The Devil's Bag Man (17 page)

I
t was like looking into a diorama.

A miniature room, rendered in precise and loving detail.

A bed. A desk. A lamp. A chair.

And in the chair, a doll. He was meant to be an old man, Sherry thought, dropping to her knees and peering closely; the oddness of the tableau did not quite register because she was so taken, so transported, by the craftsmanship.

It was stunning. The doll was tiny—no larger than a small mouse, or a large cricket—but the desiccation of his face, the deep wrinkles lining his arms and neck where they sprouted from a loose white tunic, had been wrought with impossible care.

She stared, blinked, and stared some more. Ruth was by her side now, face a blank slate as she, too, stared in awed perplexity at the toy or the totem or whatever it was.

Cucuy did say that Rubacalo had a daughter
, Sherry mused.
But what kind of little girl would want a doll like this?

She peered still closer. There was something spooky about the
doll—an intensity to the energy that surrounded it. Maybe it was a voodoo weapon, and somewhere a real man winced in pain every time Rubacalo plucked one of the doll's long white hairs.

But then why the furniture?

Sherry turned to examine the miniature bed more closely, and then startled at a tiny movement in the periphery of her vision. She could have sworn the doll had blinked.

I must be more exhausted than I thought
.

Then he unfolded himself from his chair, walked slowly to the threshold of his three-sided room, and said, “Where is Herman?”

His voice was brittle and crackly, like sticks snapping in a fire. But it was clear. And sad. As if he knew the answer. Sherry looked into his tiny face, aged beyond age, and felt her heart swell with strange sympathy for this creature, whatever he was.

“He's dead,” she said softly. And then, without thinking, she added, “I'm sorry.”

He blinked his clear brown eyes—they shone within his shrunken face like minute jewels, the only part of him that had not been utterly ravaged—and a heavy sigh rattled through his sticklike body. “Then Cualli has won.”

Sherry nodded. “I'm afraid he has.” Something in her wanted to comfort him, and so she said, “For now, anyway.”

His eyes, locked to hers, pulsed with a kind of energy. “Brave words,” he said. “Who are you, child?”

“My name is Sherry. Sherry Richards. This is my friend Ruth.”

He lifted a bony, withered hand, and smoothed down the few strands of pure white hair that grew atop his liverspot-mottled head. Something about his movements, his physique, reminded Sherry of a grasshopper, or a praying mantis: the large eyes in the small head, the thin, folded arms and legs.

“You are his daughter. The man Cualli took. Herman told me of you.”

Sherry nodded.

“Then I am sorry for your loss. I felt his soul and body cleave apart. I have become attuned to such things, over time.”

“What
are
you?”

“My name is Izel.”

“And you're . . .”

“I am a man, child. A man, in a body that was never meant to last this long.”

A shudder passed through her. “How long?”

“Five hundred and twenty-seven years. Cualli was my fellow priest. My closest friend. I watched him become the abomination you have seen today. And before the gods renounced this world and left us to destroy ourselves, I begged them to tell me how he could be unmade. Do you know what the First Oath is, Sherry Richards?”

She shook her head slowly. “I didn't even know there were gods. I mean, I thought there was only one. And that he was fake. Or dead.”

“It is we who are dead to them. I am the last man ever to lay eyes on one.” His eyes welled with tears. “In that moment, I understood how blessed we had been, and how far from grace we were about to fall. Do you know what hell is, Sherry Richards?”

“This,” she said simply, without thinking.

Izel nodded his ancient head. “Yes. The absence of the divine.”

“I meant more like the presence of monsters. Especially when they take over your father's body.”

It was hard to read Izel's face; it was so small, so racked by time. But Sherry thought she saw him wince.

“The First Oath,” she prompted.

“Yes,” he nodded. “Yes. It is the oldest prayer. From a time when we knew nothing of the gods but fear. It is a promise to forsake, to sacrifice, that which is most precious.” He closed his eyes, remembering, and two more tears leaked out, disappeared into the deep ravines lining his cheeks. “I believed that was my nephew. The only other member of my family to survive Cualli's purge. But I was wrong.”

Izel opened his eyes. “The most precious thing was death,” he whispered. “That is what Chimalma took from me that day.”

“So the gods answered your prayer,” Sherry said and felt her face flush as something like hope suffused her.

Or purpose.

Yes. Purpose was what she felt.

“That means you know how to kill him,” she went on, keeping the question out of her voice, willing the sentence to be fact.

“I do. But for all the long years of my life, no such opportunity has emerged. Cualli is too smart. Too cautious. He does not take risks unless he has to—and now he will not have to for a very long time.”

