“Nowhere to go. Nowhere to run.”
I took a tentative step toward the counter. One prescription bottle mentioned anxiety, another depression. A third was labeled Zyprexa.
“That one’s to suppress the symptoms of the delusional disorder my doctor thinks I have,” she said, reaching for the vodka. “They use it mostly with schizophrenics and psychotics. I’m not either one but they gave it to me anyway. I take it, hell I take everything they give me. Can’t do anything worse to me than the shit already in my head.”
Though I was the last one to advise anybody on their consumption of alcohol, I said, “You probably shouldn’t be drinking if you’re on all this.”
Ignoring me, she threw back a few gulps then returned the bottle to her side with a weary sigh. “I’ve been waiting for you, or somebody like you.” She studied me with pained, glassy eyes. “You in the game?”
It took me a few seconds to realize what she meant. “I’m a writer not an investigator. Martin’s an old friend and I’m doing this as a favor to his mother.”
“Some favor. Old bitch ought to be put down just for bringing him into the world. Told me she was dying when she hired me. She’s still hanging on, huh?”
I leaned against the counter and feigned nonchalance, keeping a close eye on the gun. “I understand you went south of the border looking for Martin.”
“How old?” she asked, one hand still on the cross.
“Excuse me?”
“You said he was an old friend.” Her voice was shaky now. “How old?”
“When we were kids, I haven’t seen him in years.”
“I was in the Army once.”
I was afraid she was already too far gone to be of any use to me. “OK.”
“Cop too for awhile. Then I got into this. I specialized in missing persons. Mostly kids—runaways and abductees—husbands skipping out on child support payments or housewives who take off to do the grocery shopping and never come home. But not anymore, I got to go on disability now. Can’t function properly, the doctors said. Whole world can’t function properly. It’s damned. That’s why he’s there…here…among us.” She looked to the window, as if distracted by something outside. “Been all over the country, all over the world tracking people, some that didn’t want to be found and some that needed finding so bad it was their only chance. You wouldn’t believe the things I’ve seen. But I never ran into anything like I did down there.”
“What did you run into?”
“Ask his mother, or that perky stuck-up bitch with the big tits and the glasses. I told them both I couldn’t bring him back, couldn’t force him. I thought he was just some nut out in the desert playing Manson or some shit with a bunch of drugged out assholes. I thought he was bullshit.”
“Isn’t he?”
“No,” she said softly. “No.”
“What happened, Connie?”
Her eyes crept suspiciously along the walls. “He’s watching us you know. Right now, he’s watching, listening to every word we say.”
Fear gripped me by the throat. “What happened in Mexico?”
Can you feel it on your throat, in your bones?
“I never saw him,” she said. “But he was close. I could feel him. Inside me…in my head…moving in my blood. Same as you can feel him right now.”
I dream of the dead.
“When you were in Tijuana,” I pressed, “did you talk to a man named Jamie Wheeler?”
Connie let the blanket fall off her shoulders then ran a shaking hand over her face to the top of her head. “I’ve never had much use for pervert priests.”
I crouched down but kept a safe distance. “You hired a man named Rudy Bosco to take you to Martin, to get you through El Corredor de Demonios—The Corridor of Demons—do you remember? You were set to go and then something happened and you came home.”
She grabbed another swig of vodka then held the small cross up so the light from the window could catch it. “You a believer?”
“Used to be.”
“Lost your faith?”
“Something like that.”
“Better get it back, there’s not a lot of time.” Her eyes turned cold and lifeless again. “You don’t even know why you’re going there, do you?”
“Why don’t you tell me?”
“The guy that went before me—Thompson—he didn’t know. I didn’t know. Now you don’t know.” Connie glanced at the gun. “But he knows. It wasn’t us he wanted, it’s you. He’s waiting on you.”
“Martin knows I’m coming?”
“You don’t even know what he is!” she said, screaming suddenly and slamming her fists down onto the floor on either side of her. “Didn’t you hear me? He’s watching! Of course he knows! He knew I was there! He knew!”
