We Don't Speak Her Name

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. I'd been having that same stupid dream about that same stupid house for as long as I could remember, but the summer of 2011 was the first time that I'd seen the flickering light of a candle burning in the windowsill.

It was kind of my fault this all happened in the first place. You see, I kind of grew up disconnected from my culture. Waltham, Massachusetts was a far cry from the deep, dark abyss of the northern Guatemalan jungles where my dad and uncle were raised. But every summer, as soon as school let out, we - meaning my two older brothers and me, plus my parents, my aunt and uncle and my two first cousins - would go down t0 Guatemala to visit my dad's family. Most of our time would be spent helping out with various harvests of various crops where my grandfather and other relatives lived. There, we would sit in candlelight at night shucking corn and stringing up peppers, while the older members of my family sat around telling the stories of our people that I forgot about as soon as September came around and I de-transitioned from Guatemala back to my normal life just north of Boston. It was during one of these stories that I first heard Her name.

Well, I didn't really hear Her name. Technically, we weren't allowed to speak it. Doing so would invoke Her presence, like She would jump out at us from the dark corner of my grandfather's cottage. We heard other stories too, about little people who wore big hats and rode hell-horses, and other tales of a different era of Guatemala's history. But it was always the stories about Her that scared me the most. I suppose I could attribute that to the fact that Josué - the middle brother of the three of us - would always find a way to hide around the outhouse and scare me every time I tried to go out there to pee. But there was something about the way my older relatives spoke about Her that made me think there was a little more to the story than they let on.

In the summer of 2011, I was 12 years old. My oldest brother Jairo was freshly graduated from high school at 18, and my other brother Josué - the bane of my existence, really - was 15 going on 16. We were just at the right ages to want to get into shenanigans with our cousins and the other kids we knew down there, kids of family friends who we had known since we were all infants. My cousin Isabella was about to be 20, and my little cousin Kevin was 10. There was a pretty big age gap between us, and Jairo and Isabella preferred to distanced themselves from us kids. That left Kevin and me at the mercy of Josué, who made it his life's mission to make us miserable just like he did at home. The only upside to being crammed in a room with both my brothers and cousins was that Mom and Dad forbade Josué from bringing his guitar, which saved me from ear-splitting renditions of Metallica solos.

Harvest times were a village affair. In a small agrarian community in northern Guatemala, your neighbours often worked on your fields and vice versa. My family was very well-known throughout the town. My grandfather was sort of the de-facto village chief, and took his role quite seriously as the face of order within the community. Due to the lingering tensions of the Civil War - the peace accord was only signed in 1996, after all, three years before I was born - my grandfather had been at odds with the town's official Mayor, who had been on the opposite side as my family had been. This was exacerbated by the fact that while Gomez was officially the mayor as declared by the government, the villagers mostly sided with my grandfather on important issues. Families eventually picked sides, and bad blood commenced. Remember that fact, because that becomes important later on.

I can't tell you the first time I felt called to the jungle. It felt like a constant underlying current thrumming through my veins, beckoning me deeper and deeper into those trees. Sometimes I would lie awake in my bed at night long after my brothers had gone to sleep, listening to the wind rustling the ceiba trees and hearing the whispering of the tail end of my name. When I was about seven years old, I had been digging in the dirt outside my grandfather's house looking for salamanders when I had seen a dancing group of orangish orbs, almost like fireflies. But they didn't behave like fireflies. They were organised and flew in a swarm, almost like a formation. I swore I could hear the whispers of "Giovanny, Giovanny" on their wings, beckoning me, telling me to follow them.

I had woken up confused and disoriented the next morning, with a gaggle of family members surrounding me. My grandfather, fully kitted in his curandéro regalia, was blowing thick ocote wood smoke at me as he chanted something. I had gotten a verbal thrashing from my father and my uncle about going off into the forest alone, especially at night, and how the entire village had been looking for me until my grandfather had roused himself from sleep and had joined the search party. I tried to tell them that the lights talked, that I had heard my name. And with thunderclouds over their heads, both in unison in deep tones, my father and uncle both told me, "If you heard your name, no, you didn't."

I lived by that rule for the rest of my childhood, but that never stopped the whispers. That never stopped the pull I felt to those trees in the dead of night, when everyone else was asleep. It never stopped me from laying awake at night as my relatives spoke in hushed tones, talking about how I too had inherited the restlessness deep inside me that had driven my father into that very same jungle when he was a teenager. They wouldn't get very far deep in those conversations until my grandfather would interrupt them, always something along the lines of, "The boy's future is his own to decide, without our influence. He must choose it of his own will. You more than anyone must understand this, Catarino." And though my father was the toughest man I knew, I could still picture him shrinking back when his own father spoke the wisdom of ancients.

