The Black Witch of Mexico

by Colin Falconer

  THE BLACK WITCH OF MEXICO

  Would you sell your soul to have anything you wanted?

  by

  Colin Falconer

  Chapter 1

  Mexico. Near the border with Guatemala.

  “What is it you want? I can give you anything, anything. Todo que quieres.”

  This was a game, right? Adam wanted to laugh, mostly at himself for being here. But this guy was serious.

  “I have cured cancer. I have cured people who couldn’t walk. I have the power. I can call it down for you. You do want something, don’t you? If you do not want, you will not come here. What is it? Tell me.”

  “Call what down for me?”

  “I can summon the Great Lord of the Fog. I shall ask him to obey my orders and come into the light. Satan obeys the light. Satan obeys me.”

  Adam decided to play along a while longer. It was surreal, sitting here in this dank little house, with its dirt floor and hand hewn beams, talking about the devil.

  He understood now how he could dupe these local people: play on their superstition, their powerlessness, their fear. He was no better than any huckster you’d find on a used car lot.

  He supposed force of personality was a part of it, too; the way he looked at you with those hypnotic black eyes.

  “Where did you learn to do this?” Adam asked him.

  “This you cannot learn, not from a book, not from anywhere. It’s something that you have in the blood. My father was a brujo, my grandfather too.”

  The witch had thick, crow-black hair slicked back from his forehead, half-lidded eyes that had a kind of somnolent malevolence, like he was watching him through the bars of a cage. But a snappy dresser, even down here in the middle of nowhere: a silk guayabera shirt, chunky gold rings on every finger, one of them a skull with small rubies set into the eyes. He was a parody of himself.

  "There exists good and evil in the world,” he said. “There is the devil and there is God.” He regarded him with his magician’s nasty eye. “I can call forth the maldad negra and cause great harm, even death. Is that what you want? Is it? All I need is a name, and a piece of their clothing or even a photograph. I can take away your bad luck and give it to someone else. Is that your secret desire? Come, tell me.”

  His voice was soft, insistent. Adam imagined him reaching into his pocket and producing a gold pen. Here, sign this contract with the devil.

  “Whatever you want,” he said again.

  There were candles scattered around the room, each with a photograph lashed to it with twine. “Who are they?” Adam said.

  “That woman there had cancer. I cured her. This one could not have children. This one, a man wants her to fall in love with him.”

  The man really believed he had these powers. He was a menace.

  “That one,” he said, pointing to a man in a cowboy hat, a cigar clamped between his teeth in a cocky grin, “that one is marked for death.”

  He smiled and waited.

  “You want something.”

  Her photograph was still there in his wallet, in the back pocket of his jeans. The brujo was right, he did want something; he had come here for a reason. There was a secret he had even tried to hide from himself. What if this maldad negra really worked? It would be an interesting experiment. And what harm would it do?

  Another part of him was horrified. Adam, what are you thinking? You can’t really go along with any of this.

  “You say you can kill a man?” he said, stalling for time.

  “Como no.” Of course.

  He reached into a drawer and brought out a package wrapped in greasy brown paper. The smell made him recoil. The brujo untied the twine and took out a crude black doll made from melted candle wax. Hair had been stuck to it with ribbons of different colours. “Here,” he said, and he held it out for Adam to touch. It was soaked with some sticky liquid. He rubbed it between his fingers.

  It was the colour of coffee but the smell was vile.

  “What is that?”

  “It is oil taken from the dead.”

  He pushed it away and wiped his hands on his jeans. “What do you do with it?”

  “I take a photograph, some hair, something of the man you wish to kill. Then I tie it to this doll with a piece of thread and then I attach it to a bone. A finger bone is best. If the man has died a violent death, it is better. I get a toad, I choke it with the doll then I sew up its lips. I bury it in the graveyard.”

  A toad, of course. This would make a great story when he got back to Boston.

  “I must also ask the devil’s permission. Then it is done. Your enemy will die within the moon. Who is it you want me to kill?”

  “You speak to the devil?”

  “There is a cave on the other side of the lake. It descends to the world of the dead. I meet him there.”

  He’s insane, Adam thought. Back in Boston we would have him in a secure unit. Why am I still here listening to this? Get out of here. You’ve satisfied your curiosity.

  Leave.

  “Do you want this man to die? Is this what you desire?”

  “I don’t want her to die.”

  “Ah, so it is a woman that makes you suffer like this. Do you want her back?”

  He thought about Elena, imagined her naked in his bed again, the smell of her perfume, the feel of her curls against his cheek as she lay under his arm. Just the memory was like a cold pain in his gut.

  Did he really think he could get her back with a magic spell, like some lovelorn medieval prince? He could imagine what his father would think if he could see him now, what his friends would say.

  But then no one need ever know.

  “I see it on your face how much you want her back. Then let me do this for you.”

  Adam reached into his back pocket and took out his wallet. He stared at her dog-eared photograph, felt the familiar sting. He hesitated.

