by Ryan Calejo
“C’mon,” Violet said. We started into the crowd. All around us, colorful streamers blew in the breeze, and lacy paper cutouts of calacas danced between the stone arches and covered walkways that lined the square. We slipped between the streams of bodies, careful not to trample on any of the winding trails of marigold petals that had been laid out pretty much all over the place. They were called caminos de los muertos—or paths of the dead. Family members put them out for their relatives that had passed on. Most led to elaborate altars decorated with bright red cockscombs, wildflowers, and mounds of fresh fruit. There was also bottled water and cans of soda to refresh wearied spirits.
“You see anything?” I asked V.
She stood on her tippy-toes, trying to see over the crowds. “I don’t even know what the woman looks like.”
“You’ll know if you see her,” Saci said. “Trust me.” He gripped my arm. “Ei, Saci thinking, maybe we come back some other time.… Maybe we go now.”
“We can’t go,” I said. “We need to do this.”
He blinked slowly, and his expression turned grim. “If you sure ’bout dis, den maybe Saci know a way down.…”
“You do?”
“Long time ago I hear rumor about an entrance near da…” He let his words trail off as his eyes drifted past me, over my shoulder.
“Dude, what are you—” I turned.
And suddenly felt my blood freeze when I spotted a lobisomem moving slowly through the crowd behind us.
With its inhuman size and height and the long hooded coat it wore to conceal its hairy arms and legs, it wasn’t exactly hard to pick out. The creature was maybe forty yards away, sniffing the air near the entrance to the garden.
The gate we’d just walked through.
Violet squeezed my hand. “Charlie…” Following her gaze, I saw that the lobisomem wasn’t alone—in fact, it had plenty of company. Its buddies were spread out everywhere—half a dozen of them prowling the dark hills just beyond the square, a spotter pacing back and forth along the roof of the old pink church, a pair lurking right outside the gate, scanning the crowds with those glowing red eyes. My heart started to beat harder. The blood thrummed and pulsed in my temples. I wasn’t sure about a whole lot at the moment (it was hard to be, with the hand of fear that had closed around my neck), but I did know this: The lobisomem had set a trap. They’d set it right here in El Jardín, and we had just walked straight into it.
But how did they know we’d come here …?
Of all the places in Mexico. Of all the places in Latin America.
How could they have known?
Violet’s eyes, full of fear, rose to meet mine. Her voice was barely a whisper as she said, “Charlie, what do we do?”
The question was, what could we do? There was a whole lot more of them than there was of us, and they also happened to be a whole lot bigger and a whole heck of a lot faster. We weren’t about to just give up, though. Not by a long shot. “We have to find La Catrina,” I said. “And quick!”
We started across the square, cutting through streams of happy, laughing partiers. Wax candles burned everywhere, casting a hazy yellow glow over everything and everyone. With my pulse pounding in my ears and the way my nerves were scrambling my brain, it wasn’t long before the painted calaca faces of the festivalgoers started looking real to me. I was now having a hard time differentiating between imagination and reality, fiction and real life. Voices, music, and laughter melted into a single dizzying rush, and my panic kicked up another few notches.
Just as we swerved around a group of rhinestone-studded mariachis singing “Calaverita,” Violet said, “Oh no,” and something warty and green plopped down between my sneakers. A frog. I squinted up to see about another thousand or so free-falling through the sky toward the square. It was raining frogs again—no, pouring frogs. They tumbled through the air like candy out of a busted piñata.
“Dis can’t be good,” Saci started to say, and then shut right up as another lobisomem emerged from behind the wall of hedges to our left.
This one had its hood pushed back to reveal its sharp, furry features, almost as if he didn’t care people might notice him. The only good thing was it hadn’t seen us. Yet.
I grabbed Violet and Saci and steered them into a tight circle of people marching up the middle of the square, lifting a ten-foot-tall papier-mâché calaca.
We stepped on a bunch of toes, got a few angry looks. The lady working the skeleton’s left leg (they were trying to make the calaca look like it was walking around and waving at people) almost tripped over us.
