I.

The ballerina’s shattered body lay disarticulated across the volcanic rocks that jutted from the lip of the ravine below La Puerta del Diablo.

Municipal Police Chief José Daniel Argueta clicked off the flashlight and took a step back from where he stood at the edge of the cliff.

“Fuck!” He screamed into the night.

She was well known. Famous, even. Only moments before, the two of them had been on the highest of three rock formations that made up La Puerta, drinking from a pata—a large plastic bottle of vodka—while dancing to the music drifting out from his patrol car radio.

And he? Was a nobody. Someone who couldn’t believe his luck even as she kissed him.

It looked bad.

The truth, though, was this: she’d pushed him away, bottle in hand. He’d clapped along to the music. Her movements became wilder, more frenzied. Taking the bottle back, he’d egged her on.

“Not bad, para una cincuentona—for a fifty-year-old—” she’d said, mid-twirl.

Then, her ankle rolled and, like a puff of fog, she’d gone over the side.

Pendeja, he thought, his panicked heartbeat rattling against his ribcage. Pendeja de mierda.

The Police Chief paced back and forth in the near-moonless night, his polished boots kicking up dust where he walked.

Why had he allowed it? Her suggestion to ring in her birthday at La Puerta del Diablo was so juvenile. But his response, that he would introduce her to the gamekeeper, even more so.

He liked her, that was the problem. Despite being aware of the dangers, Argueta had wanted to impress her and take her wherever she chose, including La Puerta.

The formation rose at the boundary between Planes de Renderos and Panchimalco with three bulbous cliffs named el Chulo, la Chulita, y el Chulón. Each one was bigger than the next, their slopes curving down sharply, meeting at a crevasse that crumbled deep into the earth, down into a network of geothermal tunnels that ran for kilometers across the country.

La Puerta also had a reputation dating back to long-extinct ancestors who hurled their children into the ravine to sate ancient gods that dwelled in the earth.

Argueta looked down below once more. Could he say it was suicide?  Word around town was that she was too broke and depressed to keep her dance academy afloat.

Patting his shirt-pocket, Argueta desperately wanted a cigarette. Cold sweat beaded his forehead. He gripped the flashlight tighter and kept looking down into the ravine. The clock was ticking.

Where was the gamekeeper?

Suddenly, he heard a snort followed by a short bellow in the dark.

“Tranquilita, Eusebita, tranquilita,” a man’s voice croaked in time with a tin cowbell.

Argueta turned and pointed his flashlight into the night. “You’re late. Real late.”

 Eugenio Sarabia raised his arm to block the light. “Cow got loose again. The drought has been making the animals crazy, Jefe.” He looked at Argueta through his narrow eyes, “All of them.”

The Police Chief swallowed.

Everyone at the station knew Sarabia as a thin, doddering whisp of a recluse with rheumatic hands. He lived in a clapboard wood and zinc shack across the road from La Puerta and was always behind on his rent to the landowner for the spit of dry dirt that surrounded the hovel.

Argueta, however, knew Sarabia as the gamekeeper. His family had lived in the dilapidated shack for generations, tending to the thing Argueta had wanted to show the ballerina on her birthday.

She’d always been so kitschy about the local culture.

Sarabia stood next to Eusebia, looking around. “Did your woman run away before the show?”

“There’s been an accident,” Argueta mumbled, gulping down the reflux caused by the vodka. “I need your help. Pulling her up. From down there,” Argueta mumbled.

Sarabia chuckled. Then, realizing the Police Chief was serious, he placed his hand on Argueta’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, Jefe. I’ll say a prayer. But you know it’s no good down there at night.” He pulled on Eusebia. “The good news is that people jump off el Chulón and disappear all the time. No one will pay any mind.”

“This one was special.” Argueta blinked. “I don’t want it to take her.”

The gamekeeper raised his eyebrows, confused. “But, jefe, you have no choice.” He patted the cow’s hindquarters, “At least now, I can keep my Eusebia.”

Annoyed, Argueta took out the revolver holstered next to his hip and fired a shot at Eusebia’s hooves.

