by Jim Butcher
Back at the guesthouse, I fell into bed and slept six hard hours. I was still a bit groggy when I turtled out of my bedroom and down to the empty sala about noon. The visitors had all gone out, most of the family was at church or in the kitchen. Mercedes Villaflores glanced out of the kitchen window and waved to me to come inside.
“Buenos días! Did you enjoy your evening?” she asked, immediately putting a cup of coffee and a plate of food on the counter for me.
“Yes,” I replied, not sure if “enjoy” was the right word, but certain I’d learned something, if I could shake it into clarity. “Where’s Mickey—Miguel?” I sipped the coffee and felt it kick my system back up to speed. I looked for Iko, but didn’t see him, and was just wondering about that when Mercedes replied.
“Oh, he’s still asleep.” She shrugged and returned to her stove, chatting over her shoulder. “Teenagers . . . You know.”
Thinking about the missing ghost dog and Mickey made me think of the cemetery. “Mercedes . . . who’s Tío Muñoz?”
“Tío Muñoz? Where did you hear of him?”
“Mickey mentioned him.”
“Ah! That boy . . . he’s such a trouble. Muñoz is . . . the family bogeyman. You know: the crazy uncle your mama tells you will take you away in the night if you don’t finish your supper. Totalmente loco en la cabeza,” she added, knocking a knuckle against her temple, as if sounding a melon for ripeness. “He was accused of working black magic long ago, but he run up into the hills and disappeared. I think, if he is alive, he is no trouble to anyone, just a crazy old man. If not . . . maybe he’ll come to dinner tonight, eh?”
She laughed; clearly she didn’t feel the same horror as her nephew, but then . . . she wasn’t fascinated with black magic, as Mickey was.
“Do you know anything about the Arbildo family that used to live in San Felipe del Agua?” I asked.
She just shook her head.
I poked at my food and thought. I was seeing a picture that was not at all pretty. I wished I was sure what had turned Maria-Luz from sweet on Jimenez to sour. Why hadn’t Jimenez told her where Purecete was buried? Was that the key? Or had she discovered something else?
I fished the little baggie of statue shards from my jacket pocket and stared at the bundle of hairs, tied with red thread, wound counterclockwise. The magic goes backward. . . . Like the writing on the paper. I could see the slip of notepaper clearly in my mind: the letters cramped on the left, expansive on the right, as if it had been written backward, running out of space. . . . She’d scryed me out through the Grey, talking to ghosts through a black-magic connection, as Mickey had described. Death magic, blood magic . . . Had Maria-Luz sacrificed the dog . . . ? No, Iko was dead long before she knew about me—possibly before I was a Greywalker—back when Jimenez died in a plane crash. Just how long had she had the statue waiting for the right grave? Why had she wanted to put Iko’s spirit, wound in black magic, on Jimenez’s grave?
Tío Muñoz seemed more interested in Mickey than in me. But if he was—or had been—a black sorcerer, maybe he was interested in the black magic I was carrying in my pocket as well as his great-nephew. You can’t count on much about black magic or bogeymen, though he didn’t seem to approve of Mickey’s personal darkness.
I needed to talk to Maria-Luz or Hector Purecete. I hoped one or both would show up once darkness fell at San Felipe del Agua.
Mickey scuffed into the kitchen looking morose and wan.
“We still on for tonight, Mickey?” I asked.
“Huh? Tonight?”
“Yeah. My little ghost party at the panteon, remember? You’re going to help me with the setup, right?”
He looked relieved I hadn’t said anything about Tío Muñoz. “Yeah, right. Setup. Sure.”
“What time do we need to head up the mountain? Four?”
“Dusk. Whatever. Tía Mercedes won’t mind if I’m back late for the party here.”
She said something in Spanish that sounded like she’d be happier the later he was.
“OK,” he replied. “We can leave at four with the food and stuff.”
“Cool. See you down here, then,” I agreed, carrying my empty coffee cup to the sink and allowing Mickey to escape.
