Broken Souls (16 page)

“You’re fucking kidding me,
right?” I say. “You want me to go with you down into a pit that just magically appeared in the ground?” I kick a rock over the side of the pit. It bounces off one of the stone steps and disappears into the darkness. I don’t hear it land. “Oh, and bottomless, too? You just really pulled out all the stops. Where’s my skullcap? Do we get torches?”

“Allow me some mystery,” Alex says. “Jackass.”

“Why are you even walking? You don’t need to walk.” He answers me with a raised middle finger. The darkness swallows him up. I cannot believe I’m actually considering this. I stand there, weighing my options. Follow and maybe get buried alive, maybe get some answers, or stand out here with my dick in my hand and get bupkes. The police sirens in the distance decide it for me. They’re going to find that Porsche in about two minutes.

“I know I’m gonna regret this,” I say, pulling out my phone and using it to light the steps. I follow him down into the pit.

“I guarantee it,” Alex yells up from below me. He sounds far off, but he shouldn’t be more than a few yards ahead of me. A few circles down and the light above me fades. I look up and see the opening hundreds of feet above me, when it should only be a couple dozen feet at the most. Not long after the cool night air becomes drier, hotter, the moisture disappearing like it’s being sucked out by a vacuum cleaner. I keep walking, using my phone to light the way. I know I’ve only been walking a few minutes but it feels like hours.

“And here we are,” Alex says, as I hit the last step. “My humble abode. Ta-da!”

I step off the last stair into darkness so complete the paltry glow from my phone can’t penetrate it. My feet clatter against something on the floor and I freeze. No telling what he’s got down here.

“Impressive,” I say. “And, you know what? A little dark. A light would be awesome.” A soft glow rises along the walls and I find myself in a long chamber carved out of stone. The walls are rough-hewn volcanic rock. I click off my phone and slide it back into my pocket.

The floor is littered with skeletons. I stop counting corpses after I hit thirty. Bits of cloth and dried skin hang off them like cobwebs. Some with weapons, some with armor. All pointed in the same direction. They died trying to get to the far end of the room. Even if none of them left ghosts I should feel something. Some kind of twinge that tells me this is a mass grave. But there’s nothing here. I bend down to pick a helmet off of one of the skulls.

“Nice décor.”

“You like?” Alex says, shuffling his feet through the piles of bones like a kid in a ball pit, his feet passing through the bones as if they weren’t even there. “I call it Early Spanish Conquistador.”

I follow him to the far end of the room, stepping around bones as best I can. He stops at a jade statue of a man sitting cross-legged on the ground. Gaunt, with wiry muscles, his ribs showing, his belly empty with the outlines of organs pressing against the flesh. Though his head is a bare skull, there are eyes in his sockets that seem to cast an intensity of anger that’s palpable. He’s wearing an elaborate headdress adorned with feathers, a necklace made of eyeballs. Stunning workmanship. Everything from the grinning skull face to the headdress to the loincloth between his legs seems to be carved from an entire block of jade.

“You know that marriage deal you’ve got with Santa Muerte?”

“How could I forget it?”

“I’m the ex-husband.”

It takes a few seconds for it to sink in. I crouch to get eye level with the angry-looking statue sitting on the floor. I’ve seen these designs before in other statuary, these different elements sculpted and carved by clumsier hands. As if those others were desperately trying to capture the essence of this thing right here. And then I realize that they were.

“Mictlantecuhtli. This isn’t a statue. This is actually you. The King of Mictlan.” The things the wind told me are beginning to sound a lot more worrisome.

“I’d give you a cigar but, well, if you can find one in this mess you’re welcome to it.”

“Where are we?” I say.

“Not under the La Brea Tar Pits, I can tell you that.”

There’s a familiarity to all this. It’s not the Conquistadors, the statue, or even the cave. It’s the dry air that smells of dust and locked-up rooms, the feeling that the world’s been hollowed out and left to stagnate. I felt that before in the vision I had of driving with Alex in the Eldorado.

