Hungry Ghosts (Eric Carter #3)(26)

And nailed to each doll is a child’s screaming ghost.

Like the dolls they’re all different types. Some look to be infants, some toddlers. None looks to be more than five or six years old. Their phantom light casts everything in a pale, blue glow that casts erratic shadows as they writhe in their plastic prisons, struggle against their bonds.

“Jesus fucking Christ.”

“I’m pretty sure he’s not here,” Tabitha says, sadness and resignation in her voice. Even she’s not immune to this psychic onslaught. She steps out of the boat and onto the shore.

“What the hell is all this?” I follow her, consider tying the boat, but don’t see anything to secure it with. Suppose it doesn’t matter. I doubt I’ll be coming out this way again. If I ever come out at all.

“It’s a side door to Mictlan,” she says pitching her voice above the ghostly noise. If anyone else were with us they would wonder why we were shouting. “The man who built this place didn’t know what he was doing. Story goes he found a little girl drowned in the canal. Tried to save her and couldn’t. Later he found a doll floating in the canal and stuck it in a tree. Then he hung more and more dolls. Did it for fifty years. Folks figured he was still trying to save that girl, I guess.”

We walk past the walls of shrieking ghosts staring at us from the trees, the doll heads swiveling to track us. Some of them twitch against the wires holding them in place. One of them falls to the ground.

Tabitha kneels to the ground and picks up the doll, and the child’s spirit inside stops screaming. She gently places it back into the crook of the tree, holds it for a moment in place, her hand against its porcelain face. When she steps away its screams rejoin the cacophony of the damned.

“So what’s the real story?”

“Pretty much the same thing,” she says. “Only he killed the girl in the canal and then went on to murder the rest. He’d lure them with promises of candy or money. And then he’d bring them here and drown them. He kept pieces of them, a lock of hair, a finger. There are a few eyes around here, I’m sure. He’d put them into the dolls as trophies. I don’t think he knew the dolls would trap their souls. But if he did, he probably would have gotten off on it.”

“What happened to him?” I hope somebody strung him up and used him as a pi?ata with a machete.

“Drowned in the canal. Ironic, when you think about it. Here it is.” We stop at a wide break in the trees overgrown with vines. I can see a light shining through. She parts the vines to reveal a shimmering wall of red light wide enough to walk through hanging between the branches.

“Well, that doesn’t look ominous at all.”

She cocks a thumb over her shoulder. “All that suffering back there? All those ghosts? It made this. It called to it and the door opened. That’s what Mictlan has become. Their suffering tore a hole into it.”

“Sounds like a great place.” I can’t wait to burn it down.

“It was. A long time ago. And there are a couple of spots that still are.”

“You’re okay with all that back there?” I say.

She looks past me at the strung up dolls, the shrieking ghosts of children. Her face goes flat, she chews her lower lip. Picking her words? Rationalizing what this island is so she can keep this back door open?

“No,” she says finally. “I just can’t do anything about it.”

“And how does Santa Muerte feel?”

She ignores the question, and I think that’s answer enough. She steps closer to the portal. All sly smiles and snark again. “Well, we’re here. Care to carry me over the threshold, lover?”

“Ladies first,” I say.

“Sure you trust me? I might run off. Track down Santa Muerte. Throw a wrench in your plans.”

“You won’t,” I say. “Not until I’ve killed Mictlantecuhtli.”

“You’re awfully trusting.”

“No, just banking on the selfishness of human behavior.”

“Fair point. See you on the other side.”

She steps through, the red light swallowing her up. I don’t think she’ll take off, and if she does she won’t get very far with that cuff on her wrist. I don’t want her waiting any longer than necessary in case she gets ideas. It’s a risk, but I have to do this.

The wailing ghosts of murdered children stare at me with hungry eyes, mouths working like gasping fish. Who knows how far gone they are, trapped in this hell? I doubt they remember who they are, where they’re from. All they know is pain and hunger.

Tabitha might not be able to do anything about it, but I sure as hell can.

The dolls are the key. They hold the tortured souls in as if they’re wrapped in barbed wire. I could free them. But I’d have to do it one by one and with this many it could take hours, maybe even days.

I don’t have time to let them loose one by one. But maybe I have another way. I pull Quetzalcoatl’s lighter from my pocket. He said it would burn anything. I wonder how far the flames will spread. Far enough, I hope, to clean this island. Far enough to set them free.

I flip it open and flick the striker until I get a low, blue flame. It doesn’t look any different from a normal one. Quetzalcoatl said in Mictlan it would burn the whole place to the ground. I really, really hope it doesn’t spread quite so far on this side of the veil.