I walked down to the zocalo and found a cafe table to occupy while I made a phone call. The layers of spirits and magic were thicker and brighter than ever, surging like an ocean in the plaza and spilling into the streets leading to it. I dialed Quinton’s pager and waited for him to call me back. Quinton was still paranoid about the possibility of being rediscovered by his ex-boss, so the easily tracked technology of cell phones was one he chose to do without.
About half an hour later, as I was working on a sunburn, he returned my call.
“Hey.”
“Hey, yourself. Need a favor.”
“Shoot.”
“I don’t have Internet access here, so can you run some searches for me and get back with information before four p.m. here?”
“That’s . . . two here. Yeah, I can do that. What are the search terms?”
“I need everything you can find on the death and bio of a Mexico City lawyer named Jimenez. Sorry I don’t know the first name, but he was the partner of a guy named Guillermo Banda. Jimenez died in a plane crash a few years ago. Also anything on the Arbildo family that owned a ship or boat called the Dulcia that sunk in 1982, based out of Mexico. And look for any connections between Jimenez’s firm and Arbildo—especially anything shady or questionable.”
“Arbildo. That’s the woman who left you the dog.”
“Her family and her lawyer, yeah. There’s something strange going on between them and, so far, death hasn’t proved to be much of a barrier. I’m also wondering if Maria-Luz was adopted, but it’s doubtful there’d be any record of that on the Internet.”
“You never know. I’ll see what I can get and call you back.”
I thanked Quinton and hung up before going out to walk around the zocalo and take a closer look at the Grey grid of Oaxaca. There were a lot of things about the way energy flowed here that were different from Seattle’s grid and I didn’t want to be surprised that night. I needed a little local practice with the power lines before I felt comfortable about my ability to deal with the potential conflicts that might be in store. I tried a variation of the ghost-pull that had brought up Ernesto Santara and got Iko, as I’d hoped. I was pretty sure I’d be able to banish him again, if I had to. I still had no idea what part he had been intended to play at Hector’s grave.
Quinton called back and I took notes about the perfidy of lawyers; hard financial times; an unhappy schoolgirl with bad, black habits; and the sinking of insured boats, while leaning against an old church wall, cooled by the shade of the stones and the ice-water feeling of the rising tide of ghosts. The ghost dog panted at my feet, tongue lolling onto the bricks of the plaza.
A silvery skeleton dressed in a dark vest and trousers paused to pet the dog and raised his head to me. “Éste es tu perro?”
“Hang on,” I told Quinton. “My dog? No,” I replied to the skeleton man. “You know this dog? Uh . . . Usted . . . uh . . .” I stumbled through the language as badly as ever, but the ghost seemed to know what I meant.
He shook his skull and clacked something I didn’t catch, but the meaning seemed clear enough. It wasn’t his dog, but it might have been Estancio Rivera’s dog. I pointed at Iko. “Esta perro?”
The skeleton nodded his skull vigorously. “Sí! Es Iko!”
Iko rolled over in the spectral dust and offered his belly for rubbing.
I returned to my phone call while the skeleton man gave Iko some attention. “Is there any mention in those files of an Estancio Rivera?” I asked Quinton.
“Not that I’ve seen, but Rivera is about the most common name in Mexico after Garcia. This is in Oaxaca, right . . . ?”
I could hear his fingers speeding on a keyboard. “Yeah.”
“Huh. This is kind of weird. A guy named Estancio Rivera dis
appeared from a Mexico City hotel room in 1981, presumed dead. Wallet, ID, and clothes were found, but not his money or the man. ID was from Oaxaca. He worked in a mezcal distillery and guess who owned it.”
“Arbildo?”
“Give the little lady a cigar!”
“Damn,” I muttered. Did I have it? Was it that easy? Hector was the missing Estancio as well as Maria-Luz’s real father. He’d vanished in Mexico City, where the Arbildos lived. Then changed his name and taken a post on an Arbildo ship that sunk. . . . He’d been “dead” twice before he died for good.
The skeleton ghost stood up, tipped his hat, and walked off after wishing me a “Buenas noches.” I nodded at him and noticed the shadow of the church was nearly across the plaza now. The tower bells began tolling four.
“I have to run. Thanks for the help.”
“No problem, but I would like to hear the story. . . .”
