They were worshiped by our ancestors. Now they are forgotten. Soon, they’ll make us remember.
We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Piñata by Leopoldo Gout, out from Tor Nightfire on March 14.
It was supposed to be the perfect summer.
Carmen Sanchez is back in Mexico, supervising the renovation of an ancient abbey. Her daughters Izel and Luna, too young to be left alone in New York, join her in what Carmen hopes is a chance for them to connect with their roots.
Then, an accident at the worksite unearths a stash of rare, centuries-old artifacts. The disaster costs Carmen her job, cutting the family trip short.
But something malevolent and unexplainable follows them home to New York, stalking the Sanchez family and heralding a coming catastrophe. And it may already be too late to escape what’s been awakened…
6
The heat was brutal that day. The morning haze was shattered by the aggressive sun before work at the abbey had even begun in earnest and by noon the old church was a sweatbox. Even the breezes blowing through the openings of the construction site only brought with them hot dust. It was unforgiving weather. Carmen was in the nave of the building, wiping sweat from her brow trying to walk some of the contractors through the blueprints and mock-ups of the section of the walls they were renovating. If they thought her bossy already, Carmen wasn’t sure how they’d handle how bad a mood she was in sitting in the oven of the church. Just as she felt her temper about to boil over, explaining what she thought were simple concepts over and over, but hampered by some language barriers, one of the workers tapped her shoulder from behind.
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Piñata
“What?” she snapped. Hearing her own voice come out with such aggression gave her pause. She took a deep breath and regained her composure, resuming with a calmer tone, “Is there something you need me for?”
The worker simply pointed to the church entrance where a young woman holding a manila folder was talking to the grounds’ security guard. Carmen left the blueprints in the hands of one of the contractors, telling them to ask Joaquín if they needed more information, and walked to the entrance. The young woman, slight of build with bright eyes, turned to look at her as she approached.
“Can I help you?” asked Carmen, as no one else seemed inclined to say anything.
“Hi! Yes, I’m here from city hall,” said the woman.
“Ah, sure. What is this about?”
“Can we speak privately?” she asked.
“Of course, right this way. My ‘office’ is over here. I hope it’s nothing serious,” Carmen said jokingly, but upon seeing the woman’s earnest face, she started to think that maybe it was.
They entered a room that had been converted into a temporary office. It had some desks and a pair of drawing tables with blueprints. The smell of dust, cement, and plaster permeated the air. Carmen pulled two lukewarm cups of water from the cheap watercooler in the corner of the room and offered one to the woman before sitting down.
“So, how can I help you?”
“Thank you. I brought some paperwork from city hall for you to sign off on. I could’ve sent a messenger, but I could use the fresh air, so I brought it down myself. My name’s Yoltzi, by the way,” she set the documents down on the desk next to Carmen and paused for a long while, swallowing hard before adding, “I also wanted to talk to you about something.”
Carmen opened the folder and looked through the papers. “Talk to me about something?”
Yoltzi shifted her weight, looking uneasily around the office like she was watching something else in the room other than Carmen. Her initial bright demeanor had become stilted and uncomfortable as her words stumbled over one another. “I saw you the other day. Uh, in the plaza. I saw you talking to Quauhtli. I’m an old friend of his, Quauhtli’s, and thought I’d introduce myself.”
Carmen glanced up from the girl’s restless feet and looked at her intently for the first time: her bare face, her hair reaching her midback, a spotless white shirt, a light blue jacket, and a knee-length skirt. “And you knew to find me here? I don’t get it, but okay.”
Carmen’s eyes narrowed ever so slightly as she contemplated the possibility that this was an attempt at a shakedown. She’d already had to deal with many who had come asking for extra money to deliver materials, so “things didn’t get complicated with the permits,” so the inspector would give an approval, so the engineer of so-and-so department provided their signature, anything. She was beginning to get used to it and was learning to read which of these blackmailers she could ignore and which ones she had no choice but to pay. Her bosses back at the office knew that was how things worked in Mexico and they’d considered it for the budget, but that didn’t mean that she had the full liberty to pay any shameless scoundrel who came by asking for money. She was especially wary of those from the local government. Now city hall was sending a girl down to the site with some paperwork that, upon a closer look, Carmen was positive she’d already seen approved copies of, and she “wants to talk”?
