The shock had prevented Noemí from moving, but now that she felt his hand closing around her, she attempted to shove Virgil away and rush to the door. He yanked her back, though, with a vicious strength that threatened to snap her bones, and she gasped in pain, but still she fought him.
“Come on, help me here,” Virgil said, looking at Francis.
“Let go of me!” she screamed.
Francis did not approach them, but Florence grabbed Noemí’s free arm, and together Virgil and the woman dragged Noemí toward the head of the bed. She twisted her body and managed to kick the night table, sending a porcelain chamber pot crashing onto the floor.
“Kneel down,” Virgil ordered her.
“No,” Noemí said.
They shoved her down, Virgil’s fingers digging into her flesh, and he placed a hand behind her neck.
Howard Doyle turned his head upon the pillow and looked at her. His lips were as bloated as his leg, crusted with black growths, and a trail of dark fluid dripped down his chin, staining his bedclothes. This was the source of the bad smell in the room, and up close the stench was so awful she thought she would retch.
“My God,” she said and tried to get up, to scuttle away, but Virgil’s hand was a band of iron around her neck, and he was pushing her even closer to the old man.
And the man was rising in his bed, turning and stretching out a thin hand, his fingers digging into Noemí’s hair and pulling their faces closer.
She was able, at this disgustingly intimate distance, to clearly see the color of his eyes. They were not blue. The color was diluted by a bright, golden sheen, like flecks of molten gold.
Howard Doyle smiled at her, showing off his stained teeth—stained with black—and then he pressed his lips against hers. Noemí felt his tongue in her mouth and then saliva burning down her throat as he pressed himself against her and Virgil propped her in place.
He let go of her after long, agonizing minutes, and Noemí was able to gasp and turn her head.
She closed her eyes.
She felt very light; her thoughts were scattered. Drowsy. My God, she told herself, my God, stand up, run. Over and over again.
When she looked around, she tried to focus her eyes and saw that she was in a cave. There were people there. A man had been handed a cup, and he was drinking from it. The hideous liquid burned his mouth, and he almost passed out, but the others laughed and they clasped his shoulder in a friendly manner. They hadn’t been so friendly when he’d first arrived, a stranger in these parts. They were skittish, and for good reason.
The man was fair-haired, and his eyes were blue. He shared a resemblance with Howard, with Virgil. The shape of the jaw, the nose. But his clothes and his shoes and everything about him and the men in the cave pointed to a previous time.
When is this? Noemí thought. But she felt dizzy, and the sound of the sea distracted her. This cave, was the ocean nearby? The cave was dark; one of the men held a lantern, but it did not provide much illumination. The others continued with their jokes, and two of them helped the blond man up. He stumbled.
The man wasn’t doing very well, but that wasn’t their fault. He’d long been ill. His physician said there was no cure. There was no hope, but Doyle had hoped.
Doyle. That was him, yes. She was with Doyle.
Doyle was dying and in his desperation he’d found his way here, seeking a remedy for those who were beyond remedies. Instead of a peregrination to a holy site, he’d come to this wretched cave.
They hadn’t liked him, no, but these folk were poor, and he had a fat purse of silver. Of course, he’d feared they’d cut his throat and take the silver, but what else was there to be done? All he could manage was to promise them there’d be more where that came from if they kept their end of the bargain.
Money wasn’t everything, of course. He knew as much. They recognized him as their natural superior. Force of habit, he imagined. My lord spilled from their lips, even though these were scavengers.
In the corner of the cave Noemí saw a woman. Her hair was stringy, her face plain and pasty. She held a shawl around her shoulders with a bony hand and looked at Doyle with interest. There was a priest too, an old man who tended to the altar of their god. For in the end this was indeed a holy site of a strange sort. Instead of candles, the fungus hanging from the cave walls, luminescent, lit a crude altar. Upon it there were a bowl and a cup and a pile of old bones.
If he died, Doyle thought, his bones would be added to that pile. But he was not afraid. He was half dead already.
Noemí rubbed a hand against her temples. A terrible headache was building inside her skull. She squinted, and the room wavered, like a flame. She tried to focus on something and fixed her eyes on Doyle.
Doyle. She’d seen him stumbling around, his face worn down by disease, but now he looked so hearty she almost confused him with another man. His vitality restored, one would have expected him to return home at once. But here he was lingering, running a hand down the woman’s naked back. They’d married, following the custom of her people. Noemí felt his disgust as he touched the woman, but he kept a smile on his face. He must dissimulate.
He needed them. Needed to be accepted, needed to be one with these rough folk. For only then could he know all their secrets. Eternal life! It was there for the taking. The fools didn’t understand it. They used the fungus to heal their wounds and preserve their health, but it could be so much more. He’d seen it, the evidence was in the priest they blindly obeyed, and what he hadn’t witnessed he’d imagined. There were such possibilities!
The woman, she wouldn’t do. He’d known that from the start. But Doyle had two sisters, back in his great home awaiting his return, and that was the trick. It was in the blood, in his blood, the priest had said so already. And if it could be in his blood it could be in their blood.
