Sundown in San Ojuela

by M.M. Olivas

Genres: Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology; Coming of Age; Hispanic & Latino; Dark Fantasy; Horror

Synopsis

When the death of her aunt brings Liz Remolina back to San Ojuela,
the prospect fills her with dread. The isolated desert town was the site
of a harrowing childhood accident that left her clairvoyant, the
companion of wraiths and ghosts. Yet it may also hold the secret to
making peace with a dark family history and a complicated personal and
cultural identity.

Setting out on the train with her younger sister Mary in tow, she
soon finds herself hemmed in by a desolate landscape where monsters and
ancient gods stalk the night. She’s relieved at first to find that her
childhood best friend Julian still lives in San Ojuela, but soon
realizes that he too is changed. Haunted.

Yet she’ll have no other choice than to seek out his help as the darkness closes in.

 

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Release date: November 19, 2024

Publisher: Lanternfish Press

Print pages: 343

Sample

PROLOGUEThe Boy in the Black-Striped Serape

THE WAY THE BOY in the black-striped serape had described Casa Coyotl on the drive over, Oliver had imagined it rotting—turreted and spiderwebbed like a haunted Victorian house in a bloated jump-scare movie. From the property’s iron gates, the house looked shapeless. A dark mass hunched beneath cypress trees that dragged their fingertips against the night. And now? Standing up close, at the base of the front steps? There was something horrible about the house that no movie could have captured. Something old, and heavy, and waiting.

It wasn’t Victorian at all. It was a Spanish hacienda, its stark white clay sculpted out of the land itself with the horribleness baked in. The flat, mission-style bell tower that rose from the facade pulled a memory from deep in Oliver’s belly: touring the San Diego missions one hot spring day in the fourth grade, while Miss Lambertson monologued about how beautifully designed the former slave quarters were. How Oliver’s skin had itched so much that he scratched his arms raw between those walls. How he couldn’t stop thinking that he stood on bones. Bones. Bones.

With a skeleton key that he’d pulled from his serape, the Boy unlocked La Casa and pushed in the doors, which cackled as they swung—a dozen hehehahas escaping from the house’s maw.

“Was that the ghosts?” Oliver asked him. “Or a cry for some goddamn WD-40?” He stood with his hands in his pockets, trying his best to look smug or bored. Trying not to mind the damp fear pulsing down his spine or his father’s voice echoing in his head, calling him coward, coward.

“That was funny,” the Boy replied. “But you’re not laughing.”

The Boy stepped into the house; Oliver followed. In the foyer was a grand staircase that reminded Oliver of old Disney movies, but when he peeked inside the smaller rooms, he saw digital clocks, flat-screen TVs, computer monitors—things that told him a person had lived there recently, a real person. Not the shadow of a memory from elsewhen.

They kept the lights off, “because if we turn them on, Samuel will know someone’s here,” the Boy said in his thin, scratchy voice. “He’s the groundskeeper. He sleeps out in the dock house across the lake, and he doesn’t like trespassers. But I come here all the time when I’m not allowed, and he never finds out, because I’m okay with the dark.”

“That’s cool.” Oliver nodded, not listening. His attention was on the hulking forms of antique furniture that clogged the halls, gleaming with the night’s sickly green. Oliver wondered just how much you could make pawning antiques that no one would miss.

The Boy whistled a lazy tune into the dark. He smelled of death and desert sand, and his eyes glowed dull red with the touch of the moonlight.

A voice in Oliver’s head told him, Turn back! But with each step deeper into La Casa, a darkness pulsed through him that left his head fuzzy, as wild and exciting as the desert wind. He’d felt the same darkness for the first time earlier that evening, when the Boy caught his eyes from across a gas station parking lot.

---

Oliver was on the run, heading east towards the California desert and the country beyond. The night before, he’d traded verbal blows with his father again, one of those Mexican family arguments that started out of something small and grew

till it rattled windows. He’d asked if he could go on a road trip, just him and his friends, but his dad said no and his mom nodded, tight-lipped. It was his dad’s final comment that got him. “¿Para qué quieres gastar todo tu dinero, ah?”

As if that was all he’d done since high school: waste time and money. Still the same burnout kid with the same burnout friends, and all the family arguments since were just epilogues tacked on to the old one, which festered, terminal and ugly. Oliver’s father was concerned with the chisme his church friends or Oliver’s tíos and tías would speak if his son ever did anything “off.” Anything not “appropriate.” He was always trying fit Oliver into his machismochoked idea of what a man was.

