The Bell Towers
[Being Chapter Nine in the Tale “The Only way was East.”]
The Monumental Clock can be seen from the US side of the border. Nearly 200 feet in height, the giant silver arch pokes high above the rust-color fence placed there by the Americans. It shoots so abruptly into the sky that it might as well be the voice of Tijuana itself, crying out to its older brother, refusing to live in its shadow. A monolithic black screen hangs from a spiderweb network of metal cables at the center of this shining doorway into nothingness.
In the late ’90s, Mayor Kiko conceived of the archway, “El Reloj Monumental,” as a beacon to usher the city of Tijuana into the year 2000 and the fresh millennium beyond. But an all too familiar series of scandals, corruptions, and money embezzlements delayed the archways completion until late 2001 where it received a lukewarm reception from the people of Tijuana upon its unveiling. Shortly after that, the giant screen which served as a clock (the only pragmatic function of the arch) inexplicably stopped working. And it stayed that way, broken down and lifeless until the Koreans decided to step in and lend a helping hand. The new screen, which proudly brandishes the Samsung logo below it, spends half its time as a clock and half its time broadcasting commercials to the passerby below on Avenida Revolución.
Calluna has already told you all about my hallucination. How I saw a Big Green Eye appear on that screen which stared down into my soul, and that upon seeing it I screamed and crumbled into a hollow shell of myself. I have no memory of these events. I have tried to piece together what happened during that block of time as best I can. What follows is my account of the chunk of time between that terrible lap dance in Tijuana and waking up outside of the red castle in Rosarito.
Calluna took the stripper’s hand and danced her way toward the stage. Biting her lower lip and closing her eyes she entered a trance state as she moved to the music. I wanted to cheer for my friend, but the stone pressed down on my hand and the rest of my body with a terrible heaviness. I knew that at any time I could release the stone and reanimate myself, but I didn’t want to. It seemed as if I’d been clinging to its darkness my entire life. That it had become a part of me.
Calluna didn’t have any of the technical skills that the other dancers had, but that didn’t matter. She had more passion than all of them combined. I can’t say that I was aroused though. The blood that would have gone to my dick was rushing to my left hand which was clenched so tightly into a fist around that stone that I was in danger of breaking it. Nevertheless, I was impressed with her. It was as if her ass were possessed by a demon that tried to free itself from beneath the mixed tones of her bouncing rump by thrashing left and right.
I was not turned on, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t thinking about sex. Sex was all I could think about. With every fondle and caress of that rock shaped like a broken heart I could hear the stone’s soothing whispers. They crackled like a fire in my ear and I swam deeper into the foam of its comfortable waves. I hated the way it felt. But I loved the way it felt, too. It was ripping my heart open and at the same time applying a soothing balm as it sang to me:
“It’s okay, it’s okay, I’m here.”
Calluna pumped and thrust to the “Taki Taki” as beads of sweat eeked from her forehead. I was almost comatose, leaning against the bright pink sofa as the stone sang its lullaby to me:
“Look at you just laying there like some pathetic slop. It’s no wonder that stripper didn’t want to touch you. There is something wrong with you. Deep, deep within you. You are flawed beyond repair. You are broken like me and you will never be fixed. But at least we have each other, at least we…”
“FUEGITO!” Where are you?!?”
Stacey’s voice ripped me from the dark waters and back into reality. I looked around the club for our enchantress landlord but she was nowhere to be found. It was then I realized that she wasn’t in the club at all, but speaking to me through her walkie-talkie-keys. The twin sister set of keys to her house. The ones she’d been using to spy on me.
“Please Fuegito, I can’t find you! You need to come back to the house before the witching hour. It’s the full moon and the asking stone could take over your heart. If that happens — ”
A hand made only of bone came out from the darkness and covered the talking key, muffling it. The hand was connected to a robe. Huge and dark and scratchy. My eyes followed the robe up an arm and stopped at the spine floating just below a face that was falling apart. Barely any flesh left on his bones, just a few rotten gray slabs by the cheekbones and on his brow. His eyes were empty all the way back. The phantom priest who had haunted me since he first saw me from that old church up the coast had now made his full appearance. His face had completely given way to decay, and yet, I immediately recognized who it belonged to. The face I had seen depicted in statues my entire life. “The founding father of California,” Saint Junipero Serra.
The small Kumeyayy Indian boy that had been traveling with the priest the entire night now shyly poked his head out from behind the robe. A meek skeleton wearing nothing but a loincloth. He shook his head as if to say “this is a bad man,” and as he did, clumps of dirt fell from the gaps in his spine. Worms and roaches crawled out of these clumps and onto the dirty floor.
“Let’s ignore her,” the skull said. “Best not heed the counsel of a witch.”
“There he is! Come on, wake up Buddy!”
