Another day passed at El Varón’s compound. He wasn’t around—he said he’d be gone on business until the next morning, whatever that meant—so she felt free to wander. His employees seemed less tense, too, from the overweight goon playing solitaire on the dining room table to the maid cooking a late breakfast. Like all the women who worked in the compound, the maid never said a word or even acknowledged Ellen or William’s presence, nor did she talk to the men unless they spoke to her first. William was absorbed in a National Geographic special about alligators on the enormous TV, so Ellen went into the kitchen to refill her coffee.
“Cómo estás?” she whispered to the maid. The woman was of Mayan descent, maybe in her twenties, no taller than five feet, and dressed in a neon-bright traditional dress.
The maid turned, looked at the back of the man playing solitaire, and held her finger to her lips. She turned her gaze to the nearby pantry. Ellen nodded.
Inside the pantry, among the sacks of masa harina, bottles of liquor, and rows of canned food, the maid positioned herself so she could watch the man at the table. “We must be quiet,” she whispered.
Ellen couldn’t hide her surprise. “You speak English?”
The woman nodded. “A little. I worked for an American lady. An archaeologist. Before I got sent here.” Her bitterness burned in her voice.
“What is your name?”
“Costanza,” she said.
Ellen took her hand. Costanza, her eyes still on the card player, grasped it briefly and then pulled hers away. “We can’t be caught talking, or he will hurt me.” Her eyes conveyed the seriousness. Hurt, as in hurt bad.
“I understand. Costanza, I need to get away from here. With my son. I need help. I don’t know how to do it.”
She shook her head. “He likes you. He wants you to be his wife. I heard him talking about you. He calls you his pajarita. His little bird.”
Ellen feigned vomiting, and a tiny smile passed Costanza’s lips. But the maid was shaking. Ellen knew she was putting Costanza at great risk, so she had to hurry. “Do you know any way out of here? Other than just walking through the main door?”
Costanza leaned closer. “There is one way. Some of the men come out of the…” She struggled for the word, pointing downward.
“The basement.”
Costanza nodded. “Down the stairs. They come and go. But I would not go there. He has a room down there. I am not allowed inside, or even near it. A place where he does bad things. And hurts people.” She crossed herself. “One of his other…pajaritas…He took her down there, and she never came back.”
The hair on the back of Ellen’s neck rose. Jesus. It had to have been the blond-haired woman who had slept in the same bed.
“He is not like other men,” Costanza said, her voice barely perceptible.
Ellen thought that was obvious. “He’s a narco. I understand that.”
Costanza shook her head more vigorously. “No. He is a brujo.” Her eyebrows bunched. She couldn’t think of the English translation. “But much worse than a brujo. We have a name for his kind. Naguales.”
Ellen hadn’t heard the word, but she didn’t like it. “Naguales? What—”
The goon in the dining room screamed and slammed his fists against the table. Costanza startled, and she pulled away, knocking over a bottle of tequila.
The man was cursing his shitty deal of cards, but when he heard the bottle shatter he jumped up and turned to the pantry. Costanza was apologizing beneath her breath—lo siento lo siento lo siento—and pulling the larger pieces of glass into a pile. Ellen tried to step past her, but the man—all 275 pounds of him—blocked her.
“Que era yo,” she said. “Lo siento.”
The man’s face was scarred, and his breath smelled like stale beer. He had a toothpick hanging from the corner of his mouth, and it turned upward as he smiled at Ellen. His eyes went from hers to her chest, then back up. He spoke, but his voice was so mealy she couldn’t make out much of what he was saying, other than it was okay and the stupid maid would clean it up. He swatted Costanza’s head, and she crawled past him carefully through the glass shards and spilled liquor. He watched her, then turned back to Ellen. She’d felt that gaze before, dozens, maybe many dozens, of times in West Virginia and throughout their travels in Central America—the leer of a man who was considering doing something he knew was very wrong. But something he wanted to do very, very badly.
The reek of the spilled tequila was overwhelming. Would this ugly piece of shit touch her? She was El Varón’s property—that had been made abundantly clear to everyone. But stupid, nasty men sometimes did stupid, nasty things, even things they’d later regret.
“Mom?”
William appeared behind the man. He looked up at the enormous brute, then back to Ellen. His eyes were on fire with hatred.
The man turned. “Hola, chico.” He laughed, hollowly, then walked back to the table.
Ellen shot William a silent thank-you and mouthed a kiss. Costanza reentered the room with a broom and a dustpan, but she wouldn’t make eye contact with Ellen. She swept up the glass silently.
Later, Ellen took William outside under the pretense of sitting by the pool. She assumed the house was probably bugged, or at the very least her room was, but hoped that outside they could talk privately.