The old cow bucked and Sarabia almost lost his hold on the moldy rope slung through the rusted rings of her halter. “Why would you do that?”

 “Her body is still down there,” Argueta said, “Throw in the cow. Distract it.”

Argueta fired another shot at Eusebia’s hooves, “Help me or you’ll be the one getting thrown into the ravine.”

Sighing, the old man led Eusebia up the cliff. When they reached the top, he tied her loosely to a Maquilishuat tree that hung at the very edge of the cliff, its remaining pink blooms glowing light blue in an intermittent gleam of moonlight.

Eusebia snuffled at the sweating gamekeeper, her tongue extended like wet, purple velour from her mouth, as she attempted to lick the salt off his clammy palms.

“Shh,” Sarabia said, cradling her head as he drew a knife across her soft, white throat.

Eusebia moaned and began to thrash. The blood pumped out around the men’s feet with a thick, copper-coin smell. Unable to tolerate the commotion, the Police Chief fired three rounds into the animal’s skull.

The cow’s knees buckled and she went over the cliff, almost pulling the tree down with her.

Argueta and Sarabia stepped to the edge and looked down, Argueta aiming the flashlight.

With a great burst, the cow landed on the lip of the ravine.

“Look,” the gamekeeper said a moment later. He pointed. “There it is.”

Slug-like, a black, boneless mass oozed up from a crack in the earth and began traveling along the rim of the ravine with a flapping motion that reminded Sarabia of the way Eusebia’s tongue had moved in the seconds before he shot her. He felt revulsion.

The thing undulated along the bloody edge of the chasm, ignoring the ballerina’s body. It arrived at Eusebia’s broken, twitching carcass, wound itself around it, and began dragging it back back the way it had come. In less than a minute, both carcass and creature had vanished into the fissure from which the creature had emerged.

“Well, it’s fed,” Sarabia said, “Shall we?”

Argueta nodded, looking paler than before, “I’ll owe you all the cows after this.”

Stretching, Sarabia shook his head. “You already paid enough, don’t you think?”

 The two men walked towards the side of La Chulita, the formation that sloped the farthest away from the ravine, to arrive at a wooden ladder the gamekeeper had embedded into the rock face.

“I thought you people stayed away,” Argueta said, looking down at the steep drop.

“Times change. Needs don’t. Everyone from the cantones out there needs to get to the bus stop quickly so they can go find work in the city,” Sarabia said, stepping down a rung.

Argueta looked at the gamekeeper, who explained, “Look, I don’t like it. My family was tasked with keeping people far away from here. But I recognize that cutting through La Puerta is easy for today’s young, who don’t believe the old tales. This ladder is a compromise. Far enough away from the ravine itself. If one or two get curious, at least they feed the thing.”

When the two men got to the bottom, they cut through brush and across several switchbacks to where they could see the ballerina’s dress flapping limply in the breeze. In the air, the reek of cow’s blood hovered, thick and cloying.

“I’ll go,” Sarabia said, not waiting for Argueta to ask.

“What is it?” Argueta said.

Sarabia shrugged and said, “We’ve never asked questions. We were only told to feed it. Consistently and carefully. Or else it would find a way out.”

Argueta choked back gasp of horror. “Should we push her into the ravine?”

“We just fed it, jefe,” Sarabia replied, annoyed. “An old cow, yes—but still producing. Best not overdo it.”

“You’re right,” Argueta said. “And anyhow, I wouldn’t want her to be picked apart like some torta by the thing in there.”

Inevitably, as he watched Sarabia walk to the edge of the ravine, the police chief’s mind galloped through all the possibilities.

The easiest solution would be to push the dead ballerina into the ravine and say she’d disappeared. How many women simply vanished from the face of this country, without a second care or thought?

The Police Chief scrubbed his face with his right hand. No. If there was one small thing he could do for her, it would be to spare her the indignity of a scandal, at least. That included being labeled a suicide.

But he’d have to do it in a way that all eyes pointed away from him.