“And what did you want to talk about, exactly?”
“It’s just… not easy to explain,” said Yoltzi, “So I hope you’ll forgive me if it sounds a little outlandish.”
She couldn’t even maintain eye contact with Carmen as she spoke. Looking up at her, Carmen watched those bright eyes darting around the room, restlessly fixing on seemingly anything that wasn’t her. Carmen turned around for a moment to see what was so transfixing to her uncomfortable guest, expecting to see some buzzing gnat or fly. Nothing. A white wall. Carmen turned back to Yoltzi, her already suspicious eyes boring into the nervous girl who refused to look her in the eye.
“Listen, miss, if you’re here to ask for something, just ask. I’m pretty busy, as I’m sure you’re all aware of over there at city hall. If you’re about to tell me there’s a ‘processing fee’ or some crap for this paper you’ve just brought then you can—”
“Señora, you’re going to find this very strange,” Yoltzi blurted out, “but you might be in danger.”
“Danger?” Carmen asked quietly. “What are you talking about?”
“Around here, there are unexplainable forces capable of causing a lot of pain.”
“Are you threatening me?” Carmen’s voice remained quiet, but she rose, furious. She wanted to shout Yoltzi out of the room, but calmly walked to the small window in her office from which she could see the piles of building material and parked trucks of the workers.
“No! I’m only trying to warn you.” Yolzti frantically stumbled over her words, “They’re very old forces. They’ve been here since, I don’t know, forever.”
“How much?” Carmen sighed, still looking out the window, away from Yoltzi.
“How much…?”
“Yes, just tell me. How much is it going to cost us this time around? You come from city hall, telling me that there are some papers that slipped through the cracks or whatever—papers I know I’ve signed before, I recognize the document code at the top—and say that I’m in danger. How much is it going to be to make sure that these documents get ‘properly processed’?”
“No, no, it’s not like that. This, what I’m talking about, it’s not for sale, or up for blackmail.”
“Then what is it you want?”
Yoltzi looked at the floor, her eyes staring straight into one of the old cobblestones visible under the thin layer of sawdust which covered every surface of the jobsite. Carmen briefly softened seeing the young woman shrinking away from her. Even if it was a particularly egregious attempt at a shakedown by the local government, she couldn’t be more than twenty-five. She probably was just some poor secretary they sent down here to deliver a message. Carmen spoke her next words calmly and clearly, but there was an unmasked brittleness to her voice, an actively suppressed rage.
“We are working with a very limited budget. I know you think gringos are like bottomless wells of money, but that’s not the case. You’re making our lives impossible. You go back to city hall and tell them they’re going to bankrupt us if they keep this up. And if that happens, every single person working out there will be unemployed. We can’t work this way. We’ve paid the mayor’s office plenty by way of permits and work orders. If they’ve so thoroughly run out of ways to drain us that they’re just sending the same paperwork again, I honestly don’t know what to say. No more, miss. No more.”
“No, you’re misunderstanding me. This has nothing to do with the construction.”
“Then what is it about?” Carmen was dumbfounded.
Yoltzi finally lifted her gaze from the cobblestone and looked directly into Carmen’s eyes as she said the first clear words since entering the office, “It’s about your daughter.”
Carmen hadn’t lost her temper in a very long time. She took pride in maintaining a level head on a jobsite, but this was too much. The brittle, cold calm in her voice shattered and it rose to a bellow with every word.
“Wh-what? How dare you come here and threaten my family?” She stepped away from the window and toward the young woman in her office. “Get your ass out of my office before I get security in here. Get off of my jobsite!”
“No, señora, I’m not here to threaten you.”
Carmen snatched the paperwork Yoltzi had brought with her from her desk and shoved it into her hands. “Leave now. Tell them to just send an invoice like everyone else does. For lumber or something. But get the fuck out of here.”
Carmen was livid, but she was also afraid, afraid like she had never been before. The horror tales—the kidnappings, murders, femicides, and other atrocities—she’d heard about for so many years yet felt so distant, as if they belonged to another world, not hers, materialized themselves in this young woman with indigenous features, unarmed and humbly dressed. She never expected this fear to manifest itself in such a way. She thought she must surely just be a messenger for someone else, someone who could hurt her and her family.
