Mexican Gothic(70)

“I’ve seen and dreamt very strange things. Are you telling me the house has done that? Because there’s a fungus running inside of it?”

“Yes.”

“Why would it do that to me?”

“It wouldn’t be intentional. I guess it’s in its nature.”

Every damn vision she had experienced had been terrifying.

Whatever this thing’s nature was, she couldn’t begin to understand it. A nightmare. That’s what it was. A living nightmare, sins and malevolent secrets fastened together.

“Then I was right about your house being haunted. And my cousin is not insane, she’s simply seen this gloom.”

Francis nodded, and Noemí chuckled. No wonder Francis had been so agitated when she had suggested there was a rational explanation to Catalina’s strange behavior and her talk of ghosts. Not that she would have guessed it was all connected to mushrooms.

She glanced at the oil lamp burning by her bedside and realized she had no idea how much time had passed. How long she’d been in the gloom. It could have been hours, it could have been days. She couldn’t hear the patter of the rain anymore.

“What did Howard Doyle do to me?” she asked.

“The fungus is in the walls of the house and it’s in the air. You don’t realize it, but you’re breathing it in. Slowly, it has an effect on you. But if you come in contact with it in other ways, the effect can accelerate.”

“What did he do to me?” she repeated.

“Most people who come in contact with this fungus die. That’s what happened to the workers in the mine. It killed them, some faster than others. But obviously not everyone perishes. Some people are more resistant to it. If they don’t die, though, it can still affect their mind.”

“Like Catalina?”

“Sometimes a little and sometimes worse than Catalina. It can burn out your own self. Our servants, you might have noticed they don’t talk much. There’s very little of them left. It’s almost like their mind has been carved out.”

“That’s not possible.”

Francis shook his head. “Have you ever known an alcoholic? It affects their brain, and so does this.”

“Are you telling me that’s what’s going to happen to Catalina? To me?”

“No!” Francis said quickly. “No, no. They’re a special case, Great Uncle Howard calls them his bondservants, and the miners, they were mulch. But you can have a symbiotic relationship with the fungus. None of that will happen to you.”

“What will happen to me?”

Francis’s hands were still firmly in his pockets, but he was fidgeting. She could tell, the fingers clenching and unclenching. He was looking down at the cover on her bed.

“I’ve told you about the gloom. I haven’t told you about the bloodline. We’re special. The fungus bonds with us, it’s not noxious.

It can even make us immortal. Howard has lived many lives, in many different bodies. He transfers his consciousness to the gloom and then from the gloom he can live again, in the body of one of his children.”

“He possesses his children?” Noemí said.

“No…he becomes…they become him…they become someone new.

Only the children, it goes down the bloodline. And for generations the bloodline has been kept isolated, to ensure we were all able to interact with the fungus, that we would keep this symbiotic relationship. No outsiders.”

“Incest. He married two women who were sisters, and he was going to marry Ruth to her cousin, and before that he must have…his sisters,” Noemí said, suddenly remembering the vision she’d had.

The two young women. “He had two sisters. God, he had children with them.”

“Yes.”

The Doyle look. All the people in those portraits. “How far back?”

Noemí asked. “How old is he? How many generations?”

“I don’t know. Three hundred years, maybe more.”

“Three hundred years. Marrying his own kin, having children with them, then transferring his mind into one of their bodies. Over and over again. And all of you? You allow this?”

“We have no choice. He’s a god.”

“You have a damn choice! And that sick fuck is not a god!”

Francis stared at her. He had taken his hands out of his pockets and was now clutching them together. He looked tired. Slowly he slid a hand up and touched his forehead; he shook his head.

“He is to us,” he said. “And he wants you to be part of our family.”

“Then that’s why he poured that black sludge down my throat.”

“They were afraid you were going to leave. They couldn’t let you do that. Now you won’t be able to go anywhere.”

“I don’t want to be part of your god damn family, Francis,” she said. “And believe me, I’m going to go back home and I’m going to—”

“It won’t let you go. My father, I don’t think I told you about him, did I?”

She had been looking at the black marks on the wall, the mold in the corner of her room, but she slowly turned her head to look at him. He had taken out a little portrait from his pocket. This is what he clutched in his hand, she thought. The little picture nestling in his jacket’s pocket.