In the summer, Oliver could ignore it more easily. He’d spent the last days of the season with his friends, smoking in the parking lot’s ocean breeze after long work shifts left his feet tender and throbbing. But summer was over now, the next one eons away. It was mid-October, and all his friends had scattered across the country to colleges he couldn’t afford. Places where their parents couldn’t barge in and yell, “You never turn off the lights!” or “What do you have to complain about, eh?” or “You’re not depressed. You’re fine.”

Their argument that final night had tapered off like all the others, with mutters and scoffs and a greater gulf yawning between them than when it had begun.

Oliver slept in the next morning. Woke at twelve and ate at two. He was pulling his server’s uniform out from the dryer in the garage when he stopped to look at his father’s 1972 Dodge Challenger—the oldest thing his father owned and the only remaining link to the life his family had once lived, back before buying this house that, for the first time, didn’t come with window bars. His father polished the car every weekend with buckets of leftover shower water that he captured in plastic bins throughout the week. Oliver was forbidden to drive it. Even to back it out of the driveway. If Oliver ever stepped too close to it, his father would mumble, “Careful, careful.”

The voice in his head told him, Go!

So he snatched up his dad’s keys, threw some shirts and packets of ramen into his backpack, and left.

An hour into the drive, his mom called. He didn’t answer. She left a voicemail that began, “¿Oliver? ¿Qué hiciste—”

He shut off the phone. Stuffed it into his back pocket. He wondered if his parents would think about why he’d run away. If his friends would. If his father could figure it out, given enough time. Probably not.

He was somewhere along the 74, the Dodge roaring beneath him, the electric twang of Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Child” thrumming, when he rounded the bend where the ICE checkpoint waited. He didn’t notice it at first—he was too focused on the pumpjacks jutting from the mountaintops. Skeleton horses bobbing their heads up and down, up and down, blackened in the desert sun.

The officers waved Oliver down. Singled him out from all the other drivers passing by. In the moment he almost let the music take him—almost stomped on the gas until the checkpoint was just an arc over the highway line in his rearview. But then he thought of his father: the way an ICE officer once broke his ribs when he refused to show papers, ten years back. Oliver had never seen his dad so scared, turtled up on the parking lot’s asphalt. So, despite the fear and music pulsating through him, Oliver shut the radio off and pulled to the side of the road.

A man in a black uniform rapped a knuckle on the driver’s side window and asked Oliver where he was going and where he’d been. Said: “Relax, kid,” and “Shouldn’t you be in school right now?” and “Is this yours? Hell of a car.”

When the officer asked for his license, Oliver flinched. “But I didn’t do anything wrong.”

That was what did it.

What caused the officer waiting in the shade to rest his hand on the black, gun-shaped bulge hanging off his belt. What caused the other officer to say, 

“I’m going to have to ask you to step out of the vehicle.”

Oliver protested—he hadn’t broken any laws; he shouldn’t be detained—but the officer dragged him out and bulldozed him into the ground. Asphalt kissed his chin. The officer twisted Oliver’s arms behind his back and leaned close enough that his stubble prickled Oliver’s ear. His breath a hot waft of sour milk. “I’m not going to say it again. Now, hold still.”

The officer slid Oliver’s wallet out of his pocket, found the license, and slapped it down beside Oliver’s cheek. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

They let him go after that.

And Oliver drove slowly and steadily for the next dozen miles until he pulled off at the first exit he found, someplace deep in the Inland Empire where the dirt was red and serrated mountains carved up the sky like knives: a town whose sign read City of San Ojuela.

He couldn’t get out of the car fast enough. Filled up his tank with shaking hands and kicked the fuel shaft half a dozen times, shouting, “Stupid—stupid—stupid,” until he slipped in an oil slick and hit his elbow on the chrome bumper.

You can still go back home, he thought. It wasn’t too late. His mom would forgive him, like she always did. But his dad would be waiting with a loaded diatribe for this new mess Oliver had made.

An attendant glared at Oliver from the window of the 7-Eleven. He half expected the guy to storm out and demand he head on back the way he came. Oliver ignored it, paid for his gas, and was back in his car, ready to get the fuck out of that sundown town, when the gas station’s double doors split and the Boy in the black-striped serape rushed out into the neon glow. Their eyes met.

And the desert pulsed through him.

The Boy took off running across the parking lot. The doors split open again behind him and a bunch of high school kids spilled out, chortling like a hyena pack as they corralled the Boy against the streetlamp, lashing at him with words like wetback and bitch and witch and prick and faggot.

