Petras ghost, p.18
Petra's Ghost, page 18
“If you disagree with it, why are you still a Catholic?”
“Are there things the U.S. government is after doing that you don’t agree with?” he asks.
“I suppose.”
“And yet, you don’t stop being an American, now do you?”
“I see what you’re saying,” Ginny says thoughtfully.
“In Ireland, being Catholic isn’t about religion, at any rate.”
“What’s it about then?”
“Sticking it to six hundred years of English oppression,” he says with a wink.
Ginny stifles a giggle behind one hand, and Daniel grins like an idiot. He loves making her laugh, particularly after the seriousness of their conversation in Burgos. When the welcoming nun takes her place behind the pulpit, she clears her throat and the two guiltily collect themselves as if they’ve been caught passing notes in class.
“Señor, ten misericordia.”
“Señor, ten misericordia,” all the nuns repeat in unison. The nun with the slouching wool socks walks unsteadily toward the front and lights the altar candles. Daniel is briefly afraid she will fall directly into the flame of the Christ candle, but she manages to make her way to the back pew and sit heavily on a cushion. Someone else turns off the main lights, and they all wait expectantly in the dim glow until the sister at the front speaks again.
“Cristo, ten misericordia.”
“Cristo, ten misericordia,” repeats the group.
Daniel glances down at the laminated blue card. The words in Spanish are there for him to follow along. Even if he doesn’t understand the language, he knows “Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy” when he hears it.
“Señor, ten misericordia.”
“Señor, ten misericordia.”
The candles flicker on the front table with the ebb and flow of voices as they speak the prayer as typed on the blue card. The foreign words give an air of incantation to the blessing. Daniel searches the room, wondering where the priest is to lead the service, then gathers that the nuns take care of it all themselves. Another thing that has changed since he was growing up.
“Orad por los peregrinos.”
“What’s does that mean?” Daniel asks Ginny under his breath.
“Pray for the pilgrims,” she says, interrupting her own recitation. She has her eyes closed, repeating the Spanish words along with the rest of the women. She doesn’t need the blue card.
“Amén.”
“Que el Señor dirija vuestros pasos con su beneplácito.”
“Please don’t ask me to translate that,” she says, still with her eyes closed.
“Amén.”
“Ginny.”
A sound, he’s heard it before.
“Y que sea vuestro compañero inseparable a lo largo del camino.”
“Ginny.”
He hears it again. Just like that night, hoarse and throaty in the corn.
“Honestly, Daniel, use the translator on your phone.”
“Amén.”
“Ginny, do you hear it?”
“What?” she says, finally opening her eyes and turning to him, annoyed.
“That,” he whispers. And there it is again, that unmistakable rasp, a breath full of liquid and labour, with no life to it, a death rattle. He turns around to the back of the darkened room to see where it’s coming from.
The woman is there beside the aged nun with the socks, holding on to her liver-spotted hand as if they are old friends. She wears the traditional nun’s garb of his youth. Blood has seeped into the white of her starched headpiece and spread like an advancing disease. She strokes the fingers of the elderly nun with one hand and holds one finger of the other hand to her lips. He notices, even in the candlelight, that her knuckles are streaked with red dirt and ooze, her fingernails broken down to the quick.
“Ginny,” he says quietly, reaching for her beside him, but she is already up and moving out of the pew.
“Cristo, ten misericordia.”
“Cristo, ten misericordia.”
“Ginny!” he yells after her.
She is dashing down the aisle, past the lead nun who stops her recitation and scolds Daniel with her eyes for the outburst before continuing on again.
“Señor, ten misericordia.”
“Señor, ten misericordia.”
He turns around again in his seat, hoping to see something different. The woman is no longer in the back pew. He bends forward, elbows resting on his thighs, head down, trying to steady himself. That’s when he feels the crawling sensation of slippery fingers on the back of his neck. He looks down and across to see mud-splattered hiking boots peeking out from beneath the tatters of a black robe, so close he can read the brand. Merrell, like Ginny wears. The woman’s broken mouth spews the words directly into his ear as she leans in from beside him.
