The Witching Hour: 11 Enchanting Novels Featuring Witches, Wizards, Vampires, Shifters, Ghosts, Fae, and More!, page 85
I saw a lot of Grace when I was in college and we’d grown close. We had dinner almost every week and she sometimes invited me for sleepovers to hang out and drink wine and watch movies all night. She was partial to 70s movies, which I mostly thought were super depressing although I loved Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
When I came home to Sangre de Cristo to take over the botanica after my abuela’s death, we kept in touch by Skype.
Now Grace comes down to Mexico three or four times a year to get some face time with the people who run the orphanage she set up after in memory of my father.
After my Mexican grandmother died, Grace gave Marisol’s name to the orphanage’s library. My abuela had been ridiculously pleased by the gesture because her own mother had been illiterate. Of course, Marisol being Marisol, she couldn’t just be pleased, she had to complain that the only reason Grace had honored her that way was because she wanted a Mexican name on the building and didn’t know any other Mexicans. That wasn’t true and she knew it, but my grandmother’s disdain for my father was so great it extended to anyone related to him except me. Death has mellowed her sentiments somewhat but she still can’t mention my father’s name without frowning.
I’d come to love Grace very much, though I saw her more as an older friend than a blood relative. It had taken her two years after that encounter in the hospital for her to get around to the subject of what she called her “second sight” and the vision of my mother’s ghost we’d shared the night my father died. Even then, she’d acted like she was embarrassed by her gift, which she said she’d inherited from her Irish grandmother. It was something she never talked about, she’d said. “I didn’t want people asking me to tell them their fortunes or tease me about being the ‘Texas Jeane Dixon.’”
Who? I’d wondered. But by then I’d felt comfortable enough with Grace to tell her my own story about the first time I ever saw a ghost.
I was still a little girl when I realized that Sangre de Cristo not only sat on the dividing line between two countries but straddled another border as well, and that this second location was not marked on any map.
My grandmother always said that Sangre de Cristo was a halfway point, a way station between life and death, and that the souls of the dead could travel in both directions — and not just on Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead.
Most of the dead were just lonely, my abuela said when I asked why the souls stuck around, adding that most of the dead meant no harm to the living. Then she would abruptly change the subject, which of course, only made me more curious.
“What about the others?” I’d pester her. “What about the ones that do mean harm to the living?”
My grandmother always waved away my questions, assuring me that no ghost would ever enter our house, not while she was there, and when she wasn’t there, her little dog, Angelita, would look after me.
That always made me laugh, because Angelita was a chubby little Chihuahua who loved everybody and spent most of her days dozing in our doorway, soaking up the sunshine and hoping someone would drop a treat in front of her as they stepped around her to get into the house.
I laughed and I believed my grandmother, and stopped worrying about what ghosts could and couldn’t do. After all, I’d never seen a ghost.
And then one afternoon I came home from school and found Angelita dead on our doorstep, her fawn-colored fur rusty with dried blood.
For all her assurances that no ghost would ever harm me, my grandmother had never mentioned the possibility that one day a ghost might hurt Angelita.
At first, I was so stunned by the sight of the dog’s butchered body that I couldn’t even make sense of what I was looking at.
Her chest was cracked open, and her little heart had been torn out and stuffed into her mouth. Her bright brown eyes were open and dull in death, but as I leaned down to pick her up, they became mirrors. I looked into Angelita’s eyes, expecting to see myself reflected there, but I didn’t.
Instead I saw the face of the thing that had killed my grandmother’s sweet dog.
Oddly, I wasn’t frightened by what I was seeing. I knew I was looking at something uncanny, something weird in the oldest sense of the word, but despite the malevolence I could feel radiating from it, I didn’t get the feeling that any of his anger was directed at me personally. And I got the sense that its anger was impotent, mucho ruido y pocas nueces, all bark and no bite. Still, though he might not have been able to hurt me, he’d certainly hadn’t had a problem killing Angelita.
So the apparition unsettled me. It was something that had once been human but hadn’t been alive for a long time. Its face was a mask of skin stretched over a skull so tightly it had torn in places, revealing dry bone beneath.
A black flame filled the sockets where its eyes used to be and as I stood there cradling Angelita, the thing turned those burning not-eyes toward me.
Again, I wasn’t afraid as I felt its rage focus on me. This was a thing that was full of hate and it hated me in that moment simply because I was the one who was there, but I wasn’t afraid because I knew I was stronger than it was.
I was only eight years old.
After I dried my eyes, I took Angelita into the house and wrapped her in my grandmother’s prettiest shawl, the one embroidered with white roses and trimmed with golden fringe. I said a prayer and asked St. Francis to take especially good care of Angelita because my grandmother had told me that though St. Francis loved all animals, he loved silly little dogs the best because they made him laugh.
After I had wrapped Angelita up, I called my grandmother at her botanica. I don’t remember exactly what I said to her, but when she arrived home just a few minutes later, she ignored the little bundle of silk on my bed and drew me into a comforting hug, murmuring words that weren’t in Spanish but in Mixtec, which was her first language.