There were times of respite, too. We would go fishing along the creeks and streams, or go to one of the pure blue cenote watering holes to swim and play. Often a big group of village kids would go, and this had nothing to do with the spiritual aspects of what lurked in the forests than it had to with the number of poisonous snakes, large felines and other dangerous fauna that also called Petén their home. It was on one of these carefree afternoons swimming in a cenote where I was issued the challenge that would lead me to not only accept the whispers I heard inside me, but forced me to learn how to use them at a moment's notice. It was the day Adrian Gomez went missing.

"I bet you can't dive off there," Josué taunted. He was pointing at a large rock formation somewhere above my head, where the terrain changed from flatlands to an outcropping overlooking the cenote. I shrugged and climbed to my feet, ready to shut my brother up once and for all. With a smug look, he watched as I clambered up the rock and padded to the flattest one, testing my own legs to see if I could make the jump. I closed my eyes and threw caution to the wind as I took flight, flipping over once before curling into diving position. I landed in the water with a minimal splash, resurfacing and shaking my overgrown black curls out of my eyes. I smirked over at Josué. He made a rude hand gesture at me and turned away.

As I treaded water, I watched to see what the other kids were doing. Kevin was over a little ways away from me, attempting to speak Spanish as best he could with one of the village girls. She was a pretty girl too, with wide brown eyes and brown hair that glinted in the sunlight. As I watched this interaction, I noted a group of boys were headed in their direction - and they seemed to be moving at a hurried pace. Something about their gait set me on edge, and I peeked over to where Josué was sitting. I whistled, getting his attention. "Hey," I called out. "We might want to go see what's up."

Josué's head swivelled over in the direction I was pointing in, and he cursed before jumping to his feet and calling out for Jairo. The two of them broke into a run so they could reach Kevin before the hostile-looking group did, and I swam over as fast as I could. We ended up getting there at the same time, and Kevin started to pick up on the fact that there was danger in the air. "If you want to talk to him, you talk to me," Jairo snapped before the ringleader of the group could even get a word out. "He doesn't speak Spanish."

Adrian Gomez was a brute of a boy, about the same age I was, but much bigger. He was paler than most of us with puggish facial features and hazel eyes that almost disappeared when he squinted, which was often. "What's the matter?" he taunted at Kevin, who looked up in alarm. "Got to get big brother to fight your fights for you? Where's the same confidence you had when you were chatting up my sister?"

"Gomez, they're kids," Jairo sighed. "They're just talking. There's nothing for you to see here."

"I think there is!" Gomez was incensed. "I don't like you American types coming down here telling us how to run things. You think you're some hotshot just because you have American money now and your abuelo is a witch, but I'm not afraid of him."

"Keep talking and you'll be afraid of me, ceróte," Josué cut in. Both of them were bigger than Adrian, but I was just a little smaller. I puffed myself up nonetheless, trying to seem as intimidating as possible. "Leave him alone."

"Tell your cousin to stay the hell away from my sister or you'll all be sorry," Gomez replied. "In case you losers forgot, you don't live here. My dad is the mayor, and he is the boss of this town. We live here. Unlike your daddy, we didn't run away when things got rough."

"And whose stupid fault is that?" I finally piped up from the first time. Something about that comment had unleashed a different type of intoxicating courage inside of me. "Whose side was your daddy on during the war, huh? At least my dad had heart and fought for the good side."

The whole group went silent. I felt a heaviness settle over me, like I'd seriously messed up. Even Jairo and Josué were looking at me like they couldn't believe what had just come out of my mouth. Gomez's eyes narrowed even further in his doggy face. "Say that again," Gomez challenged, low and slow.

"I said, your daddy's a murderer," I repeated, rising up to the call-out. "You want to talk about Americans, huh? Your daddy's nose is so far up the Americans' assholes that his face has shit all over it."

I was not prepared for Gomez to tackle me, but I quickly got the upper hand. Being the youngest brother meant I had been pummelled on my entire life by people a lot bigger than me, and I knew how to get out of any sort of WWE-type wrestling moves Josué had ever felt the inkling to try on me. Chants of "fight, fight, fight" rose up as our tussle attracted the attention of pretty much every single kid who was at the cenote that particular afternoon. As we rolled around on the ground, each of us covered in mud and getting a few punches in here or there, I heard Isabella calling out, "Stop! All of you, stop!"

