Petra's Ghost, page 23
“The ghost that follows you is real, Daniel. I have seen her.”
Daniel takes a step back. “You’re having me on, Rob,” he says. How did Rob know about the woman? They’d discussed ghosts, but no specifics. Daniel doesn’t even believe that what he’s seen counts as a ghost. “Surely, you don’t believe that,” he finally says.
Rob takes his thumb and rubs the smooth metal of the heart on his lapel. “My wife gave me this because she wanted to protect me while I was on the Way,” he tells Daniel. “But my real heart was no match for the Pyrenees.” He turns to Daniel, puts a hand on his shoulder. “I never made it over the pass that first day.”
“You’re not after making sense, Rob.” But the sense of what Rob is saying is starting to make Daniel’s hands shake. He wants to reach out and grab the Dutchman in a bear hug again, feel the weight of his presence, the heat of his body, to confirm for himself.
Rob is running up the side of the stone monument again. Rocks left by the well-intended spill down the side and tumble past Daniel onto the grass. The Dutchman waves the letter from his wife from the top, even though Daniel never saw him retrieve it.
“Not all ghosts mean to harm you, Daniel,” Rob shouts down from the tower of rocks. “But remember, they all carry messages.” He disappears over the other side of the huge cairn, the sun lighting up his painter’s cap from behind him like a halo.
When Daniel circles around the monument to find him, he is not there. Although, later he may admit to himself that he did not expect him to be. A small shiny piece of metal glints in the sun among the dusty stones. Daniel picks up the copper heart and holds it still in his open palm before fastening it to his own jacket. He stands for a moment, his head bowed. The horses’ hooves beat the hard ground in the distance. He walks on.
“What’s the matter, Daniel?” His sister’s concern is obvious even from the small screen of his phone. Her expression is pained. Her voice lowered. After giving out to him for not calling her in a week, she has finally calmed down enough to let him speak.
“I don’t know,” he tells her, sitting alone on a bench in the courtyard of the albergue in Portomarín. Everyone has gone inside to escape the evening’s chill. White flagstones glow coldly in the dark.
“You don’t seem yourself,” Angela says.
Daniel feels the copper heart weighing down the material on the front of his jacket. It probably belongs more on his sleeve when he talks to his sister. Still, he keeps the story of the Dutchman to himself. Angela would not believe him if he did tell her.
“Are you after going to Finisterre?” she asks him. “To spread Petra’s ashes, like you said.”
“To be honest, Angie. I don’t know where I’m going.” He looks up at the rectangle of dark sky above the courtyard. The moon has come up. It is a waxing crescent floating as a thin bowl. His sister gives him a little more time to explain then switches gears when he doesn’t.
“I was reading in the papers about that woman, the one gone missing on the Camino,” she says.
“Aye,” Daniel says. “It doesn’t look like they’ll be finding her either. It’s a feckin’ shame.”
“Sure, you never know. Maybe she’s gone to the beach with a Spanish fancy man.”
“Ginny was after saying the same thing,” he says, thinking again about how much the two would have liked one another under different circumstances.
“Well, that makes sense. She’s from the coast as well. They appreciate a good beach out there, so.”
“As well?”
“The missing woman. Said in the article she’s from California, like your Ginny.”
Daniel leans into the phone, filling up his sister’s screen. “Where in California, Angela?”
“Sure, I don’t know, one of those surfer suburbs, sounds like a fruit.”
“Orange County?” Ginny’s hometown.
“Aye, that’s the one. What the hell’s going on, Danny, are you …?”
“I gotta go, Angela.” He switches off the Skype feed and leans over, hugging himself on the bench, trying to slow the gallop of his heart. The crescent moon reflects off the blank screen of his phone like the open jaws of a trap. He doesn’t know how long he’s been aware of the woman standing in the far corner of the courtyard, but he knows she has been biding her time there. He can sense her moving out of the shadows now, her boots dragging along the flagstones of the courtyard. He screws his eyes shut tight, bent over, as if willful blindness might force her to disappear. He can hear a toned vibration begin to creep up from her damaged voice box, like a shriek shot with a mouthful of novocaine. It takes a moment for him to realize what it is. Singing.