“¡Ay, Dios mío!” she shouted.
“Perdone,” I said. “Mi culpa. Perdone.”
“Miren dónde van, gamberros,” yelled a voice behind us.
Through the forest of swinging arms and legs, Violet spotted another lobisomem. Ten yards ahead of us, coming this way.
The second she pointed this out, we pushed our way out of the circle and headed in the opposite direction—
Only to walk straight into another lobisomem.
Bad news: This one had seen us. Worse, it was already raising its fang-lined muzzle, preparing to alert the rest of the pack.
But an instant before it could let out its terrifying howl, a chorus of screams erupted from the far side of the square. Screams of panic. Terror.
I whirled, expecting to see more werewolves, but what I saw was even worse—what I saw was zombies!
CHAPTER NINETY-FIVE
What looked like an army of zombies had surrounded the square. Not tens or hundreds or even thousands, but tens of thousands—thousands upon thousands upon thousands more. I could see them lined up in legit battle formation just beyond the high iron gates of El Jardín: A horde of pale, stick-thin bodies wielding swords and spears and carrying shields. And, like you might expect with things that had spent the last hundred or so years rotting away in the earth, they were totally gross. Their skin had begun to melt off their bones. Their fingers were clawlike and twisted with age. Teeth that had stretched into fangs grew out of their mouths. Just one look at them was enough to send my Panic-O-Meter spiking. Then they began marching upon the square, marching as one, and my Panic-O-Meter basically exploded. Next thing I knew the zombies began to attack the festivalgoers, swatting aside children, swinging their weapons at the men and women. I heard shrieks and saw dozens of bodies crumple to the ground. And the zombies would’ve no doubt hurt many more had the lobisomem not immediately engaged them. Werewolves and zombies clashed in a blur of teeth and steel. Howls ripped through the square. Terrified wannabe calacas fled in every direction, tripping over one another, knocking over tables and food carts. One dude—a sombrero-wearing mariachi—broke his guitarra over the head of one of the zombies, then took off running. Unfortunately, none of this distracted the lobisomem standing directly in front of us. Its glowing red eyes were still locked on me, and it was now reaching one clawed hand out toward me.
“Charlie, run!” Violet shouted, but before I could, there was a loud crack! and I saw the werewolf’s eyes roll up to whites an instant before he collapsed, facedown, on the cobblestone street. Standing over the body of the KO’d werewolf was a hooded figure with what looked like a thick tree branch growing out of its right sleeve.
“Now we should definitely run!” Saci shouted.
But just then the figure reached up to push back the hood of its dark cloak, revealing a familiar face. “Adriana!” I shouted, shocked. “What are you doing here?”
Her lips curved into a smile as she said, “Let’s just say that looking after you two is a full-time job. But we don’t have much time. I’d like to introduce you to my amiga.” She glanced to her left, where a lady dressed in a frilly white bridal gown stood facing the opposite direction. “Perhaps you’ll recognize her.…”
Now the lady in white turned to face us, rising to her full height—and my jaw dropped somewhere near my ankles. Yeah, I recognized her all right.…
It was her. The Lady of the Dea
d.
CHAPTER NINETY-SIX
La Calavera Catrina was easily over seven feet tall and telephone-pole slim, and radiated with a powerful otherworldly presence—something you had to experience to understand. Her face, a bony white skull the color of freshly fallen snow, was as terrifying as it was beautiful. Her eyes were dark, bottomless sockets. Her teeth were perfect and white. Her forehead and the smooth ridges of her cheekbones were decorated with intricate designs—geometric patterns and swirls, spiderwebs, and the long stems of roses seemingly carved right into the bone. They reminded me of fancy henna tattoos. Only, unlike any henna tattoos that I’d ever seen, these sparkled in the moonlight, appearing to swirl and dance as she moved. Her old-fashioned bridal gown clung to her ultra-slim frame, and she wore this wide-brimmed hat decorated with bunches of yellow marigold flowers, red roses, and wide purple feathers—ostrich, maybe. Beneath it, where her ears would’ve been, were two bright red roseheads, each almost the size of a softball and glistening as if freshly plucked. I’d never seen anything like her. Nothing so regal and ancient and utterly mesmerizing.
