Highway to Hell (10 page)

A tattered collection of stuffed animals—the taxidermy kind—guarded the front door. A vulture lurked atop a wooden crate, and an armadillo hunkered beneath one of the pottery chimney stoves for sale. On the wall was another large sign, painted in garish red: SEE THE DEADLY CHUPACABRA! THE ONLY COMPLETE SKELETON IN THE WORLD!

Lisa's sneakers crunched on the gravel as she paused to take it all in. “That sign does wonders for its credibility.”

“Everyone's got to make a living, I guess.” The front door was propped open, and I stuck my head inside apprehensively, worried the place would be slithering with vipers, like the pit in
Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The tiny foyer was deserted and free of snakes. Live ones, anyway. A glass display counter held an ancient cash register, and the walls were lined with shelves full of rubber snakes, stuffed animals—the fabric kind—and cheap Mexican souvenirs. An ancient cooler, humming noisily in a corner, held the promised ice-cold Coca-Cola.

Everything was covered with a thin layer of grime, and there was a strong, musty smell. At the counter Lisa picked up a placard listing the admission fees. “Five bucks? For a two-headed snake?”

“And chupacabra bones,” I said. “Cheap at any price.”

To the right of the counter was an open doorway. Lisa stuck her head in and called, “Hello?”

The only answer was probably my imagination, a hiss of protest at an interrupted nap. “They—whoever runs this— must be in the back.”

“Maybe.” She was full of gruesome glee. “Could a two-headed snake eat you twice as fast, do you think?”

I tried not to shudder. “Thanks for that mental image.”

After a last look around, she started in. “Let's just pay on the way out.”

Of course I followed her rather than be left alone in the place. Snakes or no snakes, museums creep me out.

I had to pause to let my eyes adjust to the low light. At the end of a short hallway there was a diorama of the local desert. Scrubby mesquite trees, salt grass, cacti, and more taxidermy specimens: a bobcat, a tortoise, and a mockingbird. I eyed the fauna for goat-sucking potential. The tortoise and bird I ruled out right away, but the bobcat could probably do some damage to a herd of goats. A cow, however, would be a stretch.

To the right of the display were three glass cages. Yellowed index cards taped to the front identified the animals inside. The rat snake, the hognose snake, and the black racer were all harmless and beneficial, keeping the rodent population in check.

The black racer flicked his tongue at me through the grimy glass, following my movements with its slitted yellow eyes. He might be harmless and beneficial, but that was still eerie.

“Check this out, Mags,” Lisa called from the next display.

On the wall was a mural of a woolly mammoth being hunted by saber-toothed tigers. In front of this grisly scene was a huge bone—like,
Flintstones
huge—helpfully labeled:
MAMMOTH LEG BONE.

Lisa read from the typewritten info card. “This says that a rancher found the bone after Hurricane Celia washed out part of an arroyo.” She glanced at me, curious. “Is it real?”

“Yeah.” I could sense the age and authenticity without touching the thing. Clearly other people hadn't held back, because there was a hand-sized dark spot on the fossil where the bone thickened at the end.

“Remember when we went on that eighth-grade field trip to see the King Tut exhibit? How you fainted in front of the sarcophagus?”

I shot her an irritated frown. “Vividly.”

“At least now you know why.”

She was right. Even as a kid, art and artifacts had seemed very alive to me. They were observers of everyday domesticity and witnesses to the end of kings and countries. Maybe that was why I've always found museums so unsettling. At least in legitimate ones, that history was contained and safeguarded. Here, not so much.

I moved to the next diorama, where some department-store mannequins stabbed a big lump of fake fur that was meant, I guess, to be a bison. Not exactly a respectful representation of the prehistoric Native Americans. In front was a dusty case full of flint arrowheads, most of which just felt like funny-shaped rocks to me.

The next scene was a burial; the mannequins were having a weirdly macabre doll funeral. Beneath the fly-specked
glass of that display case were domestic items—a stone for grinding meal, some carving tools, and what looked like jewelry: small pieces of horn or tusk ornaments, and a necklace made out of delicate bleached bones.

These artifacts were real and old. Seeing them under the thick layer of dust made me sad and indignant. The index card said they were from an excavation of a cemetery site in Velasquez County, believed to be from the grave of a Coahuiltecan Indian, maybe a medicine man or shaman, but no one could be sure.

