Lupo came out to meet him, wagging his tail. His drooling tongue hung out between his fangs and he was panting, choking with servile passion. He slept in the tool shed on a pile of empty sacks. All the mud in the cemetery seemed to have stuck to his hairy coat. On his back he had some reddish scabs that never managed to heal. And far from lessening his ugliness, the tenderness of his expression accentuated it. But he was a good dog. He happily joined the gravedigger in the rain: they would not leave each other’s side all day long. Since old age had made them retire from the world, all they had was each other. Their mutual company was enough for them, along with the proximity of the dead people, who were no bother, absorbed as they were in musing on their nothingness. At most they gnawed discreetly at their shrouds if Bastián had drunk a lot, or they drummed with their bony fingers on the wood of their coffins, not to cause a fuss and have someone open them, but only for fun. Bastián felt an immense tolerance towards them.
When they were near the half-dug tomb, Lupo lowered his ears and began to tremble, scratching at the muddy earth with his paws and recoiling. But Bastián knew the animal was no coward. He was never frightened by the will o’ the wisps of decomposition, nor the strolls of the lost souls in the blackness of moonless nights, nor the boys who threw rocks at him when he prowled outside the walls of the cemetery seeking relief for his masculine urges in the bellies of the female dogs. This, however . . .
‘Bloody hell! What is this?’
In the grave he had begun to open last night, before getting so drunk he couldn’t even see where he was putting his shovel, there lay a dark and suspicious lump.
‘What the dickens is this corpse doing here?’ Although he hadn’t checked whether it was a cadaver, for him any body in that position had to be. Bastián’s world was made up of those who were dead and those who weren’t yet. And he went on planting them, a devout gardener, in order to fertilize the world.
With the handle of his shovel he moved the lump, which stretched and let out a groan. From the pile of old rags a thin little face and small hands, bony, bluish like diluted milk, filthy with red mud, emerged into the ashy light of the rainy morning. This wasn’t a corpse, it was hard but not stiff, and beneath the blue and mauve whiteness of cold there were purple transparencies that announced the bloody warmth of life.
‘Well, well! Good morning, girl!’ the straw-hearted man exclaimed with thick irony.
She sat up. She sat there at the bottom of the hole, looking at him balefully with her green little eyes. She was a girl as old as the world, scrawny and pale, bleary. A mop of unkempt red hair stuck out from between the creases of the thick garment covering her, which appeared to be a military cloak.
‘Come on, get out of there! I have to finish the grave.’
He offered his callused hand to the girl, who spurned it and climbed out like a spider, gripping the soft walls of the hole, at whose edge she sat down without saying anything.
‘Better hope you haven’t caught cold or damp or anything, if you slept in this hole.’
She didn’t open her mouth. After a while, Lupo, who at first had growled, scrunching up his muzzle and showing his fangs, approached her. In his pupils strange fires burned. The spirit of the old dog in him was working for the first time in a long time, and it did so painfully since up until then happiness for him had consisted in the cultivation of apathy. Something simultaneously sweet and bitter was taking hold of him, flowing towards the deepest fibers of his canine insides like a love potion, or a death one, at the same time as he felt something tighten around his neck, pulling him towards the girl who had risen up from the earth.
Bastián began his work, making sure to pay no heed to the girl, who didn’t stop looking at him with her bleary little eyes, whose dark circles underneath, like the marks of a beating, seemed on the verge of spreading across her face. She had a large mouth, lipless like a snake’s, and she was graceful as a kitten, but there was something about her that was disturbing, insect-like.
The man got out of the hole and sat down to rest beside her.
‘I don’t know you, girl. You’re not from around here, huh? What’s your name?’ he asked as he chewed a piece of tobacco, looking out into infinity.
‘My name is Ángela, and I’m not from anywhere. I have to go now.’
