Chapter XIII #2
He picked up his pace. “?Senorita!”
He caught a glimpse of her face through her hair as he drew alongside her. It was contorted; she was in pain.
Her eyelids were shut.
His heart stuttered as it caught itself; he loosened a breathy half laugh.
Sleepwalking he understood. He was always careful to take Mamá’s elbow gently during her episodes; the trick was to guide her back to bed still sleeping, for if she were to wake and find herself standing in a strange place, she would burst into breathless weeping.
He could not guide Alba back to the house without waking her. It was too far; there was not enough time. The longer she stayed out here, the more certain he was that she would fall ill from the cold.
“You need to wake up, senorita,” he said. “I am sorry.”
Bracing himself for the shock and the weeping, he touched a hand to her shoulder.
She whirled to face him.
His hand was ripped from her shoulder with a force that her slender frailty belied; before he could cry out in surprise, before he could so much as draw breath, she was facing him, she was upon him with anger in her stance, and she was hissing, hissing like a cat, and—
She had no eyes.
Dark holes gaped in her face like a corpse’s, like a skeleton’s, black and deep and endless and growing and gorging themselves on darkness.
He recoiled.
He was not seeing things. The moonlight on her hair and skin was real, so, too, were the shadows cast by her cheekbones.
He could see the lines of taut skin at the edges of those massive sockets, waxen and tight.
Her lips pulled back from teeth in a snarl.
The glint of spittle on her teeth was real .
Invisible hands yanked her shoulders back, one at a time; she jerked and shuddered. A delicate foam seeped through her teeth, gathering at the drawn corners of her mouth.
She jerked again, her chin lifting, her arms flying to her chest and twitching there, her wrists limp. The cords of her neck jumped and tightened.
She released a wail like a bat’s cry, high, piercing. Enough to send Elías’s hands clapping over his ears with a gasp of pain.
Then, it was as if a rope snapped: Her body dropped.
She collapsed on the rocky path, catching herself on her forearms. Hair poured over her back. It shimmered like mercury with each of her heaving, ragged breaths.
He stood mute. He did not bend down. His heart hammered as if he had been running.
Her hair slipped over her shoulders and obscured her face from him. He could not bring himself to face that lack of eyes, but he could not look away, could not tear his frozen body from the earth to run—
She lifted her head.
Her eyes were soft, glistening with tears that rolled down her face. Her arms trembled violently; her elbows smeared dark blood on the front of her nightdress. Her chest rose and fell with sharp, shallow breaths that shook her whole body.
He was going mad. Losing his mind to mercury poisoning already. He had to be. It was the only explanation.
He fell to a crouch before her, scanning her for further injury.
“Senorita,” he said, ignoring how his voice cracked over the word.
She lifted her head to him. He hated how he braced, how his whole body wanted to flinch away.
He used to dread the moment when Mamá woke in the midst of sleepwalking.
When he saw himself reflected in her eyes as a stranger, something to fear, a long-clawed monster ready to seize her soul at the fragile crossroads of dreaming and waking.
Alba might shriek and push away from him—and who could blame her?
He was a stranger, and she was in a strange place far from home, far from even the meager comforts offered by Casa Calavera.
Calavera, calavera. The eyes gaped hungry and black, endless, famished, coming for him—
“Are you all right?” he asked.
She was not. She was still sobbing, but as she held his gaze, she caught her breath. She inhaled, first shallowly, then again, and deeper, as if she were steadying herself.
As if seeing him made the night less frightening.
“Elías,” she said, and it sounded like relief.
His heart turned over.
Oh . Somewhere in the back of his head rang a detached, concerned voice; it was thin and distant. That’s probably not good .
It was easy to bat away.
He took her hands in his. “They’re like ice,” he cried.
She looked past him, at where they were: on a rocky path halfway between the house and the mouth of the mine, nothing around them but biting wind and sallow starlight. Her breathing quickened; soon it would be racing out of control again. “I…where…?”
“You were sleepwalking.”
She tugged at her hands; he released them. They shook as they rose to her face, as tears slicked her pale cheeks afresh.
The wind cut at his shirt and bit his skin. She needed to warm up, to be protected from the wind, and immediately. She was barefoot, for the love of God.
The workshop was not the coziest place, but it was protected from the wind. There were embers. There was more firewood.
“Come inside,” he said. “Can you stand?”
She shook like a leaf barely attached to a dead, wintry branch. She could scarcely keep her hands covering her face; they knocked clumsily against each other.
Without waiting another moment, he slipped his arms under Alba’s legs and around her back. Her skin was so cold it burned where it met his arms and chest. With a grunt, he lifted her, and, holding her tightly to him, retraced his path to the workshop.
The valley went quiet. A sensation slipped over his arms like a ghostly brush of fingertips, raising hairs and gooseflesh in its wake. His boots slipped on stones in his haste; he set his teeth hard and walked as solidly and as quickly as he could.
They were too exposed. Each breath he drew tasted like danger, though he could not say why, nor what caused this. The valley was deserted; there was nothing but them and the night.
The night had never frightened him like this before.
But he had never before experienced a night like this.