Argueta stood thinking among the creosote bushes while the old man tied his metates around the ballerina’s bleeding parts, then slung her body across his back in a poorly assembled heap.

Sarabia walked back slowly across the uneven terrain and when he reached Argueta, he looked at the police chief with sadness.

“I hadn’t realized,” Sarabia said, with tears in his eyes, “that it was her. That she was your woman. She was so kind to us.” He smiled at the police chief. “You did the right thing. No one deserves that.”

The two men began their climb back up the ladder. When they got to the top of La Chulita, Sarabia, eager to get back home, untied the metates holding the body on his back. It had barely dropped into the dust when Argueta pressed his pistol to the gamekeeper’s head.

“I want to thank you for your help,” Argueta said, “But I don’t see how this works out any differently.”

Then, Argueta pulled the trigger. Sarabia fell in a heap next to the ballerina’s body.

Without wasting a moment, Argueta slipped cuffs on the gamekeeper’s worn wrists.  Then, his legs shaking, he walked down to the squad car. It was 4:00 a.m. and the classical station was already playing Brahms. With a trembling hand, he picked the two-way radio.

“There’s been a murder at la Puerta. Body recuperated, suspect in custody, send reinforcements,” he said.

Then Argueta walked up and sat next to the crumpled Sarabia Inexplicably, the old man, barely alive, began to mumble, “It should not be left without care.”

Argueta jumped up, shocked that the gamekeeper was still breathing, “What?” he said.

But Eugenio Sarabia did not speak again.

Argueta looked up at the sky. The early morning sun was starting to crack the low-hanging clouds. Through the white mist, the flashing lights of the other patrol cars snaked up the caliche road that swung along the top of La Puerta.

Before they arrived, Argueta walked to the shack and searched for the money he’d given the gamekeeper for his cow. He found it stuffed in a coffee tin and jammed it into his pants.

The police chief would tell the other officers that he’d caught Sarabia trying to run off with the body of the woman he’d undoubtedly killed tied across his back. The old recluse attacked him and Argueta was forced to shoot him.

No one questioned it.

Sarabia was blamed for the murder of a national treasure.

The ballerina, despite gossip, would get the benefit of the doubt. After her stately funeral, her remains were buried in a christian cemetery, an honor which would never be granted to a confirmed suicide.

The year was 1972.

The highway project between los Planes de Renderos and Panchimalco would be completed within a year, and with it the promises of greater connectivity between the remote villages that dotted the hills of the municipality of La Libertad and the bustling metropole in the valley beyond. In the meantime, men and women continued to use Sarabia’s ladder on their way to work, or to travel. Occasionally, someone disappeared.

Out in the distance, along the coastline, the smoke from the burning sugar cane fields wafted in the direction of San Salvador like a black spirit.

Beneath the smoke, the land hungered.

 

II.

In Brazil, tallies were box shaped. For every item counted, a side was drawn until the box was closed. When the person counting reached five, a line would be struck through the middle of the box.

In Japan, tallies looked a bit like small trees, with one large overhanging branch at the top, followed by progressively smaller ones sticking out from the vertical trunk.

Captain Chamba Portillo preferred the American way of tallying things. One vertical notch drawn next to the other, with a horizontal line vivisecting four lines to count off for five.

“1,145; 1,146, 1,147 . . .”

Lines felt more accurate in their representation of the bodies he kept track of.

Side by side, he arranged them neatly on the ground before his men rolled them off the cliff and into the ravine below.

The year was 1981.

Black smoke still hung above the valley beyond La Puerta, but it no longer had the sweet smell of sugar cane coated in the diesel-sparked flames of slash-and-burn season. It was the acrid smell of charred flesh and bloat, mixed with the garlic-like fumes of white phosphorus.

As he sat in the cab of the military-issue flatbed truck, Captain Portillo drew each stroke with a stubby 2B pencil.  With conviction, he applied the same exact pressure each time to the pages of the black moleskin notebook he always carried in the back pocket of his uniform pants.

“1,149, 1,150 . . .”

