A Cult of Two
by Harrison Kim
Chapter 2: In the Hotel Ontario
I sat on the floor of Room 201, Hotel Ontario, Zocalo Precinct, Mexico City. I checked my surroundings before coming in the door, to make sure I hadn’t been fooled by false directions. Indeed, the familiar number 201 meant that I was awake and not dreaming or misled. I sat on the thin brown coffee-stained rug.
Santeria Master Jimmy sat on the bed, his massive black hair a crescent under the ceiling light. “Anna lied,” said Jimmy. “She doesn’t want to seem like a slut.”
“So, you really did have sex with all three of them?” I asked.
Jimmy grinned and poured himself another glass of white rum. I looked up at his teeth as he smiled, he’d never had a cavity, he told me, “Always use toothpicks.” Under a certain light his front molars often appeared almost transparent.
“The man with the big shoulders is pressing on your mind,” his deep resonant voice sounded. “You are being deceived by those that wish to destroy us. Santeria calls these devils the Olosi.”
The man with the big shoulders was the hotel manager, Perez. He looked like a heavy-set older man. “That’s not who he really is,” said Jimmy. “He’s a conjectured walking Olosi.”
Santeria conjectures involved manipulations that influenced human minds through god- or demon-possession of living or inanimate objects.
Perez’s face drooped forward as he shuffled, bent over, never smiling. “That’s because his real self is trapped inside the demon shell,” said Jimmy. He took another swallow of rum. “His real self resembles a misshapen cockroach.” The Master chuckled grimly. “I can see it right now, through the wicked illusions.”
“This hotel is so old there have to be ancient Aztec spirits in the walls,” I offered.
“We’re talking about immortal demons, Harrison,” Jimmy nodded.
I knew the stories of Aztec Priests ripping out virgin sacrificial hearts at their temple altars. This probably happened right where the Hotel Ontario sat. A modern person could absorb this ancient spirit influence and be taken over and manipulated to hurt others or himself.
That’s why, at the end of every day, Jimmy and I prayed and chanted before statues of the Saints, lighting special candles to clean the air and exorcize any lingering ancient demons.
“We must move from this hotel soon,” Jimmy said. “The smoke is becoming heavy. The snake is rising.”
He gazed around the room. “Anna’s breathing that haze into her lungs and she’s tripping, man, on the power of the ancient demons.”
I pondered Anna’s tone.
“Her voice sounded so angry,” I said again.
The sisters had been good to me. There were three: Estrella, Silvia, and Anna. Estrella, the youngest at sixteen, short and round-faced, always sat close, touching my shoulder when I played Anna’s guitar in the hotel courtyard. She sang in a heavy accent, mouthing the English words, humming choruses to Beatles songs.
“I will learn English this way, from you,” she said. Later, we practiced the words in my hotel room, sitting close there on the bed. One afternoon she jumped right under the covers and invited me in.
“I cannot resist your temptation,” I told her, as she drew the blankets back and showed her naked self.
I had to tell Jimmy about my first Orisha-based success.
“Master love potion and John the Conqueror root have bought you confidence and power,” Jimmy chuckled.
That crumbly piece of plant was only one of the many herbs and potions I took or rubbed in every morning. I doubled my dose after that first encounter with Estrella and added Spanish Fly.
I was 21 and single. I wandered Mexico in search of identity and adventure, spent several months camping up in the Sierra Madre, hiked along the coast until I wandered down into Mexico City and met Jimmy. He was smooth-skinned, a bit chubby, with thick fingers and a charismatic, articulate demeanour.
“You are my perfect acolyte,” he told me. “We shall work together to gain power, and when we do, we shall heal others, no matter what their race, creed, or colour.”
He frequently repeated his ambitions to help people surface from the suffering of day-to-day reality, to create conditions for emergence and rebirth.
“I have had a hard life, Harrison,” he said. “The street was my school.” He said he had spent two years in Vietnam. “We mostly partied and swam in the ocean,” he said. “Only the occasional firefight.”
His reassurances regarding my spiritual potential gave me a focus and a goal. “You are a young man with a powerful soul,” he told me. “You have the potential to be a Master.”
In the month I’d been at Hotel Ontario, we’d chanted spells, prayed to the saints, worn oils and strode the streets with confidence. We charmed and connected with everyone. Young secretaries came to our room at lunch hour to have their hair combed in a rhythmic fashion while they listened to our music. I became an expert at hypnotic brush technique. Sister Silvia was one of my first clients.
“It’s got a trance feel,” I said as she tried it out on me, too, the strokes ritualized, focused. We both fell into touch-induced bliss.
“I don’t want to go back to work,” Silvia often said. She lay back against my chest. I ran the comb through her hair as Jimmy sat in the background, grinning and writing in his book of spells.
Of all three sisters, Silvia cared for me the most. On my birthday, she gave me a deep, long hug and proclaimed, “May your future be the best you ever wished for.”
I let that sink in. The way she said it, so emotional and real, came straight from her centre. “She’s not possessed by spirits at all,” I told Jimmy.
“You’d be surprised,” he said. “Never let down your guard.”
Jimmy didn’t speak Spanish. “I don’t understand a word you and Silvia are saying,” he said, “but I can tell she likes you. Give her something back, and that will draw her in more.”
“Tell me a wish you have and let us carry it out.” I asked her.
Silvia grinned mischievously, tilted her high cheek-boned head. “I want to go to a horror house,” she said. “There’s a very good one over in the Zona Rosa.”
“Won’t that be too scary?” I asked.
“I like scary,” she smiled. “Even this room is scary.” She looked around. “All your statues and candles. You are a very mysterious man.”
“I’m worried Silvia will become unduly bonded to you,” Jimmy told me in English, while she checked out her form in the long mirror. “Be careful of your chi.” Then he grinned. “Remember, she is a married woman.”
“I cannot forget that!” I laughed and felt even more certain in my power and confidence. A married woman liked me! Karl, Silvia’s husband, a dour Austrian who taught at a local English language school, was hardly ever around.
“I’m three months pregnant by him,” Silvia announced, as she, Jimmy and I took the bus over to the horror house.
This didn’t faze me. I considered Silvia more of a friend. I also believed everything existed in an illusion. Whatever notion I felt in the moment could become real, depending on my immediate forceful exercise of personality. The pregnancy did not concern me. It had nothing to do with my immediate reality. If Silvia preferred to spend time with me, that was due to her choice and my confidence.
Silvia squealed and held onto me as we moved down the dark narrow halls of the horror house, located in a run-down University-area tenement. Students in masks and costumes popped out at intervals. “Aargh!” they screamed. One yelled, “I stubbed my Frankenstein toe!”
“I have never had so much fun!” said Silvia. “Karl never takes me to such fun places.”
“This is all so fake,” Jimmy growled. “All part of the Mexico facade. These students, they’re just making some quick money.”
“That’s obvious,” I said. “But it is entertaining.”
“It seems like fun to you,” he said, “but these fools can awaken the demons that live beneath this floor.” He stamped his foot for emphasis.
“Silvia likes it,” I said. “So, I’ll just go with that right now.”
“This is too unpredictable,” Jimmy said. “Are these people working for the Olosi?” He sighed. “And I forgot my rum.”
Copyright © 2021 by Harrison Kim
