I never did ask Don Fermin anything about the well. I don’t think I really wanted to know.
One Saturday, shortly after I had stepped into my room, the phone rang. I thought maybe it was Don Fermin. Maybe I had forgotten something at his apartment. Instead, it was Salvador.
“Hi,” I said. “How you doing? Are you having trouble with the antenna again?”
“It’s got nothing to do with the damn television,” he said, his voice clipped. “Listen, I need you to take the rest of my shift for the night.”
“You feeling sick?”
“Yeah. Maybe. There’s something…How fast can you come?”
“An hour or so.”
“Hurry up.”
He hung up. I decided to let the brat sweat it and spent a good amount of time parting my hair and shining my shoes. I packed my lunch and filled my thermos with coffee and off I went to catch the bus.
Salvador wasn’t in the office when I arrived, though his books and papers were spread over the table. I figured he was doing the rounds and sat down to wait for him, switching on the TV set. I waited for thirty minutes for him to come back before I decided to look for him.
I started thinking maybe the guy had gone out to drink before coming to work and had passed out in a hallway. The poor bastard might have stumbled down the stairs and hurt himself. Unfortunately, there was only one flashlight and Salvador had taken it with him.
I made quick work of the lower floor and then went upstairs, poking my head into the empty offices, calling for him.
Eventually it became obvious I’d have to look in the stables.
I’d have to cross the small courtyard.
I decided to be quick and direct about this. However, once I stepped into the courtyard I felt my courage fading. There was no moon that night. No stars. The sky was smooth as velvet black.
I felt a great desire to return to my room and spend the rest of the night watching old movies on the television set.
But I knew the way. I must walk the path. I edged close to the wall, fixing my eyes on the old stables, avoiding the sight of the well.
I was halfway there when I heard it.
It was a whisper. It trailed up my back and reached my ears, the voice buzzing like an insect. Then there was a soft scratching and the shuffle of a foot upon stone.
The buzzing increased and I thought maybe it wasn’t an insect. Maybe it was the flapping of wings.
There came another footstep upon the floor. The sound echoed and bounced around me. I lowered my head and pressed my hands against the wall.
I thought about a poem Don Fermin had read to me one time.
All the earth is a grave and nothing escapes it, nothing is so perfect that it does not descend to its tomb.
I whispered that line half a dozen times, with my hands glued to the wall.
A loud boom caused me to turn. I saw the flashlight rolling towards me across the floor. Instinct made me scoop it up and I held it, aiming the beam in the direction of the well.
Salvador was on the floor next to it, staring at the sky.
I rushed towards him and stared at his face, which was streaked with blood. His eyes seemed glassy and unfocused. He was breathing very slowly, his chest hardly rising. I stepped back and bumped my foot against something. I looked down: it was the well’s stone cover.
The courtyard grew quiet.
There was a great deal of fuss about Salvador Machado after that. His family hired a lawyer and started arguing it was the magazine’s fault that this had happened. The accident only took place because the premises were so poorly maintained. They claimed that Salvador had tripped or fallen, hitting his head. The magazine talked about a nervous breakdown brought on by an excessive consumption of drugs and alcohol, typical of the circle in which Salvador moved. Others said Salvador Machado had been trying to commit suicide by jumping into the well. An eager cop even looked at me with suspicion, perhaps thinking I had attempted to murder the student, but they dropped that theory pretty quick. I mean, Salvador hadn’t really been physically hurt. He’d just gone a bit loopy.
The well’s stone cover caused a smaller amount of concern, though it also came with its own set of problems. The thing was very heavy and it took three men to lift it back in its place, but that was only after two other men simply quit and refused to do the job.
Several years ago I took my son to the Museum of Anthropology to do some research for a paper. We walked by the exhibits, he took notes and every now and then I leaned down to read the little white placards explaining what I was looking at.
There was one typed card which said Aztec instruments for ritual bloodletting were often in the shape of hummingbirds, their needle-sharp beaks piercing the skin.
