6. Guardian Angel #3
The angel Nicholas told her that he would make sure neither of them would resist. At midnight, he brought Dad and Inés to the room they shared.
He seemed to have taken away their will.
With a single gesture he had them get on their knees and pray, and they did.
Then he sent Marisa to have a talk with the landlord.
“We must not be interrupted,” he explained.
She tried out an excuse: “My family and I started attending a religious center, and we’re going to say some prayers. ”
“Twelve hours,” Nicholas said, “until the final Purification.” He instructed her to close all the doors and windows and to turn on all the taps in the house: they would need a lot of water.
“Flowing, flowing,” he said. And they would need to pray.
The three of them holding hands, naked in the bedroom, the mattresses on the floor.
Marisa could feel the force, and she saw Nicholas’s feet hanging at the level of her eyes.
Now he gave off a black light, a shadow that outlined his body like the charcoal silhouette that had killed Mom.
Nicholas himself had lit candles in all the upstairs rooms and on the ground floor.
He spoke, but Marisa didn’t understand him, except when he gave her curt orders.
Psalms, he would command. And Marisa and her sister and her father prayed, with the Bible open.
All the wicked of the earth you discard like dross;
therefore I love your statutes.
My flesh trembles in fear of you;
I stand in awe of your laws.
I have done what is righteous and just
“Justice for Mom—be gone, Satan,” Marisa screamed.
She cried when she saw her father was excited, even though every time he tried to approach Inés he received a kick from the angel, who was floating in the air, wrapped in black light.
Dad’s face, the doll’s face, started to get deformed from the blows, but the angel kept going: My dear, this is not real, when it’s over, you will have your family back, as before, as it should be.
They prayed, holding hands, until the angel stopped them and enfolded Dad and Inés in his arms again: he was so strong; he could lift them both at once.
They were as though dead, so lax that excrement and urine dripped from between their legs, and soon the whole hallway reeked, in spite of the candles and aromatic herbs.
“I’m going to hold him on his feet,” the angel said.
And Marisa knew she had to be brave.
Inés merely looked on, though she didn’t seem to see.
Marisa went to the kitchen and came back with a knife, the first one she found, a small knife with a wooden handle and serrated blade. She looked at the angel, who had closed his eyes. And she stabbed the knife into the doll’s face. Once, twice.
It will come out through the chest, the angel said, though his lips did not move.
“Daddy, I’m sorry,” Marisa said. She used the knife to draw a circle in the flaccid skin of his chest.
And now the neck, the angel commanded, and he dropped Dad. Marisa received the jet of blood on her face and slipped in the blood that covered the floor. She felt the hot liquid drench her groin, and with it she felt an unfamiliar shiver. This is what Inés feels, she thought, when Dad is the doll.
Again in the face, to get the doll out. Those stiff eyelids, she thought, and she yanked them off.
Dad’s mouth was open. Was he screaming? She could only hear the angel, who was now beside Inés, holding her up.
Her sister seemed to be awake. It didn’t matter.
The angel dropped her. Inés fell into the blood and rolled around in it. She was laughing.
Lucifer in the face, the angel said. Do it!
And Marisa knelt and bit the doll to tear it out once and for all, once and for all.
Again, she felt a hot wetness between her legs.
It’s blood, it’s blood, she thought, and she spat out flesh, cheek, lips.
She turned around, teeth clenched, and she saw the doll in Inés’s face.
Inés was smearing the blood over her breasts, so dirty, so impure, whore, Mother-murderer, whore.
Then the angel opened his eyes, and his shadow outline bellowed. Intruders, Marisa knew. How had they gotten the door open?
“Be gone! This is not real!” the angel cried. When the intruders tried to stop Marisa, the angel intervened. With a swipe of his hand, he sent them flying across the room, over and over. Marisa still had the knife raised high.
“I am the Purifier!” the angel screamed. “This cannot be stopped!”
But Marisa felt her knees go slack. She tried to stave off the intruders who wanted to bind her hands behind her back; she struggled to lunge and bury the knife in Inés’s face, which was the face of the doll.
It was in her sister, but it was also everywhere, and it was screaming something impossible to understand, something that made the black light around the angel disappear, the angel who was no longer floating, whose feet now touched the floor, whose head was down, and who was saying, Stupid, weakling, but without any rage, now resigned.
Marisa looked at the intruders and said, “The devil was in Dad. Mommy, Mommy, now Daddy will be good again.”
The intruders pushed her toward the front door. She screamed the angel’s name, but there was no reply. The last thing she saw, before a blanket was wrapped around her and she was blinded by the midday sun, was the blood-spattered ceiling, and the doll’s laughing eyes in the eyes of her sister.