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

‘This mutt must be an idiot!’ the girl exclaimed in a low voice. ‘That’s not what we’re here for, you silly fool. Why are you in such a hurry?’

Lupo, whose greatest misfortune was understanding human language, which made him an object of scorn to dogs and cats, felt something like the desperation of an aging lover for his girlfriend, although neither he nor Ángela knew that, both being creatures little inclined towards love. But anyway his rheumy eyes filled with tears that ran down his muzzle, and his heart shrank.

Unconcerned about the movements of the beast’s soul, she headed with decisive steps towards the corpse of one of the hanged. Stiff and lifeless, it swung in the night’s quiet air because a bird that had nested in its belly had come flying out at the sound of footsteps. The cadaver’s face was handsome in the moonlight; in it there was a definitive quietude.

‘How lucky you are, you dead bastards, not having to run around trying to earn a living.’

But remembering that her father, shut up in a deep dungeon, wouldn’t be long in joining them in the same club of those who danced at the end of a rope, she fell silent out of respect and went to work.

He had a good set of teeth, a shame about the incisors that had been broken by a blow, perhaps from a rock, which had also cut the upper lip. Ángela rose up on tiptoes but couldn’t reach. She looked around and found only a block of stone long detached from the wall and black with moss. Faced with the effort that awaited her, she gave a kick of impatience.

‘Damn you, you son of a bitch!’ she rebuked the hanged man. ‘They could have hung you lower!’

The stone was porous and light like a rotten tooth, but for the girl’s bird-­like strength it meant pain if she lifted anything weighing more than the folds of her cloak. She managed to drag it, however, and climbing up on it she reached the scarecrow’s mouth, from which she pulled out several molars with skilled and vigorous little tugs, paying no heed to the stench coming from the black hole and the blue tongue.

In the western part of the ramparts there stood an abandoned turret, in whose damp ruins old Crisanta, a third-­rate witch and sorceress, lived all by herself. She had seen better days, but too much tippling had made her lose many of the gifts she had received from her female bloodline, which had passed down from mothers to daughters the pact with Satan, ratified with a drop of blood. If she appeared to be a beggar, it wasn’t from poverty but from the worst of miseries: avarice, which left her uncomfortable, dying of hunger and dressed in rags, although she was sitting on treasures that she hid in her magpie’s nest.

She received Ángela with a grunt and invited her to sit beside her on a bench in front of the fireplace, where a charred log was burning out and about to disintegrate into ashes. The girl remained standing, took a packet from a pocket of her cloak and set it noisily on the table, saying with the dry voice of a little despot:

‘I brought you this, Crisanta. Let’s see what it’s worth.’

Without looking at her again, Crisanta stirred the fire with an iron fire shovel, her eyes fixed on the embers which shone for a moment like rubies.

‘What is it?’ she asked, feigning indifference.

‘Molars freshly pulled from a hanged man.’

‘Molars from a hanged man! Right!’ mocked the sorceress. ‘And how do I know they’re from a hanged man and not waste from the barber’s?’

Ángela didn’t respond. Crisanta turned towards her and fixed her dust-­irritated eyes on the girl’s, which reflected the purest and most innocent evil in their greenish waters. In all the days of her life, she had never seen eyes like those. It was whispered at the sabbath that they were the devil’s eyes, but she had never been permitted to see those. How come this little brat just happened to have them? What had she done to deserve them? When the women’s glances met, it poisoned the air to the point that Lupo raised his head, anxious as though he scented danger.

‘If I say they’re from a hanged man,’ the youngster muttered between her teeth, her face pale with rage and her throat swollen, ‘then they’re from a hanged man.’

Her eyes had hardened like stones. Some dark spots on her irises painted figures of black toads on the green water.

‘I’m not interested,’ replied the old woman, turning her glance away towards the fire, which had gone out again. ‘Right now I’m mixed up in something big.’

‘Big? What do you mean, big? Spoiling some woman’s love affair or making her miscarry. Beyond that, I don’t know what you’re capable of.’

‘A hand of glory. You don’t happen to have a hand?’

‘There’s a loose one in the charnelhouse. If you want, I’ll bring it to you. My dog tore it off, but I didn’t know it was good for anything.’

‘It’s no good, girl, it’s no good. I need a fresh hand, with blood in its veins, not the dried-­up rotten things you’re in the habit of carrying about.’

‘Fresh!’ Ángela remarked in a falsetto voice. ‘Is it to eat or what?’

The old woman explained to her what a hand of glory was and how to make it. To begin with, she needed the hand of a hanged person, not like those rotting in the charnelhouse, but rather a fresh one.

‘From a man or a woman?’

The girl’s question caught the sorceress by surprise. She didn’t know.

‘Doesn’t your guide show you?’

She was referring to an enormous book Crisanta had, which was called Great and Universal Elucidarium , an inheritance from those who had preceded her in the art and the source of most of her knowledge. It was so large that to finish reading a line, she had to take a couple of steps in front of the lectern. It was written in black ink that was so corrosive it had eaten through the paper in many places, and in spiky handwriting like the devil’s own.

‘It just says a hanged man’s hand,’ the old woman responded with a sigh of impatience.

‘Well then, it has to be a man’s,’ the girl judged. ‘It’s a shame because in the city a few days from now they’re going to hang the coal cellar murderess. The one who killed her three children and hid them in the coal in the kitchen.’

‘We can try. We have nothing to lose. With what they’ll give us for a hand of glory we won’t be poor anymore.’

‘Why are you talking in plural like the bishops?’

‘Because I’m referring to you too. If you help me, we’ll share it. I’m no longer up to jaunts through cemeteries and you have a knack for getting into tricky places. Go on, girl, bring me a fresh piece and you won’t regret it. Don’t waste time with this crap,’ she said, sending the hanged man’s molars into the fire with a sweep of her hand. A thick but ephemeral smoke rose up, as if from the other world or in a theater.

Ángela had remained thoughtful, with Lupo nestled up at her feet. She seemed to be attentive to the sound of the wind which, crashing against the tower, howled furiously in search of other paths between the holes in the rocks and the thorny shrubbery.

At dawn, lost among the crowd, she attended the execution of the infanticide in the market square. When the fury of the storm provoked by the departure of the condemned woman’s soul dispersed the people and there remained only two guards watching over the corpse, which would hang from the gibbet a couple of days as a warning and lesson to bad mothers, Ángela took shelter from the rain with Lupo in the vestibule of the Church of St. Justa. From there she could observe all that happened at the gallows and its surroundings.

Not even she herself knew for certain what she was going to do. She counted vaguely on the guards’ getting drunk that night and sleeping like logs. She trusted in the dark force that seemed to have been hovering over the city for some time. Caught up in her plans, she remained motionless all day, curled up like a cat. She was cold and hungry, and she knew there was no use in staying there while it was daylight, but she was bound by a leaden laziness that had been overpowering her to the point where she was unable to move.