Originally published 2021, in the From the Yonder 2 anthology released by War Monkey Publications. Edited by Joshua P. Sorensen.
It’s a little after one in the morning when the luchador stumbles into Cantina del Brujas. The bottles of cheap whiskey he’d drained alone in his apartment earlier that evening have left Marco Alvarez more than a little unsteady.
The cantina is grimy; dimly lit by yellowed lights and a stylized, slow-dying, red neon sign of a calaca skull just above the bar. There are only three or four patrons at this hour, tucked away in booths nursing their demons—five, actually: a woman Marco hadn’t noticed just a moment ago is sitting at the bar a few stools down from him. She’s dressed in a faded black suit and matching wide-brimmed hat. Her dark hair is held in a ponytail by a red ribbon as garish as a slit wrist. She’s very pale, and uneasiness flutters in his stomach as she looks at him.
“Jack, neat,” Marco says to the bartender as he climbs up a stool and slaps his last thousand pesos onto the scoured and pock-marked bar. “As many as that will get me.”
The bartender is old, her face lined and cratered by age. She’s reading a romance novel, one of those with the bodice-ripping artwork on the front cover. She sighs, palms Marco’s money and puts the book down on the counter near the cash register. She makes his drink, slides it to him across the bar and returns to her paperback.
Marco downs the whole glass, slides it back to the bartender for a refill. She ignores him, focused on her book. Marco tinks the glass loudly with a dirty fingernail.
The bartender huffs, tosses the book back onto the counter and refills his whiskey. She’s about to turn back when Marco says, “Must be getting to the good part, huh?”
The bartender’s back goes straight as a board. She moves after a silent moment of collection, grabs three more glasses and fills them. She turns and lines the glasses up in front of Marco, grabs her book and retreats to the other end of the bar, fleeing his orbit.
Fine with him. He downs another glass.
“Rough day?”
The voice is a jolt of electricity up his spine; a nail scratching across concrete.
Marco turns as he grabs his next whiskey. The woman in black is looking at him, lips curled in an inviting smile.
“Not good,” Marco says. He downs his drink.
Next in line.
“Wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t.” The woman gestures at their poorly lit, poorly maintained surroundings.
Marco laughs. “This is true.”
The woman pats the barstool next to hers. Marco notices the black nails on her pale fingers are chipping. There’s something about her that excites him, though—
He remembers he’s out of money and downs another drink. Can’t afford such pleasures, not after today. Not for a while.
“Thanks, but no,” he says, sliding his empty glass across the bar. He reaches for his next drink, comes back with an empty one. He frowns.
“I bought a bottle,” the woman says, and Marco notices she’s holding an unopened bottle of Don Julio. She motions to two empty glasses on the bar in front of her. “Won’t be able to finish it all myself, and you look like you need it more than I do.”
Marco hesitates. Something about this woman, the way she smiles, is too inviting; it all feels...off. Then again, she’s offering free drink—and expensive drink, at that. He’s got a good buzz going, drunk by most standards, but he’s nowhere near the oblivion he thirsts for.
“Can’t say no to that,” Marco says with a quick smile, dismounting his stool and moving next to her.
The woman smiles, opens the bottle of Don Julio and pours them both a glass. Marco watches, almost mesmerized by the strange way her skin seems to shimmer up close, like he can see through it to the skull beneath. Who is this woman who looks so much like a painting of Santa Muerta?
“To stories,” the woman says, handing him a glass.
“To drinking,” Marco says, and they clink their glasses together and drink.
The Don Julio is smooth and warm and flavorful, like liquid silver running down his throat; like consuming a pleasant summer breeze.
“Just how bad was your day, Marco?”
Somewhere in his head, Marco recoils. He’s sure he hasn’t introduced himself. But everything’s so...hazy.
“Bad,” he says, finishing his drink and eagerly accepting her generous refill. “Lost a big match.”
“Match?”
“Wrestling.”
“Ah, I thought you looked like a fighter.” She winks at him. “What promotion do you wrestle for?”
“None. It’s street wrestling.”
“Oh, I see.”
“Street’s a good way to make quick money. If you’re really good, you can maybe make a name for yourself, if you build a following.”
“Maybe catch the attention of a big promotion?”
“Maybe.” Marco takes a drink. The world takes on a dreamlike quality, almost as if he’s looking through an empty bottle smudged with fingerprints. “But not likely.”
