Petras ghost, p.25
Petra's Ghost, page 25
“Gracias,” Ginny says gratefully.
Daniel waits patiently, but he knows they can’t stay under the shelter of the little fruit stand for long. Ginny’s infection is getting worse. He has seen her stagger once or twice and even slur her words. It is also getting later, the window for arriving in Santiago before nightfall is getting shorter and shorter. He’d force her to take a taxi at this point if he could. But she is adamant that she wants to finish the pilgrimage to the Holy City her own way. He couldn’t call a cab if he wanted to now anyway. His phone hasn’t had even one bar of reception since they started climbing the mountain.
He is getting ready to suggest that they move on when he notices the fruit man has taken his knife out again. His eyes crinkle up, even as he puts the blade into his mouth and splits his face up the middle with it. It gets stuck on the cartilage of his nose for a moment and then races straight up to his heavily lined forehead where the skin peels off neatly on either side. He pulls the top of his skull off like a lid and a black crow flaps out and flies off into the dusky sky.
“Ta-da,” says Beatrice from beside him, with a magician’s flourish of her hand. When she takes a deep bow, one of her ears falls off onto the wet pavement.
A deafening flash of light on thunder strikes above them, and the birds start to shriek. Daniel hears the crack of the heavy branch too late. It collides with the back of his head and knocks him down flat on the asphalt. Before he loses consciousness, he looks over to see the fruit man’s skull with the perfectly peeled skin lying open on each side.
Just like the orange, he thinks, before the rain and Beatrice’s torn ear lying beside him fade to the deep black of a crow.
CHAPTER 16
Monte del Gozo (2 miles)
WHEN DANIEL COMES TO, the storm is raging in a nighttime sky. A huge branch the size of a tree lies across the trail in front of him, naked and slick, blocking the path up the mountain. Luckily, he’d only been hit by one of its smaller offshoots. The painful lump at the back of his head sprouts throbbing tentacles that reach down into his neck. Lying on the ground with his cheek wet and raw in a filthy puddle, he wills himself to get up. The most he can manage is to lift his head a few inches off the ground to take a glimpse around. Water gushes through the gutters on either side of the path. Beatrice is gone, as is the fruit vendor. After a minute, he is able to force himself into a seated position. That’s when he realizes Ginny is gone, too.
Shaking, he stands then climbs over the huge branch. He starts making his way up the greasy incline, slipping and falling, his head still woozy from the blow, his feet burning from blisters that are probably infected now. He is part robot, part beast, mounting Monte del Gozo in the dark. The frightful image of Ginny alone and hurt somewhere grates like brittle glass in his fractured mind. He must get to her. He may have not been able to save Petra, but maybe he can save her.
Beatrice is not far behind, gliding, not walking, up the mountain. The toes of her hiking boots hover above the path. She is gaining on him, her hair plastered down with the rain. Forest-green ooze runs freely from the crater in her skull where her abductors bashed it in with a shovel when they were done with her — the same shovel that dug her grave in one of the farmers’ fields that border the Camino. Daniel doesn’t know how he knows this, but he does. Perhaps she whispered it to him as he lay prone on the ground. The thought of what else she might have done to him while he lay unconscious makes his insides wither.
He hikes down a gully to get past another tree that has fallen. This one is too big to climb over. Not in this storm. Not in his state. He slides in the wet muck, catching his ankle forcefully between two rocks, unable to remove it. The pain bursts, sharp and immediate. Yanking on the leg of his hiking pants, he pulls madly to free himself, but his boot won’t come free. He drops his backpack and pulls harder. He’s desperate now, crying out as the thunder claps overhead. He can’t hear the birds anymore over the rain. He can’t hear anything but the roar in this head — until a faint melody reaches him, drifting up the hill. Beatrice has started to sing again. Her song shapes and shifts and finally coils around Daniel’s ear like a serpent, calling to him with sickly sweet seduction, daring him to turn around. To walk not toward Santiago, but back to her, where she will envelop him in her stiff decomposing arms, smothering him deep within the folds of the red Columbia sweater.
