Chapter 8: Deadzone
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Author’s Note: In this week’s chapter, we revisit familiar sounds from 13 Secret Cities and 9 Lords of Night. We also head into the second half of the interview with Steven Puttock. Don't forget that you can chat with me about Hall of Mirrors inside my Discord server.
-Cesar Torres
Chicago
Hall of Mirrors by Cesar Torres
Copyright @ 2022 Cesar Torres. All Rights Reserved.
Hall of Mirrors by Cesar Torres
Chapter 8: Deadzone
NESTOR BUÑUEL
A soft rap at the door startled both Puttock and Nestor. The two men looked at each other, considered laughing about it, but instead, they held on to their masks, each face flat and unmovable.
Puttock lifted his index finger and wagged it toward the door. “Visitors,” he said.
Delia popped her head inside. “Nestor, I need to talk to you for a second.”
“Oo, you’re in trouble,” Puttock said, winking but never smiling. Nestor was still reeling from Puttock’s disclosure of the killing of Lizette Fernandez.
“We’re almost done here,” Nestor said. “Puttock, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be right back.”
Two officers stepped into the room to supervise Puttock while Nestor paced the hallways outside side by side with Delia Douglas.
“Lizette Fernandez checks out,” Delia said. “We have a match for her as a missing person. You’ve done real good here.”
“It hurts to think about what he’s done,” Nestor said. “I could tear his head off with my bare hands right now.”
“I understand,” Delia said. “Been there, in many ways.”
“You have your hair in a ponytail today,” Nestor said, as he popped a stick of gum in his mouth.
“What the hell does that have to do with anything?” Delia said.
“You wear your hair up like that for only two types of occasions. When you have to show up to court, and when you’ve got something weighing heavy on your mind.”
“I suppose I should be flattered you pay attention,” she said as her eyes drifted into the infinity point of this narrow hallway. The heat was still unbearable today. “I don’t have a court date today, and that only leaves the latter.”
“Shoot,” Nestor said.
“The governor just raised a security alert for us. Contingency plans are going into effect in New York State, California, and the city of Atlanta. National Guard is deploying. Curfews begin today.”
“And Illinois?”
“The president is sending additional army troops to Chicago to give the National Guard backup,” Delia said. “It’s meant to neutralize the vigilantes. Maybe this move will bring down the number of murders connected to vigilante violence.”
“Fuck my life. The army?”
“I just got word that they’re even moving armored vehicles into the Loop.”
“Felix,” he said, shaking his head.
“If you want, you can cut out now and head back,” she said. “You don’t have to finish he Puttock interview. He’s given us enough of what we wanted. I can understand if you need to get your ass home.”
“How can I even get there? Flights are going to be canceled or delayed.”
“I got you covered. I talked to the governor this morning, and he can get you on a military flight to go back to Chicago as a thank you for helping us with this project.”
Delia’s words trailed off into vapor as Nestor glanced down at his own phone. He had 75 notifications from Felix, blinking at him, screaming pay attention to me. Open me. Look at me.
From the journal of Felix Calvo, October 27, 2030
I walked down Broadway from Granville to Irving Park. Polidrones and helicopters filled the sky, but most people went about their way, as if the danger unfolding around us wasn’t really happening.
I suppose I do this, too. Every day, I binge on streaming movies, I line up hookups on my dating app, and I tell myself, “I deserve a little treat.”
But the reality is that my phone’s alerts are off the hook, and something has changed in our environment. There’s an electric charge in the air, and I can feel it on my skin.
I know I shouldn’t be walking out here. I know it’s not safe.
I’ve been texting Nestor over and over and over, but he’s busy with the Puttock case.
But he needs to listen. He needs to know that I saw Tecolotl. He’s here, in the city. Sometimes he looks like a shadow, and sometimes, he’s as solid as concrete. And I get the sense that he wants me to follow him toward the south.
When I reach the intersection of Addison and Broadway, I am forced to find a new route. The police have cut off all traffic, and they’re checking people’s IDs. There’s a series of fires, or maybe shootings in Lakeview, and only residents are allowed to move through the barricades. I choose instead to walk toward the lake, away from the barricades. The lake is probably also off limits during this emergency, but I know a spot, near Addison and Lakeshore Drive, where hopefully I can cut through an underpass.
Fuck yeah, the cops haven’t closed it off yet.
