Across the Spectrum

by Nagle, Pati

  Esteban Gamarra licked his lips. “And if one of us sees?”

  “We follow. We find where he settles himself. He must have baggage.” One way or another, Don Sebastian had to leave the ship, and by day, Jesus would have to carry him. A coffin like Dracula’s would be impossibly conspicuous. He would have to be in bat shape. “Do not approach him! Only come to report. We will meet on the Puno platform. While the train loads.”

  ∞

  “Señora! Señora!” Esteban Gamarra’s voice overrode the din at the station entry, as Concepçion struggled to keep her footing in the crowd. “Señora, the train is not going to load!”

  Concepçion hauled herself round, to find his eyes staring wide. “The engineer says the descent to Arequipa is too dangerous in the dark—”

  “But surely, we could advance to Juliaca?”

  “Señora, Juliaca has no hotel! Nor enough room for half these.” His gesture flashed about the hallway, first-, second-, third-class passengers entangled in protest and demand. “The train must stay at Puno. First-class passengers at the hotel, billets for the others. Señor el Jefe is, ah, very angry. But the engineer will not budge.”

  My fault. Concepçion felt her ears burn with shame. Single-handed, I delayed the Inca at Guaqui, and for nothing of use. Now Don Jose will be rabid. And his wrath will fall on this one honest man.

  “Yes, have someone take my baggage,” she cut into Esteban’s next outburst. “But I must see the engineer.”

  At the very least, she told herself, I must explain. Take the blame. Apologize.

  Not surprisingly, the engineer was by his locomotive. Evidently he had prevailed, for the boiler was uncompromisingly cold. Underlings ran about with oilcans, tools and water buckets, but the engineer himself was tapping the left-hand drivers with a small hammer, wheel by wheel. Painted black like all Southern Rail engines, the locomotive loomed in the twilit station-shed like some great machine demon, the arrogant jut of funnel, the long prow of the cow-catcher, the squared lines of cabin and tender only emphasizing the breadth of the massive, glistening boiler’s flank.

  Under that wall of weight and power, against the serried rank of pilot and driver and trailing wheels, the man looked insignificant. Yet it is he who controls all this in motion, Concepçion thought. He who, for conscience’ sake, has brought the whole enterprise to a halt.

  Esteban coughed. “Señor Vivanco?”

  The engineer straightened. Concepçion met grave dark eyes in a rawboned face. The bones were uncompromising as the look. A gravel-rough voice said, “Yes?”

  Mestizo, she thought. Castizo, one mixed-blood parent, as I have, but Indian blood somewhere close. “I am Concepçion Gonzaga,” she said. “Edouard’s widow. I am also the person who delayed the Inca at Guaqui. Since this has caused such trouble, I have come to apologize.”

  For Don Jose’s undoubted demands, curses, threats of dismissal, and at the least, copious abuse, all directed at this man. Both of them knew what she meant.

  Vivanco examined her for another unblinking half-second. Then, briefly and slightly, inclined his head.

  “Edouard’s widow,” he said.

  Concepçion inclined her head in turn.

  “The delay. It was then for good cause?”

  Concepçion blinked. Edouard, she said silently, what a reputation you left. “Señor, you are of the Ferrocarril. A person of reason. Rationality. Science. But not all things, yet, can be explained by science.”

  Vivanco’s silence answered, Go on.

  “A man died on the train, outside Guaqui. Señor Gamarra here can attest: something bit his throat and drained his blood.”

  Vivanco glanced at Gamarra and back to her.

  “I wished, I demanded that the Guardia Civiles investigate. They did not find the killer. On the steamer, I learned that—it was a brujo.”

  Someone on the boiler housing overhead banged metal on metal with a vicious clang. The iron roof reverberated. Unmoved, the locomotive towered over them, black in the dimness as the vampire himself.

  “It feeds on human blood,” Concepçion said. “It means to go to Arequipa, to find more people. It told me this. When it tried to enslave me, on the steamer last night.”

  She could feel Esteban Gamarra’s gasp. Vivanco merely shifted the hammer to his other hand. Stared another endless moment. And said, “So it will try to board this train?”

  Concepçion tried not to babble in relief. “Señor, I fear so. I mean to—remove it. With Señor Esteban here. And another. We will try to find it, here in Puno. But if we cannot . . .”

