La Noche de la Chankla: Hanged
Chapter 20
Unable to sublimate the horror of knowing what had happened to Spider, Luisa left her mother’s house and retreated to stay with friends in El Paso. Luna, although her eyes were wet, thought it was best, but she wished she had some place to send Javier, some place safe. Lila and Javi’s father still hadn’t returned, and Luna had not been able to reach them. The worry for her family gnawed at her, like a feral dog on the carcass of javelina, almost more so than the knowledge of what lied in wait for her and the brujas in the Silver Moon, the enemy they would have to face, sooner or later. So she did the only thing she could think of to do, while waiting for the inevitable confrontation that neither she nor the the other brujas desired. She retrieved her box of potions from her room.
Luna did not believe that Javier was a natural witch, as she had been. Oddly, neither of her daughters had shown any propensity toward it, although Luisa, with her former black lipstick and heavy eye makeup, had almost looked the stereotypical part, according to commercial Halloween orthodoxy. No, Luna believed that the circumstances they were surrounded by, the fear of what lied in wait, had somehow sparked Javier’s ability, caused it to manifest when it would not normally have. Other than the nahuals of the Hounds, she had never dealt with a male witch, and she had never trained anyone, she and her friends having come together by fate. But it seemed a necessity of the moment and, although she was not sure where to begin, Luna did not feel that there was much time.
“Javier. Ven aquí, por favor.”
The boy, as was his custom, obeyed and came into the kitchen. He had not been outside playing, and he no longer had any interest in it. Something had changed about him and even Hueso sensed it, remaining on the couch in lieu of following upon his boy’s heels. Javier seemed older, the shy, innocent, and emotional ten year old having given way to someone else. An unknown wisdom had taken hold of his eyes, and they no longer shied away.
“Javier, I want to show you some things. Sit at the table.”
He obeyed, watching as his abuela opened a wooden box, the same one she kept in her bureau drawer, containing oils and yerbas that had, over the years, permeated the wood with their scents. Javier breathed them in, almost greedily.
“Mijo, this is Limpia oil,” she said as she removed the top from the vial and tilted the little glass container until the oil touched her finger. “You know that ‘limpiar’ means ‘to clean,’ verdad?”
The scent of the oil filling his nose, he nodded, quietly. Javier’s Spanish was sorely lacking, as he really had little use for it. His school’s curriculum was in English, and his parents had raised him speaking English as his primary language. The little Spanish he did know came mostly from Luna, and she, over the years, had lost much of her own, although she could still understand it.
“It’s sent to me by a bruja who makes it special. It has rosemary and Palo Santo tree extract.”
“What is it for?” Javi finally ventured to ask, although he had an inkling.
Glad that her nieto was showing interest, Luna explained, “We use it to cleanse ourselves, mijo, to remove any bad influences from wayward spirits. Rub this on your head in a cross,” she said, as she transferred the essence to Javi’s finger. He did as told, while she took out another small glass jar. “And this, this is Coyote oil. It is used to help us think clearly when needing to make spells and to connect to the spirits. Do the same,” she prompted.
Javi recognized the complex odor of the Coyote oil, having smelled it many times, as Luna often used it in an oil diffuser when the family needed a little push to get past some unforeseen obstacle and wore it herself often.
“You can put it on anything to help,” Luna instructed. She was unsure of how to explain it to him any better than that, and that was all he needed to know at the moment. She continued to pull various oils, herbs, and sahumeros from the little box, giving Javier a simple explanation as to their uses, hoping the nascent power he was showing would help him intuit their meanings and qualities better.
Feeling that she might be overloading him, she finally said, “That is enough for today, mijo. Go back and watch your shows with Hueso.”
Unbeknownst to Luna, Javier had taken it all in, as if he had already known it. He also understood what his abuela was trying to do, but he did not know how he comprehended it. He just did. Hueso shivered and slapped his tail on the couch cushion, as Javi took up his former seat, and Javi stroked the tan fur on Hueso’s head, thinking about what his abuela had told him and vacantly staring at the television. He was not hungry. Then he heard the telephone ring and heard Luna answer it. At the same time, the image on the television changed, and Javi began to see an obscured, black and white image of something hanging from the arm of a streetlight. It seemed to him like an old movie, the kind he normally turned off. Initially assuming it was tennis shoes, a common sight, as it came into focus he realized what it was and couldn’t swallow. Two men.
