Divine Madness (3 page)

Her end of that island had been inhabited mainly by American expatriates with money and relaxed personalities—trust fund babies mostly, who had no urge to follow in Mummy and Daddy’s well-shod footsteps, or to provide them with kids who would have an III or IV
tacked onto their names. Some were unfortunate first wives bought off when their former hubbies went accessory shopping for their midlife crises and came home with new girlfriends—invariably younger and dumber—instead of hot cars or Rolexes. A few were retirees from Silicon Valley who were tired of fending off corporate raiders who treated acquisitions as a kind of blood sport now that the dot-coms were a bust and the dying companies were chum in the water that attracted sharks. Though, now that she thought about it, one of the men on the island had been a retired Silicon Valley dot-com hit man himself.

There were some accountants, also victims of the tech bust, who had official people looking at the books they’d cooked and deciding things were neither rare enough nor well-done enough for their tastes, and who were issuing warrants in complaint. There was even one guy who made a living as a urine donor for professionals who couldn’t quite pass company drug tests on their own. They’d been fun neighbors, easygoing, having many of the same appetites as the rest of the modern world but possessing slower metabolisms. They reminded her a bit of the society in which she had been raised, people who came from families where “summer” and “winter” were used as verbs—as in “We’ll summer in the Hamptons and winter in Vail”—but they had left much of that behind in favor of smaller, more private lives. They understood that geographical proximity did not mean friendship.

However they’d come, most were now Jimmy Buffett’s spiritual children, laid back and fond of margaritas. And they’d also been incurious about her. That had been a huge plus. True, there wasn’t a great depth of intellect in those neighborhoods and that had left her feeling a bit lonely, but she had been mostly content with her situation. Certainly she had liked it better than the way she was living now. Being homeless sucked. Ninon sighed and the cat did too.

It was unfair, actually, to say that every place they had visited since was a hellhole—though she had begun her most recent stay in rural Mexico at a small hotel in Guanajuato near the
Museo de Momias
, and that had to be listed somewhere in Hell’s zip code.

What had prompted her gruesome impulse to visit that museum she could not say, since there was no particular resurrection myth associated with the mummies, and as a rule she avoided places like it, cemeteries and churches that served up feasts of corpses for the morbid. She’d had more than enough of that on her eighteenth birthday. Still, something had guided her into the dreadful glass house raised for the dead.

The back story of the museum was partly appalling and partly, if you had a dark sense of humor, amusing. The poor corpses in the cemetery of San Sebastian had actually been dug up in 1853 because of back taxes due the local government—though how the dead were expected to pay taxes…

You managed it,
the voice in her head spoke up.
And you’ve been dead for centuries.

The words prompted from her a horrified giggle.

The franchise tax boards should try this,
the voice went on.
A yearly cemetery tax levied on every family in America. It could be added to the property tax bill. And if you fail to pay, the penalty would be to have Grandma dug up and put on display in a museum
.

Ninon clapped a hand over her mouth to still her horrible laughter, which transformed into a cough. Death and taxes weren’t something she usually found amusing, singularly or in conjunction. It was one more sign of her weakening mental state.

There had been one hundred and ninety-nine souls disinterred that first year, their bodies buried in carbon and lime, pulled from their crypts and moved to a new building at the edge of town, the guide gleefully informed the museum’s visitor. Once they began looking, other cemeteries
were found where natural mummification had taken place, and they, too, were dug up. One thousand, two hundred and eighteen in all. They had continued to be dug up until the law was amended in 1958 and put an end to this practice of charging a cemetery tax.

If Ninon had properly understood the guide, whose Spanish was as far removed from formal Castilian as it was possible to be, there was evidence that several of the corpses had been interred prematurely and the poor souls woke in grim boxes in the suffocating darkness of those severe vaults where they were stored. One poor woman had her arms raised overhead and there were long claw marks on her face. Living inhumation—that’s what it was called. It didn’t happen much in these days of modern medicine. Unless it was on purpose, of course. Sometimes during revolutions the soldiers got a little hasty with shoveling the bodies of their enemies into mass graves. And there were always psychopaths with certain kinds of tastes.

