by Paula Guran
Once they had reached their destination Imelda took off the heavy golden necklace she had been wearing and placed it in her father’s hands. Then she kissed him on the cheek and pulled Eduardo with her, back towards the ledge where Aunt Celeste was waiting.
“Are we going to leave him there, just by himself?” Eduardo whispered.
“Hush,” she said.
He did not know what he had expected, but it had not been . . . this. He’d heard the Mayans had sacrificed children to the rain god Chaac, that they wrapped them in ceremonial robes and stabbed them with a flint knife. Somehow the idea of the knife had lingered in his mind, sacrifice. Wrists slit. But was their uncle simply going to stand in the water and starve to death? Would he attempt to drown himself?
What horrid game was this and how had he convinced himself to play it? He ought to have called for a doctor when he first arrived.
They climbed up the ledge and Eduardo turned to Imelda, his voice harsh.
“This is insane.”
There was the splash of water as the necklace the old man had been holding slipped from his fingers.
“We need to get him back in the car right this instant,” he told her.
“No,” she replied, her arms crossed against her chest.
A rumbling distant noise, like the sound of thunder, echoed through the cave. All of a sudden there was a golden light in the water. It did not come from above, but from below. Not the sun’s glow. Something else. He blinked and stared and stepped forward to try and get a better, but Imelda grabbed his arm, holding him back.
A curtain of water rose before his astonished eyes, taller than a man. Water that was light . . . or light and water. It was blinding; he was forced to look away. The rumbling grew and grew, like the moaning of some strange beast.
He was afraid and clutched his cousin tight, embracing her. She’d been afraid of the dark, spiders, large dogs. She’d been afraid of so many things when they were children, and now it was he who was terrified.
There came the loud noise of water as it splashed down, the aqueous “wall” crumbling, stray droplets whipping their bodies until the cenote was still and quiet once again.
Eduardo swallowed and looked at the others, looked down at his cousin who was still holding him.
Zacarias was gone.
By the time they exited the cave it had begun to rain.
The night was cool with the refreshing rain, but even though the heat had dissipated he could not sleep. He opened the door to Imelda’s room a little after midnight. She was in bed, but her eyes were open. She did not seem surprised to see him there. He made his way slowly towards the bed, sitting at the edge of it and she sat up, her pale nightgown catching the light of the moon.
“Maybe it’s this place that makes us so,” he said. “Maybe if we went away we might be different.”
He tried to picture her in the city, wearing a colorful mini-skirt and high boots, with eyeliner and a martini in her hand. They could be normal. Lead normal lives. He could marry Natalia. Imelda could find some nice boy to care about.
But he thought of the dream he’d had, the horrid pale baby in his arms, and felt his mouth go dry.
“We wouldn’t.”
“How do you know?” he asked, exasperated. “You’ve never gone anywhere.”
If only she’d give him some reassurance, if only she’d tell him they could escape . . . oh, he’d believe her. He would. He wanted to believe it. If only.
“I can’t stay here,” he said. “It’s like a museum. It’s a relic.”
“Eduardo, I know the stories, I know the past,” she whispered, tossing the covers away and moving toward him upon the bed. “But you understand the present. They sent you to the city for that reason. I can help you and you can help me. Don’t you see? We can’t have a future without you.”
“What future?” he said. “That . . . this . . . is not a future.”
She held his face between her hands, forcing him to look at her.
“Do you remember, what grandmother told us? That under the sea there is a phosphorescent palace of many terraces, with gardens of pale corals. There swim those that will never die, in wonder and glory. Forever.”
Her fingers touched his brow.
He didn’t know if he wanted forever.
“If you won’t do it for the family, do it for me. Stay. I’ve been so lonely.”
She kissed his cheek, then the corner of his mouth, before he shook his head and retreated from the bed.
He could feel it, beneath his skin . . . the thread that marked them as the same, that bound them together. But he could not picture it. His life within these walls. His body, deep, deep, within the endless waters.
