Jacaranda

by Cherie Priest

  He’d made up his mind. He only needed one word, one flicker of distraction. The timing would be everything.

  Eduardo said, “It’s just as well.” And with a buck of his elbow he raised his gun.

  Faster than that—Juan Rios didn’t know how, couldn’t remember how it happened—but the padre was holding his own guns. Always the better shot, always the faster marksman… always the first to make a decision, whether the decision was good or bad.

  He’d made it now.

  This decision. It was probably bad, but not all bad. It couldn’t be.

  In that hair’s breadth of a moment, shaved down to an instant so narrow and fine that the padre saw it as static as a painting—as still and unmoving as the icon of the Mother behind him, looking down, watching him break the only important vow he’d ever made.

  But this was important, too.

  He did not breathe. He counted.

  Thirteen men, and only twelve bullets in his guns. Every shot must be perfect, and at least one shot must pull double duty. He must fire quickly—so quickly that surprise remained on his side, for he would not get another hair’s breadth to reconsider. Not another bullet, should he miss a single mark.

  His mind drew lines between the men in the church, the men only just now realizing that the man in the cassock was armed and prepared to defend the flock. In English, a snippet of the old King James he’d read somewhere, he murmured—“He shall give His angels charge over thee”—while the calculations churned.

  He didn’t see any angels. He saw targets.

  The moment broke, the painting slashed. The imagined photograph torn to shreds by gunfire. Precise gunfire.

  Bullets to heads: one, two, three.

  Bullets to hearts: four, five, six.

  Bullets to backs: seven, eight.

  More bullets, more heads: nine, ten, eleven.

  Plaster from the statues chipped to powder and rained down on his shoulders. Bullets fired in return, some striking the ceiling, the altar, the icons. The windows. Most of them hit their wayward, harmless marks before the men who fired them hit the ground. Twitching, or not. Each one of them dead before they had any time to wonder what had happened.

  It was not even a painting. Not even a photograph.

  Two men remained: Eduardo and a thickly mustached man behind him. The other man was ready to run; he’d halfway turned already, statistics or fortune had let him live the longest, and he knew a lost fight when he saw one. Maybe he hadn’t wanted to rob a chapel anyway. Maybe he only took the job because he was hungry, or desperate for some other reason.

  Well, he was here now. And he was still holding one gun, having dropped the other. Halfway turned, and no—not ready to leave. Reaching for the widow Santos, to hide behind her? To hold her hostage, one big gun to the side of her fragile head?

  There were no more moments to split, and only one bullet left in the gun.

  Juan Rios hesitated, not long enough for it to matter to anyone but Eduardo and the twelfth gunman. But it mattered to the angles, too…the mentally sketched lines that told the padre where to aim, and how. Two men left, one bullet, and no path that would send it careening through both of them.

  And Eduardo, he’d been a friend once, hadn’t he?

  The answer was “no,” of course, and Juan Rios knew that better than anyone, but it cost him the last bullet all the same. He made up his mind, and sent the bullet past Eduardo—nicking his ear and making him swear, but otherwise doing him no harm.

  Behind him, the twelfth bandit fell down dead. He toppled over the back of a pew, his backside in the air. Undignified to the last.

  Eduardo lifted one hand to his bleeding ear, and looked Juan Rios in the eye.

  The bandit did not look over his shoulder to see the shocking state of the small sanctuary. Men, women, and children huddled on the floor, holding their breath, covering their heads. Twelve dead men, felled by twelve shots.

  Unheard of. Unlikely. But there it was.

  “That was practically a miracle,” Eduardo gasped, blood squeezing out from between his fingers. Louder, he said, “People will wonder about it, anyway. The priest with the pistols, killing twelve bandits with twelve shots. They’ll drag your name before the Holy Father. In twenty years’ time you’ll have your own medallions, Juan Miguel.”