“Then why do it?”
“Just something I’m good at. And it helps pay the bills.”
“So you had a bad match,” the woman says, dismissing the idea with a languid wave of her hand. “Surely that’s not the end of the world.”
Marco grunts. “You’d think.”
“Giving up so easy?”
“Don’t have a choice.”
“Of course you have a choice.”
“Not when you lose your mask in a lucha de apuesta.” He punctuates this by downing the rest of his drink. He motions for another refill.
The woman pours him another.
“I’ve seen that happen in the arena matches on TV,” she says. “But those luchadores still have a career afterwards.”
Marco nods. “Those are the guys in the promotions. Me—”
“You’re just a street fighter.”
“Right. And losing your mask in a betting match on the street means you’re through. The...mystery, the shine, it’s all gone. No-one cares who’s under the mask. It’s the mask that counts. It’s the mask the fans follow. Once that’s gone...You’re out for good. No one will pay to watch you anymore.”
The woman pouts her bluish lips, and Marco feels an overwhelming urge to kiss them. He drinks more instead.
“Rough day,” she finally agrees.
“Yeah.”
“What will you do?”
Marco shrugs. “Bounce for a few more places, probably. That’s what I did when I wasn’t wrestling. The worst thing is that the prize money would have kept me afloat for a good, long while. Could’ve let me focus on wrestling.”
“Prize money?”
“Yeah, from the match. Winner keeps his mask and gets twenty-three-thousand pesos.”
“So this guy that beat you—”
“Guerrero Grande.”
The woman gives him a look. “Really?”
Marco shrugs. “Luis—his name is Luis Rivera.”
“So Luis got your mask and your money?”
Marco drowns the harsh truth in his tequila. “Yeah.”
The woman empties her glass and sets it on the bar. She eyes Marco for a moment, her sharp, gray eyes burning through him.
“Marco,” she says slowly, softly, focusing on the bottle in her hand as she refills both their glasses.
“Yeah?”
“What would you say if I could get you that money back?”
Marco laughs. “I’d say you’re full of it.”
“I’m not.” She faces him again, eyes hard and unflinching.
Marco wants to look away, to wither under the heat of her gaze, but he forces himself not to.
“How?” he asks. Almost a whisper.
The woman drinks deep. “Tell me, do you like this...Luis Rivera?”
“No. Not at all. He’s a real pendejo.”
The woman smiles. “Good.”
Marco feels like a swarm of cockroaches is skittering down his spine. “What?”
“Well, I assume your dislike of Luis means you won’t mind anything unpleasant befalling him.”
Marco feels suddenly unmoored from reality, drowning in possibilities. “I...I don’t know.”
“Sure you do. You need that money. But you also need Luis gone in a way that doesn’t point back to you. Which is where I come in.”
The weight of Marco’s world seems to collapse upon his shoulders: the rent due next week; the overwhelming reality that he’s lost his most reliable means of income, and will probably be evicted; this strange, unsettling woman offering him a way out of the hole he now found himself in—the very hole he’d walked into this bar hoping to fill with alcohol—and the harsh truth that her offer was actually tempting.
He takes a drink—his first small sip of the night. “How?”
“Have you ever heard the tale of El Silbón?” the woman asks.
Marco shakes his head.
“It’s said it originated in Venezuela, but it’s been so long I can’t remember if that’s where I first told it. It’s one of my favorites. Would you like to hear it?”
Marco shrugs, continues drinking.