I dash through, and I nearly break my shit tripping over a pair of homeless people. This underpass is filled with them. I feel guilty and embarrassed as I tiptoe my way through their bodies and their belongings, but I don’t slow down.
I emerge from the tunnel and I see a pair of green and black wings fluttering above the Waveband Clocktower, just south of the golf course. They make a sound that is crystal clear to me, but I wonder if anyone else can feel it and hear it. It sounds like church bells, but deeper, wider, infused with information in each musical note.
The sunlight feels as hot as lava, and I cover my brow with my hand so that I am not blinded by the sun. In that moment, I see him. Tecolotl is sitting on top of the clocktower, and his sharp claws are cutting grooves through the brick. The bell sounds that emanate from his body change their melody as he opens his beak. From it, his snake tongue emerges, and the snake, whose scales are the color of fire and whose eyes sparkle like diamonds, emits a hiss that sounds like the sound of waterfall.
Tecolotl then dives off the field house, into a patch of trees just a few hundred yards south of where I stand.
I am scared, but I run toward the trees. I have to find him.
NESTOR BUÑUEL
Delia Douglas took a moment to answer a few emails and give her team tactical directions over the phone. Nestor had known for years she was born to be a great leader, but he was witnessing that talent come to full fruition now. He remembered the sex they shared the night before and reminded himself that he did not deserve someone like her.
When she was done taking care of business, she pocketed her phone and crossed her arms.
“So yes, my hair is up in a ponytail, Nestor. I slept on some ideas last night. So I’ll just cut to the chase: What’s the real meaning this place Puttock keeps talking about—Mictlán?”
“He thinks it’s a real place.”
“He watched Coco too many times.”
“No, no, no,” Nestor sid. “Mictlan’s is nothing like what was shown in the movie Coco. That was a hyper-palatable capitalist confection by Disney. The place Puttock is describing is something out of time, maybe beyond the limits of what our consciousness can comprehend. But it comes to us from the world of religion and myth. Puttock thinks Mictlán is as real as Central Park in New York.”
“I can see how that makes him dangerous, but in my opinion, also delusional. The reason I ask is that I worry that Mictlán could be a code word for criminal network activity. Dark web traffickers, narcos, republican neo-Nazi sleeper cells.”
“No, none of those groups have Mictlán on their radar,” Nestor said. “Puttock’s obsession is unique to him, trust me.”
“So he really thinks he will get a chance to enter Mictlán,” Delia said. “But if that’s so, why not just commit suicide?”
“Because a suicide has no guarantee of power for Puttock.”
“What power would he get by gaining access to a place where all souls go when they die?” Delia said.
“Think about Dante, John Milton, Samuel Kahan and Roberto Bolaño. They all gained access to the divine, while also making contact with the profane. They traveled to the depths of darkness. They achieved a type of immortality in doing so.”
“Puttock wants to be timeless?”
“Not in the same way,” Nestor said. “He wants to be a necromancer..”
“Even if he’s not connected to neo-Nazis, I’m done for now. Finish the interview, but go as short as you want,” Delia said. “Then you can kiss him goodbye.”
“Not with those fucked up candy corn teeth of his,” Nestor said. They both laughed. Delia made her way to the room at the far end that led to the observation room, and after getting a nod from the officer guard the door, Nestor twisted the doorknob and prepared to say a very satisfying and last goodbye to the Night Drinker.
From the Journal of Felix Calvo, October 27, 2030
I just walked past a sign posted in the entrance to this patch of trees.
BILL JARVIS BIRD SANCTUARY
I never knew this place existed. The sanctuary is dotted by several signs of bird species that migrate through the lakefront, but all the signs have been vandalized. Someone has scrawled the word “Climate Crisis=Worldwide Death” on on of the wooden benches used to observe the birds in the trees.
And in fact, I don’t hear or see any birds. No one does anymore.
But I do hear bells.
I put my phone away. I have to stop checking notifications. All my friends are sending me panicked messages. My mom’s flipping the fuck out. I catch a glimpse of some of the news headlines, unfortunately. Someone has set fire to a row of condos facing Wrigley Field and they’re burning as we speak. That explains the police and ambulance sirens tearing through the North Side right now.
