Chapter XXVII
XXVII
Elías
A thick fog had rolled into the mountain valley of Mina San Gabriel, obscuring the stars and moon, cloaking Elías in a whisper of moisture.
He shivered—unlike Carolina and María Victoriana, who were wrapped in rebozos, he had not thought to bring a sarape for warmth.
He had left Casa Calavera in a hurry, intending to return to the house straight away.
No longer.
Padre Bartolomé would expect him in a few hours.
Until then, he walked through darkness. He could not retrace his steps if he tried.
San Gabriel was a cluster of adobe houses haphazardly stacked—some practically atop one another—against one side of the valley in a ferocious competition for sunlight, leaving the alleys that cut through them an impossible snarl.
They left the village via a rocky passage narrow enough to thread a needle.
María Victoriana led the way, scrambling like a mountain goat as the path wrenched upward.
He did not want to lose her in the gloom; he pushed himself forward as quickly as he dared.
The fog was too thick for him to judge how high they climbed, but the burning pull of his breath on thin air and the bite of the cold slicing through his sweaty shirt were enough for him to know that if he were to fall, he would keep falling until he struck the gates of Hell.
Carolina walked behind him—or so he reminded himself, at least twice, for he could not hear her footfalls over María Victoriana’s scramble and his own labored breathing.
She moved like a ghost. Perhaps she had become one.
Perhaps they all were, and this was Purgatory: a mad dash ever higher, higher, with a plummet to doom below and no salvation in sight.
The entrance to a small grotto appeared as a new scene in a dream.
First, there was nothing, nothing but Elías’s hoarse panting and the hesitant crunch of footsteps on loose stones, and then, there it was, as if it had always been there.
A narrow opening in solid stone, slim enough in appearance that he might have mistaken it for a crevice unworthy of attention.
But a soft glow winked from inside.
“Mamá always leaves the candles lit, in case anyone wants to come here,” María Victoriana said. “Come on.”
She approached the grotto; the top of her head nearly brushed the apex of the natural arch in the stone. Elías would have to crouch to enter the new shrine.
Carolina appeared from the mist and seized María Victoriana by the arm. She yanked her daughter to the side.
“You stay here,” she said firmly.
Elías’s heart stumbled in his chest. He would have to go in alone?
It had not occurred to him that he might be afraid to enter, but he was.
A sensation of dread had been building behind his sternum throughout the ascent, and now, it swelled with the overbearing power of a wave. No , it said, not alone .
“Why?” he asked.
He felt more than saw the cut of Carolina’s look.
“What you have been doing—what you plan to do—is dangerous. We”—and this had a weight to it, an emphasis that marked him as other —“do not touch the darkness like that. It is against nature. That is why the priests call it the occult. It is as foreign to us as they are.”
“Then why would you bring me here?” he asked.
Her eyes glinted in the gloaming, fierce and determined.
“Darkness,” she said, “can only be undone by its like.”
She gestured for him to enter the grotto.
She would sacrifice him for the greater good. When this understanding unfurled in his breast, he expected it to be met with anger—a frustration at being used, a feeling of injustice.
Instead, he felt a bright pang of relief.
In a way, this was confirmation of all that had gnawed at him over the years, tunneling like maggots through his very bones.
He was evil. He left people. He betrayed them.
He was prideful. He lusted. Greed drove him.
He had never been an angel, but he had fallen like one, and would keep falling, through flame and smoke and sulfur, down, down, down…
And that might actually help Alba.
“We will wait for you,” Carolina said, tone indicating that she considered this a great mercy. “The descent would kill you otherwise.”
—
At first, the soft embrace of being underground was familiar.
It took on an uncanny edge when he remembered that he was dozens of meters, if not a hundred or more, above the village of San Gabriel and Casa Calavera.
He focused instead on the metallic drip of moisture striking stone.
On the smell of candles grazing against humid air.
On the bite of foreign incense, its taste as thick as a tapestry.
The grotto’s ceiling rose overhead; cautiously, he uncurled his hunched back and found that he could stand. A quick glance over his shoulder revealed the small mouth of the entrance, its edges gray and shimmering with fog.
