Witch Lights (14 page)

“Ray, open your eyes. Look at me,” Mantu said.

He opened his eyes. There were spirits all around inside the tiny house. He could see them with his poisoned eyes, vague faces shifting in and out of his vision like clouds of smoke. He'd seen similar beings before, outside of Crawford's house when he'd been blasted on Lily's exotic drugs. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I keep slipping. I'm really trying but it's hard to come back.”

Mantu asked Sabina to hurry.

While her sister removed Ray's shoes and socks, Sabina took two plastic bottles off a shelf. They looked like shampoo bottles without the labels. She dumped a small puddle of dark liquid into a black ceramic bowl, then took a pinch of something that looked like grayish dirt from another bottle and mixed it up with a blackened bone the size of a finger. Then she opened a leather pouch that had been hanging around her neck. From inside, she took a handful of tiny golden-brown mushrooms with twiglike stems, crumpled them up, and dropped them into the mixture.

Ray shivered. Were they hallucinogenic mushrooms? The last thing he needed was to inject more insanity into his failing brain. “What are those, Mantu?” he asked.

“Medicine,” Mantu said. “You need to trust her.”

Sabina spoke to her sister, who then translated for Mantu. Ray understood the Spanish clearly.
He may die.
And despite his numbness, his mental collapse, and the lure of the dark world behind his eyes, he forced himself to open his eyes wide and look at Sabina's shriveled, deeply wrinkled face with its one chalky eye and the other full of dark ancient secrets.

“I'm ready,” he said.

Sabina nodded and made the sign of the cross between her pendulous breasts. She held open her arms, and her sister brought over one of the doves, its head tucked inside her palm. Sabina took the bird, whispered to it, and held it above the bowl. She took the knife, and with a practiced, swift motion, sliced the bird's neck. She dropped the knife and held the dove tightly with both hands as it jerked and convulsed. Some of the blood splattered onto the side of Ray's face and he flinched.

After the bird had bled out, she asked for another. She looked directly at Ray and spoke. Her sister leaned close and said in Spanish,
This poison requires much blood. To lure it out.
She sliced the neck of the second
paloma,
which put up even more of a death struggle, jerking and twisting until a few white feathers drifted to the floor. Then it, too, went limp.

Sabina stirred the dark, thick mixture. She dipped a finger into it, then tasted it. She had maybe three teeth left. Licked her lips, nodded, and whispered prayers. She stared at Ray and spoke to him while her sister translated in barely comprehensible Spanish, and Mantu explained in English. Like a crazy game of telephone.

Mantu put his mouth close to Ray's ear.

“Black magic is used to fight black magic. You are going to be given a poison that could kill you. A poison to fight another poison. But it's the only thing that can save you.”

Ray nodded.
Just get it over with.

But she wasn't finished, and Mantu continued. “Bad spirits will go into you. To rid the bad spirits already inside you. They will do as she asks, because they are hers, but they always demand something in return. You must accept that or she cannot continue.”

What could be worse than dying or going permanently catatonic here, on a pile of blankets on the dirt floor of a witch's hut? “Do it. Now. Please.”

Sabina nodded. She picked up a bottle of liquor, drank a mouthful and then sprayed it all over Ray, from his face to his feet. A shower of the stuff. It smelled like mezcal, and it immediately shocked him back to reality. He flinched, startled, but didn't have the energy to move or even ask what the hell was going on.

“She's cleansing you,” Mantu explained.

Sabina then took a swatch of grass—fragrant, with tiny flowers—and started rubbing them over his skin, beating them against his heart, the sides of his head, his groin, and the bottoms of his feet.
Thwack-thwack-t
hwack,
almost but not quite painful, around and around him. When she finished, she threw the bundle into the woodstove, where it erupted, bright and crackling, before quickly burning away.

Sabina spoke to him, but he didn't need to understand whatever variant of Mayan she spoke to get her message. She was holding the bowl out to him. Mantu helped him to sit up on his elbows.

“Tomar una copa,”
she said. And brought the bowl to his lips. Ray grimaced.

Have a drink
.

Ray nodded. He had little time to spare.

“Sí. Sí. Ahorita,”
Sabina said.
Right now.

Ray felt his guts clench as he opened his mouth. She tipped a little in. His mouth filled with warmth, and he gagged.

“No,”
Sabina shouted. She held her hand over his mouth, strong for such a tiny woman. He swallowed, felt his gag reflex kick again, and forced himself to contain it. It tasted surprisingly like his own blood from recollections of dental procedures—metallic and electric—only more watered down. And gritty with the dirt.

“Más,”
Sabina said.

Ray lifted his shaking hands. Held the bowl to his lips, supported by Mantu, and tilted it back. He shuddered and swallowed as quickly as he could, but Sabina lifted the bowl higher, and the entire contents ran into his mouth. Again, he started to gag, but Mantu held his head firm and Sabina held his mouth shut, her tiny, sharp fingernails digging into the side of his face.
“No, no, no,”
she whispered.

“Swallow it,” Mantu said.

Ray did. His stomach lurched, threatening to send it all back up, but he gritted his teeth and tried not to think. And then it was done.

The sister waved the censer in front of him and copal smoke engulfed his face and seared the inside of his nose. It burned but smelled clean, like a mineral dug from inside a mountain.

Sabina lit a hand-rolled cigar and rubbed her palms together. Then she started to pray.

First came the invasion of his body.

Sabina's rhythmic chanting stopped. Her eyes grew wide and she began shouting in Mayan. She took a deep mouthful of her cigar smoke and blew it into his face, thick clouds of strong, harsh tobacco. Shouted again, screaming in rapid bursts that sounded like curses, and then started wailing.