She rose and, bundled up in the rain-soaked cloak, she started to walk without turning back. She slipped between the tombs and the cypresses like a shadow. Lupo followed her for a moment with his eyes. When he was about to lose sight of her, he got up and ran barking after her with the happy energy of one who has finally found his reason to live.
But the job was not a comfortable one. There was a lot of walking and not much eating. All day they traversed vacant lots, following paths that didn’t seem to lead anywhere, skirting walls furtively. Lupo missed the slop and scraps Bastián gave him, the warmth of the fireplace, and even the sounds the dead people made when they stretched their bones.
Ángela and Lupo advanced along silent streets. In the city everyone was asleep except the cats in heat and a mare who was miscarrying in the southern suburbs. Her moans were carried on the breeze. The night would have been lovely, had there been eyes to see it. When the moon peeked out between the clouds, the world turned gray and black, every detail sharp as in an engraving. And when it appeared in the middle of a clearing, it was terrifying. Beams of white light filtered through the treetops and traced a changing lacework on the ground, turning the rough brick arches and well parapets into marble and the tears seeping from the stones into diamonds. A mercuric cloak had fallen over the world. It was not possible to imagine hearts beating beneath that frozen platinum veil, nor love, nor warm limbs entwining on feather mattresses. Perhaps, yes, snowy bodies trembling with impotent love between crisp starched sheets.
Ángela used the stars to calculate whether it was a propitious moment for what she was planning. The Star of Bitterness was in the exact center of the night. In the darkness evil swelled, ripe, about to fall in one’s hands like a fruit. It was time.
The old door of the charnelhouse opened at a push from her little hands. The spectacle offered to her view in the moonlight didn’t make the slightest impression on her. She was used to it. They were familiar to her, the stiff corpses of the condemned that hung from the beams in the courtyard like hams, those who lay piled up on the ground, those stacked up rotting under the porticos.
Lupo, believing he’d figured out his new mistress’s intentions, walked ahead, ripped off a corpse’s left hand with bites and tugs and dropped it at her feet like an offering.
‘This mutt must be an idiot!’ the girl exclaimed in a low voice. ‘That’s not what we’re here for, you silly fool. Why are you in such a hurry?’
Lupo, whose greatest misfortune was understanding human language, which made him an object of scorn to dogs and cats, felt something like the desperation of an aging lover for his girlfriend, although neither he nor Ángela knew that, both being creatures little inclined towards love. But anyway his rheumy eyes filled with tears that ran down his muzzle, and his heart shrank.
Unconcerned about the movements of the beast’s soul, she headed with decisive steps towards the corpse of one of the hanged. Stiff and lifeless, it swung in the night’s quiet air because a bird that had nested in its belly had come flying out at the sound of footsteps. The cadaver’s face was handsome in the moonlight; in it there was a definitive quietude.
‘How lucky you are, you dead bastards, not having to run around trying to earn a living.’
But remembering that her father, shut up in a deep dungeon, wouldn’t be long in joining them in the same club of those who danced at the end of a rope, she fell silent out of respect and went to work.
He had a good set of teeth, a shame about the incisors that had been broken by a blow, perhaps from a rock, which had also cut the upper lip. Ángela rose up on tiptoes but couldn’t re
ach. She looked around and found only a block of stone long detached from the wall and black with moss. Faced with the effort that awaited her, she gave a kick of impatience.
‘Damn you, you son of a bitch!’ she rebuked the hanged man. ‘They could have hung you lower!’
The stone was porous and light like a rotten tooth, but for the girl’s bird-like strength it meant pain if she lifted anything weighing more than the folds of her cloak. She managed to drag it, however, and climbing up on it she reached the scarecrow’s mouth, from which she pulled out several molars with skilled and vigorous little tugs, paying no heed to the stench coming from the black hole and the blue tongue.
