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

Her presence made the woman who usually begged in the doorway cower in her spot as if she wanted to disappear. She was a young blond woman with no arms, but with the beautiful legs of a tightrope walker, an idiot angel fallen from the archivolt. Passing in front of her, a lay sister who was coming out of the temple stopped and tossed some coins in her lap. The girl raised her ingenuous iris-­blue eyes and smiled kindly and gratefully. Ángela, who was watching the scene a few steps away, let out a mocking chuckle. The old woman fled in terror. For a moment the two girls had seemed to be one, and that one, the devil.

The hours passed like those in a feverish dream, sometimes slow and at others so fast that she would have said the tower clock had gone mad. Its clapper sounded not like bronze but iron. The dampness of the stones had gotten into the girl’s soul and, arriving at her frozen heart, had turned to frost. Lupo shivered along with her.

The dead woman’s long hair fluttered against the inclement sky like a black flag. Wrapped up in their cloaks, the guards paced around in circles without neglecting their watch, but when that time of night arrived when there is a wrinkle in the fabric of the world and senses and natural laws cease to reign, they fell asleep, and Ángela prepared to take advantage of their slumber.

But a troop of silent shadows overtook her, emerging from the corners of the square and flowing together like a river. Surrounding the gallows, they lowered the hanged woman without delay. They were her relatives, fed up with so much scandal. They weren’t inclined to have shame brought on them for a single minute more. They had come to an agreement and they were carrying her off. This was unknown to Ángela, who in her capacity as an innocent though diabolical child saw only the skin and guts of the world, but not the schemes of men. She followed them like one more shadow through the maze of the upper-­class neighborhood, with which she was unfamiliar, passed in front of the Casa de las Rocas where they kept the elephant given by the sultan of Egypt, which trumpeted at the sound of people. Lupo stifled a panicked bark, cut short by a kick from his mistress that instantly made him keep quiet. Then they crossed the river and headed to Los Cigarrales, entered the estate and deposited the dead woman in the crypt after they had put her in a coffin and the curate had said a funeral prayer at top speed.

When everyone had left, Ángela opened the coffin, grabbed one of the dead woman’s arms and pulled on it until the hand was outside, with the wrist on the edge of the wall of the box. There was something in the air just then, barely an icy breeze circulating through the black and gloomy dampness of the crypt. But the girl was used to the groans of the souls who resist leaving their bodies for good and the murmur of those that remain stuck to the flesh. She knew she didn’t have to pay any attention to those phantasms, smoke from a bonfire that has gone out and a siren’s songs carried on the wind from the region of shadows. She took a firm grip with both hands on the hatchet Crisanta had lent her, raised it as high as she could, and, collecting her scant strength, unleashed it again and again on the dead woman’s stiff left wrist until the hand came loose. She then groped with her own hands until she found it and put it in a pocket of her cloak.

Then a hair-­raising creak made Lupo’s fur stand on end. The door flew open. In its opening, silhouetted in the paleness of the sky, which was beginning to be tinged with pink, there appeared a tall, white figure. Something dark oozed from its mouth and its clawlike hands opened and closed like those of an automaton. Ángela squeezed the murderess’s hand in her pocket and gulped. Her fright was giving way to awe. Because she was beginning to realize who the woman was who, for her part, was looking at her with relief.

‘Señora . . .’

‘None of that señora stuff. I’m calling it a night. Can’t I be left alone in my own house?’

She sniffed.

‘There were people here.’

‘Yes, señora. The hanged woman’s relatives stole her from the gallows and brought her here to bury her. They left her in this coffin.’

‘And what are you doing here?’

‘I came for a hand to cast a spell.’

‘Well then, if you’ve finished, get lost.’

When the vampire returns to her lair, she won’t be happy at finding you there , Ángela remembered from a song from her childhood.

‘Good, girl, good. We can make use of this. It’s not too spoiled yet,’ Crisanta said, palpating the pale severed limb and squeezing the horrid wound with expert fingers. Her beady eyes gleamed with satisfaction and willfulness. ‘Someone,’ she remarked, ‘should have given this broad a reading before it was too late. It’s obvious from these lines that she was going to come to a bad end,’ and she traced them with her index finger on the dead flesh. ‘They look like flies’ legs. Now we have to make the brine of glory.’

‘How?’ asked Ángela.

‘The brine of glory,’ the old woman said slowly and solemnly, as if she were reading, ‘is made with salt, saltpeter and pepper, and a pinch of gunpowder if you have some, all mixed together. You put the hand in it in a clay jar and leave it there fifteen nights. It says so in the book.’

The witch carried out her schemes in the presence of the girl, who didn’t miss a detail. She absorbed the knowledge with the cold avidity of the disciple who knows she will betray her teacher and neither feels any scruples nor antici­pates any remorse.

‘Look how lovely, my dear,’ said Crisanta with giddy enthusiasm when the salting time had passed. ‘Dry and clean, it doesn’t even seem to be from a cadaver. Like the hand of a virgin at the altar.’

Ángela assented earnestly, although the thing reminded her more of a hen’s foot.

‘The nails are broken,’ she pointed out.

‘So what?’ replied the other, annoyed. ‘It doesn’t matter. Now I just have to grease it and it’ll be ready to burn for hours.’

‘What do you make the grease out of?’

‘With fat from a hanged man or a cat, it’s all the same. We’ll use some from a cat. There are women who have qualms about killing cats because they think they’re guardians of the home, but I have no such scruples, nor do I believe in superstitions. Cats are cats, they can’t do anything to us.’

‘Which one should we kill? A black one? Or the neutered tabby, which will have more fat than any of them, with that belly of his hanging down to the ground?’

‘It can’t be a neutered one,’ the old woman said. ‘Fat from a castrated cat is easy to get, since they let you cut their throats without fighting back, but it has less power than fat from an intact male. Go and see if you can find the striped one with the yellow eyes. He’s probably sleeping on the steps in the sun.’

Lupo went out with her into the splendor of the blue morning. Soon they found the cat, curled up into a ball between two rocks. He awoke at hearing them, cast a sleepy golden glance and yawned, showing the beautiful teeth of a miniature wild animal.

‘Come on, mutt, time to earn your keep.’

The dog obeyed to the letter. After a brief skirmish full of sound and fury, from which he emerged bleeding, he deposited the soft palpitating prey at his mistress’s feet.

With no small difficulty, Ángela was reading her way through the Elucidarium during the old woman’s absences, sneaking a peek whenever she was alone in the tower, feigning fatigue or menstrual pains, which had come to her for the first time on the day when Lupo killed the cat so they could extract its fat. She learned from the book that the hand of glory was a tool used by robbers in their exploits, since it had the virtue of making all the inhabitants of a house, masters and servants, fall into a profound sleep, and opening all the doors and locks for as long as the fingers of the hand were lit like candles. She fantasized about what she could get for herself with the help of the hand Crisanta was preparing, and she dreamed of getting hold of the book. It contained many other invaluable secrets and it would help her make her way in life and go from being a scavenger to someone with real power. But before she had the chance to carry out the plans she was concocting in her imagination to make off with those treasures, the people who had ordered the talisman showed up.