This is:
a dusty, nearly-nameless colonial town baking in the summer heat, simmering in the deep humidity, encroached on all sides by the slithering green promise of growth. Everything grows everywhere here, and everything else finds a way in and something is always eating something, somewhere. Something is decaying and something is erupting into decadent bloom and someone is always being born or dying. Without much notice.
Off the beaten path; away from the fresh breezes of the coast. Not so far into the southern mountains that elevation offers any respite from the oppressive heat.
There is no Anglican church in town, and he presided over the funeral at sufferance of an elderly but still dark-haired monsignor in the cool shadows of La Parroquia de Sagrado Corazón de Jesus three days past. Sufferance: not welcome. Msr. Josemaria Barragán extended no similar invitation to Pan to stay in guest quarters at the breezy white rectory and he had only a glimpse of the pleasures inside: the white central courtyard filled with birdsong, the plashing fountain, the flare of a peacock's tail - oh yes, a fucking peacock's tail - glimmering iridescent in the afternoon light.
So: guest quarters in the cheap guesthouse because he could not impose on a family poorer than most back in his parish. A guesthouse that caters to hippies and hipsters headed off the beaten path, trying to discover something authentic in the interior, away from the coast.
The height of the day and he is making arrangements to leave as the work is done, the grieving are not comforted, but known and heard and acknowledged, their loss has eased. The dead man is in ground and it is sacred ground, also, again at the Monsignor's sufferance, in exchange for a donation to the restoration of the rose window depicting, in rather brutal anatomical detail, the eponymous sacred heart, pierced and bleeding. The central square is bright but blasted white and lazy in the heat, nothing moving but a lizard skittering along stucco. The sluggish curl of ceiling fans.
When a small hand tugs on the belt loop of his black pants and he finds Adolfo, who is seven, and related somehow to the dead man: son or cousin or brother or nephew. Call him nephew, and pushed by the family as their spokesman because Adolfo speaks English to the American, no matter how often or how regularly Pan attempted to address the grieving in the Spanish they share.
Fr. EcheverríaMexico is not trapped in time. To the north wage wars fueled by American consumption of narcotics and he was held up in customs for more than one day as the bordermen made sense of his intent and his destination and it's going to be worse going back north because the bordermen on the other side of the great wall can't tell the difference between a Hispanic of Taíno extraction and a Hispanic of Nahuatl or Aztec or Otomi extraction. The people of Mexico are not and have never been one people but it's easier that way, to look at them as such.
It's easier to look at the priest come down from Colorado as an American. He is American. He speaks Puerto Rican and he has a United States passport and he speaks a Spanish that doesn't sound anything like the Spanish of Veracruz and he didn't expect an embrace and the full use of their facilities when he arrived at the parroquia. Accepted their resistance and the monsignor's resistance and the resistance of the land and the people who worked the land and now it's time to go home.
No cell phone reception for he has no international plan on his inexpensive model and when he wants to call the church he has to call collect. Hasn't spoken to Rosa in a week. He has an itinerary that he might return to the airport before he overstays his visa.
A warm day threatening to grow hot and he stands outside in black jeans and a white button-down shirt. Dons his sunglasses for the land here is dusty and ancient and the sun is a part of the people and not something from which the people try to hide. That stained glass window in sight. He turns to walk down the steps and out of the place when a hand finds his sleeve.
"Adolfo," he says and he knows Adolfo will answer in English because this is an opportunity for him, because he wants to learn and grow fluent that he might go north himself one day and bring his family up out of the poverty they know here, but Father Echeverría speaks in Spanish even though it isn't their Spanish. "¿Qué tal?"
ars moriendi"Pa - " Adolfo begins, then stops and corrects himself with a quick and darting smile. White teeth in his tanned face, blinding in the heat of the afternoon sun. "Father."
Beyond the boy, a lizard crawls lazy over white stone. All the village's cats are sleeping lazy in the midday sun. They curl like mantles around the statues of the saints, tucked carefully against the smooth limestone, the thick stone walls that make the interior of the parroquia cooler than any building in the city. Even the few official buildings, the strange little museum full of artifacts unearthed by local farmers tilling the fields, which are cooled by wheezing second-hand air conditioning units that smell like creeping green rot.
