The old woman’s bony brown hand seized Fernando’s elbow like a claw. It was as if he’d been about to stroll blindly through the gates of hell, the way she was restraining him. If she wasn’t so clearly distraught, Fernando might have laughed at the absurdity of it. Instead, he kept his face calm and neutral.

“I’m just gathering palm fronds, Abuela.”

His grandmother slashed her chin so hard to one side Fernando wondered how her skinny neck didn’t crack. “You should not have passed the trees,” she said again. Her glance was stern, flinty as slate. “The jungle is no place for you! Even for an old witch like me it is dangerous, but for one such as you…”

Fernando resisted the urge to smile. “One such as me, Abuela? What do you mean?”

“A man!” she said, balling her fists and stamping her foot. “That is what I mean.”

Whatever her fears about the jungle, Fernando couldn’t imagine it presented more danger to him than a little old woman like her. But seeing how urgently her eyes still flashed up at him, he decided he ought to humor her.

“What’s so dangerous about it?” he asked politely. “The jungle.”

The old woman squared her jaw at him. Fernando did smile down at her then.

“You know, Abuelita, the less you say, the more curious I’m going to be.”

His grandmother puffed up like an angry hen, but Fernando’s wry expression didn’t waver. After a moment, she deflated.

She looked at him in a defeated way which chastened him far more than her harping reproaches. For a moment, she almost seemed to look through him, as though she were not seeing him, but someone else in his stead. Then she sighed and spoke.

“If you want to know, then I will tell you: it is she whom you should fear—she who is the devourer of men. This jungle is her dwelling place. She has ever lived in its shadow.”

She spoke a word then, hissed it rather—a native word that sounded somehow to Fernando like a name. Or chillingly, like a curse. His smile slipped.

“Qué dijiste?”

“La gorgona,” his grandmother said to him. Her voice was harsh and low, almost a whisper. “That is what the Spaniards called her, but she has had many names, long before this. She is a demon, a devil.” When the old woman made the sign of the cross this time, it was done in the proper order. “She is part woman and part snake in her looks, though she is neither. She is a curse to women and death to men. Even to glimpse the back of her is perilous. She cannot be killed. She cannot be cast out. Many have tried, and all have failed.”

Looming just beyond them, the shadow of the jungle seemed a jeering darkness to him now. Rippling and chittering and swelling. Pressing in on them where they stood.

Fernando met his grandmother’s eye. “Have you glimpsed her, Abuela? This serpent she-devil who lives in the woods?”

“Yes,” the old witch said, frowning heavily, “to my sorrow.”

“And my mother?” Narrowing his eyes toward the rustling, leaf-fringed shadows, Fernando asked, “Did she glimpse her, too?”

“Worse, nieto,” the old woman replied. “She went looking for her.”

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La Gorgona © CS Dark Fantasy