  A hand snaked out, the rings gleaming in the candlelight. “Give it to me,” he said.

  Adam looked back at the photograph; he imagined Elena’s arms around his neck, her hips grinding into his. Her eyes were locked with his, they would stay that way for hours sometimes. She could keep him on the edge forever, sighing little gasps of pleasure with each stroke: You’re the most beautiful lover I ever had, you’re so sweet, I never knew a man like you.

  It was a drug, wasn’t it? He had thought he was immune, that he could quit whenever he wanted, but every time he made love to her he had gotten hooked a little more and when the time came to quit he couldn’t do it. He was just another empty-eyed, hollow-cheeked junkie for love.

  “Give it to me,” the witch repeated.

  Why not?

  No one will ever know.

  He passed her over, watched her blonde curls and sunny smile disappear into the drawer. He couldn’t breathe.

  Chapter 2

  He was woken by whispering, someone knocking at the window. He sat upright with a gasp. He had been dreaming that he was being chased through soft sand.

  It was black. He kicked off the sheets, rank and damp with his own sweat. He couldn’t remember where he was.

  He reached for the flashlight, his hands shaking.

  “Adam,” someone murmured. “Oiga, oiga. Por favor, Adam.”

  “Arrivo,” he mumbled and pulled on his pants and his shirt. He went outside but he couldn’t see who it was had been sent to fetch him, they had already set off back towards the village. He followed them down the dirt road to an adobe house on the very outskirts. A dog barked at their approach.

  An oil lamp was burning inside. A child lay on a burlap cot in a corner of the room. He could smell the pungent herbs from the poultice they had placed on her belly. It seemed the cur
andero had been here first. He was their second choice.

  “What’s wrong with her?” he asked.

  “Tiene una rana en el estómago,” her father said. She has a frog in her stomach.

  “Why do you think she has a frog in her stomach?” though he already knew the answer. Adam took away the poultice and put his hand on the girl’s abdomen, feeling for a lump or a pulsation. There was nothing. “Por que crees que se ha tragado una rana?”

  Her father just shook his head; it was the mother who spoke up. “She didn’t swallow it, the witch put it there.”

  “He wants my cornfield,” the father said. “But I won’t to sell it to him, so he did this to me.”

  “Why does he want your cornfield?”

  “My husband went to him to take away a curse,” the mother said. “But he couldn’t pay him what he asked, so now he wants our cornfield instead.”

  The little girl was burning up. Her jaws were clenched tight, and as Adam crouched there in the dark, she went into a seizure. Her father made the sign of the cross. Her mother wept.

  He made a quick examination with the flashlight. There was a filthy Garfield band-aid on the bottom of her foot.

  “How did she do this?”

  “She stepped on a piece of wood in the yard.”

  He sighed. Tetanus.

  “She has to go to the hospital,” he said.

  The father shook his head. “No, we can’t afford that. Please, you do something.”

  “There’s nothing I can do here. She has to go to the nearest hospital, this is very serious.”

  The father put his head in his hands and started to weep. Neither of them seemed to understand. He tried to explain to them what tetanus was: that it was due to bacteria getting into the cut on her foot, that she would die if they didn’t take her to the hospital at once.

  “No, it’s the frog,” the father said. “You have to take away the maldad negra.”

  “It is like my husband says,” the woman said. “Anyway, we don’t have money for the hospital.”

  “But she’ll die here. I don’t have the drugs to treat her.”

  “We would have to sell our farm to pay for the hospital,” the man said. He nodded over his shoulder at the rest of his family, watching them from the shadows: three other small children with big black eyes and protruding bellies.

  “If she’s going to die, then it’s better she dies here with us,” the woman said.

  “But if you take her to the hospital, maybe she won’t die.”

  “If you can’t take away the maldad negra, can some other doctor do it?”

  “It isn’t the witch,” Adam said to her. “It’s tetanus.”

  There was a long silence. The man stared at his wife and she stared back. In the yellow light of the lamp the man’s cheeks looked like they had been hollowed out with a blunt spoon.

  “I told you this would happen if you went to that witch,” she said.

  The little girl started to shake again, more violently this time. There was foam around her lips.

  The mother got on her knees and started to pray.

  The little girl’s father put his hand on Adam’s shoulder. “Thank you for coming,” he said.

  “You can’t let her die,” he said. “You can’t.”

  “There is nothing anyone can do.”

  “You can take her to the hospital!”

  He put his head on his knees and sobbed. His passive acceptance was beyond Adam’s comprehension. Adam decided it must be his execrable Spanish; perhaps they did not understand what he was telling them. He would fetch Luis.

  He went back to the clinic. Rosa had woken Luis, he was still stumbling about getting dressed. Adam told him what was wrong and searched the store room for what medicines they had that might help the little girl, then gathered the plastic tubing, a bag of saline, needle, tape, and connecting pieces. He would need to set up an intravenous line; she was already badly dehydrated.

