At the first couple blows, Sebastián buckled to the ground as if he’d been hit, too, going fetal as the hammers rose and fell. When the guys swinging the iron backed off, the Skull took over, squatting next to Sebastián, doing no worse than laying a hand on his shoulder, but Bas flinched, anyway.
This was beyond figuring out, as long as he couldn’t hear what the Skull was saying—and there was a conversation going on. One minute, two minutes, three. He wasn’t treating Bas cruelly, only patting him on the shoulder a couple times, as if telling him, There, there, it’ll be all right.
Then the Skull had somebody bring his box of knives and it looked to be last night all over again. Until he took one for himself and gave another to Sebastián. He pointed at Cardenas and his pulverized joints, lying on his back and howling at the sky.
Enrique clutched the bars over the window as Bas began shaking his head, no no no no. The Skull went first, sinking his first knife to the hilt into Cardenas’s thigh, then glaring at Sebastián: Your turn.
When he couldn’t do it, the Skull’s voice got louder, yelling now, discernible.
“You don’t hate him? You don’t hate his music, everything a hack like him stands for?” the Skull shouted. “Come on, man, you’re ten times the singer he is. Let it out! You sing about hate all the time! Is that just an act? What good is the hate if you don’t let it out!”
Sebastián gave Cardenas a halfhearted poke, sufficient to scratch the skin but not good enough. The Skull badgered and threatened, then told him he’d better do it right this time or maybe Santa Muerte would get one of his eyes. He didn’t need both eyes to sing. Didn’t need either of them, for that matter.
It snapped him. Bas wailed from the ground and with a sob plunged the knife into Cardenas’s belly.
Back and forth then. One for you, one for me. It came easier each time, Bas sticking in every subsequent blade with less hesitation and more resolve. This is what it takes to crawl away. It was like watching a little more of him going dead inside each round.
Ten or twelve knives later, the Skull called a break to confer, voices too low to hear again. He had somebody bring another wooden box—like a small, low crate—and hefted something out of it, treating it with obvious care. Enrique couldn’t tell what it was, only that it looked flat and heavy and as black as outer space. It was lost from view as the Skull put it on the ground and the two of them hunched over it.
Minutes of this, while every so often, Cardenas wailed and moaned and tried to move in some way that his smashed parts wouldn’t allow.
Until it was back to the knives. Just the Skull this time, looming over Sebastián in a posture of challenge, authority. Bas kept trying to back away but was too cracked to get anywhere, head hanging at the end of a neck gone limp as he used up the last of whatever he had in him to say no. Not that. Please, no. Every time he did, the Skull merged another knife with some part of Miguel Cardenas.
“I can do this all day!” the Skull told him. “You gonna let that happen? Gonna let me keep doing this until I run out of knives? All you got to do is cut him once. It would be an act of mercy.”
And that was how you broke somebody for good: made him do a thing like this.
“You tell me no one more time, the next thing you get to do is pick which one of your people you get to watch me gut in front of you. Your choice.”
Took one piece of his soul at a time.
Bas must have quietly acquiesced. The Skull handed him a knife, one of the big, mean-looking ones, maybe the same go-to blade he’d used to finish things last night. And the finish was the same. From this angle, Enrique couldn’t see much, Sebastián in a kneeling position, his elbow pumping back and forth in a sawing motion. Two hideous screams. One ended quickly; the other one kept going. And going.
That was the impressive thing about Bas. He could hold a note for a long time.
Way past what for most people would be the breaking point.
—
It was hours before he could talk, another hour after that before anything intelligible came out. Until then, it was just Bas in a corner, huddled up like a whipped dog, catatonic sometimes, shaking when he wasn’t, eyes focused on nothing. Sofia held him, rocked him, reported that he felt like he’d crawled out of a cold river. Morgan and Olaf hung close, ready to help if they could, but they couldn’t.
“He wanted to know,” Bas said, halting every few words, “about the last album.”