“Laat me, vivre.” Let me live.
He wills himself to open his eyes, raising his head. She is standing close enough for him to see the blood-tinged saliva bubble up between the tragedy of her lips. Her tongue flicks in and out, almost half of it missing. She must have bitten it off recently, he thinks. The jagged meat of the stump still has a tooth embedded in it.
When she reaches out to him, her sleeves in tatters, he can see the criss-cross of weeping welts that slash through both forearms, defence wounds. One has sliced the blue treble clef of her delicately noted tattoo clear in half. The skin from it flaps over and hangs there, as though a musician has hastily turned the page.
“Let me live,” she croons with her mutilated tongue. When she takes a step toward him, the front of her red Columbia sweater begins to undulate and ripple with something that slithers underneath.
He stumbles back to the entrance of the albergue, tripping over the cement doorstep. The phone slips from his hand and strikes the flagstones below, the screen cracking. When he picks up the phone, the moon reflects in pieces in the broken glass. Stumbling through the door to the warmth and strength of numbers, he tries to hold on to his sanity as well as his dinner.
He needs to find Ginny. He needs to find her now.
CHAPTER 14
San Paio (8 miles)
DANIEL WALKS ALONG THE forest path holding the collar of his jacket closed against the fierce wind. The imprint of the copper heart on his lapel presses through the thinness of his gloves. He wears a rough wool cap pulled down hard over his ears. He bought it in Portomarín when the weather began to turn. It is November now, after all. Or at least he thinks it is. Time, as he has observed before, can be tricky on the Way — particularly in this last part, where the wind can blow a man right off his course. The force of it bites into the land, rips what’s left of the leaves from the trees. It shrieks between the gap of his backpack and jacket, chilling the little beads of sweat that run down his spine. Even with the protection of the forest on the path this morning, he can still feel the madness of that wind tormenting the edge of the eucalyptus, a breed of tree not native to Spain but nonetheless here, an interloper, much like himself. He’d like to tell Ginny about the origins of eucalyptus, but he still hasn’t found her.
Beatrice stays with him, of course. The missing woman is always nearby. Today she tries to hide behind the twisted eucalyptus trees, but Daniel can still hear her sighs impossibly over the wind, as if she is getting bored with following him. He doesn’t know when he became fully convinced it was her. Sometime after she reached out to him in the courtyard but before he saw her picture on the poster, a pixelated photocopy from before, smiling for the camera when she still had all her teeth. She pursues him all the more closely as he approaches Santiago, every day a little more brazen in her ways. She always makes certain that she is near enough for him to see the latest arrangement of her face. The one intact cloudy eye a little more sunken in than the day before. The skin flapping in the wind as it pulls ever farther away from the bone structure of her jaw. He tries not to let the sight of her get to him although the stench is hard to take, a cross between open sewage and an apple left in a bag too long. Today when he glances over his shoulder, she gives him a wry smile full of maggots, then lies down dramatically on the forest floor and lets the elements take her, becoming one with the black rotting leaves. Such a performer, she is. He watches as the sweet smell of decay sucks her under the ground like a filthy kiss.
Head down, he pushes his way through the wind. It is only eight miles, a day’s journey, to the cathedral he has crossed an entire country to reach. But that no longer matters. He needs to find Ginny before Beatrice does. He knows she must be close now or the dead woman wouldn’t plague him so. It is the thought of protecting Ginny, rather than the nearness of Santiago, that gives him the strength to resist sinking into the forest floor himself, to keep on walking even though he knows Beatrice is still there. The way he kept going to the hospital every day for Petra as death hung in the doorway but wouldn’t quite come inside, the pain and the drugs so thick she didn’t even know him half the time. Her drape of semi-consciousness was a blessing he hid behind like a traitor in those final days.
