Shapeshifted

I stood and walked out to look back to where the train was. Could the train be moving air? Or was the sound of it running on its tracks echoing back off a certain spot? The sound began again. I silently pointed at the drain, and Olympio made a face but slowly began nodding.



“Okay, that is creepy.” He shoved the rest of his chips into his mouth and set his soda down.



I walked closer and squatted down beside the drain’s mouth. “Is someone down there?”



“¿Aquí abajo?” echoed back to me.



“It’s creepy, but it’s not—” Olympio began, coming near.



“Pero no es—” echoed back to him, from a different voice. And then what sounded like a sob. We both jumped back and heard sounds of actual crying—someone choking back tears.



“We have to go down there,” I said.



Olympio shook his head violently back and forth. “Call nine-one-one.”



I knelt closer. “Can you hear me?” The crying continued. Louder. “Olympio—how do we get down there?”



He reached for my mouth with his hand. “Don’t tell her my name!”



“Sorry, sorry.” I stood and dusted off my knees. There had to be some way to get down in there. “Show me where. Please.”



“We can tell the others,” he said, pointing back to the people in the clinic.



“I could barely get you to believe me,” I said. “And how often does nine-one-one get people to come down here?”



He closed his mouth and looked back and forth from me to the storm drain, where the crying kept on. “Fine. I’ll show you, for ten dollars.”



CHAPTER EIGHTEEN



We walked down the street together, a little back toward the station, then to the left before Olympio stopped in front of the pharmacy. “We need five dollars.”



Not in a position to deny him favors, I handed the money I hadn’t used on breakfast this morning over to him.



“Good. Wait here,” he said, and went into the store without me. I waited, the sun beating down. Just as I started to suspect that he’d ditched me and run out through the back, Olympio returned. “Here.”



He showed me a small flashlight, free of packaging, with batteries already in it, and handed me a fistful of change. I shoved the change back in my pocket as he led on.



* * *



We went down a few alleys, and then between buildings and behind another alley, before storm drains opened up into one final wide cement ditch in the ground, like a footpath for giants. There were makeshift tarp tents along either side of the open ditch. We wove through these quickly as people slumbered inside. “This is Tecato Town,” Olympio announced. “Tecatos are—”



“I know what tecatos are.” We started walking down the steep graffiti-covered hill, leaning back as we did so, and I was glad I’d worn tennis shoes today. There were shards of broken glass everywhere—I wished I had my gloves. “Can your grandfather cure them?”



Olympio grunted in thought. “No. I don’t think so. To be healed, you have to want to be healed. I’ve never met a tecato who wanted to be healed all the way. They’re all a little in love with the drug. Why do you ask?”



I glanced up at the tents that were disappearing above the cement horizon. “My brother. He could be sleeping up there.” He probably wasn’t—he was probably at a homeless shelter—but I hadn’t asked him where he was staying the last time I saw him. On purpose. My foot skidded, and I almost had to put a hand down. “Gah!”



“That’s your ghost, then. He’s haunting you.” Olympio reached the bottom, taking a few running steps to land on mud-stained cement. I followed him, much less gracefully. “Maybe you should see my grandfather. Even if he can’t help your brother, he could help you.”



“Why do I need help?”



“He’s haunting you—your worry. He’s causing your susto, stealing your spirit.”



I snorted. “He’s been susto-ing me for years, then.” I almost told him about my mom, then caught myself. He was just a kid; he didn’t need my problems.



“Why don’t they sleep down here?” I asked as we reached the ditch’s flat bottom.



“Flash floods. Wash everything away. Us too, if it rains.”



Huh. It was humid today, as always, but the sun was still out. At the bottom, we started heading toward the three circular metal tunnels that led beneath the street and then down. They looked like the beginning of some joke, where the devil asked you to pick a door. “How come you know so much?”



“Everyone plays here as kids. When you’re little, you tell each other stories about La Llorona, the stories that your mom told you, to scare you away from here. When you’re older, you take other kids here to beat them up.” We took a few steps into the tunnel. “It dumps out on the far side of downtown. I know where it comes out, but I’ve never gone all the way through.” The entrances to the tunnels were colored with graffiti, the floors strewn with rocks and glass. I saw the orange cap from an insulin syringe.