“These things should be in a proper museum.” When Lisa didn't reply, I glanced over to see her pensive face lit by the fake firelight in the diorama. “What are you thinking?”

She shook herself back from wherever she'd been in her head. “About burial grounds. Sacred space.”

I stared at the case, feeling like there was something here I was missing. “This stuff was found on ranch land, right? Maybe the ranchers are having trouble because they've violated Indian burial grounds. Like in
Poltergeist.
”

She chewed on that. “There have been Europeans here for over two hundred and fifty years. It's a little late for revenge on the long knives, no matter how justified.”

“I guess.” Continuing through the plywood maze, I rounded the next corner and came nose to nose with a rattle snake.

I jerked back and the snake made the same motion, cocking his head as if to strike. At the other end of his coils, his rattle tail blurred with the force of his warning.

“Whoa.” Lisa leaned over my shoulder to peer into its glass cage. “Does it have two heads?”

“No.” I put my hand over my stuttering heart. “One is more than enough.” The snake, still buzzing, fixed me with its cold yellow stare, its triangle head poised to attack.

Lisa put out a finger like she was going to tap the glass, but didn't. “It sounds just like the movies, only more so.”

I knew what she meant. The sound was blood-chilling, sending the cold of instinctive fear rushing through my veins.

“Let's go find this chupacabra already.” I moved off and the snake stopped rattling.

Lisa didn't follow. When I went back to see why not, the rattler started buzzing its tail again. The chill in my gut intensified, a colder dread than the noise itself could provoke.

“It doesn't like you.” Lisa stared into the sand-filled enclosure, fascinated.

“It's just reacting to my motion. I'm moving, you're standing still.” All the same, I was seriously weirded out, and not just because of the Western movie sound effect.

“You know,” she said thoughtfully, “snakes aren't always associated with evil. Some cultures think they can see between worlds. Maybe it recognizes another Seer.”

“Yeah, that would be why it looks so glad to meet me.” I pulled her away before she could tell me anything else I had in common with a deadly serpent.

The next doorway finally paid off. Inside a small, octagon chamber, was
el chupacabra.

“Wow,” said Lisa, confronted with the grotesque figure that greeted us. “That is one ugly son of a bitch.”

I stared at the five-foot-tall sculpture, the “life-sized artist's representation,” as the card described it. The legend in 3-D. “No argument here.”

The depiction was weirdly hypnotic, a Frankenstein monster made up of parts of other animals. As tall as me, it had tar-black hide and stood on its hind legs, kangaroo style. Batlike wings sprouted from its shoulders, and spines ran down its back. The head was smooth and dome-shaped, and the eyes were violent red, like the forked tongue that poked through huge white incisors.

“Fascinating,” Lisa said in her Mr. Spock voice.

I'd brought my pocket camera with me. I much preferred my bigger Nikon, but it was hard to sneak into places where it might not belong. I took a few pictures, but didn't risk the flash. “It's like a gargoyle and a Roswell alien had a love child.”

She pointed to the fangs. “And Nosferatu, the original vampire. Funny how the same things come up so often in horror folklore. There must be something about that shape that connects with our human psyche.”

“That's very Jungian of you, Lisa.”

She went to the wall behind the statue and read the description. “According to this, the forked tongue and huge fangs are for draining its victim's blood. When the eyes glow red, it paralyzes—do you think they mean hypnotizes?—its prey to suck the blood at leisure.”

“Nice.” I continued around the wall displays, which had a list of sightings, grainy photographs, and other “proof” of the animal's existence.

After all this buildup, the main feature of the exhibit was an anticlimax. The chupacabra skeleton was as big as a pony, but mounted in the same position as the statue by the door-reared back, wings spread, claws out, teeth snarling.

I was disappointed in spite of myself. Limbs were out of proportion, the mass unbalanced and awkward. “This thing has all the psychic resonance of a Thanksgiving turkey carcass.”

Lisa leaned close to examine the wings. “Appropriate. I think these are chicken bones wired together.”

A metal pipe barrier kept us from getting too close, but I examined the skull as best I could. “What do you think this is? Bobcat?”