“I’ll take you to dinner when I get back and tell you the whole thing. Right now I have an appointment in a graveyard.”
I shut off the phone and ran back toward the Villaflores guesthouse. Iko barked and ran along beside me. We skittered into the doorway together and straight into a glowering Mickey.
“Thought you’d ditched me.”
“No,” I panted. “Just lost track of time. You ready to go?”
He frowned at me, clearly teetering on a decision.
“Come on, Mickey. You didn’t come up here just for the family celebration.” I leaned in close to him and breathed my words into his ear. “You want the magic.”
He bit his lip.
I wanted all the help I could get, and even if Mickey didn’t know what he could do, he could still be useful if things went bad. And a plain “please” was not going to work with him.
He gave a sudden, hard nod. “I’m coming.”
We grabbed our coats and boxes and bundled into the car as fast as possible. Iko sat and waited patiently, then vanished to meet us at the graveyard.
The sun was already gone by the time we reached the panteon at San Felipe del Agua. A procession by candlelight was wending to the cemetery, carried on a wave of music. We parked and joined the crowd that surged into the cemetery, Iko reappearing as before, just inside the gates.
The ofrenda and decorations were untouched and it took only a few minutes to put out the food and drink, trinkets, cigarettes, mezcal, and wash water, to light the candles and the copal. We both sat down to wait while the ghost dog circled the graves, sniffing.
The odors of food, flowers, incense, and alcohol floated into the air on mariachi music and the chatter of living humans while the Grey hummed like a generator nearing overload. The thin silver mist-world seemed to quake as the ghosts flooded out, eager, hungry, happy. They rushed into the gap between the worlds with a roar. I gasped at the explosive upheaval of the Grey and Mickey stared, crouching on his stool like an angular gargoyle.
“How many do you see?” I asked.
“Thousand. . . . More than ever. And there’s . . . stuff. Like worms. Everywhere.”
Everyone who can see it sees it differently, I guess.
“Where’s our man?” Mickey looked around, shivering. “Maybe . . . the dog?”
“Yeah, maybe it’s time. Iko,” I called, reaching down to pat the ground on top of the grave, sending up a sudden gust of marigold scent and the odor of earth. Iko ran onto the grave and sat down. Nothing changed.
Remembering the children and their chocolate, I put out my hand. “Hand me that mezcal, Mickey.”
Quivering, Mickey picked up the bottle and slapped it into my outstretched hand. “You want a drink?”
“No. But I think Señor Purecete might—or Estancio Rivera, if he prefers.” I twisted the bottle open and spilled an ounce or two onto the grave next to Iko. The ground seemed to swallow it, groaning and heaving a cloud of yellow and gold sparks into the air.
Someone crawled up from the grave.
He was probably a slim man in life, judging by the narrow-cut clothes his skeletal form wore in death. He had a jaunty hat on his skull and a scarf tied around the absent circumference of his neck. A shadow of flesh clung over the skeleton, giving it a blurry, out-of-focus look. Iko whined and wriggled at the ghost’s feet, rolling in the dirt and showing his belly.
“Oh . . . Iko,” the shade breathed, the words coming clear into my head. “Where is your mistress?” He scratched the dog as it quivered in delight.
“Not here yet,” I offered. “But I think she’ll show up soon.”
Mickey glanced around and I followed his lead, but no one was paying us any particular attention. They were all busy and the sounds of the fiesta ramping up to last the whole night through drowned the oddness of any conversation we might have.
I held out the bottle and the ghost took it. “Gracias, Señora. It is a long time since I had a drink with a lovely lady.” A spectral twin of the mezcal bottle rose to his mouth and he poured a long shot down his transparent throat.
“Ernesto said you were a lady’s man,” I said.
The ghost of Hector Purecete belched and lowered the bottle. “Ernesto? From the Dulcia? Poor fellow. Good-hearted, not so good-headed. I’m sorry about the crew. It was only me Arbildo wanted drowned.”
“So it wasn’t an accident that the boat sank when you were on it. Jimenez found a way to sink it for Arbildo. The insurance company wasn’t sure, but they suspected it. You know they paid off, eventually, right?”
