The guide looked at Beth and smiled nervously, showing his missing teeth. “But she wants something in return. A lock of your hair.”
Beth’s heart skipped a beat. The old lady was smiling at her eagerly, and she looked away, turned toward the west wall of the hut, where she had the misfortune of seeing a child’s skull with several pieces chipped off its cranium lying in a homemade wire cage. This couldn’t be good. She didn’t know much about magic or witchcraft, but in fiction and film, hair was usually used as a binding agent, to gain power over someone. She saw herself turned into some sort of zombie, working as a slave for this old hag, doing things against her will—ideas that she would have scoffed at six months ago but now seemed perfectly logical and reasonable.
“How about my hair?” Hunt offered.
Manuel translated, but the witch shook her head angrily, said something, and spat.
Beth knew why he’d offered. Life insurance. He was protected. She was vulnerable, had left herself wide open, and this might all be part of some elaborately planned scenario worked out by the insurance company to bring about her death.
Still, what choice did they have?
“Okay,” she said.
“No,” Hunt said at the same time.
They looked at each other.
“We’ll find it some other way,” he told her.
“Yeah,” Joel said, and she heard the fear in his voice. “Don’t do this.”
“There may be no other way. It’s been two days already. It’s going to be three. I have to.” She stepped forward, pointed to her head, and almost before she knew what was happening, the witch had scissors in her hand and was snipping off a lock of hair from over her right ear.
The old woman scurried to the back of the hut, placed the hair in a small crumpled paper sack, then returned to where they stood near the door. She talked rapidly, too rapidly for even Manuel or Jorge to simultaneously translate, and they could only wait until she had finished, then try to paraphrase what she’d said.
Jorge spoke first. “It’s in the mountains,” he said. “According to her, it’s at the bottom of a canyon marked by a star carved in a cliff and a rock in the shape of a man.”
“Yes,” Manuel confirmed.
The witch said something else, something short, and the guide’s face lit up. “Sí,” he said. “Sí.” He smiled, nodding. “I know where this is.”
“How far away is it?” Hunt asked.
“A few hours. We will go tomorrow. The road is very rough.”
Grateful to be able to escape the foul-smelling hut, Beth followed Manuel out the door into the bright light and clean air. Just before she closed the door behind them, the old woman said something else, something long and involved in a rapid-fire delivery. Manuel nodded, interjecting what seemed words of agreement, but he did not translate.
“What was that all about?” Beth asked.
He grimaced. “A warning.”
“About the insurance company?”
“About babies,” Jorge said, frowning.
“Babies?” Hunt said and then looked at his friend in awkward embarrassment, thinking of Jorge’s own mutilated child.
Martina. They’d named him… her Martina instead of Martin.
Manuel walked across the dirt to the pickup. “There are more…” He searched for the word. “Events here than your insurance company. This is an old land. There are many religions here, many spirits.”
“But what about the babies?”
“She said beware of them,” Jorge told them.
She could hear the frustration in Hunt’s voice. “What does that mean?”
Manuel shook his head. “I will explain to you on the trip back. We must leave now. She does not want us here at nightfall.” Left unspoken was the fact that they did not want to be here at nightfall.
The guide did indeed explain about the babies on the trip back, shouting his story over the roar of the engine, and it was a strange and frightening tale indeed. She felt as though they’d followed one monster down the continent only to find that it came from the land of monsters.
According to Manuel, when babies in Chiapas died, they did not ascend to heaven or descend to hell or go on to any sort of afterlife. Instead, they remained bound to the earth, to the town or city in which they lost their lives. And they were angry. It became the goal of their fiendish existence to harass the living, particularly women of childbearing years, to keep them from sleeping and to frighten them at night. They were harmless as long as they were not allowed inside a bedroom. Whether in a home or hotel, they could roam the hallways and kitchens and other rooms, making noise, scaring people, but they could do no physical harm. Once allowed into a bedroom, however, through an open door or window, the babies grew strong and could hurt, attack. Kill.
“They want to punish their parents, the parents who let them die, but as far as they are concerned, any adult will do. They are tricky,” the guide warned them. “You will think they have been left on your doorstep or are crying to get in like a cat, but do not believe them. They are trying to fool you into letting them in your room. Whatever you do, do not open any doors or windows. Stay in your bed. Go back to sleep.” He paused. “The witch warned you to be careful. She says they come for you tonight.”
Before their encounters with the insurance company, Beth would have dismissed such stories as so much nonsense. But now she promised Manuel that no matter what they heard, they would not open any doors or windows in their room until morning.
Sure enough, she awoke that night to the sound of a baby crying and the tapping of a tiny fist high up on the hotel room door.
It has to be floating in the air, she thought.
She sat up in bed, chilled, and saw that Hunt was awake as well. He quickly tried to close his eyes and pretend he was asleep, but she’d caught him, and when she elbowed his side, he sat up next to her.
“I hear it,” he admitted without prodding, and she could hear the fear in his voice.
“I don’t like this country,” she said. “It scares me.”
“The people are nice.”
“Who? The thugs? Or the witches?”
“Maybe that’s why the insurance company’s here. They fit right in.”