When we left the museum I stood under the shadow of the tall statue of the rain-god Tlaloc. Don Fermin once told me about the night in 1964 when they dragged the statue to its current place outside the museum. It rode on a gigantic wheeled platform, in a steel harness, from its home by the town of Coatlinchan where it had been carved. It rained that night, as though a storm followed the statue.
We are shocked when we think about the Aztecs sacrificing captives at the foot of their temples, consecrating their buildings with blood. But I’ve known of more than one man injured, maimed or killed at the construction sites where I’ve worked.
The foundations of buildings are drawn with blood.
Once you accept that, you know certain places must be haunted. Our City of Palaces, by its nature, must have more than its share of hauntings.
As I said at the beginning, I can’t speak of ghosts but there was something in the House of Hummingbirds. What exactly, I cannot say. I think Don Fermin knew but never told. I think I’ve been close to understanding it but I will never speak it out loud.
Oh, you need something more concrete than that? Well, I’ll tell you this: Look around carefully when you walk these old city streets at night. Whatever was in the House of the Hummingbirds, I’ve felt similar things brush by in other places.
You can turn your recorder off now.
Mexican by birth, Canadian by inclination. Silvia writes speculative fiction, from magic realism to horror. Her short stories have appeared in places such as The Book of Cthulhu, Imaginarium 2012: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing and Shine: An Anthology of Optimistic Science Fiction. She also edits fiction, including the brand spanking new Fungi anthology and the upcoming zombie-themed Dead North. Her first collection, Shedding Her Own Skin, will be out next year. Find her at silviamoreno-garcia.com or on Twitter: @silviamg.
Story illustration by Stjepan Lukac.
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The Treatment Room
by Kevin Crisp
I have not long been a vagrant, nor will I be much longer. This much has been determined. I continue to run and hide, but it is merely animal instinct at work. The man in me knows it to be futile. My date approaches.
I was an assistant to Dr. William Ernst at the Butler Hospital until several weeks ago. It was respectable work that my uncle and benefactor had found for me, and it passed the hours. During my breaks, I sat in the neglected garden behind the hospital and smoked sitting on a decrepit brick planter in which long-forgotten daylilies and creeping juniper decayed.
And as I smoked, I watched a door in the wall of the hospital.
It was an inconspicuous old door, tucked behind a poorly planted spruce. It showed of long disuse; the base of both the door and its frame were rotten and black with mold. The heavy dun-colored paint chipped away in large flakes along the frame and the door knob was badly rusted. As my internship progressed, the door annoyed me increasingly, like a scab that a young boy won’t cease picking apart. I guessed that it must lead down to some point in the cellar, as I was sure there was no external door in that corner of the building.
Finally, curiosity got the better of me, and I turned the knob, which turned with a gritty feel like sand in the teeth, and the hinges groaned as I
pulled it open revealing steep steps down to what I presumed to be an old quarter of the cellar. The wooden steps were old and thin, and the nails had loosened to the point that each step swayed beneath my weight. At the base of the stairs, there was a musty, earthy smell odor like a potting shed. I expected pitch blackness, but found myself facing a room that was dimly lit from several spots along a wall. I must have accessed a working portion of the basement from an old, forgotten entrance, and so I called out to anyone who might be working in the lighted portion, “Hello? Is someone down here?” No one answered.
As my eyes acclimated to the dim light, I could see little windows along the walls up ahead. I could see the end of the long, narrow space now, which appeared to be a hall ending in a closed door. I approached the first of the small windows. The window was at eye level, and square, about the size of my hand with my fingers spread. It lacked glass but was covered instead by a metal grate. The room beyond at first appeared to be unoccupied. There was a small cot with a moth-eaten wool blanket. A little table sat in the corner by the cot, with a small oil lamp from which the light dimly lit the room. I was about to move onto the next window, when I heard a rustling of cloth and a quick, dull thud as of something soft and heavy falling to the floor.