“No,” Sherry heard herself say, as the flush spread through her and the world unblurred and a new fist of resolve clenched tight inside.

She was Jess Galvan's daughter, and that meant more than it ever had.

“No,” she said again, steel in her voice now. “The time is now. He thinks he's invulnerable. That he's won. He's going to be overconfident. And ambitious. He'll stick his neck out. I'm sure of it.”

“Perhaps,” Izel said. “But we cannot unmake him. There is only one who can do that.”

“Now we're getting somewhere,” Sherry said. “Who?”

“The one he made,” the ancient priest replied, and Sherry felt her jaw tighten.

“I'm not really a big fan of riddles. You got a name?”

Izel shut his eyes, his withered body going perfectly, uncannily still.

“His wife,” he said at last. “My sister. Chacanza.”

“Wife?” Sherry repeated, dumbfounded. “This fuckin' guy is married?”

To her surprise, it was Cantwell who answered. The doctor's eyes were red and wet, but they were clear. She'd come a long way in a short time, Sherry thought. From despair to determination. From mourning what she'd lost to defending what she had.

“The Queen of the Virgin Army,” she said, in a voice both choked and hollow. “That's who you mean, isn't it?”

“I'm afraid so.”

“I've studied the legend,” Cantwell told him. “Tezcatlipoca stole her away from him, right?”

“In a sense,” Izel replied. “Her soul resides with his, trapped in the Dominio Gris. But her body remains here on earth, her will set against her great love, her great betrayer. All those sacrifices became a part of her, an extension of that will.”

“Can we talk to her?” asked Sherry. “I mean, is she still a
person
?”

“I do not know. She is hidden, as I have been. Herman put vast resources into finding her, as did his father before him, but their efforts bore no fruit. She is said to walk the desert by night, and to feed on
the flesh of men. But these may be nothing more than peasants' tales, invented to frighten children into behaving. The layering of one legend atop another.”

“Does she know what she's capable of?” Cantwell asked. “Does she know she can kill him?”

Izel shook his head. “Almost certainly, she does not—though she may understand that they are bound together. That she can never rest while he lives.”

They were quiet for a moment. Izel fell back into the state of stillness he seemed to occupy with such ease, and the women mulled his words.

“So basically,” said Sherry, cracking her knuckles, hand-heel popping against each one in turn, an old habit of her father's, “we've got to find a cursed, undead, body-without-a-soul cannibal with an army at her beck and call. Who's managed to stay hidden for hundreds of years, despite all the time and money that generations of rich drug lords have spent trying to get a bead on her. And if we do track her down, we have to hope she's capable of listening to us, although it's just as likely that she decides we'd make a delicious afternoon snack. And then we convince her that she's the only one who can kill Cualli, and . . . then what? She hops in the car and we go knock on his door? Pretend we're the Girl Scouts, maybe?”

She bent low over Izel. Face-to-face with him, she realized she must look like a giant to the wizened priest. “After five hundred fuckin' years, is that seriously the best you got?”

A loud rap on the window of the open car door made Sherry jump and spin.

“I can help you,” declared a raggedy figure, backlit by the setting sun.

For a moment, Sherry thought it was a ghost. A cloud of wispy, person-shaped smoke.

“You want the queen, I'm your man.”

He stepped closer, became more real. Sherry saw cracked lips and raw sunbaked skin, and she dove toward the console button, pushing it until Izel spun out of sight and was replaced by Rubacalo's shining artillery.

She snatched up a .45. The gold was legit; it felt heavy in her grip. She heaved out of the car and squared her shoulders to his, the gun loose at her side.

“Who the fuck are you?”

“Your dad, he was a friend of mine. They call me Gum.”

He took a step toward her, and Sherry filled the space between them with arm, fist, and weapon.

“Funny, he never mentioned you.”

But as she said it, Sherry felt a surge of recognition and realized who this man was. The knowledge appeared in her brain—not like something she'd remembered, but like something she'd just been given.

She felt something else, too.

An abstract, unmistakable sense that her father was near.

Thanks, Dad
.

And then, just as suddenly, he was gone.

“Gum,” she said to the wastrel before her, naming him the way you named a stray dog, to tame whatever flex he had left in him. “Yeah. My father told me about you. Start talking.”

He rested an elbow on the top of the car door and relaxed against it. The way his bony hands dangled from his wrists reminded Sherry of perched vultures, waiting to swoop.

“I can feel her,” he said, voice low and gruff. “She and I, we're both in two places at once, see. Only, I ain't dead like everybody else there. I— I did like your father. Ate somethin' I wasn't supposed to, know what I mean?”