  The guns were empty, but they were heavy in the padre’s hands. He did not lower them, though he began to shake. He did not know why. Eduardo, always the showman, continued. “Mark my words, as soon as you’re dead these people,” he gestured at those cowering behind him, “will descend upon your corpse like buzzards. They will tear your frock, and snip your hair, cut your nails. They’ll pick you over, wanting something to show their grandchildren, to prove they were here when it happened. Or, then again, maybe they won’t. They may decide it was luck after all. Luck, and the leftover skill of a man who used to kill for a living. For surely, if this were any true miracle—true and proper—I would be the one out of bullets.” He raised the gun, aiming it between the padre’s eyes and pulling back the hammer. “It would be me. Not you.”

  It was only a reflex, Juan Rios supposed—just some leftover memory buried in his muscles that made his trigger finger tighten. He knew the chamber was empty. He knew this was no miracle, that it was only his last breath.

  But the trigger slipped back.

  And the fancy gun with the silver plate finish and engravings of squash blossoms fired.

  Eduardo never had a chance to be surprised. He stood upright, dead as a stone, for a count of five, six, seven seconds; he collapsed knees first, then his hips folded, and he dropped to his side, flopped onto his back, and stared at the crossbeams in the ceiling above without seeing a goddamned thing.

  Half an hour later, the padre stood in the courtyard of the Jacaranda Hotel—a wide rectangle surrounded on three sides by the wings of the building itself, and capped on the fourth by a large fountain. He faced this fountain, trying to decide if there was any significance to the patterns of colored tile, or the statue of a woman holding two water vessels; he could scarcely make out any of the finer details, for the sky was a deeper purple than before and the moon struggled to appear, without any success. Only a cool, pale blot marked its place in the heavens, and only a persistent drizzle proved the clouds.

  He was reasonably certain he’d seen the exact same statue on a fountain in Mexico City, and the tile was good-quality, but not custom-made.

  The nun joined him. She stood silently beside him, likewise staring at the fountain. “Sometimes, it’s only art,” she said, echoing his unspoken sentiment.

  A small hint of mischief worked its way into his face and his voice. “If it lacks meaning, I don’t know that we should call it art. Perhaps ‘decoration,’ instead.”

  “As you like.” She took a seat on a nearby bench. He sat on the fountain’s edge. It was moist and cold through his frock; the air too wet to dry the tiles, but not yet ready to soak them.

  Beside them both, a large gaslamp hissed, sparked, and flared to life—illuminating the courtyard alone at first, and then with the help of five others like it. Now he had a better view of the water fixture, but no better opinion of it; and now he could see the rest of the landscaping: the palms, climbing vines, succulents, and assorted flowers, all placed with as much care and formality as the plates and cutlery upon the supper table, an hour before.

  The padre finally spoke again, mostly by virtue of thinking aloud. “What can we say about the men and women who have died here? You told me before that some were called here…were they all? Or were some merely unlucky?”

  “That’s not the sort of thing that reveals itself in polite mealtime chatter. Believe me, I’ve tried to bring the subject around—to no avail. But it’s funny,” she said, her tone suggesting nothing funny at all. “There’s such silence surrounding what occurs here. Everyone knows, but no one says anything, except in whispers behind closed doors.”

  “That hardly sounds like the best way
to address the problem.”

  “I know,” she murmured. “Or rather, I agree. I do what I can to be open, and to draw others into my confidence. What little success I’ve met, has mostly been with Sarah—and mostly since you’ve arrived. You’re gentler than me, perhaps. You have a way about you…”

  “But so do you.” He meant it as a polite rebuttal, but he almost understood why her efforts had not been as fruitful as she’d like. It was not merely the habit, not only the accent—so different from what most people heard on the island. It wasn’t even the brown eyes, flecked with gold.

  Or were they gold eyes, flecked with brown? Everything depended on the light.

  She looked up at the place where the moon must be, and he thought maybe she’d heard him thinking again. If she did, she pretended otherwise. “It’s kind of you to say so, if charmingly untrue. But would you look up there,” she tilted up her chin, to direct his attention. “Not a star to be seen, and getting damper by the hour.”

  “The storm is almost upon us. Let us pray we’re not washed away in our sleep.”