Standing on my tiptoes, I discovered the source of the sound. Lying supine on the floor was a young, beautiful girl, clad in a loose-fitting hospital gown. Her lithe arms were splayed across the floor, and her back was arched up most tetanically. Her head lay at a quite unnatural angle, and the muscles of her neck were visibly tense between the thick curls of raven-black hair. The nails on her hands were terribly overgrown and unkempt, coiling several inches from the tips of her stiff, claw-like fingers. She had the appearance of a body in rigor mortis, but for the troubled heave of her bosom as she gasped periodically. Her eyes were rolled back so that only the whites showed. From her nostrils and the corners of her mouth and eyes, thin trickles of blood could be seen dripping down her fair cheek to the stonework floor.
“Miss? Miss, are you alright?” She gave no response for several moments. Then suddenly, a tremor shuddered her body. It was a rapid and most unnaturally quick convulsion, like the twitch of a cat’s tail while watching a bird from a window. It is impossible for words to convey the horror of this movement. It was as rapid as the flicker of a candle flame, and while her general posture remained mainly unchanged, the violence of the movement brought her young body a few inches off the floor from the waist up. “Help! Is someone there to help?” I called down the hall, but there was no reply. I called again, yelling quite loudly, toward the steps hoping that some attendant on a smoking break might hear me, but oddly I could no longer make out the stairs in the dim light. I tried the door to the cell, but it was locked heavily.
Stepping back from the door, I saw a yellowed, brittle chart record pinned to the wall. Most of it was in an indecipherable script I could not make out, but the header at the top was legible. Her name was there, and a date of admission, which was some time ago. Next, there was a release date; here, the month and day were clear, but there were too many digits in the following number to constitute a sensible year.
As I moved along the hall, the other cells were similar to the first, except that the occupants and corresponding charts varied. Each inmate lay on the cot or floor in apparent spastic paralysis in a loose-fitting, soiled and moth-ridden hospital gown. Like the girl, their tense stillness was every few moments disturbed by a twitch that made the hairs on my neck stand on end. Each chart had an admissions date in the relatively recent past, but the release year was nonsensically long.
At last I came to the door at the end of the hall. A placard on it read “The Treatment Room.” I knocked, but there was no reply. I called “Hello?”, but there was no reply. I turned the knob, but it was locked.
To my left and right, I now saw that similar halls extended in both directions, with the dim light spilling out of square windows in the doors. The oppressive silence was broken only periodically, by the terrible twitching of bodies within their cells. Each hall was long, fading in the dimness to utter blackness, and I wondered how far beyond the foundation of the hospital they must extend, or whether the light played some trick on my sense of perspective.
Then, in the distance, I heard footsteps coming toward me. Despite my desire just moments before for anyone at all to come to my calling, my heart now raced and I felt I must get out of the hall as rapidly as I could. I turned from the door marked Treatment Room, but my right leg would not budge. Looking down, I saw that my shoelaces of my right shoe were shut between the door frame and the Treatment Room door. Had the door opened when I didn’t notice? Could it be that I had been inside and not remember? Strangely, I am still not sure.
The footsteps were closing in on me and in my rising terror, I tore off my shoe and ran down the hall stumbling in my one remaining shoe. I heard the steps picking up speed to match my pace. I ran past many more cells than I remembered having passed, but still could not see the stairs through which I had entered the basement. Fear clouded my reasoning, and when I came upon a cell with a door that was opened by just a crack, I glanced inside with a thought to evading my pursuer. The room, I could see, was unoccupied, and as I pulled the heavy door open to admit me to slip inside, my eyes landed upon the record pinned outside the door. The name listed was my name. There was an admission date too, and it is not many days from now. The release date was not yet filled in.
My fear overwhelmed me, and I stood frozen, as unable to move as in any paralysis I have experienced in dreams. My pursuer was nearly upon me, and it was only with agonizingly painful slowness that I was able to turn my head to meet them.