“Daniel …” The voice is small and weak, but oh so familiar. He feels the gentleness of a light hand placed on his back. The rain starts to let up. Then a warmth pours over him as she wraps her arms around him from behind. The waves of her unfettered hair flow down over his shoulder and onto his chest, covering the metal heart the Dutchman gave him. The familiar sound of her speech is like a salve that heals every part of him. Even Beatrice’s song disappears into the ether, like storm clouds that have come and passed.
“Petra.” He weeps openly now, pulls her hand to his face, fully fleshed and healthy. He kisses each finger, one at a time. He doesn’t need to turn around to know it’s her. A man knows his mate. “I thought I’d lost you.”
“Shh,” she coos. “It’ll be okay, Daniel.”
He takes both her hands in his, pulls her more tightly around him. He can feel the swell of her breasts pressing into his back. But her chest is still, just like the last time he saw her.
“Where have you been, my love?” he asks.
“Not far,” she says.
He lowers his chin to his chest, closes his eyes against the tears. “Oh, dear God, Petra, I’m so sorry.”
She pulls him toward her and cradles his head in her lap like a child. “No, Daniel, I’m sorry. For asking you to help me. It was too much.” It had been too much. It had almost broken him.
“I was weak though, Petra,” he protests. “I was after letting you suffer for so long.” He lifts his head, turns around to bring his fingers up to her face, her beautiful, intact, untouched-by-disease face. “And then …” He can’t finish, thinking about that day, the feel of the crisp, white pillowcase on his hands as he pushed down over her mouth and nose, crushing the weak spasm of breath left in her.
“You only did what I asked you, Daniel.”
It is true — she had asked, begged him even. And part of him had hated her for it, that final request. But not as much as he hated himself. It wasn’t what he did that he can’t accept. It is why he did it. Doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. It can plague a man worse than the evilest deed. But it is time to tell the whole truth, no more dealing in halves.
“It was you I was supposed to be doing it for, Petra. I loved you so much. Love you so much,” he corrects himself. “But in the end, at the end …” He stops, pulls her to him, buries himself in her neck. She smells like the freshly laundered dress he buried her in.
“At the end, you wanted me gone.”
He lets out a deep moan she absorbs with her body. She has voiced what he cannot. He had done it not for her. But for himself. His own selfish weak-man self. The endless trips to the hospital. The bedside vigils next to the skeleton that was no longer his wife. The tubes and the needles and the swish of the nurses in and out with looks of efficient pity. The eternity of waiting and watching as her life drained out, so painfully, so slowly. The strength he’d needed to do what she’d asked came not out of his love for her, but because he just couldn’t stand it any longer. He had acted not to lessen her suffering, but in a desperate bid to end his own. Letting her die thanking him for a kindness he never proffered.
His arms pull tight around her like the drowning man he has become since she left him. She takes in his sorrow, allows it to run its course. It’s not enough, he thinks. He is cursed. He can never be released from his own culpability. It imprisons him, locks him in limbo, as surely as doomed sailors on a ghost ship.
“I should have been a better man. A stronger man,” he says, loosening his grip on her. He puts his wet forehead on hers. “I could be that man to you now, Petra, I could.” And at that moment he believes he can. He will follow her wherever she’s gone, and he will be the man he should have been, the man she deserved all along.
“You have to let me go, Daniel,” she tells him, tracing a tear on his cheek. “I’m not meant to be here.” She kisses him softly. Her lips are as icy as the rain. “You are the only one keeping me here now.”
“It’s been you?” he asks, looking up, unbelieving. “You, Petra, following us all along?”
“No, Daniel, that is another.” She pushes back his curly wet locks where they’ve fallen into his eyes, just as she had done when she was alive. “And it’s Ginny keeping her here, not you.”
“Why?” he stammers. “How?”
“I’ll tell you.” Her long pale arms reach down and move the rock that had trapped him as if it weighs nothing. “But then, Daniel, you have to promise.”
