The Devil's Bag Man (25 page)

The tunnels wound, branched, and spiraled, leading downward and onward, but Chacanza never hesitated. The path was imprinted on her consciousness. She could have walked it blind.

The man, the vessel, followed behind, a torch in his hand. Before long they were so deep that the earth muffled all sound, and there was nothing to hear but his labored breath and both their footfalls, nothing to see but their own deformed shadows, bobbing against the walls. She wondered what Cualli was thinking as he floated in his prison, what poisonous bile or honeyed words spewed from him at this very moment.

Whether a part of him craved this. Longed for sweet obliteration, as she did.

The answer depended on how much of him remained. Whether some spark of the sweet and noble man she'd once known had managed to sustain itself inside the corrupted, blackened thing that was Cucuy.

You will never know,
she told herself.
Soon all you have seen and done will be as ash in the wind, and the world will be cleansed of abomination
.
Perhaps the gods will feel a ripple in the fabric of the cosmos
.
Perhaps they will return
.

Chacanza smiled.

She was ready. And they had arrived.

DO NOT ENTER that room if you value your life
.
Not even I have dared set foot there since—

The blare of Cucuy's voice cut off abruptly, like a radio losing its signal, as Galvan followed Chacanza across the threshold.

There was nothing inside but a wooden platform covered in disintegrating, mildewed linens.

The marriage bed.

Galvan leaned the torch against a wall. Chacanza stared down at the bed, and Galvan followed her gaze, saw the stains. Burgundy.

And lying atop it, covered in rust, the sacred knife.

It hit him with the force of revelation, though he had known it all along.

“This is where you died.”

“Yes.”

She met him at the foot of the bed. “Tell me what I must do.”

You know not what you do!
Cucuy bellowed, so suddenly that Galvan startled.
Destroy me and you loose Tezcatlipoca on this world! Let us rule it together instead! Use my strength, Jess Galvan
.
Make yourself a god
.
Rule them with wisdom
.
Show them justice
.
I wanted those things too once
.
When I last stood in this room
.
I give you my word, I will not interfere
.

For a split second, a vision flashed through Galvan's mind.

Himself atop a golden throne, munificent and all-knowing.

Nice try, motherfucker
.

Galvan shook it off.

“You've got to kill me,” he told Chacanza, stepping around the bed so that they stood only inches apart. “The same way he killed you. Rip out my heart. Eat it.”

All that you know will be torn asunder
.
Do not do as I have
.
Do not dabble in the arts of the gods
.

Chacanza's eyes were wide and earnest.

“That will unmake him? Unmake us both?”

Galvan nodded. “But there's one more thing. We've got to be . . .”

She waited for him to tell her.

He waited for her to get it.

Expel me from this realm and I shall avenge myself against you with a fury you cannot begin to fathom
.

“Fucking,” Galvan blurted, when Cucuy's rant had run its course. “We've got to be fucking.”

The word meant nothing to her. It was not of Chacanza's world.

“You know . . .” Galvan rifled through his mind for the phrase his compadre Brittanica had used, three months and what seemed like an entire lifetime ago, when the convict had first told Galvan the tragic story of Cualli and Chacanza.

For a long moment, the only thing that came to mind was an awful
pun,
talk about going out with a bang,
Galvan's brain determined to spend its final minutes deploying the same laugh-to-keep-from-breaking dumbassery that had gotten him this far.

At least he was consistent.

“Joined as one,” Galvan remembered at last.

That, Chacanza understood.

“It is the only way,” she said. It was not a question but a statement, and Galvan didn't bother to reply.

Instead, with trembling hands and a heart gone hummingbird inside his chest, Galvan unclasped his belt and let his pants drop to the floor.

He'd been trying not to think about this part.

Chacanza watched him, somber, her green eyes like shimmering pools, and then lifted her dress over her head and stood naked before him.

“I'm ready,” she said, and she climbed onto what remained of the bed.

Galvan looked over at her, and then down at himself.

“I'm, uh . . . not,” he said.

Your children
.
Your children's children
.
All your issue, until the end of time
.
I will drive them mad, one after the next, until your name becomes a curse that men and gods alike despise to utter
.

That wasn't helping either.