Later, after we’d buried Angelita in the back yard underneath a rosebush, my grandmother took me back with her to the botanica.
Dismissing her friend Esperanza, who worked in the shop a few days a week, my grandmother closed the store, locking the door and pulling down the shades until it was dark inside. Then she lit a sweet-smelling white candle that seemed to make her skin glow where the light hit her face.
She gave me a tamarind lollipop from the jar by the cash register and asked me to tell her again what I had seen in the mirror of Angelita’s eyes.
She made me repeat the story over and over because each time I told it, I remembered some new detail — like the livid knife scar on the thing’s neck, or the way its rank breath had smelled of cigarillo smoke and garlic gone rancid.
She asked a new question each time I finished my recitation, and it was as if her questions were unlocking doors in my memory.
I hadn’t remembered noticing what the creature wore, but when she asked me to start again for the sixth or seventh time, I suddenly realized he’d been dressed in a black Tecate beer t-shirt and that even though he was thin, the fabric was stretched tight over a pot belly.
And then, very casually, she asked me to tell the story once again and this time to tell her the name of the apparition. It had seemed the most natural thing in the world for me to add that piece of information as I related the story.
“His name is Gustavo,” I told her. “Gustavo — ”
“Moreno,” she said.
“Moreno,” I’d finished, somewhat put out that she had guessed the answer before I could tell her his name.
“How did you know?” I’d asked. “Do you know him?”
“Yes,” she’d said, biting off the word the way she bit off the ends of thread when she was mending my t-shirts. She left me at the botanica counter rearranging the candles and the little boxes of amulets and other items she kept there while she stuffed herbs into folded packets of paper and little cloth sacks.
“Why would Gustavo Moreno want to kill Angelita?” I asked, feeling anxious.
She simply pressed her lips together and shook her head in a way that told me to quit asking questions.
When she was finished packing up her herbs, she came over to the counter and said my name softly. I looked up from an array of heart milagros I’d scattered on the counter. They were my favorite.
“Aixa, I need you to come with me now. There’s something we have to do.”
“Okay,” I said, a little scared because my grandmother sounded so serious.
I got even more scared when I saw where we were going — the little cemetery behind the church.
If Sangre de Cristo was a rest stop on the highway between life and death, this little patch of sacred ground was like a roadside stand selling cheap fireworks — everyone who traveled through the town stopped there.
Or so I’d heard.
The mean kids at school liked to scare the little ones with stories of ghostly encounters they’d had in the graveyard. When those stories reached the ears of our local priest, he just snorted and suggested that some people he knew needed to spend more time inside the church and less in the cemetery, and in his next sermon he’d made pointed references to superstition and false beliefs. Then he’d look hard at Dave Gomez, as if he knew that he was the meanest of the big boys and the one most responsible for spreading ghost stories to scare little kids.
But Dave wasn’t the only one who told stories. I’d heard my grandmother and Esperanza whispering about dead people too.
On the day that Angelita was killed, I tried to hang back, letting go of my grandmother’s hand as we approached the arched cemetery gate. It was getting close to sundown and I still slept with a nightlight because I was afraid of the dark. Even with my grandmother beside me, I did not want to go beyond the gate where the shadows were already gathering.
“I don’t want to go in there,” I said, my voice coming out in a whine.
“I know,” my grandmother said, “but we have to.”
“I want to wait for you here,” I protested stubbornly.
“No,” she said, turning to face me and kneeling down so I didn’t have to look up at her. Her face was all wrinkly the way it got when she was worried but her voice was as calm as if she was telling me a bedtime story.
“We have to go in together. Do you understand? We need to do this. It was you who saw Gustavo and he will be here waiting for you.”
I hadn’t liked the sound of that and I really didn’t understand why it was so important we do whatever we had to do together, but I had nodded, and we’d gone through the squeaky cemetery gate and past rows of neatly tended graves. We passed by my mother’s grave and stopped to say a prayer. There was a bunch of yellow flowers lying by her headstone, which puzzled my grandmother because she hadn’t been the one who left them there.
Late as it was, there were still several other people in the small cemetery, one an old woman pulling weeds, and I could tell from my grandmother’s expression that the other people weren’t really there, that they were traveling one of the unseen roads that ran through the shadow side of town and what I was seeing was the earthly echo of their souls.
“I can see the ghosts,” I said to my grandmother. “Like you.”
“Yes,” she said. “Like me.”
Though I was still scared, this new-found talent pleased me. I couldn’t wait to tell my friend Connie about it. As if she could read my thoughts, my grandmother said, “It’s not a good idea to tell people you can see ghosts,” she said. “Not everyone understands.”
“Okay,” I said begrudgingly because I knew Connie would be jealous if I told her. She had a mother but I could see ghosts.
The dying sunlight shone red on the white stone of the grave markers, making them look like they’d been painted in blood as part of some ancient ritual. The darkness seemed to gather density as we approached an unmarked grave that was really just a sunken place in the earth, far enough away from the other graves to mark it as lonely. I could feel prickles rising on my skin the closer we got.
