Olympio went on. “There’s a lot of echoes in here. It’s haunted, for sure. I did wonder, though, if all those times I thought you heard someone, it was just some other kid getting his ass beaten at the end of the line.” He turned on his light. “Now we just walk back the way we came. Only underground. Watch out for needles.”
We walked slowly, crouching, shining the flashlight before each and every step. The smell here was metallic, almost like the taste of fresh blood, the tang of wet rust. There were small tree branches—I wondered how far away those had been swept in from; where the hell was the nearest park?—condoms, bent spoons, and the occasional bullet case. Graffiti warned us that this place belonged to the Three Crosses, then the Reinas, then other names I couldn’t read with faded colors—enough different scripts that it was clear no one really ruled here.
“Why does she cry? In your stories?” I whispered to Olympio, and heard it sussurate around me, like listening to a breathing lung.
“Someone killed her kids.”
“The Donkey Lady?”
“No. The Donkey Lady—she’s under the train station at night. She’s different. Someone shot her donkey, and then she became one—don’t ask me.” He turned to look back, shining the flashlight up at his face, casting it in frightening shadows as he started talking again slowly, like it was an effort to explain things to someone as unimaginative as me. “La Llorona fell in love with someone who didn’t love her back. She killed her children to follow him, but he still didn’t love her. So she killed herself, and now she haunts rivers and snatches children away. And this place can be like a river, sometimes.”
He swung the flashlight down to the ground and began walking.
“Isn’t that an old story? Like it happened far away from here?”
“So?”
“So—I’m just saying, chances are she’s not haunting a storm drain someplace where it snows in the winter.”
Olympio glared over his shoulder at me. “I’m not hearing anything anymore—let’s go back,” he said, and then the wailing overtook us, echoing in the small tunnel. I yelped, Olympio jumped, and the flashlight fell to the ground, clanging on the tunnel’s metal floor.
“Shhh!” I grabbed up the flashlight.
“Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go—” Olympio started pulling at me, his hands scrabbling over mine for control of the flashlight.
“Hang on, okay? Who’s there?”
I looked to Olympio to translate for me. “She says she’s a grandmother who needs help.”
“Well then.” That didn’t make it any less creepy, but I’d take talking ghosts over disembodied crying any day. I took a few steps farther up the tunnel, and Olympio followed me. When I slowed down, he bumped into my back. We reached a fork in the tunnel, where it branched in two.
“She wants to know if we’re still coming,” Olympio said. It seemed like her voice was coming from the darker path, of course. Olympio stopped me. He picked up a branch and set it down pointing in the direction that we’d come from.
“So we’ll know which way to pick when we come back.”
And then we went into the black.
The woman just kept asking if we were coming, over and over again. It got so I bet I would know those words too, in addition to
I tried not to let on that I was scared, but my imagination was just as good as Olympio’s; worse, I’d already seen awful things before. Swirling Shadows that tried to suck you down, the teeth of an angry werewolf, vampire fangs, cancer. All sorts of different things that wanted to gnaw on you.
It got hotter, smelled worse, and suddenly there was light.
Sunlight poured in from a grateless storm drain above, but it illuminated only a square on the opposite wall. Hector was wrong about there being guns down here, but there was trash; everything from the street had been swept in. It stank. No clouds in the sky, but somehow water lingered here, in disgusting pools hidden by—or made of—trash. I stepped into the strange room, hunched over so the moldy ceiling wouldn’t touch my head.
Olympio spoke to her first.
Olympio looked to me. “She’s probably from Tecato Town. She got lost and hurt.”
I motioned with the flashlight for her to come nearer. She threw up her hand against it and withdrew. “Sorry, Grandmother,” Olympio said.
She was huddled up, wrapped in a black blanket. Her eyes were hollow, and she had sparse white hair in greasy ringlets around her face. “Can she come out to me?” I asked Olympio while keeping my eyes on her. While I doubted I was going to become part of a horror movie right now, I’d seen enough of them to know better than to look away.
She said something, and Olympio translated. “She says her ankle hurts.”
“Can she show me her ankle?”
Olympio asked her, and she did so, putting it out and pulling up the blanket to expose it while making little cat-like hisses and cries.
It was swollen and red. Cellulitic for sure. “Shit.”
She spoke some more. “She says she can’t walk.”
I swallowed. It stank in here, and we’d walked so far, and there was no way this little woman was going to be able to walk back out.
“Oh, no. You aren’t even thinking that, are you?” Olympio asked me.
“I am.” Suddenly, despite the heat, I wished I was wearing long sleeves and jeans. Isolation gear. Maybe a full biohazard suit. I handed the flashlight over to Olympio. “It’s going to be a long walk back.”
“You’re telling me.”
I came nearer to her, where she sat in the one spot of shade. I gestured for her to stand as best she could. And then, despite the stink and my rising horror, I reached out for her.
Her blanket, where she’d been sitting on it, was damp. I didn’t know if it was water, or urine, or worse. “Oh, God,” I said, for strength, and then closed my mouth to keep out the smell. She scrabbled at my neck with her bony arms, fingernails clawing me. I took a shuffling step, and—by pulling down on me, my back already screaming from crouching in the tunnels all the way down here—so did she. She yanked my neck, and pulled herself forward, and exhaled what I knew was a curse word.
While the tunnel had seemed long enough going into it … walking back out, helping to hold up someone who stank and was damp and was climbing all over me … the only thing that stopped me from gagging was the horror that in doing so, she might get something into my mouth, a corner of her blanket, a piece of stringy hair. So I suffered in silence as Olympio led us back out, step after laborious step, as the dirt ground into me and the woman’s dampness soaked through my clothes.
The last turn, and we were facing the tunnel’s exit. The circle of sun looked so sweet, and with the fresh air rushing in, I didn’t care if it was piping-oven hot. Freedom was so, so near.
“She says she doesn’t want to go out there,” Olympio told me, forcing me to finally speak.
“Tell her she’ll die in there,” I muttered out of the safe side of my mouth, hauling her forward one more step.
