If you arrive in the nameless city, tread carefully around its center.

Be careful when you hear the cicadas.

Be careful when you smell the smoke.

This is the way Nine Abadón Street welcomes its strangers.

Over there you won't find any angels,

Over there you'll be stepping on demons.

It has borne and nourished one hundred and seventy-four tragedies.

It houses three tarot stalls, a butcher shop, and a seedy bar that old dogs like to sleep by.

The neighbors know too much, talk too little.

On holidays, they perfume it with lavender and vanilla.

During weddings, they dress it with garden roses and hidden thistles.

At funerals, the wind shakes the windows and people gather up in houses to smoke.

After all, each death means the birth of a new demon to cement the way.

So, if you find yourself facing the street.

Don't bother it, don't dare to say hello. Beware, do not turn to see it.

If it becomes interested in you, you'll end up becoming one of its cobblestones.

In a tiny apartment dead smack in the center of the city, a woman gazes at her watch. It strikes midnight. She doesn't know what day it is, but that's none of her business anymore. She's dead anyway. Her name used to be Fátima, like the statue of the virgin. She looks at the cigarette ash on the windowsill and recalls the last person who killed her. It occurred a few days ago when he rushed before her and burst into tears. He never had a name. He barely had two shirts in her wardrobe. That and the cigar ash on the windowsill.

Tenderly, she bundles it up in a little pile and blows on it. She watches as the wind gets tangled with the remains of a man who loved her without knowing her. Remembers the shirts, he didn't even take them when he left. Contemplates burning them, and decides that it would be best not to open the wardrobe again. It's now filled with his cologne, the one that smelled cheap and of stranger. No, she won't burn the shirts. She'd rather burn her hair.

Better not. Inside her hair lives the memory of the person who almost killed her in a way that mattered. She had more than one name. She had a box full of them. The box still sits in a corner of the laundry room. Fátima can no longer remember all her names because the box scalds at the touch. But one of them was Martina. She remembered it well, it was the one she wore when she threw a hot iron at her. The iron scalded at the touch. Fátima absently touches the back of her arm, where the wound mark curls. Martina's brand. She, who screamed and tore apart and wept like a child. Who killed Fatima not when she actually tried to do it, but when she kissed her cheek, stole one of her lipsticks and a train ticket, and left her name box. The kiss scalded at the touch. No, she definitely can't burn her hair. Better burn her skin.

But hundreds of freckles stare back at her from her skin, and those look a lot like her brother's. Although she was never alive for him, she still held affection towards him. At least he had had the decency to make it clear that he wanted nothing to do with her, nor with the rest of their family. He never gave her life, and therefore never ripped it away from her. Not to mention that when he ran away, he left her a pair of shoes and a few coins for the bus. Nowadays they call him the Centipede, she ponders, but when our mother was still alive they called him the same name as our father.

She doesn't remember that name either. Father had disappeared in a bonfire: the name, the man and everything he left scattered around the world. The only thing he didn't take into the afterlife were his children, he probably thought they'd weigh him down. But everyone has always told her that she looked a lot like her father... Maybe she could follow his steps and go up in flames with the scraps she's got. 

If she's lucky, her soul will get trapped in between the rubble. That way she could nose around in the affairs of the neighbours for eternity. Maybe she could fuse with the wooden planks that saw her grow up. Her mother used to say that the street was cursed. That her bad luck was due to the demons that lived beneath it. They crawled between cobblestones and during the night, they escaped and danced. Fátima has never liked to dance, but she could get used to it.

 Yes. Better burn the apartment.

Fátima takes one last look at her own face, sets fire to the carpet and remembers a second too late that she hasn't left a note.

They’d warned Landon he’d be here. No one had actually dared to voice it to him, but he could almost touch the red flags sticking out: beneath purses, in between murmurs, even crawling out of seemingly calm expressions. The silence was the biggest warning of them all. Whenever Landon came to visit, the street came alive and dissolved into a cacophony of exclamations, cheers and now and then, sobs. He was one of the few prodigies that the city had conceived, after all. A dignified pianist, a musical virtuoso. Landon had played abroad, had sprouted between cobblestones. The love during his visits was always deafening, always blown out of proportion.