As we approached, Gustavo Moreno appeared, sitting cross-legged on the ground where a marker should have been. Angelita’s blood was still all over his clothes and a dark fire blazed in his empty eyes.
He chuckled like a drunk when my grandmother greeted him and he nodded his head mockingly toward me.
“Hello, mija,” he said, and beside me, my grandmother stiffened.
He seemed fascinated by me, and as my abuela laid out candles and a tiny statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe and various other items on a red cloth she’d spread on the ground in front of him, he ignored her and studied me.
“You look like your mother,” he said.
“I know,” I said, pleased. There were pictures of my mother all over our house, and I’d spent hours studying them, looking for the echo of her features in my own face.
“You have her eyes,” he said and I preened. I thought my mother had pretty eyes.
As an adult, I realize what a surreal conversation it was to be having with a ghost, but I was just eight, remember, and I didn’t have that much experience having conversations with strange older men, dead or alive.
“You have her mouth, too,” he said and then he patted the fly of his filthy jeans. “Why don’t you come over here and put your pretty mouth on me?”
His words confused me. I was trying to frame a reply when my grandmother stepped in front of me, shielding me from Gustavo’s sight.
“Go get Father Paz,” she said as she squared up to the ghost.
I hesitated, and her voice sharpened.
“Now, Aixa.”
I heard Gustavo laughing as I fled.
By the time I’d found the priest and guided him back to my grandmother, she was alone and there was melted wax on the ground where the candle had burned. The priest didn’t like my grandmother very much — they’d sparred over the years about her stubborn persistence in clinging to what he called her “pagan beliefs” — but he respected her and greeted her cordially.
“Where’s Gustavo?” I asked, and she flicked her eyes at me for a second before returning her gaze to the priest.
“Back where he belongs,” she said, and Father Paz crossed himself and said something that didn’t sound like a prayer at all.
Then he said, “Marisol,” in a strangled voice.
I looked up at that because he usually called her Señora Cervantes.
“What?” I said, and wiggled around to get a look, but the priest grabbed my shoulder to hold me in place.
“Let her look,” my abuela said. “It’s why she’s here.”
“What?” I asked again, pulling away from Father Paz.
“Miralo,” my grandmother ordered. Look at it!
My eyes followed her pointing finger. On the ground beside the grave the grass was speckled with blood and drops of what looked like solidified black dew in the fading light.
I leaned closer and saw it wasn’t hardened candle wax but some nasty sticky substance that hissed as if alive and seemed to be moving.
I reached out my hand to touch the drops, and I heard the priest draw breath as if to protest. If my grandmother had said something, I would have drawn back my hand, but she stayed silent as I touched it. Suddenly the evening got even darker, as all the light seemed to be sucked out of the air around me, leaving only a black radiance that shone like a spotlight on a figure kneeling on Gustavo’s grave. It was a woman with her back to me. Her hair was black and straight and fell to her waist like a girl’s.
The woman seemed to sense my presence and turned around. She was pretty, with small, sharp features and black eyes that looked strange to me, though I couldn’t put my finger on what was so odd about them.
I backed up then, more afraid of this pretty woman than I was of the dark.
“What do you see Aixa?” my grandmother asked softly.
The woman had turned her attention back to the ritual objects in front of her—the small stiff body of a dead crow, a metal cup that looked like a communion chalice, and a bottle filled with what looked like a greenish steam.
I realized she couldn’t see me, that what was happening had already happened and what I was seeing was a playback of the event, like I was watching a movie.
“I see a woman,” I said. “Her name is Rosamara. I don’t think she’s very nice.”
Father Paz went very still.
“Rosamara Quintana,” I said.
I didn’t question how I knew that, any more than I’d ever questioned how I knew the sky was blue. Nor did I find what happened next very surprising. One minute Rosamara was there by herself, and the next moment Gustavo was standing in front of her, his dead face ashen, his voice low and pleading. He was saying something to her, something I couldn’t hear, but from the anguish on his face, it was obvious that her summons had caused him great torment and that he wanted nothing to do with the task she had brought him back from the dead to perform. And then it seemed plain to me what she wanted and why he was so reluctant.
“Gustavo didn’t want to kill Angelita,” I said. “She made him do it. She said she’d hurt him if he didn’t do what she said.”
Gustavo’s pleading became more desperate, but Rosamara was implacable. At last he fell silent, his head bowed submissively.
She kept speaking, and again I could not hear what was being said but I could hear the commanding tone in her voice. When she fell silent, Gustavo nodded twice and walked off in the direction of the cemetery gate. I turned my head to follow him, and when I turned back around, Rosamara was gone.
“She’s gone,” I said, almost to myself. “And Gustavo, too.”
“Bueno,” my abuela said. “Let’s go home.”
“We should talk,” the priest said to her.
She waved him off. “Later.” As we walked away I wondered why she had summoned the priest to the churchyard if she was just going to blow him off. Now I realize she wanted him to witness my magical awakening in person. know my powers had manifested themselves. She wanted him to lend his protection to hers. She may have followed the old ways but she was not above asking for a little help.