And before that when I visited Santa Muerte’s realm. “This is Mictlan,” I say.

“More Mictlan-adjacent. A subbasement of Mictlan.”

“I heard you were dead. Committed suicide.”

“Suicide’s maybe not the word,” he says. “My choice and I’m dead, but gods don’t die like people die. It’s more like sleeping. You don’t kill an idea, but sometimes you can bury it pretty damn deep. When the Spanish came they took everything. Slaughtered my people with their ideas and words as much as they did with their swords. But we gave them syphilis, so you know, there’s that. But I got tired and people stopped believing. Or maybe it was the other way around, I don’t know. So.”

“So you came here to die? And this is what happened to you?”

He points to the carpet of bones. “Some of the Spanish figured out how to break into Mictlan. They figured they’d rape the heavens the way they raped the land. Did a number on the place. Chased me down and I brought them here. They realized too late it was a trap. Their souls are still wandering around here somewhere.”

“And your wife, Santa Muerte?”

“I hate that name,” he says, spitting the words out. “She used to have such a beautiful name. Mictecacihuatl. A proud name. Powerful. What is she now? Some third-rate saint for a religion that won’t even acknowledge her. Some peasant goddess who has to hide herself behind the trappings of her conquerors.”

He fixes his eyes on mine and I can feel a burning hatred coming from him. “And she’s not my wife, anymore,” he says. “She’s yours.”

“That was not my idea. I was railroaded.”

“Doesn’t matter. Point is you’re married to her now. And I wasn’t even invited to the wedding. What do you know about the King of the Dead?”

“There are a lot of them,” I say. Gods like to think they’re the only game in town, but when you’ve got all of human history to work with they tend to stack up on each other. “I’ve met a couple. Used to hang with some of the Ghede Loa. Samedi, Cimetiere.”

He laughs. “Those aren’t kings. Shepherds and keepers, maybe. Protectors and judges. But kings? Please. Compared to Mictlantecuhtli they’re nothing.”

“What’s with the switch from first person to third?” I say. I think I know, but I want to confirm it.

“Because Mictlantecuhtli is a name and a title.”

He lets me chew on that, watching me, not talking. My mind grabs onto that idea and worries it like a dog with a rat. The entity is the title. The title is the entity. The king is dead, long live the king. Magic is based on belief and belief takes that shit seriously. It’s like a logic puzzle by M.C. Escher. None of the conclusions have to make sense, they just need to be logical. The pieces start to click into place.

He’s Mictlantecuhtli. Mictlantecuhtli is the King of the Dead. The King of the Dead is the husband of Santa Muerte. I’m the husband of Santa Muerte. And if I’m the husband of Santa Muerte then I’m—

“Fuck me.”

“We have a winner!” He throws his arms wide into the air. “Welcome home, O Lord of Mictlan!”

The power I tapped into on the train, that I used to kill those demons Downtown, that I used to heal Tabitha. This is where it came from. It’s his power, now mine. Except—

“There’s two of us,” I say. “If I’m the Lord of Mictlan then what are you? Why can’t I use that power when I want it? It comes and goes.”

“I’ve always been around, but constrained. Watching the world go by. Observing things. But when you married Mictecacihuatl I— woke up isn’t entirely right. Became aware of you? Something like that. You’re becoming more like me, I’m becoming more like you. You’re being rewritten on a cosmic scale. We both are. That’s how I’m able to appear to you, how I can pluck bits and pieces from your head.”

“That’s how you know about Alex,” I say.

“That and how I can appear to you at all. And also how I managed to get past that funky new tattoo you got. I was already in the house before you locked the door, so to speak. Sometimes I can show up, other times— there’s interference. I’m not sure from where but I can guess. Point is, we’ve got a link to each other. I can’t read your thoughts but I can pull enough to get an idea of what’s going on.”

“What about your power? Is that interference, too? Is that why I can’t use it all the time?”

“That’s just time. It’s early days, yet. Right now all you can do is touch it. The fact that you can use it at all right now is not a good sign for you.”