He closed his eyes and ground his teeth together, tried to concentrate. To cut through the blaring cacophony, subdue the terror.

Master himself.

You've come this far
.

You ain't leaving this room alive
.

So get it up and save the world, motherfucker
.

But it was as if he'd already begun the process of abandoning his body. Only the thinnest filament of sensation connected him and his mind to his sex.

He groped with a hand, but neither part felt like it was his own. A cold sweat broke out across his brow, beneath his arms. He felt nauseated, feverish, as if his body was already breaking down, crumbling, returning to the earth.

And then, all of a sudden, Galvan felt her hands on him. Her mouth. His body came back into focus. He opened his eyes, looked down, and saw the sculpted porcelain curve of her back as she bent over him, and
every vision he'd ever had of Chacanza came flooding into his mind, as if the dam holding them back had broken.

Cucuy was loose inside him, frenzied and desperate but also confused.

Conflicted.

Excited.

Those haunting dreams of the woman in yellow had not been Galvan's alone; for five hundred years, the Terrible One had dreamed of his bride. They had called out to each other, beckoned across the vast reaches of space and time.

They were one being. They completed each other. And though he railed against it, recoiled from it, unfurled a litany of threats and pleas and lies, a part of Cucuy wanted this.

Wanted her, even if having her destroyed him.

If he hadn't, Galvan's body could not have cooperated.

As it was doing now.

Lust filled him, and he reached down and took Chacanza's face in his hands. She took her mouth off his cock, stared up at him, spoke in a throaty whisper.

“Take me, Cualli. Let us bring each other peace.”

She took his hand, led Galvan to the bed. He eased inside her and heard himself moan, guttural and low, starbursts of color filling his field of vision. Cucuy's presence was a subsonic rumble inside him now, like a cat's purr, bespeaking some incomprehensible mixture of pleasure and violence, a precise fault line separating abandon and defeat.

She began to move beneath him, hips undulating, one hand pressed to his chest and the other wrapped around the hilt of the knife.

“Don't do it yet,” he grunted. “Wait a little while.”

Chacanza's legs were like a vise grip, locked around his back. She nodded.

“Yes. I will enjoy you first, my love.”

Galvan closed his eyes. He didn't want to know when it was coming. Endorphins he'd never known existed saturated his body; he was experiencing heights of sensation he'd never dreamed possible, as far beyond normal human experience as the strength, the speed with which Cualli's presence had endowed him.

I should have done more of this
.

He felt his release building, mounting inside him, and Galvan's eyes popped open.

Chacanza stared back, emerald eyes blazing like some otherworldly fire, and Galvan knew it was time.

His scream was pain and ecstasy at once, as Galvan came and the knife tore through his chest. Chacanza's hand plunged inside him, wrapped itself around the beating muscle, ripped it from its mooring of tissue and vein.

She shoved it in her mouth, and they died staring into each other's eyes.

Again.

N
o blackness this time.

No flurry of bats, no half-formed waiting room, no colorless ocean in the sky.

Those histrionics, he guessed, were reserved for the new arrivals.

Not the motherfuckers with the frequent customer punch cards.

Galvan awakened as if from a nap, naked and unscarred, heart beating quietly inside his chest. He was in a garden, strange and familiar at once. The place had changed in the time he'd been gone, but there was no mistaking it.

When the soul and body are severed from each other in a manner that is unnatural
. . .

Galvan rose and looked around. There was a pall over the realm, somehow; the once-vibrant colors seemed muted, drained, as if Tezcatlipoca's kingdom were in mourning.

Which, it dawned on him now, was precisely the case.

The Dominio Gris had lost a queen. He felt it suddenly, acutely. Chacanza had been unmade. Her soul and body reunited and passed blissfully out of existence. She was at rest.

That was the price Tezcatlipoca had paid to know that he was safe, that he could not be summoned back from this land of invention and depravity. He'd given up his queen, just as he'd forced Cucuy to do.

Cucuy.

Galvan felt his heartbeat accelerate as he considered the priest's fate.

Let us bring each other peace, Cualli
.

Chacanza had believed it. Mercy had guided her hand. What she had done, she had done for them both. To rejoin what had been torn asunder, rid the universe of the twinned abominations Tezcatlipoca had brought into being.