La máscara detrás de la cara, that would’ve been. The Mask Behind the Face.
“What about it?”
“He wanted to know where it came from.”
Enrique had to let this sink in, double-check to make sure Bas had it right. Even if it explained why they’d returned him alive, Enrique still couldn’t believe it come down to this: that they’d been taken by a fan who wanted to get close to the band.
“I didn’t understand what he meant. I couldn’t follow him. I didn’t know what to tell him.” Sebastián seemed unable to stop replaying everything in his mind, or stop shaking his head. “He made me look at a rock. He kept making me look at the rock. I couldn’t see what he wanted me to. But he wouldn’t let me look away from the rock.”
It was about all they got out of him.
Things were quiet for the evening and the rest of the night, sitting in the dark with los muertos, the other dead. A whole new heavy black mood had settled in. Forced to butcher one another—this was an escalation nobody had seen coming, and now that it was here, how was anyone supposed to look at the person next to him without imagining which of them might end up forced to hold the knives?
None of them had overheard what Bas had said—it was too soft to hear unless you were right next to him—and Enrique wasn’t going to tell the rest to ease their minds. Go on, keep trusting one another, you’re still in this together, because if it happens again, it’ll only be me or Sofia holding the knife. Yeah, that would go over great.
Just Olaf, just Morgan. He told them.
The rest? Let them live with it, the same fear they’d spent their lives inflicting on their neighbors. This is what it takes to start paying for your sins.
He listened in the dark as Padre Thiago ministered to the ones who decided they’d lived as wolves long enough and it was time to be lambs again. Time to let a priest pray over them, deliver them of the cruel devils that had taken them over to make them do such terrible things. If they were going to God soon, they wanted to go clean and pure and forgiven.
And there it was—the reason he’d never had much use for God. If he had to believe in a god at all, he wanted one who would really hold you to your life’s choices.
—
When they came for him the next morning, Enrique was ready for it, the only one in the room who didn’t retreat to the far wall like the others. They were so used to it, these guys with their guns and their yelling, they didn’t know what to make of him, that somebody would sit on the floor, waiting for whatever came next. His passivity unnerved them, all eight guys peeking at one another like they didn’t trust it and didn’t know what to do next, afraid they were being suckered into the struggle of their lives.
“I’ll go,” Enrique said. “No big deal. When did fighting it ever work for anybody? I’ll go.”
They took him alone, him and nobody else. They escorted him around the side of the church, three days since he’d felt the ground beneath his boots and the open sky and the direct searing heat of the sun. At the end of it, the Skull was waiting, and behind him, that colossal likeness of Santa Muerte with her scythe, grim against the cloudless blue and gritting her ivory teeth at the horizon. Everything else looked baked to shades of brown.
Somebody shoved a foot into the back of one knee to drop him to the earth. He knew better than to get up. The guards backed off to give them space.
“I figured it was either you or Sebastián,” the Skull told him. “Drummers, they’re the heart, they’re not usually the visionaries. They feel the pulse of the earth. Th
ey don’t see through time. So it had to be you or him. And it wasn’t him.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yeah, you do. You’re just playing stupid.”
From here, close up, it was like seeing this guy for the first time. He was more than a living skull now. Skulls didn’t have eyebrows. Skulls didn’t have lips. Enrique could see the way his skin moved over his actual bones, could discern the numbers and words, patterns and pictures, inked into his skin. He looked close to emaciated, either by genetics or by choice, or maybe he was an example of function creating form. He had only as much as a reaper needed, and no more.
“You keep playing stupid, I’ll treat you like you’re stupid. You’ll make me do something to smarten you up. Is that what you want?”
“I want to be gone from here. Me and mine. That’s what I want.”
The Skull nodded as if this were one of many possibilities. “It could happen.”
Three little words, so much hope. It could happen. But probably an illusion.
