Chapter XXIII
XXIII
Alba
This possession, she remembered.
She remembered feeling as if her voice had been wrenched from her clenched fists, no matter how hard she fought to keep it.
She felt as if every one of her fingers had been shattered.
She felt her jaw working but heard no sound coming out; she felt a mist rising in her, filling her lungs, choking her, moving from her chest into her face, up her nose and stinging as if it were water rushing back into her skull.
She heard it .
She heard Elías, too—a voice rippling as if through a deep underground cavern, resonant with echo and movement.
But it was it that filled her skull and jerked her around as if she were a puppet on strings.
This was what happened when she woke with her bare feet aching and dirty from having walked over gravel. Her limbs animated by a spirit that was not her own. Seized, stolen, wrenched from her.
That’s what it was: theft .
A need for justice burned in her. It wasn’t fair. This was her body.
Was this what the demon had done to kill Romero? Seized Alba as she slept and spilled blood with her hands?
It filled her with revulsion. With a sense of helplessness and despair. Elías and the demon carried on, out there, in the realm of bodies and voices, but in here, behind her eyes, trapped in the fog of the demon’s captivity, it was all Alba could do to stay aware. Time moved sluggishly.
Was this how defeat happened? With the desire to rest? Was this how her soul would be damned to eternity in Hell—her giving up to a demon because she was tired ?
She forced herself to look, to listen, and when the entrapment broke, with a booming begone , Alba flooded through her own body with a flush of ecstasy.
Air was sharp and cool against her skin; every inch of her tingled as if it were a limb woken from bloodless sleep. She could levitate, if she wanted to. She could burst into flame.
Elías knelt on the ground before her, spent, bright blood streaming from his nose. When he took her handkerchief, it was with a wariness that bruised her.
He was afraid of her.
But he took her offered hand and allowed her to help him to his feet. He dabbed at his nose and winced. It had stopped bleeding, but his upper lip was streaked with blood; the handkerchief was a lurid masterpiece. He folded it up, but not before she caught hints of dark clots.
“We should speak to him now,” Elías said. His voice trembled with exertion. “The priest.”
This took her by surprise; it must have shown on her face, for he continued: “When siesta is over and the others wake, there will be no getting him alone to speak privately until after nightfall. And I do not want to wait until it is dark.”
Sleep had fled her mind. She was restless. She could run to the mouth of the mine and back without her breath hitching, without breaking a sweat. Her body thrummed with life, and it was hers .
“But shouldn’t you rest?” she wondered. She gestured to a chair by the hearth. “Sit with me,” she said. “Catch your breath.”
His eyes flitted to where she pointed, and a flash of yearning swept under his expression.
“No,” he said slowly. “We ought to go now.”
Did he not trust her? Did he worry that it was the demon who wanted him to stay, to prevent him from seeing Bartolomé?
It was a wise fear. This she had no choice but to admit.
—
The euphoria of autonomy over her limbs faded as they walked back to the house and exhaustion set in, gray and itchy and heavy as a penitent’s hair shirt.
It seemed as if miles stretched between them and the house; with the siesta ensuring that the Monterrubios and Alba’s parents alike were resting, they did not bother to hide.
It was as if each step sapped the flare of energy that had animated her in the workshop; she had burned bright and burned out, and she was again a husk. Dry, bloodless, parched.
She followed Elías down the hall, for he had murmured that he knew the way to the priest’s room—he had seen Carlos disappear there in the evenings.
Elías stopped them before a door and raised his hand to knock.
She put a hand on his arm to stop him—for fear coursed through her, sour and swift as nausea.
He looked down at her in surprise; she loosened her grip so that her knuckles were no longer pale but held his arm down all the same.
“What is it?”
“We should go back,” she whispered. “This is a mistake.”
He frowned, searching her eyes—for the demon?
Was it the demon that was causing her to act this way? She did not think so—it felt like her own force that animated her; the taste of her fear was familiar. The sudden sense of no in her gut—that was not the demon. Or was it?
She wanted to trust herself, but she could not.
The priessssssssst.
Her breath caught. The demon had shown its cards. She released Elías’s arm as if it had burned her.
“It doesn’t want us to see him.” She could feel the waver in her voice before she heard it; it sounded childish to her ears. Weak. Hot tears burned the corners of her eyes; she batted them away. This thing within her had stolen her confidence. She felt adrift without it. She felt unlike herself.