But this time, even the cicadas were immersed in a vow of silence, holding their breaths as he stumbled around.  

And dense as he may have been, he still had a pair of mildly functioning ears and a disposition for gossip. The whispers told him more than what he needed to know. That the bastard had arrived two days ago, that he had a tan now, no wedding ring in sight. He was sure the street had been doing their best to keep them from seeing each other, but Landon could imagine his shit-eating grin as he pronounced words with a fake accent. The pianist ignored the fact that he often did the same in order to seethe over every little detail he could remember about the man.  

He was overly confident, Landon thought as he scribbled on his musical scores, and a chronic liar. He was the first-person Landon felt he could breathe with. His eyes were constantly jumping around but when he looked, really looked, they were two beacons, alight and scorching. The rest of the world was penumbra. He was infuriating and stubborn. And yet, Landon remembered he despised Debussy, used to go on long rants about it. He had opinions on everything, passion boiled inside his chest. And he remembered the way he loved so easily, so freely. 

But Landon also remembered the way he’d cheated on him, just as easy and free. He closed his eyes, rage building inside the pits of his stomach. Bastard. He felt a small migraine settling between his temples but still, he decided to carry on with the small concert planned for that night. As much as he feared encountering him, he was also too prideful to show that he actually cared. 

The rest of the day was penumbra. He found himself sitting in front of a stranger’s piano way too soon. He wasn’t prepared yet, not today nor ever. The hairs on his neck stood up on end while every person from his past poured in, it seemed they had regained their voices. Children he’d never seen before sat at his feet, his highschool classmates perched around them. He’d never hated the small city more than at that moment. He’d never hated him more than at that moment.  

And of course, he started with La Cathédrale Engloutie. He tried to convince himself it was an inside joke, a sweet salute to old times, but the way he ended the scales was a little too rough, the notes bordering on aggressive. Unspoken words were tugging out of them, desperate to resurface and bite. His body contorted, his eyebrows jumped and moved along with the notes, his breathing came out ragged. In a moment of weakness, he glided almost clumsily into Campanella, just because he could. Because he was a bit of a show-off, and because he always enjoyed the struck looks of the audience. Because if he were here, he thought, sweat dripping down his cheeks, he would be looking at me with those eyes. Scorching, alight.  

His hands were cramping by the time he made it to the encore. His face was a pressure cooker, and something smelled wrong. But everything that he could pay attention to now was Beethoven, who was proving to be particularly difficult that night. He could only hear and feel the resistance of the keys against his fingertips, how they ripped and bit through the air. His heart cried along with them. Furious, shaking, whining.

So it wasn’t a surprise how loud he cried out when someone ripped him away from his only source of solace. Too late he realized what was it that smelled wrong, why everything was blurry. Someone was tugging on his arm, pushing him outside. The street had never been more alive, the orchestra never as loud. Too late he looked up to see the apartment above crumbling and spitting fire. Too late he noticed that one of his ex-classmates had been missing during the performance.

Fire embers fell on their foreheads, the smoke only made them yell louder. For the first time in a long while, he felt powerless. He knew no melody he ever produced would ever replicate the rushed screaming, the howls, the silence that follows a real tragedy.  The death of a stray dog, the birth of a new demon. Fátima’s last ballad. 

So his voice rose, tore, cried to mingle in with the chants. He yelled as he hadn’t before, lungs filled with smoke and his throat aching, sobbing, spitting cinder. He repeated the same name, God knows how many times. He searched for him in the crowd, pushing and silently praying.  

Just as he was about to collapse of exertion, a pair of beacons turned towards him. Everything was white noise. Time was penumbra. 

If there’s one thing she knows about herself, is that she’s nosy. People never seem to tire of informing her. “Get your own cup of coffee to stick your nose into,” the girls at the office spit, crushing morning into a fine grain. “Don’t talk to me about something I haven’t told you about” the ones at the cabaret are less aggressive, more dangerous. They’ve never liked her much around here. Nine Abadón doesn’t wish to be known, less alone told. Helena rises to the challenge.

As she stands near the flower archway tonight, high heels in hand, she’s practically buzzing. A wedding. The wedding. The salon is covered in white garden roses, and she can smell the disapproval of the bride’s family from her spot. Beautiful Luz smiles as if she doesn’t know what else to do, standing in the middle of the hall like a particularly anxious porcelain doll.

