Witches of Rascar Pablo: Part I

Chapter 6: Tres Lenguas

11:34 am Martes, Mayo 16, 1954 (PDT)
Rascar Pablo, Jalisco

Carlos woke to the livid glare of his father.

“Papá?” Carlos strained himself, tried to get his eyes to open wide enough to be sure it was indeed his father standing over him. His head pounded and throbbed with a hangover. He looked around the room – his brothers Juan and Tomás were there – both painted and armed with rifles. “Buenos días,” he muttered.

He vaguely remembered getting into a fight the night before, at the quinceañera. A single bright neon bat fluttered in and landed on his face and he swatted it away. “Listen, Papá,” he said, “I don’t know what came over me last night. Lo siento.”

“What is that?” asked Tomás, “What are you swatting at?”

Carlos refrained. “Huh? Nada.”

“Fucking druggy pendejo,” growled Tomás. “You shame our family.”

Carlos placed his hands firmly over his temples as if to keep his head from spinning. “I’m sorry, Papá,” he said slowly, with crackles and sleep in his voice, “but I see her face everywhere. It’s my fault that she was taken, and it’s killing me.”

He looked at his father. His father avoided making eye contact.

“My daughter is still alive,” he said, “but we are not here to talk about her, or your shameful display last night. Get dressed, we are going to Tepe D in Tres Lenguas.”

Carlos had never been to Tres Lenguas, much less its most secretive branch – ‘Tepe D’ – where brujos were made. Like several other villages in Rascar Pablo, Tres Lenguas was an intricate network of cabins, joined together by walkways, built hundreds of meters high on the walls of one of the many rocky canyons that ran through the area.

Carlos got dressed and slung his guitar over his shoulder. Tomás tore it from his back, and chucked it aside. “You won’t need that,” he said.

Carlos followed his father up the many flights of stairs elegantly carved into the red volcanic rock, with his two brothers in tow. Not a word was spoken.

The ancient glyphs that were chiseled into each step were caked up with mud and clay and harbored spiders and insects, and whispered warnings of life-threatening truths.

“So… what business is this?” asked Carlos, trying to gauge how much trouble he was in.

His father offered no reply. Nor did his brothers.

The stairs terminated, and the siblings faced the huge wooden doorway on which a lizard with three tongues and the letter ‘D’ were painted.

“Go,” said Carlos’s father.

Carlos gulped. “You are giving me to the brujos?” he asked. “I’m sorry about last night, Papá. Please.”

A tear rolled down his father’s cheek as his two brothers forced him through the doors.

“Wait, Papá!” The doors slammed shut behind him. He tried opening them but they wouldn’t budge. He stood alone in a dimly lit hallway whose walls bore an archaic codex he’d never seen before.

A woman dressed in revealing animal furs approached. He recognized her from the quinceañera.

“Isabel?”

“Sigame,” she said. “Follow me.” She turned and started down the hallway.

“Hey… fancy seeing you here. Es una coincidencia, no? So… are you like… an apprentice… or something?”

She didn’t answer.

“Anyway… I had a good time last night… maybe we can do it again… sometime?”

She said nothing, and continued down the hallway. He followed her down to a room, where she told him to wait, and then left him.

He looked around. It looked like some kind of operating room. Each wall was decked with shelving that supported taxonomies of beakers and jars filled with mixtures of herbs, and terrariums containing reptiles and amphibians. Tables and carts on which medical instruments were strewn surrounded an operating table. On the operating table lay the pale dissected corpse of a man.

Carlos took a few steps nearer the operating table, and was instantly repelled by the face of the corpse. It seemed to be mid-scream, and its eyes were covered with cataract-like blotches. Its head was tilted, pinned down, its cranium dissected, its brain stem exposed.

“It’s still alive,” came the voice of a young man.

Carlos started. He turned and regarded Don Orión, the young shaman.

“Señor Brujo,” Carlos gulped. “It’s an honor.”

“This man has been infected by a worm,” said Don Orión as he approached the operating table.

“And… is he… still alive?” Carlos’s mind began to race as he wondered why his father had brought him there.

“Not the man,” said the young shaman, pointing to the exposed brain stem, “life has passed from him, but the worm lives.”

Carlos looked at the brain stem. It twitched in the coils of some translucent squid-like tentacles.

Carlos backed away from the operating table with a look of disgust.

