Page 76 of The Hacienda
Of course he did not question. Men do not trouble themselves with women’s bodies, save when they can be of use to serve or to sate them.
I did not relax.
Not as I prepared my toilet and loosened my still-damp hair from its knot, not as I fussed over my undergarments in the small chamber adjoining our room in a half-hearted attempt to maintain my lie. Not as I returned to the room and saw he had extinguished all the candles and already lay down in bed.
It was too dark. This was not a natural dark. It was too thick. It curled too intimately over the bed. I needed copal. I stepped toward my vanity; the floorboards creaked under my bare feet. I could not—
“Leave it,” Rodolfo murmured, half asleep. “I can’t sleep with light.”
I froze. Should I try to light the copal, or would that irritate him? It was the only thing I had, the one piece of safety.
“Come to bed,” he said.
My feet were like lead as I trod across the floorboards and slipped into bed. I lay stiffly on my back, neither moving toward him nor away.
He drifted off immediately. The rise and fall of his chest was rhythmic, slow. So incongruous with the drumming of my pulse in my ears as I stared up at the wooden rafters.
Somewhere between one blink and the next, I tripped into uneasy dreaming.
The air thickened with smoke. I was in my house in the capital, my father’s house. Red light leaped and danced around me, wild as a tempest, tearing at the dark plumes. The house was on fire; I knew with the perfect, terrible certainty of dreaming that Papá and Mamá were deep in the house. They were in danger.
I called for them, but smoke choked me, swallowing my screams, slinking tight around my throat like a clawed hand. I stumbled forward, but my legs were too heavy. My head was too heavy. The floor came up to meet meand I was pinned to the floorboards, flames licking through their cracks from beneath, smoke clouding my vision. I had to get to my parents. I had to. But I could not move.
Somewhere in the house, a door slammed.
I wrenched myself awake. In this house, in San Isidro, I sucked in lungfuls of air crisp and free of smoke. But that aircrackled. It was alive, alive with the fey energy of kindling about to catch.
Another door slammed. Closer, this time.
My heart echoed the act against my ribs.
There was no one in the house. No one but myself and Rodolfo, who turned in his sleep, murmuring something unintelligible.
Slam.
I was going to die in this house. The knowing swept through me, heavy with grief, cold and oracular as the whispered words of a saint.
San Isidro was my tomb.
But not tonight.
I threw the blankets off my legs. The room was black as the Devil’s shadow. I could not see my hands before me as I pawed desperately for matches. Two strikes; light spat into being. My reflection peered back at me as I held flame to wick.
Yellow flesh peeled away from my face, dry as parchment. Like the corpse at the foot of the stairs, it stretched too thin, revealing the hollows of my eyes and a line of too many teeth stretching back to my ear.
I shut my eyes. It was a vision, like the night of the failed exorcism; it could not hurt me.
Or could it?
Ana Luisa was dead, her heart stopped by fright. Andrés was snatched from the air and flung against the wall of the green parlor. In the capilla, the blood on his face did not vanish. Injury inflicted by the house did not vanish like the visions as dawn streaked the skies above San Isidro’s roof. Death would not dissipate like a nightmare.
I stood and stepped toward the doorway. Reached for the handle, hands shaking. I did not care if Rodolfo woke.
If I stayed, this house would kill me.
I opened the door and fled.
Darkness clawed at me; cold hands yanked my hair, pawed my nightdress. Drumming erupted beneath my bare feet, thundering through the floor and following me to the head of the stairs. Unseen hands planted on my shoulders. Cold as ice. Hard as death.