Sherry lowered the .45 and shuffled aside a pace, as Cantwell clambered out of the car and stood beside her.

“You're in the Dominio Gris,” Ruth said, matter-of-factly.

“A part of me is.”

“Is my father there?” Sherry demanded.

Gum nodded. “But I ain't seen him yet. I dunno if I will.”

“And why's that?”

“Dunno what the god will do to him.”

“Tezcatlipoca,” said Ruth.

“He don't like that name no more.”

“Why the fuck should I trust you?” Sherry asked, and she jerked the car door back so that Gum's elbow slid off and he fell back a pace. “For all I know, you wanna feed us to Queen Whatshername.”

“Chacanza,” he said, supplying the name with a kind of breathy reverence. And then, “I don't.” He shook his head. “I don't.”

Sherry stared at him. “That's it? That's your entire argument?

Gum dropped him arms and his voice and stepped closer.

Sherry let him.

“I know her
there,
” he said. “She's kind. She does what she can to help people. Here . . .” He shrugged. “Here she's pretty fucked up, seems like to me.”

“Yeah, you think so?”

Gum shrugged again. “I'll take my chances with her. And with y'all. Things can't get no worse for me than they already are.”

“That's comforting.”

Sherry sized him up again. He was beyond the point of hiding, she thought. Too divided against himself, too torn apart by the limbo he was in, to pull off major acts of subterfuge.

She'd take her chances with him, too.

Not like there was a plethora of options.

She was about to open her mouth when the console spun again, and Izel regarded them from his chair.

From this angle, it looked distinctly like a throne.

“Give me a few words with this creature,” he said. “Alone.”

W
hat have I done?

Good-bye, Jess Galvan
.

And then he was falling through blackness—flailing, bracing to hit bottom any second and pancake, the world growing colder with each passing moment until breathing hurt, the lungs too tender for the harsh air.

At least I still have lungs
.

From the depths came a fast-rushing sound, and then bats were everywhere, thousands of them shooting past, their stink and screams filling the emptiness, the bright yellow malevolent streaks of their eyes all Galvan could see.

He fell past them, and everything slowed. The air grew warmer, thicker, turned gelatinous. Instead of falling, he slid through it more slowly and then not at all. It oozed into every orifice, filled his nose and ears and asshole, his mouth and eyes, invasive and unpleasant, inescapable. He could hear his teeth grinding, loud and brittle in the silence.

The silence.

Galvan probed it, cautious and fearful.

Yes. It was real.

Whatever dimension he'd been banished to, whatever had been stripped from him, whatever atrocities he'd committed and whatever punishment awaited, Galvan was alone in his body again.

Alone in his mind.

No Cucuy. No fight.

He was whole, and it was glorious.

For a few moments, that was enough. The ocean of violence and terror inside had receded; it was unreachable now, a fading memory. He knew he should be on fire, crazed with remorse and ravenous for revenge, but he wasn't. Perhaps that
was
the punishment. Perhaps he was a ghost, and everything would fade away, memory and passion, hate and love, until humanity itself was just a dream.

Beneath his feet: ground. Apparently, he'd never stopped falling, just stopped being able to perceive his own movement. Galvan wrenched free of the squelchy substance that encased him, protected him. In the last few seconds it had hardened into a Galvan-shaped mold, and extrication proved simple, as if the stuff understood its job was over and wanted to set him loose.

He was in a kind of bubble—Galvan flashed on a photograph he'd seen once, a raindrop with a tiny insect floating inside—and he pushed forward, the jelly giving way, and birthed himself into the world that lay outside.

The landscape was entirely alien. He cast about for some detail he might use to orient himself—ground, sky, horizon—and reaped only dizziness for his efforts.

Light suffused this place, but it seemed to have no source; there was no sun, no moon, no vale of stars. Instead, the land itself—the sand-that-was-not-sand beneath his feet, the rolling hills or dunes in the distance—glowed from within, the colors changing slowly in a kind of rolling visual symphony of lush sunset shades: salmon and magenta and blush pink, deep purple and shallow purple and ochre, on and on.

It all changed together, which was why distinguishing the land from the sky was so difficult—and why it took Galvan a pocket eternity to realize he was standing at the shore of a lake or an ocean. There was no
tide, no shimmer to the water, nothing to shimmer upon it. Only when he walked a few paces away from the melted cocoon that had brought him there and felt warm wetness envelop his bare foot did he understand that before him lay a body of water.

