World's Scariest Places: Volume Two

by Bates, Jeremy

  It was Nitro who’d called me “Mr. Days of Thunder.”

  “You know, chavo,” Nitro went on, “for a race car driver—a former race car driver—Jesus totally left you in his dust on the highway.”

  “Who got pulled over?” I said.

  “Who wimped out?”

  “You really need to get over that screen door, Muscles,” I told him. He didn’t react to the pejorative nickname, but I knew it got to him, which was why I used it. “You know what I don’t get?” I added. “It wasn’t even your place.”

  “Jack,” Pita said. “Drop it.”

  But I didn’t want to. This trip was getting to be too much. First, Jesus invites himself. Then he invites Nitro—and no one bothers to tell me?

  “Anyone else coming I don’t know about?” I asked.

  “We mentioned Nitro was coming last night,” Pita said.

  “Not to me you didn’t.”

  “I’m sure we did,” she said.

  “We did,” Jesus assured me with bullshit sincerity. “Maybe you just don’t remember—?”

  “Guys! Guys!” Pepper interjected brightly. “What does it matter? We’re all here, and we’re going to have a great time. That’s all that matters.” He flourished his arm toward the trajinera. “Now all aboard!”

  3

  A long yellow table down ran down the center of the gondola. Fourteen chairs accompanied it, giving everyone plenty of room. Pepper and I sat across from each other near the bow while Jesus and Nitro sat near the stern. Pita and Elizaveta settled smartly in the middle of the boat, acting as a buffer between Nitro and me. The boatman or oarsman—or whatever you called the guy who steered the gondola with the long pole—was two boats down, playing cards with two other boatmen. He was middle-aged with a grizzled moustache and wiry salt and pepper hair. Dark salt stains dampened his shirt around his neck and beneath his arms. When he saw us boarding, he jotted across the boardwalk, disappearing into the crowd, returning a few minutes later carrying a large bucket of ice filled with beers, sodas, and an assortment of juices. I asked him how much for the lot. He told me three hundred pesos, which worked out to twenty pesos a drink, or roughly one dollar. I passed money to Pita, who passed it to Jesus, who paid the guy. Then Jesus plunked the bucket on the table. Elizaveta and Pepper each took a soda, Jesus and Nitro and me a beer. Pita declined everything. She was on some strict diet, and I rarely saw her indulge in anything that contained more calories than a stick of celery.

  The boatman expertly guided us away from the crowded dock and into the waterway, then we were on our way.

  4

  The canal was crowded with other flat-bottomed gondolas like ours, most filled with Mexican families, couples on dates, and Caucasian tourists. A flotilla of merchants in smaller canoe-like boats tooled between them all. Their wares were similar to their brethren’s on the docks: jewelry, candied apples, corn, toys, ponchos, flowers. Jesus waved over a floating tortería restaurant and ordered a variety of sandwiches. While we were eating—despite the two tamales I’d consumed earlier, I was still hungry—a boat carrying a Maríachi band in charro outfits sidled up next to ours, serenading us for the next while at what worked out to be a few bucks a song.

  Soon we pulled away from the congestion and moved deeper into the ancient network of maze-like canals. The floating gardens Pepper mentioned earlier replaced the historic buildings and markets and general hustle and bustle of Cuemanco. Tall semi-evergreens lined the banks. Many had developed multiple trunks that formed expansive canopies of dark green pendulous foliage. A few were absolutely monstrous, as thick as a living room in diameter, and I suspected they had been planted by the Aztecs hundreds of years before. Complimenting these were coral-red flame trees and purple-blue jacaranda and colorful flowering plants such as bougainvillea, poinsettia, oleander, and hibiscus.

  As we glided down one channel after another, I glimpsed old farm-houses, flower nurseries, and other cottage industries. Birds and farm animals grazed on green pastures. Kids swam in the water, men and women toiled in fields, and older folks sat stoically on rocks or logs or other makeshift seats, not doing much of anything. Pita and Elizaveta waved at them. A few waved lazily back.