The boy doesn't have sunglasses.
He doesn't have shoes and the pavement is scorching but he has callouses so he bears it. Gives a surreptitious look upward at the Sacred Heart window and crosses himself, then looks back up to Pan.
"El tío, he don't go yet. You - " a pause, the boy frowning as he searches through the words he knows, and finds the next right one, "Will you come? Tell him to sleep."
Fr. EcheverríaBeside the priest the boy is dreadfully small. The top of his head not even to the priest's waist. Many of the men in the village stand a full head shorter than him, sometimes more, they plagued by poor nutrition and genetics thus damning them to short stature. In a place sun-drenched and seaside with everything awash in God's light if not the favor spilling forth from the Vatican their Roman Catholic denomination calls home he still draws attention to himself but these people do not trust him.
The anglicano boriqueño. They have no reason to trust him.
But the boy tugs his sleeve and crosses himself and the priest looks down at him for several seconds before he drops into a crouch. Would be at his eye level if he took off his sunglasses. Boy can still feel the weight of his gaze through the plastic lenses.
Another man would have assured the boy that of course his uncle sleeps. They buried him yesterday. He saw the casket go into the earth, does he not remember? His uncle is with God now.
Pan asks: "Where is he?"
ars moriendiThe boy is astonished to have the full freight of the priest's attention. Never has a man in black (and white) looked at him so directly, and so specifically on his level. It takes the boy a moment to remember or hear the question, staring as he is at his own reflection and the blinding starburst of the sun's light in the surface of Pan's plastic sunglasses. Pan asks a question and the boy wants to answer but he does not have one. He just curls his shoulders in a sharp little jerk.
"El tío he come back at at - noche. Night?" And peels his lips back from his teeth to make a noise, like scritch scritch scritch. "En la puerta. He want to come in and we say no, no. He wants sweet milk. Abuelita, she say no. Maybe soon she lets him in? He makes her sad."
Fr. Echeverría"Your grandmother is right," he says, "to keep him out even if it makes her sad."
The sunglasses keep the light from hitting his eyes but it keeps the truth of his thoughts from the people he consoles out here, the people he doesn't know and who don't know him. Besides the people there's the boy and the boy don't need to see what he thinks about his uncle in the green of his eyes.
He rests a dry hand on the boy's shoulder.
"¿Puedes hacerme un favor? Vuelve a casa y di a tu abuela que vengo ahorita. Y lo inhumaré justamente. ¿Bien?"
ars moriendiAnd the boy, the boy nods solemnly to the priest, still more than a bit mesmerized by his own reflection in the lenses, by the captured brilliance of the sun overhead. This close he smells like sweat and farm animals and lard and masa and wood ash and he nod nod nod nod nods his understanding, punctuating each of Pan's sentences, every one of his statements, every single instruction with a bob of his head.
"Si, Padre."
Does not attempt to respond in English this time, because there are only so many levels on which our minds can function and in this moment all the boy can manage is to accept and remember the instructions he is given.
Adolfo turns around, glancing up once more at that graphically shredded, bloodied and beating glass heart in the rose window, crosses him self, and runs off on soft padded feet through the ageless white heat of the afternoon. Except for the drift of palm fronds in the faint breeze, he is the only thing moving in the square.
Fr. EcheverríaLast week he spoke to Rosa on the telephone and it will cost La Iglesia del Buen Pastor but La Iglesia del Buen Pastor has become much more fiscally responsible in the time that Father Echeverría has been presiding over services and they have funds set aside for things like outlier communications bills. Rosa expects him on a plane tomorrow morning and she will express annoyance at his lateness if this does turn into lateness but she understands. Her family comes from Mexico and though she was born on this side of the border she knows the land and the people in the land. She would stay longer too if she went down to Mexico but she is not a Disciple of the Celestial Chorus. She is a Consor. She hates that she knows what she knows and has seen what she has seen and she told him last night that they needed him back home.
"Sé, Rosa, sé," he'd said.And she'd said, "You do not, Francisco, or you'd be here right now. They don't want you down there any more than we do."
Doesn't matter. He's here now and there's a ritual to perform.