  Gamarra flinched. Vivanco lowered his head a little, looking up under his brows. Then he said, with a new, harsher grate in his voice, “Señora, whatever you ask, tomorrow, the engine crew will attempt.”

  ∞

  “Señora, I swear, we have looked everywhere! The steamer, the wharf—I examined every piece of baggage, Esteban saw all who passed the ticket-office. We cannot find either of them!”

  Ramon Flores was almost inarticulate with terror and frustration. And fear learnt from a bad master, Concepçion thought. Well, Edouard always said, action wrecks every plan. “I could have missed them, at the gangplank,” she said, “in the station. The streets.”

  Would I had this brujo’s art, querida, Edouard chuckled in her ear, to wile men and pass invisible. How I would shake those idle gangers of mine!

  If this one has such an art, she asked herself, how will it help to search?

  How will it help, to say that now?

  “Señores,” she said firmly, “tonight, they may be anywhere. Tomorrow, they must be on the train. We must watch straitly, on the platform, so we cannot miss Jesus. After that, it is a matter of patience. Remember, by daylight, the other must be asleep.”

  They looked back at her, half credulous, half uncertain. I must be confident, she told herself, as a foreman, as Edouard would be. I must bolster, not destroy their trust.

  “Remember, if you do encounter the brujo, hold fast to your cross. Pray to Mary, to Pachamama of the Indians—so you believe, no matter which. And do not—do not! look into its eyes.”

  ∞

  The hotel was thin-walled, rackety with drinkers and others working off their impatience, her bed lumpy. None of it would have mattered, Concepçion knew as she tossed, had there been any form of surety in her mind.

  The vampire must be on the train when we leave, she told herself for the fortieth time. His slave must carry him. His slave we can find.

  Or might he board in the darkness, in human form? If he could reach my cabin unnoticed, escape unnoticed, can he pass locked doors and conceal himself somewhere we never imagined? In the coal, under the carriage floors, on the roof?

  When the faintest hint of grey paled the window she could bear no more. Fifteen minutes later, in her warmer shirtwaist, skirt and shawl, she was in the street.

  I can scan the alleyways, she told herself, on chance of sighting Jesus. Go down to the station, patrol around the train, till dawn.

  Puno’s ragged main thoroughfare stretched ghost-misty between blots of building to the paling stars. Any street lamps had gone out. Under building eaves deeper shadow blotches marked the poorest travelers, swathed in a blanket or serape, emitting a faint undertow of sound. Grunts, sighs, snores. Somewhere in a distant back street a dog was barking. Somewhere else, cold and bitter as the air, a cock crowed for the approaching dawn.

  Concepçion paced half a block, another. The station façade coalesced before her, its broad arch identifiable even in the gelid dark. Then in the maw of an alleyway, a boot clicked on wood. A man half-grunted, half-gulped. Something hissed.

  Concepçion’s heart stood still in her breast.

  Then her hands flew to her reticule, to the crucifix about her neck. She whipped the chain over her head and about her fingers and with miraculous deftness wrenched out her brand-new Ladies’ Magnesium-Powered Personal Illuminator. She took three long strides into the darkness’s maw and scrabbled for the s
witch..

  Light blazed. The darkness snarled like a furious cat. White brilliance drove the picture into memory indelibly as a lightning strike.

  A man jammed against the boarded alley wall, head back in a parody of ecstasy, bulging eyes, gaping mouth. Dangling hands, a mass of shadow folds from the upthrust serape, the black shape of the vampire pressed beneath, head fastened like a tick’s to the naked throat.

  One hand gripped the man’s jaw, forcing his head up, holding him in place. The other made a white blot at the vampire’s groin. The black velvet trousers gaped. He held himself as at a urinal, and something streamed down against the other man’s leg, thick and black as tar, with a throat-stopping stench.

  Concepçion cried, “Madre de Dios!” and swung the cross.

  The light snuffed. She heard the vampire curse. Something thumped, something flew by so close she staggered as from the passage of a train. Then the shuddering dimness held only stench, and the victim’s body, settling amid a slow rustle of garments like a just-felled tree.

