Mexican Gothic(96)

Virgil’s eyes narrowed as he wiped his mouth clean.

“I’ll make you bite off your own tongue,” Virgil said simply.

The men had changed positions, and now Noemí could see Francis’s face, the blood welling down his temple as he heaved and shook his head, and Noemí saw the way his eyes were open wide and the way his hands were shaking and how his mouth was opening and closing, like a fish gasping for air.

Dear God, Virgil was going to make him do it. He would make him eat his own tongue.

Noemí heard the growing buzzing of bees behind her.

Look.

She turned around, and her eyes fell on the face of Agnes, her lipless mouth set in an eternal circle of pain, and she pressed her hands against her ears, furiously wondering why it wouldn’t stop.

Why that noise wouldn’t cease, returning over and over again.

And it struck her all of a sudden this fact that she had missed, which should have been obvious from the very beginning: that the frightening and twisted gloom that surrounded them was the manifestation of all the suffering that had been inflicted on this woman. Agnes. Driven to madness, driven to anger, driven to despair, and even now a sliver of that woman remained, and that sliver was still screaming in agony.

She was the snake biting its tail.

She was a dreamer, eternally bound to a nightmare, eyes closed even when her eyes had turned to dust.

The buzzing was her voice. She could not communicate properly any longer but could still scream of unspeakable horrors inflicted on her, of ruin and pain. Even when coherent memory and thought had been scraped away, this searing rage remained, burning the minds of any who wandered near it. What did she wish?

Simply to be released from this torment.

Simply to wake up. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t ever wake.

The buzzing was growing, threatening to hurt Noemí again and overwhelm her mind, but she reached down and grabbed the oil lamp with quick, rough fingers and rather than thinking about what she was about to do, she thought of that single phrase that Ruth had spoken. Open your eyes, open your eyes, and her steps were quick and determined, and for each step she whispered open your eyes.

Until she was staring at Agnes again.

“Sleepwalker,” she whispered. “Time to open your eyes.”

She tossed the lamp against the corpse’s face. It instantly ignited the mushrooms around Agnes’s head, creating a halo of fire, and then tongues of fire began to spread quickly down the wall, the organic matter apparently as good as kindling, making the mushrooms blacken and pop.

Virgil screamed. It was a hoarse, terrible scream, and he collapsed upon the floor and scratched at the tiles, attempting to stand up.

Francis also collapsed. Agnes was the gloom and the gloom was part of them, and this sudden damage to Agnes, to the web of mushrooms, must be like neurons igniting. Noemí for her part felt jolted into complete awareness, the gloom shoving her away.

She rushed down the dais and immediately went to her cousin, pressing her hand against Catalina’s face.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“Yes,” Catalina said, nodding vigorously. “Yes.”

On the floor, both Virgil and Francis were moaning. Virgil tried to reach for her, tried to lift himself up, and Noemí kicked him in the face, but he clawed at her, scrabbled to grab hold of her leg. Noemí stepped back, and he was extending a hand, still grasping and pulling himself forward even though he couldn’t walk. He crawled toward her, gritting his teeth.

Noemí took another step back, fearing he’d pounce upon her.

Catalina picked up the knife Francis had dropped, and now she stood over her husband and brought the knife down into his face when he turned to look at her, piercing an eye, in imitation of what she’d done to Howard Doyle.

Virgil fell down with a muffled groan, and Catalina pressed the knife in deeper, her lips closed together, not a single word or sob escaping them. Virgil twitched and his mouth fell open, spitting and gasping. Then he lay still.

The women held hands and looked down at Virgil. His blood was smearing the black head of the snake, painting it red, and Noemí wished they’d had a great big knife, for she would have cut off his head if she could, like her grandmother had cut off the head of the fish.

She knew, by the way Catalina clutched her hand, that she wished for the same.

Then Francis muttered a word, and Noemí knelt next to him and tried to get him to stand up. “Come on,” she told him, “we need to run.”

“It’s dying, we are dying,” Francis said.

“Yes, we are going to die if we don’t get out quickly,” Noemí agreed. The whole room was quickly catching on fire, patches and patches of mushrooms bursting into flames, and the yellow curtains she had pulled aside were also burning.

“I can’t leave.”

“Yes, you can,” Noemí said, gritting her teeth and coaxing him to his feet. She couldn’t make him walk, though.

“Catalina, help us!” she yelled.

They each took one of Francis’s arms and placed it over their shoulders, half lifting, half dragging him toward the metal gate. It was easy to swing it open, but then Noemí eyed the steps leading up and wondered how they were going to manage that climb. But there was no other way. When she looked back, she saw Virgil on the ground, stray sparks falling upon him, and the chamber burning bright. There were also mushrooms growing on the walls of the staircase, and these too seemed to be catching fire. They had to hurry.