Noemí pressed her fingertips against her forehead. The headache was growing stronger, and her vision blurred.
Doyle. Sharp, he was. Always had been, and even when his body had failed him, his mind was a blade. Now the body was alive, vital, and he thrummed with eagerness.
The priest recognized his strength, whispered that he might be the future of their congregation, that a man like him was necessary. The holy man was old and he feared for the future, for his little flock in the cave, for these timid folk. Picking through wreckage, scrambling in the dirt, that was their life. They’d fled here seeking safety and they’d survived till now, but the world was changing.
The holy man was right. Too right, perhaps. For Doyle indeed envisioned a deep change.
Lungs filled with water, the priest weighed down. What a simple death!
And then it was chaos and violence and smoke. Fire, fire, burning. The cave was deemed almost a fortress by its inhabitants. When the tide came in, it was cut off from land and only approachable by boat, rendering it a cozy, safe hideout. They hadn’t much, but they had this.
He was a single man and there were three dozen of them, but he’d killed the priest and now he held sway over them. He was holy. They were forced to remain on their knees as he set their bundles of cloth, their possessions, on fire. The cave filled with smoke.
There was a boat. He pulled the woman into the boat. She obeyed, numb and afraid. As he rowed off, she stared at him, and he glanced away.
He’d thought her unattractive. She was now frightfully ugly, with her belly grown and her eyes dull. But she was necessary. She would serve a purpose.
And then Noemí wasn’t with him as she’d been all this time, as close as his shadow. She was with someone else, a woman, with her fair hair falling loose around her shoulders as she spoke to another girl.
“He has changed,” the young woman whispered. “Don’t you see it? His eyes are not the same.”
The other girl, her hair plaited, shook her head.
Noemí sh
ook her head too. Their brother, gone on a long voyage and now returned and there were so many questions to ask, but he wouldn’t let them speak. And the first woman, she thought a horror had befallen him, that an evil possessed him, but the other one, she knew this had always been him, under the skin.
I feared evil long ago. I feared him.
Under the skin, and Noemí looked down at her hands, at her wrist, which itched terribly. Before she could scratch herself pustules erupted and there rose tendrils, like hairs, upon her skin. Her velvety body fruited. Fleshy, white, fan-shaped caps sliced through her marrow and her muscle, and when she opened her mouth liquid poured up, gold and black, like a river that stained the floor.
A hand on her shoulder and a whisper in her ear.
“Open your eyes,” said Noemí reflexively. Her mouth was full of blood and she spat out her own teeth.
20
“Breathe. Just breathe,” he told her.
He was a voice. She couldn’t see him well, because the pain blurred her eyes and the tears didn’t help in that regard. He held her hair back as she vomited and helped her stand up. Black and gold specks danced under her eyelids when she closed them. She’d never felt this sick in her life.
“I’ll die,” she croaked.
“You won’t,” he assured her.
Hadn’t she died? She thought she had. There had been blood and bile in her mouth.
She stared at the man. She thought she knew him, but his name escaped her. She was having trouble thinking, remembering, separating her thoughts from other thoughts. Other memories. Who was she?
Doyle, she’d been Doyle, and Doyle had killed all those people, burned them all.
The snake, it bites its tail.
The young, skinny man walked her out of the bathroom and pressed a glass of water against her lips.
She lay on the bed and turned her head. Francis sat on a chair, close to her, dabbing the sweat that beaded her forehead. Francis, yes. And she was Noemí Taboada, and this was High Place. It came back to her, the horror she’d been subjected to, the bloated body of Howard Doyle and his spit in her mouth.
She recoiled. Francis froze, then slowly handed her the handkerchief he’d been holding. She clutched it in one hand.
“What did you do to me?” she asked. It hurt to speak. Her throat felt scratchy. She recalled the filth that had poured into her mouth, and she suddenly wished to run into the bathroom again, to vomit her guts out.
“Do you need to get up?” he asked, readying a hand to help her.
“No,” she said, knowing she couldn’t reach the bathroom on her own, but also not wanting him to touch her.
He slid his hands into his jacket’s pockets. The corduroy jacket she’d thought looked good on him. The bastard. She regretted every nice thing she’d ever thought of him.
“I’m supposed to explain,” he said, his voice quiet.
“How the hell are you explaining that?! Howard…he…you…how?”
Christ. She couldn’t even put it into words. The damn horror of it. Of the black bile in her mouth and then the vision she’d had.
“I’ll tell you the story and then you can ask me questions. I think that would be the easiest thing,” he said.
Noemí didn’t want to do any talking. She didn’t think she could talk much, even if she tried. Better to let him speak, even if she felt like punching him. She was so tired, so sick.
“I suppose now you realize we are not like other people and this house is not like other houses. A long time ago, Howard, he found a fungus which is able to extend human life quite a bit. It can cure diseases; it keeps you healthy.”
“I saw that. I saw him,” she muttered.
“You did?” Francis replied. “I suppose you entered the gloom. How deep have you gone into it?”
She stared at him. He was confusing her more. He shook his head.
