Was she torturing him on purpose?
If they were ever intimate again, he’d remember this, forcing them to go slowly, setting a pace that would be near torture for her.
He’d walked through her mind, seeing her history with her previous lovers, the way she’d rushed them to intimacy for both satisfaction and judgment.
That wouldn’t happen with him.
He lowered his head to his hand and covered his eyes. This was bad. Really bad. He began counting, hoping the distraction would calm his raging need. It didn’t. He tried to think about benign things—the scent of her coffee—but ended up thinking about the scent of her skin. He thought of the town, scrambling to revive itself, surrounded by the verdant jungle…and the monsters gathering in the shadows.
It was that last thought that broke through his lust.
Ash walked through the town, shocked at how much it had changed in the short while she’d been away. The roads were clogged with cars making deliveries and transporting tourists in and out. There were even a few buses parked near the village square.
People were everywhere. When she’d been here the first time, it was a ghost town. Now the homes crowded together on the outskirts of town, those built from odds and ends of lumber and panels of corrugated aluminum, were being rebuilt with sturdier materials. Ground-floor apartments within three streets of the main square had been turned into shops, restaurants, and short-term rentals.
Word on the street was that the mysterious and saintly man who’d turned the town around had been taken back to heaven, but that didn’t stop the tourists from trying to at least touch the places he’d touched, stand where he’d stood. Many had brought curios to have blessed by placing them near where the saint had been.
No one doubted he was a saint, even if he’d not been officially recognized.
Ash crossed the town, walking down the narrow roads where the death chairs had been placed. On her first visit, the bodies had been mostly intact. She wondered if anyone had tried to get close enough to remove the corpses—she hadn’t been able to. Wild scavengers could, however. They had pulled the soft tissue from the bones, but the skeletons still remained intact, still sitting in their chairs, bits of fabric clinging to them. The remains were now even more gruesome.
Surrounding these macabre displays, tourists placed their mementos and crosses, hoping to have them absorb some of the saint’s energy.
Ash stood among the crowd gathered in a half-circle around the last chair. She stepped back from the gathering, seeking some perspective. Whatever had infected her mind from her first visit was still affecting people now. It was a relief to know she hadn’t made this up. The town couldn’t be poisoning all these people—at least not without serious side effects that would bring attention to their shenanigans.
Something real had happened here, something inexplicable.
She snapped a pic on her phone. It took several attempts to get a clear photo of the death chair. Her camera kept shifting its focus to something else nearby, as if her hand moved. Maybe that was proof of the energy field around it. Her images mostly caught the throng gathered around the chair, not the chair itself.
Ash turned her attention to the mural that had been painted over the pink and orange base. A portrait of the saint was in the middle, standing at a high vantage point overlooking the mountain village, his back to the mural viewer. His hair was short on one side, long on the other, colored dark in one quarter, blond in another. His naked body was divided into three chunks—his shoulders and upper arms showed his skin as a dark brown, his middle section showed him with white skin, and his legs were a light brown. A white cloth shrouded his hips in horizontal folds.
A young volunteer posted at the mural began her lecture on the art and the mysterious man it depicted. Ash recognized the boy near her. It was Pablo, holding a big collection jar. The speaker covered several of the incredible feats he’d done while in town, most of which were in the mural.
Ash tilted her head as she looked at the art. At first, she thought the painter was influenced by Cubism, but the speaker explained that one of the curious things about their visitor was that no two people had seen him in the same way, which was why the artist had painted him in the blocky way she had. People were adamant they’d seen what they had, but none of their descriptions matched others’.
A shiver slipped over Ash, raising gooseflesh across her arms. The saint was a shapeshifter. Either that, or he’d found a way of scrambling people’s minds. And since shapeshifters didn’t exist but mass hallucinations were well documented, she went with the latter.
She took a picture of the mural. Whatever had altered her reality perception had also hit the town’s residents and visitors.
Maybe there was something in the water, a chemical left over from the illegal gold mines in the area or toxic waste from the contraband producers that hid their work in the jungle. She thought about taking samples of the water to have it analyzed. Maybe there was a place she could drop the vials off in Medellín.
There had to be a clear explanation for what was happening.
Ash studied the mural, seeing new things each time her eyes moved over certain areas. She walked the length of the wall to look at one area in particular. Something was depicted standing at the edge of the jungle…something that looked very much like a werewolf. What a strange thing to stick in a painting of a supposed saint.
The girl had stopped speaking and was now fielding questions from her audience. When the crowd broke up, she came over to stand next to Ash. “You can see them,” the girl said. “Not everyone can.”
Ash turned to look at her. Werewolves weren’t real. But then, none of this was. And yet she had only to look at the zombie thugs stuck to their chairs to see that some of it had happened.
The girl pointed out several more instances of the monsters in the woods. “It is la Tunda,” she said. “Our own fabled cryptid. She tricks the unwary into going into the woods, then devours them. Saint Merc fought several of them to save Pablo.” The girl nodded over to the boy standing with the collection jar.
Pablo recognized her. “You came back.”
Ash nodded. “I had to. I needed to understand what happened here.”
“It isn’t for understanding. It’s only for accepting.” The boy’s eyes were big and solemn.
“I’m glad you’re safe, Pablo.”
He nodded. “As I am you.”
Ash dropped a few U.S. dollars into the jar he held, then headed back into town. Each of the other murals faced an equally grisly corpse still sitting upright in its chair. Each was surrounded with items visitors wanted blessed. Each had an interpreter and another kid with a collection jar.
Geez. She was such an easy mark. Of course they sensationalized their stories—they were selling an experience, just like any haunted house tour.
Saints and cryptids. Vanquished gangs. Good and evil and mystery.
Damn, but it worked great.
She laughed, glad the town had found a way to save itself…and because laughing staved off terror.
She looked toward the far end of the plaza, where the church was. A queue of people spilled down the stairs and wound around the corner of the plaza. She joined the end of the line, and more people followed her. The elderly couple behind her was anxiously eyeing the church doors.