Demon Core: Part 16

[heya_baru]

Part 1

Dirges of Silence

The week before I turned ten, my grandmother sold her mortuary in the suburbs of Albuquerque and placed me under her wing following the death of my parents. Before the mortuary’s closure, she stole slivers of youth from her untimely dead and ate them with her tea, an act that curried no favors with the divine who saw the youthfulness of the dead as their birthright. To thumb the scales of sin, she would lay awake on cloudless nights as to let the moon confess its sins to her before forwarding its contrition to god. With the rising of every sun, angels would tally her sins while she washed her hair, and even the most captious among the heavens would count the sum as zero.

On long and unwelcome winter nights when the stars carried my weeping from my own lips to her ears, she would come into my room and tell me a tale, one she swore on the name of her mother to be as real as my tears:

The Carriers Of The Past

In the years before the Mexican-American war, when the Rio Grande tasted only the blood of the Puebloans and Spaniards, a remote village that slept in the shadow of the Sandia mountains maintained a custom handed down to them from their founder, who in turn received it from the whispers in the desert nights: for every pentad of years that passed in a person’s life, they would quench a red-hot sewing needle in the blood of a bull before using it to ink their hardships into their skin. When a person passed, a mortician would tally all the tattoos, cataloging the years of woe and anguish, and come upon a single number; he would write this sum upon a slip of jute and pass it to a priest under the light of the moon. Every number in the tally, a priest would say, equaled the number of times god had refused the prayers of the dead. When the day of the funeral came, one mourner for every number of the sum would drape themselves over the dead and flagellate their backs while they wept onto the wood of the coffin, as to strike contrition into the heart of god.

One summer when the tears of the sun rained heavy upon the village, a group of citizens dragged a vagrant, Felipe Carderera, before the mayor, claiming that his biography of skin was false. Felipe, a man with a back like a Puebloan hut, was the child of a tryst between a widow and a man who died of fright when he heard a devil clear its throat over his shoulder.

As a boy, village rumor stated that a nocturnal ghost hung over Felipe like the hair upon his head, for when he awoke during the midnight hours to urinate he would find a spectral man waiting outside his door, who would grasp and tear at Felipe’s arms, claiming that the child had stolen what was not his. A priest told the young Felipe to sleep with a gemstone woven into his linens, so that at night he could drape the cloth over the ghost and a dowser could follow to where the haunt was laid to rest. He did as such, as the next morning a priest found the cloth in the unmarked grave of his father, but the burial plot contained only the blanket and the corpse of a pregnant goat; from that moment Felipe slept only under the stars, so no creature could hide behind his walls and doors.

He hunted scorpions with his hands and drank blood that poured from the slaughterhouses. As a young man he exchanged the skulls of seven vultures for his virginity, and it was said that after that night, the woman who accepted his trade slept forever with a tame rattlesnake between her breasts, to protect herself from the devil.

Before Felipe’s hair turned gray he promised himself he would leave the village, but as he ventured over the slopes of the Sadia mountains, the ghost of his father carved a demon from the roots of a hundred sage plants and set the beast upon him. The demon took Felipe by the throat and forced his head into the sand, singing Felipe’s childhood lullabies backwards while filling his mouth with his mother’s menstrual blood, and he tumbled down the mountains with a broken back.

When brought before the governor and made to account for his dishonesty, he was stripped naked before the court and inspected by a mortician, who confirmed that the years of grief inked upon his slovenly skin summed to zero. When the governor asked him why he believed that god had never denied him, Felipe stated:

“God has never once turned his neck at me, for I have only asked him for succor in my dreams; As a boy I ate the ripest fruit handed to me on plates of gold, and enjoyed the tenderest cuts of beef, while as a man I bathed in waters purer than the soul of a nun, and slept with women whose hair drifted into the darkness of night while they rested their satisfied heads on my chest. From the moment I lay my head upon a pillow of goat hide and dirt I want for nothing, and as such not single pentad of hardship has passed over me.”

The governor, obviously dissatisfied with such an answer, implored Felipe to understand that his dreams were not real, and thus could not count against the tallies of his hardship. Felipe, however, was adamant:

“The pleasures I know in my dreams are real to me, for if one wakes from a nightmare with their heart pounding in their chest, can one say the nightmare was a pure phantasm, when the heart believes it real? I would say I reject the reality of you, of this town, of the dirt under my nails. When I bask in the cool daylight of my dreams the suffering of my most wretched waking hours seems no more material than you consider your own dreams.”

Now furious, the governor threatened to put Felipe to death for his mendacious dealings with god and the truth; it was a fate Felipe happily accepted, for what is a dream but a little death that anticipates the longest sleep?

So it came to pass that on a placid summer’s day, Felipe walked before a firing squad, and as he passed before the seven soldiers, he bowed his head, and said that he would urge god to forgive the men their ignorance.

On the nights after my grandmother recited the tale, I would bury my head in the sheets and pray to god for dreams that returned me to those briefest moments of my childhood, the years of ignorance that one feels always as an unsated hunger. Only in the deepest of dreams would he would answer. On the following mornings, I would again weep into my pillow.