Beth sighed. “I don’t like it. It’s like… an omen. Like we’re being told, ‘Get out while you can.’”
“You don’t really believe that, do you?”
She shrugged.
“I’m signed up for deluxe life now. We’ve got to get to the insurance company and find the agent’s policy and put a stop to him. And quickly. Or else my premiums are going to come due and I’m not going to be able to pay them and…” He didn’t finish the thought.
“Life insurance. Maybe that’s why those criminals couldn’t hurt you,” she said. “Bullets bounce off you just like Superman now.” She’d been teasing, sort of, but it came out more seriously than intended, and Hunt took it that way.
“Maybe so,” he said.
Outside the door was a baby’s cry. From behind the curtained window to the side of the bed came a gentle tapping against the glass. They huddled together beneath the blankets.
“Do you think Jorge hears them?” she asked, thinking of his child.
“I hope not,” Hunt told her. “I hope not.”
3
The witch, it turned out, did not know where The Insurance Group was headquartered, and her misinformation almost got them killed.
As arranged, Manuel arrived at the hotel just after sunup with a full tank of gas, and they drove into the jungle in the opposite direction from the witch’s house—a harsher, more vertical landscape. He had brought his brother’s truck this time, with room for all of them in the cab, two in the front with Manuel, two in the back on a narrow cramped bench seat.
Hunt held on to the dashboard as the pickup bounced over eroded ruts and jumped embedded boulders on its way into the mountains. The road they were on looked more like a hiking trail—he saw no other tire tracks i
n the dirt, only what looked like crowds of hoofprints—but the truck successfully navigated a narrow pass and climbed a switchback up a cliffside. After another hour of winding mountain travel, they reached a clearing, a small flat spot in which a spring-fed pond was ringed by the ruined foundation of a long-gone structure.
Manuel slammed on the brakes, came to a stop. Once the gravel settled, the only noise in the canyon was the ticking of the truck’s cooling engine. “Here is where we get out.”
“This is it?”
“No, this is as far as we can drive. From here on, we must walk.”
“Have you been here before?” Beth asked.
“Not exactly. Here, yes. This was the site of a very famous battle. But beyond, where the witch told us to go, no. I have only her directions.”
“You don’t think we’ll get lost?” she said worriedly.
“It is not far. We will be fine.”
This did not feel right to Hunt. It was exotic and remote enough to be real—a secret canyon in remote mountains with directions provided by a witch—but he felt going in that this was wrong. The Insurance Group might be nearly as old as time itself, but it was an urban, not a rural invention. It should be where people were, not way the hell out in the boondocks.
Joel, at least, seemed to agree. “This doesn’t seem like the kind of place an insurance company would have its headquarters. Not even this insurance company.”
Still, they followed Manuel’s lead, each of them taking out one of the canteens that the guide had packed in the back. Hunt drank until he was full, refilled his canteen from the spring, took a piss behind a rock, then waited until the others were ready.
The five of them set out on a foot trail up the canyon.
He’d been prepared to walk far, had expected to wander through a maze of hidden canyons for hours before searching around to find a star carved in a cliff and a rock in the shape of a man, assuming that if this battleground was so famous and the location of the insurance company so secret, the two would be located fairly far apart. But almost immediately after they started walking, Jorge pointed up ahead, and through the tops of the trees, high on a mountainside, was a clearly marked star in a circle, a gigantic pentagram impossibly etched into the face of the cliff. Hunt did not know how such a thing was possible. It appeared to be the size of a several-story building, and the only way he could imagine it being done was by someone on a scaffold. Yet there it was.
“Now we look for the man,” Manuel said.
Shortly thereafter, the canyon split, trails forking off to follow each branch, and Manuel took them up the one to the left. The canyon on the right appeared to go around the mountain in front of they and away from the star, but the left canyon sloped upward toward the carving.
It was hot and they were sweating, and here in the jungle the humidity seemed to be hovering somewhere near a hundred percent. Joel took off his shirt, used it to wipe his face, then tied it around his waist. It was a good idea, and the rest of the men followed suit. Beth unbuttoned the top two buttons of her blouse.
The canyon before they seemed to peter out, and the trail climbed up the steep incline at such an angle that they were forced to stop every ten minutes or so to catch their breath and wet their parched throats. Finally, they were at the top, and here was a formation Hunt recognized. A mesa. Until now the mountains had been sharp and pointed, traditional triangles, but now they were on a flat arid plateau that stretched before they. The star was still visible off to their right—if it gave off light, it would have been shining down on they—and now they could see a tall boulder that, whether naturally eroded or man-made, resembled a standing soldier.
“Let us go,” Manuel said.
It took longer to reach than Hunt thought it would, and he was not sure until the last moment that they would find anything when they got there. The space between the star on the mountain and the rock that looked like a man appeared to be merely a flat stretch of dry grassy plain.
But then they reached the rock, and he saw that the plateau ended here. The plain had been an—
intended?
—optical illusion. Before they was a deep gorge, and at the bottom of the gorge was a garden.