“Is he finally up?”
“I can’t tell. I mean his eyes are glossy but that flame thingy is burning again, so that’s a good sign right?”
“Aye, this is like trying to start a bad lawnmower.”
“Maybe you could try the bells again? That seemed to work last time.”
I could see Calluna and Stacey above me. Trying to wake me up. But I couldn’t do anything about it. The two women looked liked giant towers hanging over me, especially Stacy the way she bent over and dangled ber bells. But I realized that it wasn’t just their position over me that made them seem so large. I was much, much smaller then I had ever been before.
I was in a small claustrophobic room that seemed to be the inside of my own head. As I scanned my environment I saw what looked like brains pulsing on the walls around me, but it was hard to see anything clearly in all those shadows. I had no idea where I was or how I had gotten there. The last thing I remembered was staring into Junipero’s empty skull eyes before everything went black.
Ahead of me, I saw two large holes with a bright light shining through them. I understood those to be my eyes. I was a very small person inside of my own body. I was naked. I was engulfed in a green flame. Through the huge circular windows in front of me, I could see the giant figures of Stacey and Caluna looming above. From what I could tell, my body was lying flat on the street and its head was staring vacantly at the sky.
In front of me stood a complicated apparatus of levers and pullies. It seemed that these were the controls to my body. I tried to move them, but a black goo had converged on the gears and made them impossible to budge. I heard a song echoing as it bounced around the walls of my brain:
“How darkly the dark hand met his end,
he was withered and bony,
exposed for a phony
But we heed the last words that he penned:
Haste to discrace a traitor,
do not wait till later…”
“I’m in here! Calluna! I’m in here!” I screamed, but they couldn’t hear me. Feeling quite literally trapped in my own head, I panicked. I began to thrash at the convoluted control panel in front of me but nothing would budge. I found a lever labeled “neck” and yanked on it in desperation. It gave way, and the black slime squirted at me and the chain came loose.
This caused my body’s head to fall from looking at the sky to resting on the street. I could hear Stacey screaming “Chinga madre he’s out again!” But the giant eye-windows did not close, and my body’s tongue flopped out of its mouth and onto the cobbled street. Even in that little room inside my head, I could still taste the germs on the pavement. It tasted like a 200-year-old steak that had been shit and pissed on by various cats, dogs, horses, and humans over the years.
My eye-windows now pointed directly at the house. That brick monster the color of glowing blood in the moonlight. It seemed infected. It was much larger than I remembered it in the day time, too. The small cactus garden out front had doubled in size. The prickly pear nopal sprouted green human faces that screamed “Tengo haaaambre” in the wind. Little beings that could have been birds or fairies (I couldn’t quite tell from that distance in the dark) were fluttering around the cacti which would snap the heads off of these creatures if they flew too near and guzzle down their purple blood.
The house just stood there waiting for me.
The moon, which had been a glowing yellow tortilla a moment before, went black as if it were blinking. When it reopened I saw one Big Green Eye staring down at me. Glaring through me, and into the hole in my heart. It looked like a crocodile’s eye. The muscles of the iris were various shades of moss and a sickly amber. It had one small vertical sliver of a black pupil at its center. The iris tightened as it focused its evil glare on me from thousands of miles above the sky.
As it stared down at me, it assaulted me with images that I could not unsee. A hint of what I might find in the tower, a warning to proceed no further. I saw an orgy of corpses dog-piled on top of each other 20 feet high, all of them fucking one another as their jaws and feet and faces fell off of them. A black vomit that fell out of my ears and my eyes and my nose until I was completely swallowed by it. A little boy encased in ice.
Visceral displeasure shot down my spine. It was like there were needles in my heart. I screamed and pled and kicked the lever labeled “eyes” hoping to block out the images that the eye was sending me. Steam issued from the crawling gears and apparatus of my body’s brain. Then, my eye-windows shut, and everything went dark.
Everything was bright. The sky was blue and wide. Fields of golden grass surrounded me, and I was alone. The only sounds were that of the wind and the distant crash of waves somewhere to the west. Above me, I heard the rolling clicks and clips of ravens.
I wandered that empty purgatory for a while before I heard the clang of a bell and the distant muffle of men’s voices. As I neared the sounds, I saw what looked like a tower being constructed in the distance. As I got closer I realized that the building would be a Catholic mission once completed. I could see the framework for roman arches, and a large pile of pale adobe bricks. But at the moment all that stood was a single bell tower. Shirtless Kumeyay men were passing clay bricks to each other as they grunted, a few of them were raising the bell to its proper place atop the tower, using pullies and rope.
Although it could not have been more than three stories tall, it pierced the heavens being the largest object in any visible direction save the large mountains off to the east. The bell seemed to watch over the area that surrounded it. From the fields of grasses to the mountains to the sea. Its huge steel form seemed unnatural in this landscape. Ugly and bulbous and metal. I hopped off of the footpath and crouched in the tall grass to get a better look.