It took a bunch of the older kids to pry Gomez and me apart from each other. We were both struggling and breathing hard, looking back in the others' direction. "You're lucky these people are holding me back!" he barked at me. "If they weren't, I'd make you wish you were never born, Quintana! I hope the X**bay gets you and drags you back down to hell!"

There was another round of deathly silence. Jairo glared at Gomez with the fury of 1,000 suns. "Are you stupid, Gomez?" he snapped at him. "You don't say Her name! What's wrong with you?"

"Aww, afraid of a little ghost?" Gomez laughed, and the rest of his gang began laughing with him. "Look at that, everyone! The Americans are scared of a little ghost story! Everyone knows X**bay isn't real! Or are you just so stupid that you believe everything your brújo grandpa tells you?"

"Get lost," Josué scoffed, turning me around and leading me away from the group, which was now roaring with laughter. Jairo scooped up Kevin with his free hand and the four of us trudged away from the cenote, ignoring the cackling coming from behind us and the gleeful shouting of that same word - X**bay - over and over again.

"Jairo, what is that? What are they talking about?" I asked. He was pointedly ignoring me as we walked the dirt paths in our sandals away from the cenote and back towards the village. "Who is that?"

Finally, my questioning must have gotten too annoying for him. Once we reached the outskirts of my grandfather's farm, he spun around to face me. "Don't you dare say that name," he snapped at me. I blinked. Jairo was usually the calmer one out of my two older brothers, too aloof and absorbed in his studies and personal life to care about what Josué and I were doing. "You don't understand how terrible She is. You haven't seen Her."

"The whispers," I instantly understood. "Jairo, you hear them too. I know it. I hear them all the time. They call my name..."

"No." That was the end of it. "You don't say that name, ever. If you do, She'll find you. You remember when you ran away that one night into the woods? You were lucky Abuelo found you when he did. If She gets you, you won't come back this time."

"Jairo, listen to what you're saying," I whispered, astonished. "La Siguanaba isn't real. Dad said..."

"Dad's a liar. And as far as I'm concerned, the rest of them are too. Don't ever talk about this again. If you do, I will kick your ass into next Tuesday." And that was all it took for me to shut up.

Dinner that night was a hushed, sombre affair. My mother was concerned, and my father even more so. Kevin and Josué hadn't been listening to the conversation between me and Jairo, so they hadn't overheard. But the minute Kevin began talking about what had happened at the cenote, I was the one getting in trouble. "We come down here in peace to visit our family and friends, not to start stupid schoolyard fights," my uncle Calixto scolded me. "Do you realise what could've happened if you'd injured Gomez's son? Stay away from Gomez and anyone who comes out of Barrio Jalapa."

"Okay, Tío," I'd said, hanging my head into my plate of rice, embarrassed. And he was right. We all went to bed that night, refusing to speak to one another. Jairo was obviously still rattled. I could tell Josué and Kevin wanted to ask so many questions, but they obviously picked up on the fact that neither of us was going to be forthcoming with information. When the whispers came again, I ignored them the best I could. I said three Hail Mary rosaries and stuffed my pillow over my head, trying to catch an inkling of sleep before I had to get up tomorrow morning to help gather the eggs from the henhouse.

But the world I'd entered into in my dreams was arguably worse than the reality. I kept seeing that same old house from my childhood dreams, somehow barely still standing, looking like it'd gone through Hurricane Stan all over again. It was a typical shack like the kind you would see up here, missing parts of the roof and no windows. It stood staunch in the middle of the jungle, the trees growing in and around it like nature was trying to reclaim its territory. Despite every muscle screaming at me to run, I felt this inexplicable pull towards the place. The whispers were growing louder. It was pitch darkness outside, with not even the moon to light my path. "Giovanny," the breeze wrapped around me with its call. "Giovanny, I know you can hear me. Come this way, Giovanny..."

I was powerless. My legs refused to cooperate with my brain, which was sending me into adrenaline overdrive. I could only stare helplessly at the front blown-out window of the shack, trying to see through the shadows, begging my legs to move. A flickering candle started up in the window and I could see the outline of a woman, standing with her back to me and her long black hair flowing over her waist. Something about her posture seemed wrong, and my body flushed all over. I was like a deer caught in the headlights of a semi-truck. Ever-so-slowly, she turned around. In the candlelight, I got a glimpse of her terrible smile, her mouth filled with pointy, razor-sharp teeth...