“Oh, sí. It was an old boat. Kill two birds with one stone—heh. Or two problems with one hole in the hull. He didn’t want her to know, or he’d have just had me cut to pieces in an alley in the Distrito.”
“Leon Arbildo, you mean.”
“Sí,” Hector replied, taking another gulp of ghostly mezcal. “Leon had a head for business.”
“What was her name?”
“Who?”
“Leon Arbildo’s wife. You met her at the mezcal distillery, didn’t you?”
“Ohhhh . . . Consuela. No, we met at a party. She was very bored. So was I. But of different things.” Hector drew closer to the table and looked it over, pausing to scratch Iko behind the ears and pat his sides roughly. “I imagined I was so very suave she fell at my feet, but I suppose it was truly that I was new and not like Leon.” He laughed and his yellow teeth snapped together with a sound like castanets. “Youth is arrogant and full of folly.”
He put out a skeleton claw for the towel and water. Mickey and I watched him in silence as the ghost washed his nonexistent face and combed his memory of hair. Then the specter straightened his scarf and resettled the hat on his head before surveying the spread of food.
Mickey’s eyes couldn’t stretch any wider without the orbs falling out, I thought. “They never speak,” he whispered. “I never hear them speak. . . .”
“Get used to it,” I muttered back. “Once they know you can hear them, they don’t shut up.”
The boy jerked his head toward me, drawing a breath that shook in his throat. He was more excited than the dog.
Hector—I couldn’t think of him as Estancio after all this time—had torn off a hunk of phantom bread and sat on the edge of his grave, munching it. His teeth clicked and ground together. “I thought I would never taste pan de muerto again. It’s very good.”
“Mi—mi tía lo hizo,” Mickey stammered, replying in Spanish, since he heard Hector in that language, just as I heard him in English.
Hector looked at him for the first time and the boy flinched back at the uncanny gaze from the ghost’s empty eye sockets.
“Your aunt? You must thank her for me. My Carmencita—my little girl Leon called Maria-Luz—could not bring me food and drink for these many years. She was afraid the lawyers would discover her knowledge of me and of what they would do if she came here. I left my home to be with Consuela—her mother—and I hid myself as a long-dead man, Hector Purecete, who would not mind. At first I did it to be near Consuela and later, when they thought they’d killed me,
to watch over my daughter.”
Bones and wings rustled in the darkness and a sigh of unearthly wind brought another ghost to the party.
“Papa.”
We all turned to look at the smaller spirit that had walked up to Hector Purecete’s grave. She wouldn’t have been very tall in life, but she had probably had her father’s build. A gleaming, oil-black nimbus surrounded her, shivering off the white surface of her dress. The memory of her face was still strong, creating a translucent veil of phantom flesh and expression over the visible bones of her skull. So this was Maria-Luz Carmen Arbildo.
The dog jumped into the air and barked in joy, running to tangle under her feet.
The ghost woman laughed and patted the dog. Then she looked sharply at me. “You brought him. But what happened? He should not be loose already.”
“The statue was broken at customs,” I answered. “I think Guillermo Banda paid someone to do it.”
“That bastard . . . I hate him. More than I ever hated Jimenez for what he did.”
I opened my mouth to ask her how she’d known what Jimenez had done—though I thought I knew—but was cut off by a shriek of eldritch wind.
“Don’t dare!”
“Dare what? To tell the truth?” Maria-Luz screamed, turning to the latest arrival.
This skeleton ghost was dressed in a suit—possibly the one he’d died in—much like Banda’s suit. I guessed this must be Jimenez since he’d come when named, and he was royally pissed about it.
“Bruja. Your father knew what you were up to. We followed you for your own good!”
“Liar!” she shouted, smacking him across his grinning, naked jaw with her bone-claw hand. “Leon Arbildo was not my father. That’s why you followed me. That’s why you spied on me and my real father. You said you were looking for him, but you weren’t. You tried to hide him from me—you tried to take him from me when I was still a child. That’s why you wrecked the boat, why you killed all those people. To get rid of my father!” So she had known about Jimenez, about Arbildo’s sinking of the boat, and about the graves Jimenez had not reported to her. No wonder she’d been mad when he died.