  Pepper, I realized at one point, was saying something to me. I blinked, looked at him. The warm sun and pastoral scenery had lulled me into a hypnotic state.

  “What did you say?” I asked him, tilting a beer to my lips.

  “Where do you go sometimes, Jack?” Pepper said in his ebullient manner. “I asked you if you can now see why the Spanish dubbed Xochimilco, ‘The Venice of the New World.’”

  “It’s nice,” I said.

  “You’d never know these canals were a mass grave.”

  I frowned. “What are you talking about?”

  “A mass grave,” he said. “During the revolution, the army dumped the bodies of hundreds of opposition fighters into the canals.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  He shook his head. “Not long ago many skeletons were discovered all throughout the channels.”

  We were floating over dead people? Suddenly the place was not so Eden-like.

  I said, “You should mention that in your documentary.”

  “I intend to.

  I sipped my beer, thinking about this, letting it gather weight in my mind, when Pita flicked the cigarette she’d been smoking into the water. She was chatting with Elizaveta, telling her how she and Jesus used to come to these canals at nighttime when they were younger. They’d rent a large gondola with their friends and turn it into a floating nightclub with music, dancing, drinking.

  Pita, and Jesus for that matter, were colloquially referred to as “Juniors”—the sons and daughters of Mexico’s elite ruling class, whose wealth was only matched by their sense of entitlement. Pita and Jesus weren’t so bad—they actually worked (Pita was the PR specialist for the family brewery)—but I couldn’t stand some of their friends. They were the type who bragged about having four hundred pairs of shoes, or two hundred suits—and keeping them stashed away in swanky homes abroad.

  I considered sliding Pita my beer bottle, telling her to put her cigarettes out in it instead, but that seemed like a jackass thing to do, especially given the fact we were still fighting. She’d think I was starting something, and she’d continue tossing her butts in the water, to make a point. Lately she’d become adept at making much of nothing.

  I shifted on my too-small chair to get more comfortable. My headache was returning. Maybe it was the onset of one of my migraines, or maybe it was just the heat, or the beer, but a locust-like thrumming had started in my frontal lobe, beneath the vertical gash that likely required stitches. I massaged the area around the bandage with my fingers.

  “Jack, look there,” Pepper said. He was pointing past me to a glade in the trees along the bank, where a twenty-foot Aztec pyramid stood. It appeared to be a stage prop, painted in bright shades of purple, pink, and green. “That’s the set for a show that has been put on there for the past ten years,” he added.

  “What kind of show?” I asked.

  “It’s called ‘La Llorona.’ It’s based on a famous legend in Mexico of the same name. Basically, a beautiful woman drowns her children to get revenge on her husband, who cheated on her with a younger woman.”

  “Hell hath no fury—”

  “Yes, yes, Jack,” Pepper said. “Anyway, this woman, she’s so filled with guilt, she ends up killing herself. But she’s held up at the gates of heaven. She’s not allowed to enter until she finds her children. So she ends up trapped between this world and the next, doomed to search for her kids for all eternity.”

  “Hence the reason you should never murder your kids to spite someone.” I swatted at a fly buzzing around my head, missed it, and said, “So why’s it called ‘La Macarena’—?”

  “‘La Llorona,’ Jack. That’s Spanish for ‘The Weeping Woman.’”

  I furrowed my brow. “Does this legend have anything to do with the Island of the Dol
ls? You mentioned the hermit who used to live there, Don Juan—”

  “Don Javier Solano.”

  “He found a body of a little girl in the canal?”

  Pepper nodded. “The locals around here believe there is a connection, definitely. Because on nights when the chinampas are shrouded in fog, La Llorona is believed to roam about, kidnapping other children who resemble her missing children, drowning them in the hope she can take them to heaven instead of her own.”

  “I don’t know if you can really pull the wool over God’s eyes like that, you know, with Him being omniscient and everything.”

  “It’s a legend, Jack. But that’s what the locals think happened to the little girl.”

  “La Llorona drowned her?”

  Pepper nodded again. “You know how superstitious Mexicans are.”