I jolted awake just as heavy repeated thudding noises sounded from outside of my grandfather's house. Josué, Jairo and Kevin were stirring too, rubbing their eyes to clear them from sleep. I looked over at Jairo helplessly, and the thudding continued. My heart was going a mile a minute, and I couldn't shake the trance that dream had put me in. How? How had She found me here, so far from my dream? I registered shouting, and the cocking of a shotgun. "No!" my grandfather instructed. "Put it down, Catarino. I'll handle this."

"Open the damn door, Quintana! I demand to know what your grandson did to my son!" a voice barked from outside the house. A chill ran down my spine, but for an entirely different reason. I knew that voice. Mayor Gomez - the man whose son I had scuffled with earlier at the cenote.

"Manuel, I'm sure there's an explanation for this. What happened to your son?" my grandfather asked calmly. He must have opened the door.

"What happened? WHAT HAPPENED?" Gomez exploded with rage. "My son is missing, brújo maldito! And I know your demon brat had something to do with it! You get him out here right now, and you tell me where he is or I swear on my life, I will have the army come and throw you in jail to rot for good!"

"Which one of my grandsons, Mayor?" my grandfather asked calmly, as if he was just having a casual chat. "I have four of them, you know."

"You know EXACTLY which one!" the mayor yelled. I could almost imagine the vein popping out of the side of his neck. I hoped it exploded.

Footsteps sounded across the floor. The door to our bedroom cracked open, and my grandfather poked his head around it. "Giovanny," he said in the same tranquil tone, "would you please come out here? I'd like to ask you a couple of questions."

My blood ran ice cold. Nevertheless, I stumbled out of bed, leaving my brothers and my cousin behind to just stare at me. I followed my grandfather through the living room and into the foyer area, where instantly the mayor made a grab for me. "YOU! You're the little demon who hurt my son!" he frothed at the mouth.

"You take another step closer and I'll blow your head off," my father growled from behind me, cocking his shotgun.

Gomez turned to look at my father, but then thought better of it. My father's reputation was one that warranted extreme caution, especially when he was holding a gun. He turned back to me. "You tell me where my son is right now, you brat!"

"I don't know," I whispered. "Honestly, sir. I don't know."

"LIAR!" the mayor boomed. I thought he would keel over of a heart attack, just based on how red his face was.

"Giovanny, listen to me," my grandfather interjected, still as mild as ever. "I want you to think about everything that happened this afternoon. Think about it for a minute, and when it comes to mind, I want you to tell this man where he can start looking for his son."

A chill swept over me, one I could not explain. I knew where Adrian Gomez was. There was no way he couldn't be there. Every sign I was receiving pointed in that direction. "The house," I finally whispered, a tremor overtaking my vocal chords. "He went to look for Her. She's at the house."

"What? What house? Who?" the mayor kept pressing me. "Stop speaking nonsense, boy! You tell me right now who took my son!"

"She did," I said. "La Siguanaba. He said her name today, at the cenote."

The silence that followed was interrupted only by the mayor's heavy breathing. "What a load of nonsense," he finally spluttered. "Listen to me well and good, boy. If you don't tell me right now what you did to my son and where you took him, so help me God, you and your whole family will suffer consequences unlike any you could imagine."

"It's not nonsense!" I blurted out. "He said her name! We were arguing at the cenote, and he said he hoped She took me! And I'm telling you, that's where he is. She has him. She has him at the house."

The mayor looked like he was about to blow a gasket. "If you don't mind the interruption," my grandfather suggested, "I advise we get a search party together. Oftentimes when things like this happen, we should get people out there looking for ones who have disappeared before they reach a state where they can no longer return."

"Stop speaking in riddles, Ariel!" the mayor snapped.

"There are no riddles here, Benito," my grandfather returned. "But we have a young boy lost in the forest after dark. Believe what you wish about the spiritual dwellers, the jungle is no place to be for a young boy at this time of night."

The mayor turned on me with a snarl. "You're going to take me to this 'house' right now, you hear me?" he barked. "Get going."

"No." My father stepped in. "My son is not going anywhere, especially not with you."

"Catarino, quiet," my grandfather intervened once again. "Giovanny has seen the place. He is the only one who can lead us there. If we are to return Benito's son unharmed, we must trust in the guidance of the one who has seen."

"Dad!" my father blustered. But my grandfather wasn't budging. "Then we're coming too," he eventually caved. "Calixto, get Jairo up. Maria, you and Mercedes stay here with the others."

It was done as my father ordered. Less than five minutes later, we were all standing in the middle of the street surrounded by a gaggle of townspeople, all of whom were roused for this specific purpose. My grandfather gently laid his hand on my shoulder as he looked towards the dark tree line. There was no moon in the sky, and the millions of twinkling stars and the overhanging arm of the Milky Way couldn't dispel the foreboding darkness that lay ahead of us. "This way," I gestured, and my grandfather nodded.