He rises from his crouch and his aging joints protest the crouch and the abandonment of it. He plants his hands on his hips and regards the stained glass and listens to the fronds behind and around him and he starts before he even makes the conscious decision to start communing with the One. Humble despite all that he can do, knowing how much he does not know and all he has not learned to do yet. Still believes he has to pray for the strength to do the things he can do, as if he doesn't know the difference between a gift and a loan.
Maybe ought to step inside the church and find the monsignor and tell him what has just been told to him. But the monsignor's eyes are not open the way his are open and he has already placed him outside the circle of the flock. The dead man's family belongs to the monsignor. The dead man belongs to the priest.
Once the boy has disappeared through the horizon and he feels a wholeness in his heart the priest takes his hands off of his hips and walks through the village to the house of the dead man's mother.
ars moriendiSomething that Rosa did not tell him: how many times that little Cultist has come slinking around looking for him. How Consuela Jimenez was sure that the priest had returned after she saw the girl sitting on the porch of the rectory on a Saturday night, dressed in a fuck-the-world-for trying bustier covered with studs and spikes and her usual prostitute-chic clothing - the fishnets and cutoffs and five inch black-and-silver spike-heeled stilettos, leaning her temple against one of the porch supports and playing with her phone. Pan will perhaps never know that he missed Sera's sole two and a half weeks of sobriety since ever because even if Rosa were inclined to inform him of Sera's occasional presence, at the church or the rectory, Rosa would naturally assume that Sera was drunk, high, fucked up somehow. Maybe she'd even suspect heroin now: as Sera's getting thinner, sharper, more minutely hollow every single day.
These things do not come up in their conversation, though.
And his flock is much larger, more far-flung, and even needier than one drunk girl.
--
That walk in the heat of midday when even the buzzing and biting flies are taking a siesta is both deeply unpleasant and sublimely surreal, all that washed brightness, the central streets of the town with the old colonial homes, heavy adobe facades fronting the dusty streets, thickwalled and brooding, the windows slatted closed and the heavy wooden shutters drawn. No front yards: life centers inside, and Pan knows that inside many of these old homes, perhaps most of them, the vista changes entirely, high-ceilinged, thick-walled rooms sluggish in the afternoon heat but noticeably cooler for the materials, opening around and onto a secret courtyard garden.
The dead man's family do not live in these few but fine old homes, clustered in a core around the central square. Some few of them are even two-storied, with wooden Moroccan balconies hanging off the second stories, all screening wood to hide the residents from view.
So he walks past the small core of the town, past the few commercial establishments. Past the rambling guesthouse hugging the outskirts, surrounded by fruit trees, jungle encroaching in on all sides. Dusty pavement gives way to packed and rutted mud. Further out are the shanties: not thick-walled adobe but plywood and rotting cardboard and corrugated metal roofs think enough to keep out most of the rains that come every afternoon, drenching, almost without fail.
The grandmother's home is one of these: an amalgam of these things. There is one solidly built room made of concrete blocks, each concrete block painstakingly paid for out of the dead man's earnings. The earnings that did not go up his arm or his nose, that did not stay in America or filter back through the chain of commerce to the cartels in the north or the narco terrorists half a world away: One large room of concrete block with rebar sticking up out of the top ready for the story, which may not be built until Adolfo is old enough to make the trip north himself. And a series of appendages - wood and chicken wire and damp cardboard and rusting tin.
The path takes him past the cemetary, where the dead are not so much buried in their sacred ground as they are interred, skeleton upon skeleton, in old stone tombs that sink slowly into the muck, year by year by year. The humblest are shaped like mere coffins. The grandest are extraordinary little chapels, spectacular homes for the dead, and all that stone is covered by wax from half-melted candles that the abuelitas come and light, whenver they have a need or a prayer or a memory.
Fr. EcheverríaWith no one walking with him he keeps his thoughts to himself. Does no good to complain of the heat in places like this but he bears the heat as does everyone who makes their life of the earth and the people who work the earth. His hands are calloused for his hours are spent with the youths and the working class and he is a big man but he is not big with resplendent overindulgence like some pastors grow to be. That weight around his midsection is nothing he could avoid. Middle age is nothing one can avoid.
Humble gratitude in this. He could have ended up like Eduardo.
