Hungry Ghosts (Eric Carter #3)(27)

I touch the lighter to the ground where it catches on dead leaves, engulfs them in blue fire. The flames spread with unnatural speed, crawling across the moist earth, up into the trees.

The screams of the children rise in pitch and volume and I wonder if I’ve made things worse. Panicked shrieks as the flames tear them from their prisons. Plastic melts, porcelain cracks. The dolls explode from the heat. Twisted wires holding them in place crumble to dust. Thick gouts of black smoke belch toward the sky and the shacks and fence are consumed.

The screams die as each ghost pulls itself free from its prison, only to be replaced with a terrified mewling. Shredded souls trapped so long with their murderer they don’t know what to do. They swarm me, buzzing around me like bees.

I don’t know where they need to go, either. Like all ghosts, they’ll fade away, bleed off to whatever promised land awaits them. But it could take time. Until then they’re going to be miserable and afraid. I don’t know how to help them. I could do an exorcism, but that takes time and materials. I don’t have enough of either. Setting them free is the best I can do.

The flames hit the water, lapping at the shore, and set it to boiling before dying out. It’s persistent, I’ll give it that. In the wrong hands the lighter could really fuck things up.

I watch the island burn until the flames threaten to turn back on me. I wait as long as I dare, smoke making my eyes sting, making it hard to breathe. I cover my mouth and wait. The final doll cracks open and the tormented child’s soul inside it bursts free.

This island of trapped children is just the portal to Mictlan. Jesus. Is it this bad inside? Am I walking into Hell here? Have I bitten off more than I can chew?

Suppose it doesn’t matter. I’m committed. I step through the portal, letting Mictlan swallow me up, shaken and afraid. Is this whole thing just a stunningly bad idea?

Guess I’ll find out.





The oppressive heat from the flames gives way to the dry, cracking heat of a desert at high noon. Instead of the stink of smoke and burning plastic the air is filled with the fetid stench of blood and rot.

Like when I went to Mictlan by way of Los Angeles the landscape is almost identical in structure if not form. The canal behind me is a thick river of blood. The ground is made of shattered skulls, the trees are bone. Flaps of desiccated skin and sinew hang from the branches in a sick mockery of leaves. Nearby I can see the buildings of the barrio we drove through to get here, each building constructed from bones.

In the distance where Mexico City proper should be are tall, bone pyramids that rise toward the sky. I can see a shimmer of red along their sides, light reflected up from something I can’t see. The buildings surrounding it are low and compact, crazy sprawl of the city nothing like the one on the living side. Beyond that I see a landscape of bleached bone, mountains of black glass.

Tabitha sits on a bleached pile of skulls waiting for me, the bone trees swaying their flesh leaves in the breeze. “Took you a while,” she says. She stands, frowning at me. Comes close and runs a finger across my forehead, coming away with it covered in soot. Behind me the portal to Isla de las Mu?ecas shudders, the light changing from a deep red to a pale blue.

It shatters like glass, exploding shards of light over us with a sound like a bomb going off. We both instinctively duck, but when the light hits us it fades into nothing.

“What the hell did you do?” The way she says it doesn’t sound like an accusation.

I wipe soot from my face with the back of my hand, spit ash out of my mouth. “Set something right. So where are we?”

From the look on her face she wants to ask more but doesn’t. She’s not stupid. She knows what I did. Even if she doesn’t know how I did it.

“Past some of the rougher spots,” she says. “We have the obsidian mountains to get through, but the worst of those are behind us. No knives flaying the skin from our bones.”

“That’s a plus.”

“It’s not an easy hike to get to Mictlantecuhtli’s tomb. All the buildings this far out are obstacles more than anything. Window dressing and not much else. I know a bit of a shortcut nearby. It sucks, but it beats slogging through all this crap.”

I nod toward Mexico City and the bone pyramids. “And that?”

If I’m oriented right, on the living side that area would be either Tenochtitlan or Tlatelolco, two Aztec cities that sat where Mexico City is today. But these pyramids here are larger than I recall from the books I’ve read about them. Instead of clean lines and geometric steps, these are misshapen, lopsided, twisted in weird ways.

“A joke,” she says. “Mictlantecuhtli built those to ‘honor’ Huitzilopochtli. Tenochtitlan was his home and he demanded sacrifices at his temples. Sun god, warrior god. Mictlantecuhtli thought he was an asshole, so he made a mockery of his temples and the city.”

The landscape isn’t exactly based on the area today, and it isn’t exactly from five hundred years ago. Out here on Isla de las Mu?ecas it’s largely the same as it is in the living world. But further afield, with the pyramids in the distance, it’s clearly Tenochtitlan. Which means that red reflected light is probably Lake Texcoco where the city sat on an island before the Spanish started draining the water.

A canal full of blood is one thing, but a whole lake? Ugh.

“Nothing for Tlaloc?” Huitzilopochtli and Tlaloc, sun god and rain god, ruled in this area, sometimes sharing space, certainly sharing sacrifices. I think back to the map of Mexico City. I passed their twin temples out by the Mexico City Cathedral. That gives me a reference point. I feel a little better knowing roughly where we are.