“Orad por los peregrinos, Daniel.”
“Christ!”
The nuns stop their prayers, look up at him with fear and confusion. The woman whisks herself out of her seat and takes off up a side aisle and out the door that Ginny just ran through. Daniel stumbles out of the pew, following her, the trails left behind by her jagged wet fingertips still fresh upon his neck. He throws open the door and runs after both women into the night.
“Ginny!” Daniel shouts her name down the deserted street. His voice comes back to him off the limestone walls of the village. A cold sliver of moon draws out the shadows. His heart beats loudly in his chest, but it’s not loud enough to drown out the chant of the nuns resuming their prayers behind the thick convent doors. He runs across the street and peers in the window of the local pub. Ginny’s not there. Although, the local priest is, looking shocked as Daniel brings his wild face up to the window.
He turns and takes the stairs two at a time that lead back up to the plaza. Everything is quiet and undisturbed when he reaches the top. Ginny couldn’t have made it back to the albergue already, he thinks. He checks just the same, panting as he demands from a stunned Dores whether she’s seen her. She hasn’t.
Outside again, he looks over the stone ledge onto the lower tier of the village. He can see most of the streets from this vantage point, and nowhere does he see Ginny. Or the other one. Everything about the village is drowsy and silent, asleep for the night, until he hears a match strike loudly to his right.
“Looking for someone, are ya?” Mark stands only a few feet away. His face lights up orange from the long wooden match.
Daniel can see his two friends behind him, holding each other up. The man with the straw boater hat pulls the drunken girl to the stone wall and forces her to bend precariously over the edge. She laughs when it hits her hard in the gut, doubling her over. Then she stands, wipes some spittle from her mouth and slips the guy the tongue.
The Englishman lights his cigarette, then holds the burning match in front of his eyes, watching as the flame makes its way down to his fingers. His gold and silver rings flicker in the light. “I think I know where she might be,” he drawls once the fire starts to singe his skin.
Daniel forces himself to stay through the sickening odour of burnt flesh, to hear what Mark knows. Once he does, he runs back down the stairs to the main street. The harsh bray of the drunken girl’s laugh follows him all the way out of town.
Ginny’s standing on the edge of a bridge looking over it when Daniel finds her. Much as she stood with him at the Salt River, except this time it is the dusky flow of the rio Urbel that captures her attention rather than the poisoned run of the rio Salado. The water level is low. Daniel can’t see anything reflected in its murky surface, not even the gaunt moon. It is cooler outside the walls of the village and Ginny has tied up the hood of her jacket against the wind. As he gets closer, he stops. A heavy curtain of hair hangs out of the front of her hood and he thinks he can see something ripple unnaturally underneath. She turns and parts the hair to look at him, and the illusion disperses.
“Daniel.” She runs off the bridge and into his arms, burying her face in his shoulder, holding him like he’s rescued her from the depths of the dark river below. He enjoys for a moment the forgotten bliss of having a woman in his arms, murmurs reassurance and other inanities. He rubs her back. Mostly he just revels in the way her body relaxes into his, buoyed by his ability to comfort her with his presence and his touch. It makes him feel like a man again.
After some time, he speaks, breaking the spell. “Ginny, you saw her, didn’t you?”
She starts to cry softly but manages to nod, still buried in his shoulder.
“Who is she, Ginny?”
She looks up at him, tears falling onto the strings of her hood, her mouth slightly open as if she is about to respond with a question of her own. He knows her secret now. She sees the woman just as he does. The horror of that image is what has perhaps bonded them all along.
When Ginny brings her full open lips up to his own, he is not as surprised as he might have been. That kiss had been coming ever since the first night they saw the dark figure hovering over the fields of Azqueta.
When she finally pulls away, he still has enough wits about him to ask again. “Who is she, Ginny?”