It was the most beautiful sight Hunt had ever seen, made even more so by its juxtaposition against the surrounding countryside. Below them, row after row of flowers, in all colors of the rainbow, moved to the strains of an unfelt wind, as though they were dancing. Gigantic tropical-looking plants with elephant-ear leaves and long-stemmed roses were growing happily next to smaller proud carnations.
He did not see any sort of building, but maybe there was a cave he couldn’t view from this angle. He still was not convinced that this was where they would find The Insurance Group, but he was entranced by the gorgeous scene below, and when he looked over at the others, he could tell that they were as well.
A stairway was carved into the cliff, and at the bottom of the stairway was a gate attached to a white picket fence. The sight made him laugh—with happiness rather than amusement—and he grabbed Beth’s hand, and the two of them started down.
It was midday, but at the bottom of the gorge the light was as dark as dusk. Hunt did not understand why. From above, the garden had been clearly visible, flowers basking in the sun, but down here all was in shadow, and the cliffs up top looked murky and gloomy, as though shrouded in storm clouds.
He was holding Beth’s hand, and then he wasn’t holding her hand, and then he wasn’t sure where she was. Joel had been right behind them, but he could not remember seeing his friend since they started down the steps.
There was a rustle, a whisper, a soft sussurant sound that gave him goose bumps and spoke to him on some level he did not want to acknowledge. The whispering continued slipping slyly into his ear. It was not a language, not exactly, but there were words and there were thoughts and there were images accompanying those thoughts, and they seemed to bloom in his brain like flowers, opening up to full-blossom inside his skull. Suddenly, the sounds were everywhere, and he looked around for Beth and Manuel, but he could not see, could only hear, and the things he heard whispered of death.
He wanted to get out, needed to get out, had to get out, but he was trapped. Then he felt as though he were falling down a very deep well, and when he landed he was cushioned by a soft bed of flowers, and then the flowers were touching him, caressing him.
And then they were stinging him, biting him, eating him.
And then…
He was being pulled out through the gate and onto the bottom of the stairway by Joel and Manuel. Next to him, on the stone step, Jorge was helping Beth get groggily to her feet.
“I am sorry,” Manuel said. “I should have been there faster.”
“What happened?” Hunt asked. His lips felt dry, his eyes hurt.
“I wouldn’t’ve believed it if I hadn’t seen it,” Jorge said incredulously. “It was like the Wizard of Oz poppies, man.”
“The flowers tried to take you,” Manuel told him. “We saw Beth beneath a bush, and after we pulled her out, we found you under flowers. They tried to take me, too, but I cannot hear them so well.” He grinned. “I am deaf in left ear.”
“She lied to us,” Beth said angrily.
Manuel nodded. “She lied. She wanted to trap us here. Trap you here, probably. She has your hair.”
“I never trusted that hag,” Joel said.
“Do you think she’s working for them?” Hunt asked. “For the insurance company?”
“The witch works for no one but herself She has no connection to your insurance company. I doubt she has ever heard of it.”
Beth shook her head. “But why would she do this, then? Why would she try to throw us off the trail and get us killed?”
“That is her way. Do not think of her anymore. We are through with her. We will find your insurance company another way.”
“But—”
“Do not think of her. It is not good.”
Hunt looked back
, past the gate, at the rows of beautiful flowers.
And started up the steps and the long walk back to the truck.
At night, the babies came back, looking to punish their parents. Hunt knew they were supposed to remain safely behind locked doors, but a part of him wanted to peek out of the hotel room and see what the babies looked like. He imagined them as evil-eyed infants with mouths filled with fangs, but they could just as easily have been invisible, fiends without faces. He would never know, though. While he would have liked to see for himself, he knew enough not to break the rules that had been laid down for them. They were visitors in this country, they knew nothing about these things, and if they were going to live to see the insurance agent brought down, they would have to remain focused.
He fell asleep to the sounds of tapping and crying and hissing.
In the morning, Manuel was all smiles. “Luck shines on us, amigos. I have been asking around, and one of my colleagues has a friend whose brother works for a man who killed himself last week because he could not pay for his insurance. I think this is what you are looking for.”
“But we need to find out where this company is. We need to go to the actual building.”
“And here we are in luck. My colleague’s friend’s brother saw the salesman who sold his boss the insurance walking down a street on the west side yesterday and the day before. It was at the same time both days.” He held out two hands like scales. “If we’re there and he’s there…”
“We can follow him,” Joel said.
“Sí. Yes.”
Hunt shivered involuntarily. This sounded right, this sounded familiar. No secret canyons in remote mountains but a man walking the streets, making his rounds. Now they were getting close, and he was getting scared. The enormity of what they were attempting to do was starting to come home to him.
“What time does he walk by?” Hunt asked.
“Eleven-ten. We should be there a half hour early, just in case.”
“An hour,” Hunt told him.
“An hour, okay.”
He hoped that this was another insurance agent, someone local to the region who was working for The Insurance Group, but he could not help picturing in his mind their agent wandering the streets of Tuxtla Gutierrez in his old-time hat and trench coat, selling insurance policies that caused upstanding pillars of the community to commit suicide.
THE POLICY Page 33
