IV

Fernando watched the shadows play over the clapboard walls, chinked with cracked clay, packed with moss and palm floss. In the flicker of the oil lamp, the shadows bent and twisted, undulating salacious and sinister over the racks of dried herbs, the grubby tallow candles, the rough-hewn shelves of bones and beads and carved icons, the yawning seed husks and glowing amulets, the murky vials of potions and jars of insect wings, the clusters of tin crosses and the painted faces of the saints, sunken into the warped wood in the heat and the damp like byzantine murals in a chancel defaced and long abandoned.

Low and dirgelike, indigenous chanting punctuated the susurrus quiet. Fernando groaned and threw his arm over his face. The clamminess of his skin cooled his swollen eye for a blissful moment. His entire body felt like one huge bruise, a shank of meat pummeled out, beaten down to the bone.

Strong scents stung his nose, herby and acrid. Almost caustic in their pungency. He pushed himself up by the elbows. He dragged himself up the cot to sit at a haggard recline. Nearby at the table, littered with bits of pumice stone, trimmed plant parts, dishes of colored pastes and little earthen jars, his grandmother chanted still. She stirred at a clay pot with a stout wooden spoon. With her brown spider’s fingers, she sprinkled in a powder that looked like cinnamon but most certainly was not.

Fernando pinched at the puffed bridge of his nose. “Abuela,” he said, “what is that?”

“A seeing-draught,” the old woman answered, still humming and stirring. “For opening the inner eye to the spirit world. I saw myself making it in a dream.”

To Fernando it smelled a lot like mezcal.

“It is a dangerous thing,” she went on in a warning tone, “to invoke this second sight. Men have gone mad looking beyond the plane. But the danger that lurks here is greater. Better not to be left blind when it strikes.”

To his relief, she rapped the spoon on the rim of the pot, concluding the ceremony. She fitted a clay lid to it. Gingerly she lifted the pot and put it away in a cabinet in a corner of the shack. Puttering over to the cookfire, she took the lid off the kettle simmering there. She ladled out a bowl of stew for him which was almost as strange as the seeing-draught, but far more palatable to his beleaguered senses. It was an immersion of wild fowl and vegetables, stewed in goat’s milk. Rich and greasy and gamey, but pleasantly savory.

As he ate, his grandmother nodded her approval. “I shot the bird and dug the roots this morning while you slept.”

“You could have culled from the chicken coop and garden, Abuela,” Fernando said, lowering the bowl in chagrin. “There was no need for you to go to such trouble.”

“Tame birds, tame plants.” The old woman shook her head. “Eating the weak will make you weak. You must get your strength back, and this will make you strong.”

She pushed a lock of damp hair from his eyes. Fernando smiled back at her from where he sat, feeling a bit better already.

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La Gorgona © CS Dark Fantasy