“Ray, what about her titties? Big? Small?”
Ray opened his eyes. The bar was gone. He was back in this strange moving machine with Mantu, barreling along through the darkness.
“Ray, goddammit, talk to me. Big titties or little ones? Did you ever cop a feel? Make it to second base?”
Michelle. Sweet, unsupervised Michelle, with her ancient parents snoring upstairs, her sisters running amok with boys in Trans Ams, and her pot-smoking older brother listening to Black Sabbath in his bedroom. “Little. I kissed her in the hall every day before shop class.”
“What did you make in shop class? A bong? I’ll bet you made a bong, didn’t you, you little bastard?”
Now he was back in the bar. The silly questions were coming from the bar’s jukebox. “No. I was a jock back then. I ran cross country.”
“Who are you talking to?” Lily asked. Her hand slid down into the back pocket of his jeans and the other slipped around his chest from behind. She squeezed his ass. “Ray, why are you so distracted? Pay attention to me. Come on. Let’s dance.”
The jukebox voice again. “Did you love her, Ray?”
Of course he’d loved her. As much as any sixteen-year-old boy loved his girlfriend. How could he not love her Charlie perfume, skin-tight Jordache jeans, and her hot, sweaty neck when he made out with her? “I loved her. Hell, yes. Of course I loved her.”
“Ray?” Lily held his head. Looked into his eyes. He wished he could leave the bar. It was hot, and uncomfortably crowded, and Lily was starting to annoy him with her insistence and her big black eyes. “What?” he asked. “I’m trying to listen to this song.”
“What did you listen to?” the man in the jukebox shouted. “When you were making out with Michelle? What was on the radio?”
And then the jukebox started playing music again. And Ray smiled. “ ‘All My Love.’ Led Zeppelin.”
“Excellent, Ray. You keep the music playing while I’m talking to you, okay?”
Lily faded away, and Ray held Michelle tighter and tighter as they spun around at the ninth-grade dance.
—
The jukebox played REO Speedwagon. Then Styx. And Journey.
“You’re kidding me. You white boys listened to that awful shit? For real?”
Ray laughed. Lily was breathing in his ear, but the funny guy on the jukebox wouldn’t shut up.
“No Michael Jackson? Grandmaster Flash?”
“Sorry, I was from the other side of the tracks.” He looked around the bar. Lily was a mantis again, her head wobbling on a thin neck, but her hair was as long and red and luscious as he remembered. Cockroaches scuttled across the bar, but no one seemed to mind. The bartender himself was a cockroach, in fact, his multiple legs pouring drinks and cleaning glasses. The entire bar was full of insects, snakes, and a weary bat huddled over a tumbler of whiskey and ice. Normally, he hated bugs. But this place was kind of nice. The kind of place you could stay for a long time, and get to know everyone.
“Ray? Ray? Asshole! Yo, shit for brains!”
Say what you would about him, but the guy in the jukebox was funny, in an obnoxious way. Lily held out a cigarette to him in her weird bug claw. He waved it away. “Have one with me,” she said. “For old time’s sake.”
“We’re almost there, Ray, you whacked-out honky bastard. You need to talk to me a little bit longer, okay?”
He turned back to the jukebox. Lily was standing behind his barstool and her tongue rasped up the back of his neck to his ear. He was getting hard again and his pants were too tight. Did mantises even have tongues? Or was she a person again? It was hard to keep things straight in this bar. Everything was fluid and changed every time he looked away. Maybe he just needed another drink.
“Let’s get back to Ellen. Tell me about her. Where did you meet her?”
Lily hissed. “Fuck that bitch. Listen to me, Ray.” Her hands—they were hands again—moved down to his crotch. “Let’s go somewhere we can be alone.” She squeezed him and he groaned. Damn. She didn’t waste any time.
“Ellen, Ray—think about Ellen. She loves you and she misses you and we need to find her. Where did you first meet her?”