  ∞

  Concepçion managed not to actually fall out of the alley mouth. She laced her stays looser than most, but they cut breathing so she could only scurry, eyes clinging desperately to the fitful black blur ahead. Making for the station. Mother of God, let me not lose it! It must be going to the train . . .

  Blackness flitted across the station façade and vanished in the entry arch. Lungs bursting, Concepçion rushed through onto the platform. Men criss-crossed under the coldly glaring lights, train, engine, station crew. Nobody staring, nobody shouting. Oh, Dios, did no one see where it went?

  Sheer instinct sent her to the locomotive: the train’s head, its motive force, the province of the man who had kept it here. “Señor Vivanco!” she gasped.

  And as by magic he was beside her, saying sharply, “Señora, what is wrong?”

  “The brujo.” Concepçion coughed in the raw Altiplano air. “I saw him in the street. I think he came to the train.”

  She felt rather than saw Vivanco spring alert. Then he shouted, “Roberto!” over a shoulder. And to her, brusquely, “What do we seek?”

  “A man—small, very upright, a high mestizo. Black old-fashioned coat. A face like an Inca. Proud. Proud as Pizarro. But if you see him, do not approach! He will spell you with his eyes.”

  She heard the sharp intake of breath and caught his sleeve. “Or else . . .”

  “Or else?”

  She tried not to make her voice small. “Look for a bat. A vampire bat.”

  ∞

  “Señores, I most sincerely ask your pardon.” Concepçion bit her lip. “I have taken you all from your work. Disrupted the station. Perhaps delayed the Internationale. But there is a man, a, a creature. Involved with the murder, in Guaqui. We must find him! Because one way or another, he will be on this train.”

  The assembled men’s silence was its own reply. They think me hysterical, if not crazy. But if I tell them the truth?

  Vivanco was abruptly again beside her, saying loudly, “Dismiss. We must finish the work.” Drawing her into the half-arches behind the platform, he kept hold of her elbow, eyes scanning her face. As abruptly he said, “What will you do?”

  Concepçion’s tears burnt away. Her spine stiffened. “My helpers and I must check the passengers. The brujo may be on board, but his servant is not. If we can find, we can follow him.”

  Vivanco’s eyes narrowed. You will not, that look asked, give up?

  “Señor, I delayed the train at Guaqui, so you were forced to hold it here. There is a man dead, back down the street, because this—brujo—was delayed too.” She saw the sudden appalled guilt in his face. “Señor, you are blameless. But I let even the dead lie, to follow this creature. While I may stop it, I will not give up.”

  For an instant he was silent. Then he touched right hand to temple as if saluting Don Jose. “Send,” he said, “if you have need.”

  ∞

  “Señora, señora!” Ramon Flores all but fell into Concepçion’s sleeper, exclaiming at the top of his lungs. “We found him, we found him after all!”

  Concepçion nearly fell off the bunk herself. “Madre de Dios! How? Where?”

  “I remembered what you told us.” Flores grabbed the door jamb giddily. “Pray if you meet him, to Mary or Pachamama. And we had not found them—the train loaded, pulled out, there was no stop before Juliaca.” He was too overstrung in the wake of desperation to laugh, even in joy. “So I prayed, señora! Pachamama, I begged. Show me. Just show me, where . . . Oh señora! It was as if my eyes cleared, and there he was! Rolled in his serape, under the provision shelf in the second-class galley, the door was open, I looked straight in!”

  “Blessed Pachamama!” At that moment Concepçion could have kissed him. “But he, did he see you?”

  “No, no, señora! His head was down, as if he slept.” He danced on the shuddering floor as the train rattled down a slope. “Now, señora, now what do we do?”

  “Find the brujo.” Concepçion hardly had to think. “He must be close. And in bat form, or they had seen him, in the earlier search. Quick, Señor Flores, back to second class. Pray to Pachamama as we look.” With a faint pang, she wished that she, too, could invoke Grandmama’s Aymara earth goddess. “I will call on Mary myself.”

  The vampire was in the galley too. Above the range-hood, a rod spanned the car to hold up pots and pans. The vampire was still little more than a black smear among the utensils, but it was there. The long-handled hook for fetching pans down leant beside the range. Concepçion stared up, clutching her crucifix, prayer ebbing on her lips. We have found him. Now, what do we do?