El Paso had its fill of images of hanged men in recent decades, victims of the narcos Luisa’s corridos lionized. But these men didn’t appear to be in El Paso. Javi thought he recognized the street the light was on, and it was in Las Cruces. Hands bound before them and their eyes appearing to gave been gouged out, Javi could not force himself to look away. The men’s cheap suits were stained with their own blood, but, jarringly, they almost appeared to him as if they were angels, with wings, fallen in battle.
Then the image blurred away, but it returned almost immediately and showed the fear-paralyzed boy another horror. His school came on the screen, grayed out and flickering. As he watched, the building sank slowly into the ground, through the sand, into nowhere. Javier was no longer in the living room of his abuela’s house, but found himself standing upon the edge of a pit, looking down … down into darkness. Indistinct at first, he thought he could see a light, a tiny, orange light, deep in the bowels of the earth … fire-like, growwing bigger. Before he knew it, his eyes grew as large as moons, as it was almost upon him and the being that bore the eyes of fire, huge and hulking, was reaching for him with a hand ablaze…
As he heard the old-style handset sound from a place that seemed far far off being placed back in its cradle, reality rushed back to him. The screen returned to the man dressed as a clown. Hueso shivered next to him on the couch. He could not move, could not speak. He knew it had been a vision, but it had been so real. He heard his abuela in the cocina, speaking softly to herself.
Luna needed to catch her breath after hearing what Luz had to tell her, and began to pray. The two agents who had come and dragged the brujas into the office, the ones Luna had controlled through the words that had come to her, had been found tortured and hanged in broad daylight. But not hanged by the neck. They had been suspended from a streetlight bar, as Javi had seen, but he had not seen that they were still alive when found, hearts still beating. Their backs had been split open under the shoulder blades, and their rib chiseled away. As they kept breathing, their lungs had been externalized, and continued to function, inflating … deflating, bared to the sky … wings. They died not long after being cut down. It was a message to the followers of the Silver Moon, but also another undeniable warning to the brujas. Luna could not help but fear for Lila once again. But there was something else.
“Javi, I need to go out for not very long … quizás vente minutos. I want you to stay here and lock the door behind me. Will you be okay?”
All the boy could do was nod. He did not want to be there by himself, even for twenty minutes, but he could not bring himself to leave the perceived, relative security of the couch and Hueso. Any words he may have been able to use to protest were lost to him. His tongue was dry.
Satisfied that Javi would be okay for a short time, Luna left the house, taking her piedra de luna with her, believing it might be of more use to her at that time than her nieto. She walked out just as Luz and Xochitl drove up. Javier heard the car tear away, and he knew that they were going to verify that the school had been erased, just like the church. Trembling, he slid from the couch and went to the door, the fear of it being unlocked greater than the terror he had witnessed on the screen. Then, ensuring that Hueso followed him this time, he went into his room and hid under his covers with the light on.
A few minutes later, as the sun disappeared behind the horizon, bringing the indigo of night upon Agape, a black SUV rounded the corner and stopped in front of the little white house with the low, gray chain link fence, parking on the far side of the street. A man got out, a man in an expensive suit, wearing a peculiar pendant around his neck. His face would normally have been familiar to Luna and Javier, but now it was distorted, more canid than man, and his eyes glowed red. He sniffed the air, possibly checking for the protection of the stone that was not there, and then began to cross, intent upon battering down the door and abducting the current resident at home.
As he reached midway between his SUV and the little house, he heard the revving of an engine and the screech of tire rubber as it made a sharp turn, rounding the corner. Before he could react, high beams blinded him, making him shield his face, and the car, accelerating at an exponentially increasing speed, plowed into him before slamming on the breaks, sending him crashing to the asphalt and breaking his neck. The man was dead. Robertson, the nahual, or whatever he was, was dead.
Luz, Luna, and Xochitl slowly opened the doors of the sedan and quietly and carefully walked toward the body, which lied motionless on the ground. Luna had had a sense of incredible foreboding as the woman had viewed the vacant lot upon which the school had once sat, a feeling that her nieto was in trouble. Luz and Xochitl, feeling that Javier was like their own grandson or nephew, had heeded Luna’s intuition and raced back to the house. But, when Luz had seen the glow of Robertson’s eyes, she knew that he had to be ended. They all knew, and the looks upon their countenances in that moment said that they had decided upon it. As they looked at the body, suit torn and pendant broken, an intense wind arose, blowing sand and roaring, as if it were alive, roaring as it had in the desert.
Luna’s neighbor, Señor Alvarez, who occupied the little blue house across the street, catercorner to Luna’s, saw the entire incident through his window. His lights were on, and the brujas could see him as well. They feared that Alvarez, being something of a curmudgeon and eremite, might call the police, which was as good as calling the Silver Moon.