Paralyzed by fear and wonder, I just stood there, staring up at the Lady of the Dead as the dark sockets of her eyes bore deeply into mine. Which, by the way, was more than a tad bit freaky, considering there were no eyes in there. Finally she said, “Es mi placer, Charlie.”
“You—you know my name…?” The words trembled on my lips, barely audible over the shouts and howls rising above the square.
“She knows more about you than that,” Adriana whispered into my ear—and then, “It was my pleasure to watch over you.” With that, she stepped back, smiling, and spread her arms wide.
Before I could ask her what was going on, what she was talking about, Adriana began to sing, that soft haunting voice of hers echoing out across the square. And then… well, something strange happened: Even as she sang, her body began to change. And when I say change, I mean change: Her upper half began to swell, her shoulders ballooning outward as she grew several feet taller right before our eyes. The skin on her arms and legs darkened, turning a rich coffee color. Then it began to harden, becoming rough, grainy, marked with honey-brown ringlets and knobby little bumps. Cracks appeared in the cobblestones around her feet as her toes sank into the stones, lifting some several inches and vanishing beneath them. As I watched, gaping, the fingers of her hands stretched out impossibly long, twisting and twining, forming a network of spindly branches. The branches closed into a canopy, and as her voice grew louder, buds suddenly appeared. Then leaves, bright red and glistening, burst to life.
With a soft moan, Adriana threw her head back, and I realized that her face was changing too—her features fading, melting into the coffee-colored bark that now covered her from twigs to roots. And it was only when her face had completely vanished into the bark that her song ended.
Shocked—beyond shocked, really—I stared up at her, beginning to wonder if I should trade my eyes in for a pair that worked a little better. Except that wouldn’t have helped any. Because it wouldn’t have changed the facts, and the facts were simple: Where Adriana had been standing—and not even twenty seconds ago—now stood a tree, huge and timeless. A kapok tree. The national tree of Argentina. Suddenly an old story came back to me, one that had been nipping at the edges of my memory back in the woods when Adriana had sung her song and I’d played the guitarra. It was another legend taught to me by my abuela, the story of a young indigenous girl called Anahí, who lived with her tribe on the shores of the Paraná River. Every evening she would sing to her people about her love of their land and its beauty, and her voice was so lovely that everyone considered it a blessing and always looked forward to her song. But one day a group of conquistadors came to conquer their land and took her entire tribe prisoner. Anahí, who had always spent her days free, roaming the forests and frolicking in the great river, could not take being chained to a post. So one night when her prison guard fell asleep, she saw her chance and tried to escape. The guard, however, happened to wake, and in their struggle Anahí accidentally stabbed him with his own sword. His dying cry startled the rest of the soldiers, who then captured Anahí and sentenced her to death. On the day of her execution, after they’d tied her to a tree and lit a stack of firewood at her feet, the soldiers were astonished to see that the girl did not scream as the flames burned hotter and brighter, but rather sang. And the following morning they got an even bigger surprise: They woke to discover a kapok tree blooming in all its glory at the very spot where the girl had died.
Finally—finally—everything clicked together for me.
“It’s her,” I whispered to Violet. “The girl from the story she sang to us… the one who was burned alive and came back as a tree.”
But that wasn’t even all of it. No, see, I remembered this tree—this specific tree… Remembered seeing it back in Brazil when we laid our trap for Saci. Remembered seeing it in Chiloé when one of its great branches had swept down to swat an anchimayen out of the air just before she could incinerate us. I even remembered seeing it back in the town where the lobisomem had attacked, where it had saved me as I’d escaped into the alley wearing Saci’s cap.
It was her the entire time.…
She’d been tracking us, protecting us without us even knowing.
She’d never left.