“William,” she whispered. “Do you know what a brujo is?”
He nodded. “Well, a bruja is a witch, so I guess a brujo is a man who is a witch. Why?”
She thought about hiding it, but realized it didn’t make sense—if anyone could figure out an escape route, it might be William. So he should know everything, every detail that might help. “One of the maids told me Mr. Banana Hammock is a brujo.” The word sounded foul coming from her lips.
William’s eyes widened. “I told you. There’s something weird about him. Something different. He’s not normal. He’s like you-know-who.”
She shook her head. He didn’t need to finish. She still felt herself on the edge of panic thinking about what William had said about the basement room. And now Costanza had confirmed it.
“There is a room downstairs. Probably the room you were talking about. And some kind of way out. Maybe a tunnel or something. People come from the basement, and they leave that way, too.” And maybe leave permanently.
William was visibly afraid. “I don’t think we should go down there.” His voice was as frail as a reed.
“I hope we don’t have to. But if it’s the only way out of here, other than the front door with all those idiots with guns, we might have to.”
His face had grown pale. Jesus, the poor kid. After Blackwater, she’d hoped he’d never experience any more of the stuff Ray only obliquely referred to as the bad weird. Since their capture in Blackwater William had apparently developed some kind of psychic sense. Some people called that sort of thing a gift, but Ellen couldn’t see it as anything but a curse. Especially for a kid. A kid who had already witnessed horrors that could shatter the sanity of a strong adult.
He’d picked up on the horrible vibes coming from whatever witchcraft or sick violence El Varón was doing in the basement. And now it seemed that might be their only way out.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “Whatever we have to do, we’ll do it together. And we’ll say goodbye to this place forever.”
“Ray, are you okay?”
He wasn’t okay at all. Every time he closed his eyes and tried to sleep, bizarre images appeared and started dancing, as if there were a projector in his head shining surrealist films on the insides of his eyelids. Snakes, insects, and thick-tentacled underwater things wove and twirled and slithered. When he opened his eyes, the crazy images disappeared, but the world outside his head was going through a disconcerting metamorphosis, too. Everything was changing, getting somehow uglier and more vulgar. Color was fading, leeching all vibrancy, and edges were becoming less defined. Worst of all, the van was beginning to feel like the inside of a giant insect carapace.
“No,” he whispered. “Things are really getting weird, Mantu.”
Mantu shone a flashlight in his eyes, then moved it away. “Christ, your pupils are enormous,” Mantu said. He held two fingers against Ray’s throat. “Pulse is elevated, but not that bad. You feel sick?”
He shook his head. “No, not really—just messed up in the head. Everything looks so weird. Like the life is being sucked out of it. Even you—you look like you’re made of plastic. And then I close my eyes and it’s like…I can’t even explain it. It’s another world. Full of snakes and bugs and bats and shit like that.”
“Damn,” Mantu said. “Sounds like one of her nasty concoctions all right. Micah called that stuff Qlippothic—what the Cabalists call shells. Lifeless husks left over from the big bang. Impure spiritual forces. That’s the stuff she specializes in.”
“Okay, enough,” Ray said. “I don’t care what they are. I just want it to stop.”
Mantu held his arm. “Listen to me. You need to hang on for a while. This ain’t something we can fix with a visit to a clinic. They’ll shoot you up with antipsychotics, and that won’t work for this. I need to get you to someone who knows how to fight this poison.”
“Well, I hope you can hurry it up and find him. I feel like I’m on an endless bad acid trip. And I don’t know how long I can fight it.” It was true. And the worst part was that the uglier and more unreal the outer world got, the more strangely attractive and real the swirling, lurid Technicolor phantasm behind his closed eyes became. He couldn’t help but remember Crawford’s immense garden, when Lily had convinced him to take ecstasy and some other weird drug. He’d blanked out a lot of that experience, but before he did the world around him had become incredibly strange and full of what seemed like alien spirits. But this felt even worse. This was a one-way ticket to total insanity.
“It’s a she, not a he—her name’s Sabina. A certified old-country Mayan nagual. A witch.”
“A witch? You’re taking me to see a witch?”
“We don’t have any other choice. You are fucked up big-time, my friend. I know someone at Eleusis who could get you fixed, but I’m not welcome there anymore, as you have probably guessed. And this is some really bad mojo she put on you. It’s sorcery, Ray, the blackest of black magic. I can’t just take you to any old curandero—you need someone who knows the dark magic in order to counteract it. Hey, look at me. You listening?”
Ray shook his head. A swastika-like pattern of serpents was twirling in front of him, pulling him into its spiraling center. He opened his eyes. “Sorry. I’m doing the best I can.”