Then something—some
things
—crawled into him. In through his eyes, his mouth, scraping like sharp-scaled snakes as they forced their way inside. In his nostrils. Up into his rectum. Dozens of them, thin, wormlike, and strong. He was being invaded. Raped. Infested.

He couldn't breathe. He would die if they didn't stop crowding in his throat.

And then they all drew into the center of his body. The pain was excruciating and he gasped as air entered his lungs. They were writhing in the center of his chest, gnawing away at him. The pressure was unbearable. It felt like all of the flesh and organs had been gouged out.

Sabina shouted and clapped her hands three times.

The pain and pressure vanished.

Ray sat up. The witch's room had been replaced by a temple. But not like the ruins he'd visited—this was newly hewn from stone. Mayan kings and priests were carved into the walls, covered in bright, vibrant paint. Torches burned, and pots of charcoal lifted copal smoke into the air.

Sabina was young. Her hair black, wrinkles gone, glazed eye clear. Both eyes staring into his with a disturbing, almost predatory, intensity.

“Where am I?” he asked.

She spoke. As she did, he realized her lips weren't moving. She was talking straight into his head.

You are in many places and times, Ray. You have always been a traveler.

He thought-spoke in reply. It was so much easier communicating this way.

What do you mean?

The torchlights danced in Sabina's enormous pupils.
You will learn. There is not much time now. There is a fight taking place in your bones. In your intestines. In your brains and your bowels. One side will win. I have sent in spirits of pestilence, and rot, and the sour wind that brings painful suffering.
Sabina's face turned skeletal, her eyes sinking into black holes, but then just as quickly she was a young woman again.
I am not a healer. My dominion is death, and decay, and despair. I suck the lives of children from their mother's wombs and grow festering cancers in the guts of kings and priests. I am malice. I am the worm that burrows into the brain and the maggot that feasts on the flesh of the dead.

Ray drew back. Her pupils had filled up her entire eyes. They were black, black, black.

The spirits I sent into you may kill the spirits the redheaded witch put into you. My helpers are from
Xibalba,
old demons that crawl beneath the earth among rocks and roots, but her magic is unknown to me. It comes from somewhere I have never traveled, out among the stars, from before the earth came into being. If her spirits eat mine, you will die. Not just your body, but your soul. You will join them and they will gnaw you into nothingness.

The torches brightened and the reflected spheres in Sabina's eyes filled the blackness.

If mine eat theirs, you will live. But they will take something from you. A part of you that will never cease to cause you pain. They will let you live, but you may wish you had not.

Ray responded,
I just need to find Ellen and William. Can you let me do that?

Sabina's smile widened. Her eyes were back to normal. Now they were in a clearing in a jungle, in front of a small fire. A group of shadowed men sat in a circle playing drums, but they were indistinct and wavery, like ghosts. Sabina wore the skin of a jaguar and a crown of quetzal feathers. She held up a round polished stone the size of her fist. Obsidian. “Look,” she whispered.

Ellen. She was sitting in a chair, wearing a strange white robe, surrounded by flowers. She was crying. Weeping, lost, and horribly alone in a sea of men, all of them leering and staring at her. Behind her stood that ghastly, skeletal reaper woman, an enormous version of Sabina's chintzy statue. And this lady reaper was real. Her bony arms came down, the blade of the scythe coming to rest across Ellen's breasts, and she was swallowed up in the folds of the black robe.

“No,” Ray said. He closed his eyes.

“Look!” Sabina laughed. “See what you asked to see!”

He opened them again. Ellen was naked, now, in a bed surrounded by darkness, a white garment ripped next to her. She was curled up against a wall, eyes wide, like a frightened animal. From the shadows something crept toward the bed, walking stiffly. At first Ray thought it was the skeletal robed woman again, but then he realized it wasn't a black robe he was seeing, but wings. Enormous, leathery, sharply angled wings.

And then it turned to him, and he saw its face.

Sabina cackled.

It was only partly human, with long pointed ears, eyes as black as Sabina's obsidian stone, and a nose that ended in a brutish snout. But what made a scream rise in his throat was the snarling, fanged mouth, the long sharp teeth.

It saw him. It smiled at him, the teeth stark against the pink ribbed interior of its mouth.

“Camazotz!” Sabina shouted. “He learned from me the mysteries of the Old Ones. I taught him the language of the
ajtz'alam
and the power of flight. He is the one who will wed your woman, Ray. He will put his seed in her. Don't close your eyes—look!”

And the horrid bat-human thing was crawling onto the bed, its clawed hands spreading the veined, leathery wings. It crawled atop Ellen, who started screaming, and fell upon her, wrapping her in the black embrace of its wings.

“Stop it,” Ray croaked. “I don't want to see anymore.”

He opened his eyes and they were back in Sabina's home. Alone. Mantu and her sister were gone. Green balls of light poured in through the tiny windows, sending moving shafts of sickly illumination dancing around the room. Sabina sat, smiling widely, her three teeth like jagged, leaning tombstones. She was enjoying this, all of it.
I am malice,
she had said.

“They're here,” she said.

More globes of green fire moved through the walls, each of them the size of a softball. They hovered above him, shimmering like soap bubbles. More, maybe a dozen, entered. As if the walls didn't even exist. They bobbed and floated, and soon the room was filling with them. He could no longer see Sabina, just the mass of opalescent orbs.

She answered before he could ask. “The spirits of all the
brujas
who have come before me,” she said. “They have gone back into the rocks and roots. My sisters, called forth from their realm beyond death. They will burn away everything inside of you.”

Ray shivered. Despite their brightness they radiated intense cold.

“Ask them in,” she said.

He stared at them. There was a weird beauty in the green, swirling lights, but it was cold and hard and old beyond belief.