Page 51 of Badlands (Nora Kelly #5)

A S THE FIGURE put the mask aside, Skip saw revealed, to his enormous surprise, not the crazed cult leader he expected, but an ordinary-looking Caucasian man of about forty: good-looking, with a salt-and-pepper beard, brown eyes, and an obviously expensive haircut.

“It would have been infinitely preferable for you to have accepted my gift, especially on this day of days.”

“Day of days?” Skip echoed numbly.

The man nodded. “One prays for it, prepares for it—yet though one knows it will eventually come, when it finally arrives, one is awed nonetheless.” He paused.

“You said you wanted to become one of us. Your wish will be granted.”

“But… in what way?”

The man pursed his lips.

“A rubber tree might wish to flap its leaves and, birdlike, take to the skies… but not, I imagine, in the form of a floor mat in the restroom of an airplane.” He shook his head.

“You are the vessel through which we will realize what we’ve so long prepared for—which our visionary founder promised.”

“Your founder?”

“You met him. Just now, on the mesa top. Dr. Carlos Oskarbi.”

Skip, struggling with confusion and fear, realized he was referring to only one thing—that shriveled mummy figure in the litter.

“Oskarbi?” he said, whispering because his mouth had suddenly gone dry.

The man on the throne nodded.

Then he gestured to the guard, spoke once again in what sounded to Skip like a nonsense tongue.

The guard responded and busied himself on the far side of the kiva.

The white-painted figure looked back at Skip.

“We have a moment while he makes up a preparation for us. I’m ready to help you understand why your impending sacrifice is of such consequence. Ask what you will.”

Impending sacrifice .

Skip tried to speak but found himself unable to utter a sound.

The man shook his head sympathetically.

“Then I will explain. In your world, I am Dr. Morgan Bromley, professor. Here, in Gallina Canyon, I am the leader of the Convocatoria de Brujos .”

“The convocation of sorcerers,” Skip said, finding his voice.

“We are seekers of a particular kind of knowledge that confers great power. Those who fear this knowledge for centuries have tried to erase it—destroy it through massacre and genocide. Look what they did to the Gallina people: our spiritual forebears, whose kiva we now occupy. It has taken decades to reconstruct what was lost. Many times, in that other world where I run a library and teach anthropology, I’ve wished I could tell of the effort and scholarship that went into that reconstruction, first by our spiritual father, Carlos Oskarbi, and then by myself as his heir. Carlos first traveled the path to power in Mexico, where the Totonteac Indians had preserved the knowledge. He persisted even in the face of efforts by his teacher to hinder him. And then he brought the teachings out of the mountains and gave them to us, his students. He wrote a book, but withheld the central teachings—those that could be shared with only the select few. When he passed on to a higher plane here in the canyon, due to an unfortunate accident, I undertook to complete his work. I refined and perfected the ceremonies. I began the sacrifices. Your arrival was the sign we were waiting for. The sacrifices were not in vain. And as you see, his sacred remains are still presiding over our ceremonies.”

“What’s this sign you’re talking about?” Skip managed to ask.

“You think you came here of your own free will. But in reality, you were summoned here by our diablero . You’re confirmation that our annual rituals of devotion, combined with the sacrifices of our three members, have pleased our diablero .”

Three members?

“You mean the women who died in the desert?”

“Not ‘died.’ Voluntarily and joyfully elevated. They have now joined Dr. Oskarbi on the higher and far more beautiful plane of consciousness.”

This was so fucked up—this guy was nuts.

“But no one brought us here,” Skip protested feebly.

“You two were summoned to us for a vital reason. Your sacrifices will power the ceremony in which we finally summon Xuctúhla.”

“Xuctúhla?”

“Our founder was taught, from his years immersed in the ancient Totonteac religious tradition of Mexico, that there’s a way to tap into this power of the unseen world that lies behind this one. There’s a way to open the door and raise the diablero , the master of smoke, the feathered creature of darkness, who offers us knowledge and power… Ah.” Abruptly, Bromley stood up, nodded at a sign from the guard, and then placed the mask back on his head.

“I see the preparations are complete.”

Skip swallowed.

“But… Wait. I want to know more.”

“And you will.” Bromley gestured to the guard, who brought a small, lidded pot over which he’d been toiling with a pestle.

Bromley took it and removed the lid.

In a paralysis of dread, Skip watched Bromley approach him, holding the outstretched bowl.

In it was a paste of some greenish, sticky, gum-like substance.

Bromley scraped it from the pot, rolled it into a small bolus with his hands, and held it out toward Skip’s face.

Instinctually, Skip turned away.

The guard grasped Skip by the hair and jerked his head back around.

In his other hand he had the obsidian knife, which he now pressed against Skip’s throat.

“Please accept the gift of transformation,” said Bromley in a mild voice.

Skip opened his mouth and the thing was thrust in, like a foul communion wafer.

“Chew,” said Bromley.

He bit into it, his mouth flooding with the bitter astringency.

“Swallow.”

Skip obeyed, the acrid taste drying up his mouth and throat once again.

He shuddered, trying to get down the substance sticking to his throat.

Now the guard handed Bromley an ancient clay beaker, which he in turn offered to Skip.

In it was a vile-looking brown brew, with bits of beetle wings and insect bodies floating on the surface.

“Drink,” urged Bromley, holding the cup to his lips.

When Skip hesitated, the knife dug again into his throat; he felt its sting, sensed the trickle of blood.

He drank the brew, swallowing it as fast as he could, made all the more difficult by the stone blade pressed into his throat.

Forcing down nausea, Skip watched as the guard lowered the knife and then put away the cup and the bowl.

He returned a moment later, still holding the knife.

“Compared to all our years of study and preparation,” Bromley said to Skip, “doesn’t your own sacrifice seem small?”

He nodded and the guard approached, once more with the blade raised.

“Wait! No! Don’t do this—!”

“Tonight,” Bromley said, “we will see him. We will experience him.” Raising his voice like a camp-revival preacher, he cried, “ Tonight, you will be the conduit through which we summon Xuctúhla! ”

The guard seized Skip and muscled him over to the ladder.

Looping his arm under his shoulder, he hauled Skip up and outside, dragged him over to the base of the second tripod, and threw him to the ground.

The white figure retreated.

Lying on his side, frozen with terror, Skip could hear around him the swelling of a breathy chant from the congregants.

A formal ceremony of some sort seemed about to begin.

He looked on with a dull sense of unreality.

The humming chant continued, the white figure leading it with swaying motions and a dramatic swinging of his arms. Moans arose, and weird gestures filled the air.

Occasionally, one or another of the cultists would fall to the ground and writhe.

A pile of wood had been arranged beneath Edison, and now—at a shouted order from Bromley—the group began collecting kindling from a nearby heap and stacking it beneath the second, empty tripod.

It was all too obvious what they were planning to do.

Now Skip saw someone attach a thin steel cable to the straps tying his ankles.

He stared at the tented pile of wood at the base of the empty tripod.

He saw the other tripod, with Edison’s carcass still hanging from it.

A strange lassitude came over him as two naked women, smeared in red ocher and holding burning torches, circled the pile of wood beneath Edison’s corpse and set fire to it.

Now the drugs, or poison, or whatever Skip had been given truly started taking hold.

Colors became brighter, the hum of chanting drilled into his brain.

The ground seemed to shift.

And the dreamy sensation that suffused his brain began to quell his anxiety and fear, replacing them with a dull sensation of uncaring acceptance.

He heard a low, hissing chant slowly fill the air like steam.

The flames leapt up and he saw the sparks, distorted and hallucinatory, begin to whirl into the night sky.