Mantu’s jaw muscles clenched. “I would give you something to knock you out for a while, but that might make things worse. Shit.” He pounded the steering wheel. “Listen, it’s gonna take me another two hours, minimum, if I drive nonstop. I can’t keep an eye on you, but I’m going to keep talking to you. You pay attention and keep talking to me. Got it?”
“Yeah. Got it.”
“Because if I have to keep pulling to the side of the road and shaking you back to your senses, it’s going to take us a whole lot longer. And if you slip away into that bad craziness in your head, you might not be coming back. Ellen’s not gonna appreciate me showing up with a drooling vegetable, and you certainly aren’t going to be able to help get her out of there like this. So if you want to find her and William and not let that shit take you over, keep your eyes open and stay with me. I don’t care what we talk about, but you gotta keep the conversation going. You dig?”
Ray nodded.
Mantu climbed back into the driver’s seat, and the van lurched forward along the dirt road.
Ray closed his eyes, just for a moment, and everywhere around him bats, thousands of them, black and white, swarmed in layered patterns. He’d seen an illustration like it in an M. C. Escher book, but this was Escher on way too much LSD.
“Okay, tell me about your family. Tell me about your mother, Ray. Was she pretty, or ugly like you?”
Ray laughed, and for a moment, the visions faded. “Hey, that helped. Laughing.”
“Good. Laughter is a medicine, but it’s also a weapon against things that live on fear. So you’ll have to excuse me if I throw down some of my early routines.”
“Please.”
“I just hope you catch the old references. Saved by the Bell. Steve Urkel—remember him? And I had a whole routine about Roseanne Barr.”
“Let it fly,” Ray said.
Ellen knew William wouldn’t sleep. The kid was so tuned in to her emotions she knew it made no sense to hide anything from him. So around three A.M., after listening to him tossing and turning beside her, she finally rolled over. He was staring at her.
“Okay, this is getting creepy.”
He frowned. “Sorry, Mom. But I don’t want you to do it.”
She stared. His hair stuck out like a horn above his ear. She’d always kept him clean cut, but now he was starting to look like an unkempt teenager. “I know you don’t. But I’ll be careful.”
“No. I won’t let you go down there.”
“Listen, William. I’m your mother.”
“I don’t care.”
She glared, then saw it had no effect, and sighed. “The maid said it was the only way out of here other than trying to get past the goon squad at the front door. And he’s away tonight, so everybody’s sort of slacking. Right? Like when Mr. Radford wasn’t at the diner and all the ladies would talk on their phones and smoke cigarettes out back by the Dumpster. Remember? So this might be our only chance to find a way out. Or would you rather stay here for another year or two?”
William swallowed. It took him a moment, but he shook his head. “You can’t go unless I go with you.”
“Oh, no. You aren’t—”
“Mom, I won’t let you go by yourself. What if something happens to you? Then it’s just me. And he doesn’t care about me. If it wasn’t for you I’d be dead. He’ll do to me whatever he did to that man down there.”
Ellen held his head between her hands. “All right. You’re right—we’re a team. We’ll look together. I’ve been trying to figure out a way to get down there.”
“I know,” William said.
She rolled her eyes. “I don’t know if I like this mind-reading stuff. You can’t just peek into everything I’m thinking, can you?”
He smiled. “No. It’s not mind reading. It’s more like just knowing what you’re feeling.” He sat up and rubbed his eyes. “Plus you had three cups of coffee tonight so I knew you didn’t want to go right to sleep. So I’ve been thinking about it, too—how we can get out of here. And I have an idea.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“It’s like a scene from my robot book. In the Darkbot headquarters. I drew diagrams and everything. It was like a puzzle I made for myself to figure out. So I’m doing the same thing here.”
“Okay, but let’s figure it out fast. If there’s a way out of this place, I want to get our butts out now. Before El Weirdo gets back.”
William rubbed his eyes. “But you have to promise me something. If it’s really bad—if we do get down there and I say we need to come right back here—you’ll listen to me. Okay? Please, Mom? You have to promise me.” He held out his pinky.
She wrapped hers around his. “Promise,” she said. “Now tell me your plan.”
Mantu’s voice began to fade.
“So what was her name, Ray? How old were you?”
“Michelle,” he mumbled. “We were both fifteen.”
“Michelle? What color was her hair?”
“Brown.”
He closed his eyes. He was in a bar, a cheap dive in Baltimore. A lady praying mantis sat on the stool next to him, drinking a milky white cocktail. Her black mirror eyes stared into his. He’d never found bugs attractive, but there was something terribly sexy about her. If he played his cards right he might even be able to sleep with her.
“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.”