“Herpentaria!” Martina calls out, her smile fat with malice, “Fifty bucks her father shoots the groom by the end of the night,”

“You mean Quevedo? Probably,” Helena positions herself so she’s looking at the bastard of a groom. “But if he kills Góngora, he won’t have anyone else to squabble with”

“Are those their names?” Right. Martina is never around for a long time. There’s no way she’d know.

“It’s what we call them”

Martina cocks her head to the side, and Helena rises to the challenge. As the first ball commences, the violins get drowned out by their story spilling out of the Herpentaria’s mouth. Quevedo and Góngora. Sworn enemies. No one knows exactly when it started, not even the Herbalist, but they’ve been fucking the other over for as long as they’ve uttered words. They grew up a house apart, and to this day it hasn’t been sold or rented. Once, Góngora pissed in all of Quevedo’s shoes. Once, Quevedo broke Góngora’s right arm. He got his left broken in return. Once, they lost their voice for two weeks after arguing an entire Winter night. Once... Once Góngora left the city, and when he returned he married Quevedo’s daughter.

Martina chokes on her drink at this point of the story, she whips her head around to look back at the bride’s father approaching the couple as they finish their first dance. “Holy shit,” the devil whispers, “Helena, he’ll kill him”

As he’s two steps away, Quevedo stops. His fists are clenched. Hell freezes over. He breaks into tears. He kneels.

Luz’ porcelain face cracks. She puts her hands around her father and sinks down to whisper apologies into his ear.

Góngora turns to look the other way. Guilt looks foreign on his face.

“Poor thing, she’ll get her dress dirty”

As they walk home together, they’re silent more or less. Usually, Helena would leave last to make sure she didn’t miss a single detail. To ensure she drank the whole picture. Her glass is half empty tonight, Martina insisted on leaving after the first slice of cake. Said it was too gruesome.

“You really can’t have one boring moment here, huh?” moonlight washes over the two of them, the cicadas are quiet more or less.

“I wonder when they’re getting divorced,” Helena murmurs, “I wonder if Luz will move out”

“If she does, she better go as far as she can. This street is crowded enough as it is,”

“They’re building new apartments though, after last year.”

“What happened last year?”

Martina wasn’t around. There’s no way she’d know. For once, Helena shrugs her shoulders at the truth. “I forgot”

//

To those that have read Nine Abadón before, Helena Herpentaria replaces Maru (The Herbalist) in this version. This is because I originally intended to write her chapter instead, but couldn't bring myself to. Maru may come back later though.

You’ll only find the doctor between corners, is what the neighbours used to whisper. He lived in the shack at the bottom of the street, the one with those awful gothic frames on the doors, the poor thing could barely stand its own weight. It had been built by the youngest son of the Morales, who claimed it was experimental architecture. The only experiment that would come out of the little joke for a house would be what his father did to him when he found out what the youngest Morales had done with the money he’d lent him for college. In any case, the architect had shut everyone’s mocking mouth when he shook hands with Eustaquio McGrath, the new owner of the mausoleum dressed as a home.

At first, the stranger caused fascination among the neighbors, what with his vermilion suits and Apollonian profile.

A doctor? What type? From which place? Who sends him?

They got used to having none of their questions answered. In part because the doctor was mute, but mainly because it seemed he liked to play the part of the tortured mind. And as the months went by, they also got used to the fact that the only place that they could marvel at his clear eyes would be through his windows.

The tall figure of the doctor began in the main room and ended in the door jambs. When the children walked towards the institute, they took the opportunity to snoop in. Still in his evening gown, he paced the study, his bulging eyes fixed on maps, anatomy diagrams and fat tomes. Each and every morning a cup of coffee was perched on the French desk, expecting a fate of being forgotten at best. At worst, it ended up spilling over poems written in Latin.

When one of the Rojas twins returned from the café, the doctor obsessed over the patterns on his walls, trying to hold back tears. Still in his evening gown, and with an infinite tenderness, he cradled his essays towards his chest with one hand. With the other, he held a half-empty, or half-full, bottle of whiskey. During some afternoons, he soaked the papers on his drink of preference with the same delicacy, and set them on fire. Once, Rojas made the mistake of crossing eyes with the man while he performed this task. She never wanted to talk about it, but inside the clear eyes, she found nothing.