“Let’s go fuck,” Lily whispered, her tongue moving in his ear. “Right now.” She tugged on his zipper. She was the mantis again. Those giant shiny eyes were a little unnerving now that he looked at them more closely. He slid off the barstool and pushed her away. “Not now,” he said. He walked to the jukebox, hoping no one saw his erection. It was full of CDs of black musicians. Michael, Janet, Public Enemy, Lionel Richie, Miles Davis. One CD was unlabeled, but the cover was a photo of an old black man with a scarred face dressed in a goofy white suit. And the crazy thing was, the man in the picture smiled at him. How about that. “What did you say?” he asked the man in the jukebox.
“Ellen. Ellen Davis. Pay attention. Where did you meet her?”
“It was at that diner. In Blackwater.”
“Keep talking, brother. Keep talking.”
Chapter Seven
Ellen crouched near the top of the stairway as William stepped slowly down the stairs. Luckily the stairs were covered in thick shag carpeting, the kind of carpet that had already gone out of fashion when she was a kid, so he didn’t make a sound. Next to the front door the fat solitaire-playing goon slept, his rifle on his lap. Ellen didn’t like guns, which some people thought strange since she was born and had spent all of her life in West Virginia. She’d always hated hunting, and dead deer hanging on the backs of trucks made her queasy and terribly sad. But she knew the gun on the fat man’s lap was something as hard-core as what Steve would have used in Iraq. It looked grotesque, rising and falling on his belly as he snored. Next to him, a small black-and-white monitor mounted to the wall showed a series of live surveillance camera shots: the dirt road outside the fence, illuminated in spotlights, the inside of the fence perimeter, and the outside of the enormous reinforced front door. No one could arrive at El Varón’s by surprise.
William looked at her, and she knew what his expression said: Don’t go in the room without me. She nodded. He waved her back, and she moved up another step into the shadows. Now she could only hear the snoring. William disappeared around the corner, and she said a silent prayer for him.
She struggled to calm her breathing. It was intensely quiet in between the snores. They were lucky El Varón was gone, or else Mr. Fat Guard would probably be too terrified to doze off. Everyone was so rigidly well behaved and subservient when El Varón was around that this night seemed bizarre. When the cat’s away. She and William were mice.
Only El Varón wasn’t the least bit catlike. More like a snake. Or a spider—something venomous.
She waited, praying William’s idea would work.
—
William was making his way through the living room now, she knew, past the garish boom-boom room and into the kitchen. Beyond the kitchen were the doors to the patio and pool. William—and she had felt a wave of pride when he told her—had been carefully monitoring and mapping all of the goings-on, from the stations and paths of the guards to the placement of alarms and cameras. He had noticed the guards setting an alarm each night when they locked up the patio door. Four beeps and it was armed for the night.
And all the while she’d been worried he was going brain-dead from the video games and TV. She’d been blessed with a damn smart kid. Brilliant, in fact, as his third-grade teacher had repeatedly said. Sneaky, too. And once they’d gotten away from here—which they were going to do, since she couldn’t even consider any other possibility—she’d make sure he got a real education. College, graduate school, the works. No matter what it took.
But what was her life going to be like after this? Was Ray okay? Was he even alive? She had to believe he was. William seemed to think so, and if anyone could pick up on something like that it was him. But how would she find him again? And then what? Back to the Brotherhood’s compound? Was she cursed to go from one armed compound to another? Living
behind high walls and razor wire the rest of her life? “He calls you his pajarita. His little bird,” Costanza had said.
Well, fuck that. Fuck all of that.
A shrill piercing screech ripped through the silence. She’d known it was coming, but it still almost made her scream. Whoop-whoop-whoop. He’d done it. He’d opened the patio door. God, please let him be okay. Please don’t let them hurt him.
Below her, Mr. Fat Guard stumbled past the stairs and vanished into the living room, his gun and enormous key ring jangling. Now was her chance.
She hurried down the stairs, rounded the stairwell, and descended one more flight. A door stood at the end of a short hallway. On each side of it were murals. Mayan art—the strangely cartoonish, simplistic but alien style that always made her imagine the early Mayans ate a lot of the funny mushrooms they found in the jungle. Two long, oddly angled human figures, with oversized skeletal heads. Holding something in their long-fingered hands. It took her just a moment to figure out what those bony hands were holding. Human heads. With stylized blood spraying from the bottom of their necks.