“Señor,” said Carlos, “with all due respect, why am I here?”

“I brought you here because I wanted to talk to you,” said the young shaman. “Do you notice anything else about this man?”

Carlos reluctantly looked over the corpse again. “He’s human?”

“What else?”

“He’s from… the other world?”

“And do you know what this is?” Don Orión indicated the translucent tentacles writhing out of the exposed brain stem. They reached out and squirmed as he glided his hand just above their fibrous surface.

“No.”

“It is a parasite composed of nothing but sound. It senses only sound. Its metabolism is based on sound – it even reproduces by sound.”

Carlos looked bewildered.

“It is an ingenious contraption of sound waves,” said the young shaman, “spawned by the priests of Katatòn. They control their hosts by reinforcement – if the host does something the worm agrees with, it floods the brain with endorphins, otherwise it starves it. The Katatonians can program them to make their hosts carry out nearly any atrocity. Give me your hand.”

Don Orión placed Carlos’s hand onto the corpse. The pectoral muscle twitched and Carlos cringed. When the corpse sat upright, and he jerked his hand away.

“I thought you said he was dead!”

“He is dead. The worm still has some influence over the nervous system.”

The corpse’s chest expanded. Air filled its lungs. It exhaled and let out a high pitched scream like knives against a chalkboard. Carlos put his hands over his ears. He felt dizzy and nauseous, like something was stabbing at his brain.

“What is that?” he asked. His legs wobbled and he nearly collapsed.

“The worm is trying to find a new host. But don’t worry, it cannot survive in you. You are… protected.”

“Protected?” Carlos’s neon bat returned and fluttered about his face and he swatted at it.

“Surely you don’t think you can hide that?” said the young shaman of the bat. “You have been breaking the rules, abusing the medicine.”

Carlos couldn’t hide it, nor could he hide his anxiety.

Don Orión held out his hand and the bat, which was neon pink at the moment, landed on it.

“So, you can see it?” asked Carlos.

“One who is so clearly ill-prepared for the consequences should not consume of it.” Don Orión took a deep breath and then exhaled onto the bat. It grew to be twice its original size, and its color changed to neon green.

“Do you know how we punish those who behave so recklessly?”

Carlos looked intensely at the young shaman.

“You are from los guerreros estrellas, aren’t you?” asked the young shaman.

Before Carlos could answer, the young shaman broke into a spasm, his arms flailed, his legs kicked, and he spat and spewed gibberish. By the time Carlos could come to his aid, the fit had already ended with the young shaman stumbling over one of the carts, casting a tray of scalpels and biscripts onto the floor.

Carlos didn’t know what to make of the display, and he felt tempted to make a run for it. But he also felt sympathy for the young Don. After all, his contributions to the war against the Katatonians were countless, and he was sure that no one ever left Tepe D without his permission.

“My apologies,” said the young shaman, picking himself up. “My nerves are not what they used to be – I’m afraid I no longer have the mechanics for existing in both worlds at once.”

Carlos looked puzzled.

“Aren’t you are from Las Estrellas?” asked Don Orión.

“Yes… but…”

“Then you know how to build a mace? The weapon for which your people were once respected?”

“Well, it’s been a long time…”

“Either you know how, or you don’t. Which is it?”

“Yes. I know how.”

“Then you have a choice, guerrero. You can carry out a task for me in the other world, or you can join the clergy, and give your mind to the deity.”

Carlos’s jaw dropped. “That is not a choice,” he fumed.

“I’m glad you feel that way.” The young shaman smiled and clapped his hands together. “Isabel!”

She appeared within seconds. “Take this guerrero to Separación.”

“Separación?” said Carlos. “Can’t I go to the other side as myself?”

Isabel bound Carlos’s hands with chains, and blindfolded him.

“It is only until you are in Separación,” explained Don Orión, “then she will remove the chains and blindfold.”

* * *

12:53 pm Martes, Mayo 16, 1954 (PDT)
Rascar Pablo, Jalisco

Carlos knew that brujos often traveled to the other world by separation. Gerreros never did. If he had known it would be expected of him he would have considered joining the clergy. Nor did he know much about the process of separation, but he did know it was dangerous, and rumors of brujos completely losing their sense of self – not remembering who they were, or whether they were anyone at all – had surfaced from time to time.

