You've Been Warned

He pours the soda into a glass with ice and hands it to me. “Now let’s take a look at those pictures,” he says. “Figure out what’s going on.”

“Excellent.”

I reach into my shoulder bag and pull them out. He’s barely had a chance to look at the first one when I realize... we’re not alone.

Chapter 60

“JAVIER?” COMES A VOICE from another room. “Javier? Is someone there with you?” It’s a woman. She sounds old, foreign, and a bit confused.

“Si, Mama,” says Javier over his shoulder. He turns back to me. “My mother moved in last year after my father passed away. Unfortunately, her health is not too good.”

“Javier?” she calls out again. “I’m talking to you. Javier?”

He winks at me. “Her hearing isn’t too good either.” He raises his voice. “Si, Mama!”

“Con quien estas hablando?”

Javier translates for me. “She wants to know who I’m talking to.” He answers her, “Ella es mi amiga.”

“La has visto antes?”

He rolls his eyes. “She wants to know if she’s met you before. Now I have to introduce you, otherwise she’ll be offended. Do you mind? I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” I say. “I’d love to meet her.”

Javier leads me out of the kitchen toward the very back of the apartment. He slows for a moment along the narrow hallway to whisper something to me.

“Just so you know, my mother is very religious and she’s gone a little overboard in her decorating.”

I’m not sure why he’s telling me this. That is, until we reach her room.

Jesus!

Literally. There have to be at least a hundred crucifixes hanging on the wall—big, small, wood, ceramic—with another fifty propped up on a bookshelf and bedside table.

“Mama, ella es mi amiga Kristin.”

She’s sitting in a rocking chair by the window, wearing the plainest of plain tank dresses— cement gray, if I had to name the color. But what I really notice is how incredibly frail she looks. She’s so thin she’d give Penley a fat complex.

As she glares at me with sunken eyes, I walk toward her and extend my hand. It seems like the right thing to do.

Wrong.

Terribly wrong!

I get no farther than a few steps when those sunken eyes explode with fear. She clutches a set of blue rosary beads in her lap and begins to scream wildly. All hell breaks loose in this claustrophobic room full of crosses.

“Espiritus malos! Espiritus malos! Mantengase lejos de mi. Ella esta poseida por espiritus malos!”

Javier gasps. “Mama! What are you saying?”

That’s what I want to know, but Javier isn’t translating. Instead, he rushes to her, trying to calm her down. She doesn’t.

She gets worse, in fact, more crazed and agitated.

“Ella esta rodeada por espiritus malos!” she screams, her sliver of a body nearly out of control.

Javier grabs her and yells something in Spanish, but it’s as if she can’t see or hear him. She keeps pointing and hollering.

At me.

“Espiritus malos! Espiritus malos!”

Javier’s worried face leaves little doubt that this is something his mother has never done before. “I’m sorry, Kristin, but I think it’s best if you leave.”

“Espiritus malos! Espiritus malos!” the old woman shrieks. She’s also stamping her feet on the floor.

“What does she keep saying?” I ask, as I slowly back out of the room.

“It’s nonsense,” says Javier. “Don’t worry about it.”

“No, I want to know. Tell me.”

His mother begins to convulse, her rocking chair now like an electric chair. She bites down so hard on her lower lip that blood begins to trickle. My God!

“Mama!” yells Javier.

The old woman is jabbing her finger at me.

“Espiritus malos! Espiritus malos!”

“Kristin, I’ll look at your pictures another time. At work. You really need to leave!”

But I can’t yet. “Not until you tell me what she’s saying. I have to know!”

He glares at me, clearly vexed at my persistence, if not my presence.

“C’mon, Javier, tell me!” I plead.

Finally, he does.

“Espiritus malos,” he says. “My mother says you’re possessed by evil spirits. She thinks you’re a devil.”

Chapter 61

I’M SO DIZZY leaving Javier’s apartment I nearly do a face plant on the sidewalk. I stagger for a block or so, shaking my head.

What on earth just happened? I’m a devil? Me?

The image of his mother keeps repeating in my mind, her screams echoing in my ears. Espiritus malos! Espiritus malos!

Again I tell myself to keep it together.

For the first time I’m not sure I can.

Espiritus malos... I’m a devil.

Of all the questions I have, I realize there’s now another. Where am I?

I’ve been walking, oblivious to the unfamiliar streets or even the direction I’m heading. It’s almost dusk.

I stop and rummage through my shoulder bag, pushing aside the pictures I remembered to grab on the way out. Next I check my pockets, but they’re not there either. Javier’s directions are nowhere to be found.

Oh, great. I’m lost in Brooklyn.

“Excuse me,” I say to the next person I pass, a young woman with a backpack. She can’t be more than twenty. “Do you know where I can find the F train?”

She barely slows down. “Sorry, I’m not from around here.”

You and me both.

Farther down the block I see an older man, perhaps in his seventies, sitting on a stoop reading the Daily News. He looks sort of like Ernest Borgnine.

“The F train, huh?” He points over my shoulder. “The first thing you want to do is turn around.”

I do exactly that as he begins to rattle off the lefts and rights I need to take. I’m listening as best I can, trying to keep track. Did he say two lefts before the right or one?

I’m about to ask him to repeat everything when I see something I don’t want to see.

Some one, actually. A man.

It may be dusk, but I can see him clear as day. That’s what having darkroom eyes will do for you.

I wait a second, and again he pokes his head out from behind the white delivery truck double-parked at the corner. I don’t even need to see the face.

All it takes is the ponytail.

Chapter 62

“HEY, LADY, YOU’RE GOING the wrong way again!” growls the old man on the stone