I didn’t want her to go for the gun, so I slowly stood up and took a step back. “All right, take it easy.”
She calmed quickly, though her cheeks were streaked with tears. “They’re all gonna die out there. That’s what he said. He keeps saying it, I know you can’t hear him but I can, I—I can, he…he whispers these horrible things to me and I can’t make him stop. No matter what I do he won’t stop.”
I didn’t even know this woman, but seeing anyone in this condition was heartbreaking. “Connie, you need to get in touch with your doctor.” I wanted to open a window. The air was stale and stagnant, and it felt like the walls were closing in on me. But I stayed in the doorway. “You can’t stay here like this, do you understand? Can I call someone for you?”
“He sent them for me at night.” Her voice became a detached monotone. She stared at the floor, seeing things I could only imagine. “It’s primal. The dark, the night, it’s primal. He knows that. He understands the things that frighten us so deep in our souls that they’re written into our genetic makeup, and he knows how to use them against us. At night, he…he sent them for me at night.”
Lightning crashed in my head, memories and nightmares, rain and blood pouring over scar tissue stretched taut over muscle and bone, all of it blinking like strobe lights as inhuman cries screeched across barriers of time and matter, that which was possible and those things I’d been taught to believe could only exist in bad dreams, fantasy, or the crippled and diseased minds of people like Connie Joseph. And with it came horrible terror that threatened to lay waste to whatever scraps of sanity I could still claim as my own, the same terror I’d felt all those years before cowering under blankets in my bedroom, certain God was punishing me, damning me for my iniquity.
She looked up from the floor and directly into my eyes. She knew the fear in me, recognized it for what it was because she felt it too.
I steadied myself against the doorframe. “What the hell did he do to you?”
“I stayed at this fleabag hotel so I could keep a low profile,” she explained. “Kind of place nobody bothers you, nobody pays any attention. I know people heard my screams, there’s no way they couldn’t have. But no one came, no one from the hotel or the streets, not even the policía. They’re all afraid, they—they know what he is and why he’s there. They fear his negromancia—necromancy, divination by magia negra—get it? Black magic, sorcery and communication with the dead. They fear him…and they should. His followers call him Papá, but the others only talk about him in whispers. And when they do, they call him what he really is.” Slowly, Connie got to her knees and raised her sweatshirt up over her midriff, stopping just shy of her chest. The undersides of her breasts were visible, and below them, in the space between her breasts and her navel, there was a crude and hideous rendering of a symbol that had been literally branded into her flesh: a primitive but horribly detailed image of the sun, an eight-pointed configuration of rays coming from its circular center in different directions depicted by what appeared to be human bones. “They call him Anticristo.”
I began to shake uncontrollably. “Jesus Christ,” I whispered, backing away. I’d seen that symbol before, many years ago, on the cover of the black book Jamie h
ad found in the scarred man’s knapsack.
“It’s the ancient sign for ‘The Traveler’.” Though tears continued to roll across her face, Connie suddenly began speaking like someone hypnotized and reciting back lines she’d been taught verbatim. “Throughout history, the ‘Traveler’ appears in stories from all the religions in one form or another. It can be an angel of mercy, a holy martyr disguised as a traveler, or it can be a demon disguised as a man, a demon with the powers of a god.”
The scarred man gazed at me through heavy rains, his arms raised, his scars scurrying like fast-moving vines, slithering over his skin and encasing him in a mutilated chrysalis of vice, decadence and depravity.
Sins of the world…
“How do you know all that?” I asked.
“They taught me, the ones he sent at night.” She lowered her shirt and slumped back to the floor. “They taught me while they burned it into me. I had to learn it so I could tell you, Phil.”
I shuddered. I hadn’t told her my first name. The first detective had looked into me, not her. Both she and Thompson, the second detective hired, had only gone after Martin. Connie had no way or reason to know who I was.
“How do you know my name?”
