James Jenkins: The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories. Volume 1

The gravedigger Bastián emerged from the nightmare that had tormented him during the few hours of sleep he managed to get after his drinking binge the night before and opened his eyes to the light of an unpleasant day. His mouth was thick. A burning sourness rose from his belly to his throat. The efforts he made to belch brought on a fit of coughing. Remembering the work he had left not even half done, he muttered some blasphemies that didn’t give him the slightest relief. He was on the verge of yielding to the temptation to roll over and go back to sleep, but one of the voices in his head told him that he had to finish digging the grave if he didn’t want the people from the day’s first burial to arrive and find no hole for their deceased. The local council was so poor that he couldn’t afford an assistant to help with the hardest work, although sometimes the coal merchant’s son, the red-­headed Candido, who had devils in him, would lend him a hand in exchange for some tobacco.

Lupo came out to meet him, wagging his tail. His drooling tongue hung out between his fangs and he was panting, choking with servile passion. He slept in the tool shed on a pile of empty sacks. All the mud in the cemetery seemed to have stuck to his hairy coat. On his back he had some reddish scabs that never managed to heal. And far from lessening his ugliness, the tenderness of his expression accentuated it. But he was a good dog. He happily joined the gravedigger in the rain: they would not leave each other’s side all day long. Since old age had made them retire from the world, all they had was each other. Their mutual company was enough for them, along with the proximity of the dead people, who were no bother, absorbed as they were in musing on their nothingness. At most they gnawed discreetly at their shrouds if Bastián had drunk a lot, or they drummed with their bony fingers on the wood of their coffins, not to cause a fuss and have someone open them, but only for fun. Bastián felt an immense tolerance towards them.

When they were near the half-­dug tomb, Lupo lowered his ears and began to tremble, scratching at the muddy earth with his paws and recoiling. But Bastián knew the animal was no coward. He was never frightened by the will o’ the wisps of decomposition, nor the strolls of the lost souls in the blackness of moonless nights, nor the boys who threw rocks at him when he prowled outside the walls of the ceme­tery seeking relief for his masculine urges in the bellies of the female dogs. This, however . . .

‘Bloody hell! What is this?’

In the grave he had begun to open last night, before getting so drunk he couldn’t even see where he was putting his shovel, there lay a dark and suspicious lump.

‘What the dickens is this corpse doing here?’ Although he hadn’t checked whether it was a cadaver, for him any body in that position had to be. Bastián’s world was made up of those who were dead and those who weren’t yet. And he went on planting them, a devout gardener, in order to fertilize the world.

With the handle of his shovel he moved the lump, which stretched and let out a groan. From the pile of old rags a thin little face and small hands, bony, bluish like diluted milk, filthy with red mud, emerged into the ashy light of the rainy morning. This wasn’t a corpse, it was hard but not stiff, and beneath the blue and mauve whiteness of cold there were purple transparencies that announced the bloody warmth of life.

‘Well, well! Good morning, girl!’ the straw-­hearted man exclaimed with thick irony.

She sat up. She sat there at the bottom of the hole, looking at him balefully with her green little eyes. She was a girl as old as the world, scrawny and pale, bleary. A mop of unkempt red hair stuck out from between the creases of the thick garment covering her, which appeared to be a military cloak.

‘Come on, get out of there! I have to finish the grave.’

He offered his callused hand to the girl, who spurned it and climbed out like a spider, gripping the soft walls of the hole, at whose edge she sat down without saying anything.

‘Better hope you haven’t caught cold or damp or anything, if you slept in this hole.’

She didn’t open her mouth. After a while, Lupo, who at first had growled, scrunching up his muzzle and showing his fangs, approached her. In his pupils strange fires burned. The spirit of the old dog in him was working for the first time in a long time, and it did so painfully since up until then happiness for him had consisted in the cultivation of apathy. Something simultaneously sweet and bitter was taking hold of him, flowing towards the deepest fibers of his canine insides like a love potion, or a death one, at the same time as he felt something tighten around his neck, pulling him towards the girl who had risen up from the earth.

Bastián began his work, making sure to pay no heed to the girl, who didn’t stop looking at him with her bleary little eyes, whose dark circles underneath, like the marks of a beating, seemed on the verge of spreading across her face. She had a large mouth, lipless like a snake’s, and she was graceful as a kitten, but there was something about her that was disturbing, insect-­like.

The man got out of the hole and sat down to rest beside her.

‘I don’t know you, girl. You’re not from around here, huh? What’s your name?’ he asked as he chewed a piece of tobacco, looking out into infinity.

‘My name is Ángela, and I’m not from anywhere. I have to go now.’

She rose and, bundled up in the rain-­soaked cloak, she started to walk without turning back. She slipped between the tombs and the cypresses like a shadow. Lupo followed her for a moment with his eyes. When he was about to lose sight of her, he got up and ran barking after her with the happy energy of one who has finally found his reason to live.

But the job was not a comfortable one. There was a lot of walking and not much eating. All day they traversed vacant lots, following paths that didn’t seem to lead anywhere, skirting walls furtively. Lupo missed the slop and scraps Bastián gave him, the warmth of the fireplace, and even the sounds the dead people made when they stretched their bones.

Ángela and Lupo advanced along silent streets. In the city everyone was asleep except the cats in heat and a mare who was miscarrying in the southern suburbs. Her moans were carried on the breeze. The night would have been lovely, had there been eyes to see it. When the moon peeked out between the clouds, the world turned gray and black, every detail sharp as in an engraving. And when it appeared in the middle of a clearing, it was terrifying. Beams of white light filtered through the treetops and traced a changing lacework on the ground, turning the rough brick arches and well parapets into marble and the tears seeping from the stones into diamonds. A mercuric cloak had fallen over the world. It was not possible to imagine hearts beating beneath that frozen platinum veil, nor love, nor warm limbs entwining on feather mattresses. Perhaps, yes, snowy bodies trembling with impotent love between crisp starched sheets.

Ángela used the stars to calculate whether it was a propitious moment for what she was planning. The Star of Bitterness was in the exact center of the night. In the darkness evil swelled, ripe, about to fall in one’s hands like a fruit. It was time.

The old door of the charnelhouse opened at a push from her little hands. The spectacle offered to her view in the moonlight didn’t make the slightest impression on her. She was used to it. They were familiar to her, the stiff corpses of the condemned that hung from the beams in the courtyard like hams, those who lay piled up on the ground, those stacked up rotting under the porticos.

Lupo, believing he’d figured out his new mistress’s intentions, walked ahead, ripped off a corpse’s left hand with bites and tugs and dropped it at her feet like an offering.