“I am afraid too,” Elías whispered. “But I am here. You are not alone.”
A tear rolled from the corner of her eye; she swept it away with a fierce, proud gesture. “Knock.”
Elías did, twice and softly.
A shuffle from within; some movement toward the door. The door opened a crack.
From where she stood off to the side, she could not see Bartolomé’s expression. She regretted this slightly—Elías, with his bloodied nose and hair falling out of its leather tie, was a sight. She wagered she looked no better: exhausted, shaking, her own hair pulling itself loose from its plait.
“Padre,” Elías said. “I’m sorry to disturb you. We wish to speak with you, and…it is urgent.”
The door opened more, and Bartolomé peered out into the hall, looking for the we to whom Elías had referred.
He saw Alba.
He leaped back from the doorway in fright. A solid thunk ; a hiss of pain. A mangled joder . When he opened the door and nodded for them to step inside, he held a hand to the side of his head.
A flush of mist shot through her skull like steam escaping the lid of a boiling pot.
Again , it hissed. Harder. Smash. Bleeeeeeed.
Her face stung behind her nose and eyes, as if she had inhaled water, but it relented and cleared.
“Please, come in,” Bartolomé said through his grimace.
He ushered them inside without another word and shut the door softly behind them.
His room had kept the austere look of the hacienda de minas before Mamá had descended with half of Zacatecas’ interior adornments in tow: simple wooden furniture, plain white walls stained, near the fireplace, with years of soot.
A single rug over the swept stone floor.
A solitary chair by the hearth, which he gestured to for Alba.
Elías lingered behind her right shoulder, a handsbreadth away.
Bartolomé produced a stool from near his bed and pulled it beneath him. He sat and faced Alba, leaning forward and watching her face carefully.
She wanted to split her skin and flee, to rush out of this room and get out of his presence. She stood suddenly, hands twitching at her sides.
“Never mind, Padre,” she said, words jumbled and barreling over one another to get through her teeth. “It’s not important. I’m sorry to have disturbed you.”
A hand on her shoulder.
“Let’s talk for a moment,” Elías said. His tone was soft, even, as if he were calming a spooked animal.
She could feel Bartolomé watching this interaction, eyes moving from her face to the hand on her shoulder—so familiar, as if it belonged there—to Elías and back again.
Years ago, Papá had owned a white dog, one with pale eyes that were both shifty and watchful—they were as empty as the sky at noon, clear as a mirror.
They were not eyes that inspired trust. The dog was already old and impatient when she was a child; it nipped her when it perceived her as being underfoot, which was often. Sometimes it drew blood.
“Will you sit?” Elías asked.
She did not want to sit. She wanted to wrench her head to the side and bite off his fingers, hear the crunch of bone between her teeth and—
The mist was in her face again, stinging her nose, clouding her eyesight. Her throat felt as if it were closing, as if it were turning to stone and twisting tight, tight, tight .
“Alba?” Elías’s voice came from far away.
This was her body. Hers . She would be the master of it.
“I am not well, Padre,” she said. Her voice vibrated with an undercurrent not her own, something dark, something that tasted of below , that was tinny on her palate. She swallowed.
“Physically or spiritually?” Bartolomé asked.
“Both, all of it,” she said. “I need help.”
It sounded like babble to her ears, but she said it all the same, and it felt freeing to do so. Her throat had loosened; it felt easy to swallow again.
But she had let down her guard too early.
For when Bartolomé asked her to describe what the matter was and Alba opened her mouth to reply, she was seized with a violent shaking.
Elías lifted his hand from her shoulder, mouth parted in shock, and looked at Bartolomé as if to say this isn’t me .
The walls bent. The room was distorted, a kaleidoscope of color and rattling. She was a bag of dry bones, shaking and shaking. Clatter and smash and—
Firm hands on her shoulders.
“Alba,” the tall man said. “Alba, can you hear me?”
She wanted everything to go dark. The priest had a rosary in his hand and the tall man was holding her too tightly, as if he would wrench her toward the priest. She had to get away, she had to get to the darkness, to stone and water, for there she could lick her wounds and recover, there she could plot—
“In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen,” the priest murmured. First quietly, then again, and again, with more force, a muscle in his jaw flexing.