She pressed a palm against her mouth and her eyes were filled with tears. He didn’t want to make her cry.
“Don’t say goodbye when you leave,” she said.
Her voice cracked at the last word, water breaking against the rocks. He could not bear her grief and rushed out of the room without glancing back.
Eduardo takes a long shower in the morning and shaves slowly, pausing to stare at his face in the cloudy mirror. He packs, then unpacks, sits at the edge of his bed staring at the wallpaper with its blue and green scallops.
He dresses in one of his loud shirts with its bright patterns, and goes in search of Mario. The boy is in the kitchen, drinking his coffee. He looks up at Eduardo and nods his head in greeting.
This is some relative of his, some bastard Marin and Eduardo stares long and hard, trying to detect something else in his features. The covert shadow they both share. But he sees nothing amiss. Perhaps Mario does not carry their old taint, he will not go through the change like the pureblooded Marins do.
It might be the same for Eduardo. This affliction might skip him.
He’ll feel better as soon as he boards the train. Once the wheels are turning he’ll remember the city, his apartment, Natalia’s voice. And the memories will stir him forward, back to a land of concrete and stone where neither water nor salt hold court.
If he boards the train.
“Mario, I need you to prepare the car,” he says.
“Where are we going?”
“You’re going to He’la’, to post a couple of letters for me.”
He hands Mario the envelopes and goes outside the house, walking until he is at a good distance, able to observe the whole building. Birds cry in the trees, indifferent to his turmoil, as he slides his hands in his pockets and walks towards the cenote.
He knows she’s swimming there even before he glimpses her in the water. It’s easy to find her – as if he were looking for treasure upon a map, dashed lines clearly directing pirates to the prize.
He falters only for a moment when he reaches the edge of the cenote, like a man consulting a wind rose, but she raises her head then, sees him, and he takes a deep breath and ventures in.
She’s naked and he feels nervous once he reaches her, like a groom on his wedding night, and he supposes maybe that is the right emotion. This is their marriage.
He remembers the tiny, pale fish swimming in the underground pools of water and it scares him. Such depths and darkness.
He lets her fingers run across his skin and she kisses him, wrapping her arms around his neck. His mouth opens under hers.
In Mayan there is no word for “yes,” and he’s always thought it such a meaningless set of letters, so he spells his answer with his body.
The water is blue and perfect and cool. She pulls him down, into the depths of the cenote and he clasps her hand, follows her, holding his breath like they did when they were children, the jungle whispering secrets to the lovers.
“Much has been said about H. P. Lovecraft’s regrettable prejudices,” notes Michael Wehunt. “I’m not the first to find it rewarding to invert that intolerance by structuring a story around a protagonist with whom Lovecraft would have never engaged – in this case, a black female who learns to be strong in the face of long odds. What wo
uld a character with the life Ada has endured do in a cosmic horror scenario, when the stars are right and there is a Door? This story, for me, became all the more Lovecraftian through the very growth of Ada, using HPL’s influence in brighter ways, even in the darkness. Naturally, ‘The Music of Erich Zann’ informed this story, but here the music was to play a different role.”
Wehunt spends his time in the lost city of Atlanta. His fiction has appeared in such publications as Cemetery Dance, Shadows & Tall Trees, Unlikely Story, and Aickman’s Heirs, among others.
I Do Not Count the Hours
Michael Wehunt
——
—We’ve come far.
—Through cracks.
—You could hum the last thread with ours.
—We’ve looked for you.
Whispering.
Ada has these thoughts, or they have her, as the window latch closes somewhere to her right. She turns to look but can’t see. Coming back to herself in darkness, she feels a crawling dread until she realizes the breath spreading hot across her face is her own, and tugs the sheet off. It puddles on the floor, a grayed moth-eaten black thing that’s not hers.
The door to Luke’s office is open before her. There’s a prickle along her arms, but from what she doesn’t know. The sense of a camera, a watcher, a moment it isn’t time to have. Or – something. Gone now.