There was a word, in black, blocky letters, written on the door: Xibalba.
And on the side of the door, an enormous, thick padlock.
Shit.
And then she smelled it—a hint of something rotten. When she’d worked at Doris’s Diner, the Dumpster would be at its worst the day before trash pickup. Especially in the wretchedly hot days of summer. And then she found a better comparison—the smell coming from beyond the door smelled like the meat stalls in the Guatemalan markets. She had almost given up eating meat after wandering through the aisles of butchered pigs, stacks of pale chickens, and hunks of beef carcasses. It was the floor that grossed her out the most—what felt like walking on a huge, black scab. And the smell of old blood, mixed with new blood.
The earsplitting alarm shut off in mid-whoop.
Someone was yelling. That asshole fat guard was screaming at William. She flushed with an instant violent anger. If that piece of shit hurt her son…
But she needed to get back upstairs. Before someone caught her. She pulled the padlock, just in case it had been left unlocked—no luck. She turned, ran up the first set of stairs, and peeked around the corner. Nothing, just light from the TV, some cheesy telenovela playing at low volume for no one.
And then she heard William, panicked, apologizing in Spanish. “Accidente,” he kept saying. She walked quickly toward the back door, and now three of El Varón’s armed goons stood around William.
“What’s going on?” she asked. She was always forgetting her Spanish when she got frightened or mad.
The goons turned. The fat, mealymouthed guy walked up to her with no trace of his earlier leer. Again she struggled to understand what he was saying, but got only the gist—the boy had tried to open the door. He’d set off the alarm. He’d been told the rules over and over again.
“I left my book outside. I just wanted to get my book, Mom. I forgot about the alarm.” He repeated himself in Spanish for them.
“Come with me, William.” She glared at the men. “He’s a boy, dammit.” She grabbed William’s shoulders and hustled him to the stairs.
When they got back in the bedroom she mock-scolded him for the cameras they both assumed were watching them. Waved her finger in his face and all—she was proud of her dramatic touch, even if they weren’t being monitored. And then, when they both crawled into bed, she whispered into his ear: “Good work, kiddo. But we’re not getting out through there unless we find a key to a very big lock.”
—
Ellen awoke later, her brain fuzzy. What time was it? She’d heard muffled noises from outside the room, maybe from downstairs. William was already sitting up next to her, his eyes wide.
“Something’s happening,” he said.
Ellen got out of bed and slipped into her pink bathrobe, cinching the belt. “I’ll see if I can find out what’s going on.” William grabbed her arm. “Please be careful, Mom,” he whispered, his eyes wide.
She kissed his forehead. “You know I will.”
She opened the door, hoping no one would hear the telltale click. When she heard the commotion downstairs, she knew it wouldn’t be a problem. She crept carefully to the edge of the stairwell. Shadows of several men stretched along the floor. El Varón moved into view, and she ducked out of the way, her heart hammering.
Someone cursed in Spanish. Another laughed—the overweight pervert. She peeked around the stairwell. There was more commotion, and she froze as someone fell into her view. A man, his hands tied behind his back. His head bloody, his face concealed in shadows.
A word in English: fucker.
The fat goon grabbed him by the back of his shirt and hoisted him up to his knees. Ellen could only partly understand what he said amid the flurry of Spanish obscenities. Something about paying for his lies. El Varón stepped back into view, in front of the bloody bound man. He was dressed in a black suit, but it was disheveled. His white shirt was spattered with blood. Ellen withdrew as far as she could, hoping the shadows fully concealed her.
El Varón knelt in front of the bound man, who was shaking uncontrollably. Ellen felt her stomach knot. She could smell his rank sweat and piss all the way at the top of the steps. El Varón smiled, and for the first time she saw the unconcealed malevolence behind those dark eyes and brilliant white teeth.
“Por favor, Jesús Cristo, por favor, mi familia, Señor…” the bound man was crying.
El Varón laughed, deep and throaty and cold, and Ellen understood his reply distinctly: Your savior has no power here.
