The old woman’s voice was harsh and low, as though she didn’t use it much. She hadn’t paused in her chopping up of the fibrous, milky mystery vegetable in the slightest. Fernando wondered when she’d last left this shack, or had last had company here, for that matter.

“I’m Carmencita’s son,” he said, “your grandson. I’ve come from Bogotá to see you.”

His grandmother set down her knife. She turned to face him. Fernando’s breath caught as she did. Her eyes glinted in the candlelight, dark as onyx. Dark as his mother’s.

Her skin was firm and brown and faintly lined, like crinkled satin. Her girdled breasts were full and high, bearing up the many metal crosses and stone pendants her necklaces laid upon them. However old she must be, she didn’t look it. She was diminutive, doll-like.

She gave him a long, searching glance, as if she were absorbing the sight of him. Or perhaps simply absorbing the words he had said. After a while, she nodded once, in seeming acceptance of it all.

“You have the shade of her about you,” the old woman said. “I saw in a scry of stones my daughter would return to me, only changed. And so she has.”

Fernando smiled at this strange pronouncement. He couldn’t help it. Though her words were cryptic and rather mad, it was the first time someone had told him he resembled his mother—and in spirit, no less.

Fernando didn’t take this remark of hers as a compliment, per se. His grandmother’s tone wasn’t commendatory. It was simply matter-of-fact. Fernando appreciated this sort of frankness in itself.

The old woman’s eyes sharpened upon him. “Do you know what they call me, in that town?”

“They call you a witch,” Fernando replied.

“Una bruja vieja, sí.”

“I don’t care what they call you, Abuela.”

The old woman smiled, slight and furtive. “But I am what they say.”

“It doesn’t matter to me.”

“Only because you don’t believe it,” she said, squinting hard at him. “But you should. It is why I’m still standing here, in this place. Because I still observe the old ways.” She muttered something aside then, in a language he didn’t understand. Yet the forbidding import was clear to him. “It is the only way to survive here. The spirit of the jungle, it devours the unwary.”

There was a faint hiss from behind her as she said this, as if uttered on ominous cue. From the shuttered window, an acid-green viper slithered in through a gap of ruddy light. Its dark forked tongue tasted the air. Its yellow eye stared, slit-pupiled and lidless.

The fine hairs at Fernando’s nape rose, not entirely out of natural aversion. Snakes had always aroused in him a sordid curiosity—sinuous, scaled and envenomed as they were.

The venomous snake didn’t startle his grandmother. As though standing her ground, she remained stonily still and silent as the serpent descended from the windowsill to the floor. Her dark eyes glared after its undulating, ribbonlike course, as if it were an unwanted guest she hoped soon would leave.

She made no move to chase the snake away or to kill it, so Fernando made no move either. Together they watched as it disappeared, slipping through a crack in the flooring. His grandmother made the sign of the cross, then intoned another word in that guttural, alien tongue of hers.

“Her little servants, little slinking spies. How brazen she is.” Before Fernando could ask who ‘she’ was, his grandmother’s onyx eyes flicked to him. “If you’re staying here, nieto, you’ll want to raise your bed up, same as mine.”

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La Gorgona © CS Dark Fantasy