Once she’d answered I left her there in her empty, stripped-down apartment, with her vodka and pills, daydreams and nightmares, bullets and tears. But while crossing the city slumped in the back of a cab, the visions followed me. An image of her standing in those two big windows in the front room of her apartment, that gun to her head as the same storm clouds raced through our minds, across the sun and through alleyways, people bustling along on the city streets below, swaying in scraps of glittering rain only those like us could see. And with the purpose Martin had given her burned into her flesh and mind and soul now fulfilled, from a sinister corner of my own mind I saw her tumbling through those windows, shattering them as she fell forward, plunging toward soon-to-be bloodied pavement, one temple a small black and bloody hole, the other blown apart with jagged and appalling ruin.
No, I realized then, not glittering rain at all, but a shower of glass, broken and falling with false beauty toward a destiny born of deceit and bloodshed.
I closed my eyes and replayed the last true moments I’d spent with her.
“I had to learn it so I could tell you, Phil.”
“How do you know my name?”
Connie swallowed more vodka and gave the same malicious grin she had when I first walked in. “He just whispered it in my ear.”
PART TWO
EIGHT
Mexico. For most it conjures dreams of insulated resorts, tourist towns, beautiful beaches, splashes of color and a vibrant and hardy people, margaritas, food, the border, vacations or escapes, news clips on illegal immigration, stories of college kids and wild bars or racist B-movie and cartoon versions of a people and a country that never existed. My dreams are different. Mine are blacker, quiet as graveyards buried in the grit, bones and sand of aged deserts that broil helplessly beneath an ancient sun. Like something slowly burning, smoldering just beneath the surface, engulfed gradually by fire that is not quite flame, they are an orange glow gliding across cigarette paper, devouring it in measured waves with each deliberate, tight-lipped inhale. My dreams consume me not whole, but in agonizing shards and cannibalized little pieces.
As I lay sweating and exhausted on a sparse bed in a cheap hotel, the sounds and smells, vibrancy and sins of the city poured through the open window. The walls were chipped and cracked, stained with watermarks and God knows what else, the floors dusty, worn and uneven, and the ceilings low, like a coffin lid snapped down tight. There was no bathroom, only one per floor in the squat two-story hotel, but there was a free-standing sink right in the room and out in the open not far from the foot of the bed. I’d never seen anything like that. Moments before, I’d splashed my face and neck with water, but the heat was high and I was already covered in another sticky glaze of perspiration.
Thankfully my flight was uneventful, and after landing in San Diego I took a transit bus to San Ysidro then a cab to the border. Once there, as I only had my one suitcase, I decided to walk across into Mexico. I moved through a turnstile and a rather disinterested Mexican officer asked me a few routine questions, quickly checked my bag then sent me on my way. A line of cabs were waiting once I’d cleared the turnstile area, but I opted to stay on foot. I followed the crowd, mostly tourists, past a shopping center known as the Plaza Viva, and then crossed a walking bridge over the Tijuana River, taking in the view of an enormous Mexican flag as I went. On the other side I continued to stick with the crowd, walked west up First Street past a wax museum and several small novelty and curio shops. About half a mile later I made my way onto the hustle and bustle of Avenida Revolución, which was packed with shops, restaurants, bars and other touristy draws and fanfare.
Feeling like a criminal that had slipped into someone else’s home with nothing but bad intentions, I kept on, moving at a slow but steady pace through the noisy and crowded streets, past tourists and locals alike, away from the blaze of the more heavily-traveled areas and deeper into the lesser-seen sections of the city. Anxiety and discomfort hit me in wave after wave. I didn’t belong here, had no business in this place, but as the neighborhoods grew worse and the vehicle traffic heavier, I knew I was closer to where I needed to be. Flashy attractions alive with hordes of tourists gave way to street vendors catering more toward locals and those living in the shadows. Those who existed in or had come to Tijuana for things other than shopping and partying, those I was looking for, and I suppose, now, those like me. I strolled past shoeshine booths and more rundown and seedy bars and restaurants, my shirt already stained with sweat marks. Open-air carts and stalls serving various foods filled the air with the aroma of spices and cooked meats, but I wasn’t interested in eating or doing much of anything other than finding a place to crash and get my bearings. Even the architecture had changed. The mostly flat-roofed buildings became more tattered and heavily worn, and rather than featuring bright neon, colorful signage and happy, smiling, festive people, dirty laundry hung from metal poles or windows, faces turned tired and bleak, and the homeless sat crumpled on corners and along narrow, filthy alleys, their dead eyes following me as I walked by and pretended not to notice them.