Isabel guided him through the maze of hallways by the chain bindings on his wrists. He was able to wriggle out of the blindfold by rubbing his shoulder up against it. Isabel cut a regal figure indeed. Not a bad view, he thought, as he followed her across the walkway leading to the next cabin, hundreds of feet above the canyon floor, to what was probably his doom.

“What are you looking at?” she said, peering over her shoulder at him.

“I’m looking at you, chica.”

She smiled. “I know what you’re thinking.”

“Oh yeah? What’s that?”

“You are thinking you should have given your mind to the deity.”

Carlos glared at her.

“Come,” she said. “I want to show you something.” She took a detour onto some narrow, makeshift scaffolding. Carlos almost lost his balance when he looked down and saw how high up they were.

They came to a stairwell from below which rose wiry echoes of delirious chatter. The stairs terminated at a cabin, the lizard with three tongues and the word “Clero” were painted on its entrance. A row of doorways lined the hallway. The chatter grew louder. Isabel opened one of the doors and went in. Carlos followed her. A man was inside pacing back and forth, babbling, and pointing his finger accusatorily at someone who was not there. The room was clean, meticulously organized. The bed was made, the desk kempt, a row of books in descending height. King James, and the Mendoza Codex among them. On the floor was stretched a canvas on which an unfinished, maze-like topographical map was drawn in a multitude of colors and mediums. Jars of murky water and tadpoles weighed down its corners and held it taught. Beans, rice, and a thousand little shards of a porcelain were strewn across the wall.

“Not hungry today?” asked Isabel.

“Fuck you!” said the man. “I remember when I became a human!”

“Carlos,” said Isabel, “meet Francisco, the mapmaker.”

Carlos raised an eyebrow at what looked to him like a lunatic. “Mucho gusto?”

“I remember,” Francisco said to the bean and rice encrusted wall before him, “At first we were everywhere like… like… mucus! Like film on a glass bubble, but then we were… peeled off by observation and… and… stretched and filled by the voice of the deity and… and then we were buoyant and we sailed like balloons on the swollen flatulents!”

Carlos leaned into Isabel. “Chica,” he whispered, “what’s wrong with this guy?”

“He is a mapmaker,” she whispered, “he goes to Katatòn almost every day to search for Maximilian’s domain. He has given his mind to the deity… and stop calling me chica.”

Francisco knelt before the canvas, took a polliwog from one of the jars, swallowed it, and with his finger, scraped up some red from the palette of colors and continued painting. “We expanded into mist and contracted into foam,” he said. “We were flung from the crest of the wave that broke onto the cosmic wake, whose ebb and flow – the primordial motion driven by the harangues of a pink moon – persisted for eons. And when the spume was smeared ashore… that’s when I became a human.”

Carlos cringed at the display.

“What did you do today, Francisco?” asked Isabel.

“My name is not Francisco!” he said. “My name is… umm… well… something…”

Carlos’s bat appeared and fluttered about where Francisco knelt. Francisco then went to Carlos and whispered to him. “Please put that thing away, Chank is racist against bats.”

“Racist?” asked Carlos. “Who?”

The mapmaker pointed to the beans and rice on the wall, “Chank,” he whispered, “he’s racist.”

“Carlos will be needing a compass that points to the One Tree on the other side,” said Isabel.

“Jalisco’s escape velocity,” the mapmaker spat, “is three buttons of the dark succulent. And to achieve inclination toward the One Tree… one blue polliwog.”

The mapmaker took another polliwog from a jar and dangled it by its tail before Carlos’s mouth. “Take it like a good guerrero,” he said with a deranged look in his eyes.

Carlos looked at Isabel and screwed up his face.

“Take it,” she said.

Carlos swallowed the polliwog and gagged and scowled trying to keep it down.

The mapmaker took Carlos’s bound hands and studied his palms. He whispered an incantation. “Dale a sus palmas el don de la dirección hacia El Único Árbol del otro lado, y protégelo hasta el fin. Mira.. ”

When Carlos looked at his hands. The creases in his palms flashed sharply with bright blue and purple that left him momentarily blind. “Ay… cabrón…”

As they exited Francisco’s quarters, Isabel put the blindfold back over Carlos’s eyes. “Do you feel better about your choice?” she asked him. “That man was a guerrero just like you were.”

Carlos shuddered at her use of the past tense ‘were’ as if he’d already been stripped of his station.