  I did. And this didn’t apply to only the poor and uneducated. Superstition seemed to be built into the collective unconsciousness of the entire country. Pita, for instance, was about as Americanized as you could get, but she one hundred percent believed in ghosts.

  “What about you, Jack?” Pepper went on. “Are you superstitious?”

  “Hardly.”

  “I’m not surprised,” he said. “You look like an atheist.”

  “What does an atheist look like?”

  “Like you. They have a hard edge. How should I say this...always looking a bit pissed off.”

  “I’m not always pissed off.”

  “I didn’t say that, Jack. I said, looks pissed off. I know you’re a very nice guy.”

  “Thanks, I guess.” I finished the beer, set the empty bottle aside. “So I still don’t see how all the dolls work into the story? Why did this guy, this Solano, begin stringing them up all over his island? Were they some sort of offering to the drowned girl’s spirit?”

  Pepper nodded. “She began contacting him at night, communicating with him in his dreams. She told him she was lonely. So the dolls were his gift to her, to keep her spirit at peace.”

  “This might sound like a stupid question, Peps, but where did he get all these dolls?”

  “Didn’t your teachers ever tell you there’s no such thing as a stupid question?”

  “Only because they were the ones always asking the stupid questions.”

  “An atheist and a pessimist—oh joy.” Pepper beamed a smile at me. “To answer your question, Jack, Solano got most of his dolls from Mexico City. He would go there occasionally to search the trash heaps, or the markets. But then later in his life, about ten years ago, Xochimilco was designated a national heritage site. A few years after that a civic program to clean up the canals was implemented, and the island was discovered. At first the locals thought Solano was an old crackpot and steered clear. But then a few of them began to trade him dolls for produce he grew.”

  I swatted at the fly that kept taunting my slow reflexes and thought about what Pepper had told me—and I had to admit I was now more curious than ever to see the island.

  “Pretty cool, Peps,” I said. “Sounds like you have one hell of a documentary on your hands.”

  “I agree, Jack. I think it will be my best one yet. And with the way Solano died recently, it all just comes together.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “How did he die?

  “Didn’t I tell you?”

  “You only told me he died, which is why we’re able to trespass on his island.”

  Pepper folded his hands on the table and leaned forward conspiratorially. “He drowned in the same spot where he found the girl’s body, fifty years to the day.”

  “Bullshit!” I said.

  “It’s true, Jack.”

  “What did the police say?”

  “They couldn’t determine anything. Solano had been dead for too long. The fish and salamanders got to him long before they did.”

  5

  I dreamed I was in a gondola with Pita. Not in Xochimimco. Maybe Venice, though I had never been to Venice before. It was dusk, what daylight remained was washed out, otherworldly. A mishmash of old buildings decorated with friezes and columns and broken pediments lined the banks of the wide canal, though they all seemed deserted.

  I had the sense we had been in the gondola for a very long time, hours, days even. Pita kept telling me we were almost there, and by “there” she meant heaven. She was excited to see her younger sister, Susana, who’d died when she was five years old. Susana and Pita had been playing hide-and-seek with some other neighborhood kids. Susana climbed into the fountain out front their house and drowned in the shallow water.

  Pita never talked to me about Susana. She’d mentioned her when we first began dating, but that was it. Now, however, she seemed more than happy to talk about her sister, and she began listing off all the things they were going to do when they were reunited. When I mentioned that Susana might still be five years old—how do you age if you stop existing?—Pita went quiet, contemplative.

  I was grateful for the reprieve. I had enough on my own mind. Specifically, I was worried I wouldn’t be allowed into heaven because I was an atheist. I kept wondering what I would do if Pita got in and I didn’t. She would probably tell me it was my fault for not believing in God. She would do the whole I-told-you-so routine. She would leave me there, outside the gates, on my own. And that’s the last thing I wanted: to be stuck by myself in limbo, if that’s where we were right then.

  The daylight continued to fade quickly, as if time was being fast-forwarded. The air cooled, becoming frosty with the prescience of death.