“The fungus, it runs under the house, all the way to the cemetery and back. It’s in the walls. Like a giant spider’s web. In that web we can preserve memories, thoughts, caught like the flies that wander into a real web. We call that repository of our thoughts, of our memories, the gloom.”
“How is that possible?”
“Fungi can enter into symbiotic relationships with host plants. Mycorrhiza. Well, it turns out that it can also have a symbiotic relationship with humans. The mycorrhiza in this house creates the gloom.”
“You have access to ancestral memories because of a fungus.”
“Yes. Only some of them are not full memories; you get faint echoes and they’re jumbled.”
Like not being able to tune to a radio station, she thought. Noemí looked at the corner on the wall that was defaced by the black mold. “I’ve seen and dreamt very strange things. Are you telling me the house has done that? Because there’s a fungus running inside of it?”
“Yes.”
“Why would it do that to me?”
“It wouldn’t be intentional. I guess it’s in its nature.”
Every damn vision she had experienced had been terrifying. Whatever this thing’s nature was, she couldn’t begin to understand it. A nightmare. That’s what it was. A living nightmare, sins and malevolent secrets fastened together.
“Then I was right about your house being haunted. And my cousin is not insane, she’s simply seen this gloom.”
Francis nodded, and Noemí chuckled. No wonder Francis had been so agitated when she had suggested there was a rational explanation to Catalina’s strange behavior and her talk of ghosts. Not that she would have guessed it was all connected to mushrooms.
She glanced at the oil lamp burning by her bedside and realized she had no idea how much time had passed. How long she’d been in the gloom. It could have been hours, it could have been days. She couldn’t hear the patter of the rain anymore.
“What did Howard Doyle do to me?” she asked.
“The fungus is in the walls of the house and it’s in the air. You don’t realize it, but you’re breathing it in. Slowly, it has an effect on you. But if you come in contact with it in other ways, the effect can accelerate.”
“What did he do to me?” she repeated.
“Most people who come in contact with this fungus die. That’s what happened to the workers in the mine. It killed them, some faster than others. But obviously not everyone perishes. Some people are more resistant to it. If they don’t die, though, it can still affect their mind.”
“Like Catalina?”
“Sometimes a little and sometimes worse than Catalina. It can burn out your own self. Our servants, you might have noticed they don’t talk much. There’s very little of them left. It’s almost like their mind has been carved out.”
“That’s not possible.”
Francis shook his head. “Have you ever known an alcoholic? It affects their brain, and so does this.”
“Are you telling me that’s what’s going to happen to Catalina? To me?”
“No!” Francis said quickly. “No, no. They’re a special case, Great Uncle Howard calls them his bondservants, and the miners, they were mulch. But you can have a symbiotic relationship with the fungus. None of that will happen to you.”
“What will happen to me?”
Francis’s hands were still firmly in his pockets, but he was fidgeting. She could tell, the fingers clenching and unclenching. He was looking down at the cover on her bed.
“I’ve told you about the gloom. I haven’t told you about the bloodline. We’re special. The fungus bonds with us, it’s not noxious. It can even make us immortal. Howard has lived many lives, in many different bodies. He transfers his consciousness to the gloom and then from the gloom he can live again, in the body of one of his children.”
“He possesses his children?” Noemí said.
“No…he becomes…they become him…they becom
e someone new. Only the children, it goes down the bloodline. And for generations the bloodline has been kept isolated, to ensure we were all able to interact with the fungus, that we would keep this symbiotic relationship. No outsiders.”
“Incest. He married two women who were sisters, and he was going to marry Ruth to her cousin, and before that he must have…his sisters,” Noemí said, suddenly remembering the vision she’d had. The two young women. “He had two sisters. God, he had children with them.”
“Yes.”
The Doyle look. All the people in those portraits. “How far back?” Noemí asked. “How old is he? How many generations?”
“I don’t know. Three hundred years, maybe more.”
“Three hundred years. Marrying his own kin, having children with them, then transferring his mind into one of their bodies. Over and over again. And all of you? You allow this?”
“We have no choice. He’s a god.”
“You have a damn choice! And that sick fuck is not a god!”
Francis stared at her. He had taken his hands out of his pockets and was now clutching them together. He looked tired. Slowly he slid a hand up and touched his forehead; he shook his head.
“He is to us,” he said. “And he wants you to be part of our family.”
“Then that’s why he poured that black sludge down my throat.”
“They were afraid you were going to leave. They couldn’t let you do that. Now you won’t be able to go anywhere.”
“I don’t want to be part of your god damn family, Francis,” she said. “And believe me, I’m going to go back home and I’m going to—”
“It won’t let you go. My father, I don’t think I told you about him, did I?”
She had been looking at the black marks on the wall, the mold in the corner of her room, but she slowly turned her head to look at him. He had taken out a little portrait from his pocket. This is what he clutched in his hand, she thought. The little picture nestling in his jacket’s pocket.
“Richard,” Francis whispered, allowing her to look at the black-and-white photograph of a man. “His name was Richard.”
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