The material world lay behind him. He had chosen to cross beyond it. Each step he took forward was into the empty quadrant of the map, uncharted, unmarred, for here, there be monsters.
Forward he went.
The new shrine was similar to the one he had stumbled upon when he first arrived at Mina San Gabriel.
At first it appeared humbler, for it was smaller in size, but as he took hesitant steps toward it—searching for purchase with the toe of his boot and only settling his weight when he found flat ground—he realized that he had assumed wrong.
The same thin, white effigy held pride of place in the back of the grotto, placed on a low wooden table that served, in a way, as an altar. She was swathed in white cloth, like a statue of a saint, and before her on the table sat that same silver bowl of mercury.
But as he drew near, the air thickened. Incense coalesced around him like fingers of fog, its weight heavier than air as mercury is heavier than water.
No sound from outside could reach through it; he was underwater, he was enveloped.
There was nothing but this: the white effigy, the silver bowl.
He found his hand hovering over it, drawn as if by the power of a magnet.
The silver caught the candlelight and drank it in, consuming it, alchemizing it, transmuting it into a glow that lit the metal from within.
Mercury was like silk, its luster like sin. It was moonlight on Alba’s hair. The burnished gleam of her eyes. The touch of her breath on his lips.
He plunged his fingertips through the surface of the element, relishing its cool sweep over his blackened fingertips. Its give, its resistance, were softer than skin, so soft it could not be metal, so soft it had to be living.
Azoguero .
A voice thrummed through him. He could have sworn it was only in his head, but the surface of the mercury rippled, as if reacting to a forceful sound.
Sorcerer .
He snatched his hand from the bowl—or rather, he meant to, and found with a tumble of panicked heartbeats that he could not .
It held him fast. Mercury lifted into him and filled him, burgeoning as if it had broken through a dam, and all he could see was a river of quicksilver, molten and gleaming and thick with life, rushing as if toward a thundering waterfall, down into darkness…
I have been waiting for you.
The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. When faced with that rush of being , that awareness, that thundering voice, his mind cleaved in two. One half was calcified by terror; the other was alight with awe.
He kept his eyes on the bowl, as if to respectfully avoid meeting the gaze of the effigy, when in truth he studied the surface of the mercury. It trembled; ripples spread across its surface. The force of the voice was able to move something physical.
It was real .
Words from his father’s journal echoed through him: The shrine casts fear into my heart whenever I draw near; I am not brave enough to enter it.
Given the choice to fear it or worship it, he would fall to his knees in prayer. It almost felt as if he had no choice but to do that.
But there was a choice. For him, at least, as someone who had brushed his fingertips over the words of El Libro de San Cipriano and found himself lacking. He had burned like gas: a bright flare, then nothing, extinguished without so much as a sputter.
He was desperate for fuel. Brujos were born with their own; he had none. He was a man, he was mortal, he was flesh and bone that blackened and shook with poison more each passing day.
Charlatan alchemists made deals with the devils.
Was this a devil? It was certainly no saint.
This shrine brought to mind the Bosporus, the throat of swift water and deadly cold that cut between ancient hills; this was black veins in solid stone, hundreds of meters inside the earth.
This was a sweeping darkness so complete it would burn through his veins, through his skull, and leave him a pile of ash in its wake.
This was a power that would send the priest into a righteous fury if he knew.
This was worse than idolatry. This was sin of the blackest cloth.
Darkness can only be undone by its like.
“I came to ask for your help,” he said. His voice was barely above a whisper.
His breath created faint ripples on the surface of the mercury.
“A demon plagues a woman here. I have tried to deal with it on my own. We sought the help of a priest. But I am afraid none of it will work.” He inhaled sharply through his nose to steady himself. “I am weak,” he added. “I seek aid.”
I move with quicksilver , the voice said. I am wherever it runs. Your veins are thick with it. Your lungs are heavy with it. It is the road to me. Walk that road.
The mercury seared with light. A burning sensation snaked up his arm, moving through his body faster than a lightning strike. It was a bolt of pain, like metal to the tooth, and it was everywhere —in his limbs and gut, in his lungs. It shone with a fierce, scorching heat through his skull.
Use quicksilver , the voice said. Rid my land of the foreign devil.
“I will,” Elías gasped. “I will.”