“Ay cabrón!” Luz exclaimed when she saw him.
But he just looked at them stone-faced and at the body, which was now only Robertson, with no mark of the two legs remaining. After crossing himself, Alvarez waved to them with a single motion and nodded his head. As antisocial as he was, he was aware of recent events and had had enough of it. It was his town too, and his signal was meant to ensure the women that his lips were sealed.
“Javier!” Luna shouted, as she looked toward her house and then back at Luz and Xochitl.
“Go, Luna!” Luz said, “We will take care of this!”
Without hesitation, Luna ran to the house and, after finding her key, opened the door. Javier had done as asked and bolted the door behind her. She exhaled with some relief for that and ran inside to find him.
“Pero, how are we going to to take care of this, Luz?” Xochitl asked with exasperation.
Luz went to the black SUV and checked the interior. She found the keys still swinging in the ignition, Robertson having planned upon a quick departure. Starting it and pulling it up near the body, Luz popped the back hatch. “Okay, Xochitl, help me get him into the back. Andale!”
“We can’t lift him, Luz! He must weigh 250 pounds!”
As the two women struggled to get the corpse of Robertson into the SUV, the chore suddenly became easier, as another pair of hands appeared beside them and took the majority of the weight. Alavarez. He said nothing, but ensured that the body was in far enough before closing the door. Turning to the brujas and, still not uttering a word, he nodded once more. Luz and Xochitl, their faces registering stunned shock at his aid, nodded back, before he returned to his house and turned off his lights. The two women looked at each other, grateful for the unexpected help.
“I’m going to drive the SUV north, into the desert, Xochitl. You follow in my car.”
Xochitl had no reason to argue and, as the time ticked on, the work of getting the body into the back having seemed to take hours, a perceived need to flee the scene became imperative, impressing itself upon the women’s minds. They drove far out into the sand, far enough that they could no longer see the lights of El Paso. Luz spotted a deep arroyo and signaled for Xochitl to stop, fearing that her car would get stuck. Luz continued down into the desert scar and left the SUV at the bottom, laboriously making her way back up to where Xochitl was waiting.
“Now what?” Xochitl asked, then showing signs that her paranoia had given way to exhaustion.
“I’m not sure what else we can do.”
“But they’ll find him and the car and the paint from your car and … "
“I said I don’t know, Xochitl!” Luz shouted, more angry at herself for her lack of foresight than Xochitl’s nagging, emotions rising within her and her moonstone aglow. Then, with an odd sense of peace, she spoke the words that floated into her mind, “Incendium maximus!” her voice echoed.
Bursting into flames that quickly turned from orange to blue, the SUV, within minutes, was reduced to smoldering ashes and melted plastic. The reflections of the flames danced in the brujas’ eyes, before dying away. The body within the metal skeleton had become all but unidentifiable.
Xochitl, impressed with Luz, grunted her satisfaction at the destruction, before, being a natural worry wart, another snag occurred to her. “Ay, but the teeth … "
Luz heard her, but had no solution. “Sí, there’s nothing we can do about that. They will find it, but the connection to us has been hidden by el fuego.”
That was not good enough for Xochitl, who had had her own word dancing on the tip of her tongue but had feared to speak it, in deference to Luz. The urge now overtook her and she uttered it. “Sepelite!” The charred remains of Robertson and the SUV began to shake, before being swallowed up into the sand, as the school must have been swallowed by the caverns of Niflheim.
“Xochitl!” Luz exclaimed and smiled.
Now believing that they were as safe as was possible from being charged with the death, dragged off by the minions of the Silver Moon, the two women drove back to Agape, deciding upon the way that they were two tired for anymore drama that night and that Luna needed time with Javi to explain. They went home, and Luz called Luna to let her know what had happened and not to worry.
Luna had found Javier hiding under his covers and, after a long, tight hug, explained to him what had transpired, which Javi took, she thought, rather well, uncharacteristically. Javi was not happy that Robertson was dead, and it brought Chloe to his mind and how she had hurt him. He knew she was not to blame for her father, but, in some way, he knew that Robertson’s death was inevitable. Thinking of these things, he looked into his abuela’s eyes and told her about the vision. Luna, fearful of the implications but wanting to assure him that he was protected, asked him, in her usual way if were hungry, having no other way to communicate safety to him. He found that he was not, just tired. So Luna put her moonstone under his pillow, turned off the light, and let her nieto and Hueso go to sleep, but not before she cast an additional protection spell to ward off any intrusions from Niflheim, any dream-riding by the evil that was Surtr.