Once we had gotten to where we could no longer see the outskirts of the village, dread began to set in. I had played in this forest hundreds of times, but the welcoming animal sounds and the rustling of the trees were dead silent this time. It was if there was a huge predator in the area, and the animals were wisely taking shelter. But here I was, roped into a search for a bully, all because this accursed whispering wouldn't stop in my head. I closed my eyes and stopped, trying to remember the way in my dream. It had been easier then, because I had already been at the place. "Giovanny," someone called my name, and I opened my eyes.

"Did you say something?" I asked my father.

"What? No."

"I just heard you talk. I just heard you say Giovanny," I insisted.

"No one said anything, Gio," Jairo said, looking clammy and scared.

"Enough with the hearing voices already, you little lunatic," the mayor snapped, but he looked shaken too. "Where is this house? Where is it?"

I didn't even have to say anything. The universe decided to answer that question for me. All of a sudden, it was as if a tornado had blown through the jungle where we all stood, and we were getting picked up in it and thrown around like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. I could barely hear the screams of the rest of the search party as I groped blindly around for Jairo's hand. I closed my eyes as the jungle spun faster and faster, the rapid spinning making me sick to my stomach. Suddenly, we were all thrown apart as if a violent blast had struck directly in the middle of our group.

I flew at least 20 feet. It had to be, for the force I landed with on the ground knocked the wind out of me and I could only lay there, paralysed and groaning, for the longest time. When I finally felt better enough to open my eyes, I was in a completely unfamiliar section of the jungle - and I was completely alone. "Hello?" I called. "Dad? Abuelo? Jairo?"

There was no answer. They didn't even holler back from a distance. Panicking, I scrambled to my feet. I hadn't even thought to bring a flashlight or anything with me, because I had been under the impression that my family would be with me this whole time. I screamed louder, "DAD? JAIRO? WHERE DID YOU GO?"

"Gio?" I finally heard Jairo's voice in the distance. "Gio, where are you?"

"Jairo!" I yelled back, relieved. "I don't know what happened!"

"Gio?" Jairo's voice called again, exactly the same as it had before. "Gio, where are you?"

"I'm here, Jairo, I'm here!" I called out again. I began running blindly in the direction his voice was coming from. All the while, he kept calling out to me, and I crashed through undergrowth and shrubbery while I tried to get closer. But no matter how fast I ran, the voice kept sounding farther and farther away from me. What the hell was happening? Was he moving in the other direction? How was he getting further away? "Jairo, where are you going? I'm coming to you! Why do you keep running away from me?"

"Gio," Jairo's voice called again, but something about the tone chilled me cold. That was my brother's voice...but it was also not his voice. There was an underlying tone to it that didn't belong to Jairo. "Gio, where are you?" the voice called again.

It sounded so far away this time. I looked around me, feeling like I had run in circles. A dripping noise caught my attention, and I looked up, expecting to see storm clouds gathering overhead. Something warm splattered on my hair and I jumped, wiping it off, looking for the bird that had decided that was the time and place to poop directly on my head. When I looked at my wrist to inspect the damage, I blanched in horror. There was no bird that pooped bright red...was there?

The dripping only got more frequent. It began echoing all around me, like a grim concerto of falling water. The red liquid on my hand began to drip down my forearm, splattering onto the ground. Another drop landed on my head, and then another...and then, it was like someone had poured a lukewarm cup of broth down the back of my neck. I winced, my stomach turning. Deep down, I knew what this was. But nothing could have prepared me for what I saw when I opened my eyes.

I retched, and I retched again. There aren't enough gory scenes in It, Stranger Things and Texas Chainsaw Massacre to explain what it is that I saw. Strung up all around me high up in the surrounding trees, in various positions of torture and impalement, were the members of the search party. I glanced around in horror as I saw the mayor, the town doctor, Don Mario from the school...everyone I knew from the village that had come out with us to search for Adrian Gomez had been literally flayed into pieces, bones broken in grotesque ways, all ritualistically posed in the jungle around me. I fell to my knees in terror, the scream I wanted to scream dying somewhere in my throat along the way.

Wet noises let me know I wasn't alone. I fell back on to my haunches, scrambling backwards from whatever was making the noise. Something was hunched over a splayed-out body about six feet or so away from where I was now sitting on the ground. From the mop of brown curls caught by the limited light available, I could tell just by looking at him that Adrian Gomez was extremely dead, and something dark and cloaked was feeding on him. My wild eyes were able to make out a flicker of candlelight in the darkness, and the looming structure of the decrepit house from my nightmare directly behind the grisly scene.