And then he said something that she could barely make out, but she was too terrified to move any closer to catch it. Something about death, and hell, and a word she understood when she heard it: subterráneo. The bloodied man started to wail, and the fat goon yanked the back of his shirt so hard it choked off his voice.
“Xibalba,” El Varón said. She-bal-ba. You’re going to Xibalba.
She withdrew back into the darkness as they dragged the screaming man down to the basement.
—
The glaring face of an Aztec warrior hovered over him, garishly painted, eyes ablaze, teeth clenched. If that wasn’t horrible enough, insects crawled all over that grim face—scorpions, spiders, beetles, all over his skin, in his nostrils, his eyes, and swarming in and out of his mouth.
No, it wasn’t an Aztec warrior. It was Mantu.
“Ray? Dammit, Ray. Come back to me, man.”
Ray felt the slap. His face burned. Slowly the insects and the Aztec paint melted away, and Mantu’s sweaty face moved closer. “It’s me, Ray. You’re slipping, man. You need to look me in the eyes and listen, okay?”
He had been somewhere else. It had been nice, if a little strange—inside of some kind of damp, reddish chamber. Mantis Lily had been feeding him a thick yellow liquid out of a pink-veined bladder while hundreds of tiny mantises were slowly eating bits of him—gnawing on his fingers, his face, and his feet. It hadn’t been painful, though—on the contrary, the nibbling of their minuscule teeth had been quite pleasurable.
Now he was back in this strange place, staring at this dark-skinned man. He blinked a few times, and then the reality of his situation whooshed him back.
“God, Mantu.” He felt feverish, his mouth tasting something foul. “What’s happening to me?”
“The poison is taking you over. But you’re strong, amigo. Tougher than you look. I’m surprised at how well you’re hanging on. I think it might have gotten the best of me by now.” He opened a bottle of water and poured it on Ray’s face.
Ray shook his head, sputtering. “Okay, damn.” His stomach lurched, but he breathed deeply and fought the nausea. The transition from the weird world in his head back to the real one was like being thrown out of a fast-moving car.
“We’re almost there. I’m pretty sure she lives in a village outside of San Andrés Sajcabajá.” He shook Ray by the shoulder. “You need to sit up. And
I know it’s hard but you need to keep your eyes open. Wide open. I want you alert when we get there, because if you go too deep it might be too late. I need to ask around the village to find her. Like most naguales, she lives outside of town. Her people respect her, but they’re scared shitless of her, too.”
“Can she fix me?”
“I sure hope so. Jeremy tried to recruit her, but she wanted nothing to do with us. She’s probably too wild anyway. Naguales are powerful, but independent, and they don’t like people trying to force them to do anything. She’s not really a healer, but you need more than a healer right now. She works with the dark shit that’s gotten inside of you, so she’ll know how to get it out. But we shouldn’t be wasting time. Come on. Sit up straight.”
Ray sat up and blinked. The sun was going down, and the pink and orange of the sky were so intense it hurt his eyes. The woods and mountains all around them looked malevolent, and he kept seeing faces in the vegetation. This was far worse than the horrible drug he’d snorted at Crawford’s party. He shivered. “Is it cold, or is it just me?” he asked.
“It’s cooler in the mountains, but it ain’t cold in here. It’s the poison making you feverish.” He reached into the back and grabbed a Mayan blanket. “Here. This will help you stay warm. And please try to keep your eyes open. When you close them, you start to drift. Wherever it’s taking you, it’s getting harder and harder for you to come back.”
He nodded. “I forgot all about this place. I mean, here—the real world. Where I was…seemed so real.”
“That world is real, I think. I heard one of the Brotherhood chemists talking about these kinds of brain poisons. If you don’t get that nasty shit out of you, your soul and your mind wind up lost. Wandering around there with no way back. Your body—well, you might as well be a potted plant.”
Ray thought of Mantis Lily and shivered. “She’s there, too. She’s projecting herself into it.” He pulled the blanket up to his chin. “Let’s go. Hurry.” The other world was lying in wait. Lily was in there, working her magic from its darkness, pulling him deeper. He even smelled her jasmine perfume in the still air of the van.
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