He leaned forward, as if to share a secret with her. “I can make you get out of those clothes. It won’t take me a minute, and I will hurt you. Or you can take them off yourself, like a good girl.”
He meant it. She still felt light-headed, and the water was too hot, but she peeled off her undergarments and tossed them away, to rest in a corner of the bathroom. She grabbed the bar of soap sitting on a porcelain dish and scrubbed her head, soaped her arms and her hands. She worked quickly, rinsing the soap out.
Virgil had closed the tap, his left elbow resting on the edge of the tub. At least he was looking at the floor rather than at her, apparently content to admire the tiles. He rubbed his mouth with his fingers.
“You cut my lip with your shoe,” he said.
There was a trail of blood on his lips, and Noemí was glad that at least she’d managed that. “Is that why you’re torturing me?”
“Torture? I wanted to make sure you didn’t faint in the bath. It would be a pity if you drowned while in the tub.”
“You could have stood guard outside the door, you pig,” she told him, brushing a wet strand of her hair away from her face.
“Yes. But that wouldn’t be half as much fun,” he replied. His grin would have been charming if she’d met him at a party, if she didn’t know him. He had fooled Catalina with that smile, but it was a predator’s grin. It made her want to hit him again, to beat him in the name of her cousin.
The faucet was dripping. Plop, plop, plop. It was the only noise in the bathroom. She raised a hand, pointed behind him.
“You can pass me the robe now.”
He didn’t reply.
“I said, you can—”
His hand dipped into the water, settling on her leg, and Noemí pushed herself back, slamming against the tub, making water splash onto the floor. Her instinct was to stand up, jump out of the tub, and run out of the room. But the position he occupied meant her path would be blocked if she did. He knew it too. The tub, the water, seemed to the young woman her shield, and she drew her knees against her chest.
“Get out,” she said, trying to sound firm rather than afraid.
“What? Are you suddenly bashful?” he asked. “Last time we were here it wasn’t the case.”
“That was a dream,” she stammered.
“It doesn’t mean it wasn’t real.”
She blinked incredulously at him, and she opened her mouth to protest. Virgil leaned forward, his hand settling on the back of her neck, and she shrieked, pushing him away, but he’d gotten hold of her hair and was tipping her head back, pulling it hard.
He’d done that in the dream, or a similar motion. Pulled her head up and kissed her, and afterward she’d wanted him.
She tried to turn her head away.
“Virgil,” Francis said loudly. He was standing by the doorway, his hands curled into tight fists at his side.
Virgil turned his head toward his cousin. “Yes?” he said, his voice hard.
“Dr. Cummins is here. He’s ready to see her.”
Virgil let out a sigh and gave Noemí a shrug, releasing her. “Well, it seems we’ll continue our chat some other time,” he declared and walked out of the bathroom.
She had not expected him to release her, and her relief was so profound she pressed both hands against her mouth and bent forward, gasping.
“Dr. Cummins wants to check up on you. Do you need help getting out of the tub?” Francis asked. He spoke softly.
She shook her head. Her face was burning, flushed with mortification.
Francis had grabbed a folded towel from a pile upon a shelf, and he wordlessly handed it to her. She looked up at him and clutched the towel.
“I’ll be in the room,” Francis said.
He walked out of the bathroom and closed the door behind him. Noemí dried herself and put on her robe.
When she stepped out of the bathroom Dr. Cummins was standing by the bed and gestured for her to sit down on it. He took Noemí’s pulse, checked her heartbeat, then opened a bottle with rubbing alcohol and dampened a ball of cotton with it. He pressed the piece of cotton against her temple. Noemí had forgotten about the scratch she’d incurred, and she winced.
“How is she?” Francis asked. He was standing behind the doctor, looking anxious.
“She’ll be fine. There’s nothing but a couple of scrapes. It won’t even necessitate a bandage. But it shouldn’t have happened. I thought you had explained to her the situation already,” the doctor said. “If she’d damaged her face Howard would have been very sore about it.”
