11

11

THE NEXT DAY, I sat on the front steps of the house, waiting for night to fall. A candle burned on my right, already lit despite the still-orange skies. At my other side, copal in a censer released a steady, curling plume of mauve smoke.

A book sat abandoned by my side. Since Papá died, reading had been my constant companion, my path to escape the confines of my life. Not so since arriving at San Isidro. Paranoia rendered me incapable of losing myself in words, especially in the hours near sunset. What if I were to become too caught up in reading and night fell without me noticing? Without being prepared? It was the same fear that woke me with a start from my siesta that afternoon. With no one to judge me, no one to care, I had taken to bringing a blanket into the sun-flooded back terrace and drowsing on the steps that led to the garden, blood warmed by sunshine and lulled by the presence of lit copal.

Sometimes, I thought longingly of my first nights at San Isidro, curled up next to Rodolfo’s heavy warmth. How soundly I slept with the certainty of someone’s weight on the other side of the bed, the steady rhythm of breathing.

I would not be alone in the house tonight either, but tonight would be different. Padre Andrés was due to arrive at sunset.

I had met him at the capilla around noon. Ana Luisa cast me a curious look when I asked her to prepare the small rooms that adjoined the chapel for a guest, but she asked no questions. Perhaps she should have. It might have prevented the look of surprise on her face when she saw Padre Andrés walking up the path to the capilla from the main gates of the hacienda, a maguey fiber bag slung over one shoulder, his long legs bringing him into the heart of the estate with an easy grace.

“Buenas tardes, Doña Beatriz. Señora,” he greeted Ana Luisa, formal and stiff.

Her eyes narrowed. It did not escape me how hard and cold they remained as I thanked Padre Andrés for agreeing to take up residence in the capilla, to make sure that Mass was celebrated on a more regular basis for the servants of San Isidro.

Though Ana Luisa and I were meant to return to the main house together, she excused herself from my presence as quickly as she could and made for the servants’ quarters. To tell Juana, perhaps. But to tell her what? That I, as the mistress of the hacienda, had invited a priest to bring God’s word to the men and women who worked for my husband’s family? There was no crime in that. Nothing suspicious.

So why did Ana Luisa keep casting stray glances over her shoulder at the capilla as she walked away?

This evening, she came and left after an early dinner as was her custom. Asking myself if she was acting strangely was futile—who didn’t, in this house? Even during the day I found myself jumping at the slightest shift of shadow. I began wearing a set of house keys at my waist, not just for the comforting click of iron as I strode through the empty house, but because every time I was certain I had left a door open on purpose, I would retrace my steps and find it locked shut.

The first time this happened, it was when Ana Luisa was still in the house, cooking dinner. I shouted and pounded on the door until she unlocked it with a wry look. I was embarrassed, but it did not escape my attention that if she had not been present, I would have been stuck all night in the windowless storeroom where I was putting away maize.

Without copal. Without candles.

Keys became my constant accessory.

If I were honest, if I were not trying to hold the house at arm’s length out of fear it would somehow infect me with madness, I might admit that even in daylight, I could feel the house settling around me. As if I were but a fly on the hide of a giant beast that twitched in sleep.

Now it was waking.

From the moment the sun dipped behind the western mountains on the horizon, it began to shift. Lazy at first, stretching its phantom limbs, then slowly gaining alertness as the dark grew more complete.

Beyond the walls of San Isidro, Apan settled into the cool of its evening. Dogs barked as sheep were herded home; the indistinct voices of tlachiqueros rose as they returned from the maguey fields. The dark form of mountains rose beyond the town, lazily sprawled in a protective circle around the valley.

The slim form of Padre Andrés darkened the arched doorway of the courtyard of the main house. A smaller bag than he was carrying earlier was slung over his shoulder; the sound of gravel beneath his shoes filled the courtyard.

I took the candle and rose to greet him. I was more than a head shorter than him; the result of the candle held before me was that the shadows carved his cheeks hollow like a skull. A chill went down my spine at the thought of the skull in the wall grinning at me.

I barely knew this man. Yet I was placing my reputation, and possibly my life, into his hands.

Why? Was it the black habit and the smudge of white at his collar? What guarantee was that, in times like these, when priests turned over their parishioners, insurgents, to the Spanish armies, when someone as powerful as Rodolfo feared the lingering claws of the Inquisition?

This one was different. I knew it with a certainty that made my bones ache.

“Welcome, Padre,” I said.

He thanked me and looked past me into the deepening shadows of the house.

“Ah, San Isidro. You didn’t use to be like this,” he said. His voice was soft, even soothing, as he addressed the house. As if he were placing a hand on the brow of a feverish patient. “After you, Doña Beatriz.”

I crouched to pick up the copal censer, handed it to Padre Andrés, and collected my book from the step.

“What do you mean to do tonight, Padre?” I asked as we entered the dark entryway. I had lit thick tallow candles and left them wherever there was space; they huddled in clusters by doorways, in saints’ eaves carved into the walls, lined tidily along the long hall leading to the parlors.

“Andrés,” he corrected absentmindedly, his chin tilted up to the ceiling as he scanned the wooden beams. “I’m not sure yet. First, I would like to see the house as you do.”

“You would have to be alone for that,” I said, leading him up the candle-lined hall. Candelabras were on the long list of things I had sent to Rodolfo, the list that he informed me must have gone missing en route to him, for he never received it. Twice it had gone missing, and I was beginning to lose patience with the men who rode with the mail to the capital.

