Paola Santiago and the Forest of Nightmares

by Tehlor Kay Mejia

  His smile was odd, Pao thought. Like this mouth wasn’t used to stretching in that particular way.

  My dad always smiled with his mouth closed, Pao remembered, like she was looking at a sepia photograph from a long time ago. This man was smiling with all his teeth.

  “The little scientist,” he said. “So you did get something from him after all.”

  “From who?” Pao asked, but he ignored her.

  “Your friend’s abuela is unconscious because she saw her past self ten years ago, when she brought her grandson home after a fantasma attack. She knew she’d have to cross over, go back in order to save him someday. She just didn’t know when that time would come.”

  “Cross over?” Pao asked. “What do you mean? All that happened in a dream. . . .”

  “Surely you understand by now that your dreams aren’t dreams, Paola.” He sounded disappointed, like she’d brought home a subpar math grade. “Yes, you have some of the silly, mundane dreams all mortals do. But when you saw the river at the mouth of the void, and when you walked into this forest, you were not dreaming. You were entering the void, seeing places and times that you could never access in life.”

  “So when we saved Dante in the past . . .” Pao said, both excited by the discovery and dreading its implications. “We were really in the past?”

  “The void cares nothing for the construct of time,” her father said, though his tone had an edge now. He was growing bored of her questions. “When you crossed over to heal yourself, when you thought of saving your friend, you emerged at the place where he would most need you. That happened to be a time you perceived to be ten years ago.”

  “But . . . how was Señora Mata there?” Pao asked. “How did she travel into the past?”

  “Mortals don’t have access to the void without training and instruction, and it costs them dearly to travel into it. She knew the sacrifice she was making. She left her living body. There are no guarantees she’ll be able to return to it.” His tone said he couldn’t care less whether she succeeded, but Pao’s blood was running cold.

  She thought of the flummoxed doctors at the hospital in Silver Springs trying to get a reading on Señora Mata’s vitals. She left her living body. . . . But didn’t that mean she was . . . ?

  “Carmela made good use of her time with Los Niños de la Luz,” her father said, a grudging respect in his tone. “She took from the dark side as well as the light. Of course, as a mortal she couldn’t access the gateway physically, so she sent her consciousness back through it in a dream to save her grandson. Pity I got to him first.”

  The gateway, Pao thought. The green paper dolls that had surrounded her before the ambulance came. Señora Mata had created a portal. . . .

  “The doctors said it was like her body was there but her consciousness was gone,” Pao said, mostly to herself. “They were right.”

  “They’re bound to get something right eventually. Even a monkey could write the Great American Novel if he smashed at the typewriter long enough.”

  But Pao was barely listening to his probability metaphor. She was too busy thinking about portals. Her father had said they weren’t intended for mortal use.

  It was the last piece, and Pao was afraid to look at it.

  “And the monsters?” she asked, delaying the inevitable. “Why have they been following me?”

  An irritated spasm crossed her father’s face. “Beto sent them to try to stop you, to scare you into going back home. He almost managed it with the cadejo bite. I had to manipulate that stupid friend of yours to get you back on track after that. . . .”

  “Dante?” Pao asked, her train of thought suddenly derailed. “What did you do with him?”

  “He’s none of your concern anymore,” her father said severely, and Pao couldn’t help but think that, in another world, this would be his you’re too young to date talk. “But since these are the last few moments of your mortal life, I suppose there’s no harm in letting you see. . . .”

  Pao’s father reached up and summoned another strand of purple energy from the cloud. Before Pao’s eyes, it fashioned itself into a little circular dish, like the scrying mirrors her mom sometimes used.

  “Mortals aren’t meant to enter the void,” he said in his cold, bored tone. “Not until it’s time for them to die. If they do somehow manage to travel in and out again, they come back with their minds altered, susceptible. I started speaking to him through his own dreams shortly after you returned, using him to draw you to me. I knew that if you were alone, you’d be too reckless. You’d go looking for connection. . . .”

