The 13 Secret Cities (Omnibus) (13 page)

That was about four years ago. Since then, I had outgrown that book, and in fact, I had now almost forgotten
The Grimoire.
It was silly information, and I had moved on to harder school work and details that really mattered.

Except that if you read more of those books, you might know what to do when a monster with a dog head tries to kill you.

That was my voice I heard talking to me in my head, but it could have easily been spoken by José María, who remained mute. The beast had been able to speak with me after it performed our blood pact. José María shivered in the blackness.

The monster will gut him. He’ll drink his black tears. You know it.

I looked into the canine head above me, its gums lined with black pus, and its breath bearing the scent of violence. Its hairless skin, dull and dry, was parchment, and the bulge in its loincloth a terrifying and ridiculous monstrosity. How I wished now that this thing I named X could be as easily conquered as Hugh Bright had tamed the dragon.
 

Can’t hurt to try. This isn’t exactly a place that sticks to the rules. May as well go for it.

X was so bony and jagged that I didn’t think much of climbing up his body like a chain link fence. I grabbed the loose skin near his ribs and pulled myself up. As I did so, his eyes went wide as saucers, and he grunted in a flurry of musical beats. His hard nails clawed at my skin, but I didn’t care. I used the saggy muscle of his thigh for leverage, and I jumped up onto his head. Its jaws released the reek of dead flowers and fish innards. I pressed my lips onto its forehead, just like Hugh Bright as he conquered the dragon.

“NO!” the beast shouted, and it tossed me off his body. I flew through the air and landed hard on my back. The beast took two steps forward and he leaned over me.

X took his clawed hands and pulled the corners of his canine mouth apart. The flesh came apart like taffy at first, and he opened his maw as his body stiffened. The eyes, those all-too human eyes, jittered and vibrated, and the nimbus of sound that allowed me to see through the darkness turned sharper, moving into a higher pitch. The jaw spread open like a flower as its folds spread out wide. I gasped.

It was a travesty of a jaw. A machine of death
.
Four rows of teeth curved outward, as his gums rolled forward from his mouth.
 

José María scrambled in the dark, blind, screaming in silence. He crawled on all fours.

X made the rows of teeth in his jaw bristle, and he craned his neck at an incredibly sharp angle. He shouted once at José María, who curled up into a ball when he heard the musical bellow. Then the creature craned his long neck back toward me.

He shouted again.
 

My breast shook and my ears felt like they were bleeding. It was a shout made of a hollow sound, hard, everlasting. It was lonely music, like the blues, but bereft of soul. His eyes swelled and threatened to split open.

And then screamed one more time. As he did so, a smell emanated from his body.

X released the smell of the woods, something floral, something made of dirt and rain—

Marigolds. The beast smells of marigolds.
 

As the smell reached my brother and me, I experienced several visions—several experiences—all at once.

I was a nurse in a dormitory, huddling under my bunk. My lungs burned as I held my breath. I pressed my lips together to not let out any sound, so I could not be heard by the man with the knife who had just butchered the other women in my house just a minute or so ago. Seconds passed, and I couldn’t hold it any longer. I let out my breath and took another breath. I held it again. And then I saw his shoes. They cleared the threshold of the bedroom, and then I heard his breath. Heavy, moving closer. When he yanked me by my hair, he tore out most of it, and he had to grab another patch on my head so he could pull me up to full standing. His face was sadly a blur. As he stabbed me, I felt a realization: I hadn’t had the chance to get married. When he was done cutting me, I fell to the ground. The last image of my life was a chunk of cheap yellow paint on the wall, and the stranger’s calves in front of my nose. This death was not imagined. I was really there. My name was Merlita.

I was a skinny teenager, barely fifteen years old, crossing the intersection of Pulaski and Lake. I didn’t react quickly enough to the pops. They went off like soda bottle caps. Pop, pop, pop. My friend Bernard shouted. He shouted hard, and he called my name. None of it made sense. Behind me, a liquor store’s glass windows blew out, and then I understood. The black Suburban screaming down the street was shooting, its passenger holding a handgun in each fist. I felt pressure in my gut, in my head, and in my shoulder. Red flowed from me, and it was then that I felt regret and fear. Would Momma be okay? I pressed my hand to my chest and my stomach, and my insides were soft, like gelatin. Momma lived under the fist of my father, who also beat me when he showed up unannounced at our house around the corner. If this blood was true, I would never see Momma again, and I would never get her out of this neighborhood.
 

I was old, much too old, and I hated it. Ninety
-
three years old, and my knee ached like the devil. I remember that. I no longer had a reason to live, because my wife’s death had left me empty. My many sons tried cheering me up, but my knee tortured me every minute of the day, and the cancer in my liver was winning. My father had come to Chicago from Poland a long time ago, and as I lay on the sofa
,
drinking straight from the whiskey bottle, I became alarmed. He used to drink like this, too, sideways on the couch, piss stains on his boxers and one eye half shut. I couldn’t remember my father’s name. I tried. I really tried. His name. What was his goddamn name? There was a blank space in my memory. I wept into my hands, and the stabbing pains grew deeper in my gut, right where my liver was located. It was New Year’s Day, and my sons were coming for a visit at four p.m. The pain in my insides grew deeper, sharper, and I knew what was coming next. I died with my hand still wrapped around the neck of the bottle, and wishing I could just remember that name. Since we arrived in Chicago, we had lived on the South Side. I remembered that.