Olympio went on. “There’s a lot of echoes in here. It’s haunted, for sure. I did wonder, though, if all those times I thought you heard someone, it was just some other kid getting his ass beaten at the end of the line.” He turned on his light. “Now we just walk back the way we came. Only underground. Watch out for needles.”



We walked slowly, crouching, shining the flashlight before each and every step. The smell here was metallic, almost like the taste of fresh blood, the tang of wet rust. There were small tree branches—I wondered how far away those had been swept in from; where the hell was the nearest park?—condoms, bent spoons, and the occasional bullet case. Graffiti warned us that this place belonged to the Three Crosses, then the Reinas, then other names I couldn’t read with faded colors—enough different scripts that it was clear no one really ruled here.



“Why does she cry? In your stories?” I whispered to Olympio, and heard it sussurate around me, like listening to a breathing lung.



“Someone killed her kids.”



“The Donkey Lady?”



“No. The Donkey Lady—she’s under the train station at night. She’s different. Someone shot her donkey, and then she became one—don’t ask me.” He turned to look back, shining the flashlight up at his face, casting it in frightening shadows as he started talking again slowly, like it was an effort to explain things to someone as unimaginative as me. “La Llorona fell in love with someone who didn’t love her back. She killed her children to follow him, but he still didn’t love her. So she killed herself, and now she haunts rivers and snatches children away. And this place can be like a river, sometimes.”



He swung the flashlight down to the ground and began walking.



“Isn’t that an old story? Like it happened far away from here?”



“So?”



“So—I’m just saying, chances are she’s not haunting a storm drain someplace where it snows in the winter.”



Olympio glared over his shoulder at me. “I’m not hearing anything anymore—let’s go back,” he said, and then the wailing overtook us, echoing in the small tunnel. I yelped, Olympio jumped, and the flashlight fell to the ground, clanging on the tunnel’s metal floor.



“Shhh!” I grabbed up the flashlight.



“Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go—” Olympio started pulling at me, his hands scrabbling over mine for control of the flashlight.



“Hang on, okay? Who’s there?”



“Una abuela,” came the sound back. “¡Una abuela necesitada!”



I looked to Olympio to translate for me. “She says she’s a grandmother who needs help.”



“Well then.” That didn’t make it any less creepy, but I’d take talking ghosts over disembodied crying any day. I took a few steps farther up the tunnel, and Olympio followed me. When I slowed down, he bumped into my back. We reached a fork in the tunnel, where it branched in two.



“¿Vas a venir?” said the voice.



“She wants to know if we’re still coming,” Olympio said. It seemed like her voice was coming from the darker path, of course. Olympio stopped me. He picked up a branch and set it down pointing in the direction that we’d come from.



“So we’ll know which way to pick when we come back.”



And then we went into the black.



* * *



The woman just kept asking if we were coming, over and over again. It got so I bet I would know those words too, in addition to sangre and mija. I might hear them in my sleep. They might be the last things I ever heard, if Olympio’s imagination was accurate.



I tried not to let on that I was scared, but my imagination was just as good as Olympio’s; worse, I’d already seen awful things before. Swirling Shadows that tried to suck you down, the teeth of an angry werewolf, vampire fangs, cancer. All sorts of different things that wanted to gnaw on you.



It got hotter, smelled worse, and suddenly there was light.



“¿Vas a venir?”



Sunlight poured in from a grateless storm drain above, but it illuminated only a square on the opposite wall. Hector was wrong about there being guns down here, but there was trash; everything from the street had been swept in. It stank. No clouds in the sky, but somehow water lingered here, in disgusting pools hidden by—or made of—trash. I stepped into the strange room, hunched over so the moldy ceiling wouldn’t touch my head.



“Usted está aquí.” The woman who’d called to us was in the far corner. The sunlight robbed me of any night vision, making it hard to see her in the shadows. I could only distinguish the crumpled shape of her form.



Olympio spoke to her first. “¿Abuela por qué estás aquí?”



“Me perdí y me lastimé,” she answered him.



Olympio looked to me. “She’s probably from Tecato Town. She got lost and hurt.”