Ninon shuddered at the thought. She knew about waking up from death alone in the dark.

All the exhibits in the museum were depressing, many corpses wearing nothing but shoes and socks, but she’d found the dried body of a pregnant woman to be the most disturbing of all. The guide had talked on about natural salinity and nitrates that caused mummification, oblivious or inured to his visitors’ horror at the sight. Then, as Ninon leaned over the display case containing the world’s youngest mummy, she had felt the now familiar weight of someone’s hostile gaze, and since the only person in the room was a man long dead and eyeless to boot, she had known familiar dread. Sickness crawled up through her body, making her as cold and weak as vampire’s prey. It never occurred to her that her fear was irrational, a bit of imagination run amok. Instinctual awareness had come calling too many times for her to be mistaken about the danger that shoved this cold alarm before it like a sickly
shadow. She had always known when Saint Germain stalked her dreams. Sleep became a twilight of fearful shadows, an endless corridor lit by the sinister light of stolen Glory Hands harvested by his father. But this was the first time he had found her during the day since she had fled New Orleans. That was not good news. It meant that his search was narrowing in on the same areas she was traveling.

She had left Guanajuato immediately after contact, heading for the Chihuahua Desert because there had been reports of strange ceremonies being conducted during the summer lightning storms—resurrections of the dead, shape-shifting, levitations—and because it was away from where she had told the hotel clerk that she planned to be. Nothing concrete prompted her precipitous departure from town, skipping a long-anticipated shower at her hotel, except this well-developed sense of danger that said her pursuer was close, and that she again needed to run as fast and as far as she could.

Aleister—no, Corazon—wasn’t enthused about further travel that day in their Jeep, which was one of the early, primordial models that didn’t have much use for things like shock absorbers. But for a while he seemed entertained by the birds in the spiky agaves and the odd appearance of an alarmed Mexican prairie dog. When they passed a long pipe-organ cactus, sentinel of the true desert, he ceased watching the wearying landscape and returned to his nap. He was wise this way, knowing he needed a solid eighteen hours of sleep to be at his very best.

Ninon had groaned in understanding and reached into her purse for a piece of black licorice to soothe her cough. It reminded her of the aniseed dragées she used to take at bedtime to sweeten her breath for her lovers. The taste of licorice exploded on her tongue and flooded her mouth with sweetness. It was a strange counterpoint to the rest of the world around them. This place was certainly more bitter than sweet. In fact, it actually hurt the eyes and
furred her tongue as it dried her tissues. Some soft lands appeared almost edible, every plant a possible culinary delight. Her childhood home had been like that—fields of sweet strawberries filled with sunlight, orange groves living in glass houses, dairy farms of tender grass where farmers made vast wheels of goat cheese and baked rustic brown bread that they would offer to travelers and runaway school girls. And then there had been the vast flower fields of Grasse…

Corazon twitched and gave a soft growl.

But this was not such a place and even the cat knew it. Everything here was hard and came with thorns. A person lost in this wasteland would starve or be poisoned, if not killed by the sun first. Best to simply sleep through this hell if a siesta was an option, even if sometimes you rolled over and smelled Fate on the pillow next to you, and you knew that Death had come and lain beside you while you dreamed of demons and ghosts.

She needed to rest. Still, respite from worry proved elusive. That night, though exhausted in mind and spirit, she and Corazon lay unsleeping in a shabby, sweltering hotel in a town too small to have any name—though hotel was an elevated word for the two-bedroom, rotten adobe sweatbox built against a crumbling cantina erected with short-lived hopefulness in 1929. Neither the hotel nor the cantina where she risked having dinner—and risk was the word—seemed to have seen a dust rag or a mop since. The yellowed sheets in her room were also suspiciously fuzzy and she had stripped them off the bed, preferring to sleep on her sleeping bag on the bare mattress. The bed was probably more bug-ridden than the floor, but there was clear evidence in the corners of the room that the floorboards were a highway for rodents of various types and sizes. A few scorpion tails suggested what the preferred meal was.