“Sebastián may be the one at the front of the stage, but he does what you tell him to. He’s only got as much to work with as you give him. You’re the architect of what you three do,” the Skull said. “Tell me I’m wrong.”
“It’s more complicated than that. But you’re not wrong.”
“I get it. You need him and he needs you. You, you’re not the kind of guy who’ll ever be at the front of the stage. You don’t have the look. But you got something better. You got the brains. You got the vision.”
It was one of the more backhanded compliments anyone had given him. But under the circumstances? He’d take it.
“So…The Mask Behind the Face. I could tell, just from the title, here’s someone who knows some things. Here’s someone who sees. Then I listen and read the lyrics, and I think, here’s someone who understands. How you did it, that’s beyond me, I don’t know how a studio works, but you managed to put together the electronics and all that other aggro shit with those ancient flutes and grinding stones and old drums, and made a sound not like anything I ever heard. An effect not like anything I ever felt. A sound, that’s just noise unless you got an idea behind it. And you did. That was the thing that convinced me, whoever did this is some kind of shaman.”
The Skull was pacing with the frantic movements of somebody who’d spent a long time looking for an elusive prize and was on the verge of finding it.
“It wasn’t just the notes. Anybody can play the notes.” He squatted, nose to tattooed nose with Enrique. “There’s something in there between the notes, looking back out. I don’t know how you captured that. But it’s there. And it’s a fucking monster.” It was hard to tell if his eyes were desperate or insane. “How did you know?”
Slowly, Enrique shook his head. “I’ve got no answer for that. I wish I did.”
“You don’t leave here unless you give me better than that.”
“I could make up a better lie. Is that what you want?”
The Skull peered at him from inches away, as if trying to see beneath the skin. “You got the look of the first people here. Maybe that explains it, why you and not Sebastián. You got the look of the conquered, not the conquistador. You got that blood memory in you, maybe.”
He pulled back, squatting with his bony elbows on his pointy knees.
“And me, see, I know blood. I know sacrifice. I’m one of the ones they call when they really want to send a message, because I can do it and not blink.” He motioned to the towering Santa Muerte, the body parts laid out before her. They buzzed with flies and gave off a stink like roadkill. “It’s just another day’s work to me. But that doesn’t mean I don’t ever think about what I’m doing. To me, it’s nothing new. It’s something that’s come around again, part of something that goes way back. I can feel it in the knives. Their handles, man, they fucking hum.”
His scrutiny turned puzzled, hungry for secrets he’d never been able to grab.
“A guy like you, you don’t get your hands red the way I do. But you figured it out, anyway. All I’m asking is how.”
“It’s just knowing some history, some myths, is all. Same shit, different century. It’s just following where it leads.”
The Skull nodded, eager, like they were getting somewhere. “You went straight to the oldest stories, I could tell. The people here, way before the Spaniards showed up, they had a good thing going. They had this teacher, maybe he was a god, or maybe he was something else and a god was the only thing they knew to call him. Kukulkan…Quetzalcoatl…whatever his real name was. He was teaching them everything they needed to know. These people, they were on their way up. The sun was theirs. And then the clouds came. It’s what clouds do, right? Come in and wash things away.”
The legends called him Tezcatlipoca—a dark, malevolent god who had come along and driven the teacher off.
Whatever the differences between them, he and the Skull could speak of this much like equals, at least.
These archaic figures, these events, had always felt to him like more than myth. More than his ancestors’ way of trying to make sense of their failings, their hungers and thirsts, their savagery. Behind the stories was something hidden and true, and behind that, more truths that he couldn’t begin to guess at. He just knew they were there.
Ever since he was a boy, seeing the world take shape around him, farther and farther from his mother’s kitchen, it was hard to deny the sense that something had gone wrong here, in this land. Hundreds of years ago, or maybe thousands. Something had come down from above, or up from below, or in from outside, and convinced the people that it had a never-ending need for their blood, shed in all kinds of ways. You see those knives? You see those chests with the hearts beating inside them? You see those skins you can peel away and wear over your own until they fall apart? Get to it, and don’t ever stop. This is what it takes now, so never forget.
