Then there was confusion, turmoil, struggle. Halperin heard voices speaking sharply in Spanish and in Nahuatl, but the words were incomprehensible to him. He rolled over on his side and drew his knees to his chest and lay shivering with his cheek against the warm wet soil. Someone was shaking him. A voice said in English, “Come back. Wake up. She is not here.”
Halperin blinked and looked up. Guzmán was crouched above him, pale, stunned-looking, his teeth chattering. His eyes were wide and tensely fixed.
“Yes,” Guzmán said. “Come back to us. Here. Sit up, let me help you.”
The gallery-owner’s arm was around his shoulders. Halperin was weak and trembling, and he realized Guzmán was trembling too. Halperin saw figures in the background—Filiberto from the hotel and his son Elustesio, the mayordomo Don Luis, the alcalde, one of the alguaciles.
“Ellen?” he said uncertainly.
“She is gone. It is gone. We have driven it away.”
“It?”
“Amo tokinwan. Devouring your spirit.”
“No,” Halperin muttered. He stood up, still shaky, his knees buckling. Don Luis offered him a flask; Halperin shook it away, then changed his mind, reached for it, took a deep pull. Brandy. He walked four or five steps, getting his strength back. The reek of the cactus-flowers was nauseating. He saw the bare ribs again, the pulsating heart, the sharp white teeth. “No,” he said. “It wasn’t anything like that. I had too much to drink—maybe ate something that disagreed with me—the music, the scent of the flowers—”
“We saw,” Guzmán said. His face was bloodless. “We were just in tine. You would have been dead.”
“She was from Miami—she said she knew San Francisco—”
“These days they take any form they like. The woman from Miami was here two years ago, for the fiesta. She vanished in the night, Don Luis says. And now she has come back. Perhaps next year there will be one who looks like you and talks like you and sniffs around studying the masks like you, and we will know it is not you, and we will keep watch. Eh? You should come back to the hotel now. You need to rest.”
Halperin walked between them down the walled streets. The fiesta was still in full swing, masked figures capering everywhere, but Guzmán and Don Luis and Filiberto guided him around the plaza and toward the hotel. He thought about the woman from Miami, and remembered that she had had no car and there had been no luggage in her room. They eat us. Such things are impossible, he told himself. They are worms, wild beasts. And next year would there be a diabolical counterfeit Halperin haunting the fiesta? They are—not our brother. He did not understand.
Guzmán said, “I promised you you would see the real Mexico. I did not think you would see as much of it as this.”
Halperin insisted on inspecting her hotel room. It was empty and looked as if it had not been occupied for months. He stretched out on his bed fully clothed, but he did not particularly want to be left alone in the darkness, and so Guzmán and Filiberto and the others took turns sitting up with him through the night while the sounds of the fiesta filled the air. Dawn brought a dazzling sunrise. Halperin and Guzmán stepped out into the courtyard. The world was still.
“I think I’ll leave here now,” Halperin said.
“Yes. That would be wise. I will stay another day, I think.”
Filiberto appeared, carrying the owl-pig mask from Halperin’s room. “This is for you,” he said. “Because that you were troubled here, that you will think kindly of us. Please take it as our gift.”
Halperin was touched by that. He made a little speech of gratitude and put the mask in his car.
Guzmán said, “Are you well enough to drive?”
“I think so. I’ll be all right once I leave here.” He shook hands with everyone. His fingers were quivering. At a very careful speed he drove away from the hotel, through the plaza, where sleeping figures lay sprawled like discarded dolls, and mounds of paper streamers and other trash were banked high against the curb. At an even more careful speed he negotiated the cactus-walled road out of town. When he was about a kilometer from San Simón Zuluaga he glanced to his right and saw Ellen Chambers sitting next to him in the car. If he had been traveling faster, he would have lost control of the wheel. But after the first blinding moment of terror came a rush of annoyance and anger. “No,” he said. “You don’t belong in here. Get the hell out of here. Leave me alone.” She laughed lightly. Halperin felt like sobbing. Swiftly and unhesitatingly he seized Filiberto’s owl-pig mask, which lay on the seat beside him, and scaled it with a flip of his wrist past her nose and out the open car window. Then he clung tightly to the wheel and stared forward. When he could bring himself to look to the right again, she was gone. He braked to a halt and rolled up the window and locked the car door.
It took him all day to reach Acapulco. He went to bed immediately, without eating, and slept until late the following afternoon. Then he phoned the Aeromexico office.
Two days later he was home in San Francisco. The first thing he did was call a Sacramento Street dealer and arrange for the sale of all his masks. Now he collects Japanese netsuke, Hopi kachina dolls, and Navaho rugs. He buys only through galleries and does not travel much any more.