Padre Andrés stepped forward, pausing when he noticed I had not joined him. “Do?a Beatriz?”
The walls were so close, too close. The darkness too deep. I thought of the flint in Juana’s eyes as she pushed me into the dark. How the walls spun around me from mezcal. She knew this house. She knew it was like this.
And she sent me into the dark anyway.
“I want the copal.” My voice was strained, breathless.
“Would you like to return to the green parlor?” Padre Andrés asked.
Part of me yearned for the sensation of my back safely against a wall. Part of me screamed for light. It begged to light a thousand candles, to throw anything that could be burned into the fireplace and set it aflame.
Part of me wanted to burn the whole house to the ground.
The other part of me could not bear being alone. Padre Andrés was here. He was another creature in the house, one who meant me no harm. Another soul in the dark. Another pair of eyes, to watch my back when I could not. I could not tear myself from that safety, not even to sit in a room of copal and candles, inhaling smoke until I went dizzy.
“My house, my responsibility,” I said. “Forward.”
I set my jaw and faced the darkness.
The darkness faced me, a tremor of sick joy rippling through it.
We left doors ajar behind us on purpose, to test my perception that something other than Ana Luisa was making them shut behind me. When we reached the staircase, Andrés breathed in sharply.
“The cold,” he said hoarsely, barely above a whisper. We could have shouted at the top of our lungs—there was no one to judge us, no one to hear us—but we could not bring ourselves to raise our voices. As if he, too, realized we were being watched, being listened to. I knew the house would hear him anyway.
The cold was like stepping into a current. Three paces back, it didn’t exist at all; now it was all-encompassing. It snaked up my spine, wet, slick, heavy as mud, and settled on my chest. My breathing grew shallow and pained; no matter how I tried, I could not breathe deeply enough.
A clacking noise to my right; Padre Andrés’s teeth were chattering. “What is that?” he forced out.
“A terrible draft,” I said, my own jaw stiff from the cold. The house swallowed my joke whole.
“The north wing is where you found . . . ?”
I nodded, too chilled to speak. This was different. Before, when the cold had attacked me, it was a wind, biting and dry, ready to snap me in two. This was like wading through thick water: it tore at my limbs, its heaviness seizing my thighs, grasping at my waist.
We moved into the north wing.
Naturally cold storeroom, I had written. A wild giggle rose in my throat, and I covered my mouth with a hand to silence it.
I let Padre Andrés take the lead in the narrow hall, my heart thundering against the tightness in my chest as we waded slowly through the cold. For a moment, the click of the heels of his shoes on the stone floor was all that broke the silence.
Then he stopped abruptly.
In the flickering light of the candles, I could see that bricks littered the narrow hall before us. The bricks that had collapsed when I—
Red eyes appeared over the bricks, high enough from the ground to belong to a person.
I gasped. Andrés seized my free hand.
The red winked into darkness and vanished.
Candlelight danced on the bricks, on the collapsed wall . . . and glinted off the gold necklace that was still draped around the skeleton’s broken neck.
The hair on the back of my neck lifted; a buzzing fear followed, rippling over my flesh. We were exposed. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to create a barrier between us and that, nowhere to hide.
Andrés raised his candle, then moved it down and side to side in the sign of the cross. “In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus—”
I cried out as darkness leaped from the walls, from around the skeleton, from behind us, from before us. The cold sucked shadows toward it with a ferocity that made our candles flicker and jump.
Andrés’s candle died.
12
BACK UP.” ANDRéS’S VOICE pitched with fear; his hand tightened on mine as he fell back a step. “Slowly.”
A rush of shadows swept from behind us. The keys at my waist rang like wind chimes; the candle’s flame bent forward. I wanted him to let go of my hand so I could cup it around my flame. It licked upward, fighting as desperately as if it were being suffocated. As if the air in the hall were too close for it to be able to breathe.
Then it went out.
A low no escaped Andrés’s mouth as darkness fell over us.
“Back to the parlor,” he said. “I face back; you face forward.”
We moved as one, our backs against each other, facing the darkness. We had no copal. No weapons to defend ourselves. Nothing to shield us from whatever it was that seethed inside the house, whatever it was that pursued us like the weakened prey we were.
There was no candlelight. Only Andrés’s hand crushing mine. It was not enough. Not when the house was all around us. There was no running from it; there was only running deeper into its bowels, and the cold pulling at my legs like mud as we fought toward the parlor where we had left the copal.
I relied on memory to carry me to the fork in the hall, past the staircase, too terrified to reach out to the walls and feel my way forward, for what if they crumbled beneath my touch and revealed new horrors? It was becoming difficult to lift my feet, difficult to breathe, as if something heavy were pushing on my chest. The cold, the dark, was heavy, so heavy . . .
A girlish laugh lilted toward us from the direction of the collapsed wall, faint and wavering, as if carried on a breeze from far away.
Juana, the laughter called, birdlike and thin. Juana.
“Go, go.” Andrés picked up speed, forcing me forward into the dark. His hold on my hand was so firm I could barely feel my fingers. My feet knew the way, and carried us into the main hall, past the dining room . . .
Juana, Juana . . .
The door of the parlor was shut, though we had left it open. I reached for the handle—it was locked. Of course. God damn this house.
Andrés collided with me, pushing me against the door. My teeth jarred against one another and I cried out as my candle fell to the floor. It cracked against the stone floor and rolled away in pieces.
“Carajo,” Andrés said. “I’m so sorry, I—”
Juana. Less faint now. It was following us, dropping in pitch, becoming less singsong, less girlish. Its ring was dissonant, setting my teeth on edge. Juana.
It drew closer.
“Can you open it?” Andrés’s breathing came in rough gasps. My heart throbbed in my throat as I fumbled with the key; finally, we fell forward into the dark room. Andrés slammed the door shut behind us with his shoulder.
The copal sputtered out. All the candles were extinguished. He released my hand. “Lock the door. I’ll light candles.”
He didn’t have to ask me twice. I did so, then followed him as he stumbled forward into the room.