But perhaps Tezcatlipoca had other ideas. Perhaps his gambit had been about more than securing the borders of his land, eliminating any challenge to his timeless reign.

Perhaps his own capacity for cruelty bored him. Perhaps the beings who populated this realm, with their limitless capacity to endure it, did too.

Just then, a voice broke the silence.

“Maybe you're wondering where everybody is.”

Galvan turned to see Gum picking his way across a vast, empty expanse of light pink sand.

And indeed, just as he said, the place was utterly devoid of life.

“Yes,” he heard himself say, in a voice sludgy with disuse.

“Come with me.” Gum beckoned, and Galvan followed.

In the distance, beyond a sweeping hill, a sound like thunder boomed. They walked toward it.

“So,” Gum said, “how was that shit, anyway?”

Galvan scowled at him.

“You know. The queen.”

And Gum made the finger-in-the-hole gesture, like some third-grade punk. Without thinking, Galvan swung a fist and knocked him on his ass.

“Whoa, whoa. Take it easy.” Gum raised his palms in surrender, and Galvan shook his head, extended a hand, hauled him back up.

“She died a hero,” he said. “Heroine. Whatever. That's all you need to know.”

Gum shut the fuck up, and they walked on.

“Well, shit's been crazy here, boss. When she died, Tezcatlipoca shut everything down. I'm talking no light, no water, no fucking
atmosphere
. It was like being a bug stuck in amber. Total sensory deprivation, except for
that
.” Gum gestured at the hill, the sound. “His screams. Seemed like it lasted forever.”

Galvan furrowed his brow. “How long's it been since—” he started to ask, but it didn't matter. Time didn't work the same here anyway.

He'd have to get used to that.

“And it's only gonna get crazier,” Gum concluded, as they reached the top of the hill. “See what I mean?”

Galvan looked, and his jaw dropped.

Sitting low above the valley was the ocean in the sky. It churned with pregnant fury, a swirl of pastel hues.

Below, the girls swarmed the field—all twenty-some-odd thousand of them. They stared up at the sky, rapt and expectant, as the ocean shaped itself into a funnel, a tornado.

Tezcatlipoca floated above them, his form massive, his golden glow filling the air. And as the funnel deepened, his booming cries of anguish changed.

Grew deeper.

Became a maniacal laugh more terrifying than any wail of sorrow.

The tornado disgorged what was contained within in, and the god's laughter reached a crescendo.

A young man, clad in robes of pure white, spun through the air in what seemed like slow motion and then crashed to the ground.

Silence, sudden and absolute.

Tezcatlipoca alighted a few paces away, strode to the supine newcomer as the girls crowded around, jostling for position.

The man lifted his head an instant before the god grabbed his mane of jet-black hair and jerked him to his feet.

It was Cualli.

Cualli, tall and fresh and beautiful.

Cualli as he must have looked when the world was young and uncorrupted.

Cualli, gazing at the women he had doomed.

The god he had served.

The god he had betrayed.

The very beings at whose eternal mercy he now found himself.

Though
mercy
was a word that had no place here.

For some reason he could not explain, Galvan felt a sudden, uncontrollable urge to help him, an inexplicable sense that even in this land beyond all reckoning, their fates were still intertwined.

“Welcome,” Tezcatlipoca said. “You have no idea how badly I have wanted to see you again, Cualli.”

And the god's laughter boomed across his kingdom.

ADAM MANSBACH
is the author of the instant
New York Times
bestsellers
Go the F**k to Sleep
and
You Have to F**king Eat
, as well as the novels
The Dead Run, Rage is Back, Angry Black White Boy
, and
The End of the Jews
, the winner of the California Book Award. He was the 2009–2011 New Voices Professor of Fiction at Rutgers University, a 2012 Sundance Screenwriting Lab Fellow, a 2013 Berkeley Repertory Theater Writing Fellow, and a 2015 Artist in Residence at Stanford University's Institute for Diversity in the Arts. His work has appeared in
The New Yorker
, the
New York Times Book Review, Esquire,
and
The Believer
, and on National Public Radio's
All Things Considered
. He lives in Berkeley, California.

Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at
hc.com
.