So he walks and in walking passes the cemetery. They were just here. He had to fight to get the dead man a space in this place and he glances past it as he finishes the walk. A thought strikes him. It's a terrible thought and he cringes at its emergence but Father Echeverría steps off the path for some minutes that he might walk through the grounds and find the plot where they buried the man. No headstone yet for the family cannot afford one. Not even a wooden cross crafted by hand. They are still too shocked to mourn.
He knows where it is though. He was just there yesterday.
ars moriendiThere are more dead here than there are living. The cemetery is quiet and overgrown and it is choked with stone and concrete coffins, sitting over the sodden ground that would throw the dead back to life so easily. Let them come belly-up on dark nights, rotten. Be sniffed out and dug up by scavengers and hungry predators and dark gods, too. Because this is a place that remembers gods older than Father Echevarría's own, who demanded sacrifices bloodier and more constantly than his own, and never offered the world a son to kill in place of the old ways of sacrifice.
The cemetery like the town square is silent at this hour and he hears the heat and not the insects because even the insects are drowsing now. Sunlight so bright off lichen-covered stones as he walks through the slow-disintegrating grandeur full of forgotten names and dying legacies and the dead. Past the vaults and mausoleums, through the aging statues of weeping angels and crying saints and maudlin mothers. Back and back and back until: these plain plots, sandwiched together by concrete curbs. Poured concrete vaults into which the dead are entombed, most nameless, who can afford a carpenter to make a cross that will rot in the heat or be devoured by termites, who can afford a stonemason to etch the names of the dead into the concrete. Who can read, to remember the names of the buried.
Here: where the land is beginning to sink and the concrete is newer but already more rotten than some of those mausoleums near the entrance in the spreading shadow of a rubber tree covered with twisting vines.
If he thinks that the heavy concrete lid of that wretched little vault is - ajar somehow, it is not his imagination.
There is also: a smear of red powder in the center of the concrete.
The melted remains of a single ebon candle burned down to a stub.
The scent of old rot, sweet and thick in the air.
Fr. EcheverríaA dozen things he would have done if he himself were a different man. Wouldn't be here if he were a different man. Would have been going to a grave of his own instead of solitary confinement if his eyes had opened into Hell instead of Heaven but he doesn't even think of that so far away from home as he is right now. Doesn't think to return to town and knock on the door of the monsignor or slip into denial and go on to the grieving mother's house. Doesn't contact the constable.
What he does is Father Echeverría braces both hands on the sides of the vault to test its bindings and if he can find a place to apply leverage and push it more ajar than it sits already then the priest does so. A rational explanation exists not for the vault itself but for the explanation he will give if anyone comes upon him breaking into the grave of the joven who came back a heroinómano, poisoned up there in the soulless north.
And as he examines the vault he starts to utter the Lord's Prayer in Latin. Not rote in the sense that it is mindless recitation. He cannot Work without it. Has to bolster himself up, test he is still strong enough to perform the miracles his God bestowed upon him.
ars moriendiThe vault is unstable and the concrete is rough and the lid is light and has not been sealed. Not properly or not wholly or someone came and chipped away at whatever mortar they might have used to chink it closed and from inside the scent of rot that blooms more solidly in the foetid afternoon heat, a rot that breathes, sweet and ugly, the things that happen to our corpses when we slough off this mortal coil.
Empty inside.
Or rather: not empty because this is not the first time this grave has been sealed and unsealed. The dead man was laid over the dead-past and beneath where he lay there were other remains, more crawlingly skeletal than his own. Hair remains, streaming from the yellowing skull of the next-lowest corpse, and fingernails, curved to ivoried points by some trick-of-the-body that remembers how to grow.
He prays and seeks no counsel but his own and God's. Can taste the sidling rot in the air beneath his tongue as he remembers the bread of life and the blood of life and the body that Christ sacrificed for him and for every sinner when he hung himself - when he allowed himself to be so hung - from that Roman tree.
And he is a long way from Galilea and the gods here are different and less human-minded than his own but:
the prayer tugs, this noiseless point of awareness in his mind.
Not far, not far.
There are fine red filaments from that red powder and fine black filaments from that candle black as squid's ink, black as the other-side of shadow or even Shadow, this gentle pulse of otherness that is noxious and noisome outside the taste of his prayer and also: which braid themselves nearly together in his vision, like an astral tether.