“Well, there once was a very poor family. A father, a mother, their young son, the grandfather and the grandfather’s hound. They didn’t have a lot, but every year for the boy’s birthday the father always went hunting for deer—it was the only real gift they could give the boy. So the boy’s birthday comes around, and just as he does every year, the father leaves early in the morning with his bow and arrows to go hunting. Only this time, he takes the boy with him, figuring he’s old enough for his first hunt. The boy is jubilant; but after hours and hours of tracking and waiting, they come up empty handed. And now the sun is setting, and it’s time they return home. But the boy, he flies into a rage and beats his father to death in the woods with a rock. Then he takes his father’s hunting knife and guts him and takes his father’s heart and liver back to his home. The boy gives the heart and liver to the mother to cook for his birthday dinner and tells her and his grandfather that his father will come along after he has finished dressing the rest of the deer. As the boy and the mother and the grandfather begin to eat, the mother remarks about how tough the meat is, and how it’s so unlike the father to take so long. The grandfather agrees, and decides to go into the woods to search for the father. But just as the grandfather is leaving, he notices the boy is wearing the father’s hunting knife—the very knife the grandfather himself had given to the father, his son. It is then that the grandfather realizes what the boy has done, and what they have been eating. The grandfather begins to beat the boy, and eventually the boy confesses everything to him and the mother. The mother begs the grandfather to punish the boy further, so the grandfather ties the boy to a tree and whips him mercilessly, until the flesh of his back is raw and seeping. The grandfather then calls for the mother to bring him hot peppers, which he crushes and rubs into the boy’s wounds. Once he is done, the grandfather and the mother force the boy to lead them to the father’s body. They make him place the father’s bones in a sack which the boy must sling over his wounded back. Then the grandfather whistles three notes, and sics his hound on the boy. As the boy runs through the forest, the hound on his heels, his back burning under the weight of the bag of his father’s bones, the mother casts a powerful curse on him. So now El Silbón wanders the night, whistling. If you hear him, it means he’s coming for you. When he catches you, he will break you open, consume your organs and take your bones, placing them in the bloody bag he carries over his shoulder, the bag that continues to grow heavier and heavier, doubling him over as he wanders the darkness.”
Marco feels hollowed out, his buzz gone. He feels stone-cold sober.
“That’s one of mine,” the woman says.
“One of yours, what?”
“My stories.”
“So you—”
“I conjure stories.”
Marco gulps down the rest of his tequila and sits clutching the empty glass.
“I could send El Silbón for Luis, if you’d like.”
“I see.” Marco slowly places his glass on the bar, never taking his eyes off the woman. “And what’s in it for you?”
“Nothing, really. Just another story to tell.”
“Okay,” Marco says. He glances up at the clock over the cantina’s back door. It’s three A.M. But how is that even possible? “I, uh, better get home before I black out in a gutter. Thanks for the drinks.”
“And Luis?” the woman asks. “Shall I send him a story tonight?”
Marco stands. “Uh, sure, whatever.”
The woman smiles. “Very good. You can get your money in a day’s time.”
She blows Marco a kiss.
“Whatever you say,” Marco says over his shoulder as he pushes through the door of Cantina del Brujas, determined to get as far away from the strange woman as fast as possible.
When he glances back to make sure she’s not following him, the woman in black is already gone.
***
A cockroach scuttles across the back of Marco’s hand and rouses him from his sleep. He’s on his kitchen floor, still wearing his clothes from the night before. He grunts, flicking the roach across the room where it lands on its back just under the fridge, then rights itself and disappears.
Marco envies the pest as he slowly gets to his feet, envies their seeming invincibility: he’d heard somewhere they’d have no problem withstanding a nuclear holocaust. They’d prevail—thrive, even—as the world burned to ashes around them.
Sunlight streams in between the broken blinds over the window above the sink and lasers Marco in the eyes. The light cracks through his skull like a glowing bullet, his hangover rumbling anew in his head like a roach with a jackhammer crawled in through his ear while he was sleeping. He puts an arm out to steady himself against the fridge.
Images of the dimly lit Cantina del Brujas, a pale woman in a black suit and hat at the bar coalesce in the fog of his memory and then, just as quickly, dissipate. He can’t remember much of their conversation, bits and pieces, really—but he can recall just how unsettled he’d felt sitting next to the woman.
That feeling creeps back into his stomach now.
He wonders if she’s still at the cantina, if she’d be there if he visited this afternoon.
Marco tells himself she couldn’t be there, that she’s just in his head, a figment of his imagination. A bad dream.
Besides, he doesn’t have time to go to the cantina today. He needs to find another job. Maybe run security for one of the back-alley drug and gambling dens that sprout like weeds in this neighborhood; maybe bounce for a couple more cantinas, on top of the ones he was already bouncing for. Whatever it is, he knows he’ll need several more jobs just to make up what he’s lost now that wrestling’s not an option.
And rent’s due at the end of next week.
And his landlord has a zero-tolerance policy.
If he can’t pay, he’ll be evicted, and he’ll be back on the street, homeless and hungry. Marco promised himself a long time ago that he’d never end up back on the street. He intends to keep that promise; kill for it if he has to.