Oliver revved his engine. A powerful snarl. He drove right up to those assholes and stepped out in front of the headlights with his sunglasses on and arms crossed, like the badass he definitely wasn’t. How quickly they scattered.

Oliver tried to help the Boy up, but he pulled his hand away.

“I didn’t need you to do that,” the Boy said. At least, Oliver assumed he was a boy; he could have not been. His hair hid his face, and his voice rasped. He didn’t look older than seventeen.

“Okay, dude. You’re welcome. Wasn’t no problem anyway.” Oliver flexed his hand, a faint burn pulsing where he’d touched the Boy’s skin.

He would have left it at that, but the Boy said, “I’d leave town quick, if I were you.”

Oliver’s guts twisted. “What?”

“But not that way.” The Boy pointed in the direction Oliver had come from, toward the highway. “The cops hang out there. It’s the only big road that comes in and out of San Ojuela. They’ll pull anyone over for anything. And nobody has your kind of car here. Someone like you, driving a car like that…” The Boy’s eyes glittered at the Dodge. “Oh, yeah. They’ll get you.”

Oliver sighed. “Alright,

 then, what would you do?”

“You’ll wanna take the back road. Past Tassajara. You go for a mile or two till you hit the pumpjack field. From there you find another way onto the 74 so you can keep running.” He paused. “You are on the run, aren’t you?”

It was the way he said it. The way those eyes seemed to know him, and how the tingling darkness warmed his hand. That same darkness seemed to cradle the Boy; it kept him safe from whatever was out here.

Oliver wanted that safety, that bravery. That was how he found himself offering the Boy a ride. Across town, past blocks of decaying, boarded-up strip malls where dead leaves tumbled on cracked roads. The Boy spoke only to tell Oliver, “Turn right here,” or, “Turn left there.” In the red of a stoplight, he elaborated. “A lot of people who used to live here couldn’t make the rent. Now there’s not many of us old ones left. You’re gonna wanna take another left.” Soon enough they’d made it to the gates of the hacienda, where the desert ended and lush trees grew among the cacti.

“People around here think it’s haunted,” the Boy said. “You can come in, if you want. If you need a place to stay, no one will bother you here.”

---

Now, Oliver took in the interior of the house the Boy called Casa Coyotl: its cracked walls, the faint smell of lavender and rotting wood.

The bones beneath his feet.

It felt like a dream. If someone had pulled him aside to tell him it was—that he’d wake up back home tomorrow to continue waiting tables, cleaning bathrooms, getting stoned, and sleeping late, waiting for his true life to begin—he’d have believed them.

“The kids used to have a song about this house,” said the Boy. “You know Spanish, yeah?” When Oliver nodded, the Boy chanted:

Casa Coyotl, Casa Coyotl

Dentro del pueblo con ojos

Profundo en los desiertos

Aullando y esperando

Allí con los dientes agudos—

Para comerte mejor

El cuerpo hasta los huesos.

He flashed a crooked smile that made Oliver think of a broken heart. He had a soft face, and his skin was pale copper. The rest of him he kept hidden behind the dark patterns of his shroud.

“I mean, yeah, that’s definitely a creepy-as-fuck song, I guess,” Oliver said.

“When I’m here, I feel the soil and listen to the sad songs buried underneath. It’s sad as hell here, don’t you think? Everyone thinks the house is evil, but it’s not, at all. I think it’s a gentle place. Safe.”

Oliver realized he knew the rhyme. He’d heard it years ago from one of his cousins around some campfire out in Joshua Tree, back when that was the thing they’d do. They’d share their stories of duendes and ghosts and chupacabras in the dark. Oliver remembered the crunch of distant footsteps, the blare of a faraway train’s horn. Everything he knew of the unknown he’d learned out there.

“There’s a story about the people who lived here years ago. A man moved in with his two daughters. And he was nice enough, if a little odd. But who isn’t, you know? Problem was he’d grown up here, escaped, only to end up back again. They say the ghosts within these walls didn’t want the man to ever escape the house again, so they drove him mad.”

Something was howling outside—wailing? Some creature beyond the property’s edge. That was the thing about deserts and the way their unsettling sounds carried. They could either be far away, or right outside. The desert never let you know which it was.

“No one knows what happened to the two girls. They were here one day, gone the next. Some versions say they died in gruesome ways, but that’s all urban legend shit. Most people say their mom took them away and the police locked up the father. The only one who stayed behind was the aunt who owned this place, but she got old, and now the house is dying slowly.”

He let the silence settle.

“That’s not a scary story,” Oliver finally said. “It’s just sad.”

The Boy blinked. “You know, I think so too.”