“You shouldn’t be mad at him. Francis did explain that I’m in a house full of incestuous monsters and their toadies,” Noemí replied.
Dr. Cummins stilled his fingers and frowned. “Well. You haven’t lost that charming way of addressing your elders. Fill a glass with water, Francis,” the doctor said as he continued dabbing at her hairline. “The girl is dehydrated.”
“I can manage,” she replied, snatching away the piece of cotton and pressing it against her head.
The doctor shrugged and tossed his stethoscope in his black bag. “Francis was supposed to talk to you, but he must not have made himself clear last night. You can’t leave this house, Miss Taboada. No one can. It won’t let you. If you try to run off, you’ll suffer another attack like the one you had.”
“How can a house do that?”
“It can. That is all that matters.”
Francis approached the bed with the glass of water and handed it to her. Noemí took a couple of sips, carefully eyeing both men. Cummins’s face caught her eye; there was a detail she had not noticed before and which now seemed obvious.
“You’re related to them, aren’t you? You’re another Doyle.”
“Distantly, which is why I live in the village, managing the family’s affairs,” the doctor replied.
Distantly. That sounded like a joke. She didn’t think there was any distance in the Doyle family tree. It didn’t branch at all. Virgil had said he’d married Dr. Cummins’s daughter, which meant that, to boot, they’d attempted to pull that “distant” relation back into their bosom.
He wants you to be part of our family, Francis had said. Noemí clutched the glass with both hands.
“You must have your breakfast. Francis, bring the tray here,” the doctor commanded.
“I’ve lost my appetite.”
“Don’t be silly. Francis, the tray.”
“Is the tea warm? I’ll very much enjoy tossing a scalding cup in the good doctor’s face,” she said lightly.
The doctor took off his glasses and began cleaning them with a handkerchief, his brow furrowed. “It seems you are determined to be difficult today. I shouldn’t be surprised. Women can be terribly mercurial.”
“Was your daughter difficult?” Noemí asked. The doctor raised his head sharply and stared at her, and she knew she’d struck a nerve. “You gave them your own daughter.”
“I have no idea what you are talking about,” he muttered.
“Virgil said she ran away, but it’s not true. No one leaves this place, you said so. It would never have let her go. She’s dead, isn’t she? Did he kill her?”
Noemí and the doctor stared at each other. The doctor stood up stiffly, snatching the glass from her hands and setting it on the night table.
“Perhaps if you’d let us speak, the two of us alone,” Francis told the older man.
Dr. Cummins clasped Francis by the arm and gave Noemí a narrow look. “Yes. You must talk sense into her. He won’t tolerate this behavior, you know it.”
Before exiting the room, the doctor paused at the foot of the bed, his medical bag held tight in one hand, and addressed Noemí. “My daughter died in childbirth, if you must know. She couldn’t give the family the child they needed. Howard thinks you and Catalina will be ha
rdier. Different blood. We’ll see.”
He closed the door behind him.
Francis grabbed the silver tray and brought it to the bed. Noemí clutched the covers. “You really must eat,” he told her.
“Isn’t it poisoned?” she asked.
He leaned down, set the tray upon her lap, whispering in Spanish to her ear. “The food you’ve had, the tea, they’ve been laced with something, yes. But the egg is fine, start eating. I’ll tell you.”
“What—”
“In Spanish,” he said. “He can hear, through the walls, through the house, but he doesn’t speak Spanish. He won’t understand. Keep your voice low and eat, I’m serious. You are dehydrated and you vomited so much last night.”
Noemí stared at him. Slowly she grabbed a spoon and tapped the hard-boiled egg’s shell without taking her eyes off him.
“I want to help you,” he said, “but it’s difficult. You’ve seen what the house can do.”
“Keep you inside, apparently. Is it true I can’t leave?”
