Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

Santa Muerte came in all sizes, and this one was as big as a live woman—on her pedestal, even a little bigger than that. She wore pale patterned robes, purple and white, with a sky blue cowl over her head. A wreath of dried-out flowers circled her brow. Her scythe was enormous, the blade oversized and stylized, six inches wide in the middle, curving over her head from outside one shoulder to past the other. It was way bigger than anything you’d want to swing in the fields, with a smaller skull mounted where it angled away from the wooden shaft.

Her teeth were white and even, her eyes a pair of empty voids.

She swam in wavering shadows, lit by a forest of candles. The rest was like every shrine he’d ever seen, gaudy and colorful and beautiful and sad. Flowers, from fresh to withered, lay everywhere, more bouquets than they had vases. A plate of tortillas sat at the bottom hem of her robes. Petitioners’ notes were pinned to her robes. Pictures were taped to the walls, propped against the candle jars, stacked on tables—the sick and the dying, the dead and the missing, and somewhere in between them, the lost. Those who were simply lost.

Morgan was on it, in her element now, setting up a tiny, stubby-legged tripod with the efficiency of a soldier field-stripping a rifle—a tabletop tripod, but down on the floor. She set out a couple of Nikons, then unfolded a pair of circular reflectors, one silver and the other gold, and put them off to one side, and then went scurrying about with a light meter.

Olaf moved the three of them around, had them hunker and squat while he sprawled in the floor with his camera mounted on the pygmy tripod, the lens angled at them, shooting up from below. You could see his bald spot from here, a circular patch the size of a drink coaster missing from his white-blond hair.

He sounded happy with what he was seeing.

He’d positioned Sofia in the middle, the way photographers often did. Balance, Olaf was probably after, but there was something else he may not have been consciously aware of. The way Sofia looked, her features were a hybrid of the polarities on either side of her. In Sebastián, what you saw was a fine-boned European strain, the face of a Spanish conquistador. In Enrique, the broad peasant face and long, coarse hair of what the conquerors had found waiting for them, like he’d stepped out of some arid canyon that time forgot.

You looked at their faces and saw the whole of Mexico’s history in them.

And now, behind them, Santa Muerte looming over them all.

A couple hours later and one pig’s heart heavier, the SUV rolled west out of Matamoros, through that zone where the city frayed apart and unraveled into the countryside, a stark land seared by the sun and sprinkled with small farms, small ranches, tiny hovels. Twenty miles into it, Hector hooked a right onto a dirt road and headed north, until they were only a mile or so from the river. One mile away, Texas, but still, a whole other world.

Hooray for GPS. It wasn’t like there were signs pointing the way here.

They stretched their legs again across the scrubby, hardscrabble ground and listened to Crispin be confused.

“There’s nothing here,” he said. “I thought there’d at least be some buildings left.”

“Not for a long time,” Sebastián told him. “After the investigation, the police brought in some curanderos to cleanse the spirit of the place, then burned everything.”

“Then what’s the point, may I ask? For all that’s going to show in the photos, you could shoot them literally anywhere.”

“Because the point is here. Here is the point.” Bas sidled up to him and threw an arm around Crispin’s shoulders, a rare moment of salesmanship for him instead of flat-out telling how it’s going to be. “You can’t cleanse away something like what happened here. You can’t get it all. You don’t feel it? You will. It’ll come through.” He patted Crispin on the back. “The fans, it’ll mean something to them . They’ll appreciate the effort. This place called to us. We heard it loud and clear, and we had to answer.”

“What’s this we shit?” Sofia muttered, only loud enough for Enrique to hear.

She was right. This was totally a Sebastián thing. Not a bad idea, necessarily, as image went, because image mattered, but still… this was kind of out there even for Bas.

“Half the songs on this next album are about here, and what came out of here. What they did here opened the gates to Hell and the gates never shut. If you don’t get that, you don’t get us.” Sebastián, closing the deal with their alleged number one fan. “Where else could we shoot?”

Rancho Santa Elena, this place had been called, back when it was somewhere that somebody wanted to live. A generation ago it was the headquarters of a family business moving marijuana from the south up into the States. Different era, same old shit. Problems with the DEA, problems with rivals. They’d hooked up with this good-looking Cuban guy out of Florida who was making his own religion—part voodoo, part Santeria, part Palo Mayombe, and the rest, his own sick craziness. An isolated spot like this, with an outbuilding to repurpose as a temple, nobody close enough to hear the screams, human sacrifice seemed a reasonable price to pay for keeping their traffic routes safe. Eleven shallow graves’ worth. Body parts for their cauldron, necklaces out of bones. There was power in it. It made you bulletproof. Made you invisible.

And nobody knew, nobody cared, until the Cuban decided he needed the blood of a young gringo who would die screaming. So they nabbed a college boy down on spring break, he and his buddies coming over the border for a change of scenery after they got tired of things on South Padre Island. Poor guy went off for a piss and never came back. They gave him twelve or so really bad hours before they got down to the serious business and took off the top of his head with a machete to get at his brain.

Enrique had to get a little older to learn the less obvious lesson: where he and his parents and sisters and everyone he knew ranked in the North American scheme of things. If it had been another dead Mexican, those people would’ve kept getting away with it. You want to wreck your shit, kill a gringo. That’s when people start noticing.

By now, Hector had opened up the SUV’s back door, and they moved in to help slide out the long, bulky crate that had flown cargo class from LA. Real wood, you didn’t see that much anymore. Pride in your work, right there—the props company had packed this thing for survival . Hector took a tire tool and pried off the lid, and after they pawed aside the foam peanuts, they lifted the thing free.

Plenty of wows and holy shits all around. Those props people knew their stuff, how to take fiberglass and make magic. The statue was lighter than it looked, sturdier than it felt, and even when standing right next to it, looked exactly like stone that had weathered for centuries. They’d even painted it with stains.

“What is it?” Morgan asked, the only one of them who didn’t know.

“It’s called a chacmool,” Sebastián told her. “It’s a really old design, pre-Colombian. Aztecs, Mayans, maybe even older. Up at the top of a pyramid, that was one place they might go. See that platter in the middle? That was for holding sacrifices.” He grinned, a needling meanness behind it. “Didn’t have to be a heart, but if you got one laying around loose, why not.”

The same as the likenesses of Santa Muerte, chacmools might differ in little details, but the core was always the same. A strange design, blocky, the way so much of that ancient Mesoamerican sculpture was carved. The basic template was a man, feet flat, knees up, leaning back on both elbows, while balanced on his middle was a receptacle to receive offering—could be a platter, could be a bowl. His head was turned to the side, like he was challenging anyone who approached him to give until it hurt.