  “Oh, I don’t think it will find us tonight. Maybe tomorrow. In the wee hours, if we aren’t particularly lucky.”

  He nodded, at her and the roiling indigo blanket above, where only a rare, stray twinkle broke through the darkness. “Will the hotel survive it, do you think?”

  “It might,” she mused. “It’s a solid building, made to withstand the coastal storms; but we’re quite vulnerable here, you know. The island is long and narrow, and flat as a pan. It’s a lovely place, to be sure…but we must be honest with ourselves: It’s little more than a sandbar, wallowing between the Gulf and Texas. A better question might be, ‘Will we survive the storm, should it catch us here?’”

  “I am confident of your resourcefulness.”

  “And I am confident of yours. More than you are, perhaps.”

  He considered his response, not knowing how much she needed to hear—or how much of the truth she wanted. Finally he said, “We all walk this earth on borrowed time, but mine is borrowed against something greater than death. I do not know what awaits me on the other side, and I do not know when I can expect to arrive there. These missions, if that’s what they are…one of them will be my last. I am due a reckoning.”

  “We all receive our reckoning, in time. None of us knows when.”

  “This is…different,” he tried to explain. But Sister Eileen did not ask for clarification, and he gave up trying to offer any.

  “I’ll take you at your word. But tell me, what do you feel about this place? Use whatever vision or intuition you’ve been given, and look. Try to listen. We’re not at the center of the hotel anymore. We stand outside it, looking in. From here, what does this place say to you?”

  “It says…” he closed his eyes, and opened them again.

  He looked, and he listened.

  He saw darkness, purple and black, and motionless at a glance.

  But no, it moved. It swirled so hugely that it only appeared to hold still—the same illusion of watching a swift-sailing ship in the distance, seeming to creep across the waves. If the darkness had a shape, he could not discern it; but he sensed that it spun in a circle, tendrils dragged along its exterior to flail and wave and cut. A wheel of blackness, revealed only at the edges where it shifted against the earth, and scratched against the clouds.

  The padre heard the rushing roar of something larger than the island by a thousand-fold, shouting at the earth and everyone who crawled upon it. Offshore, still. Something that would devour half the ocean, and use it to blast the land clean.

  But was he hearing the hotel, or the coming storm?

  “It wants to consume,” he said quickly, before he’d given himself a chance to think about it. “It exists to feed.”

  “But is it tethered here, or only drawn here?”

  “Both, perhaps. Something tethered and angry, calling to something free but angrier still. The hunger…” he said in a whisper. “I feel its hunger—and the certainty that whatever becomes of us, we deserve it—each and every one.” He turned the question to her: “But what about you? What does this place tell you?”

  “It tells me that I’m out of my depth,” she said flatly. “Yet I must remain.”

  A small spatter of rain flicked against the padre’s cheek. He wiped it away and waited for a second drop to come, and it did, followed by another. He looked up and saw only the swirling clouds, backlit from second to second by fractured bits of lightning that never hit the earth.

  “It’s not the storm. Not yet,” the nun said. “Merely a promise.”

  “This place doesn’t make promises. It makes threats.”

  “Then never mind all this. Let’s go back inside.”

  He was not quite surprised by her antsy inclination to return to the hotel.

  He did not share that inclination, not in the slightest—he’d just as soon pack his things and leave immediately, and only his sense of duty prevented him…or duty, combined with some fatalistic certainty that it wouldn’t matter. He already knew there wasn’t time to leave. The storm was too near, and too big to escape from, now; it’d take him one way or another, if the gaping maw beneath the Jacaranda didn’t take him first.

  Constance Fields stood pale and motionless in the lobby, standing squarely upon the storm-shaped mosaic as if she were pinned there. She faced the front doors. They were open, and though the woman stood unmoving and gazed with hard intent, there was nothing to see outside except for the immense and gusty darkness, staggering past.

  She did not speak, and she did not blink while the wind rose and fell, not so strong yet—not really. It did not billow and bluster with enough power to slam those heavy doors, on their oversized hinges. They were oak, each one the size of a dining room table; but still they rattled back and forth.