  As he worked he told Luis the problem. Luis did not seem particularly surprised, and he supposed he shouldn’t have been either--he had been in the village long enough.

  They went back together and had Luis explain the diagnosis to the parents again, and about taking their daughter to the hospital, but he got the same answer: yes, they understood, but they did not have the money for doctors. They would pray for her.

  * * *

  He stayed there for two days, holding the mother’s hand, bathing the child, only going back to the clinic when there were other patients for him. He slept on the floor beside the girl’s cot as she shivered and moaned her way to a totally unnecessary death.

  The father worked his cornfield. The children played outside. The mother cooked over the brick stove; the smell of death and the smell of baking created a unique miasma in the tiny room. The woman tried to get him to eat but he couldn’t stomach food. It shouldn’t be like this, he thought. Children should not have to die like this.

  Bernard came by several times a day. Adam begged him to help him change the father’s mind.

  “I’ll try,” he said. “But these people are very poor. They have other children to care for. A long stay in the hospital is beyond their means.”

  “Then I’ll pay for it!”

  “Then will you pay for everyone? How many children have died since you got here that you could have saved in Boston or New York or San Diego? Will they save her in San Cristobal, do you think?”

  “She would have a chance.”

  “What sort of chance? Ten to one?”

  Adam shrugged. “I don’t know. A chance.”

  “She would be in the hospital on her own. She would die alone. This man cannot leave his cornfield, and his wife cannot desert these other children. At least here she will die peacefully with her family around her and they won’t have to sell their little farm to pay the doctor at the hospital.”

  “We have to try to save her!”

  “Saving all of our children is a luxury for rich people like westerners, Adam. Just take care of her as best you can.”

  “They think the Crow did this!”

  “The witch?”

  “They think she is dying because of him, because she has a frog in her stomach. That’s why they won’t do anything!”

  “If that’s what they believe then they’ve already given her up for dead. You know that by now.” He put a hand on Adam’s shoulder. “You’re not God.”

  But I should be, Adam thought.

  * * *

  The little girl died on the evening of the second day after one long, final seizure that seemed to go on forever and wore even Adam’s nerves. Finally, when her heart gave out, he clamped off the intravenous unit and removed the needle from her arm. He stood up and nodded to the mother who was watching him, her face twisted into a monkey howl of grief.

  She cradled the child’s head in her arms. Adam watched, feeling hopeless and angry. All this talk of witches and frogs! What she needed was drugs and an intensive care unit.

  Bernard came in carrying a Bible, his stole around his neck. A beetle scurried across the girl’s forehead. He brushed it away and mumbled a prayer of blessing.

  He waited outside until Bernard had finished. When he came out he put an arm around Adam’s shoulders. “Don’t take it to heart,” he said.

  “What other way is there to take it?”

  “You accept there are things you can do and there are things that you can’t. People have a right to make their own decisions, even about living and dying.”

  “It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “If the world made any sense, you wouldn’t be living on the same planet as me. If you watch the world carefully, you’ll see that things never make sense.”

  “She didn’t have to die.”

  “It wasn’t your decision in the end. You’re a good man, Adam; you’re dedicated and passionate. But enough is enough. You must be hungry, you haven’t eaten in days.”

  “I’m all right,” he said and walk
ed away.

  He didn’t want to be consoled. He went down to the river to wash away the sweat, the dust, the death. The river was green and sluggish warm. He stripped down to his shorts and waded into the shallows and ducked his head under the surface. Afterwards, he stood for a long time staring up at the sky, letting the water dry on his skin in the late afternoon sun.

  When he turned around he saw someone up at the tree line, watching him. It was the Crow.

  He shouted at him but he just smiled and walked away.

  Chapter 3

  When he got back to thecasa, Rosa was waiting for him. “I will make you tortillas,” she said, but he shook his head. He was exhausted. He just wanted to sleep.

  “You have ... this,” she said and she pointed to her neck.

  He frowned and went into his bedroom and found his shaving mirror. There was a rash on his neck, probably from the green crap the brujo had spat at him. He had washed it off under the tap as best he could, but he felt like everyone could still smell it.

  He was sure everyone knew what he had done, something in their eyes made him uneasy. He felt dirty. They can smell the witch on me.

  He collapsed onto the bed, felt like he could sleep for a hundred years. But an hour later, as the sun set over the pueblo, he was still awake. He tossed and turned on the narrow cot thinking about the little girl. He finally slipped into a fevered half-sleep, and her face changed to Elena’s and she moaned and reached out a hand.

  “I didn’t mean to hurt you,” he muttered.

  He woke up suddenly, his heart racing. He pulled off all his clothes and threw himself back down on the bed. If he didn’t get some sleep he would go crazy. The rash on his neck was itching. He thought he heard a rustling in the corner. Jesus, a snake. He felt for the flashlight beside the bed. But there was nothing. Just his imagination, just way beyond tired.

  He switched off the light and closed his eyes. But sleep would not come. He kept seeing the little girl, and the little girl was always Elena, and she was in pain.