The 13 Secret Cities (Omnibus) (17 page)

I caught a movement in the bookcases, and I stopped the chair from rocking by planting my feet on the hardwood.

A shadow stretched over the bookcase next to me, and it shifted, bulging outward, like a fist through pantyhose. The shadow floated at eye level, where Minerva kept her cat encyclopedias and her ceramic doll collection. It throbbed, defying the light that created it, and I heard a rustling sound, like leaves in the month of October. Just like the voice, the sound came from inside of me, clear as anything I could hear with my ears.

I
’ve been here with you, nuzzling you. Why do you hide from me, Clara?

I took in long breaths, trying to calm myself down.

Fight the fear.

Another shadow shifted next to the first one, and the triangular shape bent itself like taffy. They were twin shadows now, dancing just about ten feet in front of me. They formed into a shape.

I was looking at a pair of eyes, blinking, staring at me. They were big eyes, and I didn’t dare imagine just how big their owner would be.
 

I could see the details in the dark, just like I had learned to see every shade of the color black inside Mictlán. The eyes glistened with wetness, and veins marbled their surface. It had no eyelids, just a membrane that flicked over the eyeballs as if it were blinking.

You gonna bring me your little cousin Jonas, too? You’ll let me suck on those little eyeballs? I will squeeze them between my teeth like grapes.

Jonas,
I thought.

I can have the infant, and your uncles, and your aunts. Bring them all to me, Wanderer?

The voice had used that word: “Wanderer.”

I let out a scream, but my hand muffled it quickly. I rose from the chair. I had no idea if I would run away, but I would be ready if I had to.

I needed the comfort of something familiar, something from this world. Something good.

The voice spoke again, and its speech grew harder, more clipped. I heard nails scraping on a hard surface. Thousands of nails.

You like Abuela Blanca’s chair. She did
,
too. I ate her up after she had the stroke. Your father Adán was right there in the room with her, and he watched her go while I bloomed in her head like the marigolds that flower down inside the valley of spines. Your grandmother, so old, so ready. She was praying to Jesus Christ when she died; did you know that? When I took her, she forgot about everything
but
the Jesus. Funny
,
because she used to believe more in us, the citizens of Mictlán, than in that other god. She understood we were very real, but at the last moment
,
she turned back toward that man on the wood. Her flesh became mine.

Did you know most of them wet themselves when I come and touch them on the shoulder to take them to the next world, Clara?

“Stop it,” I said. I was talking to no one and nothing. “Stop this now.”

But it doesn’t stop, Clara.

Did you like it when you set the wheels in motion, Clara? When the gas blinded everyone in that hollow dome and the men were free to shoot them like cattle? When their heads exploded, round after round? When those women and teenagers got shot?

The eyes blinked, and I recognized something in them. Something feral and big.
 

“Xolotl!” I said, invoking the name of the creature. I had called its name once, and it stunned him. Perhaps—

Thunderous music sprouted from the bookshelves. It was angry music, full of metal and acrid tones. The music died and the sound of clicking nails returned.

I am not Xolotl, Wanderer. But I can send the Xolotl to fetch you. He can do my bidding
,
too. He knows your scent well.

“Who are you, then?” I said.

I am the keeper of the law in Mictlán. You don’t know my name? You should know my name. LET ME WHISPER IT TO YOU.

My eardrums burst with pain from the needles of sound that stabbed my brain. My breasts stung like fire and I felt things, like cockroaches, all over my body. The sound was music, and its melody was built of sandpaper, belches and the tearing sound of teeth on flesh.
 

The name I heard was nothing like Xolotl’s true name when he had given it to me at the gate of Mictlán.

Send me more tribute, wanderer. Millennium Park was not enough.

I took slow steps backward, ready to bolt out of the room as soon as I got close enough to the doorway. I wanted Xbox, I wanted Corona, I wanted cumbia, I wanted my mother’s prying eyes and anything else that was happening downstairs. I wanted away from this thing.
 

“I am imagining this,” I said.

Interesting idea
, the shadow said.
But how can you imagine me? Those without a tonal do not have imagination.

But one thing is true…
THEY
know you who you are.

“Who are…
they?”
I demanded. My hand was on the doorway finally.
 

The Lady and the Lord. The Lords that live inside the black heart beneath the coil. Come see their faces. You will never forget their faces. They will kiss you long and hard, and you will feel the pleasures of the body, and the ejaculation of your mind. Come, Clara.

I bolted out the door.
Fuck this
, I thought. I pivoted on my heel and darted into the hallway.
 

I slammed into limbs and breasts, and the soft textures of a knitted sweater.
 

We tumbled to the ground, and I kicked out my legs and my arms, and I kept my screaming quiet, my fear tight inside my belly.

“Clara!” shouted my mother. Her hair was tangled in mine, and she tossed me off her. She was flat on her back, and she got onto her knees to inspect me.
 

“Get up,” she said. I was stunned and my head ached, and she lifted me up in what José María called “Mexican Mother Move.” She put a hand under my armpit and then hooked the other at my hip and lifted me as if I were made of paper.
 

“Cálmate
,
niña!” she said, and she slapped me. That was also part of the Mexican Mother Move.

“Clara Hortensia Montes Olmedo!” she hissed.

She said my full name. Now I knew she was angry.

I felt the shadow back in the TV room, and I wanted out. But my mother held her eye contact. Soon
,
I was breathing slowly again.