  The hotel’s office opened with a creak, and Sarah appeared behind the counter. “Good heavens!” she exclaimed, and she charged toward the swinging, swaying front doors to wrestle them shut. “We can’t have that, not with a storm coming in.”

  “Tomorrow,” the nun said softly. “This is only the preamble.”

  No one but the padre heard her.

  When the doors were closed again, and the last of the breeze died down, Sarah turned her attention to the woman in the lobby. “Mrs. Fields, are you all right? Did you open those doors? We ought to keep them secured, so the tempest stays out. I hate to lock them,” she nattered on in the face of this particular new strangeness. “Other guests might arrive, but I suppose they can always knock if they want to come inside that badly.”

  Constance Fields relented, and wrenched her eyes away from the doors—to fix them now upon Sarah. “We ought to lock them all, immediately. And the windows too. Keep the whole world out, for its own good…because it’s too late for ours.”

  “Now, Mrs. Fields,” she chided. “Come on, and I’ll see you back to your room. Are you feeling well? Can I get you anything to drink?”

  “No. To all of that.”

  Sister Eileen lifted her face, and her eyes flashed. Her nostril twitched. She whispered the word, “Blood.” Then she stepped forward, out of the rear entrance corridor where she and the padre had lingered. She approached Constance Fields. “You’re not all right, are you? No, you’re not all right at all.”

  Constance Fields gave a great sniffle, and a trickle of blood slipped out of her nose. It pooled briefly in the divot above her lip, then curled over it, and splashed down the front of her dress.

  Sarah’s eyes went wide, her pupils as big as coins. She stepped aside, and the nun tried to take Mrs. Fields by the shoulders. When the woman wouldn’t be turned, Sister Eileen walked around her, and paused.

  She looked over her shoulder at the padre, then again at Mrs. Fields’s back. She took a deep breath and said to Sarah, “My dear, I’ll need some rags and hot water.”

  But the steadfast Mrs. Fields said, “Don’t trouble yourselves.”

  Sister Eilee
n insisted calmly, “You need to sit down. You’re bleeding.”

  “I’m aware.”

  The padre joined them, and he saw how the rear of her dress was slashed, raked by claws or knives or something else that had cut her deeply. Gouges bubbled with every breath she took, and bits of bone showed through in bright white flecks. Shreds of fabric dangled down to trail the back of her legs, all of it wet and ruined.

  “Señora,” he urged. “Please, come take a seat.”

  If she felt any pain at all, she did not appear bothered by it. “I do not wish to take a seat. I wish to wait for my husband.”

  The nun persisted: “Please, lie down. You need medical attention and I…I have a little training. You can’t possibly have the strength to stand much longer.”

  With a rasp at the edge of her voice, she replied, “I have what strength it gives me. I lose what it takes, the same as everyone else.” One shoulder drooped, and a dribble of blood ran down the back of her arm, her hand, and off the tip of her longest finger. A puddle formed while they watched. More blood spilled out of Mrs. Fields’s nose, and onto her bosom.

  Sarah shook her head wildly and retreated, unwilling to touch the woman again—unwilling to touch any of them, or look at them either, if she could help it. Her hands were only just big enough to cover her mouth and her eyes at once. She stumbled back behind the counter, back into the office.

  “I can’t…oh God, I can’t. Not another one, not—”

  Whatever else she groaned was lost when she slammed the office door, and sealed when she turned the deadbolt to secure herself within.

  The hard line of Mrs. Fields’s mouth softened, and upturned into a faint smile. “Worthless child, directing the traffic of the damned. She’s not like the rest of us, though.”

  “How’s that?” the padre asked. He held out an arm, offering her strength to lean on or merely guidance toward the nearest wicker chaise.

  Like all other offers thus far, she refused it. “Sarah wasn’t called here, not like we were. She was only too weak to walk on past. Well…” she swayed, but did not fall. “She can stay here if she likes. Or if she thinks she has to.” Her eyes stayed transfixed upon the front doors. “Even hell needs its civil servants.”