The braid curves through the graveyard. It is livid and wrong in his vision and it
weaves
back through the graves, away from the rotting edge of the swamp into the slowly-dimishing glories of colonial heros past. Where the concrete tombs become more elaborate, where they become not mere tombs but chapels, monuments, mausoleums, memento mori. Where slowly disintegrating angels with white eyes and clipped wings brood over lichen covered marble. Where the tombs have doors that are never sealed because the living may wish to remember the dead.
They bind together, red and black, they fuse-and-thicken and the trail-and-prayer end in one of the oldest of the chapel-tombs, closest to the rusting iron gates, overgrown with invasive trumpet vine and jasmine. The door is just ajar.
Fr. EcheverríaStone angels never held much sway over him for the one that guides him through this life for handing him his purpose carries a flaming sword and speaks without opening his mouth. All he has here with him is the knowledge that his purpose is true and he has not done his duty for the damned man is not well laid to rest and he cannot return north where the soil soaks up blood so well it cannot give it back to the crops until he knows the damned man is going to stay put.
His flight is supposed to leave tonight but he does not think about that now. Father Echeverría slides the lid of the vault back to the state of almost-but-not-quite open in which he found it and he moves his hand over the stations of the Cross before himself, before he leaves.
"et ne nos inducas in tentationem; sed libera nos a Malo."
So he walks back through the graves away from the rotting edges and into the boastful colossuses that speak of the wealth and the entitlement of the European conquerors who left their mark on the appetites and the attitudes of this place hundreds of years after the bloodshed ceased. He walks past the stone angels without fear that they look upon him with judgment in their eyes and his footfalls are soft for the reverence he holds for the place though it holds no such thought for him.
And he knows what the monsignor would think if he heard or saw him now. He lights a cigarillo for he does not have incense ready at hand and though he does not smoke the cigarillo the smoke is herbal and cloying and pushes his awareness out past where he can see. If any sentience other than his own existed in the place he'd know it.
"Eduardo?" he calls.
ars moriendiThere is no answer.
Or rather, the answer is not verbal. Is not formed in a human brain and made by a human mouth. It lacks that electrical spark, that frission of awareness and - yes - intention with which even the least-human of humans frames their answers.
It is not even animal but,
it sounds like one.
Scritch-scritch scratch.
Scritch-scritch scratch,
- from inside the mausoleum.
D Á V I L A etched into the disintegrating marble over his head. Now barely discernible.
Scritch-scritch scratch.
Scritch-scritch scratch.
- comes closer with every beat of his heart.
Fr. EcheverríaHe knows the man was dead because he saw him laid out on the slab at the morgue with gangrene cut into the infected injection sight and the vomit crusted around bloody-dry lips and the milky stare off into nothing settled into his eyes.
He knows the man was dead because they performed an autopsy on the body to rule out any other cause of death besides the obvious and the Y-incision ought to have killed him and the removal and replacement of the brain ought to have killed him.
He knows the man was dead because he spent a week after the autopsy in a sealed coffin awaiting approval from U.S. Customs for the shipment to leave the country and another week in transit and by the time the coffin arrived in Vera Cruz a living being would have died of thirst and when they opened the coffin they saw no signs of metabolism or persistent signs of life. Only a body decomposing at the rate at which they expected it to decompose.
And Father Echeverría does not believe in vampires or werewolves or zombies but he does believe in demons and he does believe that demons can and do cause the dead to rise up sometimes. He also knows that things exist in the cosmos that are beyond his understanding but he trusts that God knows what He's doing. That God has entrusted him with the tools he needs to know what he is doing even if he does not always know what He is doing.
So he thought he knew Eduardo was dead. Something is on the other side of the door and it feels like Eduardo but does not feel alive.
Father Echeverría takes his rosary from its place in his hip pocket and loops it around his wrist that he may have it in his left hand if he needs it. He tests the door of the mausoleum and if it will give way he pushes it out of the way.
ars moriendiThe door gives way; groans on its hinges or rather sighs and there's a shriek too, if a quiet one, a shearing of metal-on-metal that feels old and fractured and fracturing.
Dust coughs up from the marble floor, drifts in rising spirals of motion see and he can see too: the tracks in the long-dead dust. The dead-man's tracks, scuffed and sloughing-slow because he never lifted his feet.
