Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

Her heart raps louder than the woodpecker.

She clenches her fists, wills herself not to cry.

A man saunters from the roofless building. He’s short and round with no neck, but what startles her the most is his face: the lidless black eyes, the toothless smile stretching from ear to ear, and the deep creases — folds really — that make his forehead look like wet clay. Gold prongs, each the size of Chicya’s big toe, skewer his ears, and he wears a gold nosepiece that looks like the spread wings of a condor. His tunic is knit from yarn unlike anything Chicya has ever seen: gold and red, as if spun from a bloody sun, and tufted to make his torso look feathered. Unlike the other monsters, this one holds a gun, and it’s aimed right at Chicya.

With his other hand, he shoves a fistful of ground meat into his mouth. The smile doesn’t waver, even as he mashes the meat with his gums. As he approaches, she smells cuy chactado , fried guinea pig. His pace quickens, and she sees that he has feet. No stumps, but feet .

She shrinks back from him.

“Good,” he says, “it’s good to show respect.” His voice is oddly high, and his Quechua syllables end in trills. He pops the gun into a pocket.

“What . . . who are you?” she whispers.

“Welcome to the True Sacred Valley. Here, all that matters is the most sacred Inca ceremony. We’ve never lost it. You’ll fit right in.”

Her mind reels. What is the most sacred of all Inca ceremonies? She tries to remember. Inca children were sometimes fattened before ritual slaughter. Women drank fermented corn chicha before being sacrificed to the gods. Priests wrapped the corpses of royal Inca in beautifully embroidered funerary blankets, and buried them with gold masks, ear plugs, and nostril plates. She stares at the man. He’s wearing similar accouterments.

“You have nothing to fear in Wakapathtay,” he says.

Surely, he jokes. This can’t be Wakapathtay. Nobody’s ever seen the village, much less lived in it. According to the ancients, Wakapathtay was the birthplace of those who came before the true Inca. It sat high on a mountain over the Sacred Valley, tucked where only goats and alpaca could climb. Wakapathtay was also home to the Sacred Cave where, in 1544, the leader Manqu Inca — who defeated Hernando Pizarro’s forces in the village of Ollantayambo — went to die.

The man takes Chicya’s arm, and he gently strokes it. But if he thinks this soothes her in any way, he couldn’t be more wrong. Her skin crawls beneath his touch. She wants nothing to do with him or his companions. “You’re living proof that Wakapathtay exists, just as we all are,” he says. “We remind people of their heritage. You can’t get this service anywhere else because, you see, everything springs from Wakapathtay.”

“What do you do to these people?” she asks.

“I give their lives meaning.” He turns as two creatures hobble on leg stumps from the path that snakes up the mountain. One creature looks like a spotted deer with a rope around his neck. The other has the face of an owl and the body of a cat. Both have spouts on their heads. They carry a stretcher made from the same yarn as the man’s tunic. On the stretcher is a bizarre corpse made from two fused men. Although their faces are mangled to pulp, she knows from their black skin and bloodied white fur that these are the “men” she saw fighting before her capture. They had beat the life out of each other with the clubs.

“Come!” The man drags her over to the creatures and their stretcher. He trills wildly, and the deer and owl look relieved. Then he says, “This is an honor and a blessing. Cisco and Luis have done well.”

Cisco and Luis, the fused corpse.

The owl creature bobs its head. “We thank you, Maras. You are kindness itself.”

The clay pot of the intertwined girls clacks across the bench. The girls writhe, and their mouths open as if they are screaming; and the pot itself seems to wail.

The man, Maras, ignores the commotion on the bench and tells the deer and owl to “bring the new girl to Nayra to feed. She’ll make a good replacement for Bachue and Cava.” Then he scoops up the clay pot, which writhes and wails more shrilly, and stuffs it into a backpack. “Back to the cave, my lovelies.” Unblinking eyes leer at at Chicya, up and down they gaze, as if assessing her value.

The deer grabs one of her arms, the owl grabs the other. She screams and tries to yank her arms free, but these two are strong, like rock, and the struggling bruises her skin. They drag her through the dirt to the roofless building.

Maras clambers up the steep stairs carved into the mountain. His backpack bobs as he hoists himself from stair to stair. Chicya feels sorry for the girls of the clay pot. The pot seemed so alive, the two girls so miserably pathetic and fated to . . . what?

As the deer and owl nudge her into the tent, an elderly woman on skinny stumps sways in the breeze. She strums a harp and warbles an old Inca tune.

What might be a girl eases Chicya onto a chair and hands her a platter of food. The stew: alpaca, cilantro, lime, and tomato; and again, the large kernels of corn. The girl: face gnarled like a tree trunk, knobs like giant warts on her neck and arms, hair long and sleek like a black waterfall, body slender like Chicya’s; and Chicya dips her eyes, and yes, the girl has two feet.

“I’m Nayra.” The girl gestures at the platter. “Go ahead. Eat.”

Chicya sips from a cup. Fermented corn juice. She sips again and tells the girl her name, then says, “Please, tell me what’s going on here. What do they want with me?”

The girl lowers her voice. “If you cook or drive a truck or fix things for Maras, he spares you.”

“From what?”

“I cook.”

“What does he spare you from, Nayra?”

Nayra quivers. The knobs on her neck shake. “Don’t ask me anything else,” she says. “Just eat.”

And so it goes as time passes. Nayra gives Chicya more food than she can eat, and it’s always the same: the corn kernels and fermented juice, the alpaca stew. Nayra refuses to supply any information. Maras checks on Chicya as she rests on her pallet, and he seems pleased. She’s too weak to do anything but eat and sleep.

Over time, she changes, and not for the better. Her face feels gnarled, and her skin hurts when she smiles. Her stomach is larger, her waist ill-defined, her toes half the size they were when she first came here. Worse, she feels drugged all the time, and it isn’t a good feeling like with the coca and lime. Rather, it dulls her brain and makes her sluggish.

She could stumble down the road that winds up the mountain to this place. She could , but every time the thought enters her head, she falls back asleep. Besides, her feet have withered and are now mere nubs, so how far would she get? And then, there’s that small problem about Maras with his gun . . .

“Did you ever think,” Nayra says one day, “that your life would end like this?”

Chicya lies on her pallet. Her arms are heavy, her legs like wood. Nayra sits beside her, stumped legs outstretched, body round now like a ball. She lost her feet weeks ago. Her skin looks jaundiced, or maybe . . . claylike .

“Why do you suddenly care about me?” asks Chicya.

“For five years, I’ve been here and Maras never made me fight. I only had to cook. Now,” she blinks back tears, “well, look at me. I’m as good as gone.”

“So you let him do this to me out of fear for yourself?”

“I never thought he’d make me fight. He’s always favored me. Of course, he had Bachue and Cava to earn money for him, and now they’re broken.”

Chicya props herself on her elbows. It’s hard to keep her head from crashing back to the pallet. She shifts to her side, keeps her left elbow on the bed, then cradles her head in her hand. This keeps her head up.