In the western part of the ramparts there stood an abandoned turret, in whose damp ruins old Crisanta, a third-rate witch and sorceress, lived all by herself. She had seen better days, but too much tippling had made her lose many of the gifts she had received from her female bloodline, which had passed down from mothers to daughters the pact with Satan, ratified with a drop of blood. If she appeared to be a beggar, it wasn’t from poverty but from the worst of miseries: avarice, which left her uncomfortable, dying of hunger and dressed in rags, although she was sitting on treasures that she hid in her magpie’s nest.
She received Ángela with a grunt and invited her to sit beside her on a bench in front of the fireplace, where a charred log was burning out and about to disintegrate into ashes. The girl remained standing, took a packet from a pocket of her cloak and set it noisily on the table, saying with the dry voice of a little despot:
‘I brought you this, Crisanta. Let’s see what it’s worth.’
Without looking at her again, Crisanta stirred the fire with an iron fire shovel, her eyes fixed on the embers which shone for a moment like rubies.
‘What is it?’ she asked, feigning indifference.
‘Molars freshly pulled from a hanged man.’
‘Molars from a hanged man! Right!’ mocked the sorceress. ‘And how do I know they’re from a hanged man and not waste from the barber’s?’
Ángela didn’t respond. Crisanta turned towards her and fixed her dust-irritated eyes on the girl’s, which reflected the purest and most innocent evil in their greenish waters. In all the days of her life, she had never seen eyes like those. It was whispered at the sabbath that they were the devil’s eyes, but she had never been permitted to see those. How come this little brat just happened to have them? What had she done to deserve them? When the women’s glances met, it poisoned the air to the point that Lupo raised his head, anxious as though he scented danger.
‘If I say they’re from a hanged man,’ the youngster muttered between her teeth, her face pale with rage and her throat swollen, ‘then they’re from a hanged man.’
Her eyes had hardened like stones. Some dark spots on her irises painted figures of black toads on the green water.
‘I’m not interested,’ replied the old woman, turning her glance away towards the fire, which had gone out again. ‘Right now I’m mixed up in something big.’
‘Big? What do you mean, big? Spoiling some woman’s love affair or making her miscarry. Beyond that, I don’t know what you’re capable of.’
‘A hand of glory. You don’t happen to have a hand?’
‘There’s a loose one in the charnelhouse. If you want, I’ll bring it to you. My dog tore it off, but I didn’t know it was good for anything.’
‘It’s no good, girl, it’s no good. I need a fresh hand, with blood in its veins, not the dried-up rotten things you’re in the habit of carrying about.’
‘Fresh!’ Ángela remarked in a falsetto voice. ‘Is it to eat or what?’
The old woman explained to her what a hand of glory was and how to make it. To begin with, she needed the hand of a hanged person, not like those rotting in the charnelhouse, but rather a fresh one.
‘From a man or a woman?’
The girl’s question caught the sorceress by surprise. She didn’t know.
‘Doesn’t your guide show you?’
She was referring to an enormous book Crisanta had, which was called Great and Universal Elucidarium, an inheritance from those who had preceded her in the art and the source of most of her knowledge. It was so large that to finish reading a line, she had to take a couple of steps in front of the lectern. It was written in black ink that was so corrosive it had eaten through the paper in many places, and in spiky handwriting like the devil’s own.
‘It just says a hanged man’s hand,’ the old woman responded with a sigh of impatience.
‘Well then, it has to be a man’s,’ the girl judged. ‘It’s a shame because in the city a few days from now they’re going to hang the coal cellar murderess. The one who killed her three children and hid them in the coal in the kitchen.’
‘We can try. We have nothing to lose. With what they’ll give us for a hand of glory we won’t be poor anymore.’
‘Why are you talking in plural like the bishops?’
‘Because I’m referring to you too. If you help me, we’ll share it. I’m no longer up to jaunts through cemeteries and you have a knack for getting into tricky places. Go on, girl, bring me a fresh piece and you won’t regret it. Don’t waste time with this crap,’ she said, sending the hanged man’s molars into the fire with a sweep of her hand. A thick but ephemeral smoke rose up, as if from the other world or in a theater.