Marco’s stomach clenches and the woman in black’s ice-cold stare comes back to him. A gaping hole seems to dilate inside of him, a sinkhole in his soul. He knows there’s no way he’ll be able to get enough money in time to pay his rent. Maybe if he had two weeks instead of one, it might be possible, just barely. But one week? No way. And in Mexico City? No way in hell. He was just one in a sea of innumerable people trying to make ends meet, to stay afloat, to survive. On any given day there were uncountable Marco Alvarezes he’d have to compete with for the lowliest of jobs. Wrestling had been the only thing that set him apart; the only thing that had given him a leg up. It wasn’t something everyone could do, let alone do it well. Marco could.
But it’s gone now. All gone.
And Luis Rivera took it from him.
Marco vomits in the sink.
He wipes his sleeve across his mouth, splashes water in his face.
Luis.
That pendejo.
Luis is probably still riding high on his victory, rolling in his twenty-three-thousand pesos without a care in the world, drinking, drugging, and whoring; living la vida grande while Marco’s left with nothing—not even the mask he’d sewn himself all those years ago—and days away from being evicted.
Something inside Marco clenches again, wringing him like a wet rag.
He’s never going back on the streets.
Never.
***
Luis lives in an apartment complex very much like Marco’s, in a barrio about twenty minutes away. The moon has just come up as Marco makes for the stairwell. The snub-nosed revolver he’s tucked in the back of his jeans is rubbing his skin raw.
He takes the three flights of stairs at a brisk pace, past crumbling hallways covered in graffiti. Someone is cooking something that smells incredible: the smell of cumin and chili peppers and lime makes Marco’s stomach grumble; his pantry and fridge are bare, but he hopes to remedy that here, now.
The building pulses with noise: large families together in small quarters; whores loudly plying their trade; children laughing and screaming; someone playing a guitar and singing off-key.
Marco stops at Luis’s door, hesitates. He steels himself, goes numb, retreats to that place inside that kept him alive during the worst days and nights of his life. He is a passenger in his own body, safe and sound. Untouchable. He reaches back under his jacket and shirt, reassures himself the revolver is still there, still with him.
He lets out a heavy breath, pulls his shoulders back, straightens his spine, and pounds the door.
No answer.
Marco keeps himself tucked deep, focuses only on the fact that he must survive.
He pounds the door again.
Nothing.
Although...
With the noise emanating from the apartments around him, he can’t be sure. He thinks he heard something, maybe...whistling?
Marco leans forward, placing his right ear flush against the door.
Silence.
He grunts. Okay, so maybe no-one is home. This could still work to his advantage—especially if Luis left some of his winnings behind. And what are the chances someone here would even notice the sound of a door being bust in?
Marco looks around, leans over the railing of the stairwell, checks the stairs down to the first floor.
No-one.
Nothing but noise.
Home free.
Marco pulls out the revolver just in case, then kicks in the door. The wood around the lock splinters under the force of his boot. A latch on the inside catches, keeps the door from fully opening. He tears the latch off the frame with another kick, and lets himself in.
***
Blood, everywhere. On the ceiling. Bodies broken apart in the kitchen and living room, bones pulled free of flesh in antlered architectures. Chewed organs slopped on the floor.
Down the hallway, past the kitchen, Luis is suspended between two bedrooms, his skin cut loose from his body and stretched taut from wall to wall. His body trembles, his musculature glistening red and wet, his ribs cracked and pried open. His face is still intact. Blood pours from his mouth, from the stump that used to be his tongue. His throat has been carefully mutilated, leaving him alive, but unable to so much as whimper.
But it isn’t the blood that terrifies Marco; it isn’t even the sight of Luis flayed alive and tacked to the wall by jagged shards of his own ribs like a human butterfly.
No, it’s the look in Luis’s eyes that terrifies Marco to the point that he pisses himself.
He has only seen that look one other time in his life, back before he was a luchador or even a bouncer; back when the only job he could find one summer was working at a slaughterhouse.
Something whistles a triad of discordant notes behind Marco and he spins reflexively. The thing is massive, hunchbacked, dressed in a black deeper and darker than the void between stars. Blood and viscera glisten on its clothing.
Oblivion burns at the edges of Marco’s vision like black smoke. The thing brings down a bone and caves in Marco’s skull.
He’s alive just long enough to feel his flesh pulled open and his spine ripped from his body.