Mexican Gothic(76)

“I want to help you,” he said, “but it’s difficult. You’ve seen what the house can do.”

“Keep you inside, apparently. Is it true I can’t leave?”

“It can induce you to do certain things and stop you from doing others.”

“Control your mind.”

“In a way. It’s more rudimentary than that. There’s certain instincts it triggers.”

“I couldn’t breathe.”

“I know.”

Slowly Noemí nibbled at a bit of egg. When she was done he pointed at the toast, nodding, but shook his head at the jam.

“There must be a way to get out of here.”

“There might be.” He took out a little flask from his pocket and showed it to her. “Recognize this?”

“It’s the medicine I gave my cousin. What are you doing with it?”

“Dr. Cummins told me to get rid of it after that episode, but I didn’t. The fungus, it’s in the air, and my mother makes sure it’s in your food. That’s how, slowly, it gets a hold of you. But it’s very sensitive to certain triggers. It doesn’t really like light much, nor certain scents.”

“My cigarettes,” she said, snapping her fingers. “It irritates the house. And this tincture, it must irritate it too.”

Did the healer in town know this? Or had it been a happy accident? Catalina had figured out the tincture had an effect on the house, that was certain. Accidental or intentional, her cousin had discovered the key even if she had been prevented from turning it.

“It does more than that,” Francis said. “It interferes with it. You take this tincture, the house, the fungus, will loosen its hold on you.”

“How can you be sure about that?”

“Catalina. She tried to run away, but Virgil and Arthur caught her and brought her back. They found the draught she’d been taking and determined it was affecting the house’s control on her, so they took it away. But they didn’t realize this had been going on for a little while, and she must have asked someone in town to post a letter for her.”

Catalina, clever girl. She’d devised a fail-safe mechanism and had summoned help. Unfortunately, now Noemí, the would-be rescuer, was also trapped.

She reached for the flask, but he caught her hand and shook his head. “Remember what happened to your cousin? Take too much at once and you’ll have a seizure.”

“Then it’s useless.”

“Far from it. You’ll have to drink a little bit each time. Look, Dr. Cummins is here for a reason. Great Uncle Howard is going to die. There’s no stopping it. The fungus extends your life, but it can’t keep you going forever. His body will give way soon, and afterward he’ll begin the transmigration. He will take possession of Virgil’s body. When that happens, when he dies, everyone will be distracted.

They’ll be busy clustering around both of them. And the house will be weakened.”

“When will this happen?”

“It can’t be too long,” Francis said. “You’ve seen Howard.”

Noemí didn’t really want to remember what she’d seen. She put down the bit of egg she had been nibbling and frowned.

“He wants you to be part of the family. Go along with it, be patient, and I’ll get you out of here. There are tunnels, they lead to the cemetery, and I think I can hide supplies in them.”

“What does ‘go along with it’ mean exactly?” Noemí asked, because Francis was evading her eyes.

She caught his chin with one hand, made him look at her. He stood perfectly still, holding his breath.

“He’d like you to marry me. He’d like you to have children with me. He wants you to be one of us,” Francis said at last.

“And if I say no? What then?”

“He’ll have his way.”

“He’ll carve my mind out, like the servants? Or simply rape me?”

she asked.

“It won’t come to that,” Francis muttered.

“Why?”

“Because he enjoys controlling people in other ways. It would be too coarse. He let my father go to town for years, he let Catalina go to church. He even let Virgil and my mother get far away from town and find spouses. He knows he needs people to obey his will and do his bidding, and they must welcome it, otherwise it’s too exhausting.”

“And he can’t control them all the time,” Noemí ventured. “Ruth was able to grab a rifle, after all, and Catalina tried to tell me the truth.”

“That’s right. And Catalina wouldn’t reveal who’d given her the tonic, no matter how much Howard tried to wrestle that information from her.”

Plus the miners had organized a strike. As much as Howard Doyle would like to believe himself a god, he couldn’t push and force everyone to submit to him every hour of the day. And yet, in decades past, he must have been able to subtly manipulate a great number of people, and when that wasn’t enough he could kill them or make them disappear, like with Benito.

“Outright confrontation won’t work,” Francis said.

Noemí examined the butter knife and knew he was right. What could she do? Kick and punch and she’d end up right where she was, perhaps even worse off. “If I agree to go along with this charade, then you must get Catalina out too.”