The Mummies of Blogspace9 (11 page)

Still no word from Cyrus.

As for me, I’m gearing up for my day, doing a little light reading about long dead conquistadors. Fascinating, isn’t it? Hey, you know what else is fascinating – the fact that there could be a gigantic pile of gold hidden in our pyramid.

We haven’t done much work inside the pyramid. Actually, I didn’t even know there was an inside, other than that little chamber with the murals. But I’m wondering what we might find if we started poking around at some of those old adobes. A doorway, maybe?

And you know what? Before anyone else wakes up, and before I lose my nerve, I’m going to have a peek inside. Don’t worry, if I see any monsters, I’ll skedaddle. But before I leave you, I have Sebastiano’s third entry transcribed. Here is it, a little shout-out from the year 1580:
Anno Domini Nostri Iesu Christi 1580, 26 Junio
// year of our lord 1580, 26 June

I continue to sleep poorly, not fully understanding the nature of the demons that walk the village at night. They are quite well-tolerated by our Indians, even entering the houses, but they always return to the pyramid before dawn.

Despite my gripping fears, I determined to explore the pyramid. But each time I approached, I was rebuffed by my congregation. They’d grow quite alarmed, quite insistent, even blocking my path.

So great was my concern, my fear for my own soul, that I rode my mule to Chocope, to seek counsel from Father Vasco. It was he who founded my very church before our Bishop granted him a larger congregation. Surely, Father Vasco would have taken some notice of these lurkers.

Upon arriving in Chocope, I found him ill, too ill to see visitors, his housekeeper informed me. She was an Indian woman of quite robust appeal. Might I speak with the good Father for a moment, I inquired. It’s a matter of some urgency.

A fuss was made, but she led me to the bedchamber where Father Vasco lay on one side of a very large bed. I’m not certain why I found that point curious, but had it been me so reposed, I would have aligned myself in the middle of the bed. However, that’s a detail of no consequence.

After inquiring as to his maladies, I told him of my interaction with the demon, and my conviction that these spectral things were nearly as numerous in my village as were the Indians. For some time he made no response.

We live in a word full of demons, he told me finally. Were it not a world full of demons, there would be no need for priests. Surely though, I was letting my imagination run wild. The night is filled with shadows, he suggested. And he reminded me, that as my superior, he was charged with supervising my ministry. He encouraged me to pay more attention to my sermons, and to worry less about my superstitions.

Chastened, I bid Father Vasco a speedy recovery. I untied my mule, that Indian woman hissing at me all the while like a snake. And I prayed as I rode. I prayed that Our Heavenly Father in his wisdom would help me find a way to banish this evil from our world.

As I turned onto the path leading up to my village, I became convinced that God had answered me. I rode up to the door of my small church and pushed it open. Not a grand place, I assure you, no riches adorned it, no silken tapestries, no windows of Venetian glass. But it was a house of God. And I was a man of God.

My life’s work would be to rid this world of those unholy things. And when I next made my prayers, they were prayers of gratitude for this conviction, this clarity.

That evening, having finished my supper, I read my Breviary before putting out the candle. But I had no intentions toward sleep. I waited, and then I quietly ventured forth. I kept to the shadows, moving quickly to the pyramid.

As I crept around the farthest corner, I noticed a light from within. I moved closer, nearing the narrow entryway, from where I heard a throaty noise, like a purring, if one could imagine something the size of a small mountain purring. I jumped back behind a ruined wall as two Indians approached. Each carried some squawking poultry, for what purpose I could not imagine.

I determined to get closer, but each time I left my hiding place, another Indian neared with a bird or a guinea pig. It was then I understood what was transpiring inside. It was a mass. An unholy mass, but it was a mass nonetheless.

It was my intent to march inside, to hold my crucifix high and consecrate that place, but no sooner had I taken one step did a figure emerge. I flattened myself against the wall lest he notice me, but I saw him standing there. The clouds were intermittent, but allowed enough moonlight to see something wet, something moist on the man’s face and chin. Something was dripping.

I prayed for the clouds to part, and they did. One must be careful what one prays for, and I will wish to my dying day that I did not see what I saw next. As the moonlight illuminated the whole world, I saw that the wetness was blood, and the face and chin from which it dripped belonged to Father Vasco.

June 27, 2011
Seville, Spain
Vasco Cuellar

Duran, you yet live! I’ve long believed I was the only conquistador left. You disappeared after Cuzco, leaving me alone with our secret, our curse. And now you question my sanity? Always the deep thinker, weren’t you?

Why not steal half the king’s gold, you suggested, and hide it in a portal to hell? What’s the worst that could happen? We died. We were murdered by malignant demons discontent to let us remain murdered. That’s the worst that could happen.

I too fared poorly after we parted company. I wandered the countryside for years, traveling by night, avoiding the villages when I could. My presence was alarming. I had become something alien, not a man, but something understood by the Indians, if not yet by me.

I set myself a goal one evening as I feasted on a sea lion washed onto the beach – I would reacquire my soul. So I marched into the city of Lima and reacquainted myself with the one man in Peru who I believed could help me; Vicente Valverde.