She’s had some bad moments. He has to come back: this is what she remembers murmuring through the house over and over. She can hardly touch the bow to her viola since he left. The weeping of the strings in all this empty space is just too much.
And now she’s Bluebeard’s wife holding the word divorce in her mouth, the bony shape of it there, its sour ashy taste, but she can’t spit it out.
She stands at the entry to hallowed ground: his studio-slash-sanctuary. Just an unused corner room now, two more windows the nights keep peering into. But she needs some sense of him with her. Already she’s breathed his smell out of the clothes in his closet. She reaches in and snaps the overhead light on. The room stops breathing and a long shadow shrinks into the far corner.
She steps into the office and she’s only Ada, and Luke wasn’t quite a Bluebeard until recently. There’s a lot left in his office, considering he moved out the day after the Breakup, coming to the house while Ada was sobbing at her friend Regan’s place. Four weeks and two days ago.
Empty boxes wait for him just like she does. Two tripods, a dolly, some of his lights are still here. His desk. Only the one bookshelf, half filled with tumbled-over film school textbooks. He was never a big reader until this last, awful year, when his love dried up and he started eating and sleeping in here, collecting piles of books and stacks of pages from his printer. She’d catch glimpses of a huge map with pushpins clustered where the Smoky Mountains rub against the Blue Ridge, papers taped up like detective novel wallpaper. But she never came inside until now.
Gram taught her well, not to go places.
And here, this photo facedown on his desk, is exactly the reason she’s still not ready. His whole inner life, separate from their coupledom, was held in this room, and he’s chosen that inner life and left the picture of them behind. She has to gather the courage to turn the frame over. Four summers ago in Raleigh, they’re smiling into that piece of future they still have. Luke’s reddish straw hair, hazel eyes, his nose orbited by freckles, and Ada’s wide dark gaze and a face that always looks so open and sure in photos. Her forever-short hair, her tomboy angles. Their differences are what stand out, because they stood out for him. He loved them, those differences, but she used to hate it when she caught him comparing their skins when they were pressed together in bed. He couldn’t get over his fascination of being with a black girl, but she’d welcome it now, to feel him climb onto her.
Stop using the past tense with him, Ada. She positions the picture frame where it would face him if he were sitting in his chair, then starts opening the desk drawers. In the second she finds an empty journal and a sheaf of his photographs. He never let himself get serious with stills. Here’s the half-skeleton of a burned house they saw once, out near the beginning of the Blue Ridge Parkway. Luke told her once that some religious group had lived there, probably died there. Ada’s sure this is the same house, remembers the day they found it in the woods. That was a fairytale day, but he didn’t have a camera with him. She’s sure of it. On the back of the photo, in Luke’s scrawl: Still in area? Who owns this land?
Another picture slowly reveals a shadow of something hanging in the charred doorway of the same ruined house. STILL THERE is printed neatly on the back. The next is completely black, but there’s the feeling that it’s not finished, it hasn’t escaped the light all the way. She flips it over and there’s a black circle filled in with Sharpie ink. But most of the photos feature trees, the anonymous ground, no art in them, as if he went into the woods and turned in a slow circle. There’s no writing on these. In the last two a ring of narrow sticks marks the ground in a clearing.
She rifles through the rest of the drawers, all empty except the last, which is full, inexplicably, of soil. She rakes her fingers through it and stirs up several short twigs, picks one up only to realize it’s a dead caterpillar. She jerks her hand away and rubs it on her jeans. There’s something else buried there, half-risen, red plastic with a cap on one end and a keyring hole in the other. A USB drive, she thinks, brushes it off, reads the word EMMA scratched into it, penknife etchings.
Emma. He’s never said anything of a female subject, or a female friend, but this room feels full of the things he never said. The thought of another woman’s been a ghost in Ada’s mind for too long now, a ghost she’s nearly wished would haunt her. All the bitter energy needs a conduit.