His boot treads are getting slick with the wet black eucalyptus leaves that carpet the path. They cling to the space between the heel and sole, interfering with his stride. He sits down on a large rock and begins to pry off the viscous clumps with a stick. They fall to the ground beside him in raw chunks. When he finishes, he scans the path and catches sight of Beatrice, about fifty feet away, slowly tracing his steps in her mud-caked Merrell hiking boots. Gore from her head wound has coagulated on the strands of her long brown hair, coating it into a nest of grey speckled ropes. The wind whips them around her head, obscuring her face. She looks like one of the Furies. Another blessing. For a moment, the two freeze and regard one another, like the worthy adversaries they have become. A truce called under the canopy of wind-swept trees. But then, the stiff arms slowly reach out in accusation, straining the sleeves of the red Columbia sweater, and Daniel can see the colourful beaded bracelet with the silver shells gleaming brightly on one blackened wrist, the twin for the one on Ginny’s own. He bolts from the rock and gets back on the trail.
He has to find Ginny soon. He can’t wait and look for her tonight when he reaches Santiago.
Santiago, he knows in his heart, will be too late.
The eucalyptus forest gives way to industrial fields surrounding the airport, but Daniel never sees any planes in the air, just a high fence with barbed wire, grown over with exhaust-choked ferns. He walks for an hour alongside the empty autopista, never seeing a car, only a dead rabbit with its head caved in tossed carelessly toward the median. Roadkill, Daniel thinks. We have that back home as well. The thought makes him inappropriately nostalgic although he’s not sure for which home.
He has rarely seen wildlife on the Camino — only the occasional small lizard skittering along a rock wall, but nothing warm-blooded, like the rabbit. Of course, there are the domesticated animals, placid farm livestock, or mangy dogs snarling along property lines both chained and unchained. Even now, a sleek dark cat crosses in front of him to stand in an icy pool on the road. Daniel stops to watch it lap up the brains from the dead rabbit’s skull as if from a cup. Repulsion is just a hair’s breadth away from fascination, he realizes. Maybe that’s why his sister likes those forensic shows so much.
Thankfully, the rabbit is the only dead thing he’s seen since the forest. The approaching industry seems to have caused Beatrice to fade, making her transparent, and then finally, gone. Daniel begins to relax as he makes his way into the outskirts of the village of San Paio. It feels good to be free of her, even for a little while, alone with his footsteps and the morning. Even the sun starts to shine, further lightening his mood.
That’s probably why he got lost. He should have known from past experience that you need to remain vigilant in the built-up areas. The telltale bright yellow arrows that point the direction to Santiago are often missing or vandalized in the towns. At times, they are even replaced by counterfeit arrows leading to local proprietors greedy for the lucrative trade of foreigners in search of spiritual journeys, as well as coffee and trinkets. Not so in this village, where all the merchants seem closed for business, the deserted streets leading him only into a state of limbo. There is no one to ask for directions, even with his limited Spanish. The one sign of life so far has been an unmarked delivery van that raced toward him when he first entered the village on a narrow cobblestone street. He’d had to flatten himself in a doorway to keep from being run over. Daniel holds the useless guidebook open in gloved hands and tries to find his way back to where he knew where he was going.
Beatrice returns to make the occasional appearance, still keeping her distance. He can see her right now through a window, sitting on the couch next to a young woman watching TV. Before that she was lying on a bench, down a laneway, covered in newspapers like a vagrant. Another time she perched high up a church belfry in a stork’s nest, the yolk of an egg dripping down her chin along with the remnants of a partially developed bird embryo. Beatrice is like a page in a pop-up book, animating Daniel’s confusion, always just far enough removed to be avoidable but close enough to be a surprise, as though she is not sure of where she is going either.
Finally, Daniel rounds a bend that opens onto a good-sized plaza, the village centre. At the far end, past a disabled fountain, he sees a sign turned the right way around in a café window. Abierto. He strides across the square toward it, clutching his guidebook in one hand as he tries the door with the other. It opens.
“No funciona! No funciona!” The man at the bar is adamant as he shouts at him. The heat of the room is stifling after spending so many hours in the frigid outdoors. Daniel removes his wool cap and gloves before he responds.