Ángela had remained thoughtful, with Lupo nestled up at her feet. She seemed to be attentive to the sound of the wind which, crashing against the tower, howled furiously in search of other paths between the holes in the rocks and the thorny shrubbery.
At dawn, lost among the crowd, she attended the execution of the infanticide in the market square. When the fury of the storm provoked by the departure of the condemned woman’s soul dispersed the people and there remained only two guards watching over the corpse, which would hang from the gibbet a couple of days as a warning and lesson to bad mothers, Ángela took shelter from the rain with Lupo in the vestibule of the Church of St. Justa. From there she could observe all that happened at the gallows and its surroundings.
Not even she herself knew for certain what she was going to do. She counted vaguely on the guards’ getting drunk that night and sleeping like logs. She trusted in the dark force that seemed to have been hovering over the city for some time. Caught up in her plans, she remained motionless all day, curled up like a cat. She was cold and hungry, and she knew there was no use in staying there while it was daylight, but she was bound by a leaden laziness that had been overpowering her to the point where she was unable to move.
Her presence made the woman who usually begged in the doorway cower in her spot as if she wanted to disappear. She was a young blond woman with no arms, but with the beautiful legs of a tightrope walker, an idiot angel fallen from the archivolt. Passing in front of her, a lay sister who was coming out of the temple stopped and tossed some coins in her lap. The girl raised her ingenuous iris-blue eyes and smiled kindly and gratefully. Ángela, who was watching the scene a few steps away, let out a mocking chuckle. The old woman fled in terror. For a moment the two girls had seemed to be one, and that one, the devil.
The hours passed like those in a feverish dream, sometimes slow and at others so fast that she would have said the tower clock had gone mad. Its clapper sounded not like bronze but iron. The dampness of the stones had gotten into the girl’s soul and, arriving at her frozen heart, had turned to frost. Lupo shivered along with her.
The dead woman’s long hair fluttered against the inclement sky like a black flag. Wrapped up in their cloaks, the guards paced around in circles without neglecting their watch, but when that time of night arrived when there is a wrinkle in the fabric of the world and senses and natural laws cease to reign, they fell asleep, and Ángela prepared to take advantage of their slumber.
But a troop of silent shadows overtook her, emerging from the corn
ers of the square and flowing together like a river. Surrounding the gallows, they lowered the hanged woman without delay. They were her relatives, fed up with so much scandal. They weren’t inclined to have shame brought on them for a single minute more. They had come to an agreement and they were carrying her off. This was unknown to Ángela, who in her capacity as an innocent though diabolical child saw only the skin and guts of the world, but not the schemes of men. She followed them like one more shadow through the maze of the upper-class neighborhood, with which she was unfamiliar, passed in front of the Casa de las Rocas where they kept the elephant given by the sultan of Egypt, which trumpeted at the sound of people. Lupo stifled a panicked bark, cut short by a kick from his mistress that instantly made him keep quiet. Then they crossed the river and headed to Los Cigarrales, entered the estate and deposited the dead woman in the crypt after they had put her in a coffin and the curate had said a funeral prayer at top speed.
When everyone had left, Ángela opened the coffin, grabbed one of the dead woman’s arms and pulled on it until the hand was outside, with the wrist on the edge of the wall of the box. There was something in the air just then, barely an icy breeze circulating through the black and gloomy dampness of the crypt. But the girl was used to the groans of the souls who resist leaving their bodies for good and the murmur of those that remain stuck to the flesh. She knew she didn’t have to pay any attention to those phantasms, smoke from a bonfire that has gone out and a siren’s songs carried on the wind from the region of shadows. She took a firm grip with both hands on the hatchet Crisanta had lent her, raised it as high as she could, and, collecting her scant strength, unleashed it again and again on the dead woman’s stiff left wrist until the hand came loose. She then groped with her own hands until she found it and put it in a pocket of her cloak.
The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories Page 5