“He was sentenced to the Clergy,” she said, “for abusing the medicine – now he serves the deity, he can’t remember his own name, who he is, his past.”

Carlos said nothing.

“But by doing this you will get a better chance than anyone to find Maximilian, and separation is no longer a sure forfeit of one’s sense of self. Your chances will be much better than Francisco’s.”

“And what are my chances?”

“About fifty-fifty.”

Carlos sighed.

* * *

1:31 pm Martes, Mayo 16, 1954 (PDT)
Rascar Pablo, Jalisco

Once in Separación, Isabel removed the bindings from Carlos’s wrists and the blindfold from his face. Carlos looked around the candle-lit room. Ornate dream-catchers and ancient Jalisciense masks hung from the ceiling. The walls were decked with shelves that held hundreds of old volumes with titles in Castelian, Old Romance and a third language which he did not recognize that bore a resemblance to Nahuatl. There was a wooden desk littered with dust-covered codices, and a relic of what looked like the skeleton of an abnormally small human holding a dish that contained a white powdery substance. Across from the relic sat a large wooden chair with straps and bindings about which various runes and symbols were drawn onto the stone floor with chalk.

“Sit down,” she said.

Carlos climbed into the chair and she began fastening bindings around his arms and legs.

“For your own safety,” she said, referring to the bindings. “We are going see the deity – you must not speak in his presence. And know that I won’t hesitate to leave you there should you fail in this.”

“I told you,” said Carlos, “I’ll do it.”

“Good.”

She took a flask from the shelf, grabbed Carlos by the hair, forced his head back.

“Drink this,” she said.

Carlos tried not to laugh but he couldn’t help it. “I like you, chica,” he whaled.

She tightened her grip. He opened his mouth and she poured down the contents of the flask. She pulled down one of the masks that hung from the ceiling and placed it over Carlos’s face. It was wood with a white skull painted onto it.

She removed her clothes so that she was completely naked, and then she took a lit candle from a mantle and carefully set its flame to the white powder in the dish of the relic.

“Wow,” exclaimed Carlos, “Are we getting naked?”

“Shhh! Silencio, cabrón!”

The powder ignited. Its brightness transformed the entire room. The mask over Carlos’s face grew warm and, looking through it, he found himself on the wall of a massive pyramid where a long queue of women – each nude and carrying an infant – snaked its way up. He tried to move but he felt weak. He looked down and his body was that of an infant. He tried to shout but it came out the cry of a baby. Isabel appeared and scooped him into her arms and joined the other women.

They reached the top of the pyramid and Carlos could see the women taking turns placing their infants into the hands of the giant monkey carved from some heavenly stone. It was Isabel’s turn. She placed Carlos’s infant body into the hands of the stone monkey.

Carlos could see nothing but blue sky and sunshine. Then the sun convulsed, and with a flash of its light came a searing headache, and then blackness.

The next thing he saw was Isabel as she removed the mask from his face and unstrapped him from the chair. Light crept back in and he recognized the candle-lit room, and the little skeleton relic on which black ash now sizzled and smoked.

“Are you okay?” asked Isabel, sincerity in her voice.

“I was a baby!”

“Your form is a reflection of your knowledge of the universe.”

“Why does my head hurt?”

“The deity has given you a gift.”

“What gift? A headache?”

“You will know soon enough.”

“What now?”

“You’ll go to the other world.”

“How will I go?”

“Your mind will be injected into a human. You’re to build a mace to help us kill off the worms.”

Don Orión burst through the door waiving about a sheet of paper. “A human has been there,” he shouted.“A human child!”

“Where?” asked Isabel.

“To wherever Maximilian is hiding!”

“How do you know?”

“Because of this.” The young shaman brandished a drawing of a bare-breasted faun gargoyle. “This was drawn by a human child. It is of an old Habsburg relic – one of Maximilian’s prized possessions – it would never be found outside his domain.”

“A human child has been to Katatòn, and escaped?” asked Isabel. “And lives?”

“Why are you just standing there?” shouted the young shaman, “It must be this child that the worms are after! Get him ready! Now! – if he’s to protect this human!”

“But Carlos isn’t ready,” argued Isabel, “and it would take at least a couple of days to prepare him.”

“Does he have a compass?”

“Yes.”

“And he’s seen the deity?”

