The body lay at the foot of the stairs. It had moved. It was moving. It lifted one arm—half bone, half rotting flesh—and seized the first pillar of the banister. It hauled itself up a step and raised its head to grin at me.
It was a skull; like its arm, shreds of flesh clung to it, and matted hair stuck to its crown with blackened blood. Lidless, empty eye sockets locked on me.
Then I blinked, and it vanished.
Cold sweat slicked the small of my back. Rodolfo was saying something about the decoration of the upstairs as he led me into the room that I had made a study, and then into the bedroom. I wasn’t listening. I was stunned, my heart hammering violently against my ribs, my eyes peeled wide.
I was going to die in this house.
I was going to shatter into a thousand pieces in the dark, crushed by the cold, by the agonizing malice of the watching, the knowing. I would die.
“Don’t you think?” Rodolfo was saying as he closed the door to the bedchamber behind us.
None of the candles were lit. I ignored him and seized the first box of matches I could find. I was aware of him watching me as I lit them on the table of my vanity; slowly, that awareness drew me back into myself. I could see the tremble in my hand, the frightened hunch of my shoulders. I could feel the concern in his posture.
Concern was dangerous. He was dangerous.
“So many candles, right before bed.” There was a light laugh in his voice.
“I . . . I was so lonely without you, you see,” I sputtered. I did not turn to face him but straightened. In the mirror, the light of the candles was reflected and expanded; beyond the line of my shoulder, Rodolfo was a dark silhouette, moving closer, closer, closer—
He took my arm.
I whirled to face him. He lifted my hand to his face and kissed the soft skin on the inside of my wrist.
An ancient instinct lifted in the back of my skull and sent a ripple of panic through my body.
I was prey. I was trapped.
“I was lonely too.” His voice was low, a rumble in his chest as he took me by the waist and pressed me to his body.
I needed to run.
I pushed against his chest. He did not release me but instead buried his face in my hair, kissing it, and moving to my neck.
I needed to throw him off, to wrench away. But I was nowhere near as strong as him—his hold on my body was like iron, and his shoulders curled around me in easy dominance.
“Querido, not tonight,” I breathed. My voice was strangled. He kept kissing my neck anyway. I imagined him growing fangs, long needlelike fangs, too many for his mouth, and flesh-colored claws, and—“Rodolfo. No.”
He loosened slightly, gazing down at me. If the intent of him was to look amorously at me, the candlelight shattered the effect: shadows emphasized the depth of his eye sockets, making them seem too deep, almost hollow—
I pushed him away.
He frowned, tightening his hold on my wrist. No. He could not become angry. He could turn on me in moments, he could—
“It is my time of the month,” I sputtered, forcing a smile to stretch my lips wide over the lie. My blood had come two weeks ago. Early, to my displeasure. Mamá once said the same used to happen to her in times of distress; if my experiences of the last weeks did not amount to distress, then I didn’t know what to call them. “It is quite uncomfortable, you know.”
Please. Please. I don’t know where I sent the prayer, but it was received. Rodolfo’s face realigned in a swift fall; he placed a soft kiss on my forehead and released me. “Of course.”
Of course he did not question. Men do not trouble themselves with women’s bodies, save when they can be of use to serve or to sate them.
I did not relax.
Not as I prepared my toilet and loosened my still-damp hair from its knot, not as I fussed over my undergarments in the small chamber adjoining our room in a half-hearted attempt to maintain my lie. Not as I returned to the room and saw he had extinguished all the candles and already lay down in bed.
It was too dark. This was not a natural dark. It was too thick. It curled too intimately over the bed. I needed copal. I stepped toward my vanity; the floorboards creaked under my bare feet. I could not—
“Leave it,” Rodolfo murmured, half asleep. “I can’t sleep with light.”
I froze. Should I try to light the copal, or would that irritate him? It was the only thing I had, the one piece of safety.
“Come to bed,” he said.
My feet were like lead as I trod across the floorboards and slipped into bed. I lay stiffly on my back, neither moving toward him nor away.
He drifted off immediately. The rise and fall of his chest was rhythmic, slow. So incongruous with the drumming of my pulse in my ears as I stared up at the wooden rafters.
Somewhere between one blink and the next, I tripped into uneasy dreaming.
The air thickened with smoke. I was in my house in the capital, my father’s house. Red light leaped and danced around me, wild as a tempest, tearing at the dark plumes. The house was on fire; I knew with the perfect, terrible certainty of dreaming that Papá and Mamá were deep in the house. They were in danger.
I called for them, but smoke choked me, swallowing my screams, slinking tight around my throat like a clawed hand. I stumbled forward, but my legs were too heavy. My head was too heavy. The floor came up to meet me and I was pinned to the floorboards, flames licking through their cracks from beneath, smoke clouding my vision. I had to get to my parents. I had to. But I could not move.
Somewhere in the house, a door slammed.
I wrenched myself awake. In this house, in San Isidro, I sucked in lungfuls of air crisp and free of smoke. But that air crackled. It was alive, alive with the fey energy of kindling about to catch.
Another door slammed. Closer, this time.
My heart echoed the act against my ribs.
There was no one in the house. No one but myself and Rodolfo, who turned in his sleep, murmuring something unintelligible.
Slam.
I was going to die in this house. The knowing swept through me, heavy with grief, cold and oracular as the whispered words of a saint.
San Isidro was my tomb.
But not tonight.
I threw the blankets off my legs. The room was black as the Devil’s shadow. I could not see my hands before me as I pawed desperately for matches. Two strikes; light spat into being. My reflection peered back at me as I held flame to wick.
Yellow flesh peeled away from my face, dry as parchment. Like the corpse at the foot of the stairs, it stretched too thin, revealing the hollows of my eyes and a line of too many teeth stretching back to my ear.
I shut my eyes. It was a vision, like the night of the failed exorcism; it could not hurt me.
Or could it?
Ana Luisa was dead, her heart stopped by fright. Andrés was snatched from the air and flung against the wall of the green parlor. In the capilla, the blood on his face did not vanish. Injury inflicted by the house did not vanish like the visions as dawn streaked the skies above San Isidro’s roof. Death would not dissipate like a nightmare.
I stood and stepped toward the doorway. Reached for the handle, hands shaking. I did not care if Rodolfo woke.
If I stayed, this house would kill me.