“It can induce you to do certain things and stop you from doing others.”
“Control your mind.”
“In a way. It’s more rudimentary than that. There’s certain instincts it triggers.”
“I couldn’t breathe.”
“I know.”
Slowly Noemí nibbled at a bit of egg. When she was done he pointed at the toast, nodding, but shook his head at the jam.
“There must be a way to get out of here.”
“There might be.” He took out a little flask from his pocket and showed it to her. “Recognize this?”
“It’s the medicine I gave my cousin. What are you doing with it?”
“Dr. Cummins told me to get rid of it after that episode, but I didn’t. The fungus, it’s in the air, and my mother makes sure it’s in your food. That’s how, slowly, it gets a hold of you. But it’s very sensitive to certain triggers. It doesn’t really like light much, nor certain scents.”
“My cigarettes,” she said, snapping her fingers. “It irritates the house. And this tincture, it must irritate it too.”
Did the healer in town know this? Or had it been a happy accident? Catalina had figured out the tincture had an effect on the house, that was certain. Accidental or intentional, her cousin had discovered the key even if she had been prevented from turning it.
“It does more than that,” Francis said. “It interferes with it. You take this tincture, the house, the fungus, will loosen its hold on you.”
“How can you be sure about that?”
“Catalina. She tried to run away, but Virgil and Arthur caught her and brought her back. They found the draught she’d been taking and determined it was affecting the house’s control on her, so they took it away. But they didn’t realize this had been going on for a little while, and she must have asked someone in town to post a letter for her.”
Catalina, clever girl. She’d devised a fail-safe mechanism and had summoned help. Unfortunately, now Noemí, the would-be rescuer, was also trapped.
She reached for the flask, but he caught her hand and shook his head. “Remember what happened to your cousin? Take too much at once and you’ll have a seizure.”
“Then it’s useless.”
“Far from it. You’ll have to drink a little bit each time. Look, Dr. Cummins is here for a reason. Great Uncle Howard is going to die. There’s no stopping it. The fungus extends your life, but it can’t keep you going forever. His body will give way soon, and afterward he’ll begin the transmigration. He will take possession of Virgil’s body. When that happens, when he dies, everyone will be distracted. They’ll be busy clustering around both of them. And the house will be weakened.”
“When will this happen?”
“It can’t be too long,” Francis said. “You’ve seen Howard.”
Noemí didn’t really want to remember what she’d seen. She put down the bit of egg she had been nibbling and frowned.
“He wants you to be part of the family. Go along with it, be patient, and I’ll get you out of here. There are tunnels, they lead to the cemetery, and I think I can hide supplies in them.”
“What does ‘go along with it’ mean exactly?” Noemí asked, because Francis was evading her eyes.
She caught his chin with one hand, made him look at her. He stood perfectly still, holding his breath.
“He’d like you to marry me. He’d like you to have children with me. He wants you to be one of us,” Francis said at last.
“And if I say no? What then?”
“He’ll have his way.”
“He’ll carve my mind out, like the servants? Or simply rape me?” she asked.
“It won’t come to that,” Francis muttered.
“Why?”
“Because he enjoys controlling people in other ways. It would be too coarse. He let my father go to town for years, he let Catalina go to church. He even let Virgil and my mother get far away from town and find spouses. He knows he needs people to obey his will and do his bidding, and they must welcome it, otherwise it’s too exhausting.”
“And he can’t control them all the time,” Noemí ventured. “Ruth was able to grab a rifle, after all, and Catalina tried to tell me the truth.”
“That’s right. And Catalina wouldn’t reveal who’d given her the tonic, no matter how much Howard tried to wrestle that information from her.”
Plus the miners had organized a strike. As much as Howard Doyle would like to believe himself a god, he couldn’t push and force everyone to submit to him every hour of the day. And yet, in decades past, he must have been able to subtly manipulate a great number of people, and when that wasn’t enough he could kill them or make them disappear, like with Benito.