I’d become immediately aware that I was no longer in my own country, but somewhere wholly apart from it. And yet, it was as if it wasn’t entirely Mexico either, but some borderland between the two, a purgatory of sorts precariously tucked away in the shadows between Heaven and Hell. I couldn’t seem to win either way. The closer I got to both, the deeper the dread.
I eventually came upon The Hotel Pacífico Dormitar, or The Hotel Peaceful Slumber, as I later learned it translated to, and rented a room. A dark and dingy dump situated next to a rundown Laundromat, it sported a filthy front desk area manned by a toothless local, decaying wooden stairs, walls and ceilings barely covered in flecked and peeling paint, and ramshackle little rooms. The smell of cigarettes, cigars, sweat, sex, cheap booze and vomit—with a little urine thrown in for good measure—hung in the air not only in the hallways, but in the rooms as well.
Night was still a ways off but coming soon. I decided to collapse on the bed with a few bottles of cold beer I’d gotten from a store a couple doors down and try to figure out how the hell I’d ended up here. Two days before I’d been in Utica, broke and wondering how I was going to sell my next book, and now I was on the other side of the continent in a sordid room trying to psyche myself into roaming the dark streets and back alleys of Tijuana in search of Jamie Wheeler—of all people—and some cat named Rudy Bosco.
I couldn’t feel Martin here. Connie Joseph said she had, but I couldn’t. I was probably closer to him than I’d been in years but I had no sense of him whatsoever. He was here, though. He was here. Somewhere outside this city, only hours away, holed up in an abandoned old church in the middle of nowhere with disciples probably willing to kill or die for him at a
ny moment. He’d somehow known Connie Joseph was in Tijuana, and he’d sent people—his people—to mutilate and torture her. And no one knew what he’d done to Thompson, the one who’d come before her. I wondered if the same fate awaited me. In the days to come would I vanish from the face of the Earth too—just another sad statistic—or return home a shattered husk? Would my daughter grow up and live her life never understanding why I’d truly come here or what had happened to me?
Even with everything I knew it was hard to reconcile any of this. As a mere boy myself I’d seen and helped Martin kill someone, but I still couldn’t picture him out in some desert hideaway performing black magic, playing bloody satanic games and conjuring the dead. Over the years I’d tried so hard to block out my memories of him covered in blood and swinging that sword in the rain that I’d almost removed it from my consciousness. Almost, but not quite. More often than not I still saw him as a kid, the teenager I knew—certainly charismatic even then—but not someone capable of all this. After all, the murder of the scarred man had been an accident. Hadn’t it? I’d watched Martin on tape, heard his babbling, felt his insanity in every grainy moment passing before my eyes. But I still couldn’t get my mind around it.
Like the night of the scarred man, none of it seemed quite real.
Some bad things happened in town tonight…
I threw back some Corona and wiped the sweat from my brow, remembering how Martin had circled the scarred man once he was down, how even though he’d been as terrified and confused as Jamie and I had been, he’d relished the power that fear offered as well. Relished it and took hold of it. Maybe he was still hanging on all these years later. Maybe he’d never let go, but instead refined and honed it to whatever he and it had since become.
If he and Jamie had gone back and dug up the knapsack as they’d planned, Martin might still have the things inside. The sword…the book…
The symbol on its front cover led me back to Connie Joseph’s maimed midriff, and the awful image seared into her flesh.
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