She pulls the cap offand stares into the slit of the device’s mouth. Bluebeard’s wife again. Her laptop’s in the bedroom, but she brings it back into Luke’s studio, boots it and tries not to look at the photo of them while she waits. She inserts the drive and clicks its icon when it appears on her desktop.
There’s nothing on it except four small mp4 video files in a folder named found. They’re all dated 16 September, four days before the Breakup. She mouses over the first, consecrate, braces herself for a bedroom in low light, writhing movement and Luke cupping breasts much fuller than her own, hungry mouths opening onto each other. A breath, a deeper breath, who are you, Emma? She opens it.
Four figures stand in the middle distance, shin-deep in a creek whose waters in the hazy lens glare run the reddish brown of Georgia clay. They hold hands and stare into the soft current, grouped like a closing parenthesis, water stains creeping up their pants. There’s no sound and a vague tracing of video static drifts over the figures. The details of them are hard to grasp. One is taller, stooped, she thinks. Two have short hair, though as she leans closer, dragging the play bar back twice, Ada becomes convinced one of these is something like a mannequin held upright by the others. A thing limp in its clothes, faceless and without clear hands. The clip’s all one steady shot, as though from a tripod, a minute and thirty-eight seconds until she notices the blot of shadow coming out of the woods on the other side of the water. It stains a corner of the screen as it spreads toward the creek bank.
Now the shot cuts to black, but still with the grainy digital snow. She lets it play out to be sure, sitting crosslegged on Luke’s favorite rug. After nearly three minutes, the audio snaps on, a scrape and the low moan of a cello, a forlorn thing that chills after all the silence. The dark fades bluer and a half-moon suddenly appears, sliding around on the screen. She hears the bow wring one long final note on the cello string that bends in the middle and stops. A click, a lingering hum, then the QuickTime control panel reappears.
She doesn’t pause before clicking on the second file, titled bowl. Instant movement, the shot traveling through woods in middle-night dark, a flashlight in its dying throes drifting over a carpet of dead leaves. Tree silhouettes, hints of deeper forest. No sound again and none of the
snow from the first clip.
The cone of light diffuses, the ground dropping away into a pit of some kind, something dug out of the earth. The view tips forward and Ada can see a long white hump down in the hole, the sprawl of a body, nude or clothed in white. The shot blurs for a moment, whips around to scan the woods behind, silent black cut with wedges of indigo. The camera returns to pan across the pit, and the white body is gone. A flutter, flicker, the flashlight wavers and gives up to the dark.
Again she waits the clip out. It cuts back to life – or the light’s batteries are replaced – past the three-minute mark, Ada gasping as she sees two feet in the frame, inches away. The camera is in the pit now, the electric light a degree stronger. White fabric ends at dark knobs of ankles, two dirty feet. For a rattled instant she thinks they are her own feet. Paler than usual in the yellowing light, the shape of one big toe calling to her. Chipped pearl nail polish. But as she peers closer, another figure crawls out of the background, over the body and toward the camera in one lurch. Flat coin eyes gleam and the light spins away, the video ends.
She shoves the laptop across the rug, leans over and snaps it shut. Did Luke shoot these? Are they only found footage, as the folder name might suggest? He loves that stuff. Please, the latter, but there’s nothing useful in the file information. She’s got the beginnings of a headache, but even after this last horrible video, even after those feet, she has a stubborn, vivid urge to lie down in that hole and pick out the stars caught between branches. The oaks would drop leaves curling in on themselves in death, and she’d watch them spiral briefly toward her. It wouldn’t be a grave. Her thoughts are not that lost. It only seems like it might be a closeness she could feel to him.
She won’t cry, doesn’t know if she can. She has an interview in seven hours, a steady job she needs on top of the unsteady session work, unless she sells the house. But this place is her only lifeline now, and she searches for angry thoughts to keep her here: have the locks changed tomorrow, move her music stuff in here. Get the exorcism underway. She knows better. The third video’s filename is bed, it sinks in and tugs at her but she has no space for any more. Not the aching panic that would bring, surely, seeing whose bed and what was done on it.