I couldn't help myself. I was caught in a deadly trap. I desperately searched around for a way out, but it was like the trees with their macabre decor had closed in on me. I glanced through the carnage to see if I could see my dad or Jairo or my grandfather, but somehow, I couldn't. I couldn't even imagine what horrors had befallen them. I made some sort of choked-off noise, and I knew instantly that that was the wrong move. The cloaked figure stopped in its meal and looked up, and I could make out a head looking directly at me but couldn't see any discernible eyes.

The figure rose, towering over Adrian's corpse. It must have been at least seven or eight feet tall, but I wasn't really focused on that. I scrambled backwards again, trying and failing to will my knees into working to stand up. As slow as silk, the figure rose to its full height and began to approach me. "Giovanny," it called again, in the same horrible combination of both my brother's voice and not my brother's voice. "I was waiting for you, Giovanny. I've been looking for you for many years now, ever since you escaped my grasp the first time..."

The candle in the window flared again. The cloak covering the figure fell back, and I was greeted with the emaciated face of a horrible woman. Her face was gaunt and sunken-in, her eyes completely black without a speck of humanity. There was red smeared all over her face, no doubt the blood of the search party. She stalked towards me then, hunger written into her features, her pointed teeth soaked in red primed and ready. "No!" I gasped out. "By the power of God, you cannot hurt me!"

X**bay actually laughed at me. It was a horrible laugh, the kind of mocking laugh you would expect from the villain in a slasher film when they had the protagonists cornered and at a certain death point. "There is no God in the jungle, Giovanny," She laughed at me, and She was now so close that I could feel her slinking around me. My foot slipped and I stumbled, but I held my ground. If I was going to die, I was going to die with my head up. "I'm sure The Sorcerer told you that. His protection can't help you now."

"That's not true!" I screamed, tears starting to flow down my face. My flight or fight responses were churning through me, and I was standing my ground preparing for a fight that I knew I couldn't win. "You can't touch me like this!"

"My dear boy, I have you right where I want you," She hissed out, low and slow. Her voice had lost all inflection of my brother, and was now just the pure inhuman whispering that had lured me to the house in my dreams, and had called to me since I was a little boy. She reached around me and I felt the horrible freezing cold hand wrapping around my rosary. It snapped the thing right off my neck, scattering the beads everywhere along the jungle floor.

Flailing around helplessly against the darkness that surrounded me, I dug around in my pocket, hoping desperately that the little patch of herbs my grandfather had gifted me with was there. I found something even better. A stick of ocote wood, one of the sacred trees of my people. I curled my hand around it, picking it out of my pocket. In the other one, I fumbled for a lighter, hoping beyond hope that it would be enough to save me. As if the universe knew what I needed, I withdrew the lighter and lit the end of the stick on fire. "In the name of my ancestors, I rebuke you!" I shouted, my voice high-pitched and terrified. "I have the power of the Curandéro Ariel Quintana behind me!"

The lighter seemed to materialise in my hand. Thrashing around, I managed to withdraw it from my pocket and flick a small light on. That same light gave me the courage I needed to connect the flame with the end of the ocote stick. Once it was smoking, I blew the smoke as hard as I could directly at the unholy entity that was hell-bent on capturing me. She let out a grotesque screech as I tried again, blowing more and more smoke, spinning around to make sure I caught her at every angle. The smoke was working! I was driving her back!

But it wasn't enough. My foot slipped and I found myself falling again. I caught myself on my elbows, but it wasn't enough to keep the ocote stick from flying out of my hand. Seizing Her opportunity, She knocked my elbow out from under me and pinned me down against the forest floor. She loomed over me, teeth bared, ready to rip my throat out. I began screaming out to God, the ancestors, whoever to hear my prayer and rescue me, but as her tepid breath came closer to my face, I could hear her hiss out one last triumphant sentence. "Now, I will feast on the rich blood of the legacy of Quintana," was all I heard, and I closed my eyes and prayed that whatever death I was going to suffer would be quick. "Oh, Giovanny, Giovanny, Giovanny..."

"GIOVANNY!" I bolted upright. I had been expecting to die right there, on the floor of the jungle, in the shadows of that cabin that had haunted my dreams...but I was neither there, nor dead. I was laying in my bed in my grandfather's house and Jairo was leaning over me, violently shaking my shoulders. "Giovanny, what the hell is wrong with you?" he was yelling.

