Fernando woke with a start. His heart hammered wildly. He was damp with sweat, feverishly hot. Horribly and painfully aroused.
Furiously ashamed.
His hand stung, sliced open by an icon fallen from the shelf above his cot. The walls groaned, creaking. Shaking perilously under the strain of remaining upright against the stormwinds that assailed them. Rainwater fell in a frenzied staccato from rips in the thatching.
Fernando got up from his cot. Through the midnight gloom he searched for his grandmother. She slept like a corpse in her hammock and veil of mosquito netting. Beneath ropes of beaded talismans, her bony brown hands lay folded at her breast—an indian priestess mummified in her enchanted slumber, ravaged by time and forgotten by it all at once.
Fernando tore back the netting and shook her by the shoulder. “Abuela, wake up!”
She stirred sluggishly, as if she’d been drugged. This spry old hen who woke like clockwork at the first faint rays of dawn blinked up at him in groggy stupefaction through the tumult. Her aged eyes groped blindly for purchase in the unfamiliar dark. Streaming in all directions along the ragged roof fronds, a few drops of rain struck her brow. At the splash, she bolted upright with a sudden cry, as though a spell had broken.
“That conniving fiend! Of course she would set her snare for me in the dreamworld while she wreaks her havoc here.” Scrambling out of her hammock, the old woman seized him by the arm as more crosses and trinkets crashed down from the quaking walls. “The house is lost, nieto. She has got her coils around it. She will crush us to death inside it if we stay.”
Across similar, if not so calamitous, lines Fernando had been thinking the same. “The shed’s new and sturdy. We can wait out the storm in there.”
“No, no.” The old woman’s sharp chin slashed back and forth in her vehemence. “We must head to higher ground, to the bluffs where the rock will not bend to her thrashing. The bluffs, nieto—do you hear me?”
“Abuelita—”
But a great section of thatching peeled back and flew off as he spoke. Wind wailed whirling through the gap, pelting them with rain and debris. In the clamor and commotion, the old witch slipped with surprising swiftness through his grasp. Snatching up a poncho and her warstaff, she vanished into the stormy dark.
Cursing, Fernando took off after her, dashing out onto the porch that was warping beneath his feet. In a flash of lightning he saw her leaping nimble as a goat from one patch of dry ground to the next through the muddy torrents that were fast swallowing them up. Fernando grabbed a flashlight from the sill. He turned to go back inside and get a tarp when the house gave a screech and shudder so ominous and hair-raising he bolted down the porch steps into the squall instead.
The tarp would have made no difference, anyway. The driving rain soaked him through in an instant. Ankle-deep in the swirling floodwaters, Fernando stood in the yard, riveted in dread. He realized now, as the embattled house swayed and moaned in its death throes, that all that had ever been mooring it to the earth had been the tangled mass of ferns and vines he’d cleared away.
Through the sinister glow of the lightning-shot, miasmic skies, he watched the shack slide sideways. On splintering piers it lurched into the free-flowing muck, collapsing into a skeletal heap of crumpled boards and torn thatching whose crashing roar of demise was smothered in the hellish cacophony of the storm.
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La Gorgona © CS Dark Fantasy