I didn’t fail to notice the item buried in the back pages about the third frozen body found in the city’s back alleys in as many nights, but I didn’t need any reminder of my failure to locate the latest demon.
But this new interloper from the Otherworld has not come alone. Incursions and possessions have been on the rise in Recondito the last few weeks, and I’ve been running behind on the latest Wraith novel as a result. I spent the day typing, and by the time the last page of “The Return of the Goblin King” came off my Underwood’s roller it was late afternoon and time for me to get to work. My real work.
As the sun sank over the Pacific, the streets of the Oceanview neighborhood were crowded with pint-sized ghosts and witches, pirates and cowboys. With little care for wars and murder trials, much less the otherworldly threats that lurk unseen in the shadows, the young took to their trick-or-treating with a will. But with sugar rationing limiting their potential haul of treats, I imagine it wasn’t long before they turned to tricks, and by tomorrow morning I’m sure the neighborhood will be garlanded with soaped windows and egged cars.
I can only hope that dawn doesn’t find another frozen victim of the city’s latest invader, too. After my failure tonight, any new blood spilled would be on my hands—and perhaps on the hands of my clowned-up imitator, as well.
The dive bars and diners along Almeria Street were in full swing, and on the street corners out front, pachucos in their zoot-suits and felt hats strutted like prize cockerels before the girls, as if their pocket chains glinting in the streetlights could lure the ladies to their sides.
On Mission Avenue I passed the theaters and arenas that cater to the city’s poorer denizens, plastered with playbills for upcoming touring companies, boxing matches, and musical performances. One poster advertised an exhibition of Mexican wrestling, and featured a crude painting of shirtless behemoths with faces hidden behind leather masks. A few doors down, a cinema marquee announced the debut next week of Road to Morocco. I remembered my dead sister’s words in last night’s dream, and entertained the brief fantasy of Hope and Crosby in daykeepers’ black robes and silver-skull masks, blustering their way through the five houses of initiation.
The last light of day was fading from the western sky when I reached the cemetery, wreathed in the shadows of Augustus Powell’s towering spires atop the Church of the Holy Saint Anthony. A few mourners lingered from the day’s funeral services, standing beside freshly filled graves, but otherwise the grounds were empty.
I made my way to the Freeman family crypt and, passing the entrance, continued on to the back, where a copse of trees grows a few feet away from the structure’s unbroken rear wall.
As Don Javier had taught me a lifetime ago in the Rattling House, I started toward the wall and, an instant before colliding with it, turned aside toward an unseen direction, and shadowed my way through to the other side.
Don Mateo was waiting for me within. He’d already changed out of his hearse-driver’s uniform, and had dressed in his customary blue serge suit, Western shirt printed with bucking broncos and open at the neck, a red sash of homespun cotton wound around his waist like a cummerbund.
“Little brother,” he said, a smile deepening the wrinkles around the corners of his eyes. He raised his shot glass filled to the rim with homemade cane liquor in a kind of salute. “You’re just in time.”
When Mateo speaks in English it usually means that he’s uncertain about something, but when he gets excited—or angry—he lapses back into Yucatan. Tonight he’d spoken in Spanish, typically a sign his mood was light, and when I greeted him I was happy to do the same.
“To your health,” I then added in English and, taking the shot glass from his hands, downed the contents in a single gulp, then spat on the floor a libation to the spirits. Don Javier always insisted that there were beneficent dwellers in the Otherworld, and libations in their honor might win their favor. But while I’d learned in the years I spent living with the two daykeepers, either in their cabin in the forest or in the hidden temples of Xibalba, to honor the customs handed down by their Mayan forebears, and knew that the villains and monsters of their beliefs were all-too-real, I still have trouble imagining that there are any intelligences existing beyond reality’s veil which have anything but ill intent for mankind.
When I’d finished my shot, Don Mateo poured another for himself, and drank the contents and spat the libation, just as ritual demanded. Then, the necessary business of the greeting concluded, he set the glass and bottle aside, and began to shove open the lid of the coffin in which my tools are stored.
“Four nights you’ve hunted this demon, little brother,” he said, lifting out the inky black greatcoat and handing it over. “Perhaps tonight will be the