“Yes… but…”

“Then he is ready.”

“But what human is he to occupy? Do you even have any tracers?”

“I was able to get this,” he said as he pulled a lock of frayed human hair from his shirt pocket, “it is from the same child who made the drawing.”

“But how is he to inhabit the same human that he’s supposed to protect?”

“There is no other way. And there are worms on the boy’s path as we speak. Do as I say. Get him ready, now!”

Carlos followed the young shaman and his apprentice further up the canyon wall, up a staircase made of wood and rope, to the uppermost cabin, which they entered from a bottom hatch. There was a skylight on the ceiling, and a lightning rod jutting through it like a giant antennae. Below the skylight was a bathtub filled to the brim with a mud-like substance. A short bald brujo with dark skin and a heavily tattooed face was there. He approached Carlos and pulled four bone slivers from a beaded quiver on his wrist, and whispered an incantation as he carefully stabbed each one meticulously into carefully chosen points on Carlos’s left arm.

Carlos flinched and growled. “Ay… cabrón!”

Then, from a small flask on his bracelet, the brujo sprinkled a line of brown dust onto his thumb, and held it up to Carlos’s nose.

“Ole,” he said.

“Wait!” said Carlos, turning to Isabel. “The human. I will occupy his body?”

“Yes,” answered Isabel.

“I will control it?”

“Only when he sleeps. When he’s awake you will see what he sees, and you can speak to him, but that’s all.”

After hesitating a moment, Carlos snorted the powder off the warlock’s thumb. An enormous distance immediately grew between him and the others in the cabin, and their voices became faint, and he could barely hear them. He looked at Isabel. Her mouth was moving but he could hear nothing. “Cómo?!”

Isabel shouted something. Her voice was prolonged and distorted, “ANY human is a potential worm!”

On Don Orión’s signal the short brujo wrapped his arms around Carlos from behind, and Isabel took him by his legs.

Carlos felt himself go weightless as they plunged him into the tub. Mud slowly spilled over its sides as he sank. Only his face remained above the surface. He watched as his neon green bat danced about the room in a panic. Don Orión held out his hand and beckoned it land there.

“Stay you here,” said the young shaman to the bat. He took a leather strip from around his neck and tied the bat by its leg to the foot of the tub. “Protect him where you can.”

The bone slivers in Carlos’s arm began to burn, and he felt himself rise. Isabel shouted something into his face, but he could barely hear her. “Qué?!”

“Stay away from the hole,” she screamed.

“What hole?!” The initial onset of dissociation subsided. He felt euphoric, his heartbeat grew louder, and time slowed with each breath.

Wind howled and dark clouds rolled in and boomed over the canyon. The short brujo looked up, through the skylight, to a massive thunderhead, and shouted, “Dios mio! Dale huida!” Lightning struck the rod and electricity arced over the tub.

Carlos was buoyant, outside his body. He looked down and saw his face still an island in the mud-filled tub. The short brujo was frantically trying to get his attention, shouting something inaudible, pointing to the skylight. Carlos looked up and began floating towards it. The closer he got to it, the faster he went, until he flew out of it, into the clouds. Everything – the cabin, Tepe D, Jalisco – shrunk to the size of a pinhole. Time became discrete, dropping like tiles onto a pathway, unfolding before him on the horizon. In that moment he felt connected to everyone, to everything, and he understood.

“Yo miro todo,” he shouted. And then he was confused. “Yo miro… yo… yo?… qué es yo?”

A dark hole opened up next to him and pulled at him like a vacuum. He drifted toward it, straying from the tiled path. The closer he got to it, the less certain he became of who he was. He struggled, tried to evade it, clung to himself desperately, but it was too powerful, sucking up everything he knew, and his memories flew from him, one-by-one, like beads off a necklace, until he wasn’t sure whether he had ever been anyone at all. He pulled away with all of his might.

“I am Carlos,” he shouted, “Soy yo! I am me!… I am me!… Soy yo!”

He lost all feeling in his legs. His arms followed, and then the rest of his physical self. Then it returned, only the sensations trickling back to him were somehow not his own. His eyes opened – seemingly involuntarily – and he found himself in a large hall with shattered windows surrounded by a rabble of teenagers chanting, “Fight! Fight!” And then there was blackness.

End of Part I

Part II will be posted on 03/18/2024.

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