Circling the shirtless men were two mestizo soldiers on horseback. Half Indio, half Espanol. An entirely new class and racial entity. One that had the power to hold the whip to his native cousins, but that could never aspire to call himself a true Spaniard.
“No, no no! Santiago! Otro lado! Otro lado!”
The new voice came from the only white man in the group. He had a scroll in his hands, which I suppose held the plans to complete the mission. He wore a large scratchy robe and a huge black hat to protect his rosy cheeks from the California Sun. It was Father Junipero Serra, his face fully restored.
I recognized the boy he was scolding, too. The same dead boy that followed Juiperro along on his haunts through the streets of Tijuana. His skeleton was now covered in smooth brown skin that didn’t seem to swelter under in the heat like Serra’s pink and melting hide did. As the priest accosted him, the boys’ eyes began to water and tear up. He ran to an older member in the group and hugged him tightly but the priest followed and tore them apart.
He pointed his finger in the boy’s face and slapped him hard across the cheek, leaving a pink handprint that quickly faded into brown. The boy went running down the hill on the footpath. As he passed me, he caught my eyes with his, and with a look of recognition, the boy scowled at me.
“Aye, por Dios…” The priest shrugged and waved to one of the soldiers. The soldier nodded and he flew after the boy on horseback. The horse quickly caught up and the mestizo cracked his whip once to scare the boy. But he didn’t stop.
He cracked the whip again, and this time it landed squarely across his naked back. It only needed one clean stroke to complete its task before returning to the hand of its master. Brown and red ribbons of flesh untied themselves from one another on his back after it struck. Blood and water oozed from the gash, quickly mixing with the dirt. The boy let out a cry that the ravens echoed above him in their clicking cadence.
¡ ¡ ¡ T O N G ! ! !
The loud toll of the bell sounded after the boy screamed his blood-curdling cry. When the rest of the Kumeyaay heard such a terrible scream come from such an innocent child they dropped their bricks and their rope and came running. This caused the bell to fall all the way back to the floor. But it did not break, and I thanked fate for that. Who knows what terrible punishment would have been inflicted on these people had it cracked upon contact with the ground. But its terrible toll still rang out as the loudest sound in that empty landscape, echoing back to us from the mountains in the east.
The priest rode up to the boy and quickly dismounted. He cradled the child as he wept and bled in his arms. Cooing him and rocking his body as if he were a mother giving suck. He rubbed a soothing ointment of aloe vera and oils over the wound as he sang a Mallorcan lullaby and eventually the boy fell silent.
The boy’s father and the other workers crowded around the scene. It was clear that they wanted to come to the boy’s side but the mestizo brandished the whip and scowled, letting them know that another step closer would be a grave mistake. When the boy’s father saw him weeping all he could do was whisper his name to him from afar.
“…Chaup…”
Junipero did not hesitate, but with the boy still weeping in his lap walked over to the whisperer and smacked him hard across the face. “Su nombre,” he said aloud so that all of the Kumeyaay men could hear, “es Santiago Serra de las Montanas Sagrades de Córdoba!” At that, he looked up to one of the soldiers, and angrily threw his hand up.“Ya!”
“¡Devuelvan a trabajar!” The mestizo yelled and cracked his whip in the air. The small group sadly returned to their work without a sound.
The priest walked up the trail with the boy still sniffling some tears and his arms wrapped around the priest’s waist. The priest was cooing him gently and patting his long hair. He stopped when he noticed me crouched in the long grass.
“Oh! Hello again.” He said with a rosy smile.
“You speak English?” Was all I could think to say. Idiotically frozen there with fear in the grass.
“I ought to, I’m a man of learning.” A big warm smile on his face. “I speak English, Castillano, my native Mallorcan, and just enough Russian to write to the colonies in the north.”
“What about his language?” I asked, nodding to the silent whimperer.
“Ha! That is a good one. Walk with me, my child.”
I didn’t want to, but when I saw the soldier tapping his finger on the whip and scowling at me I figured I had no choice. He didn’t say anything, he just happily hummed to himself as his chubby cheeks bounced with his stride. He was an older man, maybe fifty or sixty, but still filled with plenty of life.
“Why did you have that little boy whipped?”
“He was misbehaving,” Junipero said simply and shrugged, not breaking his stride in answering me. He just kept his happy face and his eyes pointed straight up at the bell. “These are all my children. And it is my duty as their spiritual father to protect them, but also to show them discipline. Spare the whip and you spoil the child. This is what the Lord teaches us. My own father was no less stern with me.”
“Protect them from what exactly?”