She bites down on her lower lip in the way she must know by now tortures him. Even with the fetid breath of that creature still clinging to his skin, he still feels a solid tug of longing for her. He keeps his gaze serious, hopes she can see in the dim moonlight that he is not going to be swayed from an answer, despite her inviting lips.
Ginny takes a step away, looks down at the ground. “It’s my friend,” she says. “The one who was supposed to walk the Camino with me.”
Daniel moves toward her, takes her chin in his hand and lifts her face up to his. She turns her head and closes her eyes.
“That woman’s dead, Ginny,” he says.
She starts crying softly again, and he takes his hand away. For a while, they stand like this together, with the sound of the weak river trickling beneath the bridge and Ginny’s soft hitching breaths above it. She turns to face him again, her mouth only inches away from his. Her eyes are wide and searching behind the tears. He swears he can see a moon sliver reflected in each one.
“I know, Daniel,” she says, collapsing into him again. “I know she’s dead.”
CHAPTER 11
Rabé de las Calzadas to Población de Campos
THE NEXT MORNING, GINNY asks to walk alone. She says she needs some space, a nonsensical excuse that Daniel knows is polite code for “bugger off.” He agrees to her wishes, despite what happened the night before, and they decide on a meeting place for the following morning. It is easier to do this than argue with her; she is stubborn and her mind is made up. He doesn’t want to scare her away again. He checks the empty plaza before he leaves, wary of the Englishman and his crew, but they appear to be sleeping in or already gone. None of them emerges from the doors of the rival albergue.
That day he walks mostly by himself, feeling out of place and sorts. The blister on the side of his foot finally gets the best of him, and he is forced to pull over and lace it with a needle and thread the way the Englishman had lectured. He chooses a bench beside a bodega, which he has learned is not a corner grocery store like back in Jersey, but a dome-shaped earth dwelling built into a hillside. The guidebook says these are only used to store wine. But a middle-aged matron in a house dress comes flying out of the hobbit-like front door in the ground and chases him away with a straw broom.
“My God, woman, they’re just feet,” he shouts as he hops away, his injured and bare foot trailing black thread. He is not usually a rude or angry man, but raw nerves are beginning to eat away at his self-control.
How can the woman be Ginny’s overdosed friend? It’s ridiculous. And yet, the terror of those fingers on the back of his neck, the beetle he saw crawl in and out of the slack mouth in the corn. Ginny’s explanation is the first thing that has made sense, yet it’s preposterous. He is an engineer, after all, a man of science. He doesn’t believe in Santa Compaña or banshees or butter witches. He didn’t even really believe in the woman who’s following them, until Ginny admitted to seeing her, too. He tries to put it out of his mind and concentrate on the trail, but the landscape is uneventful with little shade or notable sights to distract. Endless fields that would be filled with bright poppies and other wildflowers in the spring and summer are tawny and depleted in the fall. Wind turbines, like those he’d seen at Alto del Perdón, turn perpetually in the distance.
The monotonous call of cuckoos distracts him, at first, then begins to irritate. If only with the frustration of trying to figure out where the bloody birds are nesting with so few trees around. He tries to find an answer in the guidebook and ends up spilling his water bottle out onto the pages. They wrinkle and he knows they will dry all stuck together. It is not a good day.
He arrives in Castrojeriz and signs in at an albergue with fifty people allotted to each room. They are not full, but close enough. He makes a point of staying indoors and among people. The woman, whoever she is, seems to avoid crowds. As Daniel lies awake in his bunk bed, he marks off the hours by the passing of gas and other bodily eruptions of dozens of strangers. At least he doesn’t dream — the one benefit of insomnia.
The next day, he hits the road at dawn, weary and not expecting much. Ginny is waiting for him, as promised, at the crossroads just outside of town. They exchange brief greetings, then carry on in silence, a result of the untimely hour as much as their awkwardness. He wonders where she stayed the night before but doesn’t ask. He wants her to start the conversation. She finally does when they are halfway up the steep slope of Alto de Moselares.