In total, Portillo had dumped 1,151 . . . no 1,152, counting the body of the small boy the soldier by the name of Castañeda had just thrown from the flatbed. He never knew how to tally children. They weren’t fully formed lines. So far, today’s total alone consisted of 150 villagers—men, some women, the one child. All of them terrorists.

Or terrorists in the making.

Portillo scrawled it in: 1,152.

He got out of the cab and walked over to make sure they were all dead. If not . . . one final gunshot in between the eyes. With each recoil of the gun the brown heads bounced like hollow gourds on the chalky dust.

“All right, roll them out,” he told the men, placing the gun back into his holster.

“Yes, Captain,” the men said in unison.

One by one, each body rolled off the cliff and into the ravine. By morning, their corpses would all be miraculously gone.

As they drove away, the flatbed now empty, Portillo recalled when he’d been given the orders, strict ones, out of Ilopango Air Base.

To find a place where no evidence could ever be found.

Portillo had heard things as a kid, bizarre things about La Puerta, from his Uncle Chepe, a retired police chief. Chepe had finished drinking himself to death in 1979, after the coup, almost as if to avoid what was coming.

It was difficult to believe in such alcohol-soaked nonsense spewed by a coward. But, in a panic, after receiving the order, Portillo picked up a woodcutter on the road to Panchimalco on a fake charge of communist insurrection. He needed to put the rumors to a test.

After slicing the woodcutter’s throat with his Toloza, Portillo pushed him off El Chulón.

The woodcutter fell into ravine below and what Portillo saw and heard could only be described as . . . satisfaction. Relieved to have found the perfect dump site, Portillo had driven to the only open librería in the city, where he bought himself the moleskin notebook and a box of pencils, and began his tally.

Portillo opened his window and lit a cigarette. The pale smoke coiled into the night, and the humid mountain air settled like a hand across his own fingers as they firmly clutched the wheel.

Shifting on his seat, he felt the notebook pressed against his thigh in his back pocket, and he smiled. He took great comfort in organizing the terrible things he was told to do.

Two nights later, the men were back at La Puerta with six more bodies on the back of the flatbed truck. But as they looked down from El Chulón they realized they had a problem.

“It’s like we fed it too much,” Castañeda muttered.

 “It’s a pile of rocks, what are you implying?” a second soldier, named Aguilar, said.

Portillo pressed a hand to his mouth.

Bones, with the flesh barely picked off, had been thrown up from the ravine with such force that they scattered far out into the valley.

At the point where the ravine ended, a hill he’d never seen before had bubbled up. Squinting, Portillo could tell it was unlike the others. It seemed almost too soft to be part of the ground.

“Not even the buzzards come around here, that’s what I’m implying,” Castañeda said, “The land’s sour. We overfed it.”

“Use one of those,” Portillo pointed at the six corpses they’d laid out in the dirt.

Aguilar shrugged and kicked one off the edge. It fell squarely into the ravine. But as soon as it landed in the darkness, it spewed back up into the night sky, landing like a rag doll coated in slime next to a herd of skittering goats.

“Son of a bitch,” Portillo said, “Tierra que no come, tierra que no esconde.” If the land doe not eat, it also does not hide.

“What do we do?” a third soldier, named Jiménez, asked.

“Find a solution,” Portillo said, “and quickly.”

“I’m not going down there. I’ve seen what this place does,” Castañeda said. The other two nodded their heads, their oversized green helmets shaking like bells on their skulls.

“We have orders, soldier,” Portillo said, “As far as we know, it is, in fact, too full. All we can do is hide what it’s thrown up.”

Frustrated, tired, the four men walked down to the flatbed truck, which they had parked next to an abandoned clapboard and zinc shack where they had stored several shovels, tarps, and explosive charges.

“La Chulita has an old ladder that approaches the ravine from the side. Might give us some cover.” Aguilar pointed it out as they walked back to the cliffs.

Nodding, the four men clambered down the wooden ladder and approached the ravine as hunters would a wounded lion.

“That smell,” Jiménez said, retching.

“Nasty,” Castañeda said, fanning the air in front of his face. “Eggy burps. Happens when you have indigestion.”