Does not lift them now as even as he shuffles toward that open door.
This is what Father Echeverría sees inside that mausoleum: the dead man in his funeral suit the vomit still crusted to his mouth despite the dead man's sister-and-mother who took that broken and mutilated and embalmed if just barely body with the grotesquerie of the Y-incision and the broken rot of gangrene and the track marks riddling his once-strong arms and stripped him down and scrubbed him clean. Clean as they could scrub his arms, which were past the point of rigor mortis, and dressed him in the best clothes they could find, nevermind that they could not afford the loss of them.
He has decayed further; faster really than one would expect. The grayed skin framing his skull has sunken in and the hair has grown and there's a place between his nose and cheek where bone shines through.
Bone also: shines through his abraded fingertips, where rotten and maggot-riddled flesh has been smeared and clawed away leaving the tips of his carpal bones mounted by ghoulishly sharp nails visible.
Scritch-scritch scratch.
Eduardo is dead.
Eduardo shuffles toward the edge of the half-circle of light leaking in through the open door of the mausoleum.
He comes no closer than the sunlight but he can smell the humid life, the glow of it from the priest and his mouth lolls open with hunger or hatred or sorrow all mute. Tongue no more than a bloated maggot between his peeling lips.
The gums have receded. The roots of his teeth are visible and his mouth is pulled back in a rictus of agony.
Fr. Echeverría"Ay, mijo..."
He remembers the first time Eduardo came into his office and he remembers the last. They are not the same time. The first time he was there for the NA meeting and he was there for the solace of the language spoken during the services and the agony of distance from his family though he sent funds from his factory work home to them and he did not cry in the office of Padre Echeverría but his spirit did cry out and the Padre did what he could to soothe him.
And he set him to work where he could. Not only the high school kids but the men of the church who fixed broken fences and cracking steps and removed pews unfit for duty and replaced them with new ones. The work ought to have kept him clean but the temptation was great and Eduardo struggled. They watched him struggle and they steered him towards salvation.
The last time he sat on the couch in the office he spoke of the ease with which he could find a fix and he heard Padre Echeverría speak of the things he could do to stay away from the ease but he did not listen.
Now he can neither hear nor listen and Father Echeverría stands in the light and he knows that is not one of his children shambling towards him. Too decayed and too far gone to even resemble one of his flock yet he strayed and he still walks and if the body of Eduardo feels the growing Light in the place it does not show in the rot of his dead eyes.
"Venga acá."
He keeps a flask in his back pocket but it does not hold firewater. It holds Holy Water. He holds out one arm like to welcome the man back to the arms of the Lord while the other goes to that back pocket and uncaps the flask.
ars moriendiWhat the dead man knows or understands of those words is a mystery. The eyes are blank and milky and only the half-rotten fingers: the ones that have been worked down to the fucking bone speak of things like intention, meaning, awareness-of-place. He has been scratching them to bone on the walls, or perhaps he has been sharpening those wicked nails, the same inky black as the half-burned candle, to clawed points.
But oh, mijo says the priest and though the shambling corpse of a dead junkie shies from the half-circle of sunlight spread into the dusty marble floor of the Dávila chapel / mausoleum he moves toward the sound of the priest's voice. Stumble / shuffles because they did not bury him with shoes because we were meant to walk on god's earth, to feel the heat of sunrise warming the ground-beneath-our-feet, to wake again in glory or fall again damned or muddle about in purgatory for a thousand lifetimes, atoning, knowing, learning, understanding that hell is as much the absence of God as it is the literal presence of the brightest of His fallen angels but -
- a sick, wet sound. Like the shearing off of a wet sheet.
Eduardo staggers into the light and here is a surprise: it does not burn his dead flesh, though the bright burst of sunlight does make him begin to suppurate even faster.
Foul blisters rise to the surface of his skin and oh Pan the dead man is reaching for you in death much as he did in life. Mouth open, gagging wet on that bloated tongue, this
"gkkk gkkk gkkk"
- gurgling out of him as he reaches for the priest's arms even as the priest uncaps that flask.
Reaches to grasp Pan's left forearm and right shoulder the way he might have once in life, in his office, an expression of hard masculine gratitude, something shunted and shoved back into his skin as he refused to cry about the pain, the anxiety: of separation and the punch-through agony of addiction. The passing but luminous pleasure of an always-ephemeral high.