"Jairo? But...you're gone. How are you here? Where am I?" I asked, my voice as small as a mouse's. "All of you are gone. We went out to the forest to look for Gomez, and we..."

"Giovanny, what are you talking about?" was all Jairo said before Isabella pushed him out of the way, looking me over.

"Jesus, you're sweating like a pig," she commented, placing a hand on my forehead. "But you don't have a fever. I think you just had a nightmare."

"A...a nightmare?" I asked in shock. The early morning light was filtering in through the shuttered windows of our room. Kevin and Josué were both awake, sitting tiredly along the edges of their beds. Both of them were looking at me warily through their exhaustion.

"You were screaming in your sleep," Josué said, uncharacteristically quiet. "You woke everybody up."

"I..." I didn't even have the words to explain what had happened. Gasping, I dragged my hand up to my neck. My rosary was still there, the wooden beads still hanging onto the string. I pulled the cross out from my shirt and examined it. I looked down at my elbows, at least expecting to see some scrapes where I had fallen in my desperate attempt to escape. Nothing. My palms were totally normal. I felt the top of my head, expecting to come away with a sticky hand of blood. Once again, nothing.

Nobody spoke then. My father poked his head into the room. "Well, since Gio woke everyone up, I guess it's a good thing. Come on and eat breakfast so we can get a head start on the chores. We're going to need to make a run for supplies into town. Gio, you and Jairo can take the truck and do that while we stay here and work on the new fence for the cows."

I didn't even bother asking. Nobody here seemed bothered by the events of the previous night. It was almost as if...they had never happened. As if in a daze, I climbed out of bed and changed out of my pyjamas and into my day clothes, pulling on my shoes in utter disbelief. I kept touching my hair, my rosary...anything. There were no signs of a struggle. There was no sign that anything was even minutely out of place.

I ate breakfast quietly, ignoring the chatter of my family. My grandfather was observing me with a keen eye, but I turned away from his gaze, trying to avoid any uncomfortable line of questioning. As I turned to place my plate in the sink, however, he caught my wrist. "Giovanny," he asked quietly, in the same calm tone he'd used with the mayor in my apparent nightmare-within-a-nightmare the previous night, "is there anything you want to talk about, míjo?"

The question threw me for a loop. How could I tell him? What would I even begin to say? We looked at each other for a long time, and I stared at the wisdom of the years hidden in my grandfather's heterochromic eyes. The white streak in his jet black hair - still having not gone grey with his age - was combed back in his usual style. "Uh, no," I finally mumbled. "Nope. Nothing."

He didn't seem convinced. Mercifully, he dropped the subject. I finished cleaning up and brushed my teeth, stuffing my hat on my head as I got ready to go with Jairo into the main part of town. "Giovanny," Abuelo said again right before we were ready to head out the door. "You know you can ask me anything, and I will answer you."

"Oh. Okay. Thanks." I stuttered over my words. He hummed his assent, but stepped aside to let me pass through the front door. I felt immensely better when I saw the sunlight, and Jairo glanced at me with a raised eyebrow before turning away and climbing in the truck. I jumped into the passenger seat and he started the engine. The rumble of the old Toyota Tundra was a comforting one and he put the truck into gear, setting off towards the town.

Everything seemed so mercifully mundane after that. After grabbing the supplies we needed from the store, we stopped at a street vendor for some fresh Guatemalan-style enchiladas. We sat in the bed of the truck in total silence as we ate, and I was amazed that I was even able to scarf food down as well as I was able to, considering everything I had been through the previous night. Jairo called out to me, and I looked up at him. "Yeah?" I asked.

"What?" Jairo replied.

"You called me?" I asked, confused.

Jairo glanced at me. I felt a weird lurch in my stomach again. "I didn't say anything," he said.

A chill ran through my veins. "But you..."

"Oh come on, Gio. Knock it off," he scoffed. "Just get back in the truck, would you? Everyone's waiting for us."

I did as he asked, finishing off the last of my enchilada and wiping my hands on my pants. As I hopped off the bed of the truck and shut the back door, I glanced up and almost crapped my pants right then and there. Standing right in front of me, in broad daylight, was the house.

It was a totally normal, nondescript house. It wasn't even as busted up as I remembered it from my nightmares. But it was definitely abandoned. No one could live in a house with a giant hole in the side of it. I was distantly aware of Jairo starting the truck, but it didn't even register in my brain. I was looking at the windowsill. There was no candle there, but my mind caught a flicker of movement from inside the house.