“And what is that thing?” Aguilar asked, pointing to the domed hill that appeared to quiver and ripple against the night sky.

“Never mind that,” Portillo said, “Start gathering so we can get to burying.”

The men worked until sunrise, picking up as many bones as they could and dumping them onto a tarp. Portillo and Jiménez then tied off the tarp and dragged it behind the domed hill, where they dug a trench.  Meanwhile, Castaneda and Aguilar climbed up the wooden ladder and brought down the six bodies they’d come to dispose of that night.

When every bone and scrap was accounted for and dumped in the trench, Castaneda placed the charges in the dirt.

 “One minute!” He yelled.

The men took cover behind a row of boulders. As the charges went off, the hill began to deflate. As if from an abscess, a putrid liquid flowed from the hill and through the trench, carrying the remains with it.

“Oh, God,” Aguilar threw up into the dirt.

The stench of the fluid was worse than the burps. Soon, a thick stream of it was running down to where the men stood. It lapped at their boots, making their eyes burn and flesh peel.

They all ran back to the wooden ladder at the side of La Chulita. By the time they had ascended, the entire area stank of death and liquid rot.

“What will we do the next time we have to dump someone?” asked Jiménez.

Portillo, stunned into silence, did not respond. He thought only of his uncle.

Within the next few weeks, Portillo and his three men all fell ill with an aggressive osteosarcoma. The attending military oncologist could only theorize that some secret soviet chemical agent left in the hills by the terrorists had made them all sick.

But the men knew. They had aspirated a sickness from an overfed earth. It now rotted them from the inside out.

By the end of 1981, Portillo’s final body count would rise to 1,161—a number that included his men and himself.

But even before he died, he could no longer press his pencil to his moleskin to sketch vertical and horizontal lines. He could no longer draw the strange, dark things he saw during his lidless, medicated sleep. His hands, blighted and fingerless, could no longer hold anything at all, not even the stub of a 2B pencil.

Portillo and his men withered away and were buried in a military graveyard as casualties in the war against communism.

 And the land, overstuffed and aching, slowly began to settle.

III.

The black wax pooled like a liquid shadow inside the fluted glass holding the veladora.

Despite the heat, El Barbitas gripped it tightly in his right hand. In the crook of his left arm, he carried a cage containing a fat hen, which clucked nervously as they walked up the path to La Chulita.

His friend, Maquedas, wrapped his arm around the much shorter Barbitas. He said, “If I saw you in the dark and didn’t know any better, I would think you were here to haunt the shit out of every indio trying to herd their animals across these cliffs.”

El Barbitas grinned and shook off the lanky Maquedas. “How do you know I’m not?”

“I’m not afraid of a demon, especially this one,” Maquedas said, and laughed, tapping his friend on the butt with the machete he always carried.

“All right, we’re getting close,” El Barbitas said. “Be serious, and quiet.” Then he laughed.

It was 2009. El Barbitas was sixteen. Maquedas, just shy of seventeen. El Barbitas was sixteen. Maquedas, just shy of seventeen. The boys had come up together in the clica that ran Cantón El Ensueño on the outskirts of Soyapango. But the government crackdown on their employer, La Empresa, had set the city on fire. La Empresa’s lieutenants, desperate for weapons and cash, increased their business dealings with a group of men and women on the other side of the Guatemalan border, people who some said worshipped Death.

One day, Marvin “El Toro” Sarabia had summoned El Barbitas to inform him that things weren’t going as planned.

“They’re worried,” El Toro said, “that this mano dura shit is going to affect business. They say a blood offering might help.”

“A blood offering Jefe?” El Barbitas waited for an explanation.

“Do you know why I told you to dump the dead off La Puerta?” El Toro asked. El Barbitas shrugged.

“We were just doing what you told us, Jefe.”

“There’s a devil that inhabits the tunnels near the bottom of the ravine; he’s as old as the mountains. Years ago, my grandfather was a gamekeeper who lived nearby, and the landowner gave him the task of feeding that thing. Keeping it fed, and keeping people away. Now the devil devours what we offer—and when we don’t offer, he takes.”