It was everything he knew and nothing he could prove. All he’d ever been able to do was turn up the volume and scream into the clouds.
“Gracias,” the Skull whispered, and pushed up from his squat to stand tall again. “Thank you for letting me know I’m not the only one.”
They’d been friendly enough that the anger began to override the fear. “Man, everything you asked is something you could’ve asked me through the band’s website. Or hit me up on Twitter. People got questions, we don’t ignore them. We talk back, you know.”
Images flickered like flash cards. Their driver Hector, killed at the wheel. Crispin, shot out of his shoes. Guys butchered outside the window, and forcing Bas to join in. They could let him go right now, and he would never unsee these last few days. For as long as he lived, he would be waking up from nightmares.
“Did it really have to take all this?”
And look. The Skull knew how to smile. “You think this little chat is it? No, this is us getting to know each other. The next part, that’s the initiation. That’s the important part.”
He whistled and motioned toward their makeshift prison, and three guys came out escorting Padre Thiago. He’d chosen not to fight it, either. Calmest face you ever saw. Like he expected God was going to take care of him on the spot. There, there, my child, trust in me for deliverance.
“Don’t do this. Please don’t do this.” Enrique had sworn he wouldn’t beg, and listen to him now. Everybody’s got a plan until the knives come out. “Did I not treat you with respect? Didn’t I take you seriously? What’s the point of this? You think trying to turn us into you is gonna get you any closer to answers than you got already?”
The Skull was only half paying attention as he hauled over the box of knives and the compact crate from last night. The latter was the least among his props, and with every other nightmarish thing going on, Enrique had all but forgotten about it.
He made me look at a rock. He kept making me look at the rock.
The desperation was starting to eat deeper. “It wasn’t any shaman that did that album, jus
t three pissed-off people who like to make loud noises. I don’t know shit; all I’m doing is asking the same questions as you.”
I couldn’t see what he wanted me to. But he wouldn’t let me look away from the rock.
Padre Thiago passed him then, patted him on his big, round shoulder, the cruelest thing the priest could’ve done—absolving him in advance. It was all Enrique could do to not scream at him. Get your hand off me, old man. Don’t you know where this is going? Don’t you know what he’s gonna make me do to you? I don’t want you forgiving me for any of it.
From the crate, the Skull removed the artifact from last night, flat and heavy. As black as outer space, he’d thought, while seeing it from a distance, not knowing why he’d made the connection. Now he remembered reading about an astronaut who came back saying that, from out there in it, space looked shiny.
Obsidian, he realized, now that he saw the artifact close up. Volcanic glass. It was shaped like an irregular rectangle, scooped out but too shallow to be a bowl, too bulky to be a plate, and polished into a black mirror. The rim was threaded with gray-green veins marbled into the stone itself, seemingly random, but nagging him with a promise that if he stared long enough he would comprehend a hidden pattern, an intentional design the earth had woven in the chaos of fire and lava.
The outer edges were rougher, designs carved around the circumference, lines that thickened and thinned, swooped and jittered and curved back onto themselves. Not Aztec, not Mayan, not Olmec, not like any patterns he’d seen before.
As he looked at it, his gaze pulled by its peculiar gravity, it caught a reflection of lumpy clouds skimming overhead, the effect like smoke drifting across its gleaming black surface.
I know what this is…
Except when he looked up, there were no clouds.
The Smoking Mirror—it was another of their names for Tezcatlipoca, the dark god who had chased away their teacher. They hadn’t called him that because of his eyes, his face, his demeanor. None of that. It wasn’t poetics, it was practical. They’d called him that because of something he’d owned and used. He would gaze into it and see things—the faraway doings of gods and men, they said.
Dark Screams, Volume 7 Page 10