  “First, we get the Indian out.” Ramon Flores was still jittering beside her. “I can bring a conductor. If I pray to Pachamama, he should see too. That one should not be in the galley, and be sure, he has only a third-class ticket. We can take him all the way down there.”

  “Yes.” Whatever noise Jesus made, the vampire would not wake. With Jesus out of earshot, what could they not do?

  Grandmama’s permanent remedies for a brujo were close to Stoker’s for Dracula: stake the sleeper’s heart with hawthorn wood. Cut off the head, fill the mouth with garlic. Expose all to the sun, and let it burn up the undead flesh. But how do I behead a vampire bat?

  Superimposed ran pictures of Don Sebastian in her cabin, rapier upright, ancient as Pizarro, haughty as a hidalgo, immaculate in white stock and black velvet coat. Whatever horrors he had wrought, his presence demanded a death with dignity.

  However undignified the death he dealt. The lightning-etched scene in the alleyway flashed past her too. Dios, how he must hate that. Why, in heaven’s name, must even a Dracula piss when he feeds?

  The train noises blanked. Instead she heard her brother, dead of fever these seven years, laughing in her ear beside her grandfather’s herd-fire, hissing, “’Cepçion, ’Cepçion, come and see!”

  Dragging her to the recumbent, slumbering cow, to crouch, stifling giggles, as the small black shape of a vampire bat planed to earth, to waddle, on its wingtips, to the cow’s side. Scale a shoulder, bare the two razor-sharp front teeth, and bend to feed.

  And begin to urinate, a bare minute after it drank.

  Concepçion gasped. So this one is truly a vampire-bat?

  Then the other memory overrode everything, Grandmama by her hearth, smiling as Roberto closed his shrilling narrative. “Abuela, it started to pee!” And adding lore of her own. Yes, vampires walked rather than risk rousing prey by a direct landing. And did Roberto know the secret of how they flew?

  “Oh. Oh, Dios.”

  Ramon Flores stopped babbling and stared at her. Stared harder as she took her hands from her cheeks and twitched like a crazy woman and demanded, “How far is it to Juliaca? Quick!”

  ∞

  The Internationale slid majestically up to the platform in Juliaca. Brakes squealed, the locomotive let out a bullfrog roar of steam. More steam wreathed the driving wheels as Concepçion cascade
d inelegantly from the first-class doorway and tried to run among the station scrimmage to the cabin side.

  “Señor Vivanco!”

  The engineer came down in a leap. “You have found it,” he said.

  “I have found it, por Dios. And I think I know how to deal with it. Señor, only tell me: is this engine a Baldwin too?”

  He looked at her almost as Ramon Flores had. But he nodded immediately.

  “Truly, thank God.” For what seemed the first time in minutes, Concepçion breathed. “One favor, then, señor. On the down grades, after Crucero Alto—maybe over Colca Canyon—I mean to pull the emergency cord.”

  Vivanco nearly reared back like a horse. “Señora—!”

  “And then I want you to blow the whistle. As hard, as high as it will go, so long as the steam lasts. Or until I pull the cord again.”

  “What?”

  “Then, please God, we will be rid of our brujo.” She could feel the flush of mad inspiration, of madder excitement, in her cheeks. “Por favor, señor. This once, ignore the regulations. The train will take no harm, and nor will any other passenger. A great many people will be saved . . . if you can do this one thing.”

  Vivanco stared as if she had grown the devil’s horns. Then, slowly, his face changed. Abruptly, he made a little half-bow. “When you pull the cord,” he said, “the whistle will blow.”

  ∞

  Concepçion stood in the second-class galley door, pot-hook in hand and mouth oven-dry. By the connection tube, Ramon Flores gripped the red emergency-stop handle, eyes locked on her. At the car’s end, she knew Esteban Gamarra waited, clutching his crucifix, to block off entry from third-class.

  Two and a half eternal hours ago, the Internationale had pulled out of Juliaca, to thread its way over the Altiplano, along Lagunilles lake, past endless vistas where only a herd of llama or alpaca or a one-room farmhouse broke the emptiness. Half an hour since, they had taken coal and water at Crucero Alto. Now the locomotive was braking, easing the train into the steepest section of the descent.