He drew back his leg, shocked, and noticed he was naked. The scars that defined him were gone; his skin was smooth and perfect, like a newborn's.

“Hello?” he said, and the word echoed in the tropical air—as if the vault of the sky were low and tight against the land, the visible world smaller than it appeared, a cavern of sorts.

No response. Galvan turned in a slow circle, refamiliarizing himself with his body and weighing his options in this still and lifeless place.

It was the water that called to him, that seemed to offer solace. He found a whisper of passion again, in the simple desire to submerge himself, and so he indulged it.

One step. Two. Calf deep. Waist. Chest. But was this liquid even water? It seemed to have no density, no substance of its own. He wondered if it would support his weight, or if he would fall right through it like empty space. Nor did its temperature give it form; the water was no warmer or colder than the air. Or perhaps it was no warmer or colder than his body. It was impossible to tell. Just as the unity of form and color blurred the sky, land, and water, the sameness of temperature complicated any distinction between Galvan and not-Galvan, made him wonder where he began and ended.

If life on earth had been asserting and policing those lines of demarcation, then perhaps life here—if this was life, and if
here
was somewhere—was about letting them go.

It was a theory, anyway.

Galvan took another step and felt the water ring his neck.

Perhaps he could breathe underwater, he thought. He'd been able to inside that jelly-bubble, when by all rights he should have suffocated, so why not? And besides, maybe the action was underwater around here. There certainly wasn't much going on up top.

Or maybe you're alone here
.
For all eternity
.

It was a theory, anyway.

He hedged his bets and filled his lungs, then dove beneath the
surface and frog-kicked toward the depths. The light was unchanging, grew no darker as Galvan forced himself deeper. Nor did the water grow colder.

The temptation to risk a breath mounted with each stroke, but he resisted—relished both the feeling of wanting and the feeling of denying himself. The lines distinguishing Galvan from not-Galvan were sharpening.

He shot through the water, knew he'd burned through more than half his store of oxygen, passed the point of no return. The water turned from tangerine to lemon by degrees and then began to shade toward fuchsia. Galvan could see clearly, no salt to brine his eyeballs, but there was nothing to look at. The ocean was as featureless as the land, and as bereft of life.

His chest burned, and he put on a final burst of speed, told himself some destination lay ahead. That it had to. That he would not have been drawn to the water without reason, that he had not come all this way simply to perish.

Yeah, because your life's been so full of purpose until now?

Could he die here? Galvan imagined his limbs going limp as water filled his lungs. His corpse drifting through this barren ocean forever, like an astronaut's through deep black space.

Then he breached the surface and plunged, limbs akimbo, through open air and sky. A cassock of soft purple moss softened his landing, but did nothing to cushion his consciousness.

What the fuck?

He blinked away the stars, got his legs beneath him, sucked in a huge gust of humid air, and staggered to his feet.

Sure enough, the ocean was high overhead—vast and wide, like an endless color-shifting cloud bank, suspended and self-contained, a big fat middle finger in the face of earthly physics. Whatever meniscus he'd broken to escape it and fall to the ground had repaired itself instantly.

He tore his eyes away and looked around.

There was only one word for this place.

Insane.

To start with, there were the colors. It looked like a four-year-old with a jumbo box of fluorescent crayons had run roughshod over a drawing
of a magical kingdom—as conceived and penciled by her nine-year-old sister. The ground cover was a mishmash of high grasses and low mosses, in every color but green. Creeping vines of scarlet kudzu twined around blue cacti in a marriage of climatic opposites; trees bearing an array of fruit Galvan had never seen dotted the vast, gardenlike landscape—gardenlike except where giant pits of sand interrupted, or clusters of massive, steaming icicles sprouted from the ground.

But it wasn't the flora.

It was the fauna.

The ocean might have been empty, but this place teemed with life.

Human life.

Female human life.

There must be hundreds of them
, Galvan thought, eyes darting from one vista to the next, distant to near, the garden unending.

No, thousands
.

They slept, strolled, and sprawled. Some wore simple clothing, fabric fashioned from plant fibers, but most were naked.

And all of them were young.

Innocent
.

Pure
.

The words flashed through his mind, as Galvan put it all together, remembered what Cucuy had told him.

For every body buried in a shallow grave out
there
, every heartless virgin the Ancient One had sacrificed and discarded, there was a girl here. Cucuy had built a harem for the god.

Starting with his own wife.

A cold chill ran through Galvan.

She was here somewhere.

The woman in yellow. The seductress who had filled his dreams.