I wrapped my hair in a towel, and I walked out into the back porch to smoke a cigarette. I could hear the son of the Montes down the street blasting Rhinoceros, and I thought,
Don’t they ever turn down the music?
My phone rang from the living room, but I let it go to voice mail. I was dreading answering the call from my boss, so no hurry. I’d fake a doctor’s note if that’s what it took to take another day off. Instead, I went to the kitchen and popped an Eggo waffle in the toaster. I ran down the figures of my credit card debt and the student loan payments I still had left. I was going to get a handle on this problem, and today was the day it all would start. I had spent the past three months hiding the numbers from my Trevor, but he knew I had a problem. $150,000 in debt, and a serious shopping problem. I stared at the stuff I bought and put in our extra bedroom. All of it beautiful stuff, my things, my clothes. A new purse and a silk skirt. Dozens of DVDs. Perfume. I considered going out shopping later today. Why not? Then I put the butter knife into the slots of the toaster to fish out the waffle. The knife came to life, hot to the touch, and suddenly it was glued to my skin. My jaw clenched, and I felt a surge. Cramps in my flesh bent my arm into the shape of a hook. My lips trembled, and fear filled my being. I shook, my whole body clenched, and I felt my own eyeballs cook and my hair begin to smoke. The clock that was plugged into the wall popped, and fire broke out from the socket. I didn’t fade out into death. It was more jerky than that. Like a TV set flickering on and off. I tumbled into a place of fear, and the last thoughts in my head were those of that credit card bill for $14,608 that lay on my counter as my retinas and my corneas burned. I smelled my own body fat cooking, and the dark came over.

Each plume of marigold stench thrust these experiences into me, and my eyes watered. I vomited black liquid onto the dirt, and the bends in my stomach made ghostly music.
 

“Want more, wanderer?” X said.

I shook my head.

“Then you know not to try touching me like that again.
Never
touch me.”

“Am I dead?” I asked.

X was still holding his jaw open from the corners of his mouth, and his tongue rolled out like a snake. He pulled the corners up, and his grin mocked me. He walked toward us again, and in a swift move, he grabbed José María and me by our collars. He leaped over rocks with grace, and as we cut through the darkness, I felt as if I were flying up the side of the mountain.

“I do not want to go up there. Stop it,” I said.
 

The mountain peak felt wrong, all wrong, and I knew we were not supposed to go there. The toes of my shoes grazed the rocks beneath us, and I heard screeches above us. Birds were circling this mountain. They had always been there. I just couldn’t see them until X’s nimbus of sound lit them with its tone and I could see their textures.
 

It was a whole flock. It stayed close to us, scanning with dozens of eyes. The birds stared at me with a deep knowledge. These were like no birds I had ever seen. Their bodies were solid but made of the blackest smoke. Their eyes and flat faces stared into me, and they left trails of smoke in the moonless sky.

They are owls.

We reached the peak in what seemed like seconds, and the final point was nothing more than a mound of snow, black and glittering like the same snow I knew on Earth.
 

“If I cannot keep your guest as my present, you must leave,” X said, and he hurled us toward the snow mound. The snow sparkled like volcanic sand, though I knew that if I touched it, its icy coldness would sting my skin. X swelled with rage, and his skinny body filled with wetness, as if his circulatory system had reactivated. His dog face and his human eyes coveted José María. It wanted to consume flesh.

We fell toward the snow, and as we approached it, I saw it magnify before me, as if my eyes contained microscopes inside each eyeball. Inside each black snowflake, I saw myself reflected. It was like seeing a honeycomb of mirrors, and we approached it with speed and fury. My eyes magnified the images, and I know José María saw them
,
too. We had been here before.

Thousands of mirrors before us. And my brother and I inside each one.

We barreled toward the snow, and when we made contact, we passed through it like bodies through gelatin. Sound swallowed us up, filling our ears and blasting our bodies into ether.

We struck a hard object.

What it feels like to hit the pavement at 1106 West Lawrence Avenue in November: wet and slick. And oh, so good.

I had never been so happy to feel gray water slide on my cheek. I breathed in exhaust, the smells of french fry grease, pho, injeera and motor oil. City air. But what was even better was seeing color. Red stoplights, the emerald tease of the Green Mill off to my right and the gorgeous brown of the back of my hands. Light spread everywhere, and where it shone, color followed.

Things are no longer black.

Tears came to my face and the wind got knocked out of me, but there was glory on my right as José María landed with a thud next to me. I heard a dull crack near his hip. This sound was glorious, because it was a sound from the real world. It felt familiar, and thankfully, it didn’t emanate music. We were back.

José María scrambled to his feet and withdrew his Samsung from his pocket. “Piece of shit!” he said, and he tossed the two halves of the phone into the traffic before us. It hit the windshield of an SUV driving east on Lawrence Avenue.

The driver pulled over across the street.
 

I stood up, straightened my skirt, and I blinked, over and over and over
,
to make sure I was really here, really back.

The driver of the car stormed toward us. His belly bounced over his belt, and his face reddened.

“What the fuck is your problem? You wanna start something?” he shouted.

José María spat out, coughed, and his voice choked on a syllable. He coughed again, and I heard his voice, loud and clear now.

“Step the fuck away from us! I’ll beat your fucking ass!” my brother shouted. Red spots bloomed on thin cheeks and he shivered with anger.

José María ran toward the vehicle. This was nothing I had ever seen him do before. The driver stepped backward, almost stumbling over himself. José María punched the passenger side window, and the window rattled. He then took his closed fist, raised it above his spiky head, and slammed it down on top of the car. He didn’t leave a dent, but the noise of his fist slamming on the steel rang out like a gong. The driver stepped back into his car.
 

He locked himself in his car as José María ran up to the window.
 

“Step out of the car, asshole,” screamed my brother.

José María was still shouting as the car took off.