“Señora, you’ve misunderstood me. I don’t mean to scare you or harm you. I come to warn you about these forces.”
“Leave, now, please. Before I call the police. I’m going to research who you are, and if anything happens to me or my daughters, you’ll be held responsible.”
Yoltzi stood up.
“I’m sorry about this misunderstanding. Trust me, I came bearing no ill will.”
Carmen walked toward her desk, grabbed her phone pretending to ready herself to call someone. She followed Yoltzi’s movements with her gaze while she realized she had no clue whom she would call. The police? If this was a government racket like she assumed, they’d only hand wave it away. The workers who hated her? Father Verón, who was even less intimidating than she was? She felt more alone and far away from home than she’d ever realized since arriving.
Carmen clenched her hands to stop them from shaking as she watched Yoltzi disappear beyond the door of the abbey, she didn’t want anyone to see how shaken the encounter had made her, didn’t want to give them yet another reason to talk about her. Carmen’s gift as a professional woman had been, for many years, her ability to remain calm no matter the situation. Compartmentalizing. That was the way to survive the competition within the American corporate world as a Mexican woman. If you show too much emotion, you’re considered either vulnerable and weak or a volatile drama queen, neither of which belonged in a budget negotiation. If you show nothing, they don’t trust you and brand you an outcast, incapable of being a team player, a robotic bitch. Architecture was still a boys’ club and she could feel it. No one said it outright, but she knew the second she slipped and let her temper flare, people would quietly label her whether they were conscious of it or not. She walked back to the workers and resumed her explanation on the wall finishes without showing any distress. Unscathed. Even a bit more severe.
But her fist was still clenched at her side to stop the trembling. She couldn’t quiet the thought that people were stalking her, people who knew she had girls at home. Perhaps she shouldn’t even be leaving the girls alone. They were an easy target; all anyone had to do was stop by and take them. How was she supposed to remain calm under these conditions? She would have to report what happened to the central office in New York, but they might go into hysterics and bring her back immediately along with the girls, and she would lose the direction of the construction. Or worse, they could think that she was blowing it out of proportion and use it as evidence that she was not ready to manage a construction in a foreign country, never mind that this was her own country, confirming the racist stereotypes and anti-Mexican prejudices that some of her bosses—and the executives at the office—held. Right this moment, Mexico was going through a particularly negative phase with the international press. She had to be careful with what she said.
When she was finished speaking to the workers, Carmen decided to head home, quickly, to check on the girls. She called Izel on the phone as she gathered some of her things from her desk.
“Izel? Are you alright?”
“Uh… yeah? What’s up?”
“Is Luna alright too?”
“Yeah, Mom she’s fine. She was just in here trying to show me her sketchbook.”
“Go check on her for me, please?”
“Mom, I literally just saw her. She’s fine.”
“Izel!” Carmen pleaded over the phone, “Please. For your paranoid Mama, just put your eyes on her for me.”
She heard Izel groan as she stomped down the hall, “Ugh! Fine. What are you all worked up about? Is something going on?”
“It’s fine, Izel. Don’t worry, I just wanted to call and check on you guys while I was away, that’s all.”
“Luna! Mom wants to know if you’re alright.” Carmen heard Luna’s voice chiming on the other end of the line, muffled by her distance from the receiver.
“She said she’s fine. I told you it’s all good.”
“Thank you, Iz,” Carmen finally breathed out, “I’ll be home in a little bit. Text me if you want me to pick anything up.”
Carmen couldn’t tell them what had happened either.
She walked toward the exit, imagining herself buying a gun, a small one, a .38 or a Glock, or a semiautomatic rifle, an AR-15, something powerful. A lot of architects from the firm had weapons and loved talking about them. Carmen couldn’t remember ever holding a gun, even a toy gun. She thought maybe she could call Fernando. She could talk to him, although he did have the irritating tendency to tell her she was imagining things, he was the gaslighter-in-chief. Either way, she had no choice at the moment.