“Promise what?”
“To let me go.”
When Daniel reaches the road at the summit, the storm has peaked again. Thunder and lightning overflow the night sky. Through the rain, he can see the haze of city lights shining far below. Stinging cold water runs down his cheeks as he pictures the people inside their lit houses, watching TV, making love, talking with their families over a meal.
“You know what they say about the Camino, don’t you, mate?” The Englishman stands on the sidewalk. He is a towering menace with a drenched black backpack.
The fruit vendor stands beside him, his scalp still hanging open like two glistening petals exposing his sleek, pulsing brain.
“It’s everywhere,” Mark tells him, as the barman who chased Daniel out of his little coffee shop in San Paio comes to stand beside the big man. Glinting in his hands is a round-point steel shovel. He lifts it high above his head. It is streaked with the rain and smears of Beatrice’s brain matter.
She stands behind him, fingering the shell bracelet on her wrist, her one dead eye bright with anticipation. She and Ginny had bought the bracelets before they left for the Camino. Beatrice had them made specially to match. Friendship bracelets. Daniel knows this now because Petra has told him all about Beatrice, Sheena’s twitchy little sister. Beatrice, Tris, Trish. The old friend Ginny had to leave behind.
“Go fuck yourself!” Daniel says as he rushes into the street.
The chapel is the right place to go. The only place to go. It stands on the north side of the empty roadway on the edge of the mountain, perched and private. The small wooden sign above the entrance reads Capilla de San Marcos. Daniel can just make it out by the pale red light that glows from inside. He makes a run for it despite his injured ankle. Blood from the gash the rock left behind fills his right boot, but at least the ankle isn’t broken. A heavy iron ring hangs from the wide-planked front door like that from a bull’s nose. His fingers almost freeze to the metal as he pulls on it. After a few desperate tries it opens. Stooping under the low doorway, he slams the door shut behind him, locking it with the metal cylinder of the deadbolt. A blast of thunder goes off outside like a gun salute.
Inside it is warm and dry, not like the other churches and chapels he has visited on the Camino that were chilled, drafty places. He sees Ginny sitting in a pew up front, shivering and rocking herself, the water dripping from her clothes and hair. When he confronts her, he can see she has left a puddle on the grey stone floor.
“You left her behind,” he says, but not the way she told him. “The first time you walked the Camino.” His own clothes drip onto the sanctuary floor as he stands to accuse her. A crucifix looms above them showcasing pierced bloody feet and hands. The eyes of the Saviour are white and veined, rolling up into his head. The crown of thorns drips blood as their clothes drip rain water. Ginny lets out a wail, the agony of Christ somehow mixing with her own.
“You don’t understand,” she says.
“You knew those men were after taking her, and still you left her behind.”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“Your friend didn’t overdose before the trip,” Daniel says, his voice and breath measured. “She came with you.” Petra had shown it all to him. All he had to do was close his eyes as she spoke, and it was as if he had been there.
He had watched as the tension between the two women blossomed from their first day in the Pyrenees and worsened from there. Beatrice was weak both physically and mentally, often fretful and complaining. Ginny had become resentful over time.
“You argued in Mazarife,” he says. “You went on ahead. She followed, begging you to slow down.”
“Stop it, stop it!”
He’d watched it all unfold. Ginny had reached the next crest of hill after the ravine with the dirt road running through it. She would have still been able to hear Beatrice below, where she struggled desperately to keep up. To hear her cry out with a voice that was different than the pleading that had come before. Not angry or plaintive, but clipped, like a bird fallen abruptly from the nest.
“Did you hear the van,” Daniel asks, “before they took her away?”
“I looked down,” Ginny whimpers, covers her face with her hands and starts rocking herself again. “And I thought I saw her.” But really, he knew what she had seen. Two men speeding away in a beat-up Renault.
“You ran away. You were well able to run for help, but you didn’t. You could have gone somewhere. Told someone.”
