Through the Grey, page 25
“It’s not as cold as a stake out during a Seattle winter.”
He snorted. “Gonna be empty up here. Most people do this at home.” Mickey gave me an assessing look that clearly found me a bit wanting.
“I think I can handle it,” I said.
Yet another shrug as he started gathering up the excess supplies. “The angelitos come at four and stay until the morning. You’ll have to do it all again tomorrow for the adults, too. I’ll pick you up when the sun comes up.”
“Hey, Mickey, Tio Muñoz says Happy Birthday.”
He jumped back from me. “What?”
“An old man near the water pipe said I should tell you he sends his good wishes.”
He stared at me. “Tio Muñoz? Mierda! He’s a legend in my family. He’s a…a…”
“Ghost? Didn’t look like a ghost.”
Mickey was shaking his head and gathering the excess stuff in a hurry. “No, no. He’s the one—you know: I said about my great uncle? What’s the word…a bad wizard.”
“Warlock?”
He shook his head. “No. Not a brujo. He’s…a black sorcerer. Undead.” He threw the last of the materials into a box and snatched it up against his chest, eyes wild—which was not what I’d have expected. “I’m going back to Tia Mercedes. You’ll be fine, yeah?”
“Yeah…” I said, not sure why he was freaking so thoroughly, since his Tio Muñoz wasn’t any kind of undead I knew.
“Yeah, right. OK. I’ll be back for you in the morning. Don’t go talking to Tio Muñoz! Don’t believe what he says!”
Iko and I followed him with the rest of the boxes and loaded them into the Chevy under the weight of Mickey’s red-and-orange brooding. Then we watched him drive away, leaving the ghost dog and I in the emptying panteon as the hour of dead children approached.
The last of the homeward-bound walked out of the gate—two small children in slightly rumpled clothes—strewing a path of marigold petals for the dead. In a mood of strange solemnity, I watched them lay the deep orange line down the road until they disappeared around a bend. I walked back to the grave, Iko dancing before me all the way.
The ghost dog seemed more real than ever, if still a bit translucent. As the long shadow of the mountain began to steal the light, that became less apparent, but a new oddity began to show around him: a blue glow like marsh light that flickered over the dog-shape and cast it into strange silhouette against the pockets of twilight forming in the cemetery as night crept forward.
I unfolded a camp stool from the box and set it aside, paused to put on my coat, and dug deeper for a box of kitchen matches. As the church bell began pealing four, I lit the candles and the copal, sending the sweet, musky scent into the cooling air. The breeze stirred the grasses near the fence to rattling. Smoke and Grey mingled, sparking with gold and white lights. I could hear the Grey humming, the shapes of the mountains glowing in the silvery mist as great bulks of power.
Something splashed into the water bowl and I turned with a jerk to see nothing, no small shape lurking near the table end, as I’d half expected. I shivered as my skin prickled with a premonition of movement nearby. The darkness was still only a threat, but a sense of presence seemed to gather with it, though nothing stepped forth. Yet.
I poured hot chocolate into one of the tea cups and sat down to wait while afternoon advanced toward evening. The ghost dog lay down beside me and smiled with secret thoughts. We waited, swirled in the dizzying odors of the night and the sound of distant music from houses just out of sight, alone in the hush of sacred anticipation in the doorway to the land of the dead.
Something brushed past me, giggling. Iko barked and chased the formless whisper of laughter across the burial ground toward the iron gates. Then nothing. The ghost dog returned and threw himself down on the ground with a dog sigh. Candles smoked and the stream of incense swayed upward like a charmed cobra. The muttering emptiness of the cemetery held sway long past sunset, past the eight o’clock peal from the church tower.
I renewed the hot chocolate in the cup and sipped a little myself, finding it more bitter and spicy than American chocolate. It went better with the sandwich Mickey’s aunt had packed for me than the coffee did, but I thought I’d better save it in case of tiny haunts. Maybe it was because I was thinking of it, but that was when a little cup of chocolate on the table rattled and I looked again at the ofrenda.
One of the cups was moving in its saucer, tilting forward and back. Tiny silver-mist hands clutched for it and missed again and again. I stood up and picked up the cup, saying, “Here, let me help you.”
I held the cup low and filled it to the brim. Then I offered it down around my knees, holding it still until I felt something tug on it. I let myself slip all the way into the Grey looking for whatever was pulling on the cup.
A skeleton child, barely as tall as the table, reached for the cup. Its bony, incorporeal hands met the porcelain, but couldn’t grip. I tipped the cup and watched the steaming chocolate dribble onto the ground while the foggy skeleton seemed to nibble at the edge of the cup. It pushed the cup away and clacked its teeth in satisfaction.
The toys on the table moved. Smears of color hovered around the ofrenda, lined up in front of the other, empty, cups. I poured chocolate into all of them and watched shadows of the cups tilt and rise as spectral hands reached for the sweets. There was a burst of chatter—like radio static—and a dozen small skeletons dressed in the memories of their best clothes, appeared around the table. They weren’t as well-formed as the adult ghosts I’d seen—as if they hadn’t had time to get the knack of being alive before they were dead. None of the chatter was quite understandable to me—unlike the adult ghosts I’d talked to—coming through to my mind only in Spanish.
Iko jumped to his feet again and began trotting around the little ghosts, sniffing them, but he returned disgruntled and disappointed to my side and sat down with a huff of breath. Apparently none of the skeletal kids was familiar.