“Themselves,” He said plainly. “These are a simple people, easily overtaken by the enemy and turned to violence and to lust. Why, They Killed Fray Luis Jayme and burned this mission down last year.”
“They seemed to be doing just fine before the Spanish got here,” I said.
“Ha! You really are a funny one. If the Russians took Alta California from Spain they would slaughter my children in a single stroke. But, by the grace of God that will not happen because our heavenly father has put us here to teach these children in the ways of the gospel, and to protect them. And so it is.”
We reached the top of the hill. Junipero motioned to one of the soldiers and smiled at me.
“And it is by God’s good graces that you have found yourself here with me, come and I will teach you how to lead these people in the ways of life under the bell.”
One of the soldiers brought out a beautiful white horse that rode right up to me. Its saddle was fitted with a sword, a whip, and a Bible.
“What do you mean?”
“My boy, you are a mestizo. There is great power in this. You are a bridge from the crown of Spain to these people. Your mixed blood gives you a right to ride that horse.”
“But I…” I was confused. I looked down at my hand and the stone was gone.
“That cursed rock is with your body in the land of the living. Stay here and you will never be tortured by it again. You will never be made to feel powerless by it again. You will never have to face your sin of stealing it by going into that awful house. You are safe here with me here, my child.”
I was tempted. Images of that terrible house and the green moon from my nightmares above it flashed into my mind. Mounting the horses to get away from it didn’t seem like a bad idea. But then the bell began to clang.
¡ ¡ ¡ T O N G ! ! !
¡ ¡ ¡ T O N G ! ! !
¡ ¡ ¡ T O N G ! ! !
The earth around us shook and the world became a triple exposure photograph of three places: the land of the dead, the land of the living, and a place I couldn’t recognize. But with each pound and doom-filled toll, the images became clearer.
The bell tower slowly morphed into the Monumental Clock, that giant silver arch in the Tijuana Square. With another toll, it would slowly fade back into the mission before morphing yet again into a giant woman holding the chiming bell. This cycle would repeat many times until we found ourselves firmly back in Tijuana below the silver arch.
The huge screen suspended from the spiderwebs of cables broadcast a giant green eye staring at my body and Calluna’s. The priest and I watched my body from a removed distance as it bowed in terror and screamed on the other side of that doorway to oblivion.
“Is this the life you want to return to? One filled with fear and inadequacy?” Junipero was dead once more and he stared at me with the empty eyes of his skull. “Come with me my child, where it is safe.” He clutched his skeleton hand at me but I bolted toward my body which had now boarded the taxi-bus and was well on its way to back to the house in Rosarito with Calluna.
The priest was close behind me, now mounted on his dead horse. The two skeleton soldiers were riding beside him as they chased me down the freeway. My horse was tied next theirs, waiting for me to mount it.
My astral form was fast but not as fast as the cars running right through us, oblivious to us. I noticed a familiar Toyota with a loudspeaker screaming “Tamales! Tamales! Tamales Muy Riiiiiiicos y baratos!” and I grabbed on to the bed and let it drag me along the onramp before I hopped into it. The skeletal horses could not match the truck's speed and soon were lost on the horizon.
Back in Rosarito I finally reached the red castle. As I ran down the street I could see Calluna and Stacey trying to wake my body. Stacey would ring her bells and my flame would putter up for only a moment before losing another battle to the coastal wind. I almost froze when I realized that the moon was still a big green eye but I pressed on, looking down at my floating feet to avoid its gaze.
I knew it was time to re-enter my body, but I didn’t know how. I awkwardly floated above myself, making harsh observations of my hairline and the double chin that formed in the fetal position I was lying in. Stacey noticed me and stopped toiling over the soulless body below her. She made eye contact with me and grinned. Then, she rang her little bells one last time and a green cinder erupted from the crown of my head like a flamethrower. Calluna took a step back to cover her face. The flame was bigger than I’d ever seen it. Had a gravity to it. Sucking in everything nearby from moths to fairies into its orbit.
I tried to say something to Stacey but no words came out of my mouth. She just smiled and said to Calluna: “It’s okay, he’ll be back to normal soon.” And that was the last thing I can remember because the call of the flame became too powerful for my ghostly form to resist, and soon it had sucked me up and swallowed me whole. I spiraled down into it like the stopper had been pulled out of the sink of the astral plane of the universe.
I found myself at the gates of the house. The teeth of the red beast. I was fully in my body again, I could move it the way I wanted to.
“Oh look Stacey! He’s awake!” I was in their arms. They were dragging me toward the house.
“What’s going on?”
The door to the house opened of its own accord. Blackness. Dark. Nothing but Creaks and wind and the distant screams of monsters. I could hear the tower calling me.
“We have to go inside,” Clalluna said. “You have to return what you took.”
[END OF CHAPTER NINE.]