  As if on cue, a corpse appeared in the water, starboard. It floated face up, a few feet from the gondola. The eyes were ivory orbs, sightless. Skin was missing in places, revealing vellum-hued patches of skull.

  I pointed out the body to Pita. She looked the other way, playing ostrich, believing if she didn’t acknowledge it, then it wouldn’t exist. But then another body appeared, then another. Soon they filled the canal for as far as I could see in the gloom. Heads and limbs bumped against the hull of the gondola as we cleaved through them, but instead of slowing down, we seemed to be speeding up, as if the dead were ushering us along.

  I was telling Pita this couldn’t be the way to heaven, it was too morbid, too sad, when a thundering roar, like a waterfall, sounded in the distance. It was accompanied by a thick, wet mist, which wrapped around us, blinding us.

  Pita began to scream. I turned to face the boatman, to tell him to stop, to take us back.

  The boatman was a skeleton, its empty orbits gazing past me, its mouth fixed in a permanent rictus, its impossible arms pushing us forward with that long pole, rhythmically, inexorably.

  Pita had stopped screaming, and it took me a moment to realize why. She had become a doll. Life-sized, but definitely a doll, molded from polymer clay, painted bright colors, with glass eyes and synthetic hair.

  I tried to stand, to jump ship, to swim through the corpse-infested water to safety, yet I couldn’t move, and I wondered whether I was a doll too.

  Suddenly the mist parted and a black disc on the surface of the water appeared. Doom filled me as I knew this was a one-way trip, I was seconds away from dying, and there was nothing I could do to prevent it from happening.

  The gondola plunged over the edge of the void, into a bottomless abyss, and I was falling, falling, falling.

  6

  I woke up and knew I was still dreaming because now I was in the ER room of the Florida hospital where I’d been airlifted to by helicopter after the racing accident. My heart wasn’t beating. I was in cardiac arrest, effectively dead in both brain and body. Then I began to float, or my consciousness began to float, up toward the ceiling of the room, and then I was looking down, watching the medical staff work the defibrillator on my bare chest, watching them inject me with a cold saline solution to hopefully save my brain and organs, hearing their discursive conversations, hearing “Hotel California” on the stereo, hearing the lyrics about checking out but never leaving.

  Everything was just
as it had been when this happened to me for real eleven months before…and then the dream took on a mind of its own. A hole opened in the ceiling, and I found myself being pulled into it, down a tunnel of white light. Yet this wasn’t the comforting white light you hear about from people who’d had near-death experiences. There was no feeling of overwhelming transcendent love, no sense of connectedness to all of creation. Instead there was only terror like I had never experienced and never knew existed, terror that stripped me to my bones. Because there was a presence in that white light. It was waiting for me. I couldn’t see it, hear it, or smell it, but it was there, and it was waiting. And it wasn’t God, or at least not the benevolent one to which Christians and Muslims and Jews prayed. It was pure evil. And when I reached it, when it enfolded me in its embrace, it would never let me go. I would spend all eternity—the afterlife, heaven, hell, whatever you wanted to call it—in absolute, unrelenting pain.

  7

  I came awake with a start. I wasn’t dead. I was in the gondola in Xochimilco, seated at the long picnic table, my head on my arms.

  I sat straight, still waking up, and rubbed my eyes. I was shaken from the nightmare, disorientated. The first part of it—when I was in a gondola, and maybe a doll—wasn’t too bad. That was almost fun in a trippy sort of way. But the second part, when I was dead in the ER, floating down the tunnel of white light, toward whatever it was that awaited me, that was not fun at all.

  I’d been having similar dreams two or three times a week since the accident. Sometimes I’d just float around the ER watching the doctors and nurses work on me. Sometimes I’d leave the ER and zip around the hospital, invisible to the patients and staff. Sometimes I’d watch my physical body wake up in the ICU, and I’d freak out because I realized there was no getting back into it; I was going to be trapped outside of it forever, doomed to haunt the hospital. And then there was the dream I’d just had, which was the worst by far.