I start to ask why, but I already know the answer. I don’t get the whole package until I’m completely him. What the wind told me makes sense now. Calling me the king of the dead. Talking about the old king and the new one. Two things in particular it said come floating up in my memory. “Watch the false friend.” That one’s obvious. I’ve been wondering about Alex since I heard his voice on the step of the Griffith Observatory.

But what about the wind’s other advice? “Beware the dead king.” Can Mictlantecuhtli be trusted? Can the wind? What’s the angle here? There has to be one. There always is.

“Muerte wants a new king for Mictlan and I fit the bill,” I say.

“Don’t flatter yourself.”

“Then why the hell else do it?”

“She doesn’t want a new king” he says. “She wants the old king back. I was with her for thousands of years. You think she wants some punk to rule by her side? Please. She’s going to wait until you’re more me than you. Then she’s gonna stick a knife between your ribs. The title of Mictlantecuhtli dumps into the best closest candidate. The new king dies and the old one is reborn.”

“You come back to life.”

“And you’re a sacrificial lamb. In theory. We talked about it a long time ago. In case something happened to either one of us. Not like we ever tried it. It might work, it might not. But even if it doesn’t pan out, she’s still going to kill you.”

“I feel special.” I knew she wanted to use me for something. Now I know what.

“Hey, that beats the alternative. For both of us. If she doesn’t kill you we just keep swapping places. Eventually, you’re Mictlantecuhtli and I’m just some schlub.”

“Sounds like I get the better end of the deal.”

“You think so?” He taps the jade statue’s head. “Take a look at me. This is where you’re headed. I made this choice. I want this. But you? Eternity’s a long time stuck as a rock. I don’t care about you. I really don’t. But I like it here. I came down here for a reason. My time’s over. I want to keep it that way. Your world sucks. I want no part of it.”

“The pain in my chest,” I say. “Like somebody was ripping out my insides. It’s because of that, isn’t it? When I use it that’s me changing.”

“I’m willing to bet you’ve got some interesting anatomy right about now. A bone or two here, a chunk of a kidney. If a doctor opened you up he’d be scratching his head.”

“How come I don’t feel any different afterward?”

“Oh, you’re fine. Technically. You’ll keep on breathing, moving, all that. Until you don’t. That pain is part of the process. I said you were being rewritten. I wasn’t kidding. You’re turning into everything I am. When you use that power and it stops hurting? That’s when you should start to worry.”

“Say I don’t believe you. How do I even know you’re telling the truth?”

“You don’t. And there’s some things I can’t tell you. Old agreements. I’d rather you did trust me because we’re tied together and it might help me keep you alive and me dead a little bit longer.”

“This isn’t adding up. If I turn into you how can she even kill me? I’ll be a god. What the hell’s she gonna shank me with?”

“And realization,” he says, “dawning in three . . . two . . . one.”

“Oh, sonofabitch. The knife. She’s the one who had Sergei steal the knife.”

“You’re the slow one in your family, aren’t you?”

“You’re pretty sarcastic for a death god.”

“What’s funny is that you think I’m speaking English,” he says. “I haven’t said a word that isn’t Nahuatl since I met you. Your brain’s doing all the translating. So if I’m coming off as sarcastic, what’s that say about you?” I ignore him.

“If she had Sergei get this knife for her, why the hell is he still running around skinning people?” I say.

“It’s a guess, but I think she doesn’t have him on a very tight leash.”

“A guess?”

“It’s not like we talk. I made the knife a long time ago for Xipe Totec.”

“The farm god.”

“Farm god. Please. He’s a lot more than that. War, disease, rebirth. He’s all over the map. That kind of thing’ll make a guy schizophrenic. That knife can do a lot more than just take someone’s skin. It can kill damn near anything, including the other gods. When I gave it to him the shit hit the fan and everybody’s all freaking out because I gave Mister Bipolar an instrument of mass slaughter. So Huehuecoyotl stole it and got Tlaltecuhtli and Quetzalcoatl to help hide it with some mortals. That Bruja you’re hanging out with is from a long line of caretakers.”