The smell of the place — burnt wood cut with garbage, plus a chamber-pot whiff of sex’s unmistakable long-stood stink — reminded Chess fiercely of the last time he’d been fever-caught, when small. Inflammation of the appendices, the whorehouse’s live-in barber-cum-abortionist’d called it — a churn of pain, pushing out the side of Chess’s stomach in a sore, swollen curve.
How he’d kicked and raved! They’d had to hold him down, English Oona getting him briskly lit on smoke and cradling his head as the “doctor” cut into him without benefit of alcohol, let alone ether. Now and then, she’d turn Chess’s head so he could puke in a blue porcelain basin with a chipped rim. It came in endless racking waves of pain and nausea, nausea and pain, eventually blotting him out entirely.
And much later, resurfacing to the agony of his wound — black stitches through seeping red skin, rucked like a bad seam — he’d been soothed back to sleep by the regular creak and heave of her fucking the Doc a bare hand’s-breadth away, for payment.
But this was now — the agonies of Mictlan-Xibalba were gone at last. His body lay right there in front of him, intact as ever . . . aside from one little missing part, of course. For fine as it might look from the outside, it lay doubly empty — pithed, a shucked husk.
You took my heart, you son-of-a-bitch, he thought, “to” Rook — whose very absence, he found, hurt him almost as much. Reached down inside and took it, and then . . . you gave it away to that evil whore from Hell, right in front of me. Let her take the damn thing, and eat it.
Yet that wasn’t entirely so, either: he’d given his heart away, gladly. Like the fool Oona always called him.
Yet here a voice intruded, neither thought nor conjuration, so much, as . . . simply there. And said: Aw, quit foolin’ yerself, you great pansy. You never even ’ad no ’eart worth the losin’, to begin with.
Yet forget that, pelirrojo, conquistador. Forget it all, and listen.
And gradually — Chess became aware of voices filtering through the chamber-walls, muttering and indefinite. Without making any sort of decision to do so, he sent his consciousness drifting that-a-way, random and thoughtless as any eavesdropping bird. After a moment, the wall itself grew porous, seeping away in foggy sections, revealing — not another room, but the memory of another room, another place.
Outside Splitfoot’s, the moon hung heavy, bright as the devil’s coin. Under it stood Ed Morrow, looking north — ’til Reverend Rook flickered into being beside him, and offered him an already-lit cigar, which Morrow waved away. And as Rook pulled deep, blew out, the smoke rose up languid into the night sky, catching light from the window Chess knew he himself had lain behind that same night, trapped in that bitch Ixchel’s toils, having his rebellious body put through its paces.
You should’ve saved me that, you bastard, he thought, with all the crap you’d spewed hitherto concerning love, and loyalty. Would’ve, for sure, you’d ever really cared for me at all.
“Well, listen to you — big man wiv ’is guns, whinin’ away at lost love like a baby whore. Ain’t too proud now, are ya?”
She was sitting on the bed, behind him. Or — above him? Beside him. Inside him.
That same smell as ever, pussy-wash and opium-cookings, acrid on the tongue. Her hair fell rust-red around him, and as she grinned down, he could see the holes where her teeth had once held gold.
“You . . . you’re damn well dead.”
“’Cause your fancy-man says I am? Well, ’e’d know, of course.”
“You wanna get the fuck away from me, old woman. . . .”
“’Ow old you think I was? ’Ad you when I was only fourteen, and damn if that didn’t knock all the other kids I might’ve borne right out of me. So thanks for that, son, if for bloody nothin’ else.”
“That what you’re here for? To thank me?”
“Oh, lovey . . .” She made a moue possibly intended as endearing, which might’ve even looked so, if it hadn’t pulled her face skullishly gaunt. “Ain’t you never thought maybe I went somewheres better — that I might finally be ’appy enough t’say all the things I never ’ad no inclination to, back there? ’Ow I might pray it ain’t far too late to tell my son just ’ow much I always loved ’im?”
Chess stared — then finally burst out laughing. Insulting, and frankly meant to be — yet Oona’s face didn’t change. Over and over Chess tried to recover himself, then looked on that awful smile, and was helplessly swept up once more. It was only the sight of his own body on the bed below — so passive and still — that finally cooled the hysteria again.
Voice still shaky: “Oh thank Christ, you ain’t her at all. Can’t be.”
“Can’t I?” Smile still unchanging, more and more maskish by the moment. “Didn’t I never make a joke, then?”
“Not when it was on yourself. So if you ain’t her, then . . . just who the fuck are you?”
Oona reached out, put a too-long finger on his chin; Chess tried to twist away, but couldn’t. The contact, he realized too late — along with a pressure that forced his regard back downwards again, into that time-echo slice of past where Rook and Morrow still held their secret confab — were both things of spirit rather than flesh, impossible to fight off, except through magic.
And I ain’t no hex.
“Names later, little one. I fink you might not want to miss this.”
So: Rook and Morrow looking up at the window, behind which Ixchel had Chess at her mercy.
“Why would you do that to him?” Morrow asked, wearing that same half-puzzled frown always made Chess want to punch it whenever he saw it, because Ed was far too smart to play dumb as often as he did. “Let her — ”
“’Cause she needs it.” Rook replied.