And in the early mornings when the Centipede returned from a trip, Eustaquio rested in the frame on the open windows, the closest thing to human contact he had in those days. Dressed in one of his beloved suits, gummed hair and ash-stained hands, he directed the traveler a distant salute. For his part, the Centipede felt his stomach knot each time he passed by, the clear eyes too similar to those of his sister. He wouldn’t be surprised if he peeked in one morning and found the whole body stained with ash. They could never get rid of the smoke stench in Fatima’s body. They said people couldn’t stop coughing during the funeral.

The centipede did not have the time or the brain to heal people, that was for certain. Even so, it was an early February morning, the anniversary of The Fire, when he took one of Eustaquio’s frail hands, and brusquely cleaned it with his handkerchief.

"Lock yourself in if you want, but don’t play with that," he snapped, not aware of the tears that had been accumulating in his eyes for two years, finally slipping down free. “Don’t play with that,”

They remained silent for a few moments, for a few hours. The centipede did not heal people, Eustaquio had barely reacted. But in the early hours of the morning, one can drown these things on the melody of the cicadas. One can gaze at the shadows hiding inside the street lanterns. One can pretend Nine Abadón is a piece of lost world. One can smell the stories, speak to the demons that inhabit them.

When he’d made his decision, the doctor turned towards the Centipede with lost eyes. He put his clean hand toward his chin, and pushed forwards with its back, an imperceptible smile on his lips.

Thank you.

He hasn't been home for a long time. And if he has, he's been drunk. Either way, the lights haven't been on for months, and the letters by his doorstep only keep on coming. Everyone pretends not to know who sends them, for the sake of the remitter. But it has just as well turned into one of the street's traditions, to check if they're still there each morning. Elena, nosy as she was born, has stolen some of them and sometimes pulls them out of her purse to let people read them. Only sometimes. Today, they're sprawled all over the table and signed in tremulous handwriting.

_____

Ay, mi Flaco,

The house isn't as bright without you around. I've never been much of a writer, you know this. But when you're gone I tend to fall into melancholy. How's your job? I never liked the idea of wresting, you know, but it’s been growing on me. I can see you, belt in hand. Just don’t let them touch your face. I can tell you everything that has happened over here. The girl on the floor below, the one with the sad stare, I'm sure she's up to something. The Gongora boy sometimes come over to talk for a while, a new family has moved close. And your brother, well you know how he is, he's kept me well-informed. Please respond as soon as you can.

With all the love, Mom.

_____

Flaquito mío,

A tragedy happened, so now I'm staying with the young teacher, Sofía. I cn’t write it down, dear. Please come visit, I'll tell you about it. If you can't come, respond as soon as you can.

Love you always, Mom.

_____

Ay Flaco,

What have you done?

Love, Mom

_____

Mi Flaco, mi corazón,

I didn't want to believe the rumors. I still don't. I can't take much more, I can’t hold on forever. I told you that fighting would get you nowhere. I told you that side-jobs will get you killed. You told me it was a job, Flaco. Your brother won’t receive you, but I explained everything to Sofía. I can help you, why don't you ever believe me? You don’t need to be strong, when you can be safe. Please. Come home.

I love you, Mom.

_____

Today, they're disorganized and stained. Today, some tears fell on top of the last lines. It's been three years since the Fire, and only three hours since the old widow that lived two cities away with Sofía, passed away. Elena and the girls are silent, smoking. Cruz is picking out flowers for the funeral, nothing but sweet peas and daisies. By the time Eustaquio arrived, the woman's breathing matched that of the rhythm of her rocking chair. The wind howled and sobbed, as it would for the next week.

Some days later, Claudia Bernal would be buried next to a small chapel. Some neighbors would be there, maybe the Gongora boy and that new family. There'd be no family members of hers. And her tombstone would carry no name, no dates. The young teacher Sofía would cry silently, stay there hours after everyone left.

Some months later, Sofía would receive some money in the mail. It'd have a note, attached to it.

For the troubles and the funeral. Thank you, El Flaco.

Some years later, sweet peas and daisies would adorn the nameless tomb.