Yoltzi left the office panting. When she was a teenager, they found a heart murmur, and at this moment, she felt a sharp pain in her chest that barely let her walk. Not only had the confrontation with Carmen rattled her, maybe even more so than confronting a tzitzimitl, but also the shadows manifesting themselves on the walls had filled her with anxiety and grief. She found herself in a very complicated situation. It was highly unlikely that she’d be able to have another conversation with the architect. If she wanted to protect Luna from her terrible fate, she would have to come up with another plan. But at the moment, she felt ashamed, regretful, and hurt, and she couldn’t think about anything else.
She was amazed by the irreparably disastrous way she’d presented her case. She’d always felt gifted with the ability to read people and anticipate their reactions, and this time around she’d gotten everything wrong. She let her anxiety and impatience get in the way of treating this as the delicate matter it was. Quauhtli had warned her not to tell Carmen anything right away, but when she saw those moving shadows on the cobblestones, she couldn’t stop herself from trying to alert Carmen, who took her vague warnings as a physical threat. Stains on Carmen’s improvised office wall had come to life and twisted like messages from a remote past, and the recent pain of her people—their sacrifice upon being converted and forced to build that abbey, exploited until death in the name of a god that was venerated—was clearly marked on the walls.
As a girl, in school, they would call her Yolanda, Yolandita, Yolo. That would always put her in a mood. She would always correct them.
“My name is Yoltzi.”
Sometimes a few of them listened to her. Most ignored her, though, and kept calling her whatever they wanted. She thought, understandably, that they meant to belittle her, giving her a Spanish name that redeemed her from her indigenous one. It was a way to show her that they thought of her as less than, that they couldn’t even respect her name. She hated that name so much, it was the one she used whenever she felt she’d done something wrong. Whenever she scolded herself, instead of calling herself an idiot or stupid, she’d call herself “Yolandita.”
“Ah, Yolandita, you really screwed this one up,” she told herself out loud while passing by the security checkpoint, where the guard was having a Coke.
7
After leaving work, Yoltzi liked to sit at the plaza. The heat was less intense than during the day. There were people, children, and you could breathe more of that fresh, idyllic air of peace that’s supposed to reign in a small town like this. Sometimes, she’d buy herself some ice cream and enjoy it slowly by herself. People often saw this as a call for company, and men, old and young, drew near to start a conversation. Sometimes they were pleasant, and others disgusting. She didn’t mind much. She usually ignored them, or, if needed, used that special talent she possessed to reveal embarrassing truths about themselves, things she read in their faces, the way they talked or walked, dressed or flirted. Rejecting them was like a sport. She didn’t find them desirable in the least.
She particularly liked twilight, when light started to recede. Sitting in silence, she saw how the shadows became longer until they slowly conquered everything, like a dark liquid spilling over the plaza, the streets, the whole valley, to flood the town in the blackest of oceans. She liked watching how the glints, reflections, and glares disappeared, only to be replaced by the artificial illumination, in a relay of light and contrast. Likewise, the sounds changed, and the heat gave in. It was a time of ghosts, in which she herself felt part of their history, of the living and the dead, the pilgrims, the victorious and conquered troops, of the markets, of the families and the children. Sitting down on her bench, she could see the days go by, the years and the centuries, with a fascinating cadence. Ever since she was young, whenever she came to the plaza at twilight, she could see the difference between the living, coming and going, worried about getting back home, about having no money, trapped by the desire of having something or someone, and the dead, careless, without pressure or interests, moving ritually, leisurely.
But today, the shadows and specters didn’t pass through like they usually did. They seemed confused, and she couldn’t feel the harmonious flux that marked the transition from day to night. They were disturbed, moved in disorder, changing their rhythms and directions. Something was happening, or was about to happen, something that had shaken the diaphanous beings, the sleepers, the transparent ones, the gone, the spirits. Yoltzi remained seated, watching restlessly. It was one more sign that the danger was real, that there were forces capable of altering the order in the reign of the immaterial, and it could probably affect the physical world. She could see a giant flock of birds in the sky moving rapidly side to side as the sky grew darker. Yoltzi wondered if people around her could see what was happening, or if they were at the very least bewildered by the bird’s erratic movements. The flock seemed to contract and expand, as if it were a giant, obsidian heart. One could hear the screeches and squawks become louder and louder. The sky was nearly pitch-black, but the birds with their synchronized movements throbbed, getting closer and closer to land, as if they wanted to crush the buildings, devour everything in their manic and gigantic pulse. Initially, between the darkness and the distance, the flock seemed nothing more than a uniform mass. Suddenly, she could see that those were not birds, but butterflies, millions of them, a gigantic colony drawing strange figures against the background of a black sky.
