Fernando rarely dreamed. Yet here in his grandmother’s jungle shanty, he dreamed without ceasing. Strange muddled half-dreams that felt to him like a delirium, a bizarre paroxysm in which he was paralyzed but still surreally aware. Visions came to him, elusive and chimerical and obscure. Visions of shifting shadows, of half-glimpsed monstrous forms. Voices spoke to him, sibilant and feminine. Voices unknown to his waking mind.

Once he woke to find his grandmother chanting over him. She had been studying his sleeping expression. Her ancient brow was knit in concentration. Her look was strangely knowing.

“She wends her way easily through the land of dreams,” the old woman said as she finished her chant. “She is more spirit than flesh.”

Fernando rolled over and dozed again. His dreams were dark and formless. Brooding at the fringes.

He only knew that he had slept because when he rose from bed he felt rested. Otherwise he might have thought himself stuck in some hallucinatory haze born of subconscious unease, of irrepressible restlessness. Though his cot was raised well off the floor, it seemed to make no real difference to the procession of creatures that paraded over him nightly. The walls of his grandmother’s shack may as well have been open air for what little they kept out.

Fernando wasn’t particularly squeamish. Still, it was an act of conscious will to dismiss the tiny legs crawling over him, the buzzing of wings so close to his ear. In the quiet of night, the susurrations grew cacophonous. The skittering sensations took on a diabolical edge.

Flicking a hairy spider off his cheek, Fernando grinned at the thought of his persnickety half-siblings being forced to spend the night here. They’d be driven to fits before the sun went down.

What they would’ve thought of his old witch of a grandmother he couldn’t imagine.

Fernando spent the first few days of his stay more or less observing her and her eccentric ways. The old woman had a wiry strength about her, not unlike the rangy goats she kept. She shrugged off Fernando’s attempts to help her with her morning chores: fetching water, gathering rushes, sweeping the shack and peeling dried bulbs.

To his surprise she did let him paint the goats with her. Brusquely she instructed him how to mix the various colored clays and how to apply them. What words to say. He mimicked her indigenous chanting as best he could. If he got it wrong, she didn’t correct him.

He trailed her about like a second shadow as she tended to her peculiar garden of oddities—adjusting a stone here or there, straightening a leaning crucifix, tying a clump of feathers to shrub, sprinkling salt or sand or ash around an object or flinging one or more of these powders at seemingly nothing at all.

When Fernando asked her a question, she answered with a riddle. Whether this caginess was intentional or not, he couldn’t decide. But it certainly was frustrating, especially when he was desperate to know anything about his dead mother from the one person in the world who must have known her best.

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La Gorgona © CS Dark Fantasy