My brain was racing again. How? How could this be? The blurry movement inside the house formed itself into a figure, and I swallowed a lump of acid in my throat as a sheet of shiny black hair moved, catching the sunlight. "Giovanny," I heard my name again. I knew what was going to happen next, but I felt powerless to stop it. The figure began to turn, and I caught the barest glimpse of a mouth pulled too wide to be human, pointed teeth poking out and the flash of a gaunt cheekbone...

"Giovanny!" I blinked. Jairo was standing directly in front of me, looking annoyed, waving his hand in front of my face. "Hello, what's wrong with you? Snap out of it, Giovanny! You're starting to really piss me off!"

"Jairo, move!" I hurriedly shoved him so I could look around him, but he wasn't budging. "Don't you see it? Look in that window right there! Don't you see...Her? Please tell me you see it too, Jairo!"

Jairo turned around, and I was finally able to get a look around him, desperate to point out...nothing. There was nothing there. The house was still there, but there was nothing inside it. There was no darkness. It was a clear view through to the other side with the hole in the middle, and there was no sign of anyone or anything inside. Jairo looked at it for a minute and turned back to me, his lips pressed into a thin line. "Giovanny, I'm only gonna say this once," he said, and his voice sounded like it was toeing the line between fear and anger. "There's nothing there. There's no one in there. Whatever you're doing, whether it's some prank or you just being your regular annoying self, stop it. It's not funny. Now, get the hell inside the truck or I'm going to leave you here."

I opened my mouth to argue, but the fear of being stranded in an unfamiliar section of the village shook me. Wordlessly, I followed his instruction and climbed into the passenger side, shutting the door behind me. As we peeled away from the side of the road, I kept my eyes trained on the house, fully expecting someone...something...to make its presence known. Nothing ever did.

The rest of the afternoon passed by without event. We worked on the fence until the sun began to set and my grandmother called us inside for dinner. People passed by on their way to and from the centre of town, and I almost gasped when I saw Adrian Gomez and his usual gang of goons, looking completely unharmed. They made "woo" noises as they passed by me, pulling their hats over their faces and wiggling their fingers. I stood there until Jairo literally wrenched my arm away, throwing a rude hand gesture back at them as they roared with laughter. I helped my father bring the cows back in from their grazing, and we all gathered around the table for dinner. As we got ready to go to bed, I almost felt like I was back to normal.

I was about to fall asleep when the whispering came again. It was my name on the wind, the same as it always was. I tossed and turned, stuffing my pillow over my head, anything to drown out the persistent calls. A presence on the end of my bed made me bolt upright, only to come face to face with Josué. He looked pale, paler than I'd ever seen him. I couldn't even get a question out before he offered me one side of his earbud. "Here," he said. "Sorry, it's not your style of music. But it'll help drown it out. Trust me."

I was shocked, both that Josué was offering a peace gesture, but more importantly that he seemed to know what it was I was hearing. He climbed into the bed with me, both of us sitting upright against the headboard. A quick tally registered Kevin sprawled on his back, fast asleep and unbothered. Isabella was sleeping in a different room, but I could make out the dark figure of Jairo, curled in on himself. "Josué, I..." I started to say.

"Yeah. Me too. For years. But trust me, it doesn't stand a chance against Social Distortion." I took his advice, taking the other end of the earphones offered to me and putting it in my ear. The blaring guitar solo drowned out the whispers, and I fell asleep to the sounds of Josué's breathing and Social Distortion's "Don't Take Me For Granted". For now, at least, I was safe. I hoped.

Kevin began hearing them too, not two years after me. Isabella had been hearing them all along. Jairo had heard them the night after his tenth birthday, and Josué the year after. I never felt the need to venture alone into the jungle at night again, and I prayed I would never have to. But the protection charm my grandfather placed on the village was strong. We were protected, as long as we steadfastly ignored the whispers coming through the trees.

It's been about 10 years. I became pretty well-versed in my abilities that were inherited just by virtue of who I descended from. I wasn't as good as Isabella, who made quite the killing off of tarot readings and house blessings. I wasn't even as good as Josué, who channeled his into his music, or Jairo, who thankfully - for him, at least - seemed to have lost them completely. Not even Kevin, who painted masterpieces that were channeled through him by some other force. But I studied and learned enough to keep myself protected, and that was all that mattered.

But I won't lie to you. There are times when I let my guard down. And that's when, on the back end of the breeze, I can sometimes hear my name being called out. "Giovanny..." it says, so quiet you can barely hear it, "Giovanny...you can't run forever, Giovanny..."