“I know the coffee machine is broken, for feck’s sake. I don’t want a coffee.” He lapses into English as a way of frustrated rhetorical commentary. He can see the coffee machine in pieces behind the bar, the nozzle for the steamed milk corroded with something burnt and bubbly. He is unilingual, not stupid.
“No funciona!” the bartender repeats, as if shouting loudly enough will make Daniel go away. It doesn’t, but it could. The man is rotund in that threatening way, where the excess weight just means more power. Daniel wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of it.
He pushes the guidebook forward on the bar, open at the map page.
“Dónde está el Camino?” he asks. Where is the Camino?
“En todas partes,” the man replies, pushing the book back. Daniel’s blank expression forces him to translate. “Everywhere,” he says, spreading his beefy arms out for illustration. He turns and begrudgingly removes a bottle of lemonade from a dark fridge and hands it across the bar. It is warm to the touch. The electricity must be “no funciona” as well.
“Have you seen a woman with a ponytail come by here?” Daniel takes the chance that the man’s English is better than he lets on. “She has a backpack the same as mine.” He turns and shows the man his turquoise pack, the one that embarrassed him so much when he first started out that has now become a part of him.
“No.” The man’s answer is emphatic. Daniel is not sure whether he hasn’t seen her or just doesn’t understand what Daniel is saying. Either way he’s out of luck.
“Gracias,” Daniel says, giving up. He retrieves the book and the lemonade and goes to sit at a round wooden table by the door.
The barman chases after him. “Cerrado!” he bellows. Closed. The Spanish are serious about their siesta. But surely it’s too early for that.
Daniel looks down at his watch and finds it gone from his wrist. He must have left it at the last albergue. He’d departed rather abruptly when he found Beatrice waiting for him in the men’s toilet floating above the stall.
The bartender ushers him roughly out the screen door and into the plaza as if he’s stolen something. He’d be more embarrassed if there had been anyone around to see. The plaza is as empty and abandoned as it was earlier. Only a few painted cast-iron patio tables leftover from the summer dot the square. He sits down on the numbing metal of a chair and opens the lemonade with his Swiss Army knife. The wind stings his bare hands like a spray of sharp needles. He should put his gloves back on.
That’s when he sees her, sitting at the edge of the plaza at a similar table. Too far away for Daniel to see her properly without squinting. Beatrice’s face seems to swim and writhe in the distance, her hair pulled back in an unbalanced ponytail. I suppose it got in her eyes, he thinks. She turns and looks away, dismissing him.
“Damn it!” He slams the bottle down on the table. “Damn it to hell!” He is tired of this. He is so fucking tired of this. The sour lemonade presses back up into his mouth like bile. Beatrice, unimpressed with his outburst, continues to look away.
“Why are you doing this to me?” he shouts across the plaza, made brave by the distance and his anger. His voice echoes through the empty square, bouncing off the stone walls of the vacant village. The guidebook lies open on the table as he grips the edges of its pages, white-knuckled and furious.
That’s when things change, the way they sometimes do. Time and space can play games when you have been walking for days, alone in the screaming wind. Beatrice likes games. Because while she is still there at the table at the edge of the plaza, with sudden clarity Daniel knows she also stands behind him, peeking over his shoulder at the guidebook, her face bent down beside his own. The foul stink coming from her mouth is unmistakable, warm and gaseous as she brushes her lips against his hair. He refuses to turn around and look. Instead, his hands grip the pages of the guidebook as he stares straight ahead, unable to take his eyes off the apparition at the edge of the plaza, willing it to only be in one place, and not in this impossible duality both ahead and behind him.
The maggots start to drop on the page from over his shoulder, one by one, writhing on the paper streets and pathways of his map, like pale blind pilgrims who have lost their way.
The woman on the other side of the square gets up and starts running toward him, her ponytail bouncing behind her, along with the turquoise backpack just like his own. Ginny calls out his name as she runs. It fills the plaza like a scream.