Or had they been Cucuy's dreams, and Galvan merely an interloper, an eavesdropper on her siren call to the man who had betrayed her unto hell or purgatory or limbo or whatever this place was?

But even as he thought it, Galvan knew it was none of those. He was mapping Christian ideas on to it, but those concepts were foreign, imposed, after the fact. The Dominio Gris was the Dominio Gris. A prison turned playground, if Cucuy was to be believed. And there was
no reason to doubt him. He might have been a monster, but he hadn't lied yet.

All that explained why homegirl napping against the closest Day-Glo palm tree looked so familiar. He'd probably laid eyes on her a few months back, when he'd made his border run and every Virgin Army conscript close enough to sense the presence of the heart had done her damnedest to stop him.

He'd probably laid more than eyes on her, actually. Probably driven a station wagon over her or swung a machete at her neck. Maybe she was among those who'd swarmed and devoured his buddy Payaso, or ripped the strongman Gutierrez limb from limb.

If so, she looked no worse for wear—or for the violence Cucuy had perpetrated either. No more than Galvan himself did. Apparently, the travails of the body were erased here.

As no doubt befit the pleasures of the god whose garden this was.

The garden, and every piece of fruit it bore.

Galvan walked a few paces, until he stood directly before a girl with dark eyes, whose flowing raven-black tresses covered her small breasts. She looked old, he thought; not
old
old, barely sixteen, but old like she'd been born a few hundred years back, before the gene pool diversified. Thoroughbreds like her didn't exist anymore.

She peeled a large fruit with her teeth, a cross between a kiwi and a mango, green pulpy flesh beneath silky ribbon-thin skin. She took no notice of Galvan whatsoever.

“Howdy,” he tried, with a halfhearted little wave. “I'm, uh . . . new here.”

She blinked at him, lower half of her face invisible behind the fruit, then spun on her heel and walked away.

Tough crowd.

“They can't talk to you.”

It was Galvan's turn to spin on his heel.

He found himself face-to-face with a lean, handsome young man, sandy haired, with piercing green eyes. A piece of fabric, tied around his waist like a skirt, was his only nod to modesty.

The dude smiled. “Don't recognize me, huh?” He shifted his weight, from one foot to the other. “It's me, Gum. I look a little different here.”

“Gum. Jesus Christ. You clean up good.” Galvan looked him up and down, grimaced. “I could use one of those. Feels kinda wrong to be walking around with my dick swinging in the breeze.”

Gum unwrapped the cloth from his torso, ripped it cleanly in half, and offered Galvan a strip just wide enough to do the job.

“Thanks. So we're . . . dead, or . . . what the fuck, man?”

Gum shook his head. “Nah.” He jutted his chin at the garden, the girls. “They're dead. Or—more dead. Undead. You and me, we're different. We didn't die. But me, I'm still out there. And you, you're not.”

Galvan mulled that over for a few moments. “So you've got a foot in each world.”

Gum's baleful stare confirmed it.

“How the fuck you manage that? I mean, right now, we're here, having this conversation. But somehow you're also, like . . .” He trailed off, unable to find a way to balance the idea atop the teetering stack that already filled his mind.

Gum pawed the ground with his bare foot and winced. “It feels like being torn apart,” he said quietly.

The gears of Galvan's mind were turning. Slowly, grimed with rust. But turning.

“Find my daughter.” He reached out, grabbed Gum's shoulder. “Please. I've gotta know if she's alive.”

Gum's eyes flitted left-right-left, like he was reading type off Galvan's forehead.

Or deciding whether to lie.

“She is,” he said at last. “I'm with her.”

Galvan felt the sweat burst from his pores. All was not lost. He could still reach out to Sherry. The questions poured out of him, each one erasing the last.

“Where is she? Who's she with? Is she safe?”

“For now,” Gum said, but something had shifted. His eyes, his posture. A new caginess. Or, more accurately, the old caginess.

“Tell her to get as far away as she can,” Galvan said. “Tell her run and don't look back. And that I love her. And that I'm sorry. And that I'm gonna—”

Gum's face was a brick wall, and it brought Galvan up short. “What?”

“She's with Izel. They're going to find Chacanza.”

“I don't know who either of those people are,” Galvan said, but his stomach dropped as he said it.

He knew. Her name, her face, her very essence had echoed, rattled, and floated through Galvan for as long as Cucuy had colonized his body. She was the ghost in the machine, the fist of regret and love, fear and hatred that clutched at the monster's heart.

The last vestige of his humanity.

The final threat.

“Why?” he breathed, bracing himself for the answer. “They got a plan?”

It was Gum's turn to grimace. “Not much of one.”