Padre Andrés nodded. “You may leave me, if you wish. Get some sleep.”

Had he noticed the purple shadows beneath my eyes? I laughed, dry and humorless. “I can’t sleep in this house, Pa—Andrés,” I corrected myself. Addressing a priest by his given name should have struck me as strange, but it rolled naturally off my tongue. Perhaps because he was so young, perhaps because he spoke to me as if I were his peer, not his parishioner.

We reached the green parlor, and I opened the door. Darkness crept from the corners of the room. Cold flushed the stone floors like icy water.

The house was awake.

“This is the green parlor,” I said, my voice echoing despite how low I kept it. The room had a single door and the customary high windows; unlike my bedroom, which had the door to the study as well as to a small room with a chamber pot, it was a sturdy, defensible position. One could have one’s back to the wall and face the door. It was the kind of room I would have wanted, if I were spending the night on my own for the first time in a house like this. I echoed Ana Luisa’s explanation: “It is called the green parlor because—”

“Because it used to be green,” he murmured, half to himself, as he stepped into the room. It was still bare of furniture; as Padre Andrés had requested earlier, I brought a few blankets and laid them near the fireplace, near two copal censers and abundant candlesticks. He gestured to the flagstones as he scanned the rafters. “The carpet. It was green.”

“Padre Guillermo said you were familiar with San Isidro,” I said. “Why?”

He did not immediately reply. He had tilted his head to the side, as if he had caught a strain of distant music. A long moment passed; he was so still, the darkness beyond him so complete, that he almost seemed to bleed into it.

Then he turned; candlelight caught on the sharp panes of his face. “My mother lived her whole life on this land until she married my father. My grandmother lived here as well. I stayed with her often, when I was a boy.”

So he had known this house and knew something had changed. That, too, must be the reason why he chose to go against Padre Vicente’s orders to help me: attachment to a childhood home. “Where is she now?” I asked. “Your grandmother?”

“Buried beyond the capilla.” Padre Andrés set his bag and the lit censer down next to the blankets. “Do things happen every night?” His voice was now crisp and serious as he set to lighting the candles with matches, illuminating the room like a chapel.

I cleared my throat, embarrassed to have pried so much. “The feeling of . . . of being watched never goes away, not even during the day. Some things have happened in broad daylight.”

“Your discovery.”

The skeleton in the wall.

A clammy veil settled over the small of my back at the thought. “Generally, it is worst between midnight and dawn.”

Padre Andrés rose, his height unfolding like a plume of smoke. “With your permission, I will now examine the house without copal.”

“You’re mad,” I said flatly. Or at least he would be by the end of his experience in San Isidro if he insisted on doing that. The red eyes in the dark flashed through my mind. “If something were to happen to you . . .”

What would then happen to me? I could protect myself with copal, but it would eventually burn out. I could not be left alone in the dark. Not anymore.

“I will be safe, Doña Beatriz.”

But I wouldn’t be. If I knew anything about how the house felt—and lately I was beginning to worry I knew altogether too much—I knew that it resented people like him and me. People with plans and ideas. Dread drummed a militant beat in my chest at the thought of going back to my room and sitting in the dark, all the while aware he was poking and prodding around the house’s entrails. He didn’t understand what this house was. He couldn’t.

I did.

“I will accompany you,” I said firmly. “This is my house. I am responsible for you.”

“Doña Beatriz,” he said, taking a candle to match the one I held in one hand. “I know what I am doing.”

Then I would be safe at his side. Wouldn’t I be? I cast a longing glance past him at the smoke from the censer. No harm could come to me in the presence of a priest.

Or so I told myself.

“We can start with the parlors,” I said, forcing more confidence than I felt into my voice. “Make our way to the kitchen, then retrace our steps to the north wing.”

He walked at my side as we began, asking to pause in certain rooms. As we approached the kitchen, the house was coy. The tendrils of its feeling kept their distance from Padre Andrés, but I could feel it calculating, feel it watching him with care. The sensation writhed under my skin like a centipede.

What if it did nothing to him? What if this were all in my head? If I were imagining the cold, imagining the thundering pounding on the door of my bedroom, imagining—a wash of sweat appeared on my palms—the watching? The cold hands tugging at my hair? The voices? What then? Should I ask him to exorcise me instead?

The light from our candles jumped and licked the doorframe of the kitchen. Our shoes met with Ana Luisa’s herbs, the ones that grew so abundantly in the garden. Andrés fell into a crouch and brushed his fingertips over them, then lifted his fingers to his nose to smell the sap. He made an indecisive sound, stood, and cast his glance around the room as if looking for something.

His attention fell on Ana Luisa’s charcoal markings around the doorframe; his nostrils flared with a quick intake of breath as his eyes skipped over the markings.

“What were you thinking?” he breathed, softly incredulous. It seemed directed more at himself than at me. Something about his voice seemed almost angry.

“Is something wrong?” I asked, voice unsteady. A sudden shift in his energy had accompanied his discovery, and I felt as if I were standing on the deck of a ship that had turned into rough waters.

He did not answer my question. “You mentioned that the north wing was where you found . . .” He paused as if reaching for a word, only to decide the better of it. “Shall we go there next?”

“Very well.” I wet my dry lips and turned to the kitchen doorway.

The darkness yawned open, a maw. Nausea swept over me.

It had heard us.

Padre Andrés stepped forward, pausing when he noticed I had not joined him. “Doña 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.