Chapter Text
Somewhere, in the arid Sonoran desert, a small town that didn’t exist was being haunted.
Check any census listing the various settlements that dotted Mexico and you would find none under “Las iras de Auriel”. It was a strange name, a reliquary of those who first built the neat whitewashed houses that sat baking under a vengeful sun, who would swear that the Archangel Uriel had cursed the area to burn with the heat of divine flame. It started as a joke, but seemed to stick, at least in the few short years before it was wiped off the map.
This was not a town that you could come across by accident. It was remote, unconnected and rundown, hidden among the desert scrubs, surrounded on one side by bluffs of sandy, weathered limestone and just the desert expanse for as far as the eye could see on the others, interrupted only by the haze of the desert heat. Its singular raison d’etre had been the promise of what lay below. Black diamonds. Coal.
This town had, once upon a time, held aspirations of coal mining, the lure of it reeling in prospectors, business owners and miners, surface level shafts being dug within the natural cave system that burrowed through the cliffs to reach those prized seams. For a few, short years it seemed that a seed could be nurtured here, that the town could blossom into more than a few rambling houses, a general store and a small church.
Catastrophe always flourished in the most insidious of ways.
A large magnitude earthquake struck the region like a hammerblow, devastating the small town with rockfalls and buildings sinking into the natural tunnels below. Its most vital effect was on what occurred under the town. The large-scale instability in the caving system put paid to any desires for a larger mine, the mining network largely collapsed with vast regions becoming unmapped and the extent of the whole system, both natural and artificial, lost. After this, any legitimate business trickled away or dried up, moving to better situated and better prospered places than the rapidly shrinking smudge on the map. Its rise and fall all occurred too fast for it to even be considered a settlement.
However the town was well placed in some ways. By some stroke of luck, it was relatively close to the US - Mexican border, and its invisible status made it an attractive satellite for less… principled businesses. So it was that when the miners moved out, the narcos moved in, most recently and notably, the Zaragoza cartel.
Manuel Roba had been using Las Iras as his base of operations since his previous encampment had been raided after a loose end was unearthed, despite his caution. He supposed that it had been fun, while it lasted, but it had all come rather too close to mixing business with pleasure, and while the loss stung, he hadn’t been all too wounded in the ensuing chaos, though the same could not be said for that little loose end. He was sure that he had suitably avenged himself without dirtying his hands, and wished the man (what was his name, Stephen? Samuel? No matter) Feliz Navidad.
None of this changed the fact that Las Iras was seemingly being besieged by some spectre, a servant of Santa Muerte who seemed to appear from nowhere and disappear in the same breath.
At first, accounts were vague. Dark shapes moving in the night, weapons disappearing and some night watch guards insisting that they had seen a flash of bone-white out of the corner of their eyes, always gone when they tried to look. Easy to dismiss as the night and the unfamiliar location playing tricks on the weak-minded.
Then, the sabotages began.
Convoys, outgoing communications, incoming merchandise, it didn’t matter when or where, how secret the movements were or how many decoys were deployed, some manner of disaster always struck. He lost more cargo in the ensuing days than he had ever lost before as leader of the cartel. Clients began getting antsy, debts began to be accrued, and it was becoming harder and harder to ignore the superstitious rumours that ran rampant among the rank and file.
This was also when the reports of a laughing skull began.
Initially this sabotage was little more than a thorn in Roba’s side, one he attributed to some rival cartel who had infiltrated, and he send his sicarios among his men to weed out any moles. He had eventually picked a man randomly for punishment, someone that his people could blame for the disasters to remove the sting of the mounting paranoia and relieve the superstition that was rife among them. If the sabotages continued, he would blame a larger cell. Putting a face to this enemy neatly solved two problems in one. He’d made a true example of the man, and left his battered and beaten body naked and barely alive to cook in the afternoon sun, forbidding anyone to help, kill or bury him.
The next morning his body was gone.
Roba flew into a rage at this, unleashing his sicarios once more to punish any and all of the watchmen who were on rotation that night, each of them swearing that they had seen nothing. His punishments were legendary, swift and brutal, quelling any possible rebellious spirit that could be mounting, and blood watered the desert’s sand more liberally than the rains had in centuries.
Eventually his anger cooled, and he forgot the incident, or at least he did until the man made a reappearance, planted on a stake in the middle of the town square.
The man was slumped, arms angled slightly outwards like a man receiving benediction from on high, legs locked in a kneeling position. His body was a mess of contusions from Roba’s initial punishment, unhealed and pooling blood, and his belly was swollen and distended, pregnant with decay. Flies swam in lazy arcs around him, the beginnings of maggots hatching in the soft tissues and exposed wounds, his feet mangled from the attentions of some carrion eaters, taking their chances before the desert took back its bounty. The heat had accelerated the decomposition, but the lack of water had dried and desiccated the man into a shrivelled husk, what blood that remained dripping from his wounds syrupy and dark and viscous. The most alarming part of this pose, the attention to detail almost tender, was the man’s face, or rather, the lack of half of it. His lower mandible had been ripped off of his face with some terrible force, the muscle fibres around it ragged and torn, the skin ruined and in ribbons with the savagery of it. His tongue lolled down his throat like an eel, though it had long since dried out, shrinking with the heat of the sun bearing down on it. The wooden stake propping up this facade had been thrust through the delicate roof of his mouth, emerging somewhere behind the central sulcus, around where the plates of the skull fused, his eyes sagging out of their sockets, gazing up to this impossible sight. His lower jaw was nowhere to be found.
However terrible the sight might’ve been, the men that surrounded it were hardened narcos who had seen carnage and mutilation as great, if not more, than this. None of them were moved by the violence of the act. It was the meaning of it that disturbed them. Watchful eyes focused on Roba, and he began to feel the prickle of observation that would become an unwelcome friend to him in the coming weeks.
After this, almost every week, someone of the Zaragoza cartel disappeared and reappeared somewhere in the town, in the same pose, terror etched into their faces and their jaws ripped out and missing, like a great trophy from an elephant or a lion. Rumours ignited, burned and grew, whispers of a laughing skull, a servant of Santa Muerte, a ghost that was stealing away members of the cartel, though the reasons why were the point at which theory devolved into pure speculation. At first Roba was somewhat insulated, the losses only occurring at the lower ranks, until the fateful night when one of his sicarios , Juan González, failed to report. After that it was only a matter of when.