Eventually the Boy led him to a door at the center of the house, where the weight of the place sagged above them, as if held on slender strings. The Boy took Oliver’s hand; whispered, “Quick—I wanna show you something.” And together they stepped into a flood of moonlight.

There was a massive cavity at the heart of the house. A courtyard with arched cloisters and a fountain that bloomed in the middle.

“What do you think?” the Boy asked.

Oliver could hear nothing, see nothing of the world beyond the walls. He walked toward the fountain at the center of it all and looked up: above him stretched a cascade of a billion beautiful stars twinkling in black velvet. Back home, there were no stars. Just brown light pollution. No open spaces like this. Tight walls. Locked doors.

He’d never seen so many stars before.

“I…I think it’s amazing.”

He couldn’t hear distant sirens like he did in San Diego. No buildings cutting into the sky or planes roaring in. There was only the desert’s hollow call. He wasn’t looking up from earth to sky, he was looking down into the

 universe entire.

How could he go home when there was so much still out there? Oliver felt for the phone in his back pocket and clicked the home screen, but nothing happened. Right. He’d shut it off. Dozens of calls and texts from his mom must be lurking there. He just had to turn it on.

If he called her, he’d tell her he was sorry, and stupid, and she would forgive him, because unlike his father’s, her love wasn’t built on what kind of man he had yet to become. It would only take two hours, driving through the night, to get back to her. The thought tugged at the tendons of Oliver’s heart, and maybe he did abandon course in some other, parallel life; but it was October, and his dad would be there, and the feeling was only a sadness tugging at him, the past reaching out to say goodbye.

“I’m sorry for snapping at you earlier,” the Boy said, bringing him back. “When you helped me. I was still coming back into myself. But it was rude.”

“Back into yourself?”

“My skin. When my friends get like that, it’s a lot easier to just lose myself. Kind of go somewhere else, out there or deep inside, until they’re gone. You know? But don’t worry. I’m used to it.” The Boy forced a smile. A broken heart.

“Fuck those guys, dude. People can be awful.”

“They don’t like the tricks I can do,” he said. “They say I give them nightmares. But that’s impossible, they’re just paranoid assholes.”

Oliver remembered what they’d called him at the gas station. Witch. He didn’t say a thing.

“You’re not afraid of me.” The Boy raised an eyebrow.

“I’m not.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t think I have a reason to be. It’s normal people that hurt people,” Oliver said. He forced a laugh.

The Boy crouched in the darkness. Oliver felt his eyes on him. Swore he saw them glowing.

“We should go.” The Boy said it quickly—moved too fast for Oliver to think. He could only follow the Boy back through the house, propelled by instinct: across the courtyard and foyer and out the double doors to the roundabout where he’d parked. Only now the car sagged in the gravel. The tires hung off the rims in tatters. The trunk was ripped open—a gaping wound.

That was when he saw the shape prowling behind the car in the dark. A moaning thing—an undead thing. Its skull shaped like an animal’s, exposed and raw, with the shine of half a dozen monstrous eyes jostling in each socket, battling each other for dominance.

A feather crown atop its head.

“What the fuck?”

The creature lunged. The Boy pulled Oliver back into the house and slammed the door. The creature pounded against it, splintering the wood and lock, but they pinned the door shut with all their body weight and held it there until the howling stopped. Oliver shut his eyes. It’s a dream, he repeated to himself. It’s a dream. All he had to do was open his eyes and he’d be in the bed he’d always known. When he did open his eyes, though, they met two bare feet. Attached to them was the Boy, staring down at him.

“Bro, what the fuck was that?!” His own voice sounded far away from his body. He was reduced to a hysterical, screaming thing he didn’t recognize. Shouting over the Boy as he tried to calm him down. The Boy told him he had to stop it and shut up, or else—

“What’s going on here?”

They stopped shouting.

A stone gargoyle shifted in the deep shadows of the house and stood upright. No: an old man, his stance strong, with a full mustache and placid eyes and a bolo tie fastened with a dark stone around his throat.

“The groundskeeper.”

“Thank Christ.” Oliver pushed the Boy away from him and scrambled up. “Sir—there’s something outside.”

The man opened the door, looked into the emptiness outside, and closed it again. With a thick Spanish accent, he said, “You certainly did a number on that. That’s an old lock. It’s going to take a specialist to come in and make it right again.”

