I-I-IX

I stroke the top of Santa Rosa de Izquierda’s head and scratch behind her ear. She purrs, then jumps onto my shoulder and digs in her claws. This ought to tell you everything you need to know about Rosa.

“Steady on there, old girl,” I say. “I can’t very well pull up the door with you fastened to my bally arm, now, can I? Fuck off.”

She gives me a needly squeeze and leaps off onto the altar. I, because I was fool enough to let Rosa play kitty-cat before I got her to help me, must now heave up a bloody great stone slab all by myself. I stoop to grab the little fingerholds in the floor. I strain.

“Ha-bloody-ha.” I glare up at Rosa from my undignified spot on the ground. She’s sitting on the altar, doing the feline equivalent of laughing her arse off. Now I recall that her last body was a former luchadora – the new meat must have called for an adjustment of the counterweights. The trapdoor yawns, and from the staircase below a greenish fluorescence belches into the candlelit room. The little minx bounces from her perch to my crotch, and thence down the stairs. I rise, dust myself off, and follow.

Above ground, Rosa is la curandera, the witch-woman, patroness of the Wicked Truth. Downstairs, however, she’s really quite interesting. I first met her while I was practicing Voudoun, and even though I’ve mastered it now we still keep in touch. A chap in my position can’t have too many friends, or too many good suits. Rosa is the former, and churns the latter out by the dozens, thanks to this little subterranean sweat-shop of hers. As I jaunt down the stairs I hear a whining, buzzing chorus, like a room full of sewing machines. Rosa waits expectantly for me to open the door at the bottom for her. I turn the knob - on the other side waits a room full of sewing machines.

Perhaps I do Rosa an injustice in calling this place a sweatshop. The air is hellish-hot, but the dead don’t sweat, and the ranked rows of corpses don’t seem to mind. Their eyelids are sewn shut over gold coins, their lips are stapled around mouthfuls of snake flesh and saltpeter. Right now they’re getting ahead of the game, churning out knockoffs of a dress that Rosa’s made for the dewy blonde from ‘Gossip Girl’.

The original is hanging from a beam in Rosa’s little office. I offer it the tribute it deserves. “Smashing, Rosa,” I say. “It’ll hit the tabloids before it hits the floor of her producer’s limo. Where’s my suit?”

She goes nosing in among the racks that are triple-parked in the corner of her subterranean factory that she’s walled off against the noise of the sewing machines. “Mawr,” she says, and I reach for the hanger. I’m careful not to look to closely at the simple lines and understated sheen of what lurks beneath the plastic. If I look, I’ll gush, and that will just embarrass both of us.

Rosa’s suits don’t violate the $100 rule. Not because I don’t pay for them – although I don’t, except occasionally in blood, sweat and tears – but because they are priceless. When I see dear brother Adrian this evening, he will be wearing something designed in Milan and born on Saville Row, with a price tag that more usually applies to real estate. In the presence of this suit, sewn by a zombie in a DC basement, Adrian’s will unravel with shame.

“Ta, old girl.” I hang the evening’s costume next to the cover of the next ‘Us Weekly’. “One more bit of business. I need a reading, and you’re the only one in town I trust besides me.”

She accepts the compliment with feline grace. That is to say, she ignores it utterly and sets to clawing the hell out of a bolt of linen. When she’s finished, she noses open a supply cupboard and scrambles up onto one of the shelves. She roots around at the back and comes out with a rubber-banded tarot deck between her teeth. Nothing fancy here. No frills, no candles, no smoke and mirrors. Just a sneak peek at whatever fresh hell awaits yours truly in the coming hours.

Out of respect for Rosa’s condition, I remove the rubber band and set the deck in a spot on her green industrial metal desk that isn’t covered with drawings and snippings. She hops up and muddles it about with a forepaw, slopping the deck into a puddle of loose cards before reforming it. I prefer a riffle to a wash shuffle for the tarot, but then I’ve got people-hands.

Rosa flicks her tail. She closes her slitty green eyes and extends a single claw. She slides one card from the top of the deck onto the desk, face down. A second card. A third. This is fate. Rosa uses a modified three-card spread -- not the half-assed past-present-future tripe that tourists get on the boardwalk, but a potent short-range illuminator. Card number one is the worst-case scenario. Card number two is the best possible outcome. Card number three represents what’s going to decide between the two.

Flip, flip, flip. Fuck.