But Ginny hadn’t told. She’d just kept on running, convincing herself that Beatrice was okay. That she had just decided to go back to the albergue — her friend who had become like an albatross around her neck with her methadone and her moaning. She ran long and hard from the threat in the ravine, the way she had run from her sister and the deadly bathwater sixteen years before.
“I didn’t know!” she cries into her hands.
“You did know!” He is being cruel, letting out all his fury on her. His anger at her deceit, certainly. But it is more than that. He wants to punish her, just as he sought to punish himself and, he realizes now, Petra as well. “Why did you run?” he demands. His rage echoes off the walls of the tiny chapel.
“Because,” Beatrice says quietly from a pew at the back. “She didn’t see me when she looked behind her.”
Daniel turns to observe the dead woman. Knows what she says is true. Petra had shown him. He had seen what Ginny saw when she looked back into the ravine that day.
A strip of red fabric abandoned in the dirt, the collar torn roughly from the red Columbia sweater. Just like the scream from Beatrice’s lips when they took her away.
Beatrice swoops across the sanctuary like a bird of prey. Daniel is forced flat to the floor, where he knocks his wounded ankle hard against the base of the baptismal font. Pain explodes up his leg. Ginny screams and runs for the side door of the chapel behind the sacristy, Beatrice close in pursuit. When Daniel recovers from the shock of the pain, he limps behind the two of them, dragging a streak of his blood across the chapel floor.
“Ginny!” He calls out to her in the storm from the arch of the doorway.
The gutters are flooded, the water coursing down the steep roadway. Ginny runs into the street, slips, and falls in the water. Daniel takes off into the rain, dragging his leg behind him, even as he sees the headlights come speeding around the corner. Even as she struggles to her feet. He no longer seeks to punish her with his words. He knows about running — from life, from guilt, from the scene of a crime — about hiding from the truth. But the car gets to them first, sending Ginny sailing into the air. She hits the pavement with a sickening thud of bone and cartilage. Only clipped by the sleek chrome bumper, Daniel is knocked down at the curb, where he tries to crawl to her across the wet pavement, one leg bent the wrong way behind him.
“Ginny, I understand. I do.”
She is too far away for him to touch, for her to hear. He uses what strength he has left to lift his head. The car is gone. A hit and run. He sees a man with a white collar run out from behind the chapel.
“Help her,” Daniel pleads. “Please.” His voice is a mangled croak. The cold rain runs down his face, mixes with hot tears. He can’t lose her. He can’t let another woman’s death be on his hands.
The priest is beside him now, sounding far away as he speaks in a language Daniel doesn’t understand. Lowering his cheek onto the muddy asphalt, Daniel can see Ginny’s body lying prone a few yards away. He doesn’t know what happened. He had been right behind her, reaching forward to push her out of the car’s path, but something had held onto him, grabbed him by the collar of his jacket, and pulled him out of harm’s way at the last second. He looks up, past the priest, expecting to see one dead woman, but instead finds another.
Beatrice brings one finger to her lips before she walks away to lie down beside Ginny, her arm protectively wrapping around her old friend. But not before she opens her palm to show him the copper heart that came off in her hand when she pulled him from in front of the deadly wheels of the speeding car.
He sees the hairy black roots of eucalyptus grow up through the roadway, snaking their oily branches around the two intertwined friends. The largest morphs into a purple-green arm with a colourful shell bracelet gleaming at the wrist. It forces its fist into the screaming mouth of one of the heads from the stream bed that have sprouted up like sickly spring buds on the other limbs. Daniel watches the face contort as it chokes on the bright round beads mixed with shells. Beasts like those he saw in the paintings at Astorga claw with yellow talons from below the ground, gnashing their sharpened teeth. He hears the priest beside him, talking on a cellphone in Spanish. His voice fades in and out with the roar of the rain. As Daniel loses consciousness, he watches the roots of the eucalyptus pull both women down below the street and the rain and the storm, to a place where artwork comes to life in a thousand nightmares.