They were so near they began to swallow up the power lines and church towers and still they drew closer. People started to run, scared at the sight of so many of them. The butterflies descended like waves, like an invading army, layers and layers of wings flying at top speed among the people, the benches, the kiosk. All those tiny wings, the delicate bodies, swallowed sound like a black snowstorm. Hiding under a bench, Yoltzi could hear people screaming, children crying, but they were muffled by the mass. The beating wings made a nearly imperceptible roar, like white noise, whispered screams. She couldn’t believe what she was witnessing, and wondered whether this was another illusion, an apparition. Thousands of wings and bodies comprising a single, massive tentacle brushing against her head, her back. A man was waving a stick trying to scare them away, swatting as if to break a piñata. From the ground, she saw the shadows sliding down the air, threateningly. This was too real for it not to be true. There was no way these creatures had simply lost their way or become confused into a swarm like this.
Paralyzed with fear and perplexity, her eyes shut tight, she heard howls of pain only a few steps away. Kneeling under her meager protection she rocked back and forth, finding herself muttering and humming a song. It must be the one Quauhtli pointed out last time we were in the plaza together, she thought. While she still didn’t recognize it, she somehow melody. It was unclear whether or not she was making up the words she muttered, they felt like near gibberish to her, but as she sang, the noise began to subside and she no longer felt the wings beating against her back and neck.
When she opened her eyes, she saw the man with the stick drop to the ground and cover his bloody face. As suddenly as the tempest began, the colony disbanded, the butterflies flew away erratically, some remained perched on trees and cables, and many more carpeting the asphalt with their dead bodies. The plaza was now bathed in darkness and a brief moment of stunned silence was soon broken by the confused words, scared voices, and weeping of the few people that hadn’t yet fled. Yoltzi stood up, shaking off the dust and little bit of the shame in having been so afraid. She ran toward the man who was now bleeding and screaming.
“Sir, let me help you. What happened?”
Crying, desperately wailing in fear, the man dropped his hands and revealed his skinned face. Flayed flesh framed his bones made shapeless and obscured by the amount of blood painting them, the deep, black holes where eyes used to be, and a jaw holding his teeth like little marble blades. The sobs wracking his body choked together, knotting in his throat as they gasped out of the lipless mouth and twisted into a deranged, roaring laughter. Yoltzi lost her balance and fell on her backside. The man covered his face again, crying and begging.
“Help me, please. I can’t—I can’t see. I felt one on me and I was just trying to get it off my face.”
Yoltzi stood up again and walked toward the man, grabbed him by his shoulder and helped him stand up. As she helped him up he once again dropped his guarding hands. His face was normal, save one eye socket which was bleeding profusely. The wound was deep and ragged. Looking at the hand, still trembling in the air near his chin, the shivering fingers were covered in blood and the nails had clumps of raw, cleaved skin underneath them. She tried to calm him down while they walked, telling him it wasn’t that bad, that they would probably bandage him and send him home. She walked him to Juárez Hospital, left him there, and went home.
She had so many questions. Between the meeting with Carmen and the butterflies in the plaza, it had been a terrible day. It seemed like everything was happening too quickly. A sort of vortex was taking over her life, as if the specters were knocking loudly on the doors of reality, trying to come in. But for what purpose? She’d never felt anything like that. With the ability to traverse the land of the living and the dead, she’d never felt there were forces trying to tear down the barrier between worlds. What could they possibly want?
As she walked along the road back to town and home, she watched dusk fall over the clouds as twilight began setting in and whistled to herself. It was a comforting tune. Maybe Quauhtli was right about it being from their childhood. It made her feel safe in this uncertain time.
Excerpted from Piñata, copyright © 2023 by Leopoldo Gout.
