I LED MY MULE out of San Isidro’s stables that afternoon. The sun slipped from its apex toward the western horizon; the chorus of grasshoppers rose with the heat of the siesta hours.
I cast a look over my shoulder at the walls surrounding the house, at its uneven peaks and dips, the spine of an ancient beast.
The house watched me leave, its stare baldly appraising.
A tender, bone-deep fear drew its fingertip down the back of my neck.
What had happened to San Isidro in my absence? So often I had sought the company of the house as a boy, ducking past the patrón and his family to find a forgotten storeroom where I could lose myself in its ancient gossip. Back then, the house recognized me as one of the few who could hear it and welcomed me whenever I entered. Centuries of memories lingered in its shadowed hallways, so thick they wove the building’s walls a gentle, ageless sentience, one that was distracted and uninterested in the affairs of the living.
But now? This was not the house I had known as a child, its chatter secretive and benign. The earth at the house’s foundation was saturated with sickness, a blight, its black veins leading up the hill to the gate and tangling under it like the roots of a cursed tree.
Such a change could not be immediate. It must predate Do?a Beatriz’s arrival. It must have something to do with the apparition of the body in the wall. There was no doubt that the anger that vibrated deep in the bones of the house had something to do with that. It festered like an old, infected wound, open and weeping.
I had to fix it. My loyalty to the house was as complete as that to my family; this hacienda was home. I made my decision the moment I stepped across its threshold: I would purge it of its rot.
But how?
My thoughts immediately fell to the locked box in my chest, following the inevitable pull of the current. Every bit of darkness inside it clawed to be let loose.
Last night, cornered in the green parlor by the rage of the house, I acted in self-defense: I unlocked the box. Driven by fear, I reached into myself and released a trickle of the darkness I kept bottled tightly in there.
And now every time I closed my eyes, I saw glyphs carved on the insides of my eyelids. Every time my thoughts wandered, they were drawn with unholy, inescapable attraction to that locked box.
When I was a youth, Titi heard of witches in the north who had been tortured and jailed, accused of an epidemic of demonic possessions. Those who starved in prison or died of torture-inflicted wounds were most often mestizos like me, mestizos or criollos, for Indios did not fall within the jurisdiction of the Inquisition.
“There are some things I cannot protect you from,” she told me sadly.
It was true. I was her heir, always had been, but her blood and her gifts were only half of that which flowed in my veins. The rest was a darkness neither she nor I could name.
So Titi sent me to the seminary, where she believed I could hide in plain sight from conscription and inquisitor alike.
Hide I did. And, as much as I initially doubted Titi’s conviction that I should join the Church, theological instruction became the structure I hadn’t known I craved. It gave me a map with clear markings, explicit indications of correct paths and the wrong, a beginning and an end. Clarity gave me the strength to put my faith in the Christian God—though timidly at first, fearful of being scorned for both my birthright and Titi’s teachings. To my eternal surprise, I found myself accepted. Welcomed, even. Trusted.
So long as the sinful parts of my pocked, split soul were crushed into submission, I was given a place to belong. So long as that part of myself was bound with chains, I had His love.
Even since returning to Apan, I had not touched that part of myself. In order to serve as my grandmother’s heir, I leaned on what she taught me and that alone. I told myself it was because I did not need that darkness. I had what Titi taught me. I had earned the guidance and trust of the Lord through penance and devotion.
Now I knew it was because I was afraid.
I acted in fear last night. I had earned still more fear for my trouble: would I ever again be at peace, without that heavy, aching awareness of the locked box in my breast? But would I be able to cure San Isidro without it? What if I could not?
Hacienda San Isidro—my home—was poisoned. It was hurting. Rot like this would spread beyond the house’s walls, leeching life from the earth, blighting the fields, lacing the homes of the village with affliction. It was a sickness. It must be contained, then eradicated.
My thoughts knelt softly before the locked box.
When I opened it last night, when I set a curl of my own darkness free to protect myself and Beatriz from the malice of the house, she did not flinch from me, nor look at me in revulsion. She did not tell me I should burn, as my father had when he learned of the darkness that his bloodline had manifested in me. Even in the candlelight, I could see her eyes filled with trust.
Something in my chest fluttered pleasantly at the memory.
If I were to crack open the box for only a moment, if I were to release only a sliver of what simmered within . . . If I were to control it so completely it had no choice but to return to the locked chamber in which I kept it, then perhaps I could use it to cure the house.
Perhaps it could work.
The mule tossed his head; then, rolling the bit against his teeth in gentle annoyance, he lowered his head and rubbed his forelock against my shoulder. Walk on, that said, ornery and impatient—the sooner we began walking again, the sooner he could be rid of bridle and bit and me alike, and rest in the shade.
I obeyed, still lost in thought. My gentle prying with the villagers about the house had mostly been fruitless. They were far more intent on telling me all that had happened to them in my absence, the sicknesses they had suffered. Unfortunately, there was much to discuss. Cholera, from infected drinking water. A rash of measles killing children one spring. Then typhus struck the village. My heart contracted hearing the damage my absence had wrought. Typhus! I shook my head mournfully as the mule and I walked toward the western road. Even at thirteen, I could have rid the village of typhus-spreading parasites with an hour of work.
But I had been banished.
The only mercy was that the plague had taken Do?a María Catalina with it.