The skies grew dark well before dusk. Fell winds gusted, breathy and portentous. Hushed whispers of warning that skimmed the ear. The dense, damp air stirred like a broth. Grey-black thunderheads thickened as they rolled in above the lashing trees. Murky clouds churned slow and viscous overhead, like a cauldron of conjured night.
The old woman peered up at the growing tumult, the lines of her face shadowed with presentiment. “A storm is coming.”
Swiping a hand across his sweaty brow, Fernando replied, “We could use the rain.”
His grandmother frowned over at him. “This is not that kind of storm, nieto.”
While he put away farming implements and lashed things up in preparation for the inclement weather, the old woman went about making preparations of her own. Her attitude was warlike as she marched about the perimeter of the yard, throwing varicolored sand and waving a knobby staff. The staff was bored through at the top, looped through with strands of feathers, teeth, talons and stones. Rust-colored flakes sloughed from the whittled wood. She sliced and stabbed toward the shadowy menace of the trees. She caterwauled into the rising din of the storm winds in her aboriginal tongue, a few words of which Fernando now understood—forbid and trespass and blood.
The rain began to fall, great big leaden drops. Heedless of this, his grandmother marched on. The zeal with which she performed her strange rites hadn’t dampened in the slightest. Fernando caught up with her and took her by the arm.
“Come on, Abuela. We need to get inside.”
“No,” she said. She shook her head, her silvery hair tarnished to pewter. On her lower lip a bead of rainwater trembled. “I’m not finished yet.”
But Fernando led her back to the house anyway, as the first crack of thunder boomed and lightning split the sky.
In his dreams Fernando was a child again, sitting at his mother’s feet. She was sitting at her vanity, brushing out her long dark hair. It shone in the lamplight in streams of waving silk, rich and thick and lustrous. Decadent to his eyes. He watched her in profile for what seemed like hours while she looked at him not at all.
Her attention was riveted on her own likeness in the oval glass. Her black gypsy eyes glowed, a darkling shine. Absorbing all light and reflecting back nothing. He glanced at her mirror-image as she set down the brush. He saw there in her strong dark features the striking basis for his own. Her masculine face recast into his, and rendered handsome by the transformation. Her wildness not so much tempered by his father’s seigneurial blood as rarefied by it, and housed in a form better suited to such pursuits.
Whether his grandmother was cursed or not, Fernando saw now as a man looking through his child’s eyes that Carmencita most certainly was. In his twinned perception she was an angel afflicted. Twice-bitten by the cruel jaws of fate.
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La Gorgona © CS Dark Fantasy