“I saw it.”

“Saw what?”

“Black eyes,” I said. I blubbered, and all of it spilled out. “This
other
thing talked to me—it’s not the Xolotl, it’s something else—and it says I have no tonal, I have no tonal, and is that like not having a soul? Mom!”

She smacked me hard again.

My cheek stung from her slap, but then I was crying into my mother’s hair, and
 

(you have no tonal)

WANDERER.

“Come with me,” my mother said.
 

She moved fast through the hallway. She opened the last door on the left, the one that led up to Minerva’s attic on the third level of the house. I looked up into the white stairway and saw many hard triangular shadows, and I knew that thing I saw could move through them
,
bend them so it could make a pair of eyes, and I didn’t want him to take my mother, or me, or anyone in the house.
 

But I had to trust her. She was my mother.

There was a baby below, for God’s sake. And this monster up here wanted to eat everyone in the house.
 

It had said it would take even the baby.

I followed my mother and the folds of her gray dress.
 

That was the last time my mother and I climbed a set of stairs together.
 

This was the way my mother fit into the tapestry of the Montes clan.

She had been born Juliana Olmedo, the sole daughter of Francisco Olmedo and Antonieta Haciendas, grandparents I had only met once but who still lived in Guadalajara. My grandfather Francisco ran his own shoemaking business, and as his factories expanded from Mexico City to Monterrey, so did his wealth. My mother had been sent to the United States for university, and she met my father while she visited Los Angeles.
 

Their Los Angeles affair was short, their long
-
distance relationship long. By the time my father got on his knee for her hand, my grandparents had made up their mind that my father’s family was much too vulgar and low class for my mother to marry him. When my mother married my father, she essentially said goodbye to her life in Guadalajara.

And that meant that my mother had found a home in every single one of my aunts’ houses. The Montes sisters took her in as one of their own, for better or for worse, and that meant that over the years, my mother made a new family in multiple houses across Chicago: Minerva in Palos Hills. Paca and Olguita, both in Berwyn. Pati in Bridgeport, and Dolores in Tinley Park.
 

And then there was the oldest sister, La Negra.

Her house was in Logan Square, but none of us—not my father, nor me, nor José María
,
much less my mother—had set foot in there as far as I could remember.

Le Negra was absent from today’s party.

She was not a party person.

You would think that having an aunt called “La Negra” would be a very racist thing, and it was.

It also wasn’t.

I had tried explaining this to friends on campus, and I had run around my own words in circles and silly politically correct excuses.

The Montes called their oldest sister Veronica La Negra because she was indeed “negra.” Our great-grandparents had originally hailed from Veracruz, a place filled with Caribbean blood and African ancestry. Veronica’s hair and skin stood out in stark contrast to the siblings’. Even our grandmother had called her La Negra. I had witnessed our uncles crack jokes about her skin and kinky hair, and they had held their bellies to contain their cackles.
 

Our great
-
uncle often suggested La Negra should take up a career in dance, because “you know, it’s in your blood, Negra.” When La Negra still used to attend parties, and hip
-
hop songs came on the stereo at our birthday parties, hands ushered La Negra to hit the dance floor, and even my father told her she should show us what that “Veracruz blood” was made of.
 

La Negra had never taken well to these comments, and so she stayed away from pretty much all of us. And yet, she was closest to my father. If my partner in crime was José María, my father had La Negra.
 

La Negra steered wide berths around my mother, and in essence, she only chose to communicate with my father. I knew cross words had been exchanged between them at José María’s baptism in 1990, but like many of the grudges that existed inside the Montes clan, they remained for years without being spoken about explicitly.

My mother and I emerged into the attic, which had been carefully painted in white. Cheap IKEA furniture provided places to sit and relax, though the space functioned more like a giant warehouse. The belongings of my grandmother Blanca were stored up here, as were those of our great-uncles and more. It was impossible to ignore the power of La Negra in this chilly corridor.
 

When my Abuela Blanca and my grandfather Darío died, La Negra had collected all their things and brought them up to this attic. But no one touched any of these things without La Negra’s permission. She might not attend the family gatherings, but she was the keeper of these things.

“Grab that box, Clara, and bring it over here,” my mother said. “Hurry.”

I brought down the box on the mantle. It was an old tin sewing kit. Its circular shape felt good under my hands, and the old-time lettering on the top had faded away. Now it just shined in a dull gray under the track lighting.

I set it down on a side table next to my mother’s chair.
 

“Mom, all this secrecy is—well
,
I’m just gonna say it—annoying as hell. We can’t tell any of my aunts about Mictlán because….”

“Because it’s more serious than you think.”

You don’t know the half of it. You didn’t go there like I did.

“It’s the worst place I’ve ever been,” I said.

My mother considered my words and nodded. She ran a hand through my hair.
 

“You are intent on
not
following instructions, so I thought I’d try talking to you my way, away from your father. Woman to woman.”

“Mom, I don’t know what to do.“

“Did the Xolotl give you any instructions?”

“No, it just wanted tribute.” I didn’t tell her he asked for José María as this tribute.

“And your tonal? Did you see it? Your father believes that if you find your tonal, that the shadow that hovers near you would stop haunting you.”

“Ha, don’t I wish. I saw nothing.”

“No tonal?”

“The Xolotl dragged us
,
Mom; it tried eating me. But it told me its name, in the language they speak down there.”