Suddenly, this small patch of woods is becoming very silent. I hear the bells, but they have distorted, becoming wobbly, waterlogged. I move past a few trees, and I find a shallow chain link fence. I climb over it, and through the trees, I see a tiny man-made lagoon that’s of course meant to nourish migrating birds.
There’s only one bird there. And it stands six feet tall, with his back turned to me. Wisps of black smoke rise from its body, and he gives off a scent of incense, and something else, something forgotten, something not of this place.
I am now just ten feet away, tiptoeing, when the bird cranes its neck a full 180 degrees. And he finds me. His four eyes are orbs brimming with the color gold, and inside them, I lose myself again. I feel my heart race in my chest, and my scar tingles.
I take one step forward, and the smoke owl cocks his head.
From behind me, I hear a loud explosion, and more police sirens filling the Chicago air.
Tecolotl turns his whole body toward me, and as he does so, he eclipses all the sunlight that was formerly bathing us. A soft blanket of greenish black smoke envelops me, and he opens his beak.
He calls me by name, but the word emerges as a symphony of music and rhythm. Tecolotl spreads his wings, and I gasp, as I refamiliarize myself with the thousands of eyes on their surface. They blink in unison, and the eyes track me. They see me.
NESTOR BUÑUEL
Nestor flipped open a legal pad before him to create a bit more psychological distance between him and Puttock than their previous sessions. This was the end of the road, and a more formal stance would not just give Nestor closure, it may also provide him with a bit of psychological protection from Puttock. Puttock’s arrest in 2025, and the sequence of events that followed, punctuated Nestor’s life with regret. Sure, Nestor had been instrumental in apprehending the serial murderer, but in the end, the case had been mostly handed over to the FBI, and in part to Delia Douglas. And that was just a formality. The truth was, Nestor was no longer in Captain Smith’s good graces at the department, but Nestor didn’t realize that until two or three years after the season in which he caught the Night Drinker. Smith was more concerned about his own status, and his ability to make it climb higher so he could one day run for mayor, and that meant that he had never really been invested in helping the people who needed the most help.
Nestor knew that the police force he joined in his twenties was not the same police force he exited when he was in his early fifties. By the time, he retired, police officers resembled soliders, technically, tactically and philosophically, and the incentives to use heavy force and cast aside discretion in respecting suspects had been eschewed by the system and the new legislation enacted by Congress. After all, there were no real consequences for choking a suspect to death by stepping on their neck, or shooting them dead with 90 rounds of semi-automatic firepower, especially if they were black males.
Nestor had also made his own mistakes. He had let his own rage take the driver’s seat often, and as a result, he had abused and intimidated some suspects throughout his career in ways he regretted. Not all of them had been black, but that didn’t make the situation any better.
It was only when Nestor encountered the strangeness of the Night Drinker case and its lurid mysteries, that he had started to realize his failures.
Nestor had attended every single day of Steven Puttock’s trial, testified on the stand, and seen the jury convict him, but by that point, Nestor was introduced in court as “former officer Nestor Buñuel.”
Nestor had watched himself on CNN, exiting the court house, answering a few questions at the press conferences, and he had imagined himself as an action figure: poseable, but stiff and wooden, dressed in an outfit that never changed. Every time he appeared on the screen, he stared out through his black eyes, hidden behind his thick beard, and his black armor—the expensive tight black t-shirt and the sportscoat he favored. To the outside world, they saw a cop and book author who seemed like a success.
The truth was that when he retired, Nestor had been miserable, and discontent.
What a cliche of a cop he was. Burnt out, overworked, and drunk in his forties, and scorched and drunker but the time he reached his fifties. Booted from the force via politics, and barely scraping enough cash to pay rent with his retirement money. Forced to become a private investigator to make ends meet, and somehow, recruiting Felix Calvo along the way, and making a pilgrimage to Chicago, a city that Nestor detested with all his might, but which now, five years later, was starting to feel like home.
Nestor was trapped inside himself, inside a labyrinth of his own invention, and getting older only seemed to make it worse.
“Penny for your thoughts, detective,” Puttock said. His smile was gone, and hatred poured out through his grey eyes.
“We’re going to wrap up now,” Nestor said. “I just want to make sure we covered everything that’s pertinent.”
“You know, I thought about that story you shared about El Hombre de Oro. That definitely felt pertinent.”
“It’s just a story,” Nestor said.
