Gianfranco Mancini’s Reviews > Mexican Gothic > Status Update

She set her lamp down on the floor and ran a hand over the table, lifting the lid of the box. Inside she found a knife with a jeweled handle and held it up. “I’ve seen this,” she said, “in my dreams.” Francis and Catalina had slowly walked into the chamber and were both looking at her. “He killed children with this,” she continued. “He did many things,” Francis replied. “Casual cannibalism.”

They’d cleanse the house afterward, she thought. A mad thought, but it was there, that they’d wash the floors and the linens and scrape off the blood, and toss her into a pit in the cemetery without a cross, like they had so many others.

Francis came by a little while later. He brought with him a tray with her dinner and his razor wrapped in a handkerchief. Noemí joked that it was a terrible wedding present, and he chuckled. They sat side by side on the floor as she ate, the tray on her lap, and he managed a few more quips, and she smiled.

She gazed at the wide-open fangs of the snake surrounding the mirror, and she turned her face and rested her chin on his shoulder. And like that they sat for a long time, she dark and he pale, making an odd contrast amidst all the snowy-white sheets, and around them, like a vignette, the darkness of the house blurring the borders.

“I wanted to apologize,” Noemí said. Florence pressed a hand against her right temple and closed her eyes. “You have. Go, go.” And like the wretched creature that Florence had mentioned, that does not know its place nor how to find it, Noemí sat on the stairs for a while, staring at the nymph on the newel post and contemplating the motes of dust dancing in a ray of light.

“There’re heavy places. Places where the air itself is heavy because an evil weighs it down. Sometimes it’s a death, could be it’s something else, but the bad air, it’ll get into your body and it’ll nestle there and weigh you down. That’s what’s wrong with the Doyles of High Place,” the woman said, concluding her tale.

It lives in the cemetery, Catalina said. The words had not frightened her. But now, standing outside, with only a packet of cigarettes and a lighter, she felt exposed and vulnerable, and she couldn’t help but wonder exactly what lived in the cemetery.

She paused, as if catching her breath. All of a sudden Catalina opened her eyes very wide and her face had a terrifying intensity to it. It was the visage of a woman possessed. “There’re people in the walls,” Catalina said. “There’re people and there’re voices. I see them sometimes, the people in the walls. They’re dead.”

The house was quiet. No one walked through the halls, no one crept into rooms at night to stare at sleeping women. Still, it took her a long time to go back to sleep, and once or twice, when she heard a board creak, she sat up quickly and listened for footsteps.

“What sort of epidemic was it?” He tapped his pencil’s eraser against his desk three times. “It wasn’t clear. A high fever, very tricky. People would say the oddest things, they’d rant and rave, they’d have convulsions, they’d attack each other. People would get sick, they’d die, then all would be well, and a few years later again the mystery illness would strike.”