“Child,” she said scoldingly, and I looked around to see a matronly black nurse with greying hair. “Child, you’re not supposed to be here,” she said simply. “Not today.”
“I’m sorry, mam–” I stuttered. “Which way is out? I know I’m where I shouldn’t be, but I’m lost.”
“You can see the stairs right over there,” she said, pointing out the stairs in the dark down the hall. I turned back to thank her and apologize again, but found myself alone. I thought perhaps she had stepped into the cell beside me to service it, but when I looked inside, it was still empty. Then I ran. I ran up the stairs and out into the garden. I ran to my apartment, and tried barricading myself within for several days, but felt trapped and had to move on. I have since hid at the wharf, in the cemetery, and in alleys among the drunks and derelicts, but I suspect that it is of no use to run or to hide. I cannot forget my date, and it’s soon now, very soon.
Kevin Crisp teaches human anatomy and has published some fifteen science articles and book chapters, mainly on peculiarities of the blood-sucking leeches. When he’s not working with cadavers or leeches, he occasionally finds time to write fiction. His work has also appeared in Frontier Tales and 365 Tomorrows.
Story illustrations by Steve Santiago.
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Obsidian Capra Aegagrus
by Christopher Slatsky
How much again?
Listen friend, ah’m gonna hep ya. The obsidian capra aegagrus, well it’s the expensive shit- $500 a gram. Outrageous I know I know. But I’m a reasonable man, I want to see this through. For you, bein’ as you’re my new customah an’ all, $300. His difficult to place but vaguely Southern drawl gave his voice a warmth that his words turned to ice.
It was early afternoon- how much heroin had I mainlined already? Two grams? I could stand a lot more. I’d anticipated and funded this drug acquisition over a period of months by selling several boxes of my beloved vinyl collection topped off by a handful of drug deals where I illicitly chalked up the product to inflate the price. But $300 for a gram of heroin was unheard of even if it was the legendary La Chiva. I only had $260 to my name but my resistance to traditional heroin made everything else boring, I had to up the ante. I could no longer even come close to the waves of euphoria a few mgs of smack had
swelled under my skin back in the day. I’d been looking for this obsidian’ musk for months, never accepting that the legendary heroin the most erudite junkies and most subversive poets spoke of with reverence was an urban legend.
You ready to touch the yella’ hem of the KING’s robe? His features were odd, long oval face, flat nosed like a boxer who had lost too many bouts, high cheekbones that seemed to collapse his beady eyes deeper into his taut skin, an unruly wisp of a goatee the same pale straw color as his thin-haired scalp.
What’s that?
Ya know, Chase the Ochre Dragon? Crank up?
I was so nervous about the mysterious heroin I was about to buy and insert into my veins I could only respond with a stuttering reference to the strange swirling symbols and the number 238 tattooed on the back of the thoroughbred’s hands. He idly played with a gaudy pinky ring ascribed with the skull of a goat.
Like the ring? I get ya one ok? Ya be one a the Thousand too. Heh hah. But first ya gotta buy then ya slam then we talk.
Of course I handed over the $260. The dealer frowned, considered the missing money, shrugged, pushed the wad of bills into his pocket and removed a bindle in its place. A’right, good enough fah now. You pay the rest back latuh, ‘k? He dangled the small intricately folded envelope between a thumb and forefinger so long they appeared to have too many knuckles. I nodded, he tossed me the heroin.
I cooked the shit up with the dealer sitting right there the whole time watching me with that bovid-shaped face of his. I filled the syringe, dark brown liquor strained through the cotton ball, found an intact vein, spiked it, slipped the tip deeper, pulled the plunger back and welcomed the pink swirl of my blood floating freely inside- this was my cue to push the syringe down slowly and gently like an artist methodically stippling the shading in a drawing.
Lovecraft eZine Megapack - 2012 - Issues 10 through 20 Page 68