  Pao choked back a sob. La Llorona had abducted Dante as bait, and that had left him vulnerable to this horrible man’s ploy. Everything was Pao’s fault, after all.

  “When you’ve served your purpose, he’ll be disposed of,” her father said, turning the black mirror so she could see, at last.

  Dante, bound and unconscious, dressed in his white-and-gold hero clothes.

  “Where is he?” Pao screamed, throwing her full weight against the bonds, tears filling her eyes. When she blinked them away, the mirror had disappeared. “What did you do to him?”

  Her previous anger toward Dante began to give way, fear and regret surging in. He hadn’t been himself—and she’d sensed it. Her father had been controlling him. Manipulating Dante’s jealousy, his fear for his abuela . . .

  “He’s gone to the same place we all go in the end,” her father said. “The same place you’re going now. But not to worry—when we open the gates for good, he’ll be set free along with all the others. He’ll be given the chance we all want—to seek vengeance for our untimely demise.”

  Pao didn’t know what he meant, but she could sense they were reaching the end of this interview.

  “Any last questions before we begin the procedure?” he asked, and Pao stopped struggling, slumping back in her chair.

  “Just one,” she said, sitting up straight. “Why won’t you look at me?”

  It wasn’t the question she’d intended to ask, but it was the one that came out. The whole time he’d been holding her captive, her father had avoided her gaze. He’d surveyed her quickly, he’d glanced her way, but he hadn’t looked into her eyes once since they’d embraced briefly on the porch.

  “I have more important things to do,” he said silkily, but Pao could hear the tension lacing his tone.

  “Look at me,” she said. “I’m your daughter. Look at me once before you kill me or use me to further your super-villain agenda, or whatever you’re planning to do.”

  She didn’t know why she was pushing it, but some instinct told her to keep pressing until he gave in.

  “Are you afraid to?” she asked. “If I’m so insignificant, why are you scared?”

  “I fear nothing,” he said, and stepped toward her.

  Pao leaned forward in her seat. “I just want to see my father before I die,” she said. “You owe me that much.”

  He knelt before her, his eyes closed like he was steeling himself for the sight of something horrible. Then he opened them and looked right into hers.

  The reaction was immediate. In the timeless depths of his deep brown eyes, a struggle was occurring, like two eels made of pure light wrestling with each other in a dark sea.

  Pao saw La Llorona’s palace, and a teenage boy with a ghostly cast to his features, pain twisting them as green light grew unbearably bright around him.

  She saw Maria’s face, young, lit by one of Arizona’s spectacular sunsets. Smiling, a flower tucked behind her ear. Before the picture changed, the smile turned to a look of horror, and Maria’s screams echoed in the trailer, or in Pao’s mind.

  Then there was baby Pao, her eyes wide and dark.

  She was two, toddling across a parking lot.

  She was three, crying as her father walked out the door and closed it for the last time.

  Pao was crying now, and her father’s chest was heaving, his face twisted in agony. She wanted to stop all this, to let
him be evil rather than force them both to experience the pain for another second.

  Just as she was about to look away and break the connection, give up the power she had wanted but now couldn’t bear, the images stopped flashing. Pao’s father’s face was still, and his eyes were open, locked onto hers like he never wanted to look away again.

  “Paola?” her father said, and this time his voice was raw and scratchy, as if he’d been screaming into a pillow for hours. His expression looked like he was seeing her for the first time since they’d embraced on the porch. “Oh god, I’m sorry, Paola. I’m so sorry.”

  “Dad?” Pao said, a lump building in her throat. “César? Is it . . . really you?”

  “It’s me,” he said, getting to his feet, walking slower, his eyes wrinkling at the corners as he took her in. “We have to get you out of here, and we don’t have much time. I don’t . . . know how long I can hold him off.” He pressed his hands together, and the purple bands around her wrists and ankles glowed gold before falling away.

