The priest looked over his shoulder. There was nobody there.
"Compadre?" asked Marta again, her voice sounding farther off than Ismael had thought at first. She was not behind him as he'd feared but inside the house, looking for him.
"Dammit," the priest said, clenching his teeth.
Luckily, Marta hadn't realized the garage door was open. As soon as she noticed that, or figured out he wasn't in the room where they'd left him last night, chances were she'd check the backyard, and that would be it.
Maybe I could hide over there, Ismael considered. Wait until she comes out and strangle her with my belt. No, that could give her the chance to scream. He spotted a black river stone by the chained inner gate they must have used as a doorstop and picked it up, satisfied with its weight and size. This will do. A clean hit to the back of her head and— Soon the murmur of another pair of serious voices grew louder in the living room, wrecking his chances of a swift murder. Ofelia did warn me her mother wouldn't dare to be alone with me again.
"Father Ismael?"
"Those must be the bishop's minions," the priest assumed, entering Abe's office and closing the door behind him as quietly as possible.
"Didn't you say he was here, ma'am?" asked a man with a hoarse voice.
"We left him here this morning," Marta floundered, stumbling over her words. "I locked all the doors in the house. There's no way that... Compadre?"
Chains rattled as she removed the padlock and opened the inner gate. Marta and the two men accompanying her were now on the patio less than a foot away from the priest.
"What's in this room?" asked the other man with them.
Ismael held his breath and crouched down even more.
"I don't know. My husband—"
"The garage door is ajar," said the man with the hoarse voice, interrupting her.
"My God!" Marta slurred her words. "I walked by the house not twenty minutes ago, and it was closed."
"He can't be far then."
Although the priest heard them rush off, he feared the hammering in his chest would be loud enough to give away his hiding spot.
Calm down, he told himself. They are leaving.
Then the cell phone hanging from his neck rang.
Ismael tried desperately to silence it. With fumbling fingers, he stopped the music coming from it as Abraham's picture on the screen went black. Did they hear it? The priest hesitated for a moment before peeking outside the room. No one was in sight, and he heard but the leaves rustling in the stormy wind.
"That was too close," he whispered to himself.
In the office, there was nothing more than an empty click when he flipped the light switch on the wall by the door. It was dead. Night had already plummeted over San Isidro, and the thick veil of clouds above was making the darkness in the office absolute.
"And God said, let there be light," Ismael pressed a button on the mobile phone to use it as an improvised flashlight until he noticed a little string hanging from the ceiling. "And God saw the light, and it was... weird."
He pulled the string. After the dangling light bulb had come on, it swung like a pendulum for a few seconds, blinking before it revealed a small, untidy room decorated with racks of wooden specimen drawers holding rows of butterflies pinned under glass.
Every bit of the wall to his left was crammed with stacks of boxes containing documents in manila folders, or covered by corkboards with blurry photos of unfamiliar faces and clips of newspaper articles about The Skulls.
In the center of the office, there was a desk with a yellowed white typewriter on it, beset with piles of papers, documents, scribbled notes, and photographs of forgotten places taken from afar, as well as some books about child psychology.
"'Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by my deeds.' James 2:18," Ismael said, reading out loud the framed Bible quote above a padlocked filing cabinet in the back of the room.
The whole place reeked of dust, mustiness, and hidden truths.
Ismael's eyes devoured every detail of each report he found in plain sight. Many had to do with the homeless and glue-sniffers who had overrun the unfinished buildings in the northern part of the town, such as the 'ghost' train station, the abandoned cable company, or the new terminal that never was. As far as he could tell, in those abandoned construction sites it was easier to find a used syringe on the ground than something edible in the trash.
Then, the priest read an article about how the country's spiraling inflation had fueled both the school dropout and crime rates. A secret to none, most teenagers thought robbery was the best choice to fill their pockets, even though this could mean trading their home addresses for that of the local cemetery before age thirteen.
"How interesting," mumbled Ismael, looking at the pictures pinned on the cork boards that chronicled how the Skulls' masks had evolved; there were also a few mugshots of criminals that belonged to the gang. None of them were past their twenties. "And according to this," he reread the hand-scribbled notes, "Ofelia was not lying about their devotion to their leader. They'd all taken a vow of silence in prison."
Unaware of how long he'd been in the office, the priest knew everything he'd read so far wouldn't help him answer the question. Until now, Abraham's office contained little more than the results of San Isidro's autopsy, a town that hadn't noticed its own death.
A glance around the room made him realize that the files he needed had to be under lock-and-key.
"The filing cabinet," he said.
The priest looked at the river stone he'd accidentally brought inside with him, and concluded he could either be quiet or fast, but not both. After taking a deep breath and casting one last look at the door, he set to work. However, breaking the damn padlock on the wooden filing cabinet took him more strikes than he expected. It was as if the piece of furniture was resisting, fighting back to keep its secrets from being revealed.
"Fuck!"
As the final strike opened it, a few splinters buried in the priest's fingers like sharp fangs.
Over the next few minutes, Ismael skimmed through the contents of each folder he found, but nothing seemed to shed light on the king's identity—until the truth hit him in the pit of his stomach. A cadaver had disappeared years ago. The corpse of a suicide victim, the dead body of someone he'd cared for a great deal.
His head was spinning. Not only did he know the Mime King, but he had been responsible for his creation.
The priest had spawned his own demons.