Do you remember him, Duran? The great priest – a Bishop he became. That day in Cajamarca when the Inca emperor was captured, it was Valverde who shoved the Bible in his face. And though the story is told otherwise, you and I know better – the emperor threw down the Bible not because it was a Bible, but because it was a thing shoved in his face.

Though nine years had past, Valverde remembered me well. He paled when he heard my confession. He was returning to Spain, and I begged him to bring me home so that I might take Holy Orders myself and embark on a penitent life.

We sailed within the month, but when our ship made urgent port on the island of Puna, we were captured. Wild Indians they were, and I screamed that night as they roasted Valverde in their fire. Horrified, I watched when they carved him up for their consumption. Horrified still, I took the bowl handed to me, and began to eat.

I was ordained in Seville in the Spring of 1550, but my mind had well-unhinged by then. No man in Spain understood what those cannibals saw clearly back on that island; that I was soulless.

I didn’t sleep, you understand, but I dreamed. I dreamed of those imps in the pyramid, those little demons who cut us. I prayed for those dreams to end, but they would not. Nor would the hunger.

I was not well-tolerated by my superiors in the Church. My howls, my cries to God discomforted them, so they dispatched me to an impoverished village high in the Pyrenees, a congregation of nearly two hundred miserable wretches. They hated me the moment I arrived, and I ate the last of them just before Christmas, saving me from the chore of crafting a holiday sermon.

I spent decades wandering my empty parish, dining well on the occasional pilgrim, but the dreams would not abate. I concluded one morning, after a fine French meal, two gentlemen from Toulouse having recently arrived, that I would redeem myself to God. I would return to the darkest place on earth, to the place of our transformation.

I sailed for Peru. With great trepidation, I conspired to become a missionary priest, and one evening I plied the Bishop of Trujillo with such fine Alsatian brandy that he agreed to my proposal. I would bring the word of God to those Indians who guarded our very pyramid. I was going home.

We built a small church, but it was of no consequence. Those Indians knew what I was. I went inside the pyramid that first night. I wasn’t afraid, and the Indians made no attempt to block my entrance. The walls had been freshly painted with the blood of animals. I closed my eyes and I licked the blood from those walls, as I would every night hence.

I never entered the room with the gold. Never. I had no use for gold. Nothing I sought could be purchased. I had come for redemption, but redemption was not at hand. Before long, I had become an altogether different sort of priest. The language of the Sopays flowed freely from my mouth as I delivered my sermon, my dark mass.

For two years this continued, until the Bishop arrived to evaluate my performance. He expressed great concern about my failings. I had not a single convert, and the two Indian women who shared my home were quite marginally clothed. My Bishop shook his pious head. But our Church works in bewildering ways, and I was transferred, given a larger parish.

I tried, Duran. I tried again to speak to God, to beg his forgiveness, but it was not forthcoming. To my old church, the Bishop dispatched an idiot priest called Sebastiano. I prayed that his counsel might lessen my burden, but I nearly ate him on nine occasions, so I kept him at some distance.

Finally, I made one last effort at redemption. I penned a long missive to the only man alive who had the power to intercede with the Heavens on my behalf. No, not that flatulent imbecile Pope; I’m speaking instead of Gaspar Quiroga – the Grand Inquisitor of Spain.

I wrote my confession. I told everything, and I begged his forgiveness. Many months passed, but he came. He came with his servants, his soldiers, and his priests and his chroniclers, and he bade me sit quietly with him by the fire, just the two of us one evening, so that I might share every detail.

In the morning, he cast me in chains. I was shipped back to Spain and imprisoned in a remote monastery. The penitent monks who guarded me had taken their vows of silence, and I heard not another human voice for three hundred and fifty years.

Not until the ravages of the Spanish Civil War came to an end, did a lone misguided soldier release me from my prison. He couldn’t have been more than nineteen years old, but tasted like fifty.

Did the dreams stop during those long years? What do you think, Duran? I call myself Perdido because that is who I am. I am no longer a priest, no longer a man, no other than a howling revenant unleashed into this world. I stopped being Vasco Cuellar centuries ago.

As for Sebastiano, I never heard from him again. But it’s not him you have to fear. You’re wrong, Duran; the Sopays are not gone from the world. There is one left. You did not sense him when you returned to the pyramid because he had by then departed. He was invited in by my captor, by the man who chained me. Invited into his heart, that Sopay was, by Gaspar Quiroga, the Grand Inquisitor himself.

June 28, 2011
Seville, Spain
Bruce Wheeler

I miss you, Michelle. I would dearly love to know if I’m still dearly loved. I hope you’re not souring on me just because I’m an international criminal.

I’ve changed identities more rapidly than expected. My pickpocketing roommates keep an abundance of wallets strewn about the apartment, but I consistently pick the wrong ones.

For two days, I was Jakob Wempel of Berlin, Ohio. I wore eyeglasses and a long fake beard. Identification is required to access the research library at the University of Seville, so I handed over Jakob’s Ohio driver’s license, and began searching for historical references to Sebastiano Gota, and to our new undead friends; Cuellar and Duran.

Nothing came of it, except a link to a source called ‘Archivo Rota’ the broken archive, which I chanced upon accidentally, having keyed in S. Goya instead of S. Gota. But I found no other references to it. Then Jakob’s uncles came for me.