Yes, sleep eluded her, but safe behind her thick walls and heavy door, locked by the expediency of a chair
shoved beneath the door knob, Ninon finally took the time to stop panicking about what had happened in the museum and to think sensibly about what she should do. Living the rest of her life in places like this was not acceptable—if this could even be called living. What had become of the woman she had been? All she now did was run, never confronting her enemy. Worse still, she hadn’t allowed herself a friend—a human one anyway—for the last two decades. And there had been no close friends or lovers since Saint Evremond died. She was alone except for the mice and flies—and her cat.

As though summoned by her thought, a small cockroach crawled through the door’s keyhole and then along the back of the room’s only chair. La cucaracha paused midway along the chair’s back and then reared up on his hind legs. He seemed to sneer at her—
Buenas noches, Senorita Gringa. Welcome to the first of many
perreras
where the unwanted dogs of the earth go. I am sure you will be with us
para siempre—
forever—now. My million cousins and I shall enjoy getting to know you, sleeping with you, sharing your food, swimming in the same cesspools. I shall return
inmediatamente
and tell them of your arrival. We shall have a party tonight,
si? Then he sang:
Porque necessito marijuana que fumar
.

La cucaracha
might have said more, but Corazon chose that moment to eat him, and since the cockroach had been mocking her, Ninon let her cat enjoy his snack. She wasn’t crazy about his new eating habits, but she didn’t think the bug would hurt him. After all, he had taken to eating rock scorpions last year, even though they had enough poison in them to euthanize all nine of his lives, and the island’s indestructible wild goats too. He was also missing his favorite treat of frozen green peas and inclined to be cranky about changes in his diet.

Ninon watched while he ate, welcoming even that disgusting distraction. The bug dinner didn’t lasted long, though, and she and Corazon soon returned to brooding
in the quiet that was as deep as the hush of a cathedral, but one where perhaps murder was to be done.

She had known all along that she had to eventually stop running from Saint Germain and formulate some definite plan for dealing with her nemesis. The man now called himself Ramon Latigazo, a supposed real estate tycoon, but she knew he was really the son of the Dark Man. Yes, Ramon or Saint Germain, he was the son of the serpent who had offered her the fruit from the tree of unhappiness. It was he who chased her, not the Dark Man himself. She had to remember that. The son was not the father. The Dark Man had died on Christmas Day last year in New York at the hands of Lord Byron—and many blessings upon the poet for ridding the world of that insane beast. Her present nemesis had other strengths and weaknesses.

The next step of their deadly dance could be up to her—if she chose to take it. That was a dreadful thought, but her chances of survival would improve if she went on the offensive, if she took a stand.

The one good thing about Saint Germain’s many attempts on her life was that Ninon no longer felt guilty for planning on ridding the world of him. There was no time for guilt about his murder. It was self-defense. Her brain, the storehouse of several lifetimes of knowledge, applied logic, and bruising memories, was failing. And she was beginning to feel blurred around the edges. Her ability to project a confident image, to control her expression and hide her superior reflexes, was bleeding away in a painful trickle. Every day she appeared less human. Her lungs, too, were beginning to relapse into their diseased state. But that was no longer what drove her to fight Saint Germain and seek this darker gift of Mexico, this gift that would surely damn her if she were not already condemned. No, she sought to renew her strength not to save her life or end her pain, but because she had to stop Saint Germain before he unleashed whatever new evil he
planned to loose on the world. That he meant the world harm she did not doubt.

And she would do it as soon as she was strong enough.

Or before, if she never were truly strong enough.

In the next room the bedsprings began to creak and the filtered sound of at least one party’s lust seeped through the cracked plaster. The other party remained silent, so silent that Ninon wondered if she might be of the rubber blow-up variety. She listened with slight interest as the man began exhorting his manhood in original if graphic terms, some of which she had not previously heard—at least not in Spanish. Two long minutes later the moaner climaxed with a self-congratulatory yodel that would have impressed Slim Whitman, though it made Corazon sneer. Ninon sympathized. She had nothing but contempt for a job done hastily and sloppily.