The way he spoke was calming. Oliver’s pulse slowed, and he wondered what it was he’d seen out there—if it was worth being so scared of. Probably just a

starved and mangy coyote, made monstrous by the moonlight. And those kids from the gas station had thought it would be funny to slash his tires. “I—I can pay for it. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry,” the old man laughed. “It’s just another antique. But you look tired. You’ve had a long day. Maybe it would be good to get some rest?”

Yes, Oliver thought. Right. Rest. But something nudged him to stay awake. Something about bones under the dirt.

To the Boy, the groundskeeper said, “Get him comfortable and we’ll see him off in the morning, okay? You don’t want the police finding you out so late.”

The Boy nodded. He led Oliver back to the courtyard. Oliver sank back in a cushioned chair, and the Boy made room for himself on the couch facing it. He’s right, Oliver told himself. You’ll be alright. You’ll be safe. You’ll wake up tomorrow and that groaning thing, the bad dreams, the cops—they’ll all be gone. The thought of his mom lying awake crept into his head, but he told himself he’d deal with it in the morning. He promised himself he’d call her.

I’ll fix us.

For a while neither the Boy nor Oliver spoke. Only when Oliver had faded into a dream haze did the Boy’s voice crawl back into his ear:

I knew someone like you once. He hated this town and wanted to leave. But the boys caught us together behind the bleachers and their fists pulped his face. Then he brought a knife to school and held it to one of their throats against a bathroom stall—but you’d understand why he had to hurt them, right?

You get it, even if they didn’t. They said expulsion, assault with a deadly weapon—called him terrible things that drove him to run away. Now the night calls to me. In my sleep it whispers to my blood and purrs in my bones. Samuel makes the whispers hurt less, so I can hear the coyotes howl.

Oliver woke up.

A pale lamp buzzed above him. The courtyard was gone, and interior walls boxed him in, killing any sound, any wind. He tried to stand but leather straps pulled him back into the chair. He tried to kick his feet, but those were bound too. He remembered the feeling of all the bones buried beneath the mission’s dirt.

Dread plunged into him.

He thrashed in his seat, twisted against the straps until skin split and rough wood drank up the blood. Chest constricting, he gasped for sips of air.

“Relax, it’s okay,” a voice said at the edge of the light. It was the Boy, watching with strange curiosity from a chair across the room. The chair was turned backwards, his arms crossed over its top rail. “We’re in a room deep in the house. No one will hear you if you scream, so you might as well not.”

Drowning. Drowning. Oliver was drowning.

“Cut it out, dude. What the fuck is going on?” The words spilled from his mouth. “I—I have to go. I gotta go, I gotta get home. I’m sorry—I’m sorry.”

The Boy blinked. “Listen, he’ll be here soon, and I can’t ever stand to watch.” He got up, backed into the dark until only his eyes remained. Sad, amber-red eyes. “When he’s here, just go inside yourself. Dig down and hide there, Oliver. I

promise it won’t hurt when you’re far away.”

Oliver was crying, pleading. Please, please, please—

“I’m not a bad person,” the Boy said. “I want you to know that. We try to keep it with just bad people, but it doesn’t always work out like that. Listen, it isn’t your fault, okay? It’s just bad timing is all. It’s always just bad timing. On the bright side, you don’t have to go home. You’ll be free from all that awful shit.”

Tears stung Oliver’s sight, blurring the Boy until he was a shadow of a wraith watching him. He needed his inhaler. Or his phone. If he had his phone, he could call his mom, he’d tell her he was sorry.

“I think…if things were different, maybe we could have been friends,” the Boy said. Oliver began to sob. The Boy nodded. “Right. Okay. It will be okay,” he said. Then he walked away into the dark.

A door shut behind him. Soon it creaked open again, and a shadow crept forward. Hand wrapped tight around a dark blade.

Oliver didn’t scream. Even when the shadow began to carve, and the pain was shooting whiteness. He just bit his tongue and thought of the stars.

---

In the morning, when the sunrise stretched mountain shadows long across the valleys and bluffs, a fire crackled in the desert, miles outside the town of San Ojuela. Flames snapped around what might once have been a Dodge Challenger. The paint curled and the seats crinkled. A spire of smoke rose from the burning wreck, reaching its black hand into the morning as the wind sighed across the desert sky.

ACT I

The Return

ONE

Dark Liz, Who Can See the Dead

ELIZABETH WAS FOURTEEN the night La Muerte dragged herself out of the mirror in the corner of the bedroom, the glass smoking then rippling like water until the ends of her toes slipped through. La Muerte smelled of hot wax and sweet marigolds, and the taste of ash kissed Elizabeth’s lips.

It was after midnight. Elizabeth had been lying awake in the ocean of her new bed, ...