretty much a moot point.

  The rest of me only knows that it’s really fucking heavy and fast and it feels like being hit with a truck. Its weight bears down on me, and I slam into the ground.

  Its roar turns into a scream as the blade punches through its abdomen. Hot blood sprays me from its opened gut. I push the blade down, ripping through more of its flesh. It rolls away, slashing its claws against my side, shredding my jacket and striking sparks when they hit the stone.

  I try to get up but the wind’s been knocked out of me. I can’t move. It’s then that I realize I don’t have the knife or the Browning anymore. The blade stuck in the Ahuizotl’s belly when it rolled off me, flinging it into the dirt a good ten feet away. I don’t see the gun anywhere.

  I use the same levitation spell to grab the knife, but I twist the magic a bit to pull it to me. It zips toward me, but before I can get hold of it the grasping hand at the end of the Ahuizotl’s tail wraps around my neck and jerks me up off the ground. It brings me close, looks at me with bright, green eyes, its face twisted into a scowl of pure hatred.

  “Liar,” it screams. “Welcher, cheater, grifter. What do you have to say?” It loosens its grip enough that I can take a breath.

  “I’d say somebody bought you some of that word-a-day toilet paper.” My voice comes out in a strained croak.

  “Quetzalcoatl is waiting. Why have you not fulfilled your bargain? Why does Mictlan not burn?”

  It takes a second for me to realize it’s not speaking English but I can understand it just fine. Nahuatl? Good bet. I had something similar with Mictlantecuhtli last year, but I couldn’t tell because all I heard was English. The Ahuizotl looks like a badly dubbed Kung Fu flick.

  “You do get that you’re gonna go up like everything else here, right?”

  It tightens its grip around my neck. “As was promised me, yes. Mictlan burns, and I am released.”

  “So he did send you. I told him I had things to do first.”

  “I have been waiting for five hundred years to be free of this hole.” It loops its tail around my neck a couple of times and squeezes tighter. I can feel trapped blood pounding inside my skull. The edges of my vision fade to gray. You’d think with all this turning to stone crap I’d be immune to strangulation. But no. I claw at its tail, try to loosen its grip. It’s no use.

&nb
sp; “If you will not free me with the release of death then I will free you and feast on your carcass. I will crunch your bones between my teeth and lap up your blood. You are no good to me if you will not fulfill your end of the bargain.”

  I would really like to tell it that I’d be happy to keep up my end of the bargain, but that I’ll have to be alive to do it. But its grip is too tight and I can’t get a whisper out, much less a full sentence.

  “You want to be free?” Tabitha says behind it. “I’ll free you.” It whips its head around to face her as she steps in close, slashing Mictlantecuhtli’s blade hard through its throat. The knife tears a massive gash that opens up all the way to its spine.

  Arterial blood fountains out of its neck like a busted hydrant. It tries to slash at her, but its already dying and she easily blocks each strike with the knife, slicing into the hands, lopping off fingers.

  It recoils from the pain, but Tabitha keeps up her attack. She steps in close, reaching up into the massive gash in its throat and yanking its tongue out through the hole. On one hand, Jesus fucking Christ. On the other, she just pulled off a pretty flawless Colombian Necktie.

  The Ahuizotl knocks her aside, scrabbles at its throat with its lacerated hands. The tail loosens around my neck and I fall to the ground. The Ahuizotl tips over, a thick, wet sound coming from its ravaged throat. Tabitha rushes it again, slashing with the knife. It tries in vain to ward off Tabitha’s attack. When it finally stops moving Tabitha doesn’t seem to notice. She keeps slashing at it with the knife like a crazed butcher. I pull myself free of the tail, wait until her strikes slow and finally stop.

  She stands next to the Ahuizotl’s corpse, her breath coming in hitching gasps. She wipes blood out of her eyes. We’re both drenched in it.

  I come up to her and before I realize what’s happening, she has the Browning pointed at my head.

  “Tabitha—”

  “You are going to tell me about Quetzalcoatl and this burning down Mictlan bullshit right the fuck now,” she says. “Or I will goddamn shoot you.”