  Pao rubbed her wrists and got out of the chair, her knees almost buckling.

  Her dad caught her, looking deep into her eyes again, like he was drawing strength from what he found there.

  “Is it Beto?” Pao asked, with no time to sugarcoat it. “La Llorona’s son. I know Mom knew him before she met you, and I know he was bad news—I mean, how could he not be, considering who his mother was? But seriously, Dad, if he’s doing this to you, we have to stop him.”

  The pride on César Santiago’s face as he listened to her was something precious. Something Pao would hold on to forever. It was like she was five years old and had just explained how gravity worked. Before long, though, sadness took over his features again, and he sighed.

  “I wish I had time to tell you everything, but . . .” He looked at her again and smiled like he was just taking her in. “It’s not Beto,” he said. “It’s . . . It’s so hard to explain. I’m Beto, Paola. I’m La Llorona’s second son. Also known as César, because I—”

  But before he could go any further, his face froze, like a video that had caught up to the end of its buffering.

  “No!” Pao said. “No, Dad! Stay with me, please!” The tears were falling now, and she stepped forward to grab her father’s hands. “Look at me, Dad. Don’t let him do this to you. Please stay. Please, please stay!”

  “I’m . . . sorry . . .” he said, like he was pulling the words out of the void itself. “I love you.”

  And then his eyebrows lifted, his wrinkles smoothed, his mouth grew thinner and more cruel, and their hand-holding was no longer a gesture of combined strength. It was a liability.

  “Nice visit with daddy dearest?” asked the sneering voice, and he dragged Pao back to the chair himself this time. “I hope you enjoyed it, because that was the last time you’ll ever see his worthless, miserable face.”

  “It’s your face!” Pao cried, so angry she would have said anything to hurt him.

  The man who looked like César Santiago but was not—and wasn’t Beto, either—stepped back and slapped her across the cheek. “Don’t you ever,” he growled. “This is not my face. My face—my life was stolen from me because of an evil woman’s selfish, reckless choice. I have been trapped in this body for far too long. And tonight—tonight I will finally have my revenge!”

  With his eyes bugging out, his hair standing on end, the man who was not Pao’s father pulled the old-fashioned hair-dryer bubble down over her head. Delirious with fear and confusion, Pao almost laughed at the mental image of herself in the ridiculous helmet. Like some little old lady getting her grays tinted blue.

  Pao held back the laugh, as well as the feeling that she was truly losing her mind. She needed to fight, but she was dazed. His words were spreading through her like honey—slow, then faster as they heated. His life had been stolen by a selfish woman? He was wearing the wrong man’s face?

  And her father, her real father, had said he was Beto. . . . But how could that—

  Suddenly, Pao was back in the throne room of the glass palace, with La Llorona about to perform her horrific experiment to bring back the daughter she had drowned. The experiment that would have required Pao to sacrifice her life so her essence could be combined with Ondina’s.

  The ghost woman had allegedly performed it successfully once—on her second son, Beto, who had run away afterward.

  These facts crystallized in the beaker of Pao’s brain until the glass shattered in every direction. The truth she had wanted to know was now painfully, horribly clear, but there was no time to think it through, or to discover what it all meant.

  Because the man who was not her father—the man whose soul had been reaped to bring Beto back to life—was strapping the plastic hood to Pao’s head now, attaching wires all over it, and breathing heavily, like they were approaching the finish line of a marathon.

  “Listen,” Pao said in her most persuasive voice. “I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking I’m like him. Beto. My father. But I’m not.”

  The man who was not Pao’s father didn’t listen, just continued the process of securing her to the chair. His eyes were unfocused now, a vivid intensity humming and crackling within him.

  “I don’t know my father,” Pao said, and had truer words ever been spoken? “I didn’t even know who he was until four minutes ago.”

  No answer.