“Outright confrontation won’t work,” Francis said.
Noemí examined the butter knife and knew he was right. What could she do? Kick and punch and she’d end up right where she was, perhaps even worse off. “If I agree to go along with this charade, then you must get Catalina out too.”
Francis did not reply, but she could guess that he wasn’t enjoying the idea of springing two people out by the way he frowned.
“I can’t leave her behind,” she said, clutching the hand in which he still held the bottle. “You must also give her the tincture, you must also break her free.”
“Yes, fine. Keep your voice down.”
She let go of his hand and lowered her voice. “You must promise, on your life.”
“I’m promising. Now, shall we give it a try?” he asked, taking out the bottle’s glass stopper. “It’ll make you a little sleepy, but you probably need the rest.”
“Virgil can see my dreams,” she muttered, pressing her knuckles against her mouth for a moment. “Won’t he know, if he can see my dreams? Won’t he know what I’m thinking?”
“They’re not really dreams. It’s the gloom. But be careful when you’re there.”
“I don’t know if I can trust you,” she said. “Why would you help me?”
He was unlike his cousin in a thousand tiny ways, with his slim hands and his weak mouth, spindly where Virgil was solid forcefulness. He was young and wan, and infected with kindness. But who could say if it was all for show, if he couldn’t sink into ruthless indifference. After all, nothing in this place was what it seemed. There were secrets upon secrets.
She touched the back of her neck, the place where Virgil’s fingers had dug into her hair.
Francis twirled the glass stopper in one hand. It caught a stray ray of light, filtering through the curtains; a tiny prism, painting a rainbow on the edge of her bed.
“There’s a cicada fungus. Massospora cicadina. I remember reading a journal article which discussed its appearance: the fungus sprouts along the abdomen of the cicada. It turns it into a mass of yellow powder.
The journal said the cicadas, which had been so grossly infected, were still ‘singing,’ as their body was consumed from within. Singing, calling for a mate, half dead. Can you imagine?” Francis said. “You’re right, I do have a choice. I’m not going to end my life singing a tune, pretending everything is fine.”
He ceased toying with the glass stopper and glanced at her.
“You managed to pretend so far.”
She stared at him, and he stared back at her gravely. “Yes,” he said. “And now you’re here and I can’t anymore.”
She watched him, silent, as he poured out a minute amount of liquid onto a spoon. Noemí swallowed the tincture. It was bitter. He offered her the napkin that had been set by her plate, and Noemí wiped her mouth clean.
“Let me take this away,” Francis said, placing the bottle back in his pocket and picking up her tray. She touched his arm, and he stopped.
“Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me,” he replied. “I should have spoken sooner, but I’m a coward.”
She pressed her head back against the pillows after that and let the drowsiness take over. Later—she wasn’t sure how much later—she heard a rustling of cloth and sat up. Ruth Doyle was perched at the foot of her bed, looking down at the floor.
Not Ruth. A memory? A ghost? Not quite a ghost. She realized that what she had been seeing, the voice whispering to her, urging her to open her eyes, was the mind of Ruth, which still nestled in the gloom, in the crevices and mold-covered walls. There must be other minds, bits of persons, hidden underneath the wallpaper, but none as solid, as tangible as Ruth. Except, perhaps, for that golden presence that she still could not identify and that she could not even declare a person. It didn’t feel like a person. Not like Ruth.
“Can you hear me?” she asked. “Or are you like the grooves in a vinyl record?”
She wasn’t afraid of the girl. She was a young woman, abused and abandoned. Her presence wasn’t malicious, merely anxious.
“I’m not sorry,” Ruth said.
“My name is Noemí. I’ve seen you before, but I’m not sure you understand me.”
“Not sorry.”
Noemí didn’t think the girl was going to offer her more than those scant words, but suddenly Ruth lifted her head and stared at her.
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