La Calavera Catrina had once again turned the empty sockets of her eyes on me. The patterns carved into her cheekbones seemed to swirl and dance. “A kapok tree’s roots run deep and strong. They are a perfect access to the realms that lie beneath.”
As she spoke, the trunk of the tree pulled apart like a yawning mouth, revealing a sort of entrance… a descending, spiraling staircase, but instead of stone or concrete, the steps were the loops and knobs of tree roots. The whole thing was mind-boggling. Like something you’d see in a theme park. Only, it was real.
La Catrina ducked into the opening, but before I could follow, Saci grabbed my arm. “Don’t go,” he said, his dark eyes as intense and serious as I’d ever seen them. It was honestly a little unsettling. “Don’t do it.”
“Don’t be such a scaredy-cat,” Violet told him. “C’mon, Charlie.”
CHAPTER NINETY-SEVEN
The stairwell—or rather, the treewell—was cramped and dark and smelled not so surprisingly of bark. We followed La Calavera deep underground, our footsteps echoing loudly in the gloomy silence. Maybe fifty yards down, the world opened up around us: We were no longer moving through tree roots but some dark underground chamber with stony walls and floors that looked like they’d been paved with ash. I began to hear voices again, the same whispers and groans I’d been hearing around castells. They were louder down here, more desperate sounding.
La Calavera’s eyeless gaze narrowed on my face. “Do you hear them? ¿Las voces?”
I nodded, slowly, wondering how she knew. “Who are they?”
“The voices of the forgotten,” she said, and nothing more. Apparently she didn’t care to elaborate, and I was too terrified by what it could mean to ask her to.
As we followed the Lady of the Dead through a series of twists and turns, Violet whispered, “This place is completely bonkers.… It’s literally a maze down here.”
“La Sociedad designed it like this in the ancient days,” La Catrina said. She spoke slowly, as if she had all the time in the world. Which I guess she probably did. “It was the only way to keep dead things from finding their way out.”
“Ei, we not going to the Land of the Dead, are we?” Saci asked her. “Because that ain’t no place I want to visit anytime soon.…”
“We are not going that far down,” La Catrina replied in that hollow voice of hers.
“So where we going, then?”
“An in-between place. Somewhere neither here nor there. A place of sacrifice.”
“You mean an altar?”
“The highest,” she said, and Saci’s anxious eyes found mine.
“I no like dis, irmão.… You should definite
ly turn around.”
The Lady of the Dead’s hollow laughter echoed softly off the tunnel walls. “Already betraying your deal, Saci Pererê?”
Saci seemed to stiffen. “Wha’? I don’ know what you talking about, lady, okay?”
After a few more turns, we came to what looked like a dead end—a huge stony wall that stretched from floor to ceiling and across the width of the chamber.
“We are here,” La Calavera Catrina announced. “El Muro de Partición…” She turned to me. “The altar lies beyond this gate, but I can take you no farther. I cannot enter, for it is forbidden to my kind.”
Intricate designs and stunning geometric patterns just like the ones we’d seen underneath La Rosa Cemetery back in Miami had been carved into rough, grayish rock. Right where there should’ve been some sort of keyhole, there were two sets of five almost finger-size holes, four on top, one on the bottom.
“So how do we get inside?” I asked La Catrina, but the Lady of the Dead shook her head grimly.
“I have lost the ability to open such gates myself.”
“What do you mean?”
Her right hand slipped out from the sleeve of her silky skull-embroidered gown, and I saw that two of her fingers were missing—index and middle. “All ten are required to open this gate.”
I stared silently at her hand. Her fingers looked so familiar.… Where had I seen them before?
Suddenly a thought occurred to me, and digging into the front of my shirt, I brought out the necklace Adriana had taken from La Pisadeira back in Argentina.
The dark sockets of La Calavera Catrina’s eyes seemed to light up.
“Where did you find those?” she breathed.
“Took them from a surprisingly heavy hag.”
“Wait,” Violet said, “so you’re Death. It was your fingers the necromancer sliced off.”