  Pao’s voice echoed strangely in the bubble. “Look at me,” Pao said, trying to form a mental connection with the broken, bitter soul trapped inside her father’s body. She projected her own experience onto him. The abject terror she’d felt when she learned she’d been marked as Ondina’s soul twin . . . Her horror as the ritual was set up in front of her . . . The hopelessness that had threatened to drag her under . . .

  Her father’s borrowed hands stilled on the leg restraints as Pao’s memories overwhelmed the soul at the controls.

  “I’m more like you than him,” Pao said softly. “I know how it was for you in the end. The fear. The feeling of being trapped. I barely got out alive.”

  The man’s shoulders shook, and his face was obscured, but Pao thought he might be crying.

  “I understand,” Pao said as soothingly as she could while every part of her was panicking. “I’m not like them. I never would have done that to you. . . .”

  Pao’s father’s body stood up, the cruel eyes dry as they stared into Pao’s. He looked insolent now, like he knew full well that Pao couldn’t free his soul, and he was right. Any empathic link she had tried to create with him was nullified by Pao’s very existence.

  Whether she had known it or not, she was Beto’s daughter.

  This was why Dante had told her she could never be the hero. You really don’t see what you are, he had taunted. But now, at last, she saw.

  A laugh cut through the static in Pao’s head. “You think you understand?” The man’s voice was layered with disbelief. “You think the moments before the ritual were the difficult part, little girl? You’re sorely wrong.”

  Pao could do nothing but listen in horror as he continued, his voice—so different from her father’s—haunted and low.

  “Yes, it was frightening when I, an innocent young man, first saw a ghost approaching me by the river. And I was paralyzed with terror when it dragged me under the water to be a prisoner in its palace. But the difficult part? That came later. When that abomination separated my soul from my body.” He shuddered, but his eyes didn’t leave Pao’s. “The difficult part was the excruciating process of being bound by dark magic to the cold, lifeless husk of her murdered son. The violence of the intertwining as she grew a new human out of us there, in her torture chamber’s prism. Bones splintering and regenerating, skin stretching, fingernails and teeth uprooted and replaced. The horror of it.”

  Pao’s stomach churned as she envisioned it against the backdrop of the cave, where prisms had once held Emma, Dante, and Franco. There had been an empty one, too. Waiting for Pao herself.

 
“And then . . .” he said, his pupils blown wide with madness and memory. “Then we were one. And my consciousness, my self was lost, absorbed in another, forever bound to carry out his every whim, desire, and rebellion.”

  Beto’s rebellion, Pao thought. She remembered the pain and resentment in La Llorona’s disembodied voice when she had mentioned her “ungrateful” son. He hadn’t wanted anyone else’s life to be stolen for him, but his mother had burdened him with that terrible, unjust reality forever. He’d left her, paving the way for his little sister, Ondina, to set Pao free.

  “But eventually I woke up,” the man said now, in a chilling voice that indicated he’d been subservient for longer than he could bear. “I began to fight. And in fighting, I discovered myself again.”

  “What will you do?” Pao asked. “Take the body back? Destroy Beto for good?”

  “It’s too late for me,” he said, shaking the head of the body in question. “I have no body of my own, no life to return to now. But this world—so selfish, everyone too absorbed in their own lives, constantly putting their own needs and desires above others . . .” He trailed off. “I’ve thought long about how to punish the woman who did this to me, Paola. But you stole that vengeance from me when you freed her.”

  Pao pictured it now, Ondina and her mother embracing, so human as they let go, forgave, and moved into the great beyond.

  “I didn’t know,” Pao said. “I didn’t—”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Because I have a greater purpose now. That woman was a product of society’s sickness. People’s entitlement, their greed, a selfishness that has spanned the centuries, poisoning every generation. That sickness must be rooted out, the sickness that lives in every mortal on this failed mistake of a planet.”

  “You’re going to open the void,” Pao said, her voice hollow in the plastic hood as she put the pieces together at last. “Release the monsters and the fantasmas. Kill everyone.”

  “A fitting end,” he said, his face as triumphant as if he’d already accomplished it.