“Could be. Or maybe a cougar. They weren't always extinct in Texas.” She craned her head to inspect the teeth.

“What a bust.” This didn't prove anything. We were back to square one. I turned away, dejectedly scanning the rest of the exhibit.

Directly across from the skeleton was a flat piece of limestone, or other sedimentary rock. Impressed in the surface were two footprints, extremely similar to the ones I'd photographed at the roadside where we'd crashed the car.

The card beside the display said: DINOSAUR? OR
EL CHUPACABRA?
NO ONE CAN BE SURE.

Lisa was still playing dentist, paying no attention as I wandered off. “Check this out, Mags. You can see where they attached the fangs.”

I ignored her, and stretched out my open hand toward the fossil. After a moment's hesitation, I placed it into the claw-footed impression. It was old, but not dinosaur old. I didn't get an impression of new violence, like on the road, but there was something there, some energy that wasn't quite … normal.

“Hey! You girls!”

We whirled in unison. A man stood by the life-sized artist's representation, his face like thunder. “What do you think you're doing?”

In a guilty rush I blurted, “There wasn't anyone up front.”

His skin was tanned as leather, his hair grizzled where it escaped his gray ponytail. “I mean with
el chupacabra.
Those bones are very rare and unique.”

Lisa coughed into her fist, and I spoke loudly to cover any commentary. “We were just wondering how you came by them.”

“Same way I do all the artifacts here. Folks bring them in, want money for them.” His scowl gave him a Popeye the Sailor squint. His forearms were kind of big, too, come to think of it. “I think you'd better leave.”

“We'll pay on the way out.”

“I don't want you kids messing with the artifacts. You should show proper respect.”

This was ironic, coming from someone who kept people's ancient belongings in a case and never dusted them. My ears began to burn, but under his watchful eye, Lisa and I left the chupacabra room like chastised children.

Popeye stayed behind, I guess to check for damage to Ol' Chupy. Under my breath, I told Lisa, “You know what we haven't checked out? Whether there have been attacks like this—what's going on now around Dulcina, I mean—in the past.”

“How are you going to find that out?”

“We could look in the archives of the local paper.”

“Dulcina?” Lisa snorted. “They don't need a paper. They have the Duck Inn.”

“Maybe the Kingsville or Corpus Christi archives. Or the old ranch records.”

“You don't really expect me to go to Zeke with this chupacabra story, do you?”

“Why not? Or I will. My cover story can be that I'm investigating a logical source for the legend—”

I'd forgotten about my boyfriend, Mr. Snake. The violent rattle made me flinch, and I stumbled backward into the curio case that held the burial artifacts.

As soon as my hand touched the dusty glass, a shock raced up my arm, an electric vibration that I felt all the way to my back teeth.

I jerked my hand away, rubbing my fingers to soothe the nerves, even though there was nothing physically wrong with them. “What?” asked Lisa, glancing back to check for Popeye.

“There's something in this case.” I wiped at the glass, trying to clean it. Among the ornaments of shell and bone was a flat medallion, like a sand dollar. I thought at first that it had the same double-armed cross as the Velasquez brand, but when I leaned closer, I saw that it was different, more delicate. The upright was rounded at one end, and the cross pieces were made up of fragile lines, almost obscured by age.

“Where's Popeye?” I asked, pulling my Canon from my cargo pocket.

“Just around the corner.”

I couldn't risk a flash, then. I barely had time to take the picture at all, when our host came around the corner.

“You girls aren't stirring up that snake, are you?” The proprietor peered at us in disapproval, but didn't seem to see
me slipping my camera back into my pocket. “Not tapping on the glass or anything?”

“No, sir.” I moved to hide the suspiciously clean spot on the curio display case. “What happened to the Native Americans that used to live here?”

“No one knows. They just vanished.”

I'll believe a lot of weird things that I wouldn't have a year ago, but this wasn't one of them. “Seriously. Was it smallpox from the Spanish? Or what?”

His squint narrowed suspiciously. “You sure ask a lot of questions.”

Lisa had one of her own, completely unrelated to mine. “Are these real snake skins?” She pointed to a dispenser in a corner, like a gumball machine. The clear plastic eggs that normally hold toys or cheap jewelry instead held dry, papery sheddings.