“I thought the meseta was supposed to be flat,” she complains.
Daniel would normally feel the need to explain that a meseta is a geological plateau characterized by alternating high plains, but he has more pressing things on his mind.
“Are we going to talk about this, so?” He pauses halfway through the sentence, taking an extra breath to help with the climb.
“About what in particular?” she asks, stopping to free one of her hiking poles from the ground where it has gotten stuck between two rocks.
“About what happened back in Rabé de las Calzadas, Ginny,” he says, surprising himself by remembering the name. He stops and braces himself standing sideways on the hill. He agreed to the earlier separation, but he’s not letting her off the hook about this.
“The kiss?” she asks innocently, and he feels his face begin to colour.
He’s not ready to talk about that. She had caught him off guard with her lips. His body had reacted enthusiastically, but the rest of him felt as guilty as hell. “The woman,” he says, picking the less frightening of the two subjects. “Who is she, Ginny?”
“I told you,” she says, then plants her hiking poles ahead of her and starts climbing again.
Daniel follows her. “That doesn’t make sense, Ginny. Are you wanting me to believe there’s a dead woman following us? One of these Santa Compaña or what have you?”
“She’s following me, not you. And do you have a better explanation?”
“I have about a dozen better explanations.” He draws up beside her. The backs of his calves are starting to cry out in protest. Why the hell couldn’t they have had this conversation before they had to scale Kilimanjaro. “It could be anyone, dressed up to scare,” he says. “Perhaps it’s even that sister of yours. She sounded like a right piece of work.” The words are out of his mouth before he has a chance to think about how unbelievably callous he’s being.
“She doesn’t even know where I am,” Ginny says, unfazed by the sensitive subject. “Besides, last thing I heard she married some Silicon Valley software exec, probably popped out a couple of kids by now.”
“Perhaps someone else you know, having you on, playing a prank.”
“Some prank.”
Daniel’s breath comes in huffs now while Ginny keeps up the pace without getting winded. Must be the hiking poles. He decides to ask a question requiring a more detailed answer so she can do most of the talking for a while and he can save his breath.
“Right, then tell me, why are you thinking it’s your friend?”
“Because it looks like her, or at least what I can see of her through the … you know.”
Daniel knew.
“And that red Columbia sweater and the Merrell hiking boots that we bought together back in Berkeley, they’re all hers.”
“Sure, hundreds of people have that form of a sweater. And Merrells are as common as dirt.”
“The last thing she said to me was that she would die before she’d let me go alone on this trip,” Ginny says.
“Given that the woman did die, I reckon she made her choice.” An inappropriate comment surely, but his sarcasm gives rise to an idea. “Do you think she might have faked it?” he suggests.
“Her death?” Ginny stops now and leans on a hiking pole, pulls her water tube from where it’s clipped on her shoulder strap and takes a drink. “I don’t think so, Daniel. I saw it, I mean, I saw her. Dead.”
“Where?” Daniel asks.
She puts her hands on her hips, and the poles dangle on either side of her. “In a convertible Fiat, driving thirty over the speed limit on the I-80,” she says. “For Christ’s sake, Daniel. In a casket. At the funeral. Where else?”
“Could have been staged, like,” he suggests, but only half-heartedly.
“Listen,” she says, “this is all bullshit, I know. But all I can tell you is yes, I’ve seen what you see, and yes, she’s scary as a Stephen King novel, but I’ll tell you what else.” She leans in to him so closely he can smell the creamy sweetness of the café con leche she had at breakfast. “I don’t care.” She pulls back quickly and starts walking again.
Daniel stands on the hill for a moment, stunned. Then strides up the rocky dirt path to catch up. He stands in front of her this time, blocking the way, forcing her to talk directly to him.
“You don’t care? What do you mean you don’t feckin’ care?” he says with heaving breaths. He’s at the end of his wits as well as his lung endurance. How can she not care that a dead woman is stalking her?