“I have heard . . .” El Barbitas began to say.

“The ravine itself is the mouth of the devil. His tongue sweeps the the cliffs as if they were lips. His guts are the domed hills.”

El Barbitas did not know what he should say.

El Toro said, “There’s been a message from the men across the river. Death is asking that one of us give the devil his due. We’ve decided that this honor should belong to you.”

“Jefe?”

Reaching to press a forefinger against El Barbitas’s chest, El Toro said, “You must give him something that comes from here. It is you who must decide.”

With El Toro’s finger still touching him, El Barbitas had stood wondering what that something could possibly be.

                                                                                        * * *

“Wasn’t there a ladder here last week?” Maquedas asked, taking the veladora from him to light a cigarette.

El Barbitas blinked. He looked at the side of the rock formation and back at the remnants of the shack across the road. Everything around here was crumbling.

Maquedas set the veladora down on the dirt. Above, a sliver of red moon scratched the sky like a claw.

The chicken began to flap in its cage.

“It’s like she knows what we’re about to do.” Maquedas stuck his bony finger into the cage and poked the bird.

“I feel sorry for her,” El Barbitas said. “You remember that chicken my grandma got that one year at Christmas?”

“You hid it in your room and named it Mercedes,” Maquedas said, and snorted. “Don’t tell me you named this one, too.”

“Francesca,” El Barbitas said. “That was a good Christmas.” His voice wavered, “I’m gonna piss.”

El Barbitas retreated behind an overgrown ficus bush and watched as the burning ember of Maquedas’s cigarette went up and down from his friend’s mouth to his hip.

From his waistband, El Barbitas drew a pistol and cocked it. The bird certainly wouldn’t be enough to satisfy the devil. And he couldn’t think of anything else that truly came from the spot that El Toro had tapped on his chest.

El Barbitas walked until he was at arm’s length from Maquedas, who continued to gaze out at the sparkling bowl of the valley.

“I’m sorry,” El Barbitas whispered, no louder than the passing breeze. He began to raise his weapon.

Unexpectedly, Maquedas wheeled and struck him in the arm with the machete. Then, as El Barbitas screamed and clutched his arm, he raised the blade and split his skull.

El Barbitas fell face first into the dirt, blood spilling from him. He twitched once and lay still. Shaking, breathing hard, Maquedas stared down at his friend. Then, he rolled his body off the cliff.

 El Barbitas’s chicken squawked and flapped her wings. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” Maquedas said, as much to himself as to the bird.

Then he sat in the dirt looking up at the sky until the orange flame of the black veladora burned through wax and wick and the sun began to rise, setting fire to the horizon.

Maquedas tucked the chicken cage beneath his arm. He descended to the freshly re-paved highway, and rather than heading in the direction of Canton El Ensueño, he caught the early morning economy express bus to Guatemala City. Fuck El Toro and fuck La Empresa.

From there, he rode a pecero to Tapachula. The caged chicken delighted the two young Mam girls who sat next to him, poking their fingers through the wire. “Why don’t you eat her? She looks tasty,” one of them asked.

After a moment, Maquedas said, “She belonged to a friend.”

From Tapachula, Maquedas walked for three days to Arriaga, where he climbed on the back of a yellow freight car attached to a long black train.

 At Ixtepec, his next destination, the train was still moving too fast when he leapt from it,  and he landed awkwardly on the opposing steel rail. The impact fractured both his ankles, and the chicken cage flew from his arms and beneath the squealing wheels of a train passing in the opposite direction.

A day later, Two Scalabrinian monks found Maquedas writhing in pain on a pile of trash, still gripping the pulpy remains of the dead bird to his chest. The monks carried him to a free medical clinic attached to a shelter five miles from the center of town, where they stretched him out on a wooden cot to await the setting and binding of his ankles. His pain was great, and he continued to writhe until two shots of morphine spread numbness through him, and he finally fell quiet, his eyelids fluttering. It was then that he began to weep.

Because suddenly, he missed the friend he’d been ordered to murder.

___________________________________________________________