Mexican Gothic(91)

Francis’s fingers were slack around the gun, and Noemí pulled it out of his hand easily. She had shot once in her life before. It had been that trip to El Desierto de los Leones, and her brother had set little target pieces up and their friends had applauded her accurate aim, and then they’d all laughed and gone horseback riding. She remembered the instructions well enough.

Noemí raised the gun and shot Howard twice. Something snapped in Francis. He blinked and stared at Noemí, his mouth open. Then she pulled the trigger again, but she’d run out of bullets.

Howard began to convulse and shriek. Once, when Noemí’s family had gone to the coast on vacation, they’d eaten stew, and she recalled her grandmother slicing the head off a large fish for their dinner with one steady swoop of the knife. The fish had been slippery and fierce, and even after its head had been chopped off it wriggled and attempted to escape. Howard reminded her of the fish, his body rippling violently, wracked with such violence even the bed shook.

Noemí dropped the gun, grabbed Francis by the hand and pulled him out of the room. Catalina was standing in the hallway, both hands clasped against her mouth, staring at them, staring over Noemí’s shoulder at what lay on the bed, kicking and screaming and dying. Noemí didn’t dare to look back at it.





26

They stopped running when they reached the top of the staircase.

Lizzie and Charles, the other two servants at High Place, were standing a few steps below, looking up at them. They shivered, their heads lolling to the side, their hands opening and closing spasmodically, their mouths frozen in a stark grin. It was like observing a couple of wind-up toys that had fallen apart. Noemí guessed that the events that had transpired had affected every family member. It had not, however, destroyed them, for these two were there, staring at them.

“What’s wrong with them?” Noemí whispered.

“Howard lost control of them. They’re stuck. For now. We could attempt to walk past them. But the front entrance might be locked.

My mother would have the keys.”

“We are not headed back for the keys,” Noemí said. She was also unwilling to walk past those two, and she was not heading into Howard’s room again to rifle through a corpse’s pockets.

Catalina moved to stand next to Noemí, staring back at both of the servants, and shook her head. It didn’t look like her cousin was eager to go down the main staircase either.

“There’s another way,” Francis said. “We can take the back stairs.”

He rushed down a hallway, and the women followed him. “Here,”

he said, opening a door.

The back stairs were narrow and the illumination was poor, only a couple of sconces with light bulbs to guide them all the way down.

Noemí reached into her pocket and lifted her lighter while holding onto the bannister with her other hand.

As they were winding their way down, the bannister seemed to grow slippery under her fingers, like the body of a slick eel. It was alive, it breathed, and rose, and Noemí lowered the lighter and stared at the bannister. Her injured hand was throbbing in unison with the house.

“It’s not real,” Francis said.

“But can you see it?” Noemí asked.

“It’s the gloom. It wants to make us believe things. Go, go quickly.”

She walked faster and reached the bottom of the stairs. Catalina came walking right behind her and then Francis, who sounded out of breath.

“Are you all right?” Noemí asked him.

“I’m not feeling great,” he said. “We need to keep moving. Ahead it seems to be a dead end; there’s a walk-in pantry and inside it there’s a cupboard. It’s painted yellow. It can be moved aside.”

She found a door and inside it the walk-in pantry he had mentioned. The floor was made of stone, and there were hooks to hang meat. A naked light bulb with a long chain dangled from the ceiling. She pulled the chain, illuminating the small space. All the shelves were empty. If this place had stored food, it had been a long time ago, for there was dark mold running up and down the walls, which would have rendered it completely unsuitable for such use.

She saw the yellow cupboard. Its top was arched, and it had two glazed doors and two large drawers at the bottom, marks and scuffs marring its surface. It had been lined in yellow fabric, to better match its outside.

“We should be able to push it to the left,” Francis said. “And there, in the bottom of the cupboard, there’s a bag.” He still sounded like he was trying to catch his breath.

Noemí bent down and pulled open the cupboard’s bottom drawer.

She found a brown canvas bag. Catalina unzipped it for her. Inside of this bag there was an oil lamp, a compass, two sweaters. It was Francis’s unfinished escape kit. It would have to do.

“We push it left?” she asked, stuffing the compass in her pocket.

Francis nodded. “But first, we should block the entrance here,” he said, pointing at the door where they’d come in.

“There’s that bookcase there we can use,” she replied.

Catalina and Francis proceeded to drag a rickety wooden bookcase against the door. It was not a perfect barricade, but it did the job well enough.

Safely hidden in the small room, Noemí handed one sweater to Catalina and the other to Francis, for it would no doubt be chilly outside. Then it was time to tackle the cupboard. It looked heavy, but surprisingly they were able to slide it to the side with less effort than the bookcase. A dark, weathered door was revealed.