I felt small hands on my knees and plucking at my sleeves. I looked down and found two small skeletons dressed in cloudy white dresses looking back up at me with empty eye sockets.
I’m not much of a kid person, so I never know what to say or how to act when faced with children. I had no idea if the ghosts of children knew any more than they had when alive, but even children have information. I squatted down, feeling my bad knee pop.
“No hablo Espanol muy bien,” I said, probably mangling what little I remembered from years living in Los Angeles. With my luck they didn’t speak anything else, but sometimes ideas came through with ghosts, even when the language was foreign, as they had with the ghost of Ernesto Santara. “Ustedes habla Ingles?”
They turned their skulls on their slender spines in unison: no. They didn’t bother to talk at all, but, with a shiver, I knew they were twins then, and they wanted to know why I was in their graveyard. No one had come for them in a long time and they were lonely—was I a relative of theirs? How I knew these thoughts I couldn’t begin to tell you.
I shook my head and pointed to Purecete’s memorial stone. “I’m looking for him. And for Maria-Luz Carmen Arbildo. Maria-Luz y Hector.”
Two skulls tilted in curiosity as if to say “why those two?” while a toy truck pushed its way across the dirt nearby guided by a misty skeletal boy.
“Umm…” I started, not sure how to explain. “Como Maria-Luz… umm… knows?” I stumbled through the language, tapping the side of my head and hoping the sign translated somehow, “Hector?”
The skulls consulted each other with a glance of unseen eyes. They turned back to me and spoke as one. The words pushed the concept into my head, naked and complete, but not in English. “Él es su padre.”
Their father. Whose burial place she did not seem to know, whose name she did not have. “Oh,” I breathed, the situation both more clear and less. Why the black-magic present, then? What was the nature of that paternity that she sent such a dubious gift?
The twin ghosts beckoned me to follow and they drifted toward the Arbildo plot. Leaving the chocolate and the ofrenda behind, I followed them and Iko followed me.
The graves of the Arbildos were crowded with tiny skeletons and strange, half-formed shapes of silvery energy thick as clay moving in some somber dance. The two skeletal girls floated through the weird party and stopped before a grave with an unusual double cross of gilded iron from which the gold had flaked until only shreds remained. “Nuestra madre y nosotros.”
This was the grave of Dulcia Maria-Carmen Ochoa Arbildo, wife of Antonio, and her two daughters, Carmen and Lucia, who had all died April of 1936. The girls had been four years old. Dulcia had been twenty-five.
“Por qué—” I started, but the ghosts of Carmen and Lucia pointed their bony fingers at the crowd of small spirits.
“Vea: nuestros hermanos y hermanas.”
I looked. Beside the grave huddled a knot of unformed shapes, the features of lives they never lived flickered and changed, fluid as water, over half-faces the size of my fist. I’d seen this before; they were transient souls, in flux between one life and the next. Grave upon grave across the plot was littered with the reminders of children who had never been born, or died while still infants and toddlers. They were everywhere, generation after generation of the family’s bad genetic luck and horrific accident. It seemed as if the Arbildos of San Felipe had been cursed.
Maybe, against all tradition, this was something the family preferred to forget. Hardly a wonder, then, if Antonio Arbildo had removed his family from this place as soon as he had the money to do so. Not too surprising if he had named a boat for his ill-fated wife, or that the boat had been lost with everyone aboard, except a single man and a dog.
A dark shape started to push the grid into some new form, struggling against the strength of the Grey’s energy lines. Iko barked suddenly and the deep humming of the Grey hit a sour note. The ghosts flickered out with a collective gasp. The shape collapsed back into darkness and I was alone again in the graveyard.
I still didn’t have all the pieces, but an idea was forming in my head. Dead children and a daughter by the wrong father… I returned to my camp stool and sat again beside Purecete’s grave, pouring the last of the chocolate and wondering if the ghosts would return.
They didn’t.
Dawn came up slowly in cold shades of blue, while I huddled, expectant and ultimately disappointed, in the empty panteon. It was still lit only by candles and drifted with copal smoke when Mickey arrived.
He avoided my glance and packed up the food and containers, the toys and gewgaws in glowering silence. I let him. My body was too tired and my brain too full of strange threads weaving slowly and incompletely into a tapestry I didn’t yet understand to want to add the frustration of cross-examining my volatile escort to the mix. I followed him back to the Chevy, hardly noticing that Iko had disappeared with the dawn and didn’t follow us to the car this time.
Back at the guesthouse, I fell into bed and slept eight 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 dias! 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 Tio Muñoz?”
“Tio Muñoz? Where did you hear of him?”
“Mickey mentioned him.”
“Ah! That boy…he’s such a trouble. Muñoz is…the family boogey man. 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 ran 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 de Aqua?” 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 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 Maria-Luz had the statute waiting for the right grave? Why had she wanted to put Iko’s spirit, wound in black magic, on Jimenez's grave?
Tio Muñoz seemed more interested in Mickey than in me. But if he was—or had been—some kind of 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 boogey men, 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 de Aqua.
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 set-up, right?”
He looked relieved I hadn’t said anything about Tio Muñoz. “Yeah, right. Set-up. Sure.”
“What time do we need to head up the mountain? Four?”
“Dusk. Whatever. Tia Mercedes won’t mind if I’m late back 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 re-discovered by his ex-boss, so the easily-tracked technology of cellphones 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 sank 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 school girl 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. “Este su 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.
