Mexican Gothic(72)

Et Verbum caro factum est, said the snake.

She was on her knees now. The chamber was cold and made of stone. It was dark; there were no windows. They’d set candles upon an altar, but it was still much too dark. The altar was more elaborate than the one she’d spied in the caves. The table was covered with a red velvet cloth and silver candelabra. But it was still dark and humid and cold.

Howard Doyle had added tapestries too. Red and black, the ouroboros displayed on them. Pageantry, Doyle understood pageantry was an important part of this game. There he was, Doyle, clad in crimson. Next to him stood the woman from the caves, heavily pregnant, and looking ill.

Et Verbum caro factum est, the snake told her, whispering secrets in her ear. The snake was gone, but she could still hear it. It had a peculiar, hoarse voice, and Noemí had no idea what it was telling her.

Two women were helping her down a dais, to lie down at the foot of the altar. Two blond women. She’d seen them too, before. The sisters. And she’d seen this ritual before. In the cemetery. The woman giving birth in the cemetery.

Birth. The child cried out, and Doyle held the child. And then she knew.

Et Verbum caro factum est.

She knew what she had not properly seen in her previous dreams, and she did not wish to see now, but there it was. The knife and the child. Noemí closed her eyes, but even behind her eyelids she saw it all, crimson and black and the child torn apart and they were eating him.

Flesh of the gods.

They held their hands up, and Doyle deposited bits of flesh, bits of bone, into their hands and they chewed this pale meat.

They’d done this before, in the caves. But it had been the priests, when they died, who offered their flesh. Doyle had perfected the ritual. Clever Doyle, who was well learned, and had read plenty of books on theology, biology, medicine, looking for answers, and now he’d found them.

Noemí’s eyes were still closed, and the woman’s eyes were closed too. They pressed a cloth against her face, and Noemí thought they would kill the woman now, they would also cut up her body and ingest it. But she was wrong on this point. They swaddled the body.

Swaddled it tight, and there was a pit by the altar, and they were throwing her into it but she was alive.

She’s not dead, Noemí told them. But it didn’t matter. It was a memory.

It was necessary, always is. The fungus would erupt up, from her body, up through the soil, weaving itself into the walls, extending itself into the foundations of the building. And the gloom needed a mind. It needed her. The gloom was alive. It was alive in more than one way; at its rotten core there was the corpse of a woman, her limbs twisted, her hair brittle against the skull. And the corpse stretched its jaws open, screaming inside the earth, and from her dried lips emerged the pale mushroom.

The priest would have sacrificed himself: part of the body devoured, the rest buried. Life erupting from those remains, and the congregation tied to him. Tied ultimately to their god. But Doyle was no fool who would offer himself in sacrifice.

Doyle could be a god without having to obey their arcane, foolish rules.

Doyle was a god.

Doyle existed, persisted.

Doyle always is.

Monsters. Monstrum, ah, is that what you think of me, Noemí?

“Have you seen enough, curious girl?” Doyle asked.

He was playing cards in a corner of her room. She watched his wrinkled hands, the amber ring upon his index finger flashing bright under the light of the candles as he shuffled the cards. He raised his head to look at her. She stared at him. It was the Doyle of now.

Howard Doyle, his spine bent, his breath labored. He placed three cards down, carefully turning each one. A knight with a sword and a page holding a coin. She could see, through the thin shirt he wore, the black boils dotting his back.

“Why do you show me this?” she asked.

“The house shows you. The house loves you. Are you enjoying our hospitality? Would you like to play with me?” he asked.

“No.”

“A pity,” he said, revealing the third card: a single, empty cup.

“You’ll still renounce yourself in the end. You’re already like us, you’re family. You don’t know it.”

“You don’t scare me, you piece of shit monster, with your dreams and your tricks. This isn’t real, and you’ll never keep me here.”

“You really think that?” he asked, and the boils rippled down his back. A trickle of black liquid, as black as ink, dripped onto the floor beneath him. “I can make you do anything I want.”

He sliced one of the pustules in his hands with a long nail, pressing it against a silver cup—it looked like the goblet in the card he’d been holding—and it broke, filling the cup with a foul liquid.

“Have a drink,” he said, and for a second she felt compelled to step forward and take a sip, before revulsion and alarm froze her limbs.

He smiled. He was trying to show her his power; even in dreams he was the master.

“I’ll kill you when I wake up. Give me a chance, I’ll kill you,” she swore.

She threw herself at him, sinking her fingers into his flesh, wringing the thin neck. It was like parchment, it tore beneath her hands, muscle and blood vessels showing. He grinned at her, with Virgil’s brutish smile. He was Virgil. She squeezed harder, and then he was pushing her back, his thumb pressing against her lips, against her teeth.