His fucking claws dig into Pan's left forearm, the open arm, welcoming the dead man back to the Lord. The nails are shivering-cold and smoke-black and there's a sort of smoke already drifting from the corpse right?
But also: the priest knows his ritual is already working. He can see the red-and-black threads unraveling, loosening their hold on what is left of the dead man's basal ganglia, unhinging his spine. There's a grasping but animate slackness as the work expands and the cold shiver of pain as first sharpened nails, then exposed bone, punch through his left forearm.
Fr. EcheverríaCall it hubris: he does not fear the grip of the dead man nor the bite of his bone through the still-living flesh on his own arm because the priest believes he will survive this. Because pain is just his body crying out that it has been injured and he knows it has been injured but he will walk away from this and the dead man won't.
He flinches with the pain because it is a sharp and sudden thing and he is not insensate but he does not recoil from it.
That is not to say that he does not feel the fear in the pit of him. A cold oily thing that would rise up in him if he were younger. But he is not younger and his mentor has been dead since he was. He ignores the fear for it has no place in the ritual.
And this is not a proper viaticum for he does not have a pyx or a burse or wax candles. No communion cloth. He cannot purify his fingers properly but he does spill some from the mouth of the open flask over the hand that does not come up between the two of them to brace on the dead man's shoulder to keep his mouth away from his neck. A fear he has though he does not know he has it.
He intones in Latin - exaudi nos, Domine sancte, Pater omnipotens, aeterne Deus - though the dead man cannot hear him and though no one dwells in this house but the bodies of those who have gone home to Him already.
Holy Water leaves the flask in a cross before the dead man and the water hits him on the stations. He can already feel the unlife flee from the corpse but he can also feel the bone break his skin. No point stopping until the dead man will rest in his grave and stay there.
ars moriendiThis is the roughest sort of exorcism: worked more with Will than with ritual, though the skeleton of the ritual remains, this framework through and around which Father Echeverría begins to unweaves the animus animating this once-human corpse. The priest steers the dead man's mouth away from his neck; he does not understand that instinct, does not even consider why or how he wrangled the dead man while praying the prayers in Latin, while offering blessing and banishment and absolution, perhaps, for whatever it is beneath and woven through the suppurating flesh that has been taken and consumed by the demon.
There is the heat of the afternoon at his back and low buzz of flies and there are graveworms in the moving flesh, devouring the softest and most tender pieces, burrowing into the gelatin of the eyes, laying eggs of the next generation to be born. And bourne.
And then all-at-once, ahh. Collapse. The sun has moved a finger's breadth in the sky and the priest has spent some fair portion of his Will on this work but the work is finally done. Eduardo collapses into a pile of rotting skin and broken bones, half enshadowed, half in the light of the Dávila mausoleum.
The pain in the priest's forearm is sharp and throbbing and the blood where it wells is more black than red but there is surprisingly little blood, for the damage done.
--
So: the priest lays the dead man to Rest and then to rest, returning him to the humble concrete vault in which he was laid just yesterday pushing the lid firmly closed.
The black candle, he finds, has melted to insubstantiality and the red powder smeared across the grave has drifted away in the wind or: been used up, unmade, undone, by the priest's work.
--
He has time to visit the meager little guest house in which he found room-and-sometimes-board to change clothes and wrap a bandage around his wounds.
He has time to visit the dead-man's grandmother and assure her that she will not be troubled by his corpse at night, any longer.
He has time to refuse the meager gifts they attempt to press on him, to pat Adolfo on the head and correct his pronunciation of both Colorado and Denver, and to understand that it won't be all that long before the boy makes his first attempt at the border his uncle crossed to his addiction and his doom.
He has time even to visit the Monsignor and warn him that here the dead rise and he should arm himself with bell book and candle, but this we expect he does not do.
He has time to catch his plane: which leaves just before midnight and arrives sometime in the stark hours of the morning. The ache of his wounds is sharper and more present and more pregnant at altitude but they will heal.
Slowly,
and leaving scars. Which are not the only scars on his arms. Which will fade in time until they are no more than a minor hatchwork of lace on his skin but: scars all the same.
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