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

They came enveloped in a cloud of dust, two men and a woman. The men entered the house, but the lady remained in her saddle, her head covered in a wide-­brimmed black hat that permitted only the gleam of two eyes like embers and the tip of a haughty nose to be seen. She wore a dirty but elegant black and green dress that brought out her good looks. She must have been very young and arrogant.

Crisanta took the dead woman’s stiff hand from a fine crystal cheese dish where she kept it and, setting it atop a cloth on the table, showed it to her clients, exaggerating its virtues and the efforts it had cost her to acquire it.

But with a sweep of his hand, the younger and more quarrelsome of the two men threw both cheese dish and carrion to the ground, where they smashed with the sound of broken glass.

‘It cost you a great deal to get hold of this rubbish, old woman? And you had us come here for that?’

‘What’s the idea? You know more than I do about how these things have to be made!’

‘I won’t say anything about making it, but you’re not going to deny that this is a female hand. You’re a lazy good-­for-­nothing.’

And to show that no one made fools of them, and also as a warning to incompetent witches, they cut off Crisanta’s left pinky and took it with them, saying it was a good talisman against senile old women who tried to con them. The girl and the dog trembled when they heard the young lady in the black hat laughing.

‘I told you so,’ mumbled Ángela again and again while the old woman, howling in pain, applied a poultice to the wound.

After chewing some henbane leaves, she fell into a doze. She appeared greatly relieved. Before losing consciousness, she said to the girl:

‘Get out of here. Since you started hanging around this house I’ve had nothing but hassles. I want to be alone.’

Ángela set out walking and, followed by Lupo, headed towards the nearest cemetery, Santa Rufina, in search of a night’s lodging in the mausoleum of the Mira Valdesúa family, which could be opened easily, but then she thought better of it and hurried her pace towards Los Cigarrales. She felt an irrepressible desire to see the inhabitant of the crypt again. What’s more, since the vampire wouldn’t return until dawn, she had time to sleep for a while.

There, hidden between two old caskets, she overheard an entertaining and instructive conversation between the two women, who had become friends. The vampire was dripping with blood, the other was a melancholy, one-­handed ghost. When the monsters had set off on their nocturnal errands, she threw herself into the infanticide’s coffin, which being new was the most comfortable, and she slept divinely until dawn.

That night Ángela conceived the idea of getting hold of a hanged man’s hand and using it to escape from poverty.

The storm raged, surrounding the turret in lightning and thunder. The smoke from the fireplace seemed possessed: it came in instead of going out. Shadows not justified by the candles’ light danced on the walls. Ángela had stopped what she was doing and watched them with furrowed brow as though she found some flaw in their movements. The skull she was polishing with a piece of agate rested forgotten in her lap. Now and then Lupo sniffed at it apathetically.

Suddenly Crisanta leaned against the kitchen sink, raising her hands to her chest. She was turning blue. When she fell to the floor emitting terrible spluttering sounds, Ángela was on the verge of running away. She had to get out of there because if that old hag died, the devil would surely come for her soul and she didn’t want to be around when that happened.

‘Help me,’ panted the old woman. ‘Help me or I’ll curse you with my dying breath!’

Lupo had taken shelter trembling in a corner. A hissing wind crept through the chimney, which besides smoke also scattered ashes from the hearth across the room. The pale lightning flashes lit and then extinguished the light of the world. Each time it thundered it seemed the turret would come tumbling down. Ángela dragged the old woman’s body to the bedroom, pulling her by the feet. It cost her a painful effort to lift her up and put her in the bed. When she had managed it, she remained seated on the floor for a moment without moving, recovering her breath, while the old woman wheezed in a pure death rattle.

‘The pact! The pact must be undone!’ she exclaimed all of a sudden with a voice that didn’t seem to be hers, stretching one hand towards the girl. Ángela got to her feet and approached her. Both were terrified. ‘In the dresser drawer . . . the parchment . . . take it out and burn it, and help me to make the act of contrition.’

In that wobbly and dilapidated piece of furniture, enormous as a mausoleum, there were all kinds of rubbish, mixed with the very finest linen, silverware, and objects of value. Ángela rummaged frantically until coming upon a roll tied with a black ribbon. Her excitement was such that she didn’t realize she had poked herself with the tine of a fork. A drop of blood stained the parchment.

The heaviest thing, she told herself, was going to be the Elucidarium, because as for the rest of it, she only planned to grab the highest-­priced objects, which were small. At first she intended to put it all in a sack, but then she considered that if she used a very fine damask pillowcase she had seen in the depths of the dresser to pack the things in, she would kill two birds with one stone, so she took it out of the drawer and laid it out on the floor.

‘What are you doing, my child?’ asked the old woman, sitting up again, with a firm and clear voice little in keeping with her deathbed condition.

The girl did not answer. She put half her body under the bed and dragged forth a little coffer, which she placed in the center of the pillowcase.

‘No way, not that,’ shouted Crisanta angrily. ‘It’s taken me a lifetime to acquire it!’

‘Shut up, grandma, you’re going to make yourself worse. What does it matter to you anymore? It won’t do you any good now . . . It’s better if I take it, since after all I’ve been the one who’s taken care of you . . .’

‘You’ll bury me at least? Look, if you leave me here, I’ll rot, and my soul will be furious, and I’ll bring harm to you and . . .’

‘Yes, woman. Calm down.’

But when the old woman breathed her last breath, resembling a belch, and remained quiet for good, Ángela no longer thought of anything but getting out of there as quickly as possible. She finished making a bundle with the pillowcase, put the book in it, and left the turret dragging it like the ant drags its booty against wind and tide.

Although she no longer needed to yank molars out of corpses to earn small change, wealth didn’t go to Ángela’s head nor cause her to abandon her habits or her work. She studied the Elucidarium with eagerness day and night, until her head was bursting and her eyes were filled with grit. There were things she didn’t understand, but she made great progress. And when they condemned Pedro Madruga, who was said to be her own father, she saw the perfect opportunity to get hold of a good hand with which to make a powerful talisman. This time she wasn’t going to sell it cheap to some young gentlemen like Cristina did with her work. She would use it herself to her own benefit. Thus she used all her astuteness, patience, and ability to slip through the cracks like lizards do, until she managed to get hold of that magnificent member, strong from having come from a son of the village and at the same time with skin soft like silk from not having worked in the rough and vile jobs that destroy body and soul. And she started marinating it in the brine of glory.

At the same time, she learned from the Elucidarium that leaving a sorceress’s corpse uninterred brings bad luck. Remembering that Crisanta was rotting unburied in the turret, she felt a great cold rise up from her belly to her throat while sweat pearled on her forehead.