“Don’t underplay it. The ancient Aztec tradition of selecting a virile young man, dressing him inside the skin of the god Tezcatlipoca, imbuing him with the god’s powers, and the rest of society treating him as the god himself for a carefully planned span of calendrical time, was really special. And even if your story, which is sort of disgustingly homoerotic, is just a ribbon of fiction, it has lots of merit. It proves that the essence of the black Tezcatlipoca is alive and well.”
“How so?”
“The luchador you call Hombre de Oro would of course be a perfect nagual. He’s an ideal vessel to receive the dark powers of Tezcatlipoca. A meek and frail homosexual transformed into a beast, a hero for the masses. Transformative, magical, transgressive. Very clever, very original. And very Tezcatlipoca-esque.”
“It speaks to you,” Nestor said, jotting down a note on his pad without looking up.
“Fuck yes. I pray at the altar of Xipe Totec and bring him skins as gifts, and that nagual luchador also performs favors for Tezcatlipoca, at least with the little time he’s got before he’s sacrificed up again to the god.”
“Would you say you see your killings were a religious ritual?” Nestor asked.
Puttock tapped his fingers on the table, and spent a moment picking a nail clean. “You know, I enjoyed it.”
“Excuse me?”
“Skinning them. I enjoyed it. It’s not pretty. But it’s an art. I didn’t do it for every single tribute, but for the ones I did do it. I enjoyed it.”
“Tell me about that,” Nestor said.
“Skin is is our armor against the natural world. But we don’t truly appreciate its symbolic meaning, do we?”
“Is the skin you’re wearing now your true skin?” Nestor said.
Puttock’s face froze. His pupils widened.
“Detective Buñuel goes full poet on our last day!” Puttock said, clapping his hands. “I like this. He asks me if this skin I wear is who I really am!”
He looked at his hands, turned them over a few times. He cackled under his breath. And then he remained silent. Nestor had found a question that for once, Puttock didn’t want to answer.
“Got any more names of victims for me, partner?” Nestor said. This was the finale of this story approaching. Finally, he could just hit a few key questions, and then get his ass back to Chicago.
“The worst is yet to come,” Puttock said. “You keep on jotting notes, as if they matter. But you’ll see. Everyone inside this roach motel we call society will suffer. And you will suffer too.”
“Why?”
“Because Xipe Totec is angry.”
“What made him angry?”
“It was his resentment against his three brothers, his alienation, that made Xipe who he is today.”
“Xipe’s anger — it reminds me of Cronos’ jealousy of his child Zeus,” Nestor said. “Cronos did everything in his power to get rid of that baby.”
“Yes. YES! You do know, Lucifer fell because he had the audacity he could be a peer, an equal to the god of the Bible. And Cain and Abel, you know how that turned out, don’t you? Anger and jealousy runs through all these stories like a hot vein.”
“Did your victims feel like brothers to you?” Nestor said. “Were you reliving the drama of the Tezcatlipocas through your killings?”
“Of course not,” Puttock spat. “There’s a difference between a man who offers up a gift to the gods, and the gift itself.”
“Who else did you murder? How many in total?” Nestor said.
“I needed thirteen sacrifices,” Puttock said. “Thirteen is a holy number.”
“Did you murder thirteen victims, then?”
“They’ll call me an auteur one day. Just like Kahan.”
“The movie director.”
“Exactly. You know, he only ever made thirteen movies. He knew the template.”
“He directed films,” Nestor said. “He didn’t murder people.”
“But you can’t ignore his movies. Kahan’s films were portals to other worlds, to higher dimensions.”
Nestor had grown so tired of this psychopath. He suddenly remembered the way Felix had pointed out the pair of robins outside their apartment, and he felt homesick. He was ready to go home. But he wanted his last words to sting Puttock. He wanted him to feel pain.
“How does it feel to know that you’re a fucking failure?” Nestor said. “Does your god Xipe Totec even give a shit that you got caught? You’re just a charlatan in a jail cell. Pathetic.”
Puttock recoiled as if slapped, tensed up his shoulders and his neck, and jumped out of his chair. He lunged at Nestor with both hands outstretched. Puttock knocked Nestor straight out of his chair. Nestor landed on his back, and before he could recover, Puttock was throttling him, spitting in his face, and screaming at the top of his lungs. Nestor punched Puttock on the nose, and blood gushed from the killer’s nostrils. The two men rolled on the floor, and the world shook.
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